Few Have Been Taught To Any Purpose

An Artist Who Brings To His Work A Mind Tolerably Furnished With The General Principles Of Art, And A Taste Formed Upon The Works Of Good Artists – In Short, Who Knows In What Excellence Consists - Will, With The Assistance Of Models... Be An Overmatch For The Greatest Painter That Ever Lived Who Should Be Debarred Such Advantages.

Gardening As Far As Gardening Is Art, Or Entitled To That Appellation, Is A Deviation From Nature; For If The True Taste Consists, As Many Hold, In Banishing Every Appearance Of Art, Or Any Traces Of The Footsteps Of Man, It Would Then Be No Longer A Garden.

The Value And Rank Of Every Art Is In Proportion To The Mental Labor Employed In It, Or The Mental Pleasure In Producing It.

I Have Heard Painters Acknowledge, Though In That Acknowledgment No Degradation Of Themselves Was Intended, That They Could Do Better Without Nature Than With Her; Or As They Express Themselves, 'that It Only Put Them Out.

The Great End Of All Arts Is To Make An Impression On The Imagination And The Feeling. The Imitation Of Nature Frequently Does This. Sometimes It Fails And Something Else Succeeds.