Contain Multitudes

Jo Wood and Steve Chapman photographed at Burgh House, standing and seated in front of a row of magnolia paintings, Steve with a stuffed raven on his lap - the promotional image for the show.

“I am large, I contain multitudes.”
- Walt Whitman

This is the online home of Contain Multitudes, a portrait show at Burgh House in Hampstead, 19 to 23 August 2026.

Everyone else is welcome.

For the many friends and readers who won’t be in London that week, the show is also unfolding here, one portrait at a time. Same title, same pictures, with room for the sitters to say what it was like to be drawn.

The pictures in the show come from a run of visits I’ve made over the past few years to people in the places where they work: writers at their desks, lawyers in their offices, publishers among the books they’ve made, a priest in the room where she thinks. Some of the sitters are old friends. Some I met for the first time on the day. Several are indie publishers whose example, watched at close range, gave me the courage to publish my latest book myself.

The show’s underlying idea is at The Party You Never Leave.
How it came to be: The Arc Behind This Portraits Show.

19-23 August 2026
Burgh House, New End Square, Hampstead, London NW3 1LT.
Entry free.

Private view (evening of 18 Aug)
A thank-you to backers of A Speccy Man Has A Breakdown.

Portraits, unfolding

The show is going up here, one portrait at a time. Newest at the top.

	Steinberg, and Steinberg A drawing after Saul Steinberg’s photograph of himself with a life-sized cutout of his younger self
	Sixty-three years in one room Hunter Davies, journalist and Beatles biographer
	Four books, or eight Barnaby Rogerson and Rose Baring, Eland Books
	Not Mr and Mrs Clark, not Percy Jo Wood and Steve Chapman – arranged loosely after Hockney
	Multitudes across a life The idea that has kept coming back, and the shape it has taken in the work
	The father you wanted and needed Ben Akers and his nine-year-old self
	Everything on the table Joel Levack and Phil Tidy, hot-desking in a former film studio in Soho
	With hindsight I was daunted Julian Rothenstein, Redstone Press, in his home office in north Kensington
	Booking tickets, actually Shehan Karunatilaka, Booker Prize winner, at his laptop
	One life, three photographs Someone sent me three pictures of her father. This is what I drew
	What I would say to her Salwa Emerson and her thirteen-year-old self
	The jumper she knitted herself Mary Ann Sieghart, journalist and author of The Authority Gap, in her Wiltshire office
	The postbag after the night before Sam and Elly of Galley Beggar Press, on the carpet with Sirius, packing books
	A room of one's own Elly Millar, co-director of Galley Beggar Press, in a first-floor office with shelves and a Woolf poster
	Elton John, Live In Moscow Sam Jordison, Galley Beggar Press, in his book-lined garden office
	A book of liturgies Ayla Lepine – priest and art historian, caught reading
	The man who talks to everyone Patrick McCann, head of learning at Linklaters, retiring and not
	The publishers' room Six independent presses
	It became a runaway success Mark Ellingham and Nat Jansz at Sort Of Books

I make these portraits to commission – in people’s own workplaces, or over Zoom from anywhere. More about that here.