Top 100 Quotes About Portraits
#1. There are portraits and still-lifes
And the first, because 'human'
Does not excel the second
Charles Tomlinson
#2. We are nothing more than molded clay given breath, but we are nothing less than divine self-portraits,
N.D. Wilson
#3. As a boy, I used to look at reproductions of Rembrandt's portraits ... the people in his paintings were so real I felt I knew them ... It is his empathy for the sitter, combined with his enjoyment and dexerity in handling paint that captured my imagination then, and is what I am striving for still.
David Cobley
#4. I do not care to paint portraits indoors. I cannot feel sympathetic.
Joaquin Sorolla
#6. His account books reflect a concern with fashion, as shown by periodic visits to a French tailor, and his sartorial elegance is confirmed in portraits. In one painting, he wears a double-breasted coat with brass buttons and gilt-edged lapels, his neck swathed delicately in a ruffled lace jabot.
Ron Chernow
#7. Alexandra, my eldest, here, plays the piano, or reads or sews; Adelaida paints landscapes and portraits (but never finishes any); and Aglaya sits and does nothing. I don't work too much, either.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#8. I think [indications of vulnerability are] why so many portraits work when they're difficult: we believe we're presenting ourselves one way, but the camera always reveals something more vulnerable, despite our best efforts.
Katy Grannan
#9. Up the stairs I found an imposing headquarters, decorated with the portraits and busts of solemn, whiskered old darlings who, no doubt, bled their customers with leeches and passed on the information to alarmed small boys that self-abuse leads to blindness.
John Mortimer
#10. When you are doing portraits, you have that intimacy with someone for a few minutes. For a really good portrait, you don't take the portrait - it's given.
Giles Duley
#11. I'm a filmmaker who is known for these ambiguous portraits that tell multiple sides of the story without really telling the audience what to think.
Joe Berlinger
#12. I was shooting lots of large format portraits then but I've since changed to digital, where you have so much more control. There are millions of things you can do with digital; you can be more spontaneous, and you're more in control of your color palette.
Gregory Heisler
#13. It is, indeed, only in old age that intellectual men attain their sublime expression, whilst portraits of them in their youth show only the first traces of it.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#14. When I first came to America there still was Look Magazine and LIFE Magazine, and the photography in those magazines was amazing to look at. They had the best portraits, and their news photography.
Vilmos Zsigmond
#15. I really like doing portraits, but I like taking pictures of things that are natural, like scenery, too.
Georgia May Jagger
#16. Cassius and Brutus were the more distinguished for that very circumstance that their portraits were absent.
[Lat., Praefulgebant Cassius atque Brutus eo ipso, quod effigies eorum non videbantur.]
Tacitus
#18. In portraits, the grace and, we may add, the likeness consists more in taking the general air than in observing the exact similitude of every feature.
Joshua Reynolds
#19. When you do not like human beings, you cannot make good portraits.
Gisele Freund
#20. He nodded. "That would work. It's a date. So ... I'm meeting the grandparents? What should I wear?" he teased me. "As long as you're not wearing a body bag, I should think you'll do just fine," I laughed, turning back to his collection of portraits.
Amy Plum
#21. 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.
August Wilhelm Von Schlegel
#22. Dreams are like portraits; and we find they please because they are confessed resemblances.
George Crabbe
#23. I didn't try and do fashion pictures. I tried to do portraits of girls wearing dresses.
David Bailey
#24. All we can ever know about are the portraits of each other inside our own skulls.
Greg Egan
#25. I have always loved reading, so was interested in the literary world, and took many literary portraits.
Fay Godwin
#26. When you do portraits professionally it's not a desire, it's for money.
Imogen Cunningham
#27. All my forebears worked for a living. My grandfather painted portraits. My mother too. My aunt painted seascapes.
Erica Jong
#28. Jane Austen, who is said to be Shakespearian, never reminds us of Shakespeare, I think, in her full-dress portraits, but she does so in characters such as Miss Bates and Mrs. Allen.
A. C. Bradley
#29. Geography is crucial for my work. I went to Antarctica and took a studio to several of the main ice fields to make field recordings of ice to create a symphony - acoustic portraits of ice.
DJ Spooky
#30. Contented, unambitious people are all very well in their way. They form a neat, useful background for great portraits to be painted against, and they make a respectable, if not particularly intelligent, audience for the active spirits of the age to play before.
Jerome K. Jerome
#31. I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.
Frida Kahlo
#32. Your aim as a photographer is to get a picture of that person that means something. Portraits aren't fantasies; they need to tell a truth.
Tim Walker
#33. And painted portraits have a life of their own that comes from deep in the soul of the painter and where the machine can't go.
Vincent Van Gogh
#34. I loathe my own face, and I've done self-portraits because I've had nobody else to do.
Francis Bacon
#35. My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.
Richard Avedon
#36. I want to make portraits and images. I don't know how. Out of despair, I just use paint anyway. Suddenly the things you make coagulate and take on just the shape you intend. Totally accurate marks, which are outside representational marks.
Francis Bacon
#37. Who would not have been laughed at if he had said in 1800 that metals could be extracted from their ores by electricity or that portraits could be drawn by chemistry.
{Commenting on Henri Becquerel's process for extracting metals by voltaic means.}
Michael Faraday
#38. Whatever China I'd been born into, I would probably still have become a painter - I loved sketching portraits as a child, and began art classes at the age 7. But if China hadn't been under Maoist rule, I might never have become a writer.
Ma Jian
#39. I remember Steve Kaufman as the artist on Saturday Night Live doing the Pop Art portraits for the show.
Joe Piscopo
#40. Do portraits of people in familiar and typical attitudes, above all give to their face the same choice of expression that one gives to their body.
Edgar Degas
#41. My portraits are half what I see and the other half is invented or dictated by the person and the painting.
Francesco Clemente
#42. I know from doing portraits that you have to look at someone a really long time to see what they're covering up, to see their inside face, and when you do see it, and get it down, that's the thing that makes people freak out about how much a drawing looks like them.
Jandy Nelson
#43. I saw the Village as a place you could escape to, to express yourself. When I first went there, I wrote and performed poetry. Then I drew portraits for a couple of years. It took a while before I thought about picking up a guitar.
Richie Havens
#44. Before the New York Times starts running "Portraits in Grief" of former Enron employees, it's worth remembering that even after the collapse, Enron stock is still worth more than the entire Social Security "trust fund."
Ann Coulter
#45. If you're a guest [at my $113 million house], you'll be able to call up on screens throughout the house almost any image you like - presidential portraits, reproductions of High Renaissance paintings, pictures of sunsets, airplanes, skiers in the Andes, a rare French stamp, the Beatles in 1965.
Bill Gates
#46. Make people's portraits in familiar and typical attitudes.
Edgar Degas
#47. Callie was ruing the moment that afternoon when she had suggested a small, intimate dinner. Tonight, even the ancestors watching from the portraits lining the sitting-room walls seemed to be mocking her.
Sarah MacLean
#48. It's very difficult to take candid portraits of children because they're moving around all the time.
Ren Ng
#49. The street resembled fairgrounds deserted in haste. There was a little of everything: suitcases, briefcases, bags, knives, dishes, banknotes, papers, faded portraits. All the things one planned to take along and finally left behind. They had ceased to matter.
Elie Wiesel
#51. Show some respect. They were your grandparents. -Batman
Just names and dusty frames on the wall to me. -Damien
I take exception to that. There is not a speck of dust collecting on those portraits. -Alfred
Peter J. Tomasi
#52. In making portraits, I refuse to photograph myself as do so many photographers. My style is the style of the people I photograph.
Lotte Jacobi
#53. The painter who is so enamoured by the beauties of the parts of a landscape, that he strives to represent all, cannot succeed. His picture will be an arrangement of a series of portraits of things without unity ... There must be variety and contrast, but in measured doses.
Walter J. Phillips
#54. Write something about me then,' he said when I came back. He grinned. 'Go on! Now! I bet you can!'
'I don't do portraits, Choe.'
The lies liberated from this statement skittered off into infinity like images between two mirrors.
M. John Harrison
#55. If the portraits of our absent friends are pleasant to us, which renew our memory of them and relieve our regret for their absence by a false and empty consolation, how much more pleasant are letters which bring us the written characters of the absent friend.
Heloise D'Argenteuil
#56. Even with her red-rimmed eyes she was the reason artists painted portraits.
Chelsey Philpot
#57. That is what [Andy] Warhol portraits do: They elevate the subject into an icon of the pop culture he was documenting.
Giorgio Armani
#58. If I was in love with someone, I would get their picture out of the school yearbook and do portraits. If I was curious about sex, I would draw pictures of it. There were no books for me to look at. Then I would go find my father's matches to burn the paper.
Lynn Johnston
#59. Painting self-portraits without clothes on has also given me some publicity.
Cleo Moore
#60. When you pose for a photograph, it's behind a smile that isn't yours. You are angry and hungry and alive. What I value in you is that intensity. I want to make portraits as intense as people.
Richard Avedon
#61. I wanted to translate from one flat surface to another. In fact, my learning disabilities controlled a lot of things. I don't recognize faces, so I'm sure it's what drove me to portraits in the first place.
Chuck Close
#62. I have always loved the amateur side of photography, automatic photographs, accidental photographs with uncentered compositions, heads cut off, whatever. I incite people to make their self-portraits. I see myself as their walking photo booth.
William Klein
#63. When we write stories that are happy, with little conflict or inference of sin, then we are creating portraits of the world that perpetuate a sort of "soft universalism," the idea that no one is truly lost but rather that all are actually saved.
Gene C. Fant Jr.
#64. I think I'm predominantly known for my portraits. Obviously in my work there are landscape or stilllife elements, but mainly my work is people ...
Ari Marcopoulos
#65. My sitters get tired waiting for commissioned portraits. If they commission me they have to wait years sometimes because I discard so many.
William Dobell
#66. Michael used to draw self-portraits with nightmares hidden in his curls.
Janet Fitch
#67. I'm interested in human vulnerability. We are alone, and my portraits reflect this quality. I don't want anything to get in the way of this feeling.
Thomas S. Buechner
#68. You don't change the course of history by turning the faces of portraits to the wall.
Jawaharlal Nehru
#69. I never can pass by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York without thinking of it not as a gallery of living portraits but as a cemetery of tax-deductible wealth.
Lewis H. Lapham
#70. I have done only two portraits: one of the artist Francesco Clemente and another of Andy Warhol.
Jean-Michel Basquiat
#71. I don't have one specific tattooing specialty. I enjoy doing full-color new school, portraits, neo-traditional, realistic, black and gray, ultra detailed art, etc ... but always custom.
William Webb
#72. The people who get their portraits painted-rich people-they want to look good.
Claudia Gray
#73. Tommy showed me around, starting with the photos on the walls, many of which were of himself, including a few grand, framed neoclassical portraits he'd had done.
Greg Sestero
#74. Understand this: we are both tiny and massive. We are nothing more than molded clay given breath, but we are nothing less than divine self-portraits, huffing and puffing along the mountain ranges of epic narrative arcs prepared for us by the Infinite Word Himself.
N.D. Wilson
#75. Photographers who come up with power never get accused of imitating anyone else even though they photograph the same broom, same street, same portraits.
Minor White
#76. Why do these big old country houses always have family portraits in the dining room? Do you really want to eat with someone's gloomy great-grandfather looking down on you?
Elizabeth Jane Howard
#77. The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can't hear yourself speak.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#78. They parade for us
In zoos - in portraits
Of every generation.
Abigail George
#79. Age continually alters the faces of those who think or study, and so their portraits differ from one another and don't even resemble them for very long. I dream so much and live so little that I'm sometimes only three years old. But the next day I'm three hundred, if the dream has been sombre.
George Sand
#80. Franz Kline, who became known for his black and white paintings, did a whole series of gorgeous landscapes and wonderful portraits that may still hang in Greenwich Village.
David Amram
#81. We ... joked a little about presidential portraits. He [Bill Clinton] told me that he and Harrison Ford had been joking recently about how chins drop with age, and he didn't want to look that way.
Nelson Shanks
#82. I have painted portraits that to me are almost photographic. I remember hesitating to show the paintings, they looked so real to me. But they have passed into the world as abstractions - no one seeing what they are.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#83. When I was first exposed to the films of Ingmar Bergman, I found them frank and disturbing portraits of the world we live in, but that was not something that displeased me. They were beautiful. I thought people would respond to my plays the way I responded to Bergman's films.
Wallace Shawn
#84. Only the most pleasant characters in this book are portraits of living people and the events here recorded unfortunately never took place.
Margery Allingham
#85. Portraits are to daily faces As an evening west To a fine, pedantic sunshine In a satin vest.
Emily Dickinson
#86. I was going to have cosmetic surgery until I noticed that the doctor's office was full of portraits by Picasso.
Rita Rudner
#87. There is nothing that special to see when looking at me. I'm a painter who paints day in day out, from morning till evening - figure pictures and landscapes, more rarely portraits.
Gustav Klimt
#88. A person himself believes that all the other portraits are good likenesses except the one of himself.
Edvard Munch
#89. I toyed with making portraits based on people's discarded shopping lists found on the street, or old diaries bought on eBay, or other forms of borrowed stories. When I stumbled across the Missed Connections listings, I knew immediately I'd found it.
Sophie Blackall
#90. Kenneth Hari does not paint portraits as they are but as he is. I feel he is hiding something from me. To board a train into his mind would give me a ride into dark adventure.
Tennessee Williams
#91. Elizabeth Peyton, the artist known for tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant youth, is now painting tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant middle age.
Jerry Saltz
#92. For proper family portraits it's best to stick with classic, timeless looks that will not only be beautiful now but also in 20 years, and keep the wardrobe color palette similar so it looks like the group shot was well planned.
George Kotsiopoulos
#93. My movies are film-paintings - moving portraits captured on celluloid. I'll layer that with sound to create a unique mood
like if the Mona Lisa opened her mouth, and there would be a wind, and she'd turn back and smile. It would be strange and beautiful.
David Lynch
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. Of what use are pedigrees, or to be thought of noble blood, or the display of family portraits, O Ponticus?
Juvenal
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. Photography freed painting from a lot of tiresome chores, starting with family portraits.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
