Description
This course will consist of a detailed study of English portraiture during the eighteenth century. Portraiture was the dominant pictorial genre in English visual culture during this period, and was practised by many of the country's leading artists, including Thomas Gainsborough, William Hogarth, Angelica Kauffman, Allan Ramsay, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Joseph Wright of Derby. This course will analyse the changing character and function of portraiture in the eighteenth century, and address the ways in which the genre responded to, and participated in, broader cultural developments.
We will study portraits in a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, and engraving, and explore the manner in which these different types of work operated in the social spaces of the domestic interior, the exhibition room and the public building. As a whole, the course is designed to recover the ways in which Georgian portraiture functioned as an ambitious, often highly complex sphere of artistic practice and as an exceptionally sensitive site of cultural mediation and response.
Preliminary reading
Just to clarify I’m not expecting you to have read all of these before the start of next term, this is just a selection of books which I thought you might find useful/interesting.
Introductory books on eighteenth-century art
David Solkin, Painting for Money: the visual arts and the public sphere in eighteenth century England, (New Haven & London, 1993)
John Barrell (ed.), Painting the Politics of Culture: new essay on British Art, 1700-1850 (Oxford & New York, 1992)
Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (ed), ‘The Consumption of Culture, 1600-1800: image, object, text’ (London & New York, 1995)
John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, (London, 1997)
Ellis Waterhouse, Painting in Britain, 1530-1790, (1953)
Introductory books on portraiture in the eighteenth century
Richard Brilliant, Portraiture, 1991
Shearer West, Portraiture, 2004
Desmond Shawe-Taylor, The Georgians: Eighteenth-century Portraiture and Society, London, 1990
Richard Charlton-Jones (ed), The British Portrait, 1660-1960, Chapters 1-3
John Hayes, The Portrait in British Art, 1991
David Piper The English Face, 1978
Marcia Pointon, ‘Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in eighteenth century England’ (New Haven, 1993)
Mark Hallett & Martin Postle eds., Joshua Reynolds and the Creation of Celebrity, (London, 2005)
Marcia Pointon, Strategies for Showing: women, possession and representation in English visual culture, 1665-1800, (1997)
