Private & Public Portraits.
“The test of a portrait is not wether it attracts attention on the walls of an exhibition, but how far it succeeds, in the house where it is meant to live, in telling the story of sympathy and comprehension through years of silent appeal.” Walter Sickert, review of R.A. exhibition, The Speaker, May, 1897.
A good point of departure for considering the state of portraiture in late nineteenth century Britain is Walter Sickert’s review of the R.A. in 1897. In this piece Sickert divides portraiture into portraits of an august nature, such as Reid’s likeness of Professor Mitchell which has a “fine old air of serious, self-respecting portraiture” and the portrait destined for the home or the private space. The former would be an example of the open, “thumping advertisement” compared to the more muted style of Roche, or even Sickert’s own portraits like the Mamma mia Poveretta, an uncompromising study of age and bodily dissolution, done a few years later in Venice. Sickert’s uncompromising portrait was designed for the private interior where this cross between Rembrandt and Degas could be studied from the owner’s armchair. A later double portrait of Sickert, Ennui, (above) owes much to Degas’s painted inhabited interiors where the division between the sexes, family members is emphasised. Sickert was to write a fulsome tribute to Degas when the artist died in 1917. Less tense, and more intimate are the portraits of Gwen John’s that she did during her early years in France; these are essentially reflective, capturing quietly the life of the interior during her time in France where she painted companions like Dorelia, who is sometimes shown in pictures with such titles as The Student thus underlining the introspective nature of the picture.
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