All around, displayed like portraits against the wood paneling, were the residents of the East 80s, confident that for as long as their dinner at Crown lasted, the tiny flames and gentle wattage and dark lampshades would conspire to cast them and their jewelry in the kindest possible light.
While we have no 19th-century artist equal in stature to Manet, or indeed to Goya, it would be instructive to see some of Goya's full-length portraits against those of Gainsborough – especially the wonderful Mary, Countess Howe from Kenwood House in Hampstead, London.
Most of Pisanello's painted portraits, such as the Margherita Gonzaga (c. 1438), and Lionello d'Este (c. 1440), show the sitter in profile (a convention of Pisanello's portrait medals) against a background of delicate, colourful flowers and butterflies.
In a 17th-century painting of an Indian woman done in Brazil by the Dutch artist Albert Eckhout, the nude subject strikes a conventional portrait pose against a bucolic landscape.
A contact sheet of Julia's long legs, propped up in a telephone booth; her open, ruddy face as she arranges a picnic in a newly mown field; Julia sunbathing with a friend on a Paris rooftop; a nude portrait, silhouetted against a closed curtain in a hotel room.
So, while we were hanging out, I took his portrait up against the wall.
Use passport-style photographs, head & shoulders portrait taken against a plain white or solid color background.
The details in the studio portraits, framed against bare backdrops, are intimately attached to the sitters.
A series of colorful, vigorously impastoed portraits push against formal limits with strange cropping.
