Portrait painting

As a portrait painting ( too French, portrait ', " portrait" ) refers to a genre of painting whose subject is the figure of a man in a painting.

Differentiation areas

Depending on the size of the image section, a distinction in painting headpiece, chest image, Hüftbild (half figure), half-length, elbow ( portrait from head to knee), Full figure, according to the attitude or turn of the figure, especially the head, is called the portrait taken as from the front ( en face ) or from the side ( in profile ), half or three-quarter profile. An overview of the article 's portrait.

Study of a head is called a sketchy, more for practice or as a study executed portrait.

Tronies are fully executed portrait -like head and character studies that show no individual person and were often created by painters as preliminary studies for paintings or for a type.

History

The portraiture was already well trained in the ancient times in Egypt. The mummy portraits preserved in large numbers dated to the Roman period. The end of their production is mostly recognized middle of the 3rd century in the recent research.

Portraits from the Middle Ages are often delivered in the form of Dedikationsbildern. As one of the first autonomous board pictures, in which an individual is portrayed, the portrait of John the Good in the Louvre applies.

During the Renaissance, the portrait by painters such as Antonello da Messina, Piero della Francesca, Pisanello, Perugino and Botticelli or Bronzino mannerists was trained to the highest virtuosity and painterly perfection. In the heyday of Italian painting succeeded artists to give the portrait the importance of a character image in which the whole essence of the sitter arrives at the expression. Raphael and Titian are hereinabove, under the Dutch Rubens, van Dyck, Frans Hals and Rembrandt, from the Spanish school especially Velázquez. The latter masters know by coloristic mood and significant background to deepen the description. The result are portraits since that time usually in the order of rulers that the services of their court painter made ​​use of, by members of the urban nobility and representatives of the bourgeoisie, such as bankers, merchants, guilds or rich art and antique collectors.. The Dutch painting applied to the so-called conversation pieces and the Doelen ( rifle ) and regent pieces in which the sitters were significantly associated to free groups.

With the increasing importance of the commissioned painting the Porträtbildnerei is so much came from the 17th century to the fore, that no painter of meaning is the same revoked. Portraiture was functionalized in the Baroque of nobility, clergy and merchants for the professional representation. From favorite portrait painters of modern times, the French David, Gérard, Ingres, Cabanel, Bonnat, Carolus- Duran, Robert Lefèvre, the German Anton Raphael Mengs Alexander Macco, Winterhalter, wax, Magnus, Hensel, G. Richter, Angeli, Lenbachplatz, the Englishman Reynolds, Gainsborough, Millais, Herkomer, the Dutchman Isaac Israels, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Citroen, or the American James McNeill Whistler to call.

In contemporary art, portraiture does not play a big role more portraits are now produced on a large scale by photographers. Nevertheless, there are also up to the present outstanding portraitists, such as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and Luc Tuymans.