Portrait Paintings For Sale
Whether you are looking for an original Portrait painting or a high quality art print, Saatchi Art has over 35,602 original Portrait paintings for sale from emerging artists around the world. Read more
Portrait paintings, when skillfully executed, have the amazing ability to convey not only the exterior likenesses of the sitters, but their interior qualities as well. This can be achieved through the artist’s judicious choice of pose, setting, dress, props (often symbolic), and/or color, among many other elements. If you’re an admirer of fine art portraiture, we encourage you to explore Saatchi Art’s vast selection of portraiture paintings for sale. We’re very proud to offer a wide array of exquisite portrait paintings created by some of the world’s most talented emerging artists.
Portraiture is an artistic style that has interested artists throughout human history. One of the oldest known portraits in the world comes from Czech Republic, and is roughly 26,000 years old. It depicts a woman’s face, and was made from mammoth ivory. Some of the earliest surviving painted portraits of people who were not kings or emperors come from the ancient Egyptians; they often painted funeral portraits of their dead. They were also known for depicting their dead on sarcophagi. Portraiture can also be traced back to ancient Greco-Roman art, where artists sought to capture the likeness of famous leaders and gods in the form of wall-paintings, sculpture, and even coins. During the Renaissance period, artists became fascinated with both the natural world and Greco-Roman culture. This lead to a renewed interest in exploring portraiture. In the subsequent Baroque and Rococo periods, artists were commissioned to create portraits in order to record an individual’s social status. During the 19th century, the growing middle class began to have their portraits commissioned as well. This interest was expounded upon by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists; much of their artwork depicts the working class and bourgeoisie, as well as their family and friends. The interest in portraiture has been carried into the 20th century, and most notably explored by two very well-known English artists, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud.
An artist will create a portrait in order to capture the likeness of an individual. A portrait can feature one person, a couple, or a large group, such as a family. The subject might be nude or clothed; standing or sitting; or even riding a horse. The subject might be painted in full or half length, head and shoulders, or just the head. In order to successfully execute a portrait, an artist must study the subject(s) at length; this may require a number of sittings and sketches. The artist may place the subject close or far from the picture plane. This may affect the viewer’s relationship with the subject. A subject placed close to the picture plane connotes a sense of familiarity; a subject placed far back connotes formality. A self-portrait refers to a portrait that the artist creates of themselves.
Rembrandt van Rijn is remembered today for his self-portraits, which many believe are the most impressive ever created. A very well-known portrait painting by a famous artist is “Mona Lisa” by Leonardo Da Vinci. The ambiguity of the subject’s facial expression still inspires much fascination in its many viewers at the Louvre today. Two famous artists from the 19th century, Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet, were fascinated in creating portraits that featured those of the lower class and the bourgeoisie. John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was an American artist who was considered to be one of the leading portrait painters of his generation. Perhaps his most famous portrait painting is “Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau)”, which depicts a young socialite named Virginie Amelie Avegno Gautreau; she was notorious in Parisian high society for her beauty and indiscrete affairs. Another scintillating famous figure painting portrait is “Olympia” by Edouard Manet, which depicts a nude woman gazing directly at the viewer. Chuck Close is well-known for his photorealist and massive-scale portrait paintings, and he uses very detailed patterns in order to portray his subjects. Other famous portraitists include Raphael, Titian, Thomas Gainsborough, Gustav Klimt, Jacques-Louis David, Vincent Van Gogh, Edgar Degas, Amedeo Modigliani, Frida Kahlo, Andy Warhol, and Kehinde Wiley.
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Artemisia Gentileschi was invited to London in 1638 by Charles I, and probably produced this sophisticated and accomplished self-portrait in England. She holds a brush in one hand and a palette in the other, cleverly identifying herself as the female personification of painting – something her male contemporaries could never do.
It was probably during her brief English sojourn (1638-c.1641) that Artemisia Gentileschi produced this painting. She was invited in 1638 by Charles I to come to London to join her father, Orazio Gentilieschi, who had been working in England since 1626. On one level the work depicts an allegorical figure of Painting, and was described as such in Charles I’s inventory. Artemisia follows the standard emblematic handbook of the period, the Iconologia of Cesare Ripa, where Painting is described as ‘a beautiful woman, with full black hair, dishevelled, and twisted in various ways, with arched eyebrows that show imaginative thought, the mouth covered with a cloth tied behind her ears, with a chain of gold at her throat from which hangs a mask, and has written in front ‘imitation”. Artemisia captures the essentials of this description, leaving out the inscription on the mask and the gagged mouth, intended to symbolise that Painting is dumb. With clothes of evanescently coloured drapery, she holds a brush in one hand and a palette in the other. The work is also, however, a self-portrait: as a woman artist, Artemisia identifies herself as the female personification of Painting. There are precedents for this conflation of identities in representations of female artists. The portrait medal struck by Felice Antonio Casoni, celebrating the Cremonese painter Lavinia Fontana, depicts on the obverse a profile portrait of the artist, while on the reverse appears an allegory of Painting. Artemisia here fuses two established visual traditions within a single image.
Few of Artemisia’s self-portraits survive and the references to them in the artist’s correspondence only hint at what others might have looked like. An engraving after a painted self-portrait of Artemisia by Jerome David, a bronze medal of 1625-8, and the portrait of her by Simon Vouet (private collection, Bergamo) are additional visual sources which may hint at her likeness. Her self-portrait has been identified in many other of her paintings, such as her Woman with Lute (Curtis Galleries, Minneapolis) and the recently attributed Self-portrait as a Female Martyr (private collection), and in many of her other religious paintings, which give some indication of how she represented herself.
It is clear that Artemisia’s image was very much in demand among seventeenth-century collectors, who were attracted by her outstanding artistic abilities and her unusual status as a female artist. The Roman collector and antiquarian Cassiano dal Pozzo was one of her strongest supporters. Writing to him in 1630, she notes: ‘I have painted my portrait with the utmost care’; in a later letter, she promises that she is sending ‘my portrait, which you once requested’. Some scholars have suggested that these two letters refer to the Royal Collection painting, which for some reason Artemisia never sent to Dal Pozzo, but instead brought with her to England. In 1630 she would have been in her mid-thirties, which corresponds with the apparent age in the present picture. However, it would have been odd for Artemisia to break her promise to send the self-portrait mentioned in her letter to Cassiano dal Pozzo, one of her most prestigious patrons. Certain scholars have inclined to the view that the Cassiano self-portrait has been lost and that this is another, completed after Artemisia’s arrival in London in 1638 (when she was 46 years old).
Artemisia wears a brown apron over her green dress and seems to be leaning on a stone slab used for grinding pigments in which the reflection of her left arm is visible. Underdrawing along her left arm may indicate where she marked out a position for her arm: quick, expert brushwork can be seen in the way in which she has depicted this arm as barely suggested. The area of brown behind her has been interpreted as background, or as a blank canvas on which she is about to paint. It looks like prepared canvas and was always thinly painted, but it is worn and may bear a closer resemblance than was the artist’s intention. She used the ground left exposed to suggest areas of shadow: particularly striking is the rolled up sleeve of her right arm, where fluid strokes of white delineating the edge of her sleeve meet the brown shadow of exposed ground. The position of the fingers of her right hand are different in infra-red reflectography and x-radiography, suggesting that the artist was resolving this area as she worked, eventually lengthening the index finger.
As a self-portrait the painting is particularly sophisticated and accomplished. The position in which Artemisia has portrayed herself would have been extremely difficult for the artist to capture, yet the work is economically painted, with very few pentiments. In order to view her own image she may have arranged two mirrors on either side of herself, facing each other. Depicting herself in the act of painting in this challenging pose, the angle and position of her head would have been the hardest to accurately render, requiring skilful visualisation.
With this fascinating work Artemisia Gentileschi contributed to seventeenth-century visual arguments concerning the elevated status of the artist.
Catalogue entry adapted from The Art of Italy in the Royal Collection: Renaissance and Baroque, London, 2007
Provenance
Recorded by the Trustees of the Sales of Charles I in October 1649, at Hampton Court as ‘A Pintura A painteinge: by Arthemisia’; sold for £20 to Jackson and others on 23 October 1651 from Hampton Court (no 5); recovered at the Restoration and listed in the Passage at Whitehall in 1666 (no 293)
