Robert Henri Quotes

Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art. In a woman the flesh must be like marble; in a statue the marble must be like flesh.

I have unbounded admiration for the nude. I worship it like a god.

Art can never exist without naked beauty displayed.

I like the body. I like to design everything to do with the body.

The foundation of beauty is the body.

What is art? Nature concentrated.

I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.

All really great pictures exhibit the general habits of nature, manifested in some peculiar, rare, and beautiful way.

A painted landscape is always more beautiful than a real one, because there's more there. Everything is more sensual, and one takes refuge in its beauty.

High art consists neither in altering, nor in improving nature; but in seeking throughout nature for 'whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are pure;' in loving these, in displaying to the utmost of the painter's power such loveliness as is in them, and directing the thoughts of others to them by winning art, or gentle emphasis.

When an artist paints a picture he does not want you to consider his personality as represented in that picture - he wants you to look at the beauty of that picture. No one cares who has painted the picture as long as it is beautiful.

The sculptor does not work for the anatomist, but for the common observer of life and nature.

When a man paints a naked woman he gives her less than poor Nature did. I can conceive of few circumstances wherein I would have to paint a woman naked, but if I did I would not mutilate her for double the money. She is the most beautiful thing there is except a naked man, but I never saw a study of one exhibited.

Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art.

Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions.

I began thinking about my skeleton, this solid, beautiful thing inside me that I would never see.

My concern has always been to paint nudes as if they were some splendid fruit.

Love and art do not embrace what is beautiful but what is made beautiful by this embrace.

Art is - representing the beautiful. There must be Art in everything.

For what could be more beautiful than the heavens which contain all beautiful things.

O painter skilled in anatomy, beware lest the undue prominence of the bones, sinews and muscles cause you to become a wooden painter from the desire to make your nude figures reveal all.

Style, like the human body, is specially beautiful when, so to say, the veins are not prominent, and the bones cannot be counted, but when a healthy and sound blood fills the limbs, and shows itself in the muscles, and the very sinews become beautiful under a ruddy glow and graceful outline.

Nothing is quite beautiful alone; nothing but is beautiful in the whole. A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace.

A great painting or symphony or play, doesn't diminish us, but enlarges us, and we, too, want to make our own cry of affirmation to the power of Creation behind the Universe.

Endeavoring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.