Nicholas Penny

In the National Gallery you can look into a dark and very ancient stone chamber where there is a teenage girl of exquisite beauty, wearing white satin and kneeling upon a velvet cushion, blindfold. She is supported, tenderly, by a gentleman in a black cloak and looked on by a large man in red tights who holds an axe. In front of her, between her and us, there is a wooden block surrounded by fresh straw: behind, in the shadows, ladies-in-waiting, who have divested her of robes and jewels, sob and swoon. ‘The great business of painting,’ declared Jonathon Richardson the elder, echoing almost all earlier European writers on art from Alberti onwards, ‘is to relate a history or fable’ – to compete with the poet or dramatist, and best of all with epic and tragedy. The Execution of Lady Jane Grey by Delaroche reminds us that the ‘great business’ was not neglected in the 19th century, although by then there were those who argued that painting what could be seen, whether landscape or ‘modern life’, should be a higher priority. It was only in this century that theorists decided that for a painter to be concerned with narrative was improper and ‘literary’ (although writers were still permitted to be pictorial). By then the ‘great business’ had been lost to the ‘pictures’, as the cinematograph was popularly known.’

Roger Hinks portrays himself as picking his way fastidiously through a sadly Philistine and foolish world, musing upon his aesthetic disappointments and, less often, consolations. Even during what his friend K (the late Lord Clark) describes in the foreword as ‘the abominable intrigue which forced him to leave his beloved British Museum’, he scrupulously avoids self-pity. But self-satisfaction and self-righteousness were certainly not purged by keeping the journal. His intelligence and sensitivity often distanced him from the art of the past which was the ostensible object of his desire, but in recompense elevated him comfortably above all but a handful of his fellow men. It is hard to suppose that he was suited to working in a public museum, however wrongly he was uprooted from it.

There is also one Michael Agnolo from Caravaggio who is doing marvellous things in Rome … He thinks little of the works of other masters … All works of art he believes to be ‘Bagatelli’, child’s play, whoever by, and whatever of, unless they are made from life, and that there is no better course than to follow Nature. And so he will not make a single brushstroke without taking it straight from life.