The Art of the Portrait

About

Arguably the most famous portrait in the world is Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’ and a very large proportion of the most important works of art in museums and prominent art collections are ‘portraits’.

In the current list of the most expensive paintings sold at auction, the majority of the top twenty are all paintings of people, or what we might loosely call portraits, including number one, Leonardo’s ‘Salvator Mundi’ sold for $450 million in November last year.​

Portraits are one of the most enduring forms of artistic expression and the practice of commissioning portraits of important personages or loved ones continues much the same as it has down the ages, proving that there is no real substitute for an image made by a professional artist, even in our digital ‘selfie’ twenty first century.
 
They are also the only piece of art likely to remain in the collection of a family or institution long after other works have found other homes. The practice of creating painted, drawn or sculpted portraits has never had such a variety of exceptional artists and this exhibition aims to showcase the work of a small group of these very fine practitioners. 

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