Examine the Chevalier d’Eon. I mentioned him once in a story I wrote, having vaguely meant to put him into a tale: a cross-dressing spy, caught up in intrigue, royal proclamations and court cases. Legally pronounced female, apparently against his will. I knew all this, but I did not know how kind he looked. I know that if ever I write about him, this portrait, painted by Thomas Stewart after an original by Jean-Laurent Mosnier, who knew d’Eon, will change the way I tell his story.

As a writer, I find myself drawn to the writers: the Gallery’s troubled portrait of the Brontë sisters is like something from a mystery novel. On the left side of the painting, Anne and Emily, jaws set and defiant, on the right side the third sister, Charlotte, her face gentler, a half-smile at the edges of her lips. The three women of glorious gothic romanticism, describers of ex-wives in attics and runaways on moors; three women who wrote of haunted figures in just-as-haunted landscapes, in a portrait painted by their mysterious and dissolute brother, who was, we realize as we stare, once himself a character in the painting, the central figure around whom the three women cluster, but who is now painted out, replaced by a pillar. Still, a ghostly shape confronts us, like an after-image, or a reflection. The painter’s lack of skill somehow adds to the power of the picture: this is not a portrait by a professional. It is a story, frozen and mysterious, and there were, I have no doubt, tears and harsh words involved in Branwell’s painting himself out of the portrait. (Or did someone else paint over him? Is the pillar some kind of clue to a mystery most gothic?)

I know that photographs tell us things about the photographer, but I do not wonder about the photographers in the same way that I wonder about the painters, even when they have composed their photographs as elegantly as any classical portrait. Julia Margaret Cameron’s photograph of Alfred Tennyson, austere and windswept, taken on the Isle of Wight, is haunting. The background is a smudge, the hand holding a book reminds us of formal portraits of the religious, while the face is thoughtful and seems, to me at least, almost tragic. This is the man who would write “Crossing the Bar.”

Twilight and evening bell, and after that the dark! I think. And may there be no sadness of farewell, when I embark.

I learned the poem as a boy, when Death was merely an abstract idea, one I suspected I would almost certainly manage to avoid as I grew up, for I was a clever child and Death seemed quite avoidable back then.

And as we come closer to now, as we come through modern (and what a beautiful, old-fashioned word that is), the paintings erupt and divide into contemporary movements and ways of seeing and of describing. Strict portraiture is given to photography, then taken back once more, and now we are in my lifetime and in the material of my life. The Brian Duffy portrait of David Bowie is as iconic as the Aladdin Sane record cover that I contemplated when I was twelve, certain that if I understood it and its lightning-bolt imagery, then I would understand all the waiting secrets of the adult world. Bowie’s eyes are closed in the Aladdin Sane cover photo, but in this image, anisocoriac eyes stare, surprised, into the flash. Bowie seems more vulnerable. And, looking at an image that once symbolized all the mysteries of adulthood for me, I realize he looks so heartbreakingly young.