From Old Masters to Canvas Photo Portraits

Centuries ago, painters like Diego Velazquez created memorable family portraits using oil paint on canvas, displaying a mastery of lighting, composition, and brush technique. Today, this type of painted family portrait, often commissioned by noble families and royalty, hangs in many museums throughout the world. In our technological age, photos have largely replaced oil paintings as the preferred medium for memorializing familial groups. Nonetheless, even the advent of digital photography has not completely wiped out the traditional approach to family portraiture.

The Old Masters were often known and sought after for their skill in portraiture. Among the upper classes, a single or group depiction painted by a skilled artist was one way to ensure that death didn't mean the family name was destined for oblivion. Heads of state, wealthy merchants and their wives -- not to mention mistresses - and illustrious public figures all chased instant immortality in the form of a canvas portrait. Of course, immortality via portraiture was a tradition with a long history dating back centuries. But it gained new life with the rise of painting in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. A canvas portrait by a master like Rembrandt or Holbein was no small endeavor, especially when it depicted a large group; often, subjects were required to sit or stand stiffly for hours on end as the painter sketched.

For hundreds of years, until the arrival of photography until in the mid-19th century, oil or watercolor on canvas was the most popular method of memorializing the family line. Once Louis Daguerre had perfected a means of capturing a still image and transferring it to a permanent surface, the game changed forever. Though artists would continue to find portrait work, Daguerrotypes, then tintypes, and eventually paper-backed photos became the popular medium for family pictures. Economics certainly played a role in the rise of the photo portrait. Indeed, for a long time, only the poorer classes sought to have themselves immortalized in photos. The privileged few retained the use of a professional painter, viewing the family portrait as an expression of artistic merit as much as a personal record. As photos became a matter of mass production, gradually even heads of state yielded to portrait photography.

Nowadays, outside of Buckingham Palace, modern family portraits in oil are scarcely to be found. But the use of canvas photos as a medium for portraiture has discovered a second life in the form of photo transfers. Professional photographic services can turn digital prints or into canvas photos - complete with simulated brushstrokes - at highly affordable prices. So one day in the future, the Joneses of Main Street may hang alongside Spain's royal family, both immortalized on canvas thanks to canvas photos.