'Portrait of the Artist' - review

November 14 2016

Picture: BG

Here's my Financial Times review of the new Royal Collection exhibition, Portrait of the Artist. It's a great show, well worth a visit.

Other reviewers seem to like it too (though most of these are behind a paywall): here's The Times, Telegraph, Evening Standard, Sunday Times. You may need to register to see my FT piece, but the free article allowance there is generous.

The photo above shows Rubens' portrait of Van Dyck. It's a fine picture, but almost more interesting for what it isn't. The gaze is not direct, there isn't any obvious sign Van Dyck is a painter, nor that they were friends or colleagues. It's subtler than that, and all the more powerful for it. Standing in front of it is, for a fan of both Rubens and Van Dyck, really quite profound - you don't often get to see a confluence of so much creative genius in one picture. I didn't have space to mention the picture in the FT piece, and instead focused on the self-portrait element of the show. Interestingly, for a long time Rubens' portrait of Van Dyck was wrongly thought to be a self-portrait. It's far less emphatic than Van Dyck's self-portraits though, and, in terms of determining what Van Dyck was really like, perhaps a useful contrast to them. 

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