Face Painting
IN the first room of the Royal Academy's huge exhibition of British portraits is Hol- bein's portrait of Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, from the Royal collection, and I would recommend this implacable master- piece as an essential and exemplary measure of all that follows, a tuning-fork and metro- nome by which the tone and pulse of every other picture here should be gauged. A portrait is not like any other form of picture, or should not be so, I believe, either to artist or to spectator. No ingenuity of design, no eloquence of form, no excellence of handling can compensate for a feeble or mendacious account of the human being. However much manners and modes may have changed from century to century, the most valuable and permanent qualities of a Bellini, a Titian, a Holbein, a Rembrandt, a Goya make such attributes seem absolutely irrelevant. The physical and spiritual dynamism of the genuine encounter is what the portrait is about, and an exhibition of 800 such pictures should make an unnerving experience. Of the 800 here how few belong to the Holbein succession. Gainsborough certainly in his Mary, Countess Howe, his Duke of Argyll and his Sir Benjamin Truman. Alan Ramsay at his best, a more fragile and relenting artist but one whose sensibility was not just esthetic. Stubbs, who painted some of the most affecting and penetrative portraits in English art but who is included rather than represented, as the pictures which would prove his status do not happen to be here. The replica of the Gim- crack shown at Burlington House two years ago lacks the nerve of that masterpiece, My list would also include the early and innocent portraits, not to be repeated, by Holman Hunt of Canon Jenkins and by Millais of Mr. and Mrs. Wyatt. Pre-eminent among modern works is Gwen John's account of herself. There are also, unhappily, many of those portraits which celebrate rather than record and in the doing so offer us not the emperor but just his clothes. Here Reynolds is both the test and an out- standing point of dispute. This exhibition con- firms for me a long-held opinion, not only that his work clod not, from a structural point of view, bear examination, but that he must be counted among the liars and,panders. The way and extent in which he differs from his masters, Van Dyck, Titian, Rembrandt, is fundamental. He is not just another type of pictorial practitioner but another and a lesser kind of man. As the unrelieved centre of the puff and
pretence I would select the large gallery where such artists as Sir Francis Grant, Winterhalter and Watts show the nineteenth century at its pretentious worst. This is, except perhaps for the historian, the least rewarding Winter Exhibition I can remember. But usefully it ought to demonstrate that we should not be quite so proud of our tradition of portraiture
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