Faces, figures and cloth
Silhouettes through time, beauty ideals across eras, famous portraits and the studio’s care rituals.
Silhouettes
Choose an era to see its shape.
The New Look
Christian Dior showed a nipped waist and a skirt of many metres of fabric in 1947, a deliberate return to luxury after wartime rationing.
Beauty across time
Ideas of beauty change with place and period.
Heian Japan
Courtiers prized layered robes in carefully matched colours and very long black hair.
Renaissance Italy
A high forehead, pale skin and soft, rounded features were admired in portraits of the time.
The 1920s
Short bobbed hair, dark lips and loose clothing broke with older expectations.
Today
Ideas of beauty are broader and more varied in public life than they once were.
Faces in portraits
Three portraits worth knowing.
Mona Lisa
Leonardo da Vinci, painted from about 1503. Soft edges and a hazy background give the face its quiet presence. It hangs in the Louvre.
Girl with a Pearl Earring
Johannes Vermeer, about 1665. A face turned over the shoulder against a dark ground, lit by a single pearl. It is in the Mauritshuis in The Hague.
Madame X
John Singer Sargent, 1883 to 1884. The portrait of Virginie Gautreau caused a scandal at the 1884 Paris Salon, and Sargent soon moved to London.
Rituals of care
The studio side of Pretti. Prices are samples to edit.