Looking at Yiadom-Boakye’s portraits is an act of slow discovery, the unveiling of a mystery.
portraits
Posted inArt
A Powerful Debut
As a young Asian American painter, Susan Chen knows what she is up against and is consciously pushing back.
Posted inArt
David Hockney’s Life in Drawing
The history of Hockney and his lifelong life-drawing itch, pursued now over seven decades.
Posted inArt
The Beauty and Anxiety of Seeing Myself, and My Partner, in a Portrait
I forget if we asked Danny Ferrell to paint us or if it was his idea, but I was surprised to feel so much when I saw the painting for the first time at an art fair.
Posted inArt
Six Rare Portraits of Jane Austen Go on View
A rare 1869 watercolor of Jane Austen will join five other portraits, including the only portrayal of the novelist known to have been made during her lifetime.
Posted inArt
Splicing Together Portraits of Countries’ Leaders
The artist Guney Soykan’s Face of a Nation series consists of striking and unusual timelines of countries’ political leadership over the past half-century.
Posted inArt
A New Online Trove Brings Historical Silhouettes to Light
The popularity of silhouettes in the 18th and 19th centuries wasn’t only due to them being an affordable form of portraiture before the era of photography, the art also fit with popular pseudosciences like phrenology.
Posted inArt
The Flattering Tricks of 19th-Century Portraiture
For the wealthy 19th-century elite, a portrait rendered by a respected artist was a signifier of status — an oversized and ostentatious calling card.
Posted inNews
The Frick Scores a Trove of 450 Historical Medals
The Frick Collection is adding an impressive cache of metal portraits to its collections.
Posted inBooks
Mining the Unknown in Julian Barnes and John Berger’s Essays on Art
Underlying Julian Barnes’s and John Berger’s respective new collections on art, Keeping an Eye Open and Portraits, is the notion that we’re still figuring out how to engage with and portray the past.
Posted inBooks
The Many Identities of Raphael’s “Lady with a Unicorn”
The 16th-century “Portrait of a Lady with a Unicorn” by Raphael was altered twice: first by the artist, who replaced a lap dog with a tiny unicorn; then in the 17th century, when the sitter’s bare shoulders were covered and the broken martyrdom wheel of St. Catherine of Alexandria was painted over the mythical creature.
Posted inIn Brief
No Money for Portrait Artists in Congress’s New Spending Package
Congress will vote on a new tax and spending bill Friday, and in case you wondered, not a dime of the $1.14 trillion dollar package will go to oil portraits.