Portraits
In the Harry Potter series the subjects of magical portraits (even those of characters that are dead) can move, interact with living observers, speak and demonstrate apparent emotion and personality. Some can even move to other portraits to visit each other, or to relay messages, or (if more than one painting of the subject exists) can move between separate locations by way of their portraits. Many such portraits are found on the walls of Hogwarts. It is unknown how magical portraits come into being: whether they are produced by a painter or brought into existence by other means. Magical photographs with similar properties can be created by developing normal film in a magic potion.
At least three portraits, those of The Fat Lady and Ariana Dumbledore, and the Hogwarts Kitchen Portrait, can perform at least one action with a direct effect on the world outside the frame of the painting. The Fat Lady's portrait is the door that covers the entrance to the Gryffindor common room, and she can swing the portrait open when given the correct password or close to prevent entry. Ariana's is able to swing open revealing the secret passage from the Hog's Head Inn to Hogwarts that was created by Neville Longbottom using the Room of Requirement. The Hogwarts Kitchen portrait, a painting of a large bowl filled with fruit, will swing open after the pear gets tickled and giggles, to reveal a hidden door that leads into the kitchens where the Hogwarts house-elves work.
Portraits can also move between paintings, going wherever they like in the same building. However, outside the building, portraits can only move to other paintings of themselves, for example, Phineas Nigellus Black who has a painting in The Headmaster's Office and at 12 Grimmauld Place. In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Harry asks Phineas Nigellus to bring him Dumbledore's painting from Hogwarts through to the 12 Grimmauld Place copy; this is when Black explains that paintings can only move out of Hogwarts into other portraits of themselves.
In Deathly Hallows Snape takes instruction and advice from Dumbledore's portrait; suggesting that portraits retain memories and personality, or can be enchanted to retain memories. Dumbledore also cries in his portrait when he finds that Harry was successful in defeating Voldemort, again suggesting that portraits keep the memories of those they are painted after.
Authorial statements regarding portraits have been vague. Rowling made a comment in an interview that a portrait is something like a faint imprint of the person in question, imitating the basic attitude and thought patterns of the person. It is therefore completely different from a ghost, which, as explained by Nearly Headless Nick, are the souls of wizards who are afraid to leave the world. Portraits exist completely separately from the person's soul, being just an impression of the person passed on. Rowling may have found inspiration in short stories by the French novelist Théophile Gautier (1811–1872). In La Cafetière (The Coffee Pot, 1831) and in Omphale (1834) people in portraits and tapestries come alive, step out from the wall into the room, drink coffee, dance, talk with and kiss the story-teller.
Read more about this topic: Magic In Harry Potter
Famous quotes containing the word portraits:
“You that would judge me do not judge alone
This book or that, come to this hallowed place
Where my friends’ portraits hang and look thereon;
Ireland’s history in their lineaments trace;
Think where man’s glory most begins and ends
And say my glory was I had such friends.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“There are portraits and still-lifes
And the first, because ‘human’
Does not excel the second,”
—Charles Tomlinson (b. 1927)
“It is not merely the likeness which is precious ... but the association and the sense of nearness involved in the thing ... the fact of the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever! It is the very sanctification of portraits I think—and it is not at all monstrous in me to say ... that I would rather have such a memorial of one I dearly loved, than the noblest Artist’s work ever produced.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)