Second place

In 1648 the French Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture) decided to classify five hierarchies of genre (or type) in painting.

Portraiture was ranked second – below history painting, which was ranked highest, but above genre painting, landscape and still life.

Portraiture ranked highly because it included depictions of people, and important historical figures or those defined by their virtue or heroism. Yet it has often been dismissed because of its focus on likeness or mimesis – and therefore copying.

The divisions between genres isn't always clear cut, with portraiture overlapping with both history painting and genre painting.

What is a portrait?

Staff from across the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, alongisde artists and visitors, discuss what portraiture means to them.

_{Video credit: Scottish National Portrait Gallery}

Renaissance portraiture

The fifteenth century marks a turning point in the history of Western portraiture when specific likenesses of people began to emerge – linked to Renaissance ideas around the individual – and the genre became more professionalised. Before then, portraiture can be traced back to Greek and Roman antiquity when general depictions appeared on sculpture or coins.

Artists such as Masaccio, Robert Campin and Hans Memling began painting donors into their religious panel paintings. Later, Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden produced portraits of individuals in a highly realist style typical of early Netherlandish art. Andrea del Castagno and Pietro Perugino are among Italy's earliest portrait painters.

Many portraits from the fifteenth century adopted a profile view or three-quarter face. Leonardo da Vinci's famous Mona Lisa (c.1503–1505) broke from this tradition by showing her in half-length, a trope also used in Raphael's portrait of the humanist scholar Baldassare Castiglione (c.1514–1515).

From the sixteenth century, full-length portraits became much more common, particularly when representing the nobility, as did the representation of tradesmen and wealthy merchants (a particular feature of later Dutch art) alongside monarchs and aristocrats.

Status symbols

Beyond recording a sitter's features, portraits also attempt to say something about a person – be it their power, wealth, or taste – and are a reflection of a particular society. Certain props, clothing or gestures send signals about an individual.

From the sixteenth century, artists such as Hans Holbein the younger incorporated figures into elaborate settings to provide a more comprehensive portrait: the luxury Anatolian carpet in The Ambassadors (1533) is a reminder of the two men's high status.

In the Armada Portrait, Queen Elizabeth I – who very much controlled her image – rests her hand on top of a globe to demonstrate her imperial authority.

More recently, Kehinde Wiley's portrait of former American President Barack Obama features African blue lilies in reference to his father. David Hockney's double portrait, Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1971), similarly places a vase of lilies beside Celia Birtwell to signal that she was pregnant at the time.

Power and patronage

Portraiture has a long history in Britain thanks to its relatively stable monarchy and established aristocracy. The portrait miniature, for which Nicholas Hilliard is best known, was especially popular from the sixteenth century.

Many of the great portraitists during the seventeenth century were in fact Flemish painters to the British court, including Anthony van Dyck, Rubens, and Godfrey Kneller. Van Dyck is especially known for his flattering depictions of King Charles I.

Van Dyck greatly influenced Peter Lely, also a painter of Dutch origin who was appointed Principal Painter to Charles II in 1661. He is famed for his extravagant portraits of society women adorned in fabric and jewels.

In the eighteenth century, Joshua Reynolds sought to depict his sitters in grand, classical poses. Thomas Gainsborough is known for portraits of landowners and young women in landscapes, while his rival Thomas Lawrence spoke frequently of the challenges he faced while painting portraits.

The Baroque style had an impact on European portraiture, not least on Diego Velázquez’s group portrait of the Spanish Royal family, Las Meninas. In seventeenth-century France, Hyacinthe Rigaud was famed for his images of Louis XIV, while celebrated portraitist from the late 1700s, Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, was Marie Antoinette's favourite painter.

Once the preserve of the rich and powerful, portraiture has evolved to represent a range of people.

Photography and fragmentation

Perhaps the biggest development on portraiture came with the invention of photography in the nineteenth century. This meant that capturing a likeness became much quicker and easier, freeing painting from the need to faithfully reproduce an image.

Photography made portraiture more accessible and affordable, and enabled artists to experiment with techniques. Pierre-Auguste Renoir's portraits of young women, for example, show how Impressionism sought to capture a fleeting reality.

In the early twentieth century, Cubists such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque approached portraiture in a very different way by fragmenting the figure. Henri Matisse's colourful Fauvist portraits sought to capture his sitters' character.

Portraits by School of London artists such as Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach are barely visible from under thick, dark impasto paint. Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud are known for violently distorting or emphasising aspects of their sitters' faces and bodies. 

Howard Hodgkin broke down the concept of portraiture even further by creating abstract works that nevertheless conjure some form of human presence. 

Self-portraiture and the selfie

Self-portraits, which give us insight into an artist's personality, first appeared in the mid-fifteenth century when the role of the artist changed. They allow artists to experiment with style, technique and identity and, crucially, they don't rely on a sitter.

Important proponents of the genre include Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi, Egon Schiele, Gwen John, David Hockney, and Jenny Saville.

Vincent van Gogh's impressionistic self-portraits capture something of his inner turmoil. For Frida Kahlo, the self-portrait was a way of taking control of her body which was left disabled after a bus crash.

Tracey Emin's more recent My Bed (1998), meanwhile, pushes at the limits of self-portraiture by presenting her bed the way it looked at a difficult time in her life. Since the 1970s, Cindy Sherman has photographed herself to dissect ideas around gender and identity.

Digital innovations have hugely impacted self-portraiture as the smartphone now allows anyone to take a 'selfie'.