Say Cheese! The Artist Will See You Now

Be it a king or a commoner, the portrait remains a paradox, reflecting reality and illusion in a single frame.

Jonathan Yeo, King Charles III official portrait, 2024

A caricature artist beckons you to sit for a few minutes as you wander along a tourist avenue. You indulge them and leave with a permanent marker drawing on paper. The exaggerated facial features make you smile. The next day you are at a studio for a passport photo in harsh white light. “Don’t smile,” the photographer tells you as you sit stiffly against a white backdrop. Very few would be fortunate to have an artist paint their portrait, notwithstanding the playful lament of John Singer Sargent, the leading portrait painter of the Edwardian era: “Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.”

Juan Gris, Portrait of Pablo Picasso, 1912

A portrait goes to the core of one’s very being, forcing a confrontation between existence and perception. Photographer and writer Paul Caponigro states the dilemma: “It’s one thing to make a picture of what a person looks like, it’s another thing to make a portrait of who they are.” Can any medium truly capture a person as they are? As they perceive themselves to be? Fashion photographer Richard Avedon goes further: “A portrait isn’t a fact but an opinion - an occasion rather than a truth.”

The daguerrotype changed the fundamentals of portraiture, introducing a novel way of being documented in a two-dimensional format. Photographs could capture a subject as no realist painter could, and photographers became a new kind of artist. Modern portrait artists who use photography as their medium would consider the poignant belief that a photo steals a person’s soul, a compliment of the highest order. To be able to convey the true and complete essence of a person is a formidable, if impossible task. Henri Cartier-Bresson said, “In a portrait, I’m looking for the silence in somebody.” His portraits of Mahatma Gandhi are now iconic. In photojournalist Raghu Rai’s black and white portraits of Mother Teresa, Ustad Bismillah Khan, and leading figures from all fields, he in his own words, “picked up a fact of life, and that fact will live forever.”

But even with the ubiquitous presence of photography, a painted portrait continues to offer something unique and intangible. Sitting for a portrait is an intimate act between an artist and their model. Even if they are working off a photograph, allowing someone else to represent who you are takes courage and faith. Artists from Mughal durbars created exquisitely detailed, stylized royal portraits, replete with symbolism. They represent ideals of beauty, wisdom, statesmanship and power, aesthetically sublime, yet conveying the gravitas of the emperor, portraying him as he wanted to be seen and remembered. President Obama’s portrait by Kehinde Wiley shows him on a chair almost engulfed by “nature and symbolic flowers that reflect both his personal and professional history.” In the 2024 official portrait by Jonathan Yeo, King Charles III seems to emerge like a phantom from a background constructed of violent, red brushstrokes. This jarringly contemporary rendering is an especially enigmatic choice for a man who has spent decades as king-in-waiting while advocating for a return to traditional and conservative architecture and art practices.

Portraits of those not necessarily running the world offer even more room for artistic freedom and interpretation. There’s Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, a portrait so popular that poems have been written about her beguiling smile. M.V. Dhurandhar’s portrait of his wife, is a masterpiece of academic realism, and yet conveys something deeper lurking beneath the surface. Raja Ravi Varma portrays his models with finesse, while also imbuing them with classical virtues sometimes dictated by the commissioning client. Whistler’s portrait of his mother is an intently observed study of motherhood, austerity, and the melancholy of ageing. Grant Wood’s American Gothic, is more than a portrait of a farmer and his daughter, it is also a statement on the mid-western rural ethos of the 1930s. Colleagues and friends – Husain and Ram Kumar’s – portraits of each other have an informal ease, exuding warmth and compassion. Juan Gris’ 1912 Portrait of Pablo Picasso pays homage to Cubism, with the torso, neck and head deconstructed into planes that defy the structure of a human body - and yet he is identifiable as Picasso. Each of these portraits is as unique a representation of its subject as it is a revelation about the mind of the artist who painted it.

Picasso once asked, “Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?” The conundrum lies in defining the word “correctly.” Whether royal or plebe, we persist in wanting to be portrayed as something we feel we are, in our hearts and souls, through whatever medium is available to us in our lifetime. In Camera Lucida, his book on semiology and photography, Roland Barthes writes, “great portrait photographers are great mythologists.” A portrait, quite simply, is a story about a person, told by the artist. The inimitable Salvador Dali however claimed, “I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.”

(The author is an architect, writer, editor, and artist. Her column meanders through the vibrant world of art, examining exhibitions, offering critiques, delving into theory and exploring everything in between and beyond.)