Exhibition: Face to Face: British Portrait Prints from the Clifford Chance Art Collection

Sir John Soane’s Museum presents Face to Face: British Portrait Prints from the Clifford Chance art collection, an exploration into the development of portraiture by British printmakers in the 20th and the first decade of the 21st Century.

Featuring works by Patrick Caulfield, David Hockney, William Hogarth, Gavin Turk, Peter Howson and Gary Hume, Face to Face offers a rare opportunity to see a selection of pieces from the Clifford Chance Art Collection. Nearly 40 artworks rarely seen by the public will be displayed in the gallery space at the Sir John Soane’s Museum, exploring the themes of realism, abstraction, process, caricature and social commentary through the medium of portraiture and self-portraiture.



The exhibition includes works such as David Hockney’s 1976 Henry at Table; Leon Kossoff’s Going Home; Paula Rego’s homage to Jane Eyre in her lithographs of Mr Rochester; an early Patrick Caulfield screenprint – Portrait of a Frenchman, 1971; Tim Noble and Sue Webster’s Double Double Vision Vision (a lithographic portrait drawn whilst the artists were blindfolded); Turner Prize 2013 nominee Lynette Yiadom Boakye’s first etching Siskin; and Gary Hume’s The Cleric, from 2000.

Sir John Soane’s Museum has portraiture displayed throughout. Portraits of Napoleon, William Pitt the Younger, Sir William Chambers and portraits of Soane and his family form an important aspect of the collection of the Museum. Face to Face extends this investigation into portraiture past Soane’s compilation of work and into the 21st century.