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..indistinctness is my forte.
J. M. W. Turner -
If I could find anything blacker than black, I'd use it.
J. M. W. Turner
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Painting can never show her nose in company with architecture without being snubbed.
J. M. W. Turner -
It is necessary to mark the greater from the lesser truth: namely the larger and more liberal idea of nature from the comparatively narrow and confined; namely that which addresses itself to the imagination from that which is solely addressed to the eye.
J. M. W. Turner -
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'.
J. M. W. Turner -
Then you will do away with the only social meetings at the Art Academy in London we have, the only occasion on which we all come together in an easy, unrestrained manner. When we have no varnishing days, we shall not know one another.
J. M. W. Turner -
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..'
J. M. W. Turner -
My business is to paint what I see, not what I know is there.
J. M. W. Turner
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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.'
J. M. W. Turner -
I never in my whole life could make a drawing like that; I would at any time have given one of my little fingers to have made such a one one of Girtin's yellow drawings.
J. M. W. Turner -
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.
J. M. W. Turner -
.. I reprobate the mechanically systematic approach of drawing.. ..so generally diffused. I think it can produce nothing but manner and sameness.
J. M. W. Turner -
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.
J. M. W. Turner -
No, Mr. Williams, certainly not; if Mr. Drake a solicitor of the English Railway Company has purchased a 'Turner', he ought to know it is a Turner; I was once silly enough to look at a picture that I was told had been painted by me, and I found myself soon after stuck up in a witness-box, giving evidence about it; I then said I'll never be so silly again.
J. M. W. Turner