I'm amazed that you could have the greatest portrait in the United States, of George Washington; you could have the Declaration of Independence desk, the desk on which it was written; you could have the hat that Abraham Lincoln had on the day he died, in buildings that really not only possibly endanger them, but the American people coming to look at them.
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The explanation of the propensity of the English people to portrait painting is to be found in their relish for a Fact. Let a man do the grandest things, fight the greatest battles, or be distinguished by the most brilliant personal heroism, yet the English people would prefer his portrait to a painting of the great deed. The likeness they can judge of; his existence is a Fact. But the truth of the picture of his deeds they cannot judge of, for they have no imagination.
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I hate to paint portraits! I hope never to paint another portrait in my life. Portraiture may be all right for a man in his youth, but after forty I believe that manual dexterity deserts one, and, besides, the color-sense is less acute. Youth can better stand the exactions of a personal kind that are inseparable from portraiture. I have had enough of it.
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Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change --only to give stability to one beautiful moment.
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A true portrait should, today and a hundred years from today, the Testimony of how this person looked and what kind of human being he was.
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I had rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.
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Every job is a self-portrait of the person who did it. Autograph your work with excellence.
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We demand that people should be true to the pictures we have of them, no matter how repulsive those pictures may be: we prefer the true portrait in all its homogeneity, to one with a detail added which refuses to fit in.
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It is not likely that posterity will fall in love with us, but not impossible that it may respect or sympathize; so a man would rather leave behind him the portrait of his spirit than a portrait of his face.
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It seems to be a law of nature that no man, unless he has some obvious physical deformity, ever is loth to sit for his portrait.
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In a portrait, I
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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 man's manners are a mirror in which he shows his portrait.
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Few persons who have ever sat for a portrait can have felt anything but inferior while the process is going on.
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Every job is a self-portrait of the person who did it.
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A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.
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Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.
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There are only two styles of portrait painting; the serious and the smirk.
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Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
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Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.
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Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.
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I would rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.
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The countenance is the portrait of the soul, and the eyes mark its intentions.
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The portrait I do best is of the person I know best.
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Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.
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