Below you will find our collection of inspirational, wise, and humorous
old portrait quotes, portrait sayings, and portrait proverbs, collected over the years from a variety
of sources.
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.Oscar Wilde
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In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view and to be conceptual with a picture. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.Annie Leibovitz
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There are only two styles of portrait painting; the serious and the smirk.Charles Dickens
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To sit for one's portrait is like being present at one's own creation.Alexander Smith
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A true portrait should, today and a hundred years from today, the Testimony of how this person looked and what kind of human being he was.Philippe Halsman
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The severe portrait that is not the greatest joy in the world to the subject may be enormously interesting to the reader.Irving Penn
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A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.John Singer Sargent
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When having my portrait painted I don't want justice, I want mercy.Billy Hughes
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The reason some portraits don't look true to life is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures.Salvador Dali
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A portrait is like an ornamental headstone. It is not for the subject, but for those who look upon it. For those you want to remember.Julie Klassen
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A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.Edward Steichen
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A portrait isn't a fact but an opinion - an occasion rather than a truth.Richard Avedon
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Portraits are the most intimate photographs. The image will survive the subject.Victor Skrebneski
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A study of family portraits is enough to convert a man to the theory of reincarnation.Arthur Conan Doyle
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A portrait, to be a work of art, neither must nor may resemble the sitter... one must paint its atmosphere.Umberto Boccioni
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When you start with a portrait and try to find pure form by abstracting more and more, you must end up with an egg.Pablo Picasso
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For me, a good portrait shows the fragility and humility of the person, and at the same time a strength, a resting in themselves.Wolfgang Tillmans
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Nothing in a portrait is a matter of indifference. Gesture, grimace, clothing, decor even - all must combine to realize a character.Charles Baudelaire
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To demand the portrait that will be a complete portrait of a person is as futile as to demand that a motion picture be condensed into a single still.Alfred Stieglitz
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When you are doing portraits, you have that intimacy with someone for a few minutes. For a really good portrait, you don't take the portrait - it's given.Giles Duley
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Painting someone's portrait is, of course, an impossible task. What an absurd idea to try and distil a human being, the most complex organism on the planet, into flicks, washes, and blobs of paint on a two-dimensional surface.David Cobley
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A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.Richard Avedon
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And painted portraits have a life of their own that comes from deep in the soul of the painter and where the machine can't go.Vincent Van Gogh
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Portraits are supposed to "look within," but in my opinion very few people have an interior significantly different from the outside portrait.Jon Witcomb
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A Portrait of the artist as a young man is in fact the gestation of a soul.Richard Ellmann
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The portrait I do best is of the person I know best.Nadar
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Portraits are about revealing aspects of an individual.Kehinde Wiley
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In a portrait, you always leave part of yourself behind.Mary Ellen Mark
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A family portrait is only complete with love to fill it's frame.Wes Fesler
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The portrait of my parents is a complicated one, but lovingly drawn.Joyce Maynard