portrait

Pluralportraits

Formsportraits, portraiting, portraited

1. 1
   nouncountable

   A person's likeness in a painting or another kind of picture, typically showing the head and shoulders.

   The museum's new exhibit features portraits by Dutch masters.

   He commissioned a portrait to mark his fiftieth birthday.

   Similarlikeness, picture, depiction

   Note

   Behind the word is a past participle: Middle French portraict, the noun use of portraire, "to portray", from Latin prōtrahō, "to draw forth". A portrait is literally something drawn out, just as a drawing is named for the act that made it. Joshua Reynolds, in his Discourses on Painting and the Fine Arts, located the art's real difficulty: likeness lies more in the general air than in matching every feature exactly.

2. 2
   nouncountable or uncountable

   A page or screen orientation in which the vertical sides are longer than the horizontal sides.

   The report reads better in portrait, with its long edge running vertically.

   Most word processors open new documents in portrait rather than landscape.

   Oppositelandscape

   Note

   Printing and computing borrowed the name from the painted likeness, whose head-and-shoulders frame stands taller than it is wide. Its partner is landscape, the wide orientation. It usually appears without an article: a page is set in portrait or printed in portrait. It is the default for most text documents, so people tend to name it only when contrasting it with landscape.

3. 3
   nounfigurativelycountable

   An accurate depiction of a person, a mood, or a similar subject.

   The biography offers an unflinching portrait of the artist's troubled later years.

   His essay paints a portrait of a community on the edge of change.

   Similarportrayal, depiction, picture, profile, sketch

   Note

   The figurative portrait keeps the painter's verb. Writers paint a portrait of urban life or of a troubled decade, and the phrase works for moods and places as readily as for people. Letitia Elizabeth Landon's Francesca Carrara (1834) shows how naturally the word crossed into words: a woman hands over her portrait, "written by herself", and it turns out to dwell lovingly on her own mouth.

4. 4
   adjective

   Depicting the actual features of an individual rather than an idealized version.

   The gallery specializes in portrait busts that record each sitter's true likeness.

   Roman portrait sculpture often depicted aging faces with unflinching realism.

   Oppositeidealized

   Note

   This adjective works only before a noun, as in a portrait bust or a portrait statue. It cannot be graded, since nothing is more portrait than something else. Its job is to classify a work by intent: it marks a likeness of a real individual and sets it apart from an idealized figure. In practice it behaves much like the noun used as a modifier.

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