Let’s end this month of portraits with the most famous and most sung about and certainly most visited in the world.
In fact if you ever plan to visit the Louvre and have a good look at the painting, don’t get your hopes up too much.
Here’s a photo I took the last time we went to Paris (2009). 

At the front row you can see a woman with auburn hair and a boy with glasses, these are my wife and son.
This was on a weekday shortly after opening.

Leonardo da Vinci
(1452 - 1519)

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian polymath of the High Renaissance who was active as a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect. While his fame initially rested on his achievements as a painter, he has also become known for his notebooks, in which he made drawings and notes on a variety of subjects, including anatomy, astronomy, botany, cartography, painting, and palaeontology. Leonardo is widely regarded to have been a genius who epitomised the Renaissance humanist ideal, and his collective works comprise a contribution to later generations of artists matched only by that of his younger contemporary Michelangelo.

Mona Lisa (Gioconda)
c. 1503–1506, perhaps continuing until c. 1517
Oil on poplar panel
77 cm × 53 cm
The Louvre, Paris

The painting has been traditionally considered to depict the Italian noblewoman Lisa del Giocondo. 

It is painted in oil on a white poplar panel. 

Leonardo never gave the painting to the Giocondo family. It was believed to have been painted between 1503 and 1506; however, Leonardo may have continued working on it as late as 1517. 

King Francis I of France acquired the Mona Lisa after Leonardo's death in 1519, and it is now the property of the French Republic. 

It has normally been on display at the Louvre in Paris since 1797.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa

 Jacques-Émile Blanche
(1861 - 1942)
 

Jacques-Émile Blanche was a French artist, largely self-taught, who became a successful portrait painter, working in London and Paris.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques-Émile_Blanche

Portrait de Claude Debussy
1903
Oil on canvas
34 x 41 cm
Collections de la Ville de Saint-Germain-en-Laye

(Achille) Claude Debussy (22 August 1862 – 25 March 1918) was a French composer. He is sometimes seen as the first Impressionist composer, although he vigorously rejected the term. He was among the most influential composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This portrait was painted in the garden of the painter's house in Auteuil in 1903. The session was interrupted by a passing downpour which gave the composer this "air of white cheese tired by the nights" but which inspired the third piece of the “Prints for the piano”: “Gardens in the rain”.

 Vincent van Gogh
(1853 - 1890)
 

Vincent Willem van Gogh was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade, he created approximately 2100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of them in the last two years of his life. His oeuvre includes landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and self-portraits, most of which are characterized by bold colors and dramatic brushwork that contributed to the rise of expressionism in modern art. Van Gogh's work was beginning to gain critical attention before he died from a self-inflicted gunshot at age 37. During his lifetime, only one of Van Gogh's paintings, The Red Vineyard, was sold.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_van_Gogh

Portrait of Armand Roulin
1888
Oil on canvas
65,5 x 54,3 cm
Museum Boijmans - Van Beuningen, Rotterdam
https://www.boijmans.nl/en/collection/artworks/3905/portrait-of-armand-roulin

While staying in Arles in the south of France, Van Gogh befriended the station postal clerk Joseph Roulin. He portrayed the whole family: the postal clerk, his wife, their baby daughter and also their son, who can be seen here. The 17 year old Armand, with his downy moustache and gloomy look, is a true adolescent.

Edgar Degas
(1834 - 1917)
 

Edgar Degas was a French Impressionist artist famous for his pastel drawings and oil paintings.
Degas also produced bronze sculptures, prints, and drawings. Degas is especially identified with the subject of dance; more than half of his works depict dancers. Although Degas is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism, he rejected the term, preferring to be called a realist, and did not paint outdoors as many Impressionists did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Degas

Portrait of a Young Woman
C. 1885
Oil on canvas
27,3 x 22,2 cm
The MET
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436153

This small portrait appears to be a rapidly executed study of mood and figure type. Degas, who was closely attuned to the nuances of gesture and expression, focused on capturing the woman’s contemplative gaze, treating her costume and the background in a more summary fashion.

Paul Cézanne
(1839 - 1906)
 

Paul Cézanne was a French Post-Impressionist painter whose work introduced new modes of representation and influenced avant-garde artistic movements of the early 20th century. Cézanne is said to have formed the bridge between late 19th-century Impressionism and early 20th century Cubism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Cézanne

Portrait of Anthony Valabrègue
1869-1871
oil on canvas.
60 x 50,2 cm.
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/103RGP

When a jury member at the Paris Salon of 1866 first saw Paul Cézanne's portrait of the journalist and critic Antony Valabrègue, he exclaimed that the portrait was not painted with a knife but with a pistol. Although the Salon refused him admission, Cézanne continued to paint many portraits of his friend, including the present example, thought to have been painted around 1869 to 1871.

For this painting, Cézanne used a palette knife rather than brushes. With the spatula-like instrument, he applied paint in thick, successive layers, giving the surface a complex, rough-and-smooth texture. He then used the knife to squeeze the paints together so that they mixed directly on the canvas. In this fashion Cézanne moved the paint around, eliminating contour lines and instead creating impastoed areas of color, as if sculpting in paint. In another portrait of his friend made four years earlier, the coarse, almost violent appearance created by Cézanne's technique led Valabrègue to complain in a letter to the writer Zola: "He has given me such a fierce complexion that it reminds me of the statue of Champfleury when it was stained with squashed blackberries."

Fujishima Takeji
(1867 - 1943)
 

Fujishima Takeji (藤島 武二) was a Japanese painter, noted for his work in developing Romanticism and impressionism within the yōga (Western-style) art movement in late 19th- and early 20th-century Japanese painting. In his later years, he was influenced by the Art Nouveau movement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujishima_Takeji

Portrait of an Italian Lady
1908
Oil on canvas
39,4 x 49,4 cm
Fukuoka Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan

Fujishima finally was able to travel to Europe in 1906 at the age of 38. After studying in Paris he then we t to Italy where he studied with the portrait-specialist, Carolus-Duran, a member of the French Academy and then the head of the French Academy in Rome. This work is thought to have been painted during Fujishima's stay in Rome and minimizes the literary lyricism seen in his images of women prior to his European sojourn. Here the artist focuses on a search for firm formal modeling. Fujishima has used his limited palette to provide a precise rendering of his model's features, an approach indicative of his thorough understanding of the Academic methods of figural depiction.

Frederic Leighton
(1830 - 1896)

Frederic Leighton, 1st Baron Leighton, PRA, known as Sir Frederic Leighton between 1878 and 1896, was a British Victorian painter, draughtsman, and sculptor. His works depicted historical, biblical, and classical subject matter in an academic style. His paintings were enormously popular and expensive, during his lifetime, but fell out of critical favour for many decades in the early 20th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederic_Leighton

Portrait of May Sartoris
c.1860
Oil on canvas,
152 x 90 cm
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, US.
https://kimbellart.org/collection/acf-196403

In 1853, the young Leighton met Adelaide Sartoris, a former opera singer and celebrated hostess whose friendship provided him with an entrée into artistic and fashionable society. He seems to have painted this celebrated portrait of Adelaide’s daughter, Mary Theodosia (May) around 1860, the year after he settled in London. She is aged about fifteen and depicted in the setting of the family’s country residence in Hampshire. The fallen tree suggests the passage of time and mortality, accentuating her fragile beauty.

 Juan Gris
(1887 - 1927)

José Victoriano González-Pérez better known as Juan Gris, was a Spanish painter born in Madrid who lived and worked in France for most of his active period. Closely connected to the innovative artistic genre Cubism, his works are among the movement's most distinctive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Gris

Portrait of Pablo Picasso
1912
Oil on canvas
93,3 x 74,4 cm
The Art Institute of Chicago
https://www.artic.edu/artworks/8624/portrait-of-pablo-picasso

In 1906 Juan Gris traveled to Paris, where he met Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and participated in the development of Cubism. Just six years later, Gris too was known as a Cubist and identified by at least one critic as “Picasso’s disciple.” Gris’s style draws upon Analytic Cubism—with its deconstruction and simultaneous viewpoint of objects—but is distinguished by a more systematic geometry and crystalline structure. Here he fractured his sitter’s head, neck, and torso into various planes and simple, geometric shapes but organized them within a regulated, compositional structure of diagonals. The artist further ordered the composition of this portrait by limiting his palette to cool blue, brown, and gray tones that, in juxtaposition, appear luminous and produce a gentle undulating rhythm across the surface of the painting.
Gris depicted Picasso as a painter, palette in hand. The inscription at the bottom right of the painting, “Hommage à Pablo Picasso,” demonstrates Gris’s respect for Picasso as a leader of the artistic circles of Paris and as an innovator of Cubism. At the same time, the inscription helped Gris solidify his own place within the Paris art world when he exhibited the portrait at the Salon des Indépendants in the spring of 1912.

Henri Fantin-Latour
(1836 - 1904)
 

Henri Fantin-Latour was a French painter and lithographer best known for his flower paintings and group portraits of Parisian artists and writers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Fantin-Latour

Portrait of Mademoiselle Marie Fantin-Latour
1859
Oil on canvas
60,5 x 85,5 cm)
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery

This portrait of his sister was rejected by the Salon exhibition is 1859 for being unfinished. He had deliberately concentrated on her face and hands, leaving the clothes and background simply painted. Fantin-Latour’s work was instead exhibited, along with other works refused into the Salon exhibition, in the studio of the artist François Bouvin which became known as Boudin’s Atelier Flamand.

Mariano Fortuny
(1871 - 1949)

 

Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo was a Spanish polymath, artist, inventor and fashion designer who opened his couture house in 1906 and continued until 1946. He was the son of the painter Mariano Fortuny y Marsal.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariano_Fortuny_(designer)

Portrait of Henriette Fortuny
1915
tempera on cardboard
50,5 x 34 cm
Museo di Palazzo Fortuny, Venice

Jan Adam Kruseman
(1804 - 1862)
 

Jan Adam Kruseman was a Dutch painter, known primarily for his portraits, although he also did landscapes and genre scenes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Adam_Kruseman

Portrait of William II, King of the Netherlands
Portrait of Willem II (1792-1849)
1839
Oil on canvas
109,5 × 86 cm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/SK-C-170

This is a portrait of King William II in military uniform, but with a decidedly informal air. Accompanied by his hound, he poses casually in the dunes, which in the Romantic era was considered the quintessentially Dutch landscape. In 1848 –when revolutions were raging throughout Europe –William II renounced royal autocracy and the Netherlands became a parliamentary democracy.

Isaac Brodsky
(1883 - 1939)
 

Isaak Izrailevich Brodsky (Russian: Исаак Израилевич Бродский) was a Soviet painter whose work provided a blueprint for the art movement of socialist realism. He is known for his iconic portrayals of Lenin and idealized, carefully crafted paintings dedicated to the events of the Russian Civil War and Bolshevik Revolution. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaak_Brodsky

Portrait of Kliment Voroshilov in his Office
1929
Oil on canvas
115,7 x 87,2 cm
The institute of Russian Realist Art, Moscow, Russia

Giovanni Carnovali
(1804 - 1873)
 

Giovanni Carnovali known as Il Piccio ('the little one'), was an Italian painter.
Carnovali was born in Montegrino Valtravaglia (Varese). In 1815, at the age of just 11, he was admitted to the Carrara Academy in Bergamo under the guidance of the director Giuseppe Diotti, who immediately recognised his young pupil's natural talent. The artist soon began to break away from the strict Neoclassicism of his academic training and return to the figurative tradition of the 16th and 17th century, which he interpreted with great expressive freedom, especially in portrait painting. His debut at the exhibition of the Carrara Academy and his first major public commission for a work on a religious subject came in 1826. After the first short trips for study purposes, made on foot in the second half of the 1820s, he travelled as far as Rome in 1831 and stopped in Parma on the way back.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Carnovali

Portrait of Pietro Ronzoni
1825
Oil on panel
30 x 37 cm
Fondazione Cariplo, Milan, Italy

 

Ryūsei Kishida
(1891 - 1929)

 

Ryūsei Kishida (岸田 劉生) was a Japanese painter in Taishō and Shōwa period Japan. He is best known for his realistic yōga-style portraiture, but also for his nihonga paintings in the 1920s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryūsei_Kishida

 

Portrait of Koya Yoshio(Portrait of a Man Holding a Plant)
1916
Oil on canvas
33,5 x 45,5 cm
The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo

Friedrich Dürck
(1809 - 1884)
 

Friedrich Dürck was a German portrait and genre painter.
His uncle was the royal Bavarian court painter Joseph Stieler.
In 1828 (at 19 years old) he exhibited a portrait in public for the first time and soon became a well-known painter in Munich. He traveled to Italy in 1836 and stayed in Rome and Florence until 1837. After his return he lived in Munich and portrayed numerous personalities from public life and the Bavarian court, including King Ludwig I in 1858. In 1849 he accepted an invitation to the Swedish court and in 1854 to the Austrian court. After 1860 he painted mainly genre and costume paintings.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Dürck

Portrait of D. Amélia
c. 1837-1839
Oil on canvas
39 x 45 cm
Museu Imperial, Petrópolis, Brazil

Thomas Cromwell Corner
(1865 - 1938)
 

Thomas Cromwell Corner was a portrait artist from Baltimore, Maryland, USA and founding member of the Baltimore Museum of Art.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Cromwell_Corner

Henry Walters (1848-1931)
1938
Oil on canvas
116 x 98 cm
The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore
https://art.thewalters.org/detail/6141/portrait-of-henry-walters/

In this posthumous portrait the founder of the Walters Art Museum, Henry Walters (1848-1931), is shown with three objects from his collection: a Mosan enamel plaque of the 12th century, a Limoges enamel reliquary of the 13th century, and a German brass statuette of St. Sebastian of the early 16th century. Henry is shown wearing the same stick-pin decorated with a Carthaginian stater that appears in another posthumous portrait commissioned from Frank O. Salisbury. This stick-pin is now in the museum's collection.

Mary Beale
(1633 - 1699)
 

Mary Beale was an English portrait painter. She was part of a small band of female professional artists working in London. Beale became the main financial provider for her family through her professional work – a career she maintained from 1670/71 to the 1690s. Beale was also a writer, whose prose Discourse on Friendship of 1666 presents a scholarly, uniquely female take on the subject. Her 1663 manuscript Observations, on the materials and techniques employed "in her painting of Apricots", though not printed, is the earliest known instructional text in English written by a female painter. Praised first as a "virtuous" practitioner in "Oyl Colours" by Sir William Sanderson in his 1658 book Graphice: Or The use of the Pen and Pensil; In the Excellent Art of PAINTING, Beale's work was later commended by court painter Sir Peter Lely and, soon after her death, by the author of "An Essay towards an English-School", his account of the most noteworthy artists of her generation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Beale

Portrait of a Physician
Late 17th century
Oil on panel
63,5 x 75,9 cm
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, UK

 Renato Guttuso
(1911 - 1987)
 

Aldo Renato Guttuso was an Italian painter and politician. He is considered to be among the most important Italian artists of the 20th century and is among the key figures of Italian expressionism. His art is characterized by social and political commentary, and as a member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) he became its senator for two legislatures, from 1976 to 1983, during Enrico Berlinguer's secretariat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renato_Guttuso

Portrait of Alberto Moravia
1982
Oil on canvas
125 x 100 cm
Casa Museo Alberto Moravia, Rome, Italy
https://casaalbertomoravia.it/it/percorsi/percorsi_per_sale/soggiorno/ritratto_moravia_con_maglione_rosso

Alberto Pincherle (28 November 1907 – 26 September 1990), known by his pseudonym Alberto Moravia, was an Italian novelist and journalist. His novels explored matters of modern sexuality, social alienation and existentialism. Moravia is best known for his debut novel Gli indifferenti (The Time of Indifference 1929) and for the anti-fascist novel Il conformista (The Conformist 1947), the basis for the film The Conformist (1970) directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. Other novels of his adapted for the cinema are Agostino, filmed with the same title by Mauro Bolognini in 1962; Il disprezzo (A Ghost at Noon or Contempt), filmed by Jean-Luc Godard as Le Mépris (Contempt 1963); La noia (Boredom), filmed with that title by Damiano Damiani in 1963 and released in the US as The Empty Canvas in 1964 and La ciociara, filmed by Vittorio De Sica as Two Women (1960). Cédric Kahn's L'Ennui (1998) is another version of La noia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto_Moravia

Francesco Hayez
(1791 - 1882)
 

Francesco Hayez was an Italian painter. He is considered one of the leading artists of Romanticism in mid-19th-century Milan, and is renowned for his grand historical paintings, political allegories, and portraits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesco_Hayez

Portrait of Carolina Zucchi (The Sick Woman) (Carolina in Bed)
1825
Oil on wood
49,4 x 60 cm
Galleria Civica di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Torino, Torino, Italy

The woman portrayed was Carolina Zucchi, Hayez’s model and student, with whom he also became sentimentally involved, forming an intense intimate relationship in around 1822.

Beauford Delaney
(1901- 1979)
 

Beauford Delaney was an American modernist painter. He is remembered for his work with the Harlem Renaissance in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as his later works in abstract expressionism following his move to Paris in the 1950s. Beauford's younger brother, Joseph, was also a noted painter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauford_Delaney

Portrait of James Baldwin
1965
Oil on canvas
64.8 × 54 cm
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, US

<i>Intense yellow brings a sacred and redemptive light to Beauford Delaney’s portraits of people he admired, as seen here framing the writer and Civil Rights activist James Baldwin (1924–1987).</I>

Jan Gossaert
(c. 1478 - 1532)
 

Jan Gossaert was a French-speaking painter from the Low Countries also known as Jan Mabuse (the name he adopted from his birthplace, Maubeuge) or Jennyn van Hennegouwe (Hainaut), as he called himself when he matriculated in the Guild of Saint Luke, at Antwerp, in 1503. He was one of the first painters of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting to visit Italy and Rome, which he did in 1508–09, and a leader of the style known as Romanism, which brought elements of Italian Renaissance painting to the north, sometimes with a rather awkward effect. He achieved fame across at least northern Europe, and painted religious subjects, including large altarpieces, but also portraits and mythological subjects, including some nudity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Gossaert

Portrait of Hendrik III, Count of Nassau-Breda
c. 1516–17
Oil on panel
57,2 x 45,8 cm
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas
https://kimbellart.org/collection/ap-197930

<i>In keeping with the meticulous attention to detail of the northern schools, Gossart carefully renders the textures of the carpet, fur collar, buttons, and checkered black-and-gold doublet, creating an image of jewel-like intensity. The count wears the pendant of the Order of the Golden Fleece, the elite chivalric order dedicated to the defense of the church.</I>

Frida Kahlo
(1907 - 1954)
 

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón was a Mexican painter known for her many portraits, self-portraits, and works inspired by the nature and artifacts of Mexico. Inspired by the country's popular culture, she employed a naïve folk art style to explore questions of identity, postcolonialism, gender, class, and race in Mexican society. Her paintings often had strong autobiographical elements and mixed realism with fantasy. In addition to belonging to the post-revolutionary Mexicayotl movement, which sought to define a Mexican identity, Kahlo has been described as a surrealist or magical realist. She is also known for painting about her experience of chronic pain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frida_Kahlo

Portrait of my Father Wilhelm Kahlo
1952
Oil on masonite
61 x 47 cm
Museo Frida KahloMuseo Frida Kahlo, Ciudad de México, Mexico

Frida Kahlo considered her father as a great example and influence. She painted him in 1951 next to his camera. In the bottom, she wrote: "I painted my father Wilhelm Kahlo, Hungarian-German born, professional photographer and artist, with a generous, intelligent and fine character, brave because he suffered of epilepsy for 60 years but he never stopped working, and he fought against Hitler, with love, His daughter Frida Kahlo".

Joshua Reynolds
(1723 - 1792)
 

Sir Joshua Reynolds PRA FRS FRSA was an English painter who specialised in portraits. John Russell said he was one of the major European painters of the 18th century. He promoted the "Grand Style" in painting, which depended on idealisation of the imperfect. He was a founder and first president of the Royal Academy of Arts and was knighted by George III in 1769.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Reynolds

Portrait of Master Bunbury
1780-1781
Oil on canvas
76,5 x 63,8 cm
Philadelphia Museum of Art
https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/103817

The sitter is Reynolds's three-year-old godson, whose attention the artist captured during the long sittings by telling fairy tales.

Sam Yeates
(b. 1951)
 

Sam Yeates is an American artist. He grew up on a farm 16 miles outside of Stephenville, Texas. After graduating from North Texas University with a BFA in Drawing and Painting, Sam Yeates began working for the Armadillo World Headquarters in the Capitol City, making posters and musical promotional art. Yeates freelanced for several years with clients, including Willie Nelson, Budweiser Brewing and Warner Bros. Records. In the late 80’s Yeates, began teaching painting, drawing, and mural execution at Austin Community College. He continues to paint, mostly with oils and acrylics, and exhibit his work that addresses his rural Texan upbringing, and the solitude of his native, wide-open landscapes.

https://www.samyeates.net/about-the-artist-and-contact

Portrait of a Woman with a Blue Guitar.
2001
Oil on canvas
South Austin Popular Culture Center

Francis Cotes
(1726 - 1770)
 

Francis Cotes RA was an English portrait painter, one of the pioneers of English pastel painting (or drawing), and a founding member of the Royal Academy in 1768.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Cotes

Portrait of Joseph (1741-1786) and his Brother John Gulston (1750-1764)
1754
Pastel on blue paper, mounted on canvas
67,3 x 82,6 cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, US
https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/108F5W

 

In this double pastel portrait, the brothers Joseph and John Gulston appear close-up in half-length, standing before an expanse of wooded landscape. The elder brother, Joseph, age thirteen, wears a "Van Dyck" costume, a costume in the style of Anthony van Dyck's portrait paintings from the 1600s. Also in a historicizing vein, his younger brother John wears a dress, traditionally worn by both boys and girls until they reached four years of age, and holds a wicker basket full of colorful summer blossoms.

Amrita Sher-Gil
(1913 - 1941)

Amrita Sher-Gil (was a Hungarian-Indian painter. She has been called "one of the greatest avant-garde women artists of the early 20th century" and a pioneer in modern Indian art. Drawn to painting from an early age, Sher-Gil started formal lessons at the age of eight. She first gained recognition at the age of 19, for her 1932 oil painting Young Girls. Sher-Gil depicted everyday life of the people in her paintings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amrita_Sher-Gil

Portrait of a Young Man
1930
Oil on canvas
63,3 x 76 cm
National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, India

This painting done by Amrita Sher-Gil in 1930 shows a beautiful likeness of friend and fellow-artist, Boris Tazlitsky. The works shows her painterly skills even when she was a very young student at Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. Her handling of pigment and surface is quite remarkable.

 El Greco
(1541 – 1614)
 

Doménikos Theotokópoulos most widely known as El Greco (Spanish pronunciation: [el ˈgɾeko]; "The Greek"), was a Greek painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish Renaissance. El Greco was a nickname, and the artist normally signed his paintings with his full birth name in Greek letters, often adding the word Κρής (Krḗs), which means "Cretan", in Ancient Greek.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Greco

Portrait of Jorge Manuel Theotokopoulos
1600/1605
Oil on canvas
81 x 56 cm
Museo de Bellas Artes de Sevilla

Painted by El Greco, during his time in Toledo. It depicts his son and collaborator Jorge Manuel Theotocópuli.

 Rita Angus
(1908 - 1970)

Rita Angus known as Rita Cook early in her career, was a New Zealand painter who, alongside Colin McCahon and Toss Woollaston, is regarded as one of the leading figures in twentieth-century New Zealand art. She worked primarily in oil and watercolour, and became known for her portraits and landscapes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rita_Angus

Portrait of Betty Curnow
1942
Oil on canvas
64,7 x 77,5 cm
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Auckland, New Zealand
https://www.aucklandartgallery.com/explore-art-and-ideas/artwork/3721/portrait-of-betty-curnow

Rita Angus’s compelling Portrait of Betty Curnow resulted from numerous preparatory sittings and discussions about portraiture. The two women collaborated by selecting the objects and costume which would best depict Curnow, her family life and her history. The items surrounding Curnow are imbued with personal symbolism. She is close to her family, seated on her grandmother’s chair before her father’s portrait. Her husband poet Allen Curnow’s presence is apparent through his many books. She holds her son Wystan’s trousers, which she was mending. A watercolour by Angus, which was a gift to the family, leans on the shelf. It refers to Curnow’s Canterbury childhood. Both the print of Jan Brueghel’s harvest scene and the repeating ovoid shapes allude to fertility. This portrait’s charisma has made it an emblem of New Zealand painting.

Rogier van der Weyden
(1399 - 1464)

Rogier van der Weyden was an early Netherlandish painter whose surviving works consist mainly of religious triptychs, altarpieces, and commissioned single and diptych portraits. He was highly successful in his lifetime; his paintings were exported to Italy and Spain, and he received commissions from, amongst others, Philip the Good, Netherlandish nobility, and foreign princes. By the latter half of the 15th century, he had eclipsed Jan van Eyck in popularity. However his fame lasted only until the 17th century, and largely due to changing taste, he was almost totally forgotten by the mid-18th century. His reputation was slowly rebuilt during the 200 years that followed; today he is known, with Robert Campin and van Eyck, as the third (by birth date) of the three great Early Flemish artists (Vlaamse Primitieven or "Flemish Primitives"), and widely as the most influential Northern painter of the 15th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogier_van_der_Weyden

Portrait of a Young Woman (or Lady Wearing a Gauze Headdress)
1435 - 1440
Oil on oak wood
47 x 32 cm
Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin

The painting is composed through a mix of horizontal and vertical lines. The verticals of her head-dress blend into the lines of her shoulders and chest, while the horizontal folds of the veil are set against the line formed by her upper and lower lips. Given the individuality of her features, Rogier was obviously working from a life study of an actual person. Yet there are elements of abstraction in the image. The model is likely a member of the middle class, given her relatively plain dress, matronly features and accentuated breasts. It is widely believed that she was modeled on the artist's wife, Elisabeth Goffaert, though this has not been proven. The portrait is similar to other female portraits by Rogier and Robert Campin. In fact, the similarity between Rogier's and Campin's female portraits is so strong that they were sometimes mis-attributed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_of_a_Woman_(van_der_Weyden)

 Amedeo Modigliani
(1884 - 1920)

Amedeo Clemente Modigliani was an Italian painter and sculptor of the École de Paris who worked mainly in France. He is known for portraits and nudes in a modern style characterized by a surreal elongation of faces, necks, and figures — works that were not received well during his lifetime, but later became much sought-after. Modigliani spent his youth in Italy, where he studied the art of antiquity and the Renaissance. In 1906, he moved to Paris, where he came into contact with such artists as Pablo Picasso and Constantin Brâncuși. By 1912, Modigliani was exhibiting highly stylized sculptures with Cubists of the Section d'Or group at the Salon d'Automne.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amedeo_Modigliani

Jeanne Hébuterne with Hat and Necklace
1917
Oil on canvas
67 x 51,5 cm
Private collection

Modigliani met Jeanne Hébuterne, a 19-year-old art student, in the spring of 1917 through the Russian sculptor Chana Orloff. Soon Modigliani ended his relationship with the English poet and art critic Beatrice Hastings and a short time later Hébuterne and Modigliani moved together into a studio on the Rue de la Grande Chaumière. Jeanne began to pose for him and became a principal subject for Modigliani's art. Modigliani depicted Jeanne Hébuterne in more than twenty works but never in nude. He transformed Hébuterne into an idyllic symbol of a modern woman.

Hendrick Goltzius
(1558 - 1617)

 

Hendrick Goltzius, or Hendrik, was a German-born Dutch printmaker, draftsman, and painter. He was the leading Dutch engraver of the early Baroque period, or Northern Mannerism, lauded for his sophisticated technique, technical mastership and "exuberance" of his compositions. According to A. Hyatt Mayor, Goltzius "was the last professional engraver who drew with the authority of a good painter and the last who invented many pictures for others to copy". In the middle of his life he also began to produce paintings. 

 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendrick_Goltzius

Portrait of the Haarlem shell collector Jan Govertsen van der Aer
1603
Oil on canvas
82,7 x 107,5 cm
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam
https://www.boijmans.nl/en/collection/artworks/4553/portrait-of-the-haarlem-shell-collector-jan-govertsen-van-der-aer

The famous Haarlem based painter and engraver Hendrick Goltzius has painted an informal portrait of his friend, the textile merchant Jan Govertsen van der Aer. The proud merchant is dressed in a black tunic with a simple open collar. On his lap is his valuable collection of shells.