Run through your list of Christmas presents past. You’ve bought her the frock
and the handbag and the day at the spa. You’ve got him the cufflinks, the
fountain pen and the hot-air balloon trip. You’ve both got drawers full of
socks. The bath-room cabinets are overspilling. That scarf you selected so
lovingly is still wrapped in Cellophane. The last tie you gave him was
surreptitiously lost. So what next? What on earth can you possibly give as a
present? And not least when Christmas is just a couple of weeks off.
Have you thought of a portrait? You don’t have to flinch. Portraiture has come
a long way since those pastels that you saw on piano tops in the Seventies.
And though you can still commission a classic old-fashioned oil portrait,
there are dozens of artists who offer a far more contemporary look. But how
do you choose?
The range of possibilities runs from the sublime to the quite literally
ridiculous. It goes from Lucian Freud, the cultural equivalent of one of
those custom-made bags available only to the smallest minority of the most
select clients, to the camp-stool caricature that you have done in Leicester
Square – probably the artistic equivalent to a bottle of bubble bath from
Boots.
The most famous artists choose their sitters – not the other way around. So if
you are hoping to be immortalised by David Hockney, it’s pretty unlikely.
But you can always go along to the National Portrait Gallery and dream.
The gallery doesn’t actually run a commissioning service, but staff will be
happy to pass on your contact details, and plenty of less famous exhibitors
are eager to take on work.
But if it’s a famous artist as much as a portrait that you want, an investment
as much as a personal memento, you could always gamble on the futures
market. Trawl the art-school degree shows and try to pick a winner. The
wait, if you are lucky, could pay off. The artistic pantheon is full of
painters who would once have been pathetically grateful for the cash that a
portrait commission brought in.
The National Portrait Gallery’s annual BP Portrait Award is a good place to
spot talent. It is open submission, so the artists range from established
professionals to talented amateurs. Paul Benney, for instance, who has
regularly been voted the award’s best artist by the public, has become one
of the most successful portrait painters of our times – an accolade that he
regards as much with suspicion as with pride. Still, his list of sitters,
from Jerry Hall through the Marquess of Bath and Baroness Amos to Isaiah
Berlin, reads like a roll call of contemporary society.
You could join the list. A full oil portrait will set you back something like
£30,000, but you can get a charcoal sketch for just £2,500. The former can
take dozens of sittings (depending on how relaxed and emotionally open the
sitter makes himself). The latter will more likely take a couple of
afternoons. You can go along to Benney’s studios in Suffolk or London or, in
certain circumstances, he will come to you.
“The creation of a portrait,” he says, “is an incredibly intimate process.”
Sometimes he pads round people’s houses, looking for a place to pose them.
Sometimes he rummages through their wardrobes, trying to decide what they
should wear.
We may spend time alone with a person (who is neither friend nor family
member) fairly frequently – at the dentist, for instance, or in a business
meeting – but in these encounters there is something else on the agenda to
distract you. For a portrait you just have to sit and try not to twiddle
your thumbs. Perhaps it’s more comparable to a trip to the therapist –
except that the relationship can be more real, Benney suggests, because
where the therapist remains a mere sounding board, the painter engages.
“A portrait arises out of a dialogue”, Benney says. “You have to find out who
your sitter is. You have to make a safe place where they feel comfortable
enough to be themselves and not put on a public mask.
“I can’t paint just anyone. I have to be able to find something to say. I have
to enter into that visual conversation. But obnoxious people can be really
interesting to do, and when someone is boring, I can be fascinated. I stare
at them and wonder about why they are that way.”
Occasionally, however, he does turn down a commission, “like the time when a
prominent businessman suddenly announced that he was one of the biggest
contributors to the BNP and that the trouble with this country was that
Hitler didn’t win the war. People are incredibly frank with portraitists.
But I didn’t want to sit and listen to that. I didn’t want to start on an
argument but neither did I want to condone his views so I just backed out of
the commission.”
“The right chemistry between painter and sitter is vital,” says Sara Stewart,
of Fine Art Commissions, a venture founded about ten years ago to provide a
service for clients wishing to commission a portrait. Stewart has a
rigorously selected stable of about 30 artists offering works that range in
price from a drawing for £1,000 to an oil for about £15,000. You can look up
her artists on the website, or better still visit her St James’s gallery in
Central London. Or you can go to the Royal Society of Portrait Painters (the
RP as its known) to discover a number of often more established and slightly
older – but not necessarily traditional – talents.
The range of artists is wide. They will work in all sorts of ways. Some,
notably the Russians who have trained for years in sternly traditional
academies, will paint the entire portrait from life. Younger artists might
prefer a slicker, more postmodern look and will be perfectly happy to work
from photographs. Poses can vary from the intimate studies to grand swagger
portraits. “I have been asked to paint anything,” Benney says, “from a naked
mother nursing her baby to a pair of surgically augmented breasts. I loved
doing both of those pictures.”
But for the sitter, choices can be confusing. An organisation can feel safer
than setting about the whole process by word of mouth, than finding some
friend with a supposedly talented second cousin whose work you are too
embarrassed to be honest about. Both the RP and Fine Art Commissions offer
advice.
“The decision comes from the heart, not the head,” says Annabel Elton at the
RP. “People tend to have a strong idea of what they want, but we are there
to guide them if they need it and to do the embarrassing stuff like
negotiating the price.”
“No portrait painter is good at everything, whatever they tell you,” Stewart
says, “and a lot of them will be so keen to get the commission that they
will be tempted to oversell themselves, to say that they can do whatever you
ask and then throw in the dog to boot – even if the dog is going to end up
looking like a dead cat. I am here to try to help people not to make this
mistake, to pick the right portraitist for their purposes.”
This can mean anything, she says, from choosing a painter such as Nick Bashall
who, having worked as a war artist in Kosovo and Basra, can offer a
sometimes much needed intellectual stimulation, to pointing customers in the
direction of such rising talents as Tom Leveritt, who can still be
commissioned for less than £10,000 but whose prices are even now probably
rising.
Whichever choice you make, a portrait is a luxury product. “Sitting is pure
‘me’ time,” Stewart says. Some men start off by balking but then come back
for extra sessions. Women tend to love it.
But think carefully before you plan a secret picture. The portrait painting
world is full of stories about people who sneaked off to sit for surprise
pictures and found themselves suspected by jealous spouses of illicit
affairs. Maybe it’s best just to play safe and pop a handmade artist’s
voucher under the tree.
— Paul Benney: www.paulbenney.com
or e-mail to benney@paulbenney.com
; Royal Society of Portrait Painters: www.therp.co.uk
or tel: 020-7930 6844; Fine Art Commissions: www.fineartcommissions.com
or phone 020-7839 2792
Face facts: three top British portrait painters
STUART PEARSON WRIGHT
Famous sitters: The Duke of Edinburgh, J. K. Rowling The Duke stormed
out of his sitting for this painting, left, on the ground that the painter
had given him an enormous nose, leaving him to complete the likeness using
an elderly man called Bill from Bethnal Green, East London.
Prices: undisclosed
JONATHAN YEO
Famous sitters: Grayson Perry, Rupert Murdoch This year, irritated by
the Bush Library’s withdrawal of a commission it had offered him to paint
George W. Bush, Yeo went ahead with the portrait anyway, creating it out of
cuttings from porn magazines.
Prices: £24,000 to £75,000
LUCIAN FREUD
Famous sitters: Francis Bacon, Kate Moss Freud takes a notoriously long
time to paint a portrait. For Ria, Naked Portrait 2007, he is said to
have required his model Ria Kirby to sit for five-hour sessions, seven
nights a week over a staggering 16 months, only missing four sessions.
Prices: Tends to choose his subjects himself; his best paintings sell
for around £4 million£7 million
