Portraiture Quotes

If a figure doesn't look back at you, you forget it.

— Nathan Oliveira

My approach to portraiture is conceptual.

— Amy Sherald

I am not altogether displeased with the shirt-front.

— Paul Cezanne

All art is self-portraiture.

— Kehinde Wiley

There is no self-portrait of me.

— Gustav Klimt

Everything I paint is a portrait, whatever the subject.

— Jamie Wyeth

My nose isn't big. I just happen to have a very small head.

— Jimmy Durante

The person portrayed and the portrait are two entirely different things.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

I do not care to paint portraits indoors. I cannot feel sympathetic.

— Joaquin Sorolla

What I remember about being painted was a very severe atmosphere. I remember her intensity and sharp glance.

— Andrew Neel

I never could have predicted that I would have done something that could be called portraiture.

— Laurie Simmons

When I'm painting and drawing I only do people. Acting is obviously portraiture - and writing is as well.

— Antony Sher

One is never satisfied with the portrait of a person that one knows.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Ah! Portraiture, portraiture with the thought, the soul of the model in it, that is what I think must come.

— Vincent Van Gogh

It is bad enough to be condemned to drag around this image in which nature has imprisoned me. Why should I consent…

— Plotinus

I will tell you something else: it is a major responsibility not only of portraiture but of all human communication for each…

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

What is portraiture? It's choice. It's the ability to position your body in the world for the world to celebrate you on…

— Kehinde Wiley

My work doesn't speak about individuals (it's not portraiture in the traditional sense), it tries to speak about life in general in…

— Beat Streuli

An act of naming should quite rightly enable me to call any-thing a self-portrait, not only any drawing, 'portrait' or not, but…

— Jacques Derrida

But eventually I moved the portraiture into the smaller clay things which gave them more of a caricature look to them, rather…

— Joe Fafard

Faces are the most interesting things we see; other people fascinate me, and the most interesting aspect of other people - the…

— David Hockney

We have a lot of sort of received historical ways of viewing portraiture. And I suppose in some way I'm sort of…

— Kehinde Wiley

In a sense, every work you do is a self-portrait because your paintings always reveal more about you than about your subject.…

— Richard Schmid

What a conception of art must those theorists have who exclude portraits from the proper province of the fine arts! It is…

— August Wilhelm von Schlegel

And there's even a lord named Lord Dashwood [like the characters in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility]. It's very steeped in Austen.…

— Jerusha Hess

Artists with the lack of proper education and experience of working from life will copy whatever is visible on the photograph, without…

— Igor Babailov

I try to paint from life, but I had such a miserable experience with Bonaparte, who wouldn't sit still and kept mumbling…

— Roman Genn

I hate to paint portraits! I hope never to paint another portrait in my life. Portraiture may be all right for a…

— John Singer Sargent

A good form strikes all eyes pleasantly, long before they have any science on the subject; and a beautiful face sets twenty…

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Tyree was a dreamer who painted idealized women in idyllic South Pacific landscapes, the faces of wizened island men and later exotic…

— C.J. Cook

Where some may see flat, static narratives, I see a spectrum of tonal gradations and realities. What I am creating is literally…

— Toyin Odutola

“You should regard each meeting with a friend as a sitting he is unwillingly giving you for a portrait - a portrait…

— Hope Mirrlees

In the years since The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, Voinovich has sharpened his satire, and Monumental Propaganda is…

— Ken Kalfus

To get someone to pose, you have to be very good friends and above all speak the language.

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Listen: if I am a painter and I do your portrait, have I or haven't I the right to paint you as…

— Oriana Fallaci

I loathe my own face, and I've done self-portraits because I've had nobody else to do.

— Francis Bacon

The self-portrait is an act of objectifying the self and in that regard is a unique form of portraiture.

— Burton Silverman

You have no idea what portrait painters suffer from the vanity of their sitters.

— Kenneth Clark

The thing that's fascinating about portraiture is that nobody is alike.

— Imogen Cunningham

With an 'advanced' artist, it's not now possible to make a portrait.

— Clement Greenberg