Gallery Visit: Visit a Portrait Gallery - Part 4, Project 1

I was glad that this exercise came up at the time of year when the Royal Society of Portrait Painters holds its annual exhibition at the Mall Galleries. I like the Mall Galleries – the space is so understated and welcoming, and it's easier to imagine the works on show hanging in one's own home than in more grand spaces like the National Portrait Gallery. The portraits on show often include a range of poses that you don't see at the national galleries, where the subjects are usually famous and the portraits formal. (This is a slight deviation from the instructions for this exercise but  is a good way of seeing over 200 examples of contemporary portraiture before the arrival of the annual BP Portrait Awards exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.) A significant proportion of the paintings in this annual exhibition are done by Members of the Society, who are, naturally, looking for commissions, and have portrayed their subjects in fairly flattering light.

Three paintings were of particular interest to me when I read the advance publicity for the exhibition:- the first of Cambridge economics don Dr Victoria Bateman; the second of ex-prime minister Tony Blair; and the third of Sir Roger Bannister and his wife.

The first gained a fair amount of advance publicity because of the fact that Dr Bateman had commissioned the painting herself to take a snapshot of how she looked just after her thirtieth  birthday, and wanted to be painted in the nude in an unflattering pose to say “something about body image and our culture” because she feels “we have come to a point in society where we associate the female body with just one thing – sex”. She paid £9000 for the work, by Anthony Connolly, and plans to hang it in her living room when the exhibition is over. So it was with some interest that I went along to see if her aim of provoking people into realising that behind a nude can be an intelligent woman had been achieved. 

Anthony Connolly is a Member of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters and usually completes preliminary sketches (right) before embarking on the final work. These preliminary sketches are, to me, more powerful than the finished pose, which has Dr Bateman looking somewhat defiantly at the viewer. The artist has portrayed the subject in a very relaxed, unselfconscious way, as if she is leaning on a wall waiting for a bus, with her weight shifting from one leg to the other. 

 

 

                                                      The paintings in this gallery have all been commissioned by organisations, and they have often been intended for semi-public display. This one was intended only for the subject, her family and her friends, to be hung in the living-room of her home. I think the artist has shown a very non-frivolous, almost severe looking Dr Bateman, who seems to be daring us as viewers to criticise her stance. I wonder about the significance of the lily-of-the-valley flower in the bottom left foreground. Is it a favourite flower, or could it be a reminder for herself and her partner that this is as she was at 30? when I looked up the meaning of the this flower, I found that it could mean: 

"Return of happiness, purity of heart, sweetness, tears of the Virgin Mary, you've made my life complete, humility, happiness, love's good fortune. The legend of the lily of the valley is that it sprang from Eve's tears when she was kicked out of the Garden of Eden. It is also believed that this flower protects gardens from evil spirits. Also known as the flower of May."

Curiously, her hands are almost hidden. Is this on purpose, to draw attention to the fact that this lady is all about intellect and brains, I wonder?  I like the choice of the blue shower-like background, as it brings out the warm tones of the skin, which is beautifully painted and reminds me a bit of the range of skin-tones in Egon Schiele's The Family (below).

 Dr Bateman says she hopes the portrait  "will provide a talking point for her friends and family for many years to come". To me, the pose looks contrived and unnatural, and I can't get away from my initial reaction to it as a veiled attempt at something slightly daring from a woman who is taking a very traditional path in life.

The second portrait I wanted to concentrate on was of ex-Prime-Minister Tony Blair, which I have chosen as the subject for the next exercise in Project 1, Exercise 4 - Analyse a Formal Portrait (see Friday 23rd May 2014). The main attraction here is that this is the first time it has been shown in public, as it is owned by the artist. But I am also intrigued by the vitriol surrounding this man, and the anger he can provoke for distancing the Labour Party from its socialist roots and embracing capitalism; and for his position as staunch ally of the Bush Administration in its War on Terror and invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. We don't hear much about Blair's Faith Foundation, or the fact that he is on record as saying that religious extremism is the cause of most of the conflict in the the world today; or the fact that he himself is a deeply religious man who converted to Catholicism six months after resigning as Prime Minister. Perhaps he had always felt a Catholic at heart - his wife and children have always been - but the UK has never had a Catholic Prime Minister. Was his public religious affiliation a political strategy? Who is the real Tony Blair? 

I wanted to find out if the artist, Alastair Adams, managed to find the real man in his candid informal portrait done with Blair's approval while he sat for the formal portrait of Blair that had been commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery. As Adams owns the portrait, it has been in his private collection, but is soon to go on public display in Belfast, Northern Ireland. 

This is a very symmetrical painting, with little variation in tone or colour, and painted in oil with fine brushstrokes. A casually dressed Blair stands in front of his desk in his home study with various objects arranged on top, and a large painting on the wall behind. It gives the impression of order, discipline and clarity - there is no clutter in this study. Perhaps Adams was trying to capture the essence of Blair as a straightforward, stalwart man. Was he trying to portray the view that one can disagree with his views, but he is not duplicitous? Adams has painted him in such a way that Blair looks like someone who does not shy away from controversy and is not afraid to voice his principles. Perhaps his departure from national politics and his role as international peace-seeker has freed him from the need to court support from the voting public. There is lots of symbolism in this painting, which at first glance looks like a typical domestic scene, but that is misleading when we look more closely at the objects depicted.  (See the full analysis of this painting in the next post).

 

Lastly, is a pencil and charcoal portrait of one of my first sporting heroes, Roger Bannister, who was the first man to run a mile in under four minutes, with his wife Moyra. At 76 x 102cm, it is quite a large drawing by the famously well-established Philip Noakes who has known the couple for many years. When interviewed, Noakes said that he wanted to emphasize different aspects of both their achievements - Sir Roger's as a famous athlete celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of his record-breaking run and also his long career as a distinguished research neurologist and Master of Pembroke College, Oxford - and Lady Moyra as his lifetime companion and a  painter/ceramicist, who has recorded in words and illustrations their lifetime of travel.

This portrait will hang in Pembroke College, Oxford. I can't fault the drawing of the two main figures, but my first impression of this portrait is that it is just too busy. The rather ghostly-looking head on Sir Roger's left shoulder looks particularly redundant, and the two drawings of Lady Moyra  (above her and to her left) look too repetitive. The same can be said about the numerous plates/plaques/trophies/framed pictures surrounding the couple. It is clear that the painting in the top left is of a race, possibly Bannister's record-breaking mile, but the various other objects (which might well represent awards and achievements) merge into clutter with the display-shelf-unit floating between them like a wayward satellite. What is Sir Roger holding in this left hand? It looks like a giant glass shard, but the meaning is not clear to the viewer. And the two little bovine-like creatures galloping in from the right - are they samples of Lady Moyra's painting or his ceramics? Whatever they are or represent, the portrait would have been improved by their ommission in my opinion. The longer I looked at this portrait, the more I felt that Noakes had started out with some preliminary sketches on a large piece of paper and decided to make it into the finished work by adding things here and there.  Looking at his some of his previous works (many of which hang in the National Portrait Gallery) I can see his eye for detail, but nowhere can I find evidence of the cluttered approach he uses here. Although his technical skill is evident, Noakes has not shown the achievements of this couple at all well, and I find the portrait very unnatractive.