Draft show notes for Burgh House
18-23 August 2026
Burgh House, New End Square, Hampstead, London NW3 1LT.
Free entry.
“I am large, I contain multitudes.”
- Walt Whitman
Over the last few years John-Paul Flintoff has been drawing people in the places where they work, live, or worship: at their desks, in their studies, in churches, kitchens, on a barge, and in a former film studio in Soho. This exhibition brings the portraits together for the first time.
Sitters include a Booker Prize-winning novelist, a City lawyer packing up to retire, a priest lying down on her office sofa to read, a head teacher pictured before a wall of her all-male predecessors, and a small-press couple on the carpet packing books for their subscribers, with the dog.
Each portrait tries to catch what does not fit the job title – the unexpected thing inside the expected role. Together they make a case for what the show’s title from Whitman suggests: that every person carries more than one self, and a good portrait is one that notices.
The private view is a thank-you to the backers of Flintoff’s book A Speccy Man Has A Breakdown. Everyone else is welcome, without charge, on the days that follow.
