Group Portrait

Two or more people portrayed together, arranged to show rank, family ties, shared work or common cause.

4,521 works · 10 related artists

About

A group portrait records several people together, and its composition shows how they relate: by rank, kinship, work or cause. Egyptian sculptors carved King Menkaure and his queen side by side around 2500 BC, her arm around his waist. In the 17th-century Dutch Republic, civic guard companies and charity boards paid to be painted as a body, and Frans Hals gave the format new energy in Banquet of the Officers of the St George Civic Guard (1616). Rembrandt van Rijn went further in The Night Watch (1642), turning a militia company into a scene of movement and light.

Johann Zoffany's The Academicians of the Royal Academy (1771–72) gathered London's artists around a life model, and Francisco de Goya's Charles IV of Spain and His Family (1800) lined up a royal household with unsparing candour. Richard Avedon's white-backed photographic murals of 1969, including Andy Warhol's Factory circle, updated the frieze.