Individual Portrait
Portraits of a single person, balancing likeness against the image a sitter or patron wants to project.
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About
An individual portrait centres on one person, balancing likeness against the image a sitter or patron wants to project. Early Renaissance Italians favoured the profile, borrowed from coins and medals: Piero della Francesca painted Federico da Montefeltro from the left (c. 1473–75), hiding the eye he had lost in a tournament. Hans Holbein the Younger's Sir Thomas More (1527) records stubble, velvet and a gold collar with equal care, and Diego Velázquez's Juan de Pareja (1650) gives his enslaved assistant, later freed and a painter himself, the gravity of a nobleman.
Modern portraits turned inward or stripped away flattery. Frida Kahlo painted herself more than fifty times, often with thorns, animals and emblems of pain. Richard Avedon set drifters, miners and slaughterhouse workers against plain white paper for In the American West (1979–84), and Lucian Freud painted friends and family over long sittings, building flesh from dense, heavy paint.
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