Early forms of portraiture often came in the form of sculpture and statues. Grown out of political necessity they were often depicting emperors to celebrate their power. This demand for portraits was responsible for the growth of the Art Industry.
In Medieval times portraits were mainly in architecture, predominantly on the interiors of churches depicting saints onto panels. Up until the 1400’s portraits had mostly been of historical figures and of royalty. The style was hieratic, using symbols to denote character. It was not until the Italian Renaissance brought about concepts of three dimensional modelling, light and shade and perspective that the quality of portraits improved. Later the Dutch Realist School made painting the everyday and a natural approach more popular. The artist Johannes Vermeer painted portraits of ordinary people.
Once it was acceptable to paint anyone in a portrait artists began exploring the pictorial aspects of the image, such as colour and line. Further still some went on to consider the psychological state of the sitter. Expression of this became more important than an actual likeness.
This leads on to how portrait artists paint today and goes back to my dissertation subject of ‘relationship to the sitter’. When an artist paints a portrait there is a balance of achieving a likeness and portraying a particular character through expression. Some may choose to draw their sitters from life believing they can gain more of an insight into their character. Do we have to know the subject well to recognise when they are most like themselves? Some like Gerhard Richter may feel that painting directly from a photograph is no different. Does it depend on the photograph the artist chooses? On her essay in Portrait Painting and photography Cynthia Freeland makes the observation a “naïve realist might say that the photographer or (painter from photos) could succeed at capturing the subjects air fortuitously just in case the sitter was posing in a very characteristic way.” So are those of us painting from a picture just lucky or unlucky with the composition? I would like to think that by choosing my own composition for my paintings I can be very precise about the expression I am looking for. It may not reflect the inner character of the sitter however it retains a sense of presence. As Cynthia Freeland testifies “other photos work equally well to certify presence without capturing that elusive ‘air’.”
