1. Ivan Albright, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1943)
Ideas and Identities
Block 4
Image and Identity:
Modern Portraiture
Dr Vivienne Richmond
Ivan Albright, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1943)

2. Why portraiture. Block structure What is a portrait
Why portraiture? Block structure What is a portrait? National Portrait Gallery Britain in the centuries

3. Block structure Week 1: What is a portrait
Block structure Week 1: What is a portrait?  Week 2: Visit to National Portrait Gallery  Week 3: Portraiture and gender Week 4: Photography  Week 5: Contemporary portraiture

4. King Henry VIII Unknown artist, late 16th century

5. Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar au Chat, 1941

6. Marc Quinn, Sir John Edward Sulston, 2001
Sample of Sulston’s DNA in agar jelly mounted in stainless steel

7. Definitions Portrait: ‘A drawing or painting of a person, often mounted and framed for display, esp. one of the face or head and shoulders; (also) an engraving, photograph, etc., in a similar style. (Now the usual sense.)’ Oxford English Dictionary Online ‘… portraits are art works, intentionally made of living or once living people by artists, in a variety of media, and for an audience.’ Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (London: Reaktion, 2002) ‘While a portrait can be concerned with likeness as contained in a person’s physical features, it can also represent the subject’s social position or “inner life”, such as their character or virtues.’ Shearer West, Portraiture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)

8. ‘… all portraits engage in some way with the identity of the sitter represented … The twenty-first-century notion of identity as those aspects of character, gender, race, and sexual orientation unique to an individual is the legacy of the seventeenth century, when the idea of “the self” began to be explored philosophically. Previously identity was seen to be rooted in those external attributes, conveyed through the body, face, and deportment, that distinguished one individual from another. … The idea that portraits should communicate something about the sitter’s psychological state or personality is a concept that evolved gradually and became common only after nineteenth-century Romanticism fuelled … a fascination with the particular qualities, idiosyncrasies, and actions of a celebrated individual.’  Shearer West, Portraiture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)

9. Ideas and Identities
Rembrandt, self-portrait
The Self

10. Purpose - ‘… to freeze time and to extend artificially the life of the represented individual.’ - dynastic: ‘to establish the pedigree of the portraits’ owners’ Joanna Woodall, Portraiture: Facing the Subject (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997) - to assert/celebrate national/institutional supremacy/achievement/history - to demonstrate artistic skill - to create individual/group biographies - as documentary records - as a proxy or gift - as a commemoration/memorial - as a political tool

11. Problems (i) ‘[In the] “dualist” conception of identity … there is a division between the person as a living body and their real or true self. An insistence upon this opposition means that a vivid physiognomic likeness cannot represent the identity of the sitter in [a] satisfying way … Bodily resemblance comes to seem a barrier to union with the sitter, rather than the means whereby it can be achieved.’ Joanna Woodall, Portraiture: Facing the Subject (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997) ‘A portrait … seeks to bring out whatever it is in which the sitter differs from the rest of humanity and would even differ from himself were he portrayed at a different moment or in a different situation … [and] to bring out whatever the sitter has in common with the rest of humanity and what remains in him regardless of place and time.’ (1953) Erwin Panofsky (1953), in Shearer West, Portraiture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) 

12. Problems (ii) ‘… every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.’ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) Richard Brilliant: ‘… the viewer’s awareness of the art work as a portrait is distinctly secondary to the artist’s intention to portray someone in an art work, because it is the artist who establishes the category “portrait”.’    

13. The National Portrait Gallery

14. Philip Henry (5th Earl) Stanhope (1805-75)

15. Thomas Carlyle ( )

16. Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59)

17. Earl Stanhope’s concept of a national portrait gallery: '
Earl Stanhope’s concept of a national portrait gallery:    '...a gallery of original portraits, such portraits to consist as far as possible of those persons who are most honourably commemorated in British history as warriors or as statesmen, or in arts, in literature or in science'.

18. 1856: British Historical Portrait Gallery established
1856: British Historical Portrait Gallery established.   First acquisition: The Chandos portrait of William Shakespeare, by John Taylor, c. 1600s.

19. 1856: British Historical Portrait Gallery established Great George Street, Westminster : opened to public 1869: moved to Exhibition Road, South Kensington.   1885: moved to Bethnal Green Museum   1896: permanent gallery opened on present site, St Martin’s Place    

20. Original cost: £96,000 Present value: £41
Original cost: £96,000 Present value: £41.1m  Government grant 2012/13: £7.3m   Total income 2013: £17.4m Primary Collection: ‘11,799 portraits of the most famous people in British history.’ Reference Collection: 335,000+ images – ‘a national resource.’

21. ‘The National Portrait Gallery was established with the criteria that the Gallery was to be about history, not about art, and about the status of the sitter, rather than the quality or character of a particular image considered as a work of art.’ ‘Carlyle believed that portraiture could be a means to link the past and present. As a historian he had written of the great value of “bodily likeness” of historical figures, going on to claim that portraits transformed “vague historical names[s]” into recognisable human beings. A worthwhile portrait need not be good art, but it must be “sincere”, made by “a faithful human creature of that face and figure which he saw with his own eyes, and which I can never see with mine”. … [This] defines the Victorian conception of the authentic portrait.’ Paul Barlow, ‘Facing the past and present: the National Portrait Gallery and the search for “authentic” portraiture’, in Joanna Woodall, Portraiture: Facing the Subject (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997)

22. ‘It has been a central concern of the Trustees since the foundation of the Gallery that portraits acquired should in some way be authentic records of the appearance of the sitter, ideally done from life and in any case not a modern copy.’   ‘Under the terms of the 1992 Museums and Galleries Act the Trustees maintain “a collection of portraits in all media of the most eminent persons in British history”.’

23. 2012/13: 2. 5m visits (British population 2012: c. 63
2012/13: 2.5m visits (British population 2012: c. 63.3m) 11% of UK visitors from Black, Asian and minority ethnic groups 10% of UK visitors from lower socio-economic groups overseas visitors = 45% of visits

24. UK: 1801: population c. 16. 3m; rural residents c
UK: : population c. 16.3m; rural residents c. 70%; employed persons working in agriculture c. 40% 1911: population c. 45.3m; rural residents c. 20% ; employed persons working in agriculture c. 8% Transfer of employment to retail, clerical, transport, energy and industrial manufacturing sectors; domestic service.

25. Next Week – Thursday March 6 2014: Visit to National Portrait Gallery
SEMINAR GROUPS 1a AND 1b - VISIT STARTS AM
Meet Main Entrance, St. Martin’s Place, 9.55am
SEMINAR GROUPS 2a AND 2b - VISIT STARTS AM
Meet Main Entrance, St. Martin’s Place, 10.25am
YOU SHOULD EXPECT TO BE AT THE GALLERY FOR AROUND HOURS. 
IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS ABOUT ANY ASPECT OF THIS VISIT, PLEASE CONTACT VIVIENNE RICHMOND - - NOT YOUR SEMINAR TUTOR.