Portrait Quotes

A man's manners are a mirror in which he shows his portrait. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend. View quote
John Singer Sargent
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. View quote
Oscar Wilde
It seems to be a law of nature that no man, unless he has some obvious physical deformity, ever is loth to sit for his portrait. View quote
Max Beerbohm
My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain. View quote
Helmut Newton
Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself. View quote
Samuel Butler (novelist)
One is never satisfied with a portrait of a person that one knows. View quote
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative. View quote
Annie Leibovitz
The landscape is like being there with a powerful personality and I'm searching for just the right angles to make that portrait come across as meaningfully as possible. View quote
Galen Rowell
I call him Governor Bush because that's the only political office he's ever held legally in this country. I don't care where they hang his portrait, I don't care how big his library is. To me, he'll always be "Governor bush." I don't even capitalize his name when I type it anymore. View quote
George Carlin
In all that surrounds him the egotist sees only the frame of his own portrait. (Jean Antoine Petit-Senn)
It should also be born in mind that the research on 'movement' and the dynamic outlook on the world, which were the basis of Futurist theory, in no way required one to paint nothing but speeding cars or ballerinas in action; for a person who is seated, or an inanimate object, though apparently static, could be considered dynamically and suggest dynamic forms. I may mention as an example [his paintings] the 'Portrait of Madame S. View quote
Gino Severini
I do not see in what way the face of a man should be a less interesting landscape than any other. A man, the physical person of a man, is a little world, like any other a country, with its towns, and suburbs... As a rule what is needed in a portrait is a great deal of the general, and very little of the particular. View quote
Jean Dubuffet
It is for the artist.... 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. View quote
James McNeill Whistler
What is a portrait good for, unless it shows just how the subject was seen by the painter? In the old days before photography came in a sitter had a perfect right to say to the artist: "Paint me just as I am." Now if he wishes absolute fidelity he can go to the photographer and get it. View quote
Aubrey Beardsley
Too much of Indian writing in English, it seemed to me, consisted of middle-class people writing about other middle-class people - and a small slice of life being passed off as an authentic portrait of the country. View quote
Aravind Adiga
To sit for one's portrait is like being present at one's own creation. View quote
Alexander Smith
The painter's portrait and the physicist's explanation are both rooted in reality, but they have been changed by the painter or the physicist into something more subtly imagined than the photographic appearance of things. View quote
Jacob Bronowski
The painter paints his brushes black Through the canvas runs a crack Portrait of the pain never answers back. View quote
Phil Ochs
Even though I love my mother, I didn't want to make an idealized portrait of her. I'm fascinated more by her defects - they are funnier than her other qualities. View quote
Pedro Almodóvar
I leave you my portrait so that you will have my presence all the days and nights that I am away from you. (Frida Kahlo)
Your library is your portrait. View quote
Holbrook Jackson
The landscape of any farm is the owner's portrait of himself. View quote
Aldo Leopold
Sensitive people faced with the prospect of a camera portrait put on a face they think is the one they would like to show to the world... Every so often what lies behind the facade is rare and more wonderful than the subject knows or dares to believe. View quote
Irving Penn
Many photographers feel their client is the subject. My client is a woman in Kansas who reads Vogue. I'm trying to intrigue, stimulate, feed her. My responsibility is to the reader. The severe portrait that is not the greatest joy in the world to the subject may be enormously interesting to the reader. View quote
Irving Penn