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

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

3. Franz Xaver Winterhalter, Queen Victoria, 1842

4. Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar au Chat, 1941

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

6. 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)

7. Artist SitterPatron Audience

8. Purpose - To extend the life of the individual - as a proxy or gift - as a political tool - as a commemoration/memorial - dynastic - to demonstrate artistic skill - as documentary records - to create individual/group biographies - to assert/celebrate national/institutional supremacy/achievement/history

9. 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)

10. 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) ‘… 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”.’ Richard Brilliant

11. The National Portrait Gallery

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

13. Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)

14. Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59)

15. 1856: British Historical Portrait Gallery established Great George Street, Westminster. 1859: 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 http://www.npg.org.uk

16. 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.’ http://www.npg.org.uk

17. UK: 1801: 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.

18. 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 http://www.npg.org.uk

19. 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'.

20. Trustees rules for acquisitions: 1) To look to the celebrity of the person rather than the merit of the artist 2) No portrait of any person living, or deceased less than ten years 3) No portrait to be admitted by donation, unless at least three-fourths of the Trustees approve Charles Saumarez Smith, The National Portrait Gallery

21. 1856: British Historical Portrait Gallery established. First acquisition: The Chandos portrait of William Shakespeare, by John Taylor, c. 1600s.

22. ‘I quite concur in your remarks as to the propriety of making history, and not art, the governing principle for the formation of this gallery […]. The authenticity of a portrait, and the celebrity of the person represented, will be the grounds for the admission of a picture, and not its excellence as a work of art’. - William Ewart Gladstone to Lord Ellesmere, 10 June 1856

23. Unknown artist, Edward V, late 16 th century

24. Thomas Heaphy, Arthur Wellesley, First Duke of Wellington, 1813

25. Cassandra Austen, Jane Austen, c. 1810

26. ‘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”.’ http://www.npg.org.uk

27. ‘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)

28. Often I have found a Portrait superior in real instruction to half-a-dozen written “Biographies”, as Biographies are written; or rather, let me say, I have found that the Portrait was a small lighted candle by which the Biographies could for the first time be read, and some human interpretation be made of them. - Thomas Carlyle 1854 Charles Saumarez Smith, The National Portrait Gallery, 12

29. Franz Xaver Winterhalter, Queen Victoria, 1842

30. Franz Xaver Winterhalter, Queen Victoria, 1842 (Palace of Versailles)