AND ANOTHER THING
Painting God's image in the human face
PAUL JOHNSON
Portraiture is the most humane and fasci- nating of all the arts. In fact if I had my time again I would become a professional portrait painter. I love gazing at people's faces in the tube, to see if I can penetrate their mystery. The Bible says that God made us in His image so that to paint peo- ple's portraits is, in a metaphysical sense, to paint God Himself. Yet most painters despise portraiture and always have done. They do it of necessity, to live. In Tudor and early Stuart times painters had no alternative: English royalty, the nobility, gentry and merchant classes would commis- sion nothing else. They were a philistine lot, not prepared to pay good money except for mugshots of themselves and theirs. If you think of what was happening in Italy, and even France, in the 16th century, and then compare it with what we had to show, as displayed in the Dynasties exhibition at the Tate, England was a miserable artistic backwater then. In fact take away the Hol- beins and there is little of value left. As Francois i sneeringly observed of the court of Henry vin, 'Their idea of beauty is to cover everything in thick coats of gilt or gold paint.'
One reason why painters did not like doing portraits even in those days is that convention demanded that anyone sitting for a portrait had to wear their best clothes and put on mighty serious expressions. The Tudors in particular look a grim lot, though we know for a fact that they often laughed their heads off, sometimes quite literally by making jokes about Henry yin's appear- ance. Even Lord Cobham's six delightful children look morose, though they are tuck- ing into a delicious bowl of fruit and have their pet parrot and marmoset on the table. One of the saddest portraits of all is of Tom Durie, Queen Anne of Denmark's jester: he looks as if he carries the sorrows of the entire world on his shoulders and is about to drown them in the enormous cup of wine he is holding. Isaac Oliver did an exquisite miniature of his wife Elizabeth smiling gen- tly, but this work was an intimate family likeness, probably worn next to the painter's heart. For public consumption, levity was frowned on. After all, when looked at close- ly, the 'Mona Lisa' is not really smiling and Hals"Cavalier' certainly does not laugh. What makes Hogarth's sketch of the shrimp girl such a landmark is that she is not just a comic grotesque, she combines beauty and grace with laughter. The seriousness rule of portraiture grad- ually disappeared in the 17th century but plenty of other conventions remained and that is why painters find the genre so irk- some, especially since the rules are applied not by their peers but by often ignorant sit- ters. Those who were paying insisted not just on flattery but on sartorial correctness. Even the patient Sir Thomas Lawrence, one of the few masters of portraiture who seemed happy in his job, was irritated when the Duke of Wellington told him he couldn't paint a sword 'for toffee' and insisted it be corrected. 'Yes, Your Grace, I shall attend to it presently."No, attend to it now!'
Yet if painters do not like portrait-work it is often what they were made for. It is a fact, and the 20th century has demonstrat- ed it beyond peradventure, that a majority of painters really do not know what to do with their skills and need patrons to set them subjects. The more detailed orders they receive the better they paint. It is hard to think of any major 20th-century artists — except the landscapists — who would not have benefited from a stricter, old-style dependence on exacting patrons. Henry Lamb, whose portrait drawings were almost in the Ingres class, tried all kinds of 'real' subjects and mastered none of them. It was the same with the gifted Glyn Philpot, who was lost outside a routine portrait commis- sion. Even Sir William Orpen, best of them all, could never think of subjects worthy of his genius. And when artists do not really know what to paint they are liable to take to booze — look at John, and Orpen himself.
These reflections are prompted by anoth- er new exhibition in London, the large ret- rospective of David Hockney's drawings at Burlington House. Hockney is a splendid fellow, immensely funny and illuminating on all artistic matters — there is no one with whom I would rather visit a gallery and his technical skills both as draughts- man and colourist are phenomenal. But he was born to be a portraitist and outside portraiture it seems to me he has never quite found a role. His portraits do not always come off. I looked at the one of Stephen Spender with his widow Natasha and we both agreed the nose was too big and coarse — though she observed that, oddly enough, it was a marvellous likeness of one of Spender's uncles. Next to it, how- ever, there is a drawing of surpassing bril- liance of old Auden, deadly accurate and quite devastating.
Hockney's drawings of his mother are wonderfully moving, and there are two drawings of 'Celia' I would give anything to possess: rumour has it that Hockney tried hard to fall in love with this succulent crea- ture before surrendering in despair to the horrors of qucerdom. Be that as it may, these drawings are great and poignant works of art. I wish that Hockney, so mar- vellously endowed by his creator — for I doubt if he learned anything much at art school — would devote himself for a few years, in the service of God, art and poster- ity, to a prosopography of England in the last years of the millennium — leaders, beauties, geniuses, the smart and the unfashionable, the grandees and the com- mon folk.
He could do for our times what Van Dyke did for Cavalier England or Lawrence for the Regency or Sargent and Orpen for the Edwardian and Georgian ages. He knows very well, for he has stud- ied this exact point deeply, that he can record these human images infinitely better than any photographer, however skilful. And he has the dazzling speed required for this great work (by comparison, Baron von Thyssen told me Lucien Freud required over a hundred sittings for his portrait). But will Hockney do it? Of course not. Artists are not biddable these days, more's the pity.
Previous page
