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Portraiture played a very important part in Kisfaludi Strobl's oeuvre, and in this respect he has been aptly compared with Miklós Barabás. He portrayed many well-known and important personalities of this century, and became a real master of the art, his works being characterized by objectivity, deep psychological understanding and sensitivity of modelling. His likenesses have won great acclaim both in Hungary and abroad.
He was first invited to England to do a single portrait, but in the end he completed more than fifty. From this rich and varied assembly, the portrait of G. B. Shaw is perhaps the most outstanding, and dearest to the artist himself. In the catalogue of Kisfaludi Strobl's London exhibition in 1932, G. B. Shaw wrote, "The bust of myself which is before you in this exhibition is not only recognizable as what I look like: it is also what I ought to look like, and what I should like to look like. Perhaps I shall, someday, if I contemplate it with sufficient intensity. At all events, let posterity imagine me just so."
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