Portrait of a girl

Oil on board, 12 x 16 inches (30.5 x 41 cm)

This is the beginning of a portrait of a young girl. (Hey, I'm just getting started!)

Back when I was sculpting a lot of busts of different sorts of people I decided that some types were easier to render than others. Qualities in an individual which made the portraiture task easier were age, ugliness, maleness, and ill humor. So that means that the most difficult subject for a portraitist to take on is a lovely, laughing, young woman or girl. The sculptor, Carpeaux (see detail of "La Danse," below) is the only sculptor I can think of who could pull it off.