The artist throws you off your guard, watches you in movement and in repose, puts your face through its exercises, observes its transitions, and so gets the whole range of its expression.

Out of all this he forms an ideal portrait, which is not a copy of your exact look at any one time or to any particular person.

Such a portrait cannot be to everybody what the ungloved call "as nat'ral as life." Every good picture, therefore, must be considered wanting in resemblance by many persons.
There is one strange revelation which comes out, as the artist shapes your features from his outline.

It is that you resemble so many relatives to whom you yourself never had noticed any particular likeness in your countenance.
He is at work at me now, when I catch some of these resemblances, thus: There! that is just the look my father used to have sometimes; I never thought I had a sign of it.

The mother's eyebrow and grayish-blue eye, those I knew I had.