Hanging the head : portraiture and social formation in eighteenth-century England / Marcia Pointon.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pointon, Marcia R., author.

Contributor:

Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, contributor. .

Yale University Press, publisher.

Series:

Paul Mellon Centre for studies in British art.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Portraits--Social aspects--England.

Portraits.

Portraits--England--History--18th century.

Portraits--Social aspects.

England.

Genre:

History.

Portraits.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (ix, 278 pages) : 291 illustrations (some color), portraits

Other Title:

Hanging the head : portraiture and social formation in 18th century England

Place of Publication:

New Haven : Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 1993.

Summary:

"Eighteenth-century England possessed a thriving portrait culture: likenesses of particular individuals exhibited at the Royal Academy or in the interiors of public institutions, such as guildhalls and charity foundations, as well as in private houses, were part of a network of visual communication that encompassed print-collecting, popular performance, and figurative acts of speech.... Marcia Pointon demonstrates how portraiture provided mechanisms both for constructing and accessing a national past and for controlling a present that appeared increasingly unruly. Through detailed historical analyses of particular aspects of portrait representation - images of criminals, the fashions and rituals around the masculine culture of hair and wigs, the gendering of childhood in celebrated paintings like Penelope with or 'Pinkie' - Pointon establishes the rich and complex ways in which portraiture reflected eighteenth-century England. How 'the head' was hung - whether it be a matter of the disposition of an actual body or the image of that body - was determined by social rules of posture and decorum, by artistic convention and commercial practice, and literally by the ways in which patrons chose to arrange particular portraits on walls - paintings that served ritual and symbolic as well as decorative functions"--Publisher's description.

Contents:

pt. I. Biography : System : Portrait. I. Spaces of Portrayal. i. Hanging and Framing

ii. Portraiture as Business : London in the 1780s

II. Illustrious Heads. i. James Granger and the Politics of Collecting Engraved Historic Portrait Heads

ii. Ordering the Past : the Origins of Granger's System

iii. The Grangerized Book

III. Significant and Insignificant Lives. i. Likeness and Genre

ii. The Unfortunate Brave

iii. The Fantastic Gallery : Portraiture and Political Strategy

pt. II. The Portrait and its Subject. IV. Dangerous Excrescences : Wigs, Hair and Masculinity

V. Going Turkish in Eighteenth-Century London : Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her Portraits

VI. The Conversation Piece: Generation, Gender and Genealogy

VII. The State of a Child. i. Infancy, Femininity and the Child-Portrait in Romney and Reynolds

ii. Allan Ramsay's Mansel and Blackwood Group and Thomas Lawrence's 'Pinkie'

iii. The Psychodynamics of Childhood : Hogarth and Lewis Carroll

Epilogue: 'Saved from the housekeeper's room': the Foundation of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Notes:

Art Libraries Society of North America George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award, 1994

Description based on print record and online resource (A&AePortal, viewed on September 18, 2019).

Includes bibliographical references (pages 263-270) and index.

ISBN:

9780300249798

0300249799

OCLC:

1119733360