Howard Hodgkin: Absent Friends, National Portrait Gallery, London, review: Who would have guessed that he had made so many portraits?

Howard Hodgkin, who died last week, oversaw the retrospective of his portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery

Portrait of Howard Hodgkin, 2016 (Miriam Perez, 2016)

Passing from life to after-life can be a very tricky moment of transition for any artist. After Henry Moore died, his reputation took a nose-dive. Picasso, who was a bit of joke to so many in the 1950s (ask David Hockney for independent verification of that reckless generalisation), is powering along as ever – thanks, in part, to the brilliant custodianship of the Picasso Foundation, which is always finding new ways to re-invent him – aided, of course, by his astonishing productivity, which means that there is always something new at the back of the wardrobe.

What of Howard though, who died last week? This retrospective of his portraiture is something of a pleasant surprise. Who would have guessed that he had made so many portraits, and so consistently throughout his life? It's a much better show than the Tate retrospective of 2006, sharper, more singing. In part, that is to do with the fact that many of the paintings at the Tate looked unemphatically small and slightly glum because of the dimensions of the galleries in which they were shown. Here, the height of the galleries seems just right – the works are contained and shown off well, never lost or feebly swimming about.

'Mr and Mrs Robyn Denny' by Howard Hodgkin

For all that, it's quite an odd show. Hodgkin was a maddeningly difficult man to engage with in conversation – high-handed, taciturn, rude, maddeningly obtuse, unforthcoming. And yet this show – perhaps it is something to do with the fact that it would be a late opportunity to have said in public what he had never quite been able to say before – really opens up.

'Absent Friends' by Howard Hodgkin

Well, the long captions do anyway. In spite of what you might think you are looking at on these walls – perhaps it's a tumbling triangle abutting a rectangle in the close company of a luscious, sweeping wave of orange – this is in fact, the text tells us, so-and-so just on the point of removing her Dior dress during that long and bibulous afternoon in Cheyne Walk when we all somehow found ourselves in the pleasant company of both my late and unlamented dealer and Mr and Mrs Teddy Barings, those staunch collectors.

'Waking up in Naples' by Howard Hodgkin

No, it's not quite that, of course, what we are looking it. It never is with Howard. It's his take on the scene, perhaps remembered, half swimmingly, half rapturously, months, days or years later.

Howard oversaw all this before he took his final bow. He must have wanted it to be like this.