ETYM French portraiture.
The activity of making portraits.
In the visual arts, the creation of a likeness to someone. Such likenesses appear in many cultures but first flourished in the West in ancient Rome as statues and coins of the rich and the powerful. In Egypt in the 3rd century ad portraits painted in wax on the panels of mummy cases achieved a high degree of realism and frankness. Extinct during the Middle Ages, portraiture revived in the 14th century as patrons and donors began to appear in religious pictures.
Outstanding portrait painters include Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Titian, Tintoretto (Italy); van Eyck, Campin (Flanders); Fouquet, the Clouets, David, Ingres, Cézanne (France); El Greco, Velázquez, Goya, Picasso (Spain); Dürer, Cranach (Germany); Rembrandt (Netherlands); and Hilliard, van Dyck, Reynolds, Lawrence, and Gainsborough (England).
The self-portrait evolved as an independent genre during the Renaissance, reflecting both the growth of individualism and the greatly improved status of the artist. It is uncertain whether Jan van Eyck’s Man in a Red Turban about 1433 (National Gallery, London) is a self-portrait; if it is, it is probably the first of its kind. Other examples include Dürer’s Self-portrait 1493 (Louvre, Paris), Rembrandt’s Self-portrait about 1659 (National Gallery of Art, Washington), and Van Gogh’s Self-portrait with Bandaged Ear 1889 (Courtauld Institute Gallery, London).