PORTRAITS

All portraits start out centred on the sitters. It is only later that people value and acquire them for other reasons.

The prime focus of my stock is the sitter. Its particular inspiration is respect and admiration for the creative spirit in man, which I assume is what motiviates my clients as well. 'The stirrings of the human heart are most perfectly represented through the intuitive perceptions of writers, musicians and artists.' (Elizabeth Cayzer). Artists - in the sense of the word that embraces all the Arts - develop their sensibilities and creative imaginations within the disciplines of their craft to enrich and ennoble life; they reach out, into themselves, for the numinous, for the god-like possibilities in Man.

The theme is therefore the creatively talented - almost exclusively writers, artists and musicians.

To the admirer or collector of the creative imagination, the portrait is a form of visual biography, essential to a full comprehension of the personality and therefore of the work. Aquinas said that man cannot understand without images. The face is the prime mark of identity; without it our sense is fragmented, ill-defined, dehumanised. We need the human reference or the work remains something of an abstraction. Without this mnemonic context our appreciation is impoverished. It affects our ability to make friends of those we most admire:

'...come to this hallowed place
Where my friends' portraits hang and look thereon...
Think where man's glory most begins and ends,
And say my glory was I had such friends

(W.B. Yeats, 'The Municipal Gallery Revisited')

Creative talents have always been among the most challenging, almost sacral, subjects for the portraitist, bearing both the gravamen of their Art and of their public roles - sometimes even a hint of their desire for privacy. Often, too, there can be the responsibilities of friendship.

While concerned mostly with the identity of the sitters, I have not been unmindful that portraits are pictures, pleasing to the eye and stimulating to the imagination. I have always tried, therefore, in different media, to find portraits that are good or fine examples of technique, draughtsmanship and skill. Furthermore, because in a real sense, portraits are conceptual and documentary as well as being representations, the descriptions in this catalogue extrapolate biographical and other details and connections giving, it is hoped, an added liveliness and illumination; holding up to them a variant of Carlyle's candle (see quote below).

At least since Narcissus fell in love with his own image, portraits have had a magical fascination and that spell continues unbroken today. This in part derives from faces being the first thing most of us see in this world - from the crib through the crèche to the classroom, parents are the planetary centre of their child's imaginative universe. Perhaps, also, in some final analysis, portraits challenge the transience of human existence. And a portrait feels to be at least one better than a headstone.

Messages about people are projected and perceived on differing levels and by different media - they can all be involved in the business of portrayal. Portraiture can convey (even betray) the personality as well as the person. There is an art (or is it an artlessness?) to find the mind's construction in the face and portraits can capture something about the conscious and indeed the unconscious minds of the sitter and the artist.

Then it might be considered that subliminally we face ourselves in every portrait (the psychologist's Me Not Me object), comparatively or critically or just in terms of common humanity.

Portraits are about one of Man's principal archetypes - himself -- 'The proper study of mankind is man.'

Also common to collections of portraits is that they encompass the dynamic and affective transactions between the artists and their subjects as the portraits evolved and take in the manifold reciprocity between the spectators and the persons portrayed, not only as filtered through the eyes and imaginations of the artists, but also informed by their own personalities and interests as well as their attentive observation as spectators. Additionally, the portrait itself can impose its personality upon a room.

Over the centuries, portraiture, noted as a peculiarly British obsession, has changed, if not developed, in terms of its aims and the influences to which it has been subject, and has served the several needs of royalty, nobility, the rising middle classes, families and lovers, demagogues, institutions and other groups and hierarchies, including, largely through the medium of photography, the poor.

The demands of different ages and ambitions have resulted in portraits being variously iconic, mimetic, representative, honorific, talismanic, fictive or commemorative analogues. Perhaps most resonant of individual identity are 'loyal' resemblances (though more or less flattering; more or less reflective of the outer and of the inner man); others are symbols of position and power, and of social status, visual credentials, even objects of worship or revulsion. More recently, portraiture has served the aesthetics of differing artistic schools, such as the Realist, Impressionist, Naturalist and Expressive secessions. And then there are the humiliations of caricature. Gesture, costume and setting have played their parts in moulding the various traditions, and the changing nature of the art and of patronage have altered the commercial contracts and psychological transactions between the artist, the sitter and spectator, which, in turn, have affected the nature of the product. While the focal point for me has been the sitter, rather than the medium, believing, as I do, that almost all media are legitimate and have their merits, provided they don't decompose, I am happy to have items in all media - oil paintings, watercolours, drawings, medallions, photographs, lithographs, engravings, mezzotints, etchings, sculpture etc

In so far as I am able, I try to acquire ad vivam or life-time portraits rather than posthumous ones.

Roy Davids.

OTHERS' OBSERVATIONS ON PORTRAITURE

'I have observed that a reader seldom peruses a book with pleasure 'till he knows whether the writer of it be a black or a fair man, of a mild or acerbic disposition, married or a bachelor, with other particularities of a like nature, that conduce very much to the right understanding of an author.' (Joseph Addison)

'When I draw a man…I see his salient points…In the salient points a man's soul does reveal itself, more or less faintly…It is…when (and only when) my caricatures hit exactly the exteriors of their subjects that they open their interiors, too.' (Max Beerbohm)

'Portrait painting at its best is the most difficult and subtlest of all the arts.' (Adrian Bury)

'To be portrayed by an artist is to appear in public.' (Richard Brilliant)

'Painting is worthless, except portrait-painting.' (Thomas Carlyle)

'Often I have found a Portrait superior in real instruction to half-a-dozen written "Biographies", as Biographies are written; or rather, let me say, I have found that the Portrait was a small lighted candle by which the Biographies could for the first time be read, and some human interpretation be made of them.' (Thomas Carlyle)

'In all my poor historical investigations it has been, and always is, one of the most primary wants to procure a bodily likeness of the personage enquired after - a good portrait if such exists; failing that, even an indifferent if sincere one.' (Thomas Carlyle)

'It was his habit to paste on a screen in his workroom engraved portraits, when no better could be had, of the people he was then writing about. It kept the image of the man steadily in view, and one must have a clear image of him in the mind before it was in the least possible to make him be seen by the reader.' (Sir Charles Grant Duffy about Thomas Carlyle)

'When you look upon a portrait you must not compare it with the face when present, but with the recollection of the face. It refers not so much to the senses, as to the ideal sense of the friend not present.' (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

'…a good portrait is the abstract of the personal; it is not the likeness for actual comparison, but for recollection. This explains why the likeness of a very good portrait is not always recognised; because some persons never abstract, and amongst these are especially to be numbered the near relations and friends of the subject, in consequence of the constant pressure and check exercised on their minds by the actual presence of the original.' (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

'And while the wings of fancy still are free
And I can draw this mimic show of thee,
Time has but half succeeded in his theft -
Thyself removed, thy power to soothe me left' (William Cowper)

'I am envious of the assured tilt of the chin, the veiled irony of the eyes and the noble curve of the nose. But when I turn to look in the looking-glass I am bound to regret that I can see little resemblance between my reflection and the distinguished head painted of me.' (Villiers David of Augustus John's portrait of himself)

'There are only two styles of portrait painting: the serious and the smirk.' (Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby)

'Here take my Picture; though I bid farewell…
'Tis like me now, but I dead, 'twill be more
When wee are shadowes both, then 'twas before.' (John Donne)

'I cannot see the man for his likeness' (Roger Fry on Sargent's portrait of Sir Ian Hamilton)

'The desire to be acquainted with a man's aspect has ever risen, in proportion to...the admiration of his writing' (James Granger)

'An Artist does not need to be a judge of character if he paints what he sees and paints it sincerely' (Sir James Gunn)

'I don't know whether it's like me - but it's what I feel like.' (Thomas Hardy about Augustus John's drawing of him).

'I appear on my trial in the court of physiognomy...as if I were playing a part on a stage' (William Hazlitt)

'Portrait-painting is in truth a sort of cement of friendship, and clue to history' (William Hazlitt)

'Every man is always present in himself and has therefore little need of his own resemblance, nor can desire it but for the sake of those...by whom he hopes to be remembered. This use of the art is a rational and reasonable consequence of affection; and though like all other human actions it is often complicated with pride, yet even such pride is more laudable than that by which palaces are covered with pictures that, however excellent, neither imply the owner's virtue, not excite it' (Samuel Johnson)

'It could not have been more flattering without being less of a likeness, nor more of a likeness without being less flattering, which I take to be the definition of a successful portrait.' (Philip Larkin on his portrait by Humphrey Ocean)

'Caricatures are now rightly recognised as one of the most searching forms of portraiture, precisely because partial and subjective' (Richard Ormond)

'It is most interesting, after persons have been reading about the exploits of some eminent person, to be able afterwards to realise the man by seeing his portrait.' (Lord Palmerston in the parliamentary debate about founding the National Portrait Gallery).

'A portrait aims by definition at two essentials...on the one hand its seeks to bring out whatever it is in which the sitter differs from the rest of humanity and would even differ from himself were he portrayed at a different moment or in a different situation; and this is what distinguishes a portrait from an 'ideal' figure or 'type'. On the one hand it seeks to bring out whatever the sitter has in common with the rest of humanity and what remains in him regardless of place and time; and this is what distinguishes a portrait from a figure forming part of a genre painting or narrative' (Erwin Panofsky)

'If self-portraits have a tendency to look glum it should not be surprising. As Rembrandt discovered, it is difficult to laugh and paint at the same time.' (Tom Phillips)

'The painter always paints himself.' (Picasso)

'Every portrait is the result of a bargain between the sitter and the artist, and only in portraiture does the artist undertake a subject that can, and often does, answer back and argue…' (David Piper)

'I keep the pictures of Dryden, Milton, Shakespeare, etc., in my chamber, round about me, that the constant remembrance of 'em may keep me always humble.' (Alexander Pope)

'A portrait is a painting where there is something not quite right about the mouth' (John Singer Sargent)

'Every time I paint a portrait, I lose a friend.' (John Singer Sargent)

Portraiture is an art 'levying a tax upon the vanity of mankind.' (Walter Scott)

Portraiture is 'an abuse of real art which should (aye and will) be reserved for better purpose.' (Third Earl of Shaftesbury)

'There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face.' (Duncan in Macbeth, who paid the price for thinking so)

'layer upon layer of wrappings cover personality [and the artist must be] as absorbent as blotting paper and as patient and watchful as a cat...letting the subject gradually reveal himself unconsciously so that by his voice and gaze as well as by his solid flesh your memory and emotions are stirred and assaulted'
(Graham Sutherland)

'...As when a painter, poring on a face,
Divinely through all hindrance finds the man
Behind it, and so paints him that face,
The shape and colour of a mind and life,
Lives for his children, ever at its best,
And fullest...' (Tennyson incorporating in 'Lancelot and Elaine' G.F. Watts's reply to the question of what was in his mind when he began a portrait.)

'In speaking of portraits, there is never much to say.' (W.M. Thackeray)

'A portrait should have in it something of the monumental; it is a summary of the life of a person, not the record of accidental position or arrangement of light or shadows.' (G.F. Watts)

'Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.' (Oscar Wilde)

'Go, faithful Portrait...
And...Thou...though kingdoms melt
And states be torn up by the roots, wilt seem
To breathe in rural peace, to hear the stream,
And think and feel as once the Poet felt...' (William Wordsworth)

PHOTOGRAPHS

Photographs are a major ingredient and include the most important (and least obtainable) photographs from the two great series Men and Women of the Day (1888-1891) and Galerie Contemporaine (c. 1876-1884) appropriate to the theme of my stock. These series have become scarcer and more expensive in recent years, an almost complete set of Men and Women of the Day reaching some $12,000 at auction. Most of the photographs in both series, especially Men and Women of the Day are of worthies of their time rather than of the creatively talented and therefore do not qualify for the collection offered in this catalogue [only 20 at most of the 180 in Men and Women of the Day have relevance here]. The photographers in these two series include Herbert Rose Barraud and the great French photographers Felix Nadar and Étienne Carjat. There are also items from Alvin Langdon Coburn's remarkable collection Men of Mark, both from a proof and an ordinary copy.

PRINTS

Before photography, separately issued prints were the principal means by which pictures and painters reached a wide audience and from which artists derived a significant addition to their income. Prints proved crucial in the dissemination and development of taste and knowledge - it was to their print collections that connoisseurs and art critics turned as the primary sources in the formation of their views about a particular painting and about Art in general. When paintings have been lost, over-cleaned or otherwise damaged or re-worked, prints serve as vital documentary evidence about the originals. Fine examples and proofs seem to be becoming increasingly hard and expensive to find. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, prints, especially mezzotints (with their velvet, moody luminosity) were used extensively for portraits in England. Mezzotints are generally the main fine eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century portraits available within the budgets of many collectors - each individually made and often commissioned and overseen by the original artist.

Prints have not only, of course, been used to reproduce already existing works of art. They have also been, and still are, produced as original art works in their own right, albeit available in a number of impressions, though normally very limited. Proofs are additionally prized as being limited in the extreme (frequently unique) and share some of the spontaneous delights of preliminary drawings. Prints are therefore often 'original', sui generis, with marvellous and special qualities that will guarantee their continued survival, production and collection. Hugh Walpole in his novel Portrait of a Man with Red Hair (1929) wrote of etchings, for instance: 'Etchings are intimate and individual…They are so personal that every separate impression has a fresh character. They are so lovely in soul that they never age …' Like medallions, prints, though both are collectable for themselves, do also remain an affordable means of owning contemporary likenesses of personalities whom one admires.