A Portrait of Roger Scruton
Oil on canvas,
120 x 60cm, 2014
This work won the Ondaatje Prize for Portraiture, the major award of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters (RP), in 2016.
Thanks to Sir Roger’s fame*, it has garnered considerable attention. Nearly everyone who inquired about the portrait asked, “Is that a donkey or a horse?”
It is a donkey. The donkey serves as a nod to Don Quixote, a man who aspired to become a knight in an age when knights no longer existed.
In Cervantes’ own words:
“This gentleman, in the times when he had nothing to do—as was the case for most of the year—gave himself to the reading of books of knight-errantry, which he loved and enjoyed so much that he almost entirely forgot his hunting, and even the care of his estate. So odd and foolish, indeed, did he grow on this subject that he sold many acres of cornland to buy these books of chivalry to read… [In the end], he so buried himself in his books that he spent the nights reading from twilight till daybreak and the days from dawn till dark; and so, from little sleep and much reading, his brain dried up and he lost his wits.”
Despite Don Quixote’s constant failures and naïveté, it’s worth noting: the successful man adapts to the world, while the loser persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the loser.
One could argue that, in the end, Don Quixote did indeed become a knight. Interestingly enough, two years after this portrait was painted, Roger Scruton was knighted!
There are two key pictorial references in this painting: Watteau’s Pierrot (also known as Gilles) and Ting Qin Tu (聽琴圖) by Emperor Huizong of the Song dynasty.
*Roger Scruton, renowned English philosopher, writer, and social critic.
