Oliver
Cromwell famously said that he wanted his portrait to include “all these
roughnesses, pimples, warts and everything as you see me”. Nowadays we have little
choice in the matter. We live in an era in which our photographic likenesses circulate
ever more freely in the form of webcam images, profile pictures and mobile phone
snapshots, and they cannot all be flattering.
You
would think that, in this era of instantly available avatars of ourselves,
something as analogue as a painted portrait would have little purchase. But all
this week, viewers on The One Show are voting on which public figure should be
the subject of a “People’s Portrait” in the National Portrait Gallery. And last
week there was much interest in the artist Grahame Hurd-Wood, who aims to paint
a portrait of every person in his home city of St Davids. He thinks it will
take him at least another five years to reproduce all 1800 residents – a task
that could be done with a camera in a day.
The
painted portrait has outlived most of its original purposes. Before photography,
it was the main way of preserving someone’s image beyond their own lifetime. It
was also largely the preserve of the rich and well-connected, a way of
announcing wealth, status and ancestral lineage. None of these advantages
applies in the new age of the “selfie”, the self-portrait taken with
front-facing phone camera.
But
a painted portrait can still be extraordinarily compelling. For it can show us
that we are not, as Shakespeare wrote and most of us think we are, the lords
and owners of our faces. Before allowing ourselves to be photographed, we subconsciously
flinch and arrange our features in such a way as to give a poor sense of how we
usually look. The artist Graham Sutherland once said that “only those totally
without physical vanity, educated in painting, or with exceptionally good
manners, can disguise their feelings of shock or even revulsion when they are
confronted for the first time with a reasonably truthful painted image of
themselves”. Anyone who has been horrified at encountering their glum, ill-prepared
countenance unexpectedly in a shop window will know what he means.
Just
as a selfie is only one version of the self – for most people do not view us completely
face-on, grinning inanely, at arm’s length – a painted portrait is a reinvention
of another person. Many portrait painters make the head bigger than it really
is, because it is what we notice first in others. The eyes may be enlarged for
the same reason, while the ears, which most of us barely register unless they
are especially protuberant, are usually an afterthought. A portrait painter is
trying to capture a person’s ineffable essence rather than a mirror image. As
Picasso said of his portrait of Gertrude Stein, “everybody says that she does not look like it, but that does not
make any difference. She will.”
No
one, after all, has just one face; it changes constantly according to such
variables as angle of view, mood, lighting and the ageing process. Compared to those
of other species, human faces are very different from each other, and, since we
have more separate muscles in our faces than any other animal, uniquely expressive.
And yet every human face, for all that it is as idiosyncratic as a fingerprint, also seems fundamentally familiar. In old paintings, it is
always the face – rather than the historically distancing aspects of hairstyle,
costume and decor - which conveys the sense that the person portrayed is
someone recognisable who could step out of the painting into the present.
I still recall my shock at first seeing
the face of Tollund Man, the mummified body discovered in a Danish peat bog in
1950 - a mild, unremarkable face you might just as easily have come across attached
to a stranger on the bus. The selfie has become ubiquitous not because we live in an
unusually narcissistic age, but because we first connect with other human
beings through their faces. And that is also
why a painted portrait has the power to move us still.
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