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A Closer Look
A Closer Look: Faces
Faces are everywhere in the National Gallery’s collection: in portraits and narrative scenes, in allegories and paintings of everyday life. It is often the faces shown that communicate most directly in a picture; their expressions may reveal the drama of a story, or the character of a sitter in a portrait.
A Closer Look: Faces examines a wide array of fascinating faces found in paintings at the National Gallery. It explains why artists in the past created faces to look as they do, what painters through the ages have considered the "ideal" face, how faces are painted, and the reasons for the development of portrait painting. Illustrated with seventy pictures and beautiful details, this book provides an insider's view of the many faces in Western European art.
Published by National Gallery Company/Distributed by Yale University Press
A Closer Look: Faces examines a wide array of fascinating faces found in paintings at the National Gallery. It explains why artists in the past created faces to look as they do, what painters through the ages have considered the "ideal" face, how faces are painted, and the reasons for the development of portrait painting. Illustrated with seventy pictures and beautiful details, this book provides an insider's view of the many faces in Western European art.
Published by National Gallery Company/Distributed by Yale University Press
- GenresArtNonfiction
96 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
July 25, 2026
You know you enjoyed a book when immediately after finishing it you look for other works by the author.
Short and sweet. Yet I feel like I learned exactly the sorts of things I wanted to learn. Why do faces in early Medieval paintings look so unrealistic? Why do we not see many smiling or laughing people in paintings? Why was clothing often so ornate and commanding of our attention?
Alexander Sturgis worked at the National Gallery, London, from 1991 to 2005, serving as exhibitions and programmes curator from 1999. In this work, he answered all my questions above, and more. He does so in a methodical way, with loads and loads of paintings from The National Gallery to gawk and study. (Visiting there in person would be a big boon on someone's bucket list! Someone = me.)
I like how he guides us through the early attitudes about paintings and ends in almost the exact same place at the dawn of the 20th century, the same but different.
In early paintings, the faces were often similar, even bland, following the same template. Indeed, that is what was happening. Painters were adhering to specific ideas then about what constituted a proper painting, especially when depicting important historic or mythical figures. That expectation of their nobility or divinity was more important than any likeness. Sturgis takes us through the succeeding ages, with changes of artistic ideas.
He ends with Seurat's 1884 Bathers at Asnières where the blandness of face returns, but not a template. They are contemporary, not idealized or standardized, yet they are often unexpressive, much like the earliest paintings he covered. But now the painter's intention is for us to bring ourselves to the paintings, to even superimpose, our interpretations, our feelings onto those still, quiet faces. To be inspired by something other than didactic myths and storytelling, rather instead by our lives and experiences.
It wasn't a quick read for me, although it was only 96 pages. That's because I enjoyed spending time scouring the photos of the paintings and seeing them in a new way. It was a most pleasurable, leisurely reading.
Short and sweet. Yet I feel like I learned exactly the sorts of things I wanted to learn. Why do faces in early Medieval paintings look so unrealistic? Why do we not see many smiling or laughing people in paintings? Why was clothing often so ornate and commanding of our attention?
Alexander Sturgis worked at the National Gallery, London, from 1991 to 2005, serving as exhibitions and programmes curator from 1999. In this work, he answered all my questions above, and more. He does so in a methodical way, with loads and loads of paintings from The National Gallery to gawk and study. (Visiting there in person would be a big boon on someone's bucket list! Someone = me.)
I like how he guides us through the early attitudes about paintings and ends in almost the exact same place at the dawn of the 20th century, the same but different.
In early paintings, the faces were often similar, even bland, following the same template. Indeed, that is what was happening. Painters were adhering to specific ideas then about what constituted a proper painting, especially when depicting important historic or mythical figures. That expectation of their nobility or divinity was more important than any likeness. Sturgis takes us through the succeeding ages, with changes of artistic ideas.
He ends with Seurat's 1884 Bathers at Asnières where the blandness of face returns, but not a template. They are contemporary, not idealized or standardized, yet they are often unexpressive, much like the earliest paintings he covered. But now the painter's intention is for us to bring ourselves to the paintings, to even superimpose, our interpretations, our feelings onto those still, quiet faces. To be inspired by something other than didactic myths and storytelling, rather instead by our lives and experiences.
It wasn't a quick read for me, although it was only 96 pages. That's because I enjoyed spending time scouring the photos of the paintings and seeing them in a new way. It was a most pleasurable, leisurely reading.
Displaying 1 of 1 review