Inspiration Friday: Quotes about Beauty

{Rembrandt van Rijn, 'Old Man with a Walking Stick; Head of a Young Woman,' c. 1633-34, brown ink on cream antique laid paper.}

. No thing is beautiful. But all things await the sensitive and imaginative mind that may be aroused to pleasurable emotion at sight of them. This is beauty.
Robert Henri

. Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.
Pablo Picasso

. Artist are sometimes asked, "Why do you paint ugly and not beautiful things?" The questioner rarely hesitates in his judgement of what is beautiful and what is ugly. This with him is a foregone conclusion. Beauty he thinks is a settled fact. His conception also is that beauty rests in teh subject, not in the expression. He should, therefore, pay high for Rembrandt's portrait of a gentleman, and turn with disgust from a beggar by Rembrandt. Fortunately Rembrandt is old enough not to have this happen, and the two, the gentleman and the beggar, flank each other on the walls in fine places. but the lesson has not been learned. The idea still remains, that beauty rests in the subject.
Robert Henri


{Rembrandt van Rijn, 'Four Studies of Male Heads', c. 1635, brown ink and brown wash on cream antique laid paper}


{Rembrandt van Rijn, Beggar Woman Leaning on a Stick, c. 1628/1630, brush and brown wash on laid paper}

. That which is not slightly distorted lacks sensible appeal; from which it follows that irregularity – that is to say, the unexpected, surprise and astonishment, are a essential part and characteristic of beauty.
Charles Baudelaire