Page 382 - The Secret Museum

CREATING A PORTRAIT, ON CANVAS or on film, is an intimate act. The sitter must trust

the artist. The artist must capture the essence of the sitter. The relationship and the
creation of the portrait can so easily go wrong. But then again, after hours of trying
ideas, looking intently at the sitter, feeling for their character, sketching, thinking of
how best to express their form, the portrait can click into place, with the press of the
camera button, or the stroke of a brush dipped in paint.

It’s the portraits that went right that the National Portrait Gallery seeks to collect. I
met Dr Tim Moreton, who has been overseeing new acquisitions at the gallery since
1980. He is so intrinsic a part of the gallery that his own portrait is in the collection.

‘Whatever the mysterious magic is that gives a portrait a charge, that is what the
National Portrait Gallery is after,’ he explained. Of course they only collect portraits
of people who have contributed to the nation, and when they know the portrait – in
the case of a painting – was created while the artist was in the same space as the
sitter.

Collecting images that contain a certain magic has been the secret to the success of
the gallery since its creation. Every portrait that comes into the collection – they’re
acquired four times a year – is noted down in a vast ledger book. Whose portrait was

the first in the collection? It was William Shakespeare’s.

When I visited, in June 2012, the gallery was on number 6,942 in the book.
However some numbers can be entire collections so there are thousands more
portraits than that in the total collection. These are the paintings and photographs that
made the grade, and will be kept safe for the future.

However, in the back rooms of the gallery are the sketches of a portrait that isn’t
in the collection, by an artist who really missed the mark, as far as the sitter was
concerned. The sitter was a wordsmith, like Shakespeare. He used his words to win
the Second World War. That man was Winston Churchill.

In 1952 Churchill turned 80. He was still the prime minister. As a birthday gift,
members of the House of Lords and House of Commons past and present

commissioned Graham Sutherland, a modernist artist aligned with Surrealism, to
paint Churchill’s portrait. He had painted the writer Somerset Maugham as his first
portrait five years earlier so, despite his surreal painting style, the MPs thought he
would do a good job.

Churchill was also an artist. Many of his paintings still hang in his studio, in his
former home, Chartwell, in Kent, now owned by the National Trust. He must have
understood the process of creating a portrait because he had painted some, and
because he had sat for over a hundred of his own. He asked Sutherland at the outset,

‘How are you going to paint me? As a cherub, or the Bulldog?’ to which Sutherland
replied: ‘It entirely depends on what you show me, sir.’ Sutherland later told Lord
Beaverbrook: ‘Consistently … he showed me the Bulldog.’

Churchill sat patiently, several times, for Sutherland, as he sketched the prime