OOP:Portraits (was Sirius)

[Martin]

No: HPFGUIDX 65813

Marianne:

> Another question about portraits.  We know the people can go from 
> picture to picture, visiting each other.  But, I think this is the 
> first time we seen portraits go from one building to another, 
> assuming they are "hung" in more than one location.  Is this a 
> characteristic of all wizard paintings?  Or is this a special trait 
> that the Headmaster paintings have?


Without any canon to support this, my thinking on wizard photos and 
paintings goes like this:

Photos are relatively recent and cheap to produce, being taken by a 
magic camera (such as Colin Creevey's). The emotions and 'mobility' 
of the subjects within them is limited (Harry trying to leave the 
picture of Gilderoy, Percy walking out of the family portrait, people 
in Moody's OoPv1 group picture shuffling about as he points them out).

Paintings I assume to be painted by a Wizard or Witch artist, will 
involve spell casting and IIRC fron canon some material such as hair 
from the person being painted. I would assume portrait painting (as 
in the Muggle world) is expensive and the sitter pays for both the 
artistic skill of the painter and charms ability of the wizard/witch 
also. I suspect part of the wizarding powers of the person being 
painted might be added into the recipe. Therefore richer, more 
powerful or more senior WW folk will have better quality portraits 
with greater capacity for extended thinking and radius of action (to 
coin a military phrase). The rather dim knight in PoA runs around 
quite a few floors of Hogwarts but is always limited to rather 
medieval heroics despite hanging on a wall and watching several 
hundred years of social change pass before him. And the Fat Lady can 
travel quite a distance within the castle but the best quality 
paintings with the greatest ability appear to be the headmasters 
portraits. Of course the portraits of the headmasters may all have 
been specially commissioned with just this purpose in mind - to pass 
on to their successors their combined wisdom, a part of the contract 
possibly.

Also in the final analysis the occupant of a painting who can travel 
many hundreds of miles to another canvas of himself in order to pass 
on information may just have been thought up by JKR as she wrote the 
book ;)

Cheers all
Martin (who is on his second pass through OoP, and still hanging on 
every word).