In fact, there are only two styles of portrait painting; the serious and the smirk...
Charles Dickens,
Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839)
1
Before the advent of photography, paintings were the only way to immortalize a face. Dickens may have been right about the limited variations in turns of the mouth (the Mona Lisa, by Leonardo da Vinci, being a prime example) but he perhaps forgot the many features available for the artist to mold to their liking. One of these happens to be our largest organ system—the skin.