Portrait painting alive and well and living in England

After a little search I found what I was looking for - a painting of the British Indian actress Indira Varma at the annual exhibition of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters held, as last year, at the Mall Galleries in the shadow of the Hinduja palace in Carlton House Terrace.

Indira, daughter of an Indian father and a Swiss mother and considered one of the finest actresses in the UK, is very high profile because of her presence in the US TV drama, Game of Thrones .

The artist, Anne-Marie Butlin, who says "portrait painting is thriving in Britain at the moment", explains: "I live in Crouch End, North London, known for being home to lots of artists and actors, and had met Indira at my Pilates class! When she sat for me I simply wanted to bring out the strength and intelligence in her face."

Portrait painting strikes me as being an art which reflects a distinctly English way of life.

I found it a delight going round the exhibition and noted the portraits of former Daily Telegraph editor, Sir Max Hastings, with his wife, Penny, and their two dogs, Jasper and Ludo; the cricketers Andrew Strauss and Claire Taylor in their changing rooms at Lords; the former England fast bowler, Bob Willis, "vanquishing the Aussies"; the war photographer Don McCullin; and a line drawing of Professor Stephen Hawking.

I loved a painting by Bob Last of a girl called Agnieszka, done in the style of Edouard Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère .

The model herself, pretty as a picture, was a waitress serving at the coffee bar right next to the painting.

Would she buy the 92x128cm painting, priced at £3,500?

"I couldn't afford to but somebody might," she laughed.

The cost of a commission goes from £750 to £75,000, I am told. Half the commissions come from private individuals; the other half from institutions. According to Robin-Lee Hall, president, Royal Society of Portrait Painters, 243 out of the 2,000 submissions this year were from overseas.

"We try to accept a broad selection of approaches to portraiture," she adds.

There is no reason why artists from India shouldn't send in submissions next year.

Cannes cuts

Who said: "If my film makes one more person miserable, I'll feel I've done my job."

It is, of course, Woody Allen, whose Café Society opens the 69th Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday this week.

Allen last opened the festival in 2011 with Midnight in Paris. I thought at the time we could have a similar movie, Midnight in Calcutta, where our protagonist wanders into a coffee house, and finds himself sitting next to Tagore. He asks the next table to pass him the sugar and Subhas Bose obliges. And who should walk in as he looks up but Pankaj Roy, accompanied by Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen?

I am glad the Indian pavilion is getting busier and busier because this year delegates from India will see that the way films are made is changing. Amazon has got into the business of film production, along with Netflix.

This year, Saurav Rai, from Bengal, will be showing his 29-minute short film Gudh (Nest) in Cinefondation. I noticed that Singaporean director K. Rajagopal is screening A Yellow Bird in the Camera d'Or - the movie examines the position of the "Indian" in contemporary Singaporean society.

Away from the official screenings, the real business of cinema takes place in the Cannes Market.

Those who don't immediately show profit should take comfort from Woody Allen: "If my films don't show a profit, I know I'm doing something right."

Risen author

We will hear a lot more about the effect of British rule on Bengal since Abir Mukherjee's debut thriller, A Rising Man , which begins with a murder in Calcutta in 1919, was formally published last week.

Readers of this newspaper will be quite familiar by now with Abir, who merited three-quarters of a page in The Daily Telegraph in London last week.

It was after winning a crime writing competition in The Daily Telegraph that Abir got his contract to write the novel.

The interviewer, Jake Kerridge, called A Rising Man "a lip-smacking and highly entertaining mystery".

Abir told him that he got the writing bug from his late father and that "most Bengalis believe you've got either a book or a song or a poem in you, if you haven't written or created something you're not a proper Bengali, really.'"

According to Kerridge, Abir "reflects that the introduction of Western ideas into Bengal may have made it a more tolerant place than some other parts of India".

Eternal spirit

Jonathan Cainer, for 20 years the Daily Mail's resident astrologer, collapsed and died at home in North Yorkshire on Wednesday last week, aged 58.

I had spoken to him once in 2004 after he had returned from one of his regular trips to India, a country which he felt helped him with his work, even though the Indian system of horoscopes is different.

Cainer's final horoscope - he himself was Sagittarius (November 23-December 21) - was remarkably prescient, the Daily Mail said in its tribute.

It read: "We're not here for long. So make the most of every moment. We forget this so often, and get caught up in missions, and desires. We think we have forever and a day. In one way, we may be right - for are we not eternal spirits temporarily residing in finite physical form?"

Testing times

The cricket season has started but sports editors of national newspapers give the game only limited coverage, certainly when compared to the pages and pages devoted to football.

Take, for example, Thursday's Daily Mail , which had 15 pages of sport in an 80-page paper. All that cricket got were two columns with the scores from the county matches squeezed into the corner of a page.

Meanwhile, the president of the Marylebone Cricket Club, Roger Knight, is worried that with the number of home Test matches England plays continuing to dwindle, Lord's may not be allocated the two five-day international games it has been getting every season since 1965.

Last week, Knight addressed the annual general meeting of the MCC at Lord's and sounded a warning that "it is by no means certain that from 2020 onwards there will be sufficient Test matches to enable MCC to be awarded two per summer"...

"It is simply because there may not be sufficient Test matches to distribute amongst the grounds that would expect to stage them," added Knight, 69, who was a Cambridge Blue and went on to captain Surrey.

Tittle tattle

Just a final word on this year's annual exhibition of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters - and a painting of "Champa" by the Indian artist Shanti Panchal.

He uses watercolour but there are so many layers that the end result is like that of oil.

He is very much the artist's artist and avoids the style of painting "they teach you in college - I wanted to do something different".

He reveals Indian clients are a pain. "They always ask you to change something. I say, 'Take it or leave it.'"