It's not Lady Violet – new portrait of Dame Maggie Smith unveiled

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The National Portrait Gallery, London, has unveiled its most recent commissioned portrait, a painting of   Dame Maggie Smith by the artist James Lloyd. It was commissioned by the Gallery with the support of J. P. Morgan through the Fund for New Commissions. 

The large (six feet by three) oil painting shows the Downton Abbey actress in jacket and trousers sitting in a bare studio on a draped chair which is placed on an intriguing trompe-l’oeil platform. The red and blue chequer-board pattern of the platform give colour to an otherwise muted palette of grey, black and brown.

The sittings began in 2011 and took place at the artist’s studio in Southwark. Lloyd started by working on sketches, in both oil and charcoal, and took photographs to determine the pose he wanted. He settled on one in which Dame Maggie was seated cross-legged, her head tilted to rest on a raised hand, with her eyes looking out at the viewer. 

Lloyd made a plinth to raise her to eye level when seated, a small platform painted with an illusory cube pattern he often uses, in this case to convey a feeling of the stage. The tumbling drapery catches the light as it falls, adding, he says, ‘a certain monumentality to an otherwise ordinary studio chair’.

While Dame Maggie indicated she was very happy ‘to be directed’ the artist did not want to represent her in period costume or as one of the characters she plays, known to millions. This was to be a contemporary painting of the actress in her everyday attire. 

Despite her busy work schedule, Dame Maggie was very obliging with her time. Having painted actors in the past, Lloyd was aware that if the painting process went on long enough sitters’ appearances were liable to change according to the roles they were currently playing. In this instance, Dame Maggie turned up to one sitting with peroxide blonde hair (she had started work on the film Quartet directed by Dustin Hoffman). Lloyd could have included this but he decided to go with her previous hair colour, in keeping, he says, with the tone of the portrait. 

James Lloyd says:

I was delighted to be asked by the National Portrait Gallery to paint Dame Maggie Smith: not only because this was an opportunity to have a third painting in the Gallery’s Collection, but also for the honour of trying to portray such a luminary of stage and film. I learnt that Dame Maggie had been reluctant to have her portrait painted in the past, and at my first meeting with her, her opening words were, ‘Poor you’. This was quite the opposite from my own feelings, and everyone to whom I mentioned the commission was extremely envious (I lost count of the number of people who offered to make tea during the sittings!)

 ‘It is a large canvas but I don’t think it’s flashy’, says Lloyd.

I was after a certain understated grandeur. The background is quite stark, and apart from the patterned floor there is little colour bar the neutral greys and browns. This directs the concentration on to the warm flesh tones of the face. And with a face and character like Dame Maggie Smith’s that’s definitely more than enough.

Dame Maggie Smith (b. 1934) made her stage debut as Viola in Twelfth Night in 1952. While at the Oxford Playhouse School she received early acclaim for her role in Nowhere to Go (1958) and subsequently in As You Like It and Richard II at the Old Vic. Roles in The Recruiting Officer (1963) and The Master Builder (1964) were followed by a performance as Desdemona in Othello opposite Sir Laurence Olivier. Smith was subsequently nominated for an Oscar for her film reprisal of that role and then won two for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1968) and California Suite (1978). Other notable screen performances include A Private Function (1984), A Room with a View (1986) and Tea With Mussolini (1999). More recently, appearances in the Harry Potter series of films and in the award-winning television series Downton Abbey have won Smith new audiences internationally.

James Lloyd (b. 1971) held the Paul Smith Scholarship at the Slade School of Art and in 1997 won first prize in the BP Portrait Award as well as the Ondaatje Prize for portraiture in 2008. Lloyd has exhibited internationally, most recently at the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, and his work is held within collections including those of the House of Commons and Kunsthalle, Mannheim. His portrait of Dame Maggie is the third to enter the National Portrait Gallery’s Collection. His previous portraits were of Sir Paul Smith (the commission awarded to him as part of his first prize in the BP Portrait Award 1997) and David Alec Gwyn Simon, Baron Simon of Highbury (both 1998). For more on James’s work please see his website  or BBC Your Paintings 

James Lloyd’s portrait of Dame Maggie Smith was supported by J.P. Morgan through the Fund for New Commissions, part of J.P. Morgan Signature Series. 

Dame Maggie Smith by James Lloyd is in Room 35 in the Ground floor Lerner Contemporary Galleries at the National Portrait Gallery, London. Admission free.