A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE PORTRAIT

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE PORTRAIT

Before the invention of photography, a painted, sculpted, or drawn portrait was the only way to record the appearance of someone.

A painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expression is predominant.

The intent is to display the likeness, personality, and even the mood of the person.

WHAT IS A PORTRAIT?

ANCIENT GREECE AND ROME

They have been used to show the power,

importance, virtue, beauty, wealth, taste, learning or

other qualities of the sitter.

WHAT IS A PORTRAIT?

Cave Painting

Among the first incidences of representative art in human history is the cave paintings found on the walls of the

Lascaux caves

As humans are not central to the content of these paintings, prehistoric times are not considered to be the

birthplace of portrait artistry

The Venus of Willendorf c. 22,000 BC

• The first humans to be represented in art as the central subject of a work are pregnant women, or fertility Goddesses.

• Discovered on the banks of the Danube River, in Austria, and it was most likely made by hunter-gatherers who lived in the area.

• The Venus of Willendorf is one of the oldest sculptural works ever discovered.

• The people who made this statue lived in a harsh ice-age environment where features of fatness and fertility would have been highly desirable.

Egypt

» It was in Egypt, where living Pharaohs were given God-like status, that historic portraiture began

» Images of Deities and Pharaohs were painted and carved in places of spiritual importance, such as temples, tombs, and palaces

» Frontalism, the technique utilized by Egyptian painters who rendered human subjects, stressed the importance of the Pharaoh’s profile

» In frontalism, the subject’s body faces forward, but his head is turned to the side, with the eye on the viewer’s side being fully visible.

Greece» Venus de Milo, is an ancient Greek

statue and one of the most famous works of ancient Greek sculpture

» The date of origin is estimated at being sometime in the second century B.C

» It is believed to depict Aphrodite (Venus to the Romans) the Greek goddess of love and beauty and fertility

Medieval Civilizations

» The Medieval period in the Western World was a time of intense religious control.

» The church had more centralized power than some nations, and certainly had a greater influence on the art of the time.

» Of portraiture, Jesus, Mary and Joseph were preferred subjects, alongside saints, church leaders, and angels.

Renaissance

» The driving mood of the French and Italian renaissance was that of ’humanism’, a new emphasis on the perfection of the human form

» Southern Europe became a fruitful environment for portraiture, and its style became the basis for portraiture in the following two and a half centuries.

“seeks to bring out whatever the sitter has in common with the rest of humanity” Erwin Panofsky

Baroque and Rococo

Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement Fra Filippo Lippi ca. 1440

“seeks to bring out whatever the sitter has in common with the rest of humanity” Erwin Panofsky

Baroque and Rococo

Portrait of a Carthusian Petrus Christus 1446

Baroque and Rococo

Mona Lisa Leonardo da Vinci ca. 1503–5

Baldassare Castiglione Raphael, ca. 1514

Baroque and Rococo

In a society dominated increasingly by secular leaders in powerful courts, images of opulently attired figures were both symbols of temporal power and wealth

Flemish painters Sir Anthony van Dyck and Peter Paul Rubens excelled at this type of portraiture.

Also during these periods, artists increasingly studied the facial expressions that accompanied different emotions and they emphasized the portrayal of these human feelings in their work.

Van Dyck Self Portrait With A

Sunflower

Rubens The Artist and His First Wife,

Isabella Brant, in the Honeysuckle Bower

Neoclassicism, Romanticism, and Realism

In the late 18th century and early 19th century, neoclassical artists depicted subjects attired in the latest fashions, which were derived from ancient Greek and Roman clothing styles.

Ingres Madame Rivière

Romantic artists, who worked during the first half of the 19th century, preferred to paint exciting portraits of inspired leaders and agitated subjects, using lively brush strokes and dramatic, sometimes moody, lighting.

Delacroix Liberty Leading

The People

The realist artists of the mid-19th century created objective portraits depicting ordinary people.

Courbet Portrait of Jo

Rembrandt 1660 (left) Van Dyck 1620(right)

Finally, artists captured their own likenesses in self-portraits where they freely pursued their own ends, whether to claim elevated status, to showcase technical mastery, or to seek frank self-reflection.

THE ORIGINS OF PHOTOGRAPHY

1.1 Louis-Mandé Daguerre, View of the Boulevard du Temple, c. 1839. Daguerreotype. Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich, Germany.

1.2 Abraham Bosse, Engraving Depicting Artist at Work, c. 1737.

1.3 Artist Unknown, Gilles-Louis Chrétien’s Physionotrace, c. 1786. Drawing. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.

1.4 Artist Unknown, Gilbert Motier, Marquis de la Fayette, 1895; (below image) D’après le physionotrace de Quenedey. Aquatint, colored after physionotrace drawing. Marquis de Lafayette Print Collection. David Bishop Skillman Library. Lafayette College Library, Easton, Pennsylvania.

1.5 Artist Unknown, Bernie. Silhouette portrait, 1790s. Ink on paper mounted on 5 1/3 x 4 1/8 in. (13.5 x 10.6 cm) paper. Hans P. Kraus, Jr. Collection, New York.

1.15 Johan Kaspar Lavater, Silhouette Machine, c. 1780. Engraving from Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy. Gernsheim Collection. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

THE CAMERA OBSCURA

CAMERA OBSCURA “dark chamber”

1.6 Camera Obscura

CAMERA OBSCURA TODAY

SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA

RICHARD LEAROYD Vanessa, 2013

RICHARD LEAROYD

RICHARD LEAROYD’s portable camera obscura at Lacock Abbey

Abelardo Morell from Camera Obscura

Abelardo Morell, Empire State Building in Bedroom, 1992

“I love the increased sense of reality that the outdoor has in these new works .The marriage of the outside and the inside is now made up of more equal partners.”

1.7 Thomas Sandby, Windsor from the Goswells, 1770. Camera obscura drawing. The Royal Collection. © 2002 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

1.8 Cornelius Varley, Artist Sketching with a Wollaston Camera Lucida, 1830. Engraving. Gernsheim Collection. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center.

1.9 William Henry Fox Talbot, Camera Lucida Drawing of the Terrace at the Villa Melzi, October 5, 1833. Drawing. National Media Museum, Bradford, England.

1.11 Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, Cardinal d’Amboise, 1826. Heliograph on pewter plate (reproduction of an engraving). Musée Nicéphore Niépce, Chalon-sur-Saône, France.

1.12 Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, View from the Window at Le Gras, c. 1826. Heliograph. Gernsheim Collection. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

1.13 Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, Landscape with Gothic Ruins and Figures, 1821. Brown ink and wash drawing. George Eastman House, Rochester, New York.

1.14 Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, Still Life (Interior of a Cabinet of Curiosities), 1837. Daguerreotype. Société Française de Photographie, Paris.

1.1 Louis-Mandé Daguerre, View of the Boulevard du Temple, c. 1839. Daguerreotype. Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich, Germany.

1.16 Hippolyte Bayard, Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man, 1840. Direct Paper Positive. Société Française de Photographie, Paris.

The corpse which you see here is that of M. Bayard, inventor of the process that has just been shown to you. As far as I know this indefatigable experimenter has been occupied for about three years with his discovery. The Government which has been only too generous to Monsieur Daguerre, has said it can do nothing for Monsieur Bayard, and the poor wretch has drowned himself. Oh the vagaries of human life....! ... He has been at the morgue for several days, and no-one has recognized or claimed him. Ladies and gentlemen, you'd better pass along for fear of offending your sense of smell, for as you can observe, the face and hands of the gentleman are beginning to decay.

1.18 Artist Unknown, “The Stranger,” from Francis Wey, Comment le soleil est devenu peintre: histoire du dagguerréotype et de la photographie. Musée des Familles, June 1853. Wood engraving. Widener Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

William Henry Fox Talbot

Meanwhile in England…

1.19 William Henry Fox Talbot, Leaf, c. 1840. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

“How charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon the paper!"

Talbot’s Camera Obscura and Drawing

1834 William Henry Fox Talbot’s Mousetrap Camera

Talbot, Botanical Specimen, 1839.

• Made with paper sensitized with a solution of sodium chloride (light sensitive salt) and silver nitrate. Sodium chloride (salt) + silver nitrate = silver chloride.

• The process would eventually become known as salt prints, though Talbot referred to them as photogenic drawings.

Photogenic drawing negative, mounted on blackened paper. The earliest surviving paper negative, about the size of a postage stamp.

William Henry Fox Talbot, Latticed Window Taken with the Camera Obscura, August 1835.

WILLIAM HENRY FOX TALBOT

Nelson's Column under Construction, Trafalgar Square

1.17 John Herschel. Untitled, 1842. Cyanotype. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.