Hanging the head : portraiture and social formation in eighteenth-century England
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Hanging the head : portraiture and social formation in eighteenth-century England
Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for studies in British art by Yale University Press, 1993
- : hbk
- : pbk
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Note
Bibliography: p. 263-270
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
England in the 18th century possessed a thriving portrait culture which was part of a network of visual communication that encompassed print-collecting, popular performance and figurative acts of speech. In this book, 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 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 paintings like "Penelope Boothby" or "Pinkie" - Pointon establishes the ways in which portraiture signified 18th-century England. How "the head" was hung was determined by social rules of posture and decorum, by artistic convention and commerical practice, and literally by the ways in which patrons chose to hang in particular arrangements on walls - paintings that served ritual and symbolic as well as decorative functions.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements Introduction Part 1: Biography: System: Portrait 1. Spaces of Portrayal 2. Illustrious Heads 3. Significant and Insignificant Lives Part II: The Portrait and its Subject 4. Dangerous Excrescences 5. Going Turkish in Eighteenth-Century London: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her Portraits 6. The Conversation Piece: Generation, Gender and Geneology 7. The State of a Child Epilogue: Saved from the Housekeeper's room: the Foundation of the National Portrait Gallery, London.
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