Promethea Bound

The winner of the BP Portrait Award was announced last night. The £25,000 prize went to Wim Heldens  for his pensive portrait of a young philosophy student. But you wouldn’t know it from the coverage which overwhelmingly featured a reproduction of the runner-up: Louis Smith’s portrait Holly.

Naked, save for a silky crimson loin cloth, and handcuffed to a cave wall, Holly was the pulchritudinous poster girl of this year's exhibition.

Smith has said the painting was inspired by the myth of Prometheus, the thief of fire, who Zeus chained to a rock to suffer an eternity of attacks by a liver-eating eagle.

Smith’s soft-porn altarpiece (for she comes in an elaborate gold tabernacle frame) replaces the traditional image of an assumptive or annunciate Virgin with an S&M fantasy. The play on 'Holly' and 'Holy' isn't an accident.

Critics have drawn comparisons with Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks (all those jagged precipices and muddy ferns) and Caravaggio’s John the Baptist (he of the red loin cloth.)

But she’s got more in common with the heroine in  Titian’s Perseus and Andromeda, the original girl-chained-to-rock painting. Same milky skin, same faux-modest crossing of the legs, and same arm arched above the head - a trick for maximum perkiness favoured by Page 3 girls and Renaissance sylphs alike.



Wanted: Rights for Boybands

The website for No. 33 Portland Place, one of London’s grandest eighteenth century townhouses, has a section dedicated to the music videos which have been filmed there.

There’s Amy Winehouse’s Rehab and Orson with their one hit wonder No Tomorrow. There’s also Kate Moss dancing in stockings and suspenders for upmarket lingerie label Agent Provocateur.

But, there’s one music video the website haven’t listed. Gold Forever, this year’s Comic Relief charity single from boyband The Wanted, has been written out of Portland Place history.

It would take a devoted boyband fan with a passion for eighteenth century architectural mouldings to ever connect the two.

It took this stucco and boyband fan a morning of sleuthing to match the Robert Adam mouldings in the opening shots of the video with those of the Portland Place staircase.

Built by Robert Adam in 1775, No. 33 Portland Place is one of London’s few surviving Adam townhouses. The website proudly inventories those bits of the original Adam design which still survive and advises that the Adam interiors offer ‘a unique backdrop opportunity for shoots.’ You can take your pick from:

2 x Robert Adam Drawing Rooms

1 x Robert Adam Ballroom

1 x Robert Adam Music Room

1 x Robert Adam Dining Room

1 x Robert Adam Entrance Hall

1 x Robert Adam Inner Hall and Sweeping Staircase

If you are very keen-eyed you might have spotted Portland Place’s starring role in the King’s Speech. Lionel Logue’s Harley Street consulting room is really the top-lit ‘Distressed Room’ at Portland Place and the upper-landing of the Portland Place staircase moon-lighted as the King’s Piccadilly apartments.



Boybands are much maligned. Not as sexy as Kate Moss, not as rebellious as Amy Winehouse, boybands suffer the music industry's greatest indignities: fronting the 'Make Mine a Milk' campaign, sporting rubber noses for Comic Relief, representing their country at Eurovision, and being denied their rightful place in the Portland Place pantheon.

Wills and Kate: Part Two

Five months ago I wrote a post about William and Kate's dubious choice of Sir Martin Archer Shee's portrait of William IV as the backdrop to their engagement photocall. I suggested that William IV - who fathered ten illegitmate children with his mistress,  but failed to produce a legitimate  heir with his wife - was a poor role model for a couple planning marriage and children.

But here they are again, posing at the feet of another equally unsuitable sitter. This time it's Richard, Marquess Wellesley who enjoyed a ten year affair with the French actress Hyacinthe-Gabrielle Roland, only agreeing to marry her after the birth of three sons and two daughters. He later married Marianne Patterson but they had no children. 

With the marriage-shy, heirless spectres of William IV and Richard Wellesley hovering over their engagement and wedding day, I hope that Hugo Burnand's photograph of the bride and groom with their six bridesmaids and pageboys, more accurately predicts the couple's future.

The bridesmaids in their puffed silk are sweet, but the pageboys in Regency frock coats and frogging steal the shot.

The boys' distinctive poses come with excellent historical pedigrees. Tom Pettifer's insouciant sideways lounge recalls the pose adopted by Colonel Banastre Tarleton in Sir Joshua Reynolds’ portait of 1782. 

Painted to mark Tarleton’s return from the American War of Independence, Reynolds imagines the cavalry officer in the smoke and heat of battle. Fires blaze in the distance and Tarleton's horses rear in panic. Tarleton is unflustered and unfazed. He stands directly in the line of fire of a British canon and rests his left leg on a barrel of powder.

He has every right to look confident. Horace Walpole observed that Tarleton had 'butchered more men and lain with more women than anybody else in the army.' But the colonel didn't return from battle unscathed. Reynolds shows Tarleton missing two fingers on his right hand – an American battle wound.

Also adopting the pose of a battle-scarred hero, is second pageboy William Lowther-Pinkerton. With his right heel raised off the floor and his steady, direct gaze, he echoes John Hoppner's Horatio Nelson, painted in  1801 to mark the British victory at the Battle of Copenhagan. The vice-admiral’s empty sleeve is shown neatly pinned to his coat and he leans his good arm nonchalantly against a rock as the battle rages in the distance.

William Lowther-Pinkerton’s pose isn't a coincidence. Hoppner’s Nelson doesn’t languish in the collection of some provincial museum or stately home. He hangs immediately to the right of Shee’s William IV in the state rooms of St James’s Palace, right heel raised on the beach at Denmark.

Wellington Kicks the Candy Brothers off the Number One Spot

Nick and Christian Candy are landlords of London’s most exclusive residence.  The most expensive penthouse apartment in this most expensive block of flats has just been sold for £140,000,000. The address? One Hyde Park.

It has been four years in the building. A four year traffic jam from Hyde Park Corner to the Cromwell Road while the Candys' exclusive drills and acclaimed cranes assembled the legendary girders and struts of this iconic residence. (You must visit the website: it’s a marketing masterpiece.)

From where I sit (on the unfashionable side of the park) I cannot fathom the appeal of living above a tube station, in a building that will be empty for much of the year (too many nights in the penthouse will attract the attention of the Revenue,) with only despots, oligarchs and arms traders for company.

Besides, it’s only the second best address in the capital. Five minutes up the road is Apsley House which trumps the Candys in the postcode lottery with the address 'Number One, London.'

It is a beautiful and under-visited house. Originally built in the 1770s by architect-entrepreneur Robert Adam for Henry Bathurst, 1^st Baron Apsley, it was sold to the Wellesley family in 1807. In 1817, feeling flush after the Battle of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington bought the house from his brother and set about renovating and enlarging the property with the help of architect Benjamin Dean Wyatt.

Wyatt ripped out much of the original Adam decoration and replaced Adam’s delicate vines and painted medallions with a bolder, brasher scheme: lots of gold and cream, lots of silk and velvet, and a superabundance of mirrors, crystal and general glitter. As a final mark of victory over the French, Wellington appropriated the decorative style of Versailles and Napoleon’s Malmaison for his London town house.

Mementoes of Wellington’s success hang on every wall and much of the collection is post-battle booty. There’s an ugly portrait of Napoleon, looking tubby and toad-faced, by Robert Lefevre on the first floor and Canova’s larger-than-life statue of the Emperor (with its smaller-than-life fig leaf) glowers in the stair-well. 

The Waterloo Gallery houses 165 paintings from the Spanish Royal Collection, discovered in the luggage of Joseph Bonaparte, as he tried to make a run for it after the Battle of Vitoria.

Robert and John Adam were the Candy Brothers of their day. They built big, they built expensive and they built for the super rich. But will One Hyde Park one day be preserved for a grateful nation by English Heritage? I don’t suppose so. There can only be one number one.  

Olympia in Vogue

When Edouard Manet exhibited Olympia at the Paris Salon in 1865 she was the scandal of the season. Manet’s courtesan with her grubby heels, downy underarms, and boyish hips horrified a public accustomed to insipid Venuses painted with convenient waves and lustrous locks to protect their modesty. If Venus was the pearl of the oceans, Olympia was the bit of grit.

The critics were vitriolic. ‘Her face is stupid,’ remarked one, ‘and her skin cadaverous.’ She was ‘prematurely aged and vicious’ and ‘the body’s putrefying colour recalls the horror of the morgue.’ Warming to the deathly theme, another wrote that Olympia looked as if she were ‘dead of yellow fever and already at an advanced stage of decomposition.’

Particular bile was reserved for the thin trail of dark hair running from Olympia’s breast bone to her navel. The Salon had to appoint two wardens to stand sentry over the courtesan protecting her from the raps of angry canes.

Olympia is a memorable figure. She is sullen and bored, but sensuous. Her nakedness is carefully accessorised: backless mules trimmed with pale blue fringing, a gold bangle, pearl earrings, a thin black ribbon for a necklace and a pink carnation tucked behind her ear. What she is wearing is more interesting than what she isn't.

Which is why, when I saw the January issue of Vogue, I didn’t think Keira, I thought Olympia. There’s something familiar about the pose, uncomfortably propped on one elbow, with the shoulder slightly forced back. But more than the pose, it’s the necklace. It’s such an unusual choice – chokers haven’t been in vogue (capital V or small v) since the nineties – and such a curious combination of Olympia’s choker and pink carnation.

Vogue got their headline wrong. Keira Knightly: Renaissance Girl? How about: Keira Knightly: Modern Impressionist?

The Anti-Turner Prize

In less than 24 hours, the winner of the Turner Prize 2010 will be announced. Traditionally, this is the moment for purists to wail that JMW Turner would be turning in his grave. This year’s shortlist - Susan Philipsz, Angela de la Cruz, Dexter Dalwood and the Otolith Group - is more than usually uninspiring.

It’s a dreary, empty exhibition. It makes you long for the halcyon days of Jim Lambie’s psychedelic canaries, Simon Starling’s Shedboatshed, and Rebecca Warren’s fleshly goddesses. 

This year there are deserted galleries piped with sound art, banks of video screens, sack-like and deflated canvases, and a meditation on the Death of David Kelly. Depressing stuff.

However, Turner needn’t roll in his grave just yet, for a bricklayer from Dorset is upholding the grand tradition of the Turneresque landscape.

Antony Spencer is the winner of this year’s Take a View landscape photography awards. The winning photograph scooped £10,000 and will be on display for six weeks at the National Theatre.

The photograph (top,) taken as the sun rises over Corfe Castle, is strikingly reminiscent of Turner’s great Romantic landscape Dolbadarn Castle (below.)

Dolbadarn Castle is one of Turner’s most important paintings. Sketched in situ in 1798, and later worked up and submitted to the Royal Academy in 1800, the painting secured Turner's election to the post of Academician. 

It’s the quintessential romantic landscape: ruined castle on distant promontory, figures dwarfed by the sublimity of nature, ravines, rocky outcrops, gathering banks of cloud. Turner even affixed some suitably heroic verse to the painting. The poem recounts the fate of Owain the Red,  who was imprisoned for twenty two years in Dolbadarn by his brother Llewelyn the Last:

How awful is the silence of the waste...

Majestic solitude, behold the tower

Where hapless Owen, long imprison’d, pin’d

And wrung his hands for liberty in vain.

Antony Spencer isn’t Turner. His photographs tend towards the pinky-purpley screensavery end of things. But it’s nice to see the English landscape tradition alive and well. In these soulless days of the crinkle-crankle static of sound art and the tortuous introspection of post-post-conceptual art, it is reassuring to find a photographer taking pleasure in dawn light, frosted gorse, green and pleasant fields and that old romantic chestnut: the castle on a cliff. 

In Vino Venustas: How Caravaggio became Marks and Spencer's new poster boy

Earlier in the week, I spotted this bottle of Pinot Grigio in the Marks and Spencer flagship store at Marble Arch. The painting on the label is Caravaggio’s The Musicians (1595.)

Three students of music are caught off-guard as they tune their instruments, consult their sheet music and generally limber up for a performance. Cupid makes this trio a quartet. He fusses with a bunch of grapes, giving them a prune before they're still-life ready. If music be the food of love, play on.

It's a great image for a bottle of wine. Cupid’s grapes are a small, but vital, detail. The painting says: company, love, music, and art, these are the important things in life, but a glass of wine is a fine addition.  

If you were being pedantic you might say that a Garganega wine from the Veneto would have been better illustrated by a Venetian artist. A nice Bacchus by Titian, maybe? But I like the contrast between a refined and rarefied northern wine and a hot-blooded southern painter. At Tesco and Sainsbury’s you can get a Garganega wine with a Canaletto on the label: a clean, bright white wine married with an immaculate and exacting Venetian artist.

Alas, the civilising M&S mission has stopped at one bottle of white wine. There is as yet no Rembrandt roast beef, no Salvador Dali Lobster Thermidor, and no Damien Hirst shark fin soup.

Meet the Ancestors: A Wills and Kate Special

Two weeks ago Prince William and Kate Middleton announced their engagement. While the rest of the country were snapping up Issa dresses, ordering replica sapphire rings from QVC and placing bets on the wedding date, I was searching the Royal Collection catalogue for details on the full length ceremonial portrait hanging above the St James’s Palace photo call.

Which monarch would William align himself with on this most important of days? How about Henry VIII, famed for his matrimonial devotion and steadfastness? Or George IV who said of his wife Caroline of Brunswick that ‘it required no small effort to conquer my aversion and overcome the disgust of her person’? Maybe better to go with George III and Queen Charlotte who were married for nearly sixty years and had fifteen children together?

Prince William opted for a portrait of his namesake William IV by Sir Martin Archer Shee, the largely forgotten artist who succeeded Thomas Lawrence as president of the Royal Academy.  As matrimonial role models go, William is not the obvious choice. Before he came to the throne William IV spent twenty years living in sin with Mrs Dorothea Jordan, a comic actress with whom he had ten illegitimate children. 

The political satirists were merciless. ‘Actress’ was as bad as ‘prostitute’ and ‘jordan’ was slang for a chamber pot. A particularly vicious cartoon 'The Crack'd Jordan' by James Gillray has William disappearing headfirst into a large earthenware commode with much vigorous yahooing.  

William eventually settled down. At 53 he married the twenty five year old Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen. The couple had four children; none survived infancy. And so ended the Hanoverian kings. 

Shee's portrait of William IV was a strange choice for the engagement of William and Kate. The Jordan affair ended dismally with Dorothea, exiled to France to escape her creditors, dying alone and in poverty in a Parisian suburb. Adelaide and William suffered the death of two daughters and twin baby sons.

William and Kate might have done their homework. Both studied history of art at St Andrews (we’ll let Wills off because he did switch to geography) and should have been alert to any adverse symbolism lurking in their choice of backing painting.

I wish them well. I hope the satirists are kind to Kate, that their many strapping heirs inherit her hair and not his, and that when the time comes to announce the first Windsor/Middleton birth they’ll do it in front of something more appropriate. Court painter Johann Zoffany did a nice line in happy families. 

Savage Landscapes - Salvator Rosa at the Dulwich Picture Gallery

There is an embarrassing moment in Ann Radcliffe’s much-lampooned novel of 1794 The Mysteries of Udulpho when the author briefly loses track of her elaborate historical plot. The year, supposedly, is 1584 and the heroine Emily St Aubert is travelling through the sublime Midi-Pyrenees. The narrator provides a panoramic voice-over:  ‘This was such a scene as Salvator would have chosen, had he then existed for his canvas.’

It’s a clumsy anachronism. Salvator Rosa won’t be born for another thirty years. Radcliffe never went to Italy, never made it further south than the Rhine. The Italy of Udulpho, The Italian and A Sicilian Romance is a fantasy cribbed from engravings after Rosa’s paintings bought from a print shop in Bath.

The artist is there in Radcliffe’s wild and rugged landscapes, in the villainous banditti lurking beneath storm-blasted arches, the wiry ascetics meditating in the mountains, and in her crumbling bridges, precipitous passes, and subterraneous caverns.

Radcliffe wasn’t the only writer to rely on the Rosa effect. The first of the Gothic novels, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, reads like a series of set pieces from Rosa’s greatest hits. Walpole acknowledged the debt when he gushed in his alpine travel journal: ‘Precipices, mountains, wolves, torrents, rumblings – Salvator Rosa.’ The quote is etched on the walls of the Salvator Rosa exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.

The exhibition explores the darkest recesses of Rosa’s macabre imagination. His heroes are outlaws and outcasts, naked witches and men of the hills. His paintings are haunted by brinded cats and wingéd skeletons, fenny snakes and gutted toads, strange hybrid rat-newts and owl-bats as big as a man.

His craggy landscapes provide the backdrop to the more strange and mystical events from the Bible and ancient history. Rosa revisits the grim fate of Atilius Regulus: imprisoned inside a barrel, struck through with nails, and launched down a hill. He takes a morbid pleasure in the tragic suicide of the philosopher Empedocles as he leaps from the jagged lip of Etna into the teeming, spitting lava below. In Rosa’s version of the prophetic Dream of Jacob the angels brawl on Jacob’s ladder, having a punch up over who stepped on which rung first.  

Technically, Rosa is not one of the greats. His female nudes are ill-proportioned. Their breasts sit either squintingly close together or practically under the armpits. They sport enormous biceps, manly hands, and hobbit toes. He’s more at ease with the dry, sagging, crepey bodies of his witches than he is with a nubile life-model posing for Fortuna.

Rosa is the original Goth.  He paints his sitters with sallow, graveyard skin and relishes the dirt under their fingernails. If there is a bridge to be crossed it may collapse at any moment, if there’s a path through the mountains it is lined with armed bandits, and if there’s a distant, hopeful light in the darkening woods, you can bet your last match that it comes from beneath a cauldron.  

The Talented Mr Regency - Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance at the National Portrait Gallery

Sex Sells. Celebrity Sells. Scandal Sells. Scholarship? Not so much. The traditional way to sell a portrait show is with an emphasis on celebrity sitters, studio liaisons, and social climbing from the garret to the court.

Stick a buzzword in the exhibition title: Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity (Tate, 2005.) Sprinkle the exhibition guide with words like ‘international,’ ‘glamorous’ and ‘fashionable’ (Gainsborough, Tate, 2003; Pompeo Batoni, National Gallery, 2008.) Use phrases like ‘master of spin,’ ‘manipulation of the media,’ ‘free publicity’ and ‘cult of celebrity’ (The Creation of Celebrity, endlessly.) Above all, don’t forget this ticket-selling phrase: ‘the Mario Testino of his day’ (all portrait exhibitions post-Mario Testino: Portraits, National Portrait Gallery, 2001.)

There’s something troubling about this insistence that portraiture must be sexed-up, made contemporary, made palatable to an audience raised on Heat, celebrity wedding spreads, and the red carpet photo call. Everything must be filtered through modern obsessions; the preoccupations and social conventions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are dismissed as dusty, ‘unrelatable,’ and drily historic.

In Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance the National Portrait Gallery has admirably bucked the trend. The temptations must have been great. Lawrence was a social lion hunter. His back catalogue includes George III and Queen Charlotte, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Devonshire, the Duke of Wellington and the CEO of Lloyds, heroes of the West End stage and the Palace of Westminster, a couple of Prime Ministers and a Pope. This one had ‘Mario Testino’ written all over it.

Lawrence doesn’t need sexing-up or gossip-column titillation. What the dignified NPG show demonstrates is that an enviable address book and an It-boy persona only take you so far. What really matters is: can you paint? And, boy, can Lawrence paint.

He doesn’t just make his sitters look rich, he makes them look expensive. He endows them with the clotted cream and cherry-cheeked complexions of the truly well-bred. Tans and care-worn foreheads are for farm labourers, Lawrence’s sitters have the dewy skin and clear, bright eyes of people who breathe a superior sort of air: the air of thousand acre estates and Portman and St. James’s Squares.

Lawrence shows us the long haired Etonian Arthur Atherley brooding over Windsor with his romantic locks blow-dried into tumbling Vidal Sassoon waves. His Lady Selina Meade wears four strands of pearls around her pale, powdered neck, threaded on gold cord, each pearl reflecting a fleck of light. Mrs Wolff poses in yard after yard of pristine ivory satin, extravagantly ruched and puffed in the latest Empire style. It takes a lot of servants to keep a dress that white.   

Lawrence paints like a Marks and Spencers’ advert: this is not just a trouser suit, this is a Thomas Lawrence crimson velvet trouser suit edged with crushed French silk. This is not just a soldier’s uniform, this is a gold-frogged, silver-embroidered, bronze-sashed, ermine-trimmed officer’s uniform topped with a brushed-fur Busby hat.

Criticism tends to fall on Lawrence’s portraits of children: too cloying, a bit cutie-pie and sweetie-goo. No one does a chubby knee or a tousle-haired moppet like Lawrence does. The NPG have been rightly sparing with Lawrence’s treacle-pudding children. Four canvases of plump nursery cherubs are enough.

If there is a connection to be drawn between Lawrence and Testino it is this: they are both superlative flatterers. Lawrence paints with built-in Photoshop, slimming the thunder thighs and barrel chest of Lord Mountstuart and airbrushing the naked shoulders and décolletage of the Duchesse de Berry. In Lawrence’s hands his subjects are sexier, better, taller, stronger. Or even just cuter.