portraiture

…18th century saw more accomplished portrait painters flourishing in France than perhaps ever before in any country. Yet it is the informal, the convivial, and the intimate that are associated with the portraiture of Jacques-André-Joseph Aved, François-Hubert Drouais, Louis Tocqué, Louis-Michel Van Loo, or Étienne Aubry. The heroic was seldom…

…is the marked tendency toward portraiture in art. Persian satraps such as Tissaphernes issued coinage with what were obviously meant to be realistic depictions of the satrap’s head. Individual rulers were represented by statues in the round, like that of Mausolus from the Mausoleum (which may or may not be…

Portraits of the Evangelists became brilliant symbols, their bodies and clothes radically abstracted and brightly colored; and, in the earliest books, they are sometimes shown in the guise of the four apocalyptic beasts, the man, the lion, the bull calf, and the eagle, which represented…

…has been enormous, revolutionizing contemporary portrait painting. Not only did the three-quarter pose become the standard, but also Leonardo’s preliminary drawings encouraged other artists to make more and freer studies for their paintings and stimulated connoisseurs to collect those drawings. Through the drawings, Leonardo’s Milanese works were made known to…

…in part, the development of portraiture as an independent genre and the ever-increasing number of profane, usually classical mythological, subjects in the art of the Renaissance. The painting of landscapes, as the earthly setting of human activities, has its first modest beginnings in this period.

Roman portrait painting also shows great technical skill and realism. One of the earliest extant examples is a group of Terentius Neo and his wife, from Pompeii. Both figures recall mummy portraits in Egypt, being painted in encaustic (a technique by which colors are mixed with…

In portraiture an interest in extremes of mood found most eloquent expression in the work of Thomas Lawrence, who combined in portraits such as those of Richard Payne Knight (1794) and Pope Pius VII (1819) brilliant freedom of handling, at times approaching exhibitionism, with dramatic expression…

Portraiture required less self-consciousness than history painting, and there are a number of highly sensitive portraits, mainly of their friends, by Overbeck, Schnorr, Scheffer von Leonardshoff, and Carl Philipp Fohr (Portrait of Wilhelm von Schadow [1818]). The Nazarenes’ greatest contribution, however, was to landscape painting:…

…simple, rounded humps; in American portrait painting, the bust or figure is conventionalized in a simple frontal form, repeated over and over again and sometimes painted in advance of a sitting, leaving only the features to be filled in. More important, perhaps, is the fact that the adoption of materials…

Portraits, seldom found in the early phase, became increasingly common in the 18th century—as did court scenes, scenes of sporting and hunting events, and other scenes concerned with the courtly life of the great chiefs and feudal lords of Rājasthān.

…sects, but mentor and patriarch portraiture played a significant role in the ritual of the transmission of teaching authority. Here too, the penetrating effect of presence was the quality most sought in these visages. Ink monochrome painting was also employed by Zen adepts as a form of participatory spiritual exercise.…

The Turkic Uighurs especially favoured portraiture. In the 7th and 8th centuries Uighur artists already had acquired great proficiency in rendering likenesses in a style heavily influenced by Chinese portraiture of the Tang period. These portraits were painted on silk and were frequently inscribed with the sitter’s name.