An interior hermetically sealed, a tilted head, a clock just edging beyond a quarter past one, a whole afternoon to be got through...
The National Portrait Gallery in London houses five photographs of Anita Brookner (here), each of which repays close attention.
Anita Brookner by Lucy Anne Dickens
The most extreme of Brookner portraits. It is one of a series of photos of art establishment figures from the early 2000s. Each is formal and carefully staged; none is as austere.
Lucy Dickens said of the project, 'I am immensely grateful to those who agreed to sit for
me, despite the pressures on their time, and in some cases, old age or
infirmity. I was met unfailingly with courtesy (and often fish pie).'
The only references to Brookner's former career are the pictures on the walls, somewhat artlessly placed. We know Brookner owned an etching by Manet of Baudelaire, and a few watercolours by Edward Lear. The picture on the left has the air of a Watteau. Brookner has a pile of three magazines on a wine table at her side, the New Yorker on top:
The edition can be viewed
here.
I have no doubt Brookner was a courteous but exacting subject. I've mentioned the dearth of art-related paraphernalia, in comparison with the other images in the Lucy Dickens exhibition, but Brookner may have been playing a more sophisticated game. This David scholar surely had in mind the portrait of Mme Récamier in the Louvre:
The posture, the challenging gaze, the lamp, the armless seat, the expanses of blank wall... Brookner's ashtray probably references the shape of David's censer.
Or perhaps Brookner was remembering Marat in his bath:
Brookner scholar Dr Peta Mayer has discussed another portrait by Lucy Anne Dickens, comparing it with an image of Oscar Wilde (
here). (It was probably taken during the same session, though Brookner is wearing a different pullover.)
This 1982 photo shows Brookner in the early days of her new career. She looks younger than her age (54). The tilted head, and the hand to the head, will be repeated. When I first became a fan, I saw only black-and-white press photos; it was some time later, and of course when I met her, that I knew the colour of her hair.
We see Brookner perhaps just after her Booker win. She seems to be holding a corrected typescript. The mirror appears in several later press photos, as do the Hammershøi-style spaces of her flat.
Like the Leighton, Gerson's is a benign image of Brookner from the 1980s. The majority of the twenty or thirty images of the author available on the net show her in her flat. She is rarely seen outside. There are a few early photos taken at the Courtauld, including an excellent one of her on the magnificent staircase. In the Gerson shot, Brookner appears to be in her Courtauld study or in a library. She would know that in many portraits by David and Ingres sitters look slightly beyond the viewer. Brookner does this here.
It anticipates the slight averted gaze in the photo used in UK editions in the mid-90s:
(Notice the mirror.)
In her work on David and Ingres, Brookner has special things to say about portraiture. Again, we cannot help but see references. Here is Ingres's M Rivière:
The final photo in the collection will look familiar.
A slightly different image from the session appeared on UK dustjackets in the early 1990s:
The image chosen for the books is more serious - magisterial, mandarin, as befits those 90s novels.
'Earning her stripes' was how one picture caption put it, when the photo was used in a review.
The sofa is probably the same one seen in the background of the Dickens shot, with a different cover.
The pose is almost certainly a reference to Ingres's Mme Moitessier, Seated, in the National Gallery. Brookner often wrote about this extraordinary painting, including in the novels. Brookner's severe jacket is her version of the sitter's 'impossible dress'.
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