Portraiture Genre

Portraits are pictures of people, deities or mythological figures in human form. The genre includes group-portraits as well as individual compositions. A portrait of an individual may be face-only, head and shoulders, or full-body. Academic portraiture is executed according to certain conventions, concerning dress, the position of hands and other details. This genre was practised by artists of almost all movements, including the Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo and Neo-classical styles, as well as the English School of figurative painting. Ninteenth century portraits also mirrored the realist style of the day, while later we see a number of fine Impressionist portraits along with even more colourful Expressionist portraiture, and other twentieth century portrait artists, and the portraits painted by Picasso as well as various other Surrealist and Pop-Art portraiture. This genre also includes self portraits.

John Singer Sargent: Portrait of Madame X

Famous Examples of Portraiture:

Jan van Eyck: The Arnolfini Portrait (1434);

Leonardo da Vinci: Mona Lisa (1505);

Titian: Portrait of a Man (1512);

Lucas Cranach the Elder: Martin Luther (c.1530).

Hans Holbein the Younger: Henry VIII (c.1540)

Giuseppe Arcimboldo: Summer (1573);

Frans Hals: The Laughing Cavalier (1624);

Anthony Van Dyck: Charles I, At The Hunt (1635)

Diego Velazquez: Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650);

Jan Vermeer: Girl with a Pearl Earring (1660);

Gilbert Stewart: George Washington (1796);

Theodore Gericault: Portrait of a Kleptomaniac (1819);

James Whistler: Arrangement in Grey and Black (1871);

John Singer Sargent: Portrait of Madame X (1883-4);

Paul Cezanne: The Boy in the Red Waistcoat (1894);

Paul Gaugin: Young Breton Woman (1889);

Pablo Picasso: Portrait of Dora Maar (1942);

Alexei von Jawlensky: Head of a Woman (1910);

Otto Dix: Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden (1926);

Graham Sutherland: Portrait of Somerset Maugham (1949);

Andy Warhol: Marilyn (1967); the ultimate icon of the Pop-Art movement.

David Hockney: Mr and Mrs Clark (1970);

Lucien Freud: Naked Man With Rat (1977).

Supreme exponents of self-portraiture include: the Northern Renaissance artist Albrecht Durer, Baroque master Rembrandt, the tragic 19th century expressionist Vincent Van Gogh, the short-lived Austrian prodigy Egon Schiele and the moody German painter Max Beckmann.

Genre-Paintings

Pierre Auguste Renoir Luncheon of the Boating Party

This category of painting - confusingly referred to as genre-paintings or genre-scenes - denotes pictures that portray ordinary scenes of everyday life. Subjects encompass domestic settings, interiors, celebrations, tavern scenes, markets and other street situations. Whatever the precise content, the scene should be portrayed in a non-idealized way, and the characters should not be endowed with any heroic or dramatic attributes. The foremost example of this type of art was the Genre Painting of the Dutch Realism School. For famous exponents, see Dutch Realist Artists.

Famous Genre-Pictures:

Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Peasant Wedding Feast (1566);

William Powell Frith: The Railway Station (1862);

Honore Daumier: The Third Class Carriage (1864);

Ilya Repin: Barge-Haulers on the Volga (1870-3);

Thomas Eakins: The Gross Clinic (1875);

Pierre Auguste Renoir: Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880);

Max Liebermann: A Country Brasserie, Brannenburg Bavaria (1894);

Anders Zorn: Girls from Dalarna Having a Bath (1908);

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Berlin Street Scene (1913);

Walter Sickert: Ennui (1914);

Otto Dix: Pimp With Prostitutes (1922);

Maurice Utrillo: Flag over the Town Hall (1924);

L.S. Lowry: Coming from the Mill (1930);

Edward Hopper: Nighthawks (1942).