First British self-portrait competition announces winner

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Renske Mann looks at entries for the new Ruth Borchard art prize

A small (25.4  x 25.4cms) painting by Indian-born artist Celia Paul has won the £10,000 prize in the first-ever national  British self-portrait competition and exhibition, honouring  Ruth Borchard (1910–2000) who, during her life, collected over 100 self-portraits by British artists, including several ‘names’ then still at art school. She rarely paid over 20 guineas (21 pounds sterling) per painting.

The ‘Ruth Borchard Self-Portrait Competition and Exhibition’ is planned to become a biennial event. The collector’s family and heirs will take the opportunity to add to her core collection and ultimately establish the first National British Self-Portrait Gallery, like those already in Sweden, Ireland and Italy.

‘From over 500 works submitted, 171 self-portraits were chosen for this exhibition’, explained Dr Robert Travers, director of Piano Nobile Gallery, who represents the Borchard estate. With him on the judging panel were Ruth Borchard’s granddaughter, Rachel, and art critics Sister Wendy Beckett, William Feaver, and William Varley. 

Born in 1959 in Trivandrum, India, Celia Paul (b. 1959) attended the Slade School of Art, London, from 1976 to 1981. She has exhibited widely and has works in many public collections, including the British Museum, the V&A and the Metropolitan Museum, New York. Lucian Freud was a great influence on Paul during her student days when she modelled in many of his paintings.

In the last 20 years, Paul, who is represented by the Marlborough Gallery, has emerged as one of the most original painters working in the figurative tradition. Her paintings and drawings tend to be intimate portraits of people she knows well. ‘My work is about people and their emotions’, she has said.

 Born in Hamburg in 1910, Ruth Borchard fled rising anti-Semitism and Nazism in Germany in 1930, settling  in England, where she and her husband, Kurt, continued to run their family shipping business.

According to the book Face to Face, British Self-Portraits in the Twentieth Century, by Philip Vann (first pub. 2004, Sansom & Co in association with Piano Nobile), Ruth’s interest in self-portraits began when she was 13 and grew from an interest in diaries and other autobiographical material. Visiting art exhibitions, she wrote: ‘Always I was trying to feel my way through to the painter behind the canvas, believing that a collection of self-portraits by living artists had never been done before’.

 Borchard collected well over 100 self-portraits, many during the 1960s and ‘70s. They included such eminent artists as Roger Hilton (1911–75), Lawrence Gowing (1918–91), William Gear (1915–97), Keith Vaughan (1912–77), Euan Uglow (1930–2000), Kyffin Williams (1918–2004), Peter Coker (1926–2004), Carel Weight (1908–97), F.N. Souza (1924–2002) and many others. In an unpublished essay, she explained that she decided to concentrate on British rather than American artists, because in the former she saw that ‘There is a solid body of craftsmanship, a singular honesty, a comparative lack of intellectualism and of sentimentality’. 

As submissions in the first Ruth Borchard Self-Portrait Competition could not exceed one square metre in size, few artists painted  themselves as part of larger compositions. Exceptionally, Ken Howard, RA, renders himself in his studio surroundings. Nearly always, the artists depict themselves full-faced, using a wide variety of stylistic idioms.

Self-Portraitwith Goggles (acrylics,  64 x 54cms), by Clifford Sayer, is unusual in that his head is in near profile. Using strong, swift brush strokes, he has a pleasing boldness of execution, the red goggles reflecting in the tips of his ears and lips and illuminating his face.

Proving there is scope for traditional painting in our age of digital image making, Laurence Kell’s self-portrait (oil, 68 x 58cms) makes an impact with its beautiful design, subtlety and technical skill. In no way experimental, the execution is also far from ‘photographic’. Kell depicts himself Velazquez-like in his tonal values, using a gentle, one-directional light source. Shades of black and grey contrast with warm pink skin tones. The striped scarf leads the eye upwards toward the young painter’s face. 

Another unusually strong submission is a large charcoal and pastel drawing on paper by Alison Lambert (99.5 x 93.5cms). This powerful artist is evidently not afraid to be bold and unflattering to herself, making her self-portrait all the more psychologically revealing.

 Drawing Hawksmoor (oil, 61 x 50cms) is another lively self-portrait composition.  Robin Archer paints himself surrounded by Hawksmoor drawings with a distorted, glimpsed view of Christ Church, Spitalfields, leading out of his canvas.  

Speculating on what Mrs Borchard would have made of the competition and exhibition bearing her name, she would probably be surprised that women artists had contributed almost half of all submissions.  Only five out of more than 100 portraits in her original collection were by women painters. including Ithell Colquhoun (1906–88), Anne Redpath (1895–1965) and Jean Cooke (1927–2008).

Five women artists were short-listed: Maggi Hambling, Marcelle Hanselaar, Cherry Pickles, Mary Mabbutt and the first-prize winner, Celia Paul.