The Many Faces of Jonathan Yeo by Jonathan Yeo

Yeo, who is untrained as an artist, has a marvellous feeling for paint. They are more like strikingly naturalistic Pre-Raphaelite ideals, emerging from the shimmering, half-realised sketchiness of their surrounds. His female faces, or those who, as in Perry’s case, come in the guise of the female, are so polished and mirror-smooth they appear photographic – though photographic isn’t quite the word.

Yeo, the closest we have to a latter-day society portraitist in the spirit of Joshua Reynolds, paints flattering portraits with an old-fashioned Modernist edge. With its old-fashioned bedstead and bedside lamp, and with the picture’s almost oppressive close crop and striations of thinly applied paint, I’m reminded of one of Walter Sickert’s squalid bedrooms, the ones in which a murder may or may not have taken place.įlattery in portraiture has a fine historical lineage Two powder puffs that resemble plump macaroons, a perfume bottle and a floppy-brimmed hat are among his accoutrements.Īn earlier portrait Yeo painted of Perry-as-Claire conveyed, with its hooded gaze and slightly troubled brow, a little pathos, but not this one, though, in fact, the room that Jonathan Yeo has placed him in is reminiscent of the bedrooms of another British artist who evokes quite a different mood. Placed on his lap are his thickly veined, restless hands, fingers knotted, and he stares out at us from this frosted-pink confection of a canvas wearing a look that might be described as both winsome and quietly content.

The Many Faces of Jonathan Yeo by Jonathan Yeo