29 August 2025

Roy Strong on Sitting for Bryan Organ

As master portraitist Bryan Organ turns 90, art historian Roy Strong reflects on sitting for the artist and explores his distinctive approach — contemplative, incisive and quietly radical.

© Bryan Organ. Mr and Mrs Sharples

Renowned painter Bryan Organ has captured the likeness of many great figures – Prince Charles, Sir Harold Macmillan, and Elton John to name a few – but his art distinguishes itself beyond being simply a portrait. His paintings of people are also a testament to his endless experimentation with movement, space and form.

Organ, whose works have been commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery more than any other 20th-century painter, continually demonstrates his acute powers of observation and his facilities as a draughtsman that enable him to create a likeness that feels like a real human encounter. Published to mark the artist’s 90th birthday, Bryan Organ: Picturing People tells the stories of his most important paintings and offers a contextual overview for his work from the 1950s to today. Drawing on his beginnings on the school cricket pitch to sketching others in recording studios and beyond, this book is itself a portrait of his illustrious career.

In this extract, art historian and former director of the National Portrait Gallery, Roy Strong, reflects on the experience of sitting for a portrait with Organ, and what it is that makes his work so remarkable.

© Bryan Organ. Elton John, 1973

The great excitement about sitting for Bryan Organ is that one does not have to. This may seem a strange omission for one practising the art of portraiture, but not for one experimenting in the creation of a picture of a person. Photography has released the sitter from those weary hours on the throne, getting more tired or more drunk, or both, forever hampered by the sun suddenly disappearing behind a cloud. A picture of a person reasserts what a painter can do and a photographer cannot in relation to capturing a human being.

From left to right: © Bryan Organ. Study for Mr and Mrs Sharples, 1974-75 / © Bryan Organ. Mr and Mrs Sharples

The painter, from his myriads of snaps, can synthesise his impressions into a single image, choosing what is to him the quintessential mood of his sitter. By the placing of the figure, by his choice of background and props, by his use of colour, by the subtlety of painterly emphasis or omission, if he comprehends his sitter he is able to say infinitely more complicated things about him than a single image caught by the momentary eye of the camera.

Bryan Organ’s pictures are conceived by contemplation from afar, but not entirely, for both sitter and artist meet for merry lunches and dinners and peering eyes garner in yet more information to distil onto the final canvas. These processes seem to be the essence of Bryan Organ’s philosophy of his picture of a person. In his role of face-maker he emerges as one of the two of three painters of his generation to make any significant statement, let alone display any enthusiasm for the despised art of the portrait.