A Closer Look at the Art of Portraiture

Sitting around being sketched and photographed can be wearying, especially for someone who is used to being active and animated. That requires portrait artists to know what to talk about (for then Vice-President George H.W. Bush, they discussed what they watched together on Meet the Press), and sometimes what to listen to. In 2005, singer Tony Bennett came to Marc Mellon's Redding, Connecticut studio for a sitting. For the occasion, Mellon "upgraded my sound system, and I played standards, the American song book, sung by people he knew."

Hearing the music kept Bennett cheerful for the whole two hours. "He told me stories about this buddy, that old friend."

Unique Gift

On the other hand, posthumous subjects present a whole series of other challenges. Measurements of the sort routinely taken of living subjects -- from the bottom of the chin to the eyebrows, from the widow's peak to the tip of the nose, from the left earlobe to the right side of the mouth, the width of the nostrils (there can be 20 or 30 different measurements taken, depending upon the portrait artist) using calipers, a metal scissor-like instrument with bowed ends -- are necessarily less exact, and photographs are usually focused on the individual's face.

Portrait Oil Painting

What the top or back of the subject's head looks like can be pure guesswork. Portrait painters can get away with things that portrait sculptors cannot. Perhaps the most difficult commission that Wendy Ross ever undertook was a larger-than-life-sized bronze portrait of American Founding Father George Mason (1725-92), which was installed on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. in 2002.

Not only were there no photographs to work from, there were few portraits ever painted of him, and the earliest was done 12 years after Mason's death by D.W. Boudet, which hangs in Mason's ancestral home in Virginia.