Abstract
A tall man in a cream suit is sitting awkwardly in a dark brown chair. His head is tilted to one side, and the expression on his face is hard to read, but it is certainly pensive, preoccupied. He is glancing away to one side. Both arms seem awkwardly placed, the fingers of the left one are in a distinctly odd position. His feet, clad in light brown shoes, are visible through a glass-topped table on which there is a small tumbler.
The drawings of great men are like lines in Shakespeare, the beauty of which are beyond explanation. (Henry Tonks)2
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Notes
Quoted in Joseph Hone, The Life of Henry Tonks (London and Toronto, 1939), p. 41.
Works on portraiture include Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (London, 1991)
Joanna Woodall, ed., Portraiture: Facing the Subject (Manchester, 1997) and
Shearer West, Portraiture (Oxford, 2004). On Titian see Titian: Prince o fPainters (Venice, 1990), esp. pp. 101–8 and Charles Hope et al., Titian (London, 2003), esp. pp. 29–42; on
Velasquez, Suzanne Stratton-Pruitt, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Velazquez (Cambridge, 2002); and on
Rembrandt, Jonathan Bikker et al., Rembrandt: The Late Works (London, 2014)
Christopher Brown et al., Rembrandt: The Master and his Workshop. Paintings (New Haven and London, 1991)
William Schupbach, The Paradox of Rembrandt’s ‘Anatomy of Dr Tulp’ (London, 1982).
On Picasso’s portraits see William Rubin, ed., Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation (London, 1996)
and on photography, Graham Clarke, ed., The Portrait in Photography (London, 1992) and
Graham Clarke, The Photograph (Oxford, 1997), ch. 6.
On Bellany see Keith Hartley, John Bellany (Edinburgh, 2012) and
Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘Medicine and the Visual Arts: Overview’, Medicine, Health and the Arts: Approaches to the Medical Humanities, ed. Victoria Bates et al. (London and New York, 2014), pp. 41–63, esp. pp. 51–5. Works by Bellany may be viewed on the websites of Tate, the National Portrait Gallery, London, and the National Galleries of Scotland.
Ludmilla Jordanova, The Look of the Past: Visual and Material Evidence in Historical Practice (Cambridge, 2012), especially ch. 2.
Anne Hollander, Seeing through Clothes (Berkeley and London, 1993, first published 1978) is a compelling account of such processes.
Stephen Lloyd and Kim Sloan, The Intimate Portrait: Drawings, Miniatures and Pastels from Ramsay to Lawrence (Edinburgh, 2008).
M. Crumpling and P. Starling, A Surgical Artist at War: The Paintings and Sketches of Sir Charles Bell 1809–1815 (Edinburgh, 2005).
For an account of one of the most famous, see Ruth Richardson, The Making of Mr Gray’s Anatomy: Bodies, Books, Fortune, Fame (Oxford, 2008).
Frances Spalding, Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision (London, 2014), especially pp. 80–2, which show three such portraits from around 1912.
On John Singer Sargent, see Elaine Kilmurray and Richard Ormond, eds, Sargent (London, 1998), esp. pp. 129–75, and
Richard Ormond with Elaine Kilmurray, Sargent: Portraits ofArtists and Friends (London, 2015).
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Jordanova, L. (2015). Portraiture, Beauty, Pain. In: Saunders, C., Macnaughton, J., Fuller, D. (eds) The Recovery of Beauty: Arts, Culture, Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137426741_11
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