Portraits?
“Il n'y a rien de plus réellement artistique que d'aimer les gens.”-Vincent Van Gogh
“A painting is like a thermometer, it takes the temperature of the person that made it and the person that sees it. ”
-Pat Steir
It is not likely that posterity will fall in love with us, but not impossible that it may respect or sympathize; so a man would rather leave behind him the portrait of his spirit than a portrait of his face."
-Robert Louis Stevenson
“I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them. ”
-Lucian Freud
Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.
-Oscar Wilde
“I hate to paint portraits! I hope never to paint another portrait in my life. Portraiture may be all right for a man in his youth, but after forty I believe that manual dexterity deserts one, and, besides, the color-sense is less acute. Youth can better stand the exactions of a personal kind that are inseparable from portraiture. I have had enough of it.”
—John Singer Seargent
“When having my portrait painted I don’t want justice, I want mercy."
-Billy Hughes
“A portrait is a quarrel.”
-Henri Mattisse
“To sit for one’s portrait is like being present at one’s own creation.”
-Alexander Smith
“He reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter of fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there’s another dog.”
-Rainer Maria Rilke
