Top 100 Quotes About Portraits
#1. Portraits I've done in the past I've always thought were a reflection of me.
Judy Dater
#2. There are portraits and still-lifes
And the first, because 'human'
Does not excel the second
Charles Tomlinson
#3. Portrait The world spreads out on either side no farther than the heart is wide.
Emily Dickinson
#4. The danger, I find, is that you can become too formulaic, like some commissioned portrait painters who develop a methodology.
Jamie Wyeth
#5. I was a terrible painter - my portraits looked like the evil chimera love-children of Picasso's demoiselles and the BBC test card clown.
Sarah Hall
#6. I often concentrate on the eyes and lips, they are great indicators of mood and feeling, and I find that I can project character into my portraits by bringing the viewer's attention to these areas.
Robert Ryan
#7. A portrait isn't a fact but an opinion - an occasion rather than a truth.
Richard Avedon
#8. It is a scholar's task to find patterns in nature or cycles in history. Initially, it's no different from finding portraits of animals and heroes in the stars. The question is, Have you discovered a preexisting truth? Or have you imposed an arbitrary meaning on whatever it is you're considering?
Mary Doria Russell
#9. Karl stood up and pointed at the large portraits on the wall. He swept the room from George Washington to Ben Franklin to John Adams to Thomas Jefferson. "Soldier, Printer, Lawyer, Scholar. You become a politician because the people make you one, not because you desire to be one.
Jeff Ferry
#10. Portrait painters' mission is to portray people and the beauty of Creation. They should stay clear of ego ...
Igor Babailov
#11. We only serve as a model for the portrait of our fame.
Jean Cocteau
#12. Winckelmann wished to live with a work of art as a friend. The saying is true of pen and pencil. Fresh lustre shoots from Lycidas in a twentieth perusal. The portraits of Clarendon are mellowed by every year of reflection.
Robert Aris Willmott
#13. A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about.
Richard Avedon
#14. Oh, you ask me, what is the greatest torture of a person who does portraits for a living? I could fill several volumes with nice nasty stories. I don't know.
Imogen Cunningham
#15. Improvisational things about picture-making ... learned from working with the small camera early on have served me well in being able to think quickly when making [portraits].
Dawoud Bey
#16. Your dreams are the product of your longings, a portrait of your potential, and a promise of your future.
Erwin McManus
#17. I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.
Gertrude Stein
#18. As time passes by and you look at portraits, the people come back to you like a silent echo. A photograph is a vestige of a face, a face in transit. Photography has something to do with death. It's a trace.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#19. In my portraits I try to avoid the fleeting expression and vivacity of a snapshot.
Bill Brandt
#20. He [William Merritt Chase] is, I suspect, getting a very truthful likeness. I would like it better if [it] was not so gray, so cramped about the eyes, and not quite so corpulent. But is this not quarreling with nature?
Rutherford B. Hayes
#21. A family portrait is only complete with love to fill it's frame.
Wes Fesler
#22. In front of the model I work with the same will to reproduce truth as if I were making a portrait. I do not correct nature, I incorporate myself into it; it directs me. I can only work with a model. The sight of human forms nourishes and comforts me.
Auguste Rodin
#23. I refer to what I do as 'conceptual portraits,' meaning that I come up with an idea or concept that I would like to explore, and then I find people that fit that idea.
Alix Smith
#24. [Alexander] Hamilton estimated portrait painters as thieves of time.
Gertrude Atherton
#25. The table was a pool of candlelight -- so bright that the rest of the room seemed almost black, with the faces of the family portraits floating in the darkness.
Dodie Smith
#26. He taught me to be a Da Vinci
and I sit here, with his portraits
waiting for him to return
I do not think he will
Is that what it means to be human
to be all powerful,
to build a temple to yourself
and leave
only the walls to pray
Phil Kaye
#27. Bollocks," Ryan said. "I've seen you draw. You're very good, especially at drawing portraits."
James almost laughed. He wasn't all that good at drawing portraits. He was good at drawing Ryan.
Alessandra Hazard
#28. You will never see a portrait of my love, for miracles are never seen.
Steve Lawrence
#29. Portraits are the most intimate photographs. The image will survive the subject.
Victor Skrebneski
#30. I'm not exactly sure how old the girls are [in Bink & Gollie], but I can pretty much guarantee that their parents will never show up. That would mess up the fun. I do, however, very much like Kate's idea of having Tony [Fucile] draw their portraits.
Kate DiCamillo
#31. He exhibited three portraits, each a masterpiece, which killed every picture within range.
E.F. Benson
#32. But, memory paints impressionistic portraits of the past, enhancing some images and blurring others. To her,
Monique Martin
#33. A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion.
Robert Hughes
#34. When I paint a portrait I want to know more than just the looks of the person. I want to know how they live and what their feelings are ... It then becomes more than just physiognomy, but the feel of the person.
Jamie Wyeth
#35. I do mostly portraits. So it's just people's faces, not really any ideas.
Andy Warhol
#36. I feel like vocals are to music what portraits are to painting. They're the humanity. Landscapes are good and fine, but at the end of the day everyone loves the Mona Lisa.
Grimes
#37. For years the first of May was the day all leases expired, and on that day mass migrations would take place, with families lugging eiderdowns and ancestral portraits through the streets, as if in parody of the march of the wagon trains.
Luc Sante
#38. I think I was driven to paint portraits to commit images of friends and family to memory. I have face blindness, and once a face is flattened out, I can remember it better.
Chuck Close
#39. From a most kind suggestion put to me by Mr Farraday himself one afternoon almost a fortnight ago, when I had been dusting the portraits in the library. In fact, as I recall, I was up on the step-ladder dusting the portrait of Viscount Wetherby
Anonymous
#40. I felt that the beach portraits were all self-portraits. That moment of unease, that attempt to find a pose, it was all about me.
Rineke Dijkstra
#41. Photography freed painting from a lot of tiresome chores, starting with family portraits.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
#42. Self-portraits are a way of revealing something about oneself.
Eric Kandel
#44. Neurologically, I'm a quadriplegic, so virtually everything about my work has been driven by my learning disabilities, which are quite severe, and my lack of facial recognition, which I'm sure is what drove me to paint portraits in the first place.
Chuck Close
#45. Each person's work is always a portrait of himself.
Samuel Johnson
#46. I always take a close look at those who lose themselves in self portraits. They are solitary souls, prone to introspection, who have really grappled with their existence.
Young-Ha Kim
#47. It's quite true that what I am aiming at, even when I take portraits, is to get a scandalous picture. I would love to be a paparazzo.
Helmut Newton
#48. What we know about Cleopatra's looks is based purely on her coin portraits. Engraving was imperfect, and that when you are a ruler and you ask for a coin to be engraved with your likeness on it, you are probably trying to project a certain air of authority.
Stacy Schiff
#49. Of what use are pedigrees, or to be thought of noble blood, or the display of family portraits, O Ponticus?
Juvenal
#50. I used to always make art for girls. That was the thing I did for girls to like me. I did portraits, drawings, letters that formed outlines of significant things in our relationship. Art. I just used art in general. It usually worked.
Cary Fukunaga
#51. What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound than a portrait.
Charles Baudelaire
#52. But Maurice was clean-shaven, and, by the portraits shown to me, certainly quite beautiful; though he looked a little more like a tenor than a gentleman ought to look. James
G.K. Chesterton
#53. My dad was a photographer, so we had all these studio portraits of us.
Timothy Simons
#54. I've had photographs taken for portraits because I very much prefer working from the photographs than from models ... I couldn't attempt to do a portrait from photographs of somebody I didn't know ...
Francis Bacon
#55. Many intelligent people, when about to write ... , force on their minds a certain notion about style, just as they screw up their faces when they sit for their portraits.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#56. On the subject of "personal beauty," for example, Lincoln merrily confided he felt fortunate that "'the women couldn't vote,' otherwise the monstrous portraits of him which had been circulated during the canvas by friends as well as by foes would surely defeat him.
Harold Holzer
#58. Jarecki's 'Reagan' is a compellingly watchable and appropriately conflicted portrait ... artfully nuanced and intellectually curious.
Hank Stuever
#59. I do portraits. I usually do live models in a class environment, but I've been painting at home more. I really love the human form, and I love faces. I've tried to do landscapes a few times.
Michelle Pfeiffer
#60. The humor for me is how far above your head the signature is - it's dislocated from the sign of the artist in such a distinct way that it could almost be a self-portrait of a sort.
Laura Owens
#62. My days are kind of controlled by my projects, so sometimes they're album covers. Sometimes they're commission portrait shoots. Sometimes they are editorial, so it kind of - I don't dictate it.
Carol Friedman
#63. Life is a series of family photos in which you keep moving to the rear until finally you're a portrait in the background.
Robert Breault
#64. I used to paint and I used to draw, and I probably would have loved to have been a portrait painter if I'd been good enough, but I really wasn't good enough.
Sarah Ruhl
#65. When I look at great works of art or listen to inspired music, I sense intimate portraits of the specific times in which they were created.
Billy Joel
#66. Is this the main thing that painters of portraits care about? The person on the verge of becoming someone else?
Gregory Maguire
#67. I thank Henry James for the scene in the hotel room, that I stole from Portrait Of A Lady This particular scene is the most beautiful scene ever written.
Leos Carax
#68. The reason some portraits don't look true to life is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures.
Salvador Dali
#69. I'm very envious of the few artists who are any good and still do portraits.
Howard Hodgkin
#70. Everything I paint is a portrait, whatever the subject.
Jamie Wyeth
#71. You know-portraits are odd things." "How do you figure?" I asked. "Well at the time, that portrait told the whole story. It told the truth. We were a family-a happy family. Now that same portrait just looks like a lie.
Brian Joyce
#72. The facts of the present won't sit still for a portrait. They are constantly vibrating, full of clutter and confusion.
William Macneile Dixon
#73. The people have to know what my portraits are like in order to behave in such a way that the result is one of my portraits.
Thomas Ruff
#74. But let's speak of art for a moment. Yes, art. I know a gentleman who makes excellent portraits. This gentleman is a camera.
Tristan Tzara
#75. 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?
Oriana Fallaci
#76. The way someone who's being photographed presents himself to the camera, and the effect of the photographer's response on that presence, is what the making of a portrait is all about.
Richard Avedon
#77. When one starts from a portrait and seeks by successive eliminations to find pure form ... one inevitably ends up with an egg.
Pablo Picasso
#78. The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
(About Books; Recoiling, Rereading, Retelling, New York Times, February 22, 1987)
Anatole Broyard
#79. All we are doing are self-portraits. As simple that. We accumulate knowledge and wisdom and power, and we get our hearts broken, and we write. We write for others to absorb what took us so long to understand.
Cristian Mihai
#80. I make figurative portraits as a way to explore theories of quantum physics.
Oliver Jeffers
#81. I never wanted to make portraits - to photograph celebrities, beautiful people, beautiful landscapes, beautiful buildings, or people in distressing situations ... I have always been interested in everyman - average, ordinary people in everyday situations.
Ray Metzker
#82. Fashion is where I make my living. I'm not knocking it; it's a pleasure to make a living that way. Then there's the deeper pleasure of doing my portraits.
Richard Avedon
#84. I believe I have had the most trouble with a portrait which I painted in installments - the head on one canvas and the bust on another.
Mark Twain
#85. None of us is born with the right face. It's a tough job being a portrait photographer.
Imogen Cunningham
#86. I will never, for the future, paint the portrait of a tyrant until his head lies before me on the scaffold.
Jacques-Louis David
#87. Most portraits are lies. People are rarely what they appear to be, especially in front of a camera. You might know me your entire lifetime and never reveal yourself to me. To interpret wrinkles as character is insult not insight.
Duane Michals
#89. A study of family portraits is enough to convert a man to the theory of reincarnation.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#90. Within, there were several ponderous brazen-bound volumes of medieval date, a thin manuscript of yellowing parchment, and two portraits whose faces had been turned to the wall, as if it were unlawful for even the darkness of the sealed closet to behold them.
Clark Ashton Smith
#91. I do not care about my own appearance, but I would hope that people could see into my soul, and that is presented better in these photographs than in others. (On his self-portraits)
August Strindberg
#92. Everything in a wide sense is a kind of a self-portrait. It's just the way you see things and you're curious about certain things and just excited about them.
Jurgen Teller
#93. A filmmaker should never assume he's superior to his subject. I often find that even the simplest topic remains an enigma. The best film portraits not only evoke that enigma but ingest it in a process that renders what's invisible visible.
Damian Pettigrew
#94. What I really do is make portraits of the soul.
Jan Saudek
#95. So long as people expect paintings to be simply coloured photographs they get no individuality and, in the case of portraits, no characterisation.
William Dobell
#96. When painting portraits a lot of people say, 'Why not get a photograph of the person?' Photography is wonderful and it is an art form in itself, but ... my portrait is a culmination of elements ... a truer image of a person than just the 'click' of a snapshot.
Jamie Wyeth
#97. I don't use names or captions for my many portraits of politicians and authors for newspapers. The drawing has to be self-explanatory, so I spend a lot of time sketching to find an idea and an angle that is clear.
Siegfried Woldhek
#98. It should be the aim of every photographer to make a single exposure that shows everything about the subject. I have been told that my portrait of Churchill is an example of this.
Yousuf Karsh
#99. People don't have time to wait for somebody to paint their portraits anymore. The money is in photography.
Robert Mapplethorpe
#100. There are no bad pictures; that's just how your face looks sometimes.
Abraham Lincoln
