EVERY picture tells a story, and the story told by a portrait is one of human relationships. These, as everyone knows, can be fraught. So it might seem unsurprising that a fracas should have occurred over Michael Reynolds’s painting of Bernard Haitink.

In the old days a painter tended to accommodate the wishes of whoever had the purse. But then portraiture had a lot to do with flattery and with a few notable exceptions — Goya was bluntly frank — artists played along with the vanities of patrons. When they did not, the canvas was sent back, as Hogarth learnt to his cost.

But in the 20th century the balance shifted. Portraits became more about the vision of the creator, and vision is subject to criticism. Reynolds’s portrait is not the first in our national collection to come under fire. Alison Watt’s picture of the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother has been described as looking “like a Cabbage Patch doll”. Alistair Cooke complained that he looked too old.

But there is a big difference between accepting critical flak and being bullied into adapting one’s vision. That threatens artistic integrity. Where would we be if Picasso’s sitters, upset that he had given them two eyes on the same side of their head, had insisted he make adjustments?

The Reynolds portrait may be more loosely painted, and therefore less detailed, than his other works. But that looseness is moodily evocative. This is an atmospheric composition that, by boxing the sitter in among the angles and planes of table and bookcases, keeps him at a remove from the spectator. The relationship in this story is a distant one. Perhaps that is why confusion has occurred. It is part of the tale.

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