Below Stairs: 400 Years of Servant’s Portraits
Until May 31; Scottish National Portrait Gallery

I have fond memories of the cabbage man’s arrival in Edinburgh’s Portrait Gallery. The 18th century painting, officially named The Laird’s Fool, is of an odd-looking bearded man with a strangely phallic cabbage stalk and a big glaikit grin. He is quite unlike any portrait I had ever seen before, and I do mean portrait – this is a specific member of the Laird of Grant’s household, and not just any old cabbage man.

The trouble with portrait galleries is that you are generally faced with row upon row of straight-laced ladies and gents, posing grandly by pillars, or at writing desks with their latest treatise and a map of their colonial exploits. Painters are paid to produce flattering portraits in the fashion of the time, and all of their talents are constrained within these narrow parameters.

This exhibition of servants’ portraits, organised in collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery in London, is different. When painters were commissioned to portray servants, or when they chose to paint them for free, they were released from the usual social constraints. This allowed them to depict their subjects warts and all, and to construct quirky dramas around them. And painters had a field day with eccentric characters like the cabbage man.

The show offers variety from the very first, starting with a 15th century manuscript illustrating a royal banquet, coming right up to date with a group portrait of Viscount Coke’s estate workers in 1993, and ending with a Heath Robinson cartoon where crazy contraptions replace the servants entirely. While many of the artists are little-known, there are two paintings by George Stubbs (of a groom and a gamekeeper) and there is William Hogarth’s warm oil sketch of six of his servants, perhaps the most famous servant portrait of all.

This show is an important survey of a neglected area of art history, offering new insights into social history with separate categories for jesters and pipers, life-long servants and black servants. There is also an eye-opening display of books instructing servants on proper behaviour and satirical cartoons depicting servants as a scurrilous bunch of rogues.

Parodies like these, and like Charles Matthews as Somno in The Sleepwalker, make highly entertaining images, but they do make a mockery of the serving classes. While these are balanced by the many sympathetic images on show, it should be remembered that this is history seen through the eyes of the masters, and not the slaves.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 07.03.04