Unlike a standard biography, The Portrait has no clear chronology but consists of memories of the author's father as a role model and as a man to whom the author still owes an immeasurable debt.

The book is as much about the author himself as it is about his father and could not, he says, have been written otherwise.  It is as much about the continuing influence or power of a parental role-model as it is a study in grief, for more than six decades have passed since his father's demise.

What the philosopher J. L. Stocks once remarked about a mother can also be said of a father, namely that a father is an individual significant by his individuality.

Reflections on war, on beauty, on aspects of the human condition are interwoven with the author's memories of the various dramatis personae that have in various degrees and in different ways given shape and substance to his own life.