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October 05, 2005
Trouble with realism - a romantic ideal
Looking through my drawers of drawings today, Amy commented that the subjects all look like real people, and that they all look “there”.
Which is good because this is one of my aims. That and the fact that I only seem able to draw or paint what is in front of me.
I would’ve been no good in times of yore. For then it was not a likeness you were striving for so much as a statement of position. A portrait or a painting would serve to express the wealth of the sitter. You had to be good at painting lace, and velvet and satin and silverware. Mr & Mrs Andrews were just as interested in the land they owned, stretching out behind them, as they were in themselves and their fine clothes. So that’s what Gainsborough painted.
In fact, in an age of warts and boils, perhaps a true likeness is one of the last things required. As Baldrick remarked in Blackadder III:
Baldrick: Well, Your Majesty, I just thought –
this Wellington bloke's been in Europe for years.
You don't know what he looks like.
He don't know what you looks like.
So why don't you get someone else to fight
the duel instead of you?
Prince George: But I'm the Prince Regent!
My portrait hangs on every wall!
Edmund: Answer that, Baldrick.
Baldrick: Well my cousin Bert Baldrick,
Mr. Gainsborough's butler's dogsbody,
he says that he's heard that all portraits look
the same these days, 'cause they're painted
to a romantic ideal rather than as a true
depiction of the idiosyncratic facial qualities
of the person in question.
Edmund: (impressed) Your cousin Bert
obviously has a larger vocabulary than
you do, Baldrick.
[thanks to Mr. Curtis and Mr. Elton]
Lucian Freud said: a portrait doesn’t have to look like the sitter because you never stand the sitter next to the portrait. Which, I have to say, in this age of image saturation, we are so familiar with the concept of two dimensional images actually looking like the person, that this is rather a flawed argument.
Anyway, as I said, I have no choice, I paint the way I do because that’s the way the paint comes off the end of the brush, that and a bit of passion I guess.
Posted by john at October 5, 2005 12:53 PM
Comments
Yes, I was just reading about the Lady Lever's Painting of the Month which is a portrait of Queen Victoria. The quoted 'sycophantic indignation' of the Observer at the time is hilarious now.
http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/picture-of-month/displaypicture.asp?venue=7&id=273
Posted by: Ian Jackson at October 5, 2005 06:34 PM