Art

Drawn from four centuries of male portraiture, this exhibition is built around Van Dyck’s final selfportrait, saved for the nation in 2014

Susan Mansfield on Looking Good at SNPG

The fashion for male grooming in the last couple of decades, the rage in designer barber shops, masculine moisturisers and beard balm, might seem to suggest that men’s interest in their appearance is a new phenomenon. It isn’t, of course. Consider Mods and Teddy Boys. Or, look back further, and consider the evidence offered by the history of art.

While conventional notions of beauty in Western art tend to be focused on the female, it wasn’t always thus. The ancient Greeks idealised the male body, something which is recalled in Renaissance works such as Michelangelo’s David. But, for the last 500 years, portraits of men have focused on their status rather than their looks.

That makes this exhibition feel both fresh and refreshing. Drawn from four centuries of male portraiture, from Van Dyck to David Beckham, this is a history of sartorial dressers, of spivs and peacocks and poseurs. Whatever these men are famous for, whether as courtiers or artists, rock stars or sportsmen, the thing they have in common is how much they care about how they look.

The show is built around Van Dyck’s self-portrait, bought by the National Portrait Gallery in London for £10 million in 2014 after a major public appeal (though, strangely, it doesn’t appear until three-quarters of the way through). Now on a nationwide tour, the portrait will be grouped with fresh works in every venue, here with a selection of 28 pictures from the collections of National Galleries of Scotland and the NPG.

The Van Dyck was painted in 1640, when the artist was principal painter to the court of Charles I, a place where appearances mattered and ostentation was a political bargaining chip. He portrays himself as a gentleman, stylishly dressed in a slashed black silk doublet and linen collar, his long curly hair tossed back artfully. The painting is framed in an elaborate gilt frame which he may have commissioned.

For all that, he is drawing our eye to his face, which looks out directly at the audience, leap-frogging over the centuries. He is serious, quizzical, a man with much more on his mind than simply how well he’s doing. And he is looking at us every bit as much

Looking Good: The Male Gaze from Van Dyck to Lucian Freud Scottish National Portrait Gallery There is a sense of agency in the way these men are portrayed … we are seeing them as they see themselves

as we are looking at him.

The other Van Dyck work here is a portrait of Lord George Stuart, a key supporter of Charles, who had high hopes within the regime until he was killed at the Battle of Edgehill in 1642. Grand in scale and ambition, it styles Lord George as a romantic shepherd in an arcadian landscape (albeit a very finely dressed shepherd with bows on his boots). It’s aristocratic make-believe, dressing up and power play all at the same time.

James Hamilton, Charles’ chief adviser in Scotland, by Daniel Mytens, hangs nearby. He’s dressed in the latest fashion, a grey costume shot through with (expensive) silver thread which catches the light, with a classical pillar next to him to add gravitas. If you had wealth and power in Charles’ court, you flaunted it, and