“Expression, sentiment, truth to nature, are essential: but all those are not enough. I never care to look at a picture again, if it be ill composed; and if well composed I can hardly leave off looking at it.”
Volume V, part VIII, chapter I, section 2 (1860).
Modern Painters (1843-1860)
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John Ruskin133
English writer and art critic 1819–1900Related quotes
Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist
Action and Study
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part IX - A Painter's Views on Painting
“Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.”
Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist
"A Mysterious Visit", Buffalo Express, 19 March 1870. Anthologized in Mark Twain's Sketches, New and Old http://books.google.com/books?id=5LcIAAAAQAAJ (1875)
“I was not influenced by composers as much as by natural objects and physical phenomena.”
Edgard Varèse (1883–1965) French composer
Interview with Gunther Schuller (1965, p. 34), quoted in Sound Structure in Music (1975) bu Robert Erickson; University of California Press. .
Context: I was not influenced by composers as much as by natural objects and physical phenomena. As a child, I was tremendously impressed by the qualities and character of the granite I found in Burgundy, where I often visited my grandfather... So I was always in touch with things of stone and with this kind of pure structural architecture — without frills or unnecessary decoration. All of this became an integral part of my thinking at a very early stage.
Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist
Source: 1870s - 1880s, The Writings of a Savage (1996), p. 5: Letter to Emile Schuffenecker, (Copenhagen, 14 January 1885)
Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863–1908) British photographer
Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Composition and clouds considered as an aid to expression, p. 104
Arthur Schopenhauer book The World as Will and Representation
Vol. I, Ch. III, The World As Representation
The World as Will and Representation (1819; 1844; 1859)
Context: The composer reveals the innermost nature of the world, and expresses the profoundest wisdom in a language that his reasoning faculty does not understand, just as a magnetic somnambulist gives information about things of which she has no conception when she is awake. Therefore in the composer, more than in any other artist, the man is entirely separate and distinct from the artist.
George Perle (1915–2009) American composer
Kozinn, Allan (January 24, 2009). "George Perle, a Composer and Theorist, Dies at 93" http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/24/arts/music/24perle.html, New York Times. <br class="br">See: Alban Berg <br class="br">The Listening Composer