Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (born 1977) is a British artist of Ghanaian descent. She is best known as a painter but has recently begun to explore some of the themes of her painting in a series of etchings. Her pictures are portraits, but the subjects are fictional, drawn from her own imagined cast of characters, from literary sources or from art history. She has explained “None of them is of existing people, but they are familiar. They include Grammy winners (gracious in acceptance of awards), revolutionaries, fanatics, anthropologists and missionaries (good for showing us how to live), savages (good for showing us how far we have come and how not to live), radicals and the generally angry, amongst others”. Her subjects may be fictional but they allude generally, and sometimes specifically, to the European traditions of portraiture, in various ways. Yiadom-Boakye’s ‘sitters’ are anonymous; in the titles of the pictures she never attributes a name to them. Instead the titles allude to qualities, events, times of day etc. This etching is titled ‘Siskin’ and is one of a series of paintings and prints named for British birds.

Yiadom-Boakye’s work simultaneously deconstructs and critiques the European portraiture tradition whilst also celebrating it, reclaiming and reinvigorating it, at a time when portrait-painting is no longer an avant-garde art form. She uses the strategies of appropriation and re-framing to question the role and meaning of the portrait, but also to foreground the role of the artist as in some sense the ‘inventor’ of the sitter.

The figure in Siskin – a densely-worked etching that seems to allude both in scale and character – to Rembrandt’s etchings – is wearing a feathered ruff. This accessory also features in two of her painted portraits with bird-name titles (Greenfinch and Goldcrest, both 2012). This motif is ambiguous: on the one hand it might be a reference to the traditional habit of exoticising black figures in art by showing them in native costumes, animal skins, feathered head-dresses, etc, but equally it might be an element of fancy dress or of theatrical costume (many of her characters are posed and dressed like dancers or actors). It may be a device suggested by – or suggestive of – the bird-name titles, but it is also brings to mind the starched neck ruffs worn by sitters in portraits by Rembrandt and his contemporaries.