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"I won't change a thing in his portrait. Is it my fault if Moore looks like a squashed egg yolk and if his face is all lopsided? Anyway, the same aplies to everybody's face ... There's no symmetry in nature. One eye is never exactly the same as the other, there's always a difference. We all have a more or less crooked nose and an iregular mouth"
Edouard Manet on the Irish writer George Moore, 1878.

"I don't know if I can convey the postman as I feel him ... Unfortunately he cannot pose, and a painting demands an intelligent model."
Vincent van Gogh, 1888

"Cézanne rushed foward: 'You wretch! You have upset the pose! You should sit like an apple. Whoever saw an apple fidgeting?' Motionless as that fruit may be, Cézanne was sometimes obliged to leave a study of apples unfinished. They had rotted."
Ambroise Vollard, 1936, on posing for Paul Cézanne.

"I try to keep my sitters moving and talking, to make them forget they are being painted. This has nothing to do with extracting intimate secrets or confessions, but rather with establishing, in motion, an essential image of the kind that remains in memory or recurs in dreams. I could not do this if my sitter had to keep still ... or to hold a stiff pose until we were both sick of it. A person is not a still-life – not even a dead person."
Oskar Kokoschka, 1974.

"Even in the case of friends who will come and pose, I've had photographs taken for portraits because I very much prefer working from the photographs than from them. It's true to say I couldn't attempt to do a portrait from photographs of somebody I didn't know ... I find it less inhibiting to work from them through memory and their photographs than actually having them seated there before me."
Francis Bacon, 1987.

"Since the model he so faithfully copies is not going to be hung up next to the picture ... it is of no interest whether it is an accurate copy of the model. Whether it will convince or not, depends entirely on what it is in itself, what is there to be seen. The model should only serve the very private function for the painter of providing the starting point for his excitement. The picture is all he feels about it, all he thinks worth preserving of it, all he invests it with. If all the qualities which a painter took from the model for his picture were really taken, no person could be painted twice."
Lucien Freud, 1954.

"The aura given out by a person or object is as much a part of them as their flesh. The effect that they make in space is as bound up with them as might be their colour or smell ... Therefore the painter must be as concerned with the air surrounding his subject as with the subject itself. It is through observation and perception of atmosphere that he can register the feeling that he wishes his painting to give out."
Lucien Freud, 1954.

"I was very nervous about my naked body, when the idea of sitting for Lucien first came up, not only because I'm an unusually big heifer carting around sixteen or seventeen stones, but because of some of my body modifications ... Our first meeting took place over lunch at Harry's Bar. I dressed in colours from Lucien's palette – grey-brown trousers and jumper, and a man's short mouse-coloured wig. I was nervous and Lucien is always nervous ... And my physical features which so worried me in the beginning? – they are now in paintings which are housed in the greatest collections and museums in the world!"
Leigh Bowery, 1993, model for Lucien Freud.

"The sittings would begin between three and four o'clock and go on till about seven-thirty, when the light went ... There were 20 of those three- to four-hour sittings for my portrait; there would probably have been several more if I had not had to leave Paris ... His glance moved very quickly, almost continuously, between canvas and model."
David Sylvester, 1994, on posing for Alberto Giacometti.