Having the last laugh

Rotting teeth, modelling woes and an appreciation for solemnity have historically conspired to make painted grins a rarity, but beaming faces never fail to beguile, finds Claudia Pritchard

- Claudia Pritchard

A SHAPELY left arm flung over her head draws attention to a magnificent décolletage, but it is the raised corners of her mouth that make Lady Colin Campbell such an unusual presence in Giovanni Boldini's portrait of 1894. For, out of more than 1,000 works on display at the National Portrait Gallery in London, only a small handful are engaged in that most commonplace activity: smiling.

As a divorcée, Lady Colin was a controversial personality and notoriety continued after her death, when London galleries considered how to display a fine work of art with indelicate associations. She had the last laugh, however, now cutting a stupendous figure among other 19th-century worthies, her eternal smile eclipsing the stern features of the more conventional people that surround her. Boldini was much admired by John Singer Sargent, whose British High Society subjects, notably the sultry Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, can peer from the canvas with a look that suggests a private joke ('More than a pretty face', February 14). Emma Hamilton, too, could, in character for one of her famous tableaux, beam for artists such as George Romney, with his gift for immortalising roseate faces flushed with health or pleasure-but she was another exception. Smiles in art are so rare that, although most people recall Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Frans Hals's Laughing Cavalier, they can probably think of no other. Portraiture, traditionally considered second only to history painting in the hierarchy of respectability, seems to demand solemnity.