Portrait Painting

PORTRAIT PAINTING

Portraiture in painting and fine art has been around for centuries as cultures of almost every kind have produced masks, funeral representations, portraits of celebration and figurines, all to represent important people or people dear to someone.  Only the Islamic culture has a taboo against human representation.

The idea of portraiture is an idea of individualism.  Producing a painting that represents an individual person, instead of a type, requires a belief in people as independent selves and a financial structure to support that art.  The Romans, despite their adoration of all things Greek, preferred their artwork to be person specific rather that representations of human types, such as Beauty or Truth.  Instead, the Romans showed statues of their more prominent citizens, a fairly reliable sculpture done in Greek styles.

The humanist idea of art vanished once the Christian Church took over Europe.  Individualism ran against Christian beliefs and portraiture and biography as was known from the Romans, was replaces with a idealized representation of leaders preferring to represent themselves as faithful and obedient servants of God.

Our idea of Western art started with support from the Catholic Church in the late Middle Ages.  At about the same time, oil painting started in Northern Europe, aided by the winter coats of northern mammals, used to make fine brushes, and the use of the flax plant to make linen and linseed oil for oil painting.  A few generations before the Renaissance, Dutch and German artists were producing portraits of very fine quality.  As the Italian Renaissance exploded upon the European cultural scene, the art of the Italians and the art of the Dutch and Germans borrowed ideas from each other and fueled the great art explosion of the 1500’s and 1600’s.

As Europe became wealthy and religious descent split the continent, secular art proliferated and the return of portrait painting was one of the results. The vast majority of portraits were of the wealthy and famous, including popes, kings, financiers and religious leaders.   Until the 1800’s, portraiture was a toy for the rich as Rembrandt, Peter Paul Rubens, Diego Velazquez, Titian, Thomas Gainsborough, Sir Anthony Van Dyck, Sir Joshua Reynolds, John Copley, Gilbert Stuart and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres all lay claim to the patronization of the wealthy by painting portrait commissions.

While excellent portrait work continued in the 19^th century, the invention and success of the camera changed everything.  By mid century, families would pose stiff faced in front of the camera, as portrait painting slowly became a relic of the past, at least for a while.

The rise of modern art saw a new wave of artists experimenting with new styles of portraiture; the fresh improvisation of Impressionist portraits by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the bold colors of Henri Matisse’s Fauvist portraits, the decorative distortions of Picasso’s models and even the brutal portrait smears of Roger Bacon.  But portraiture came back as artists rediscovered the camera and the ability to use it for it’s marvelous ability to capture the effervescent.

No type of painting has spanned so many artistic movements and had been so flexible in how it’s been interpreted.  Whether it’s a bust, a head and shoulders pose, a full or half figure, a group shot, formal or informal, wealthy or democratic, good portraiture can be found everywhere.

Other works of Fine Art you may enjoy:

The Connections Of Mary Cassatt

Bend In the River, an oil painting

Silence In the City, a cityscape painting