The one great obstacle that I have to contend against in the
practice of my profession is not, as some persons may imagine,
the difficulty of making my sitters keep their heads still while
I paint them, but the difficulty of getting them to preserve the
natural look and the every-day peculiarities of dress and manner.
People will assume an expression, will brush up their hair, will
correct any little characteristic carelessness in their
apparel--will, in short, when they want to have their likenesses
taken, look as if they were sitting for their pictures. If I
paint them, under these artificial circumstances, I fail of
course to present them in their habitual aspect; and my portrait,
as a necessary consequence, disappoints everybody, the sitter
always included. When we wish to judge of a man's character by
his handwriting, we want his customary scrawl dashed off with his
common workaday pen, not his best small-text, traced laboriously
with the finest procurable crow-quill point. So it is with
portrait-painting, which is, after all, nothing but a right
reading of the externals of character recognizably presented to
the view of others.

Experience, after repeated trials, has proved to me that the only
way of getting sitters who persist in assuming a set look to
resume their habitual expression, is to lead them into talking
about some subject in which they are greatly interested. If I can
only beguile them into speaking earnestly, no matter on what
topic, I am sure of recovering their natural expression; sure of
seeing all the little precious everyday peculiarities of the man
or woman peep out, one after another, quite unawares. The long,
maundering stories about nothing, the wearisome recitals of petty
grievances, the local anecdotes unrelieved by the faintest