EDINBURGH.- Some of the finest works by one of the UK’s most distinguished portrait painters have been brought together for a captivating, career-spanning exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh this spring.

Victoria Crowe: Beyond Likeness is the first major exhibition to focus on the artist’s portraits - a hugely significant element in her work, and brings together 54 paintings and drawings, celebrating Crowe’s wide-ranging responses to her sitters and their lives. Highlights include Crowe’s remarkable portraits of cultural figures such as Nobel Laureate Sir Peter Higgs (b. 1929), radical psychiatrist R.D. Laing (1927-89) and composer Thea Musgrave (b. 1928), as well as intimate images of the artist’s friends and family.

Beyond Likeness features major loans from private and public collections from across the UK and Europe as well as key works in the National Galleries collection, demonstrating not only the exceptional skill and versatility of a remarkable painter, but also to telling Crowe’s own story and tracing her development – both professional and personal – through her art.

Born in Kingston upon Thames on VE Day in 1945, Victoria Crowe studied at Kingston School of Art (1961-65) and at the Royal College of Art in London (1965-68), and subsequently taught at Edinburgh College of Art for 30 years, while developing her own artistic practice. She has had over 50 solo exhibitions and her work is represented in collections around the world.

Crowe is renowned as a painter whose work is richly imbued with layers of meaning and personal resonance. If this is true of her of landscapes, interiors and still-lifes, then it is perhaps even more intensely felt in her portraiture.

The portraits most important and fulfilling to Crowe are those whose sitters have enriched her own thinking and awareness. In the early 1980s, she began to paint people who had broadened her interest in the inner life, the world of dream and myth, and the search for some sort of spiritual understanding. As her work evolve in this direction, Crowe developed her distinctive approach to portraiture, which seeks to record more than just a sitter’s outward appearance; her paintings also document – through symbols – the subject’s experiences, preoccupations, ideas and dreams.

Beyond Likeness showcases many of such works, including Crowe’s portraits of psychoanalyst Dr Winifred Rushforth (1885-1983), the poet Kathleen Raine (1908-2003), her close friend Jenny Armstrong and the artist’s late son Ben.

One of the early pictures in Beyond Likeness is Large Tree Group (1975), which is set in the hamlet of Kitleyknowe in the Scottish Borders. In this winter scene, Crowe’s close friend and neighbour, the shepherd Jenny Armstrong, appears as a small figure in the foreground, dwarfed by bare trees silhouetted against snowy fields and a lowering sky. A Large Tree Group is one of the most popular images in the NGS collection and has been made into a large tapestry by Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh, and gifted to the National Museums of Scotland (NMS) by a private collector. Armstrong, who lived in and herself documented the shifting Borders landscape, features in numerous Crowe portraits, three of which are in the show, including Crowe’s very last portrait of her.

The SNPG has enjoyed a long association with Victoria Crowe over three decades. One of her most striking commissions for the Gallery is her portrait of R.D. Laing, the maverick psychiatrist whose unconventional ideas upended psychiatry in the 1960s. Crowe was well-versed in Laing’s work, having first encountered it when she read his book The Divided Self as a student. Sittings for the portrait took a week, in which the artist’s impression of Laing as grave, forbidding intellectual was overturned. Nevertheless, Crowe’s imposing portrait, painted from an uncomfortable kneeling position below Laing, captures the psychiatrist’s intense, uncompromising and piercing gaze.

Victoria Crowe has often spoken about the ‘privilege’ of painting a portrait and the relationship that develops between artist and sitter and cites her experience of painting the physicist Sir Peter Higgs as particularly rewarding. In the course the sittings the artist was captivated by the way the Noble laureate, in spite of his worldwide fame and the fact that his research has changed the way we perceive the world, remains resolutely modest and shy. Crowe painted him resting in an iconic Wassily chair designed by the modernist architect Marcel Breuer, with the famous Higgs equation jotted on a wall nearby; a depiction of the explosion that confirmed the existence of the Higgs Boson, the subatomic particle that bears his name, hangs above Higgs like a lampshade.

Beyond Likeness also features Crowe’s striking portrait of the British astronomer Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell (b. 1943), who, as a 24-year-old research student discovered the existence of rapidly spinning neutron stars known as pulsars. Burnell’s illustrious career, has included professorships at Princeton and Oxford Universities, and she has also served as President of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the latter of which commissioned Crowe to paint her.

Speaking of the exhibition, Victoria Crowe said: “My work does contain passing reference to ideas of philosophy, genetics, visual sensation, consciousness of the self, memory echoes and resonances of a physical order we do not fully understand. I’m beginning to see my own journey and the work that reflects it as having a link to a continuing tradition of human questioning”.

Christopher Baker, Director of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, added: “Victoria Crowe is a painter of great accomplishment who allows us an intimate view of her fascinating sitters, the relationship she builds with them and their complex interior lives. She is also a wonderfully subtle colourist who creates layered works of remarkable beauty. It has been a privilege for the National Galleries of Scotland to work with her on selecting this exhibition, which will we are confident will prove immensely popular during Edinburgh’s Festival season.”