Here are nine portraits; four from the 2022 exhibition at Tate Britain, ‘Life Between Islands’ (exhibition guide), and five from the permanent collection of European art at the Courtauld Gallery (17th-19th Century rooms).
There’s also this good blog post by the Tate looking at five more works if you would like to explore further.
Paul Dash – Self Portrait – 1979 – Oil on Canvas
This self portrait painting, no bigger than A3, was possibly my favourite work from the whole exhibition. Dash places himself centrally on the canvas, looking intently into a mirror to find every detail of his face to capture a likeness. The light, coming from the left, is recorded in jigsaw-like pieces, travelling across his cheek and stopping on the side of his nose. His top lip is in shadow, which is common in portraiture, suggesting light is coming from above rather than below. Lighting is very important to consider when making a portrait. To get a likeness, we need to observe and record what we really see rather than what we think we see. For example, Dash’s glasses look believable because he has searched and found the fine detail where the rims change from light to shadow. Dash’s portrait is further enhanced by planning the colour scheme of the painting; the striking shapes of red, yellow and blue primary colours of his clothing and the green and brown shapes in the background make for an eye catching abstract layout.
Claudette Johnson – Reclining Figure (detail) – 2017 – Pastel and Gouache on Paper
Johnson’s work was huge; about a two metres across, making the chalk pastel painted head far bigger than life size. Using mostly dark brown pastel, with only a tad of black, Johnson has gently scumbled using the side of the medium to pick up the texture of the paper, creating a sort of half tone effect. The face has been constructed with shapes of tone; either light, mid or dark, upon which the white of the eye have been placed, as has the nostril and the dark centre line of the mouth. So long as we get these suggestions of features in the right place, we should get a good likeness.
Full image here.
Boyce builds up and layers oil pastel marks, all hatched in the same diagonal direction. Can you guess from this whether Boyce is right or left handed? The marks cover most of the face; burnt sienna for the mid tone, blue and umber for the shadows and Naples Yellow for the light, all carefully layered over the top of each other, without over-working the face to feel muddy.
Full image here.
This three and a half meter wide mixed media work portrays six people, as well as additional portraits within the photographs on the wall, and on the television! The figure on the left has been painted in profile, where the ins and outs of the face edge have been painted by carefully cutting in with the background colour. Once the head shape is achieved, the artist can add shapes of tone to describe the position and shapes of the features, for example, the dark line of the eye lashes, and the shapes under the nose and the bottom lip.
A touching group portrait of artist Brueghel’s family wearing their finest clothes. See the complete work here.
Looking closely at one of the children’s eyes in the painting, we see that the oil paint has been applied quite thickly. It’s most likely that the paint would have been built up in layers, thinly to start with, then increasing the amount on the brush each time, ‘fat over lean’. Each thicker layer will require increasing amounts of oil to make the paint more flexible to avoid cracking when the paint dries. One of the advantages artists find with painting portraits with oils is that they dry slowly, allowing wet paint to be pushed into wet paint, softening and blending the marks to achieve a believable surface texture to the skin.
The palette of colours is limited, and very simple. You can achieve similar effects today with Naples Yellow, Burnet Umber, a Rose for the cheeks and a warmer red for the lips. For the shadows, Reubens has used a cool blue grey, for example under the bottom lip. You could try adding Cerulean Blue to your palette for this.
I found this nice 3 minute time lapse video showing the painting stages an artist went through to copy a Reuben’s painting. You’ll notice that the artist uses the Grizale technique, painting in tone before glazing with colours. Whether this is how Reuben’s painted, I don’t know.
A skilful portrait by Gainsborough, of his wife, not only showing off his portrait skills, but also his ability to paint a variety of textures of clothing. See the complete painting here.
When we focus in on one of the eyes, we can see that Gainsborough describes the contours of the skin with the direction of the brush mark. We can also see thinner, translucent paint has been applied on top of the thicker paint to add detail. The addition of thinner, brittle paint, on top of thicker, more flexible paint, might be the reason for the cracking that’s occurred. If you are interested in reading about why paints crack, have a look at the National Galleries post about it here.
Gainsborough has used very similar colours to those Reubens used. Also, look out for the addition of the small white paint dots used for highlights, painted with a thick lump of paint, to catch the actual light from the gallery, making them look even whiter.
If you would like to see all 553 paintings Gainsborough made throughout his life, follow this link.
On to Impressionism. Compared to the previous two works from the Courtauld Gallery, Berthe Morisot’s painting of a woman, possibly her sister, has a slightly unfinished quality to it; as was the case with most Impressionist paintings. You can see the whole painting here. The paint has been applied thicker than the previous two works, using less layers. Again, the colours are similar to those that the previous two artists used, including the little dashes of purple that could be seen in the portrait by Gainsborough. Highlights have been applied to the tip of the nose and the lip to help them come forward, and neutral earth, and green-grey colours, have been used for shadows.
A good technique to discover the true colours an artist has used is to make a small hole (like the hole a hole punch makes) in a white sheet of paper and place it against the screen. Sometimes the actual colour you see through the hole is quite different to what you might expect.
I feel that the darks used in this painting have less warmth to them than the previous two works, like the difference between using Raw Umber and Burnt Umber. I particularly like the suggestion of the earring in this painting, with the bright gold highlights glowing against the cool, neutral, grey background. Don’t forget…. cool colours recede.
Pierre – Auguste Renoir – Portrait of Ambroise Vollard – 1908 – Oil paint on canvas
Ambroise Vollard was one of the most important art dealers of the time.
Again, the skin is painted with brush marks that describe the form of the face. You can follow the marks across the forehead, curving around the eye socket, and down the cheek. However, unlike the previous three paintings, Renoir has most likely used a round pointed brush to make his dashes, rather than a more commonly used filbert shaped brush. Clarkart states that ‘while Monet created harsh and clearly circumscribed brushstrokes with fat pigments and flat-ended brushes, Renoir employed thinned paint to create liquid strokes of colour that shimmered across his canvases.’ There are similarities between the mark making of Renoir and that of Boyce in the first section of this post.
And finally, a Post Impressionist painting; possibly the most contemporary looking painting of them all in the Courtauld Gallery. You can see the whole image here.
Henri de Toulouse – Lautrec, famed for painting the night life and people of Paris’s Montmartre district, also produced posters, illustrations and caricatures. You can see how these different forms of image making are likely to have influenced his painting technique; laying down flat areas of colour, before adding small amounts of detail on top, using sketchy marks of paint or pastel to show the features and outlines of the face.