I’ve at last come face-to-face with my portrait.   It is (of course) much better than in reproduction and also better in combination with the gallery of other sitters, where it is quite clear that they are effective and successful  interpretations of character, based, as was mine, on ties of friendship and a long process of observation and record:

I hang next door to Hannah Rothschild who I regard as my companion-at-arms through the process because she took as long and was nearly as difficult to complete:

I much admire the one of Sally Clarke which I was asked to write about sight unseen, and, like mine, looks different in the flesh (or pigment) from in reproduction:

And there’s a wonderful, rather sad portrait of a Headmistress:

I think the exhibition opens tomorrow…