Teaching Portrait and Self-Portrait Across Art History
Teaching Portrait and Self-Portrait Across Art History
Portraits look like the easiest subject in the art room until students discover that likeness is not the point. This page traces portrait and self-portrait from the donor panel to the phone camera for grades 7 to 12, covering the conventions students need to name: pose, gaze, attributes, format and what a face was for.
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The teaching problem
Why Likeness Is the Wrong Question
Students judge every portrait by whether it looks like the sitter, which is unanswerable for someone who died in 1520 and beside the point in any case. What the picture actually contains is a set of claims: who paid, who was meant to see it, and what the sitter wanted asserted about rank, piety or usefulness. Self-portraits carry a technical trap on top of that. Painted in a mirror, they reverse the working hand, and the gaze meets the viewer because it met the mirror first, so students read confrontation into an artist simply looking at their own eyes. Attributes get treated as decoration rather than argument. There is a practical issue too: portrait units involve students drawing each other, and that goes badly without rules agreed in advance.
A sequence that works
Portrait Conventions Across Five Sessions
Analysis and studio work run in parallel. Each session names a convention, tests it against real portraits from different centuries, then asks students to use it or deliberately refuse it in their own drawing.
- What a Face Was ForSort portraits by function: dynastic, devotional, memorial, commercial, documentary. Students infer the audience and the original setting from size, format and what the sitter is doing.
- Pose, Gaze and FormatProfile, three-quarter and frontal views compared, with eye contact and its absence. Students restage three poses with a phone and report how the reading changes.
- Attributes and Status ClaimsObjects, dress and background decoded across a set of sitters, then students invent an attribute set for a fictional person and swap sheets to test it.
- The Mirror and the SelfDurer and Rembrandt across working lifetimes. Students draw from a hand mirror and record what the mirror forces on them, including the reversed drawing hand.
- From Studio Photograph to SelfieEarly photographic portrait conventions set against phone self-images. Students compare framing, control and audience, then write a short evidence-based comparison of the two.
Where it goes wrong
Common Errors in Portrait Work
In studio work the proportion mistakes repeat every year. Eyes get placed too high, when they sit near the vertical midline of the head; ears end up above eye level rather than between the brow and the base of the nose; the skull behind the face is flattened, so heads look sliced; necks are drawn too narrow to hold a head up. In analysis, a stern expression is read as personality when it was a period convention for gravity, a self-portrait is assumed to be confessional, and a three-quarter view gets called a profile. Ask for evidence sentences that tie each claim to something visible. Keep classmate drawing voluntary, with a mirror, a photograph or a cast available as an alternative subject.
What's in the download
Inside the files
Editable Word and PowerPoint plus print-ready PDFs, with answer keys throughout.
- Comparison sets spanning five centuries
- Head proportion guides and drawing aids
- Editable analysis worksheets with tiers
- Slides on pose, gaze and attributes
- Vocabulary list and answer keys
- Reflection sheet for the studio strand
Good to know
Frequently asked questions
Do I need mirrors for the self-portrait lesson?
A small hand mirror each is ideal. Phone front cameras substitute reasonably well, with one caveat that is worth turning into teaching: most phones show a mirrored preview and then save an unmirrored file, so a student draws from one version and compares with another. Point that out and it becomes part of the lesson on reversal rather than a source of quiet frustration halfway through the period.
Some students hate being drawn. How is that handled?
No task requires a student to sit for a classmate. Observational work can be done from a mirror, from a photograph the student chooses, from a plaster head or from a figurine. The reflection sheet asks about decisions the student made, not about how they feel about their appearance. Set that expectation in the first lesson and the studio strand runs considerably more calmly than portrait units usually do.
How much art history do I need to know?
Enough to read the slides, which carry dates, context and the relevant convention for each work. The comparison sets are chosen so the argument is visible in the images: profile against three-quarter, attribute-heavy against plain, mirror self-portrait against commissioned likeness. Answer keys show the analysis you would expect from a strong student, so you can mark with confidence in a period outside your own specialism.
Faces With a Reason Behind Them
Portraits reward students who ask what the picture was for. The likeness question tends to answer itself after that.
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