The artist giving portraits their swagger back

Across five decades, Stephen Farthing has been painting “swagger portraits”: pictures inspired by the power, charisma and wealth that images of aristocrats and royalty have exuded throughout art history. He describes the genre as “a kind of collage — the marble, the carpets, the fabrics, all from different places in the world, it is a patchwork. The only coherence is in the person who’s collected all this stuff together, they become their own curators.”

This patchwork is found even more intensively in Farthing’s pictorial practice; freefall paint is mixed with carefully applied brushstrokes; different textures define clothes and fabrics; legs and hands emerge while the heads are often absent. The swagger comes from the painting’s own splendour, as much as from the splendour of the subject.

Farthing is speaking from Carthage in Tunisia, where he has been living for the past few years and where he has been working on a new collection of swagger portraits for a show entitled Strike a Pose which opens next weekend at Kenwood House in north London. Here his works are in dialogue with those of the British 17th-century painter William Larkin, who specialised in the wealthy aristocrats of his day, nine of which are at Kenwood. “With Larkin it’s the spectacular sublime,” says Farthing. “None of it is realism, we’re in a theatre set. These people stand in their finery, not twitching a muscle. It’s not real and that’s what I think makes them enjoyable, it’s the artifice.”

Almost life-sized, the Larkins are power portraits of excess and glamour. Sumptuous fabrics, decadently ornate footwear, brilliantly bold colours are still an intoxicating sight 400 years later. They speak to us from another time, from another world, but perhaps they are not as far away as they may at first seem. We still have “the admiration of wealth and splendour”, says Farthing. “Theoretically you can hate it but in practice most people are charmed by it or excited by it. Even the attitudes that you see in swagger portraiture are attitudes that are alive and well today in Vogue magazine, fashion photography.”

This is what makes these past sitters such appealing subjects; the Sackvilles, the Carys, the Cecils were some of the most influential families in the country, and they knew how to use the power of display. “What I’ve done, in almost everything, is look for the connections between past and present,” says Farthing. The Kenwood exhibition explores this twofold: not just Farthing/Larkin but Farthing then/Farthing now.

These swagger portraits are the third time he has approached the genre. “It started with me wandering around the Louvre and finding these paintings by Hyacinthe Rigaud and thinking these are just plain weird, they’re extraordinary Baroque feasts, they’re sumptuous, crazy.” He painted a picture of Louis XV after Hyacinthe Rigaud and “that was really when my public career as an artist started.” This was in the mid-1970s, when Farthing was a student at the Royal College of Art. And he revisited the idea in the 1990s when a professor at Oxford’s Ruskin school of fine art, this time taking Tudor and Stuart portraitists such as Hans Holbein and Daniel Mytens as inspiration. The series that followed was Absolute Monarchy.

In Kenwood’s show we see examples of these three generations of work hanging alongside each other for the first time. “The oldest painting in this exhibition I painted 49 years ago!” You can see a progression but also a recurrence of an idea. “It’s sustained me for a long period of time,” he says, although adds that he has done more than this type of work.

In this most recent series, we can trace motifs from other artworks Farthing has produced: maps, landscapes, flying carpets, works made in Jordan thinking about Islamic textiles and the rock formations of Petra — these have made their way into the Larkins. Take, for example, “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? (Sackville and Cary after Larkin)”, where we can see these Islamic fabrics again.

Alongside the exhibition, Farthing will take up residency at the Dairy at Kenwood, a historic outbuilding not often open to the public, where he will create a painting based on a work in the house’s collection, chosen for him by the staff: “Mrs Jordan as Viola in ‘Twelfth Night’” by John Hoppner. For three separate weeks, visitors will be able to see Farthing at work and to talk to him about his practice, and local schools will come to spend time with him too. This is important for Farthing, who spent many years working as a teacher. “I think I’ve learnt more about painting being a teacher of it than I even did as a student.”

Part of what has preoccupied Farthing in his long career as an artist is the language of painting, how images speak without words. “What I am always doing is trying to tell a story — the story about the way people perceive themselves and the way others perceive them. I feel that it’s the audience’s job to look for the story, to try to understand the story, and the artist’s job is to construct the story so that it’s intelligible. The best artists are the best storytellers.”

June 29-November 3, english-heritage.org.uk