A great painter’s likeness perfectly caught

Robert Hughes has suffered no shortage of appalling things over the past five years. He has experienced deep depression and a second divorce; he suffered atrocious injuries in a car crash which came within inches of killing him, and has had to undergo 12 operations to piece his body back together again; a feeble attempt was made to blackmail him; he was tried for reckless driving; a scathing attack on his character was conducted in the Australian media on account of his perceived arrogance; he became an unwelcome figure of contempt in his own country, and his estranged only son committed suicide.

From an outside perspective, all this has been dramatic and newsworthy, to be sure. But from the point of view of his admirers one of the most regrettable things to have happened to Robert Hughes is that the story of his struggle with these misfortunes (in most Australian tellings, the sickening secretion of something as close to pure Schadenfreude as you could find anywhere) has threatened to overwhelm the far more edifying story of Hughes’s life as a writer.