Sam Jackson paints pictures of Queens, Princesses, and similar women of historical note. From Cleopatra to Boudicca to Queen Victoria, via Ann Boleyn, Catherine de Medici and Marie Antoinette, Jackson showers us with a multitude of portraits of various female dignitaries selected from the Western canon. Apart from their sex, the one thing they have in common is that they cannot be painted from life. These are creative conjurings of likeness, derived from secondary sources, folk tale and the artist’s imagination.
The compositions of the paintings are uniform and unwavering in their description of head and shoulders. It is interesting to compare this rigorous format with that of the seventeenth century stylings of Godfrey Kneller’s ‘Kit Kat Club’ portraits. Similarly of consistent size and pose, however, these were exclusively of important and influential contemporary male luminaries such as Isaac Newton, Sir John Vanbrugh and William Congreve. Jackson’s cohort operates as something of a romantic counterweight to such a definitive and rather austere fraternity.
The artist’s handling is loose, cursive and naïvely bold.