Top 18 Quotes & Sayings by Henry Fuseli

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a British artist Henry Fuseli.
Last updated on November 8, 2024.
Henry Fuseli

Henry Fuseli was a Swiss painter, draughtsman and writer on art who spent much of his life in Britain. Many of his works, such as The Nightmare, deal with supernatural subject matter. He painted works for John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery, and created his own "Milton Gallery". He held the posts of Professor of Painting and Keeper at the Royal Academy. His style had a considerable influence on many younger British artists, including William Blake.

Nature is a collective idea, and, though its essence exist in each individual of the species, can never in its perfection inhabit a single object.
Blake is damned good to steal from.
Ancient art was the tyrant of Egypt, the mistress of Greece and the servant of Rome. — © Henry Fuseli
Ancient art was the tyrant of Egypt, the mistress of Greece and the servant of Rome.
Raffael's drapery is the assistant of character, in Michelangelo it envelopes grandeur; it is in Reubens the ponderous robe of pomp.
Tintoretto attempted to fill the line of Michelangelo with color, without tracing its principle.
Heaven and earth, advantages and obstacles, conspire to educate genius.
Art, like love, excludes all competition and absorbs the man.
Selection is the invention of the landscape painter.
The price of excellence is labor, and time that of immortality.
Emulation embalms the dead; envy, the vampire, blasts the living.
Expression alone can invest beauty with supreme and lasting command over the eye.
Indiscriminate pursuit of perfection infallibly leads to mediocrity.
Life is rapid, art is slow, occasion coy, practice fallacious, and judgment partial.
When we idealize the real, we sacrifice to artistic fancy.
The superiority of the Greeks seems not so much the result of climate and society, as of the simplicity of their end and the uniformity of their means.
Our ideas are the offspring of our senses; we are not more able to create the form of a being we have not seen, without retrospect to one we know, than we are able to create a new sense. He whose fancy has conceived an idea of the most beautiful form must have composed it from actual existence.
Art among a religious race produces reliques [sic]; among a military one, trophies; among a commercial one, articles of trade. — © Henry Fuseli
Art among a religious race produces reliques [sic]; among a military one, trophies; among a commercial one, articles of trade.
All actions and attitudes of children are graceful because they are the luxuriant and immediate offspring of the moment - divested of affectation and free from all pretense.
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