Benjamin Haydon
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"Benjamin Robert Haydon" was an England/English Painting/painter who specialised in grand historical pictures, although he also painted a few contemporary subjects and portraits. His commercial success was damaged by his often tactless dealings with patrons, and by the enormous scale on which he preferred to work. He was troubled by financial problems throughout his life, which led to several periods of imprisonment for debt. He committed suicide in 1846.

He gave lectures on art, and kept extensive diaries that were published after his death.

More Benjamin Haydon on Wikipedia.

Never suffer youth to be an excuse for inadequacy, nor age and fame to be an excuse for indolence.

256

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

167

There surely is in human nature an inherent propensity to extract all the good out of all the evil.

155

Fortunately for serious minds, a bias recognized is a bias sterilized.

147

The longer a man lives in this world the more he must be convinced that all domestic quarrels had better never be obtruded on the public; for, let the husband be right, or let him be wrong, there is always a sympathy existing for women which is certain to give the man the worst of it.

144

This is an age of intellectual sauces, of essence, of distillation. We have "conclusions" without deductions, "abridgments of history" and "abridgments of science" without leading facts.

140

The only legitimate artists in England are the architects.

114

One of the surest evidences of an elevated taste is the power of enjoying works of impassioned terrorism, in poetry, and painting. The man who can look at impassioned subjects of terror with a feeling of exultation may be certain he has an elevated taste.

110

Genius is nothing more than common faculties refined to a greater intensity. There are no astonishing ways of doing astonishing things. All astonishing things are done by ordinary materials.

96