Portraiture Quotes - Page 2

What a conception of art must those theorists have who exclude portraits from the proper province of the fine arts! It is exactly as if we denied that to be poetry in which the poet celebrates the woman he really loves. Portraiture is the basis and the touchstone of historic painting.

I never wanted to be commissioned to paint portraits. I like to choose my own subject and make a character study from it.

It is in some respect greater love in Jesus to sanctify than to justify, for He maketh us most like Himself, in His own essential portraiture and image in sanctifying us.

I try to paint from life, but I had such a miserable experience with Bonaparte, who wouldn't sit still and kept mumbling about catching a cold and something incoherent about Wellington , so I finally decided to work from photos.

Don't listen to the fools who say that pictures of people can be of no consequence, or that painting is dead. There is much to be done.

Listen: if I am a painter and I do your portrait, have I or haven't I the right to paint you as I want?

If a figure doesn't look back at you, you forget it.

If faces were not alike, we could not distinguish men from beasts; if they were not different, we could not tell one man from another.

I always work directly from life, partly because I really enjoy having an interaction with the person in front of me but also because I love having a direct response to shape and color.

I shall praise those faces which seem to project out of the picture as though they were sculptured, and I shall censure those faces in which I see no art but that of outline.

But eventually I moved the portraiture into the smaller clay things which gave them more of a caricature look to them, rather than a characterization.

I do not care to paint portraits indoors. I cannot feel sympathetic.

I'm an odd portrait painter in that I'm not just interested in human faces. I consider almost all of my paintings to be portraits.

Roger Fry is painting me. It is too like me at present, but he is confident he will be able to alter that. Post-Impressionism is at present confined to my lower lip... and to my chin.

Alas, it is just a single image - an extended moment perhaps. Unlike a biography, a portrait cannot present the many differing moments that make up a personality.

A competent portraitist knows how to imply the profile in the full face.

Ah! Portraiture, portraiture with the thought, the soul of the model in it, that is what I think must come.

I am not altogether displeased with the shirt-front.

You know, if one paints someone's portrait, one should not know him if possible.

A photographic close-up is perhaps the purest form of portraiture, creating a confrontation between the viewer and the subject that daily interaction makes impossible, or at least impolite.

My work doesn't speak about individuals (it's not portraiture in the traditional sense), it tries to speak about life in general in cities of the West - which is where I live and what I understand.

God often lays the sum of His amazing providences in very dismal afflictions; as the limner first puts on the dusky colors, on which he intends to draw the portraiture of some illustrious beauty.

What it is is a type of editorialization, you know? This is self-portraiture. This is what you think about the world we live in.

Portraiture is something that we're all drawn to. I think primarily other forms - we prefer, by and large, to look at human beings than a bowl of fruit.

Beware how in making the portraiture thou breakest the pattern: for divinity maketh the love of ourselves the pattern; the love of our neighbours but the portraiture.