"Portraiture" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... passion for the unattainable are admirably relieved, as in "Eugenie Grandet" and "Old Goriot," by a certain nobility and purity of motive. The novel is generally acknowledged one of Balzac's masterpieces, both in vigour of portraiture and minuteness of detail. Perhaps no one was ever better fitted to depict the ruin wrought by a fixed idea than Balzac himself, who wasted much of his laborious life in struggling to discover a short cut ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... enclosing a short outline of the chapters which remained unwritten.... The real lesson of the book lies in Zeph's unconquerable affection for his worthless wife, and in the beautiful illustration of the divine trait of forgiveness which he constantly manifested toward her. As a portraiture of a character moulded and guided by this sentiment, 'Zeph' will take its place with the best of Mrs. Jackson's work; a beautiful plea for love and charity and long-suffering, patience and forgiveness, coming from one whose hand now rests from this and all ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... will was it that the drapery, the flags rich in patriotic portraiture, the Washington, the Franklin, and the Lafayette, must come down. Some pictures she had painted, some sketches she had made, were to take their place: her father had insisted on having them framed, and now they should hang ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... of choosing a leading character that is off the lines of heroic portraiture is that the author may seem to be in sympathy with a base part in life and with base opinions. In this novel I run a different risk. I shall not be surprised if I provoke some hostility in making the bad man justify his course by the gaunt and grim morality ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... But such portraiture as the above is apt to get very vague and insipid unless one is able to convey a vivid picture of the man as he walked, and spoke, and lived. The sic sedebat in Trinity College (Cambridge) chapel has given more people a thrill at the thought of Bacon than ever gained ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... as a lawyer, and cherished the Church and State opinions of a staunch Tory. Yet, though he differed so essentially from the divine poet, he understood the greatness of Shelley at a glance, and preserved for us a record of his friend's early days, which is incomparable for the vividness of its portraiture. The pages which narrate Shelley's course of life at Oxford have all the charm of a romance. No novel indeed is half so delightful as that picture, at once affectionate and satirical, tender and humorous, extravagant and delicately shaded, of the student life enjoyed together for a few short months ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... had been examining the canvas held by Stone, answered quickly: "Neither of these, and it is more than probable that the other two are also copies by the same hand. Wonderfully well done, too, but the study of portraiture is a hobby of mine; I have even contemplated a monograph on the subject, or, more particularly, a hand-book to the smaller galleries and private collections. But I doubt if I ever do it now," he ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... Sprightly Rabbit," but it is not impossible that some may recognise, under his disguise, "Felix," the ruffianly but accomplished host, who was the model for the sketch upon page 43, one of the happiest examples in the present volume of the artist's skill in portraiture, as well as of his rare technique in pen-and-ink. Equally happy is the sketch which depicts "'Chacun' with his 'Chacune'" at the Moulin de la Galette (page 13), in which the pose of the figures and ...
— Frank Reynolds, R.I. • A.E. Johnson
... historical subjects, (not in the artistical sense so treated,) which attract great attention. "The Queen receiving the Sacrament," by Leslie; and "Waterloo," by Sir W. Allan, R.A. We are aware of the great value of this manner of pageant painting; it is perhaps worth while to sacrifice much of art to portraiture in this case. Viewing the necessity and the difficulty, we cannot but congratulate Mr Leslie—notwithstanding the peculiarity of the dresses, and the quantity of white to be introduced, this is by no means ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... historical than the average temperature or the staple productions. Whatever affects national character and destiny, whatever accounts for national manners or confirms individual sway, is brought into the record. Diaries, like those of Pepys and Evelyn, the tithe-book of a county, the taste in portraiture, the costume and the play-bill yield authentic hints not less than the census, the parliamentary edicts, or the royal signatures; the popular poem, the social favorite, the cause celebre, what pulpit, bar, peasant and beau, doctor and lady a la mode do, say, and are, then and there, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... renovation. The ill-treatment I have met with has more than ever impressed the truth of my principles on my judgement. I am young, I am ardent in the cause of philanthropy and truth; do not suppose that this is vanity; I am not conscious that it influences this portraiture. I imagine myself dispassionately describing the state of my mind. I am young; you have gone before me—I doubt not, are a veteran to me in the years of persecution. Is it strange that, defying prejudice as I have done; I ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... perhaps. I fancy the artists were bunglers. I possess a copy of a very small pencil sketch made of her face by a dear old lady friend of mine, now dead, about the year 1851 or 2. My friend had a gift for portraiture in a peculiar way. When she saw a face that greatly interested her, in a drawing-room, on a platform, in the street, anywhere, it remained very vividly in her mind and on going home she would sketch it, and some of these sketches of well known persons are wonderfully ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... historians? Of the condition of the Middle Ages from the single romance of "Ivanhoe" than from the volumes of Hume or Hallam? In like manner, the pencil of Cervantes has given a far more distinct and a richer portraiture of life in Spain in the sixteenth century than can be gathered from a library of ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... works that render his name so familiar are his Anabasis, a simple yet thrilling narrative of the Expedition of the Ten Thousand Greeks; and his Memorabilia, or Recollections of Socrates. This work by his devoted pupil is the most faithful portraiture that we possess of ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... had been for some time spreading, under his auspices, through the leading personages of the Opposition. Like most men who have made themselves familiar with the works of a great writer, I had formed a portraiture of him by anticipation. I never was more disappointed. Instead of the expressive countenance and commanding figure, I saw a form of the middle size, and of a homely appearance, a heavy physiognomy, and the whole finished by two appurtenances which would have been fatal to the divinity of the Apollo ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... for this collection has been made with the object of familiarizing the student with works fairly representative of Rembrandt's art in portraiture and Biblical illustration, landscape and genre study, in painting and etching. Admirers of the Dutch master may miss some well-known pictures. For obvious reasons the Lecture in Anatomy is deemed unsuitable for this place, and the Hundred Guilder Print contains too ...
— Rembrandt - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... under their wings better covered with thick down (wherewith also their gorge or a part of their breast under their throats is armed, and not with feathers) than are the like parts of the eagle, and unto which portraiture there is no member of the raven (who is almost black of colour) that can have any resemblance: we have none of them in England to my knowledge; if we have, they go generally under the name of eagle or erne. Neither have we the pygargus ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... portrait of Claverhouse. An original portrait Lockhart calls it, but which of the five portraits engraved in Napier's volumes it may have been, if any of them, I cannot tell. All these engravings, with a unanimity not common in the portraiture of the time, show the same face: a face of delicate, almost feminine beauty, framed in the long full love-locks of the period.[15] The eyes are large and dark, the figure small but well made, and the general expression of the countenance one of almost boyish smoothness and simplicity. ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... gone too far in this portraiture of our times? I do not anticipate this stricture, but rather another—that I have proved too much by it. You will tell me that the picture I have presented resembles the humanity of our day, but it also bodies forth all nations engaged in the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... studies of the children nor of 'goody' engravings. The walls were adorned with old-fashioned lithographs, principally portraits of country gentlemen with high collars and riding gloves: this suggested—and it was encouraging—that the tradition of portraiture was held in esteem. There was the customary novel of Mr. Le Fanu, for the bedside; the ideal reading in a country house for the hours after midnight. Oliver Lyon could scarcely forbear beginning it while he ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... particularly if they have never done so. I do not think the objection is a natural conservatism, or dislike of doing something to which one is unaccustomed. The ill omen does not appear to have been feared for the young as well as for the old, even in provincial localities, when for the first time portraiture by daguerreotypy or more recently by photography was introduced. It has long been known that among primitive peoples there is a decided prejudice against portraiture. The notion seems to be that the individual may lose his vigor, if not his life, ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various
... Ashe's arrival and all eyes, to his great discomfort, were turned in his direction. His embarrassment was relieved by Mrs. Twemlow, who advanced to do the honors. Of Mrs. Twemlow little need be attempted in the way of pen portraiture beyond the statement that she went as harmoniously with Mr. Beach as one of a pair of vases or one of a brace of pheasants goes with its fellow. She had the same appearance of imminent apoplexy, ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... a crude civilization, tumbling into the theatre in the full enjoyment of holiday, scrambling for vantage points on the sloping ground, if such were handy, or a good spot for their camp-stools. In view of the uncertainty as to the actual site of the original performances, this portraiture is "atmospheric" rather than "photographic." (See Saunders in TAPA. XLIV, 1913). At any rate, we have ample evidence of the turbulence of the early Roman audience. (Ter. Prol. Hec. 39-42, and citations immediately following). Note the description ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... my great point is a fear that you are one of those who are unjust to our old Tennyson's Duke of Wellington. I have just been talking it over with Symonds; and we agreed that whether for its metrical effects, for its brief, plain, stirring words of portraiture, as - he 'that never lost an English gun,' or - the soldier salute; or for the heroic apostrophe to Nelson; that ode has never been surpassed in any tongue or time. Grant me the Duke, O Weg! I suppose you must not put in yours about the warship; ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a gay hostelry by the road-side, with what was called in those days a portraiture of the Protector swinging from a post which stood on the slip of turf that skirted the house. It was kept by a bluff landlord and a young and pretty landlady, young enough to be her husband's daughter, and discreet enough to be an old man's wife with credit and respectability. ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... pieces with her own powder, being twenty-one barrels, wherein the judgment of God appeared, "for the master and company were many of them profane scoffers at us and at the ordinances of religion here." Without any effort at dramatic portraiture or character sketching, Winthrop managed in all simplicity, and by the plain relation of facts, to leave a clear impression of many of the prominent figures in the first Massachusetts immigration. In particular there gradually arises from the entries ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... Wallenstein is an introduction to the celebrated tragedy of that name; and, by its vivid portraiture of the state of the general's army, gives the best clue to the spell of his gigantic power. The blind belief entertained in the unfailing success of his arms, and in the supernatural agencies by which that success is secured to him; the unrestrained indulgence of every passion, and ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Scotch character, for in Scotland, strange to say—that is, to Englishmen it will appear strange—the people believe themselves to be remarkable for want of foresight—'aye wise ahint the hand,' is their own self-portraiture—and for a certain ardour of genius which leads them into all sorts of scrapes. The issue is, after all, a hard one, and viewing the long services of Mr Jerdan to the literary republic, we would hope that a cheerful life-evening is still in ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... Sitting in his closet at Beconsfield, he pictured the downcast eyes and dishevelled hair; the limbs loaded with fetters, and the hands help up in remediless supplication. He grew enamoured of his portraiture, and without waiting a moment to enquire whether it in the slightest degree resembled the reality, he volunteered the championship of Irish popery. His son was commissioned to represent him in this disastrous connexion. But Richard, once on the spot, was instantly and completely undeceived. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson has given us a true classic for the nursery and the school-room, but its readers will not be confined to any locality. Its vivid portraiture of Colorado life and its truth to child-nature give it a charm which the most experienced cannot fail to feel. It will stand by the side of Miss Edgeworth and Mrs. Barbauld in all the years to come."—Mrs. ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... is entirely a work of imagination. But as I have had to draw very largely on my knowledge of the wood-pulp trade of Eastern Canada, and the conditions under which it is carried on, I desire it to be clearly understood that this story contains no portraiture of any person or persons, living or dead, and contains no representation of any business organisation ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... troublous times, 'that the Lord has fashioned His Kirk by the uncounterfeited work of His own new creation; or, as the prophet speaketh, "hath made us, and not we ourselves;" and that we must not presume to fashion a new portraiture of a Kirk, and a new form of divine service, which God in His word hath not before allowed; seeing that, were we to extend our authority further than the calling we have of God doth permit—as, namely, if we should (as God forbid!) authorize the authority of bishops—we ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... and attendant are enveloped in long robes, in which there is no indication of folds, though fringes and tassels are elaborately rendered. The faces are of a strongly marked Semitic cast, but without any attempt at portraiture. The hair of the head ends in several rows of snail-shell curls, and the king's beard has rows of these curls alternating with more natural-looking portions. Little is displayed of the body except the fore-arms, whose anatomy, though intelligible, is coarse and false. ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... Notwithstanding his technical defects, his force, and "his feeling for grace of action and harmony of color," were such as to make him, even more than Cimabue, "the founder of the true ideal style of Christian art, and the restorer of portraiture." "His, above all, was a varied, fertile, facile, and richly creative nature." The contemporary of Dante, his portrait of the poet has been discovered in recent times on a wall in the Podesta at Florence. "He stands at the head of the school of allegorical ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... and human taste, from the spread of the fine arts among the people. Thirty years ago, their houses, if having any decoration at all, exhibited those fearful and wonderful colored lithographs and chromos in which bad drawing, bad portraiture, and bad coloring vied with each other to produce pictures which it would be a mild use of terms to call detestable. Then came the two great international art expositions at Philadelphia and Chicago, each greatly advancing by ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... Barchester, must now be introduced personally to the reader. He is worthy of a new volume, and as he will fill a conspicuous place in it, it is desirable that he should be made to stand before the reader's eye by the aid of such portraiture as the author is ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... identified it. A complete transformation destroys the likeness which was begun. There is an intentional dislocation of the parts of the story, when they might make it imprudently close in its reflection of facts or resemblance in portraiture. A feature is shown, a manifest allusion made, and then the poet starts off in other directions, to confuse and perplex all attempts at interpretation, which might be too particular and too certain. This was no doubt merely according to the fashion of the time, and the habits of mind into which ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... float, subsequently to flap above the shallows. One may sigh for it. An ill-fortuned minstrel who has by fateful direction been brought to see with distinctness, that man is not as much comprised in external features as the monkey, will be devoted to the task of the fuller portraiture. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... another field, that of literature, we know. In plastic art, by reason of the essentially inartistic spirit of the Roman race, the result was practically small; save indeed in one department, that of portraiture, to which the essential impulse was, as Leighton very suggestively shows, "ethic, not aesthetic." Even in Roman architecture, our critic finds little to weaken his view of the Roman aesthetic inefficiency. "It was not," ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... other of these characteristics. In most cases, however, you may safely bestow them all; and if it be the chief of the sect—the President himself—you may add such other ugly appellatives as your fancy may suggest; and be sure that your portraiture will still fall short of the hideousness of the original. Perhaps the most striking characteristic of these fanatics is the absolute openness of their cheat. A more commonplace imposture has never been offered for acceptance, even to ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... Scott. "I have chosen the sitting posture," Mr. Scott said, "as best conveying the idea of dignity befitting a royal personage." Mr. Foley ably carried out the conception of his principal. "In the attitude and expression," he said, "the aim has been, with the individuality of portraiture, to embody rank, character, and enlightenment, and to convey a sense of that responsive intelligence indicating an active, rather than a passive, interest in those pursuits of civilisation illustrated in the surrounding figures, groups, and relievos... ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... day that from my past divides My present, and that made me what I am. Still can I see the hot, bright sky, the sea illimitably sparkling, as they showed That morning. Though I deemed I took no note Of heaven or earth or waters, yet my mind Retains to-day the vivid portraiture Of every line and feature of the scene. Light-hearted 'midst the dewy lanes I fared Unto the sea, whose jocund gleam I caught Between the slim boles, when I heard the clink Of naked weapons, then a sudden thrust Sickening to hear, and then a stifled groan; And pressing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... of the Ryde landlady had scarcely left his pages, when Fielding found a new subject for his portraiture, in the pretentious ill-bred follies of a young officer, a nephew of the captain, who arrived on board to visit his uncle, and who serves as an excellent foil for the simple-hearted merits of the elder ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... we have said, will neither replace Murray, nor form a substitute for Eustace. Neither is their interest mainly owing to mere vivid or literal portraiture; by painting in words, as an artist would do by forms and colours, and enrolling before us a visible panorama, such as might present a clear image of the scenes described here to those who had never witnessed them. Their charm—for a charm, we trust, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... bit of it!" cried the editor, scratching the tip of his nose, where he had somehow caught a spot of ink. "Bald facts; honest portraiture. It ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... Zela's absence that I could dwell on her portraiture. She had just turned her fourteenth year; and though certainly not considered, even in the east, as matured, yet, forced like a flower, fanned by the sultry west wind, into early developement, her form, like its petals bursting through the bud, gave promise of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, No. - 537, March 10, 1832 • Various
... coin. Sign your name here, if you have one, and can write." Whereupon, and the name (with infinite hard breathing) being signed, the commissioner would proceed to fill in the man's appearance, height, etc., on the official form. In this task of literary portraiture he seemed to rely wholly upon temperament; for I could not perceive him to cast one glance on any of his models. He was assisted, however, by a running commentary from the captain: "Hair blue and eyes red, nose five foot seven, and stature broken"—jests as old, presumably, as the American ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... continual occurrence of this metaphor, it is unnatural and almost impossible to deny its presence in this psalm. In a former sermon I have directed attention to the earlier portion of it, which presents us, in its portraiture of the King, a shadowy and prophetic outline of Jesus Christ. I desire, in a similar fashion, to deal now with the latter portion, which, in its portrait of the bride, presents us with truths having their ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... her sick teacher. The faint blue crescents beneath—those strange shadows of the grave, which sometimes seem the deepest when the eyes above are giving the brightest light—imparted a frail, delicate beauty to her countenance. They were the last master-touches of Nature in working out that portraiture of ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... read. It is only when we have had time to awake from the intense interest in which he has held us by the vivid reality of his narrative, and have begun to search for faults in cold blood, that we are able to find them, In the Last of the Mohicans, we have a bolder portraiture of. Leatherstocking ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... this sentence exhibits, I hope will become manifest to the reader as I unfold before him the actual history of his faith; but being, I suppose, myself one of the last surviving witnesses of the character of recluse life as it still existed in the beginning of this century, I can point to the portraiture of it given by Scott in the introduction to 'The Monastery' as one perfect and trustworthy, to the letter and to the spirit; and for myself can say, that the most gentle, refined, and in the deepest sense amiable, phases of character I have ever known, ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... No portraiture of a Highlander would be complete without a description of his garb. His costume was as picturesque as his native hills. It was well adapted to his mode of life. By its lightness and freedom he was enabled to use his limbs and handle his ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... gentlemen, by the evidence of my own proper senses at this moment, that there are charms and graces in such greetings, such as no other greeting can possess. I know that in every beautiful work of the Almighty hand, which is illustrated in your lectures, and in every real or ideal portraiture of fortitude and goodness that you find in your books, there is something that must bring you home again to them for its brightest and best example. And therefore, gentlemen, I hope that you will never be without them, or without ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... in one only stroke a picture of our late sovereign lord King Edward the Third, who hath been dead these ten years. 'Tis a riddle to find where the stroke doth begin and where it doth also end. To him who first shall show it unto me will I give the portraiture." ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... longer dwell upon the portraiture of that saddest of all created things, the despised of many. I was taught the hard lesson of looking upon cruelty as my daily bread, tears as my daily drink, and scorn as my natural portion. Had not my heart hardened, it must have broken. But before I leave what I call the desponding epoch of my ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... years afterwards the Melvilles paid him another visit, in Edinburgh, the account of which by the younger is one of the loci classici of Scottish history. It contains, like the same writer's description of the last appearance of Knox in the pulpit, one of the most living pieces of portraiture in our literature: 'When we cam to his chalmer, we fand him sitting in his chaire, teatching his young man that servit him in his chalmer a, b, ab; e, b, eb, etc. Efter salutation, Mr. Andro sayes, "I sie, sir, yie are nocht ydle." "Better ...
— Andrew Melville - Famous Scots Series • William Morison
... when they reflected on their deeds of wickedness reaching through many years, the record of which was in the hands of a powerful and justly provoked enemy, who in a day might spread out for the gaze of the world the portraiture of their former characters, in which were mingled the features of darkest villany and the more glaring expressions of open violence and crime. Goaded on by an awful apprehension, they were prepared for any thing that might save themselves ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... of signs resorts to another expression of his flexible art, perhaps reproducing the gesture unabbreviated and made more graphic, perhaps presenting either the same or another conception or quality of the same object or idea by an original portraiture. ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... in England; but I have never seen such faces as those Boston faces, so intense, so full of a manly dignity, a subdued yet potent personality, a consciousness as far as could be from self-consciousness. I found something finely visionary in it all, as if I were looking on a piece of multiple portraiture such as you see in those Dutch paintings of companies at Amsterdam, for instance. It expressed purity of race, continuity of tradition, fidelity to ideals such as no other group of faces would now express. You might have had the like ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... for comparisons, or rather contrasts? With as much of Washington's domestic portraiture before us as these letters hold up, shall we turn to look at others? There is no difficulty, but in selecting ...
— Washington in Domestic Life • Richard Rush
... at times too diffuse; but its substantial accuracy is not questioned, and the glow of the narrative springs legitimately from the romance of the theme. Irving understood, what our later historians have fully appreciated, the advantage of vivid individual portraiture in historical narrative. His conception of the character and mission of Columbus is largely outlined, but firmly and most carefully executed, and is one of the noblest in literature. I cannot think it idealized, though it required a poetic sensibility to enter into sympathy ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... perhaps would hardly have accepted, it is further defined as being to show "the very age and body of the time his form and pressure". Yet it must be remembered that Sidney is loud in praise of so unflinching a portraiture of life, base and noble, as Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida. And on the whole it remains true that the limitations of Sidney are the limitations of his age, while his ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... will be short, The interim's mine, and a mans life's no more Then to say one: but I am very sorry good Horatio, That to Laertes I forgot my selfe; For by the image of my Cause, I see The Portraiture of his; Ile count his fauours: But sure the brauery of his griefe did put me ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... His Royal Highness Prince William, Duke of Cumberland, this faint portraiture of a truly wise, valiant, and virtuous commander as the possessor of the like noble qualities is, with the most profound respect and veneration, inscribed by His Royal Highness' most obedient and most ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... follows the lower course. There arose at one time a school of art, which delighted to paint the human face as perfect in beauty; and from that time to this we are discontented unless every woman is drawn for us as a Venus, or, at least, a Madonna. I do not know that we have gained much by this untrue portraiture, either in beauty or in art. There may be made for us a pretty thing to look at, no doubt;—but we know that that pretty thing is not really visaged as the mistress whom we serve, and whose lineaments we desire to perpetuate on the canvas. The winds of heaven, or the flesh-pots of Egypt, or the ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... India, and of the past proceedings of the Government in that country, our conviction must be that the right hon. Gentleman will be greatly to be blamed in making any alteration in that Government. At the same time, if it be not a faithful portraiture of the Government, and of its transactions in India, then what the right hon. Gentleman proposes to do in regard to the home administration of that country is altogether insufficient for the occasion. I cannot on the present occasion go into many of the details on which ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... as there remains any throb of vitality in those delicate filaments of social life by which he was enlinked to those with whom he played his part—that brother, or that friend, or that outsider who shall attempt the portraiture must feel what heavy responsibilities are his—must not forget that with him to trip is to sin against the head. And how shall he decide when the time has at last come for making the attempt? Before the incidents of a man’s life can be exploited without ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... is chiefly that of his works, can be told in few words. A pupil of David, he received the Prix de Rome in 1801. He remained in Rome much longer than the allotted four years to which his prize entitled him, and returned there often during his life as to the source of all art. By portraiture and the constant patronage of the government, the material conditions of his life, which was of a simple character, befitting a man who viewed his mission as that of an apostle preaching the doctrine of pure classicism, ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various
... its vogue. So the heroic romances, we are told, 'availed themselves skilfully of the opportunity to foster a new taste in the reading public—a delight, namely, born of the fashionable leisure of a self-conscious society, in minute introspection, and the analysis and portraiture of emotional states.' We are inclined to suspect that these words, which would serve well enough to describe the taste for the analytic novel of our own day, must be taken with considerable reserve in their application to the writings and the readers of two centuries ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... triangles; thus Benvenuto Cellini, being in all the higher branches of metal work a perfect imitator of nature, is in all its lower branches the best designer of curve for lips of cups and handles of vases; thus Holbein, exercised primarily in the noble art of truthful portraiture, becomes, secondarily, the most exquisite designer of embroideries of robe, and blazonries on wall; and thus Michael Angelo, exercised primarily in the drawing of body and limb, distributes in the mightiest masses the order ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... in excellent couplets of the eighteenth century manner, and strung together fantastic rhymes as a mode of aiding his boy in tasks which tried the memory. He was a dexterous draughtsman, and of his amateur handiwork in portraiture and caricature—sometimes produced, as it were, instinctively, with a result that was unforeseen—much remains to prove his keen eye and his skill with the pencil. Besides the curious books which he eagerly ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... of its essential unity 'The Rape of the Lock' bears witness to the presence of a power in Pope that we should hardly have suspected from his other works, the power of dramatic characterization. Elsewhere he has shown himself a master of brilliant portraiture, but Belinda, the Baron, and Thalestris are something more than portraits. They are living people, acting and speaking with admirable consistency. Even the little sketch of Sir Plume ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... garden—an old garden with old gates and old walls and old summer-houses—he lies down on the old grass (on an immemorial rug, no doubt), it is ten to one but that he will be converted. The little oblong sheaves of blank paper with elastic straps are fluttering all over the place. There is portraiture in the air and composition in the very accidents. Everything is a subject or an effect, a "bit" or a good thing. It is always some kind of day; if it be not one kind it is another. The garden walls, the mossy roofs, the open doorways and ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... have been considering this eminent person as yet only in his public capacity, as a benefactor of mankind by his fertile genius and indomitable perseverance; and the best portraiture of his intellectual character was to be found in the description of his attainments. It is, however, proper to survey him also in private life. He was unexceptionable in all its relations; and as his activity was unmeasured, and his taste anything rather than fastidious, ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... second volume of a series intended to present, in accurate colored portraiture, and in popular and juvenile biographical text, a very considerable portion of the common birds of North America, and many of the more interesting and attractive specimens of other countries, in many respects superior to all other publications which have attempted the representation of birds, ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [August, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... (vers. 13-18), setting forth the blessings which Wisdom gives, preceded by two verses, inculcating the right acceptance of God's chastisements which are one chief means of attaining Wisdom, and followed by two verses (vers. 19, 20), which exalt her as being divine as well as human. So the portraiture of her working in humanity is framed by a prologue and epilogue, setting forth two aspects of her relation to God; namely, that she is imparted by Him through the discipline of trouble, and that she dwells in His bosom and is the agent ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... splendid ornaments of their abode. They hung side by side, separated by a narrow panel, appearing to eye each other constantly, yet always returning the gaze of the spectator. Travelled gentlemen, who professed a knowledge of such subjects, reckoned these among the most admirable specimens of modern portraiture; while common observers compared them with the originals, feature by feature, and were rapturous in praise of the likeness. But it was on a third class—neither travelled connoisseurs nor common observers, but people of natural sensibility— that the pictures wrought their strongest effect. Such ...
— The Prophetic Pictures (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... first novel, his plays depicting Irish characters have been produced with considerable success at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. In "Mrs. Martin's Man" as in his dramas, he gives a faithful portraiture of the simple folk ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... English dress, should surely serve. Avowedly compiled in a vague, desultory way, with no particular regard to chronological sequence, these random recollections should interest us, in the first place, as a piece of unconscious self-portraiture. The cynical Court lady, whose beauty bewitched a great King, and whose ruthless sarcasm made Duchesses quail, is here drawn for us in vivid fashion by her own hand, and while concerned with depicting other figures she really portrays her ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... thou painted out in eloquence The portraiture of Humber and his son, As fortunate as was Policrates; Yet should they not escape our conquering swords, Or boast of ought ...
— 2. Mucedorus • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... full-length by Mr. Powers, and it amply justifies the fame he had won in other performances by the harmonious blending of such particular excellences as he had exhibited in separation. It indeed illustrates his capacities for the highest range of historical portraiture and characterization, and will occasion regrets wherever similar subjects have in recent years been confided to other artists. We have heard that it is in contemplation to place in the park of our own city ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... Of its own aweless soul, or of the Power unknown! Oh, that the words which make the thoughts obscure From which they spring, as clouds of glimmering dew 235 From a white lake blot Heaven's blue portraiture, Were stripped of their thin masks and various hue And frowns and smiles and splendours not their own, Till in the nakedness of false and true They stand before their Lord, each to receive ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... of earlier periods—we maintain that this method, necessary in fresco, and followed habitually in the first oil pictures, has produced the noblest renderings of human expression in the whole range of the examples of art: the best works of Raphael, all the glorious portraiture of Ghirlandajo and Masaccio, all the mightiest achievements of religious zeal in Francia, Perugino, Bellini, and such others. Take as an example in fresco Masaccio's hasty sketch of himself now in the Uffizii; and in ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... place. His appearance and manner chiefly indicated pride, haughtiness, and also sensuality. He had broken a spray from the ash-tree, and with a condescending air was in the act of handing it to a lady, in the portraiture of whom Dennis had truly displayed great skill. She was very beautiful, and yet there was nothing good or noble in her face. Her proud features showed mingled shame and reluctance to receive the gift in the manner it was bestowed, ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... men, had at first had his ups and downs; but his reputation had been permanently established by the verdict of a wealthy patron who, returning from an excursion into other fields of portraiture, had given it as the final fruit of his experience that Popple was the only man who could "do pearls." To sitters for whom this was of the first consequence it was another of the artist's merits that he always subordinated art to elegance, in life as well as in his portraits. The ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... representment^; imitation &c 19; illustration, delineation, depictment^; imagery, portraiture, iconography; design, designing; art, fine arts; painting &c 556; sculpture &c 557; engraving &c 558; photography, cinematography; radiography, autoradiography [Bioch.], fluorography [Chem], sciagraphy^. personation, personification; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... have anything up his sleeve. It undermines confidence. But my dissatisfaction with the quoted passage is not on account of noumenon; it is on account of the misuse of the word "silenced." You cannot silence portraiture with a noumenon; if portraiture should make a noise, a way could be found to silence it, but even then it could not be done with a noumenon. Not even with a brick, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the person of the precocious but decrepit child, the sole fruit of a sad marriage. Destined from its birth, to an early grave, its excitable imagination soon consumes its frail body. Nothing could be more exquisitely tender, more true to nature, than the portraiture of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... reverential hands, to commemorate the apostolic labors of John Wesley in that almost savage district. His likeness was on one side, and on the other the words, so often in his mouth, "In God we trust." Phyllis looked at it reverently; even in that poor portraiture recognizing the leader of men, the dignity, the intelligence, and the serenity of a great soul. She put it slowly back, touching it with a kind of tender respect; and then the two girls went home. In the green aisles of the park the nightingales were singing, and ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... sensibly shunned, and has stuck close to the brisk narrative and pithy descriptions of Chaucer. If the subject in hand be concrete description, as in the Temple of Mars, Dryden is at his best, and surpasses his original; but if the abstract enters, as in the portraiture on the walls, he expands, and when he expands he weakens. ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... and England," says Mr. Ruskin,[6] "painted with absolute fidelity by Scott and Wordsworth,—(for leading types out of this exhaustless portraiture, I may name Dandie Dinmont, and Michael,) are hitherto a scarcely injured race; whose strength and virtue yet survive to represent the body and soul of England, before her days of mechanical decrepitude, and commercial dishonour. There are men working in my own fields ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... Goldsmith showing a firmer hand in character-drawing. With a few happy dramatic touches Mr. Tibbs starts into life; he speaks for himself; he becomes one of the people whom we know. And yet, with this concise and sharp portraiture of a human being, look at the graceful, almost ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... will be sure to punish himself. The bad is radically odious, and to endeavour in any manner to ennoble it, is to violate the laws of propriety. Hence, in my opinion, Dante, and even Tasso, have been much more successful in their portraiture of daemons than Milton. Whether the age of Shakspeare still believed in ghosts and witches, is a matter of perfect indifference for the justification of the use which in Hamlet and Macbeth he has made ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... Charles Eliot Norton, for his criticism. He thought it wanting in unity; it was a group of studies instead of one study, he said; I must do something to draw the different sketches together in a single effect of portraiture; and this I ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... one of the heroines of the "Histoire de ma Vie," we cannot do it justice without lingering a little over her portraiture. She is described as tall, fair, and of a Saxon type of beauty. Her manners would seem to have been de haute ecole, and her culture was on a large and noble scale. Austere in her morals, her faith was the deistic philosophy of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... pictures on the wall,—three, and no more. One was a copy of the lovely portraiture of Milton's musical inspired youth; the wonderful eyes, the "breezy hair," the impassioned purity of the countenance, looked down on the place where the musician might be found three-fourths of her waking hours, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... induced him to do so. The poem is boyish, or at all events youthful, in point of conception; and we need not wonder that this intellectual crudeness should have outweighed its finished poetic beauties in its author's mind. It contains however one piece of mental portraiture which, with slight modifications, might have stood for Mr. Browning when he re-edited the work, as it clearly did when he wrote it. It begins thus (vol. ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... use the language of patrons, Turner administered a similar hint to Beechey. When the lecture was over, Beechey walked up to Fuseli, and said, "How sharply you have been cutting up us poor laborers in portraiture!" "Not you, Sir William," exclaimed the professor, "I only spoke of the ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... where the bad novels go, and unread in the present day, unless in some remote country town, which boasts only a very meagre circulating library. Improbability took the place of natural painting in them; punning supplied that of better wit; and personal portraiture was so freely used, that his most intimate friends—old Mathews, for ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... good to have [63] come across, are worked out, not in rapid sketches, nor by hazardous epigram, but more securely by patient analysis; and though we have said that Mrs. Ward is most successful in female portraiture, her own mind and culture have an unmistakable virility and grasp and scientific firmness. This indispensable intellectual process, which will be relished by admirers of George Eliot, is relieved constantly by the sense of a charming landscape background, for the most part English. Mrs. ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... fodder. So is every artificer and work-master that passeth his time by night as by day, they that cut gravings of signets; and his diligence is to make great variety; he will set his heart to preserve likeness in his portraiture, and will be wakeful to finish his work. So is the smith, sitting by the anvil, and considering the un-wrought iron; the vapor of the fire will waste his flesh, and in the heat of the furnace will he wrestle with his work; the noise of the hammer will be ever in his ears, and ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... the first development of art in America and it led to the working of metals, followed by drawing and portraiture. Among the Americans, as soon as that term ceased to mean Indians, art took a most distracting turn. Europe was old in pictures, great and beautiful, when America was worshipping at the shrine of the chromo; but the chromo served a good turn, bad as it was. It was a link between ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... should have noticed it if I had not known his story. He spoke not a word, and met nobody's eye, but kept staring upward into the smoky vacancy towards the ceiling, where, it might be, he beheld a continual portraiture of his victim's horror-stricken agonies. I rather fancy, however, that his moral sense was yet too torpid to trouble him with such remorseful visions, and that, for his own part, he might have had very agreeable ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... his hero to India, seemingly in order to have excuse for writing a passage which one would say was obviously inspired by that gorgeous description of the jungle in The Research Magnificent. Mr. BARKER has enough matter for two (or three) novels and enough skill in portraiture to make them more coherent and plausible than this. The theme is old but freshly seen. Tom Seton, resolved to avoid risking for his beloved the unhappiness which his mother had found in the bondage of marriage, offers her—indeed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 4th, 1920 • Various
... valuable, and might well console me for all the abuse it has called forth, both on him and me. I trusted to the substantial goodness and greatness of the character, and thought I should only make it more effective in portraiture by keeping in the few specks. I despise with my heels the whole trickery of erecting an alabaster image, and calling that a Man.... The work is now done, and I leave it to its fate. I had no personal object to gratify except, indeed, that I wished and hoped to please my poor wife." ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... literature which from century to century adorns with immortal diamonds the poetic crown of the countries where letters are cultivated. He put into it the spirit of ancient times; he blended in it at once drama, dialogue, portraiture, landscape, description; he brought into it the marvellous and the true, those elements of the epopee; he made poetry mingle in it with the humblest sorts of language. But having less invented a system ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... the clouds,—so now, through the obscurity of fable, we descry the dim and mighty outline of the HEROIC AGE. The careful and skeptical Thucydides has left us, in the commencement of his immortal history, a masterly portraiture of the manners of those times in which individual prowess elevates the possessor to the rank of a demigod; times of unsettled law and indistinct control;—of adventure—of excitement;—of daring qualities and lofty crime. ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... before I attempt the portraiture of the young wife of Mundus. Her shadow has indeed flitted once before across these pages (see Chapter Four of the Novel), but the dim outlines of a shadow may be traced by a hand that is powerless to paint the living, breathing figure. The boudoir where she sat was draped with ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... compared Lela's face to the rich portraiture of Guercino; Majoli's suggests the pencil of that famous old Spanish master, Ribera, whose pictures of women were always a blending of the elegance of a court lady with the simplicity and naivete of a church devotee. Half belle, half ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... fatuously prudent Archie, and Joe, the vegetarian, who had such exalted faith in malt, she wins a deserved happiness with someone that she had never even thought of pursuing. Mr. HALIFAX gives me an impression of almost cinematographic and gramophonic exactness in his portraiture. George Shadd, Ruth's father, who worked in the gasworks and was one of the very best, delighted me particularly, with his pathetic little garden, his battle with the slugs and black-fly, and his fine patience with Mrs. Shadd, who ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 23, 1917 • Various
... my hall of portraiture I gaze, By Memory reared, the artist wise and holy, From stainless quarries of deep-buried days. There, as I muse in soothing melancholy, Your faces glow in more than mortal youth, Companions of my prime, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... head on one side, the bison on the other. He is particularly interested in personalities, having done a number of very clever portrait busts. It is enough to look at the portrait bust of Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney's boy to realize what he is able to do in the line of portraiture. He has produced nothing finer in that line. He is ...
— Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts • Juliet James
... to the elements of art, distasteful as he found them. It was hard to pore over rectangles and curves, bones and muscles, angles and measurements, after sporting with irregular forms and fascinating colors. He tried portraiture, but he had no feeling for the business. He could not transfigure the dull and commonplace heads he was to copy. He had not the nice tact that makes beauty of ugliness without the loss of identity. He could not ennoble vulgarians. The sordid man ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... a most exquisite portraiture of the married life of the royal pair, which seems to have been as nearly perfect as any thing human can be. The volume closes shortly after the Revolution of 1848, at Paris, when Louis Philippe and his hapless queen were fleeing to England ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... vision, at her most set, hard of hair and jaw, with deep eye-sockets. She admired it for the black gown and the lace handkerchief she was holding; but she was interested in it, too, as the true egoist always is in self-portraiture, however unflattering. ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... IN THE HOMERIC AGE.—(1) Government. In the Homeric portraiture of Greek life, there are towns; but the tribe is predominant over the town. The tribe is ruled by a king, who is not like an Eastern despot, but has about him a council of chiefs, and is bound by the themistes, ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... is at present limited) is that they are far superior to glass for all purposes except portraiture of the human form or instantaneous pictures where extreme rapidity is necessary, but for all ordinary cases of rapid exposure they are sufficiently quick. The first advantage, which I soon discovered, is their entire freedom from ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 623, December 10, 1887 • Various
... gentlemen of the day, and this style seems to have particularly pleased Giorgione, who introduces it in many other pictures besides portraits. The oval of the face, which is strongly lighted, is also characteristic. This work shows no direct connection with Bellini's portraiture, but far more with that which we are accustomed to associate with the names of Titian and Palma. It dates probably from the early part of the sixteenth century, at a time when Giorgione was breaking with the older tradition which had strictly limited portraiture to the representation ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... as the sole ground and efficient cause not only of all things, events, and appearances, but likewise of all our thoughts, sensations, impulses, and actions. Obedience to nature is the only virtue." It is possible that Byron traced his own lineaments in this too life-like portraiture, and at the same time conceived the possibility of a new Don Juan, "made up" after his own likeness. His extreme resentment at Coleridge's just, though unwise and uncalled-for, attack on Maturin stands in need of some explanation. See letter to Murray, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... withering, seem hardly likely to have been employed by him in this personal sense, in a published book. Perhaps therefore we shall be safest in supposing that he alludes, not to persons who are dear, but to circumstances and conditions of a more general kind—such as are involved in his self-portraiture, stanzas 31-34. ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... emotional: interest in Tragedy Peripeteia or Reversal of the Situation, and Recognition scenes—are parts of the plot. A further proof is, that novices in the art attain to finish: of diction and precision of portraiture before they can construct the plot. It is the same with almost all ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... nothing of the movement. Philo-Judaeus, who occupied the whole period ascribed to Jesus, and engaged himself deeply in figuring out the Logos, had heard nothing of the being who was realising at Jerusalem the image his fancy was creating" ("Portraiture and Mission ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... high merit of the ancient Indian paintings at Ajanta and elsewhere is now fully recognized. A great revival of pictorial art took place about A.D. 1570 in the reign of Akbar. From that date the Indo-Persian and Indian schools of painting maintained a high standard of excellence, especially in portraiture, for a century approximately. During the eighteenth century marked deterioration may be observed. See A History of Fine Art in India and ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... the Mediterranean, from the mouths of the Rhine to the Euxine, there was no other exhibition of free deliberative eloquence in any popular assembly. And the Luise of Voss alone, a metrical idyl not less valued for its truth of portraiture than our own Vicar of Wakefield, will show, that the most sequestered clergyman of a rural parish did not think his breakfast equipage complete without the latest report from the great senate that sat in London. Hence we need not be astonished that German and English literature were found by ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... another man. The second love deceived him in the same way, preferring a Count to a genius. And his third love, George Sand, after apparently reciprocating his attachment, for a few years, not only discarded him, but tried to justify her conduct to the world, by giving an exaggerated portraiture of his weaknesses, in her novel ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... grace of her slender figure, the uncommon beauty of her pale oval face—other types had appealed more, other colouring attracted. She had studied her face often, disapprovingly. Once or twice, lacking a model, she had essayed to reproduce her own features. She had failed utterly. The faithful portraiture she achieved for others was wanting. She was unable to express in her own likeness the almost startling exposition of character that distinguished her ordinary work. She had been her own limitation. Her ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... material personality is an error in premise, and must result in erroneous con- [5] clusions. All will agree with me that material portraiture often fails to express even mortal man, and this declares its unfitness for fable or fact ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... will be short: the interim is mine; And a man's life is no more than to say One. But I am very sorry, good Horatio, That to Laertes I forgot myself; For by the image of my cause I see The portraiture of his: I'll court his favours: But, sure, the bravery of his grief did put me Into ...
— Hamlet, Prince of Denmark • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... suggestive of a Pony- nightmare was delicious to him. He had even lost money (and he took to that toy very kindly) by getting up Goblin slides for magic-lanterns, whereon the Powers of Darkness were depicted as a sort of supernatural shell-fish, with human faces. In intensifying the portraiture of Giants, he had sunk quite a little capital; and, though no painter himself, he could indicate, for the instruction of his artists, with a piece of chalk, a certain furtive leer for the countenances of those monsters, which was safe to destroy the ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... sense of the term, but to speak it in a much higher sense, by rigidly compelling, point by point, a correspondence of the words with the fact external or internal. He never would tolerate in his own children a mere hackneyed, borrowed expression, but demanded exact portraiture; and nothing vexed him more than to hear one of them spoil and make worthless what he or she had seen, by reporting it in some stale phrase which had been used by everybody. This refusal to take the trouble to watch the presentment to the mind of anything which ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... "Portraiture of characters and events should take the form of one gentleman conversing with another, in the easy tone of good society. The author who sets out to address a crowd defeats his own object; he eliminates ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... writer of the day, Dickens, in our judgment, not excepted, is delivering a course of lectures on the English Humorists. The lectures are received with great favor by an audience fit and not few. The first was upon Swift, and was a striking portraiture of that able, unscrupulous, and baffled clerical adventurer. The second lecture was upon Congreve, the most worthless, and Addison, the most amiable of the English Humorists. His treatment of Addison is characterized as more brilliant than ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... "Barry Lyndon." It can hardly be called a novel, and still less a serious biography, though it is founded on the real history of a notorious highway robber and thief. The author disclaimed in his preface any attempt on his part at authentic history or faithful portraiture. "Roguery, and not a rogue is my subject," he wrote; adding, that the ideas of goodness and greatness are too often confounded together. "A man may be great without being good, or good without being great." The story of "Jonathan Wild" is really a bitter, satirical attack ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... faded—pictures of men and women with the powdered hair of the Georgian period, and the flowing full-bottomed wigs familiar to St. James's and Tunbridge-wells in the days of inoffensive Anne. There were in all seven miniatures, six of which specimens of antique portraiture were prim and starched and artificial of aspect. But the seventh was different in form and style: it was the picture of a girlish face looking out of a frame of loose unpowdered locks; a bright innocent face, with gray eyes and marked black eyebrows, ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... sculpture, however, than its simple portraiture and noble drapery. The old man lies on a piece of embroidered carpet; and, protected by the higher relief, many of the finer lines of this are almost uninjured; in particular, its exquisitely-wrought fringe and tassels are ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin
... natural—that the volumes are worth reading on that account alone. But there is also masterly description of persons, places, and things; skilful analysis of character; a constant play of wit and humour; and a happy gift of instantaneous portraiture." ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... collected and publish'd since his death, gives wonderful glints into both the amiable and weak (and worse than weak) parts of his portraiture, habits, good and bad luck, ambition and associations. His letters to Mrs. Dunlop, Mrs. McLehose, (Clarinda,) Mr. Thompson, Dr. Moore, Robert Muir, Mr. Cunningham, Miss Margaret Chalmers, Peter Hill, Richard Brown, Mrs. Riddel, Robert Ainslie, and Robert Graham, afford valuable ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... men of their sedate and serious character, if they displayed few of the graces of European polish, at least gave no manifestation of an innate vulgarity. As it may not be uninteresting to the reader to have a slight sketch of the warriors, we will attempt the portraiture. ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... you see, I am not able to do as good work as I should," she faltered over the coffee. "I am 'faking' it all, because I cannot afford to use models, and what talent I may have is in the line of portraiture. But sitters don't flock to South Washington Square, and it is hard ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... knowledge of man, but knowledge of men as well. His greatness rests not only on his own commanding personality, but on his magical power of laying other personalities under tribute for the enlargement of his view of things and the enrichment of his portraiture of humanity. A man learns much from his own contacts with his time and his race, but one of the most important gains he makes is the development of the faculty of appropriating the results of the contacts of other men with other times and races; and one of the finer qualities of ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... Poetry is not necessary to its existence any more than the astronomy of the heavens is to the brilliancy of the sun or to the splendors of a comet. A Poet is a creator, and his most perfect creature is a portraiture of any work of God or man; of any attribute of God or man in perfect keeping with Nature or with the original prototype, be it in fact or in fiction, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various |
