Recently I’ve been thinking about painting, and about portraits in particular. If you could choose to be painted by any artist, living or dead, a friend asked me the other day, who would it be? Rembrandt, I said at once. I’d have given a different answer when I was young, but now that I’m not it’s his forensic but merciful gaze I would trust.
Last year I went to Vienna for the first time. In the Kunsthistorisches Museum I came face to face with a late self-portrait by Rembrandt that I had seen before but did not know was in this gallery. Tears filled my eyes. I felt as one does when unexpectedly coming across an old and beloved friend, at a railway station perhaps, or in the main square of a strange city – a sense of delighted recognition. It wasn’t simply that I recognised him but that in some mysterious way he knew me too. This is Rembrandt’s particular genius: because he was unsparing of himself – watch his eyes get redder, smaller, his nose more bulbous as the years go by – his self-portraits feel truthful, and so by extension do his paintings of other people. Consider his Woman Bathing in a Stream (1654), lifting her shift, looking down at her sturdy white legs in the clear water. She’s thought to be his lover, Hendrickje Stoffels, but whether she is or not, the tenderness with which he regards her is not in doubt.
Tears filled my eyes. I felt a sense of delighted recognition
The image maker
The women whom Hans Holbein drew must also have seen true reflections of themselves. I imagine them – the two queens, Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour, the daughters of Sir Thomas More – as their portraits were unveiled by this extraordinary image-maker of the Tudor court. Did they feel slight unease, as we might do today on seeing a photograph of ourselves? These drawings and others from the Royal Collection (on show until 8 April at the Queen’s Gallery in London), do have an almost photographic quality. Unlike Rembrandt, this artist’s gaze is cool, dispassionate, his own personality less intrinsic to the work. But the pictures are equally miraculous. And equally expressive of character. When we look at them, we feel we are meeting those long-dead people, that Holbein has conveyed them to us over the bridge of centuries, entirely whole and real. The five o’clock shadow on the jaw of Thomas More, Mary Shelton’s elegant eyebrows, the pearl on the pendant at her neck.
Mary Shelton was cousin to Anne Boleyn and, perhaps, briefly a mistress of Henry VIII. Holbein’s (lost) portrait of Henry is the iconic image of the man. There he stands, familiar to us from faithful copies of the original, legs apart, swaggering, shoulders magnificently padded, codpiece bulging. The very definition of a king. But let’s look closely at his cold fish-eyes, the meanness of that small, pursed mouth, a tight slit in the fleshy expanse of his jowls. Even if we knew nothing about him – this man who ordered so many executions, including the mother of his child – we would perceive from the picture that he was capable of cruelty.
Hundreds of books have been written about Henry VIII and other subjects of Holbein’s paintings. Of course, we learn from the books. But perhaps we see even more clearly by studying the portraits. “Not in our time will anyone write a life as Sickert paints it,” wrote Virginia Woolf. A sobering reflection for a writer.
In black and white
Portraits, photographs, ways of seeing. My mother, who is Indian, is in her 99th year. Among the many black and white photographs jumbled in a battered suitcase in her loft is one that shows her sisters at their boarding school in Darjeeling. As was fashionable at the time, the girls are posed in a tableau vivant. They are wearing long white dresses and sashes patterned with the Union Jack over their right shoulders. Above them is a banner that reads “Daughters of Britannia”.
My mother sees no incongruity in this. As far as she is concerned, those young women of colour were actually daughters of Britannia, children of the Raj. Her passport, issued on 6 July, 1946, states that she was a British subject by birth. It’s a passport of the Empire of India. At her convent school she studied Wordsworth; she knew of golden daffodils before she’d ever seen one.
My mother needed that passport to travel to England in 1946. She had a place at Oxford. She says she experienced no racism, then or since. I wonder about that. I, her half-English daughter, could not say the same. But I don’t question her perspective. I think that it says something, however tangential, however personal, about the experience of Empire in its dying days.
Seeing clearly
“The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there,” wrote JA Baker in The Peregrine (1967). To see clearly, it does help to know the names of things. My husband was good at identifying birds and plants and trees. After he died, I tried to learn them for myself. Flowers are fine, and I can just about manage the birds. But why, especially in winter, do trees remain so hard to name?
“The Book of Days by Francesca” Kay is published by Swift Press
