Daily Inspiration Quote by Anthony Powell

Vanity is supposed to be the point of a portrait; Powell flips it into a small, civilized humiliation. Sitting for a portrait turns you into an object under scrutiny, and the longer the scrutiny lasts, the harder it is to keep pretending you are in charge of your own image. The painter isnay just recording a face; they are editing a person in real time. That asymmetry is where Powell finds his sting.

The line works because it makes inferiority feel inevitable, almost procedural. "Few persons" is a sly, social-satirical frame: Powell is writing about a class that does, in fact, sit for portraits, and he treats their discomfort as both intimate and faintly comic. The phrase "anything but inferior" is doing a lot of work. It suggests that the sitter might cycle through dozens of emotions - boredom, self-consciousness, irritation - but all roads lead to the same conclusion: someone else is deciding what you look like, what you deserve, what will last.

Context matters: Powell, the chronicler of English manners and micro-status in A Dance to the Music of Time, understood that identity is largely negotiated in rooms with other people. A portrait session is that negotiation distilled to its most brutal form: silence, waiting, and judgment. The subtext is less about art than about social power. Even the wealthy patron, paying for the canvas, has to submit - to the artist's gaze, to time, to the fact that your face is never as authoritative as your reputation.