Figure 2.8 Arthur Devis: Portrait of Lady Juliana Penn, oil on canvas, 91.8 × 79.1 cm, 1752,
Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Source: Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania, PA, USA. 125th Anniversary Acquisition. Gift of Susanne Strassburger Anderson,
Valerie Anderson Story, and Veronica Anderson Macdonald from the estate of Mae Bourne and Ralph Beaver Strassburger,
2004/Bridgeman Images.Kate Retford’s analysis of “private” art foregrounds the view that art presents mediated representations of
historical reality. According to this view, informal family portraits representing “feeling” subjects and
exemplifying midcentury virtues of “sensibility” constructed a fiction of “naturalness” or candor,
through facial and bodily expression, composition and the interaction between figures, that often
concealed complex tensions among their actual sitters. A proliferation of conduct books informed the
social and the artistic expression of more private, intimate family life. However, an underlying concern
with patriarchy, ancestral rights and lineage persisted throughout the century, alongside prevalent
representations of caring mothers and fathers and innocent children yet to be molded by considerations of
rank and society. Portraits representing the higher echelons of society often appropriated the visual fiction
of candor, whose origins lay in a discourse of bourgeois or middleclass disinterest, in order to conceal
other more selfregarding messages about their rights to power and prestige (Retford, 2006, 16–17, 232–
233). While portraits of feeling, virtuous yet modest families became popular, as did genre paintings
referring to people of a similarly modest background, there also remained in many portraits an emphasis
on precise identities and family ties. In country house displays of portraits in particular, there remained an
emphasis on issues of lineage, dynasty, political and national allegiances. Such messages could be
conveyed simply through the ways in which works were arranged or juxtaposed on the wall, or their
sitters juxtaposed in a group portrait, and would be decipherable by those attuned to such issues in their
own family lives.
Demand for portrait busts with commemorative, market or ancestral value grew as the century progressed,
among the middle or professional sections of society. These showed a similar trend towards the “natural”
as in painting, particularly in informal, expressive busts of children. There was some resistance, however,
to abandoning the “severity” of sculpted portraits since sculpture as a medium was particularly associated
with the gravitas of the antique. While eighteenthcentury connoisseurs had relatively few examples of
ancient painting to study until, at least, the discovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum, plaster casts, prints
and copies of ancient Greek and GrecoRoman sculptures were more readily available as models.
Diderot was among those who described a particularly close affinity between the medium of sculpture
and antique gravitas:
...it [sculpture] is serious, even when striking a light note.... The painter and the sculptor are both
poets, but the latter never makes jokes.
(Diderot, 1995a, 159)For similar reasons, sculpture was considered to be better suited to the representation of ideal nature than
to naturalism. However, the medium became both more realistic and more expressive in the hands of
sculptors such as Houdon, who used various techniques such as incised pupils (to suggest “living” eyes),
wrinkles, open mouths, tilted heads and necks, trailing strands of hair and informal poses to suggest a
living, breathing and feeling subject appropriate to the new emphasis on “sensibility” (Walsh, 2008, 460–
461). Houdon represented his sitters dressed in loose antique robes or in formal contemporary costume.
As was the case with painting, the degree of formality increased as the neoclassical style took hold later
in the century, but even when this was the case his method of sculpting faces could introduce a note of
informality, feeling or individual character (Figure 2.9). Other sculptors, such as Falconet and Augustin
Pajou (1730–1809), aspired to bring a similar lifelikeness and less formally rigid classicism to sculpted