📚 Portraits

Faces commissioned and kept: the sitters, the painters, and what a likeness was ever for.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject portraits in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	The English Tongue	Thomas Dilworth	1740	198
	Oliver Goldsmith	Washington Irving	1840	133
	The schoolmasters assistant	Thomas Dilworth	1744	128
	The life of Washington	Mason Locke Weems	1800	100
	Correspondence	Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart	1865	74
	Grammatical institute of the English language. Part 1	Noah Webster	1788	65
	The man of the world	Charles Macklin	1781	48
	M'Fingal	John Trumbull	1775	41
	David Hockney	David Hockney	1968	41
	An American selection of lessons in reading and speaking	Noah Webster	1787	37
	Henri Cartier-Bresson	Henri Cartier-Bresson	1967	34
	Chuck Close	Chuck Close	1975	25
	Churchill	Martin Gilbert	1967	24
	The Presidents of the United States of America	Frank Burt Freidel	1964	23
	Helmut Newton	Helmut Newton	1982	21
	Woman's record, or, Sketches of all distinguished women	Sarah Josepha Hale	1853	20
	Napoléon	André Maurois	1963	20
	Brachygraphy	Gurney, Thomas	1752	19
	Robert Mapplethorpe	Robert Mapplethorpe	1981	13
	Goethes sämtliche Werke	Johann Wolfgang von Goethe	1893	12
	Train Your Gaze	Roswell Angier	2006	12
	Karsh	Yousuf Karsh	1983	11
	Greek & Roman portraits	Hekler, Antal	1912	10
	Art principles in portrait photography	Otto Walter Beck	1907	8
	Churchill, his life in photographs	Randolph S. Churchill	1955	8
	The ballad of sexual dependency	Nan Goldin	1986	8
	Nadar	Félix Nadar	1965	7
	Patrick Demarchelier	Patrick Demarchelier	1995	7
	Peter Lindbergh	Peter Lindbergh	1998	7
	Album	Pierre Teilhard de Chardin	1966	6

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 07 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

Nearby shelves

PortuguesePoultryPovertyPrayerPresidentsPrimates

Want the ideas behind these books explained rather than listed? Try Study for short explainers, Academy for deeper tracks, and the periodic table or the night sky when the book is about matter or stars.