Portraits - Brenda Maddox on an exhibition that is rather pleased with itself
Science is so alien to most of us that its portrayal demands a link with the known world. "This may sound silly," said a television producer preparing to film my husband, the editor emeritus of the science journal Nature, "but would you have a globe in the house?" The answer was no, but I was tempted to add: "We have a skull somewhere. Would that do?"
There are astrolabes, compasses, skulls and molecular models aplenty in "Defining Features", the National Portrait Gallery's new exhibition of portraits of scientists and doctors from 1660 (when the Royal Society was founded) to the present. The most ingenious representation imprints the head of Dr William Oliver, an 18th-century Bath physician, on the presumably health-giving Bath Oliver biscuit.
Yet this exhibition, in the downstairs Studio Gallery, is too small and eclectic to justify the grandiose claims made for it. In the wordy and self-important catalogue, Ludmilla Jordanova, a professor of visual arts at the University of East Anglia, delivers headmistressy banalities: "We can think about the term ART in two ways"; "Human actions always take place in specific social contexts"; "Likeness is always subjective"; "We need to consider these terms [science, medicine, technology] in a bit more detail, but before doing so I want to return . . ." and so on, and so on.
Her generalisations about scientists and their artistic representation were not apparent to this visiting eye. There is no sign of a Faustian bargain. The faces of the scientists portrayed look no different from those of the many other high achievers whose images line the upstairs walls of the National Portrait Gallery, some of which - the portrait of Stephen Hawking, for instance - have been unaccountably left out of this special exhibition.
That said, many of the exhibits are fascinating in their own right. The death mask of Newton, with its small, square face and snub nose, closes the lids on the eyes that saw further than other men. The portrait of Sir William Herschel, done by James Godby in 1814, shows that astronomy is a chilly business, with its subject contemplating the heavens, well wrapped up against the night air.
A disproportionate amount of politically correct attention is paid to the "silent gender" in the section entitled "Gender and Science Heroism". Perhaps any woman scientist should be classified as a hero simply for surviving in a profession in which females remain a distinct minority. But perhaps they are there because, as any newspaper editor knows, pictures of women are more eye-catching than those of men.
Dorothy Hodgkin, Britain's only woman scientist to win a Nobel Prize, is shown in several guises. She is a youthful beauty in the photograph by Ramsey & Muspratt, circa 1937, while Maggie Hambling's 1985 painting captures her arthritic old age and gives her four hands as she struggles to cope with pen, magnifying glass, papers and a sandwich. The inescapable Susan Greenfield is here, too. The first woman director of the Royal Institution, founded in 1799, she appears in a modish electronic portrait by Tom Phillips in which images change and fade to convey that Greenfield has a high media profile and works on the brain.
The cause of equal treatment for women scientists is set back by the 1997 portrait photograph of Dr Lesley J Yellowlees, a reader in chemistry, incongruously wearing a ball gown in the laboratory. Dr Yellowlees accepted the costuming suggestion of the photographer Tricia Malley in order to show "there is more to life than chemistry". If so, why didn't another Edinburgh University scientist in the same series, the electrical engineer Clive Reeves, appear in black tie or bathing trunks? It is a moot point whether portraitists depict doctors differently than scientists. Perhaps the medical man has more self-doubt. Certainly, the oil portrait of Messenger Monsey, an 18th-century doctor, shows him looking worried, as if, in spite of his fine pink silk suit and ruffled cuffs, he doesn't have a clue what's wrong with his patient.
If scientists are often presented as heroes, the task is easier when the hero is Edward Jenner (1749-1823). By far the most coherent and moving part of this exhibition is devoted to the plump, open-faced Gloucestershire country squire who discovered the cause of, and cure for, smallpox. Images of Jenner, often with cows and milkmaids in the background, flourished in many forms, from a stained-glass window in a London house to a postage stamp and a statue in Boulogne: all tributes to a man who rid humanity of a terrible disease.
The catalogue suggests that "the trope of melancholy" was inseparable from depictions of learned men, but there is little sign of it. The faces displayed show no sign of a Faustian bargain. Many look very pleased with themselves. Confidence and intelligence shine forth from the images of three Fellows of the Royal Society: Sir Christopher Wren (shown circa 1732 in an ivory medallion by David le Merchant), Rosa Beddington (who smiles from a 1999 photograph by Prudence Cuming) and Sir Geoffrey Allen (photographed by Godfrey Argent in 1977). Sir Geoffrey, beaming in his striped shirt and big glasses, could be a life-insurance salesman. Even William Harrison, the 18th-century clockmaker, looks less troubled than Michael Gambon playing him in the television dramatisation of Dava Sobel's Longitude.
What have they got to smile about? Perhaps the knowledge that what they are dealing with is not subjective but real. If, as scientists, they misinterpret the physical world, their successors in time will get it right.
"Defining Features: scientific and medical portraits 1660-2000" is at the National Portrait Gallery until 17 September. Defining Features by Ludmilla Jordanova is published by Reaktion Books, 192 pages, £14.95
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