On Thursday 11 May 2023 we hosted a reception at the Mall Galleries in London to celebrate the People's Portraits Collection - A long-standing partnership between The Royal Society of Portrait Painters and Girton College, Cambridge. A selection of portraits from the collection were on display as part of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters Annual Exhibition. We were honoured to have Dame Marina Warner, CH, DBE, FBA,FRSL, as our guest speaker for the event. The title of her talk was Presences:
The tradition of women’s colleges breaking with the mould.
The “people’ made present, in different ways, noticing the often invisible or unsung labour that makes our world.
The portrait as revelation, affirmation, also as exposure.
The relation between sitter and artist is a special kind of intimacy, arising from the exceptional attentiveness involved – the sitter too must be present, concentrated.
The present tense of the moment when the painting was made, extended over time, as it were eternally.
Dame Marina Warner, CH, DBE, FBA,FRSL.
Marina Warner writes fiction and cultural history. Her award-winning books explore myths and fairy tales; they include From the Beast to the Blonde (l994) and Stranger Magic: Charmed States & the Arabian Nights (2011). She has published five novels and three collections of short stories, including Fly Away Home (2014). Her essays on literature and art have been collected in Signs & Wonders (l994) and Forms of Enchantment: Writings on Art and Artists ( 2018 Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An unreliable memoir evokes her childhood in Egypt where her father opened a bookshop in l947. She contributes regularly to the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books and to artist’s catalogues, for example for Paula Rego’s retrospective at Tate Britain (2021). She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, a Distinguished Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy. In 2015, she was awarded the Holberg Prize in the Arts and Humanities. Since 2016, she has been working with the project www.storiesintransit.org in Palermo, Sicily. She recently published Helen Chadwick: The Oval Court in the Afterall series One Work, and an essay, Temporale, about timekeeping, during the lockdowns. She is currently writing a book about the concept of Sanctuary. She lives in London.
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