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Portraits
Before the advent of the camera,
portraits were created to have an historic record of a person or
event. A portrait is usually a pictorial representation of an individual. In
the hands of a gifted artist it becomes a means to convey something about the
person through objects and ideas. At ARTinaClick.com
we feature many important portrait artists.
Rembrandt was one of the first artist's to capture the inner essence
of the sitter. It is in these psychological profiles, particularly his
self-portraits, that we begin to understand the artist. Primitive
portraits give us a glimpse of life in the early 19th Century. Although we do
not know who painted the portraits there is often a record of the date and the
sitters. Unlike the traditional portraiture of the day these
folk art paintings are of ordinary people. The compositions, most
often of children, include favorite objects, costumes of the day and detailed
backgrounds. When the camera was invented to record the likeness of an individual,
artists sought to use portraiture as a vehicle for expression. French painter
Henri Matisse's portraits of his wife are experiments in Fauve.
Pablo Picasso's cubist inventions had experiments in portraiture
as well. In
Girl Before a Mirror,
Seated Woman and
The Dream we understand the flattening of cubist space as
all of the facial features are visible simultaneously. Perhaps one of the best
known portrait is
Van Gogh Self-Portrait with Bandaged ear. In this painting and in
the portait of his friend the postman Roulin, Van Gogh achieves the ultimate
goal of portraiture, to teach us about the artist and the sitter and most importantly
about ourselves. Today our fascination with
celebrities has made images of
Elvis,
Marilyn and
The Beatles icons of popular culture.
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