Painters painting painters
Seeing Each Other: Portraits of Artists, at Pallant House Gallery
Ishbel Myerscough, Two Painters, 2025, Oil on canvas, Courtesy of the Artist and Flowers Gallery © Ishbel Myerscough. Courtesy of Flowers Gallery
In 1978 Lucian Freud, on the lookout for a new girlfriend, took a job as visiting tutor at the Slade School of Art. He soon met, and successfully wooed, the first-year student Celia Paul. She was 18, he was 55. In the subsequent decade the young woman, obsessively in love, sat for the ageing artist on many occasions, resulting in paintings such as Naked Girl with an Egg, Painter and Model and Girl in a Striped Nightshirt. The latter is particularly intimate, depicting Celia Paul asleep, carrying Freud’s 14th (acknowledged) child.
This painting is currently on display at Pallant House Gallery, as part of their excellent new exhibition Seeing Each Other: Portraits of Artists, featuring British artists’ depictions of other British artists over the last 125 years. It’s a great concept: artist and subject tend to be deeply connected, as friends or lovers. This results in remarkably intimate, nuanced depictions.
Dod Procter, Eileen Mayo, n.d., Oil on canvas, Private Collection, on long-term loan to Penlee House Gallery & Museum, Penzance, © The Estate of Dod Procter. All Rights Reserved 2025 /Bridgeman Image
Celia Paul, now a renowned artist herself, has her own response to Freud within the exhibition. Girl in a Striped Nightshirt is placed alongside two portraits she made of Freud asleep, his vulnerability uncharacteristically laid bare. The first, drawn in 1985, is a pencil sketch; the second is a reworking of the image in oils, painted, after his death, in 2021. They are both titled Lucian Sleeping, though in the second he looks like he might not wake up again.
Another highlight of the exhibition is a pair of near-life-size oil portraits, hung on either side of a doorway. On one side we see Jean Cooke, painted naked and vulnerable beside a table piled with food, including an uncooked chicken, by her domineering and abusive husband John Bratby. On the other, Cooke gets her revenge, painting Bratby at the same table, a sleeping dog at his feet, looking well-ironed and domesticated – looking straight – far removed from his self-cultivated image as a rebellious bohemian genius.
Nearby hangs a rather more sympathetic David Bomberg painting of his wife Lilian Holt, looking affectionately back at him as she simultaneously catches his likeness, a rare example of a painting of a painter painting the painter. Or drawing the painter, to be more accurate: her depiction of him, in charcoal, is placed alongside, capturing both his vivaciousness and his vulnerability, a loving wife’s honest portrayal of her husband’s duality.
Friendship, in all its complexity, runs through the exhibition. John Minton and Michael Ayrton met at St John Wood’s Art School before WW2 and formed an intense friendship, complicated by the former’s unreciprocated sexual attraction to the latter. Ayrton’s 1941 portrait of Minton, all hollow cheeks and El Greco lugubriousness, reflects the anxieties of the age, and the sitter’s deep insecurity. Two years later, Minton admitted in a letter: ‘while I have come nearer to hating you than anyone in my life I cannot also deny my love for you.’ Sixteen years later, he committed suicide.
A significantly warmer friendship, ongoing between Chantal Joffe and Ishbel Myerscough since they met at the Glasgow School of Art in 1979, is celebrated by a series of portraits. The work captures their shared journey through artistic struggles, pregnancy, motherhood and middle age. Joffe paints Myerscough in broad, expressionist brush strokes; Myerscough depicts Joffe in her more realistic style. Neither tries to flatter the other: hanging next to a 2022 Joffe double portrait of the grinning friends exposed in tights-over-knickers is a Myerscough response painted earlier this year. This portrays both artists, sat face to face, wearing unflattering bras, recording one another’s physical decline with their different-gauge brushes.
Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden Working in his Studio, 1930, Tempera on board, Royal Collegeof Art ©Royal College of Art/Bridgeman Image
Roger Fry, Nina Hamnett, 1917, Oil on canvas, University of Leeds Art Collection
In all, over 130 subjects are depicted by 90 artists. 55 of these are both creator and subject. Nina Hamnett depicts Roger Fry and Walter Sickert, and vice versa. Eric Ravilious captures Edward Bawden at work (though rather fluffs his ginger cat). Frances Hodgkins paints Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines, who return the compliment, warts and all. There’s a flattering John Skeaping bust of his then-wife Barbara Hepworth, who responds with a drawing of Skeaping that makes him look like a character from a Hammer Horror movie. Paula Rego portrays Euan Uglow and Leon Kossoff as two monkeys. Peter Blake reinterprets Courbet’s The Meeting, featuring himself, Howard Hodgkin and David Hockney at Venice Beach. Michael Andrews hobnobs with Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon et al in the Colony Room in Soho. The YBAs photograph one another, in monochrome, at work and play. A Sarah Lucas statue of Maggi Hambling, formed of a toilet bowl and two lightbulbs, sits next to a Maggi Hambling painting of Sarah Lucas, in scribbly Arcimboldo style, with phallic fruit. Mary McCartney photographs Tracy Emin taking on the persona of Frida Kahlo. Habab Hajallie draws a lifelike image of Frank Bowling, in biro, onto a Victorian map of Britain.
A lot of it, you realise, is rather cutting edge, and it’s easy to understand why. When a painter fulfils a portrait for a patron, they will be keen to achieve some sort of figurative likeness, and capture something of the sitter’s personality. When another artist becomes the subject, there’s an added dimension: an expectation that the work will be viewed, first and foremost, as a piece of art, crafted with imaginative flair. So it’s pleasing that the curators have resisted the temptation to hang the show thematically, preferring a chronological approach. Pallant House’s latest blockbuster thus doubles up as a coherent overview of the development of British art, from the flowering of Modernism to the present day. And all with that period’s celebrity protagonists playing the starring roles. It’s quite a show.
Seeing Each Other: Portraits of Artists runs at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, until November 5.