ssful portraitist, both in Europe and America. His knack for capturing the quality of fleeting moments in time adds a layer of depth to what might otherwise be simply society portraits.the turn of the nineteenth century, realism was the dominant portrait style. Thomas Eakins was adept at conveying personality, portraying his subjects with unvarnished realism and penetrating psychological insight. In the 1876 portrait of his niece <javascript:OpenBrWindow(»images/p13.htm«,»p13«,»resizable=yes,width=215,height=270«)>, Ella, Eakins lends an air of serious deliberation to a subject that is often overly sentimentalized. Best known for her portraits of children, Lydia Field Emmet <javascript:OpenBrWindow(»images/p14.htm«,»p14«,»resizable=yes,width=230,height=285«)> incorporated characteristics of modernist techniques into her fundamentally traditional style. The resulting works are realistic portrayals that convey a sense of immediacy and the liveliness of her young subjects.the rise of abstraction in the twentieth century, experimentation with line, shape, and color changed artistic presentations of sitters. Arshile Gorky »s The Artist and His Mother <javascript:OpenBrWindow(«images/p15.htm»,«p15»,«resizable=yes,width=210,height=320»)> shows the influence of abstract modernist trends from Europe, including cubism and expressionism. Walt Kuhn «s Wisconsin <javascript:OpenBrWindow(»images/p16.htm«,»p16«,»resizable=yes,width=230,height=295«)>, painted during the Depression, is a portrait of an era more than an individual. In order to increase the expressive impact of the work, Kuhn created a representative portrait that could be any one of a number of people at a particular place in time. Similarly, artists in the 1960s employed images of widely recognizable figures from popular culture as compositional and expressive devices, producing icons of mass culture in the guise of portraits. Andy Warhol »s images of celebrities <javascript:OpenBrWindow(«images/p17.htm»,«p17»,«resizable=yes,width=230,height=305»)> are the quintessential example of this approach.in the postmodern age continues to take on new form and purpose. Chuck Close «s hugely magnified images experiment with both the meaning and the process of the portrait. From a distance, Fanny <javascript:OpenBrWindow(»images/p18.htm«,»p18«,»resizable=yes,width=230,height=295«)> appears to be a photograph, but in fact this highly detailed image is composed entirely of the artist »s fingerprints. Barkley Leonnard Hendricks , best known for his highly realistic portraits of African Americans, uses painting to address issues ofculture and identity <javascript:OpenBrWindow(«images/p19.htm»,«p19»,«resizable=yes,width=230,height=295»)>. A segment of the population traditionally underrepresented in fine art, these life-sized figures achieve iconic status through their neutral environments and their direct, ...
