The Intimate Portrait: Drawings, Miniatures and Pastels from Ramsay to Lawrence
British Museum, until 31 May
In Room 90 at the BM is one of the free exhibitions the Department of Prints and Drawings do so well. This one has been organised in collaboration with the National Galleries of Scotland and was first seen at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery at the end of last year. It focuses on informal portraits made between the 1730s and the 1830s, the period often thought of as the heyday of British portraiture. There are no grand public statements: the emphasis is on private images. Here are the love tokens and the personal mementoes, the first thoughts and studies, the intimate responses of artist to sitter, assiduously collected and kept in portfolios or cabinets to be brought out — like today’s family snaps — and proudly shown to friends and relations. Let’s hope that these extraordinary works of art occasioned less boredom than their modern photographic equivalents.
With some 180 works on show, it’s a large exhibition with a great deal worth seeing. Ideally, it’s a show to return to, and although there were a number of tourists wandering aimlessly about when I was there the galleries are sufficiently spacious to allow for serious contemplation of these detailed works. They deserve close study, and the layout and design of the Print Galleries make this possible. Most of the works are unframed and presented in wall cabinets with a handy leaning shelf in front of them, and the interested viewer may linger and absorb the finer points of pastel shading or pencil suggestion.
In an anteroom, the visitor is greeted by a trio of portraits: a beguiling chalk and watercolour by Francis Wheatley called ‘The Miniature’, in which a young woman en déshabillé gazes longingly at the image of her inamorato; a large oval pastel portrait by John Russell, the severe features of the sitter sweetened with exquisite lace and landscape detailing; and a Gainsborough pastel from his Bath period, of George Brudenell. This initially unpromising, greyish, muzzy rendition is actually full of character and sparkle, indicative of Gainsborough’s great skills as a draughtsman. Another trio within the gallery proper, of framed pastels — a self-portrait by the Scot, Archibald Skirving (1749–1819, and one of the major discoveries of this exhibition for me), Skirving’s brilliant portrait of the turbaned Gavin Hamilton, and Francis Cotes’s appealing portrayal of Sir William Chambers in a lilac-purple coat — reinforce the seriousness of this selection.
Yet the weighty is counterbalanced by the delicate and ephemeral. Some of the best things are in flat cabinets in the body of the room. For instance, the two renditions of Angelica Kauffman — one a fine, direct and revealing graphite drawing by Nathaniel Dance, the other a gentler and more flattering watercolour, only attributed to Dance. Or the delicious black and red chalk study of Lavinia Banks by John Hoppner; or George Henry Harlow’s graphite and red chalk profile of poor doomed B.R. Haydon, with next to it John Thomas Smith’s revealingly informal depiction of Turner in the BM Print Room. A marvellously appropriate inclusion.
Turn then to the wall cabinets. Here is a relatively rare (in this exhibition) ink drawing, by John Hamilton Mortimer of James Paine the Younger, a melancholy and brooding image of a young man caught in the depths of introspection. Nearby is the wonderful black and red chalk drawing of the enamel painter Christian Friedrich Zincke, depicted at work in red velvet cap by William Hoare. Here, too, are a couple of Fuseli’s strange drawings, obsessed with his wife’s intricate and tiered hair-styles, and Cornelius Varley’s powerful profile of the painter Francis Stevens. I liked Rowlandson’s full-length portrayal of his friend George Morland, carelessly dressed with his coat-tail caught in his waistband. And the remarkable portrait of Samuel Palmer by his little-known fellow ‘Ancient’, Henry Walter. Palmer looks on the brink of determined speech, as if about to tell someone to stop talking in the Quiet Carriage on the Sevenoaks line.
There are many treasures to be discovered in this rich feast of an exhibition. Look, for example, at a beautiful drawing by another Scot, and another artist new to me, John Brown (1749–87), ‘Study of the Head of an Unknown Girl’. How modern it looks, in its freshness and economy of line. Or observe the sublimely cantankerous bottle-nosed Greenwich Pensioner by Wilkie. Note Ramsay’s delicately caressed red chalk drawing of his second wife, and the superb Lawrence chalk drawing of Mary Hamilton. Or the self-portraits by Reynolds, Gainsborough and Zoffany, crying out for comparative character readings. There’s so much here that it’s impossible in a short review to do more than scratch the surface.
The exhibition is accompanied by a substantial catalogue (£25 in paperback), fully-illustrated and running to 272 pages, a work of scholarship for home perusal, not for carting around the display. This is a show of wide appeal which imparts entertainment and instruction in equal measure and which deserves to be seen by more than the dedicated few.
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