Artist-on-artist portraits at Pallant House unveil depths of admiration, love and jealousy

That there are large numbers of portraits of artists in existence should come as no surprise. When not working to commission, artists tend to paint those who mean most to them, substantially their family and friends. And artists’ friends tend, for the most part, to be other artists. They’re the ones who understand best what the artist is trying to achieve, with whom they obsessively discuss ideas and prospects, and grumble about other artists: people for whom they will likely feel a degree of admiration, jealousy, and perhaps most likely – love.

Given the possibilities for conversations and conflicts realised between artists in paint, and for revelations that may be subconscious or all too conscious, this is such rich territory it’s amazing there hasn’t already been an abundance of exhibitions on the subject of the artist-on-artist portrait.

This being Pallant House, the show takes its starting point from the quirky, romantic end of 20th-century British figurative art and ripples outward from there. And if too relentless a focus on genteel early modernists of the Bloomsbury and Neo-Romantic ilk can become a touch cloying, the Pallant House approach proves the perfect way into a subject that is all about human interaction, in which a degree of gossipy intrigue is part of the appeal.

The show opens, appropriately, with a monumental portrait of the most famous British artist of the early 20th century, Augustus John. Seen then as the ultimate bohemian with his several illegitimate children, John is given an Old Master-style treatment by the fashionable portraitist William Orpen. If John is now generally regarded as a bad artist, his contribution to the show, a red chalk drawing, is perfectly competent, but most remarkable for its subject: the avant-garde sculptor Jacob Epstein.

From here, the show darts and dives between artistic movements and the booze-fuelled social coteries and amorous liaisons that sustained them, taking in most of the key figures in 20th- and 21st-century British art along the way.

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There are no fewer than three portraits of Walter Sickert, German-born kingpin of the Camden Town School, and perhaps the dominant figure in early British modernism, all by admiring younger women artists. For Sylvia Gosse, his long-standing teaching partner, he’s a top-hatted grandee about town; for the younger Nina Hamnett, he’s smugly inscrutable in a bowler; while to Therese Lessore, who went on to marry him, Sickert appears a distant, rather philosophical figure in a beard. Better than any of them, though, is Harold Gilman’s vibrant portrait of Gosse. Its incandescent Fauve-influenced colour stands out amid the prevailing Edwardian brownness. The fact that Gilman fell out with Sickert over this departure from his former mentor’s tea-coloured English Post-Impressionism says more about Sickert than any of the portraits.

Matthew Smith and his partner Vera Cunningham are one of many couples who painted each other, generally on painfully unequal terms. While Smith’s voluptuous, strongly Matisse-influenced studies of the naked Cunningham launched him to the forefront of British art, she managed only one painting of him, the vigorously expressive Portrait of Matthew Smith, which isn’t even dated despite being more than a match for his rather slick Reclining Nude (Vera) (1924).

Barbara Hepworth, an artist determined to outdo any man in terms of drive and ambition, is seen as a fresh-faced young woman in a delightful 1931 painting by Cedric Morris, still a world away from the forbidding grande dame she would later become. Her fellow Leeds School of Art student Henry Moore appears in a conventionally realistic but marvellously brooding portrait by his friend Raymond Coxon. The pair were vying at the time for the affections of a fellow student. If Coxon got the girl, Moore got global mega-fame.

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Hepworth’s muscular chalk and charcoal drawing of her first husband John Skeaping feels very Thirties with its hint of faintly fascistic classicism, while Skeaping himself grafts Hepworth’s features onto his stone sculpture Mother and Child (1930), shown alongside. Hepworth appears again in dreamy profile in her second husband Ben Nicholson’s fluid semi-abstract linocut 1933 (Profile) (1933). While these might sound like a hodgepodge of more or less intriguing personal bits and pieces, they give a palpable sense of entering these artists’ worlds as they themselves experienced them. Nicholson’s idea of introducing elements of his own features into images of Hepworth – while not particularly evident in the example shown in this exhibition – pushes the ideal of the collaborative portrait in which an artist confronts or even merges their personality with another’s in the act of portraying them.

David Bomberg and his wife Lilian Holt are seen in simultaneously created portraits, in which we see them as they saw one another in the act of creation: in his loose and expressive portrait of her and her vigorous charcoal drawing of him. Each is too intent on capturing the moment to waste time flattering the other.

The show’s opening stages are so atmospherically redolent of an early 20th-century era of artistic struggle, when modern artists fought public hostility in a repressed, keep-calm-and-carry-on Britain, it’s almost disappointing to emerge into the high-gloss glare of post-1960 Britain in the second half.

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Johnny Shand Kydd’s black and white slides of the YBAs clowning for the camera are too pleased with themselves, as are their subjects, to offer opportunity for serious mutual reflection. The pub-crawling shenanigans of the School of London – Freud, Bacon, Auerbach et al – are so well known they hardly need reiterating here, though given the nature of the subject, it’s inevitable they will be. Lord Snowdon’s photographic portraits of David Hockney, Frank Auerbach, and Bridget Riley from Private View, his iconic 1965 book on the London art world, while brilliant in themselves, are essentially high-class reportage. You don’t feel that Snowdon has taken the risk of projecting himself into these images the way an ambitious painter would.

That accusation cannot be levelled against Sarah Lucas’s Maggi (2016), a “portrait” of the artist Maggi Hambling comprising two illuminated light bulbs and a toilet bowl suspended from the ceiling, nor Mary McCartney’s Being Frida (2000), in which Tracy Emin lies in bed looking scarily like both Frida Kahlo and herself. You’re forced to wonder if McCartney or Emin is the true author of the image.

Much smaller and apparently modest, but ultimately more revealing, is David Hockney’s etching The Student – Homage to Picasso (1973), in which Britain’s best-loved artist portrays himself as an earnest figure with a portfolio, approaching a monumental head of his idol Picasso. The fact that Hockney never met Picasso, and makes not the slightest attempt to represent him as he was, is beside the point. Artists are and always have been obsessed with other artists, and whether they happen to be their partners, close friends, personal enemies, or great figures from distant eras, it’s all one in the mind of the artist.

‘Seeing Each Other: Portraits of Artists’ at Pallant House, Chichester, runs from 17 May until 2 November