Eortrait - A work of art that represents a specific person, a group of people, or an animal. Portraits usually show what a person looks like as well as revealing something about the subject's personality. Portraits can be made of any sculptural material or in any two-dimensional medium. Portraiture is the field of portrait making and portraits in general.

Portrait is a term that may also refer simply to a vertically oriented rectangle, just as a horizontally oriented one may be said to be oriented the landscape way.

Examples of portraits by artists who were born:

• Before 1700
• Between 1701 and 1800
• Between 1801 and 1850
• After 1850

• "I would rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can shew me in the world."
  Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), English writer and lexicographer. Johnson Miscellanies, edited by G.B. Hill, 1987.
  
  
• "One is never satisfied with a portrait of a person that one knows."
  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), German writer, in his Elective Affinities, book II, chapter 2.
  
  
• "By means of a back, we want a temperament, an age, a social condition, to be revealed; through a pair of hands, we should be able to express a magistrate or a tradesman; by a gesture, a whole series of feelings. A physiognomy will tell us that this fellow is certainly an orderly, dry, meticulous man, whereas that one is carelessness and disorderliness itself. An attitude will tell us that this person is going to a business meeting, whereas that one is returning from a love tryst. 'A man opens a door; he enters; that is enough: we see that he has lost his daughter.' Hands that are kept in pockets can be eloquent. The pencil will be steeped in the marrow of life."
  Edgar Degas (1834-1917), French Impressionist. Quoted by Edmond Duranty, La Nouvelle Peinture: A Propos du Groupe d'Artistes Qui Expose dans les Galleries Durand-Ruel, Paris, 1876, translated by Linda Nochlin and included in the Sources and Documents series, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, 1874-1904, Englewood Cliffs, 1966.
  
  
• After his model -- Ambroise Vollard -- had posed for a portrait by Paul Cézanne for one hundred and fifteen sittings, Cézanne abandoned the canvas with the remark:
  "I am not altogether displeased with the shirt."
  Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), French Post-Impressionist painter.
  
  
• "If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this: in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day; to paint the man, in short, as well as his features."
  James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), American painter and etcher. The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, "Propositions" (1890). See aestheticism and art for art's sake.
  
  
• "Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter."
  Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Anglo-Irish playwright, author. Said by the character Basil Hallward, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, chapter 1 (1891).
  
  
• "A portrait is a painting with something a little wrong with the mouth."
  John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), American painter of many portraits.
  
  
• "The point on which we differ is one which a long experience of portrait painting has made me perfectly familiar-I have very often been reproached with giving a hard expression to ladies' portraits, especially when I have retained some look of intelligence in a face."
  John Singer Sargent, undated letter.
  
  
• "When you start with a portrait and search for a pure form, a clear volume, through successive eliminations, you arrive inevitably at the egg. Likewise, starting with the egg and following the same process in reverse, one finishes with the portrait."
  Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Spanish artist. Intransigeant (Paris, June 15, 1932).
  
  
• "What is a face, really? Its own photo? Its make-up? Or is it a face as painted by such or such painter? That which is in front? Inside? Behind? And the rest? Doesn't everyone look at himself in his own particular way? Deformations simply do not exist."
  Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Spanish artist. Arts de France, no. 6 (Paris, 1946). Quoted in: Picasso on Art (edited by Dore Ashton, 1972).
  
  
• "A portrait, to be a work of art, neither must nor may resemble the sitter . . . the painter has within himself the landscapes he wishes to produce. To depict a figure one must not paint that figure; one must paint its atmosphere."
  Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916), Italian Futurist painter and sculptor. Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting, April 11, 1910.
  
  
• A joke: "The Portrait":
  A woman decided to have her portrait painted. She told the apinter of the commission, "Paint me wearing diamond rings, a diamond necklace, emerald bracelets, a ruby brooch, and a gold Rolex."
  "But you aren't wearing any of those things," the painter replied.
  "I know," the woman said. "It's in case I should die before my husband. I'm sure he will remarry right away, and I want his new wife to go crazy looking for the jewelry."
  Author unknown.

Also see ala and alar groove, bust, imagines, philtrum, self-portrait, septum, and statue.

https://inform.quest/_art