The Literary Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Kt. Late President of the Royal Academy;: Containing His Discourses, Papers in the Idler, the Journal of a Tour Through Flanders and Holland, and Also His Commentary on Du Fresnoy's Art of Painting. : Printed from the Author's Revised Copies, with His Last Corrections and Additions. To which is Prefixed, Some Account of the Life of the Author, by Edmond Malone, Esq. One of His Executors..

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T. Cadell and W. Davies, in the Strand, Booksellers to the Royal Academy., 1819 - 3 páginas

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Página xxix - their excellence and their value consisted in being the observations of a strong mind operating upon life ; and in consequence you find there what you seldom find in other books.
Página 245 - Homer; who, from the midst of battles and horrours, relieves and refreshes the mind of the reader, by introducing some quiet rural image, or picture of familiar domestic life. The writers of every age and country, where taste has begun to decline, paint and adorn every object they touch; are always on the stretch; never deviate or sink a moment from the pompous and the brilliant. Lucan...
Página 51 - By this means, he acquires a just idea of beautiful forms; he corrects Nature by herself, her imperfect state by her more perfect. His eye being enabled to distinguish the accidental deficiencies, excrescences, and deformities of things, from their general figures, he makes out an abstract idea of their forms more perfect than any one original...
Página 48 - It is not easy to define in what this great style consists ; nor to describe, by words, the proper means of acquiring it, if the mind of the student should be at all capable of such an acquisition. Could we teach taste or genius by rules, they would be no longer taste and genius.
Página cxviii - ... his native humility, modesty, and candour never forsook him, even on surprise or provocation ; nor was the least degree of arrogance or assumption visible to the most scrutinizing eye in any part of his conduct or discourse.
Página 36 - You must have no dependence on your own genius. If you have great talents, industry will improve them; if you have but moderate abilities, industry will supply their deficiency. Nothing is denied to well directed labour: nothing is to be obtained without it.
Página clxxii - An Institution like this has often been recommended upon considerations merely mercantile ; but an Academy, founded upon such principles, can never effect even its own narrow purposes. If it has an origin no higher, no taste can ever be formed in manufactures ; but if the higher Arts of Design flourish, these inferior ends will be answered of course.
Página 56 - There is, likewise, a kind of symmetry, or proportion, which may properly be said to belong to deformity. A figure lean or corpulent, tall or short, though deviating from beauty, may still have a certain union of the various parts, which may contribute to make them on the whole not unpleasing.
Página cxxvi - In the window of his mother's apartment lay Spenser's Fairy Queen ; in which he very early took delight to read, till by feeling the charms of verse, he became, as he relates, irrecoverably a poet. Such are the accidents which, sometimes remembered, and perhaps sometimes forgotten, produce that particular designation of mind, and propensity for some certain science or employment, which is commonly called Genius. The true Genius is a mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular...
Página 276 - A great part of the beauty of the celebrated description of Eve in Milton's Paradise Lost, consists in using only general indistinct expressions, every reader making out the detail according to his own particular imagination — his own idea of Beauty, grace, expression, dignity, or loveliness : but a painter, when he represents Eve on a canvas, is obliged to give a determined form, and his own idea of beauty distinctly expressed.

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