April 25, 2015

Finest Hour 119, Summer 2003

Page 31

From An Iconography The Portraits of T.E. Lawrence by Charles Grosvenor, The Otterden Press 1988


“Partnership’s off! Daily Express has torn it: says you fail completely to express your sitters who use their brains: but succeed conspicuously in two portraits of men of action—Col. Lawrence and the Emir Feisal.”

So wrote Lawrence to Augustus John, prompted by a review of the artist’s 1920 exhibition, at London’s Alpine Club Gallery, including several portraits of Lawrence and one of Feisal, painted in Paris during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Lawrence and Feisal were several times together with John in the artist’s studio, speaking to each other in Arabic as John painted. At times they were accompanied by Gertrude Bell, who termed Lawrence, attired in his Arab robes, “the most picturesque figure” at the Conference.

This 23 1/2 x 31 1/2-inch portrait, the most widely-known painted image, fascinated Lawrence. Again and again he returned to view the painting. To John he complained that the gallery was so full of visitors that seeing all the paintings was difficult, but frequent returns were more likely motivated by the draw of this portrait. Christine Longford recalled encountering Lawrence “staring long and fixedly” at it. “Friends came in,” she told John Mack, “and Lawrence would converse with them, but from time to time gazed back over his shoulder, as if he were checking to see that the painting was still there.” To other friends he recommended attendance. “A friend of mine,” Lawrence wrote John, “went to the Alpine Club, and said my larger one was a conscious effort by you to show how long contact with camels had affected my face! But I explained that it wasn’t my face which had been in contact with camels.”

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Lawrence greatly loved this painting and wished to acquire it: but, financially it proved beyond his means. The subject wrote the artist: “Really, I’m hotter stuff than I thought: the wrathful portrait went off at top speed for a thousand to a Duke! That puts me for the moment easily at the head of the field in your selling plate. Of course I know you will naturally think the glory is yours—but I believe it’s due to the exceeding beauty of my face.” The “Duke” was the second Duke of Westminster, Shortly after purchasing the work, the Duke donated it to the Tate Gallery.

Years later the work still held a magic for Lawrence. According to Sgt. Pugh, an RAF comrade, Lawrence visited the Tate during a leave and stood by the painting. A large number of people surrounded it, “some admiring and some doing the othet, while [Lawrence] stood, looked, listened, smiled broadly and walked away. Such, as he said, is fame.”

Besides being exhibited at the Alpine Club Gallery and the Tate, the painting was also displayed at Leeds, at Temple Newsam in July and August of 1946. In 1963 it was sent on extended loan to the Imperial War Museum, where it remains. Also termed by Lawrence “the rebellious” painting, the work is uninscribed.

“John painted two portraits of Feisal. One, included in the Alpine show, went to Birmingham Art Gallery. The other belonged to Lawrence, who used it as the color frontispiece for the Subscribers Edition of his Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

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