cosas ‘things’ (Spanish), from Latin causa ‘cause’

Our things tell our story. These bits and bobs, which we amass through work and life, finding self-definition among the clutter, have been used as biographical motif by portraitists through the ages: astronomer Nicholas Kratzer, famously clasping dividers in one hand and dial in the other; moustachioed explorers reclining on animal skins; the pioneers of Victorian infrastructure whose tools rest briefly on hard-working desks; actors signalled by props; chemists by test tubes. These are the cliches of the commissioned portrait – and it is cliche that contemporary artists like Grace Lau play with, posing among a tableau of things which speak to imperialist perceptions of China (Chromogenic print, 2005). 

But it is possible to see playfulness and challenge even in the stolid archetype. Is the cigarette casually held a fraction from the Indian Ocean in James Tissot’s 1870 portrait of intelligence officer, Frederick Burnaby, about to set the whole wall-map on fire? Why is Gerrit Dou’s ‘Urine Doctor’ (c.1650) swilling his vial of urine on the diagonal to a desk globe, whose handle resembles the aperture of a huge, hollow pisspot, transforming that symbol of Dutch ‘Golden Age’ power into a vessel for human waste? For that matter, why has David Teniers the Younger painted the dead fish at the feet of his marketmen so like a sheet of parchment if not to exploit the double-take and capture the troubling materiality of the seaborne empire to which the trader is pointing? 

Things signal mastery. The portraitist includes the sportsman’s tools to actualise the reason for commission, solidifying the talent or intent that flickers behind the texture of skin, the shape of skull or hand. But we know, really, that the link is tenuous, the connection between thing and mastery so fragile it needs reification. After all, the monarch of the royal portrait can hold their orb and sceptre all they like, but disparate, resistant people are unlikely to think them ‘master’. The portrait’s things are not inert, then; ‘our story’ might be one of the stories told, but the bookcase at the back of the portrait of the author has others, too. To take the Spanish derivation – the language of the artist under discussion – things (‘cosas’) do not end with their originator. Things cause.

Miriam Escofet’s portrait of her artist father, José, features compositional elements drawn from classical Spanish bodegón and details from the sitter’s own work. Miriam, who won the 2024 Smallwood Architects Prize for this painting and has previously won the 2018 BP Portrait Award for a portrait of her mother (‘An Angel at the Table’), describes the painting as ‘a biographical portrait that asks what is left of us at the end of a life’. The title, ‘What will survive of us…’, taken from Philp Larkin’s poem, ‘An Arundel Tomb’, is obviously suggestive. In the poem, a visitor to Chichester Cathedral is struck by the stone effigy of a couple holding hands – a gesture which in life might have been fleeting, private, not always meant. Escofet caps ‘love’ (‘What is left of us is love’ ends the poem), stepping back from the schmaltz usually associated with the line when quoted in isolation, to foreground the permanence of the material, the obduracy of the thing.

Awarded the Smallwood Prize for its suggestion of an interior, the stuff in Escofet’s portrait is staged on plinths and parapets typical of the classical Spanish school, particularly arrangements by Juan Sánchez Cotán, Antonio Ponce, Tomás Hiepes, Francisco de Zubarán, with the simple stone window redolent of Velázquez’s trompe l’oeil. The tradition is so clear that we cannot escape its associations – of rotting fruit, creped skin beside plump, perishability, vanitas. All the more interesting, then, that title: this will not perish, it says, amidst almost every visual clue of perishability going. The painting of the painting of the apples works to highlight the process of reification, the labour of making a lasting imprint which the art of portraiture attempts to short-circuit. Arguably, it’s this hopeless tension that gives the portrait its vitality. 

So, what are José’s things? Thanks to his own profile as an artist, a key of works can easily be drawn. These are emblems of the man’s creative world, with emphasis on ‘world’ – because we are back to seventeenth-century motif and, specifically, the presence of globes. The yolky eye of the auricula, the apples, the cut face of the orange and the circumference gracefully delineated by its peel, the breast, the ruff, the blousy peony, the ring stain, the cup’s rim. Circles and spheres abound. And with this abundance of globes, the idea of a key becomes wobblier. Each world has its own system of references – an idea set into motion by the levitating apple, plucked straight from Magritte, which introduces unruly associations with American material culture. The painted object is free to roam symbolically in any direction; it lives beyond the physicality of the biographical subject. The cup and saucer in the bottom-right corner show Escofet playing with this truism, because they have been “recycled” from ‘An Angel at the Table’, creating a feedback loop between paintings. A beautiful example of hyper-real application, a study in space and atmosphere, and a reinvention of the bodegón, one of the achievements of ‘What will survive of us…’ is the way it spotlights amassment and the quest for durability. 

Rather than keep attempting to galvanise the connection between stuff and subject, effective contemporary paintings create visual disjuncts to interrogate it. Like ‘What will survive of us…’, Anthony Williams’s ‘Jaqueline with Still Life’ tackles aging – or, more particularly, the coexistence of simultaneous temporalities. A “Covid painting”, Williams’s portrait is forcefully presentist – as such, it dialogues with a world where PPE is discarded in edgelands, and Amazon home ordering goes through the roof. Also like the Escofet, it has a self-conscious title that asks us to consider the ways in which the portrait (‘Jacqueline’) and the ‘Still Life’ are discrete. In this painting, Jaqueline lies naked on the floor beside a little tableau of miniature houses, towered over by a plastic dinosaur. Unnatural scales, passing childhood and claustrophobic domesticity. But, as a nude, this is also a study in flesh and the perversity of flesh to claim parity with objects whose timeframes are vastly different. Williams tenderly paints an adolescent physique for whom toys only had a brief relevance. The milky whorls of blood-infused skin, however, are no match for those robust primary colours, especially in a painting that timestamps itself so clearly during a period of high body counts.

Whether or not to include associative objects will always be one of the choices faced by the portraitist – and, indeed, will continue to be dismissed by many as gimmick. We only need look to art history and the paintings which deploy emblems to signal the longevity of a political system , to understand that they are never simply “associative”, drawing their own fraught attention and ethics. As consumerism modulates our landscapes into surreal goblin kingdoms, the burial ground of a thousand Saxon kings, and humanity’s thingness spells its death, it is time to reconsider the expressive, obdurate stuff that outlives its sitters and eyeballs the viewer as suggestively and uncompromisingly as any heavy-lidded stare.