Marie Stillman

Louise Jopling was born in Manchester. She studied art in Paris under Charles Chaplin from 1867–68. She went on to develop a lengthy professional career as an artist and painted portraits, figure compositions, interiors, landscape and genre scenes. She became a leading female artist in Victorian London who inhabited the most advanced artistic circles of her time. From the late 1860s, she exhibited at the Royal Academy and the Paris Salon. Major patrons included the de Rothschild banking family as well as aristocratic families such as Sir Coutts and Lady Lindsay, founders of the Grosvenor Gallery. The actresses Ellen Terry and Lillie Langtry posed for portraits. Jopling herself was much photographed in the studio, by teaching students at her art school and as a fashionable woman about town. Her confidantes included James McNeill Whistler and John Everett Millais, both of whom painted major portraits of her. Jopling was a versatile artist of wide artistic, literary and social interests. Together with other women artists such as Elizabeth Thompson Butler, she exhibited her work alongside male professional artists to considerable critical acclaim and was one of the first women to be admitted to the Royal Society of British Artists in 1901. Despite the many boundaries facing professional women artists, Jopling managed to lead a remarkably independent life, achieving status beyond the genteel amateurism with which artistic women were all too often associated. For Jopling to define what it meant to be a professional woman artist was a recurring urge throughout her life and artistic career. This stemmed from her own attempts to establish a career and belief, notably in her essay On the Education of the Artistic Faculty (1903), that women should be educated on equal terms with men. Born at a time when the notion of women in professional positions was the subject of increasing debate, Jopling achieved popular and critical acclaim. While an increasing number of women artists enjoyed some form of exhibition career, Jopling joined an elite group of female artists, including Elizabeth Thompson Butler and Rosa Bonheur, who achieved remarkable public success at mainstream art institutions and whose activities were followed closely in newspapers and magazines. At the same time, Jopling spoke the male language of the professional art practice with an awareness that her gender set her apart. “I hate being a woman,” she wrote, “Women never do anything.” She recorded her experiences and frustrations in a candid memoir, Twenty Years of My Life, 1867–1887, published in 1925.

An elegant and sophisticated decorative touch in any living space, portrait paintings have remained popular throughout the years and are widely loved pieces of art for display in many homes today.

Portrait paintings are at least as old as ancient Egypt, where realistic, lifelike depictions of the recently deceased — commonly known as “mummy portraits” — were painted on wooden panels and affixed to mummies as part of the burial tradition.

For centuries, painters have used portraiture as a means of expressing a subject’s nobility, societal status and authority. Portraits were given as gifts in Renaissance Europe, and a portrait artist might have been commissioned to help mark a significant occasion such as a wedding or a promotion to high office. Prior to the advent of photography, which eventually replaced painted portraits as a quicker and more efficient way of capturing a person’s essence, the subject of a portrait had to sit for hours until the painter had finished. And during the 18th century in particular, if an artist commissioned for a portrait struggled with how to adequately memorialize and capture a subject’s likeness, sometimes a portrait painting wasn’t completed for up to a year.

Whether it’s part of the gallery-style approach to your living-room or dining-room walls or merely inspiration as you devise an eye-grabbing color scheme in your home, a portrait painting is a timeless decorative object for any interior. A landscape painting or sculpture might give you the kind of insight into a specific region of the world or a different culture that you can ascertain only through art. Similarly, when you take the time to learn about the subject of a portrait painting that you bring into your home — the sitter’s history, the relationship between the sitter and the artist should one exist, the story of how the portrait came to be — that work can become intensely personal in addition to its place as an object for an art-hungry corner of your apartment or house.

On 1stDibs, visit a vast collection of famous portrait paintings or works by emerging artists. Search by medium to find the right portrait paintings for your home in oil paint, synthetic resin paint and more. Find portrait paintings in a variety of styles, too, including contemporary, Impressionist and Pop art, or search by artist to find unique works created by painters such as Mark Beard, Steve Kaufman and Montse Valdés.