St Catharine’s is pleased to add a new artwork to our collection: a portrait by Miriam Escofet of Professor Sir Mark Welland (2016), the current Master of St Catharine’s. The new painting (oil on linen over panel) will be hung in the Hall at St Catharine’s from 28 February 2023, alongside the existing portraits of six former Masters and three major benefactors. It has already been selected for the annual exhibition of the Royal Society of Portrait Paintersand it will be loaned by the College to the Mall Galleries, London for display during the exhibition on 4–13 May 2023.
Sir Mark commented, “This has been a fascinating process for me. With a starting point of really not wanting a portrait at all to seeing the finished piece, which I intrinsically recognise as being me, it has been incredible. Miriam has produced an interpretation of me that includes key elements of my life (you may have to look closely to see them all!) with a level of detail and vibrancy that frankly astounds me. I cannot thank her enough.”
Portrait of Professor Sir Mark Welland by Miriam Escofet
Although it is an established tradition to commission a portrait of each Master to honour their important contributions, this is the first portrait commissioned by St Catharine’s to include a Master’s family. A natural setting for the painting was the Master’s Lodge at St Catharine’s, where the Welland family lived when they first moved to Cambridge and where the Master continues to be based when working in College. Miriam recalled:
“It was important for me to see Mark in his environment, as it would open up clues as to what might be possible and appropriate to include in what I sensed would be a rich but as yet undefined composition. I got a very strong sense of Mark the person and one of his fundamental ideas for his portrait was that it should somehow include his family, which of course breaks with convention. I always love a compositional challenge and was determined to make this added dimension work for him symbolically and for me artistically. I also had the added pleasure of meeting his wife Lady Lyn Welland (2020) and hearing about their family, including their children James, Alicia, Jack and Millie, their love of music and their pets, Ambrose the cat and Toby the dog, who is by all accounts a bit of a College celebrity. Gradually a very full visual tapestry started to form.
"Having visited the Master’s Lodge, I knew that I would have to include this in the portrait and it eventually provided the key for incorporating the Welland family and their pets around a harpsichord as a reflected image in a mirror in the background of the painting. I wanted to give this reflected image its own sense of space, replicating the architecture of the building. We can see a section of one of the portraits that hangs in the Lodge and there is a glimpse of the ‘Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria’ by Artemisia Gentileschi. The College was recently gifted a full-size replica of this self portrait from the National Gallery collection, which now hangs in the College Chapel, so Mark rightly felt it had to make an appearance in this painting. In my portrait the Gentileschi is about the size of a thumbprint!”
A close up of the Welland family from the new portrait of Professor Sir Mark Welland (image credit: Miriam Escofet)
Exceptionally fine detail from the new portrait of Professor Sir Mark Welland showing Artemisia Gentileschi's Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria (image credit: Miriam Escofet)
Sir Mark wrote an article last summer about overcoming the ‘terrifying prospect’ of seeing a picture of himself and selecting Miriam Escofet for this commission because of the ‘rich detail and symbolism’ of her work, for which she has won the National Portrait Gallery’s 2018 Portrait Award and been elected a member of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. Miriam commented on her choice of media and technique:
“I like to paint on panels that I prepare myself because the rigid surface of the panel and slight grain and tooth of the linen and gesso provide an ideal surface for my painting technique. I have a very classical painting technique, mix my own mediums to mix with my paints and use a great many glazes over the evolution of a painting. Glazes are transparent or semi-transparent layers of paint which can be used to subtly deepen shadows, to make colours richer or duller, and to enhance the light qualities of paint. What I particularly like about applying glazes is the palpable sense of atmosphere, space and form that they can create. I spend months on each of my paintings and probably half of that time is spent on micro-adjustments of light and colour.”
“A portrait is about more than just capturing someone’s likeness or telling their story, it is ideally about capturing their character and essence. There is always a point during the painting process when I feel the painting comes alive – in a fanciful way I like to think of this as when the work gains a soul. I am very aware of when it happens and it is very exciting when it does as from that point on I am engaged in a dialogue with the work, it starts to dictate what it needs me to do it. It feels like alchemy. I had thought at the start of the painting that I was going to leave certain parts of it less worked up and detailed than others, but it somehow wouldn’t let me take this approach. I did think at one point that might be because I was painting a portrait of a nanotechnologist!”
Miriam saw an opportunity to insert an imagined wheel from the College crest into the repeating circular patterns of the tiled floor of the Master’s Lodge, which particularly appealed to her:
“I have a slight obsession with the ground and floor areas of paintings, as I am fascinated by perspective and its possibilities in painting, but I also feel the ground sets the stage for the narrative of the painting. The tiled floor was a gift for me compositionally as it helped me create a sense of space and light in the work.
“Other elements important to Sir Mark are grouped on the table: the silver figure of St Catharine from the College’s collection, two bees and images of his nanotechnology work, including what I ended up thinking of as the ‘supermodel’ blue image of a silicon carbide nanoflower, because it is so beautiful – apparently 50,000 of these fit across the head of a pin. Mark was very particular about having a bee in his portrait as he is very proud of the College beehives!”
Detail from the table top in the portrait of Professor Sir Mark Welland (image credit: Miriam Escofet)
The new painting marks the fourth portrait of a Master of St Catharine’s known to be by a female artist after Olga Lehman’s portrait of the late Professor Edwin Rich (1930; Master 1957–73; Emeritus Fellow 1973), Daphne Todd’s portrait of Professor Barry Supple (Master 1984–93; Honorary Fellow 1993) and Victoria Crowe’s portrait of Professor David Ingram (Master 2000–06; Honorary Fellow 2006).
