Face Value: Toward a Theory of Eighteenth-Century Portraiture (original) (raw)

A number of years ago, Mark Hallett published an important and influential essay on Joshua Reynolds, Royal Academy exhibitions, and eighteenthcentury British spectatorship that should have become an inflection point for scholars of the portrait.1 The essay focused on a single painting from 1784, Reynolds's equestrian portrait of the Prince of Wales. The essay's larger purpose was to suggest a different way of thinking about how eighteenth-century paintings functioned as a result of their appearance at Somerset House. Using Edward Burney's detailed renderings of the Great Room, Hallett argued that viewers at the time were fluent in the language of display, so much so that they could "read the walls" and understand the picture in question as participating in-and in fact, being defined by-a variety of different visual "narratives," some artistic, some social, some political, all of which derived from the logic of the hang. Moreover, he argued, dominant narratives from previous years could also come back into play, the speech acts from any one exhibition thus tied to those before and after. Eloquent about the forces at work "beyond the boundaries of individual canvases," Hallett nevertheless ignored the radical implications of his own essay and opted instead for a polite request that we remember that "works of art were often defined by the company they kept" (581, 604).