Here’s Looking at ME: Reflections on Portraiture

In this series of essays, we hear from five people who have been the subject of portraits. How did they find the experience of being the sitter and what do they feel about the finished work? The essays are also opportunities for discussing the art of portraiture as the attempt to depict ‘the truth’ abut a person.

In the first programme, the artist Maggi Hambling talks about being both artist and sitter, as she discusses her 1978 self-portrait. In the following four programmes, we hear from art critic Martin Gayford who became Lucien Freud’s ‘Man with a Blue Scarf’; writer and academic Germaine Greer who was painted by her friend Paula Rego; Akram Khan whose personality as a dancer was captured in a nine panel portrait by Darvish Fakhr; and finally from scientist, doctor, politician and TV personality Robert Winston who reflects on two portraits – one a photograph by Julia Fullerton-Batten and the other a painting by Tom Wood.

Produced by Susan Marling

Broadcast: May 2012