God sends experience to paint men's portraits. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]

Dreams are like portraits; and we find they please because they are confessed resemblances. [ Crabbe ]

In portraits, the grace and, we may add, the likeness consists more in taking the general air than in observing the exact similitude of every feature. [ Sir Joshua Reynolds ]

Winckelmann wished to live with a work of art as a friend. The saying is true of pen and pencil. Fresh lustre shoots from Lycidas in a twentieth perusal. The portraits of Clarendon are mellowed by every year of reflection. [ Willmott ]

What a conception of art must those theorists have who exclude portraits from the proper province of the fine arts! It is exactly as if we denied that to be poetry in which the poet celebrates the woman he really loves. Portraiture is the basis and the touchstone of historic painting. [ Schlegel ]