Figure 2.6 Claude Michel, known as Clodion: Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689–
1755), marble, h. 164 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre.
Source: © 2015. White Images/Scala, Florence.In the case of actress portraits, historical, classical and allegorical references could elevate sitters who
might otherwise be seen as objects of a desiring, male gaze: the stage performance trappings of tragedies,
including the costumes and attributes of significant figures form ancient history and mythology, gave these
women added cultural and social status, especially when their portraits were exhibited alongside those of
women from the higher echelons of society (Perry, 2007, 62–6, 76). It was, however, more difficult to
elevate by such means the status of comic actresses, singers and dancers (Perry, 2007, 81, 137–167).
In the early part of the century the portrait painter, collector and writer, Jonathan Richardson (1667–
1745), wrote several works with the intention of developing a livelier British interest in “historical”
painting, dominated at the time by continental artists. In the first of these, Essay on the Theory of Painting
(first edition 1715), Richardson celebrates not only the cerebral and idealizing tendencies of history
painting, which raise it above the merely entertaining, “decorative,” “ornamental” or mimetic (Pointon,
1993, 6), but also the fact that such qualities could and should be captured in “lesser” genres such as
portraiture (Hallett, 2014, 33–36):
A PortraitPainter must understand Mankind, and enter into their Characters, and express their Minds
as well as their Faces: And as his Business is chiefly with People of Condition, he must Think as a
Gentleman, and a Man of Sense, or “twill be impossible to give Such their True, and Proper
Resemblances.”
(Richardson, 1725 [1715], 330)Hogarth’s 1740 portrait of Captain Coram (1668–1751), a naval officer who created the Foundling
Hospital in London, drew on the influence of Rigaud, demonstrating that British artists were capable of
producing the same grandeur as their continental predecessors (Simon, 1987, 14). The fusion of
classicism and gentility in such portraits was influenced in part by conduct books such as François
Nivelon’s Rudiments of Genteel Behaviour (1737), which proclaimed, among other things, that when
standing “the left Leg must be foremost, and only bear its own weight, and both feet must be turned
outwards...” (Nivelon, 1737, section on “Standing”). The pose suggested here was highly reminiscent of
the elegant Roman sculpture of the Apollo Belvedere. Such fusions “naturalized” (represented as natural
or justifiable) the superior station of the ruling ranks of society. Portrait painters took this trend one step
further when they dressed their sitters in the costumes and attributes of the ancient gods, in classical garb
like that worn by Poussin’s figures, or in a fashionable “Van Dyck” costume evocative of the
seventeenthcentury Caroline court and of dynastic nobility: these costumes were also popular at
eighteenthcentury masquerades (Simon, 1987, 64; Retford, 2006, 7, 218–221; Retford, Perry and Vibert,
2013, 9).
Grand portraiture acquired a new impetus in the 1760s, with the ascendancy of Reynolds. The aim, in the
artist’s words, was to produce a “general air” of the sitter in question rather than a precise likeness.
Capturing a “likeness” depended in part on viewers’ ability to recognize such “general airs” and relate
them to social peer groups, such recognition often being mediated further by gendered stereotypes
(Pointon, 1993, 81). However, as an astute businessman Reynolds also recognized the appeal to
contemporary genteel audiences of portraits combining traditional formal settings with more informal
poses and expressions: a kind of public–private hybrid type. He was adept at combining grandeur with
more fashionable concerns of dress and feminine gracefulness. A recent research project by the Wallace