Do today’s celebrities want to be captured on canvas? You would have thought, given that those modern faces have enough problems finding a secluded beach without a team of photographers lying in wait, that they would have little use for portrait painters, particularly the sort that take up hours of their time, and anyway can’t be relied upon to flatter sufficiently.
But that isn’t the case at all. John Singer Sargent may have died, and Lucian Freud can’t easily be bought, but there is a new generation of portrait painters catering for new desires. And what they reveal is that surprisingly little has changed about the profession or its thorny politics. When I talked to six leading portrait painters, I heard complaints about stupid sitters, gossip about access to famous faces, and sniffy dismissals of fellow painters’ work. High society may have disappeared, but the world of the court painter is as anxious as ever. We unveil the new generation of portrait painters capturing the great and the good.
Stuart Pearson Wright (b 1975)
One painter I spoke to described Britain’s leading portraitists as “the friends of Stuart Pearson Wright”, and that does somehow capture the vociferous leadership offered by this young man from Eastbourne. He may paint in an old sausage factory in the East End of London, but since his portrait of the Presidents of the British Academy won the BP Portrait Award in 2001 he has had astonishing success. The National Portrait Gallery now holds three of his paintings, including portraits of John Hurt and a three-dimensional J. K. Rowling, and they have just acquired ten pictures from their current exhibition of his drawings of actors, including those of Alan Rickman, Jeremy Irons, Timothy Spall and, the youngest person to be included in the NPG’s collection, Daniel Radcliffe. He puts this fascination with actors down to “stage envy” born of an early ambition to act — his painting of Michael Gambon won this year’s Garrick/Milne Prize. And, surely sealing his claim to dominance, Charles Saumarez Smith, the former director of the National Portrait Gallery, has also posed for him.
Although critically successful, he has sailed close to the wind with many of his subjects. His portrait of the Presidents of the British Academy depicted them around a table with a dead chicken on it: Pearson Wright says that he engineered things so that no one saw the finished picture until it was unveiled — whereupon there was stunned silence. And given his love of memento mori symbolism, it was probably not a good idea for the Royal Society to commission him to portray its president, the Duke of Edinburgh: this led to a picture of a bare-chested Prince with cress sprouting from his fingers and a bluebottle perched on his shoulder. An elderly gentleman from “It was the only time Tony Blair had posed for an oil painting and he found it hard to relax” Bethnal Green modelled for the chest, but still the Prince was said to be unimpressed, and the Royal Society rejected the work.
Jonathan Yeo (b 1970)
Jonathan Yeo is perhaps the closest thing modern Britain has to an old-fashioned society painter. He simply moves in the right circles: his father is the Conservative MP Tim Yeo, and his partner is the actress Shebah Ronay, daughter of designer Edina. Moreover, unlike others who strive to work in other genres, Yeo concentrates exclusively on portraiture. And focus pays dividends: although he is largely self-taught, Yeo says he has “more commissions than I can possibly do”, and that’s pretty impressive when his prices range from £20,000 to £60,000.
One of his unlikely launch-pads was winning the approval of the late Tony Banks, MP, who supported his endeavour to paint portraits of the party leaders for the 2001 election campaign (it is apparently the only time Tony Blair has posed for an oil painting during his premiership, and, according to Yeo, “he found it hard to relax”). Since then Yeo has enjoyed a string of enticing commissions from people he either knows personally or has met socially.
He was in Los Angeles recently, painting Dennis Hopper (“He’s fantastic because he’s interested in the process and endlessly curious and he has a rebellious mind”), and the model Erin O’Connor has sat for him (“She wanted a portrait that wasn’t edited or airbrushed or Photo-shopped. She’s a naturally brilliant, languid poser, and a good subject is so important, it’s 75 per cent of the job”). Minnie Driver has also sat for him, as has Rupert Murdoch, and he recently portrayed the Little Britain star David Walliams. He has painted Grayson Perry, a study of whom is in the BP Portrait Award exhibition that opened in June (“I like spending time with him, and that’s crucial”). Any other dream subjects? “George Bush,” he muses, “and Castro, while they’re still around.”
Jennifer McRae (b 1959)
Jennifer McRae started to worry when she reached her late thirties because 40 is the cut-off age for the BP Portrait Award. No exhibition open to artists over 40 has quite the same status. However, her fears were allayed when, aged 40, the NPG commissioned her to paint the West End theatre producer Thelma Holt, and that led the writer Michael Frayn to ask for her when the gallery requested a portrait of him. She says that you just have to keep on working and getting your work seen and people will find you; some artists do schmooze their way to work, but they are in the minority. “You might do a portrait for an Oxford or Cambridge college and be invited to high table and get talking to just the right person, but generally you just have to get into the studio and keep working.” And it must be paying off, as her prices for commissions are currently in a healthy range between £7,000 and £20,000.
At present, she is working on a project for the Marylebone Cricket Club and has just started sittings with Michael Vaughan. (“He’s been a slippery fish,” she says. “But these people are very busy, and anyway, even if they are in the public eye, they probably don’t really fancy being in a room for hours with a complete stranger staring at them.”) The finished portrait isn’t likely to be unveiled until next year, but in June her series of six paintings of Chelsea Pensioners went on show in the windows of Peter Jones in Sloane Square, London, to coincide with the old soldiers being given the freedom of the borough (and subsequently at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire before being auctioned for charity). “They’re amazing,” she says of her subjects. “They sit really still! And they have incredible faces.” Along with Stuart Pearson Wright and another leading painter, James Lloyd, she has also taken a break from portraiture to produce a series of still lifes for an exhibition at Browse and Darby in London.
Catherine Goodman (b 1961)
