CULTURE: Rehanging the Reformed House of Commons
The new Regency Rooms at the National Portrait Gallery
Often I have found a Portrait superior in real instruction to half-a-dozen written 'Biographies', as Biographies are written; or rather, let me say, I have found that the Portrait was as a small lighted candle by which the Biographies could for the first time be read, and some human interpretation be made of them.— Thomas Carlyle, 1854
Regency in retrospect
The National Portrait Gallery was founded in 1856 with the worthy goal of providing ‘a gallery of portraits of the more Eminent Persons in British History’ — a pantheon of the nation’s great and good, for the purpose of public edification, the inevitable perambulations before them shading into a kind of secularised civic ritual observance. But by the time the first visitors started turning up at the beginning of 1859 to view the 57 portraits that formed the core of the NPG’s original collection, the Regency was only just mutating from actual personal memory into the filmier stuff of myth and incipient legend. It was, in short, exactly the sort of past that still had enough life in it to galvanise and even polarise the present. So it is worth remembering that in 1859, the last days of Pitt and Fox stood roughly as far distant as Queen Elizabeth’s coronation does from our own day; Waterloo was as distant as the general election of 1959 and the premiership of Harold Macmillan, while the death of the Prince Regent lay as far back, more or less, as the Winter of Discontent and the beginning of the Thatcher era.
Already, though, ‘Regency’ had begun to take on some of the connotations it has today. There was a hint of gross moral laxity — in hindsight particularly, when it became possible to compare the court of the ‘Prince of Whales’ with that of his young, wholesome, slightly dull great-niece — but there was also a formidable record of elegance and style. There was British military success on a scale not known for a hundred years before, if ever, but also an ongoing anxiety over the safety of public figures and ancient institutions. There were the celebrities: poets and actors, obviously, and famous beauties too, but also inventors and agricultural innovators, scientists and arctic explorers. And then there were political battles marshalled by such titanic figures, fought over such crucial territory with such far-reaching consequences as to leave their marks on our own time, let alone that of the 1850s. Or to put it another way, it is hard to imagine that by 1859 the Regency had not begun to seem not only larger than life, but more colourful, too. No wonder, then, that the NPG’s original collection contained a fair share of Regency-era portraits. Even in the re-hung rooms, the low acquisition numbers of some of the Regency portraits — Thomas Lawrence’s marvellously vivid unfinished portrait of William Wilberforce’s is item 3 of the entire NPG collection — testify to the almost overpowering importance of the recent past at the time when the collection was established.
Of silk walls and silver cornices
This week the Regency Rooms reopen after a £1.2 million restoration programme. (Of this amount, only £367,500 was paid for by the Heritage Lottery Fund, with most of the money coming from private individuals and organisations.) Piers Gough of CZWG Architects was given the task of redesigning the rooms themselves, working around the Art Deco features of the original 1937 building, while NPG curator Lucy Peltz was in charge of displaying and interpreting the portraits themselves.
It probably ought to be said right away that the refurbishment is, to my mind anyway, largely successful. The most striking thing about the setting is its likeable brio. Passing from the rather low, rather dark corridor of the Georgian displays across a foyer into the Regency Rooms, one immediately looks forward and then upward. Ahead, three rooms away and behind a display of white marble portrait busts, the line of sight is blocked by Sir George Hayter’s huge Reformed House of Commons; since the first room is full of works that evoke the Regency Crisis, the ‘trial’ of Queen Caroline and (rather glancingly, it must be said) the Napoleonic Wars, the scale of historical narrative is thus made instantly and unmistakably clear. But as one’s eyes move upwards, it is the rooms themselves that make an immediate impression. Above walls hung in very slightly differing shades of turquoise silk rises an enormous cornice, finished in silver leaf that catches and reflects the abundant natural light that flows in from above. It is only the sumptuously rich black Belgian marble door-surrounds and skirtings, left over from the 1937 rooms, that anchor the space to earth. The old oak floors have been exposed, scrubbed down and re-varnished. The new display cases, plinths and IT stations are made of brushed stainless steel. In its colours and assertiveness, the scheme acknowledges both the Art Deco origins of the rooms and their Regency theme, while at the same time looking resolutely contemporary.
Mr Gough has not, in other words, gone for the safe option. Indeed, I imagine that many people will dislike what he has done. They will object to the look-at-me walls, the shiny cornices, and plinths that might well have escaped from a particularly smart industrial kitchen. Personally, I have a bit of a problem with the floor. Stripped oak obviously reflects a lot of light, but its rough-and-ready ambience chimes with nothing else in these rooms while its very brightness is distracting. As for the rest of the scheme, though, by the time I left I was wholly persuaded of its merits. The boldness, the contrasts, the high drama, the fascination with gadgetry and even the flood of light seem somehow right for the Regency. The overall effect is also oddly exhilarating, which seems right, too. Will it look as good in twenty years? Almost certainly not, but on the other hand, whatever bland and inoffensive watered-down institutional classicism that might have triumphed instead would also end up dating hideously, as such things always do. What’s wrong, if one has the money, with shaking things up a bit from time to time in such a way that the familiar looks strange and new again, as if one were seeing if for the first time?
Biography first
All of which brings us to the pictures. The circumstances of its creation have made it more or less inevitable that the NPG should hold one of the strangest collections of art imaginable. For one thing, even when it comes to twentieth century work, it is all basically figurative, that being the nature of portraiture. (Parenthetically, on your way down from the Regency Rooms, do wander through the Mezzanine, where there is a collection of British portraits, 1960-90, that provide as unarguable an assertion of figurative vitality as I've ever encountered.) Odder still, though, are the implications of collecting on the basis of subject over and beyond artistic merit. The result is something that is at once a catholic roll-call of worthies, an historical tour d’horizon, a cabinet of curiosities, plus an ad-hoc essay on the progress of British art — the whole studded, here and there, with some of the finest pictures these islands have produced. Thus it is that inept sketches and wooden attempts at likeness end up telling their own sorts of truth alongside first-rate work by Romney, Reynolds and Lawrence. For instance, the one authenticated likeness of Jane Austen turns out to be a wretched but compelling little pen-sketch, more a doodle than a drawing, by her sister Cassandra, where one comes away with an impression of sharp, penetrating eyes, if little else; Cruikshank's nasty, unsparing caricatures can be more revealing than good full-length portraits. As for the effect of all this, it is probably best summed up in the curators’ endearing tendency to refer to the portraits as if they were people themselves. After a while, for them as for us, the style of representation shades into becoming just another signifier of biographical information — or, perhaps, Carlyle's 'small candle' 'by which biography can be read'.
The NPG has, I think, been extraordinarily fortunate in their choice of curator. In her display tactics, Dr Peltz comes across as both fair-minded and formidably sharp-witted. The hang hinges on an intricate series of oppositions and juxtapositions, all carefully thought out, significant, apt and sometimes funny, too, while the interpretative material, for which I suppose Dr Peltz must be responsible, is a model of its kind, in terms both of content and tone. To be honest, I approached the reopened Regency Rooms fully expecting to be annoyed by endless teleological triumphalism about the nature of the ‘progress’ that brought about, inter alia, the Great Reform Act, but in the event found nothing but fairness and fullness of context all the more remarkable for the economy with which the historical background had, perforce, to be delivered. Byron, remarkably, does not emerge as a more important figure than, say, Castlereagh; royal scandals are viewed as the stuff of high politics as well as low satire; when it comes to issues of faith, party or social class, complication is acknowledged rather than tidied away.
The story told by the works in the Regency Rooms is bracketed on one hand by the cataclysm of the French Revolution and at the other by the first post-1832 parliament around whose feet, as it were, the ripples of that cataclysm lapped. It is perhaps not surprising the British-portrait-based vocabulary in which the story is told sometimes imposes its own peculiar constraints on the narrative. Thus the Napoleonic Wars happen, as it were, offstage and without Napoleon. Indeed, if I had any real complaints about the choice of pictures, it was this: that such a conflict so formative in terms of national self-perception, as much as anything, ought to have received a bit more attention, rather than simply the familiar roll-call of Wellington, Nelson and — inevitably — Lady Hamilton, as depicted in an evocative if rather mannered portrait by Romney. By the same token, while the London stage of the early nineteenth century is given splendid treatment — the portrait of socially ambitious soprano Catherine Stephens, later Countess of Essex, by the underrated John Jackson, is absolutely adorable, even if she does look unnervingly like Martine McCutcheon — the Luddites, Peterloo and plenty of other violence, urban and rural, seem curiously unreal, because no matter how much the commentary insists on them, there are, for obvious reasons, no images to bring them to life. Finally, the whole business of dividing time into self-contained Georgian, Regency and Victorian gobbets must, one imagines, have given the curator some hideous definitional headaches. It is easy enough to quibble about who’s and who’s out — where, for instance, is Warren Hastings, and why no reference to Wellington as a mature politician? — and easy enough, too, to want more notice paid to the birth of empire, and perhaps more, too, about the United Kingdom as something that extended beyond, say, the outskirts of London. Yet there are so many pleasant and unexpected surprises here — that magnificently forthright, triumphantly unsophisticated portrait of agricultural reformer Robert Bakewell, for one — that these small complaints stick in one’s throat, especially when one thinks how much more tokenistic, politically correct and foolish it might all have been.
Amongst the politicians
As it is, the portraits — in many cases, double-hung — run through Regency life, subject by subject, starting with the Crown and the court, running on past scientists, explorers, performers, artists, writers, inventors and so on, culminating in the final room — by far the largest of the series — which is very squarely focused on politics, reaction and reform. The space is dominated, in particular, by Sir George Hayter’s massive group portrait, the Reformed House of Commons, but there is also another very large painting — executed with, it has to be said, more conviction than skill — depicting an Anti-Slavery Society convention in 1840, as well as a host of individual portraits, most of them of politicians. And here, really, are some of the absolute glories of the NPG’s collection: notably, the portraits of Liverpool, Castlereagh, and Canning.
It is to Sir Thomas Lawrence, perhaps more than any other artist, that we owe that penumbra of glamour, sophistication and consummate elegance that still adheres — via Georgette Heyer, her imitators and dozens of televised Jane Austen adaptations — to the image of the Regency. His contemporaries may have poked fun at his habit of flattering his sitters, but the results are still, nearly two centuries on, almost shockingly attractive. No one since Van Dyck had ever made British men look so fascinating, and probably no one ever will again, some brave attempts by Sargent notwithstanding. And although there are fine Lawrence portraits scattered throughout the Regency Rooms — notably, his wildly dashing if almost unbelievably disingenuous portrait of the Prince Regent, as well as his nakedly sexy portrait of Queen Caroline — in this last room one has an unparalleled opportunity to experience the range, as well as the development, of Lawrence’s expressive ability.
Here one can turn from the magnificent portrait of Liverpool, aged somewhere in his mid to late 20s — tall, slim, executing an elegant contrapposto, a rather ironic smile just crossing his face — pausing to admire the inkwell at his feet, which is surely as beautiful a piece of painting as Velasquez or Rubens ever managed — to look at the haunting head-and-shoulders portrait of Castlereagh, where the intelligent, limpid eyes seem to catch those of the viewer, to almost unbearable effect — and then to look at the late, stylised, monumental portrait in which Canning, austerely dressed and impossibly tall, looming over a brilliantly foreshortened mace, raises his fist in declamatory fury. Meanwhile on the wall behind, Lawrence’s unfinished portrait of Wilberforce strikes another note altogether — one of humour, calculation and informality. I challenge anyone to spend twenty minutes in this room and not feel far closer to the high politics of the 1820s and 30s as a result of that experience. It isn't, of course, so much that Lawrence tells us what his subjectsreally looked like — politicians can't have got that much uglier simply as a result of a wider franchise, can they? — but rather, that he tells us so powerfully what they ought to have looked like — the sort of insight that is far more revealing than any literal likeness. These are portraits of people living in their own times, rather than in ours, and as Carlyle rightly implies, this gives them a vivacity only rarely possible in after-the-fact biography.
Does it matter? As a part of the refurbishment, two long narrow windows have been cut into the wall that terminates the enfilade of rooms. The architect and curator agree that this not only increases the light and demonstrates why the gallery ends where it does, in such an emphatic full stop — because the National Gallery gets in the way, in case you were wondering — but also that it serves, as it were, a symbolic purpose. They feel that by displaying the Reformed House of Commons side-by-side with actual real-life London — and it’s a neat trick, because at the back of the painting of the old House of Commons are three windows, echoing the real ones flanking it — they are inviting the viewer to consider the connectedness of the Regency era — not just its cult of celebrity, its royal scandals, its anxieties over terrorism and public unrest and technology, either, but first and foremost, its social and political convulsions and their legacy — with the world in which we live today. It’s a testament to the intelligence of the display and the quality of the collection that what might, in another context, sound either contrived or a bit smug actually comes across, there at the end of the Regency Rooms, as both so reasonable and so fitting. The Regency was hardly the distant past for the men who founded the NPG in 1856. Somehow, even today, standing amidst the portraits, it still feels surprisingly near at hand.
The Regency Rooms are a permanent feature of the National Portrait Gallery, and admission to them is free.
Bunny Smedley is ERO’s arts editor.
Bunny Smedley, May 20, 2003 10:49 AM