Figure 2.5 JosephBenoît Suvée: The Invention of the Art of Drawing, oil on canvas, 267 × 131.5 cm,
1791, Groeningemuseum, Bruges, Belgium.
Source: © Lukas Art in Flanders VZW/Bridgeman Images.The eighteenthcentury fashion for portraiture is now often associated with an increased emphasis on a
sitter’s subjectivity, or individual identity, that took hold as a “modern” market economy allowed a
broader public to commission and buy portraits. This contrasts both with previous, more aristocratic
conceptions of portraiture that had much more to do with recording the ancestry, land and property rights
of a social elite, and with patterns of cultural patronage exercised by the state, absolutist monarchies and
(in Catholic countries) the Church. Such interpretations have sometimes drawn loosely on Marxist
derived explanations of the ways in which cultural production is influenced by a substratum of political,
economic and social structures, the eighteenth century being seen as the time at which a more independent
bourgeois and manufacturing class emerged in order to alter in radical ways the markets and key
“products” of art. As such classes established their authority and legitimacy within the social hierarchy,
so the concept of the selfdetermined, active, selfconscious or selfaware subject (rather than the
passive servant of autocracy or feudalism) gained in currency. In the case of portraiture this resulted in a
growing interest, especially from the 1740s, in the “pyschological” portrait, that went beyond a physical
likeness to embrace aspects of an individual’s character and personality.
This is not to suggest that such changes occurred in any neat or universal way. Indeed, those members of
an emerging middle class could (as we have already seen, in the adoption by “new wealth” of aristocratic
rococo interiors) assert their new status by aping previous aristocratic practices. Some commissioned
family portraits in order to establish their newly found social credentials and to compensate for their
prior lack of ancestral portrait displays or galleries. In America, sober, upright portraits of professionals
(doctors, magistrates, merchants, lawyers, judges, churchmen, politicians and diplomats) helped to
establish the status of those anxious to record in a colonial context their familial (or “dynasty”) and
national status (Miles, 1995, vii), while American portrait artists studying in Europe returned home to
practice the most sophisticated styles they had discovered on their travels (Miles, 1995, 3–10, 21).
Recent investigations into eighteenthcentury portraiture and, in particular, Marcia Pointon’s Hanging
the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in EighteenthCentury England (1993) have stressed the
central role of portraiture in “constructing” rather than simply reflecting new forms of social identity.
According to this view, the genre of portraiture in particular should be regarded as a social practice or
activity, associated with contemporary discourses derived from relationships of hierarchy and power
defining society more broadly. Such a view emphasizes the sitter’s “self” as an actively constructed
entity, determined by the cultural and interpretative conventions of a society and by an individual’s
specific way of engaging with such conventions (through, for example, the commissioning of a portrait)
(Pointon, 1993, 1–8). A significant part of the entertainment offered by exhibitions was the opportunity to
speculate about the gestures, expressions, costumes and characters of sitters (Conisbee, 1981, 113;
Pointon, 1993, 62–63). The different ways of constructing a portrait (e.g. degrees of formality;
compositional formats and choice of settings and accessories; forms of dress and pose) carried symbolic
significance concerning social roles, rank and gender. Portraits were also used and displayed, for
example, as miniatures displayed in homes, as collections of prints or book illustrations or as part of an
ancestral country house display, in ways that suggested particular symbolic meanings. Country houses in
particular provided semipublic spaces opened up to many beyond a family’s intimate circle thus making
ostensibly private identities and virtues a kind of public property (Retford, 2006, 10–11). Pointon
suggests (1993, 6–7, 56) that representations of sitters’ heads were the principal means of suggesting
meanings and values: the head often stood in a metonymic relationship to the body, social identity and