The Protracted Portrait of a Lady: Eighteenth-Century Caricature Portrait Negotiations (original) (raw)

Face Value: Toward a Theory of Eighteenth-Century Portraiture

Eighteenth-Century Life, 2023

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).

The Portrait Bust and French Cultural Politics in the Eighteenth Century

The Portrait Bust and French Cultural Politics in the Eighteenth Century, 2015

The research project that culminated in the writing of this book was first conceptualized during my doctoral studies. I am immensely indebted to my dissertation advisor, Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby, for her support during this process. Throughout my doctoral studies, and later as I wrote this book, I was blessed by her admirable wisdom, unrivaled perspicacity, and outstanding warmth, which have led me to view her as both a personal and a professional role model.

Review of Dressed as in a Painting: Women and British Aestheticism in an Age of Reform

Edith Wharton Review, 2015

From medieval-style robes gathered with tasseled belts to high-waisted Grecian gowns decorated with woodblock prints to kimono-inspired breakfast wrappers with capacious sleeves, "artistic dress" (later called Aesthetic dress) was a style-and a movement-that captivated the public imagination in the second half of the nineteenth century. Kimberly Wahl offers a thorough and fascinating study of this phenomenon, using fashion as a way to explore the complex and interwoven endeavors of artistry, activism, and commerce. Wahl's study devotes most of its attention to the end of the nineteenth century, but the issues that coalesced around the aesthetic movement begin in the 1850s and continue into the twentieth century. Depicted in paintings and advertised in catalogues and women's magazines, artistic dress was born of both practical and aesthetic concerns. The crinoline and corset-free fashions featured sleeves set high on the shoulder and loose, drapey fits, allowing for the freedom of movement necessary to a class of women who increasingly participated in craft work and outdoor activities. As wearers of artistic dress were depicted in plein air paintings by artists like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and Thomas Armstrong, Wahl argues that proponents-who often designed their own costumes-"occupy simultaneously a position as subject of Aesthetic sensibility and object of Aesthetic contemplation" (xxviii). The occasion of artistic dress also created spaces for the exchange of ideas that expanded from intimate settings to the public sphere: James McNeill Whistler's studio, the Grosvenor Gallery, and the burgeoning forum of women's print media. In the 1870s and 1880s, the pre-Raphaelite aesthetic of a return to "natural" forms unaltered by restrictive fashions met with the more politically motivated rational dress reform movement. Dress reformers like the novelist Margaret Oliphant argued that health ought to be the ultimate sig-nifier of beauty and condemned unhealthy styles that confined their wear-ers to unnatural shapes and positions. The idea that fashions of the past were the key to successful, and fashionable, dress reform also recalled the pre-Raphaelite tendency to return to medieval forms. Women's magazines in the late seventies and eighties began featuring these styles, with added elements of the newly popular orientalism, heavily in their illustrations. Wahl argues that the popularity of artistic dress suggests a need for