Painters From England

"Thomas Gainsborough was a native of Sudbury, Suffolk; his father was a tailor. Gainsborough, as a child, went to the Sudbury Free School, where he distinguished himself by making ink-drawings on the desks instead of writing his copies. This I had from Mr. Briggs."

"I have dwelt on his [Gainsborough's] early works, since picture-dealers.. ..always decry them, and say he never painted a picture fit to be seen till he left Suffolk - men who, place them in the green fields, cannot tell one tree from another. It is true his early works are less artificial and less academical, but they are far truer to nature, to elevated nature. His early pictures exhibit a remarkable variety of form in his trees; his oaks are inimitable; latterly, all his trees assumed one form; for he mistook system for nature."

"It is to Gainsborough's credit that he never attempted the so-called 'grand style' in painting as did Romney with such doubtful success; in that province Reynolds holds the highest rank of the artists of his day. Gainsborough in some respects was like a child; and this gives his character a certain attraction."

"The same may be said of Gainsborough's landscapes of Suffolk and Wiltshire in which he has introduced a peasantry whose beauty could never have existed - cottagers and their children, grouped around their doors or seated in their waggons quite as beautiful as his fair dames and gallants who flutter in the Mall, or walk in palace gardens. Here the magic of the painter's art has cast a spell over the simple denizens of the soil."

"Gainsborough's Palette. - This I had from Mr. Briggs, but have lost it; still, as I have copied several Gainsborough's, I think I can furnish you with it. Yellows: yellow ochre, Naples }nllow, yellow lake, and for his high lights (but very seldom) some brighter yellow, probably some preparation of orpiment, raw sienna. Reds: vermilion, light red Venetian, and the lakes. Browns: burnt sienna, cologne earth (this he used very freely, and brown pink the same). He used a great deal of terra verte, which he mixed with his blues, generally with ultramarine. His skies are ultramarine. In his early pictures I could never trace other colours."

"We have a painter here [in Bath ], who takes the most exact likenesses I ever saw. His painting is coarse and slight, but has ease and spirit. Lord Villiers sat to him before he left Bath, and I hope we shall be able to bring his picture to town with us, as it is he himself, and is preferable in my opinion to the finest unlike picture in the universe, though it might serve for a sign; he sate only twice. The painter's name is Gainsborough."

"It was said of him [Gainsborough] that he was self-educated.. .In this self-instruction there is undoubtedly an animation in the pursuit, and self-gratulation in the success, that is flattering. But if Gainsborough had had the good fortune, which the present students have, of being taught in an Academy, we should not now regret what was perhaps his greatest deficiency, a want of precision in the form of his objects."

"[painting by artificial light is (as Gainsborough frequently did, according to Sir Joshua) very advantageous and improving to an artist."

"I always wanted her to say, "I love you, I’ll stand by you, you are very important to me," but she never did. She loved me inside, but I didn’t feel it."

"He [Gainsborough] even framed a model of landscapes on his table; composed of broken stones, dried herbs, and pieces of looking-glass, which he magnified and improved into rocks, trees, and water."

"This great painter was not only an enthusiastic lover of music, but a respectable performer on the harpsichord. I have frequently heard my father speak of his performance on this instrument in terms of great praise."

"The texture of his pictures has been objected to. There is said to be a washiness and want of solidity in them not desirable to imitate. This may be true as regards imitation; but with Gainsborough's masterly execution, the thinness and docility of his vehicle is no small part of its merit. Had he painted in a fat unyielding material, the delicacy and playfulness of his pencil would have been lost, though it must be owned that unsuccessful attempts to obtain a good vehicle mark his period."

"The Turner should be renamed the B&Q diy prize."

"The result of walking round Tate Modern is not an experience of the marvel of creative profundity which gives meaning to life, but more akin to the detritus of a dryly analytical bureaucrat reverting to an infantile stage during an extended breakdown."

"He disrupted things and that’s fine, but now things have been shaken up so much that it’s been shaken up into little bits and the little bits have been shaken up into even smaller bits. We are saying let’s put it all back together."

"Artists who don't paint aren't artists."

"It has become an ongoing national joke."

"Britain's greatest cultural asset"

"Doodles done by a lobotomised computer."

"What, like Harpic?"

"Bowie and McCartney arrived, and the biscuits and caviare started and I left immediately. I don’t like shouting across rooms, with people in shiny suits who look like used-car salesmen."

"When I was better known than her, she put my name in that tent. I was asked to do Celebrity Big Brother, but why should I? We live in an age where fame is not related to what you do."

"I am angry with him but I have compassion for him. The reason I can have a relationship with him is that I don’t see him as my father but as an individual. I’m glad I didn’t murder him that day. I couldn’t have lived with myself if I had."

"I loved moustaches. I used to draw myself with one. When I was 14, I was really into war and Van Gogh."

"I like being on the margins. You work better there."

"Your paintings are stuck, you are stuck! Stuck! Stuck! Stuck!"

"Artists who don't paint aren't artists."

"It has become an ongoing national joke."

"It’s not a coincidence that governments use art on coins and notes. They do this to help us believe in money. Without art, it’s hard for us to believe in anything."

"a seething, dyslexic, better-looking British Bukowski"

"I started taking cocaine and drink ... I turned into a babbling fucking wreck."

"Great art – or good art – is when you look at it, experience it and it stays in your mind. I don't think conceptual art and traditional art are all that different. There's boring conceptual art and there's boring traditional art. Great art is if you can't stop thinking about it, then it becomes a memory."

"Before 1999, Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas offered to get me exhibitions, but joining the Stuckists put a kaibosh on all that — because I wasn't prepared to be controlled. I agreed to co-found the Stuckists to be allowed to say what I wanted, and I left the Stuckists because I didn't really want to be in them in the first place."

"I can’t wait to get into a position to make really bad art and get away with it. At the moment if I did certain things people would look at it, consider it and then say "f off". But after a while you can get away with things."

"I was with this guy who was a plasterer, and at lunchtime he was eating a stuffed heart . . . I was thinking, "I'm not like these guys. I'm an artist." And I saw a bee come over to some flowers and get all the pollen out. I was looking and thinking, "How does it do that?" And then the guy who was eating the stuffed heart said, "How does that bee do that?""

"I just wanted to find out where the boundaries were. So far I've found there aren't any. I just wanted to be stopped, and no one will stop me."

"The best spot painting you can have by me is one painted by Rachel."

"Still I should paint my own places best; painting is with me but another word for feeling, and I associate "my careless boyhood" with all that lies on the banks of the Stour; those scenes made me a painter, and I am grateful; that is, I had often thought of pictures of them before ever I touched a pencil, and your picture ['The White Horse'] is one of the strongest instance I can recollect of it."

"I am most anxious to get into my London painting-room, for I do not consider myself at work unless I am before a six-foot canvas. I have done a good deal of skying for I am determined to conquer all difficulties, and that among the rest."

"But the sound of water escaping from mill-dams, &c., willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork, I love such things. Shakespeare could make everything poetical; he tells us of poor Tom's haunts among "sheep cotes and mills." As long as I do paint, I shall never cease to paint such places. They have always been my delight."

"This appearance of the Evening was... just after a very heavy rain — more rain in the night and very — [?light] wind which continued all the — day following while making – this sketch observed the Moon easing – very beautifully... [in the] due East over the — heavy clouds from which the late showers – had fallen."

"I know very well what I am about, & that my skies have not been neglected, though they often failed in execution — and often, no doubt, from an over-anxiety about them — which will alone destroy that easy appearance which nature always has — in all her movements."

"That landscape painter who does not make his skies a very material part of his composition, neglects to avail himself of one of his greatest aids. Sir Joshua Reynolds speaking of the "Landscape" of Titian & Salvator & Claude says 'Even their skies seem to sympathise with the Subject.' I have often been advised to consider my sky as a 'hite Sheet thrown behind the Objects'. Certainly, if the sky is 'obtrusive,' (as mine are) it is bad, but if they are 'evaded' (as mine are not) it is worse, they must and always shall with me make an effectual part of the composition. It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which the sky is not the 'key note,' the 'standard of Scale' and the chief 'Organ of sentiment.' You may conceive, then, what a "white sheet" would do for me, impressed as I am with these notions."

"How sweet and beautifull is every place & I visit my old Haunts with renewed delight... nothing can exceed the beautiful green of the meadows which are beginning to fill with butter Cups — & various flowers — the birds are singing from morning till night but most of all the Sky larks — How delightfull is the Country."

"I have added some ploughmen to the landscape form the park pales which is a great help, but I must try and warm the picture a little more if I can... but I look to do a great deal better in future. I am determined to finish a small picture in the spot for every one I intend to make in future. But this I have always talked about but never yet done – I think however my mind is more settled and determined than ever on this point."

"I paint ideas, not things. My intention is less to paint works that are pleasing to the eye than to suggest great thoughts which will speak to the imagination and the heart and will arouse all that is noblest and best in man."

"He was pure Cockney, intolerant of everything foreign. English painting, so far as it has excelled at all, has done so in inverse relation to the influence of Italy and France. I do not know of any foreign painter except Svoboda who rivalled the English School in their own métier. Comparable Parisians of the nineteenth century tended towards the lubricious or the allegorical. There is one corner of the artistic field that will remain for ever England."

"It is to Hogarth's honour that in so many scenes of satire or ridicule, it is obvious that ill-nature did not guide his pencil. His end is always reformation, and his reproofs general."

"In only one branch of painting, and that not the most honoured even in our own country, did we produce a unique, idiosyncratic national school. That is the school of narrative composition founded by Hogarth and perfected a hundred years later. It would be absurd to claim a place for him beside Titian and Velasquez, even beside Goya. He was in no sense a great painter, but he is a national figure comparable to Dr Johnson or Trollope, of whom we may well be proud... The school which Hogarth founded may be defined as the detailed representation of contemporary groups, posed to tell a story and inculcate a moral precept. The figures are not merely caught and preserved in certain attitudes; previous and subsequent events are implicit in the scene portrayed. Hogarth's moral lessons are commonplace, commonsensical: that extravagance leads to destitution, debauchery to madness, crime to the gallows, loveless marriage to infidelity and so on. It remained for the more delicate sentiment of the Victorians to refine on these maxims."

"Hogarth resembles Butler, but his subjects are more universal, and amidst all his pleasantry, he observes the true end of comedy, reformation; there is always a moral to his pictures. Sometimes he rose to tragedy, not in the catastrophe of kings and heroes, but in marking how vice conducts insensibly and incidentally to misery and shame. He warns against encouraging cruelty and idleness in young minds, and discerns how the different vices of the great and the vulgar lead by various paths to the same unhappiness."