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Painted Treasures
Investing in Oils Portrait paintings capture more than simple images, becoming family treasures and paying dividends as status symbols
Warren Kalbacker
From the Print Edition:
Kevin Bacon, May/Jun 00
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Whitney recalls painting John Sununu, the former White House chief of staff and former New Hampshire governor. "At the first sitting he was very formal and intimidating. He made me very nervous. But when he came to my studio and saw the advanced portrait, he broke out into a big grin and became my best buddy.
"That was not my only experience like that," Whitney adds.
"You have to like people and paint them at their best," says the gregarious Michael Del Priore. "When a family hires me to paint their children, what it really means is that I'm invited to become part of their family. The work I'm doing for them stays with them forever."
Allan Banks says that generally asks a subject to devote about a month of part-time sittings, each lasting from an hour and a half to three hours, to a portrait.
"You have a first impression but you wind up painting another picture because of getting to know a person over several sittings," he says. "You might be talking business with a guy who built a company from nothing and then one of you mentions a son or daughter. You see a change come over subjects if they're talking about somebody they love. That begins to come across in how they look. The artist instantly picks that up and it starts coming through in the portrait."
Banks relates a story about Sargent's portraits of John D. Rockefeller. Sargent's first likeness of Rockefeller portrayed the man as a stern captain of industry. A later portrait, painted after Sargent became acquainted with Rockefeller the philanthropist, was "incredibly sympathetic and charming."
Banks also reveals--with the well-heeled subject in mind--the artist's time-honored technique of career advancement. The one-on-one sitting is "when as an artist you can gently express your dream to do something ambitious."
Michelangelo must have recognized the opportunity to further his "greater goals" during several intimate sittings with Pope Julius II. After all, his powerful subject had other prized commissions to award: those frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, not to mention the design of St. Peter's itself, to mention only two.
Portrait artists deal with the delicate (or maybe indelicate) issue that many of their subjects may not exactly fulfill conventional ideals of beauty--which themselves change with the times.
Draper insists that he "paints 'em as I see 'em." But an artist's ideal of a fine likeness doesn't always coincide with movie-star looks. Draper opens his portfolio to a picture of a gentleman whom no one would regard as handsome but whom he recalls as a favorite subject because of his craggy facial features.
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