A portrait is meant to record a face. Behind many famous ones, though, there was a quarrel over what that face should look like, between the sitter, the person paying and the painter. Here, painters keep canvases their sitters had ordered, and a queen approves faces that still change on the way to the final picture.
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How These Were Chosen
A portrait records a real person, but it is never neutral. The sitter wants to look like the person they believe they are. The patron, a husband, a king or an assembly, wants a face that serves a purpose. The painter wants a picture that will make his name.
For centuries the portrait was also the commission that paid the rent, and the hardest test of the trade: a likeness that a family, a court or a whole city could check against the living face.
The twelve here run from the 1400s to the 1890s, each of a real sitter, even where the name is lost. Each was chosen for what it shows about who decided how the face would look, and they run from the least known to the most famous.
12. Jacques-Louis David, Portrait of Madame Récamier (1800)
The wall behind Juliette Récamier is only roughed in. She herself is painted with care, reclining in a plain white dress on a long antique-style daybed, her bare feet crossed on the cushion, her head turned back over her shoulder.
Jacques-Louis David began the portrait in Paris in the spring of 1800. Madame Récamier was a wealthy banker's wife and a leading figure of Paris society, and she and her husband had ordered the picture themselves. Once it was done, it was theirs to receive.
It was never done. David stopped before the year was out, and why he gave up was never settled. Slow progress, quibbles over the likeness and impatience on both sides have all been put forward. His parting words survive only as a tradition. Ladies had their whims, he told her, and so did artists. He would keep the portrait as it stood.
Madame Récamier answered by going elsewhere. In 1801 she ordered a new portrait from François Gérard, who had trained in David's studio, and this time she kept control of her own image, watching closely over the drawing that engravers worked from when they copied it.
David kept his canvas until he died in 1825. At the sale of his studio in April 1826, it was bought by Charles Lenormant, whose wife, a grand-niece of the banker, had been adopted by the Récamiers. The portrait David had refused to hand over went back to the sitter's family after all.
At a Glance
Artist: Jacques-Louis David (1748 to 1825), French
Painted: 1800, left unfinished
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 174 × 244 cm (68.5 × 96.1 in)
Where to see it: Musée du Louvre, Paris
About This Painting
What type of art does David's painting represent?
Neoclassicism, the style that looked back to ancient Greece and Rome, of which David was the leading painter in France. Here it shows in the bare setting and in the antique-style daybed and footstool, pieces a cabinetmaker had built from drawings by David and his pupil Moreau.
11. Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Dr Gachet (1890)
Dr Paul Gachet leans his head on his right fist, framed by a white cap, a red table and a stalk of foxglove, his dark blue coat set against a blue ground.
In 1890 Vincent van Gogh was living at Auvers-sur-Oise, a village outside Paris, where he had put himself in the doctor's care after leaving Provence. Gachet, a physician with a taste for homeopathy and etching, knew exactly what portrait he wanted. He had found his model in a picture of someone else.