The painter properly portrayed

We are continually told that biography is the dominant literary expression of the age, that Britain, in particular, is a nation of biographers, and that the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is the massive climax of this protracted love affair. Even our fiction suppurates with real-life figures both past and present, from Mrs Thrale and Charles Lamb to Henry James, Alma Cogan and Baroness Thatcher. Biographies of politicians and adventurers, duchesses and spies, consorts and comedians hog the limelight on the publishers’ seasonal lists. But artists receive only sporadic attention. It is true that most of the leading British painters and sculptors have been ‘done’, some more than once, but they are not the easiest of subjects. With a few marvellous exceptions, they do not leave behind a mass of letters and papers for the biographer to chew on; the silent hours of the studio — the mainspring of their existence — invariably go unrecorded.