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What exactly are the talking portraits?
This is what JK Rowling said about how wizard portraits are made:
When a magical portrait is taken, the witch or wizard artist will naturally use enchantments to ensure that the painting will be able to move in the usual way. The portrait will be able to use some of the subject’s favourite phrases and imitate their general demeanour. Thus, Sir Cadogan’s portrait is forever challenging people to a fight, falling off its horse and behaving in a fairly unbalanced way, which is how the subject appeared to the poor wizard who had to paint him, while the portrait of the Fat Lady continues to indulge her love of good food, drink and tip-top security long after her living model passed away.
However, neither of these portraits would be capable of having a particularly in-depth discussion about more complex aspects of their lives: they are literally and metaphorically two-dimensional. They are only representations of the living subjects as seen by the artist.
Some magical portraits are capable of considerably more interaction with the living word. Traditionally, a headmaster or headmistress is painted before their death. Once the portrait is completed, the headmaster or headmistress in question keeps it under lock and key, regularly visiting it in its cupboard (if so desired) to teach it to act and behave exactly like themselves, and imparting all kinds of useful memories and pieces of knowledge that may then be shared through the centuries with their succesors in office.
The depth of knowledge and insight contained in some of the headmasters’ and headmistresses’ portraits is unknown to any but the incumbents of the office and the few students who have realised, over the centuries, that the portraits’ apparent sleepiness when visitors arrive in the office is not necessarily genuine. [Pottermore April 10th 2013]
All the paintings we have seen at Hogwarts are of dead people. They seem to be living through their portraits. How is this so? If there was a painting of Harry’s parents, would he be able to obtain advice from them?
That is a very good question. They are all of dead people; they are not as fully realised as ghosts, as you have probably noticed. The place where you see them really talk is in Dumbledore’s office, primarily; the idea is that the previous headmasters and headmistresses leave behind a faint imprint of themselves. They leave their aura, almost, in the office and they can give some counsel to the present occupant, but it is not like being a ghost. They repeat catchphrases, almost. The portrait of Sirius’ mother is not a very 3D personality; she is not very fully realised. She repeats catchphrases that she had when she was alive. If Harry had a portrait of his parents it would not help him a great deal. If he could meet them as ghosts, that would be a much more meaningful interaction, but as Nick explained at the end of Phoenix—I am straying into dangerous territory, but I think you probably know what he explained—there are some people who would not come back as ghosts because they are unafraid, or less afraid, of death [EBF]
Q: Is Severus Snape’s portrait in the headmaster’s office? JKR: Some have been asking why hasn’t the portrait appeared immediately. It doesn’t. The reason is that the perception in the castle itself and everyone who was in the castle, because Snape kept his secret so well was that he abandoned his post. So all the portraits you see in the headmaster’s study are all headmasters and mistresses who died, it’s like British royals. You only get good press if you die in office. Abdication is not acceptable, particularly if you marry an American. I’m kidding! [laughter] I digress. I know Harry would have insisted that Snape’s portrait was on that wall, right beside Dumbledore’s. [JK Rowling, Carnegie Hall appearance]
... I like to think that Harry would be instrumental in ensuring that Snape's portrait would appear there in due course [Bloomsbury.com webchat, 30th July 2007]
This however is an occasion on which I am not inclined to treat JK Rowling's extra-textual pronouncements as canon, or not without some tweaking, because I don't think it fits well with the books. Here's what the books say about how the portraits behave: Harry unwrapped his Chocolate Frog and picked up the card. It showed a man's face. He wore half-moon glasses, had a long, crooked nose and flowing silver hair, beard, and moustache. Underneath the picture was the name Albus Dumbledore. [cut] 'He's gone!' 'Well, you can't expect him to hang around all day,' said Ron. 'He'll be back ...] [cut] Harry stared as Dumbledore sidled back into the picture on his card and gave him a small smile. [PS ch. #06; p. 77] The people in the portraits kept going to visit each other [PS ch. #08; p. 98] Harry was watching the painting. A fat, dapple-grey pony had just ambled onto the grass and was grazing nonchalantly. Harry was used to the subjects of Hogwarts paintings moving around and leaving their frames to visit each other, but he always enjoyed watching them. A moment later, a short, squat knight in a suit of armour had clanked into the picture after his pony. By the look of the grass stains on his metal knees, he had just fallen off. ` 'Be of stout heart, the worst is yet to come!' yelled the knight, and they saw him reappear in front of an alarmed group of women in crinolines, whose picture hung on the wall of a narrow spiral staircase. [PoA ch. #06; p. 77/78] The Fat Lady had vanished from her portrait, which had been slashed so viciously that strips of canvas littered the floor; great chunks of it had been torn away completely. [cut] ` 'We need to find her,' said Dumbledore. 'Professor McGonagall, please go to Mr Filch at once and tell him to search every painting in the castle for the Fat Lady.' ` 'You'll be lucky!' said a cackling voice. [cut] 'Ashamed, Your Headship, sir. Doesn't want to be seen. She's a horrible mess. Saw her running through the landscape up on the fourth floor, sir, dodging between the trees. Crying something dreadful,' he said happily. 'Poor thing,' he added unconvincingly. [PoA ch. #08; p. 120/121] 'And the Fat Lady, sir?' 'Hiding in a map of Argyllshire on the second floor. Apparently she refused to let Black in without the password, so he attacked. She's still very distressed, but once she's calmed down, I'll have Mr Filch restore her.' [PoA ch. #09; p. 124] 'When they reached the portrait hole they found Sir Cadogan enjoying a Christmas party with a couple of monks, several previous headmasters of Hogwarts and his fat pony. He pushed up his visor and toasted them with a flagon of mead. 'Merry - hic - Christmas! Password?' 'Scurvy cur,' said Ron. 'And the same to you, sir" roared Sir Cadogan, as the painting swung forward to admit them. [PoA ch. #11; p. 171] ... the Fat Lady was back. She had been expertly restored, but was still extremely nervous, and had only agreed to return to her job on condition that she was given extra protection. [PoA ch. #14; p. 199] Harry noticed, too, that the castle seemed to be undergoing an extra-thorough cleaning. Several grimy portraits had been scrubbed, much to the displeasure of their subjects, who sat huddled in their frames muttering darkly and wincing as they felt their raw pink faces. [GoF ch. #15; p. 208] The faces in the portraits turned to look at him as he entered. He saw a wizened witch flit out of the frame of her picture and into the one next to it, which contained a wizard with a walrus moustache. The wizened witch started whispering in his ear. [GoF ch. #17; p. 240] Harry got a shock to find himself facing the Fat Lady already. He had barely noticed where his feet were carrying him. It was also a surprise to see that she was not alone in her frame. The wizened witch who had flitted into her neighbour's painting when he had joined the champions downstairs was now sitting smugly beside the Fat Lady. She must have dashed through every picture lining seven staircases to reach here before him. Both she and the Fat Lady were looking down at him with the keenest interest. 'Well, well, well,' said the Fat Lady, 'Violet's just told me everything. Who's just been chosen as school champion, then?' [GoF ch. #17; p. 249] '... That friend of the Fat Lady's, that Violet, she's already told us all Dumbledore's letting you enter ...' [GoF ch. #17; p. 251/252] The Fat Lady was sitting in her frame with her friend Violet from downstairs, both of them extremely tipsy, empty boxes of chocolate liqueurs littering the bottom of her picture. [GoF ch. #23; p. 358] (Violet, the Fat Lady's friend, winked at him from her frame) [GoF ch. #31; p. 535] But Dumbledore stood up [cut] and addressed one of the old portraits hanging very near the ceiling. 'Everard?' he said sharply. 'And you too, Dilys!' A sallow-faced wizard with a short black fringe and an elderly witch with long silver ringlets in the frame beside him, both of whom seemed to have been in the deepest of sleeps, opened their eyes immediately. 'You were listening?' said Dumbledore. The wizard nodded; the witch said, 'Naturally.' 'The man has red hair and glasses,' said Dumbledore. 'Everard, you will need to raise the alarm, make sure he is found by the right people --' Both nodded and moved sideways out of their frames, but instead of emerging in neighbouring pictures (as usually happened at Hogwarts) neither reappeared. One frame now contained nothing but a backdrop of dark curtain, the other a handsome leather armchair. Harry noticed that many of the other headmasters and mistresses on the walls, though snoring and drooling most convincingly, kept sneaking peeks at him from under their eyelids, and he suddenly understood who had been talking when they had knocked. 'Everard and Dilys were two of Hogwarts's most celebrated Heads,' Dumbledore said [cut] 'Their renown is such that both have portraits hanging in other important wizarding institutions. As they are free to move between their own portraits, they can tell us what may be happening elsewhere ...' [cut] ... Harry saw many of the old headmasters in the portraits follow him with their eyes, then, realising that Harry was watching them, hastily pretend to be sleeping again. [cut] there was a shout from the top of the wall to their right; the wizard called Everard had reappeared in his portrait, panting slightly. [cut] 'I yelled until someone came running,' said the wizard, who was mopping his brow on the curtain behind him, [cut] And moments later, the silver-ringleted witch had reappeared in her picture, too; she sank, coughing, into her armchair [OotP ch. #22; p. 414–416] 'Visit my other portrait?' said Phineas in a reedy voice, giving a long, fake yawn (his eyes travelling around the room and focusing on Harry). 'Oh, no, Dumbledore, I am too tired tonight.' [cut] 'Shall I persuade him, Dumbledore?' called a gimlet-eyed witch, raising an unusually thick wand that looked not unlike a birch rod. 'Oh, very well,' said the wizard called Phineas, eyeing the wand with mild apprehension [OotP ch. #22; p. 416/417] ` 'You know,' said Phineas Nigellus, even more loudly than Harry, 'this is precisely why I loathed being a teacher! Young people are so infernally convinced that they are absolutely right about everything. Has it not occurred to you, my poor puffed-up popinjay, that there might be an excellent reason why the Headmaster of Hogwarts is not confiding every tiny detail of his plans to you? Have you never paused, while feeling hard-done-by, to note that following Dumbledore's orders has never yet led you into harm? No. No, like all young people, you are quite sure that you alone feel and think, you alone recognise danger, you alone are the only one clever enough to realise what the Dark Lord may be planning --' [OotP ch. #23; p. 438] They walked along the corridor, through a set of double doors and found a rickety staircase lined with more portraits of brutal-looking Healers. As they climbed it, the various Healers called out to them, diagnosing odd complaints and suggesting horrible remedies. Ron was seriously affronted when a medieval wizard called out that he clearly had a bad case of spattergroit. [OotP ch. #23; p. 449] The portraits of old headmasters and headmistresses were not shamming sleep tonight. All of them were alert and serious, watching what was happening below them. As Harry entered, a few flitted into neighbouring frames and whispered urgently into their neighbour's ear. [OotP ch. #26; p. 538] 'Baubles,' said Ron confidently, when they reached the Fat Lady, who was looking rather paler than usual, and winced at his loud voice. 'No,' she said. 'What d'you mean, "no"?' 'There is a new password,' she said. 'And please don't shout.' [cut] [cut] 'Oh, hang on -- password. Abstinence.' 'Precisely,' said the Fat Lady in a feeble voice, and swung forwards to reveal the portrait hole. 'What's up with her?' asked Harry. 'Overindulged over Christmas, apparently,' said Hermione, rolling her eyes as she led the way into the packed common room. 'She and her friend Violet drank their way through all the wine in that picture of drunk monks down by the Charms corridor. Anyway ...' [cut] 'It was the Fat Lady who drank a vat of five-hundred-year-old wine, Harry, not me.' [HBP c. 17;p. 328–330] he saw the brother and sister Death Eaters running down the marble staircase ahead and aimed jinxes at them, but merely hit several bewigged witches in a portrait on the landing, who ran screeching into neighbouring paintings; [HBP ch. #28; p. 560] ` Harry's gaze wandered to the portrait that sometimes contained Phineas Nigellus Black, Sirius's great-great-grandfather, but it was empty, showing nothing but a stretch of muddy backdrop. Phineas Nigellus was evidently spending the night in the Headmaster's study at Hogwarts. A black blindfold appeared over Phineas Nigellus's clever, dark eyes, causing him to bump into the frame and shriek with pain. [cut] Still blindfolded, he began groping the side of his frame, trying to feel his way out of his picture and back into the one at Hogwarts. [cut] 'Evidently it is not only Muggle-borns who are ignorant, Potter. The portraits of Hogwarts may commune with each other, but they cannot travel outside the castle except to visit a painting of themselves hanging elsewhere. Dumbledore cannot come here with me, and after the treatment I have received at your hands, I can assure you that I shall not be making a return visit!' [DH ch. #16; p. 248/249] The first problem is that it doesn't seem credible that Snape spent part of his traumatic eight months as Headmaster getting painted and visiting and training his portrait, yet we are told that Harry made sure that a portrait of him would be hung at some later point. Are we supposed to believe that the portrait of Snape was made after his death and is not in fact imbued with his personality? And if Snape did indeed have a portrait painted during his miserable time as head, when he was pretending to be a loyal Death Eater, and a portrait is "how the subject appeared to the poor wizard who had to paint [them]", its starting point will be the fake persona he was portraying for security reasons, not his actual self. Even allowing for his being powerful in both magic and personality, and it being "imbued with his aura", it's going to be a schizophrenic mix of the real man and the fake. What happens when there are several different portraits of a person and each artist had a different conception of what they were like? And if Snape had lived, would his portrait still show a man in his late thirties when he was a hundred and twenty? Would he have had to have a new one painted every fifteen years or so, or do the portraits age alongside their subject, or what? On a similar note, we see a talking, highly interactive portrait of a Mediaeval healer, but realistic portraiture in Europe died with the fall of Rome and wasn't re-invented until about 1470, about 15 years before the official end of the Mediaeval period. Was the healer very, very, very late Mediaeval, or does he have huge eyes and two left feet, or was his portrait in fact painted many years after his death? If the last, is it really him at all, or just some fictional imagining of him? There's also the fact that in the books the portraits and photographs don't speak until their subject is dead, yet the training method Rowling describes – "teach[ing] it to act and behave exactly like themselves, and imparting all kinds of useful memories and pieces of knowledge" – implies conversation. And again, it implies that Snape's portrait would be almost blank, since if he followed the process Rowling describes, he would have had just eight months to sit for the portrait and to train it. What would be the point in Harry getting it hung at all? The biggest problem is that the portraits behave like real people. They aren't just a clever AI that presents a glib appearance of a person by copying their mannerisms, and they don't simply interact with living people. They have social lives which apparently continue to happen when no living person is watching. They eat and drink, and generally behave as if they are existing in a real, three-dimensional world behind their canvas. They experience emotion and physical sensation which does not appear to be simulated for the benefit of an onlooker. Phineas, at least, advises Harry in a way that is very forceful and interactive, and speaks about his past life (he hated teaching). And there is only ever one of each subject, even if they appear in multiple canvasses: they have to flit from frame to frame. This is apparently true even of the images on the Chocolate Frog cards, which behave like the portraits except not speaking (and no, interactive portraits aren't only of dead people, because Dumbledore's card behaves like a non-speaking portrait while he is still alive). That could, of course, work if they are conscious but artificially created entities: what psychics call a tulpa or thought-form. That would fit what Rowling said about them: but it still leaves us with the problem of portraits made after a person's death having no real connection to that person, except in the sense that a historical novel about Napoleon is connected to Napoleon. It still leaves us saying that either the portrait of Snape which Harry arranged isn't really Snape in the sense that the other heads' portraits are their subject, or Snape spent time getting painted during eight months of crisis, which seems highly unlikely. If Snape did have his portrait painted from life it also casts McGonagall in an exceedingly poor light. The school itself and the other portraits presumably know that he was acting throughout on Dumbledore's orders, and Harry told everyone that he was still loyal to the Order when he died, so it would be ridiculously petty for McGonagall to keep his already-existing, talking portrait in a cupboard just because he had flown out of a window rather than kill her. Regardless of the nature of the portraits, we have a choice of continuity problems when it comes to Snape's portrait. If both of Rowling's statements are true, that the portrait has to be painted by an artist and activated, and that Snape didn't get his portrait hung immediately because he had left his post, that means that he had to have spent time to have his portrait painted during those miserable eight months, and the portrait shows what the artist saw as a Death Eater; and it means that McGonagall spitefully kept his portrait in a cupboard despite knowing he had been on the Order side, and had to be strong-armed into hanging it. If Snape did not have a portrait painted during those eight months then it makes sense that it had to be painted later and that took time, but the claim that the reason his portrait didn't appear immediately was because he had fled his post makes zero sense. The possibility I have gone with in some of my fanfics is that in the absence of a painter the school will itself generate a head's portrait by default, in the manner of an AI generating a picture "in the style of", but it didn't do so in Snape's case because he had died off the school grounds, and so the school needed some kind of notification of his death, and his painting probably needed to be commissioned from a painter. That removes the necessity either for Snape to be a narcissist or McGonagall to be a bitch, but it goes somewhat against Rowling's statement about how the portraits are made, at least in the case of the heads. It makes no sense that the school itself would think he had "abdicated", since it was a witness to the fact that he was acting on behalf of Dumbledore throughout: but it might simply not know that he had died. My own suggestion for what's going on with the portraits is quite theological – bearing in mind that in the Potterverse there is unquestionably a real afterlife. The experience of real-life psychics tends to indicate that reincarnation exists; that there is a part of the person which remains "on the other side" even when part of them is in the body; that the astral realm is malleable and shaped by thought; and that the way in which a spirit manifests is a collaboration between the spirit and the mind of the person interacting with it. 'Well, I was going to ask you that,' said Dumbledore, looking around. 'Where would you say that we are?' Until Dumbledore had asked, Harry had not known. Now, however, he found that he had an answer ready to give. ''It looks,' he said slowly, 'like King's Cross station. Except a lot cleaner, and empty, and there are no trains as far as I can see.' 'King's Cross station!' Dumbledore was chuckling immoder¬ately. 'Good gracious, really?' 'Well, where do you think we are?' asked Harry, a little defensively. 'My dear boy, I have no idea. This is, as they say, your party.' [DH ch, 35; p. 570] 'Tell me one last thing,' said Harry. 'Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?' Dumbledore beamed at him, and his voice sounded loud and strong in Harry's ears even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure. 'Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?' [DH ch, 35; p. 579] Elisabeth: In the chapter of kings cross, are they behind the veil or in some world between the real world and the veil? J.K. Rowling: You can make up your own mind on this, but I think that Harry entered a kind of limbo between life and death. [Bloomsbury.com webchat, 30th July 2007] 'You think the dead we have loved ever truly leave us? You think that we don't recall them more clearly than ever in times of great trouble? Your father is alive in you, Harry, and shows himself most plainly when you have need of him. How else could you produce that particular Patronus? Prongs rode again last night.' [PoA ch. #22; p. 312] That last one fits what was going on in the astral King's Cross scene: Dumbledore is simultaneously really Dumbledore and appearing inside Harry's imagination. So, my take on what is happening is that a moving portrait or photograph is a kind of limited incarnation of the actual person (whereas a ghost is a full incarnation), with the portrait receiving an extra infusion of soul and becoming able to speak once the person dies, even after most of their soul has gone on elsewhere. We know that pieces of a soul can operate and speak seperately, from the Horcruxes: the difference is that the portrait duplicates a piece of the original rather than subtracting from it. [Now I wonder whether the Patronus is also a splinter of soul, not always your own. It would explain why Dumbledore sees Harry's Patronus as James watching over him, and suggest that Snape's Patronus might be Lily watching over him.] That explains why there is only one iteration of each portrait person, and how a portrait painted after somebody's death can still reflect their real character, and it fits with the traditional idea that a photograph steals part of your soul. They exist in a pocket of the astral realm, accessed through the portrait and shaped by the artist's imagination. This in turn explains why we don't see living, walking statues which represent real-but-dead people in the way that the portraits do: to make that happen you would have to bring the limited incarnation out of the astral and into the solid world. It may well be so that the more powerful the wizwitch, the more of themselves is imbued into the portrait: that is, the more of their psychic attention is placed in it, especially in the heads' office which enhances their magic, whereas e.g. Walburga's portrait is a shallow slice across an already shallow personality. And the expectation of the artist may shape what aspect of the person's personality is most prominent, at least initially, in the same way that Harry's expectation shaped his vision of Dumbledore at King's Cross. But it does away with the need for a portrait to have been made while the subject was alive: part of their soul can still become attached to it well after death if the portrait is good enough and the artist really conentrates on what is known about them. It does away with the need for Snape to have been narcissistic enough to spend time sitting for a portrait and then training it while trying to protect the students and serve the Order, and with the problem that the artist would be painting what seemed to be a loyal Death Eater. It explains why the portraits not only have lives independent of the viewer but experience food and drink on the far side of the glass. It does away with the need for a portrait whose subject is still alive to be able to interact with them in a sapient way and be trained by them. It explains why there is only one fully interactive portrait-iteration of each dead person, regardless of how many times they are painted, and why that iteration doesn't seem to change character as it flits from frame to frame, even though the canvasses were the vision of different artists. And it explains why the interactive portraits of dead people are always two-dimensional paintings, not walking, talking statues. It also gets rid of the clumsy fudge about why Snape's portrait didn't appear immediately after his (apparent) death. It makes more sense if Snape simply hadn't had time to have a portrait painted, so it had to be commissioned after his death and that took time and effort and money which Harry had to campaign for. [Of course the Doylist reason Snape's portrait didn't appear in the scene in the heads' office is that he's a scene-stealer, and any scene with Snape in it immediately becomes a scene about Snape.] Apparently sapient, interactive three-dimensional objects such as the staff-room gargoyles and the chess pieces, however, are tulpas and confined to the object into which they have been conjured: we don't see the spirit leave the queen on a chess board in Scotland to go animate a queen on another board in the South of France. Paintings of figures such as the wine-making monks, which are probably generic stock characters or artists' models rather than being portraits of real once-living individuals, are probably also tulpas.
The people in the portraits kept going to visit each other [PS ch. #08; p. 98]
Harry was watching the painting. A fat, dapple-grey pony had just ambled onto the grass and was grazing nonchalantly. Harry was used to the subjects of Hogwarts paintings moving around and leaving their frames to visit each other, but he always enjoyed watching them. A moment later, a short, squat knight in a suit of armour had clanked into the picture after his pony. By the look of the grass stains on his metal knees, he had just fallen off. ` 'Be of stout heart, the worst is yet to come!' yelled the knight, and they saw him reappear in front of an alarmed group of women in crinolines, whose picture hung on the wall of a narrow spiral staircase. [PoA ch. #06; p. 77/78]
The Fat Lady had vanished from her portrait, which had been slashed so viciously that strips of canvas littered the floor; great chunks of it had been torn away completely. [cut] ` 'We need to find her,' said Dumbledore. 'Professor McGonagall, please go to Mr Filch at once and tell him to search every painting in the castle for the Fat Lady.' ` 'You'll be lucky!' said a cackling voice. [cut] 'Ashamed, Your Headship, sir. Doesn't want to be seen. She's a horrible mess. Saw her running through the landscape up on the fourth floor, sir, dodging between the trees. Crying something dreadful,' he said happily. 'Poor thing,' he added unconvincingly. [PoA ch. #08; p. 120/121]
'And the Fat Lady, sir?' 'Hiding in a map of Argyllshire on the second floor. Apparently she refused to let Black in without the password, so he attacked. She's still very distressed, but once she's calmed down, I'll have Mr Filch restore her.' [PoA ch. #09; p. 124]
'When they reached the portrait hole they found Sir Cadogan enjoying a Christmas party with a couple of monks, several previous headmasters of Hogwarts and his fat pony. He pushed up his visor and toasted them with a flagon of mead. 'Merry - hic - Christmas! Password?' 'Scurvy cur,' said Ron. 'And the same to you, sir" roared Sir Cadogan, as the painting swung forward to admit them. [PoA ch. #11; p. 171]
... the Fat Lady was back. She had been expertly restored, but was still extremely nervous, and had only agreed to return to her job on condition that she was given extra protection. [PoA ch. #14; p. 199]
Harry noticed, too, that the castle seemed to be undergoing an extra-thorough cleaning. Several grimy portraits had been scrubbed, much to the displeasure of their subjects, who sat huddled in their frames muttering darkly and wincing as they felt their raw pink faces. [GoF ch. #15; p. 208]
The faces in the portraits turned to look at him as he entered. He saw a wizened witch flit out of the frame of her picture and into the one next to it, which contained a wizard with a walrus moustache. The wizened witch started whispering in his ear. [GoF ch. #17; p. 240]
Harry got a shock to find himself facing the Fat Lady already. He had barely noticed where his feet were carrying him. It was also a surprise to see that she was not alone in her frame. The wizened witch who had flitted into her neighbour's painting when he had joined the champions downstairs was now sitting smugly beside the Fat Lady. She must have dashed through every picture lining seven staircases to reach here before him. Both she and the Fat Lady were looking down at him with the keenest interest. 'Well, well, well,' said the Fat Lady, 'Violet's just told me everything. Who's just been chosen as school champion, then?' [GoF ch. #17; p. 249]
'... That friend of the Fat Lady's, that Violet, she's already told us all Dumbledore's letting you enter ...' [GoF ch. #17; p. 251/252]
The Fat Lady was sitting in her frame with her friend Violet from downstairs, both of them extremely tipsy, empty boxes of chocolate liqueurs littering the bottom of her picture. [GoF ch. #23; p. 358]
(Violet, the Fat Lady's friend, winked at him from her frame) [GoF ch. #31; p. 535]
But Dumbledore stood up [cut] and addressed one of the old portraits hanging very near the ceiling. 'Everard?' he said sharply. 'And you too, Dilys!' A sallow-faced wizard with a short black fringe and an elderly witch with long silver ringlets in the frame beside him, both of whom seemed to have been in the deepest of sleeps, opened their eyes immediately. 'You were listening?' said Dumbledore. The wizard nodded; the witch said, 'Naturally.' 'The man has red hair and glasses,' said Dumbledore. 'Everard, you will need to raise the alarm, make sure he is found by the right people --' Both nodded and moved sideways out of their frames, but instead of emerging in neighbouring pictures (as usually happened at Hogwarts) neither reappeared. One frame now contained nothing but a backdrop of dark curtain, the other a handsome leather armchair. Harry noticed that many of the other headmasters and mistresses on the walls, though snoring and drooling most convincingly, kept sneaking peeks at him from under their eyelids, and he suddenly understood who had been talking when they had knocked. 'Everard and Dilys were two of Hogwarts's most celebrated Heads,' Dumbledore said [cut] 'Their renown is such that both have portraits hanging in other important wizarding institutions. As they are free to move between their own portraits, they can tell us what may be happening elsewhere ...' [cut] ... Harry saw many of the old headmasters in the portraits follow him with their eyes, then, realising that Harry was watching them, hastily pretend to be sleeping again. [cut] there was a shout from the top of the wall to their right; the wizard called Everard had reappeared in his portrait, panting slightly. [cut] 'I yelled until someone came running,' said the wizard, who was mopping his brow on the curtain behind him, [cut] And moments later, the silver-ringleted witch had reappeared in her picture, too; she sank, coughing, into her armchair [OotP ch. #22; p. 414–416]
'Visit my other portrait?' said Phineas in a reedy voice, giving a long, fake yawn (his eyes travelling around the room and focusing on Harry). 'Oh, no, Dumbledore, I am too tired tonight.' [cut] 'Shall I persuade him, Dumbledore?' called a gimlet-eyed witch, raising an unusually thick wand that looked not unlike a birch rod. 'Oh, very well,' said the wizard called Phineas, eyeing the wand with mild apprehension [OotP ch. #22; p. 416/417] `
'You know,' said Phineas Nigellus, even more loudly than Harry, 'this is precisely why I loathed being a teacher! Young people are so infernally convinced that they are absolutely right about everything. Has it not occurred to you, my poor puffed-up popinjay, that there might be an excellent reason why the Headmaster of Hogwarts is not confiding every tiny detail of his plans to you? Have you never paused, while feeling hard-done-by, to note that following Dumbledore's orders has never yet led you into harm? No. No, like all young people, you are quite sure that you alone feel and think, you alone recognise danger, you alone are the only one clever enough to realise what the Dark Lord may be planning --' [OotP ch. #23; p. 438]
They walked along the corridor, through a set of double doors and found a rickety staircase lined with more portraits of brutal-looking Healers. As they climbed it, the various Healers called out to them, diagnosing odd complaints and suggesting horrible remedies. Ron was seriously affronted when a medieval wizard called out that he clearly had a bad case of spattergroit. [OotP ch. #23; p. 449]
The portraits of old headmasters and headmistresses were not shamming sleep tonight. All of them were alert and serious, watching what was happening below them. As Harry entered, a few flitted into neighbouring frames and whispered urgently into their neighbour's ear. [OotP ch. #26; p. 538]
'Baubles,' said Ron confidently, when they reached the Fat Lady, who was looking rather paler than usual, and winced at his loud voice. 'No,' she said. 'What d'you mean, "no"?' 'There is a new password,' she said. 'And please don't shout.' [cut] [cut] 'Oh, hang on -- password. Abstinence.' 'Precisely,' said the Fat Lady in a feeble voice, and swung forwards to reveal the portrait hole. 'What's up with her?' asked Harry. 'Overindulged over Christmas, apparently,' said Hermione, rolling her eyes as she led the way into the packed common room. 'She and her friend Violet drank their way through all the wine in that picture of drunk monks down by the Charms corridor. Anyway ...' [cut] 'It was the Fat Lady who drank a vat of five-hundred-year-old wine, Harry, not me.' [HBP c. 17;p. 328–330]
he saw the brother and sister Death Eaters running down the marble staircase ahead and aimed jinxes at them, but merely hit several bewigged witches in a portrait on the landing, who ran screeching into neighbouring paintings; [HBP ch. #28; p. 560] `
Harry's gaze wandered to the portrait that sometimes contained Phineas Nigellus Black, Sirius's great-great-grandfather, but it was empty, showing nothing but a stretch of muddy backdrop. Phineas Nigellus was evidently spending the night in the Headmaster's study at Hogwarts.
A black blindfold appeared over Phineas Nigellus's clever, dark eyes, causing him to bump into the frame and shriek with pain. [cut] Still blindfolded, he began groping the side of his frame, trying to feel his way out of his picture and back into the one at Hogwarts. [cut] 'Evidently it is not only Muggle-borns who are ignorant, Potter. The portraits of Hogwarts may commune with each other, but they cannot travel outside the castle except to visit a painting of themselves hanging elsewhere. Dumbledore cannot come here with me, and after the treatment I have received at your hands, I can assure you that I shall not be making a return visit!' [DH ch. #16; p. 248/249]
The first problem is that it doesn't seem credible that Snape spent part of his traumatic eight months as Headmaster getting painted and visiting and training his portrait, yet we are told that Harry made sure that a portrait of him would be hung at some later point. Are we supposed to believe that the portrait of Snape was made after his death and is not in fact imbued with his personality? And if Snape did indeed have a portrait painted during his miserable time as head, when he was pretending to be a loyal Death Eater, and a portrait is "how the subject appeared to the poor wizard who had to paint [them]", its starting point will be the fake persona he was portraying for security reasons, not his actual self. Even allowing for his being powerful in both magic and personality, and it being "imbued with his aura", it's going to be a schizophrenic mix of the real man and the fake. What happens when there are several different portraits of a person and each artist had a different conception of what they were like? And if Snape had lived, would his portrait still show a man in his late thirties when he was a hundred and twenty? Would he have had to have a new one painted every fifteen years or so, or do the portraits age alongside their subject, or what?
On a similar note, we see a talking, highly interactive portrait of a Mediaeval healer, but realistic portraiture in Europe died with the fall of Rome and wasn't re-invented until about 1470, about 15 years before the official end of the Mediaeval period. Was the healer very, very, very late Mediaeval, or does he have huge eyes and two left feet, or was his portrait in fact painted many years after his death? If the last, is it really him at all, or just some fictional imagining of him?
There's also the fact that in the books the portraits and photographs don't speak until their subject is dead, yet the training method Rowling describes – "teach[ing] it to act and behave exactly like themselves, and imparting all kinds of useful memories and pieces of knowledge" – implies conversation. And again, it implies that Snape's portrait would be almost blank, since if he followed the process Rowling describes, he would have had just eight months to sit for the portrait and to train it. What would be the point in Harry getting it hung at all?
The biggest problem is that the portraits behave like real people. They aren't just a clever AI that presents a glib appearance of a person by copying their mannerisms, and they don't simply interact with living people. They have social lives which apparently continue to happen when no living person is watching. They eat and drink, and generally behave as if they are existing in a real, three-dimensional world behind their canvas. They experience emotion and physical sensation which does not appear to be simulated for the benefit of an onlooker. Phineas, at least, advises Harry in a way that is very forceful and interactive, and speaks about his past life (he hated teaching). And there is only ever one of each subject, even if they appear in multiple canvasses: they have to flit from frame to frame. This is apparently true even of the images on the Chocolate Frog cards, which behave like the portraits except not speaking (and no, interactive portraits aren't only of dead people, because Dumbledore's card behaves like a non-speaking portrait while he is still alive).
That could, of course, work if they are conscious but artificially created entities: what psychics call a tulpa or thought-form. That would fit what Rowling said about them: but it still leaves us with the problem of portraits made after a person's death having no real connection to that person, except in the sense that a historical novel about Napoleon is connected to Napoleon. It still leaves us saying that either the portrait of Snape which Harry arranged isn't really Snape in the sense that the other heads' portraits are their subject, or Snape spent time getting painted during eight months of crisis, which seems highly unlikely.
If Snape did have his portrait painted from life it also casts McGonagall in an exceedingly poor light. The school itself and the other portraits presumably know that he was acting throughout on Dumbledore's orders, and Harry told everyone that he was still loyal to the Order when he died, so it would be ridiculously petty for McGonagall to keep his already-existing, talking portrait in a cupboard just because he had flown out of a window rather than kill her.
Regardless of the nature of the portraits, we have a choice of continuity problems when it comes to Snape's portrait.
If both of Rowling's statements are true, that the portrait has to be painted by an artist and activated, and that Snape didn't get his portrait hung immediately because he had left his post, that means that he had to have spent time to have his portrait painted during those miserable eight months, and the portrait shows what the artist saw as a Death Eater; and it means that McGonagall spitefully kept his portrait in a cupboard despite knowing he had been on the Order side, and had to be strong-armed into hanging it.
If Snape did not have a portrait painted during those eight months then it makes sense that it had to be painted later and that took time, but the claim that the reason his portrait didn't appear immediately was because he had fled his post makes zero sense.
The possibility I have gone with in some of my fanfics is that in the absence of a painter the school will itself generate a head's portrait by default, in the manner of an AI generating a picture "in the style of", but it didn't do so in Snape's case because he had died off the school grounds, and so the school needed some kind of notification of his death, and his painting probably needed to be commissioned from a painter. That removes the necessity either for Snape to be a narcissist or McGonagall to be a bitch, but it goes somewhat against Rowling's statement about how the portraits are made, at least in the case of the heads.
It makes no sense that the school itself would think he had "abdicated", since it was a witness to the fact that he was acting on behalf of Dumbledore throughout: but it might simply not know that he had died.
My own suggestion for what's going on with the portraits is quite theological – bearing in mind that in the Potterverse there is unquestionably a real afterlife. The experience of real-life psychics tends to indicate that reincarnation exists; that there is a part of the person which remains "on the other side" even when part of them is in the body; that the astral realm is malleable and shaped by thought; and that the way in which a spirit manifests is a collaboration between the spirit and the mind of the person interacting with it. 'Well, I was going to ask you that,' said Dumbledore, looking around. 'Where would you say that we are?' Until Dumbledore had asked, Harry had not known. Now, however, he found that he had an answer ready to give. ''It looks,' he said slowly, 'like King's Cross station. Except a lot cleaner, and empty, and there are no trains as far as I can see.' 'King's Cross station!' Dumbledore was chuckling immoder¬ately. 'Good gracious, really?' 'Well, where do you think we are?' asked Harry, a little defensively. 'My dear boy, I have no idea. This is, as they say, your party.' [DH ch, 35; p. 570] 'Tell me one last thing,' said Harry. 'Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?' Dumbledore beamed at him, and his voice sounded loud and strong in Harry's ears even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure. 'Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?' [DH ch, 35; p. 579] Elisabeth: In the chapter of kings cross, are they behind the veil or in some world between the real world and the veil? J.K. Rowling: You can make up your own mind on this, but I think that Harry entered a kind of limbo between life and death. [Bloomsbury.com webchat, 30th July 2007] 'You think the dead we have loved ever truly leave us? You think that we don't recall them more clearly than ever in times of great trouble? Your father is alive in you, Harry, and shows himself most plainly when you have need of him. How else could you produce that particular Patronus? Prongs rode again last night.' [PoA ch. #22; p. 312] That last one fits what was going on in the astral King's Cross scene: Dumbledore is simultaneously really Dumbledore and appearing inside Harry's imagination. So, my take on what is happening is that a moving portrait or photograph is a kind of limited incarnation of the actual person (whereas a ghost is a full incarnation), with the portrait receiving an extra infusion of soul and becoming able to speak once the person dies, even after most of their soul has gone on elsewhere. We know that pieces of a soul can operate and speak seperately, from the Horcruxes: the difference is that the portrait duplicates a piece of the original rather than subtracting from it. [Now I wonder whether the Patronus is also a splinter of soul, not always your own. It would explain why Dumbledore sees Harry's Patronus as James watching over him, and suggest that Snape's Patronus might be Lily watching over him.] That explains why there is only one iteration of each portrait person, and how a portrait painted after somebody's death can still reflect their real character, and it fits with the traditional idea that a photograph steals part of your soul. They exist in a pocket of the astral realm, accessed through the portrait and shaped by the artist's imagination. This in turn explains why we don't see living, walking statues which represent real-but-dead people in the way that the portraits do: to make that happen you would have to bring the limited incarnation out of the astral and into the solid world. It may well be so that the more powerful the wizwitch, the more of themselves is imbued into the portrait: that is, the more of their psychic attention is placed in it, especially in the heads' office which enhances their magic, whereas e.g. Walburga's portrait is a shallow slice across an already shallow personality. And the expectation of the artist may shape what aspect of the person's personality is most prominent, at least initially, in the same way that Harry's expectation shaped his vision of Dumbledore at King's Cross. But it does away with the need for a portrait to have been made while the subject was alive: part of their soul can still become attached to it well after death if the portrait is good enough and the artist really conentrates on what is known about them. It does away with the need for Snape to have been narcissistic enough to spend time sitting for a portrait and then training it while trying to protect the students and serve the Order, and with the problem that the artist would be painting what seemed to be a loyal Death Eater. It explains why the portraits not only have lives independent of the viewer but experience food and drink on the far side of the glass. It does away with the need for a portrait whose subject is still alive to be able to interact with them in a sapient way and be trained by them. It explains why there is only one fully interactive portrait-iteration of each dead person, regardless of how many times they are painted, and why that iteration doesn't seem to change character as it flits from frame to frame, even though the canvasses were the vision of different artists. And it explains why the interactive portraits of dead people are always two-dimensional paintings, not walking, talking statues. It also gets rid of the clumsy fudge about why Snape's portrait didn't appear immediately after his (apparent) death. It makes more sense if Snape simply hadn't had time to have a portrait painted, so it had to be commissioned after his death and that took time and effort and money which Harry had to campaign for. [Of course the Doylist reason Snape's portrait didn't appear in the scene in the heads' office is that he's a scene-stealer, and any scene with Snape in it immediately becomes a scene about Snape.] Apparently sapient, interactive three-dimensional objects such as the staff-room gargoyles and the chess pieces, however, are tulpas and confined to the object into which they have been conjured: we don't see the spirit leave the queen on a chess board in Scotland to go animate a queen on another board in the South of France. Paintings of figures such as the wine-making monks, which are probably generic stock characters or artists' models rather than being portraits of real once-living individuals, are probably also tulpas.
'Tell me one last thing,' said Harry. 'Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?' Dumbledore beamed at him, and his voice sounded loud and strong in Harry's ears even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure. 'Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?' [DH ch, 35; p. 579]
Elisabeth: In the chapter of kings cross, are they behind the veil or in some world between the real world and the veil? J.K. Rowling: You can make up your own mind on this, but I think that Harry entered a kind of limbo between life and death. [Bloomsbury.com webchat, 30th July 2007]
'You think the dead we have loved ever truly leave us? You think that we don't recall them more clearly than ever in times of great trouble? Your father is alive in you, Harry, and shows himself most plainly when you have need of him. How else could you produce that particular Patronus? Prongs rode again last night.' [PoA ch. #22; p. 312]
So, my take on what is happening is that a moving portrait or photograph is a kind of limited incarnation of the actual person (whereas a ghost is a full incarnation), with the portrait receiving an extra infusion of soul and becoming able to speak once the person dies, even after most of their soul has gone on elsewhere. We know that pieces of a soul can operate and speak seperately, from the Horcruxes: the difference is that the portrait duplicates a piece of the original rather than subtracting from it. [Now I wonder whether the Patronus is also a splinter of soul, not always your own. It would explain why Dumbledore sees Harry's Patronus as James watching over him, and suggest that Snape's Patronus might be Lily watching over him.]
That explains why there is only one iteration of each portrait person, and how a portrait painted after somebody's death can still reflect their real character, and it fits with the traditional idea that a photograph steals part of your soul. They exist in a pocket of the astral realm, accessed through the portrait and shaped by the artist's imagination. This in turn explains why we don't see living, walking statues which represent real-but-dead people in the way that the portraits do: to make that happen you would have to bring the limited incarnation out of the astral and into the solid world.
It may well be so that the more powerful the wizwitch, the more of themselves is imbued into the portrait: that is, the more of their psychic attention is placed in it, especially in the heads' office which enhances their magic, whereas e.g. Walburga's portrait is a shallow slice across an already shallow personality. And the expectation of the artist may shape what aspect of the person's personality is most prominent, at least initially, in the same way that Harry's expectation shaped his vision of Dumbledore at King's Cross. But it does away with the need for a portrait to have been made while the subject was alive: part of their soul can still become attached to it well after death if the portrait is good enough and the artist really conentrates on what is known about them. It does away with the need for Snape to have been narcissistic enough to spend time sitting for a portrait and then training it while trying to protect the students and serve the Order, and with the problem that the artist would be painting what seemed to be a loyal Death Eater. It explains why the portraits not only have lives independent of the viewer but experience food and drink on the far side of the glass. It does away with the need for a portrait whose subject is still alive to be able to interact with them in a sapient way and be trained by them. It explains why there is only one fully interactive portrait-iteration of each dead person, regardless of how many times they are painted, and why that iteration doesn't seem to change character as it flits from frame to frame, even though the canvasses were the vision of different artists. And it explains why the interactive portraits of dead people are always two-dimensional paintings, not walking, talking statues.
It also gets rid of the clumsy fudge about why Snape's portrait didn't appear immediately after his (apparent) death. It makes more sense if Snape simply hadn't had time to have a portrait painted, so it had to be commissioned after his death and that took time and effort and money which Harry had to campaign for. [Of course the Doylist reason Snape's portrait didn't appear in the scene in the heads' office is that he's a scene-stealer, and any scene with Snape in it immediately becomes a scene about Snape.]
Apparently sapient, interactive three-dimensional objects such as the staff-room gargoyles and the chess pieces, however, are tulpas and confined to the object into which they have been conjured: we don't see the spirit leave the queen on a chess board in Scotland to go animate a queen on another board in the South of France. Paintings of figures such as the wine-making monks, which are probably generic stock characters or artists' models rather than being portraits of real once-living individuals, are probably also tulpas.
