Portraits

Portraiture is the art of making portraits. In painting a Portrait is an artistic representation of a person or sitter. The painter is aimed to represent the face and its expression, the likeness, personality, and even the mood of the person. Earliest painters used landscapes as background of portraits.

A portrait is typically defined as a representation of a specific individual, such as the artist might meet in life. A portrait does not merely record someone's features, however, but says something about who he or she is, offering a vivid sense of a real person's presence. [1]

The National Portrait Gallery in London was founded in 1856 to collect portraits of famous British men and women; the Gallery collections include over 195,000 portraits from the 16th Century to the present day. [2] The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. was founded in 1962; It is the only museum in the United States dedicated solely to portraiture. It houses around 21,000 works of art. The Education Department uses history and the arts as a vehicle to introduce visitors to significant Americans in the Portrait Gallery's collection. [3]

Albrecht Dürer's made many self-portraits; the most celebrated is the one painted when he was 29 and was renowned throughout Europe.

Diego Rivera, the Mexican best known artist, ca. 1936 did the famous portraits of Lupe Marín and of Ruth Rivera. A Rivera's mural for Rockefeller Center Man at the Crossroads, was destroyed by order of his sponsor because of the inclusion of a portrait of Lenin.

A portrait of Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra, 1600, is attributed to Juan de Jauregui y Aguilar.

Some other famous portrait painters are: Jan Van Eyck, Raphael, Francisco de Zurbarán, El Greco, Anthony van Dyck, Frans Hals, Diego Velazquez, Rembrandt, Carlino Dolci, Thomas Gainsborough, Anton Raphael Mengs, Jacques-Louis David, Francisco de Goya, Gilbert Stuart, Jean Ingres, Sir Francis Grant, Ivan Kramskoy, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Gustav Klimt, José María Velasco, and Jose Clemente Orozco.