PORTRAIT • DICCIONARIO INGLES.COM • Definition of Portrait

Add this Dictionary
to your website!
See more options...

/pˈɔrtrət/ Listen

noun

Portrait n.

The likeness of a person, painted, drawn, or engraved; commonly, a representation of the human face painted from real life. "In portraits, the grace, and, we may add, the likeness, consists more in the general air than in the exact similitude of every feature." Note: The meaning of the word is sometimes extended so as to include a photographic likeness.

Hence, any graphic or vivid delineation or description of a person; as, a portrait in words.

Portrait bust, or Portrait statue, a bust or statue representing the actual features or person of an individual; in distinction from an ideal bust or statue.

verb

Portrait v. t. To portray; to draw. (Obs.)

See images of 'Portrait'

Etymology of 'Portrait'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

Share |

"Portrait" Quotes from Famous Books

... Her gentle look and winning ways Whose portrait hangs on memory's walls, In the fond light of other days. In the dream-land of Poetry, Reclining in its leafy bowers, Her bright eyes in the stars I see, And her sweet semblance in ...

— Poems • George P. Morris

... the year before the sailing of the Armada, "singed the King of Spain's beard" most mightily, going up and down the coasts of Spain and Portugal, plundering and burning the ships in their very harbours; who sailed round the world, with the sun for "fellow traveller," as an epitaph under his portrait in the Guildhall says of him; who, on the first independent expedition which he led to America, received a dangerous wound in his attack on Nombre de Dios, but concealed it from his men, and led ...

— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland

... the life of the Golden Age or true rustic existence places him on the side of Addison, Tickell, Ambrose Philips, and Fontenelle (indeed, his statement is a paraphrase of Fontenelle's), and in opposition to the school of Rapin, Pope, and Gay, who argued for a portrait of the Golden Age. Both schools campaigned for a simplicity removed from realistic rusticity (which they detected in Spenser and Theocritus) and refinement (as in Virgil's eclogues); but to one group the term meant the innocence of those remote from academic learning ...

— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney

... people. She's been gone sin' Friday was a fortnight: they sent her the money for her journey. You may see her room here," she went on, opening a door and not noticing the effect of her words on Adam. He rose and followed her, and darted an eager glance into the little room with its narrow bed, the portrait of Wesley on the wall, and the few books lying on the large Bible. He had had an irrational hope that Hetty might be there. He could not speak in the first moment after seeing that the room was empty; an undefined fear had seized him—something had happened ...

— Adam Bede • George Eliot

... I noted with surprise, reflecting that, assuming it to be an authentic work of the master, my entire worldly possessions could not have enabled me to buy it. It was the portrait of a typical Spanish cavalier and beyond doubt a Menendez. In fact, the resemblance between the haughty Spanish grandee, who seemed about to step out of the canvas and pick a quarrel with the spectator, and Colonel Don Juan himself was almost startling. Evidently, our host had ...

— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer

More quotes...