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?