Portraits & Figures

Portrait painting is the oldest argument in art about what a person is, and the works here span five centuries of that argument. Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring are faces the whole world recognises. Rembrandt’s Night Watch and Velázquez’s Las Meninas are group portraits that broke the rules of the form — one by making a militia company look like it was caught mid-movement, the other by putting the painter, the mirror and the viewer inside the picture.

Grant Wood’s American Gothic and Sargent’s Madame X caused scandals in their own day. Raja Ravi Varma’s Kadambari and Reverie brought European oil technique to Indian subjects and changed how a subcontinent pictured itself.

Every piece is printed on archival canvas at the original work’s proportions, unframed and rolled, made to order and shipped free worldwide.