11Story

22 January 2010

John Pope

 

Portrait bust of Sir John Pope-Hennessy. Dame Elizabeth Frink (1930-1993). London, 1976 Photograph. Original bronze and perspex on wood plinth. 42.4 x 20.5 cm including plinth © The artist’s estate

It was long the practice in the British Museum for a trustee who was also an eminent artist to be asked to create the portrait of a departing director. This bust by Elizabeth Frink is of particular interest here because the subject later recorded a significant moment experienced while sitting for it. This moment has an ‘animistic’ aspect all the more striking given Pope-Hennessy’s pre-eminence as a scholar of Renaissance portraiture:   ‘I still recall, with something of a shock, the moment, at the end of the first sitting, when I looked at what had been a lump of clay, and found that a third person was in the room.’ (Sir John Wyndham Pope-Hennessy, Learning to look. London, Heinemann, 1991, p.225)   According to the National Gallery, whose collections include another of the three casts of this bust, the third was kept in his dining room by the subject himself as ‘an ideal image for posterity’. Each wore a slightly different style of spectacles.

 
 
 

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