We only serve as a model for the portrait of our fame.
To anyone who has served in Washington, there is something oddly familiar about [having your portrait painted]. First, you're painted into a corner, then you're hung out to dry and, finally, you're framed.
Sitting for a picture is morbid business. A portrait doesn't begin to mean anything until the subject is dead. This is the whole point. We're doing this to create a kind of sentimental past for people in decades to come. It's their past, their history we're inventing here. And it's not how I look now that matters. It's how I'll look in twenty-five years as clothing and faces change, as photographs change. The deeper I pass into death, the more powerful my picture becomes. Isn't this why picture-taking is so ceremonial? It's like a wake. And I'm the actor made up for the laying-out.
You will never see a portrait of my love, for miracles are never seen.
If I declare it to be so, then this is a portrait.
The portrait of a person is one of the most difficult things to do. It means you must almost bring the presence of that person photographed to other people in such a way that they don't have to know that person personally, but that they are still confronted with a human being that they won't forget. That's a portrait.
A portrait is a picture in which there is just a tiny little something not quite right about the mouth.
I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.
I love my dog. Actually, the best portrait I did was of my dog.
A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.
The person portrayed and the portrait are two entirely different things.
You know, if one paints someone's portrait, one should not know him if possible.
To sit for one's portrait is like being present at one's own creation.
Each person's work is always a portrait of himself.
Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.
Jeanne, I fell asleep among the paintings, where I could sit for many days worshipping your portrait. I fell in love with your portrait, Jeanne, because it will never change. I have such a fear of seeing you grow old, Jeanne, I fell in love with an unchanging you that will never be taken away from me. I was wishing you would die, so that no one could take you away from me, and I would love the painting of you as you would look eternally.
I was painting her portrait in the little studio, and when I came to the eyes I stopped, overcome by emotion, and said to her, 'Have you understood me?' She nodded affirmatively. 'Will you be my wife?' I asked. She made the same affirmative sign.
In life man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing. No doubt this thought may seem harsh to someone who has not made a success of his life. But on the other hand, it helps people to understand that reality alone counts, and that dreams, expectations and hopes only serve to define a man as a broken dream, aborted hopes, and futile expectations.
There are only two styles of portrait painting; the serious and the smirk.
It is not likely that posterity will fall in love with us, but not impossible that it may respect or sympathize; so a man would rather leave behind him the portrait of his spirit than a portrait of his face.