Portrait, n. the likeness of a real person.
The National Portrait Gallery, n. a treasurehouse of likenesses.
Why don’t you trip along to St Martin’s Place, WC2 and see 600 years of Who’s Who displayed in an orderly and very successful way? They make it easy for you. Take the escalator to the second floor for all those instantly recognisable Tudor and Stuart kings and queens and work your way down through the centuries to the Contemporaries rooms (Britain since the 1990s), back on the ground floor. Crucial to a good gallery is the lighting, and here, both artificial and natural, it’s good. The bad news is that you’ll need at least half a day to do the place justice. As with any collection there are highlights that simply must not be missed and, as time is invariably short, you might want to be selective.
In top down (chronological) order, the technical simplicity of the early paintings is thrown into sharp contrast by the maturity of the skilfully worked pieces of the 18th century onwards, although many of the former remain more memorable. Portraits of Elizabeth and Henry VIII in their youth are identified easier by their clothing than their features, but that may be because other, later images have established themselves in the national psyche. I think we must accept them as likenesses, nevertheless. After all, the newly crowned Victoria is barely recognisable as the same person who, as a widow in her later years, fills out and wears those familiar black-cloaks.
There is a coloured print in the Victorian section depicting a scene at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Unusually, it’s a portrait of the Crystal Palace rather than the people gathered within, confirming that the building was indeed the star. A large cavernous space several stories high, contains nothing but a few tapestries or banners hanging from the wrought iron and glass roof and a party of stuffed shirts standing around looking very small but clearly very pleased with themselves. As an image it does indeed say much about the 19th century.
Warhol has three arresting images on display, two film stars and the Queen. In any company his work stands out, as does that of Barry Fantoni, whose caricatures are scattered amongst hundreds of other images in display cases and are all exquisitely observed. Every line counts.
I wasn’t surprised to find a Diana shrine. It’s located on the first floor landing and a large blow-up of Testino’s sexiest photo of her drags you in from the top of the balcony stairs. The development from demure teenager to world icon is all there to see and, like Elizabeth I, the change is surprisingly dramatic.
The BP Portrait Award is surprising in that it demonstrates that the photo-real genre, typically using oil on canvas, is still alive and well. It’s flourishing by all accounts. Never doubt the craftsmanship. Always admire the patience. The Assistant Curator, in an Artshub article in June, said of photo-real painting that “An artist can see something in a person that a machine can’t”, but is that a good enough excuse for spending months in a studio trying to fool the viewer into thinking that your painting is in fact a photograph? The technical quality of these works – some artists are now using soft edges to simulate a camera’s response to a specific focal length setting – is amazing, but still the question lingers: Why?
The NPG is a veritable treasurehouse and so much more rewarding, in every way, than Scotland’s version. It’s popular too. On a warm summer day, a rare thing this year, it was very busy. Instead of lying in Hyde Park catching some welcome rays, crowds were jostling to see the country’s great and good, or at least the famous and infamous.
A final word. John Bellany painted the cricketer Ian Botham. We know that because it says so on the gallery label. We might very well have guessed that the sitter was a cricketer because he wears a cricket sweater. Otherwise, this is not a likeness. Nobody who has followed the sport since the late 1970s would recognise him from this. It is not a portrait of a real person. Ergo, it doesn’t belong here.
