Richard Gildart

There is a distinct sense in this portrait of a meeting of two celebrities: the north of England’s foremost portraitist, recently arrived in Liverpool, painting his new home town’s senior citizen. In his mid-nineties at the date of this work, Gildart had been a Freeman of Liverpool for 70 years, Mayor three times (the first over 50 years previously) and M.P. for nearly twenty years. A merchant in the sugar trade all his life, he had witnessed Liverpool’s growth from a small local port into Britain’s second city. Neither party flinches from their encounter and the results are uncompromisingly direct and candid. As so often with portraits of the very old, there is no place for the trappings of vanity or material existence and the image is arresting in its deliberate plainness.