"Few have been taught to any purpose who have not been their own teachers"
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Reynolds delivers this like a compliment to discipline and a warning shot at passive learning. Coming from an 18th-century painter who helped professionalize British art, it’s also a quiet manifesto: the academy can hand you tools, but it can’t hand you taste. “To any purpose” is the tell - he’s not impressed by instruction that produces fluent copyists, polite competence, or the ability to recite rules. Purpose, for Reynolds, means the kind of judgment that survives when the teacher leaves the room.
The subtext is slightly suspicious of institutions even as Reynolds benefited from them. As first president of the Royal Academy, he was literally in the business of teaching; his famous Discourses tried to codify “grand” principles for artists. Yet the line concedes the limit of that project: real education happens when you internalize critique, curate your influences, and keep working when no one is assigning the work. The “own teachers” phrasing shifts authority inward without turning romantic about genius. It’s not “follow your muse.” It’s “take responsibility.”
Context matters: Reynolds lived in a culture obsessed with imitation - copying Old Masters, learning by engraving, mastering accepted formulas. He’s not rejecting that tradition; he’s insisting that copying only becomes craft when the student starts directing it. The sentence flatters the self-driven while subtly indicting the well-trained who never develop independent standards. In an age (and a creative economy) where credentials are easy to collect and harder to convert into voice, Reynolds’ point still stings: instruction is scalable; self-teaching is the part you can’t outsource.
The subtext is slightly suspicious of institutions even as Reynolds benefited from them. As first president of the Royal Academy, he was literally in the business of teaching; his famous Discourses tried to codify “grand” principles for artists. Yet the line concedes the limit of that project: real education happens when you internalize critique, curate your influences, and keep working when no one is assigning the work. The “own teachers” phrasing shifts authority inward without turning romantic about genius. It’s not “follow your muse.” It’s “take responsibility.”
Context matters: Reynolds lived in a culture obsessed with imitation - copying Old Masters, learning by engraving, mastering accepted formulas. He’s not rejecting that tradition; he’s insisting that copying only becomes craft when the student starts directing it. The sentence flatters the self-driven while subtly indicting the well-trained who never develop independent standards. In an age (and a creative economy) where credentials are easy to collect and harder to convert into voice, Reynolds’ point still stings: instruction is scalable; self-teaching is the part you can’t outsource.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
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