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| Johann Friedrich Overbeck Portrait of painter Franz Pforr 1810 oil on canvas Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin |
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| Johann Friedrich Overbeck Portrait of painter Joseph Sutter ca. 1812-16 oil on canvas Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin |
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| Philipp Veit Self Portrait 1816 oil on canvas Landesmuseum, Mainz |
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| Johann Evangelist Scheffer von Leonhardshoff Portrait of a Woman ca. 1815-16 oil on canvas Belvedere Museum, Vienna |
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| Johann Evangelist Scheffer von Leonhardshoff Self Portrait 1820 oil on canvas Belvedere Museum, Vienna |
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| Marie Ellenrieder Self Portrait 1818 oil on canvas Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe |
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| Johann David Passavant Self Portrait before a Roman Landscape 1818 oil on panel Städel Museum, Frankfurt |
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| Friedrich Olivier Portrait of painter Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld 1819 oil on canvas Albertinum, Dresden |
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| Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld Portrait of Clara Bianca von Quandt 1820 oil on panel Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin |
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| Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld Portrait of a Man ca. 1820 oil on copper Belvedere Museum, Vienna |
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| Carl Joseph Begas Self Portrait 1820 oil on canvas Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin |
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| Carl Joseph Begas Portrait of Wilhelmine Begas, the Artist's Wife 1828 oil on canvas Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin |
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| Leopold Kupelwieser Portrait of a Woman in Blue 1827 oil on canvas Belvedere Museum, Vienna |
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| Joseph Anton Nikolaus Settegast Self Portrait 1839 oil on canvas private collection |
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| Edward von Steinle Portrait of the Artist's Daughter ca. 1845 oil on canvas Albertinum, Dresden |
"As they were not at first overwhelmed by public and ecclesiastical commissions, the Nazarenes also cultivated a quite different genre from fresco and history painting. Though they produced a relatively small number of commissioned portraits – in line with their view of the proper function of art – they made innumerable drawings (as well as occasional oil paintings) of and for each other, offering them to each other and to their friends as gifts. These small-scale, intimate, and unassuming works testify to a tension between the Nazarenes' goal of restoring art to the people, their desire to create a great public art, on the one hand, and, on the other, given the elusiveness of that goal, an inclination to reconceive the public world as an ideal community of friends and artists – a Malerrepublik, as the poet Friedrich Rückert put it – of which the Lukasbund or Brotherhood of St Luke, the original nucleus of the Nazarene movement, was no doubt the model. What was common to both the "public" and the "private" art of the Nazarenes, however, was the demand for absolute authenticity of feeling in the artist and it may well be that this emphasis on inner feeling was better suited to their private than to their public art. In the view of some critics at least, their best work is to be found not in the ambitious, full-scale paintings of scenes from the Old and New Testaments for which they are (and wanted to be) best known, but in innumerable smaller, finely contoured portraits, with minimum modeling . . ."
– Lionel Gossman, from Unwilling Moderns: The Nazarene Painters of the Nineteenth Century, published in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide (volume 2, issue 3, autumn 2003)