LONDON — Wyndham Lewis was the “triple threat” of British Modernism: He was accomplished — and innovative — as the writer of linguistically dazzling satires such as “The Apes of God” and “Tarr.” He was as an abstract artist who led the pioneering Vorticist group just prior to World War I. And, as a bracing exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London shows, he was a portrait artist of the first degree. Whether his subjects were literary lions, patrons, lovers, or himself, he painted and drew portraits with such rigor and acuity as to reinvent that Cinderella of genres.

But he was a problem child of his age — flirting with fascism (initially pro-Hitler but never anti-Semitic), an inveterate ingrate, producing oeuvres in his respective mediums that were sparse, arcane, or both, his reputation did not weather well. He has been overshadowed by writer peers such as James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, whose portraits are represented in this show. To W.H. Auden, he was “that lonely volcano of the right.”

The eight self-portraits presented here adopt styles as diverse as the personas Lewis constructed for himself. The pugilist with clenched jaw in his pencil-and-watercolor depiction of himself from 1911 is very much “the rebel” as he styled himself — Lewis was expelled from the Slade School, walked out of Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops, and disrupted a lecture by the Futurist leader Marinetti. He rallied artists and writers such as Jacob Epstein, David Bomberg, T.E. Hulme, and Pound around his polemically and typographically startling journal, Blast. The bulging eyes and pout are caught with cubistic, jagged edges.

“Mr. Wyndham Lewis as a Tyro” (1921) has a stylized, schematic, grinning visage that is ostensibly more cheerful, but the forced gaiety is more grimace than smile, redolent of the “keep smiling” propaganda of the recent war. Lewis had fought at Ypres and then served as an official war artist for Canada (he was born in Nova Scotia) and Britain. A “tyro” in Lewis’s definition — he used the word for his avant-garde magazine in the 1920s — was a kind of social robot, a demobilized man hitherto mechanized for war.

“Portrait of the Artist as the Painter Raphael” (1921) has the moderne lyricism of de Chirico’s Pittura Metafisica movement, while looking to Martin Droeshout’s engraving of Shakespeare in the first Folio edition. The painting signals his post-war return to order, as a self-styled reactionary.

By “Self-Portrait with Hat” (1932), he is back in belligerent mode, this time self-styled as “The Enemy” (his next magazine title), the raffish, sardonic man about town who sets out to get people’s backs up. This pen-and-ink drawing deploys marks in sharp cuts and jabs to get across a sense of dash and defiance.

There was something of the public schoolboy, debating-society prankster about Lewis’s attitude toward satire — he fully expected his victims to relish the attention he lavished on them. Some played along — the Schiffs, for instance, continued to support him financially despite the drubbing they received in his fiction. In an autobiographical work, he wrote: “I do not think I should be exaggerating if I described myself as Miss Edith Sitwell’s favorite enemy.” There are four portraits of her in this show, including a severe yet serene portrait in oils now in the Tate.

While his prose and language games could be merciless, in the plastic arts, Lewis could barely suppress his humanity and tenderness, despite the distilled, precise, hard-edged style he favored. “I go primarily for the pattern of the structure of the head and insinuate, rather than stress, the ‘psyche,'” he wrote to fellow painter Sir William Rothenstein. This approach comes out clearly in the extended series of portraits of the writer Naomi Mitchison, which fuse stylization and naturalism, tension and tenderness. Several gorgeous pictures of his wife, Froanna, come closest in his portrait oeuvre to full-blown naturalism, but still do not lose the refined sense of meticulous formal construction that is his hallmark.

The exhibition reaches its peak in terms of both artistic and historic significance when Lewis tackles the giants of literary modernism, his friends Pound, Eliot, and Joyce, the “men of 1914” as he called both them and himself — “the first men of a future that has not materialized.” It is almost as if the writerly acumen of the men before him instigated an extra effort to use line with more daring, precision, variety, and specificity. There are four dazzling drawings of Pound, for instance, in chalk, crayon, or charcoal — more decisive, robust mediums than he generally favored in his graphic works — that capture telling features such as the poet’s prophet-like squint and pointed jaw. Three of these date from 1919-21, while the fourth, from 1938, is preparatory for the portrait in oils of the following year, the canonical portrait of Pound.

The same accolade applies to the first of two paintings he made of Eliot in 1938. This stunning painting was, incredibly, rejected by the Royal Academy that year, which prompted friends of the artist to resign from that notoriously conservative body. Showing the besuited poet three-quarter length, reclining in a modern armchair with hands clasped and brow furrowed, his features finely chiseled, the chiaroscuro precisely delineated, it is a painting of suitably neoclassical intensity where, in Eliot’s own phrase, emotion is contained within form. What probably irritated the academicians were the abstract scroll caprices on either side of Eliot’s head, symbolic of the furies and demons captured within his verse and typical of Lewis’s abstract figurines.

There was no major painting of Joyce, but three spirited drawings. And he could equally be on top form for women writers. His 1932 drawing of Rebecca West, for example, which seems to squeeze the writer’s startled features into an exquisite knot, prompted Walter Sickert to send him a telegram when he saw it exhibited, proclaiming Lewis “the greatest portraitist of this or any other time.”

In 1941, while escaping the war in North America, Lewis detected the first signs of eyesight deterioration that would, by 1951, lead to complete blindness, which he announced to the world in his last column as art critic of his influential weekly. His last portrait, a commission for Magdalene College, Cambridge, is an uncharacteristically loose, painterly rendition of Eliot from 1949, though the acuity and compositional panache are entirely characteristic.

Until October 19 (St. Martin’s Place, London, 011-44-20-7306-0055).