Whats in a Portrait?

What’s in a Portrait?

What’s in a portrait? Is it simply just a photographic image of a person only done in oil paints, or is there much more to it? Is a portrait a way of peeling away the layers of a person and visually representing who they really are? Gericault’s Monomania: Portrait of an Excessively Jealous Woman and Cezanne’s Madame Cezanne in the Conservatory are both portraits of women. Even though these paintings are portraits of women they are completely different portraits. These are not just paintings depicting two different women. They show us who they really are, or what they meant to the artist. The artists paint them in a way that represents how history and time period affect the way and artists paints.

In Gericault’s Monomania: Portrait of and Excessively Jealous Woman, the artist captures the pure emotion of a woman suffering from a debilitating mental disease. The composition is symmetrical for the most part and the subject is positioned in the center of the canvas, which emphasizes her more as a point of focus. The brushwork is visible, but disappears around her face where there is great detail to clearly show her emotional state. The rest of her contains very visible brushwork, and it’s very sketchy. Most of her body doesn’t even seem to be brushed, but more like the paint has been blocked in with a palette knife, thus making the details of the face stand out more. Contours have been completely eliminated in this painting; he uses direct tone and color instead to convey the painting. There seems to be no direct light source everything seems to be in the dark, perhaps hinting at the subject’s mental state of mind. The only thing that seems remotely lit up is the women’s face drawing more attention to the expression on it. The colors are of a darker palette, and there is a slight sense of complimentary colors with the red and a very deep dark green. The repetition of the color red in her clothes and again in her eyes is a very strong emphasis in this painting. It helps draw more attention to her expression thus adding more emotional content to the painitng. Plus, the red in her eyes alludes to her instability. There is no sense of deep space. The women seems have been painted from straight on, although there is something to the right of the artist that is drawing her attention that way, quite possibly making her have her present expression.