Lorna May Wadsworth - A Retrospective

Lorna May Wadsworth A Retrospective

Lorna May Wadsworth A Retrospective

9 Nov 2019 - 15 Feb 2020 Surrey St, Sheffield S1 1XZ

With special thanks to SMH & AJ for making this catalogue possible.

Contents Foreword - Liz Waring.................................. 5 Gaze - Laura Freeman.................................. 6 School Days................................................ 8 The Fledgling Artist..................................... 10 Politicians.................................................. 12 The Body Politic - Philip Mould..................... 18 Beauty...................................................... 20 The Muse.................................................. 28 A Last Supper............................................ 36 Sacred or Profane...................................... 44 Grids........................................................ 60 Disneyland Dagenham................................ 72 Tondos...................................................... 78 The Modern Society Portrait........................ 82 Man and Myth......................................... 102 Gazing Back - Neil Gaiman ��������������������� 104 List of illustrations ������������������������������������ 118 List of Exhibited Works............................. 120 Acknowledgements................................. 122

Retrospective

Foreword

By Liz Waring

Curator of Visual Art, Museums Sheffield Lorna May Wadsworth is one of the UK’s most acclaimed portrait painters, and one whom, with her characteristic warmth and charm, has forged a remarkable career. Her portraits can be found adorning the walls of political headquarters, Oxbridge colleges, and multiple highprofile galleries, as well as those of private homes.

She makes portraits that not only capture the likeness of the sitter but also encapsulate their character, maintaining a true sense of individuality in everyone she paints. However, the real secret to Lorna’s success is her viewpoint: her feminine perception and understanding.

This publication accompanies GAZE, a major retrospective of her work held at the Graves Gallery in Sheffield, during the winter of 2019/2020.

We are delighted to welcome Lorna back to the city of her birth to celebrate her admirable artistic achievement. Though only just reaching her 40th year, this exhibition traces her impressive career and her development from school student to portrait artist to the powerful and famous. It seems apposite to hang her work on the same walls as the great portrait masters of history; the likes of Daniel Mytens, Sir Peter Lely, and Sir Thomas Lawrence are all represented in the Graves.

We are indebted to the lenders to this exhibition who have so generously agreed to share their paintings with us. We are particularly grateful to Philip Mould for his support in making this exhibition possible. Our final and most heartfelt thanks go to Lorna May Wadsworth.

Detail of Hail Mary, 2011-2018 [ex no.26]

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Gaze

Gaze

By Laura Freeman Muse. You see her in your mind’s eye. The studio. The dressing gown. The sofa. The goose pimpled skin turned to satin by the painter’s caressing brush. Mute, nude, listless beauty.

When Lorna May Wadsworth speaks of her “muse”, you pause. The muse has for so long been the prerogative of men that, at first, the word sounds strange. But why not a male muse? Why not a boy on the dais, bare-chested, chosen, exposed? The dynamic, though, is different. “The female gaze,” says Wadsworth, “is much less an imposition than the male gaze.” Lucian Freud, Augustus John, Pablo Picasso were all both artists and pick-up artists. Any girl was a prospect, a pretty sitter, a future model, mistress or muse. Immortalised in paint, thrown away as artist’s rags.

“Male sexuality tends to assert itself more,” says Wadsworth, “whereas the female is mitigated by the maternal instinct, more concerned for the human, less an imposition of desire.”

The female artist looks without wanting to possess, she paints without seeking to control.

When Wadsworth first starting painting what she calls her “Beautiful Boys”, she did so shyly. She would approach a man that had caught her portraitist’s eye, ask him to sit, hand him her card... and run away. In the studio, the balance of power shifted. No shyness, no hesitation, no blush.

“Confidence comes in the painting and the drawing,” declares Wadsworth. “When someone is sitting for you, they’re very vulnerable. The power becomes mine. I’m the artist.” She met her muse while looking for an angel.

She was painting the story of St Francis of Assisi and was searching for a model of almost holy beauty. At a private view she saw a young man putting on his coat. She told him he had an interesting face. Note: interesting. “People get bored,” she says, “by being told that they’re beautiful.”

The man at the private view was Joachim Gram and under Wadsworth’s eye and brush, he became an angel at St Martin-in-the-Fields. Beautiful, yes, but beaten, too. Bowed under the weight of the sins of the world, rendered in oils that weep like the wounds of stigmata. Joachim describes

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his first sitting as intimidating. When a model poses for a photographer, he says, the model is always moving, the photographer taking hundreds of new shots. It is badinage, back and forth, pout and click. Painting is more like a confession: stillness, silence, a whispered confidence between sitter and priestly painter. “I was sitting for hours with Lorna looking at me from every angle,” Joachim remembers. Nerves made him solemn as a statue.

“Now I’ve learnt that so long as she’s not painting my face, we can talk. If she’s painting my hands, I can move my foot.”

Beauty has been Wadsworth’s rebellion. “I’ve always loved beauty,” she says, “and loved it at a time when beauty in the art world and in art schools was very unfashionable and seen as the lowest of the low.” If the pursuit of beauty was radical, so too was her commitment to paint. On her art foundation course, Wadsworth was marked down for making work that “looked too much like a finished painting, that wasn’t conceptual enough.” She was told that painting was irrelevant. “Painting’s over, painting’s dead. It had all been done before.” Naysaying only made her more passionate. “But it hasn’t been done,” she used to say.

“Women have barely been allowed in the life room.”

Her eye for beauty is matched by something even more stubbornly unfashionable: a respect for history and for the portrait tradition. Her heroes are Velázquez, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Zurbarán and Thomas Lawrence. She admires John Singer Sargent for his fluid brushstrokes, for his glamour and elegance. Hers is a reverence marked by mischief.

Not a pastiche of history, but a tease. Her portrait series The Art Dealer’s Son presents the then eighteen-year-old Oliver Mould, son of Philip Mould, in different guises (cat.37). Oliver plays dress up in costumes from the National Theatre archives, in vintage finds from Portobello, in armour, ruff, tricorn and doublet, ennobled, trying on, acting up, putting on a front—as eighteen-year-olds do. Wadsworth painted Oliver as a “knackered Bacchus, a festival raver, a Wet Darcy.” Think of Colin Firth in the BBC’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice striding dripping from the Pemberley lake. She captures the carelessness of youth,

Retrospective

of a boy who had grown up with Old Masters and who could glance at a Reynolds or a Gainsborough and shrug: “Whatevs.” Perhaps the acutest likeness is the one where you don’t see Oliver’s face at all, just the back of an iPhone and the Apple logo, as the sitter denies the painter her purpose and snaps his own reflection.

A true Millennial portrait.

When Wadsworth painted the philanthropist Sir Michael Hintze, they rifled through Hintze’s wardrobe together (cat.47). It was to have been a ‘normal’ portrait, a ‘standard’ portrait. Suit, shirt, tie. Wadsworth recalls the moment she found the hanger holding the ceremonial costume of the Papal Knights of Rome: bottle green, silver embroidery, matching sword. There was also a scholar’s gown and the uniform of a naval captain. The Hintze portrait became five honorific portraits, commemorating a man and the many mantles he wears. In the pivotal panel, Hintze adopts the unmistakable stance of Andy Warhol’s Elvis. A gun becomes a smartphone as a swagger portrait is transformed into a selfie. Wadsworth talks with a wry note in her voice of the role of the “society portrait painter.” If there is a place on gallery walls for rawness, for warts-and-all revelation, for the Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, then there is a place, too, for portraits in the grand manner of Lawrence, Sargent and Boldoni, for rich stuffs and silks, china and silverware, feathers and fur. “The whole shebang,” as Wadsworth has it. In her conversation piece They Have Lunch Every Tuesday (cat.49), a double portrait of the restaurateurs Chris Corbin and Jeremy King, you have to stop yourself reaching out to test with the back of your hand if the polished teapot is still warm. In The Milliner (cat.48), Victoria Grant wears a dog’s-tooth trouser suit, a top hat and a veil. The painting of the suit’s pattern is a tour de force.

The kicked-off, monogrammed slippers invite you to stroke their velvet nap.

Wadsworth would never paint to wound but she does not set out to fawningly flatter. One politician who sat for her asked with pricked vanity: “Is my nose really as big as that?” A portraitist must peel away the mask, strip back, see beyond crowns, mitres, hairspray and the offices of state. Wadsworth is unfazed by fame. Only once, she says,

has she been “petrified.” That was with Baroness Thatcher.

But remember: even with prime ministers, the power lies with the painter. Wadsworth’s Margaret Thatcher is a portrait of uncanny sympathy. She is formidable and fragile. We know Thatcher’s image. The Iron Lady. Pearls, pussy-bow blouse, skirt suit in loyal shades of Tory blue. Thatcher in a miner’s helmet. Thatcher in a white scarf and goggles rising from the turret of a tank. Wadsworth painted Thatcher long out of power, at home, without ministers or minders, only with her “ladies-in-waiting” to let Wadsworth in and leave her alone with her subject. Thatcher sat for Wadsworth five times in the year before it was publicly known that her mind and memory were not what they were. Wadsworth describes the experience as “moving and terrible in a kind of Shakespearean way. Life is cruel. The pathos inherent in existence is enough.”

Wadsworth remembers Thatcher’s manners, her generosity, and her deference. “May I see the painting?” she asked.

When Wadsworth asked her to wait until the portrait was finished, the Baroness did not peek. If Thatcher seems to loom, it is in part because Wadsworth sat on the floor at her feet as she painted. The painting now hangs at Conservative HQ (cat.9). When Boris Johnson became prime minister earlier this year, he was photographed in Thatcher’s imperious presence. Wadsworth’s portrait has become the Party’s enduring watchwoman.

Beauty is only one facet of Wadsworth’s art. “Just beauty for beauty’s sake can be very dull,’ she says. “There has to be some kind of chord, some desire, some kind of grasping, some kind of tragic loss.” It It matters that Wadsworth is an artist and a woman. Female sitters do not seek to flirt or attract, male sitters do not chest-beat or compete. She is free to see further. In her finest portraits, she paints not merely a likeness but a calling. That calling may be political or spiritual, intellectual or artistic. She captures a moment of inspiration, sometimes creative, sometimes divine. Her portraits of the actor Sir Derek Jacobi, the author Neil Gaiman, and Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury and Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, are lit by an internal energy. You see their faces, but you sense the workings of their minds.

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School Days

SCHOOL DAYS

Unrequited Love: Men I Have Been Besotted With to No Avail 1996-1997 (Catalogue no.1) [Exhibition no.1] Acrylic, acrylic ink, water colour ink and found objects on paper Series of 25 works 16 x 12 cm

Emerging as a precocious talent at the age of 14, Wadsworth entered into the public sphere at a time when traditional forms of artistic expression, such as sculpture and painting, were challenged by the increasing popularity afforded by contemporary media: namely installation and conceptual art. With the emergence of the so-called Young British Artists (YBAs) in the late-1980s, the core institutional staples of conventional artistic training were being openly confronted in group shows such as Brilliant (1995-1996) and Sensation (19992000). Draughtsmanship, modelling, and figurative painting from life seemed to be replaced by multi-media works that defied immediate categorisation.

This was the hostile backdrop against which Wadsworth, as a teenager, began to hone her craft as a painter.

Defying the contemporary vogue for conceptual installation media, Wadsworth directly aligned herself with the Old Master painting style of previous centuries.

However, far from clinging to the past as a reactionary homage to the titans of a bygone era, she responded to the iconography and methods of production found within the Western canon of art in a wholly contemporary way. She did this by adopting a loyal commitment to painting and drawing whilst weaving in her intuitive understanding of Trecento, Quattrocento and Renaissance models. Strongly influenced by the popular culture of her childhood and the American Pop Art movement, her portraits are simultaneously bound to the broad iconographical material and compositional development that dominated the past 700 years of European artistic culture, and also firmly embracing the modes and cultural reference points of her own life and time.

When developing her approach to painting at Norton College in Sheffield, Wadsworth produced her first breakthrough piece entitled Unrequited Love: Men I Have Been Besotted With to No Avail (cat.1) [Ex no.1]. Consisting of 25 individually painted and assembled works on paper, this is first and foremost an adolescent testament to desire, veneration and obsession. Each 16 x 12cm rectangle offers a glimpse into the young Wadsworth’s sexual attractions that is at once intimate and relatable as seen through the lens of the cult of celebrity.

There is also a subtlety with which Wadsworth balances the revelational and the culturally familiar, leaving us with a work that closely resonates with Robert Rauschenberg’s combines or Andy Warhol’s celebrity multiples.

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There is a tension between figurative and abstract where certain individuals are seemingly absent, though in truth their physical appearance has been substituted by a visual symbol - a detached form of recognition known only to the artist and therefore serving to veil their identity behind colour, line and pattern. For example, college crushes are not depicted literally as their celebrity (and iconic) counterparts are but are shown as stars upon a lilac background, a meticulously imitated ‘Lion’ bar wrapper as a stand-in for a person with the surname Lyons, or as graffiti on a wall for a boy in Wadsworth’s school maths class, undoubtedly a personal interpretation by the artist of his personality and character. The figures with which the artist found herself enamoured at this point in her life that were already in the public limelight are rendered here as they have been presented in popular culture. Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher is shown as he appeared at the peak of the band’s international stardom; George Clooney remains in character as Dr Doug Ross from ER; Johnny Depp is adapted from a poster given away with the teenage magazine Just Seventeen; and Colin Firth gazes at us as the mysterious and dashing Mr Darcy from the BBC’s 1995 adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

Across this early body of work, numerous early iterations of themes that would come to define Wadsworth’s approach to her medium are evident.

The empowerment of the female gaze forms a central core of her collective oeuvre as does an exploration of the cult of the icon. Broadly speaking, iconography of ‘popular’ tropes permeate through Wadsworth’s oeuvre, such as the representation of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus and biblical narratives common throughout the High Renaissance. Further to her use of Christian iconography and popular culture as points of reference, Wadsworth uses this familiar terrain as a departure point from which she develops highly personal statements of intent that pose a direct challenge to more generally accepted conventions. This also appears in her current work through the use of montage and collage to completely invert the ownership of the gaze.

Wadsworth holds the position of power and, in so doing, she has acquired the unrequited. Laurie Lewis

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The Fledgling Artist

THE FLEDGLING ARTIST

Ever since her youth, Wadsworth was preoccupied with the genre of Portraiture.

Even as a teenager, the formal portrait was a way for her to combine the meticulous observation of her subjects with a more perceptive interpretation of their character. Through a chance encounter with the grandmother of music icon Jarvis Cocker whilst attending a Pulp concert at the age of 14, she found herself being asked to paint the Brit-Pop frontman. The painting, which still resides in Cocker’s family home, can now be seen as a pivotal moment in her career, as it instigated a pursuit of formal portrait commissions, a commitment that would eventually lead her to paint cabinet ministers such as the Rt. Hon. David Blunkett MP, the Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown MP and the Rt. Honourable Robin Cook MP, Party Conference Portraits (cats.8, 3) [Ex nos.53,3] as well as the Rt. Hon. Tony Blair (all 2003), Butch Bowie Blair (cat.7) [Ex no.2] during his Premiership.

During her time studying illustration at Falmouth College of Art (a necessary requirement for students wishing to pursue painting and drawing), Wadsworth developed a keen eye for reportage-drawing from life. On 9 April 2002, she attended the public gathering in memoriam of the Queen Mother as her funeral procession travelled through Westminster. Wadsworth made numerous sketches of the crowds and officials, including a sketch that she would develop into her portrait Chelsea Pensioner (2002) (cat.2) [Ex no.4]. The work on board is loose and the brushwork impressionistic, much in the manner of 19th Century artists who worked en plein air. The sitter’s face is full of deep expression and Wadsworth has reiterated this through her expressive brushwork. It is a portrait that exemplifies her use of the human face as a conveyor of a life lived. This work, in its contemporaneous reinvigoration of the Old Master tradition, is also a precursor of her later political portraits. Wadsworth’s appreciation for the vibrant red coat of ceremonies worn by the Chelsea Pensioner, the medallions hung by coloured ribbon from his chest, and his wide tricorn hat is perhaps reminiscent of official portraiture from the 18th century. In particular, the works of Sir Thomas Lawrence PRA FRS (1769-1830) are called to mind, such as his portrait of Sir John Moore (National Portrait Gallery: NPG 1128).

Following her graduation, Wadsworth returned to her home city of Sheffield and quickly established herself as a figurative portrait artist. The encouragement she had received during her early commissions spurred her on to acquire new and engaging subjects to paint. Under similar fortuitous circumstances to those under which she painted Jarvis Cocker, Wadsworth spotted the revered thespian Sir Derek Jacobi CBE whilst waiting at her bus stop on Arundel Gate outside the Crucible Theatre. Wadsworth recounts her decision to approach Sir Derek as a “Scrappy Doo” move, characterised by the same feisty “let me at ‘em” attitude that has helped her to achieve her professional ambitions every step of the way. At the time, Sir Derek was performing the lead role of Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and following his encounter with Wadsworth, who had boldly confronted him at the stage door, he graciously accepted her request for him to sit for her. Over a number of sittings across multiple locations, including his home in Chalk Farm, London, she completed four highly emotive contrasting head studies that serve to showcase the actor’s intensity as well as his commanding expressive range. (cat.6) [Ex no.6] 2004 was a productive year during which Wadsworth painted the first of her portraits of the Rt. Rev. and Rt. Hon. The Lord Williams of Oystermouth, PC FBA FRSL FLSW, Dr Rowan Williams (cat.5) [Ex no.7], then Archbishop of Canterbury. She also held the position of artist-in-residence for the Labour Party Conference the previous year, where she produced portraits of notable public figures including the Rt. Hon. Tony Benn and members of Tony Blair’s ‘Iraq War Cabinet’, including the Prime Minister himself in a work playfully titled Butch Bowie Blair (cat.7) [Ex no.2], as well as Robin Cook, Gordon Brown, Dennis Skinner, John Prescott and Peter Hain (cat.3) [Ex no.3].

The Chelsea Pensioner 2002 (Cat. 2) [ex no. 4] Oil on board 37.9 x 26.8 cm

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Her output during this time helped to establish her reputation as a political portrait painter, which secured her further commissions and garnered her a level of access to prominent members of Britain’s political and cultural elite rarely afforded to artists at the start of their careers. The sensitivity with which she chose to depict men in incredibly powerful positions of public influence and her forward approach to acquiring commissions led her subjects to be enamoured of her. This included the renowned actor of film and stage, the late Richard Griffiths (cat.4) [Ex no.5], incidentally himself an amateur painter of considerable talent. Wadsworth’s portrait of Griffiths demonstrates her ability to put her subjects at ease, allowing them to reveal something of their inner self. LL

Retrospective

Top: Party Conference Portraits, 2003 (cat.3) [ex no.3] Rt. Hon. Robin Cook Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown Rt. Hon. Dennis Skinner Rt. Hon. Peter Hain

MP MP MP MP

Above: Archbishop Rowan, 2004 (cat.5) [ex no.7] Above right: Richard Griffiths, 2003 (cat.4) [ex no.5] Right: Sir Derek Jacobi: Four Head Studies, 2003

(cat.6) [ex no.6]

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Politicians

POLITICIANS

Following a swathe of notable and successful political portrait commissions, 2006 was a year of challenges for Wadsworth. Her portrait of the Rt. Hon. The Lord Howard of Lympne, CH PC QC, Michael Howard, was rejected for purchase by the Palace of Westminster due to his face being shown in profile and not from the front. Naturally, feeling the disappointment of this setback, Wadsworth reevaluated her priorities as an artist. Rejection had forced upon her an opportunity to decide in which direction to go next. Should she continue to pursue a career as an official portrait painter or should she instead reassess the content of her subject matter entirely? Wadsworth recollects this event as an important moment of confrontation and conflict with her own personal choices: “I could either paint for committees and risk making lesser paintings and [therefore] compromise my artistic vision, or I could paint pictures from the pit of my stomach that were so personal it would feel like putting pages of my diary on a gallery wall, pictures that I almost didn’t want people to see as I had poured so much of myself into them […] painting [Baroness Margaret] Thatcher

non-commissioned meant that I could paint her [according to my] vision, exactly how I wanted to portray her.” Wadsworth continues to state that it is possible “to argue that it’s the only portrait of her that’s not a form of propaganda”.

The monumental portrait measuring 6ft in height was produced over the course of five sittings in 2007 and became the last formal portrait the former prime minister sat for. As International art dealer Philip Mould OBE confirms in his essay in this catalogue, Wadsworth had successfully produced a portrait “that could never have been achieved in her [Thatcher] days in political office”, further describing the work as “arguably the boldest formal life portrait of a Prime Minister ever painted in Britain.”

It is a work that defies the conventions of the formal political portrait in that it does as much as it can to separate the person from any kind of immediately identifiable agenda whilst also retaining enough didacticism to inform the viewer of the sitter’s own public history, for example in the choice to include the Conservative blue jacket she wears. LL

Butch Bowie Blair Portrait of Rt. Hon. Tony Blair MP as Prime Minister 2003 (cat.7) [ex no. 2] Acrylic and oil Over two canvases totalling 60.6 x 40.4 cm

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Politicians

Rt. Hon. David Blunkett MP 2003 (cat.8) [ex no.53] Acrylic and oil on canvas 91.5 x 122 cm

Arguably Wadsworth’s breakthrough portrait, this 2003 painting shows the artist finding her métier; a precursor of things to come.

The sittings with Sir Derek Jacobi and Archbishop Rowan Williams (cats.6, 5) [Ex nos.6, 7] reinforced Wadsworth’s belief in her abilities as a painter and led her to write to the Member of Parliament for Sheffield Brightside and Hillsborough constituency and then Home Secretary, the Rt. Hon. Lord Blunkett, David Blunkett. “You’re not in the National Portrait Gallery”, it read, “and I think you should be”.

The letter was received with great admiration for Wadsworth’s ‘chutzpah,’ which struck a powerful chord with this fellow Sheffielder. Blunkett’s rise to the top of politics was characterised by an uncommon tenacity and grit. Born blind due to a rare genetic disorder, he lost his father aged only 12 in a horrific industrial accident. He gained the qualifications needed to go to university over six years of night school, following a limiting education at schools for the blind which had unsuccessfully tried to keep his horizons low. It is not difficult to imagine how Wadsworth’s approach chimed with Blunkett, a great believer in helping people help them themselves.

The resultant work is one of immense power. Tightly cropped up to Lord Blunkett’s shirt collar, his face half in shadow, he exhibits firm composure and self-assuredness without a sense of pomp. The eyes, so often the key to any portrait, echo the darkness experienced by the sitter.

Wadsworth introduces a simple yet dynamic compositional feature into the portrait, a bold descending diagonal line which divides the work into two imbalanced segments whilst also reiterating the unconventional landscape format of the painting. Lord Blunkett occupies the space across this artificial border, perhaps reinforcing his remarkable capacity as a politician to traverse boundaries and inspire members of opposition parties.

Wadsworth achieved her goal and the work was exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery as one of the short-listed pieces at the 2003 BP Portrait Award.

It was later purchased for the permanent collection of the Palace of Westminster. LL

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Politicians

The Body Politic

By Philip Mould

In the spring of 2009, Lorna rang the bell of my gallery door to talk about Jesus. Exhibiting her characteristic chutzpah - an attribute that has helped her on the road to becoming one of today’s most successful British portraitists - she had tracked me down to discuss iconographic details in a major commission of A Last Supper she was working on (cat.26) [Ex no.62]. The conversation went well, her verbiage was as stimulating as her brushstrokes, and I became a Lorna convert overnight. We have enjoyed a fruitful friendship ever since, and I later found myself morphing into her portrait agent, discussing in detail every portrait commission she now undertakes, and readily spreading the good news of her existence.

Lorna’s approach to me, a second-hand picture dealer, was no different from those that she has successfully made to a myriad of subjects throughout her career - the interesting, the curious, the beautiful, the celebrated and the great. Even a cursory study of the portrait painters that have prospered in these Isles (and portrait painters have blossomed over here better than most other countries of Europe) will confirm that Lorna’s skill with humanity is an indispensable part of her success. She loves people: they often love her in return, and out of these amalgams have come her most successful portraits, displaying an innate balance of imaginative artistry and empathy that characterises the higher end of the genre.

Portraitists have inherent advantages and weaknesses within their profession which they need both to overcome and build upon.

The downside is having to satisfy the demands of the subject, particularly in an age of photography that is visually sophisticated and intolerant, deleting into eternal oblivion images of ourselves that we do not favour, retaining only those that we do. Equally, every successful portrait can become a self-perpetuating advertisement, a work of art which the subject’s circle can compare with the real person, and which often leads to further commissions. In an age which still values the subjectivity of a thoughtful artwork, it is interesting to watch how an artist’s success leads to further commissions, or agreements to be painted, within the same peer group or social circle – a phenomenon that underpinned the success of the likes of Van Dyck, Reynolds, Lawrence and Sargent in previous centuries.

Lorna’s political portraits are of particular flair and accomplishment and exemplify this. Before I met Lorna I was adviser to the House of Commons Works of Art Committee and we were offered an outstanding portrait of the then Home Secretary, David Blunkett. The debate on its acquisition was amongst the speediest I remember for a contemporary subject. Using her war cry of “Those who don’t ask don’t get” Lorna had inveigled Blunkett to sit by writing him a letter, pointing out his lack of presence on the walls of the National Portrait Gallery and offering to rectify this oversight. Recognising a fellow go-getter, he made time in his schedule to sit for an unknown young artist at the cottage he rented in the grounds of Chatsworth House, from which she produced one of the most successful images of New

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Labour’s front line. Off-centre, in sharp chiaroscuro, with a touch of Soviet brashness in its poster-like outlines, Blunkett’s hidden eyes subtly infer the challenge of his blindness. The Committee resolved to buy it in about one minute flat, and it now adorns Portcullis House (cat.8) [Ex no.53].

On the basis of this, Lorna was appointed artist in residence at the Labour Party Conference in the same year (2003), having successfully applied to The Arts Council for funding. She quickly adapted to the testing task of capturing preoccupied faces in full tilt, and from it, amongst others, produced something which in retrospect turned out to be a rare portrait of Blair from his premiership (unlike earlier prime ministers, he was highly reluctant to sit). Swiftly painted in her characteristic “faceted” modelling, noticeably light in tone, it is as much a painting of the moment as of the man, a study of thoughtfulness amidst the machinations of the days’ events. Last year it was sought out by Cherie Blair who had come across a postcard of the portrait from when it was exhibited at The Royal Society of Portrait Painters in 2004.

It has now been acquired by the Blair family, the title taken from Neil Gaiman’s surprised reaction to the painting: “It’s rather lovely - Blair as butch Bowie.”

Buoyed by the success of having conquered the Labour party in 2007 Lorna turned her indomitable gaze towards the ultimate Conservative trophy, Baroness Thatcher. She spied her at an opera from the back of the stalls, and unsuccessfully attempted to pass a note via her bodyguards. Upon hearing she had been rebuffed, her friend Frank Miles, a former News Editor at ITN, called in a favour which he paid to Thatcher’s Press Secretary in 1978, the year before Lorna was born. He received a letter by return of post declaring the former prime minister would be delighted to sit for Lorna.

Artist and subject hit it off supremely well, and in 2007 Lorna visited her home five times to complete the monumental canvas which now adorns Conservative Party Central Office on long term loan (cat.9) [Ex no.58]. Lorna was faced with a complex task. She did not share her politics, but hugely admired her achievements. Thatcher had been painted many times before as prime minister and earlier, but she was now of advancing age, her career consigned to the recent past. Lorna responded with characteristic ingenuity and compassion, producing a painting that could never have been achieved in her days of political office (cat. 9) [Ex no.58]. It is Thatcher the statesman, predominantly head only, her eyes tilted to the horizon, with just enough electric blue Tory symbolism in her coat to make the political point. In many ways, this painting typifies Lorna’s talents.

It accurately portrays human presence and one that was in the early stages of decline. But it is also an allegory of female political achievement, a composition that uses the human visage to deliver a broader and more enduring message about humanity and history.

No more can be asked of a portrait painter.

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Baroness Thatcher 2007 (cat. 9) [ex no.58] Oil on linen 183 x 183 cm

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Beauty

BEAUTY Study for ‘The Unrequited’ 2006 (cat.10) [ex no.11] Acrylic and oil on board 40 x 40 cm

At the same period in which she endured rejection at the hands of the official acquisitions committee for the Palace of Westminster, Wadsworth also had a portrait of a young man declined for inclusion in the BP Portrait Award 2006, The Unrequited. These two professional failures were compounded by being rejected personally by the same sitter. She recounts, “I painted a guy and fell for him head-over-heels. So I started painting beautiful boys as a way of getting over him.” Through the act of claiming different, and in her eyes, more aesthetically attractive men for herself on canvas, Wadsworth used the process of building up a portrait as a means to attain personal empowerment. This was a career-defining moment for her as it turned her on to the exploration of the Artist-Muse relationship as a subject in itself, but with one significant difference; whereas the canon has more often than not perpetuated this relationship dynamic as male artist viewing a female subject, Wadsworth chose to invert this to her advantage as a uniquely female voice working in a traditional genre.

This has led her to develop a nuanced female perspective specifically targeting male beauty as her chosen subject. Wadsworth has explained: “The only way I thought I was going to get over him [the sitter depicted in The Unrequited] was to paint boys who were more beautiful.

This led to me doing the scariest thing I could imagine […] going up to the best looking men I’d see in London and giving them my card, which was covered in pictures of politicians.”

Acting according to her own standards of beauty, Wadsworth was relentless in her pursuit of attaining her ultimate male icon. A staple practice for male artists throughout history, and particularly prevalent during the classical period and later the Italian High Renaissance, the artist’s quest to attain ultimate perfection as embodied by the female form has long been accepted as a standard preoccupation. One need only think of the 4th century BC sculptor Praxiteles and his nude statue of Aphrodite of Cnidus to conjure up the Western male-fascination with immortalising the perfect nude woman and the long shadow throughout history that this has cast. Why should a female artist not pursue the male form in the same way? This has become a question with which Wadsworth has grappled since 2006 and one which can be seen through works such as The French Boy who Broke my Heart (2007) and The Purple Sheet (2008) (cats.11,13) [Ex nos.12,14].

Her quest for ‘beautiful boys’ began during her A-Level Art examinations with Unrequited Love: Men I Have Been Besotted With to No Avail (cat.1) [Ex no.1] which was produced in response to Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 (1995). In Emin’s seminal work (now destroyed), the artist affixed appliquéd names of all the men she had ever slept with, though not necessarily all in a sexual capacity. Wadsworth had seen the installation piece at the Sensation exhibition (Royal Academy 18 September to 28 December 1997), the showcase of advertising mogul Charles Saatchi’s contemporary art collection. Wadsworth responded with her typical flair by maintaining painting as a valid art-form, producing 25 individually painted works of idols, icons and personal loves, much like Emin but with a crucial disregard towards the conceptual art object. LL

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The French Boy who Broke my Heart 2007 (cat.11) [ex no.12] Acrylic and oil on board 71.5 x 39.2 cm

Arguably the most accomplished work from the artist’s Beautiful Boys period is The French Boy who Broke my Heart. Built-up in layers of acrylic and oil on board, the sitter, Jean-Baptiste, is modelled with the same sumptuous relish for human flesh as might be found in a painting by Jenny Saville.

The exquisite technical skill with which Wadsworth has structured the sitter’s face with complex tonal contrasts and thickly applied swathes of paint is also evocative of the portrait studies of Gerald Leslie Brockhurst (1890-1978), for example, Brockhurst’s Portrait of Nancy Woodward (c.1930s) (Philip Mould & Company). What Wadsworth shares with these two artists is an appreciation for the human form as a mediator of technical prowess. Her ability as a painter of the male body is enrapturing to behold and her portraits of Jean-Baptiste firmly position Wadsworth within the long-respected tradition of portraiture. They can also be understood as a dedication to this turning point in her career away from the formal portrait commission and towards an intimate treatment of her chosen subject; men, or as Wadsworth terms them, ‘boys’. Adopting the same infantilising terminology applied to women irrespective of age by men in positions of power throughout the twentieth century, Wadsworth reclaims this power imbalance for herself. In place of ‘girls’, she has her ‘beautiful boys’, a way of claiming ownership over her male subjects which, had they been termed ‘men’, might otherwise confront the viewer with a more conformist Herculean model of male power and identity. LL

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Beauty

Jean-Baptiste Awake 2007 (cat.12) [ex no.18] Charcoal on paper 59.4 x 42 cm

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As Wadsworth untethered herself from an aesthetic practice that perpetuated an outwardly patriarchal view of society’s accomplishments as defined by male success, she produced the body of work that would culminate in her first solo exhibition Beautiful Boys (Empire Gallery, 2007). Working through her own experience of romantic rejection by inverting the traditionally masculine quest for ideal human - or rather feminine beauty - Wadsworth created portrait after portrait of beautiful men

(‘boys’) in positions of vulnerability and exposure.

Her treatment of her subjects places the artist in a position of power. The vantage point is often above the subject as in Jean-Baptiste Awake (2007) (cat.12) [Ex no.18]. This elevates the viewer who acts as a stand-in for Wadsworth herself. There is an intimacy to this dynamic and yet the subject often expresses an acute vulnerability. LL

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The Purple Sheet 2008 (cat.13) [ex no.14] Oil on canvas 51.5 cm x 51.5 cm

This tension between intimacy and vulnerability is evident in The Purple Sheet (2008), which sees Wadsworth’s muse from this time in her life, Jean-Baptiste, reclining upon a precariously woven mass of broad gestural brushstrokes - the purple sheet. His body, which in other works appears muscular and strong, is shown here almost emaciated in its outstretched state, his ribcage and pelvis protruding through his tightly stretched skin.

His phallus, which occupies the centre of the canvas, does not appear especially threatening, rather it serves to

strengthen the sense of exposure and the jarring diagonal composition. The monumentality of the sitter’s feet and the substance of the sheet upon which they rest trail off into the unsupported void beneath his head. It is a work that captures what Wadsworth has described as “raw male beauty” in many respects for its utter nonconformism.

It does not flatter, nor does it elevate the male form to monolithic proportions through sculptural modelling. It is a young man, lying as he is, bare and defenceless and therein lies his pure beauty. LL 25

Beauty

Taken 2009 (cat.14) [ex no.17] Oil on canvas 76 x 76 cm

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Expanding upon her Beautiful Boys theme, Wadsworth produced two pivotal works in 2009, both of which depict the same male sitter, ‘Max’. Wadsworth had been in search of further ‘beautiful’ men to capture in paint and had been recommended the perfect sitter by model, actress, entrepreneur and activist Lily Cole, whom Wadsworth had also painted at the height of Cole’s modelling fame. Max is depicted in two works from this date, The Conversation and Taken. (cats. 15,14) [Ex nos. 25,17]

hints at a sexual exchange between sitter and artist and by extension, ‘Max’ and the viewer. Much like Jean-Baptiste Awake (cat.12) [Ex no.18], the artist reveals an intimate moment and yet there is an important distinction between these works. There is an undeniable feeling in Wadsworth’s study of Jean-Baptiste that we are being granted access to the artist’s own private life. We are privy to a sensitive exchange which reinforces the trust Wadsworth places in her prospective viewers as they glimpse into her private experience.

Depicted in the artist’s London flat, ‘Max’ is shown in two opposing narrative guises. Using the same setting as a backdrop against which Wadsworth’s subtle storytelling unfolds, we get the impression that these works were constructed in a dialogue with one another. There is a continuity evident between the two, the former ‘conversation’ acting as a before, and ‘taken’ as an after the act. Wadsworth perhaps

However, in The Conversation and Taken, there is a definite sense of fiction at play. Firstly, the titles are narrative actions and the sitter is not identifiable to anyone other than the artist. A conversation has either just taken place or is underway, the sitter’s lips ever-so parted as if we have caught him in the moment just before or after speech. When juxtaposed with Taken, Wadsworth provides just

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The Conversation 2009 (cat.15) [ex no.25] Oil on canvas 76 x 76 cm

enough story to extract. ‘Max’ offers his right hand out to the viewer in The Conversation and his position upon the sofa implies impatience or a lack of ease.

He does not recline as in The Purple Sheet (cat.13) [Ex no.14] but rather sits on the edge, expectant and penetrating in his gaze. Upon the wall in the background, we see Jean-Baptiste in direct contract with ‘Max’. The French Boy who Broke my Heart (cat.11) [Ex no.12] is present and is never quite out of view. His influence upon the scene is firmly felt and Wadsworth weaves him into a broader autobiographical narrative that is highly personal to her. ‘Max’ becomes a stand-in for the lover who broke the artist’s heart, a romantic surrogate for the man who has not yet been banished out of Wadsworth’s life. Taken in stark contrast depicts ‘Max’ sitting again but this time he is naked on the edge of the artist’s bed, the lower half of his body concealed by a sheet, his upper body revealed but turned away. He does not engage us but is mentally

absent from the scene, as if we were witnessing him in complete isolation. Wadsworth removes the viewer’s presence from the scene entirely and we are left to question what has been taken.

The artist leaves the interpretation out in the open for debate but what can be seen in these works is an increasing concern for portraiture as a means of autobiographical narrative expression. The sitters in these works occupy a personal space and are conduits for an analysis of Wadsworth’s relationships and sexual experience. She has used ‘Max’ as a means through which she can channel feelings not yet extinguished for an old love. In so doing, the sitter loses an aspect of his own personal identity and his physical form becomes the focus of Wadsworth’s penetrating observation. Yet another inversion of the male gaze. LL

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The Muse

THE MUSE The Pearl Necklace 2009 (cat.16) [ex no.19] Acrylic and oil on board 48.5 x 48.5 cm

For the past eight years, Wadsworth has adopted her own muse. Aligning herself with a singular model - a typically masculine preoccupation - Wadsworth has produced many works in which a single person has become the source of all her inspiration. Since 2011, this has been a handsome young Danish man called Joachim Gram.

Wadsworth has described their relationship as a “chaste love affair”: “He [Gram] is the most exceptional human with a rare and calm energy uniquely suited to sitting for paintings. He is the light of my life and my biggest inspiration.”

Whilst working on an exhibition at St Martin in the Fields, London, Wadsworth was in search of a male model to stand in for an angel in a series of biblically-inspired commissions. Measuring a little less than six-feet in height and having ethereal physical qualities, Gram was approached by Wadsworth at a private art view and asked if he would like to sit for her. Since this chance encounter, they have developed a close relationship of artist and muse, and Gram has appeared in numerous works, most notably Wadsworth’s religious works and a series of paintings (cats.17,18,20) [Ex nos.44,20,31] inspired by Christopher Isherwood’s novella A Single Man (1964) and the fashion designer Tom Ford’s cinematic adaptation of it starring Colin Firth and Nicholas Hoult (2009).

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Wadsworth had the idea for her series The Single Man Paintings half way through a painting of Gram, when she realised she had created a visual representation of the fragrance she always wears, Tobacco Vanille

by TOM FORD. This gave her the idea to extend her homage to Isherwood through a body of work where the imaginative jumping off point for each of the portraits would be a scent from TOM FORD’s Private Blend collection. Strongly influenced by the stylish cinematography and mise en scene of Ford’s celebrated directorial debut, Wadsworth wanted to bring to portraiture the same production values and sartorial consideration as that of a Vogue fashion shoot. In an attempt to be faithful to the aesthetic inherent in her points of inspiration, her muse is depicted wearing TOM FORD clothing from head to toe in each of the pieces.

Referencing the baroque painters she admires, Wadsworth relishes in depicting the sumptuous fabrics, exquisite tailoring and attention to detail embodied by TOM FORD’s eponymous clothing line: “To paint something is an act of love. The care and attention the painter expends when capturing the way light falls on fabric - the sheen, the texture, the creases - is an act of extreme fidelity and observation, really seeing something. Once you’ve painted a few shirts you think, ‘Why not paint the very best shirt? Why not paint a shirt where the person who’s made it has lavished upon it as much care and attention as the painter who is capturing it for eternity.’” LL

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The Muse

Sea Scout 2011 (cat.17) [ex no.44] Acrylic, oil, and 23 carat gold on gesso panel Two x 40 x 40 cm

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The Muse

UNTITLED #7

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(above)

UNTITLED #3

(opposite page)

(Inspired by TOM FORD’s Santal Blush)

(Inspired by TOM FORD’s Oud Wood)

2014 (cat.18) [ex no.20]

2014 (cat.19) [ex no.21]

Acrylic, oil and 23 carat gold on canvas 91 x 91 cm

Acrylic and oil on canvas 122 x 91 cm

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UNTITLED #10

(opposite page)

(Inspired by TOM FORD’s Atelier d’Orient) 2014 (cat.20) [ex no.31] Acrylic, charcoal and oil on canvas 152 x 122 cm

The Muse

(above)

2018 (cat.21) [ex no.35] Oil on maple panel.

25 cm in diameter

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A Last Supper

A LAST SUPPER

Study for a Disciple (Lawrence) 2008 (cat.22) [ex no.15] Oil on panel 58 x 28 cm

Wadsworth’s 12-foot altarpiece A Last Supper (cat.26) [Ex no.62], painted in 2008 for St George’s Church in Nailsworth, Gloucestershire, brings together thirteen of her beautiful boys in a dynamic and vibrant retelling of one of the most iconic scenes in the history of art. Painted over five months in a Hackney studio, “so cold you could see your breath in it,’’ A Last Supper is remarkable not only for this final, magisterial composition but for the rich body of work it inspired. Wadsworth sketched and painted numerous boys in a variety of poses to scope out and balance their arrangement across the wide canvas, creating in the process a series of studies that offer an intimate window into the artist’s workings as she prepared for this major composition.

As with Wadsworth’s other portraits, each study captures something beneath or beyond the likeness of the person they depict, the beauty of each boy giving way to reveal inner emotions of turmoil, passion or regret.

With curling, dark brown locks that frame a heart-shaped face with high, prominent cheekbones, Wadsworth’s model is a fitting choice for the disciple described by Jesus as ‘the Beloved’. John also has a dramatic part to play in the Last Supper narrative: said to have been leaning into the bosom of Christ when news of the betrayal was revealed, John’s emotional response is unique among the group of otherwise incredulous and angry disciples. This gesture of adoration is well-matched in the model Lawrence’s angelic face, his boyish cheeks reddened with thick 36

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Study for a Disciple (Danny) 2008 (cat.23) [ex no.16] Oil on panel 58 x 28 cm

daubes of pinkish paint. Unlike Wadsworth’s other studies for her disciples (cats. 22,23) [Ex no.15,16], which meet the viewer at eye-level, the perspective in this study is shifted to just above John’s head; as we look down, John stares up, mirroring his adoring gaze towards Christ in A Last Supper. His expression in this study is not, however, carried through in the final masterpiece; with brow furrowed and eyes slightly narrowed, this John is more suspicious of his audience.

The discrepancy between the study and final painting demonstrates Wadsworth’s remarkable ability to elicit a range of emotions from just one face, rendering multiple layers of meaning across the wide breadth of her work.

Beautiful but brooding, Wadsworth’s second study for one of the disciples in her masterpiece A Last Supper (cat.26) [Ex no.62] perfectly epitomises the dark, sombre mood of the group as they receive the news of Christ’s betrayal. With lips slightly parted and gaze just avoiding that of the viewer’s, Danny’s solemn expression prefigures his role in the final painting as a consoler of two outraged disciples at the far right of the altarpiece. Contrasting with this expression is the vibrant aquamarine of the study’s background, which is carried through in the thick daubs of paint on the protagonist’s body and mixed with darker tones on his neck and head, cloaking his face in shadow.

We are left with a sense that this disciple is turning from us, lost and bewildered following the revelation of his Saviour’s approaching death.

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A Blue Eyed Judas 2009 (cat.24) [ex no.10] Acrylic and oil on canvas 76.5 x 76.5 cm

Throughout the history of art, the figure of Judas Iscariot is imagined as the archetype of Betrayal, and the representation of his persona serves as a signifier of internal depravity. Wadsworth repeatedly challenges this narrative in her Sacred or Profane? series, unravelling our presumptions and forging a new, though still disquietingly sinister, Betrayer. A Blue Eyed Jesus, painted shortly after A Last Supper (cat.26) [Ex no.62], presents an intimate, closely-observed study of this enigmatic biblical figure. The tight framing around Judas’s face and shoulders focus attention wholly on his furtive, inscrutable expression and questioning eyes. Colour is also employed as a means of bringing these features to the fore, the mingling of the oranges and pinks on Judas’ skin and the painting background acting as a powerful contrast with the sky-blue of his eyes.

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This fair-skinned, blue-eyed boy, so often the herofigure in Western art, intentionally beguiles. “I was absolutely heartbroken when I painted this picture and I think it is this betrayal that I am painting”, Wadsworth recalls. “I cast Judas as the disciple with the blondest hair and the bluest eyes – inverting the apocryphal story of Da Vinci combing the jails of Milan for the sorriest-looking scoundrel – as I figured, it’s the people you love and trust with all your heart who hurt you the most, not conveniently apparent gnarly bogeymen.” As well as speaking intimately to lived experience, the model-choice for A Blue Eyed Judas also lends its subject matter a greater degree of subtlety. Wadsworth’s inversion of traditional iconography creates an unexpected and thus unnerving portrayal of a beautiful boy, whose deceiving appearance aligns all the more seamlessly with his act of betrayal. SK

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A Last Supper

A Last Supper (Cartoon) 2008 (cat.25) Charcoal on paper​​​​ 92 x 366cm

A Last Supper 2009 (cat.26) [ex no.62] Oil on aluminium 107 x 366 cm

“All I knew is that I didn’t want to copy Da Vinci”, remarks Wadsworth of the creation of her magisterial modern altarpiece A Last Supper.

Though manufactured with the skill and visual language of the Renaissance Masters, one glance is enough to confirm the artist’s success in this respect. A Last Supper is a brave new expression of betrayal and acceptance, a striking vision of this pivotal moment in the Gospel narrative. As the twelve figures gather around their leader across a sweeping table laden with bread and wine, we are witness to the moment Jesus announces one of them will betray him (Matt 26:20-25, Mark 14:17-21, Luke 22:21-23 and John 13:21-20). His words send a ripple of emotion through the crowd of faithful disciples, reverberating almost physically across the wide breadth of the twelve-foot altarpiece. To the far left, a disciple with a red tunic flings his arms wide, knocking over his glass of wine in anger and astonishment; his neighbour gazes at him in sadness, his palms held aloft in a gesture of questioning confusion. On the opposite end of the table, whilst one disciple leans forward onto a taut, outstretched arm in disbelief, another leans back, away from the scene unfolding before him, his mouth open in horror. Amongst this agitated mass of disciples, two figures are particularly striking. Standing above all the others, Peter thrusts his body towards Christ, confronting his leader with an outstretched, emphatically pointed finger. Named by Jesus as ‘The Rock’ on which he will build his church (Matthew 16:13-20, Mark 8:27-30, Luke 9:18-20) and yet soon to deny ever knowing him, Peter’s painful reaction to his master’s words stands in tension with this

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looming future of denial. Different again is John, ‘The Beloved’ (John 13:23), who collapses into the lap of Christ in an act of adoration. The blood-red of his tunic, mirrored in the radiant plasticity of Jesus’s flesh, speaks of their intimacy and John’s passionate love for his soon-to-be Saviour.

Amidst the confusion and anger of the disciples stands Christ, serene and unyielding. This is not the stylised or stoic Christ of many medieval or Renaissance works of art; Wadsworth’s Jesus is a solemn, peaceful man who transcends the disquiet in solemnity. With lips slightly parted and eyes fixed gently away from the scene, this Christ has understood the ramifications of his betrayal; his arms wide, he accepts his fate. This gesture of acceptance stands in contrast to that of the man who will soon betray him. Judas is the only figure to remain disturbingly reticent to the news of Christ’s betrayal, with his arms and shoulders drawn in and face turned away from the viewer with an unfathomable expression. It is this absence of emotion that conveys his cruelty; so too does the physical distance between the hand of Christ, reaching out in love, and the hand of Judas, pulling away in guilt.

The style and composition of A Last Supper brilliantly evokes the stage-like drama of the Gospel narrative. Wadsworth completed the preparatory cartoon (cat.25) for the painting in stages, sketching individual disciples or even body parts and piecing these together like a puzzle. This allowed for a gradual adjusting of limbs and gestures, ensuring

the piece flowed, in gentle wave-like peaks and troughs, out from Christ as the central, tallest figure.

In the final altarpiece, painterly technique is also employed as a means to drive the narrative. Unlike most of the paintings in the Sacred or Profane? series, the paint on this altarpiece is controlled and not allowed to drip, instead forming a thick mosaic of flesh, pausing the figures in the midst of their turmoil. The scene’s matte background of pink and black also imposes an abstract, nebulous space that projects the drama in the foreground of the painting, the lighter tones highlighting Christ’s centrality, the darker balancing the composition.

As a viewer, we are called into the visceral dynamism of the disciples’ emotive reactions, drawn to engage with the nuanced layers of their body language.

Wadsworth has excluded the definitive article ‘the’ in order to “offer my picture as an interpretation, opening a dialogue about the subject… I’m reminding people that there were many Last Suppers painted before Leonardo, and mine is continuing this trajectory.” Now installed behind the altar in St George’s Church, Nailsworth in Gloucester, A Last Supper invites visitors to “look with fresh eyes at something you think you know”.

This modern masterpiece also moves beyond the Christian story it depicts, speaking to a dark, beautiful, universal truth about human nature. In the artist’s words, “love and betrayal are part of the human experience, and for me art should move the human spirit, just as it should attempt to reveal us to ourselves.” SK

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Sacred or Profane

SACRED OR PROFANE

Blue Angel 2009 (cat.27) [ex no.57] Oil and 24 carat gold on panel 91 x 91 cm

Wadsworth’s Sacred or Profane? series is characterised by an intermingling of traditional religious visual vocabulary and strikingly contemporary expressions of emotion, beauty and fleshy reality. Blue Angel sits definitively at this junction; in the author’s words, it “embodies my burgeoning fascination with refracting religious tropes of Art History through a modern lens.” Painted shortly after A Last Supper (cat.26) [Ex no.62], the painting also takes as its central figure one of Wadsworth’s beautiful boys, Joachim Gram, though this time in the guise of a celestial, winged being. Set against a brilliant gold background, the painting shines magnificently in a manner reminiscent of a heavenly realm or a gold-laden religious icon. Nevertheless, as with another of Wadsworth’s icon-like paintings, My Boy Mary (Blue) (cat.28) [Ex no.59], the angel set against this celestial background is figured as an inversion of traditional Christian typology. Far from the triumphant, powerful or serene angels that so frequently appear throughout the history of art, Wadsworth’s Blue Angel presents us with a withdrawn, vulnerable and desperately beautiful man. Crouched down, with arms wrapped protectively around his bare torso, the angel-boy leans slightly to his right, away from the light and into the shadowy interior of the painting.

The haunting expression on his face exudes an internal anguish; with lips turned down and eyes gazing wretchedly beyond the painting’s frame, this is not a fallen or sinful angel, but an innocent and damaged one. The figure’s melancholy state is mirrored in the painterly technique, where yellows, browns and pinks comprising the figure’s skin have been allowed to drip down to the foot of the painting. As Wadsworth describes, the luminous paint “seems to be dissolving in front of your eyes, almost like the painting is weeping for the angel.”

Simultaneous to this interweaving of the celestial and the melancholy is an inherent tension between the earthly and heavenly realms. Rather than unfolding miraculously from behind his back, the angel’s soft white wings, comprised of feathers delicately coated in pale hues, are seemingly attached to plastic clasped straps looping over both his shoulders. Striking too are the angel’s pale blue jeans, which crease around his folded legs. These details serve as icons of the earthly sphere, punctuating the gold, heavenly world that the angel inhabits. Sitting neither on the side of the human nor the divine, the protagonist of Blue Angel invites his audience to question the reality of his existence: are we confronted with a heavenly messenger, imbued with divine authority, or simply a beautiful boy playing at being an angel? SK

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Sacred or Profane

My Boy Mary (Blue) 2010 (cat.28) [ex no.59] Oil and 23 carat gold on canvas 152 x 152 cm

An inversion of biblical tradition, My Boy Mary (Blue) reimagines the Virgin Mary as a beautiful, sanguine boy. Set against a luminescent gold background with cross-hatched squares, the painting’s format and materiality recall that of an Orthodox icon. These devotional images, believed to be conduits of the holy person they represent, are cherished in the Eastern Church as objects seething with divine power. Those depicting the Virgin Mary show her in many guises: as a loving mother, cradling the child-Christ; as a spiritual intercessor and gatekeeper to celestial eternity, gazing out at the devotee; or as a mother-of-all, offering her blessing with a gently-raised hand.

Wadsworth’s My Boy Mary (Blue) is invariably more human. He glances down, refusing to meet the eyes of his beholder. Absent too is the Christ-child, or any signs of blessing or heavenly omnipotence: this Mary is alone, and somewhat vulnerable, with just the iconic blue mantle of the Virgin covering his head.

Rather than raised in blessing, the figure’s hand rests wearily across his forehead, as if he feels deeply the pains of the world. Naked and stripped back, sad and sullen, My Boy Mary (Blue) places the viewer in the position of a saviour, leaving us yearning to help this forlorn, beautiful boy. Just as gender is reversed in this striking, modern icon, so too is the role of intercessor and devotee. SK

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Sacred or Profane

The Pain of Christ 2010 (cat.29) [ex no.34] Acrylic, 23 carat gold, charcoal and oil on canvas 152 x 152 cm

The themes of agony, ecstasy and spiritual catharsis that weave throughout Wadsworth’s Sacred or Profane? series reach their climax in The Pain of Christ.

The painting resembles a diptych, the double-winged altarpiece conventionally placed as the focal point during a community’s celebration of mass. Yet, unlike a traditional diptych, which can be opened and closed at will to reveal or hide the image within, The Pain of Christ stands perpetually open, as an immovable confrontation of two ecstatic views of one man. To the left, the hooded figure gazes at the blood dripping from his taut, open hands; to the right, hands held high but still dripping with blood, he screams.

This figure is Saint Francis, the thirteenth-century preacher whose radical message of piety, love for the poor and a respect for nature transformed medieval religious devotion. Francis is said to have loved Christ with such a passion that he began to experience the same pains and torments that Jesus himself faced during his crucifixion. The most recognisable trope of Francis is as a sufferer of the stigmata, the miraculous reappearance of the wounds endured by Christ as he was nailed to the cross. In presenting two visions of the agonised Francis receiving the stigmata, Wadsworth draws us into an unfolding, wretched narrative. First, we see the dark moment of realisation as Francis beholds his bloody wounds, as if wrought by the nails forced through Christ’s palms; then ensues a reaction of terror, as Francis, mouth stretched wide, expresses the physical and emotional pain of these torments. The inclusion of skulls, both on the figure’s ring finger and dancing eerily on his clothing, serve as a memento mori, a reminder of the ultimate sacrifice paid by Christ on the cross and Francis’ miraculous experience of this moment. Beyond this, though, Wadsworth’s figure also functions as the archetype of the beleaguered soul. His clothes, part-Franciscan cloak, part-hoodie, suspend the figure outside history, transcending into a dynamic presentation of personal anguish and internal torment. In the same vein as Edvard Munch’s iconic Scream, The Pain of Christ stands as an expression of the haunting upheaval of the self, and of the stark, damning realisation of pain and suffering. Looking beyond the threshold of the shining gold border as it gives way to a darkened, blood-red interior of the painted world, the viewer is invited from the material to the immaterial, to stand with this haunted figure in an experience of the imitatio Christi. SK

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Sacred or Profane

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Sacred or Profane

Fashion Martyrs / Slave Master Slave Icon Slave Banksy Slave Golden Eye Slave Pop Slave 2010 - 2011 (cat.30) [ex no.56] Acrylic, oil, spray paint, gloss paint and 24 carat gold on gesso panels Five panels each measuring 66 x 51 cm

The inspiration for Wadsworth’s Fashion Martyrs can be traced back to the thirteenth-century martyrdom medallions in the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, which the artist first saw when visiting her friend (and author of the catalogue essays for Wadsworth’s A Last Supper / Sacred or Profane? exhibitions), the art historian Dr Emily Guerry, whose work focuses on these diminutive, often-overlooked medallions. Sitting just underneath the Sainte-Chapelle’s stunning stained glass windows, the forty-four paintings each show a different saint in the midst of the torture that will eventually lead to their death and martyrdom: St Victor of Marseilles is fed slowly into a mill; St Hippolytus is drawn and quartered; St Margaret is beheaded; St Agatha’s breasts are removed with pincers; St Thomas Becket’s scalp is struck from his head by three knights. The objects or body parts that define each saint’s martyrdom – St Agatha’s pincers, for example, or Becket’s scalp – feature predominantly in the scenes, functioning, as in wider medieval typography, as iconographic signifiers of their associated saint’s torment and death.

In the same way, this first in Wadsworth’s Fashion Martyrs / Slave Series takes the principal tropes of the fashion house Chanel, the pearls and leather threaded gold chain, as icons of the modern martyr. These signifiers of the brand evolved from Coco Chanel’s revolutionary practice of taking costume pearls and selling them for more than the real thing, thus elevating an item from ordinary to extraordinary by the application of the Chanel branding. Karl Lagerfeld, Chanel’s creative designer in more recent years, reinterpreted this brand iconography season after season in his collections, and the pearls and gold chain have taken on an almost religious significance for many in contemporary society. In Fashion Martyrs / Slave, however, these Chanel icons are not mere fashion accessories; pulled tight around the figures’ lips and wrists, they form instead a rope and gag that keep the protagonist hostage. Unlike the Sainte-Chapelle medallions, neither are these symbols the icons of a sacred, revered martyr; far from implements of an oppressor, the pearl and gold chain appear independently, almost as if the figure has enslaved herself in the icons of the Chanel brand. In figuring these accessories as the implements of torture, Wadsworth’s work seeks to explore the complicated, often masochistic, relationship between modern society and the fashion and beauty industries. SK

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Sacred or Profane

Pink Christ 2011 (cat.31) [ex no.45] Acrylic, two shades of 23 carat gold and oil on panel 40 x 32.5 cm

Christ’s arresting stare is at once powerful and quietly moving in this remarkable reimagining of one of the pivotal moments in the crucifixion narrative. In Pink Christ, we meet Jesus in the very midst of his torments: betrayed, delivered to the authorities and condemned to death, the torture he endures at the hands of Pontius Pilate’s soldiers includes a mock-crowning with a woven wreath of thorns. This biblical event formed the basis of a popular devotional image known as Ecce Homo, or ‘Behold the Man’, the words said to have been uttered by Pilate when he presented the scourged Christ before a hostile crowd of onlookers. While some imaginings of this scene show Jesus amidst his tormentors, Wadsworth’s rendering, in a manner more reminiscent of the Baroque Ecce Homo paintings of Guido Reni, abstracts Christ’s head, presenting a stark, intimate window into this heightened moment of pain and suffering. In Pink Christ Wadsworth pushes the concept of abstraction to the fore, utilising pink to flood the background of the painting, removing Christ from his crowd of tormentors and placing him instead in a sea of fluorescent paint. Perhaps most striking of all

Judas Light and Dark

is Christ’s expression, inscrutable as much as it is powerful. Unlike the Jesus of A Last Supper (cat.26) [Ex no. 62], this Christ is not passively serene in the face of anguish and torment. That he feels deeply is conveyed in the directness of his gaze, the rigidness of his hard-set jaw; yet how this Jesus feels as he is mocked and left debased is indecipherable.

Pink Christ leaves us guessing.

Colour is an important motif throughout Pink Christ.

“Fluorescent pink started to seep into my work as a kind of punk variation on the warm red boule you traditionally use underneath gilded gold leaf ”, Wadsworth explains. “I have also explored using fluorescent colours in place of gold as a modern interpretation of an icon painting – the colour glows and silhouettes the subject somewhat, like gold leaf does.” Though gold does not feature as a traditional background, it is wrought instead, in two shades of 23 carat gold, into the crown hovering like a halo over Christ’s head. As a masterful play on traditional materials, technique and symbolism, Pink Christ is a truly modern icon. SK

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2011 (cat.32) [ex no.36] Acrylic and oil on panel 40 x 33 cm

This pair of icon-like portraits, like the other depictions of Judas in Wadsworth’s Sacred or Profane? series, offers a more complex reading of a figure traditionally rendered as the archetype of evil.

In Judas Light and Dark, the protagonist’s inner emotional state is in turmoil. Looking both to and away from the light flooding in from the right of the frame, Judas appears as if at a crossroads, caught between the light and the dark, facing either the hope of redemption or the darkness of damnation. The composition recalls Wadsworth’s

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other icon-like paintings of Christ and the Virgin, though this painting refuses to shine with radiant gold or florescent pink. The deep, static red of the background, which has been allowed to drip eerily over the sides of the panel, breaking the tension of the surface, floods the painting instead with a colour that speaks powerfully of Christ’s blood that was shed as a result of Judas’s betrayal. The icon form of Judas Light and Dark exposes the betrayer’s potential for holiness; the darkness into which he looks hints at the fate unfolding before him. SK

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Sacred or Profane

The Kiss of Betrayal 2015 (cat.33) [ex no.40] Acrylic, two shades of 23 carat gold and charcoal on canvas 120 x 180 cm

In The Kiss of Betrayal, Wadsworth takes the iconic moment of Judas’s treachery in the Garden of Gethsemane and re-sets it in a startlingly contemporary context. By isolating the figures in a vast cinematic close-up, the piece is electric with ambiguity. Referencing icon painters of the past, Wadsworth’s sculptural figures are set against 24 carat gold, but rather than left a solid gold background as in My Boy Mary (Blue) (cat.28) [Ex no.59] and Blue Angel (cat.27) [Ex no.57], the edges of The Kiss of Betrayal are lined with shadowy charcoal, referencing Judas’s treachery. The two heads, each figured like classical sculptures, are separated by a lightning bolt of suspense, their angles reminiscent of glamorous silver screen kisses from old Hollywood. Christ’s eyes gaze out heavenwards, the catch-light picked out in silvery platinum.

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The piece sears into the crisis of homosexuality within the modern church. It is at once entirely rooted in biblical orthodoxy and the art historical canon, but in stripping all the extraneous details away, this painting directly challenges the homophobic unease inherent in many parts of the modern church. “I wanted it to be a little ambiguous, like you’re not sure if Judas is about to ‘nut him’ or kiss him”, Wadsworth explains. “By making such a cinematic scale close up, removing all other allusions to the plot and the context, to perhaps engage with and confront some Christians’ troubled acceptance of gay marriage, and I guess gay people full stop. I like to introduce a duality when I tackle religious themes, to make people really think about their beliefs and prejudices.” SK

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Sacred or Profane

Magritte Idea 2011 (cat.34) [ex no.32] Acrylic, oil, spray paint, gloss paint and 23 carat gold on gesso panel 61 x 46 cm

In this experimental work, Wadsworth makes a direct reference to the Belgian Surrealist-affiliated artist, René Magritte (1898-1967), and in particular his painting The Son of Man (1964). In the original work, Magritte depicts a Man in a long, grey overcoat, white shirt and red tie, wearing a bowler hat and standing against a stone wall. Behind the figure is an overcast and barren seascape.

Most notably the figure’s face is obscured by a hovering ripe, green apple, its stalk still adorned with fresh leaves to indicate its recent pluck from the tree.

The scene is one of disquietude that entices the viewer to question the reality of visual appearances. The result is jarring and typical of Magritte’s playful experimentation with Surrealist models.

In Wadsworth’s homage, the model, Alex Watson (younger brother of Actor and Activist Emma Watson), is shown in bust adorning only a collar and green bow tie (a stand-in for Magritte’s apple). The ‘floating’ collar and tie are clear references to the Belgian’s use of bourgeois men’s fashion items when juxtaposed with uncanny scenarios. Further to this, Wadsworth establishes a playful discombobulation of the viewer’s expectations by having a bowler hat lampshade hanging, illuminated above the sitter’s head. It is a stand-alone piece in the broader context of Wadsworth’s oeuvre and yet is an intriguing example of her capacity for experimentation and wit, reinforcing her connection with 20th-century art movements beyond Pop and Conceptual examples. LL

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Grids

GRIDS Brimstone and Treacl​e (Rupert Friend) 2012 (cat.35) [ex no.33] Acrylic, gloss paint and three shades of 23 carat gold on canvas 120 x 91 cm

In the entries above, the artist’s frequent use of 23 carat gold is noted for the precious metal’s long-standing iconographic connection with Western religious imagery. Wadsworth continues to use it in this work from 2012 to evoke the application of gold leaf in Byzantine icons and later Italianate Gothic panel paintings as a means to express the ethereal context of heaven and figures of sacred significance. Wadsworth employs it here in certain squares that make up the larger gridded collage. There is a tenuous reference point here, made all the more extracted and playful through the use of individually contrasting squares.

Each grid panel is holistic in its relationship to the whole, a portrait of Actor Rupert Friend smoking a brown-papered cigarette.

Johnny Depp

By returning to the grid-form first explored in Unrequited Love: Men I Have Been Besotted With to No Avail (cat.1) [Ex no.1], Wadsworth imbues this range of work with a sense of her own biographical nostalgia. In the above work produced between 1996-7, Wadsworth constructed the entire 25-panel piece by aligning a series of individually produced portraits of men the artist had been romantically attracted to at the time. Within these, there is an emphasis on decontextualisation where Wadsworth extracts the sitter and reimagines them as existing within an independent, self-contained collage setting. This gives the piece a Pop Art quality, similar to the composite work of Peter Blake and David Hockney’s Polaroid collages. It cements this aesthetic firmly within the digital age. This is in Brimstone and Treacle through the use of pixelated imagery.

Wadsworth has constructed the third panel down from the right by rendering Friend’s left cheek in singularly packed pixels, albeit individually painted by the artist. (above)

Unrequited Love: Men I Have Been Besotted with to No Avail (detail) 1996-1997 (cat.1) [Ex no.1] Acrylic, acrylic ink, water colour ink and found objects on paper Series of 25 works 16 x 12 cm.

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The pixel format places uniformly sized, but tonally contrasting squares next to each other to build up the impression of an image. The more squares, or pixels, inputted into a certain space, for example, a 1 x 1 in. square, the more naturalistic the image will appear once the position of the viewer is further away, or ‘zoomed out’. Wadsworth plays on this digital structure in the present work but through variation as opposed to uniformity. Each square shown here is different, utterly juxtaposed with the adjacent squares.

Wadsworth began employing this technique here to allude to the illusion of intimacy felt by the public when viewing an actor at work and then encountering this same person in the ‘real world’. The barrier between fiction and reality is a fine line and the very nature of adopting a character as a means of illusion is similar in many ways to the functionality of pixels or the act of portrait painting. The computer or the artist reconfigures reality, either through coloured squares or coloured paint and line to provide the viewer with a representation of how things appear. The contrasting grid as seen here is a stark reminder that identity is always a series of varying constructions. Wadsworth here challenges the notion that a person can ever truly be known when seen via representative forms such as acting and painting. LL

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Grids

Richard Curtis 2012 - 2019 (cat.36) [ex no.42] Acrylic, acrylic ink, oil and three shades of 23 carat gold on panel 86.7 x 58 cm

Richard Curtis is one of Britain’s most celebrated and prolific comedy writers. He is also the cofounder of the charity Comic Relief, which, over the course of its existence, has raised over a billion pounds for a plethora of notable charitable causes through celebrity and comedic performance.

Having drawn live at various Comic Relief fundraisers throughout her career, Wadsworth has excelled at capturing the multitude of talented performers and writers of our times. It is through her involvement with Comic Relief that she was asked to be an artist in residence for Curtis’s film About Time (2013).

Wadsworth states: “For me, the leading men in many of Richard’s films are ostensibly avatars for himself. I think we can glean so much about him from these characters he’s created, and also the people he has surrounded himself with and worked with again and again.

Also, he’s a very diffident man, not the kind to take to a portrait of himself. I thought it made perfect

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sense to include ‘portraits’ of his DVDs within the composition. I also like the idea of creating something ‘future-retro’ - DVDs are already on their way into obsolescence with the proliferation of direct downloading. In the future, it will look so period.”

Wadsworth highlights an important aspect of the formal portrait painting in that through the sitter, the fashions, the style and medium, it is a genre, perhaps more so than others, that is inextricably bound to the time in which it was produced. Whilst this is, of course, true about all creative production, portraiture records the physical appearance of a person at a particular moment as well as being seen through the temporal lens of that particular time and place. Here Wadsworth reinforces this through the literal representation of Curtis’s most notable creative productions. Furthermore, it is clear that Wadsworth, as an artist, firmly believes that it is possible to know a person through what they create. LL

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Grids

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Grids

The Art Dealer’s Son 2014 - 2016 (cat.37) [ex no.22] Oil on canvas, oil on linen, oil on aluminium, acrylic on panel 25 individual panels each measuring 40 x 40 cm with varying depths, comprising a larger 228 x 228 cm grid

In this large-scale piece comprising 25 individually painted panels, Wadsworth expands upon her grid theme first explored in one of her first works, Unrequited Love: Men I Have Been Besotted With to No Avail (cat.1) [Ex no.1]. Depicted in various historical and art historical guises, the son of art dealer Philip Mould OBE, Oliver, is shown across 21 of the panels.

As the son of an internationally acclaimed art dealer and specialist in British Portraiture, Oliver had a childhood in which the relics and masterpieces of the past were somewhat commonplace. Growing up surrounded by paintings by Sir Anthony Van Dyck (1599-1641), Thomas Gainsborough (1727-88) and Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1839), their ordinarily inaccessible nature would have undoubtedly have been somewhat removed.

crusader Knight or perhaps a modern football supporter, as Lord Admiral Nelson in a roundneck t-shirt, a Tudor Courtier only in a ruff, his face obscured by an iPhone as he takes a selfie, a 17th-century Dutch merchant, Piero Della Francesca’s Duke of Urbino caught in a meta moment listening to Buckingham Palace’s Queen’s Gallery multimedia guide headset. Wadsworth has dressed her sitter up much like Rembrandt (160669) would do to elevate his Bourgeois clientele to the status of nobility and royalty. Here we have a young man, shown across a series of images as if we were viewing his personal Instagram feed with Wadsworth injecting a dimension of historical licence through the application of various decontextualising ‘filters’.

Whilst working on a portrait of Oliver commissioned by Mould, Wadsworth grappled with a wide range of conflicting ideas. She had been captivated by the young man’s innocence when confronted with Old Master paintings and was enraptured by his sense of detachment from the context in which these works were made. At at time when he was engaged in thoughts of University and leaving home, Wadsworth wanted to capture some of this distance between her sitter and the contexts in which she has depicted him. By incorporating a sense of theatricality or ‘dress-up’, she has imbued the work with a contemporaneous separation between subject and historical reference point.

It is a wholly unique work and the culmination of her earlier exploration into the grid format as a means to explore multiple concepts and ideas unified by their juxtaposition and compositional arrangement. In an age in which one person can at any one time present themselves to the world in any way they wish to be viewed at that particular moment, Wadsworth has captured a sense of permanence and an enduring quality in a work that stands in direct contrast to the fast-paced transience in which people live today. The rate at which people consume, adopt and discard fashion trends and social media conventions can alienate us from connecting with our shared history. Wadsworth has encapsulated the dichotomy between two seemingly disparate human experiences perfectly in the present work by throwing the then and now into the mix together. LL

We see Oliver as Caravaggio’s (1571-1610) Bacchus, adorned in a white tank top with a cigarette resting on his mouth, as an English

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Grids

Just One Macaron More Please Mr. Executioner 2015 (cat.38) [ex no.24]

The model for these portraits is a direct descendant of Madame du Barry, the famous courtesan of Louis XIV of France. This Tripartite series plays on the tradition of honorific portraiture and the iconography of the French Court, whilst also referencing the dark pathology of eating disorders so prevalent in contemporary society. Madame du Barry was amongst those beheaded at Place de la Concorde during the French Revolution. Members of the court, such as Marie Antoinette and Louis, prided themselves on meeting their bloody ends stoically, seeking to retain as much royal decorum as possible before the baying mobs. Not Madame du Barry, however.

The female artist Vigée-Lebrun, who knew Madame du Barry well and painted her several times later recalled: “Madame du Barry … is the only woman, among all the women who perished in the dreadful days, who could not stand the sight of the scaffold. She screamed, she begged mercy of the horrible crowd that stood around the scaffold, she aroused them to such a point that the executioner grew anxious and hastened to complete his task.” Du Barry’s final words were “Just one moment more please Mr Executioner, one moment more…”. Here Wadsworth reiterates these infamous words and grants du Barry her dying wish, by immortalising her in paint in three final moments. Humorously, Wadsworth replaces the moment with a macaron, thereby inverting the tragedy and severity of history and turning it on its head to reveal something altogether more provocative. LL

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Retrospective

Left to right:

Triptych (I) Oil on masonite panel with plaster of paris maracon sculpure, which screws onto panel at rear 86.9 x 57.9 cm

Triptych (II) Oil on masonite panel with plaster of paris maracon sculpure, which screws onto panel at rear 86.9 x 57.9 cm

Triptych (III) Oil, gesso and acrylic on aluminium with plaster of paris maracon sculpure, which screws onto panel at rear 86.9 x 57.9 cm

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Retrospective

DISNEYLAND DAGENHAM

Disneyland Dagenham 2015 (cat.39) [ex no.43] Acrylic and oil on linen in a frame previously around an Augustus John painting 101 x 126 cm (including frame)

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Disneyland Dagenham

The Impossibility of Love in the Modern Age 2016 (cat.40) [ex no.38] Oil on linen in a frame previously around a David Jagger painting 100 x 79.8 cm (including frame)

When working on one of her paintings in 2016, Wadsworth required a pair of sunglasses as a prop.

She proceeded to purchase what she has described as ‘Lady Gaga style’ round flip-up sunglasses from eBay and was surprised to find that they were an official Disney product. This chance encounter placed Wadsworth into a state of nostalgia as she relived her childhood yearning to visit Disneyland.

Inspired by the branded paraphernalia of her youth, Wadsworth reimagined what it would be like to fulfil her childhood dream as an adult, the ‘magic’ stripped away to expose the harsh reality of corporate capitalism. What she would now view as ‘kitsch’ would have been her ideal Disneyland fairytale as a little girl.

Disneyland Dagenham began when Wadsworth “started constructing paintings which manifested a version of Disneyland that would speak to me now.” The models throughout the series were real life couples Wadsworth knew tangentially, who were “Facebook ‘personal celebrities’ who live seemingly charmed and happy lives. I cast them as well-known Disney couples, dressed them in vintage Disney paraphernalia and created dramatic and emotionally charged trysts and tableaux.” The title for the series transmuted from I never went to Disneyland to Disneyland Dagenham after Wadsworth’s model for Donald Duck, one of the first-ever male supermodels Paul Sculfor, told her that a site in Dagenham was on the shortlist for sites when they were deciding where to construct Eurodisney.

According to Wadsworth, she “imagined that they had built a Disneyland there, which is [in my work] populated by tragic lovelorn hipsters, trying to make their grand loves work in the modern world whilst

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on a day trip to a theme park, where opera is blared over loudspeakers and the rides make you cry by engendering a surfeit of empathy with their grand and tragic themes.”

The series Disneyland Dagenham is in part an attempt to recapture a forgotten childhood but also simultaneously imagines revisiting the children of Wadsworth’s youth now that they are adults in adult relationships. It distorts and plays with time as much as it does our expectations. The seemingly ridiculous Disney merchandise worn by her sitters in Disneyland Dagenham and Meanie Mouse I (cats.39, 41) [Ex nos.43,48] almost act as dystopian symbols for an age in which the brand identity of Disney has ceased to exist. Its identity is lost and the corporate products that were once immediately recognisable by billions of children all over the world have now assumed a new status as historical fashion. It is almost possible to imagine the context in which these works exist as an extension of Wadsworth’s The Art Dealer’s Son (cat.37) [Ex no.22]. In this work, the sitter, Oliver Mould, is shown as a contemporary man wearing the guises of a past time, disconnected from his own. Similarly, in Disneyland Dagenham, the Donald Duck hats worn by the lovers appear to be worn in a manner suggestive of a degree of isolation between the sitters and iconography of Disney.

Rather than being worn ironically, the merchandise has been stripped of its symbolic power to evoke the fairytales of childhood. What the young Wadsworth would have instantly recognised as Donald Duck, the living ambassador of Disney, now appears to adult eyes as a disembodied, inanimate symbol of change. The familiarity which dominates childhood recognition now appears jarring and uncomfortable. LL

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Disneyland Dagenham

Meanie Mouse I 2015 (cat.41) [ex no.48] Acrylic and oil on canvas covered panel in a frame previously around a George Romney Painting 58 cm diameter (including frame)

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Meanie Mouse II 2015 (cat.42) [ex no.50] Acrylic, oil and 24 carat gold on panel 58 cm diameter

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Tondos

TONDOS

William Orbit is one of the most iconic and recognised music producers in England.

Emerging on the scene in the late 1980s, Orbit released his first studio album in 1987 on the I.R.S. label. His career has taken him from a makeshift studio in Notting Hill to collaborations with Madonna, Prince, U2 and Queen. Selling over 200 million records and receiving numerous Grammy and Ivor Novello Awards, Orbit has continued to be recognised for his innovations and experimentation across a range of musical genres.

Orbit’s influence is far-reaching, yet his acclaim is understated and decidedly cool. Shown here in the tondo form, Wadsworth positions him against a neon orange background, thereby emphasising him in true ‘Pop’ fashion. The tondo format, previously reserved for religious subject matter and popularised by artists such as Sandro Botticelli, Raphael of Urbino and Michelangelo, is repurposed here for the genre of portraiture, which struck Wadsworth as a particularly apt format for her subject: “The tondo form echoed the perfect circle of a compact disc or a record and the O of Orbit’s name. It reminded me of the circularity of celestial orbits and the spheres of planets. The orange continued this theme, both phonetically and with the shape of the fruit and its solid perfection, like a small planet in the palm of your hand.”

The tondo was a format exploited to great effect during varying stages of the Italian Renaissance. In 15th Century Florentine high society, there is no greater use of the tondo than the commemorative birth tray celebrating the birth of Lorenzo de Medici (1449-92).

Il Magnifico depicts English actor Daniel Sharman in the role of the mighty patron of the arts, Lorenzo, in the Netflix series Medici: Masters of Florence (cat.44) [Ex no.37]. Whereas the commemorative desco di parto tondo, The Triumph of Fame (c. 1449), painted by Scheggia (1406-86) [The Met, 1995.7], displays a wealth of allegorical and late-medieval imagery, Wadsworth’s use of the format is wildly different. Focussing instead on a close crop of Sharman in character as Lorenzo, the mood is influenced by the cinematic context in which the actor is positioned. What Wadsworth does, however, is retain a sense of celebrity, fame and drama. These are all present in the Scheggia tondo and can be felt in this contemporary interpretation.

Pushing the boundaries of the format even further with her portrait of poet and performer Murray Lachlan Young (cat.45) [Ex no.51], Wadsworth projects the tondo into new territory.

The sides of the tondo are also painted the same luminescent orange found on William Orbit (cat.43) [Ex no.47]. This has the effect of making the artwork a kind of eclipse, the glowing neon sides drawing the eye like the sun until you are directly in front of the piece, the viewer orbiting the painting until they reach the perfect viewing point. The circle through which we view her sitter retains the portal perspective into another world, found in earlier Renaissance examples. However, the world from which Young emerges transcends the boundaries of the support and extends out on the sides of the work itself.

Wadsworth fuses the ethereal and the tangible together emphasising both the materiality of the medium and the capabilities of paint to produce dreamlike qualities. LL

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Retrospective

William Orbit 2018 (cat.43) [ex no.47] Acrylic and oil on gesso panel 25 cm diameter

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Tondos

Il Magnifico 2019 (cat.44) [ex no.37] Acrylic and oil on panel 30 cm diameter

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Retrospective

Murray Lachlan Young 2019 (cat.45) [ex no.51] Acrylic and oil on panel 40 cm diameter.

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The Modern Society Portrait

THE MODERN SOCIETY PORTRAIT

The Queen of New Orleans 2018 (cat.46) [ex no.63] Oil on linen in a frame previously around a Philip de László portrait painting of a European Princess 110 x 82 cm (including frame)

Wadsworth met Leslie Dalton, taxidermist extraordinaire, at art dealer Philip Mould’s London gallery during the artist’s showcase exhibition, The Milliner (February 2018). Dalton had been a longstanding client of milliner Victoria Grant, subject of Wadsworth’s exhibition, and was therefore introduced to the artist at the gallery. Wadsworth was immediately enraptured by Dalton’s sense of style and taste and her elegant, yet understated fashion.

She struck up a rapport with her quickly and their shared sensibilities and countenance made them make an instant connection. Wadsworth remembers being particularly drawn to Leslie’s incandescent John Singer Sargent-esque complexion. A native New Orleans modern belle, Wadsworth learned she was in town for only a week. Fresh from putting the show together the artist was dying to paint and asked if Leslie would come to her studio for her to paint her in the exact outfit she was wearing that day - a Victoria Grant hat, Gucci coat, Gaultier black high lace and net top and statement crystal necklace. She agreed and artist and sitter had an

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extremely intensive three days painting from life.

The ornate frame seen here has been repurposed and was originally around a painting by the great society portrait painter, Philip de László. The de László work depicted a European princess and although it had initially been a suitable choice of frame, it was no longer deemed to complement it.

Following the removal of the previous painting, Wadsworth has given the frame a new lease of life here in a contemporary glamour portrait for the modern-day. De László famously often painted his portraits with the canvas in the finished frame, with an eye to the overall composition being conceived as a unity. Wadsworth adopted this approach here to great effect. The delicate motifs of the frame and the angular corner points remarkably seem to mirror the Gucci coat worn by Dalton. It is clear that Wadsworth wanted to portray a strong, empowered female in a similarly dominant and confident pose. It is a society portrait thrust into the glamour and branded fashions of today. Unlike de László’s demure princesses, Dalton meets our gaze like a haughty empress. LL

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The Modern Society Portrait

A Man in Uniform 2018 (cat.47) [ex no.64]

The Scholar Oil on linen 185 x 132 cm

The Elvis Selfie Oil on linen 185 x 142 cm

The Papal Knight Oil on linen 185 x 132 cm

In her portraits of City magnate, CQS Asset Management founder and prolific philanthropist Sir Michael Hintze GCSG, AM, Wadsworth has reinvented the swagger portrait for the modern age. These three paintings comprise the left-hand wall of a set of five portraits, conceived as a site specific installation piece for a billiard room in a country house. Wadsworth had been inspired by the various ceremonial uniforms which she had come across in Sir Michael’s wardrobe when discussing the particulars of a portrait commission. Relishing the chance of painting costumes worthy of a Van Dyck painting, she conceived a series where, in the manner of the Flemish painter’s various depictions of Charles I as huntsman, in armour and enthroned head of state, she captured Sir Michael in distinct guises contrasting aspects of his professional and personal life.

In The Scholar, Sir Michael wears the academic robes of the University of New South Wales, from where he obtained an Honorary Doctorate. Standing in an oratory pose, turned a quarter to the left, Sir Michael confronts the viewer with open mouth, as if about to utter words of ceremony. Accompanied by the open book in his hands, Wadsworth displays Sir Michael in a statuesque manner.

His stance is evocative of Paolo Romano’s statue of the Apostle St Paul holding a broken sword and reading, presumably his own epistles (Saint Angelo Bridge, Rome). The statue, which can be seen on Rome’s Ponte Sant’Angelo is, of course, a religious monument, whereas Wadsworth’s portrait of Sir Michael as The Scholar is secular. However, there remains a striking resemblance in the flowing and folding drapery, the positioning of the subjects’ feet and the way both artists have shown their sitters in the act of oration.

In the central canvas panel entitled The Elvis Selfie, Sir Michael is shown in stark juxtaposition to his doppelganger in The Scholar. Both sitters are in direct contrast with one another, the former being almost austere in his commitment to duty, whereas the latter is playful, cheeky 84

and firmly positioned in the sphere of contemporary Pop. The overt reference to Andy Warhol’s 1963 Triple Elvis is a clear pondering on the influence of technology on the representation of the self. Warhol’s early 60s classic in its original silkscreen format has three identical representations of Elvis Presley extracted from a publicity shoot for the 1960 film Flaming Star. Warhol’s use of silkscreen to produce seemingly identical, yet notably different man-made prints, was, in part, a commentary on the unprecedented power wielded by mechanical technologies and entertainment media to turn a person into a celebrity and a celebrity into a modern icon. The silkscreen was a perfect blend of mechanical and manmade processes employed by Warhol to perpetuate the cult of the celebrity.

In The Elvis Selfie Wadsworth employs the traditional medium of paint on canvas to produce a witty interpretation of Warhol’s Pop Art classic. The gun has been replaced by an iPhone. The viewer sees Sir Michael as he would see himself taking a selfie in a mirror.

Whereas Warhol’s Elvis was already dated (being taken from a three-year-old film), Wadsworth’s Sir Michael emanates contemporaneity. The selfie pose is immediately recognisable; the iPhone cements the period in which we live.

The third panel, The Knight, shows Sir Michael in his official uniform as a Knight Commander of the Papal Order of St Gregory, which he was made by Pope Benedict XVI in 2005. Since that time Sir Michael has been elevated to a Knight Grand Cross and serves under Pope Francis on the board of the Vatican Bank.

Wadsworth places her figures against pure colour backgrounds, yet, rather than using Warhol’s flat colour, she has used translucent pigments to give a stained glass richness to the paintings. They are at once both wittily postmodern yet created with the production values of a baroque Master. LL

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The Modern Society Portrait

The Milliner 2017 (cat.48) [ex no.54] Acrylic and oil on sized, unprimed linen 240 x 140 cm

The Milliner is a work that fully embraces an understanding of the rich and varied histories of both hat making and the portrait tradition. It marks a significant contribution to the genre of contemporary British portraiture in its innovative approach to the depiction of celebrated Milliner Victoria Grant. Wadsworth imbues her representation of Grant with a tangible sense of command, the expression of which can be traced back to the full-length mercantile portraits fashionable in the 18th Century predominantly popularised by the innovations of Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) and Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792). Wadsworth expands upon this historical tradition, bringing in further influences from high society portrait painters such as John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) and Giovanni Boldini (1842-1931). And yet the present work marks a highly celebratory departure from a period aesthetic.

Grant is undeniably one of the most significant contemporary fashion designers working in Britain today. Among her extensive list of notable clients, she has produced unique creations for Madonna, Anna Dello Russo, Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Annie Lennox and BeyoncĂŠ. As a milliner, she is committed to upholding a time-honoured tradition while producing works that display an intuitive understanding of contemporary culture.

Grant’s commitment to British Heritage permeates through her aesthetic that often incorporates subtle hints at a proud national iconography. Her reputation is founded upon a willingness to embrace the eccentricities of hat design and fashion as a statement of the individual characters her clients express. Her work is indicative of a fusion between her own interest in Couture and British Heritage and a creative desire to present pieces that endure for their originality and elegant sophistication.

Barefoot and confidently resting her chin upon her clenched fist, Grant is shown in full command of the space which she inhabits. Seen here in her Notting Hill studio, Wadsworth presents Grant as a powerful contemporary icon surrounded by the bold designs upon which she has built her reputation. It is a painting that emanates a sense of individual identity and a profound respect for the sitter. Wadsworth has encapsulated Grant, the Milliner in a portrait of great contemporary cultural significance and one that will surely endure. LL

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The Modern Society Portrait

They Have Lunch Every Tuesday (Messrs Corbin & King) 2015 (cat.49) [ex no.30] Oil on canvas 213 x 120 cm

This magnificent seven-foot double portrait of restaurateurs Chris Corbin and Jeremy King is set in the upstairs private dining room of their signature London restaurant The Wolseley. The title, They Have Lunch Every Tuesday is a literal interpretation of the business pair’s weekly meeting but the way in which Wadsworth has used the interior design and architectural ornamentation of The Wolseley to envelop the two smart businessmen is captivating. From the Art Deco, black and gold, motifs that run along the ceiling, to the gridlike patterning on the floor, it is almost as if the restaurant acts as a physical testament to Corbin and King’s imagination and collaborative brilliance. They may appear unassuming, yet their work together has brought about some of the most iconic and stylish restaurants in London. The portrait is full of ease, style and effortlessness. It won both the de Laszlo Silver Medal and the Exceptional Talent award at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters 2015 exhibition.

Painted across two canvases, divided in the middle, the present work is split into a delicately painted still-life arrangement in the bottom-half and Messrs Corbin and King occupying a small corner of their empire in the upper-half. Upon the table sits an assortment of crockery and silverware, the silver coincidentally originating from Sheffield.

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The Modern Society Portrait

De Laszlo as DL 2016 (cat.50) [ex no.28] Oil on canvas 126 x 123 cm

Having won the de Laszlo Silver Medal and the Exceptional Talent award at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters for her double portrait of Chris Corbin and Jeremy King, They Have Lunch Every Tuesday (cat.49) [Ex no.30], Wadsworth was commissioned by industrialist and Bradshaw Foundation Chairman, Damon de Laszlo, grandson of society portrait painter Philip de László (1869-1937).

Shown here at his family home in front of the mantelpiece, above which hangs a portrait of him as a young boy, de Laszlo is shown is his uniform as Deputy Lieutenant of Hampshire. There is a charming continuity between the young boy and the decorated man. Both have their right arms crooked and forcefully posed and both gaze out with the same piercing blue eyes. Wadsworth has produced a portrait that evokes the great society portrait painters of the early-twentieth century, including the sitter’s grandfather.

The setting is also reminiscent of works by portrait painter Ambrose McEvoy (1878-1927); an artist who favoured his female sitters arranged against the mantelpiece. LL

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The Modern Society Portrait

Bibi Wearing My Pearls 2014 (cat.51) [ex no.23] Acrylic and oil on canvas 120 x 91 cm

Wadsworth has known Bibi since she was a baby, when her parents commissioned a portrait sketch of her in Kathmandu. Since that initial encounter, Wadsworth has felt enraptured by what she describes as “Bibi’s special quality” and penetrating gaze. It is perhaps rare for the gaze to invert from muse to artist, but it seems that when she is painting Bibi, Wadsworth is transfixed by her stare that was “at once penetrating and utterly disarming.”

From Wadsworth’s many interactions with Bibi as a family friend, it was clear that both this little sitter and the artist shared a rapport. Wadsworth recounts how Bibi would run up to her with wide, inquisitive eyes and marvel at the distinctive Chanel insignia on the artist’s bag. This is referenced in the present work by the Chanel necklace worn around Bibi’s neck.

There is a charming quality of innocence in this portrait that encapsulates the all too familiar

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childhood desire to be a grown-up. Adorned with Wadsworth’s pearls (that are far too long for her) and draped in the artist’s long, fluid Lanvin trench coat that trails behind the girl in the manner of an elegant evening gown or Royal robe, Bibi is the physical embodiment of youth caught between transitional stages. She still clings to childhood, evoked by the toy rabbit she holds, and yet there is a sense of departure from this stage in her young life. The toy rabbit dangles precariously, her grip loose and noncommittal as she stands proudly in her dress, painted toenails and pearls.

Wadsworth has the gift of hindsight with her in this portrait. It is all too clear to her just how young Bibi appears, wearing her pearls. And yet to Bibi herself, she is very much the grown-up, wearing pearls to prove it. One is reminded of Norman Rockwell’s paintings of childhood such as He’s Going to Be Taller than Dad (1939) or The Catch (1919). LL

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The Modern Society Portrait

The Three Graces 2019 (cat.52) [ex no.29] Acrylic, 23 carat moon gold and oil on canvas 55.5 x 121cm

Three sisters, Bea, Florrie and Nancy, are shown here in the loose guise of the Three Graces from Antiquity. Throughout Western history, the Three Graces, Charities or Gratiae have played a prominent role in the popular cultural imagination. As long-standing champions of virtues such as charm, creativity and beauty, the Three Graces have appeared in works by Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510), Raphael (1483-1520), Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) and Antonio Canova (1757-1822), to name but a few.

Here, Wadsworth’s use of the Graces is more of a compositional tool as opposed to a direct citation from the canon. In the contemporary climate in which we now live, it would seem discordant to present a person as a physical symbol for an ideal virtue. However, those familiar with art history can all too readily identify Wadsworth’s reference in the arrangement of her sitters.

The eye is naturally drawn to the youngest of the sisters (right), as she turns to greet the viewer. Her left hand gently rests upon that of the middle sister (centre which serves to direct the view onwards from sister to sister. The same compositional organisation can be seen in Botticelli’s Primavera (1477-82) through the use of a cyclical dance. Here Wadsworth employs visual motion to connect all three sisters together, bonded here as they are bonded by familial union in life. The reference to spring (Primavera) is also evidenced by the decorative wildflowers worn by each girl. This is yet another example of Wadsworth’s alliance with the Old Masters of the past. LL

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MAN AND MYTH Essay by Neil Gaiman

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It was Twitter that made it happen. Emma Freud asked me on Twitter if I would go to Mark Watson’s 24 Hour Comic Relief event, and I said yes. There was an artist in the poorly-lit backstage area who was sketching the various minor celebrities and comedians stumbling our way in and out. The sketches would be auctioned for Comic Relief.

“What do you do?” she asked.

“I write,” I told her.

“You’ve got an interesting face,” she said. “I want to paint you.”

This was 2015. I was impressed by the way she caught faces and likenesses and what seemed to be going on underneath, despite not having anywhere to work and astonishingly dim lighting. I said yes, but it was a vague sort of a yes.

There are no vague yeses in Lorna’s world. She makes things happen by a combination of determination, chutzpah, cockiness and intelligence.

Over a year later she caught up with me, with an easel and sundry artistic implements. She sketched me. She painted me. She took some reference photographs of me by a canal. And then she painted several pictures of me. They were excellent. I thought we were done, but Lorna had not even started. She informed me casually that I would need to regrow the beard I had shaved off when my son was born, because I would be more interesting to paint that way.

So I regrew the beard. Once an artist decides you’re a subject of her art, there’s nothing else you can do.

She practised painting me beardless. The eyes always looked sadder than they look in photographs.

I grew a beard.

I went to her studio to sit for her. Her studio is in a draughty building in Hackney. It is unglamorous – the walls are unfinished, although not in Lorna’s cosy studio. The studio, with a day bed for thinking on and a tiny fridge, is a refuge from the world. Huge paintings lean against the walls. An enormous Margaret Thatcher looks lost and lonely and gently confused. Men who are sex on legs lean and look vacant and are gazed at. Women who are wise and elegant are gently deflated with gewgaws and doodads. Everywhere you see faces.

She would tell me when I could talk, and when to be silent, when I could move and when to stay still. Sometimes she would talk, and sometimes we were both alone with our thoughts.

Lorna made a huge painting of my face. I looked imposing (probably mostly due to the monstrous size of the canvas) and my eyes were distant and hurt.

She told me that since meeting me she had read (and listened, it’s easier to listen to books when you are painting) to my work.

She had listened and she had heard. And, having heard, she had decided exactly how I should be represented.

She had obtained a 5000 year old piece of oak, rescued from an ancient bog. It had been carved to resemble a book. She was going to paint me on the oak.

And she wasn’t going to paint in oils, but in hot wax.

The only drawback here was that Lorna had never painted in wax before, and painting in wax is its own strange and specific discipline. Her first attempt involved using hot coloured wax, melting it and trying to get it onto the wood before it cooled too much to be of use. This method was not a success.

She came up with a new method. As she explained to me, “I haven’t actually painted you in actual wax itself. I have painted you with special oil pigment sticks within wax, each layer encapsulated by brushing hot wax on top of the paint, then fusing the layers together with a blow torch.”

When she was ready, she painted my portrait on the wood, in oil sticks and wax. She decided that it was right for a storyteller to be painted in a way that was both timeless and transient. A storyteller, preserved on two of the oldest media for preserving stories: on a piece of wood that fell, when it was part of a tree, into a bog at the end of the Neolithic era, when the first version of Stonehenge was being erected, when the city of Troy was being built, at the time of the first Pharaohs. And painted in oil and beeswax, built up in patient layers.

It was the first time anyone had ever needed to paint the back of my head, but something needed to be on the back of the book.

I loved the portrait. It felt true, because Lorna is a truthful portrait painter, and it felt like she had caught me, or an aspect of me, in wax on the bog-oak. It also felt to me that, like all real art, it was a fraction too honest for its own good.

But more even than the object itself, I loved the thought that had gone into it: the tension between permanence and transience, in the wax layers and the ancient wood that was not a book; something produced by bees from the summer flowers and something recovered from the black waters, that had been painted on the cover of a book that could never be opened.

Since then, Lorna has been on the set and on location with Good Omens. She took her sketches, and her observations of Michael Sheen and David Tennant, playing and not playing the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley, and she created painted icons out of the actor icons. She showed a smaller reproduction of the Big Neil painting in an instant Soho bookshop and micro gallery, and she showed the original next to Old Masters in Philip Mould’s beautiful gallery in St. James’s.

And sometimes my phone buzzes, and it’s Lorna, probably in her studio, showing me fragments of work in progress, painting eyes or eyebrows, folds of cloth or stray beard-hairs, and making me smile in wonder.

I feel like the process of having my portrait painted changed me. I watched Lorna reproduce things about me that I don’t usually see in my face. She does what an artist does: goes beneath the skin, and finds the person behind the eyes. Lorna May Wadsworth is more than just an extremely good painter of portraits. She is also someone who understands the artistic movements and techniques of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and who uses them to beat her own path and speak her own truths.

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Big Neil 2016 (cat.53) [ex no.55] Aquacryl, oil and white gesso highlight on unprimed French linen 200 x 160 cm

Wadsworth’s work is defined by a powerful inversion of the male gaze, so it only seems fitting that Neil Gaiman, who writes - in his own words - “stories where women save themselves,” would collaborate with a female feminist artist. Wadsworth first met Gaiman on 28 February 2015 backstage at The Pleasance Theatre, where she produced sketches of participants for a Comic Relief charity event.

Unaware of his fame, they talked as she drafted his likeness in charcoal; they discussed writing, painting, and their careers. Drawing someone from life is an encounter of energy and, for some people, the ability to capture their likeness and engage with their spirit feels instantaneous. On this occasion, Wadsworth felt something immediately and she asked if she could paint his portrait someday. He kindly replied, “sure, why not?”

To follow up on their meeting, Wadsworth sent him a tweet and he agreed to a sitting. During one of his trips to London for the launch of his compendium of non-fiction The View From The Cheap Seats, he met with Lorna at the Canal House. All but invisible from the street, Canal House is a curious dwelling that straddles Regent’s Canal in the shadow of a spaceship of a power station. For Wadsworth, it felt like the right place to paint someone who writes about the “casual chaos of the universe.”

Gaiman had first stayed there twenty years earlier as a guest of the singer Tori Amos, holing up to complete his manuscript for Neverwhere (1996), a fantasy novel about “London below” that inspired the BBC television series of the same name. During Wadsworth’s initial studies, Gaiman was hard at work on the television adaption of a book he coauthored with the late Terry Pratchet, Good Omens (1990). These meetings culminated in a small oil on gesso panel study. It’s a delicate, timeless picture.

Apparently, they talked so much during these sittings

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he felt that his mouth was less realised than the eyes and they had to enforce silence for Wadsworth to finish it.

After finishing this small-scale life study at the Canal House, Gaiman and Wadsworth decided to create another portrait. Although the author and the artist agreed that the first painting captured the affable and ethereal aspects of Gaiman’s persona, in their time spent together Wadsworth had come to understand the Homeric quality of the writer of American Gods (2001) and other epic tales. After additional conservations and sittings, they agreed to produce a monumental portrait. To match this epic format, Wadsworth suggested that Gaiman might grow an Olympian beard; he graciously obliged.

While writing his next book on the Isle of Skye, Gaiman cultivated an impressive crop of facial hair to prepare for the next series of sittings, which took place in Wadsworth’s Hackney studio in July 2016. In the end, both Gaiman and Wadsworth are delighted with the larger-than-life results.

This commanding portrait in oil stretches across a two-meter square unprimed linen canvas.

The remarkable representation of Gaiman’s likeness combines elements of the heroic with Wadsworth’s breathless style. Confronted by an intense,empathic stare that emerges out of delicately dissolving painterly strokes, this portrait conveys both the mythic quality of the author’s ever-expanding oeuvre and the small secret world living behind his eyes. His salt and pepper beard is streaked with supernatural flashes of luminescent ochre and cobalt. Gigantic but still gentle, he is some sort of starry-eyed, undefeated Kronus, imagined long before the titans fell. Here, the artist watches another creator - and he, in turn, gazes back. Dr Emily Guerry

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Man and Myth

The Book of Neil Gaiman (The Bog Oak Portrait) 2017 (cat.54) [ex no.60] Oil and beeswax on prehistoric bog oak sculpted by artist Adrian Swinstead.

Circa 37 x 30 x 10 cm

The Book of Neil Gaiman is an almost mythical depiction of the author rendered in a 5,000-year-old piece of bog oak carved to resemble an ancient book or medieval relic. Wadsworth summarises how this particular work is imbued with a playful sense of irony when she writes: “Time is contained and condensed within this dark, dense tome which will never open.” The outcome is an example of two highly imaginative and inventive minds uniting to produce a unique portrait of one of the most celebrated English authors of our time.

Gaiman’s writing fuses worlds and genres together to form some of the most internationally revered stories of the twenty-first century so far. Myth, legend and fairy tales are recurrent themes explored in his essays, comics and novels.

This enriches his work with a prehistoric, even timeless quality that Wadsworth expertly explores in her portrait.

The work itself is a remarkable example of the genre of portraiture being stretched beyond the confines of the more traditional medium of oil on canvas.

Painted in encaustic, itself a technique first dating to Antiquity), Wadsworth meticulously constructed the portrait through the layering of hot wax and pigment on sculpted bog oak dating from the Neolithic period. The resulting work is part-sculpture, part-painting and part-artefact.

The ‘front cover’ shows Gaiman’s face, disembodied, half-caught in a shadow that’s defeated by the light of his eyes. The ‘back cover’ shows his head, with spiralling curls of black, brown, white, and grey illuminated by a halo from some far-away light source. In this way, the viewer can see Gaiman as an icon but also stand behind him to follow the author into his dreamy world of dark and light. Gaiman’s brain becomes the book in between, the crucible of countless stories and fantasies, and this captivating portrait by Wadsworth provides the viewer with a new window into his imagination. LL & EG

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Man and Myth

Burning Bog Oak Icons 2018 (cat.55) [ex no.61] Oil pigment suspended in sun bleached beeswax and two shades of 23 carat gold on pre historic bog oak Two, both measuring 17 x 13 x 3.7 cm

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Crafted from the same piece of ancient bog oak as The Book of Neil Gaiman, and shining with gold leaf in a manner reminiscent of Blue Angel (cat.27) [Ex no.57] and My Boy Mary (Blue) (cat.28) [Ex no. 59], the Burning Bog Oak Icons unite two of Wadsworth’s pioneering techniques in a masterful reimagining of the protagonists of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s literary creation Good Omens. In a skilful reflection of the Good Omens plot, Wadsworth fashions both the angel Aziraphale (Michael Sheen) and the demon Crowley (David Tennant) as icon-like saints, speaking to the angel-like nature inherent in both characters.

Crowley, envisioned in Good Omens as the serpent who tempted Eve at the Creation but has a soft spot for humanity and the earthly world, is unmistakable with dark, round glasses that cover his serpent-like eyes, a hard-set jaw, and a slight quiff that hints at his masterful, playful nature. Aziraphale, tasked with guarding the Garden of Eden with a flaming sword but kind enough to lend his weapon to a venerable Adam and Eve after their expulsion, is at once kind and worried-looking in his icon, with brow furrowed and lines etched into his face with swatches of pinks and browns.

Like Pratchett and Gaiman’s imaginary world, Burning Bog Oak Icons is remarkable for its blending of spheres: the religious and the secular, the ancient and the modern, the devilish and the divine. SK 111

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The Master of Magdalene 2019 (cat.56) [ex no.39] Oil on linen 99 x 61 cm

Wadsworth’s ability to see beyond the surface of her sitter, capturing something of their inner character and qualities, is arguably at its most refined in this meter-high oil painting of the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury and 35th Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, Rowan Williams.

Williams was archbishop from 2002 to 2012, during one of the most turbulent periods in the history of the Anglican Church. Whilst the Church of England faced growing divisions over whether to allow gay clergy and women bishops, leaders such as Williams were also called upon to mediate during major global events such as the Iraq War and the Credit Crunch. Williams’s leadership was characterised by repeated calls for tolerance, peace, and dialogue in an increasingly polarised world, and his legacy as a peacemaker is what has endured in the minds of most. His scholarship has also left its mark on the spiritual and intellectual life of both the church and secular worlds. Williams has published widely on topics as varied as the Trinity, the writings of the Russian theologian Vladimir Nikolayevich, the Narnia series, faith in universities and the relationship between politics and theological identity. His ability to transcend the often rigid bounds of Anglican dogma to speak with nuance and relevance to Christian and non-Christian audiences alike is also strikingly evident in his

poetry, which weaves devotion and the divine with cultured reflections on art, music, nature and ancient Celtic history. As Williams reflects in one collection of his poems: “I dislike the idea of being a religious poet. I would prefer to be a poet for whom religious things mattered intensely.”

The Master of Magdalene, due to be displayed among the portraits of other masters and historic figures in Magdalene College’s Hall, is a nuanced visual re-telling of one man’s extraordinarily rich and varied career. Wearing a dog collar, but cloaked in the robes of a Cambridge Master, Williams is both churchman and scholar. He sits under a slightly rounded arch reminiscent of a soaring Romanesque Cathedral ceiling, but devoid of any specific details to designate it a simply religious space. The book clutched in both his hands, David Jones’s Epoch and Artist, a series of essays on Welsh art and culture, speaks to Williams’s own Welsh heritage and deep love for the history and artistic prowess of his birthplace, a legacy to which he too has now contributed. Wadsworth also hints at themes more fully explored in The White Druid of the Gorsedd of Bards (cat.57) [Ex no.65]: the frame of this portrait is made from bog oak, and the inner float and the edge of the canvas gilded to give, in Wadsworth’s words, “a tiny gold halo” to Williams’s stately figure. SK

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The White Druid of the Gorsedd of Bards (Rowan) 2019 (cat.57) [ex no.65] Oil and beeswax on prehistoric bog oak 40.5 x 25.7 x 3.8 cm

In The White Druid of the Gorsedd of Bards we meet former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams face-to-face on another ancient piece of bog oak. Like The Book of Neil Gaiman (cat.54) [Ex no.60] and Burning Bog Oak Icons (cat.55) [Ex no.61] this medium is entirely fitting. “Rowan has a mystical, mythical, wise presence to him which reminds me of Neil’s narrative universe”, Wadsworth comments.”‘I really wanted to use this medium to capture Rowan as I see him.”

Much of Williams’s theological and poetic works engage with an ancient Celtic past deeply intertwined with his own Welsh heritage. In 2002, in recognition of this work, Williams was made a member of the highest of the three orders of the Gorsedd of Bards, a community of Wales’s key cultural contributors and poets. During the ceremony, the soon-to-be archbishop was given the Bardic name of Ap Neirin, which he chose after a sixth-century Welsh poet and in honour of his father, Aneurin. It also brings to mind Aneurin Bevan, one of the architects of the National Health Service. His involvement in the Gorsedd of Bards sparked outrage amongst some wings of the Anglican Church, who accused the organisation of paganism. Wadsworth remembers “the kerfuffle” over Williams’s appointment. “I was struck by how Christians all got their knickers in a twist about thinking it was pagan. I like it when people’s received wisdom gets disrupted. It’s Rowan the poet, the Welsh mystic, the wildness in him that the Church never tamed.”

It is this wilder Rowan that looks out at us from his bog oak frame. With untamed eyebrows, slightly billowing hair folding gently back into the dark mists of the painting’s background and a gentle but firm gaze that reaches just beyond the perspective of the viewer, Wadsworth has revealed not only a former archbishop but a man whose life has been shaped by and steeped in the history, language and culture of an ancient, mystical past. SK

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Bernie Katz: In Memoriam (The Prince of Soho) 2018 (cat.58) [ex no.46] Acrylic, 23 carat gold and oil on gesso panel 25.4 x 14.6 cm

“Bernie was sprightly, perky, bouncy, cheeky and alert.

No respecter of physical boundaries, a hugger, a squeezer, kisser and ruffler of hair. Busy, bustling and bonhomous he could seem like the cheeriest, cheekiest chappie in London – but you, Lorna, you have seen what those of us who loved him saw in him, something distressed, sad, forlorn, lonely and lost. Now he is truly lost, lost to us all, but you have given him back in ikon form, haloed in gold. Thank you.”

Stephen Fry When Bernie Katz, the legendary manager of The Groucho Club, passed away on 31 August 2017, many people who knew and loved the ‘Prince of Soho’ shared their heartfelt condolences and memories. For over two decades, he had hosted some of the wildest parties in London, full of celebrities and debauchery. All the while, The Groucho earned its international reputation for offering its members a special kind of outlandish lavishness. His guests cherished his joyous persona, but his friends praised him for being deeply loyal, kind, and discrete. Bernie was someone who wanted everyone to have fun and feel at ease in his company. Especially in that leopard-print jacket, he seemed like the Dionysius of London, overseeing so many long nights of bacchanalian rites that tabloid readers could only dream of picturing. But with Bernie presiding over those exciting mysteries for the inner circle of London nightlife, he provided his celebrants with privacy and protection too.

When he learned that his friend had passed away suddenly, the actor Stephen Fry tweeted “five foot nothing and a heart twice the size of Soho Square” and uploaded a haunting photograph of Bernie Katz, seen not as the exuberant and energetic party-thrower and party-goer but

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rather, in Fry’s words, “distressed, sad, forlorn, lonely and lost.” Here, Bernie appears to stand on the other side of a closed curtain; he is off-stage, out of the limelight and exhausted. Wadsworth saw Fry’s tweet and instantly felt the desire to give “some element of salvation” to this vision (or version) of Bernie. Although the artist rarely works from photographs and prefers to paint from life, the unique eulogistic context of her encounter spurred her into action and the result is one of only a few posthumous portraits. Her composition borrows from the photographic source material in that it shows the same man emerging out of the shadows, looking away from the light. He still slouches so much that the features of his face - those heavy-lidded eyes, a chiseled nose, and tightened lips - are either concealed or revealed in chiariscuro. However, Wadsworth has removed all traces of the original, dimly-lit background. Instead, she envelops her figure in sheets of goldleaf, surrounding him with light, energy, and warmth - like a saint at the centre of a devotional icon. In so doing, she gives back to him that which he gave to others. Here, we see the painter resurrect her subject by deconstructing the darkness around him. EG

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List of Illustrations

List of Illustrations

Unrequited Love: Men I Have Been Besotted With to No Avail 1996-1997 [Exhibition no.1] Acrylic, acrylic ink, water colour ink and found objects on paper Series of 25 works 16 x 12 cm

2.

The Chelsea Pensioner 2002 [Exhibition no.4] Oil on board 37.9 x 26.8 cm

3.

Party Conference Portraits Rt. Hon. Robin Cook MP Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown MP Rt. Hon. Dennis Skinner MP Rt. Hon. Peter Hain MP 2003 [Exhibition no.3] Acrylic and oil on canvas Four canvases each measuring 40.4 x 30.3 cm

4.

Richard Griffiths 2005 [Exhibition no.5] Oil on canvas 40.4 x 30.4 cm

14.

Taken 2009 [Exhibition no.17] Oil on canvas 76 x 76

5.

Archbishop Rowan 2004 [Exhibition no.7] Acrylic and oil on canvas 30.3 x 40.4 cm

15.

The Conversation 2009 [Exhibition no.25] Oil on canvas 76 x 76 cm

6.

Sir Derek Jacobi 2003 [Exhibition no.6] Acrylic and oil on canvas Four canvases each measuring 30.5 x 23 cm

16.

The Pearl Necklace 2009 [Exhibition no.19] 48.5 x 48.5 cm Acrylic and oil on board

7.

Butch Bowie Blair Portrait of Rt. Hon. Tony Blair as Prime Minister 2003 [Exhibition no.2] Acrylic and oil Over two canvases totalling 60.6 x 40.4 cm

8.

Rt. Hon David Blunkett MP 2003 [Exhibition no.53] Acrylic and oil on canvas 91.5 x 122 cm

9.

Baroness Thatcher 2007 [Exhibition no.58] Oil on linen 183 x 183 cm

1.

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10.

Study for ‘The Unrequited’ 2006 [Exhibition no.11] Acrylic and oil on board 40 x 40 cm

11.

The French Boy who Broke my Heart 2007 [Exhibition no.12] Acrylic and oil on board 71.5 x 39.2 cm

12.

Jean-Baptiste Awake 2007 [Exhibition no.18] Charcoal on paper 59.4 x 42 cm

13.

The Purple Sheet 2008 [Exhibition no.14] Oil on canvas 51.5 x 51.5 cm

17.

Sea Scout 2011 [Exhibition no.44] Acrylic, oil, and 23 carat gold on gesso panel Two panels each measuring 40 x 40 cm

18. UNTITLED #7

(Inspired by Tom Ford’s Santal Blush)

2014

[Exhibition no.20]

Acrylic, oil and 23 carat gold on canvas

91 x 91 cm

19. UNTITLED #3

(Inspired by Tom Ford’s Oud Wood)

2014

[Exhibition no.21]

Acrylic and oil on canvas

122 x 91 cm 20. UNTITLED #10

(Inspired by Tom Ford’s Atelier d’Orient)

2014

[Exhibition no.31]

Acrylic, charcoal and oil on canvas

152 x 122 cm 21.

The Muse 2018 [Exhibition no.35] Oil on maple panel 25 cm diameter

22. Study for a Disciple (Lawrence)

2008

[Exhibition no.15]

Oil on panel

58 x 28 cm 23. Study for a Disciple (Danny)

2008

[Exhibition no.16]

Oil on panel

58 x 28 cm 24.

A Blue Eyed Judas 2009 [Exhibition no.10] Acrylic and oil on canvas 76.5 x 76.5 cm

25.

A Last Supper (Cartoon) 2008 Charcoal on paper 92 x 366 cm

26.

A Last Supper 2009 [Exhibition no.62] Oil on aluminium 107 x 366 cm

27.

Blue Angel 2009 [Exhibition no.57] Oil and 24 carat gold on panel 91 x 91 cm

28.

My Boy Mary (Blue) 2010 [Exhibition no.59] Oil and 23 carat gold on canvas 152 x 152 cm

29.

30.

The Pain of Christ 2010 [Exhibition no.34] Acrylic, 23 carat gold, charcoal and oil on canvas 152 x 152 cm Fashion Martyrs / Slave Master Slave Icon Slave Banksy Slave Golden Eye Slave Pop Slave 2010-11 [Exhibition no.56] Acrylic, oil, spray paint, gloss paint and 24 carat gold on gesso panels Five panels each measuring 66 x 51 cm

31.

Pink Christ 2011 [Exhibition no.45] Acrylic, two shades of 23 carat gold and oil on panel 40 x 32.5 cm

32.

Judas Light and Dark 2011 [Exhibition no.36] Acrylic and oil on panel 40 x 33 cm

33.

The Kiss of Betrayal 2015 [Exhibition no.40] Acrylic, two shades of 23 carat gold and charcoal on canvas 120 x 180 cm

34.

35.

36.

Magritte Idea 2011 [Exhibition no.32] Acrylic, oil, spray paint, gloss paint and 23 carat gold on gesso panel 61 x 46 cm Brimstone and Treacle (Rupert Friend) 2012 [Exhibition no.33] Acrylic, gloss paint and three shades of 23 carat gold on canvas 120 x 91 cm Richard Curtis 2012-19 [Exhibition no.42] Acrylic, acrylic ink, oil and three shades of 23 carat gold on panel 86.7 x 58 cm

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37.

The Art Dealer’s Son 2014-16 [Exhibition no.22] Oil on canvas, oil on linen, oil on aluminium, acrylic on panel Twenty-five individual panels each measuring 40 x 40 cm with varying depths, comprising a larger 228 x 228 cm grid

38. Just One Macaron More Please Mr. Executioner

Triptych (1)

Triptych (2)

Triptych (3)

2015

[Exhibition no.24]

Oil on masonite panel with plaster of Paris macaron sculpture, screwed into panel from the rear

Three panels each measuring 86.9 x 57.9 cm 39.

Disneyland Dagenham 2015 [Exhibition no.43] Acrylic and oil on linen in a frame previously around an Augustus John Painting 101 x 126 cm (including frame)

40. The Impossibility of Love in the Modern Age

2016

[Exhibition no.38]

Oil on linen in a frame previously around a David Jagger painting (including frame)

100 x 79.8 cm 41.

42.

43.

44.

Il Magnifico 2019 [Exhibition no.37] Acrylic and oil on panel 30 cm diameter

45.

Murray Lachlan Young 2019 [Exhibition no.51] Acrylic and oil on panel 40 cm diameter

46.

The Queen of New Orleans 2018 [Exhibition no.63] Oil on linen in a frame previously around a Philip de László portrait painting of a European Princess 110 x 82 cm (including frame)

47.

A Man in Uniform The Scholar The Elvis Selfie The Papal Knight 2018 [Exhibition no.64] Oil on Linen Three canvases each measuring 185 x 132 cm

48.

The Milliner 2017 [Exhibition no.54] Acrylic and oil on sized, unprimed linen 240 x 140 cm Exhibited at Philip Mould & Company, The Milliner, February 2018

53.

54.

55.

Meanie Mouse I 2015 [Exhibition no.48] Acrylic and oil on canvas-covered panel in a frame previously around a George Romney painting 58 cm diameter (including frame)

49. They Have Lunch Every Tuesday...

(Messrs Corbin & King)

2015

[Exhibition no.30]

Oil on canvas

213 x 120 cm

Meanie Mouse II 2015 [Exhibition no.50] Acrylic, oil and 24 carat gold on panel 58 cm diameter

50.

De Laszlo as DL 2016 [Exhibition no.28] Oil on canvas 126 x 123 cm

51.

Bibi Wearing my Pearls 2014 [Exhibition no.23] Acrylic and oil on canvas 120 x 91 cm

William Orbit 2018 [Exhibition no.47] Acrylic and oil on gesso panel 25 cm diameter

52.

56.

The Three Graces 2019 [Exhibition no.29] Acrylic, 23 carat gold and oil on canvas 55.5 x 121 cm Big Neil 2016 [Exhibition no.55] Aquacryl, oil and white gesso highlight on unprimed French linen 200 x 160 cm The Book of Neil Gaiman (The Bog Oak Portrait) 2017 [Exhibition no.60] Oil and beeswax on prehistoric bog oak sculpted by artist Adrian Swinstead Approximately 37 x 30 x 10 cm Burning Bog Oak Icons 2018 [Exhibition no.61] Oil pigment suspended in sun bleached beeswax and two shades of 23 carat gold on prehistoric bog oak Two, both measuring 17 x 13 x 3.7 cm The Master of Magdalene 2019 [Exhibition no.39] Oil on linen 99 x 61 cm

57. The White Druid of the Gorsedd of Bards (Rowan)

2019

[Exhibition no.65]

Oil and beeswax on prehistoric bog oak

40. 5 x 25.7 x 3.8 cm 58.

Bernie Katz: In Memoriam (The Prince of Soho) 2018 [Exhibition no.46] Acrylic, 23 carat gold and oil on gesso panel 25. 4 x 14.6 cm

119

List of Exhibited Works

List of Exhibited Works 1.

2.

Butch Bowie Blair, 2003 Portrait of Rt. Hon. Tony Blair MP as Prime Minister Acrylic and oil, over two canvases totalling 60.6 x 40.4 cm Exhibited at The Royal Society of Portrait Painters 2004 in Party Conference Portraits Private Collection (cat.7) p.13

Party Conference Portraits, 2003 Rt. Hon. Robin Cook MP Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown MP Rt. Hon. Dennis Skinner MP Rt. Hon. Peter Hain MP Acrylic and oil on canvas, four canvases each measuring 40.4 x 30.3 cm Exhibited at The Royal Society of Portrait Painters 2004 (cat.3), p.11

4.

The Chelsea Pensioner, 2002 Oil on board, 37.9 x 26.8 cm (cat.2), p.10

5.

Richard Griffiths, 2005 Oil on canvas, 40.4 x 30.4 cm Exhibited at the Garrick / Milne Prize, 2005 Private Collection (cat.4), p.11

3.

6.

Sir Derek Jacobi: Four Head Studies, 2003 Acrylic and oil on canvas, four canvases each measuring 30.5 x 23 cm Exhibited at the Garrick / Milne Prize, 2005 (cat.6), p.11

Archbishop Rowan, 2004 Acrylic and oil on canvas, 30.3 x 40.4 cm (cat.5), p.11

8.

Jean-Baptiste Asleep I, 2008 Charcoal on paper, 29.7 x 42 cm

9.

Jean-Baptiste Asleep II, 2008 Charcoal on paper, 44.5 x 31.5 cm

7.

120

Unrequited Love: Men I Have Been Besotted With to No Avail, 1996-1997 Acrylic, acrylic ink, watercolour ink and found objects on paper, series of 25 works 16 x 12 cm Exhibited at the Blue Moon Cafe, Sheffield, 1997 (cat.1), pp.8-9

10. A Blue Eyed Judas, 2009

Acrylic and oil on canvas, 76.5 x 76.5 cm

Exhibited at St Martin-in-the-Fields.

A Last Supper/Sacred or Profane?

4 March - 4 April 2010

(cat.24), pp.38-39

11. Study for ‘The Unrequited’, 2006

Acrylic and oil on board, 40 x 40 cm

Exhibited at The Empire Gallery, Beautiful Boys, 11 - 23 Oct. 2007

Private Collection

(cat.10), pp.20-21

12. The French Boy who Broke my Heart, 2007

Acrylic and oil on board, 71.5 x 39.2 cm

Exhibited at The Empire Gallery, Beautiful Boys, 11 - 23 Oct. 2007

Private Collection

(cat.11), pp.22-23 13. Max Torso, 2011

Acrylic and oil on board, 70 x 40 cm 14. The Purple Sheet, 2008

Oil on canvas, 51.5 cm x 51.5 cm

(cat.13), p.25

15. Study for a Disciple (Lawrence), 2008

Oil on panel, 58 x 28 cm

Exhibited at St Martin-in-the-Fields.

A Last Supper/Sacred or Profane?

4 March - 4 April 2010

(cat.22), p.36

16. Study for a Disciple (Danny), 2008

Oil on panel, 58 x 28 cm

Exhibited at St Martin-in-the-Fields.

A Last Supper/Sacred or Profane?

4 March - 4 April 2010

(cat.23), p.37 17. Taken, 2009

Oil on canvas, 76 x 76 cm (cat.14), p.26

18. Jean-Baptiste Awake, 2007

Charcoal on paper, 59.4 x 42 cm

Exhibited at The Empire Gallery, Beautiful Boys, 11-23 Oct. 2007

(cat.12), p.24 19. The Pearl Necklace, 2009 Acrylic and oil on board, 48.5 x 48.5 cm

Private Collection

(cat.16), pp.28-29

20. UNTITLED #7 (Inspired by TOM FORD’s Santal Blush), 2014

Acrylic, oil and 23 carat gold on canvas, 91 x 91 cm

(cat.18), p. 32

21. UNTITLED #3 (Inspired by TOM FORD’s Oud Wood), 2014

Acrylic and oil on canvas, 122 x 91 cm

(cat.19), p.33 22. The Art Dealer’s Son, 2014 - 2016

Various depths Oil on canvas, oil on linen, oil on aluminium, acrylic on panel, twenty-five 40 x 40 cm panels framed in a 228 x 228 cm grid

(cat.37), pp.66-69

23. BiBi Wearing My Pearls, 2014

Acrylic and oil on canvas, 120 x 91 cm

Private Collection

(cat.51), pp.98-99 24. Just One Macaron More Please Mr. Executioner, 2015

Triptych (1)

Triptych (2)

Triptych (3)

2015

Oil on masonite panel with plaster of Paris macaron sculpture, screwed into panel from the rear

Three panels each measuring 86.9 x 57.9 cm

Private Collection

(cat.38), pp.70-71

25. The Conversation, 2009

Oil on canvas, 76 x 76 cm

(cat.15), p.27

26. Hail Mary, 2011-2018

Acrylic, oil and 23 carat gold on canvas, 40.6 x 50.8 cm

Exhibited at the ING Discerning Eye, 15-25 Nov. 2018

Detail on p.4 27. The First Painting, 2007 Acrylic and oil on canvas, 30 x 30 cm

Exhibited at The Empire Gallery, Beautiful Boys, 11 - 23 Oct. 2007 28.

De Laszlo as DL, 2016 Oil on canvas, 126 x 123 cm Private Collection (cat.50), pp.94-97

29. The Three Graces, 2019

Acrylic, 23 carat moon gold and oil on canvas, 55.5 x 121cm

Private Collection (cat.52), pp,100-101 30. They Have Lunch Every Tuesday (Messrs Corbin & King), 2015

Oil on canvas, 213 x 120 cm

(cat.49), pp.90-93

31. UNTITLED #10 (Inspired by TOM FORD’s Atelier d’Orient), 2014

Acrylic, charcoal and oil on canvas, 152 x 122 cm (cat.20), p.34

32. Magritte Idea, 2011

Acrylic, oil, spray paint, gloss paint and 23 carat gold on gesso panel, 61 x 46 cm

(cat.34), pp.58-59 33. Brimstone and Treacle (Rupert Friend), 2012

Acrylic, gloss paint and three shades of 23 carat gold on canvas, 120 x 91 cm

Exhibited at The Arcola Theatre, 2 May - 2 June 2012 during the play’s run.

(cat.35), pp.60-61 34. The Pain of Christ, 2010

Acrylic, 23 carat gold, charcoal and oil on canvas, 152 x 152 cm

Exhibited at St Martin-in-the-Fields, A Last Supper/Sacred or Profane?

4 March - 4 April 2010 (cat.29), pp.48-49

35. The Muse, 2018 Oil on maple panel, 25 cm diameter

Exhibited at MEAM Barcelona, Painting Today, 8 March - 5 May 2019

Private Collection (cat.21), p.35 36. Judas Light and Dark, 2011 Acrylic and oil on panel, 40 x 33 cm (cat.32), pp.52-54

37. Il Magnifico, 2019 Acrylic and oil on panel, 30 cm diameter (cat.44), p.80

Retrospective

38. The Impossibility of Love in the Modern Age, 2016

Oil on linen in a frame previously around a David Jagger painting, 100 x 79.8 cm (including frame)

(cat.40), pp.74-75

39. The Master of Magdalene, 2019 Oil on linen, 99 x 61 cm

Loaned by permission of the Master and Fellows of Magdalene College, Cambridge (cat.56), pp.112-113 40. The Kiss of Betrayal, 2015 Acrylic, charcoal and two shades of 23 carat gold on canvas, 120 x 180 cm

Exhibited at Marylebone Parish Church, TAKE! EAT! 14th -15th October 2015 (cat.33), pp.56-57 41. The Breakup, 2016 Oil on linen in a frame originally around a painting by Cornelis Jonson, 85.4 x 108.2 cm (including frame) 42. Richard Curtis, 2012 - 2019 Acrylic, acrylic ink, oil and three shades of 23 carat gold on panel, 86.7 x 58 cm (cat.36), pp.62-65 43. Disneyland Dagenham, 2015 Acrylic and oil on linen in a frame previously around an Augustus John painting, 101 x 126 cm (including frame)

(cat.39), pp.72-73

44. Sea Scout, 2011

Acrylic, oil, and 23 carat gold on gesso panel, two x 40 x 40 cm

Exhibited at the ING Discerning Eye, 15-25 Nov. 2018

Private Collection

(cat.17), pp.30-31 45. Pink Christ, 2011 Acrylic, two shades of 23 carat gold and oil on panel, 40 x 32.5 cm Exhibited at the ING Discerning Eye, 15-25 Nov. 2018 (Cat. 31), pp.54-55 46. Bernie Katz: In Memoriam (The Prince of Soho), 2018 Acrylic, 23 carat gold and oil on gesso panel, 25.4 x 14.6 cm Exhibited at the ING Discerning Eye, 15-25 Nov. 2018 On loan from the ING Collection (cat.58), pp.116-117

47. William Orbit, 2018 Acrylic and oil on gesso panel, 25 cm diameter

Exhibited at The Milliner at Philip Mould, 9-18 Feb. 2018

Exhibited WMOCA International Biennial Portrait Competition 2019

(cat.43), pp.78-79 48. Meanie Mouse I, 2015

Acrylic and oil on canvas covered panel in a frame previously around a George Romney Painting, 58 cm diameter (including frame)

(cat.41), p.76 49. Hang Man’s Knot (Pop), 2011 Acrylic and oil on gesso panel 66 x 51 cm 50. Meanie Mouse II, 2015 Acrylic, oil and 24 carat gold on panel, 58 cm diameter Exhibited at Philip Mould & Company, The Milliner, Feb. 9 - 18 2018 (cat.42), p.77

51. Murray Lachlan Young, 2019 Acrylic and oil on panel, 40 cm diameter

(cat.45), p.81

52. That Man, 2012

Acrylic, oil, Revlon nail enamel and 23 carat gold on Canvas, 180 x 120 cm.

Exhibited at The London Film Museum, Enamoured: 80 Years of Revlon, Nov. 30 - Dec. 2012 53. Rt. Hon. David Blunkett MP, 2003

Acrylic and oil on canvas, 91.5 x 122 cm

Exhibited at The BP Portrait Prize, The National Portrait Gallery, 2003

On loan from the House of Commons.

(cat.8), pp.14-15 54. The Milliner, 2017

Acrylic and oil on sized, unprimed linen, 240 x 140 cm (including antique frame)

Exhibited at Philip Mould & Company, The Milliner, Feb. 9 - 18 2018

(cat.48), pp.86-89

55. Big Neil, 2016

Aquacryl, oil and white gesso highlight on unprimed French linen, 200 x 160 cm

Exhibited at Philip Mould & Company, Neil Gaiman; Good Icon, February 2018

(cat.53), pp.106-107 (detail on pp.102-103)

56. Fashion Martyrs / Slave, 2010 - 2011

Master Slave

Icon Slave

Banksy Slave

Golden Eye Slave

Pop Slave,

Acrylic, oil, spray paint, gloss paint and 24 carat gold on gesso panels, Each measures 66 x 51 cm

(cat.30), pp.50-52

57. Blue Angel, 2009

Oil and 24 carat gold on panel, 91 x 91 cm

Private Collection

(cat.27), pp.44-45 58. Baroness Thatcher, 2007

Oil on linen, 183 x 183 cm

Exhibited at the Lynn PainterStainers Prize 2007

Exhibited at Portcullis House, The Palace of Westminster, 2013 -2014

Private Collection

(cat.9), p.19 59.

My Boy Mary (Blue), 2010 Oil and 23 carat gold on canvas 152 x 152 cm Exhibited at St Martin-in-the-Fields.

A Last Supper/Sacred or Profane?

4 March - 4 April 2010 (cat.28), pp.46-47

60. The Book of Neil Gaiman

(The Bog Oak Portrait), 2017

Oil and beeswax on prehistoric bog oak sculpted by artist Adrian Swinstead.

Circa 37 x 30 x 10 cm

Exhibited at Philip Mould & Company, Neil Gaiman: Good Icon, June 4- 18 2019

(cat.54), pp.108-109

61. Burning Bog Oak Icons, 2018 Freestanding icons on circa 5000 year old bog oak contained in a carrying box

Panels: Oil pigment suspended in sun bleached beeswax and two shades of 23 carat gold on bog oak

17 x 13 x 3.7 cm

Book Box: Reactive iron paint, size and 23 carat gold on plywood

21.1 x 17 x 4.6 cm (when closed)

Exhibited at A.Z Fell & Co Bookshop 19 Greek Street, 29 May 2 June 2019

Exhibited at Philip Mould & Company, Neil Gaiman: Good Icon, June 4- 18 2019 (cat.55), pp.110-11

62. A Last Supper, 2009

Oil on aluminium, 107 x 366 cm

Exhibited at St Martin-in-the-Fields.

A Last Supper/Sacred or Profane?

4 March - 4 April 2010

On loan from St George’s Church, Nailsworth

(cat.26), pp.40-43 63. The Queen of New Orleans, 2018

Oil on linen in a frame previously round a de László portrait of a European Princess

110 x 82 cm (including frame)

Private Collection (cat.46), pp.82-83 64. The Papal Knight, 2018 Oil on linen, 185 x 132 cm Private Collection (cat.47), pp.84-85 65. The White Druid of the Gorsedd of Bards (Rowan), 2019

Oil and beeswax on prehistoric bog oak

40.5 x 25.7 x 3.8 cm

Private Collection

(cat.57), pp.114-115

121

Acknowledgements It is a great privilege to be given a retrospective of my work in my 40th year by my home city. I would like to thank Kirstie Hamilton, the Chief Executive of Museums Sheffield, for this honour.

Thank you also to Curator Liz Waring for all you have done to realise this show and your tireless logistical work in getting so many of my paintings to Sheffield.

Endless thanks to Philip Mould for his guidance and belief in my ability as a painter, for hanging my paintings in his beautiful gallery and his brilliant eye when endlessly advising me on my paintings in progress. Thank you for having the idea for a retrospective of my work, and for approaching Kirstie Hamilton.

I am incredibly grateful to Laura Freeman, Neil Gaiman and Philip for their wonderful essays.

Special thanks to Dr Emily Guerry, Laurie Lewis, Dr Sophie Kelly and Roisin Astell. Without these fine people there would be no words to go with the pictures. Thank you Dan Malkin and Joe Windsor at Doodle London for your tireless design work laying out these pages. Thank you Tim Griffiths for photographing my artwork and Stephen Fry for his lovely word portrait of the late, great Bernie Katz. Thank you to my uncle and aunt, Glenn and Anne Evans, for all their patient proofreading.

I would like to thank the individuals and institutions who have loaned their pictures to the exhibition. Special mention to Magdalene

122

College Cambridge for unveiling their Master’s portrait early so it could be included in the show.

Heartfelt thanks to Chris and Gini Temple and Martin Euance for so generously supporting this exhibition. Thank you to Max Wade for his painstaking framing and Richard Rendell at Bourlet framers for the beautiful frame that they devised with me for my bog oak and wax painting of Rowan.

Thank you to Chris Harvey at Museums Sheffield and Tracy Jones at Brera PR for telling the world about my show.

Thank you to my Muse Joachim Gram for being the light of my life and best friend in the world.

And for sitting still for me for a Very Long Time.

My deepest gratitude to all the people who have so generously given their time to sit for me on my path as an artist. Special mention to Frank Miles, who’s belief in me and tenacity secured my sittings with Baroness Thatcher.

To all the people who have helped me along the way and all the significant people I have no doubt forgotten to mention, thank you.

This catalogue is dedicated to my parents Margaret and Peter Wadsworth. I owe everything to their unending support and encouragement.

Retrospective

123

Lorna May Wadsworth

Lorna in the doorway of her Beautiful Boys

Room 1, Beautiful Boys, 11 - 23 Oct. 2007,

Lily Cole with her portrait in the Beautiful Boys

Room 2, Beautiful Boys, 11 - 23 Oct. 2007,

exhibition, The Empire Gallery, Vyner Street,

The Empire Gallery, Vyner Street.

exhibition. (Lily recommended some of the

The Empire Gallery, Vyner Street.

Oct. 2007

subjects depicted in the show.)

Baroness Thatcher at her sitting with Lorna,

Lorna with Baroness Thatcher at her Chester

Lorna with her exhibition banner for A Last

A Last Supper painted altarpiece and

photographed by the artist, 2007

Square home, 2007

Supper/Sacred or Profane? at St Martin-in-the-

charcoal cartoon in St Martin’s Hall,

Fields, Trafalgar Square, 2010

at St Martin-in-the-Fields.

Lorna with Sir Derek Jacobi infront of her

Installation shot of A Last Supper in St Martin’s

Frank Miles, the ITN journalist who persuaded

Lorna with Lawrence Finkle and Tafari Hinds

painting Sad Angel at the opening of A Last

Hall. A Last Supper/Sacred or Profane? St

Margaret Thatcher to sit for Lorna, at the

at the opening of A Last Supper/Sacred or

Supper/Sacred or Profane? 2010

Martin-in-the-Fields, 4 March -

opening of A Last Supper/Sacred or Profane?

Profane? exhibition, 2010

4 April 2010

exhibition, 2010

Lorna with Jarvis Cocker at the opening of

Lorna with Alex Watson at the sitting for

Lorna and Philip Mould with her portrait of

Lorna and actor Rupert Friend with The

A Last Supper/Sacred or Profane? exhibition,

Magritte Idea in 2011. (Photo courtesy of

Baroness Thatcher during its exhibition in

Brimstone and Treacle painting, Arcola Theatre,

2010

Camera Press)

Portcullis House, The Palace of Westminster,

2012

Dec. 2013

124

Retrospective

Restaurateurs Chris Corbin and Jeremy King

Lorna being awarded the de Laszlo

Lorna and Milliner Victoria Grant on

The artist’s mother standing outside

with their winning portrait They Have Lunch

Silver Medal and the Exceptional Talent award

her balcony during a sitting for her portrait,

Philip Mould Gallery and the window display

Every Tuesday... at the Royal Society of Portrait

at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters,

23th July 2017. (Photo courtesy of

for The Milliner exhibition, Feb 2018

Painters, 2015

16th April 2015

Will Parsons)

Lorna and Victoria with her portrait at

Installation shot of The Milliner at

Installation shot of Disneyland Dagenham

The artist and her muse Joachim Gram

Philip Mould Gallery, 2018. Photo courtesy

Philip Mould Gallery, 9 - 18 Feb. 2018.

hanging at Philip Mould Gallery, 2018

at the ING Discerning Eye Award 2018,

of Barney Cokeliss

Hats by Victoria Grant

where Lorna won the ING Purchase Prize for her portrait of Bernie Katz and The Muse was the face of the poster.

Author Neil Gamian sitting for Big Neil

Burning Bog Oak Icons at the exhibit Good

Lorna with Neil Gaiman, and the stars of Good

Art dealer Philip Mould with Lorna outside his

in the artist’s Hackney studio in 2016.

Icons within the ‘rare bookshop’ immersive

Omens Michael Sheen & David Tennant at

gallery at the opening of Lorna’s exhibit Neil

(Photo by the artist)

experience created for the launch of Neil’s TV

Good Icons with their portraits, May 2019.

Gaiman: Good Icon of her portraits of the

adaptation of the book Good Omens, Greek

(Photo courtesy of Camera Press)

author. Pall Mall, June 2019

Street, May 2019

Lorna and the walking art installation

Philip Mould, Lorna and Dr Nicholas Cullinan,

Neil Gaiman and Lorna May Wadsworth with

Dr Rowan Williams at the Master’s Lodge,

Pandemonia at the opening of Neil Gaiman:

Director of the National Portrait Gallery at the

Big Neil in Philip Mould Gallery, 2019

Magdalene College Cambridge, sitting for his

Good Icon, June 2019. (Photo courtesy of

opening of Neil Gaiman: Good Icon, June

Camera Press)

2019. (Photo courtesy of Camera Press)

portrait in 2019. (Photo by the artist)

125

Portrait of the artist by Barney Cokeliss