Quotes & Sayings About Portrait Paintings

The reason some portraits don't look true to life is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures. — Salvador Dali

It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946, when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met, principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art. — Jerry Saltz

I would rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world. — Samuel Johnson

After tidying the kitchen, Claire walked upstairs and found Tyler in the hallway, lost in thought as he rearranged his paintings hanging there, a series he called "Claire's World," which he'd painted when they first married. She wasn't actually in the paintings, he wasn't a portrait painter, but they were beautiful studies in light and color- leafy greens, black lines that looked like lettering, bright apple-red dots. If she stared at them long enough, sometimes she thought she could make out a figure, crouched among the greens. Claire wondered, not for the first time, what she did to deserve this man, her husband. — Sarah Addison Allen

Jeanne, I fell asleep among the paintings, where I could sit for many days worshipping your portrait. I fell in love with your portrait, Jeanne, because it will never change. I have such a fear of seeing you grow old, Jeanne, I fell in love with an unchanging you that will never be taken away from me. I was wishing you would die, so that no one could take you away from me, and I would love the painting of you as you would look eternally. — Anais Nin

I'm an odd portrait painter in that I'm not just interested in human faces. I consider almost all of my paintings to be portraits. — Jamie Wyeth

I regretted what a serious teenager I'd been: There were no posters of pop stars or favorite movies, no girlish collection of photos or corsages. Instead there were paintings of sailboats, proper pastel pastorals, a portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt. The latter was particularly strange, since I'd known little about Mrs. Roosevelt, except that she was good, which at the time I suppose was enough. Given my druthers now, I'd prefer a snapshot of Warren Harding's wife, "the Duchess," who recorded the smallest offenses in a little red notebook and avenged herself accordingly. Today I like my first ladies with a little bite. — Gillian Flynn

You painted all those characters into the paintings all over the school, and every one of them is a portrait of you, but in disguise. That's how you've been watching us. You spread yourself out through all those paintings. And since you are the original artist, nobody else can ever destroy the portraits. It was your way of assuring you could always keep an eye on things, even after death. — G. Norman Lippert

There are certain things - How to say this? OK. Let me give you an example. Can I give you an example? There's a self-portrait by Rembrandt. It's at Kenwood House, very close to where we live. It's one of my favorite paintings. I go to see it quite a lot. I start off on a walk on the Heath, and then I find myself there. It's one of the last self-portraits he did. He painted it sometime between 1665 and when he died four years later, bankrupt and alone. Whole stretches of the canvas are bare. There's a hurried intensity in the strokes - you can see where he scratched into the wet paint with the end of the brush. It's as if he knew there wasn't much time left. And yet, there's a serenity in his face, a sense of something that's survived its own ruin.
Fran couldn't give two shits about that painting. — Nicole Krauss

In a sense, every work you do is a self-portrait because your paintings always reveal more about you than about your subject. Your experience of something, not the something itself, is the true underlying subject of every work you do. — Richard Schmid