Jean-Antoine Laurent Portrait of a Nursing Mother 1803 watercolor on ivory Musée du Louvre |
Jean-Baptiste Jacques Augustin Portrait of artist Antoine-Denis Chaudet 1804 watercolor and gouache on ivory Musée du Louvre |
Philippe Berger Portrait of tenor Jean Elleviou ca. 1810 watercolor on ivory Musée du Louvre |
Louis-Marie Autissier Portrait of Henriette Campan née Genet (originally a Lady-in-Waiting to Marie Antoinette, then after the Revolution a schoolmistress) ca. 1810 watercolor on ivory Musée du Louvre |
Paul-Joseph Anastasi Self Portrait 1810 watercolor on ivory Musée du Louvre |
Charles-Guillaume-Alexandre Bourgeois Portrait of artist Fanny Morlot ca. 1812 watercolor on ivory Musée du Louvre |
Louis-Bertin Parant Portrait of artist Dominique Vivant-Denon ca. 1810-20 watercolor on ivory (imitating cameo) Musée du Louvre |
Aimée Thibault Portrait of the King of Rome kneeling before a Statue of the Virgin ca. 1814 watercolor on ivory Musée du Louvre |
Charles-Étienne Leguay Portrait of artist Marie Victoire Jacquotot ca. 1818 watercolor on ivory Musée du Louvre |
Lizinka Aimée Zoé de Mirbel Portrait of Pauline Boyer 1819 watercolor on ivory Musée du Louvre |
Anthelme-François Lagrenée Portrait of dramatist Pierre-Antoine Lebrun ca. 1820 watercolor on ivory (imitating cameo) Musée du Louvre |
André-Léon Larue (called Mansion) Portrait of a Young Woman ca. 1820 watercolor on ivory Musée du Louvre |
Étienne Bouchardy Portrait of a Young Woman 1828 watercolor on ivory Musée du Louvre |
François Meuret Portrait of a Woman ca. 1830 watercolor on ivory Musée du Louvre |
Emanuel Thomas Peter Portrait of Mathilde von Clary und Aldringen 1831 watercolor on ivory Musée du Louvre |
"In painting a portrait the artist aims at nothing more than that a certain individual should be recognized in his image. To achieve this, he studies to repeat with extreme precision the particular features, nay, even the deformities, of his model. Thus the usual encomium on a portrait (it is he himself) serves, in the best possible manner, to define that spirit of identity, repetition, reality which is peculiar to this kind of image; those words thus understood, and not taken in their strict sense, are applicable, in general theory, either to imitation or its works, according as the pleasure derived from them is more or less founded on sensations that are more or less restricted to physical effects."
"Not to lose sight of the comparison, there is assuredly no pleasure more limited than that which is usually the result of a portrait. If we abstract from it all the interest that individual and public feeling, or the talent of the artist clothes it with, we shall to a certainty find that the mind and the imagination have but small share in such kind of imitation; and for this reason, because the appositions to be brought about are few in number, and the operation of the mind in comparing very slightly active."
"From this instance, to which no one will find it difficult to add many others, we may conclude that imitation, when exercised in the sphere most circumscribed by reality, then contributes most to that pleasure which we have termed the pleasure of the senses, which may truly be said to be the only one that the vulgar require in the arts, and moreover the only one they receive from them."
– Antoine Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy, On the End of Imitation in the Fine Arts (1823), translated by J.C. Kent (1837)