hall of fame, The

Spectator, The, Jul 19, 1997 by Hillier, Bevis

THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

by Charles Saumarez Smith NPG, L25, L17.50, pp 237

It is a sweet relief to be able to open a book on one of our national art collections and not find in it an illustration of, say, seven clothes-pegs fixed to a piece of corrugated iron and captioned `Untitled Number Two'. Though I daresay that if Nicholas Serota of the Tate were translated to the National Portrait Gallery, before you could say `conceptual art' there would be installed a gym-shoe balanced on a bidet entitled `Lady Violet Bonham-Carter'. Or an inside-out plaster-cast of Betty Boothroyd by Rachel Whiteread, a bleaker Speaker.

Even the fanatical conspirators who keep the big business of modern art juggernauting along accept that in portraiture some glimmer of a likeness is desirable and that the kind of mumbling in paint of a Rothko is not to be countenanced in countenances. Portraiture is the one realm of art in which the modems can't get away with it. Of course - as their cheek is boundless and applauded - they have had a good try. In 1947 Patrick Heron wrote to T.S. Eliot asking to be allowed to paint him. The letter contained the ominous sentence, 'I have for a long time been thinking around the problem of a portrait' - read: 'I have been wondering how I can profitably bugger up the dreary old tradition established by Holbein, Hogarth, Reynolds and Augustus John.' As Eliot had done much the same for English poetry, he could hardly refuse. The result, illustrated in this book, was a cubistic portrait for which this merit is claimed: `Eliot is seen simultaneously both full face and in profile.' That is just the way Van Dyck portrayed Charles I; but, unlike Heron, he did not make the elementary mistake of superimposing the profile on the full-face - just the sort of double exposure that used to ruin my Brownie box-camera portraits.

The composition of Heron's painting is quite agreeable, in its arid genre, though it does not come close to the inspired pattern-making of Wyndham Lewis's portrait of Eliot, which the NPG does not possess. If you wanted to know what Eliot looked like, you could see his youthful self in two group photographs of the Harvard Advocate editors, owned by the Cincinnati Historical Society (they have been reproduced in none of the books on Eliot, nor anywhere else to my knowledge). Sir Gerald Kelly of Burmese Girl fame gave a good account of the middle-aged Eliot. And on 14 November 1956 Punch published Ronald Searle's magnificent double-page portrait of the poet in old age, with hardly a trace of caricature.

The nearest to abstraction that the English portrait has orbited is Ben Nicholson's 1933 painting of himself and his future wife Barbara Hepworth - two fishily goggling and almost indistinguishable profiles, approvingly described in the book as `slightly prehistoric'. Sort of, What the Dino Saur. Apart from this picture and Heron's 'Eliot', none of the works illustrated in Charles Saumarez Smith's largely skilful anthology from the gallery he directs needs strenuous decoding; and most of them are masterpieces.

The humble, self-effacing line about British art used to be: with our misty climate and watery skies, we excel in watercolour (Cotman, De Wint, Girtin, Charles Knight) but have not scaled the heights in oils. Ruskin recognised the quality of Turner; and in the 20th century Turner has been hailed as the first, and surely the greatest, of the Impressionists. But the tradition of British portraiture, informed by our delight in the individual and in individual quiddity (the national trait which in Edmund Burke's view, saved us from the straitjacket of a written constitution), is perhaps our most significant contribution to world art.

Near the beginning of the tradition is the formidable figure of Holbein, represented here by a miniature of Thomas Cromwell's merciless face against a lapis lazuli background. In one of his television masterclasses, the cellist Paul Tortelier was asked the cliche question, `Who is your favourite composer?' He replied: `Bach - and anyone who gives you a different answer is not a musician.' Holbein is to art what Bach is to music: cerebral, rigorous, ruthlessly defined, heading for mathematical perfection. But even those of us who venerate Bach might jib at Tortelier's dogma, comparable to F.R. Leavis's literary exclusionism in The Great Tradition. We might seek the freedom to press the claims of Mozart or Beethoven. Saumarez Smith parades before us the artistic equivalents. Gainsborough, whose self-portrait is illustrated, is the Mozart of English art serene, humane, humorous, rococo. (Admittedly, there is no Gainsborough Requiem.) Sir Thomas Lawrence and Benjamin Robert Haydon are Beethovens - heroic, bravura rule-breakers. Strategically blown-up details, as well as the portraits themselves, bring home to us how masterly are Lawrence's `William Wilberforce' (another heroic rule-breaker) and Haydon's `William Wordsworth'.

In making his selection, Saumarez Smith has had to strike a nice balance between eminent sitters and eminent artists. The NPG is, after all, our national pantheon. It would be unthinkable not to include Shakespeare, even though the painting, which shows the dramatist with a gold ring through one ear like a modern busconductor, is an indifferent work attributed to the actor-painter John Taylor. (It certainly resembles the Martin Droeshout engraving in the First Folio of 1623.) An odd omission is Dr Johnson, a figure who could belong to no other nation. His head by James Barry was very properly chosen, with a portrait of Elizabeth I, to go on the jacket of K.K. Yung's Complete Illustrated Catalogue of the NPG in 1981.