The sitter was once incorrectly believed to be Saint Peter the Apostle. Sofonisba Anguissola, Giovanni Battista Caselli, Poet from Cremona (1557-58) ©Photographic Archive Museo Nacional del Prado.

Artist Allison Payne can’t help but laugh recalling a fellow colleague’s expert advice on painting portraits. “It’s not hard,” she said the person told her. “You just have to have the exact right ...

Nearly 125 years after Pablo Picasso painted a portrait of a sculptor friend, high-tech imaging tools have revealed another portrait hidden beneath it. The concealed image reveals a woman, the ...

“Francis Bacon: Human Presence” at London’s National Portrait Gallery is the institution’s first exhibition of the artist’s portraits. Featuring more than fifty key paintings from across his career, ...

Art historians studying a painting by Pablo Picasso have uncovered the mysterious portrait of a woman, hidden beneath its surface. The portrait of the woman was lost when Picasso painted over it, ...

Gilbert Stuart tartly maintained that “no one would paint history who could do a portrait,” but as the chief depicter of George Washington, he showed that to paint portraits is often to paint great ...

Why do human beings always see themselves in everything: craggy rock formations, diffuse cloud clusters, dense swirls of paint on canvas? Basically, we’re just a bunch of unhinged egomaniacs with a ...