ART
Portraits and Landscapes
MANY people who have collections of modern paintings would like at some time or other to commission a portrait of a relative that _would agree as a painting, in general good manners, with the rest. They would like it to provide interest or excitement of its own apart from its reminiscence of the subject. How is the painter to be found? The exhibition at the Leicester Galleries called " Portraits . for Collectors" is designed as a review of the possibilities. It is a good one ; but to embark on its arrangement was a formidable under- taking. For the conception of the human face as at once a presence and a myth—a conception that has prompted most of the world's finest portraits—is dead. Today we do not enough feel that we are irreplaceable, and portrait painters and sitters cannot share that desirable conviction that they are met together on the matter of a face that is going to found a dynasty, typify an age, or at any rate launch a fleet. Rather, the sitting is an informal occasion from which, with luck, there will result the combination of a likeness and a passable picture. In the present exhibition some lively meetings of this kind are suggested. It is significant that the most satisfactory results come from painters who are not full-time portrait painters, such as Lawrence Cowing, Rodrigo Moynihan and Edward le Bas. William Coldstream, our most serious full-time portrait painter, is well represented. Victor Pasmore and Ruskin Spear show the best of the pictures that are only incidentally portraits. Henry Lamb among the well-established, and Kenneth Green among the less well, show good works.
Thomas Carr exhibits water-colours in another room. Visitors should not be deceived by their superficial prettiness, which is as attractive as it is unfashionable. There is much merit beneath it, as a glance at the two small sepias that are without the sweet colour
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