Portrait

self-portraits could become particularly aware of the artist’s talent. By looking specifically at two self-portraits done by women in Europe during the 17th century (one from Northern Europe and the other from Italy), this paper will help discern what it took to become a successful woman artist during the Renaissance and what requirements a self-portrait done by a woman would need to fulfill. The two women artists and the works being looked at include, Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self-Portrait as…

The Arnolifini Wedding Portrait (1434, oil on wood, 82.2 cm x 60 cm, National Gallery, London) by Jan Van Eyck is one of the most extraordinary and mysterious paintings in art history. The complexity and rich detail makes it perplexing to art historians who have never been able to establish the true meaning behind the portrait. The most notable opinion is that of Erwin Panofsky, who argues that the Arnolfini was a marriage ceremony and was witnessed by the painter, shown with his reflection in…

Charles Emile-August Carolus-Duran’s piece titled Portrait of an Artist in her Studio represents the action of a women painting. This piece was made in the late 19th century (c. 1880) and was considered one of Carolus-Duran’s great society portraits. The piece’s present location is the La Salle University Art Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and its original location was *****. This portrait is oil on canvas, and the “quick, loose brushwork” technique can be accredited to masters such as…

invented in 1839, it quickly became the most influential medium as it is more connected with the reality compared to painting. It provides us a new way to explore questions of ourselves in relation to the world. As a dominant theme of photography, portrait photography practiced by many artists as the diversity of the subject matter. Like Andy Grundberg (1999, p.200) indicated that, “More than any other kind of images today, portraiture photographs seem able to speck to us directly, without any…

During the 15th century portraiture was beginning to manifest in art. This genre of art began to become the main source of income for many Flemish artists (Kleiner, 555). Notably, portraits were usually used as gifts in order to insure remembrance or to assert higher authority. Flemish artists would embellish symbolic meanings in the details of their paintings. An example of this would be in Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin by Rogier Van Der Weyden, on the armrests it depicts Adam, Eve, and the…

royalty, religious figures, and today with the advancements in technology, portraits are taken and shared with the world instantly. What defines a portrait is debatable; portraits can show a person’s true personality, or show who they want to be, that’s all up to the artist. Many cultures have different styles of creating portraits and the biggest difference between cultures is the way they choose to show the subject of the portraits. Venus of Willendorf from Willendorf Austria is an early…

untouchable. The arc of this growing flexibility of perception is apparent when juxtaposing the Daguerreotype portrait of Frederick Douglas (1847), Andy Warhol’s silkscreen Self-Portrait (1967) and Juliana Huxtable’s ink-jet photograph titled Untitled in the Rage…

The Portrait of a Lady: A Fiction of Portraits I. Introduction Indicated from the title, The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James is a novel full portrait of a young lady named Isabel Archer, the main character. In first sight, it is easy to think this novel simply as a description of a lady provided by the narrator. The term “portrait” gives us a feeling that we are to see a lady fully depicted, or, portrayed inside the frame of the narrative. However, as readers read along, they get to know that…

Portrait painting thrived in the Netherlands with the increase in production driven by interest in the idea of personhood and the definition of the individual self. Portraits help document the development of a personal identity as it connects factors like marital status, class, and profession. A common portrait genre produced during the seventeenth century portrays their subjects with an impassive demeanor with little vigor. At first, these paintings may be evaluated as lacking “personality” or…

religious views or rituals. The mummy portrait of a woman and the bust of a woman, were both very important commemorations that were given to significant women. Although, it may not be very clear who these people are, it definitely shins a light of how women were viewed during these times. A unique feature that both of these portraits have is a veristic…