A Celebration of Portraiture: Twentieth-Century Britain

PIANO NOBILE was delighted to participate in a nationwide celebration of portraiture, instigated by the National Portrait Gallery to mark their reopening after a significant redevelopment. The accurate depiction of human likeness began with rhetorically truthful images of beauty and power in fourth-century B.C. Greece. Since then artists have gained an upper hand in the tradition of portraiture, making images that disquietingly externalise the sitter's identity and expose differences between how they are seen and how they see themselves. The portraits included  were made by renowned twentieth-century British artists, and each one invites you into the aura of a specific personality. No two faces are alike, no two personalities the same.

In the street or on the bus, faces are often glimpsed but rarely scrutinised. In art, however, likeness rises above the superficial fact of appearance and comes to be moulded by the methods and attitudes peculiar to the artist who makes it. As Walter Sickert observed in 1910, in portraiture only a 'little touch of sufficient resemblance is needed'; the rest is left to the maker. Likewise, Kenneth Clark once praised Lady Ottoline Morrell for hanging at home Augustus John's portraits of her: unforgiving and unattractive, they were nevertheless outstanding works of art.

Covering a range of media and approaches, from the intimate abstraction found in Howard Hodgkin's early portraits to the searching self-portraits of contemporary artists including Celia Paul, A Celebration of Portraiture: Twentieth-Century Britain offers a varied celebration of portraiture. Highlights included a newly rediscovered portrait drawing of the novelist E. M. Forster by William Rothenstein and an epic, lacerating self-portrait by F. N. Souza, which is on loan from the Ruth Borchard Collection. Other portraits illustrate friendship, as with David Landau's portrait by Frank Auerbach and Peter Morris's by Duncan Grant. A little-known painting by R.B. Kitaj, depicting a Jewish Catholic priest called Monsignor Ungar, will also be on display.

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