Life stories written on the faces of the young and old

The latest partnered exhibition at the National Gallery, featuring as it does the works of a series of great artists, Rubens, Rembrandt, Vermeer and a few others, is a remarkable show, not so much for its bravura accomplishments of style and setting, but for its concentration on the wonderful landscapes of the human face through all those stages of life that Shakespeare a near contemporary wrote about.

Paintings

The landscape of Holland being very flat and open might almost say plain, marked by woods, streams and fields, rather than mountains, lakes, or dramatic seacoasts. The harmonious domestic and private setting are what has always attracted people to such painters as these and their peers.

The accompanying paintings, Girl with a Red Hat and Portrait of an Old Woman, illustrate the theme at the heart of this exhibition – the drama is the quiet play of life through human features. The painters capture a sense of unique individuality.

There are also other pictures of smaller intent which are very striking”

This provides the unique interest of the show. This interest simply in the human reminds me strangely enough of a quite different era of art, the coffin portrait of Egypt, around the 1st Century AD, which also strove to provide a unique record of an individual.

Yet others of the more grotesque figures and clowns recall both Darwin in The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, and other records from that time of the deranged and alienated. Indeed some actually come from the first books to take a proto-scientific interest in human physiognomy. Others, more grotesque and carnival-like, recall Rabelais.

But there are also other pictures of smaller intent which are very striking: images for instances of Africans, including one stunningly drawn in ink, which utilised developments in ink manufacture to provide a more articulate sense of the black skin.

Though the captions see these figures as unlocated, they must reflect the rise of the Dutch sea-borne empire and its penetration of the East Indies, which pivoted on its South African colony. But the imperial background is hardly alluded to. The focus here is on native Holland.

Echoes too of the Middle East, one image is perhaps of a Jewish scholar, though the caption does not suggest this; there are others with Arab costumes.

Altogether this is a fascinating show. One is left haunted by some of the images, the faces of the young strangely enough filled with social anxiety, and the all-knowing placidity of the elderly, to whom perhaps nothing they hear is really new. They have heard it all before.

But the faces are truly remarkable, these are people as seen with clarity by the eye of the artist  (and perhaps the eye of God sees them too), exposed in all their vulnerable humanity.

People

This is a show for all the family, for everyone, especially young children will be quite taken by pictures of the kind of people we all know but never really concentrate our attention on.

The book reproduces the images with informative captions, but the essays explore other aspects of social and artistic history that relate to the recording of the human face.

The supporting illustrations on these pages, the young women in a red hat and the old woman, whom one can imagine to be her grandmother, will give a vivid idea of what is on show.

One is left haunted by some of the images, the faces of the young strangely enough filled with social anxiety, and the all-knowing placidity of the elderly”