Brice’s portraits have a unique quality and air of life about them. They clearly capture more than mere physical resemblance and are a fascinating adjunct to his other artistic enquiries. His main period of portrait making begins in the late-1930’s and runs through the mid-1960’s.

As Brice said in his 1965 Time Magazine quote, he was not interested in “a portrait in the sense that it is a report of the architecture of a head. What really counts in a portrait is what would be of interest to persons other than the subject or his family.”

Brice’s portraiture went beyond revealing the emotional and psychological bearing of his subjects as has marked the works of the great portraitists. As with the reset of his oeuvre, his portraits often seem to be depictions of relationships. Despite their outwardly singular subjects, many, nonetheless, feel like Hegelian synthesis of a thesis (the subject) and of an antithesis (the artist’s response to the subject, including his emotional rejoinder at the moment of creation and his commentary on the “truth” of the subject’s personality).

Thus, although gesture is central to all of his portraits, Brice otherwise does not bring a single set of pictorial or formalistic tactics to his portraits, but rather he appears to choose from a wide range of tactics, somewhat spontaneously, in accordance with the ‘truth’ that he finds in the totality of the moment.