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The National
an hour ago
- Entertainment
- The National
'It's not just a big selfie': Inside the unexpected revival of old-school painted portraits
It was, concedes Claudia Fisher, a lot of money to spend. 'I'd never spent that kind of money on something before,' says the American creative director of women's tailoring brand Belle Brummell. 'But I have something unique that gives me a lot of joy, and I have supported the art form and that's important.' Indeed, Fisher's Dh98,000 outlay went to having her portrait painted by celebrated portraitist Paul Brason, who counts leading industrialists, academics and the British royal family's late Prince Philip among his subjects. 'I just loved the way he could render fabric so exquisitely, giving his paintings an old master quality, even if the painting now just hangs in my house,' says Fisher. 'It's fun to say 'hi' to it once in a while.' Fisher is not alone. Both the Portrait Society of America and the UK's Royal Society of Portrait Painters – the two most august institutions of portrait painting, which not only promote portraiture, but also operate commissioning services that connect artists and subjects – report healthy demand. If one might worry that the smartphone age – which has made the constant taking of pictures almost compulsive – would kill off portrait painting, it seems the reverse is the case. 'Portraiture is quite a big business within the art world, really, even if it is often portrayed as being rather traditional, in the sense of being concerned with old ideas of beauty in art,' says Anthony Connolly, president of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. 'And while a lot of institutions still commission portraits – the church, military, academia, corporations, heads of state and so on – portraiture is changing dramatically from the idea that it's an elitist thing to do. Now, it's more just a culture of people painting people.' Connolly argues that while a portrait is definitely a luxury item, for a one-off work by a highly skilled individual, and for something that will last generations, it can nonetheless represent very good value, 'especially if you put it in the context of another bespoke item, the likes of a Savile Row suit '. Besides, portrait painters run the gamut as much in their price – from as little as Dh2,000 to much, much more – as they do in their style. Dubai artist Suzi Nassif, for example, creates portraits in surrealistic, sometimes cubist styles, with her subjects expressed more through unexpected colours and symbolism than an accurate likeness. 'They're imaginative portraits, more as I see them and not necessarily as the subjects might see themselves,' says Nassif, who, once she has got to know her subject, prefers to then work from memory. 'The power of the portrait is to examine the psyche behind the mask, and to do that I think it makes sense to use all the creative tools available to the painter.' Certainly, while for an artist who prefers to work in person, a portrait might require the sitter to give perhaps two to three hours of their time, maybe four or five times over several months, it's also increasingly commonplace for artists to work in part or entirely from photographs. For example, artist Columbus Onuoha, who also lives in Dubai, is recognised for his photorealistic portraits in oil paint. Digital photography actually helps him zoom in on the precise details that make his portraits so arresting. It also allows him to tackle the work as inspiration strikes rather than be beholden to the sitter's schedule. Far from being put off by having their image rendered in exquisitely unforgiving detail, 'clients love the honesty of the results, the transparency', reckons Onuoha. 'Though, occasionally, people of a certain age want to be represented as a little younger than they are. But a portrait should be a record of a time of life. I tell my subjects to be proud of the age they are, though I sometimes do a self-portrait to remind myself how it feels.' And how does being intimately examined, and then represented in paint, feel? Connolly, who is currently having his own portrait painted, suggests that far from being a discomforting experience 'it's very convivial, intimate without being salacious and almost like a kind of meditation. You feel like you're part of the painting process even though, of course, you're not painting the portrait.' Yet surely just having a photograph taken – even one by a professional – is faster and simpler? Yes, Onuoha agrees, but that is to miss the point of why people want to be painted. He argues that, while social media has certainly helped him to build a career, it's the very ubiquity of digital images – and the way they have democratised portraiture – that encourages many of his clients to want 'something that's handmade, tangible, and that puts them at the centre of an artistic process', he says. 'These people also tend to love art. They want to be involved.' But others go further, arguing that a painted portrait simply catches what a photograph never can. As Christine Egnoski, chief executive of the Portrait Society of America, suggests, it reveals the qualities of a person unseen by a snap, 'offering the viewer a more real sense of the person's presence, as well as the artist's own expression. An artist adds the feeling of the person.' It explains why, she argues, 10 million people queue to look at the Mona Lisa each year, and the enduring appeal of the portrait in art, both before and since the advent of photography. Frances Bell, portrait painter and recent winner of the Portrait Society of America's prestigious Draper Grand Prize, puts it another way. 'A painted portrait has something of the thrum of life about it, something transcendent – there's so much life on the canvas that it can feel like a window on another, sometimes historic world,' she says. 'The artist is trying to work out who that person is – their mannerisms, how they hold themselves and so on – so the result understands something deeper than a photo can. It's not just a big selfie, but is very personal, which is why it's very important that a sitter pick the right painter for them.' It's also why, she suggests, people so often turn to this special means of representing someone not out of vanity, but to mark a special moment in their life – an important anniversary, for example, or, as more than one of Bell's clients have done, to celebrate getting over a major illness. And why, so often, it's not the sitter who commissions the portrait for themselves, but a partner or family member. Sure, the result may never be hung in a gallery or a museum, but what better way to celebrate and immortalise an individual life than in paint?
New York Times
10 hours ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Rosalind Fox Solomon, Whose Photos Captured Emotional Nuance, Dies at 95
Rosalind Fox Solomon, a photographer whose penetrating black-and-white portraits shot in the American South, Israel and diverse spots around the globe earned her the admiration of critics and a place in the world's most prestigious museums, died on Monday in Manhattan. She was 95. Her death, in a hospital, was announced by the MUUS Collection, a photography archive that houses her work. Ms. Fox Solomon was sometimes compared to Diane Arbus, and like Arbus, she studied with the great Austrian émigré photographer Lisette Model. But unlike her more famous peer, Ms. Fox Solomon captured sometimes off-putting subjects with a warm intensity that infused them with humanity, even if they appeared strange or unappealing at first glance. The white woman in 'Poke Bonnet, First Mondays, Scottsboro, Alabama' (1976), in Ms. Fox Solomon's 2018 book, 'Liberty Theater,' appears pleased with herself and overconfident, potentially queasy attributes given the time and place. Like the subjects of Ms. Fox Solomon's other portraits, she dominates the frame. But she is not an Arbus freak, nor is she grotesque. She is a familiar sort of woman in early middle age, not a caricature of a white Southerner. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
CTV News
10 hours ago
- CTV News
Francis the Pig statue will return
Red Deer's infamous Francis the Pig statue will be reinstalled in August. The porcine icon has been gone for nearly two years after the metal rods that hold the sculpture in place were damaged.
Travel Weekly
12 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Travel Weekly
Ritz-Carlton's Luminara yacht christened in Barcelona
With "Bridgerton" star Simone Ashley onboard as godmother, Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection christened its newest ship, Luminara, on Thursday in Barcelona. Luminara is Ritz-Carlton's third ship and will sail its maiden voyage July 3 from Monte Carlo to Rome. "It's an extraordinary honor to be named godmother of Luminara -- a yacht that represents the very best of exploration, artistry, and hospitality," Ashley said in a news release. Luminara will the brand's first ship with Asia itineraries. It accommodates up to 452 guests and has 226 suites, just a couple more than the Ilma. Onboard, guests will find more than 700 art pieces, including work by Andy Warhol and David Hockney, as well as menus by two James Beard Award-winning chefs: Fabio Trabocchi and Michael Mina. The ship also newly features Cartier, IWC Schaffhausen and Piaget stores.
The Guardian
13 hours ago
- Business
- The Guardian
Thomas Neurath obituary
In 1967, when still in his 20s, Thomas Neurath became managing director of Thames & Hudson, the illustrated book publishers founded by his father and stepmother in 1949. He led the firm for half a century, continuing his parents' aim of bringing authoritative scholarship on the world of art and culture to a wide readership. Neurath, who has died aged 84 of cancer, developed the bedrock World of Art series, which had launched in 1958, to encompass some 300 titles covering the history of art; more than a million copies of the books have now been sold. 'I can't remember ever wanting to be a publisher,' Neurath said in a 2011 interview with Livres Hebdo, the weekly bible of the French book trade. 'And then one day I was.' It would have been a difficult fate to avoid. As the photography historian Philippe Garner, said, Neurath 'carried European history in his DNA'. His father's stepfather, Arthur Stemmer, a noted collector of Egon Schiele, had fled Vienna for London after the Anschluss; Thomas's parents, Walter, a publisher and gallery owner, and Marianne (nee Müller), a schoolteacher, had also escaped to England from Austria in 1938. Thames & Hudson became part of that injection of continental culture into postwar Britain that would include everyone from Ernst Gombrich to Oskar Kokoschka. Thomas joined the family business as an editor in 1961, his life changing completely when his father died six years later. He became responsible for the day to day running of Thames & Hudson – his sister, Constance, took over design – and he would remain the company's managing director until 2005, and chairman until 2021. It was a daunting inheritance. In Vienna, Walter had, among much else, taught at the equivalent of the Workers' Educational Association, and Thames & Hudson was shaped by the Fabian ideal of providing high quality books at affordable prices, particularly to students. Thomas felt duty bound to continue 'the heritage and socialist ideals of my parents'. At the same time, he had no intention of allowing the company to go bust by preserving it in aspic. 'In my father's view, only painting, architecture and sculpture counted as art in their own right,' Neurath said. 'He thought of photography as lacking in seriousness and fashion as frivolous.' Both of these were now added to the T&H lists, while definitions of the fine arts were broadened and modernised. In 1984, the company became the first to publish a book on graffiti, in the form of Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant's Subway Art. Others followed on such non-Eurocentric subjects as Buddhist and Aboriginal Australian art. Neurath, a child of the 60s, also introduced titles on what he called 'archetypal psychology', including John Michell's deeply kooky 1969 book View Over Atlantis. All these appeared alongside the heavyweight works of scholarship his father had favoured, together with exhibition catalogues for galleries and museums around the world. If Neurath broadened the company's cultural reach, he also set about globalising its business. Like many refugees from Nazism, the Neuraths had been eager to assimilate. One of the books on Thames & Hudson's first list in 1950 was Geoffrey Grigson's English Cathedrals. Before studying at Cambridge, Thomas had been sent to Charterhouse, a leading public school. But for all his parents' efforts, he never seemed entirely English. Royalty puzzled him: when T&H produced a book on the photographs of Cecil Beaton, Neurath was heard to moan, 'But who is the Duchess of Gloucester?' He was prone, without thinking, to assume that all his editors could read German. As well as building on the World of Art, with titles now translated into 16 languages, he opened T&H offshoots abroad. The company's original two-river name had anticipated operations in London and New York, both of them English-speaking cities. In 1989, Neurath set up Éditions Thames & Hudson in Paris, the World of Art series becoming L'Univers de l'Art. 'I loved being there,' he said. 'It had always been a dream of mine to have an office in Paris.' For all his insistence on guarding his parents' socialist principles, Neurath was a skilful businessman. The suggestion that Thames & Hudson might be in some way a philanthropic concern made him bristle. His genius for forming allegiances with foreign publishing houses helped the company flourish at a time when other publishers were going to the wall. Neurath was born in Brackley, Northamptonshire, after his parents found wartime refuge in Britain. His father worked for a publishing company called Adprint and, following Marianne's death in 1950 aged 40, married Eva Feuchtwang (nee Itzig), a colleague and fellow refugee with whom he set up Thames & Hudson. After leaving school, and a short spell with a publisher in Israel, which he hated, Thomas was sent to Paris, to work as an intern at the French house Éditions Arthaud. Moving into the so-called Beat Hotel in rue Gît-le-Cœur – a fleapit whose residents included Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs – the 18-year-old found himself caught up in the glory days of the Left Bank. Photographs of the time show him beaming widely and, invariably, smoking. From there, he left to read archaeology and anthropology at St John's College, Cambridge – he hated this, too, and dropped out – joining Thames & Hudson in 1961. The firm remained, above all, a family affair. Neurath's two daughters followed him into the business, becoming T&H directors. More broadly, employees were treated as though they were family, occasionally alarmingly so. Neurath's fits of temper were famous: Thames & Hudson mythology includes the story of him throwing a shoe at a startled archaeology editor. But loyalty was bred on both sides. The company's employees tended to stay, sometimes for their entire careers. Beneath his chain-smoking bearishness, Neurath was a shy man. Unlike his stepmother, Eva, who was driven to the office every day in a chauffeured Bentley, he shunned public life, preferring the company of his children and grandchildren in his book-filled north London house. This, too, retained a faint air of prewar Vienna. 'I grew up in a house where we talked a lot about culture and literature,' Neurath said. He is survived by his wife, Gun Thor, a jewellery designer, whom he married in 1962, their daughters Johanna and Susanna, and his sister, Constance. Thomas Neurath, publisher, born 7 October 1940; died 13 June 2025
