Portrait Quotes - page 9
My waking thoughts are all of thee. Your portrait and the remembrance of last night's delirium have robbed my senses of repose. Sweet and incomparable Josephine, what an extraordinary influence you have over my heart. Are you vexed? Do I see you sad? Are you ill at ease? My soul is broken with grief, and there is no rest for your lover.
Napoleon Bonaparte
It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946, when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met, principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art.
Jerry Saltz
Alexander Hamilton has been on the $10 since 1928, he's been well honored by the country, he was a great Secretary of the Treasury. But of all the people on the currency, the only one who isn't a president." [Note: Benjamin Franklin, whose portrait appears on the $100 bill, also was not a president.].
Grover Norquist
![Edma painted a portrait of Berthe the artist about this time [1860-61]. It is not only a sisterly dedication, it is an important statement. Berthe stands before her easel, her right hand central to the picture, poised to touch her palette with a brush. The pretty round-faced girl had vanished. (Berthe Morisot)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/37/berthe-morisot-artist-brush-1011637.webp)
..the highly abstract cubism of Mondrian - a Dutchman - (it is well-known that cubism has made its entrance into the [Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam...) though a product of cubism, Mondrian in no way imitates this style. He seems above all to have undergone the influence of Picasso, but his personality has been remained intact. His trees and his female portrait display a sensitive cerebral quality. This kind of cubism clearly follows a different path from that of Braque and Picasso, artists whose 'recherche de matière' [research of the material as matter, what Mondrian deliberately ignores]] is presently arousing such interest.
Piet Mondrian
How do ideas come? What a question! If they come of their own accord, they are apt to arrive at the most unexpected time and place. For the most part the place is out of doors, for up in this northern wilderness when nature puts on a show it is an inspiring one. There seem to be magic days once in a while, with some rare quality of light that hold a body spellbound: In sub-zero weather there will be a burst of unbelievable color when the mountain turns a deep purple, a thing it refuses to do in summer. Then comes the hard part: how to plan a picture so as to give to others what has happened to you. To render in paint an experience, to suggest the sense of light and color, air and space, there is no such thing as sitting down outside and trying to make a "portrait” of it. It lasts for only a minute, for one thing, and it isn't an inspiration that can be copied on the spot...
Maxfield Parrish
Dear Mr. Rosenberg [art-dealer in Paris, then], - Many thanks for your good letters which are a great encouragement to me. I assure you that you are the man who has encouraged me the most so far. Please excuse the tone of declaration. I will also show my gratitude when I am in Paris by doing a good life-size portrait of you, or of a member of your family if you prefer, and I would like you to accept it as a gift. I intend to be in Paris around 15 November. My mother and my brother send their best wishes. - Mr. Rosenberg, please accept my devotion, esteem and gratitude.
Giorgio de Chirico
Christ is the ideal of what a man should be. He has my ideal portrait, as it were, drawn out in His own thought and feeling. There is an exaltation and a grandeur for myself in the time to come, which Christ knows, and I do not; but I am following after. I am pressing up toward that thought that Christ has of what I am and ought to be; and I am determined that I will apprehend it as Christ Himself does. Not that I have it; but I will strive for it. My manhood is in the future. My life lies beyond the present.
Henry Ward Beecher
When as an American emissary I met him in September 1977 in his office in the Menelik Palace, I was struck at how much darker he was than his portrait on the wall behind him. The fact that he was more Negroid than the average Ethiopian highlander gave him an inferiority complex.
Mengistu Haile Mariam
As the subtitles of Jackson's biographies echo each other-demons, haunted-so both biographies present a near-identical portrait of her as daughter, wife, mother, writer: these roles inextricably knotted together through Jackson's adult life, often to the point of near-unbearable pressure and stress. Jackson's patrician, socially conscious, and woundingly censorious mother, Geraldine Bugbee, was the great-great-granddaughter of a wealthy San Francisco architect; clearly the model for the nightmare mother-figures in Jackson's fiction, particularly the embittered invalid-mother of Hill House, Geraldine persisted in criticizing and belittling Jackson long after she had acquired national renown as a writer.
Shirley Jackson
This is what's so frightening about the trends in education today. Cromwell told his portrait painter, ‘Paint me, warts and all.' That's not what is happening in America, where the trend in education is to paint only America's warts. So even the great Kate Smith, who sang "God Bless America” for years, is having her statue taken down because she made a racially insensitive record in 1931. Well you know who really had a racially insensitive record in 1931? The Democratic Party. But unlike Kate Smith's statue, it's still around.
Mark Steyn
Very few people ever had the opportunity to see Cézanne at work, because he could not endure being watched while at the easel. For one who has seen him paint, it is difficult to imagine how slow and painful his progress was on certain days. In my portrait there are two little spots of canvas on the hand which are not covered. I called Cézanne's attention to them. "If the copy I'm making in the Louvre turns out well," he replied, "perhaps I will be able tomorrow to find the exact tone to cover up those spots. Don't you see, Monsieur Vollard, that if I put something there by guesswork, I might have to paint the whole canvas over starting from that point?" The prospect made me tremble.
During the period that Cézanne was working on my portrait, he was also occupied with a large composition of nudes, begun about 1895, on which he labored almost to the end of his life.
Paul Cézanne
l paint what cannot be photographed, and l photograph what l do not wish to paint. lf it is a portrait that interests me, a face, or a nude, I will use my camera. It is quicker than making a drawing or a painting. But if it is something I cannot photograph, like a dream or a subconscious impulse I have to resort to drawing or painting. To express what I feel I use the medium best suited to express that idea, which is also always the most economical one. l am not at all interested in being consistent as a painter, and object-maker or a photographer. I can use several different techniques, like the old masters who were engineers, musicians and poets at the same time. I have never shared the contempt shown by painters for photography: there is no competition involved, painting and photography are two media engaged in different paths. There is no conflict between the two.
Man Ray
Also, the son of a miller [= Rembrandt] in Leiden is esteemed highly, though prematurely. Elyas Veldenus [= Esaias van der Velde ] is an elegant painter, though unimportant, now residing at the Hague. The rector Scrivelius showed me his portrait, very lifelike on a panel by the Haarlem painter Frans Hals.
Rembrandt
In The Night Watch, again in Amsterdam, we have the feeling of communication: that something dramatic is happening before our very eyes. This scene of a company of guards painted as a group portrait was very popular in Rembrandt's day. The only other Dutch painter who could do anything at all with the subject was Frans Hals, who did it several times and rather well. But the conventions prevailing at the time were for such a group portrait to consist of an inert line of figures which was boring in the extreme. Rembrandt, tackling this subject, sees it as a dramatic event but also as an entirely realistic everyday occurrence... It was probably the most ambitious painting in size and scope that Rembrandt had painted up to that time, but it began his downfall among his contemporaries and from then his popularity waned. As his painting got better and better, he got poorer and poorer - so much for the Dutch public of his day and their taste in art! p. 404.
Rembrandt
Poetry is not; or seems not to be. But it appears that among the great conflicts of this culture, the conflict in our attitude toward poetry stands clearly lit. There are no guards built up to hide it. We call see its expression, and we can see its effects upon us. We can see our own conflict and our own resource if we look, now, at this art, which has been made of all the arts the one least acceptable.
Anyone dealing with poetry and the love of poetry must deal, then, with the hatred of poetry, and perhaps even Ignore with the indifference which is driven toward the center. It comes through as boredom, as name-calling, as the traditional attitude of the last hundred years which has chalked in the portrait of the poet as he is known to this society, which, as Herbert Read says, "does not challenge poetry in principle it merely treats it with ignorance, indifference and unconscious cruelty."
Poetry is foreign to us, we do not let it enter our daily lives.
Muriel Rukeyser
