Famous Portrait Paintings
Faces from five centuries: Leonardo, Vermeer, Van Eyck, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Klimt and Sargent.
16 prints · printed to order on heavyweight matte paper · framed or unframed
The painted face
A portrait records a person; the great ones record a presence. Leonardo worked on the Mona Lisa for years and never delivered it; Vermeer's girl with a pearl earring is not a portrait at all but a tronie, a study of a type, which is why she has no name. Rembrandt painted himself some forty times across his life, and Van Gogh more than thirty in four years, each one a report on his own state.
The works in this collection
The Mona Lisa and Lady with an Ermine; Girl with a Pearl Earring; the Arnolfini Portrait; Klimt's Adele Bloch-Bauer I and Emilie Flöge; Sargent's Madame X; Whistler's Mother; Leighton's Flaming June; Monet's Woman with a Parasol; Rembrandt's self-portrait of 1659, The Jewish Bride and The Anatomy Lesson; Van Gogh's two self-portraits of 1887; Schiele's self-portrait.
On the wall
A portrait wants to be met at eye level, so hang it where people stand or sit facing it: a hallway, a landing, above a desk. Most are upright and suit 16×24 in a slim frame; the Klimt portraits in gold take a dark wall.