Joshua Reynolds: Mind

Joshua Reynolds was English painter, specialising in portraits. Explore interesting quotes on mind.
Joshua Reynolds: 44 quotes0 likes

“The mind is but a barren soil; a soil which is soon exhausted, and will produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continually fertilized and enriched with foreign matter.”

Joshua Reynolds

Discourse no. 6; vol. 1, pp. 157-8.
Discourses on Art

“Poetry operates by raising our curiosity, engaging the mind by degrees to take an interest in the event, keeping that event suspended, and surprising at last with an unexpected catastrophe. The painter's art is more confined, and has nothing that corresponds with, or perhaps is equivalent to, this power and advantage of leading the mind on, till attention is totally engaged. What is done by Painting, must be done at one blow; curiosity has received at once all the satisfaction it can ever have.”

Joshua Reynolds

Discourse no. 8, delivered on December 10, 1778; vol. 1, p. 247.
Discourses on Art

“The true test of all the arts, is not solely whether the production is a true copy of nature, but whether it answers the end of art, which is to produce a pleasing effect upon the mind.”

Joshua Reynolds

Discourse no. 13; vol. 2, p. 136.
Discourses on Art

“The greatest natural genius cannot subsist on its own stock: he who resolves never to ransack any mind but his own, will be soon reduced, from mere barrenness, to the poorest of all imitations; he will be obliged to imitate himself, and to repeat what he has before often repeated. When we know the subject designed by such men, it will never be difficult to guess what kind of work is to be produced.”

Joshua Reynolds

Discourse no. 6; vol. 1, p. 158.
Discourses on Art

“If deceiving the eye were the only business of the art, there is no doubt, indeed, but the minute painter would be more apt to succeed; but it is not the eye, it is the mind, which the painter of genius desires to address; nor will he waste a moment upon those smaller objects, which only serve to catch the sense, to divide the attention, and to counteract his great design of speaking to the heart.”

Joshua Reynolds

Discourse no. 3; vol. 1, pp. 70-71.
Discourses on Art