Other forms: portraits
A portrait is a picture whose whole point is one person. A queen in a gold frame, your grandmother photographed from the shoulders up, a charcoal sketch done in twenty minutes on a pavement in Paris.
The person in it is the sitter, and one you make of yourself is a self-portrait. Words can do the same job: a portrait of a marriage, a portrait of a city in the 1970s, a picture built out of sentences instead of paint. On phones and printers, portrait means the tall way up, the opposite of landscape, and portrait mode is the camera setting that blurs the background. Hold on to that pair: a portrait shows a person, a landscape shows the land.
1nounportraitA painting, photograph or drawing of a person, especially of the face and shoulders.
“The gallery's most famous portrait was painted in 1642.”
2noundetailedA detailed description of a person or a place in words or on film.
“The novel is a portrait of a family falling apart.”
3nounuprightThe upright page or screen shape, taller than it is wide.
“Print it in portrait, not landscape.”
portrait is a picture.
Portrait came from Middle French portraict, the past participle of portraire, 'to portray', and behind that Latin protraho, built from pro- and traho. The picture is something drawn forth onto the surface, which is exactly the idea plain English keeps in the word drawing.
Latin
prōtrahō
Middle French
portraict
English, today
portrait
Built from
From Middle French portraict, pourtraict, nominal use of the past participle of portraire (“portray”), from Latin prōtrahō (< prō- + trahō). Compare typologically drawing.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA