19th Century Art Quotes

I sound like Homer. I mean Winslow Homer.

I love political cartoons from the 19th century, and whenever I complete a piece of acting work that I'm particularly proud of, be it a film or play, I treat myself to a picture by caricaturist James Gillray.

The day I decided I didn't want to be a 19th-Century European curator, I knew I would never have the experience of people coming and going 'ooh' and 'aah,' the way they do around the Monets. It just doesn't happen.

I always say I'm no different than a 19th-century landscape painter, it's just that we have these incredible tools to look at the Earth and look at the world around us differently.

I wish I was better at art. I love some of the great artists of the 19th century and, compared to them, I just feel I lack this technique that they had. They have so much skill.

There are, of course, always painters whom I admire and find fascinating. I've often thought, 'Goodness, if I could paint like the Danish Golden Age painters, the early 19th century painters, the way they could paint a landscape - absolutely beautiful.'

Even the Impressionists, the most innovative artists of their time, sought to paint realistically. They believed that their freer way of portraying the visible world was truer to life than the literal realism of the 'salon painters' who dominated French art throughout the 19th century.

When I see that the nineteenth century has crowned the idolatry of Art with the deification of Love, so that every poet is supposed to have pierced to the holy of holies when he has announced that Love is the Supreme, or the Enough, or the All, I feel that Art was safer in the hands of the most fanatical of Cromwell's major generals than it will be if ever it gets into mine.

Going to the Huntington gardens and libraries was radically important for me. They have one of the best collections of 18th- and 19th-century British portraiture that you can imagine in Southern California. One doesn't think about Southern California as being the capital of great art.

The 19th-century Continental porcelain plaques that are worth the most money are the pretty ones.

In the 19th century, you had bourgeois art without politics - an almost frozen idea of what beauty is.

Since Courbet, it's been believed that painting is addressed to the retina. That was everyone's error. The retinal shudder! Before, painting had other functions: it could be religious, philosophical, moral... our whole century is completely retinal, except for the Surrealists, who tried to go outside it somewhat.

I've been fortunate to have been in Paris a dozen times, where I've gone to the Louvre. I'm very big on Impressionistic paintings.

Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography; the good ones all welcomed it and used it. Degas liked it not only because it provided an accurate record, but because the snapshot showed him a means of escape from the classical rules of design. Through it he learnt to make a composition without the use of formal symmetry.

The impressionists, Debussy, Faure, in France, did take a few steps forward.

I really became convinced I wanted to tell the story of the real-life model for the Degas sculpture 'Little Dancer Aged 14,' which was unveiled in 1881, the Belle Epoque.

I think every age has a medium that talks to it more eloquently than the others. In the 19th century it was symphonic music and the novel. For various technical and artistic reasons, film became that eloquent medium for the 20th century.