The special pleasure of portraits

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Eye to Eye. European Portraits 1450-1850

Richard Rand and Kathleen Morris

Nelson Goodman, philosopher of aesthetics, once declared that a portrait of Wellington had more in common with all other pictures than it did with Wellington himself.  Portraits always have this dual aspect, which derives from their close reference to a sitter even while filtered through the sensibility of the portraitist.  And the curators of the exhibition covered in this catalogue quote Oscar Wilde: ‘Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter’.

This small but richly illustrated catalogue conveys the special pleasure of portraits, focusing chiefly on earlier painted works from the Renaissance and 17th century (though someone who truly wants a scholarly introduction to its material would be well advised to supplement this volume with the richer fare of London’s 2008 National Gallery catalogue,  Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian).  Its range includes celebrated painters, though many of them did not devote themselves to portraits: van der Weyden, Memling, and Cranach from the North; Parmigianino, Allori, and Bernini from Italy; Baroque artists Peter Paul Rubens and Jusepe and later French masters, including Greuze, David and Gros (see Background info box on the right). The latter roster made a fitting complement to the Clark Art Institute’s own remarkable permanent roster of 18th- and 19th-century portraits from both France and England. 

Arguably, some of the images in the exhibition were not true portraits, particularly the old men by Ribera, who so often transformed such heads into lonely hermit saints or ancient philosophers, painted at half-length.  A Van Dyck study head should more properly classed with  tronies,  a distinctly Netherlandish form of generalized or fantasized portrait type, often reused in a narrative. 

It is fascinating, too, to compare the more versatile masters with some of the professional portraitists, whose  oeuvre  is well represented by this selection of artists depicting young women: Moroni (a star of the 2008 London exhibition); Thomas de Keyser, a great compatriot of Rembrandt; and van Dyck, whose fetching subject is identified as his mistress, Margaret Lemon.  By contrast the more formal and sumptuously dressed sitters of court portraits are meant to be identified: Anthony of Burgundy by van der Weyden; Elizabeth of Valois by Alonso Sánchez Coello; even Count Honoré de la Ribosière (captain in Napoleon’s Imperial Guard) by Gros. 

An introductory essay by Italian specialist David Ekserdjian lays out some of these variables in connection with the images on view, while also offering indirect praise to the single private collector who assembled these works during the past decade.  While it will not exhaust all questions raised by portraiture, the essay does provide overall guidance to the catalogue that follows.  In the end, however, such outstanding examples of portraiture fully justify themselves; they merit the close attention of an illustrated catalogue and convey portraiture’s joys and puzzles for either novice or scholarly specialist.

Eye To Eye. European Portraits 1450–1850  by Richard Rand and Kathleen Morris is published by the Clark Art Institute and distributed by Yale University Press, 2011. 160 pp., 78 colour illus. ISBN 978-0-300-17564-6