What is a Portrait?

An explanation...

The traditional definition for a portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture or other artistic representation of a person. However in more modern times, portraiture now includes subjects such as animals, domestic or otherwise and inanimate objects such houses, cars or indeed any subject singled out as the main focus for the creative piece.

If in a composition the subject is a person or animals, they are usually depicted in three ways, as a head study, head and shoulders or the full figure. Most often with inanimate objects, the subject is displayed in its entirety.

With people or animals, the intent is to capture the likeness, personality and even the mood of the subject. For this reason especially in photography, a portrait is generally not a snapshot, but a composed image of a person or animal in a still position.

A portrait often has the subject looking directly at the viewer to engage them with the ‘artwork’ and the subject.
This is not a hard and fast rule for portraiture but it is most commonly used as a composition for people portraits. For animals however, the more natural look to the subject is often preferred, which can entail the subject looking away from the viewer. Direct eye contact with some animal subjects can sometimes be confrontational, although this may be the intention of the artist or the client.

The variety of subjects for portrait art and the way they are represented is ever increasing as an art form. This is mostly due to the growing demand by customers of fine art to have their favourite subjects, alive or otherwise, immortalized forever.