portraits

The term ‘portrait’ generally designates the identifiable representation or likeness of an individual. Portraits may be painted, engraved, photographic, written, or otherwise manufactured records of the individuals or groups of individuals they portray; what characterizes the portrait as such is its capacity to convey the identity of its subject. Portraits represent their subjects by signification, rather than by metonymy or the presentation of actual remnants, for example. A lock of one's grandmother's hair does not a portrait make; nor are saint's remains portraits. Consequently, a verbal description of an individual might also constitute a portrait. In Western culture, however, portraits tend to be conceived and celebrated as durable likenesses, records that commemorate and immortalize. Whether painted or photographic, portraits serve to represent individuals (sometimes groups of individuals, hence ‘group portrait’) in their absence; they preserve the appearance or likeness of the living even after death.

The inversion of conventional expectations of portraiture in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) is telling. In this novel, the character Dorian Gray miraculously retains his youthful appearance, while his painted portrait undergoes a gradual (human) ageing process. Generally speaking, portraits preserve the likeness of an individual at a specific moment in time. Whether they take visual or verbal form, portraits are structured to convey an individual's identity, and the media in which they usually do so — stone, as in carved portraits and portrait busts; metals, cast or carved, as in coins; paint; paper, from drawings to printed paper money; photographic film — are intrinsically incapable of representing subjects over time. It could be argued that, given the temporal flexibility of the medium, a written description of an individual could express change over time. But the extent to which portraiture is conventionally and historically associated with visual media (and not as yet with video or film) relates to Western tendencies to favour notions of fixed identity and, thus, to favour fixed representations thereof.

The origins of portraiture are bound up with the origins of naturalistic representation in the West. Classical accounts have it that a young woman of Corinth traced the outlines of her lover's shadow on a wall; this momentous pictorial event is said to have taken place on the eve of his departure for war. Not only did this line drawing capture the identifying features of the young man's physiognomy; it preserved them in his absence. One of the most resilient types of the portrait of Christ, the frontal image of his face called the vera icon, is derived from the impression of Christ's features on the handkerchief offered him by St Veronica on the way to Calvary. The question of whether a profile portrait in outline or a full frontal portrait most accurately captures an individual's appearance has undergone much discussion in the West. Coins tend to bear profile portraits; painted portraits tend, with important exceptions, to be frontal or three-quarter, and in varying lengths (bust-portrait, half-length, full-length, for example) ; the authority of these types and their respective capacity to convey social standing as well as character have shifted with time. Physiognomics, based on the premise that character is revealed by external features, has been popular since antiquity; by the nineteenth century, it had acquired the status of a science. Physiognomics is one of the means by which portraiture is ‘guaranteed’ to reflect the identity of its subjects. The rank and social standing of the subjects of portraiture are also expressed by conventions, which shift with time. The carved bust was the standard type for Roman imperial portraiture; equestrian portraits, whether cast in bronze or painted, have served for centuries to reflect a ruler's dominion; in the seventeenth-century Netherlands, pastoral portraits of burghers in shepherd and shepherdess costumes were all the rage. In a number of instances, the choice of the artist commissioned to produce a portrait is as significant as the portrait's format or composition.

St Luke became the patron saint of painters because he is reputed to have been inspired to become a painter when the Virgin Mary appeared to him in a vision, and he painted a portrait of her. The rise of portraiture as a central genre in the fifteenth century in Europe has a great deal to do with investment in the capacity of images to substitute, by mimetic means, for what they represent. In this regard, the humanist Leon Battista Alberti plays a key role. In his influential treatise On Painting and Sculpture (1435), Alberti argued that ‘Painting contains a divine force which not only makes the absent present … but moreover makes the dead seem almost alive. Even after many centuries they are recognized with great pleasure and great admiration for the painter.’ Indeed, the great portraits painted by Raphael, Rembrandt, Rubens, Gainsborough, and even Van Gogh are celebrated as much for preserving the likenesses of the sitters as for the hand of the artists responsible. The fact that van Gogh's portraits are capable of fetching record prices at auction surely has less to do with art collectors' interest in the figures van Gogh recorded than in the artistry of the works as such. Nonetheless, for several centuries portraiture was deemed lower in aesthetic value than other genres of painting, such as narrative religious or mythological compositions. Likeness was not, after all, considered morally edifying.

We speak of faithful, and unfaithful portraits. The latter type is held accountable for a betrayal that amounts to failing to represent the subject of the portrait (the ‘sitter’, in cases of painted portraits) accurately. The accuracy of a portrait is, in the limited sense, mimetic and, in the broader sense, judged according to the extent to which the portrait captures its subject's character. An image might conform to the external appearance of an individual in its aggregate details, but if it stops short of conveying the presence of a unique individual, we hesitate to deem it a portrait. Conversely, we might comfortably call an image a portrait, even if it does not bear witness to the shape of an individual's eyebrows or the exact curvature of her neck, where it does nonetheless embody a recognizable aspect of the sitter's personality or character. To the accusation that his painted portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906), the image by which Stein is still most widely known, did not resemble the sitter, Picasso famously responded, ‘That's alright; she will come to resemble it.’ And Stein herself is reputed to have added, ‘I was and still am satisfied with my portrait, for me, it is I.’ Above and beyond capturing likeness, portraiture can serve to construct individual or collective identities, whether in the case of family snapshots or royal, imperial, or presidential portraits.

— Claudia Swan

Bibliography

• Brilliant, R. (1991). Portraiture. Harvard University Press.
• Pope-Hennessy, J. (1979). The Portrait in the Renaissance. Princeton University Press.
• Woodall, J. (ed) (1997). Portraiture. Facing the Subject. Manchester University Press

See also art and the body; photography; sculpture and the body.