Before you write the essay, please make sure you would not USE CHAT GPT. My professor is completely against it and I WOULD NOT RELEASE PAYMENT if I find out the essay has been AI generated.
In this assignment you will focus on portraiture. You can choose any portrait you like from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
I will attach the screenshot and the information of the artwork I have seen here.
I have chosen “Lucas van Uffel (died 1637)” by Anthony van Dyck.
By portrait, I mean a painting of a known individual who is posing for their picture. You can also choose a self-portrait. The only other condition is that it be made before 1840 (the time at which photography entered the picture). You can choose a non-Western portrait as well, but again, it has to show and immortalize a known individual. You MUST include a photograph that you made with the paper (please email it to me) as well as the titles and artists of the paintings hanging to either side of it. (This is to ensure that you actually went to the museum). If you omit these two steps, I will deduct points from your paper.)
The point of this assignment is to make you think about what exactly it means to paint a portrait. Once you’ve chosen one that you find interesting, explain what drew your attention to it. Provide a brief description, focusing on the picture’s highlights, the relationship between the sitter and their setting, their mien, position, or gesture, the objects that might lie in the vicinity, the dress of the sitter, etc. Consider why all these things were included in the picture. What do they reveal about the sitter? Make sure to take into account the size of the portrait and think about its ideal viewing point. Is the sitter making eye contact with the viewer? Or is s/he maintaining their distance? How does the encounter make YOU feel, and what might that say about the artist’s and patron’s intention? Think too whether the portrait seems an accurate representation or an idealized version of a person? You don’t need to do any research beyond the label of the museum, but you might want to Google some other portraits by the same artist to see how they compare. That will give you a better sense of whether they tend to represent everyone alike or try to capture their sitters’ unique traits.
Finally, think about the difference between a commissioned portrait and simply a painting of a person? What is a portrait’s purpose? How important is representational accuracy? What is the role of the artist in the representation? What is the role of the sitter? How does the artist negotiate between pleasing the patron, and creating a painting that will one day be intriguing even for those—like you—who don’t know the person? How, ultimately, is the painted portrait different from a photograph of a person?
