The Essence of a Person

The idea of the past and for the whole strikes me as what you might call in literature, synecdoche. You take a moment which is somehow symptomatic of something much larger about the person's character. Rembrandt can look quite jaunty and self-confident and wealthy and successful in some earlier images and then the later images he begins to look more grim and aged and tired and decrepit and depressed. So there's something that is interesting about his study of himself through time. Portraiture does provide some kind of insight into a basic quality of a person. I don't know her majesty Queen Elizabeth II but I think Lucian Froyd's portrait of her