(4 Nov 2016) FOR CLEAN VERSION SEE STORY NUMBER: 4064067
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Buckingham Palace's art gallery is unveiling a new exhibit which explores artists' portraits in all their various forms - from small sketches to a sprawling, five-metre wide oil painting.
Among the famous faces hanging on the walls: Queen Elizabeth, Prince Phillip, Rubens, Rembrandt and Reynolds.
STORY-LINE:
Portraits can take on several different meanings. This self-portrait by Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens was an apology.
It was sent to English monarch Charles I after an earlier piece had been found to be a studio work and not from the artist's own hand.
Rubens had sent the earlier work not knowing it was intended for the monarch. This replacement was intended to showcase his talents.
It's now taking pride of place in a new exhibition at The Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace.
'Portrait of the Artist' features over 150 paintings drawn from the Royal Collection.
It shows there's more to portraits than just faces - sometimes they can be used for self-promotion, at other times they show artists at work.
"This is very much not an exhibition of a series of faces, it's not just a series of self-portraits of similar-looking people through time," says Anna Reynolds, a senior curator at the Royal Collection Trust.
"There are themes within this exhibition which include the cult of the artist, for example, all about the artistic personality, what it means to be an artist.
"So artists at various times have been esteemed and raised to the same level as a prince or an emperor, but some have felt very rejected, so it's the idea of what it means to be an artist.
"But we also have images of artists at work, and we artists dressing up or playing different roles, so playing the role or a personification, or a figure, or wearing very strange clothing."
This 1908 self-portrait by French painter Jean-Baptiste Edouard Detaille shows him sporting an extravagant moustache and puffing a pipe.
He's wearing the uniform of a Red Lancer from Napoleon's Imperial Guard from almost a hundred years earlier.
With their rising status from the Renaissance onwards, artists increasingly acknowledged their own profession in self-portraits, perhaps showing a brush or palette.
Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh makes an appearance. And his art does too.
The exhibition features these reciprocal portraits of the Duke of Edinburgh and British landscape artist Edward Seago.
They were painted onboard the Royal Yacht Britannia during Prince Philip's world tour in 1956-7.
"The Duke of Edinburgh, one of his favored artists was Edward Seago and he invited Seago to accompany him on a trip on HMS Britannia back from Australia in 1956 because he thought that Seago might see some amazing landscapes as they sailed past Antarctica for Seago to paint," explains Reynolds.
"And while they were there, evidently, they painted each other."
Bringing things right up to date, there's this etched self-portrait by Lucian Freud. It was done in 1996 when he was 74-years-old.
Freud also makes an appearance in this photograph, showing him painting a portrait of the Queen in 2001.
"The sittings happened in the conservation studio at St. James's Palace," says Reynolds.
"And when you see the photograph, you see how bare the walls are and there's a pipe running. This is not a grand palatial interior to be painting in. And it shows the reality of what it was like to sit for a portrait."
The largest work in the exhibit is this sprawling, five-metre wide oil painting of revelers escorting a 13th century altarpiece through the streets of Florence.
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