Focus On: The People's Portraits
Green Pebble August/September 2010 issue

By Paul Dance

Richard Heeps, Cambridge Fine Art Photographer

The People’s Portraits Collection is housed in Girton College, which is situated just over 2 miles north-west of Cambridge city centre on the Huntingdon Road. The collection is open daily from 2-4pm, and at other times by appointment. For directions or contact details, visit Girton College, Cambridge

In 2002 Girton College, Cambridge, successfully won the bid to house the People’s Portraits collection for The Royal Society of Portrait Painters (RP). The exhibition toured Britain in 2000 and had been seen by over a million people but there was a growing desire to keep the collection together and Girton was seen as the perfect home. The collection is highly unusual; as Alastair Adams, the current president of RP says, ‘These are pictures of people who would probably not normally be the subject of
portraits and the members of the RP, I think, love the idea of democratising that access.’

The entrance to the college has been modernised but the photos on the wall of the corridor as you approach the collection tell of an earlier time in the college’s history when the college admitted only women students. There are pictures of women in ankle-length dresses, playing tennis and acting in Shakespeare plays. You then turn into the Cloisters corridor containing photographs from an artist residency by Rachel Fermi from 1997 to 1998. These give a hint to Girton’s commitment to art in general; they are spectral, almost negative, photos of Girton’s woodland walkways and shrubbery and form a perfect transition from the traditional to the modern as you walk from the 19th century corridor with its ecclesiastical feel to the 21st century portraits.

The paintings range in subject from a former thief, through farmers, a baker, two butchers, a scaffolder and a singer, to a consultant obstetrician, and in style from the pastel almost comic book paintings of Hans Schwartz’s Asian shopkeeper and teacher (a few of the artists have more than one picture in the collection) to the more serious, but tiny (20 x 15cm) picture of Nick, a carpenter,
joiner and excellent swing dancer, by Anastasia Pollard – whom she met whilst dancing – and the almost surreal image of Julia Richardson, Milk Tester by Claude Harrison.....

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(Please note this article appears in the August/September 2010 issue)

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Focus On: The People's Portraits Green Pebble August/September 2010 issue

Focus On: The People's Portraits
Green Pebble August/September 2010 issue