Painters Portrait Quotes

every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.

Right now, scientists are in exactly the same position as Renaissance painters, commissioned to make the portrait the patron wants done, And if they are smart, they'll make sure their work subtly flatters the patron. Not overtly. Subtly.

Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the anatomy of the terrible, or the physiology of fear.

Harry," said Basil Hallward, looking him straight in the face, "every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.

You too know that all my eyes see, all I touch with myself, from any distance, is Diego. The caress of fabrics, the color of colors, the wires, the nerves, the pencils, the leaves, the dust, the cells, the war and the sun, everything experienced in the minutes of the non-clocks and the non-calendars and the empty non-glances, is him.

Is this the main thing that painters of portraits care about? The person on the verge of becoming someone else?

You should regard each meeting with a friend as a sitting he is unwillingly giving you for a portrait - a portrait that, probably, when you or he die, will still be unfinished. And, though this is an absorbing pursuit, nevertheless, the painters are apt to end pessimists. For however handsome and merry may be the face, however rich may be the background, in the first rough sketch of each portrait, yet with every added stroke of the brush, with every tiny readjustment of the "values," with every modification of the chiaroscuro, the eyes looking out at you grow more disquieting. And, finally, it is your own face that you are staring at in terror, as in a mirror by candlelight, when all the house is still.

I hope the artist who illustrates this work will take care to do justice to his portrait. Mr. Clive himself, let that painter be assured, will not be too well pleased if his countenance and figure do not receive proper attention.

One chilly autumn evening, he was reminded of the painter by a stalk of corn: the way it stood there armed in its rough coat of leaves, exposing its delicate roots atop the mounded earth like so many nerves, it was also a portrait of his own most vulnerable self. The discovery only served to increase his melancholy.

Descartes was not interested in probabilities. He wanted absolute certainty. He had to be sure that indubitable knowledge, immune from skeptical attack, was possible.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the colored canvas, reveals himself.

A huge cloud of dust is not a beautiful thing to look at. Very few painters have done portraits of huge clouds of dust or included them in their landscapes or still lifes. Film directors rarely choose huge clouds of dust to play the lead roles in romantic comedies, and as far as my research has shown, a huge cloud of dust has never placed higher than twenty-fifth in a beauty pageant. Nevertheless, as the Baudelaire orphans stumbled around the cell, dropped each half of the battering ram and listening to the sound of crows flying in circles outside, they stared at the huge cloud of dust as if it were a thing of great beauty.

...it is never safe to classify the souls of one's neighbors; one is apt, in the long run, to be proved a fool. You should regard each meeting with a friend as a sitting he is unwillingly giving you for a portrait -- a portrait that, probably, when you or he die, will still be unfinished. And, though this is an absorbing pursuit, nevertheless, the painters are apt to end pessimists. For however handsome and merry may be the face, however rich the background, in the first rough sketch of each portrait, yet with every added stroke of the brush, with every tiny readjustment of the 'values,' with every modification of the chiaroscuro, the eyes looking out at you grow more disquieting. And, finally, it is your own face that you are staring at in terror, as in a mirror by candle-light, when all the house is still.

Novelists and poets are the landscape artists and portrait painters; academic writers are the people with big paint sprayers who repaint your basement.

And the most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men; sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression or a jest, informs us better of their characters and inclinations, than the most famous sieges, the greatest armaments, or the bloodiest battles whatsoever. Therefore as portrait-painters are more exact in the lines and features of the face, in which the character is seen, than in the other parts of the body, so I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to the marks and indications of the souls of men, and while I endeavor by these to portray their lives, may be free to leave more weighty matters and great battles to be treated of by others.

every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.

All my life I’ve pursued the perfect red. I can never get painters to mix it for me. It’s exactly as if I’d said, “I want Rococo with a spot of Gothic in it and a bit of Buddhist temple” – they have no idea what I’m talking about. About the best red is to copy the color of a child’s cap in any Renaissance portrait.

And, in this staunch little portrait, it’s hard not to see the human in the finch. Dignified, vulnerable. One prisoner looking at another. But who knows what Fabritius intended? There’s not enough of his work left to even make a guess. The bird looks out at us. It’s not idealized or humanized. It’s very much a bird. Watchful, resigned. There’s no moral or story. There’s no resolution. There’s only a double abyss: between painter and imprisoned bird; between the record he left of the bird and our experience of it, centuries later.

What odd chaps you painters are! You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. A portrait like this would set you far above all the young men in England, and make the old men jealous, if old men are ever capable of any emotion.

Morbid anatomy is essential to training and research, but leads many doctors into thinking that life is an agitation in something essentially dead. They treat patients' bodies as if the minds, the lives, were of no account. The smooth bedside manner we cultivate is seldom more than a cheap anaesthetic to make our patients as passive as the corpses we train upon. But a portrait painter does not learn his art by scraping layers of varnish from a Rembrandt, then slicing off the impasto, dissolving the ground and finally separating the fibres of the canvas.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on coloured canvas, reveals himself.

That man, especially when he slept, when his features were motionless, showed me my own face, my mask, the flawlessly pure image of my corpse […] in a state of perfect repose, this resemblance was strikingly evident, and what is death, if not a face at peace – its artistic perfection? Life only marred my double; thus a breeze dims the bliss of Narcissus; thus, in the painter’s absence, there comes his pupil and by the superfluous flush of unbidden tints disfigures the portrait painted by the master.

God could have made mountains without valleys. And God could have made it the case that a triangle has interior angles whose sum is more or less than 180 degrees,

A portrait is like an ornamental headstone. It is not for the subject, but for those who look upon it. For those you want to remember.

I didn't know how you were going to do it, but from now on I'll never worry about what'll become of you, son, you'll always have an idea. Son, I can't tell you what you're going to be--an engineer, a lawyer, or a portrait painter. You've perpetrated a near libel here in the front yard. We've got to disguise this fellow." - Atticus Finch

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the ocassion. It is not he who is revelead by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas , reveals himself.

We are never content with portraits of people we know. For that reason I have always felt sorry for portrait painters. We rarely ask the impossible of anyone, but of them we do. They are required to get everybody's relationship with the subject, everybody's affection or dislike, into the picture; and not merely represent their own view of a person but what everybody else's might be too.

Like my maestro, Juan Ribero, she believed that photography and painting are not competing arts but basically different: the painter interpets reality, and the camera captures it. In the former everything is fiction, while the second is the sum of the real plus the sensibility of the photographer. Ribero never allowed me sentimental or exhibitionist tricks-none of this arranging objects or models to look like paintings. He was the enemy of artificial compostion; he did not let me manipulate negatives or prints, and in general he scorned effects of spots or diffuse lighting: he wanted the honest and simple image, although clear in the most minute details.

When Mersenne circulated the manuscript of the Meditations among various philosophers and theologians to gather “objections,” he included the English thinker Thomas Hobbes and the French materialist Pierre Gassendi, an early modern reviver of the philosophy of Epicurus.

Right now, scientists are in exactly the same position as Renaissance painters, commissioned to make the portrait the patron wants done. And if they are smart, they’ll make sure their work subtly flatters the patron. Not overtly. Subtly. This is not a good system for research into those areas of science that affect policy. Even worse, the system works against problem solving. Because if you solve a problem, your funding ends. All that’s got to change.

While some of his clerical opponents suggested that his proofs for God’s existence are so obviously bad that they must have been designed by a devious atheist to in fact undermine the belief in God’s existence, more secular-minded critics protested against Descartes’s resorting to God as a deus ex machina to solve an epistemological quandary, and they questioned the propriety of relying on matters of faith in what should be a project of rational inquiry.

Son, I can’t tell what you’re going to be—an engineer, a lawyer, or a portrait painter. You’ve perpetrated a near libel here in the front yard. We’ve got to disguise this fellow.

portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.

One request most tentatively and anxiously made concerned the date when the portrait would be finished. It had to be an auspicious one: the painter could not simply finish when she wished.

But which stories do you mean, he said; and what fault do you find with them? A fault which is most serious, I said; the fault of telling a lie, and, what is more, a bad lie. But when is this fault committed? Whenever an erroneous representation is made of the nature of gods and heroes,—as when a painter paints a portrait not having the shadow of a likeness to the original. Yes,

The clear cold sunshine glances into the brittle woods, and approvingly beholds the sharp wind scattering the leaves and drying the moss. It glides over the park after the moving shadows of the clouds, and chases them, and never catches them, all day. It looks in the windows, and touches the ancestral portraits with bars and patches of brightness, never contemplated by the painters.

The painter without the critic is nothing. The good critic can make the mediocre famous, the great obscure. His power is limitless; the artist is his servant, and one day will recognize the fact.

God made the world, but he also made it true that one plus one equals two. And just as he might have not made a world, so he might just as well have not made it true that one plus one equals two, or even have made it true instead that one plus one equals three. Similarly, “[God] was free to make it not true that all the radii of the circle are equal—just as free as He was not to create the world.”34

Awkward disturbances will arise; people will not submit to have their throats cut quietly; they will run, they will kick, they will bite; and, whilst the portrait painter often has to complain of too much torpor in his subject, the artist, in our line, is generally embarrassed by too much animation.

But always those same conventional eyes, noses, mouths - waxlike and smooth and cold. It cannot but always remain lifeless. And the painted portraits have a life of their own, coming straight from the painter’s soul, which the machine cannot reach. The more one looks at photographs, the more one feels this, I think.

Webster was the only Senator who had his own drinking room inside the Capitol, and he carried among his possessions an exquisitely painted miniature of a woman’s glowing breasts—a self-portrait by the painter Sarah Goodridge, who presented the gift when Webster was newly widowed, and between his first and second wives.

Thus into the prose sentences of the modern playwright as into the poetry of Racine Berma managed to introduce those vast images of grief, nobility, passion, which were the masterpieces of her own personal art, and in which she could be recognised as, in the portraits which he has made of different sitters, we recognise a painter.

I think of something I read about Sargent: how in portraiture, Sargent always looked for the animal in the sitter (a tendency that, once I knew to look for it, I saw everywhere in his work: in the long foxy noses and pointed ears of Sargent’s heiresses, in his rabbit-toothed intellectuals and leonine captains of industry, his plump, owl-faced children).

At the end of the vacation, I took a steamer alone from Wuhan back up through the Yangtze Gorges. The journey took three days. One morning, as I was leaning over the side, a gust of wind blew my hair loose and my hairpin fell into the river. A passenger with whom I had been chatting pointed to a tributary which joined the Yangtze just where we were passing, and told me a story.In 33 B.C., the emperor of China, in an attempt to appease the country's powerful northern neighbors, the Huns, decided to send a woman to marry the barbarian king. He made his selection from the portraits of the 3,000 concubines in his court, many of whom he had never seen. As she was for a barbarian, he selected the ugliest portrait, but on the day of her departure he discovered that the woman was in fact extremely beautiful. Her portrait was ugly because she had refused to bribe the court painter. The emperor ordered the artist to be executed, while the lady wept, sitting by a river, at having to leave her country to live among the barbarians. The wind carried away her hairpin and dropped it into the river as though it wanted to keep something of hers in her homeland. Later on, she killed herself. Legend had it that where her hairpin dropped, the river turned crystal clear, and became known as the Crystal River. My fellow passenger told me this was the tributary we were passing. With a grin, he declared: "Ah, bad omen! You might end up living in a foreign land and marrying a barbarian!" I smiled faintly at the traditional Chinese obsession about other races being 'barbarians," and wondered whether this lady of antiquity might not actually have been better off marrying the 'barbarian' king. She would at least be in daily contact with the grassland, the horses, and nature. With the Chinese emperor, she was living in a luxurious prison, without even a proper tree, which might enable the concubines to climb a wall and escape. I thought how we were like the frogs at the bottom of the well in the Chinese legend, who claimed that the sky was only as big as the round opening at the top of their well. I felt an intense and urgent desire to see the world. At the time I had never spoken with a foreigner, even though I was twenty-three, and had been an English language student for nearly two years. The only foreigners I had ever even set eyes on had been in Peking in 1972. A foreigner, one of the few 'friends of China," had come to my university once. It was a hot summer day and I was having a nap when a fellow student burst into our room and woke us all by shrieking: "A foreigner is here! Let's go and look at the foreigner!" Some of the others went, but I decided to stay and continue my snooze. I found the whole idea of gazing, zombie like rather ridiculous. Anyway, what was the point of staring if we were forbidden to open our mouths to him, even though he was a 'friend of China'? I had never even heard a foreigner speaking, except on one single Linguaphone record. When I started learning the language, I had borrowed the record and a phonograph, and listened to it at home in Meteorite Street. Some neighbors gathered in the courtyard, and said with their eyes wide open and their heads shaking, "What funny sounds!" They asked me to play the record over and over again.

every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion.It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul

every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul. a

Harry, every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.

Watch out, brother,' his professor had told him more than once, 'you have talent; it would be a sin to ruin it. But you're impatient. Some one thing entices you, some one thing takes your fancy––and you occupy yourself with it, and the rest can rot, you don't care about it, you don't even want to look at it. Watch out you don't turn into a fashionable painter. Even now your colors are beginning to cry a bit too loudly. Your drawing is imprecise, and sometimes quite weak, the line doesn't show; you go for fashionable lighting, which strikes the eye at once. Watch out or you'll fall into the English type. Beware. You already feel drawn to the world: every so often I see a showy scarf on your neck, a glossy hat ... It's enticing, you can start painting fashionable pictures, little portraits for money. But that doesn't develop talent, it ruins it. Be patient. Ponder over every work, drop showiness––let the others make money. You won't come out the loser.

The song's potential is shimmering beyond the veil somewhere, while the song that you finally write is almost always haunted by a feeling of diminishment. You have a picture in your mind or a feeling in your heart that you're trying to bring into space and time, and there's just no way (yet) to deliver it in its fullness. The song in reality is as different from what you imagined as a portrait is from the painter's subject. At some point (usually thanks to the mercy of a deadline), you have to put down the brush and give thanks for the change to have made an attempt.

Inasmuch as the public cannot recognise the charm, the beauty, even the outlines of nature save in the stereotyped impressions of an art which they have gradually assimilated, while an original artist starts by rejecting those impressions, so M. and Mme. Cottard, typical, in this respect, of the public, were incapable of finding, either in Vinteuil’s sonata or in Biche’s portraits, what constituted harmony, for them, in music or beauty in painting. It appeared to them, when the pianist played his sonata, as though he were striking haphazard from the piano a medley of notes which bore no relation to the musical forms to which they themselves were accustomed, and that the painter simply flung the colours haphazard upon his canvas.

The Tomb of Lanes Marcus, the Lanes whom you loved is not here in this tomb where you visit and weep for hours. The Lanes whom you loved is nearer, Marcus, when you close yourself in your room and gaze on his portrait; that image preserved all that was worthy in him; that image preserved all that you loved. Do you remember, Marcus, when you brought from the proconsul’s palace the famous painter from Cyrene, and as soon as he laid eyes on your friend, he tried to persuade you with his artist’s cunning that he should draw him, without question, as Hyacinth (that way the portrait would garner more fame)? But your Lanes didn’t put his beauty on loan like that; firmly opposing the man, he demanded to be portrayed not as Hyacinth, nor as anyone else, but as Lanes, son of Rhametichus, an Alexandrian.

There was once a painter who traveled into the cordillera in order to paint an invisible picture of Christ. When he finished, the local Indians scrambled up the rocks to examine it and found that it was, in fact, a picture of Viracocha. A Chinaman passing by went up to see what it was that was causing such excitement and found to his surprise that on the rock was a picture of the Buddha. The painter stuck to his assertion that it was Christ who was invisibly portrayed, and a loud and rancorous argument developed. In the midst of the altercation one of the Indians noticed that the portrait had erased itself. The truth is that the mountains are a place where you can find whatever you want just by looking, as long as you remember that they do not suffer fools gladly and particularly dislike those with preconceived ideas.

And if what they say is true—if every great painting is really a self-portrait—what, if anything, is Fabritius saying about himself? A painter thought so surpassingly great by the greatest painters of his day, who died so young, so long ago, and about whom we know almost nothing? About himself as a painter: he’s saying plenty. His lines speak on their own. Sinewy wings; scratched pinfeather. The speed of his brush is visible, the sureness of his hand, paint dashed thick. And yet there are also half-transparent passages rendered so lovingly alongside the bold, pastose strokes that there’s tenderness in the contrast, and even humor; the underlayer of paint is visible beneath the hairs of his brush; he wants us to feel the downy breast-fluff, the softness and texture of it, the brittleness of the little claw curled about the brass perch.

Spiritually, too, he passed for a typical Dorimarite; though, indeed, it is never safe to classify the souls of one’s neighbors; one is apt, in the long run, to be proved a fool. You should regard each meeting with a friend as a sitting he is unwittingly giving you for a portrait — a portrait that, probably, when you or he die, will still be unfinished. And, though this is an absorbing pursuit, nevertheless, the painters are apt to end pessimists. For however handsome and merry may be the face, however rich may be the background, in the first rough sketch of each portrait, yet with every added stroke of the brush, with every tiny readjustment of the “values,” with every modification of the chiaroscuro, the eyes looking out at you grow more disquieting. And, finally, it is your own face that you are staring at in terror, as in a mirror by candlelight, when all the house is still.

The joy and power of portraiture is that it freezes us in time. Before the portrait, we were younger. After it has been created we will age or we will rot. Even Marc Quinn's chilled nightmare self-protraits in liquid silicone and blood can only preserve a specific moment in time: they cannot age and die as Quinn does and will. Ask the question, Who are we? and the portraits give us answers of a sort. We came from here, the old ones say. These were our kings and queens, our wise ones and our fools. We walk into the BP exhibition hall and they tell us who we are today: a confluence of artistic styles and approaches, of people we could pass in the streets. We look like this, naked and clothed, they tell us. We are here, in this image, because a painter had something to say. Because we are all interesting. Because we cannot gaze into a mirror without being changed. Because we do not know who we are, but sometimes there is a light caught in someone's eyes, that comes close to giving us the tiniest hint of an answer.

Are his letters to Diana downstairs?" She sighed. "What is it about girls and letters? My husband left me messages in soap on the bathroom mirror. Utterly impermanent.Really wonderful-" She broke off and scowled. I would have thought she looked a little embarrassed, but I didn't think embarrassment was in her repertoire. "Anyway. Most of the correspondence between the Willings is in private collections. He had their letters with him in Paris when he died. In a noble but ultimately misguided act, his attorney sent them to his neice. Who put them all in a ghastly book that she illustrated. Her son sold them to finance the publication of six even more ghastly books of poetry. I trust there is a circle of hell for terrible poets who desecrate art." "I've seen the poetry books in the library," I told her. "The ones with Edward's paintings on the covers. I couldn't bring myself to read them." "Smart girl. I suppose worse things have been done, but not many.Of course, there was that god-awful children's television show that made one of his landscapes move.They put kangaroos in it. Kangaroos. In eastern Pennsylvania." "I've seen that,too," I admitted. I'd hated it. "Hated it.Not quite as much as the still life where Tastykakes replaced one orange with a cupcake, or the portrait of Diana dressed in a Playtex sports bra, but close." "Oh,God. I try to forget about the bra." Dr. Rothaus shuddered. "Well, I suppose they do far worse to the really famous painters.Poor van Gogh. All those hearing-aid ads." "Yeah." We shared a moment of quiet respect for van Gogh's ear.

Astonishment: these women’s military professions—medical assistant, sniper, machine gunner, commander of an antiaircraft gun, sapper—and now they are accountants, lab technicians, museum guides, teachers…Discrepancy of the roles—here and there. Their memories are as if not about themselves, but some other girls. Now they are surprised at themselves. Before my eyes history “humanizes” itself, becomes like ordinary life. Acquires a different lighting. I’ve happened upon extraordinary storytellers. There are pages in their lives that can rival the best pages of the classics. The person sees herself so clearly from above—from heaven, and from below—from the ground. Before her is the whole path—up and down—from angel to beast. Remembering is not a passionate or dispassionate retelling of a reality that is no more, but a new birth of the past, when time goes in reverse. Above all it is creativity. As they narrate, people create, they “write” their life. Sometimes they also “write up” or “rewrite.” Here you have to be vigilant. On your guard. At the same time pain melts and destroys any falsehood. The temperature is too high! Simple people—nurses, cooks, laundresses—behave more sincerely, I became convinced of that…They, how shall I put it exactly, draw the words out of themselves and not from newspapers and books they have read—not from others. But only from their own sufferings and experiences. The feelings and language of educated people, strange as it may be, are often more subject to the working of time. Its general encrypting. They are infected by secondary knowledge. By myths. Often I have to go for a long time, by various roundabout ways, in order to hear a story of a “woman’s,” not a “man’s” war: not about how we retreated, how we advanced, at which sector of the front…It takes not one meeting, but many sessions. Like a persistent portrait painter. I sit for a long time, sometimes a whole day, in an unknown house or apartment. We drink tea, try on the recently bought blouses, discuss hairstyles and recipes. Look at photos of the grandchildren together. And then…After a certain time, you never know when or why, suddenly comes this long-awaited moment, when the person departs from the canon—plaster and reinforced concrete, like our monuments—and goes on to herself. Into herself. Begins to remember not the war but her youth. A piece of her life…I must seize that moment. Not miss it! But often, after a long day, filled with words, facts, tears, only one phrase remains in my memory (but what a phrase!): “I was so young when I left for the front, I even grew during the war.” I keep it in my notebook, although I have dozens of yards of tape in my tape recorder. Four or five cassettes… What helps me? That we are used to living together. Communally. We are communal people. With us everything is in common—both happiness and tears. We know how to suffer and how to tell about our suffering. Suffering justifies our hard and ungainly life.

It was thinner than a portrait painter in Constantinople...

We honour great men, we admire aristocrats, we applaud actors, we shower gold on portrait painters and we even, sometimes, reward soldiers, but we always despise merchants. But why? It’s the merchant’s wealth that drives the mills, Sharpe; it moves the looms, it keeps the hammers falling, it fills the fleets, it makes the roads, it forges the iron, it grows the wheat, it bakes the bread and it builds the churches and the cottages and the palaces. Without God and trade we would be nothing.

And though they may have many scruples that they are wasting time, and that it may be better for them to betake themselves to some other good work, seeing that in prayer and meditation they are become helpless; yet let them be patient with themselves, and remain quiet, for that which they are uneasy about is their own satisfaction and liberty of spirit. If they were now to exert their inferior faculties, they would simply hinder and ruin the good which, in that repose, God is working in the soul; for if a man while sitting for his portrait cannot be still, but moves about, the painter will never depict his face, and even the work already done will be spoiled.

These portraits were extraordinary enough, but dominating the whole room was a painting the like of which I’d never seen before, of a small girl, perhaps four or five years old, encased in a stiff satin dress as wide as a table at the hips, very strange on a child. Las Meninas, it was called, which means The Maids of Honour, and sure enough the princess was surrounded by courtiers, a nun, a finely dressed female dwarf and a small boy, or perhaps he was another dwarf, prodding a dog with his foot. To the left, a painter with a comically Spanish moustache – a likeness, I supposed, of Velázquez himself – stood in front of a huge canvas, facing out as if he was painting not the little girl but the viewer, specifically me, Douglas Timothy Petersen, the illusion so convincing that I wanted to crane around the canvas to see what he’d made of my nose. A mirror on the back wall showed two other figures, the girl’s parents I guessed, Mariana and Philip IV, the large-chinned gentleman on the wall to my left. Despite being distant and blurred, it seemed that they were the true subject of the artist’s portrait, but nevertheless the artist, the little girl, the female dwarf all seemed to stare out of the painting at me with such level intensity that I began to feel rather self-conscious, and confused, too, as to how a painting could have so many subjects: the little princess, the ladies in waiting, the artist, the royal couple, and me. It was as disorientating as the moment when you step between two mirrors and see infinite versions of yourself stretching into, well, infinity. Clearly there was ‘a lot going on’ in this painting too, and I’d return with Albie soon.

But we artists are not about money. Not real artists. A painter may pursue money, but not an artist. We must tell a story, and not all stories are nice. Do you see? Life is not always nice. Art is more than beauty. It is also truth. Not all truth is nice. Your brush, your lines, your colour must expose the truth. Not from here,’ he said with a soft tap on Jack’s head. ‘But from here.’ And his hand moved to Jack’s chest.

FIDELITY AND BETRAYAL He loved her from the time he was a child until the time he accompanied her to the cemetery; he loved her in his memories as well. That is what made him feel that fidelity deserved pride of place among the virtues: fidelity gave a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions. Franz often spoke about his mother to Sabina, perhaps even with a certain unconscious ulterior motive: he assumed that Sabina would be charmed by his ability to be faithful, that it would win her over. What he did not know was that Sabina was charmed more by betrayal than by fidelity. The word fidelity reminded her of her father, a small-town puritan, who spent his Sundays painting away at canvases of woodland sunsets and roses in vases. Thanks to him, she started drawing as a child. When she was fourteen, she fell in love with a boy her age. Her father was so frightened that he would not let her out of the house by herself for a year. One day, he showed her some Picasso reproductions and made fun of them. If she couldn't love her fourteen-year-old schoolboy, she could at least love cubism. After completing school, she went off to Prague with the euphoric feeling that now at last she could betray her home. Betrayal. From tender youth, we are told by father and teacher that betrayal is the most heinous offense imaginable. But what is betrayal? Betrayal means breaking ranks. Betrayal means breaking ranks and going off into the unknown. Sabina knew of nothing more magnificent than going off into the unknown. Though a student at the Academy of Fine Arts, she was not allowed to paint like Picasso. It was the period when so-called socialist realism was prescribed and the school manufactured Portraits of Communist statesmen. Her longing to betray her father remained unsatisfied: Communism was merely another father, a father equally strict and limited, a father who forbade her love (the times were puritanical) and Picasso, too. And if she married a second-rate actor, it was only because he had a reputation for being eccentric and was unacceptable to both fathers. Then her mother died. The day following her return to Prague from the funeral, she received a telegram saying that her father had taken his life out of grief. Suddenly she felt pangs of conscience: Was it really so terrible that her father had painted vases filled with roses and hated Picasso? Was it really so reprehensible that he was afraid of his fourteen-year-old daughter's coming home pregnant? Was it really so laughable that he could not go on living without his wife? And again she felt a longing to betray: betray her own betrayal. She announced to her husband (whom she now considered a difficult drunk rather than an eccentric) that she was leaving him. But if we betray B., for whom we betrayed A., it does not necessarily follow that we have placated A. The life of a divorcee-painter did not in the least resemble the life of the parents she had betrayed. The first betrayal is irreparable. It calls forth a chain reaction of further betrayals, each of which takes us farther and farther away from the point of our original betrayal.

The framing of history impacts its credibility as much as the facts. Just like a portrait painter who hides his subjects’ flaws changes our impression of them. Peeling away those layers to find the truth is often difficult. And if the person who framed the story is skilled enough, there may always be doubt, so much so that the truth is lost forever.

Toward the end of 1508, when most of the rooms were already frescoed, Bramante brought in a new talent, Raphael Sanzio, to execute the library. When Julius had eyes on his painting in the Stanza della Segnatura, he fired the painters who had nearly finished the new decorations for his private quarters and ordered Raphael to redo their works as he saw fit. The paintings that had so stunned Julius is today called The School of Athens. In it, Raphael created a visual anthology of classical philosophy that included many recognizable portraits in the crowd of erudites. We see his self-portrait as a golden-haired youth of extraordinary beauty, Bramante as Euclid holding class in geometry, Leonardo as Plato exhorting Aristotle to lift his gaze upward. Michelangelo’s portrait is the most like him, down to his negligent dress. He appears in the center of the foreground as Heraclitus, the melancholy philosopher, slumped over a makeshift table, alone in his thoughts.

Still, no one much celebrated having found a previously unknown painter [Marie Denise Villers] who was equal to the great David. Though the public continued to love the painting - they may not have known David from Delacroix, at any rate - soma academics had a change of heart about the painting itself. Sterling (see start of chapter) said some not-very nice things, beginning with, "The notion that our portrait may have been painted by a woman is, let us confess, an attractive idea." Why attractive? Because it explains everything wrong with the work: "cleverly concealed weaknesses" and "a thousand subtle artifices" that all add up to "the feminine spirit." In other words: Isn't that just like a woman?

There are several books on Walter Potter---one is called Sweet Death: A Feast With Kittens; another, The Victorian Visionary: Inventor of Kitsch. There are some on carnivals, fairgrounds, prison murals, prison art, and a hefty book with a title in gold, Portraits of Icons: From Alexamenos Graffito to Peter Blake's Sgt. Pepper. There are also books I have seen before, books I used to, until very recently when I lost my suitcase, own. One is a book on the abstract expressionist Bernice Bing; colors from her piece Burney Falls cascade down the spine---deep red, tinged with orange, outlined in black against white, brown and peach like skin. There's a book on the performance artist Senga Nengudi too, and another on the painter Amrita Sher-Gil. I take this last one off the shelf, and it falls open to a middle page, which has a picture of her painting Three Girls on it. I stand there for a moment, looking at the three girls' faces: calm, patiently waiting. They are huddled close together, as though perhaps they are sisters, but I don't think they could be; they look too different. I had a postcard of this painting taped to my wall while I was growing up. It was blank on the other side, but I kept it because I had found it tucked in the wooden frame of one of Dad's paintings. It went missing at some point, but while I had it, I looked at it often and felt that I knew---like really knew, as though I had a sense about these things---that the girls depicted were vampires, and that they were still out there in the world, looking exactly the same as when Sher-Gil painted them in 1935, and that I would one day meet them. The painting, I decided when I was a child, depicted the three girls quietly waiting for three brothers to come out of a house so that they could eat them.

Some painters just have the touch, they have that ability to capture the sitter’s true self on canvas. Looking at the works of the greatest portrait painters, they have captured far more than just the resemblance. Their paintings can evoke the same feelings as if you were actually interacting with the person they painted.

Did the girls know, the guide asked, that the Mona Lisa was a real woman, one who had lived and breathed and smiled at Leonardo da Vinci himself? That Lisa Gherardini, wife of a Florentine cloth merchant named Francesco del Giocondo, would become an icon, an embodiment of ideal beauty, a symbol of the Italian Renaissance itself? That the man who painted her would become one of the most famous names in history? That the painter captured not just a woman sitting, hands quietly folded, but an entire era in one portrait?

Chase became a critically acclaimed portrait painter and the most highly paid Asian artist of his generation. Jenny Shimizu became a model and one of the planet’s best-known lesbians (“a homo-household name,” as The Pink Paper declared) for her affairs with Madonna and Angelina Jolie (a career trajectory that, despite the tattoo on Jenny’s right biceps of a hot babe straddling a Snap-on tool, Ted never saw coming).

Later, I sat down drunk on the corner of Carondelet and Canal Streets, listening for the rumble of the streetcar that would take me back uptown to my apartment, watching the evening sun bleed from the streets, the city shifting into night, when it truly became New Orleans: the music, the constant festival, the smell of late evening dinners pouring out, layering the beer-soaked streets, prostitutes, clubs with DJs, rowdy gay bars, dirty strip clubs, the insane out for a walk, college students vomiting in trash cans, daiquiri bars lit up like supermarkets, washing-machine-sized mixers built into the wall spinning every color of daiquiri, lone trumpet players, grown women crying, clawing at men in suits, portrait painters, spangers (spare change beggars), gutter punks with dogs, kids tap-dancing with spinning bike wheels on their heads, the golden cowboy frozen on a milk crate, his golden gun pointed at a child in the crowd, fortune-tellers, psycho preachers, mumblers, fighters, rock-faced college boys out for a date rape, club chicks wearing silver miniskirts, horse-drawn carriages, plastic cups piling against the high curbs of Bourbon Street, jazz music pressing up against rock-and-roll cover bands, murderers, scam artists, hippies selling anything, magic shows and people on unicycles, flying cockroaches the size of pocket rockets, rats without fear, men in drag, business execs wandering drunk in packs, deciding not to tell their wives, sluts sucking dick on open balconies, cops on horseback looking down blouses, cars wading across the river of drunks on Bourbon Street, the people screaming at them, pouring drinks on the hood, putting their asses to the window, whole bars of people laughing, shot girls with test tubes of neon-colored booze, bouncers dragging skinny white boys out by their necks, college girls rubbing each other’s backs after vomiting tequila, T-shirts, drinks sold in a green two-foot tube with a small souvenir grenade in the bottom, people stumbling, tripping, falling, laughing on the sidewalk in the filth, laughing too hard to stand back up, thin rivers of piss leaking out from corners, brides with dirty dresses, men in G-strings, mangy dogs, balloon animals, camcorders, twenty-four-hour 3-4-1, free admission, amateur night, black-eyed strippers, drunk bicyclers, clouds of termites like brown mist surrounding streetlamps, ventriloquists, bikers, people sitting on mailboxes, coffee with chicory, soul singers, the shoeless, the drunks, the blissful, the ignorant, the beaten, the assholes, the cheaters, the douche bags, the comedians, the holy, the broken, the affluent, the beggars, the forgotten, and the soft spring air pregnant with every scent created by such a town.

Cleverness is a detriment to any courtier, my lady, lest we outshine our ruler; however, attentiveness to humans and their relationships is necessary for keeping your head. It’s also helpful as a portrait painter, although in this case, that talent has tied my noose. - Raphael

At the age of ten, Julian announced that he wanted to be a painter, like Velazquez. He dreamed of embarking on canvases that the great master had been unable to paint during his life because, Julian argued, he'd been obliged to paint so many time-consuming portraits of mentally retarded royals.

Sir David Evans was a charming old man with philosophic pretensions and a mass of white hair. Because of the philosophy he sat in front of the immense bookcases groaning under Locke, Hartley and Hume; and because of the hair these sages were cased in a dark shiny leather sparsely tooled in gold. The effect was charming – the more so in that Sir David's features invariably suggested rugged benevolence. Every few years a portrait of Sir David robed in scarlet and black and with Locke and Hume behind him would appear in the exhibitions which our greatest painters arrange at Burlington House. Of these portraits one already hung in the Great Hall of the university, a second could be seen in a dominating position as soon as one entered Sir David's villa residence, and a third was stowed away ready for offer to the National Portrait Gallery when the time came.

You should regard each meeting with a friend as a sitting he is unwillingly giving you for a portrait - a portrait that, probably, when you or he die, will still be unfinished. And, though this is an absorbing pursuit, nevertheless, the painters are apt to end pessimists.

Trewly, If you do not come home, I will tour the continent and pick the most unsuitable man to be your stepfather. He will be a painter and distribute portraits of me in the altogether to all of your friends. If you are not home by the 20th of December, I will consider this your assent to my plan.

Trewly, If you do not come home, I will tour the continent and pick the most unsuitable man to be your stepfather. He will be a painter and distribute portraits of me in the altogether to all of your friends. If you are not home by the 20th of December, I will consider this your assent to my plan. No, this is not a joke. Sincerely, Dowager Viscountess Trewly

It is style that makes us believe in a thing - nothing but style. Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.

The crime on Darties’s list that feels closest to terrorism may be the 1996 theft of a portrait by Corneille de Lyon, a court painter during the reign of François I, the famously art-struck French king. It was François who purchased the Mona Lisa directly from Leonardo da Vinci’s studio, for four thousand gold coins, which is why the indelible work, created by an Italian, hangs in France.

wondering why Nicholas Hilliard wasn’t more famous. That he painted most of his portraits the size of turkey eggs seemed to have disqualified him from the greatness we bestow on less gifted artists. This would have shocked Hilliard because during his prime, paintings “in little” were held to be among the most elevated of art forms. At the height of his powers, when he was the court painter to Elizabeth I—who famously told him to leave out the shadows—only nobles were deemed worthy of the liquefied silver leaf he anointed on the backs of playing cards with stoat-toothed tools and squirrel-hair brushes. He painted by turning a blind eye to blemish and transforming his sitters into ruffled gods and goddesses, all of which made Hilliard quite sought after at court.

The style in which libraries were decorated had been standard since the Middle Ages. Raphael would have been familiar with the scheme from, among other examples, Federigo da Montefeltro’s library in Urbino. Each of the four subjects into which the books were divided—theology, philosophy, justice, and medicine—were represented by an allegorical female figure on the wall or ceiling. The painter usually also added portraits of men and women who had won acclaim in these particular fields.

THE PRACTICE & SCIENCE OF DRAWING BY HAROLD SPEED Associé de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris; Member of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, &c. With 93 Illustrations & Diagrams LONDON SEELEY, SERVICE & CO. LIMITED 38 GREAT RUSSELL STREET 1913 Superior Formatting Publishing If you want more well formatted, classic books which have been formatted specifically for the Kindle platform then just search Amazon for "Superior Formatting Publishing". You can also browse and purchase our entire inventory at our website: SuperiorFormatting.com All of our books are priced as low as possible, feature a linked table of contents, cover art, and superior formatting. Our formatting techniques insures that all page breaks, indents, spacing and quotes are properly displayed on your Kindle device. Plate I. FOUR PHOTOGRAPHS OF SAME MONOCHROME PAINTING IN DIFFERENT STAGES ILLUSTRATING A METHOD OF STUDYING MASS DRAWING WITH THE BRUSH PREFACE Permit me in the first place to anticipate the disappointment of any student who opens this book with the idea of finding "wrinkles" on how to draw faces, trees, clouds, or what not, short cuts to excellence in drawing, or any of the tricks so popular with the drawing masters of our grandmothers and still dearly loved by a large number of people. No good can come of such methods, for there are no short cuts to excellence. But help of a very practical kind it is the aim of the following pages to give; although it may be necessary to make a greater call upon the intelligence of the student than these Victorian methods attempted.

Pablo Picasso entered the world howling. Seconds after he was born, one of the hospital physicians, his uncle Don Salvador, leaned down and blew a huge cloud of cigar smoke in the newborn’s face. The baby grimaced and bellowed in protest—and that’s how everyone knew he was healthy and alive. At that time, doctors were allowed to smoke in delivery rooms, but this little infant would have none of it. Even at birth, he refused to accept things as they had always been done. The baby was named Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruíz y Picasso—whew! He was known to his friends as Pablito, a nickname meaning “little Pablo,” and he learned to draw before he could walk. His first word was piz, short for lápiz, the Spanish word for pencil. It was an instrument that would soon become his most prized possession. Pablo inherited his love of art from his father, Don José Ruiz y Blasco, a talented painter. Don José’s favorite subjects were the pigeons that flocked in the plaza outside the Picassos’ home in Málaga, a town on the southern coast of Spain. Sometimes he would allow Pablo to finish paintings for him. One of Pablo’s earliest solo artworks was a portrait of his little sister, which he painted with egg yolk. But painting was not yet his specialty. Drawing was. Pablo mostly liked to draw spirals. When people asked him why, he explained that they reminded him of churros, the fried-dough pastries sold at every streetcorner stand in Málaga. While other kids played underneath trees in the Plaza de la Merced, Pablo stood by himself scratching circles in the dirt with a stick.

Every painter paints themselves. The chosen subject, style, and medium all unveil your personality. The creative let complete strangers look inside their head.

This sounds like a paradox, but a great painting has to be better than it has to be. For example, when Leonardo painted the portrait of Ginevra de Benci in the National Gallery, he put a juniper bush behind her head. In it he carefully painted each individual leaf. Many painters might have thought, this is just something to put in the background to frame her head. No one will look that closely at it. Not Leonardo. How hard he worked on part of a painting didn't depend at all on how closely he expected anyone to look at it. He was like Michael Jordan. Relentless. Relentlessness wins because, in the aggregate, unseen details become visible

Miss Price is a delightful young lady and a fine painter.” Vincent regarded her with narrowed eyes. “Ah yes, I am well aware of your scheme to throw her in the path of Sir Thomas Lawrence.” Sally shook her head vigorously. “It is not like that, my lord. We do not want him seducing her. We wanted to place him in your path so you may tell us how he fares, since we aren’t allowed to see for ourselves.” “And so she may receive the guidance she desires for her portraits,” Maria chimed in. “She is very talented for one of such youth and inexperience and—” He held up a hand. “I know what your intentions are. And I am not overly worried about the painter toying with her heart. He has to be past fifty by now—” “Fifty-three,” they both interrupted. “And balding and gout-ridden if your wishes have come true. At any rate, I would not permit her to be alone with the man for a second, and neither will her chaperone.” Maria nodded. “That woman is a dragon if I’ve ever seen the like.” “So

picked up the first volume that came to hand. It was on Van Gogh, and the picture at which the book opened was “The Chair”—that astounding portrait of a Ding an Sich, which the mad painter saw, with a kind of adoring terror, and tried to render on his canvas. But it was a task to which the power even of genius proved wholly inadequate. The chair Van Gogh had seen was obviously the same in essence as the chair I had seen.

Certainly the anonymous scarecrow portrait was intended to put him in his place, in much the same way as the philosopher David Hume was said to have dismissed Williams’s accomplishments by comparing the admiration people had for him to the praise they might give “a parrot who speaks a few words plainly.” It is clear, then, that in eighteenth-century Britain there were Britons, like the painter Gainsborough, who were ready to accord respect to an African, even an African who was a servant; and there were other Britons, like the anonymous painter of Francis Williams, or the eminent philosopher Hume, who would sneer at a black man’s achievement. And it was not so much a question of the times in which they lived as the kind of people they were. It was the same in the times of Joseph Conrad a century later, and it is the same today!

Yet, to view the Sistine primarily as a self-portrait doesn’t ring totally true. In spite of his arrogance regarding his artistic skill, Michelangelo was a very unassuming man. He lived an extremely humble life. Even though he was the highest-paid artist of his day, he dressed poorly and lived in a simple apartment, sending almost all his income to his family in Florence. Yes, he slipped his face into The Last Judgment, but unlike Julius II, he did not need an entire chapel or basilica to proclaim his ego. Furthermore, he considered himself first, last, and always a sculptor, not a painter. If he had made one piece the summary of his life, it would certainly have been a statue, not a fresco.

Being able to draw well’, he goes on, ‘is the hardest thing – far harder than painting, as one can easily see from the fact that there are so few great draughtsmen compared to the number of great painters – Ingres, Degas, just a few.

Great British painters, one might say, imitate the proverbial behaviour of buses. None come along for a century or more, then two at the same time. In the decades after 1800 there were J. M. W. Turner and John Constable, then none of international consequence, except perhaps Walter Sickert, until Bacon and Freud after the Second World War.

As a child in the dark days of the Cultural Revolution, I dreamed of being a painter. My art teacher warned me that paintings could land a person behind bars, especially portraits, and advised me to stick to anodyne landscapes.

There are two sides to the act of painting: the spot or line of color put on a point of the canvas, and its effect in the whole, which is incommensurable with it, since it is almost nothing yet suffices to change a portrait or a landscape. One who, with his nose against the painter's brush, observed the painter from too close would see only the wrong side of his work. The wrong side is a feeble movement of the brush or pen of Poussin; the right side is the sunlit glade which that movement releases. A camera once recorded the work of Matisse in slow motion. The impression was prodigious, so much so that Matisse himself was moved, they say. That same brush which, seen with the naked eye, leaped from one act to another, was seen to meditate in a solemn and expanding time—in the imminence of a world's creation— to try ten possible movements, dance in front of the canvas, brush it lightly several times, and crash down finally like a lightning stroke upon the one line necessary. Of course, there is something artificial in this analysis. And Matisse would be wrong if, putting his faith in the film, he believed that he really chose between all possible lines that day and, like the God of Leibniz, solved an immense problem of maximum and minimum. He was not a demiurge; he was a man. He did not have in his mind's eye all the gestures possible, and in making his choice he did not have to eliminate all but one. It is slow motion which enumerates the possibilities. Matisse, set within a man's time and vision, looked at the still open whole of his work in progress and brought his brush toward the line which called for it in order that the painting might finally be that which it was ln the process of becoming. By a simple gesture he resolved the problem which in retrospect seemed imply an infinite number of data (as the hand in the iron filings according to Bergson, achieves in a single stroke the arrangement which will make a place for it). Everything happened in the human world of perception and gesture; and the camera gives us a fascinating version of the event only by making us believe that the painter's hand operated in the physical world where an infinity of options is possible. And yet, Matisse's hand did hesitate. Consequently, there was a choice and the chosen line was chosen in such a way as to observe, scattered out over the painting, twenty conditions which were unformulated even informulable for anyone but Matisse, since they were only defined and imposed by the intention of executing this painting which did not yet exist.

Beneath the dust and spiderwebs, a nondescript man with a bloated, sad, spotty face and watery eyes looked down from the painting. Geralt, who was no stranger to the way portrait painters tended to flatter their clients, nodded.

A Churchyard In Summertime by Stewart Stafford O, to stand in a quiet country churchyard, The graveyard bending in summer zephyrs, Chlorophyll light beneath swaying poplars, Rook song in twilight's nocturne. Oblivious hues spread upon canvas, Beside the somnambulant swanning river, Miasmas of midges at the water's edge, In the crosshairs of a painter's thumb. Then the sun rolls away over the horizon, A veil draws across the long day's play, A churn supper collection of basket and easel, Recollections in the slumbering night. © Stewart Stafford, 2021. All rights reserved.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion . It is not he who is revealed by the painter, it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.

Every man’s work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself, and the more he tries to conceal himself the more clearly will his character appear in spite of him. I may very likely be condemning myself, all the time that I am writing this book, for I know that whether I like it or no I am portraying myself more surely than I am portraying any of the characters whom I set before the reader. I am sorry that it is so, but I cannot help it — after which sop to Nemesis I will say that Battersby church in its amended form has always struck me as a better portrait of Theobald than any sculptor or painter short of a great master would be able to produce.

After tidying the kitchen, Claire walked upstairs and found Tyler in the hallway, lost in thought as he rearranged his paintings hanging there, a series he called "Claire's World," which he'd painted when they first married. She wasn't actually in the paintings, he wasn't a portrait painter, but they were beautiful studies in light and color- leafy greens, black lines that looked like lettering, bright apple-red dots. If she stared at them long enough, sometimes she thought she could make out a figure, crouched among the greens. Claire wondered, not for the first time, what she did to deserve this man, her husband.

Then again, perhaps the true subject of a portrait is the interchange between painter and subject – what the sitter consciously or unconsciously reveals, and the artist picks up. Out of the sittings comes, with luck, a new entity: a picture that succeeds and fails – that is, lives on in human memory or disappears – according to its power as a work of art. …

What, then, is a portrait painter painting? An individual who persists though time, or merely the way a ceaselessly mutating human organism appears in a particular time and place? It is a good question. …