Portraits of the Family

Peter Paul Rubens, "Isabella Brandt," 1620

A lot of painters have made portraits of family. Everyone from Rembrandt to Rockwell produced at least a smattering or more of family portraiture. The thing that I find interesting about family portraits is what these works might be telling us about the family or the relationship between the sitter and the painter in any event. You get not only a look at the individual, you get a chance to see that person through the eyes of someone who knew them very well.

For example,  Rubens painted his wife Isabella with tenderness and affection, and gave her a certain mischievous and knowing look that charms us after four hundred years. You get a hint that she could be a bit of a tease, perhaps, but also rather sexy.

Vincent van Gogh, "Portrait of the Artist's Mother," 1888

 Vincent van Gogh painted a picture of his mother from a photograph, giving us a sense of innate kindness behind her poorly hidden frown. Knowing their relationship the way we do today, it seems a telling image of the artist's mother. She was terribly worried about her eldest son throughout her life, and seems to have suffered greatly. The greens in the painting seem a bit much, but I suspect they were countered by a red that has faded to transparency over the decades.

Paul Cezanne, "Portrait of the Artist's Father," 1866

Paul Cezanne painted his father large in a dark, heavily impastoed portrait, reading the newspaper, as one would expect of a banker and man of affairs. As you would expect, Cezanne's businessman father didn't approve of his son's devotion to painting, nor to the woman he would later marry. In this work M. Cezanne is certainly serious, even perhaps grumpy and it's not difficult to see that the relationship must have been a difficult one. Cezanne had defied his father's wishes and committed himself to becoming a painter only a few years before his made this enormous and forbidding picture.

Mary Cassatt, "Woman with a Pearl Necklace, in a Loge," 1879

Another painter who produced sensitive works of family members was Mary Cassatt. During the late 1870s and into the 1880s she painted numerous members of her family--sister Lydia in particular. They lived with their parents in Paris during those years while Mary exhibited with the Impressionists and was a dear friend of Degas. Strictly speaking, she painted scenes involving family rather than straight-on portraits. Nonetheless, in her images of her sister we see affection and even a kind of awe of her beauty. Woman with a Pearl Necklace is a striking image of her sister during an intermission of the Paris Opera.

Portrait of Bill, 2005

In my own case, I've done some family portraits too. Here is a portrait of Bill Barber, my mother's second husband and a thoroughly admirable guy. Bill was the definition of "salt of the earth," and was the best thing that happened to my mother in her old age. I worked up this 20x16 oil from personal references and life sketches. Someone else will have to say what they actually see in this portrait, but my intent was to show the warmth and deep goodness of the man, making his face that of a man of the land, with the kind of pale forehead that farmers' caps produce. His shirt wasn't gray but I wanted an effect of chiaroscuro with no distracting color.