Portrait Paintings

Laurits Andersen Ring was 41 when he became engaged to Sigrid Kähler in 1895. She was 21, and the two were married the following summer. Being with Sigrid opened up new worlds for Ring. His melancholic periods became longer. In the painting's tribute to life and love, it is as if the painter is consciously trying to tame his sense of happiness.

Through her relationships with Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, Kahlo was intimately familiar with Mexican mural painting and its grand ambitions, but she chose to follow a different artistic path. Her paintings form an organic and realist alternative to the austerity of Modernism and the more detached, dreamlike quality of Surrealism. Although she was called a Surrealist by André Breton, Kahlo culled her imagery from her own reality, a strategy that separated her paintings from those of the Surrealists. In an interview she once proclaimed, "They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality."

Collection: Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, United States

Collection: National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, United States

About the Artist: Marie-Guillemine Benoist, born Marie-Guillemine Laville-Leroux (1768 – 1826), was a French neoclassical , historical , and genre painter .

Collection: The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, United Kingdom

Princess Maria Grigoryevna Raevskaya (née Gagarina; 1851–1941) – daughter of Grigory Grigoryevich Gagarin and Sofia Andreyevna, née Dashkova, wife of Mikhail Nikolaevich Raevsky (1841–1893); maid of honor at the Imperial Court (1869), dame of the Order of Catherine.

Doctor Joaquín Decref y Ruiz (1864–1939) was a medical celebrity who achieved great national fame. Born in Havana (Cuba), he soon lost his father and moved to Seville and then to Madrid. There he completed High School in 1878 and subsequently began his medical studies. He read his thesis on the treatment of joint injuries in 1894 and devoted much of his professional activity to the diagnosis and treatment of mechanical diseases.

Collection: Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, Germany

James Northcote painted this portrait of himself with his mother and father in about 1780. He was then a young artist just returned from Italy and still establishing his reputation. Born in Plymouth, he trained at the Royal Academy and in the studio of Sir Joshua Reynolds, a fellow Devonian. He made his name as a painter of dramatic subjects from history and literature.

Collection: The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia

Bril proclaims his artistic and cultural achievement in this self-portrait from the end of the 17th-century. He focuses on his musical ability and also depicts one of his landscape paintings, nearly completed but still tacked to his easel. Bril appears convinced of the excellence of his method and the importance of the landscape genre, which in this example is concerned with a well-ordered view of the countryside depicted with small silvery strokes and close observation of detail.

Collection: National Museum, Stockholm, Sweden

Collection: National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen, Denmark

Lady Charlotte was the daughter of the famously beautiful Elizabeth Gunning, Duchess of Hamilton and Argyll, and inherited her family's good looks. This portrait was painted when she was visiting Naples; Tischbein was captivated by her, and said that she was "more perfect than the best artist could have imagined". He has posed this classically lovely sitter like a muse or goddess in total harmony with the natural world around her. Lady Charlotte subsequently became a successful novelist, writing under her married name.

Collection: Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, United States

Around the turn of the 17th century, the English aristocracy had a predilection for full-length portraits in lavish, meticulously depicted dress. Lucy Harington’s crown and costume were worn for state occasions such as coronations. She belonged to a court circle of politically and culturally active women around Anne, Queen of Scotland and England.