Creffield’s portraits and self-portraits are set apart from those of his contemporaries by their fusion of two apparently irreconcilable elements. On the one hand, there is the almost claustrophic closeness of the encounter. But into this is funnelled an enormous breadth of reading, listening and thinking – the product of Creffield’s wide interests in poetry, music and history. Portraiture was a mode in which he could try on different hats – sometimes literally, as when Creffield painted himself as Horatio Nelson, complete with midshipman’s cap. It thereby enabled him to explore, on the one hand, historical representations of masculinity, and on the other canonical figures in the cultural construction of Englishness.