A Change Of Scenery

Award-winning artist PHOEBE DICKINSON set herself the ultimate landscape painting challenge. ROSEMARY WAUGH finds out why

- Rosemary Waugh

Phoebe Dickinson’s portrait The Cholmondeley Children at Houghton Hall cut a striking figure in the National Portrait Gallery’s 2018 BP Portrait Award exhibition. Painted at Houghton Hall in Norfolk, the image is a classic portrait of aristocratic children in a stately home setting. Only, it’s not. The large off-centre doorway and half-cropped wall decorations give the composition the quality of an opportunistically snapped photograph, as do the hands-in-pockets attitude of the kids pictured. The subject is almost as traditional as they come, but Dickinson’s take on it is relaxed and modern, and it wears its art-historical references as nonchalantly as the older boy’s crumpled shirt.

Frequently commissioned to paint members of Britain’s aristocracy, portraiture has become Dickinson’s calling card. But despite the obvious talent she has for the genre, her working practice has long extended beyond. From early November, the Tessa Packard Showroom in Chelsea, London, will be home to a collection of new landscape paintings created during an intrepid year-long trip around the world. “I had been working in London doing portraits for more than 10 years and, as brilliant as commissions can be, I was craving some creative freedom and time to experiment,” says Dickinson. Accompanied by her husband and 18-month-old child, the trip started in South Africa before moving on to France, Iceland, America and Italy. It culminated in a week at Mont Sainte-Victoire in France, a stone’s throw from where Paul Cézanne spent his final moments and captured his own moody, strong-hued landscapes.