Face Value: Toward a Theory of Eighteenth-Century Portraiture (original) (raw)
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Traces across Time: investigating an unfinished portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds
Interfaces, 2024
The portrait I explore in this paper is an enigma. It has been identified both as the Countess of Schaumburg-Lippe and as the Countess of Devonshire. Although it is firmly ensconced in the literature, the sitter has never been securely identified and nor has the date. Nor has any attempt been made to examine whether the Countess of Schaumburg Lippe could have sat to Reynolds who painted her husband (an illegitimate grandson of George I) between 1764 and 1767. When exhibited in 2014 at Tate Britain it bore the Schaumburg Lippe name, even though David Mannings (2000) had upheld (albeit tentatively) the Devonshire identification first proposed by E.K. Waterhouse (1941). It was certainly painted, at least in part, by Reynolds (Kirby Talley, Jr.1986) but he left it unfinished; only the female sitter's face and a large diamond breast jewel were completed along with two fragments of textile. Though face and jewel are highly finished they are depicted using very different techniques. The two collectors known to have chosen to purchase this portrait are both celebrated connoisseurs: John Ruskin and Kenneth (later Sir Kenneth) Clark. It remains in the collection of the latter's family. Thanks to the preservation of E.K Waterhouse's papers at the Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, we know that as he prepared his catalogue raisonné of the work of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Waterhouse was aware of the fact that the Schaumburg Lippe identity was inscribed on the stretcher, as he wrote a note to this effect on the back of the black and white photograph he was working from. Clark and Waterhouse must have known each other well; they collaborated in 1937 in hanging a small loan exhibition in London of the portraits of Reynolds and both were leading figures in the nascent world of British Art History. The portrait is first referred to in Ruskin's collection in 1869. Clark knew of it from the engraving in the Library edition of The Works of John Ruskin which was in his school library and, as he states in his autobiography, he fell in love with it and, seeing it in the sale of Ruskin's effects in 1931, bought it. He was twenty-eight and had already published The Gothic Revival (1928) for which he must have studied Ruskin's The Stones of Venice. Ruskin, for his part, wrote eloquently about his unfinished Reynolds portrait which he calls The Lady with the Brooch in an essay on Landscape in Modern Painters. It is clear that it was the very fact that the portrait was unfinished, allowing him to infer (whether accurately or not) the artist's working methods, that he loved. Piecing together Clark's view on Reynolds and close reading Ruskin's dense commentary on his portrait by Reynolds permits us to begin to understand how the allure of such a work might attract a discerning writer to purchase a portrait of a totally unknown woman and one that offers the barest minim qua portrait. This very rarely reproduced and even more rarely exhibited portrait brings together two of my research interests over many years, eighteenth-century portraiture and the display culture of jewels. Given that it is unfinished and almost entirely undocumented, we might reasonably have expected this painting to have remained as at most a footnote in the history of eighteenth-century English grand-style portraiture. Instead, I place it centre stage, deploying those very uncertainties in order to ask questions not only about this particular strange but haunting assemblage of motifs but also about how we research historic portraiture. By reference to what we know of the life of Frederick William Ernest, Count of Schaumburg Lippe (1724-1777), and to the portrayal of his wife by Johann Georg Ziesenis, I explore whether a portrait of Countess of Schaumburg Lippe by Reynolds is at all a possibility. Furthermore, addressing this problematic canvas permits us, I suggest, to ask questions about portraiture and its functions over a longue durée. I am interested in how the unknowns of this portrait oblige us to ask different questions from the accustomed ones in a portrait analysis. What, for example, may we infer from the accounts of the collectors who were drawn to this mysterious object? How do judgements about sitters’ identities change according to how, when and by whom they are made? What kinds of data are assembled to make those judgements? What do we mean by finish and unfinish? On what do we base our judgements of this? How might traces of ownership of a particular work over time - what tends to be called in a formulaic way ‘provenance’ - contribute to our understanding of the work itself? What can we tell from the material of a painting, that is, from its pigments and support, how an artist ran his studio and what his priorities might have been? To what extent can, or should, what we can discover about context determine our judgements of a historical work? By addressing some of these questions I hope to disentangle and identify some of the things we take for granted when discussing historical portraiture while at the same time re-evaluating a disputed and neglected work.
The School of Painting at the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1828
[fig.1] George Scharf's watercolour of the Great Room in 1828 has provided importance evidence about the appearance of the Somerset House exhibition, and about its visitors. The usefulness of this image, however, belies the fact that in 1828 the greatest share of the crowds was to be found, not in the Great Room, but in the adjacent School of Painting. Without a picture of this gallery, this paper will attempt to account for its popularity in 1828, and consider how it formed a slightly different type of spectacle to the Great Room, and in so doing encouraged a different manner of spectatorship, and represented an alternative face of British art. Almost exactly half of the pictures in the Great Room were portraits, but Scharf's image reveals that their visual dominance of the space was disproportionate to their number. In 'The central place at the head of the great room', as one critic described it, 1 was Thomas Phillipps' portrait of The Duke of Sussex. Equivalent positions on the adjacent walls are occupied by full lengths depicting Viscount Broom by Henry Pickersgill (on the left) and the Marchioness of Londonderry and her son, Lord Seaham by Sir Thomas Lawrence (on the right). These three picture determined the layout of the rest of their respective walls, each being flanked along the line by further full-lengths and three-quarter length portraits, and framed by smaller half-lengths and heads. Works in other genres are relegated beneath the line, and in the corners of the room. One can imagine the effect of this arrangement upon a spectator .Initial confusion at the irregular grid-pattern created by the tightly-packed frames is relieved when the eye naturally alights upon one of the principal portraits. The gaze drifts left and right to a few picture nearby, and perhaps dips below the line for a moment, before repeating the exercise on another wall. This animation demonstrates the order in which the reporter of the Literary Gazette noticed pictures at the private view. [fig.2] Some spectators no doubt took the time to inspect some of the smaller works less prominently displayed near the floor or elsewhere. Many more, however, crowded around the benches in the centre, turning their heads this way and that to enjoy the accumulated 'mass of splendid portraiture'. 2
New Directions In British Art History of the Eighteenth Century
Literature Compass, 2008
This essay examines new developments in the history of eighteenth-century British art since the publication of David Solkin's Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England in 1993. While Solkin's account of an urban professional class recasting a civic humanist ideology in its own polite and commercial image continues to hold tremendous sway in the field, this state of the field article identifies three major trends that have tempered and challenged that account. Recent scholarship dealing with gender, space, and empire has subtly reoriented the field towards a more inclusive notion of artistic agency and reception, a more synchronic and spatial approach, and an increasingly global perspective.
Bulletin of the John Rylands Library , 2019
Rylands English MS 60, compiled for the Spencer family in the eighteenth century, contains 130 printed portraits of early modern artists gathered from diverse sources and mounted in two albums: 76 portraits in the rst volume, which is devoted to northern European artists, and 54 in the second volume, containing Italian and French painters. Both albums of this 'Collection of Engravings of Portraits of Painters' were initially planned to include a written biography of each artist copied from the few sources available in English at the time, but that part of the project was abandoned. This article relates English MS 60 to shiiing practices of picturing art history. It examines the rise of printed artists' portraits, tracing the divergent histories of the genre south and north of the Alps, and explores how biographical approaches to the history of art were being replaced, in the eighteenth century, by the development of illustrated texts about art.
British Art Studies Issue 4 – Autumn 2016
This article re-examines an ambitious caricature of the French that Thomas Rowlandson (1757–1827) exhibited in London in 1783. Recent research has confirmed that the artist undertook training at the Académie Royale in Paris while still a student at the Royal Academy in London. In the following essay, I argue that this double professional route into comic art can be related to his conception of the Place des Victoires. The broader context for this discussion is provided by several ideas that have been important to recent histories of British art, notably the rise of the public exhibition and the vigorous market for caricature prints. As what I call a “super-size” caricature, the drawing highlights how comic art could take on dimensions and appearances that suited exhibition contexts.
The Protracted Portrait of a Lady: Eighteenth-Century Caricature Portrait Negotiations
2008
Keywords: portrait, caricature, hairdo, fashion, luxury, consumption, power-negotiations Abstract: Known, among others, as a "culture of appearances" (Roche 1989), the eighteenth century is a time of accelerated individual comfort and the age of luxury par excellence, combining "leisure and pleasure" (Margetson 1970). As the London of the day goes French, in an effect of "fearful symmetry" to the inceptive Anglomania on the Continent, the secular portrait becomes an asset in its own right, with "hanging the head" (Pointer 1993) as a current legitimation practice. Pride of place is held by fabulous hairdos out of tune with any sense of proportion and, as such, favourite caricature subjects. In its historical embeddedness of the same kind and character as genre painting and the novel, the caricature portrait confirms the Blumenberg-Lowith debate on the (il)legitimacy of modernity, or what I call "the collapse of the isomorphic model". ...