Do you draw your own features unintentionally?
Readers, especially artists, I could do with some help. Do you reproduce your own features without meaning to? Do you have examples? Many initial viewers, usually those who can draw, ask me whether artists fused faces (see above) intentionally or unintentionally. They say that it’s well-known that painters sub-consciously include their own features when making a portrait of someone else. They think self-resemblance is unavoidable and it can be very difficult to convince them otherwise. I don’t share their belief but I know where it comes from. Major artists have long said something similar but they did not necessarily mean it at face value. Perhaps it was a way to make the self-representation in their portraiture, which they would have had to deny to patrons, seem unintended. Nor were they always consistent. Leonardo on some occasions said it was a tendency that artists should avoid; on others that it was the essence of art.1 There are many such statements by artists that art theorists then developed further. In the eighteenth century the physiognomist and philosopher Johann Kaspar Lavater claimed that great artists reproduce the lines of their own faces in their paintings because they cannot help but convey their own character.2 So, as a meme, the “unavoidable" hypothesis has a long history.
I respond to believers in varied ways, none very successfully. I sometimes note that major artists were so well trained that even if they did draw their own likenesses without being aware of it (unlikely given the astonishing precision of their hands) they would notice the resemblances afterwards and make the depicted face more like the sitter if they so wished. If, however, they risked the patron’s dissatisfaction by leaving it as it was with their own features, then the result could still be described as intentional. Besides, many documents survive demonstrating that when sitters did complain about, say, an odd nose artists would refuse to change it. Why would they be so stubborn if the poor likeness was unintentional? Rembrandt was taken to court by the father of one sitter who had paid for his daughter’s portrait. In addition, there are philosophical reasons why artists would paint portraits with self-resemblance as explained on the site. To paint oneself in the guise of another is not a meaningless gesture.
What I find strange though is that, despite the widespread belief that artists do it unintentionally, no-one has ever shown me a portrait with unintentional self-resemblance. So here’s how you can help. If you or any artist you know has drawn their own features subsconsciously on someone else, please email the image with a self-portrait or photograph for comparison. If there is enough evidence I will change my mind so send me what you have to info@everypainterpaintshimself.com. Either way, I will be very grateful.
1. Martin Kemp, “ ‘Ogni Dipintore Dipinge Se’: A Neoplatonic Echo in Leonardo’s Art Theory?” in Cultural Aspects of the Italian Renaissance: Essays in Honour of Paul Oskar Kristeller, ed. Cecil H. Clough (Manchester: Manchester University Press) 1976, p.313
2. “Every painter paints more or less himself. As one is, so he paints.” John B. Lyon, “ “The Science of Sciences”: Replication and Reproduction in Lavater’s Physiognomies”, Eighteenth-Century Studies 40, Winter 2007, pp. 268-9
Posted 05 Feb 2015: AndrogynyArtist as KingPortraitureTheoryVisual Perception
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Reader Comments
Is my problem. That’s why, even if my characters have different proportions, even different facial shape (some have square-ish face, some have round face etc), they all seem related.
The funny thing is the fact that I don’t look at myself in the mirror often, and I have idea on how my face really looks (plus I was fat until last year. I didn’t see my face often).
And I can’t distinguish faces in real life (I can distinguish body type, though)
Still I have this flaw. I was pointed about that by somebody, and I was unawhare about that. It doesn’t matter (when I do a portrait) how much the portrait match with the original picture. It still looks like me.
Nordlys
29 Jul 2015
i believe that since everyone has there own way of how they dress or style their hair that they do almost every day, we are far more familiar with that style. i spike my hair and wear flannel frequently so it’s easier for me to envision that style thus easier to draw.
jonnyb87
30 Jan 2019