Commissioning a portrait: Prices range from $2500. for a “head and shoulders” to $5000. for a double portrait. No money changes hands until there is total satisfaction on all sides. If practicable, the artist will visit the subject to do an interview and take photographs.
The human face and figure remain one of the most fascinating of all motifs, but in a standard portrait commission it is sometimes difficult to avoid what might be called the false rhetoric of the pose, originating in Renaissance tradition, that results from the sitter’s self-conscious desire to look their best. Everyone possesses an innate dignity that emerges in the honest interaction of artist and subject and doesn’t need to be “added in.