The Face of Britain accompanies Simon Schama’s BBC Television series on British portraits, and the form of the book keeps very closely to the form of the broadcasts. There are examinations of single faces, in single lives, ranging from the earliest days when real faces were studied and represented, to photographs of life in Notting Hill in the 1960s and 1970s taken by the Jamaican-born Charlie Phillips. The studies are roughly but not narrowly chronological, and are arranged thematically in groups – “The Face of Power”, “The Face of Love”, “The Face of Fame”, “The Face in the Mirror”, “Faces of the People”. Most of the studies concentrate on one face, one person – the historical and psychological moment, the relation between artist and subject.
Schama begins with a meditation on faces and how we scan them. Like him, I knew my children were searching to see my face from the moment of birth, even though theory then said this was not possible. Eyes, he says, are the part of our body that does not change size. How do we recognise individuals in their portraits? How do we know what Francis Bacon or Thomas Gainsborough saw when they made their works – or Samuel Palmer, or Gwen John?
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