Two portraits, two very different stories of Britain. Saied Dai’s painting of Theresa May, unveiled this week, is the latest example of what has become a standard honour for former prime ministers, as much part of the aftermath of power as after-dinner speeches and a security team. Meanwhile at Harewood House in West Yorkshire, a framed portrait of the actor David Harewood by the photographer Ashley Karrell has gone on view. Mr Harewood’s ancestors worked as enslaved people on a sugar plantation owned by the second Earl of Harewood, Henry Lascelles. If the former PM’s portrait confirms the old order, Mr Harewood’s questions it.
Yet both portraits also prove that we’ve never been more passionate and engaged with this ancient art form. What’s in a painted or photographed face? A legion of contested values and histories. Only a few years ago, portraiture was seen by the cognoscenti as a silly old genre, of interest only to corporate bosses. Today it can seem that every new portrait is news, mainly for its political and social meaning. The reopening of the National Portrait Gallery has been the artistic event of the year, its displays putting new and marginalised faces into the national story. Nor is it this an exclusively British obsession. American artists such as Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald are using portraiture to transform representations of race and identity.
