portraits of artists and friends

I went today to see the Sargent exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.  He was a prolific chap, Sargent.  This was the third exhibition devoted to his work I've been to in my gallery visiting lifetime, the previous two being the National Gallery's blockbuster including(so far as I can remember) the notorious portrait of Madame Gautreau with her haughty nose and chalk white skin above her plunging neckline, and the second being Sargent and the Sea, a sideways look at his output by the Royal Academy.  Look, he didn't just paint Society portraits, he did seascapes too.  As I recall they were good but didn't quite pack the punch of Madame Gautreau.

The current show, which runs until 25th May, concentrates on Sargent's pictures of his friends, family, and other creative people of the day.  You don't get as many sumptuous dresses as with the society portraits, but the personalities are livelier.  And you get Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, though I think that's normally on view in the Tate anyway.  It is pretty, though it always makes me think of the Ruggles family and their unfortunate decision to call their eldest daughter Lily Rose, who grows up a stout child with red hair who is neither lily nor rose like.

I like portraiture as an art form, and I particularly like it when I already know a little about some of the subjects. Gabriel Faure as painted by Sargent is a dreamy man with gentle eyes and a huge, soft moustache.  I can easily believe he wrote Faure's Requiem.  Edmund Gosse is highly strung and slightly tormented with a blue vein pulsing in his temple.  My companion had not read Father and Son and was not so struck by Gosse as I was.  We agreed that the Spanish dancer looked a complete pain, and Asher Wertheimer as if he would be thoroughly good company, while Robert Louis Stevenson looked as nervy and intense as you would expect of the inventor of Jekyll and Hyde and Treasure Island.  Sargent was a very, very successful portrait painter in his day and you can see why.

I don't actually think he was a particularly good draughtsman.  Some of his people don't make me believe for a minute that there is a real skeleton covered in actual human musculature underneath their clothes.  The Spanish dancer's feet don't seem to me to be quite in right place given where her head is, and her hand doesn't really look as though it was on her hip, if I thought she had any hips under her orange flounces, which I didn't.  But it doesn't matter.  He was brilliant at faces, and more than that he was brilliant at personalities and attitude.  The anatomy of Cezanne's card players is all over the place, after all, and those are some of the most valuable paintings on the planet.

We had lunch in Dishoom, a cafe I have vaguely heard of and which I know now I have looked at their website pays loving homage to the Irani cafes that were once part of the fabric of life in Bombay.  They serve an interesting roti, very large and very thin, so that I wondered whether it had started off as a piece of dough rolled out to paper thin dinner plate size (in which case how do they handle it?) or poured as batter.  If I ever go back I shall ask.  And I wore a new (in the mid season sale) Toast shirt in a fetching (I think) shade of burnt orange.  I felt quite trendy, but now it's back to weeding, compost, and poached eggs for lunch for the rest of the month.