page_title: Stephen Farthing
section_title: Work
hierarchical_section_title: Stephen Farthing / Work
caption_attribution_description: English: Louis XV Rigaud
context_page_description: Stephen Farthing RA is an English painter and writer on art history.
context_section_description: Farthing described his work in a 2005 interview, saying "I have dined with the devil in terms of becoming a modern artist.  I have taken hold of history, tried to understand it—and then used and abused it."
  Farthing's work reflects his education, personal experience and perspective on historical events that have captured his imagination.  After spending a period of study at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris while a student at the Royal College of Art, Stephen Farthing inadvertently fell upon what one could later describe as a postmodernist relationship with history.  In Paris, he painted an interpretation of Hyacinthe Rigaud's portrait of Louis XV that as a student won him a prize at the John Moores Exhibition in Liverpool, today this painting stands as an early example of British post modernist painting.
  In the late 1980s and early 1990s whilst showing with Edward Totah in London, Farthing showed works that positioned Latin American vernacular culture within a modernist idiom and classicism within the vernacular.
  During the 1990s, he reinvented history painting as a viable contemporary narrative taking on subject matters as diverse as the Battle of Trafalgar, swagger portraiture, and the topographical mapping of cities.  His most recent work makes explicit a theme that has consistently sat between Farthing and his audience, the "narrative" and "text".
  Farthing commented that his work is, "not this thing about 'Oh, let's let the audience make up their mind what it is'…" but about "degrading it on purpose so it becomes not more ambiguous, but less what it was in the first place."
  Toward the end of 2009, Farthing had his first one-person show at the Purdy Hicks Gallery in London where, for the first time, he showed the "back-story" paintings.  The "back-story" paintings are a series of images painted with a text in reverse sitting on the picture plane between the audience and the image.  The text tells us what is going on not in the picture but behind it, so compromising and at the same time informing the image with  text.   His technically very skilled paintings  all seem to be grounded on one guiding principle  - that what we see will always be  always conditioned by what we know.
  In November 2010, Farthing became the second living Royal Academician to be featured in the "laboratory" series of one man shows at the Royal Academy of Arts London. "The Back Story," featured an epic 30 foot painting of the Atlantic ocean.
  Farthing's  work  as a painter  sits midway between the conservative and the cutting edge  between a classical and radical painting.
caption: Louis XV Rigaud (1975), Walker Art Gallery