A Celebration of Portraiture: Twentieth Century Britain

PIANO NOBILE is delighted to participate in a nationwide celebration of portraiture, instigated by the National Portrait Gallery to mark their reopening after a significant redevelopment. The accurate depiction of human likeness began with rhetorically truthful images of beauty and power in fourth-century B.C. Greece. Since then artists have gained an upper hand in the tradition of portraiture, making images that disquietingly externalise the sitter's identity and expose differences between how they are seen and how they see themselves. The portraits included in this exhibition were made by renowned twentieth-century British artists, and each one invites you into the aura of a specific personality. Highlights include a newly rediscovered portrait drawing of the novelist E. M. Forster by William Rothenstein and an epic, lacerating self-portrait by F. N. Souza, which is on loan from the Ruth Borchard Collection. Other portraits illustrate friendship, as with David Landau's portrait by Frank Auerbach and Peter Morris's by Duncan Grant. A little-known painting by R.B. Kitaj, depicting a Jewish Catholic priest called Monsignor Ungar, will also be on display.

Naturally their faces had a different look on them. But they were, one remembered, firm faces, faces with something indomitable in their expression. [Virginia Woolf]

WORKS