On Portrait painting

A portrait has to look like the person you’re painting. But there are different opinions about just what that means.

I’ll give you a for instance…

I was commissioned to paint a portrait of a family in San Francisco. The proposed composition was to include the father, mother and their young son. Because of the schedules of the subjects, I needed to do this painting from photographs. I set up a photo shoot with the parents on their couch and their small boy playing with toys on the coffee table in front of them. Behind this grouping was a large velvet draped window view with the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance.

When I delivered the completed painting, the father met me at the door. When he saw the painting, he was ecstatic. “Wow, George! You nailed us!!” We took the painting into the house to show the wife.

“That doesn’t look like me,” she said. She stormed to another room and quickly returned with a photo of herself. “This is what I look like.” She pointed the picture at me.

To which her husband replied, “Honey, that picture is fifteen years old.” He gestured toward the painting. “This is what you look like now.” Oooo, wrong thing to say.

Her voice rising, “I think divorce is in the offing!”

And the rest of the cat fight is best not spoken aloud, in the interest of protecting the children.

Well…

That didn’t go well. I took the painting back and trimmed a little off the aging wife’s chin and cheeks, smoothed her throat, made her nose a little smaller and her complexion pinker. She liked it better, and who knows? Maybe they’re still married.

The moral? Maybe it’s simply that the best portrait painters have a gift for making people look like they think they look. The first time.

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