"Sitter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... all the intelligence of what had happened at court since I had left it; and although I professed to have renounced the world, and to have become a recluse, a sitter in a corner, as it is called, yet still I found that I had an ear for what was passing in it. They informed me that the chief executioner had returned from his campaign against the Russians, and had brought the Shah a present of two Georgian slaves, a male and a female, besides other rarities, in ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... be drawn. The first shows one-tenth of the face from the right side, the second two-tenths, and so on, waxing to full-face five-tenths; then waning sets in on the left side, four, three, and two-tenths, until ten-tenths shows nothing more than the back of the sitter's head. ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... laughing; and I may add that a part of my laughter came from my satisfaction in finding that I had been right in my theory of Miss Bordereau's origin. Aspern had of course met the young lady when he went to her father's studio as a sitter. I observed to Miss Bordereau that if she would entrust me with her property for twenty-four hours I should be happy to take advice upon it; but she made no answer to this save to slip it in silence into her pocket. This convinced me still more that she had no sincere intention of selling it during ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... in no small degree, though curiously enough entirely disclaiming the quality, the gift of presenting the essential personality of the sitter, that which a critic has called the power of "realizing an individuality." This is seen most clearly in his portraits of men, and naturally in the portraits of the men he knew ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... will honour many centuries hence. Some will perhaps prefer the more objective treatment; and it is certain that Watts's ambition led him into difficult paths. Striving to represent the soul of his sitter, he was conscious at times that he failed—that he could not see or realize what he was searching for. More than once he abandoned a commission when he felt this uncertainty in himself. But when the accord between artist and ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... of motive flows, A flavor of its many springs, The tints of earth and sky it brings; In the still waters needs must be Some shade of human sympathy; And here, in its accustomed place, I look on memory's dearest face; The blind by-sitter guesseth not What shadow haunts that vacant spot; No eyes save mine alone can see The love wherewith it welcomes me! And still, with those alone my kin, In doubt and weakness, want and sin, I bow my head, ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... time I found myself seated on a sitter's throne, while Wilkinson stood at his modelling stand working away at a mass of clay that faintly suggested a human ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 22, 1914 • Various
... whatever it may be, must be driven by delicately-adjusted clockwork to counteract the apparent daily motion of the stars caused by the rotation of the earth. The picture would otherwise be spoiled, just as a portrait is ruined if the sitter does not remain quiet during ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... things that I could not understand. It seemed they were telling that their men of knowledge had found time to be a mere measurement, or dimension, just as length or breadth or thickness. They mentioned names with reverence that I had never heard—Einstein and De Sitter and Lorentz. I was in ...
— The Man Who Saw the Future • Edmond Hamilton
... to Norwich about a fortnight later accompanied by Haydon, who was to become the guest of his sitter, {47a} and George was left to the compilation of Celebrated Trials. Sir Richard Phillips appears to have been a man as prolific of suggestion as he was destitute of tact. He regarded his authors as the instruments ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... producing the precise stereoscopic or distantial effect of nature. For myself I prefer Professor Wheatstone's rule, 1 in 25 for objects beyond 50 feet distant. For portraits I find the best angle 1 in 10 when the sitter is 10 feet off, and for busts about 1 in 5 when placed about 5 or 6 feet from the cameras. But I should be happy to receive information from any of your readers concerning this important branch of the photographic art. For months past I have ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... solid magnificence of the mahogany furnishings, the leather-covered chairs, the big purposeful desk. Above the old-fashioned marble mantel hung a life-sized portrait in oils of Inglesby himself. The artist had done his sitter stern justice—one might call the result retribution; and one wondered if Inglesby realized how immensely revealing it was. There he sat, solid, successful, informed with a sort of brutal egotism that never gives quarter. In despite ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... power to follow the general example, but remained the only sitter in the entire congregation, with my eyes, nay, all my senses, fixed, riveted upon the preacher. This, of course, attracted his attention. I saw him look towards me with surprise, then he started, his voice hesitated for a moment, but he almost immediately continued his benediction, and, as it seemed ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat
... which was blazing, notwithstanding the heat of the season and of the country. It was one of those armchairs that you still see in old castles, and which seem made to read one's self to sleep in, so easy is every part of it. The sitter sinks into a circular cushion of down; if the head leans back, the cheeks rest upon pillows covered with silk, and the seat juts out so far beyond the elbows that one may believe the provident upholsterers of our forefathers sought to provide that the book should make no noise in falling ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... paint Sir Jee's portrait on his usual conditions; namely, that the sitter should go to the little village in Bedfordshire where Cressage had his principal studio, and that the painting should be exhibited at the Royal Academy before being shown anywhere else. (Cressage was an R.A., but no one thought ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... facts as never was before,—a snarl and tangle of special conditions which it is his business to wind as much thread out of as he can. It is a good deal as when a painter goes to take the portrait of any sitter who happens to send for him. He has seen just such noses and just such eyes and just such mouths, but he never saw exactly such a face before, and his business is with that and no other person's,—with the features of the worthy father of a ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... presidency of the Society I offered to paint a signboard which should proclaim to the passer-by the name and nature of the Society. My offer was accepted, and the Board was sent down to my studio, where I treated it as I should a most distinguished sitter—as a picture or an etching—throwing my artistic soul into the Board, which gradually became a Board no longer, as it grew into a picture. You say they say it was only a butterfly. Mendacity could go no further. I painted a lion and a butterfly. The lion lay with the butterfly—a harmony in ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... his glory"—that was what the women called it. I can hear Mrs. Gideon Thwing—his last Chicago sitter—deploring his unaccountable abdication. "Of course it's going to send the value of my picture 'way up; but I don't think of that, Mr. Rickham—the loss to Arrt is all I think of." The word, on Mrs. Thwing's lips, multiplied its RS as though they were reflected in an endless vista of mirrors. And ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... Guards, and at 'em" paintings,' and Mason's exquisite idylls are 'as national as a Jingo poem'! Mr. Birket Foster's landscapes 'smile at one much in the same way that Mr. Carker used to "flash his teeth,"' and Mr. John Collier gives his sitter 'a cheerful slap on the back, before he says, like a shampooer in a Turkish bath, "Next man!" Mr. Herkomer's art is, 'if not a catch-penny art, at all events a catch-many-pounds art,' and Mr. W. B. Richmond is a 'clever trifler,' who 'might do really good work' 'if he would employ ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... there was no building high enough to overlook it, but I could see the bird when he stood upon the edge. Sitting, in a warm climate, is not particularly close work. Although the weather was cool, yet when the sun was out the sitter left her nest from six to eight minutes at a time, and as often as once in twenty minutes. Of course in rain she had not so much liberty, and on some days left only when her mate was ready to take her place, which he ...
— In Nesting Time • Olive Thorne Miller
... perhaps, in his painting-room from broken stones and bits of coal. The truth is, however, that he gave us more of Nature than any merely imitative rendering could do. As the great portrait painter looks beyond the features of his sitter to give the mind and character of the man, often thereby laying himself open to complaint as to his mere likeness painting; so the great landscape painter will at all times sink individual imitation in seeking to ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... Layer and sitter Of really first-rate quality. Though rival fowls are enviously bitter, That doth not bate her jollity. Her duties CAQUET BONBEC'S game to tackle, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... said Corvick, was to be the greatest literary portrait ever painted, and what he asked of me was just to be so good as not to trouble him with questions till he should hang up his masterpiece before me. He did me the honour to declare that, putting aside the great sitter himself, all aloft in his indifference, I was individually the connoisseur he was most working for. I was therefore to be a good boy and not try to peep under the curtain before the show-was ready: I should enjoy it all the more if I sat ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... prize. Anatomical description: limited because of absence of autopsy specimens. Apparently have endoskeleton, but organization of the internal organs remains obscure. Thought to be mammalianoid—there's a fence-sitter for you—but can't be certain of this because no young have been observed, nor any females in gestation. Extremely gregarious, curious, playful, irresponsible, etc., etc., etc. Habitat under natural conditions: uncertain. Diet: uncertain. Social ...
— The Native Soil • Alan Edward Nourse
... he could incidentally acquire information. He liked to discuss any man's profession with him, and in his talks with Flagg he made a sincere effort to get that insight which would enable him to appreciate the old masters. Flagg found him a tractable sitter, and a most interesting one. Once he paid him a compliment, then apologized for having said the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... has found less favour with the poets than the other seasons. Praise of it has usually a strained air, as though the poet were making the best of a barren theme, like a portrait-painter reluctantly flattering some unattractive sitter. But one poet has seen and seized the mysterious beauty of winter with unforced sympathy—Coventry Patmore, whose "Odes," in particular, containing as they do some of the most rarely spiritual meditation in English poetry, are all too little known. In one of these he has these beautiful lines, ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... less like a cavalry officer than you could possibly imagine. He is a heavy man, always looks half-asleep—although who is there more wide awake?—has a very red complexion, grey moustache, thick-set figure, and the last personality in the world to help an artist as a sitter. He promised to sit for the painter, although most characteristically he could not for the life of him think what he had done to be of sufficient interest for anyone to want to sketch him. At last, after a great deal of trouble, the painter got him to ...
— Sir John French - An Authentic Biography • Cecil Chisholm
... Marien, "I can say nothing," and he made ready for his sitter the next day, by turning two or three studies of the nude, which might have shocked her, with their faces ...
— Jacqueline, v1 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... sorry he had been to hear it. He questioned: "Bad luck, I suppose? I thought it was a sitter for ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... somnambulism execute a picture. But neither case would be identical in principle with mine. The artist and the mathematician would both have executed in their sleep what they had laid the foundation of when awake. I, on the other hand, would, should I transfer my aerial sitter to canvas, simply paint what I saw when wide awake, just as in undertaking to reproduce any other face from memory, whether observed once for twenty seconds or frequently and for ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... was the interest we all felt in the result of this struggle, that our feelings during the battle could not be compared to it. I could see Marble move his body, as a sitter in a boat is apt to do, at each jerk of the oars, under the notion it helps the party along. Diogenes actually called out, and this a dozen times at least, to encourage the men to pull for their lives, though they were not yet within a mile of us. The constant rising and ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... and sandals laced to the feet and legs by leather thongs. The tunic of the chief was elaborately embroidered on the breast in silk, a winged black horse being the central and most conspicuous design. The trophy hanging at the back of the sitter's chair consisted of a small circular shield, with a formidable axe, double-handed sword, and mace crossing each other, behind it, the whole being surmounted by a handsome bronze headpiece, or helmet without a visor, having a large pair of finely modelled wings starting ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... every article in the room began to rattle, whilst out of the tin vessel flew a blood red moth. After circling three times round each of the sitter's heads, the moth flew back again into the vessel, and the silence that ensued was followed by a soft tapping at the window, and the appearance of something, that resembled a big tube filled with a thick, pale blue fluid, made up of a mass of ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... exaggerating his impression of being ridiculed. Suddenly he turned very white, and before any of us had divined his intention he had seized a Japanese sword lying by and cut a dozen gashes across the canvas. Then, dropping his weapon, he flung out of the room, leaving his sitter and her friends in speechless consternation, to wonder then and ever after in what way they had offended him. In their opinions, if a man had talent and understood his business, he should produce portraits with the same ease that he would ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... hands the weapon that Mr. Sargent wields. The gift that he possesses he possesses completely—the immediate perception of the end and of the means. Putting aside the question of the subject (and to a great portrait a common sitter will doubtless not always contribute), the highest result is achieved when to this element of quick perception a certain faculty of brooding reflection is added. I use this name for want of a better, and I mean the quality ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... herself of how her special gift took form, the work grew involuntarily under her hand. She was aware of no definite impression received, no attempt at soul analysis. Vaguely she supposed that in some subtle mysterious way the character of her sitter communicated itself, influencing her; in fact her best work had often had the least care bestowed upon it. Did her inability to transfer to canvas a living copy of her own face argue that she herself was without character—had she failed because there was in truth nothing to delineate? ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... the recent introduction of high-art methods into photography has done much to diminish the unpleasantness of the operation. In the old days of crude and direct posing, there was no escape for the sitter. He had to stand up, backed by a rustic stile and a flabby canvas sheet covered with exotic trees, glaring straight into the camera. To prevent any eleventh-hour retreat, a sort of spiky thing was shoved ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... was careful to place them in definite and comprehensible surroundings. He never left us in doubt either as to the time or the place; and the same obligations of time and place, which Hals never shirked, seem to me to rest on the painter, if he elects to paint his sitter in any attitude except ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... good-looking even now, and perhaps, after being repulsed in their quest for bed and board, drifted off into an idle dream of how they might have met her a few years ago when they were less famous but more magnetically attractive. What a sitter she would have been for them, if she wouldn't be anything else! They admired the extreme delicacy of her nose that seemed so narrow in the well-rounded face, the loose brown hair that showed such a red flash in it beneath her sunbonnet, the perfect modeling of full forearms, firm ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... he sat for his picture to Mr. West, an American artist, who has himself given, in one of our periodical publications, the following account of his noble sitter:— ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... with Mrs. Rider the doctor's wife, caused unmitigated disgust throughout all the back streets of Carlingford; and "that Phoebe a-sweeping in as if the chapel belonged to her," was almost more than the oldest sitter could bear. Phoebe, it must be added, felt her elevation to the full, and did not spare her congregation. Sometimes she would have the audacity to walk from the vestry to the pew, as if she were an office-bearer, instead of coming in humbly by the door as became ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... to flatter the artist as much his sitter, so completely did it represent that unamity of opinion which constitutes social strength. Not one the number was troubled by any personal theory of art: all they asked of a portrait was that the costume should be sufficiently ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... step, forward in time from the Swedish physician relating his impressions in the seventeenth century, to an American in the eighteenth century delivering his opinions on Japan and the Japanese as viewed from the American standpoint at that period. "The sitter is the same, and, what is more, he sits on his heels to-day just as his grandfather did to Thunberg, yet it is hard to see any points of resemblance—a lesson to all theologians and politicians who still indulge the dreams that uniformity of opinion ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... portrait a very good story is told. Borrow was a very bad sitter, he was ever anxious to get out into the fresh air and sunlight. Philips was greatly hindered by this restlessness, but one day he hit upon a plan which conquered the chafing child of Nature and served his own purpose admirably. He was aware of Borrow's ...
— George Borrow in East Anglia • William A. Dutt
... back into the "sitter," where everybody was already beginning to eat and, I suppose, to enjoy themselves. There were not enough chairs to go round, but there is always the floor, and a man who won't sit on the floor when there is nothing else to sit upon is no use at an Oxford wine. Some men even prefer the floor, ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... likewise acquired; the capon takes to sitting on eggs, and will bring up chickens; and what is more curious, the utterly sterile male hybrids from the pheasant and the fowl act in the same manner, "their delight being to watch when the hens leave their nests, and to take on themselves the office of a sitter."[119] That admirable observer Reaumur[120] asserts that a cock, by being long confined in solitude and darkness, can be taught to take charge of young chickens; he then utters a peculiar cry, and retains during his whole life this newly acquired maternal instinct. The many ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... Rembrandt painted the famous "Night Watch," a picture representing the company of Francis Banning Cocq, and incidentally a day scene in spite of its popular name. The work succeeded in arousing a storm of indignation, for every sitter wanted to have equal prominence in the canvas. They had subscribed equally to the cost, and Rembrandt had dared to compose ...
— Rembrandt • Josef Israels
... PAINTERS: The real inaugurators of Dutch portraiture were Mierevelt, Hals, Ravesteyn, and De Keyser. Mierevelt (1567-1641) was one of the earliest, a prolific painter, fond of the aristocratic sitter, and indulging in a great deal of elegance in his accessories of dress and the like. He had a slight, smooth brush, much detail, and a profusion of color. Quite the reverse of him was Franz Hals (1584?-1666), one of the most remarkable painters ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... painted a few years since. The original of the latter soon came and stood before it. He had won regatta prizes; and the flags of four discordant colours were painted round him by the artist, who had evidently cared more to commemorate the triumphs of his sitter and to strike a likeness than to secure the tone of his own picture. This champion turned out a fine fellow—Corradini—with one of the brightest little gondoliers of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Scogan, Denis climbed the little ladder and stepped over the threshold. He looked suspiciously from Gombauld to his sitter, and could learn nothing from the expression of their faces except that they both seemed pleased to see the visitors. Were they really glad, or were they ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... with the Sword of the Sitter on the horse, (The Conquering Christ,) which sword proceeded out of His mouth." "He speaks ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... high, the arms being carved to resemble running lions, and the lower supports being prisoners of war, bound back to back (fig. 270). A foot-board in front served as a step to mount by, and as a foot-stool for the sitter. Up to the present time, we have found no specimens of this kind ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... comminatory progress to admit gladly that in such societies are to be found plenty of talent and of what is much rarer, sincerity. Here are men who take art seriously; here are men who have no prospective sitter, no rich patron, no terrible drawing-master in mind; here are men to whom painting is the most important thing in the world. Unfortunately, in their isolation they are apt, like the rest, to come on the parish. Theirs is no vulgar provincialism; but in its lack of receptivity, its too willing ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... to look for what lies below the surface. If your work is sincere, you find when you've finished a portrait that the soul of the sitter ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... H.R.H. was holding with Mrs. Fellowes. He shook hands very graciously, and I began with a sort of apology for having been so importunate about the photograph. He said something of the weather being against it, and I asked if the Americans had victimised him much as a sitter; he said they had, but he did not think they had succeeded well, and I told him of the new American process of taking twelve thousand photographs in an hour. Edith Liddell coming by at the moment, I remarked on the beautiful tableau which the children might ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... Nika. Thou bringest sunshine into the place. It lights up thy face and twinkles like stars in thy beautiful hair. One requires a cheerful sitter to make a good likeness, for, after all, the poor artist has only a few pigments to portray the ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... the clouds that menaced her sitter—"take this pad an' write a question on it. Don't lemme see it, mind! When you got it all wrote out, fold it up tight an' hold it against your forehead. Never ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... Corsican artist named Pontornini, then living at Tournon, a few miles distant. To this friendship we owe the first authentic portrait of Buonaparte. It exhibits a striking profile with a well-shaped mouth, and the expression of gravity is remarkable in a sitter so young. The face portrays a studious mind. Even during the months from November to April he had not entirely deserted his favorite studies, and again Rousseau had been their companion and guide. In a little study of Corsica, dated the twenty-sixth of April, 1786, the earliest of ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... Stephenson, to be erected at Liverpool. Thus, by a curious coincidence, the Liverpool stone-cutter was set to immortalize the features and figure of the Killingworth engine-man. Did those two great men, as they sat together in one room, sculptor and sitter, know one another's early history and strange struggles, we wonder? Perhaps not; but if they did, it must surely have made a bond of union between them. At any rate, Gibson greatly admired Stephenson, just as he had admired the Stelvio road. "I will endeavour ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... some?" I replied; and only too pleased, she squalled to an urchin who was distributing the squares plus a safety-pin. I was such a well-poised "rail-sitter" that I was entitled to wear both colours; and as this one was being ostentatiously fastened to the lapel of my over-jacket, I remembered the injunction to live at ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... could never catch him in the fact; although we searched after he was gone, we could never find the tobacco. Such were the diversions of Uncle Parker, a man nearing sixty. But he was punished according unto his deeds: Mrs. Stevenson took a fancy to paint him, and the sufferings of the sitter were beyond description. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Cosmo saw whose shadow darkened the doorway, he rose in haste, and standing with his hand upon the arm of the chair, waited for his father to seat himself in it. The laird acknowledged his attention with a smile, sat down, and looked like the last sitter grown suddenly old. He put out his hand to the boy across the low arm of the chair, and the boy laid his hand in his father's, and so they remained, neither saying a word. The laird leaned back, and ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... the window, over which the curtains were drawn and a shawl pinned. With a confidence which is really charming to contemplate, no 'tests' were asked of the medium, no 'conditions' imposed on the sitter. Miss S. was put in the cabinet with only a chair, and the expectant circle waited with patience. In due time the curtains were drawn aside, and the spirit-face appeared at the opening. It was still the facsimile of Miss S., with the eyes piously turned up ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... for seats. With the exception of that provision to suit their weakness, the accommodation extended to them resembled pens, and the seats were emphatically seats of penitence, intended to grind the sitter for his mean pittance payment and absence of aspiration to a higher state. Hard angular wood, a low roof, a shabby square of window aloof, demanding of him to quit the seat he insisted on having, if he would indulge in views of the passing scenery,—such ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... law of construction that any master who can color can always do any pane of his window that he likes, separately from the rest. Thus, you see, here is one of Sir Joshua's first sittings: the head is very nearly done with the first color; a piece of background is put in round it: his sitter has had a pretty silver brooch on, which Reynolds, having done as much as he chose to the face for that time, paints quietly in its place below, leaving the dress between to be fitted in afterwards; and he puts a little patch of the yellow gown that is ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... squinting at his fellow beings from under a bit of black cambric. Dan was a treasure to him; for he took well, and willingly posed in his Mexican costume, with horse and hound, and all wanted copies of these effective photographs. Bess, also, was a favourite sitter; and Demi received a prize at the Amateur Photographic Exhibition for one of his cousin with all her hair about her face, which rose from the cloud of white lace draping the shoulders. These were freely handed round by the proud ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... The case is provided for," quoth Schaunard, presenting to his sitter a very ragged garment, so ornamented with paint-marks that the honest provincial hesitated ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... which he made silver-point sketches and portraits. A good number of its pages have come down to us, and a great many of the portraits he mentions having taken were done in it, and then cut out to give to the sitter. All these drawings are on the same sized paper. We reproduce one of them here (see page 156). Besides this sketch-book he evidently had a memorandum-book in which he recorded what he did, what he spent, whom he saw, and occasionally what he felt or ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... in early life is to be stunned and quickened with novelties; but when years have come, it only casts a more endearing light upon the past. As in those composite photographs of Mr. Galton's, the image of each new sitter brings out but the more clearly the central features of the race; when once youth has flown, each new impression only deepens the sense of nationality and the desire of native places. So may some cadet of Royal Ecossais or the Albany Regiment, as he mounted ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with which my question was answered in all gradations, from gentle and hospitable kindness to downright brutality." Further promises and assurances are given, and in July, as we learn from a letter of Southey's, the good Matilda was still high in hopes that her sitter would eventually sit. Her hopes could not have come from Southey, who had none. "You would have found him the most wonderful man living in conversation, but the most impracticable one for a painter, and had you begun the picture it is ten thousand to one that you must have finished it from ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... said Nick a little vaguely, troubled about his sitter's nose, which was somehow Jewish without the ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... everybody. The following criticism of the picture has reached us, and as it represents a point of view which, so far as we know, has not found sympathy in the Press opinions which have already appeared, we print it for the edification of the artist, the sitter and any others who may have a few moments to devote to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 22, 1916 • Various
... three piglings were stolen from one of our pig- pens. The great Lafaele appeared to my wife uneasy, so she engaged him in conversation on the subject, and played upon him the following engaging trick. You advance your two forefingers towards the sitter's eyes; he closes them, whereupon you substitute (on his eyelids) the fore and middle fingers of the left hand; and with your right (which he supposes engaged) you tap him on the head and back. When you let him open his eyes, he sees you withdrawing the two forefingers. 'What that?' asked Lafaele. ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a purely imaginative picture into a portrait, and, in addition to altering the face and the lines of the figures, were to put in a number of accessories to please the patron's taste, and also to accept suggestions from the sitter as to changes in ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... rapid games of hide and seek, love and hate, in the clear briny depths above and beneath! If the angels ever look out of their sphere of intense spiritual realities to indulge in a laugh, methinks such a lonely tripod-sitter, cased over with his invulnerable, non-conducting cloak and hood,—shrinking, dodging, or bracing himself up on the defensive, as the crowd fans him with its rush or jostles up against him,—like the man who fancied himself a teapot, and was forever warning people not to come too near him,—might ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... compelling them to serve in my book; that this reproach was unjust, they who know me can best vouch for, while I myself can honestly aver, that I never took a portrait without the consent of the sitter. ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... the grandeur of AEschylus that they run amok among their contemporaries with something of the furious destructiveness of Don Quixote on his adventures. It is the noble intolerance of youth; but how unreasonable it is! Suppose a portrait-painter were suddenly to take his sitter by the throat on the ground that he had no right to exist. One would say to him that that was not his business: his business is to take the man's existence for granted, and to paint him until he becomes in a new sense alive. If he is worthless, paint his worthlessness, ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... of reproducing features so beloved; and to these joys were added the pleasure of larger conversation. The model gave Grace many opportunities of making remarks, or asking questions, and Henry contrived to say so many things in answer to one. Sculptor and sitter made acquaintance with each other's ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... twelve inches high. For a man even, it should not be more than fifteen or sixteen inches. (These dimensions apply to the front of the seat.) The back part should be at least two inches lower. With this inclination, the sitter will slide backward, against the back of the chair, instead of sliding forward, as he generally does. This sliding forward produces a strain upon the small of the back, and is, in fact, the cause of most of the fatigue in sitting. The width of the chair-seat from front ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... found himself a little more able to cope with his sitter. He was in possession, at any rate, of fresh topics—need not feel himself so tongue-tied in the presence of this cosmopolitan culture of hers, which she did her feminine best to disguise—which nevertheless made the atmosphere of her personality. She ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... by no means true, but Lady Ogram had always been a bad sitter to the camera, and had destroyed most of its results. The oil painting in the dining-room she regarded with a moderate complacency. Many a time during the latter years of withering and enfeeblement her memory had turned ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... fireside, where the easy-chair was drawn cosily up, and the tea-things stood ready to the sitter's elbow, the very sugar in the cup. There were several books on a shelf; one lay beside the tea-things open, and Utterson was amazed to find it a copy of a pious work, for which Jekyll had several times expressed a great esteem, annotated, ...
— Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde • ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
... history of Dives these old benches could have told! What troopers, and beggars, and cowled monks, and wayfarers had sat there!—each sitter helping to wear away the wood till it had come to have the depressions of a drinking-trough. Night after night in the long centuries, as the darkness fell upon the hamlet—what tales and confidences, and what murmured anguish of remorse, ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... Colvin, he said, "See how my 'Talk and Talkers' went; every one liked his own portrait, and shrieked about other people's; so it will be with yours. If you are the least true to the essential, the sitter will be pleased; very likely not his friends, and that from various motives." (Letters, I, 413.) In a letter to his mother from Davos, dated 9 April 1882, he gives the real names opposite each character in the first paper, and adds, "But pray ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that it's cruel!" Mrs. Hawthorne had voiced the instinctive objection of her earth-loving, life-praising disposition to the view he took of people and things. But what was there to do about it? When he looked at a sitter to render his personality sincerely, that was the way he saw him. If he had been limited to rendering a human being in the single aspect he wore while walking from the drawing-room to the dinner-table with a lady on his arm and a rich meal ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... of the communication had however been that my sitter was again looking up and would doubtless, on the arrival and due initiation of Mrs. Brash, be in form really to wait on me. The situation must further, to my knowledge, have developed happily, for I arranged with Mrs. Munden that our friend, now all ready to begin, ...
— The Beldonald Holbein • Henry James
... advocate on the doctrine of infant damnation. My cousin Robert Breck had old Benjamin's portrait, which has since gone to the Kinley's. Heaven knows who painted it, though no great art were needed to suggest on canvas the tough fabric of that sitter, who was more Irish than Scotch. The heavy stick he holds might, with a slight stretch of the imagination, be a blackthorn; his head looks capable of withstanding many blows; his hand of giving many. And, as I ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... something in Carolus-Duran’s attitude when at work which recalls the swordsman. With an enormous palette in one hand and a brush in the other, he has a way of planting himself in front of his sitter that is amusingly suggestive of a duel. His lithe body sways to and fro, his fine leonine face quivers with the intense study of his model; then with a sudden spring forward, a few rapid touches are dashed on the canvas ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... slow approaches herself, Euphemia was a great sitter at the feet of breathless volubility, and there were moments when she fairly hung upon the lips of Mademoiselle Marie de Mauves. Her intimacy with this chosen schoolmate was founded on the perception—all ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... his pleasant letters to his kindred in America. He was now to come into nearer contact with royalty. He slept at the Castle Inn, Windsor, and went up daily to the Castle. If he found her Majesty and any other sitter engaged, he improved the occasion by copying two of the Queen's fine Dutch pictures, a De Hooghe and a Nicholas Maas. He wrote his experience to his wife in London, and his sister in America. To the latter he said, "I came ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... desirous to come as near as possible, and in order to do this, it is necessary to present the figure in such a position as to bring it as nearly as possible upon the same plane by making all parts nearly at equal distance from the lenses. This must be done by the sitter inclining the head and bust formed to a natural, easy position, and placing the hands closely to the body, thus preserving a propel proportion, and giving a lively familiarity to the general impression. ...
— American Handbook of the Daguerrotype • Samuel D. Humphrey
... her and, a masculine friend coming to claim his dance, seized the opportunity to escape. However, another "sitter out" ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... who was reading a newspaper. While the others conversed with him, I endeavoured to make unobserved a sketch of his face. The warder noticing this, called me to the front to make it boldly, and the prisoner, smiling, told me to go on with it; which I did, and that not so badly—at least, the sitter ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... a relief from the conventional positions and accessories so frequently seen in professional work. The expressions secured are also, as a rule, unusually pleasing and natural. This is, no doubt, in a great measure due to the sitter feeling more at ease in the amateur friend's drawing room than in a stranger's studio. Particularly is this the case in some excellent work—full-length pictures—sent from the other side of the Atlantic, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... she spins unceasingly. Close at her feet sits her shadow, clothed in the same sort of long white dress, with the open sleeves disclosing the prettiest ivory arms in the world. Short curling hair of a rich dark colour hangs round the white neck and broad forehead of the sitter, and what are those little pink and white fingers doing? Must I tell? A faithful historian must recite plain facts, and, therefore, provided the secret goes no further, I will allow she was cleaning pistols! And, according to Smart's opinion, "she did 'em a sight better ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... steadfast gazing, any in passes of the hand hither and thither—if there be any magic in ce doux demi-jour so loved in France, in stuff for flattery ready pointed and feathered, in freedom of admiration, "and all in the way of business"—then is a lovable sitter to a love-like painter in "parlous" vicinity (as the new school would phrase it) to sweet heart-land! Pleasure in a vocation has no offset in political economy as honor has ("the more honor the less profit"), or portrait-painters ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... biography, there must be light and shade. The portrait-painter does not pose his sitter so as to bring out his deformities; nor does the biographer give undue prominence to the defects of the character he portrays. Not many men are so outspoken as Cromwell was when he sat to Cooper for his miniature: "Paint me as I am," said he, "warts ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... bedsteads existed; people sat and slept on the floor, separated from it only by mats made of rice-straw, by cushions or by woollen carpets, and in aristocratic houses there was a kind of stool to support the arm of the sitter, a lectern, and a dais for sitting on. Viands were served on tables a few inches high, and people sat while eating. From the middle of the seventh century a clepsydra of Chinese origin was used to mark ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... destinies." David, the artist, once a member of the Convention and a regicide, then an Imperialist, painted the portrait of Pius VII., and the Moniteur in the number of March 30, 1805, thus praised the picture and the sitter. "A large crowd gathered in the gallery of the Senate, to see the portrait of His Holiness by M. David, member of the Institute and first painter to the Emperor. This portrait is in every way worthy of the master's reputation. If the first essential in a portrait is an exact likeness, ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... disappeared into his ill-smelling cabinet to prepare the plate. When this was ready he stepped airily out to the camera and bade his victim "look pleasant." Failing to get the impossible response the artist bade his sitter to smile. Then the old farmer with a wrathful and torture-riven contortion of his mouth ejaculated, ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... Mr. Sterne. Unscrupulously, however, as he was caricatured, the sensation which appears to have been excited in the county by the burlesque portrait could hardly have been due to any strong public sympathy with the involuntary sitter. Dr. Burton seems, as a suspected Jacobite, to have been no special favourite with the Yorkshire squirearchy in general, but rather the reverse thereof. Ucalegon, however, does not need to be popular to ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... rocking-chairs imported from the United States; they are fond of sitting in chairs tilted against the wall, as we sometimes do at home. Indeed they go beyond us in this respect; for in Cuba they have invented a kind of chair which, by lowering the back and raising the knees, places the sitter precisely in the posture he would take if he sat in a chair leaning backward against a wall. It is a luxurious attitude, I must own, and I do not wonder that it is a favorite with lazy people, for it relieves one of all the trouble of keeping ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... enthusiasm, told him his beard was godlike, and nothing in the world could equal it for beauty. She never saw but one at all like it, poor Mr. Seaton's; but even that was very inferior to his. And then she dismissed the sitter. "Poor thing," said she, "you are pale and tired." And she began to use ornaments; took her bracelets out of her bag, and picked pearls out of her walls, and made a coronet, under which her eyes flashed at night with superlative beauty—conscious beauty brightened by the sense of being ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... dress of dull blue, which, artist-wise, she had chosen as her professional garb, and in which she herself made a picture to be observed with enjoyment, moved deftly about the room arranging her lights and shadows. This done, she turned to her sitter. When she came in he had been standing before a set of prints upon the wall, studying them critically, but from the moment of her entrance he had been watching her, though he held a photograph in his hand with which he might have seemed to ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... fascinated him; he forgot everything, forgot the very existence of the aristocratic ladies, began even to display some artistic tricks, uttering various odd sounds and humming to himself now and then as artists do when immersed heart and soul in their work. Without the slightest ceremony, he made the sitter lift her head, which finally ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... soon will send thee Ibrahim the Basket-maker.' Then I asked her, 'What of thee?' and she answered, 'It is now four years since there appeared to me the Manifest Truth, and He is the Relator and the Ally, and the Uniter and the Sitter-by; whereupon my folk looked askance upon me with an evil eye and taxed me with insanity and suspected me of depravity, and there came not in to me doctor but terrified me, nor visitor but confounded me.' Quoth I, 'And who led thee to the knowledge ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... his from the start. Sitter after sitter sought him out in his house on the Bloemgracht; the most distinguished men in the town hastened to patronize him. His work was liked by the burghers whom he painted, its strength was felt by artists, whose canvases soon showed its influence. Admirers crowded to his studio. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... should have a court yard that you can at pleasure cover with a linen awning that light will be good. Or when you want to take a portrait do it in dull weather, or as evening falls, making the sitter stand with his back to one of the walls of the court yard. Note in the streets, as evening falls, the faces of the men and women, and when the weather is dull, what softness and delicacy you may perceive in them. Hence, Oh Painter! have a court arranged with the walls tinted ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... the name of Dunstable, the girl accountant in the distance had also moved sharply, so as to look at the young man. But in the bustle of Madame Vavasour's entrance, and her passage to the sitter's chair, the girl's gesture ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... him, and Grant, knowing he had written books, desired to get at least a smattering of them before the sittings began. But some one, perhaps mischievously, told him Lewis was the author of The Monk, and this book he accordingly read. He took an early opportunity to refer to it to his sitter, who to his no small discomfiture disclaimed it. As conclusive proof of the truth of this denial, Lewis stated further that the book was written before he was born. Everybody was amused that Cornewall Lewis, so famous for abstruse learning, should have deemed it necessary to appeal thus to dates ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... to be irritated. She was such a friendly little soul and so obviously devoted to Ruth that he felt she was entitled to be a nuisance as a sitter. He wondered more and more what weird principle of selection had been at work to bring Bailey and this butterfly together. He had never given any deep thought to the study of his brother-in-law's character; but, from his small knowledge of him, he would have imagined some one a trifle more substantial ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... Forsooth! Od's bodkins! Hast turned liar on top of everything else, Good Saint? Good to see me, indeed! 'From such a face and form as mine, the noblest sentiments sound like the black utterances of a depraved imagination.' No, dear old holy pillar-sitter, no indeed! It may be a pleasure to hear my mellifluous voice—a pleasure I often indulge in, myself—but it couldn't possibly be a pleasure to see me!" And all the while, St. Simon was being pummeled heartily on the shoulder, while his hand was ...
— Anchorite • Randall Garrett
... that would make an ample provision for the advent of half a dozen unexpected visitors to the studio. He would have to do his best with afternoon sittings, Elfrida was not available in the morning; and he thought compassionately that his sitter must not be starved. "I will feed her first," he thought ironically, remembering her keen childish enjoyment of sugared things. "She will pose all the better for some tea." And he walked on ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes) |
