Viewing Seeing Each Other: Portrait of Artists at Pallant House Gallery

Summer is the time to head out of the city and experience some of the UK’s world-class galleries and institutions. A short train ride from London to Chicester will take you to Pallant House Gallery, where ‘Seeing Each Other: Portraits of Artists’ is currently showing (until November), featuring over 150 works by artists such as David Hockney, Lucien Freud and Lee Miller to name a few.

The show’s premise is the way artists have portrayed each other in their works, and it offers a beautiful insight into artists sometimes complex relationships to one another, but oftentimes a mutual understanding, empath and sense of respect that emanates from many of the images, such as a recent elegant pen portrait of Sir Frank Bowling by Habib Hajallie, or a new painting by Ishbel Myerscough of the artist and the painter Chantal Joffe, who first met as students in Glasgow in the 1980s where a lifelong friendship began. In Myerscough’s painting they pose with a serious gaze at the viewer, paintbrushes raised, conscious of their own images while completing the other’s.

While at Pallant House you can also catch Rana Begum’s prismatic staircase installation No 1367 Mesh and stop at the the gallery’s own cafe and restaurant. Goodwood Art Foundation is also a twenty-minute drive away.