The exhibition the National Portrait Gallery has put together to celebrate the Millennium - Painting the Century - consists of 101 pictures: one painted in each year from 1900 to 2000. Hung chronologically, it shows the last century's stylistic disarray. Even in the narrow genre of face painting no single way of doing the job, nothing which would give a good idea in advance of what kind of picture a portrait would be, was dominant. Not, anyway, after the early 1900s when an easy handling of pose and paint which goes back at least to Opie was still keeping fashionable portraitists in rather good bread and butter. Diana of the Uplands, Furze's portrait of his wife with greyhounds from 1903, Sargent's portrait of Sir Frank Swettenham from 1904 and Boldini's Duchess of Marlborough with Her Son from 1906, even Orpen's Homage to Manet from 1909 (a less radical tribute to a radical painter is hard to imagine) share a suavity which can still enrage. The Boldini (a very silly picture) has been picked by more than one critic to receive the first brickbat.

LRB 16 November 2000 | PDF Download