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Portraiture's roots are likely found in prehistoric times, although few of these works survive today. In the art of the ancient civilizations of the Fertile Crescent, especially in Egypt, depictions of rulers and rulers as gods abound. However, most of these were done in a highly stylized fashion, and most in profile,... |
From literary evidence we know that ancient Greek painting included portraiture, often highly accurate if the praises of writers are to be believed, but no painted examples remain. Sculpted heads of rulers and famous personalities like Socrates survive in some quantity, and like the individualized busts of Hellenistic ... |
Roman portraiture adopted traditions of portraiture from both the Etruscans and Greeks, and developed a very strong tradition, linked to their religious use of ancestor portraits, as well as Roman politics. Again, the few painted survivals, in the Fayum portraits, Tomb of Aline and the Severan Tondo, all from Egypt un... |
Much the largest group of painted portraits are the funeral paintings that survived in the dry climate of Egypt's Fayum district (see illustration, below), dating from the 2nd to 4th century AD. These are almost the only paintings of the Roman period that have survived, aside from frescos, though it is known from the ... |
While free-standing portrait painting diminished in Rome, the art of the portrait flourished in Roman sculptures, where sitters demanded realism, even if unflattering. During the 4th century, the sculpted portrait dominated, with a retreat in favor of an idealized symbol of what that person looked like. (Compare the po... |
Middle Ages |
Most early medieval portraits were donor portraits, initially mostly of popes in Roman mosaics, and illuminated manuscripts, an example being a self-portrait by the writer, mystic, scientist, illuminator, and musician Hildegard of Bingen (1152). As with contemporary coins, there was little attempt at a likeness. Ston... |
Around the end of the century, the first oil portraits of contemporary individuals, painted on small wood panels, emerged in Burgundy and France, first as profiles, then in other views. The Wilton Diptych of ca. 1400 is one of two surviving panel portraits of Richard II of England, the earliest English king for whom w... |
At the end of the Middle Ages in the 15th century, Early Netherlandish painting was key to the development of the individualized portrait. Masters included Jan van Eyck, Robert Campin and Rogier van der Weyden, among others. Rather small panel painting portraits, less than half life-size, were commissioned, not only ... |
Renaissance |
Leonardo's Ginevra de' Benci (c. 1474–8) is one of the first known three-quarter-view portraits in Italian art. |
Partly out of interest in the natural world and partly out of interest in the classical cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, portraits—both painted and sculpted—were given an important role in Renaissance society and valued as objects, and as depictions of earthly success and status. Painting in general reached a new ... |
Many innovations in the various forms of portraiture evolved during this fertile period. The tradition of the portrait miniature began, which remained popular until the age of photography, developing out of the skills of painters of the miniatures in illuminated manuscripts. |
Profile portraits, inspired by ancient medallions, were particularly popular in Italy between 1450 and 1500. Medals, with their two–sided images, also inspired a short-lived vogue for two-sided paintings early in the Renaissance. Classical sculpture, such as the Apollo Belvedere, also influenced the choice of poses us... |
Northern European artists led the way in realistic portraits of secular subjects. The greater realism and detail of the Northern artists during the 15th century was due in part to the finer brush strokes and effects possible with oil colors, while the Italian and Spanish painters were still using tempera. Among the e... |
Early on, the Northern Europeans abandoned the profile, and started producing portraits of realistic volume and perspective. In the Netherlands, Jan van Eyck was a leading portraitist. The Arnolfini Marriage (1434, National Gallery, London) is a landmark of Western art, an early example of a full-length couple portrait... |
Leading German portrait artists including Lucas Cranach, Albrecht Dürer, and Hans Holbein the Younger who all mastered oil painting technique. Cranach was one of the first artists to paint life-sized full-length commissions, a tradition popular from then on. At that time, England had no portrait painters of the first r... |
In Italy, Masaccio led the way in modernizing the fresco by adopting more realistic perspective. Filippo Lippi paved the way in developing sharper contours and sinuous lines and his pupil Raphael extended realism in Italy to a much higher level in the following decades with his monumental wall paintings. During this ti... |
During the Renaissance, the Florentine and Milanese nobility, in particular, wanted more realistic representations of themselves. The challenge of creating convincing full and three-quarter views stimulated experimentation and innovation. Sandro Botticelli, Piero della Francesca, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Lorenzo di Cred... |
One of best-known portraits in the Western world is Leonardo da Vinci's painting entitled Mona Lisa, named for Lisa del Giocondo, a member of the Gherardini family of Florence and Tuscany and the wife of wealthy Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo. The famous "Mona Lisa smile" is an excellent example of ap... |
A very high degree of grace in the light and shadow is added to the faces of those who sit in the doorways of rooms that are dark, where the eyes of the observer see the shadowed part of the face obscured by the shadows of the room, and see the lighted part of the face with the greater brilliance which the air gives it... |
Leonardo was a student of Verrocchio. After becoming a member of the Guild of Painters, he began to accept independent commissions. Owing to his wide-ranging interests and in accordance with his scientific mind, his output of drawings and preliminary studies is immense though his finished artistic output is relatively... |
Raphael's surviving commission portraits are far more numerous than those of Leonardo, and they display a greater variety of poses, lighting, and technique. Rather than producing revolutionary innovations, Raphael's great accomplishment was strengthening and refining the evolving currents of Renaissance art. He was par... |
In Venice around 1500, Gentile Bellini and Giovanni Bellini dominated portrait painting. They received the highest commissions from the leading officials of the state. Bellini's portrait of Doge Loredan is considered to be one of the finest portraits of the Renaissance and ably demonstrates the artist's mastery of the... |
Court portraiture in France began when Flemish artist Jean Clouet painted his opulent likeness of Francis I of France around 1525. King Francis was a great patron of artists and an avaricious art collector who invited Leonardo da Vinci to live in France during his later years. The Mona Lisa stayed in France after Leona... |
Baroque and Rococo |
During the Baroque and Rococo periods (17th and 18th centuries, respectively), portraits became even more important records of status and position. In a society dominated increasingly by secular leaders in powerful courts, images of opulently attired figures were a means to affirm the authority of important individuals... |
Rubens' fame extended beyond his art—he was a courtier, diplomat, art collector, and successful businessman. His studio was one of the most extensive of that time, employing specialists in still-life, landscape, animal and genre scenes, in addition to portraiture. Van Dyck trained there for two years. Charles I of Eng... |
One of the innovations of Renaissance art was the improved rendering of facial expressions to accompany different emotions. In particular, Dutch painter Rembrandt explored the many expressions of the human face, especially as one of the premier self-portraitists (of which he painted over 60 in his lifetime). This inter... |
Group portraits were produced in great numbers during the Baroque period, particularly in the Netherlands. Unlike in the rest of Europe, Dutch artists received no commissions from the Calvinist Church which had forbidden such images or from the aristocracy which was virtually non-existent. Instead, commissions came fro... |
With plenty of demand, Rembrandt was able to experiment with unconventional composition and technique, such as chiaroscuro. He demonstrated these innovations, pioneered by Italian masters such as Caravaggio, most notably in his famous Night Watch (1642). The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp (1632) is another fine example of... |
In Spain, Diego Velázquez painted Las Meninas (1656), one of the most famous and enigmatic group portraits of all time. It memorializes the artist and the children of the Spanish royal family, and apparently the sitters are the royal couple who are seen only as reflections in a mirror. Starting out as primarily a genr... |
Rococo artists, who were particularly interested in rich and intricate ornamentation, were masters of the refined portrait. Their attention to the details of dress and texture increased the efficacy of portraits as testaments to worldly wealth, as evidenced by François Boucher's famous portraits of Madame de Pompadour ... |
The first major native portrait painters of the British school were English painters Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds, who also specialized in clothing their subjects in an eye-catching manner. Gainsborough's Blue Boy is one of the most famous and recognized portraits of all time, painted with very long bru... |
The two British artists had opposite opinions on using assistants. Reynolds employing them regularly (sometimes doing only 20 percent of the painting himself) while Gainsborough rarely did. Sometimes a client would extract a pledge from the artist, as did Sir Richard Newdegate from portraitist Peter Lely (van Dyck's s... |
In the 18th century, female painters gained new importance, particularly in the field of portraiture. Notable female artists include French painter Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Italian pastel artist Rosalba Carriera, and Swiss artist Angelica Kauffman. Also during that century, before the invention of photography, miniatur... |
In the United States, John Singleton Copley, schooled in the refined British manner, became the leading painter of full-size and miniature portraits, with his hyper-realistic pictures of Samuel Adams and Paul Revere especially well-regarded. Copley is also notable for his efforts to merge portraiture with the academic... |
19th century |
In the late 18th century and early 19th century, neoclassical artists continued the tradition of depicting subjects in the latest fashions, which for women by then, meant diaphanous gowns derived from ancient Greek and Roman clothing styles. The artists used directed light to define texture and the simple roundness of ... |
Romantic artists who worked during the first half of the 19th century painted portraits of inspiring leaders, beautiful women, and agitated subjects, using lively brush strokes and dramatic, sometimes moody, lighting. French artists Eugène Delacroix and Théodore Géricault painted particularly fine portraits of this typ... |
The realist artists of the 19th century, such as Gustave Courbet, created objective portraits depicting lower and middle-class people. Demonstrating his romanticism, Courbet painted several self-portraits showing himself in varying moods and expressions. Other French realists include Honoré Daumier who produced many c... |
In America, Thomas Eakins reigned as the premier portrait painter, taking realism to a new level of frankness, especially with his two portraits of surgeons at work, as well as those of athletes and musicians in action. In many portraits, such as "Portrait of Mrs. Edith Mahon", Eakins boldly conveys the unflattering e... |
The Realists mostly gave way to the Impressionists by the 1870s. Partly due to their meager incomes, many of the Impressionists relied on family and friends to model for them, and they painted intimate groups and single figures in either outdoors or in light-filled interiors. Noted for their shimmering surfaces and ri... |
John Singer Sargent also spanned the change of century, but he rejected overt Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. He was the most successful portrait painter of his era, using a mostly realistic technique often effused with the brilliant use of color. He was equally apt at individual and group portraits, particularl... |
The American-born internationalist James Abbott McNeill Whistler was well-connected with European artists and also painted some exceptional portraits, most famously his Arrangement in Grey and Black, The Artist's Mother (1871), also known as Whistler's Mother. Even with his portraits, as with his tonal landscapes, Whis... |
The development of photography in the 19th century had a significant effect on portraiture, supplanting the earlier camera obscura which had also been previously used as an aid in painting. Many modernists flocked to the photography studios to have their portraits made, including Baudelaire who, though he proclaimed ph... |
20th century |
Other early 20th-century artists also expanded the repertoire of portraiture in new directions. Fauvist artist Henri Matisse produced powerful portraits using non-naturalistic, even garish, colors for skin tones. Cézanne's relied on highly simplified forms in his portraits, avoiding detail while emphasizing color juxta... |
An outstanding female portrait painter of the turn of the 20th century, associated with the French impressionism, was Olga Boznańska (1865–1940). |
Expressionist painters provided some of the most haunting and compelling psychological studies ever produced. German artists such as Otto Dix and Max Beckmann produced notable examples of expressionist portraiture. Beckmann was a prolific self-portraitist, producing at least twenty-seven. Amedeo Modigliani painted many... |
British art was represented by the Vorticists, who painted some notable portraits in the early part of the 20th century. The Dada painter Francis Picabia executed numerous portraits in his unique fashion. Additionally, Tamara de Lempicka's portraits successfully captured the Art Deco era with her streamlined curves, r... |
A significant contribution to the development of portrait painting of 1930–2000 was made by Russian artists, mainly working in the traditions of realist and figurative painting. Among them should be called Isaak Brodsky, Nikolai Fechin, Abram Arkhipov and others. |
Portrait production in Europe (excluding Russia) and the Americas generally declined in the 1940s and 1950s, a result of the increasing interest in abstraction and nonfigurative art. One exception, however, was Andrew Wyeth who developed into the leading American realist portrait painter. With Wyeth, realism, though... |
By the 1960s and 1970s, there was a revival of portraiture. English artists such as Lucian Freud (grandson of Sigmund Freud) and Francis Bacon have produced powerful paintings. Bacon's portraits are notable for their nightmarish quality. In May 2008, Freud's 1995 portrait Benefits Supervisor Sleeping was sold by auctio... |
Many contemporary American artists, such as Andy Warhol, Alex Katz and Chuck Close, have made the human face a focal point of their work. |
Warhol was one of the most prolific portrait painters of the 20th century. Warhol's painting Orange Shot Marilyn of Marilyn Monroe is an iconic early example of his work from the 1960s, and Orange Prince (1984) of the pop singer Prince is later example, both exhibiting Warhol's unique graphic style of portraiture. |
Close's specialty was huge, hyper-realistic wall-sized "head" portraits based on photographic images. Jamie Wyeth continues in the realist tradition of his father Andrew, producing famous portraits whose subjects range from presidents to pigs. |
Islamic world and South Asia |
The Persian miniature tradition avoided giving figures individualized facial features for a long time, partly for religious reasons, to avoid any hint of idolatry. Rulers in the Islamic world never put their images on their coins, and their appearance did not form part of their public relations effort in the way that ... |
When the Persian tradition developed as the Mughal miniature in India, things rapidly changed. Unlike their Persian predecessors, Mughal patrons placed great emphasis on detailed naturalistic likenesses of all the unfamiliar natural forms of their new empire, such as animals, birds and plants. They had the same attit... |
Later emperors, especially Jahangir and Shah Jahan, made great use of idealized miniature portraits of themselves as a form of propaganda, distributing them to significant allies. These often featured halos larger than those given to any religious figures. Such images spread the idea of the portrait of the ruler to s... |
Ottoman miniatures generally had figures with faces even less individualized than its Persian equivalents, but a genre of small portraits of males from the Imperial family developed. These had highly individual, and rather exaggerated, features, some verging on caricatures; they were probably seen only by a very restr... |
The Persian Qajar dynasty, from 1781, took to large royal portraits in oils, as well as miniatures and textile hangings. These tend to be dominated by the magnificent costumes and long beards of the shahs. |
Chinese portrait painting |
Chinese portrait painting was slow to desire or achieve an actual likeness. Many "portraits" were of famous figures from the past, and showed an idea of what that person should look like. Buddhist clergy, especially in sculpture, were something of an exception to this. Portraits of the emperor were long never seen in p... |
Han dynasty (206 BC–220 AD) |
During the Han dynasty, the rise of Confucianism, which regarded human as the center of the universe and society, led to a focus on psychological study. In the meantime, Taoist scholars started the study of physiognomy. The combined interests in human psychological and physical features caused a growth in biography and... |
Jin dynasty (265–410 AD) |
The Jin dynasty was one of the most turbulent periods in ancient Chinese history. After the decades of wars between the three states of Wei, Shu, and Wu from 184 to 280 AD, Sima Yan eventually founded the Western Jin dynasty in 266 AD. The unstable socio-political environment and the declining imperial authority result... |
The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove and Rong Qiqi is a thread-relief painting on tile found in a Jin dynasty brick-chambered tomb in Nanjing. The relief is 96 inches in length and 35 inches in width, with more than 300 bricks. It is one of the most well-preserved thread-relief paintings from the Jin dynasty which refle... |
The historically recorded name inscriptions next to the figures cause the relief painting functions as "portraiture represents specific people". In addition, the iconographic details of each figure based on biography renders an extent of individualization. For instance, the biography of Liu Ling in the Book of Jin reco... |
Gu Kaizhi, one of the most famous artists of the Eastern Jin dynasty, instructed how to reflect the sitter's characteristics through accurate portray of the physical features in his book On Painting. He also stressed the capture of the sitter's spirit through vivid depiction of eyes. |
Tang dynasty (618–907) |
During the Tang dynasty, there was an increase of humanization and personalization in portrait painting. Due to the influx of Buddhism, the painting portrait adopted a more realistic likeness, especially for the portraits of the monks. The belief in "temporal incorruptibility" of the immortal body in Mahayana Buddhism ... |
In terms of the imperial portrait, Emperor Taizong, the second emperor of the Tang dynasty, used portraits to legitimize succession and reinforce power. He commissioned the Portrait of Succession Emperors, which contains the portraits of 13 emperors in the previous dynasties in chronological order. The commonness among... |
Song dynasty (960–1279) |
During the Song dynasty, Emperor Gaozong commissioned Portraits of Confucius and Seventy-two Disciples (sheng xian tu) on blank ground with his handwritten inscription. The figures were portrayed in vivid lines, animated gestures, and the facial expressions were rendered a narrative quality. The portrait of the saints ... |
Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) |
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