Portraiture is very commonly looked upon as a branch of art in which the first essential for the artist is the power of careful transcription from nature, combined with a resolute suppression of individual expression.

Such a restricted conception might pass as the last word of wisdom for the maker of wax-work figures. But as a work of art, a portrait must be much more than a faithful rendering of nature. True, all portraiture implies a certain circumscription and specialisation of the world of representative effort; but it allows, nevertheless, great creative manifestations of artistic genius. For the highest demand we can make upon a portrait, the demand to be brought into the personal and spiritual atmosphere of a man or woman, can only be gratified by the artist capable of translating physical phenomena into the terms of a spiritual picture of character. He lifts the veil of nature by clarifying and simplifying the unrelated accidents of outward appearance, and making them into factors which contribute to the effect of his conception. This transmuting fatuity must not, of course, be looked upon as an immutable and equable power. It varies according to the physical characteristics of the person represented, and the temperament of the artist. There are heads, the monumental structure of which seems to have forestalled the artist's labours in all essentials. As we are unable to verify this assertion by means of antique examples, I may instance the heads of Bismarck and of Beethoven. In other cases, however, where the expressive values are less evident and superficial, a wide field lies open to the artist's creative energies. The prosaic, uninspired realist will seize relentlessly upon the dry external form; but the truly great artist will always be able to win a definite subjective effect from objective truth. His work is not falsification; what he does is to clarify and enhance actual forms. Good examples of both methods have come down to us from antiquity; of the one, in the portrait of Plato; of the other, in the head of Alexander from Pergamon.

[...]