John Singer Sargent Quotes

I do not judge, I only chronicle.

A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.

You can't do sketches enough. Sketch everything and keep your curiosity fresh.

I hate to paint portraits! I hope never to paint another portrait in my life. Portraiture may be all right for a man in his youth, but after forty I believe that manual dexterity deserts one, and, besides, the color-sense is less acute. Youth can better stand the exactions of a personal kind that are inseparable from portraiture. I have had enough of it.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

Color is an inborn gift, but appreciation of value is merely training of the eye, which everyone ought to be able to acquire.

Mine is the horny hand of toil.

I don't dig beneath the surface for things that don't appear before my own eyes.