National Portrait Gallery (1)

This book features superb reproductions and far more text than is usual for museum guidebooks, and it's quite lively and engaging. I often buy guidebooks after visiting museums, but usually end up using them as visual mementos of the trip, leafing through them occasionally, but seldom actually reading them. This book I did read through while I was in London, remembered much of it, and reread now with pleasure.

It was interesting to look at different portraits in roughly chronological order and see how the art of portraiture developed over the centuries. It was also very interesting to look at the portraits themselves, both in the actual museum and in this book. Personally I never cared much for famous people’s portraits reproduced in textbooks, and so I was very surprised when I found myself fascinated by the pictures in this museum. Of course, what first struck me was the unexpected, which often, however, proved to be revealing.

Virginia Woolf in a photograph by George Charles Beresford looks vulnerable and fragile, and not at all like a person who will self-confidently declare six years later, "I shall reform the novel" – but certainly like somebody who will commit suicide forty years later because she thought she was going mad.

John Locke in the portrait by Michael Dahl wears an almost disgusted expression, as if he could guess what the future generations would create from his political theories.

John Donne looks more like a pirate (in the romantic imagination, not the real thing) than a dean of St Paul. Later, though, I found out that he had actually taken part in two naval attacks on Spain during the reign of Elizabeth I, but her successor James I made it clear that the church would be the only field of employment open to the ex-Catholic, and with a dozen kids to support, Donne didn't have much of a choice (as far as any person getting career advice from a king can be said to have a choice). Henry James, on the other hand, looks much more like a banker than a novelist in his portrait by Sargent.

Darwin, with his hat in his hand, in the portrait by John Collier, looks very shy for one of the most renowned of scientists in the world, and one can see why he needed Thomas Huxley (the grandfather of the novelist), also painted by Collier, to do his arguments for him.

The portrait that I found the most striking, and not in a pleasant way, was that of Edward VII's wife, the Duchess of Windsor, by Gerald Brockhurst. Her smile seems so cynical, and her general expression so cold, that the picture has a very chilling effect, further exacerbated by her looming over a heavily and uniformly clouded sky. It must be sunset or sunrise, because the sky looks lighter at the horizon, but not a single sunray passes through the clouds. The feeling of deadliness is emphasized again by the barren hills in the background, by the huge dark stone bench on which the duchess sits, by the metal flowers which adorn her dress, and by the absolute symmetry of her face, as if the artist depicted not a real person, but some kind of man-made automaton. When I later read that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor likely allied themselves with the Nazis, I wasn't very surprised.

By its expression, the picture of the duchess contrasts sharply with my favorite portrait in this museum, that of Michael Faraday by Thomas Phillips. I don’t know anything about Faraday as a person, but his face in this picture exudes such warmth and friendliness that I spent a few minutes reflecting on a very different kind of magnetism than the one the great physicist had studied. On the other hand, J. K. Rowling's portrait by Stuart Pearson Wright I didn't like at all. It seemed to me bleak and unimaginative – the very antitheses of the sitter.
For me, this book is a wonderful souvenir of my visit to the museum, but I think it would be interesting to peruse even if I had never been to NPG.

(Portraits of Locke, Donne, and Huxley are not included in the book.)… (plus d'informations)