| It requires character to draw attention to the warts on one’s face. Few of us are that brave. Even fewer would be as candid as the unaffected Puritan leader Oliver Cromwell who advised his portrait painter Lely: “I desire you would use all you skill to paint my picture truly like me. And not flatter me at all; but remark all the roughnesses, pimples, warts and everything as you see me, otherwise I will never pay a farthing for it.” |
| Being commissioned to point anyone’s portrait, as many artists discover, can be a hazardous chore. Which warts does one include, and which unsightly roughnesses does one leave out? Does one insist on putting down the truth as one sees it, and risk not being paid? Or worse still, be paid but have one’s work disowned by the subject, as happened when the German industrial giant Krupps disclaimed the unflattering study made of it by the American author William Manchester. Or suffer the cruel fate of having one’s masterpiece destroyed, as was Graham Sutherland’s portrait of Sir Winston Churchill, presented to that unique parliamentarian on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, but which so upset him that his wife Lady Churchill later burnt it surreptitiously. [EXTRRACT] |
Published in THE NATION 22 Oct. 1992, and reprinted in THE ARMLESS QUEEN (1994). |
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