"The thicker you paint, the more it flows."

~ John Singer Sargent #Botd 1856 was an American expatriate artist, considered the "leading portrait painter of his generation" for his evocations of Edwardian-era luxury.

Sargent created roughly 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors, as well as countless sketches and charcoal drawings. His oeuvre documents worldwide travel, from Venice to the Tyrol, Corfu, the Middle East, Montana, Maine, and Florida.

"You can't do sketches enough. Sketch everything and keep your curiosity fresh."
~ John Singer Sargent

"Cultivate an ever continuous power of observation. Wherever you are, be always ready to make slight notes of postures, groups and incidents...Above all things get abroad, see the sunlight and everything that is to be seen."
~ John Singer Sargent

"I do not judge, I only chronicle."
~ John Singer Sargent

"Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend."
~ John Singer Sargent

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

"I don't dig beneath the surface for things that don't appear before my own eyes."
~ John Singer Sargent

"A portrait is a picture in which there is just a tiny little something not quite right about the mouth."
~ John Singer Sargent

"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."
~ John Singer Sargent

"A person with normal eyesight would have nothing to know in the way of 'Impressionism' unless he were in a blinding light or in the dusk or dark."
~ John Singer Sargent

Claude Monet Painting by the Edge of a Wood, 1885, the Tate, London

"Impressionism' was the name given to a certain form of observation when Monet, not content with using his eyes to see what things were or what they looked like as everybody had done before him, turned his attention to noting what took place on his own retina.” ~ John S. Sargent

"No small dabs of colour - you want plenty of paint to paint with." ~ John Singer Sargent