I hate to paint portraits! I hope never to paint another portrait in my life.... Portraiture may be all right for a man in his you...th, but after forty I believe that manual dexterity deserts one, and, besides, the colour-sense is less acute. Youth can better stand the exactions of a personal kind that are inseparable from portraiture. I have had enough of it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The novelist sets forth his characters in two ways, by direct comment upon them, or indirectly by reporting their actions and beha...vior and letting the report speak for itself. The portraitist uses the latter method only, translating everything into purely visual and self-sufficient terms. His problem is to fuse into a single unambiguous statement what he sees of a man and what he understands of him. The greater his selective faculty and power of communication the keener will be his portrait. Facial expressions and body gestures are a living language which we all have learned to read as a clue to, and use as a revelation, of character. A keen portraitist has a flair for this wordless language of the face, and simply by reporting the visible quantity of the body-soul equation he can give us insight into the hidden psychological quality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
These pages reproduce me very imperfectly, and there are many things in me of which I find no trace in them. I suppose it is becau...se, in the first place, sadness takes up the pen more readily than joy; and, in the next, because I depend so much upon surrounding circumstances. When there is no call upon me, and nothing to put me to the test, I fall back into melancholy; and so the practical man, the cheerful man, the literary man, does not appear in these pages. The portrait is lacking in proportion and breadth; it is one-sided, and wants a center; it has, as it were, been painted from too near.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The masculine imagination lives in a state of perpetual revolt against the limitations of human life. In theological terms, one mi...ght say that all men, left to themselves, become gnostics. They may swagger like peacocks, but in their heart of hearts they all think sex an indignity and wish they could beget themselves on themselves. Hence the aggressive hostility toward women so manifest in most club-car stories.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It seems to be a law of nature that no man, unless he has some obvious physical deformity, ever is loth to sit for his portrait.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, th...at he would not have had to represent the truth of change--only to give stability to one beautiful moment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A beautiful person among the Greeks, was thought to betray by this sign some secret favor of the immortal gods; and we can pardon ...pride, when a woman possesses such a figure that wherever she stands, or moves, or leaves a shadow on the wall, or sits for a portrait to the artist, she confers a favor on the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now the hand-painted image of a person is costly because the time of a well-trained artist is required to make it. The time spent ...by the painter is time spent seeing as well as making. Literally thousands of separate perceptions must be consolidated into a single image by the portrait painter. Even where the style is naturalistic and the technique meticulous, the necessary process of amalgamation entails synthesis, generalization, exag geration, and simplification. Hence, much as we admire the painter's craft, we know that it changes optical data. The invention and perfection of photography has taught us to see how painters change what they see. Oddly enough, we are less conscious of the fact that the camera also changes reality. Beyond that, most of us do not realize how much the photographer manipulates what the camera sees because we have been thoroughly conditioned to believe in the photographer's--as opposed to the painter's--mode of representing reality. For practical purposes this means that we regard photographic imagery as truthful while painterly imagery is viewed, at best, as poetic.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »