Sisterly solidarity
Sir: My old friend Paul Johnson is barking up the wrong tree (Another thing, 5 March), because he has failed to under- stand the idea behind the painting of the Guardian women at the National Portrait Gallery. It is not a piece of 'sisterly solidarity', any more than John Ward's drawing of the Cabinet Office secretaries, commissioned by the Trustees in 1985, was of brotherly solidarity; or Hans Schwarz's group of Trade Union leaders, acquired in 1984. It is meant to be an historical record of a group of people who have influenced the life of the nation through the work they did in the 1960s and 1970s, which reached millions of men and women read- ers. The last time I saw the late Brian Redhead he gaid, 'I should have been included, because I was responsible for encouraging the women's page', and per- haps he should.
Groups are nothing new at the NPG, as Paul Johnson points out, and not all are `hilarious failures'. We have the Brontë sis- ters, not great art, but a marvellous trea- sure. And what about Emslie's Dinner at Haddo House, Thackeray's drawing of Mr and Mrs Lewes with Thornton Hunt, Karl Anton Hickel's William Pitt, addressing the House of Commons, to name but a few? Each of them is of immense cultural and historical interest.
Sarah Raphael is a fine painter, who found herself working in exceptionally diffi- cult and distressing circumstances, as Jill Tweedie's health deteriorated far more rapilly than had been foreseen; and we are all grateful to her for accepting the com- mission and completing it.
Claire Tomalin
National Portrait Gallery 25 St Martin's Place London WC2
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