The Sea, the Sea

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In his portrait from the mid-1980s entitled “Dame Iris Murdoch” Tom Phillips painted the novelist looking out to her right toward the light that falls on her strong, pale face, high Mongol-looking cheekbones, and unsmiling mouth. Murdoch’s hair, as always roughly chopped, looks unattended to; her collar is awry. (One wrinkle in its cloth-a subtle touch-resembles a tendon in the neck.) Her expression is at once mournful and calm. A profound alertness and unflinching quality is created by the almost sweet set of the mouth and the indirect gaze, so unlike the many photographs in which she relentlessly glares out at us-the 1981 portrait by Snowdon, for example, a photo that relishes also the rumpled bulk of the body in a poorly buttoned coat. But the size and disarray of self are not the focus of the image painted by Phillips. The light draws the sitter’s gaze, falling on the broad planes of her face-and on a corner of the painting on the wall behind her. This is the horrifying and majestic late painting by Titian of The Flaying of Marsyas. The light in this painting also comes from the upper left. A further mysterious link is that Murdoch’s head obscures the head of Marsyas.

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