Philip de Laszlo: Thoughts on Portrait Painting

"Francis Adam" by Philip de Laszlo

"Has any one painter ever before painted so many interesting and historical personages?' wrote Lord Selborne to Philip de Laszlo in 1927. It would be difficult to think of one. During the course of his career de Laszlo, according to his own computation, painted over 2,700 portraits. In an output so great as his, it was inevitable that there should be failures, but a man is entitled to be judged by his best work rather than by his worst.

In a paper he read before the Royal Society of Arts a year before he died, he told his audience what, in his opinion, made a great portrait. 'It is not,' he declared, 'the merely exact reproduction of the sitter's face as it is seen by the artist in his studio - that is the kind of superficial likeness that a camera would give. It is a representation on canvas of the features of the sitter, but through the knowledge and intuition of the artist there must be revealed in those features the sitter's soul and all his potentialities of character and temperament. The picture must show us the spirit by which the human form is vitalized; and besides, it must provide the sitter with the surroundings and atmosphere which are suitable to his personality and consistent with his state of life.'

'But, as it is only what the artist can see in his sitter that will appear in the portrait, the extent of this revelation will depend upon the degree of sensitiveness in perception which the artist possesses. Nothing will serve so well to give him the necessary insight as confidence and sympathy between him and his sitter. The truly great portrait is the one in which this contact has been so close that it has spurred the artist to his highest achievement and to which, by a tacit collaboration, the sitter and the artist have both contributed something vital.'

'In the give and take of unguarded conversation the inner ego reveals itself in the sudden flash of the eyes, in the droop of the eyebrows, in the charm of the smile, the pose of the body, or even in the gesture of the hands. It is the office of the portrait painter to be quick to recognize and to retain this momentary revelation of the inner self, to bring it into harmony and into unison with the surface personality.'

He also maintained that the artist must have so sure a command over the mechanism of painting that he had no need to struggle with his materials. His hand must be trained to respond immediately to his intentions, so that he could be free to concentrate on expressing those subtleties of character by which the personality of a sitter is defined."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Portrait of a Painter" by Owen Rutter.)