“Is that you?” asked my 14-year-old son as I excitedly unpacked a box containing a hand-span-high bronze statuette that I posed for in the summer. I nodded. “Oh my God. WHY would you get a sculpture of yourself, naked? And where are you going to put it? Please don’t put it anywhere obvious. Also, again: why?” Arguably, he had a point: why would a woman who is old enough to have teenage children decide that this was the moment for such an undertaking? And where would I put it? For I didn’t, at that point, have a plan.
I like nudes. Going by the popularity of those bottom vases, we all like nudes – but I genuinely find beauty in every guise of the female form. Which is fortunate, given that I studied history of art and the canon is disproportionately packed. (In 1989, the Guerrilla Girls famously established that 85% of the naked people in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York are women). I also like portraits, for their being a record of a person and a moment (often a significant anniversary, or achievement), and I live with a late 19th-century oil of my great great grandfather, a pastel of myself as a teenager (which I wasn’t keen on until my mother described me as looking like a Georgette Heyer heroine), and several representations of my children. Further, I regularly while away happy hours in the National Portrait Gallery, a collection that includes naked portraits, and indeed naked self-portraits by artists including Chantal Joffe and Gilbert & George. For take clothes away, and a portrait becomes quite timeless; Lucian Freud often painted his subjects, who included his children and his studio assistant, without.
I mention Freud because I hadn’t thought about commissioning a more recent rendition of myself until, back in January, a fellow arts journalist asked me who I’d pick. Freud was top of my list – on the basis that I’m not particularly vain, and I think that his portraits reveal something of the sitter that the sitter might not have known, and that interests me. My second choice was John Singer Sargent, because I simultaneously am quite vain, and he managed to make everybody look extraordinarily beautiful, even very old women – and men. (Freud, on the other hand, didn’t. His portrait of the late Queen was almost universally reviled when it was initially unveiled, with one critic saying he’d made her look like one of her corgis, and another suggesting Freud should be executed.) Either way it’s a moot point, as both Freud and Sargent are dead. My third choice would be Phoebe Dickinson, who is very much alive, but she’s incredibly busy, and, actually, I’d rather commission more portraits of my children than myself, because despite liking other people’s faces, I’m less interested in my own.
I should say that at no point while pondering this hypothetical question did I consider that I might not be dressed (though I would have done it for Freud, had it been posited) because – although I do know people with naked portraits – it’s not something that I’ve ever planned on adding to my walls. I just didn’t think I was that sort of person; I’ve neither a face nor figure that would launch even a single ship, so to echo my son, why would I?