Helmut Newton
Photographer
"My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain."
Portraits quotes
Portraits
284 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Umberto Boccioni
Artist
"A portrait, to be a work of art, neither must nor may resemble the sitter... one must paint its atmosphere."
Willa Ford
Singer, Actress
"I do house things. I paint. I do portraits. I also paint my house."
Jawaharlal Nehru
Politician, Prime Minister
"You don't change the course of history by turning the faces of portraits to the wall."
Frida Kahlo
Painter
"They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality."
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Topics related to Portraits
Browse quotes that often appear alongside portraits — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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Portraits quotes (page 1 of 15)
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"[Before each of numerous portrait sittings:] Now then, with teeth or without?"
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"I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait."
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"Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait."
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"I loathe my own face, and I've done self-portraits because I've had nobody else to do."
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"One is never satisfied with the portrait of a person that one knows."
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"That’s my idea of what a portrait ought to be, anonymous and documentary and a straightforward picture of mankind."
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"Each person's work is always a portrait of himself."
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"The countenance is the portrait of the soul, and the eyes mark its intentions."
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"Sometimes I spit on my mother's portrait for pleasure."
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"(Canada) - the most parochial nationette on earth ... I have been living in this sanctimonious icebox ... painting portraits of the opulent Methodists of Toronto. Methodism and money in this city have produced a sort of hell of dullness."
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"Every image is in some way a “portrait,” not in the way that it would reproduce the traits of a person, but in that it pulls and draws (this is the semantic and etymological sense of the word), in that it extracts something, an intimacy, a force."
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"And painted portraits have a life of their own that comes from deep in the soul of the painter and where the machine can't go."
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"I want paint to work as flesh... my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them ... As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does."
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"What a business is this of a portrait painter! You bring him a potato and expect he will paint you a peach."
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"I am living a new and exalted life of late. It steeps me in a sacred rapture to see a portrait develop and take soul under my hand. First, I throw off a study - just a mere study, a few apparently random lines - and to look at it you would hardly ever suspect who it was going to be; even I cannot tell, myself."
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"When you start with a portrait and search for a pure form, a clear volume, through successive eliminations, you arrive inevitably at the egg. Likewise, starting with the egg and following the same process in reverse, one finishes with the portrait."
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"A writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees. No one can tell him about that. No one can control that reality. It reminds me of something Pablo Picasso was supposed to have said to Gertrude Stein while he was painting her portrait. Gertrude said, “I don’t look like that.” And Picasso replied, “You will.” And he was right."
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"every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself."
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"It's quite true that what I am aiming at, even when I take portraits, is to get a scandalous picture. I would love to be a paparazzo."
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"The smiling portrait of you is still hanging on my frowning wall."
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