New York City.- Sperone Westwater is pleased to present “Portraits/Self-Portraits” on view at the gallery until February 25th. The exhibition features portrait and self-portrait paintings by notable European and American artists from the sixteenth century to the present. This survey includes Old Master paintings from Italy, France, England, and The Netherlands, as well as works by modern and contemporary artists. The breadth of the works in “Portraits/Self-Portraits” demonstrates that portraiture has been an on-going and reoccurring theme in art history, especially in Western culture, for centuries. The earliest portraits were created to illustrate physical or material attributes of the sitter, which historically included nobility, family, friends, lovers, and the self. According to Angus Trumble, Senior Curator of Paintings and Sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art – who has written the essay for the “Portraits/Self-Portraits” catalogue – in the seventeenth century, the focus of portraiture shifted to capturing the character or essence of the person.