Patrick Bade
Jazz Age Portraits

Patrick Bade - Jazz Age Portraits

- We’re going to look today at society portraits in Britain between the First and the Second World War. We’ve already looked at what was really a kind of golden age of the society portrait in the That’s the period 1890, up to 1940, 14, rather. And that’s the period of Sargent and his rivals, Boldini, Anders Zorn, and so on. And his imitators. And glamorous society portraits continue to be in demand, and continue to be made, up to the Second World War. But they take on board certain changes in society, and some aspects of Modernism and modern life. In these two portraits, the oil portrait by James Gunn of his wife, you can see she’s using makeup, lipstick, jungle red nail varnish. That you would not have seen before the First World War. On the right hand side, this a group portrait photograph by Cecil Beaton. And he’s making use of a very fashionable new material between the wars, cellophane. Now, you can see the stark change, really, between pre-war and post-war in the work of one artist. You might be surprised to know it’s the same artist who painted these two pictures. It’s Glyn Philpot. And on the left it’s an aristocratic portrait. Very much, of course, in the style of Sargent. Very painterly, sumptuous. And it’s the same artist a few years later painting a waiter. And you can see the style has become much more hard-edged, and it’s got a decidedly sort of art deco flavour to it.

Now, of course, there was a continuity in the sense that art, certain devices of the flattering society portrait continued to be used. And one of them, very popular in the of course, was to have an exotic, orientalist backdrop, a screen, or a curtain. It’s a device that Sargent uses. It’s a device that Klimpt uses. And we’ve got a just pre-war portrait on the right hand side, Jacques-Émile Blanche, so it’s actually not British, although he spent a lot of time in Britain. And it’s a portrait of the great ballerina Tamara Karsavina. And on the left is a portrait by a Scottish artist called Sir William Oliphant Hutchison. And you could, there is a difference in mood and atmosphere, I’d say, between these two portraits. But you can see that there, it’s basically the same formula of placing a model against an exotic decorative background. And we see the same device being used here by another Scottish artist. This is Francis Cadell, who’s known as one of the Scottish colorists. And you see here very much a strong French influence. You know, you know that he’s very aware of the French post-impressionists, Gaugain and so on, particularly the flattening of the forms on the right hand side. So France continues right up ‘til the 1940s to set the tone, really, of a lot of British art. They’re all looking to Paris. And this is a rather interesting example. This is Sir Gerald Kelly’s portrait of the composer Vaughn Williams. My guess is that Vaughn Williams came to his studio, took one look at him, of course, he immediately thought of Ingres’ famous portraits of Monsieur Bertin dating right back to the 1830s. And the way he sits him in the chair, I mean, everything about even the hair, of course, the unruly white hair, is I think a very clear reference to Ingres.

Now, an artist who was already famous before the First World War, and was at that time considered a kind of, enfant terrible and the great white hope of the future of English painting was Augustus John. Here you see him in his prime on the left hand side, looking very handsome and very bohemian. And you can see in later years in the 1920s and thirties, he turned into a kind of grand old man of English painting. For many people his development was a, his development as an artist was disappointing. He didn’t turn out to be the great original genius that people hoped he would be. But, and he turned largely in the interwar period to portraiture. He could be a very good portraitist. And like Sargent, he could combine glamour with quite a critical and acerbic eye. Here he is with a famous model of the 1920s. This is the American actress Tallulah Bankhead. She was a kind of it girl on both sides of the Atlantic. Immensely, immensely popular in London in the 1920s. So many wonderful anecdotes about her. I’d better not even get started on them, otherwise the whole lecture would become about her. But she was a completely wonderfully outrageous character. I’ll just tell you one story. When she was in a hit run in a London play, there was a man who brought flowers after every performance. And after the final performance, he said to her, Ms. Bankhead, I want you for my wife. And she said, oh yeah, what’s she like? But so I think Augustus John has really caught her somehow, hasn’t he? In that portrait on the left.

And perhaps his most famous portrait is this one of the great Portuguese cellist Suggia, Guilhermina Suggia, painted in the early 1920s. There is actually a kind of, a kind of interesting offbeat connection with the cello between the cello and Augustus John, in that one of his multiple illegitimate children turned out to be the very distinguished cellist Amarilus Fleming. But I’ll come back to his many, many children a little bit later. As I said, he could be cervic, even cruel. I think this is quite a cruel portrait of Lady Ottoline Morrell, who was briefly his lover, but he hasn’t really repaid her very kindly. You probably many of you know about her. She was a, I think a very sympathetic, delightful character, great hostess at Garsington Manor. She entertained artists and intellectuals, not only feeding them, but entertained them in her bed as well. Distinguished, well, many of the distinguished writers and artists of the time, and they all actually repaid her quite cruelly, you know, she’s caricatured in novels by Aldus Huxley, and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover apparently was, is a portrait of her, and was inspired by an affair that she had with a hunky stone mason who was hired to make plints for statues in the gardens of Garsington. And you can see, she had a strong face. I think she’s rather beautiful, actually, in the photograph on the right hand side. You could say it’s a little bit horsey. I mean, there’s another very notorious anecdote about her having, at a tea party at the Savoy Hotel with Diaghilev and Nijinsky, and lots of very glamorous and distinguished people, and they played a very dangerous game where the gentleman had to address a lady and say what animal should represent them. And you know, madam, you remind me of a swan because of your white skin and your beautiful neck, or a gazelle, or whatever.

And she, Lady Ottoline rather rashly turned to Nijinsky, who to say the least, lacks social skills, and she said, oh, my dear, and what animal would you associate with me? And he said Camel. Which was I’m sure not what she wanted to hear. Yeah, another photograph of her, in this case it’s by Cecil Beaton. And again, I think he tends to accentuate the eccentricity of her appearance. Now, Augustus John, it was estimated, I mean, nobody knows for sure. Like Boris Johnson, he’d never knew how many children he’d had. And some people estimated he had more than a hundred illegitimate children. And it was said when he walked around Chelsea, if any small child came up to him, he assumed that it was one of his. But he was a pretty predatory character. And rather like Eric Gill, thought nothing also of sexually attacking his daughters. And this is a portrait of one of his many, many daughters. And you can, she certainly had a swan’s neck, although, ‘cause that is, I’ve mentioned this before, took talking about Sargent, that elongating the neck is the oldest trick in the book for flattering society portraits. Another of Augustus John’s lovers was another very flamboyant character, although she was considered to be a great beauty. This is the Marchesa Casati, who gave the best parties in Venice in the Palazzo that’s now the Guggenheim in Venice. And so he paints her certainly as seductive, if a little sinister. And I thought you might like to see by comparison, here’s the same woman. It’s always fascinating, isn’t it, to see the same person painted by different artists. So, here is two different versions of Marchesa Casati by Augustus John.

And here she is again by Kees van Dongen on the left hand side, and in a very pre-war portrait by Boldini on the right hand side. But Augusta, he could be a very, like Sargent, and Sargent, I think they’re, both of them tend to be underrated by many critics who write them off as being flashy and superficial. But I think both of them, when they’re really switched on, when they’re really interested in a particular subject, they can give very penetrating characterizations. And this is, I think, one of Augustus John’s best portraits of the poet Dylan Thomas. And they also had a connection in that it was Dylan Thomas’s wife, Caitlin, was an ex lover of Augustus John. And Augustus John actually introduced her to Dylan Thomas. Now, another artist who had established himself before the first World War, but continued until his relatively early death in the early 1930s, and this is William Orpen, and a self-portrait. He was very self-conscious about his short, his lack of height, and his rather eccentric appearance. Certainly not a a handsome or beautiful man. So he, in his self portraits, he tends to rather almost self caricature and exaggerate that. But when required he could produce a portrait as suave and flattering as anybody. This is, I wonder if you can actually recognise him, 'cause this is certainly a very enhanced portrait. It’s not how we usually see him. This is Neville Chamberlain, of course, notorious for waving out little piece of paper when he came back from the Munich Conference in 1938. Given here a handsome appearance and a kind of gravitas.

And so, I think Orpen, too, can really pick up on the flavour and the mood of what we call the jazz age, what the French call These are, you know, very characteristic portraits that capture, I think the mood of the 1920s, both by Orpen. This is the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, briefly before his marriage to Wallis Simpson. And he was a style icon of the 1920s and the early thirties, much imitated around the globe. So, I suppose it’s the case with most portrait painters that you can kind of tell when they’re interested in their subject, when they’re really switched on. And I think Orpen certainly had an eye for attractive young women, and actually often did his best, and most vivid, and inspired portraits of women like this one. But this actually, I’ve just been having lunch in the most wonderful left bank restaurant today. And there was a very handsome chef. I mean, it’s a small restaurant. So I actually showed him on my mobile phone, I showed him this, and said he ought to have his portrait done like this. This is Orpen’s portrait of the chef at the Hotel Chatham. And another character, another famous figure painted by Orpen. Orpen was Irish, of course. And I suppose the most famous Irishman of the interwar period was Count John McCormack. People count, of course, the the great Irish tenor. And we move on to an artist, I have to say, I don’t care for. Although his pictures fetch absolutely enormous sums, you know, an auction.

Really astonishing sums. They’re very collectible. And I think for the same reasons that he was successful and earned a lot of money in his life, he has a very slick technique, you can see that. This is him, by the way, with his wife. But I think the chief appeal of Sir Alfred Munnings is a kind of snobbish one to do with a sporty, utter upper class lifestyle. So, and he was of course, a great horse specialist, and he was particularly known for his equestrian portraits. This again is his wife, and this one too. Later one, presumably. Now we, several of these artists interestingly produced many of their best works when painting their wives. And this is the case with James Gunn, Sir James Gunn. Several were knighted, that’s quite, in England that was quite a good way to get a knighthood, was to be a successful society portrait painter. So this is a self-portrait of James Gunn, and a portrait, one of many, many portraits he painted of his second wife, Pauline. He could be quite dull. This is James Gunn when being dutiful. So, this is the Countess of Sefton on the left hand side, and a portrait he was commissioned to paint by the National Portrait Gallery of the royal family. It’s in the National Portrait Gallery, just reopened. And it’s entitled “A Conversation Piece at Windsor Royal Lodge.” But so as I said, it’s always interesting to look at the fervour of a portraitist and to see when he’s excited, and when he’s turned on, and when he’s not. And certainly James Gunn was excited by Pauline, that’s for sure. And his best and most of the seductive portraits are of her. And they’re really beautiful.

They’re gorgeous harmonies in different colours. Here again, using this kind of stock device of placing her against an oriental screen in a painting on the right hand side, which is really, kind of harmony in yellow. Actually, something’s just occurred to me. I surely should have put that in this lecture, is that the very famous portrait of the late Queen Elizabeth by like Michael Leonard. It’s one of the, apart from the Annigoni, the most famous image of her. It never occurred to me before, but it’s clearly referring to this. It shows her honour settee with the corgis. And it’s, again, it’s a harmony in yellow. More Pauline by James Gunn. And the woman who was the nation’s sweetheart in the 1930s. This is Gracie Fields. She was the most loved and popular woman. Slightly disappointing portrait. It’s too reverential, really, doesn’t, I mean the photograph on the right hand side I think gives a much more vivid impression of her impish personality than this rather bland portrait on the left. And of course, a wonderful subject for him. This is again, James Gunn, is the composer, Frederick Delius. I’m hoping to do a talk about Delius in October. By this time, Delius, he was suffering from tertiary syphilis, and he was completely paralysed and blind, but continued to compose by dictating note by note to his secretary Eric Fendi. And this, I think, this does capture the tragic nobility of his appearance at this late stage in his life. And another young lady, just this one is just titled, so she’s presumably a French working girl who caught James Gunn’s eye, and this won’t have been a commission portrait.

So this is a portrait he just painted because he wanted to. Now we move on to Glyn Philpot. I started off with him. And saying how he began his career before the First World War. And this is a fairly early self-portrait on the left-hand side, one of several artists who are vying to take on the rich and aristocratic clientele that had previously gone to Sargent for their portraits, and the style of the painting on the left is very Sargent-esque. And he continued in this style 'til the early twenties, when he suddenly in the parlance of the time, went modern. And he has a very radical change of style, of course by continental European standards, it’s not that radical, but even so in England, it caused quite a stir. And he, you can see that he was interested, he was interested in say, Picasso up to the blue or pink period, rather chalky paint on the right hand side. And the heavy contours, I think he’s been looking at those early Picasso pictures. And this is actually a portrait of his lover, a man called Vivian Forbes. And they were a very openly gay couple who’s quite Of course, homosexuality, the act of it, was a criminal offence in Britain right up 'til the 1960s. But I don’t think Glyn Philpot did much to hide his homosexuality. Here are two men painted by Glyn Philpot. Well, of course it’s the very, very heterosexual Oswald Mosley, notorious later as the leader of the British Fascist Party. He was a very handsome man, as you can see, he got through women at a terrific rate. He was a great womaniser. On the right hand side, somebody who’s possibly more sympathetic to Glyn Philpot’s taste and inclinations. This is the poet Siegfried Sassoon, famous First World War poet.

Very beautiful man again, as you can see. And he was also homosexual. Here is Glyn Philpot in his new modern style. He’s given up all that lush painterly Sargent style for something edgier, a bit edgier, and sharper. But this is just a commissioned society portrait of the, who is this? Lady Benthall, this is. But really what turns him on are hunky handsome young men. And just as it’s, you know, gorgeous young girls that turn on William Orpen, in Philpot’s case you can, it’s very clear what types of young men really turned him on. And there are great many of these portraits of him, athletes, dancers, acrobats, sort of muscular, healthy young men he’s also very clearly strongly attracted to young black men. And this guy who became a regular model for him, was somebody he actually picked up at the National Gallery, was somebody who, he was a homeless young man who went into the National Gallery for shelter. And this, he made several portraits of this young man, who called himself Tom Whiskey. He’s obviously a smart waiter in a smart cocktail bar. And this of course, another, change in society. And in Paris and London in the 1920s, American, Afro-Americans were tremendously fashionable. Think of Josephine Baker taking Paris by storm. And I have a book which I’ve mislaid, unfortunately, written by George Simenon, and it’s called Sort of Wicked Paris. And it’s got an illustration of mixed-race dancing. And underneath it says, you know, it makes it very clear that it’s an extremely fashionable, daring statement in Paris or London in the 1920s to take a black lover.

Here is Tom Whiskey again, and love this portrait on the left with the gramophone behind him, wind up gramophone, like one I had as a child. And on the right is so the, I suppose the London equivalent of Josephine Baker. This is Hutch. He was a West Indian singer. He certainly took high society by storm, and he rather, he cut a great sway through high society, having many, many fashionable lovers, both men and women. So, he went from, you know, Lady Mountbatten to Noel Coward. Very smooth, very elegant singer. And this is Glyn Philpot on the left hand side, and one of a series of portraits made in the West Indies in 1938 by Augustus John again. I saw this painting actually, for the very first time, just a few weeks ago. It’s hanging in Tate Britain in the new hangup, Tate Britain. And I was very impressed by it. It’s this young truculent girl with her very challenging stair. She’s very wary, isn’t she? I don’t think she’s totally confident in sitting for Augustus John. Now this is Doris Zinkeisen, who was, this is her self-portrait on the left dating from 1929, in a wonderful, exotic cloak. And very typically for her, this shiny silk backdrop. This, she belongs very firmly in the art deco period. And, as I’ve mentioned before in other lectures, the art deco style loves everything that is smooth and shiny. And on the right hand side, we see Doris Zinkeisen painting murals on the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth in 1936. Luckily, that liner still exists. Those murals still exist, and you can see them in the cocktail bar, the bar on the Queen Mary. And so she was much in demand in the twenties and thirties for these portraits. I suppose you could say that they’re formulaic, but they’re very brilliant, and certainly very pleasing to the eye.

She knew how to flatter the sitter, as I said, to put a couple of extra inches in the neck, and to streamline her figure, and so on. And two more of these portraits, very glossy, shiny, luminous portraits by Doris Zinkeisen. She had, she developed an important career as well as a stage designer and a costume designer. She even worked in Hollywood for a while. She designed costumes for the 1936 filmed version of “Showboat.” And here this, I think there have been a few inches added to the neck here as well. And this is Elsa Lanchester, wife of Charles Loughton. And I mean, she had a very, you wouldn’t call her conventionally beautiful, would you, really? I suppose the French would call her type sort of pretty stroke ugly. Her most memorable film role, of course, was as the bride of Frankenstein, as you see in the still on the right hand side. Now, Doris Zinkeisen, there’s a very extraordinary coda to her career. You think she’s made a whole career of doing these glossy, fashionable portraits, designing wonderful costumes for musicals and so on. But she was appointed a war artist at the end of the war, and she was one of the very first people to enter the Belsen concentration camp after its liberation by the British Army. And she made this picture, which you can see at the Imperial War Museum, which she called “Human Laundry.” I know it doesn’t really fit at all into the, quite the opposite of everything else I’m talking about in this lecture. But I thought you, if you don’t know this, you should know it. And it’s interesting.

Very sober, matter of fact depiction of something unbelievably horrific, which is the people close to death in a skeletal state and unbelievable squalor and filth just being washed down like human laundry by medical order in the Belsen concentration camp. This, now we move on to an artist called Gerald Brockhurst. He was from Birmingham, and he trained locally in Birmingham. Of course there’s a very strong Pre-Raphaelite tradition in Birmingham. The local museum has major collections of Pre-Raphaelite paintings. And Burne-Jones was a Birmingham local. And so Brockhurst as a young artist just before the First World War went off to Italy. And it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it, that he’s really absorbed Italian renaissance art. In a way, it’s kind of like Leonardo da Vinci meets art deco. Very glossy, very smooth. Now these, I’ve downloaded these image from the internet, which of course is not always very accurate in its information. And the one on the left hand side, on the internet, it says she’s his first wife. And the one on the right hand side, it says, is his second wife. They’re remarkably similar. So I suspect this is actually the same wife, but I don’t whether it’s the first one or the second one, unless he’s one of those men, of course, who always fall in love with the same type. And here is his portrait of Merle Oberon, very exotic appearance, she was half Indian, a fact that she of course couldn’t admit to in the 1930s, it was, in inverted commas, a terrible secret for her.

And it wasn’t really 'til after she died that it was generally known that she was half Indian, or even more than half Indian, I think. But fantastically beautiful woman, as you can see, both from the portrait and from the glamour photography on the right hand side. And, now this is the notorious Mrs. Sweeney. Well, I suppose at the time she was Mrs. Sweeney. She wasn’t notorious. She was just famous for her beauty. She was considered to be one of the most beautiful women in the world. Mrs. Sweeney. In one of the versions of Cole Porter’s song “You Are the Tops,” her name is Rhymed with Mussolini, “You’re Mrs. Sweeney, you’re Mussolini.” And here is a photograph of her where you can see that Brockhurst hasn’t needed, really, to flatter, flatter her. She has very perfect features. This is Meredith Frampton, a popular society portraitist in the 1930s and forties. Didn’t die until 1984. But he, as after the Second World War, of course, this type of painting went completely out of fashion, as did, say, Doris Zinkeisen. But he lived long enough to see a revival of interest in his work. I can remember when there was a small show, I think it was at the Tate. And the reason that he suddenly became interesting was that people noticed similarities with the German the new realism of Berlin in the 1920s. And purely stylistically, it is very, very similar, but it’s, this is but stripped of that kinkiness, that perversity, which is so all pervasive in the Berlin style of the twenties.

Here I’m making a comparison between Meredith Frampton on the left hand side, a portrait of a distinguished chemist, and the portrait by Tamara de Lempicka of Dr. Bouchard, who is the inventor of lactateor, which is I think an indigestion medicine made him very, very rich. And so everything seems to be made out of metal in both the very metallic, very smooth, said that’s a characteristic of the art deco. But of course the Tamara de Lempicka makes him into, the Dr. Bouchard, into a very sexy doctor, isn’t he? He could be a doctor in a Hollywood movie with his very square shoulders, his contrapposto pose, and his natty moustache. So I think Meredith Frampton’s chemist is rather less sexy, but he’s also less sinister than this, that this is Christian Shad, one of the leading artists in Berlin in the 1920s. It’s a portrait of a gynaecologist, and you think, oh my God, would you want to go near a gynaecologist who looked like this? I wonder if he was quite so sinister in real life. And again, to make the point about the stylistic similar similarities between Frampton on the left hand side and Christian Shad on the right. But without all that, this sense of perversity. I mean, are we sure that this young woman who is presumably a prostitute is actually a woman, or is she a transvestite, we’re not really sure. Just that sort of hint of kinkiness that’s so typical of Berlin in the twenties. Now I want to finish off by talking about photography. And so this is, I’d say the art of glamour portrait photography enters a kind of golden age in the 1920s and thirties.

Much, much more, you know, earlier, most portraits in the 19th century, with some exceptions, are not particularly flattering, or really, particularly beautiful. But, so gifted photographers in the interwar period developed certain techniques, and the soft filter, and so on, and light effects, wonderful shimmering light in this photograph. That’s, you know, similar in a way, say to the paintings of Doris Zinkeisen. Now this photo, this is not actually a British photograph, and I’m showing it to you because it was shown to me last week by a friend who came with me on a trip to Munich, Monica Layton, who I think many of you all know. And this is her grandmother, and I just found it such a striking image, must date from just after the first World War. And she was starting a successful career as a singer, and she sang in a production of “Fledermaus.” And we both think that this is probably her in her “Fledermaus” mouse costume. She seems to be in some kind of fancy dress costume. And, beautiful, gifted young woman who gave up her career to get married, and tragically died in the Holocaust. Now, I’m going to talk about two leading British photographers, who in the thirties specialised in high society glamour photographs. And this is Cecil Beaton, of course, later he developed other strands to his career, became particularly famous as interior designer, designer of movies, costume designer. But it was as a society photographer that he really made his reputation in the 1920s and thirties. This is a self-portrait, and he seems to be, in photographs like these, you can see he’s saying yes, photography can do everything that painting can do.

And he’s staking a claim, really, to be the successor of the great society portraitists of the past. Vinta Halter from the middle of the 19th century. This is a Vinta Halter portrait of the Empress Eugenie and her ladies in waiting on the right hand side. And you can see that Cecil Beaton has really tried to recreate it in his photograph on the left. And the same here is looking back very clearly to Sargent. This is the Wyndham sisters by Sargent on the right hand side. And so I think he’s also saying, yeah, the camera can lie. It really can lie with a very clever photographer and lots of tricks up his sleeve. He can glamorise, heighten the appearance, just as effectively as a painter. The queen mother, or I always think of her as the queen mother 'cause that’s what she was through most of my life time. But at this time she was Queen Elizabeth, wife of George VI. So, Cecil Beaton developed a particularly close relationship with the royal family. And although I think when she was young, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, she was a very pretty girl, but by this time she was quite dumpy. So he’s had his work cut out, I think, to give her glamour, and allure. And these two portraits he made of Princess Elizabeth, future queen. Again, one on the left, which is looking back to Vinta Halter and 19th century portrait, and a much more informal and more modern portrait on the right hand side. This is Edith Sitwell, again by Cecil Beaton, of course she’s a gift, isn’t she? Such a wonderful face, amazing, amazing face. But he does everything to accentuate the eccentricity of her features, her hawk-like facial features. This is a another of the great beauties of the period, but actually two different photographers here. Cecil Beaton on the left, and Paul Tanqueray on the right hand side.

This is the Chinese American film star Anna May Wong. Like many actors from ethnic backgrounds, and Paul Robeson would be another one, of course, she had very, very limited possibilities in Hollywood, and rather better possibilities by crossing the Atlantic and making films in Britain. This is Edward James. He was a very wealthy young athlete. It was rumoured that he was an illegitimate son of Edward the seventh. And he was a great patron of the arts that he commissioned to write seven deadly sins for his wife. And the portrait on the left is a Magritte portrait of him, rather disturbing portrait of him looking in the mirror and seeing the back of his head. And I think this double portrait by Ceccil Beaton, I presume was made after the Magritte, and is actually referring to it. And so in upper echelons of society in Europe, surrealism is very fashionable. This is a photograph taken by Cecil Beaton of Wallis Simpson, as she still was in 1937, wearing the famous lobster dress by Elsa Schiaparelli, which was lifted, so to speak, the design from Salvador Dali, Dali’s lobster telephone, which was one of the most notorious exhibits in the surrealist exhibition of 1936. And I’m finishing with a very delightful character, Madame Yevonde. And so she made a very good living between the wars taking photographs of upper class ladies, fashionable ladies.

Her claim to fame, if you call it that, was that she experimented with colour photography when it was something very unusual, and not usually approved of by critics. But her most famous series of photographs were made in 1935. And they were inspired by, well of course this surrealist movement, as it’s at its height. So there’s a very surreal element in these photographs. But they were inspired by a charity party, a themed party, where all the women had to come as classical mythological characters. And you can see this rather heightened, gawdy colour that she uses. On the left, we’ve got Lady Bridget Poulett as Arethusa, and on the right, the wife of the then home secretary Anthony Eden. This is Mrs. Eden as, I think she’s not, I don’t think he’s knighted by that point. He’s not Sir Anthony, so she’s Mrs. Eden as the muse of history. This is Mrs. Michael Balkan as Minerva. I imagine Trudy will certainly have talked quite a lot about Michael Balkan, who was born a Lithuanian Jew, came to England, and became a big mover and shaker, very important person, really, in the creation of the British film industry. And to this, you can see that’s obviously Europa and the bull. You know who Pluto, dressing himself up as a bull and running off, or is it Jupiter? I think it’s his Jupiter with Europa on the left hand side. Mrs. Donald Ross. And Mrs. Brian Guinness, considered one of the most beautiful women of the interwar period. I do find her fascinating, if slightly, well not slightly, very sinister actually.

She left Guinness and married Oswald Mosley, and they were of course the most notorious Nazi sympathisers in Britain. And I think you’ve had talks about all of that. But you can see what a, she was very, very beautiful woman, and she’s one of those women who I think, as my mother would’ve said, she had good bone structure. So it’s the kind of beauty that really lasts. You can see interviews with her as an old woman on YouTube. And she’s still extraordinarily beautiful in old age. And I’m finishing again with the notorious Mrs. Sweeney. Well of course she had to come as Helen of Troy, most beautiful woman of history. So I’m not sure who made the photograph on the right hand side, but it shows the pearls that were going to have such a role in her subsequent story. I suppose most people remember her today for what was probably the most scandalous high society divorce in 20th century Britain. By this time she was married to the Duke of Argyll. And she was the Duchess of Argyll. And somehow or other he managed to come across a photograph of her giving a blowjob to a naked man. He was not identifiable 'cause his head was cut off by the top of the photograph.

And still, I mean, in Sunday papers to this day, there’s still speculation. Who was the headless man? Was it Douglas Fairbanks Jr.? There are a whole lot of different theories about who it was. Well, he can’t be identified because actually his most identifiable piece of anatomy, is not visible anyway. But she was identifiable by the pearls, and that’s all she was wearing in photograph. And of course that inspired Thomas Ades’ opera, “Powder Her Face.” This is my final image. I do recommend it to you. It’s one of the few contemporary operas that I’ve seen more than once. In fact, I’ve seen it three times, and it is a very compelling piece. So I’m going to finish now, and see what you’ve got to say.

Q&A and Comments:

I’m not talking about Beatie, he doesn’t fit into this. Beatie died before 1900. He died in the 1890s, and he wasn’t a portrait painter.

There is a perfume called- I didn’t know that. That is fascinating.

Was there is, ‘cause there’s a reference to cellophane, again in “You’re The Tops,” the song by Cole Porter. One of the lines goes your “You’re garbo salary, you’re the National Gallery, you’re cellophane.” So cellophane was a very sexy new material in the interwar period.

Oh, Yehuda Wade says Orpen’s your grandfather’s cousin. He’s a very interesting artist. When he’s on form, he could be absolutely terrific.

Q: Are these women on horseback still riding?

A: Yes, I suppose probably some very smart upper class women still did ride side saddle.

Well, what about Gwen John? Well, she’s a wonderful artist, Catherine. And she might deserve a whole lecture to herself. I mean, many people think she’s a much better artist than Augustus. She doesn’t, she didn’t fit into this, this lecture, because although she painted many portraits, they’re never society portraits, that’s not what she does. They’re always rather lonely, isolated, sad women. So that would really have been out of context in this lecture to talk about her. Portrait you shared confirms that western art canon is in fact so restricted. Yes, well this is, but I don’t think you could judge, I mean this is a pretty specialised thing that I’m talking about tonight. I don’t think you can make a generalisation about western art and attitudes of western art. I mean, from what I’ve been talking about tonight.

Now, yes. I wondered this, Shelly, what is the ethnicity of Doris Zinkeisen. I mean, she was Scottish. I know she was Scottish. But you know, Zinkeisen is, you know, it’s not MacZinkeisen. I don’t know where Zinkeisen comes from. And I’ve always rather assumed that there must be some kind of Eastern European, Jewish origin. I don’t know. Is Zinkeisen, is that a commonly Jewish name? Maybe somebody knows that.

This is James. There was excellent exhibition in Edinburgh a few years ago, True to Life, British realist paintings in the twenties and thirties. Meredith Frampton, all the people. Dod Procter.

Yes. James Cowie. Do you know, I’m so glad, I’ve been racking my brains to get there. It’s gone. And it had gone, the names of James Cowie. I used to know his daughter, and she had such a wonderful portrait of herself by him. I wanted to put in this lecture, but I couldn’t remember the name. James Cowie.

Q: What was the name of the artist who painted the late queen and her corgis?

A: That is, that was Michael Leonard. Michael Leonard. If you look, that will pop up on your screen if you Google that. Thank you Rita.

Photo of Wallis Simpson. Interesting placing of a branch. Yeah, I agree with you. It’s very Freudian, isn’t it? It’s not a branch. It’s actually a lobster. But you know, it looks like, you know, blood seeping down between her legs. I’m really amazed that she was willing to wear it. Thank you Lorna.

The Madam Yevonde. Yes, I know. I love her work. It’s so crazy, isn’t it? Well, particularly that series of, you know, the women dressed up as goddesses.

My forthcoming tours, well the very next one is Kirk. There are two companies I work for Kirker, that’s K I R K E R, and Martin Randall. And I’ve got tours for both of them coming up, going to the Puccini Festival in about two weeks time. And then I’ve got an Art Deco Martin Randall tour in Paris in November. That’s the beginning of November. And I’ve got, oh, the Verdi tour, which is one of my absolute favourite tours to do in Parma in, I think that’s the end of September. It’s a lovely time to go. Fantastic combination of amazing food, Verdi, beautiful art and architecture. That is such a nice tour to go on.

This is Carol Black. Everybody talked about Tallulah Bankhead. I can tell you she was well, yeah, well she was, she wasn’t young by the 1950s. Actually, she wasn’t really in movie, but she, her most successful movie role was in the Hitchcock film Lifeboat. But she was already, you know, she wasn’t a spring chicken when she made that. She must have been well into her forties. So, and she wasn’t really, she was a great stage star, and she was a great personality, but it didn’t apparently come across in movies. I love the gravelly voice though. The deep voice is wonderful.

This, Lucy Wally and her TV programme on royal photo album showed a magnifier how the photographer had scraped away at the photo to slim Queen Victoria’s neck. Yes. Yes. So quite a lot of that went on.

Thank you very much indeed, everybody. And I’m back with you again on Sunday.