A speaking likeness - Telegraph Radio seems to be cornering the market in visual arts programmes. Monday is Portraits Day, at least on Radio 3. Portraitists such as Maggi Hambling and Alison Watt, and the portrayed, such as Martin Gayford (by Lucian Freud) and Germaine Greer (by Paula Rego), will talk. Music that attempts the doubtful task of painting portraits will be played: Elgar's Enigma Variations, for example, sketching friends such as Richard Arnold (Matthew Arnold's son) or Dora Penny, who was to leave her own portrait of Elgar in words. To us these pieces say more of Elgar than his friends, still unknown fin de siècle figures. Any portrait is an appointment with truth, or at least with an outsider's eye. It is quite unlike looking in the mirror. Whether the work of a painter or a good photographer, it provokes the response: "Can that really be me?" It is a moral education. So it is strange that our generation is the first for two centuries in which the middle class is in danger of leaving no portraits behind. In Dickens's day, people on modest incomes could afford a miniature or a silhouette, before the daguerreotype usurped their place in little ormolu frames. Today we take hundreds of bad snaps with digital cameras - and forget to print them.