The National Portrait Gallery, London, has unveiled its most recent commissioned portrait, a painting of Dame Maggie Smith by the artist James Lloyd, it was announced today, Tuesday 9 April 2013. It was commissioned by the Gallery with the support of J. P. Morgan through the Fund for New Commissions.
The large (six feet by three) oil painting shows the Downton Abbey actress in jacket and trousers sitting in a bare studio on a draped chair which is placed on an intriguing trompe-l’oeil platform. The red and blue chequer-board pattern of the platform give colour to an otherwise muted palette of grey, black and brown.
The sittings began in 2011 and took place at the artist’s studio in Southwark. Lloyd started by working on sketches, in both oil and charcoal, and took photographs to determine the pose he wanted. He settled on one in which Dame Maggie was seated cross-legged, her head tilted to rest on a raised hand, with her eyes looking out at the viewer.
Lloyd made a plinth to raise her to eye level when seated, a small platform painted with an illusory cube pattern he often uses, in this case to convey a feeling of the stage. The tumbling drapery catches the light as it falls, adding, he says, ‘a certain monumentality to an otherwise ordinary studio chair’.
While Dame Maggie indicated she was very happy ‘to be directed’ the artist did not want to represent her in period costume or as one of her characters in which she is known to millions. This was to be a contemporary painting of the actress in her everyday attire.
Despite her busy work schedule, Dame Maggie was very obliging with her time. Having painted actors in the past, Lloyd was aware that if the painting process went on long enough sitters’ appearances were liable to change according to the roles they were currently playing. In this instance, Dame Maggie turned up to one sitting with peroxide blonde hair (she had started work on the film Quartet directed by Dustin Hoffman). Lloyd could have included this but he decided to go with her previous hair colour, in keeping, he says, with the tone of the portrait.
James Lloyd says: ‘I was delighted to be asked by the National Portrait Gallery to paint Dame Maggie Smith: not only because this was an opportunity to have a third painting in the Gallery’s Collection, but also for the honour of trying to portray such a luminary of stage and film. I learnt that Dame Maggie had been reluctant to have her portrait painted in the past, and at my first meeting with her, her opening words were, “Poor you”. This was quite the opposite from my own feelings, and everyone to whom I mentioned the commission was extremely envious (I lost count of the number of people who offered to make tea during the sittings!)
Read more: http://www.artlyst.com/articles/dame-maggie-smith-immortalised-at-national-portrait-gallery
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