Looking at ourselves
Mark Glazebrook on why portrait painting has such appeal Iquickly forgave Roy Strong, shortly after he had succeeded David Piper as Director of the National Portrait Gallery, for removing my great uncle Hugh de T. Glazebrook's portrait of Lord Milner from a prominent wall near the entrance. Such
repute as this promoter of Imperial unity once possessed had dwindled by the 1960s. Furthermore, there were aesthetically mitigating circumstances which overrode family pride. However posterity will rate Milner, a great public servant who sits bathed in light between Lloyd George and Churchill in Sir James Guthrie's excellent 'Some Statesmen of the Great War', the almost impenetrably dark painting of him peering intensely from the gloom by my great uncle (who did a better job on The Prisoner of Zenda's author, Anthony Hope) will always be less than a masterpiece. On the other hand, in that shortcoming, and bearing in mind the odd rather good Sargent — of Octavia Hill for example — it resembles most Victorian and Edwardian works which belong to our increasingly large, well-analysed, wellgrouped and hung, well-lit, informatively captioned, vibrant, popular, restaurantowning, moving-staircase-boasting and socially significant repository of the national multi-cultural face.
We do not go to the NPG primarily to contemplate great art. We go to study ourselves in the mirror. We go mainly because we are interested in people and in the feel of history brought alive by the actual look of other British residents, past or present, or so we hope. Sixteenth-century aristocrats seem to be on another planet from the notables of the 20th century. Even the differences between 1650 and 1750 are remarkable. We are interested in what light such differences could throw on our own evolving individual and collective identities both as visualised and as visualisers.
The NPG is, and always has been, more about history and society — anthropology even — than about art. Decisions that its directors and trustees have made, since it was founded as a state-run enterprise in 1856, tell us at least as much about social attitudes at the date of the decisions, as the acquisitions themselves reveal about their own time. A case in point is the abovementioned post-Imperial revisionist question featuring Roy Strong and Viscount Milner, the latter captured however tenebrously by great uncle Hugh de Twenebrokes Glazebrook and still languishing in a store room — not to mention the public row in which the aged Oskar Kokoschka took Roy Strong to task for appearing to overvalue the photograph while undervaluing the possibilities of the modern painted portrait. (The English were at least three centuries behind Italy in getting started as serious painters so it was hard for them to be told, just as they were getting the hang of it, that their portraits had been superannuated by a machine.) As Neil MacGregor moves from the National Gallery to the British Museum and as Charles SaumarezSmith moves from the NPG to succeed him, Saumarez-Smith will paradoxically take charge of a better class of portrait painting.
Portrait painting at the National Gallery has to be good art. The special eye of a true painter, economical with insignificant detail but not with the truth, will always throw a fascinating light on anything it looks at, from a mouse to a cavalier's moustache; therefore certain great Italian Renaissance portraits, now well researched, continued to impress throughout periods when little or nothing correct was known about the sitters. Outside the collection of that rare and typically British institution, a national portrait gallery, a good painting of a nobody — whether an anonymous young 16th-century man by Nicholas Hilliard or a scrawny girl in a 20th-century Paris attic by Gwen John — is preferable to a passable picture of a somebody. A good portrait of someone we have never encountered can give off a thrilling aura of authenticity so that we feel instinctively convinced, without objective evidence, that the artist has captured the subject. Best of all, perhaps, is a great painting of a somebody. That somebody could be a queen by Lely in a lovely dress or a duke by Rubens on a rearing horse: images of royal families by Velasquez, Van Dyck and Goya do stay in the mind's eye wonderfully. Or that somebody could be the artist himself: witness the deeply moving self-portrait of Rembrandt at Kenwood, or Picasso's late image of his own terrified skull-like self staring death in the face. When artists draw, paint or sculpt themselves or each other, the requirement to flatter — evidently not applicable to Lucian Freud's recent little portrait of the Queen as a hard-working woman — rarely rears its morally ugly head.
The 20th century may not have been an outstanding one for productions by the professional portraitist; yet despite the rise of abstraction — and the absorption of history painting by film — it was a period rich in memorably painted, drawn and sculpted images of individuals of all kinds, by artists great or good, major or minor. I am currently haunted by the Balthus of Miro' and his daughter. The almost endless variety of media and styles may bewilder the uninitiated — a good thing about a Cubist portrait is that the eyes do not follow you all the way around the room — but we all have our favourites. It's no surprise that the annual BP Portrait award exhibition at the NPG attracts many more visitors than the Turner Prize. There is also great interest in historic shows, such as the re-assessment of George Romney initiated by Liverpool's Walker Art Gallery and due soon at the NPG. Nor has the NPG been stuffy about conceptualism. Last autumn, 'A Genomic Portrait: Sir John Sulston' by Marc Quinn presented a detail of the genetic scientist's genome. Quinn must have been acting on the assumption that neither the NPG itself nor the very notion of a portrait commission was primarily to do with art. Visitors were encouraged to see themselves simultaneously with this abstract, scientific image in the highly reflective glass. I've already mentioned that we come to our National Portrait Gallery to study ourselves in the mirror.
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