Any definition of portraiture needs to take account of the unique inter-
relationship of artists, sitters, patrons, and viewers that characterizes
this genre. The methods by which portraits are produced, the variables
of the relationships between artist and sitter, and the way portraits seem
to refer to a specific moment of production are all significant for por-
traiture as an art form.
One of the special aspects of portraits is that they are often based on
a sitting or series of sittings, in which the subject of the portrait has
physical proximity to the artist representing him or her. The same could
be said for studies from the life model, so it is important to distinguish
the portrait subject from the artist’s model (although in some cases the
boundaries between these categories are indistinct). From the foun-
dation of art academies in sixteenth-century Italy, artists employed
models as part of their education in life drawing, or to represent fic-
tional characters in scenes from history or literature. Models were
usually hired and paid by the artist or by academies, ateliers, and other
training institutions, and one of their principal roles was to pose in the
nude. The identity of models is therefore often unknown, and even
when they can be identified, their identity was irrelevant to the purpose
they served for the artist.
Many portraits, on the other hand, were commissioned or at least
the product of negotiation between the artist, the sitter, and sometimes
a patron or patrons. In contrast to the model, the identity of the sitter is
fundamental to the portrait transaction. It could be said that portraits
were produced with the model as the principal subject, rather than as a
tool or accessory. The relationship between the portrait artist and the
sitter raises a number of issues. The first of these is the extent to which
the portraitist is required by social or artistic convention to flatter or
idealize the sitter. The process of negotiation over how the work should
look could be carried on while the portrait was being produced, and it
was exactly this sort of interference that led some artists to forbid the
sitter to view the work until it was complete. William Dickinson’s 1781
stipple engraving A Family Piece [18] satirizes the potential problems of
an artist–sitter relationship in which the unprepossessing middle-class
family is already being idealized from the first strokes of the portrait
painter’s brush. The eighteenth-century artist Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s
advice to portrait painters concentrates as much on how to make
aristocratic sitters feel at ease as on the technical aspects of the act of
painting itself.
Vigée-Lebrun’s experience indicates the extent to
which the sitter’s practical demands or social expectations could inter-
fere with the creative process. The centrality of the sitter’s preferences
in the portrait transaction was notably challenged in much avant-garde
portraiture from the late nineteenth century onwards. But as avant-
garde portraits could show stylistic experimentation, bodily distortion,
or human ugliness, the type of sitter represented was often a friend or
admirer of the artist, rather than a formal commissioner.
This can be seen in the paintings of Lucian Freud. There is a debate
about the extent to which Freud’s grotesque and ungainly naked figures
should be classed as portraits, as opposed to nude studies. The majority
of his paintings depict nudes, and although many of these figures, such
as the Benefits Supervisor Resting[ 19], are not specifically identified in
the title, others are named. Freud’s attention to details of facial charac-
teristics distinguishes one likeness from another, and there is a strong
sense of character in his nudes. However, he subverts the traditions of
portraiture by avoiding conventional poses, displaying whole-length
figures naked, stressing ugliness and extremes rather than the ideal or
corrected face and body, and stripping the studio background of any
signs of the identity or status of the sitter. The Benefits Supervisor
Resting is one such portrait: the title provides a specific occupation and
putative identity for the sitter, who was Sue Tilley—an employee at the
Department of Health and Social Security. However, the voluminous
nudity, neutrality of the setting, and apparent obliviousness of the sitter
to the presence of the artist give the work the effect of skilfully wrought
painting of nudity. Most of Freud’s portraits were produced with the
consent and encouragement of his sitters, and through their uncom-
promising nudity, voyeuristic viewpoints, and lack of flattery they
remind the viewer of the inevitably intimate relationship between a
portraitist and a sitter.
Sometimes this kind of intimate relationship had problematic social
implications. Before the eighteenth century, the majority of those who
sat for portraits had a prominent position in society, the government, or
the church, and artists therefore had to deal with an inequality of status
between themselves and their sitter. Although artists like Titian, Van
Dyck, or Velázquez received knighthoods or other royal commenda-
tions, artists were usually considered well beneath their sitters in class
terms. In normal social interaction such classes did not meet, but in the
portrait transaction they had to come together on quite intimate terms.
This interaction contributed to an enhancement of the status of artists.
Velázquez’s numerous portraits for the court of Philip IV in the seven-
teenth century gave him so prominent a place in the royal household
that he could include his own self-portrait as the central figure in Las
Meninas. Velázquez dominates the centre of this portrait, while
the king and queen (seen in a mirror on the back wall) are symbolically
and perspectivally central to the composition, but physically diminutive
in comparison with Velázquez. A century later, this aspect of a portrait’s
production also meant that artists who specialized in portraiture were
sometimes required to adapt their studios to accommodate the presence
of high-born or wealthy subjects. Successful artists of eighteenth-
century Europe, such as Pompeo Batoni in Rome, Joshua Reynolds in
England, and Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun in France, therefore had well-
located and well-appointed studios which became fashionable outposts
of society as well as workrooms.
Another point to make about the artist–sitter relationship is the
potentially disruptive erotic element that could creep in. Although the
portrait sitting could be a public affair, private encounters between
artist and sitter were more frequently the norm, and portraits often
required male artists to stare for long periods at female sitters or—very
rarely—vice versa. The most famous precedent for this sort of relation-
ship was the ancient Greek artist Apelles, who painted a portrait of
Alexander the Great’s concubine Campaspe in the nude and proceeded
to fall in love with her. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
these relationships became the stuff of novels and anecdotal romance
tales about the lives of artists. George Romney in England allegedly fell
in love with the singer Emma Hart, later Lady Hamilton, when she sat
for a series of portraits; in the mid-nineteenth century, Dante Gabriel
Rossetti began an ill-fated affair with his model, Elizabeth Siddal,
while he produced many portrait drawings as well as subject pictures
representing her. Erotic tension was only one possible by-
product of the portrait transaction; for women artists, such as the
eighteenth-century Swiss painter Angelica Kauffmann, the control of
the gaze during sessions with male sitters could be socially uncomfort-
able but empowering.
The delicate psychological engagement between
the portrait artist and the sitter was one that was potentially overcome
by the invention of photography, which separated the gaze of the artist
from the body of the sitter by the bulky apparatus.
The social and psychological encounters between artist and sitter
that eventually become a portrait point to another factor that makes
portraiture different from other art forms. Most portraiture represents a
particular occasion or moment, whether directly or by implication.
Unlike a landscape painting or a history painting, which may seem to
transcend a single moment in time, the presence of a specific individual
in a portrait reminds us of the encounter between the artist and sitter.
This special aspect of portraiture has been explained using C. S. Peirce’s
semiotic theory of the icon, the index, and the symbol. According to
Peirce, an icon looks like the thing it represents; an index draws atten-
tion to something outside the representation; and a symbol is a seem-
ingly arbitrary sign that is, by cultural convention, connected to a
particular object.
A portrait has qualities of all three: it resembles the
object of representation (icon), it refers to the act of sitting (index), and
it contains gestures, expressions, and props that can be read with know-
ledge of social and cultural conventions (symbol). In this tripartite view,
the indexical qualities of portraiture are particularly notable. These
signs relate to the process of producing the portrait, and the traces of
that process that remain in the final product. When we look at portraits,
we see individuals who are now dead or are older than and different
from the way they were represented, but portraits seem to transport us
into an actual moment that existed in the past when the artist and sitter
encountered each other in a real time and place. Whether or not a
portrait was actually based on a sitting, the transaction between artist
and sitter is evoked in the imagination of the viewer.
relationship of artists, sitters, patrons, and viewers that characterizes
this genre. The methods by which portraits are produced, the variables
of the relationships between artist and sitter, and the way portraits seem
to refer to a specific moment of production are all significant for por-
traiture as an art form.
One of the special aspects of portraits is that they are often based on
a sitting or series of sittings, in which the subject of the portrait has
physical proximity to the artist representing him or her. The same could
be said for studies from the life model, so it is important to distinguish
the portrait subject from the artist’s model (although in some cases the
boundaries between these categories are indistinct). From the foun-
dation of art academies in sixteenth-century Italy, artists employed
models as part of their education in life drawing, or to represent fic-
tional characters in scenes from history or literature. Models were
usually hired and paid by the artist or by academies, ateliers, and other
training institutions, and one of their principal roles was to pose in the
nude. The identity of models is therefore often unknown, and even
when they can be identified, their identity was irrelevant to the purpose
they served for the artist.
Many portraits, on the other hand, were commissioned or at least
the product of negotiation between the artist, the sitter, and sometimes
a patron or patrons. In contrast to the model, the identity of the sitter is
fundamental to the portrait transaction. It could be said that portraits
were produced with the model as the principal subject, rather than as a
tool or accessory. The relationship between the portrait artist and the
sitter raises a number of issues. The first of these is the extent to which
the portraitist is required by social or artistic convention to flatter or
idealize the sitter. The process of negotiation over how the work should
look could be carried on while the portrait was being produced, and it
was exactly this sort of interference that led some artists to forbid the
sitter to view the work until it was complete. William Dickinson’s 1781
stipple engraving A Family Piece [18] satirizes the potential problems of
an artist–sitter relationship in which the unprepossessing middle-class
family is already being idealized from the first strokes of the portrait
painter’s brush. The eighteenth-century artist Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s
advice to portrait painters concentrates as much on how to make
aristocratic sitters feel at ease as on the technical aspects of the act of
painting itself.
Vigée-Lebrun’s experience indicates the extent to
which the sitter’s practical demands or social expectations could inter-
fere with the creative process. The centrality of the sitter’s preferences
in the portrait transaction was notably challenged in much avant-garde
portraiture from the late nineteenth century onwards. But as avant-
garde portraits could show stylistic experimentation, bodily distortion,
or human ugliness, the type of sitter represented was often a friend or
admirer of the artist, rather than a formal commissioner.
This can be seen in the paintings of Lucian Freud. There is a debate
about the extent to which Freud’s grotesque and ungainly naked figures
should be classed as portraits, as opposed to nude studies. The majority
of his paintings depict nudes, and although many of these figures, such
as the Benefits Supervisor Resting[ 19], are not specifically identified in
the title, others are named. Freud’s attention to details of facial charac-
teristics distinguishes one likeness from another, and there is a strong
sense of character in his nudes. However, he subverts the traditions of
portraiture by avoiding conventional poses, displaying whole-length
figures naked, stressing ugliness and extremes rather than the ideal or
corrected face and body, and stripping the studio background of any
signs of the identity or status of the sitter. The Benefits Supervisor
Resting is one such portrait: the title provides a specific occupation and
putative identity for the sitter, who was Sue Tilley—an employee at the
Department of Health and Social Security. However, the voluminous
nudity, neutrality of the setting, and apparent obliviousness of the sitter
to the presence of the artist give the work the effect of skilfully wrought
painting of nudity. Most of Freud’s portraits were produced with the
consent and encouragement of his sitters, and through their uncom-
promising nudity, voyeuristic viewpoints, and lack of flattery they
remind the viewer of the inevitably intimate relationship between a
portraitist and a sitter.
Sometimes this kind of intimate relationship had problematic social
implications. Before the eighteenth century, the majority of those who
sat for portraits had a prominent position in society, the government, or
the church, and artists therefore had to deal with an inequality of status
between themselves and their sitter. Although artists like Titian, Van
Dyck, or Velázquez received knighthoods or other royal commenda-
tions, artists were usually considered well beneath their sitters in class
terms. In normal social interaction such classes did not meet, but in the
portrait transaction they had to come together on quite intimate terms.
This interaction contributed to an enhancement of the status of artists.
Velázquez’s numerous portraits for the court of Philip IV in the seven-
teenth century gave him so prominent a place in the royal household
that he could include his own self-portrait as the central figure in Las
Meninas. Velázquez dominates the centre of this portrait, while
the king and queen (seen in a mirror on the back wall) are symbolically
and perspectivally central to the composition, but physically diminutive
in comparison with Velázquez. A century later, this aspect of a portrait’s
production also meant that artists who specialized in portraiture were
sometimes required to adapt their studios to accommodate the presence
of high-born or wealthy subjects. Successful artists of eighteenth-
century Europe, such as Pompeo Batoni in Rome, Joshua Reynolds in
England, and Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun in France, therefore had well-
located and well-appointed studios which became fashionable outposts
of society as well as workrooms.
Another point to make about the artist–sitter relationship is the
potentially disruptive erotic element that could creep in. Although the
portrait sitting could be a public affair, private encounters between
artist and sitter were more frequently the norm, and portraits often
required male artists to stare for long periods at female sitters or—very
rarely—vice versa. The most famous precedent for this sort of relation-
ship was the ancient Greek artist Apelles, who painted a portrait of
Alexander the Great’s concubine Campaspe in the nude and proceeded
to fall in love with her. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
these relationships became the stuff of novels and anecdotal romance
tales about the lives of artists. George Romney in England allegedly fell
in love with the singer Emma Hart, later Lady Hamilton, when she sat
for a series of portraits; in the mid-nineteenth century, Dante Gabriel
Rossetti began an ill-fated affair with his model, Elizabeth Siddal,
while he produced many portrait drawings as well as subject pictures
representing her. Erotic tension was only one possible by-
product of the portrait transaction; for women artists, such as the
eighteenth-century Swiss painter Angelica Kauffmann, the control of
the gaze during sessions with male sitters could be socially uncomfort-
able but empowering.
The delicate psychological engagement between
the portrait artist and the sitter was one that was potentially overcome
by the invention of photography, which separated the gaze of the artist
from the body of the sitter by the bulky apparatus.
The social and psychological encounters between artist and sitter
that eventually become a portrait point to another factor that makes
portraiture different from other art forms. Most portraiture represents a
particular occasion or moment, whether directly or by implication.
Unlike a landscape painting or a history painting, which may seem to
transcend a single moment in time, the presence of a specific individual
in a portrait reminds us of the encounter between the artist and sitter.
This special aspect of portraiture has been explained using C. S. Peirce’s
semiotic theory of the icon, the index, and the symbol. According to
Peirce, an icon looks like the thing it represents; an index draws atten-
tion to something outside the representation; and a symbol is a seem-
ingly arbitrary sign that is, by cultural convention, connected to a
particular object.
A portrait has qualities of all three: it resembles the
object of representation (icon), it refers to the act of sitting (index), and
it contains gestures, expressions, and props that can be read with know-
ledge of social and cultural conventions (symbol). In this tripartite view,
the indexical qualities of portraiture are particularly notable. These
signs relate to the process of producing the portrait, and the traces of
that process that remain in the final product. When we look at portraits,
we see individuals who are now dead or are older than and different
from the way they were represented, but portraits seem to transport us
into an actual moment that existed in the past when the artist and sitter
encountered each other in a real time and place. Whether or not a
portrait was actually based on a sitting, the transaction between artist
and sitter is evoked in the imagination of the viewer.
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