National Portrait Gallery, Portrait Awards 2016

I look at this exhibition every year.  I love portraits and like to see what types of people are portrayed.

This year, there was very little colour in the images.  Lots of muted shades of neutrals. As usual only about 6 really appealed to me.

Joshua Waterhouse - The Weaver

I don't usually like hyper-realism, but this was an image of a mature woman, with the wrinkles of a care-worn face clearly defined.  I loved it.  She was a highly skilled hand weaver, and was wearing a hand woven scarf, while sitting in a chair made by her furniture maker father.  I loved the depiction of these objects.  Also the artist had included a section where he had made a most detailed painting of a self portrait that she had woven.  Fantastic.  His website shows the image in detail.  I have decided not to lift any images from this exhibition, for copyright reasons.

Charlie Masson - Diversion.  The most impressionistic portrait in the show.  Simply drawn self portrait in the reflection on his phone, along with the interior of a room.  Very modern, very contemporary.

Brett Amory - Jijinka.  Very large (8' high?) painting of a male to female transexual.  A very ordinary careworn woman.  I like representation of all parts of our society.

William Neukomm - Katrina.  Absolutely brilliant head and shoulders portrait of a young black woman.    Strength, dignity and composure all conveyed by the erect manner of sitting and gaze.  Brilliant.

Laura Guoke - Petras.  Won the BP Travel Award.  A black and white image of a man with his hands over his mouth.  I suspect he was Greek.  She will use the award to go to the Greek Lesbos refugee camp, and will probably make some challenging portraits.  This project looks like it may go back the role of the original war artists - revealing uncomfortable realities which Government officialdom may prefer not to be seen.  I very much look forward to seeing the output next year.

Magali Cazo, won the 2015 Travel Prize and went to Burkina Faso.  She created some wonderful portraits of the black indigenous population, with use of high turquoise and scarlets - the colours of the clothes and land.  Her sketchbooks - concertina fold moleskins - were WONDERFUL.  It occurred to me that they could have been created from composite sketches from her travels.  The sketchbooks were a bit too wonderful to have been made on the road, but were a fantastic documentation of what she saw.

Painters Paintings at the National Gallery.

I am not sure what I made of this exhibition.  It gathers together paintings previously owned by great painters, and goes some way to analyse why these people collected the images they did.

I did some content analysis of the exhibition.  The exhibition reviewed the works collected by Freud, Matisse, Degas (2 rooms - contemporaries and masters), Frederick Lord Leighton, Watts, Lawrence (2 rooms) and Van Dyck.  I wondered whether no female artists were included as collectors because they were insufficiently affluent to be collectors, or because the exhibition curators had excluded them?  Each room commenced with a self portrait by the artist.  There was a predominance of portraiture, usually of a single person - again I am not sure whether this is a curatorial choice or collectors preference.

I liked a lot of the work collected by Freud and Matisse, and loathed a lot of the stuff collected by Lawrence and Reynolds (Presidents of the RA, whose Old Master collections are the foundation of the NG).  Notably, Freud and Matisse had a significant proportion of portraits of women.

No	Collector Painter	Male	Female	Nude?	Self Portrait	Other Genre
	Freud
1	Freud	1			1
2	Freud	1
3	Cezanne	1	1	Both
4	Freud		1	Yes
5	Auerbach	2
6	Corot		1
7	Degas		1
8	Constable		1
		5 men	5 women	3 nude	1 self portrait	0 other
	Matisse
1	Matisse	1			1
2	Gaugain	1
3	Matisse		1	1
4	Cezanne		3	3
5	Matisse		1
6	Degas		2
7	Matisse		1
8	Signac					Landscape
9	Cezanne		1
10	Picasso		1
11	Picasso		1
		2 men	11 women	4 nude	1 self portrait	1 landscape
	Degas (Room 1)
1	Degas	1			1
2	Blanche	1
3	Manet		1
4	Sisley					Landscape
5	Gaugain					Flowers
6	Pisarro					Landscape
7	Forain	6	1			Tribunal
8	Manet	8
9	Jeanniet	7		6
10	Degas	5	14	5
11	Cezanne	1		1
		29 men	16 women	12 nude	1 self portrait	2 landscp 1 flowers 1 tribunal
	Degas (Room 2)
1	Degas				1
2	Ingres	1
3	Degas	1	1	1
4	Degas		1
5	Ingres	1		1
6	Ingres	1
7	Ingres	1
8	Ingres	1
9	Degas					Skyscape
10	Delacroix					Skyscape
11	Degas		2
12	Degas	2
13	Corot					Landscape
14	Andreiu					Still Life
15	Delacroix	1	1	2
16	Delacroix	1
17	Delacroix	1
18	Ricard	1
19	Rousseau					Landscape
		12 men	5 women	4 nude	1 self portrait	2 skyscp 2 landscp 1 still life
	Leighton
1	Leighton	1			1
2	Corot					Landscape
3	Corot					Landscape
4	Leighton					Landscape
5	Leighton					Landscape
6	Corot					Landscape
7	Tintoretto	1	1	1
8	Watts					Landscape
		2 men	1 woman	1 nude	1 self portrait	6 landscp
	Watts
1	Watts	1			1
2	Machietti	1
		2 men			1 self portrait
	Lawrence (President RA)
1	Lawrence	1			1
2	Raphael	1	2
3	Reni	Multiples	Multiples
4	Lawrence	3
5	VD Groes	12	1
6	Carracci	10	1
7	V Dyck	1
		38 men	14 women		1 self portrait
	Reynolds (President RA)
1	Gainsborough		1
2	Rembrandt	Multiple
3	Poussin	Multiple
4	Bourden	Multiple
5	V Dyck	3
6	Bellini	3
7	Bassano	3
8	Michaelangelo		1
9	V Dyck					Animal
10	Reynolds	1			1
		40 men	2 women		1 self portrait	1 animal
	Van Dyck
1	V Dyck	2
2	V Duck	2
3	Titian	9
4	V Dyck	1			1
5	Titian	1
		15 men			1 self portrait

Assume where ‘multiple’, counted as 10

Just shows, the most popular subject in this exhibition was men.  I don't know if this is also restricted by the media of oil on canvas.  There was very little pastel (only a couple of skycapes), despite Degas being a key collector.  None of his theatre or ballet work was on display.  Further thought to follow.