Portraits

Mark Miller remarked in a recent conversation that most informal portrait photos are terribly composed, with the head of the subject in the dead center of the (mostly empty) frame. For him, they are hopeless to turn into paintings. High up on the wall of his studio, he pointed to a large canvas based on one such photograph. It seemed not to have gone anywhere for a long time.
 
I thought of that comment as I was browsing through a catalog of an old exhibition of paintings from the Hermitage. I find many Old Master portraits dead boring; the worst are the ones of high-status sitters, who probably came in with strong opinions about what a portrait is supposed to look like:

Gerard Ter Borch

Portrait of Catarina van Leunink (between 1654-81)

State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia

On the other hand, I was stunned by this Ter Bruggen - it is a jumble of faces, hands, and objects, obviously placed for compositional interest.

Hendrik Ter Bruggen

Concert, 1626

State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia

 

 

I was also reminded of this Ribera in the Art Institute of Chicago:

 

Jusepe de Ribera

Penitent Saint Peter, 1628-32

Art Institue of Chicago

 

 

Nominally, the Ter Bruggen and the Ribera are not portraits, but genre scenes and religious paintings respectively. However, all three pictures here are "paintings of faces". You can argue in favor of the first that it conveys a lot of psychological depth and other like things that people say about portraits, but compositionally it is pretty dull.