“But Grant’s interest in faces had remained and enlarged until it became a conscious study. […] It was, as he had said, not possible to put faces into any kind of category, but it was possible to characterize individual faces.”

Grant’s ability to characterize faces impels him to clear Richard’s name. He can’t reconcile what he sees in the portrait with the monstrous monarch so often depicted in historical accounts.

“Of all the portraits Grant had seen this afternoon this was the most individual. It was as if the artist had striven to put on canvas something that his talent was not sufficient to translate into paint.”

Richard’s portrait projects an indefinable quality that Grant, an expert on faces, has trouble voicing. The detective is obsessed with matching Richard’s face to the known facts of his life. In doing so, he may be able to articulate what he intuitively understands about the image but can’t express in words.

“I suppose villainy, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.”

Almost every person who sees the portrait reacts to it negatively. They imbue the man portrayed with sinister intentions. These extreme reactions are created by a projection of evil from the eye of the beholder.