Our ideas are the offspring of our senses; we are not more able to create the form of a being we have not seen, without retrospect to one we know, than we are able to create a new sense. He whose fancy has conceived an idea of the most beautiful form must have composed it from actual existence.
ATTRIBUTION:
Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), Swiss-born British artist, critic. “First Lecture,” Lectures on Painting (1801).
quoted in The Mind of Henry Fuseli, pt. 3, ch. 1, “Is Art Creation?” Ed. Eudo C. Mason (1951).
