A portrait painting is a picture of one particular, real person, painted so that viewers can recognize who it is.
For most of history the sitters were rulers, nobles and rich merchants, and the picture showed their rank as clearly as their features.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (140+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
English took the word portrait from the Old French verb portraire, "to trace" or "to draw forth," in the 1560s, when it meant any figure drawn or painted. Nothing in it asks for resemblance.
Resemblance, though, was what sitters wanted, and in that same decade it worried a queen. In 1563, a draft proclamation in England complained that none of the pictures of Elizabeth I had yet "sufficiently expressed the natural representation of her majesty's person."
The draft went further. It proposed to forbid the showing of any image of her that was "apparently deformed" until an approved likeness existed. It was never issued, but the problem it names runs through the whole history of the genre.
A portrait had to look like its sitter, and also like the person the sitter wished to be. Painters met both demands through choices a viewer rarely notices at first, such as features quietly corrected or a drawing reused from one picture to the next. Both appear later on this page, with an English courtier and with Elizabeth herself.
The faces of Roman Egypt
The painted portrait itself is much older than Elizabeth…
What You'll Discover
Why a duke was painted from one side.
How a courtier's face was made more elegant.
Why a queen's portrait carried an older face.
Which famous Dutch faces are not portraits.
What the flowers behind Obama stand for.