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.
Today’s portrait mania homes in on the most conservative and conventional aspect of portraiture: its perceived ennobling of the sitter. The pictures of Mr Harewood and Mrs May have this in common, even though they put very different twists on it. That is the message of this week’s two official unveilings. While Mrs May joins the government art collection, Mr Harewood infiltrates the Georgian stately home built on his family’s forced labour. Artistic portraiture is the opposite of a selfie: everything about it is formal and emphatic, not casual at all. That signification of status and honour has now become what interests artists and the public alike. Having your portrait in a public place or collection has become a powerful, symbolic act.
Yet the risk in our obsession with the politics of portraiture – conservative or radical – is that the artistic quality of an image barely matters. The new portraits both get high marks for recognisability but, beyond that, will either be remembered as art? The surge of interest in the contemporary meaning of portraiture makes us forget that it can also be a nuanced and mysterious art, whose meanings are much harder to explain or exhaust.
Great artists from Titian to Lucian Freud took portraiture to strange, poetic heights. But it’s hard to see any new Freuds among today’s portraitists. It is a bitter irony that students were discouraged for decades from taking painting seriously, before fashion changed. Now there’s a rage for paintings, but a shallow reservoir of the required skills.
Portraiture shouldn’t be a cheap way to make a point. David Lascelles, eighth Earl of Harewood, commissioned a photograph of Mr Harewood, rather than getting a top painter at top money. You would think he might afford a more ambitious work of art given he made £5.7m last year simply from selling one Veronese from his family collection. Is this bargain restitution? If we really want to change the faces of Britain, we need to find and nurture great portraitists, who can paint the truth for all time, not just a headline.
