{"id":37854,"date":"2023-12-18T16:28:45","date_gmt":"2023-12-18T16:28:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therp.co.uk\/?page_id=37854"},"modified":"2024-03-19T12:29:03","modified_gmt":"2024-03-19T12:29:03","slug":"the-rp-writing-prize-victoria-baena","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/therp.co.uk\/the-rp-writing-prize-victoria-baena\/","title":{"rendered":"The RP Writing Prize: VICTORIA BAENA"},"content":{"rendered":"

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THE RP CRITICAL WRITING PRIZE 2023<\/b><\/h2>\n

FINALIST: VICTORIA BAENA<\/h1>\n

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Albert Charles Challen, ‘Mary Seacole’<\/p>\n

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ESSAY:<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Eminently Contemporary<\/b><\/p>\n

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Since the 1856 founding of the National Portrait Gallery, its mission has been to \u201cmaintain a collection of portraits of the most eminent persons in British history.\u201d But what is, or should be, the measure of eminence? For Philip Stanhope, who appealed to the House of Lords in March 1856 for a \u201cgallery of original portraits,\u201d the parameters were more or less clear. Such a site, he submitted, should feature prominent men already recognised \u201cas warriors or as statesmen, or in arts, in literature or in science.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Earl Stanhope had already floated the proposal twice before. This time he came equipped with further backing, reading aloud letters from Thomas Carlyle which declared the portrait to be \u201csuperior in real instruction to half-a-dozen written biographies.\u201d Carlyle\u2019s own 1840 lecture series, \u201cOn Heroism, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in Society,\u201d had already expounded a theory of history based on the admirable deeds and inimitable character of Great Men. For Carlyle\u2014a biographer and historian himself\u2014portraiture offered a means of personal edification as well as national enlightenment.<\/p>\n

Recently reopened after a three-year renovation, the National Portrait Gallery continues to grapple with the legacy of its early founders and trustees. Today, the museum aspires to foreground a more inclusive understanding of British identity. Its redesign is meant to showcase a vaster array of those who have \u201cmade an impact on British history.\u201d Yet \u201ceminence\u201d continues to be the yardstick for the display and acquisition of its collection. In retaining that measure of distinction, while also seeking to elevate history\u2019s more overlooked figures, the revamped NPG also rekindles a tension at the heart of modern portraiture\u2014a tension between the singular and the collective, and between individual renown and generalizable type. Can the very logic of a national portrait gallery elude an idea of history as an ineluctable march of progress and glory, led by those proclaimed to be \u201cgreat\u201d?<\/p>\n

Both a history of British portraiture and a history of Britain through portraiture, the NPG has tended to privilege the celebrity of the sitter over the aesthetic achievement of the artist. Even before it opened to the public in 1859, competing understandings of its national\u2014and ideological\u2014aims had already sparked debate. How important was the portrait\u2019s \u201cauthenticity,\u201d that is, historical likeness? (It was decided that portraits should date from the same era as their subjects: the founders scoffed at those \u201cimaginary\u201d portraits, painted many years after their sitters\u2019 deaths, that flanked contemporary Scottish and French galleries.) But within a post-Byronic culture of celebrity\u2014epitomised by the popular literary \u201cportrait galleries\u201d of Fraser\u2019s Magazine<\/i>\u2014how would the Gallery avoid merely rewarding celebrity for celebrity\u2019s sake? (A \u201c10-year rule\u201d forbidding the acquisition of any portrait until a decade after its sitter\u2019s death sought to evade this tautological problem of eminence: the rule remained in place until 1969). The founders ultimately settled on a Horatian logic of education, instruction, as well as visual pleasure for its projected audience. To what extent, then, should moral virtue serve as a criterion for inclusion? (Eventually it was agreed that certain \u201cfaults and errors,\u201d when balanced against a potential subject\u2019s \u201csignificant contribution\u201d to British history, would not absolutely doom their chances.)<\/p>\n

The redesigned NPG\u2019s evolving understanding of \u201ceminence\u201d has genuinely transformed the look of its halls. Forty-eight percent of post-1900 galleries now feature women, compared to 35 percent in 2020. An 1869 portrait of Mary Seacole, rediscovered only in 2002, is now given pride of place on the second floor. Around the corner, a \u201cwall of fame\u201d presents dozens of cartes de visite which, thanks to the expansion of photography in the 1850s, circulated on a mass scale and helped to democratise access to the image. An \u201cEveryday Portraits\u201d section de-monumentalises European portraiture by displaying medallions, sketches, miniatures, and faces of revolutionary and anticolonial figures spray-painted onto industrially produced T-shirts.<\/p>\n

The \u201cHistory Makers\u201d wall that occupies the ground floor, the first set of portraits that most visitors will see, swerves even further away from portraiture\u2019s history as an elite form of aesthetic production, even as it also recalls the crowded, maximalist setup of eighteenth-century exhibitions. Subjects range from King Charles to the writer Jeanette Winterson, from Vogue editor Anna Wintour to filmmaker Steve McQueen. (They are a reminder, if we needed one, that \u201ceminence\u201d has no necessary politics.) Meanwhile, a tapestry along the opposite wall commemorates the \u201ckey workers, the unsung heroes of the COVID-19 pandemic.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the mid-nineteenth century, Stanhope and Carlyle were serenely confident about promoting a Victorian narrative of national progress and imperial grandeur. For the pre-1900 galleries, the NPG has now opted for recuperation and contextualisation in turn in order to tackle the internal contradictions of a nation and empire that grew rich off the oppression of its own working classes, as well as the enslavement and exploitation of colonial subjects abroad. Slaveowner Sir John Gladstone\u2019s distinguished portrait (c. 1830), for instance, is the museum\u2019s main existing record of the Demerara Uprising of 1823, in which 10,000 people in current-day Guyana rose up against their oppressors. It is now paired with a 2021 pen-and-ink drawing by Errol Ross Brewster of one of the uprising\u2019s leaders, Jack, son of Quamina.<\/p>\n

Amid its extensive rehang and thoughtful redesign, however, the National Portrait Gallery has largely retained its celebratory mode. In that sense the Gallery has not gone nearly as far in interrogating the very category of \u201ceminence\u201d as Lytton Strachey did over a century ago. Strachey\u2019s Eminent Victorians <\/i>(1918), composed during a war that was testing British elites\u2019 capacity for self-mythologising, offered four lively, avowedly partial (and sometimes simply factually incorrect) portraits of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon. These \u201chaphazard visions,\u201d as Strachey described them, abrogated any attempt at cohesion, much less an alternative national narrative. Rather, by means of gauzy irony and proto-modernist juxtaposition, Strachey would expose certain \u201cfragments of the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Traditionally, portraits were ranked beneath history painting in the hierarchy of genres precisely because they portrayed their subjects as individuals, not as instances of a general rule. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the priority of Joshua Reynolds\u2019s \u201cgeneral effect\u201d over, say, William Blake\u2019s \u201cminute particulars\u201d began to cede ground, as portraiture came to align with the legitimacy and dignity of the individual subject. Personhood, originality, depth of character: these aspects of the post-Romantic self are some of the most cherished affordances of the modern portrait.<\/p>\n

The new NPG wants to emphasise \u201cthe story of those who may not have had their portrait made,\u201d in the words of director Nicholas Cullinan. Yet as its own collections reveal, Britain\u2019s official culture long ascribed personhood itself\u2014with its incumbent property rights, voting privileges, not to mention autonomy and basic dignity\u2014only to some.<\/p>\n

In Karl Marx\u2019s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte\u2014<\/i>the source of his famous statement that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then farce\u2014he reflected on the possibilities, and failures, of revolutionaries to resist and overcome these realities. Along the way, Marx put forward a historical materialist\u2019s understanding of the relation between the individual and the masses: \u201cMen make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please.\u201d Ninety years later, CLR James echoed Marx in his own account of the Haitian Revolution, a biographical portrait of the revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture in the context of the modern world\u2019s first successful slave revolt: \u201cGreat men make history, but only such\u00a0history as it is possible for them to make.\u201d<\/i> In both cases, individual eminence is only one piece of a dialectic between circumstance, leadership, and the resistance of those more often unremembered.<\/p>\n

Unremembered by whom, we might ask? The new NPG includes several more daring attempts to reconsider the definition of portraiture. A plaque hanging beneath a famous photographic portrait by Julia Margaret Cameron of the Jamaican Governor Edward Eyre asks, \u201cBut where are the Jamaican protesters?\u201d Below, an interactive screen lends visitors the chance to experience a series of \u201cportraits in sound.\u201d Songs and lyrics by Jamaican and other reggae artists, from Culture\u2019s \u201cInnocent Blood\u201d to Steel Pulse\u2019s \u201cBorn Fe Rebel,\u201d commemorate Paul Bogle and George William Gordon, leaders of the Morant Bay rebellion, as Eyre\u2014who brutally suppressed the rebellion, with Carlyle\u2019s support\u2014looks broodingly on.<\/p>\n

To paint someone\u2019s portrait can lead to a radical reversal of hierarchies or it can merely entrench them. At their best, the redesigned galleries of the NPG ask viewers to consider portraiture not as a static form but as an evolving, ongoing practice, one susceptible to change\u2014and open to contestation. Portraits, in this sense, are not only icons of the great: they also take part in material histories of social struggle that extend beyond the canvas frame.[\/vc_column_text][vc_separator][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]To stay in touch and hear the latest news please subscribe to our newsletter<\/p>\n

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[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] THE RP CRITICAL WRITING PRIZE 2023 FINALIST: VICTORIA BAENA [\/vc_column_text][vc_separator][vc_column_text] Albert Charles Challen, ‘Mary Seacole’ [\/vc_column_text][vc_column_text] ESSAY: Eminently Contemporary   Since the 1856 founding of the National Portrait Gallery, its mission has been to \u201cmaintain a collection of portraits of the most eminent persons in British history.\u201d But what is, or should be, the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":37837,"parent":0,"menu_order":3,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"yoast_head":"\nThe RP Writing Prize: VICTORIA BAENA - The Royal Society of Portrait Painters<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"VICTORIA BAENA Finalist Essay: \u201cEminently Contemporary\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/therp.co.uk\/the-rp-writing-prize-victoria-baena\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The RP Writing Prize: VICTORIA BAENA - 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