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Sir William Sidney Smith,
by John Eckstein, oil on canvas, 1801-02, courtesy National Portrait Gallery. Although
the subject is a real event, the sitter is revealed as a theatrical, egotistical,
and rather absurd character. But he was a star in his day.
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There’s so much you can learn from portraits—the manners and
mores of the times, the sitters’ blind spots and where they had to be flattered. Portraits,
particularly painted ones, are romantic in a way that photographs are not. And
then there’s simple curiosity. What did Thomas
Cranmer, Admiral
Nelson or Florence
Nightingale really look like?
Among the paintings on display when I visited the NPG were
the portraits of Iroquois chieftains—Joseph Brant, Red Jacket, Cornplanter and Governor Blacksnake.
The Iroquois
Confederacy played important roles in both the Revolution and the French and Indian War, as full allies of the British. Joseph Brant was once important enough to have been painted by court
painter George
Romney in London and Gilbert Stuart here.
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Queen Elizabeth I ('The Ditchley portrait'), c. 1592, by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger,
courtesy National Portrait Gallery. Elizabeth stands astride the globe, but the portrait's symbolic theme is her forgiveness of Henry Lee for retiring from court.
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The NPG is suffering from falling visitation, dropping from 1,703,411
in 2017 to 1,586,451 visitors in 2018. As bad as that sounds, it understates the
problem. Visits are down more than 25% from the 2.1 million visitors they recorded
in 2015/16. Then, management blamed the drop
on a counting error by an external company.
Now critics suggest that the current decline may be due to director Nicholas Cullinan's pursuit of diversity. “If the
implication of this criticism is that we and other museums should not programme
contemporary artists (which in our case happen to be mostly women) and only
feature well-known names, I think we have a problem with metrics that focus on
quantity alone.”
That's a bit of a red herring. Britons have a long and sometimes mystifying affection
for contemporary art. In fact, Tate Modern is the UK’s biggest visitor
attraction.
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The Slave Gang, c.
1900, by unknown artist, glass magic lantern plate, published by The London
Missionary Society, courtesy National Portrait Gallery.
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Still, it’s hard to imagine that people come to the NPG for the contemporary
portraits. They come to see the Chandos William
Shakespeare, exquisite Elizabethan miniatures, or ponder the sad story of Lady Jane Grey. The NPG’s
charm lies in its antique fustiness. It’s the thinking tourist’s Tower of London experience.
The portrait gallery can only be as diverse as the society
it represents, which in much of Britain’s history meant white people painted by
men. Today British society is more plural, but it’s also glutted with imagery.
Nobody needs to go to the NPG to see what the Prime Minister look like—her
photo is everywhere. Nobody needs to go there to look at the British Everyman, either,
since he’s just down the street.
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Winston Churchill, 1916,
by Sir William Orpen, courtesy National Portrait Gallery. Churchill resigned as First Lord of the Admiralty after
the disaster at Gallipoli, which claimed 46,000 allied lives. His reputation was
ruined, albeit temporarily. This portrait was painted at the
lowest point in Churchill’s career.
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Emphasizing diversity can be a way of saying, “Look how backwards our ancestors
were.” England was, from the 16th century to the 20th, an
empire. Empires are by nature diverse. Those Iroquois leaders in a museum
dedicated to British subjects were one example. So are 31 different maharajas
represented in more than 200 portraits. Or the two great empire-building British
rulers, Elizabeth I and Victoria, and the longest-reigning British monarch,
Elizabeth II. There’s plenty of diversity in British history once you stop
pigeonholing what diversity means.
