Portraits Quotes
Collection of top 100 famous quotes about Portraits
Portraits Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational Portraits quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.
You wouldn't take a portrait of a human being from a hundred feet away and expect to capture their spirit; you'd move in close.
— Nick Brandt
A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion.
— Robert Hughes
I felt that the beach portraits were all self-portraits. That moment of unease, that attempt to find a pose, it was all about me.
— Rineke Dijkstra
It's quite true that what I am aiming at, even when I take portraits, is to get a scandalous picture. I would love to be a paparazzo.
— Helmut Newton
A letter is the portrait of the soul ...
— Josephine De Beauharnais
Your aim as a photographer is to get a picture of that person that means something. Portraits aren't fantasies; they need to tell a truth.
— Tim Walker
God sends experience to paint men's portraits.
— Henry Ward Beecher
Portraits are the most intimate photographs. The image will survive the subject.
— Victor Skrebneski
They parade for us
In zoos - in portraits
Of every generation. — Abigail George
In zoos - in portraits
Of every generation. — Abigail George
True portraits are never realistic
— Anne McCaffrey
I have always loved reading, so was interested in the literary world, and took many literary portraits.
— Fay Godwin
Lucy paints portraits of Barbara Streisand.
— Hunter S. Thompson
What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound than a portrait.
— Charles Baudelaire
The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature.
— Thomas Babington Macaulay
Bruheem kol dumuyay eloha! Blessed are all God's self-portraits.
— Richard Zimler
In making portraits, I refuse to photograph myself as do so many photographers. My style is the style of the people I photograph.
— Lotte Jacobi
One is never satisfied with the portrait of a person that one knows.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.
— Gertrude Stein
Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.
— Roland Barthes
I'm a filmmaker who is known for these ambiguous portraits that tell multiple sides of the story without really telling the audience what to think.
— Joe Berlinger
Everything I paint is a portrait, whatever the subject.
— Jamie Wyeth
A Wedding In Haiti is a great experience and its unaffected prose is as true a portrait of complex Haiti as you will find.
— Mark Kurlansky
Make portraits of people in typical, familiar poses, being sure above all to give their faces the same kind of expression as their bodies.
— Edgar Degas
In portraits, the grace and, we may add, the likeness consists more in taking the general air than in observing the exact similitude of every feature.
— Joshua Reynolds
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
I've collected Andy Warhol art for years now I have two portraits of myself done by Steve Kaufman.
— David Caruso
The reason some portraits don't look true to life is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures.
— Salvador Dali
I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them.
— Lucian Freud
That's my idea of what a portrait ought to be, anonymous and documentary and a straightforward picture of mankind.
— Walker Evans
I love my dog. Actually, the best portrait I did was of my dog.
— Patrick Demarchelier
A portrait is a picture in which there is just a tiny little something not quite right about the mouth.
— John Singer Sargent
My sitters get tired waiting for commissioned portraits. If they commission me they have to wait years sometimes because I discard so many.
— William Dobell
Who can take Death's portrait? The tyrant never sat.
— Edward Young
Jarecki's 'Reagan' is a compellingly watchable and appropriately conflicted portrait ... artfully nuanced and intellectually curious.
— Hank Stuever
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
What a business is this of a portrait painter! You bring him a potato and expect he will paint you a peach.
— Gilbert Stuart
I loathe my own face, and I've done self-portraits because I've had nobody else to do.
— Francis Bacon
Perceptions are portraits, not photographs, and their form reveals the artist's hand every bit as much as it reflects the things portrayed
— Daniel Gilbert
[In my writing] I know that I have made a caricature out of [others' academic] theories [but] I think that caricatures are frequently good portraits.
— Umberto Eco
None of us is born with the right face. It's a tough job being a portrait photographer.
— Imogen Cunningham
In a portrait, you always leave part of yourself behind.
— Mary Ellen Mark
Do portraits of people in familiar and typical attitudes, above all give to their face the same choice of expression that one gives to their body.
— Edgar Degas
The facts of the present won't sit still for a portrait. They are constantly vibrating, full of clutter and confusion.
— William Macneile Dixon
I was going to have cosmetic surgery until I noticed that the doctor's office was full of portraits by Picasso.
— Rita Rudner
Portraits are to daily faces As an evening west To a fine, pedantic sunshine In a satin vest.
— Emily Dickinson
What I really do is make portraits of the soul.
— Jan Saudek
I have done only two portraits: one of the artist Francesco Clemente and another of Andy Warhol.
— Jean-Michel Basquiat
All my forebears worked for a living. My grandfather painted portraits. My mother too. My aunt painted seascapes.
— Erica Jong
That is what [Andy] Warhol portraits do: They elevate the subject into an icon of the pop culture he was documenting.
— Giorgio Armani
The people have to know what my portraits are like in order to behave in such a way that the result is one of my portraits.
— Thomas Ruff
He exhibited three portraits, each a masterpiece, which killed every picture within range.
— E.F. Benson
When you do portraits professionally it's not a desire, it's for money.
— Imogen Cunningham
In the business of portrait photography, one must combine the artist and the craftsman.
— Louis Fabian Bachrach Jr.
We only serve as a model for the portrait of our fame.
— Jean Cocteau
There are a lot of period movies where they say, 'This is a portrait of Lady Whatever.' And it's done in like a 1950s or 60s style.
— Guillermo Del Toro
When one starts from a portrait and seeks by successive eliminations to find pure form ... one inevitably ends up with an egg.
— Pablo Picasso
It is easy to make a picture of someone and call it a portrait. The difficulty lies in making a picture that makes the viewer care about a stranger.
— Paul Strand
When I look at great works of art or listen to inspired music, I sense intimate portraits of the specific times in which they were created.
— Billy Joel
I really like doing portraits, but I like taking pictures of things that are natural, like scenery, too.
— Georgia May Jagger
I will never, for the future, paint the portrait of a tyrant until his head lies before me on the scaffold.
— Jacques-Louis David
A man cannot paint portraits till he has seen faces.
— Christian Nestell Bovee
Sometimes I spit on my mother's portrait for pleasure.
— Salvador Dali
There are no bad pictures; that's just how your face looks sometimes.
— Abraham Lincoln
[Before each of numerous portrait sittings:] Now then, with teeth or without?
— Queen Elizabeth II
I am drawn to intimate, often uncomfortable portraits of a woman persevering and awakening.
— Vera Farmiga
Portraits of Gideon, Barak, Samson,
— Preston Sprinkle
A person himself believes that all the other portraits are good likenesses except the one of himself.
— Edvard Munch
Portrait painters' mission is to portray people and the beauty of Creation. They should stay clear of ego ...
— Igor Babailov
Your dreams are the product of your longings, a portrait of your potential, and a promise of your future.
— Erwin McManus
At the best and even unexpurgated, diaries give a distorted or one-sided portrait of the writer.
— Leonard Woolf
Pulls readers in with an ironic, breezy portrait of sinister high school competitiveness. Deft and extraordinarily accomplished.
— Michael Cadnum
I'm interested in human vulnerability. We are alone, and my portraits reflect this quality. I don't want anything to get in the way of this feeling.
— Thomas S. Buechner
You don't change the course of history by turning the faces of portraits to the wall.
— Jawaharlal Nehru
There are portraits and still-lifes
And the first, because 'human'
Does not excel the second — Charles Tomlinson
And the first, because 'human'
Does not excel the second — Charles Tomlinson
With an 'advanced' artist, it's not now possible to make a portrait.
— Clement Greenberg
All photographs are self-portraits.
— Minor White
A study of family portraits is enough to convert a man to the theory of reincarnation.
— Arthur Conan Doyle
The diagram of the house is a portrait of the family, a true portrait, whether it's sad or happy.
— Jimenez Lai
I believe I have had the most trouble with a portrait which I painted in installments - the head on one canvas and the bust on another.
— Mark Twain
This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so.
— Robert Rauschenberg
Never be distracted by people's glamorous portraits of themselves and their lives; search and dig for what really imprisons them.
— Robert Greene
That moment when the person actually dictates the way I do the portrait is when the intimacy arrives.
— Francesco Clemente
I feel I'm anonymous in my work. When I look at the pictures, I never see myself; they aren't self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear.
— Cindy Sherman
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
I didn't try and do fashion pictures. I tried to do portraits of girls wearing dresses.
— David Bailey