Portraits Quotes · Page 5

Photography freed painting from a lot of tiresome chores, starting with family portraits.

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

[Alexander] Hamilton estimated portrait painters as thieves of time.

— Gertrude Atherton

Even a documentary portrait of a person that tries to be very accurate is shaped by the filmmaker in so many ways.

— Dana Spiotta

To be Despair. It is a portrait. Only close your eyes and feel.

— Neil Gaiman

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

A study of family portraits is enough to convert a man to the theory of reincarnation.

— Arthur Conan Doyle

The smiling portrait of you is still hanging on my frowning wall.

— Jimi Hendrix

I didn't try and do fashion pictures. I tried to do portraits of girls wearing dresses.

— David Bailey

Life is a series of family photos in which you keep moving to the rear until finally you're a portrait in the…

— Robert Breault

When people ask me which is your favourite portrait, they expect it to be Diana, or someone famous. But the answer is…

— Patrick Demarchelier

I always take a close look at those who lose themselves in self portraits. They are solitary souls, prone to introspection, who…

— Young-Ha Kim

There is nothing that special to see when looking at me. I'm a painter who paints day in day out, from morning…

— Gustav Klimt

You wouldn't take a portrait of a human being from a hundred feet away and expect to capture their spirit; you'd move…

— Nick Brandt

The Portrait of Dorian Grey' beautifully articulates how the altruistic part of ourselves clashes with our essentially narcissistic state.

— Walton Goggins

The portrait is one of the most curious art forms. It demands special qualities in the artist, and an almost total kinship…

— Henri Matisse

Franz Kline, who became known for his black and white paintings, did a whole series of gorgeous landscapes and wonderful portraits that…

— David Amram

There's several ways to be a journalist. One way is to be combative and take the person to task and what you…

— Cameron Crowe

Mann was less interested, I think, in constructing any kind of "portrait of an age" than he was in delineating an individual…

— Philip Kitcher

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

— Igor Babailov

Yet each of us also carries another portrait with us, a picture far more important than any in our wallet. Psychologists have…

— Josh McDowell

In The Moon, Come to Earth Philip Graham takes us on the best kind of journey, as he simultaneously reveals the fascinating…

— Margot Livesey

What is a portrait good for, unless it shows just how the subject was seen by the painter? In the old days…

— Aubrey Beardsley

But when I realized it was actually going to be this portrait of the artist, birth to death, I had to then…

— Danielle Dutton

Everything is a self-portrait. A diary. Your whole drug history’s in a strand of your hair. Your fingernails. The forensic details. The…

— Chuck Palahniuk

A portrait is a picture in which there is just a tiny little something not quite right about the mouth.

— John Singer Sargent

He sat by her, watching every gesture she made, as if he would paint her portrait afterward.

— Tanith Lee

Self-deceit is a most damaging trait. The remedy, for an artist, is to paint a self-portrait!

— Scott Kahn

When you start with a portrait and try to find pure form by abstracting more and more, you must end up with…

— Pablo Picasso

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

— Burton Silverman

I've got a portrait in the Smithsonian. Who ever thought that would happen?

— Tommy Lasorda

A person himself believes that all the other portraits are good likenesses except the one of himself.

— Edvard Munch

Seeing that I am so busily occupied with myself just now, I want to try to paint my self-portrait in writing.

— Vincent Van Gogh

My dad was a photographer, so we had all these studio portraits of us.

— Timothy Simons

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

— Kenneth Clark

Did you ever see a portrait of a great man without perceiving strong traits of pain and anxiety?

— John Adams

Edith Sitwell's interest in art was largely confined to portraits of herself.

— John Fowles

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

— Clement Greenberg

Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

I wonder whether there is such a thing as critical art. I suppose there are portraits of people who could destroy you.

— John Currin

To sit for one's portrait is like being present at one's own creation.

— Alexander Smith