Leading characters of the 20th century brought to life

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From oil paint to DNA – the portrait continued to evolve through the 20th century

A Guide to Twentieth Century Portraits by Paul Moorhouse

A Guide to Twentieth Century Portraits is a superb survey of portraits in the form of paintings, drawings, photographs and sculpture taken from across the National Trust and National Portrait Gallery’s collections.

The book focuses on portraits of characters that made a significant contribution to politics, the arts, science, literature and popular culture in Britain during the 20th century. This slim volume contains 60 portraits of such personalities as the  writer Vita Sackville-West: Hitler sympathiser, Sir Oswald Mosley: writers James Joyce and Kingsley Amis; actor  Michael Caine, Mick Jagger, Margaret Thatcher, Diana, Princess of Wales and, on the outside cover, ‘Mike’s Brother’, Paul McCartney. The inside cover shows a magnificent self-portrait by Anna Zinkheisen.

After an interestingly informative introduction, the book is divided into nine chapters, which plot the course of British portraiture from the start of the 20th century, its progress through earlier and modernist style, up to the diversity of modern portraiture.

Each of the chapters, beginning with ‘The early twentieth century’ and working ‘Towards a new millennium’ begins with a socio-political and art history narrative to place the accompanying portraits for that particular chapter in perspective. Then each individual portrait has its own accompanying text.

As sitters, Sir Winston Churchill and Queen Elizabeth II both feature in three individual portraits: Sir Winston in one photograph and two oil portraits. The Queen is represented by two photographs, one by Dorothy Wilding from 1952, the other by Eve Arnold from 1968, and a silkscreen print by Andy Warhol from 1985; none of the many commissioned oil paintings of the monarch make it into the publication. Andy Warhol is the most represented artist in the book with three of his works featuring from three separate decades: the aforementioned one of the Queen, a lithograph of Elizabeth Taylor from 1967 and a silkscreen print of Mick Jagger from 1975.

Perhaps one of the most unusual portraits in the collection is Marc Quinn’s portrayal of Sir John Sulston. From the National Portrait Gallery’s collection, this work is a sample of the sitter’s DNA in agar jelly mounted on stainless steel. Using the concept that a portrait should be a representation or impression of the sitter – to capture or evoke their presence or essence – Quinn takes the subject of Sulston’s professional life as founding director of the Sanger Centre in Cambridge, site of DNA cloning and decoding of human genetic sequence, and creates a unique portrait. Using a process similar to DNA cloning, Quinn treated some of Sulston’s DNA and contained it within bacteria. This produced a mass of spots that formed colonies grown from a single bacterial cell; these were then mounted onto the stainless steel plate. Using the sitter’s DNA makes this a truly unique portrait of Sulston.

There are some interesting circularities in the book as some of the artists whose work is included are also in turn portrayed in works: Lucien Freud’s splendid portrait of Jacob Rothschild (Man in a Chair) 1989 appears in the last chapter, while Sir Jacob Epstein’s bronze, Lucien Freud, makes an appearance earlier in the book. Graham Sutherland’s head study, for a now-destroyed portrait of Winston Churchill, is included along with Sutherland’s striking 1977 Self-portrait.

The book uses a mixed selection of photography, sculpture and easel art to represent 20th-century portraits, clearly demonstrating the many media that may be used to portray characters. This also reveals the many styles that the individual artists have adopted or developed, and the styles that were dominant during the period when they were producing their work. For example, the range of photographs displayed reveals a progression from the spare portrait style, focused on the sitter, of the late 1950s to mid 1960s, to a complex, narrative-style photographic portraiture that appears in the last third of the century. The latter is demonstrated by Mario Testino’s 1996 work of Kate Moss and Sarah Lucas’ self-portrait Sarah Lucas (Eating a Banana).

The structuring of this book into chapters that represent certain periods in the century, and that give them a historical context, makes this book a real pleasure to survey. Whether one recognises the characters or not – and I feel sure you will know most of them – these carefully crafted chapters and the individual notes that accompany the portraits enable the reader to view the sitters in their historical context. This gives great insight into the people portrayed and, in some sense, the portraits are ‘brought to life’.

A Guide to Twentieth Century Portraits by Paul Moorhouse is published by the National Portrait Gallery in conjunction with the National Trust, 2014. 64pp. fully illustrated. ISBN 978-1855144606