Word: portraitists
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...first really significant American portraitist, John Singleton Copley (1738-1815), appealed to these values. The hard, uningratiating realism of his portraits of Boston's notables--not just the prosperous Tories but dissenters like Samuel Adams and Paul Revere--was more like some French neoclassical painting than like English portraiture of the time. His clients liked Copley in part because everything in his work, from a nailhead in a chair to the exact gleam on red mahogany, was earnestly weighed and measured. In his candor and curiosity, he refused to edit out the warts and wens, the pinched New England lips...
...crisscrossing the U.S. to find just the right setting to showcase her subjects--posing a group of child gymnasts against the backdrop of a vast, dry lake bed, for example, and shooting synchronized swimmers from under water. Leibovitz, a Vanity Fair contributing photographer and arguably the world's leading portraitist, describes herself as "more interested in what people do than in the way they look." In these exclusive pictures from her upcoming book, Olympic Portraits (Bulfinch Press), Leibovitz offers images as kinetic and graceful as the athletes themselves...
Cezanne was, from that point on, a great portraitist, one of the best the world has seen, especially of himself. His self-portraits invite comparison with those of Rembrandt, and the best of them justify it. He begins, in his own images, as a wild man, a solitary, an uncouth glaring peasant with greasy hair massed on either side of the pale dome of a bald head; he ends, in his last years, as a kind of sage. Between the extremes is a painting like the Self-Portrait (Portrait of the Artist with a Rose Background), with its powerfully modeled...
JOHN SINGLETON COPLEY IN AMERICA," the show of some 75 paintings that opened last week at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a thoroughly absorbing affair. There has never been any doubt about Copley's importance to American art. He was the best portraitist the young colony produced in the 18th century. He was also its second major cultural expatriate, after Benjamin West. His career falls into two halves, the first set in provincial Boston and New York, the second in imperial London. And yet, fine as his English work was, one may prefer his American paintings...
Copley sent it, through a seagoing friend, directly to Reynolds in London, the foremost portraitist of his age. Reynolds wrote back, urging him to cross the Atlantic at once: "You would be... one of the first Painters in the World," if only he came "before your Manner and Taste were corrupted or fixed by working in your little way in Boston." West, the American painter who had already made a career in London, agreed. He found Copley's style too "liny," harsh and emphatic in outline but felt that could be corrected by "a sight of what has been done...