A Quote by John Singer Sargent

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

Quote Topics

Age Time Every Every Time Friend Lose Paint Portrait

Quote Author

John Singer Sargent
American - Artist
January 12, 1856 - April 14, 1925

My responsibility isn't to paint a flattering portrait; my responsibility is to paint a real portrait, a true portrait.

Jhumpa Lahiri

Painting has always been a means of self-expression for me. Therefore, I paint because I have to and need to, not necessarily because I want to. Subconsciously or not, the figures I paint are a reflection of myself and whatever mood I am in at the time, so every painting is in essence a self-portrait.

Lori Earley

I was good friends with Frank Sinatra, I heard Steve Kaufman painting his portrait, so I asked Steve to paint my portrait.

Lee Iacocca

The reason that I'm an actor, or an artist, is ultimately because I'm trying to paint a self-portrait, and the most complete and beautiful self-portrait that you can.

Terrence Howard

I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.

Salvador Dali

He sat by her, watching every gesture she made, as if he would paint her portrait afterward.

Tanith Lee

I don't paint women, I paint pictures. . . What I am after above all is expression. If in a portrait I put eyes, a nose, a mouth, there isn't much use; on the contrary it paralyses the imagination of the spectator, and obliges us to see the person in a certain way.

Henri Matisse

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

Oscar Wilde

OF writing many books there is no end; And I who have written much in prose and verse For others' uses, will write now for mine,- Will write my story for my better self, As when you paint your portrait for a friend, Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it Long after he has ceased to love you, just To hold together what he was and is.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Paint records the most delicate gesture and the most tense. It tells whether the painter sat or stood or crouched in front of the canvas. Paint is a cast made of the painter's movements, a portrait of the painter's body and thoughts.

James Elkins

An honest self-portrait is extremely rare because a man who has reached the degree of self-consciousness presupposed by the desire to paint his own portrait has almost always also developed an ego-consciousness which paints himself painting himself, and introduces artificial highlights and dramatic shadows.

W. H. Auden

Everything I paint is a portrait, whatever the subject.

Jamie Wyeth

I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it. Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now! Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day—mock me horribly!

Oscar Wilde

Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.

Oscar Wilde

You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody even by a wrong call. And then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you've ever made, every friend you've ever discussed something with. And attack you on that basis to sort to derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.