Printmakers

"Dear Sir, - I have truly, I must say, written three times, and now hesitate; for did I know your son's works, or, as you say, his gifted merits yet even then I would rather advise you to think well, and not be carried away by the admiration which any friendly hopes (which ardent friends to early talent) may assume: they know not the difficulties or the necessities of the culture of the Fine Arts generally speaking. In regard to yourself, it is you alone can judge how far you are inclined to support him during perhaps a long period of expense; and particularly if you look towards tuition, the more so; for it cannot insure success (however much it may facilitate practice), and therefore it behooves you to weigh well the means in your power before you embark in a profession which requires more care, assiduity, and perseverance than any person can guarantee."

"If I could find anything blacker than black, I'd use it."

"He John Ruskin knows a great deal more about my pictures than I do; he puts things into my head, and points out meanings in them that I never intended."

"Painting can never show her nose in company with architecture without being snubbed."

"I have appointed you [ his friend, the sculptor Francis Chantry ] one of my executors. Will you promise to see me rolled up in it [in Turner's painting 'Carthage'? ('Yes', responded his friend 'and I promise you also that, as soon as you are buried, I will see you taken up and unrolled.'"

"Chantrey [good friend of Turner] is as gay and as good as ever, ready to serve: he requests, for my benefit, that you bottle up all the yellows which may be found straying out of the right way; but what you may have told him about the old masters which you did not tell me, I can't tell, but we expected to hear a great deal from each other, but the stormy brush of Tintoretto was only to make the 'Notte' more visible."

"Dear Jones.. [I] give you some account of.. ..the last sad ceremonies paid yesterday to departed talent gone to that bourne from whence no traveller returns. Alas, only two short months Sir Thomas followed the coffin of Dawe to the same place. We then were his pall-bearers. Who will do the like for me, or when, God only knows how soon; my poor father's death [Sept. 1829] proved a heavy blow upon me, and has been followed by others of the same dark kind."

"My dear Chantrey, - I intended long before this (but you will say, Fudge) to have written: but even now very little information have I to give you in matters of Art, for I have confined myself to the painting department at Corso; and having finished one, am about the second, and getting on with Lord E.'s, which I began the very first touch at Rome; but as the folk here talked that I would show them not, I finished a small three feet four [painting] to stop their gabbling.."

"Dear Jones, - Two months nearly in getting to this Terra Pictura, and at work; but the length of time is my own fault. [because] I must see the South of France, which almost knocked me up, the heat was so intense, particularly at Nismes and Avignon; and until I got a plunge into the sea at Marseilles, I felt so weak that nothing but the change of scene kept me onwards to my distant point. Genoa, and all the sea-coast from Nice to Spezzia, is remarkably rugged and fine; so is Massa.. .Hope that you have been better than usual, and that the pictures go on well."

"My dear Sir, [Mr. Trimmer] - I lament that all hope of the pleasure of seeing you, or getting to Heston, must for the present probably vanish. My father told me.. ..that you and Mrs. Trimmer would leave Heston for Suffolk as tomorrow, Wednesday.. ..In looking forward to a Continental excursion, and poor Daddy seems as much plagued with weeds as I am with disappointment - that if Miss ... would but waive bashfulness, or, in other words, make an offer instead of expecting one, the same might change occupiers; but not to trouble you further, allow me, with most sincere respect to Mrs. Trimmer and family, to consider myself - Yours most truly obliged, 'J. M. W. Turner.'"

"In our variable climate where [all] the seasons are recognizable in one day, where all the vapoury turbulence involves the face of things, where nature seems to sport in all: her dignity and dispensing incidents for the artist’s study.. ..how happily is the landscape painter situated, how roused by every change in nature in every moment, that allows no languor even in her effects which she places before him, and demands most peremptorily every moment his admiration and investigation, to store his mind with every change of time and place."

"Hawkey - Hawkey [Mr. Fawkes of Farnley Hall, North Yorkshire, close friend of Turner] - come here - come here! Look at this thunderstorm! Isn't it grand? - Isn't it wonderful? - Isn't it sublime?. .There, Hawkey; in two years you will see this again, and call it 'Hannibal Crossing the Alps'."

"To select, combine and concentrate that which is beautiful in nature and admirable in art is as much the business of the landscape painter in his line as in the other departments of art."

"Well, Gaffer [his early friend Mr. Wells, artist] I see there will be no peace till I comply; so give me a piece of paper. There, now, rule the size for me, and tell me what I am to do. [Mr. Wells told him: 'Well divide your subject into classes, say: Pastoral, Marine, Elegant Pastoral, and so forth..']"

".. [I] reprobate the mechanically systematic approach of drawing.. ..so generally diffused. I think it can produce nothing but manner and sameness."

"Turner was much more interested in the interplay between the atmosphere and sunlight and how he could use this to heighten the effects of his landscapes and seascapes. John Constable rarely painted the atmosphere at all but concentrated on the clouds and the sky. The visibility in Constable's landscapes is nearly always very good, such that the horizon can be clearly seen; he rarely painted mist or fog. Turner on the other hand delighted in mist and fog which often blot out the horizon and sky in his paintings."

"After plunging them into water, he [Turner] dropped the colours onto the paper while it was wet, making marblings and gradations throughout.. .His completing process was marvellously rapid, for he indicated his masses and incidents, took out half-lights, scraped out high-lights and dragged, hatched and stippled until the design was finished. This swiftness, grounded in the scale practice in early life, enabled Turner to preserve the purity and luminosity of his work, and to paint at a prodigiously rapid rate."

"I knew him, when a boy, and have often paid him a guinea for putting backgrounds to my architectural drawings, calling upon him for this purpose at his father's shop in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden. He never would suffer me to see him draw, but concealed, as I understood, all that he did in his bedroom."

"..Turner did not believe that colour was reducible to system; and Gainsborough, when painting his 'Blue Boy' seems to have been of the same opinion."

"Many years ago, when he was making sketches for the 'Provincial Antiquities' [Scottish!] in the company of Cadell, the Edinburgh bookseller, as they passed Norham, Turner took off his hat and made a low bow to the ruins. Observing this strange act of homage, Cadell exclaimed, 'What the Devil are you about now?' 'Oh,' was Turner's reply, 'I made a drawing or painting of Norham several years since.. ..and from that day to this I have had as much to do as my hands could execute."

"Turner and Thomson of Duddingston, whom he met at Edinburgh, belonged to the same set of artists and painters, and used to go out sketching and painting together. At the meetings of the clique Turner would constantly battle with them upon the subject of light, trying to gain from Brewster and other 'savans' information thereon; and it is supposed that the discussions contributed to form a theory which enabled him to create the varied effects he has displayed in his works. To such a height, indeed, did he carry the verbal contests that the subject, it is said, finally was prohibited; and he then became more earnest to discover what combination of colour would produce light."

"I have heard him speak most enthusiastically in praise of Gainsborough's execution and Wilson's tone, and he plainly thought himself their inferior. My father had some admirable oil sketches of Gainsborough; and these Turner one evening examined by candle-light so closely that the next morning he complained of having hurt his eyes."

"Turner was very communicative to my father [in instruction], and would point out to him any defect in sketching. I think he fairly instructed my father in painting in his own method; which was to lay the dead colours as nearly as possible in the forms you wished, leaving as little as possible for finishing, using as a vehicle nothing but linseed oil, diluted as required in spirits of turpentine."

"Howard.. ..often got into warm professional disputes with him [Turner]. But Turner was mostly in the right. They once, I remember, had a very hot dispute, and for the time being lost temper. Howard maintained they should paint for the public; Turner, that public opinion was not worth a rush, and that one should paint only for judges.. ..The vulgar, on the whole, would understand form better than colour, and low subjects better than cultivated ones; so that Turner argued wisely, with reference to himself, in painting for the cultivated few."

"Henry Howard, R.A., was an early friend of my father's; and he and Turner have stayed with us at Heston. I remember, when I was about five years old, going to Penn, in Buckinghamshire, with Howard, Turner, and my father [c. 1812]; all of them in search of the picturesque. We went in a post-chaise, and, when tired, my father carried me pick-a-back. We came to a halt in a grove or copse where luxuriated wild flowers in profusion. It was a charming day; and, though so many 'years bygone' I can see now vividly before me my father and Howard, both standing legs a-straddle, and Turner at a little distance in a ditch, all hard at work at the easthetical. After a while Turner emerged from his retreat with a capital water-colour, with which Howard and my father were in raptures. He said he got into the ditch to avoid the sun, but Howard whispered my father that it was to avoid showing his modus operandi. I have heard this from my father subsequently.."

"Besides his boat, he had a gig and an old horse; an old crop-eared bay horse, or rather a cross between a horse and a pony. In this gig he used to drive out sketching, and take my father [James Trimmer] and myself with him. His sketching apparatus was under the seat. I remember once going on an expedition of this kind to Staines, and thence to Runnymede, where he made some sketches. From there he painted a picture which strongly resembles the place to this day. We went, I remember, at a very steady pace, for Turner painted much faster than he drove. He said, 'if when out sketching you felt at a loss, you had only to turn round or walk a few paces farther, and you had what you wanted before you.' He has immortalized his old crop-ear in his [painting] 'Frosty Morning'."

"I painted it in Berlin [self-portrait 'The Drinker'], while screaming military convoys were passing beneath my window day and night."

"The heaviest burden of all is the presence of the war and the increasing superficiality. It gives me incessantly the impression of a bloody carnival.. .I am now like the whores, I once painted [in his Berlin-time]: the merest brushstroke now, gone tomorrow. Nonetheless I am still trying to put my thoughts in order and, from all the confusion, create an image of time, which is my task, after all."

"Every day I studied the nude, and movement in the streets and in the shops [in Berlin]. Out of the naturalistic surface with all its variations I wanted to derive the pictorially determined surface."

"After lengthy struggles I now find myself here [Dr Kohnstamm's sanatorium in Königstein, in Taunus] for a time to put my mind into some kind of order. It is a terribly difficult thing, of course, to be among strangers so much of the day. But perhaps I'll be able to see and create something new. For the time being, I would like more peace and absolute seclusion. Of course, I long more and more for my work and my studio. Theories may be all very well for keeping a spiritual balance, but they are grey and shadowy compared with work and life."

"to study the nude, the foundation of all pictorial art, in total freedom and naturalness. From.. ..this basis there emerged the feeling, shared by all, of taking creative stimulus from life itself and submitting to the decisive experience."

"Life is unfixed when one lives in Berlin, where one has to fight for a living. It is painfully base here. I see that a fine, free culture cannot be created under these circumstances and wish to leave as soon as I have overcome this big slump."

"The struggle for existence is very difficult here [Berlin! - in 1911 Kirchner and his Brücke-friends moved from Dresden to Berlin], but the possibilities are also greater. I hope that we can create a fruitful new school and convince many new friends of the value of our efforts."

"[carving a sculpture in wood] is such a sensual pleasure when blow by blow the figure grows more and more from the trunk."

"Completely strange faces pop up as interesting points through the crowd. I am carried along with the current, lacking will. To move becomes an unacceptable effort [describing the crowds in Dresden]."

"..momentarily, we (Erich Heckel, Max Pechstein, and I) are once again at Moritzburg. There is nothing more delightful than nudes in open air."

"..art is made by man. His own figure is the center of all art.. .Therefore one must begin with the man himself."

"Marcella has now become quite at home and is developing fine features. We have become quite familiar with one another.. .There exists quite a charm in such a pure female, indications that could make one crazy. More fantastic than those of the older girls. More free, without having lost the developed female. Maybe some things are more developed in her than in the more mature ones and will diminish again."

"Believing in development, in a new generation of those who create and those who enjoy, we call together the youth of today. And as a youth which bears the future, we aim to create space to live and work, as opposition to the well-established, older powers. Everyone who reproduces, directly and without illusion, whatever he senses the urge to create, belongs to us."

"More than any of the other artists, Kirchner translated the staccato rhythm of the music into visual means; the legs of dancers become solid entities and almost dashes in his 1910 Hamburger Tänzerinnen (Hamburg Dancers) (Fig. 34). All weight of this image is on the legs, as they are the largest parts of the scene and are rendered fully in black. Moreover, the repeating subject of the three dancers each doing identical leg lifts creates a vibrating back-and-forth. In this quick sketch, Kirchner manages to relay the unified spirit of this performance."

"Kirchner superimposes [in his series Street Scene painting from Berlin], () a jaded artificiality over its excitement and glamour, situating the garish yet exotic streetwalker in an atmosphere suggesting loneliness and alienation, as well as agitation and danger. Paint is applied in spontaneous, splintered brushstrokes that create jagged forms and express an immediacy and energy that approximate the stimulating yet hectic urban environment."

"In spring 1915, the recruit, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, was furloughed from his field artillery unit because he did not prove adequate to the demand of service. The diagnosis said: "because of affected lungs and feebleness." But the true cause was a profound physical and spiritual crisis, which brought him to a sanatorium in Königstein, Taunus. Artistic efforts at overcoming the trauma are revealed in works such as the 1915 'Self-Portrait as a Soldier'. The artist presents himself in the masquerade of a uniform: his face is a mask of isolation: a bleeding arm stump looms out of the right sleeve; the painter's active hand seems chopped off."

"In the days that I spent in Dresden [before 1911].. ..I was together with Kirchner and Heckel a great deal.. .Here they led a singular bohemian life, liberated from any ordering of day-times and mealtimes; when they had the impulse they worked the whole night through and slept through the morning. I was convinced that they not infrequently lived on coffee, cake, and cigarettes.. .When the lamps were lit, we sat on benches and crouched over the batik-ed fabrics that were spread around the low table and looked at the portfolios with hand drawings and printed sheets; all the time strange, grotesque sculptures peered over our shoulders. The two showed me how they etched their lithographs, printed their etchings, and Kirchner drew two.. ..portraits of me with the dry-point needle."

"..one day [c. 1905-07], Kirchner brought with him a volume from some bookstore with pictures of Meier-Graefe about the modern French artists. We were enthralled."

"A tragedy had been quietly enacted here over the last few months. Because of the defamation in Germany [in 1937 a total of 639 works by Kirchner were confiscated by the Nazi-regime: Degenerate Art] and the failure of the November exhibition in Basle.. ..he [=Kirchner] chose a radiantly beautiful day, 15 June, to put an end to his life. I shall spare you the details. He had been suffering grievously until he was able to make this decision."

"'a true victim of the war; the hellish delusion of being sent back into battle had deranged him and flung him helplessly onto the shabby bed of a third-class hotel.. .In Davos I found an emaciated man with a piercing, feverish gaze, who saw imminent death before his eyes."

"Eberhard Grisebach, in a letter March 1917 to Helen Spengler; as quoted by E. W. Kornfield, Stauffer, Christine E. Stauffer (1992). Biography Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Kirchner Museum Davos. Retrieved March 21, 2016; from Wikipedia: Kirchner"

"A colourfully painted curtain concealed a large collection of paintings [in Kirchner's studio in Berlin]. When we began to look at them, he came alive. Together with me, he saw all his experiences drift by on canvas, the small, timid-looking woman set aside what we had seen and brought a bottle of wine. He made short explanatory remarks in a weary voice. Each picture had its own particular colourful character, a great sadness was present in all of them; what I had previously found to be incomprehensible and unfinished now created the same delicate and sensitive impression as his personality. Everywhere a search for style, for psychological understanding of his figures. The most moving was a self-portrait in uniform with his right hand cut off. Then he showed me his travel permit for Switzerland. He wanted to go back to Davos.. ..and implored me to ask father for a medical certificate.."

"We [Kirchner and Bleyl] established [c. 1902-03, in Dresden] a friendly relationship at once, and, striving for the same goals, we quickly developed a close friendship. We were constantly together, either at the Hochschule [Architecture], in our lodgings, or taking walks in the evenings, in the Grosser Garten in Dresden. We were never without pencil and paper."

"[Kirchner's studio was] that of a real bohemian, full of paintings lying all over the place, drawings, books and artist's materials — much more like an artist's romantic lodgings than the home of a well-organised architecture student."