Defining Beauty: Solomon J. Solomon, Part II

There are portrait-painters who flatter their sitters by endeavoring to regularise their irregular features. Are those painters sufficiently conscious of the existing characteristics? For they certainly do not seem conscious of what might well be taken as an axiom, that in proportion as we depart from Nature we court a weakening of results.

A serious artist is not affected by a demand for the pretty-pretty.

Proportion is the chief factor in the making of individuality, and this is clearly seen in those large photographic groups of schools and crowded collections of people where the individual heads are sometimes not larger than a small pea and are still easily identified. Subtleties of drawing or light and shade can hardly affect the heads so reduced, so that obviously the individuality of each head is almost entirely due to the relative proportions of the features.¹

¹ Solomon J. Solomon, The Practice of Oil Painting & Drawing, (Seeley, Service & Co. Ltd.: London, 1952), p. 51. (emphasis mine)