Name: Strike a Pose: Stephen Farthing and the Swagger Portrait
Uploaded: 2025-10-08T18:17:45.000Z
Duration: 3 min 4 s
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Swagger portraits are portraits that tell the story of a life.

They talk about the status of a human being.

Adverbs of degree

They talk about the place where they live and how all the indicators within the picture tell you just how important that person is.

The Suffolk Collection here at Kenwood is home to many historical portraits this that typify the art of swagger, from the opulent court portraiture of Jacobean artist William Larkin to the glamorous portrait of Daisy Leiter by John Singer Sargent.

But swagger has also been applied in modern and contemporary art.

And this year we're really excited to be bringing the work of artist Stephen Farthing here to Kenwood for a new exhibition, Strike A Pose, Stephen Farthing and the Swagger Portrait.

when I paint, I tend to paint quite large paintings or very small paintings.

The exhibition is called Strike A Pose and what it is is a collection of my Swagger portraits mixed in with some of the paintings that influenced them from the Suffolk Collection here at Kenwood.

The first one was painted in 1975, and the most recent one was painted last year.

My paintings are as much a story of painting than they are a story of the people in the paintings.

And so what you see in the exhibition is a combination of me painting from art history and me learning to paint over my life, and

me my paintings changing through life as I changed.

I will be here for a week at a time, probably three or four times during the course of the exhibition.

During that time, I can meet with groups or individuals.

I will be working in the dairy and have a studio there.

But when I'm not here, I will still be working on the project, which is to take one of the paintings in the collection and allow people to see from start to finish how I go about making a painting.

I think the most exciting thing about me working with English Heritage and coming to this house is that I've known it since I was about 18 years old.

And it's amazing to come back to somewhere and get to know it in a different way.

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Strike a Pose: Stephen Farthing and the Swagger Portrait

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