15 Feb : In a rare honour, a life-size portrait of celebrated Indian-origin Nobel Prize winning writer V S Naipaul has been unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery in the UK.
Paul Emsley, the artist entrusted with executing the delicate commission, sat Naipaul down on his folding walking stick in the garden of the author’s home in Wiltshire and allowed “light and dark to come across his face as a metaphor for life and death.”
Naipaul told Emsley’s wife, Susane, when she asked his opinion at the launch: “I love it. I have always needed time to think and this captures that very nicely. I am very honoured to have been singled out to be painted for the gallery,” Naipaul said who is a British novelist and essayist of Indo-Trinidadian descent.
Naipaul, who came to Oxford from Trinidad in the early 1950s, said, “It has been a long and at times very difficult journey to succeed as a writer in this country, but it is the only journey I felt I could make and I am glad to keep on looking and learning and writing.”
Painting Naipaul was Emsley’s prize for coming first in the 2007 BP Portrait Award but some feared the artist was being handed a poisoned challice.
This is because Naipaul does have a reputation for being nasty and even cantankerous if he feels his visitor is not sufficiently informed about his books.
It was on the strength of Emsley’s portrait of fellow artist Michael Simpson that the Gallery was able to persuade the Nobel Prize-winning writer to have his portrait painted for the Collection.
Late in 2008, artist visited the writer’s Wiltshire home. Naipaul wished to be depicted in his garden, and Emsley photographed him sitting on his folding stool.
The attention to the pose of the subject is complemented by the artist’s atmospheric treatment of the garden, which appears to disappear into the wintry darkness, an effect achieved through the application of layers of translucent glazes and the use of just two colours.
Glasgow-born artist Paul Emsley lives and works in Bradford on Avon, near Bath in the UK.He grew up in South Africa before moving to England in 1996. Paul has exhibited widely and won several prizes. His BP Portrait Award winning portrait of 2007 was a large close-up of the head of 67-year-old artist Michael Simpson.
Sandy Nairne, Director of the National Portrait Gallery, London, said: “This is a beautiful and mysterious portrait of a great writer, painted by BP winner Paul Emsley. I am very pleased that V S Naipaul enters the Collection as a new portrait.”
The portrait joins other works in the National Portrait Gallery’s Collection of commissions by BP Portrait Award winning artists which include Camila Batmanghelidjh by Dean Marsh (BP Portrait Award winner 2005) and J K Rowling by Stuart Pearson Wright.