Art History Today

The Art of the Portrait 3: Late 19th Century to Modern. 8

English Abstraction & the Portrait: Wyndham Lewis to Francis Bacon

“The open mouth became central to Bacon’s iconography from very early on..By the early 1950s, however, it had become obsessive, dominating all other concerns.” Michael Peppiat.¹

Returning to England we can see this fascination with the manipulation of form and colour used to express personality emerging through the abstract turn following Fry’s exhibitions. Initially sympathetic to Fry, Percy Wyndham Lewis eventually quarrelled with him and broke away to form his own avant-garde movement which was called Vorticism. Lewis painted a modernist portrait of the eccentric poetess Edith Sitwell which is an important avant-garde treatment of the English portrait. According to another artist William Rothenstein, Lewis said of this portrait “I go primarily for the pattern of the structure of the head and insinuate, rather than stress, the “psyche”” This clinical, detached, above all cerebral interpretation of the Sitwell milieu is not that of a participant of the charmed circle, but an intellectually detached observer with an ironic viewpoint. It is noticeable that Lewis was not really a physiological painter; he was more fascinated by the play of composition, line and colour which he could subject to deformation. Like Thomas Mann’s fictitious subcutaneous painter, Francis Bacon was fascinated by the body; but in his case, as underlined by the above comment, it was one specific part of the anatomy that fascinated him- the mouth which came about through studying a variety of sources: a book on diseases of the mouth; the harrowing face of the shot nurse in Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin; and the ashen face of the mother in Poussin’s Massacre of the Innocents. Within the genre of portraiture the mouth had never been granted such prominence before, with to use the words of John Berger, “the necks ending in mouths.”² But Bacon became aware of the dangers of turning his mouths into something aggressively abstract, so he modified his approach in the hope of doing for the mouth what Monet had done for sunsets, i.e make it beautiful.³ Eventually, other facial features like the eyes would be emphasised, though as Berger noted, these in portraits of Bacon’s friends like the artist Isabel Rawsthorne (above) imply the absence of “self-reflection” since they simply look out “dumbly” from their condition.⁴ This blank passivity captured in Bacon’s portraits may have been as a result of working from photographs of sitters rather the real person which happened in the 1950s. Like Kokoschka, Bacon was interested in distortion, but not to uncover the “inner life” but as a method of returning to the true image: “What I want to do is to distort the thing far beyond the appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance.” Bacon’s art is not illustrative, narrative or even abstract because these styles “work on the brain and not the nervous system” which places Bacon closer to the anatomical painter Behrens- who lamented he had not painted his subject from memory, or with Bacon in mind, we might add from a photograph- than the expressionists, formalists,- generally, purveyors of avant-garde art who seemed to have craved distortion and abstraction for its own sake rather “than a recording of the image.”⁵

1Michael Peppiat, Francis Bacon in the 1950s (Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, 2006), 24

2John Berger, “Francis Bacon and Walt Disney” in About Looking, (London, 1980), 111-118, 114.

3Quoted in ibid: “In fact, they were too abstract. They originally started through my having always been very moved by movements of the mouth and the shape of the mouth and the teeth. I like, you may say, the glitter and colour that comes from the mouth, and I’ve always hoped in a sense to be able to paint the mouth like Monet painted a sunset.”

4Ibid, 115.

5Ernst van Alphen, Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self (Reaktion Books, 1998), 32.

The Art of the Portrait 3: Late 19th Century to Modern. 7

Kokoschka: Sitting for the Psychological Portrait.

“I try to keep my sitters moving and talking, to make them forget they are being painted. This has nothing to do with extracting intimate secrets or confessions but rather with establishing, in motion, an essential image of the kind that remains in memory or recurs in dreams. I could not do this if my sitter had to keep still, as he might for a photographer, or to hold a stiff pose." Kokoschka.

Born in Pöchlorn, Austria, in 1886, Oscar Kokoschka quickly established himself as a painter of the cultural elite in Vienna at the turn of the century.¹ In the words of Berland, Kokoschka’s “anti-naturalist imagery emphasized the sitter's psychological state of being, and, implicitly, the artist's own intuitive creative process.”² To achieve this Kokoschka deliberately distorted physiological details in order to gain some heightened psychological effect, devices used in the movement that is loosely called “expressionism” which was defined by Hermann Bahr in 1914-16.³ Some of the features of expressionism, dissolution of form and line, vivid colouration, clearly have affinities with post-impressionism which can be seen by comparing Kokoschka's Double Portrait of the art historians Hans Tietze and Erica Tietze-Conrat (1909) (above) to Gauguin’s Tahitian Woman and Boy (1899) which was owned by a German dealer and may have been exhibited with some of Kokoschka’s early portraits.⁴ Expressionist art has been studied in relation to the emergent psychoanalytic movements, and developing as an artist in Vienna Kokoschka would certainly have been aware of growing interest in the subconscious and dreams. And while this is not the place to explore Kokoschka’s art and Freudian theory, it is important to make clear the artist’s fascination with the “inner life” in relation to his practice.⁵ Commenting on the way he posed sitters Kokoschka said that he tried to keep them animated rather than still because it helped to establish “an essential image of the kind that remains in memory or recurs in dreams.”

1For this section I have drawn on Rosa Berland, “The Early Portraits of Oskar Kokoschka: A Narrative of Inner Life. Image [&] Narrative” [e-journal], 18 (2007).

2Ibid.

3Hermann Bahr, Expressionism, written 1914, pub 1916: “The various sayings and proclamations of Expressionism only tell us that what the Expressionist is looking for is without parallel in the past. A new form of Art is dawning. And he who beholds an Expressionist picture by Matisse or Picasso, by Pechstein or Kokoschka, by Kandinsky or Marc, or by Italian or Bohemian futurists, agrees; he finds them quite unprecedented.”

4Sousslof, The Subject in Art, 41. Kokoschka described these two driving art historians as "closed personalities so full of tension."

5The subject is discussed by Claude Cernuschi in Re/casting Kokoschka: Ethics and Aesthetics, Epistemology and Politics in Fin de Siècle Vienna (Associated University Press, 2002), 101f.

The Art of the Portrait 3: Late 19th Century to Modern. 6

The Birth of the Modern Portrait 3: The Portrait in Central Europe.

“It was a pretty clumsy piece of work...I don’t flatter myself I hit her off very well, though we had, I suppose, twenty sittings. What can you do with a rum sort of face like that? You might think she would be easy to capture, with those hyperborean cheek-bones, and eyes like cracks in a loaf of bread. Yes, there’s something about her- if you get the detail right, you botch the ensemble. Riddle of the sphinx. Do you know her? It would probably be better to paint her from memory, instead of having her sit. Did you say you knew her?” Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain.¹

These words are those of the amateur- painter Dr Behrens who is also Director of the Swiss sanatorium in which Thomas Mann’s epic novel of 1924 is set. Behrens is showing a portrait of his patient Madame Chauchat to two visitors, the hero of the novel Hans Castorp, and his cousin Joachim. This particular fictional portrait is useful for considering the style of portrait painting in Central Europe in the years leading up to the Great War when the action of the novel takes place. From the descriptions in the novel, Frau Chauchat’s portrait is scientifically observed almost as if the anatomist Behrens is extending his surgeon’s skill into the realm of painting; the result of subcutaneous knowledge, getting beneath the skin of the sitter in more ways than one.² From its description we might loosely characterise the portrait as “realistic” though at the time Mann published his novel, the portrait had undergone great changes thanks to certain intellectual currents flowing through the culture and society of Middle-Europe, by which we mean Germany, Switzerland, and Austria.³ Changes in the European portrait were especially noticeable in Vienna in Austria, home to a number of portrait artists like Klimt, Schiele and Oscar Kokoschka (above). Vienna was also home to the “Vienna Circle” the name given to a group of philosophers and scientists drawn from the natural and social sciences, as well as the fields of logic and mathematics. Psychology was also of great interest to the Vienna Circle, and this interest in the workings of the mind has been connected with portrait painters such as Kokoschka who trained in fin de siècle Vienna and was certainly aware of these debates.

1Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, first pub 1924, trans H.T. Lowe-Porter (Penguin, 1987), 257.

2Castorp’s own reactions to the portrait remind us of Picasso’s portrait of Stein which is not dependent on exact likeness, but nonetheless captures the essence of the sitter: “But Hans Castorp was not particular about the degree of likeness, the relation of this canvas to Frau Chauchat’s person was close enough for him.”

3In the 1982 film made of the novel, the style of Frau Chauchat’s portrait is definitely realist rather than expressionist, impressionist or other stylistic movements in vogue at the time.

The Art of the Portrait 3: Late 19th Century to Modern. 5

The Birth of the Modern Portrait 2: Matisse at the English Galleries.

“The contrast between Dicksee’s The Lady Inverclyde exhibited at the Royal Academy that year and Matisse’s Femme aux Yeux Verts at the Grafton Galleries was too great for most of the general public; the two paintings seemed scarcely the product of the same century let alone the same decade.” Frances Spalding.¹

For the next significant moment for modern portraiture we must leave the Paris of 1906 and journey through time and space to the London of 1910. Between November 8^th and January 15^th 1911, an exhibition billed as “Manet and the Post-Impressionists” was held at the Grafton Gallery. It was organised by Roger Fry and the critic, in a moment of frustration, coined the term “post-impressionism” which has stuck forever despite the vagueness of the term for the art history lexicon.² Amongst the portraits were Cézanne's La Vieille au Chapelet of 1895, some Manets and some Van Gogh’s; but two portraits exhibited in this show demonstrated the huge gap between English portraiture and the new styles on the continent. Visitors would have been astounded to see Frank Dicksee’s Edwardian elegant The Lady Inverclyde and Rene Matisse’s expressively, coloured, spatially incongruous portrait of his wife (above) in the same show. If the public were completely nonplussed, the art establishment felt bamboozled, quickly concluding that the Matisse was one huge joke. Augustus John confessed his bafflement at Matisse’s portrait of Mme Matisse, and called it “vulgar and spurious.” Yet even contemporary painters who were in tune with avant-garde tendencies were inclined to harbour reservations about the Matisses on show at the Grafton Gallery. Sickert thought the Matisse “nonsense” and even Roger Fry who had organized the Matisse exhibition had to persuade the public that though the figure might seem ridiculous on the surface, delving beneath, one could see that the linear design was good and the colour harmonies splendid and intense.³ As Spalding says, the Dicksee takes us back to “past traditions of portraiture” and the social milieu from which they emerged; whilst the Matisse is purely about the picture itself, a fundamental difference between historical social portraits and the way the avant-garde saw the genre. Fry was trying to justify the Matisse portrait in terms of its own forms and colour, not its place in reality. Much of the ire of the critics was directed at the drawing of the post-impressionists, thus inaugurating the standard attack on modern art as childish; one called it “tea-tray painting” and valued the whole modern collection at £5.⁴ This kind of “formalist” approach would encroach upon English painting with the help of movements like Cubism and Vorticism, though the former was only represented at the Grafton by Picasso’s Portrait of Clovis Sagot done a year previously in 1909.

1Frances Spalding, Roger Fry: Art and Life (Black Dog, 1999), 137.

2Ibid, 133.

3But as Spalding says (ibid 136): “The miscomprehension must partly be blamed on the insularity and provincialism of English art. The public had been blinded and its imagination dulled by an excess of detail and story telling in paint. The persistent emphasis on representation and subject matter had deadened appreciation of form.”

4Wilfred Scawen Blunt quoted in ibid, 136: “The drawing is on the level of that of an untaught child of seven or eight years old, the sense of colour of a tea-tray painter..they are works of idleness and impotent stupidity, a pornographic show.”

The Art of the Portrait 3: Late 19th Century to Modern. 4

The Birth of the Modern Portrait 1: Picasso and Primitivism.

“He painted in the head without having seen me again and he gave me the picture and I was and I still am satisfied with my portrait, for me, it is I, and it is the only reproduction of me which is always I, for me.” Gertrude Stein on Picasso’s portrait of her.

Gertrude Stein’s playful use of pronouns in her comments on Picasso’s 1905-6 portrait of her flags up the question of identity in relation to the modern portrait. But identity in this era with its link to the modernist conventions of psychoanalysis, the inner life, and mental modes in literature cannot be separated from a concept which is more known to art history, namely primitivism. Primitivism is especially relevant to the Stein portrait since after many sittings during which Picasso fought with “resemblance, he made the decision to paint out Stein’s face and put in its place an African mask.¹ Yet as one scholar notes, even with this effacement Stein is still recognisable in the portrait, something which, judging by her comments, she obviously thought so herself.² By transposing the problem of identity in the portrait to the terrain of ethnography and cultural anthropology, Picasso opened up the genre to new possibilities. The first phase of Picasso’s “primitivism” occurs when he becomes interested in Iberian sculpture during 1906 the year he painted Stein’s portrait. According to William Rubin, the re-painted head of Stein, “smooth, hard and sculptural,” exemplified this 1906 style which had been “provoked” by sculptures found at Orsuna which were 6th-3rd century B.C.³ It is from these sculptures that Picasso distilled his initial “primitivism” though it took six months before their influence was visible in Picasso’s art. To see how much the Osuna sculptures helped him create a new style, one need only compare the Stein portrait with those of two years before, e.g. the Celestina of the so-called “Blue Period.” To complaints about the portrait not resembling Stein, Picasso replied: “That does not make any difference, she will.”⁴

1On primitivism and art history, Gill Perry, “Primitivism and the Modern” in Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction: The Early Twentieth Century (Yale University Press, 1993), 3-8.

2Catherine M. Sousslof, The Subject in Art: Portraiture and the Birth of the Modern (Duke University Press, 2006), 6.

3William Rubin, “The Genesis of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” in Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon, (MOMA, New York, 1994), 13-118, 37.

4Quoted in Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (Reaktion Books, 1991), 150. As Brilliant notes: in Man Ray’s photograph of Stein and her portrait. “Picasso’s portrait seems to be closer to the original Gertrude Stein than the ageing human being in the photograph, but Man Ray also wanted to demonstrate the persistence of that unique self, the self that was once and for all defined by Picasso as ‘Gertrude Stein.”

The Art of the Portrait 3: Late 19th Century to Modern. 3

Two British Portraitists: Augustus John & William Orpen.

“Sit down!” A command attributed to Augustus John when directing a sitter in his studio.

An artist like Augustus John would inject something of his own personality into his portraits of sitters, thus it would be more accurate to say that society- as conveyed via the portrait- was seen through the temperament of the artist whatever their social origins, or the class they elected to represent. John’s biographer Michael Holroyd goes further and suggests that John showed his own personality obliquely through the portraits of other subjects.¹ So, according to this theory, John’s portraits were a "gallery" of selves projected onto other people. Thus John manufactured a variety of identities rather than the image of a single integrated human being, and he never believed that his fellow painters like Orpen and Rothenstein had captured the true essence of his being in their own portraits of him. John achieved great success as a professional portrait painter having quite a number of illustrious sitters, but perhaps he most enjoyed painting writers including W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Dylan Thomas, T.E Lawrence, though he also painted prime ministers such as Lloyd George. Within his studio John had complete control whatever the sitter’s rank or status outside it. After leading the sitter to a chair John would order them to “Sit down” and thence onwards the client would be no more than an “object.”² John painted “with immense concentration” never speaking, occasionally stamping his foot, drawing on his pipe. The artist would jump up, knock over chairs before taking a “half-time” break much to the sitter’s relief, though to the artist he had been forgotten.³ Though a very fine portrait painter, William Orpen (above)- like Augustus John- is one of those portraitists whose status has diminished in art history, though there are recent signs of some rehabilitation which John has not enjoyed.⁴ As a war artist Orpen painted generals as well as prime ministers, Haig and Churchill. Apart from other people’s images, Orpen was obsessed with his own; but note that it is always Orpen’s own undifferentiated personality that is shown to the spectator, even down to the same pose which seldom varies throughout his self-portraits. Orpen might disguise himself as Chardin but we are in no doubt that it is his own, aggressive persona that is offered to the viewer.

1Michael Holroyd, Augustus John: The New Biography, (Vintage, 1997).

2Ibid, 474.

3Ibid.

4The exhibitions in London and Orpen’s home town Dublin in Various, 2005, William Orpen: Politics, Sex & Death.

The Art of the Portrait 3: Late 19th Century to Modern. 2

Facing English Society: Social Life, Class & the Portrait.

It seems axiomatic that the genre of the portrait should serve as a vehicle for communicating certain ideas about the social structure, its classes, and the various professions in a specific historical period. For example John Singer Sargent only admitted to the fashionable glitz of the rich and wealthy; William Strang represented the habits of the bohemian and the bourgeois (above); and Mark Gertler hinted at his own lower-class Jewish origins, though he was to rise into the empyrean heights of the aesthetic upper-middle class at Garsington. Class is certainly important when considering portraits, but as with most theories or generalisations, the hypothesis soon crumbles. The range of likenesses of famous men and women done by outstanding portraitists like Augustus John, Orpen, Rothenstein and Gertler might seem to offer a kind of collective social portrait of captains of industry, heroes of the battlefield, grande dames, poets and writers from all strata, but society is never static; these artists lived at a time when political, economic and military authority was under scrutiny due to the growing liberalisation of society after the puritanical Victorian period. Moreover, each artist had their own attitude towards portrait-painting and there were also psychological angles to consider.

The Art of the Portrait 3: Late 19th Century to Modern. 1

Private & Public Portraits: English Portraits In the Late 19^th century

“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, (above) 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 owed 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 1917.¹ 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.

1The Bellelli Family was begun in Florence in 1858, completed in Paris in 1859. It was deposited with the art dealer Durand-Ruel when Degas had to leave his large apartment. The picture created a sensation when it reappeared prior to the sale of Degas’s collection, Gary Tinterow, “Degas’s Degases” in The Private Collection of Edgar Degas, (Metropolitan Museum, New York, 1997, 75-109, 81.

The Art of the Portrait 2: 18th & Early 19th Centuries. Slides

Slides

1. Thomas Gainsborough, Self-Portrait, 1787, oil on canvas, Royal Academy of Arts, London.

2. Thomas Gainsborough, Mr and Mrs William Hallett ('The Morning Walk'), 1785, oil on canvas, 236×179 cm, National Gallery, London.

3. Sir Peter Lely, Louise de Kéroualle, c. 1671, oil on canvas, 122×102 cm, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

4. Sir Godfrey Kneller, Bt. Richard Boyle, 2^nd Viscount Shannon, 1715-20, oil on canvas, (unfinished), NPG, London.

5. Joseph van Aken, The Van Aken Brothers, oil on canvas, 89×125 cm, Private collection.

6. Thomas Hudson, Portrait of a Lady in Van Dyck Dress, oil on canvas, 93×72 cm, Private collection.

7. Charles- Nicolas Cochin, Drawing of the Prix Caylus, probably 1750s, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

8. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Lady Sarah Bunbury sacrificing to the Gods, 1765, oil on canvas, 242.6×151.5 cm, Art Institute of Chicago.

9. William Hogarth, The Painter and his Pug, 1745, oil on canvas, 90×70 cm, Tate Gallery, London.

10. E. M. Ward, Hogarth’s Studio in 1739, 1865, oil on canvas, 142.2×185.5 cm, York Art Gallery.

11. William Hogarth, Portrait of Six of his Servants, 1750-5, oil on canvas, 630×755 mm, Tate Britain, London.

12. William Hogarth, David Garrick as Richard III, 1745, oil on canvas, 191×252 cm, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

13. William Hogarth, George Arnold of Ashby Lodge, c. 1738-40, oil on canvas, 91×71 cm, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

14. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Self-Portrait with Artist shading his Eyes, 1748-9 NPG, 60.5×73.5 cm, London.

15. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mrs Hale as “Euphrosyne,” c. 1764, oil on canvas, 236×146 cm, Harewood House.

16. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse, 1789, oil on canvas, 240×148 cm, Dulwich gallery, London.

17. Michelangelo, Isaiah, 1512, Sistine Chapel, fresco, Vatican, Rome.

18. Thomas Gainsborough, Mrs Siddons, 1785, oil on canvas, 126×99,5 cm, National Gallery, London.

19. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Garrick between Tragedy & Comedy, 1761, oil on canvas, 148×183 cm, Private Collection.

20. William Hogarth, William Hogarth Painting the Comic Muse, 1757, oil on canvas, 45.1×42.5 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London.

21. Allan Ramsay, Margaret Lindsay, Mrs Allan Ramsay, c. 1757, oil on canvas, 76.2×63.5 cm, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.

22. Allan Ramsay, David Hume, 1764-65, oil on canvas, 96.0×75.0 cm, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.

23. Allan Ramsay, Dr William Hunter, c. 1760, oil on canvas, 76.2×63.5 cm, Huntlerian Museum, Glasgow.

24. Johann Zoffany, The Academicians of the Royal Academy, 1771-72, oil on canvas, 101.1×147.5 cm, Royal Collection

25. Francis Hayman, The Artist in his Studio with Grosvenor Bedford, 1740, oil on canvas, NPG, London.

26. Sir Thomas Lawrence, Queen Charlotte, 1789-90, oil on canvas, 240×147.3 cm, National Gallery, London.

27. Margaret Dicksee, Angelica Kauffmann Visiting Reynold’s Studio, 1892, location unknown.

28. George Dance, Northcote writing his Life, 1799, graphite on paper, Tate Britain, London.

29. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Allegorical Portrait of James Beatie, 1773, oil on canvas, 122×155 cm, University of Aberdeen.

30. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Portrait of Lawrence Sterne, 1760, oil on canvas, 50 1/8×39 ½ inches, NPG, London.

31. Edition of Tristram Shandy with frontispiece by Hogarth, 1760.

32. Frances Reynolds, Portrait of Samuel Johnson, c. 1780, oil on canvas, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo.

33. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Portrait of the Artist’s Sister, Frances, 1764-65, oil on canvas, 75×61.2 cm, Plymouth City Art Gallery, Plymouth.

34. Frances Reynolds, Self-Portrait with Her Two Sisters, undated, Private Collection.

35. Frances Reynolds, Hannah More, c. 1780, oil on canvas, 73.6×60.9 cm, Bristol Museums and Art Galleries.

36. J K Lavater, Image of woodcut from Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe (1775-1778). Phlegmatic and choleric (above), sanguine and melancholic (below).

37. Hyacinth Rigaud, Portrait of the Artist's Mother, 1695, oil on canvas, 83×103 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

38. Hyacinth Rigaud, Everhard Jabach, 1688, oil on canvas, 58,5×47 cm, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne.

39. Nicolas de Largillière, The Intervention of Sainte Geneviève, 1695, oil on canvas, Church of St Etienne-du-Mont, Paris.

40. Detail.

41. Nicolas de Largillière, Elizabeth ThrockmortoThrockmorton, Canoness of the Order of the Dames, Augustines Anglaises, c. 1729, oil on canvas, 82×66 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington.

42. Theodore Gericault, Portrait of a Kleptomaniac, c. 1820, oil on canvas, 61,2×50,2 cm, Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent.

43. Theodore Gericault, A Madwoman and Compulsive Gambler, c. 1822, oil on canvas, 77×65 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

44. Follower of Leopold Boilly, A bizarre physiognomical caricature with a figure pointing to another's sore eye, Wellcome Institute, London.

45. F-S. Delpech after L. Boilly, Five decrepit doctors crushed together in consultation, 1823, coloured lithograph, Wellcome Institute, London.

46. J Mynde, engraving from James Parson’s Human Physiognomy Explained, 1747.Human physiognomy explain'd: in the Crounian Lectures on muscular motion. For the year MDCCXLVI. Read before the Royal Society / By James Parsons, M.D. and F.R.S. Being a supplement to the Philosophical Transactions for that year / 1747.

47. Honoré Daumier, “There’s no doubt about it, it certainly is my profile; but I shall always regret that the artist had the obstinacy to omit my spectacles,” 1864.

48. Goya, The Family of the Infante Don Luis, de Bourbon, 1783, oil on canvas, 248×330 cm, Fondazione Magnani Rocca, Corre di Mamiano, Parma.

49. Goya, The Family of the Duke of Orsuna, 1788, oil on canvas, 225×174 cm, Prado, Madrid.

50. Goya, The Family of Carlos IV, 1800, oil on canvas, 280×336 cm, Prado, Madrid.

51. Goya, Don Manuel Osorio Maurique de Zuniga, c. 1790s, oil on canvas, 127×101 cm, Jules Bache Collection, Metropolitan Museum, New York.

52. Goya, Plate 43 of Los Capricchos, “The Dream of Reason Produces Monsters,” 1797.

53. Goya, The Duchess of Alba, oil on canvas, 210.2×149.3 cm, Hispanic Society of America, New York.

54. Goya, Portrait of Antonia Zárate, 1805, oil on canvas, 103.5×82 cm, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.

55. Pablo Picasso, Weeping Woman, 1937, drawing, oil washes and black ink on off-white wove paper, 40×26.1 cm, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University.

The Art of the Portrait 2: 18th & Early 19th Centuries. 8

Goya & the Portrait

In his engaging study of Goya, the late Robert Hughes identifies three key group portraits that are revelatory of the influences on the painter: the family group of Don Luis; the Family of the Duke of Osuna, and the portrait of Carlos IV and the Spanish royal family (above).¹ The first is developed from the English conversation piece, though the self-portrait painting a canvas within a group theme obviously pays homage nearer home, namely Velasquez’s Las Meninas. The Osuna group (1799) does not have the networks of distracted gazes common to the conversation piece; the family all look out towards the spectator;. It also pays court to the tradition of Spanish austerity, again derived from Velásquez: a palette consisting of black, white, green, neutral brown, and a touch of red. The famous group portrait of Carlos IV and his family (1800) has divided opinion as its success as a royal portrait. To some, the composition seems flawed, even comic; the figures stand awkwardly, one looking away while the placing of the king out of step compared to his consort seems strange. However, Hughes has staunchly defended Goya here arguing- with conviction- that the artist would not have endangered his career prospects by playing tricks with an important group commission.² Leaving aside the possibility of deliberate or accidental “satire” in the portrait of the Royal family, it is clear that in some of Goya’s portraits, there is more than simply an attempt to paint a likeness of a socially elevated subject. What else is to be expected given Goya’s deeply troubled personality? In the portrait of the young Don Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga (1790s), the atmosphere of the nursery is clouded by the presence of menacing animals like the wide-eyed trio of cats staring at an innocent magpie that pecks at a calling card bearing Goya’s name, all of which could mean what? The spirit of Los Caprichos pervades this perplexing picture: the cats seem to presage the creatures of the night in Los Caprichos where a wilder version of their species, the lynx stares balefully in that visual cauchemar where the sleep of reason produces monsters. Sometimes the portrait is taken out of the interior and explicitly set down in nature as if to emphasise the hidden links between the world and painting. The wonderful and celebrated portrait of the Duchess of Alba (1797) places the dazzling beauty on the banks of some silted-up river in the middle of a forlorn looking landscape. The portrait might be interpreted as a kind of allegory on the painter’s ambitions and social standing given that Goya may have been romantically entangled with the fabled aristocrat. Transfixing the viewer with her imperious gaze, the index finger of Alba’s right hand points down to the famous inscription in the soil: “Sola Goya.” Does this mean that Goya was the only man for her?³ In a less arrogant and subdued key, the beautiful portrait of the actress Antonia Zárate with mantilla and fan is infused with melancholia which is probably reflective of the painter’s own mood at this time.

1Robert Hughes, Goya (Verso, 2003), 120

2Ibid, 228f

3Ibid, 162.