London Portraits

Titian
Man with a Quilted Sleeve
c. 1510

School of Anthony Van Dyck
Portrait of Two Young Englishmen (detail)
c. 1635

Bronzino
Portrait of a Young Man
c. 1550

This afternoon Peter Brooks in a back issue of the New York Review of Books reminded me of a passage Henry James wrote in The Tragic Muse (a personal top favorite Henry James novel). The character Nick Dormer, who has sacrificed a career in politics to pursue a vocation as a painter, confronts several great portraits in London's National Gallery –

As he stood before them the perfection of their survival often struck him as the supreme eloquence, the virtue that included all others, thanks to the language of art, the richest and most universal. Empires and systems and conquests had rolled over the globe and every kind of greatness had risen and passed away, but the beauty of the great pictures had known nothing of death or change, and the tragic centuries had only sweetened their freshness.

Giovanni Bellini
Portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan
c. 1501

Rembrandt
Self Portrait
1669

I don't suppose anybody knows which exact National Gallery group of portraits Nick Dormer was using as a lever for his meditations back in the 1890s, but chances are it included some of these, which all remain in London where they were when he saw them, and look fresher than ever if my own London memories are anything to go by.

Ingres
Madame Moitessier
1856

Lorenzo Lotto
Portrait of a Woman Inspired by Lucrezia
c. 1530

Andrea del Sarto
Portrait of a Young Man
c. 1517

Hans Holbein the Younger
The Ambassadors
1533

Jean-Marc Nattier
Portrait of Manon Balletti
1757