Concerning Portraits and Portraiture (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Concerning Portraits and Portraiture<br><br>I once heard a conversation between two painters of portraits. One of them said "When I have a sitter I think to myself, 'this is just one of the great human family,' so I make a general representation of a human being, and then add so much of individual peculiarity as is needed to make the picture recognizable as a portrait."<br><br>The other painter said "My first thought is of the extraordinary peculiarities of this face and figure that I am about to paint. I notice how long the nose is, how wide apart the eyes, how firm the mouth, how drooping the shoulders, etc. These eccentricities appear so piquant and novel, they absorb me so deeply in the effort to seize and reproduce them, that I have to force myself to generalize and soften the effort, for fear of making a caricature."<br><br>In these two painters we have clearly marked types of two ways of looking at portraiture.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.