Oxford-History-Portraiture-By-Shearer
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Portraiture Oxford History of Art Shearer West is Professor of Art History at 1890–1940, and the edited books Visions of the the University of Birmingham. Her publica- ‘neue Frau’: Women and the Visual Arts in tions include The Image of the Actor: Verbal and Weimar Germany (with Marsha Meskimmon), Visual Representation in the Age of Garrick and The Bloomsbury Guide to Art, The Victorians Kemble, Fin de Siècle: Art and Society in an Age and Race, and Italian Culture in Northern of Uncertainty, The Visual Arts in Germany Europe in the Eighteenth Century. Oxford History of Art Titles in the Oxford History of Art series are up-to-date, fully illustrated introductions to a wide variety of subjects written by leading experts in their field. They will appear regularly, building into an interlocking and comprehensive series. In the list below, published titles appear in bold. WESTERN ART Modern Architecture Native North American Archaic and Classical Alan Colquhoun Art Greek Art Contemporary Janet Berlo & Ruth Phillips Robin Osborne Architecture Polynesian and Classical Art Anthony Vidler Micronesian Art From Greece to Rome Architecture in the Adrienne Kaeppler Mary Beard & United States South-East Asian Art John Henderson Dell Upton John Guy Imperial Rome and WORLD ART Latin American Art Christian Triumph WESTERN DESIGN Jas Elsner Aegean Art and Architecture Twentieth-Century Design Early Medieval Art Donald Preziosi & Jonathan Woodham Lawrence Nees Louise Hitchcock American Design Medieval Art Early Art and Architecture Jeffrey Meikle Veronica Sekules of Africa Nineteenth-Century Art in Renaissance Italy Peter Garlake Design Evelyn Welch African Art Gillian Naylor Northern European Art John Picton Fashion Susie Nash Contemporary African Art Christopher Breward Early Modern Art Olu Oguibe PHOTOGRAPHY Nigel Llewellyn African-American Art The Photograph Art in Europe 1700–1830 Sharon F. Patton Graham Clarke Matthew Craske Nineteenth-Century American Photography Modern Art 1851–1929 American Art Miles Orvell Richard Brettell Barbara Groseclose Contemporary After Modern Art Twentieth-Century Photography 1945–2000 American Art David Hopkins Erika Doss WESTERN SCULPTURE Contemporary Art Australian Art Sculpture 1900–1945 Penelope Curtis WESTERN Andrew Sayers ARCHITECTURE Byzantine Art Sculpture Since 1945 Andrew Causey Greek Architecture Robin Cormack David Small Art in China THEMES AND GENRES Roman Architecture Craig Clunas Landscape and Western Janet Delaine East European Art Art Malcolm Andrews Early Medieval Jeremy Howard Architecture Ancient Egyptian Art Portraiture Roger Stalley Marianne Eaton-Krauss Shearer West Medieval Architecture Indian Art Eroticism and Art Nicola Coldstream Partha Mitter Alyce Mahon Renaissance Architecture Islamic Art Beauty and Art Christy Anderson Irene Bierman Elizabeth Prettejohn Baroque and Rococo Japanese Art Women in Art Architecture Karen Brock REFERENCE BOOKS Hilary Ballon Melanesian Art The Art of Art History: European Architecture Michael O’Hanlon A Critical Anthology 1750–1890 Mesoamerican Art Donald Preziosi (ed.) Barry Bergdoll Cecelia Klein Oxford History of Art Portraiture Shearer West 1 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Shearer West 2004 First published 2004 by Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the proper permission in writing of Oxford University Press. Within the UK, exceptions are allowed in respect of any fair dealing for the purpose of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of the licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms and in other countries should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. 1098765432 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available isbn 0‒19‒284258‒7 Picture research by Elisabeth Agate Copy-editing, typesetting, and production management by The Running Head Limited, Cambridge, www.therunninghead.com Printed in Hong Kong on acid-free paper by C&C Offset Printing Co. Ltd Contents Acknowledgements 7 Introduction 9 Chapter 1 What Is a Portrait? 21 Chapter 2 The Functions of Portraiture 43 Chapter 3 Power and Status 71 Chapter 4 Group Portraiture 105 Chapter 5 The Stages of Life 131 Chapter 6 Gender and Portraiture 145 Chapter 7 Self-portraiture 163 Chapter 8 Portraiture and Modernism 187 Chapter 9 Identities 205 Notes 221 Annotated Bibliography 227 Timeline 236 5 Websites 242 List of Illustrations 243 Index 249 6 Acknowledgements More people than I can name helped me in some way with this book, and I owe an immense debt to the many friends and colleagues whose books and articles on portraiture I cite in the bibliography. However, I would like to single out the production team at Oxford University Press, especially Lisa Agate and David Williams, who were both cheer- ful and indefatigable in their work. I would also like to thank the anonymous reader who gave a bruising but astute critique on a much earlier draft. I benefited enormously from the reader’s extensive sug- gestions, but take full responsibility for the problems that remain. As always, my husband Nick and daughter Eleanor saw me through the pockets of stress that accompanied the writing of this book and helped make it a pleasurable experience. Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to my mother, who has always been there for me when I’ve needed her. 7 Introduction Hans Holbein the Younger’s portrait of George Gisze [1] depicts a member of the Steelyard, a group of German merchants who repre- sented the Hanseatic League in London during the reign of Henry VIII. What we can see in this portrait is a man with a sombre expres- sion, gazing out of the picture but past the viewer, wearing a well-made but unornamented costume and a plain flat cap. Gisze is surrounded by objects: the table, covered with a patterned cloth, is littered with account books, quill pens, and money boxes; the shelves are cluttered with instruments of measurement and cartography. The effect of Gisze’s workroom is paradoxical: it is chaotic, yet claustrophobic; a utilitarian space decorated with an incongruous (and precariously placed) flower in a glass vase. The setting and accoutrements in the room are painstakingly delineated, with the textured effects of the thick tablecloth contrasting with the grain of the wooden walls, the sheen of Gisze’s sleeve, the feathery waves of his hair, the copper and brass boxes, and the delicate glass of the vase. The subtle crafting of the detail con- trasts with the lack of attention to laws of perspective. The room seems to exist in an unreal space, and the profile of Gisze’s face is tilted at an impossible angle, allowing us to see the whole visage, rather than only a part of it. The pieces of paper that are seemingly left casually about the room contain legible writing. Several of them repeat Gisze’s name, including the letter in his hand addressed ‘to the excellent Gisze, in London, England’. An inscription on the back wall, written in a mixture of Greek and Latin, translates, ‘The countenance which you perceive is an accurate image of Gisze’, and it gives his age as 34, and the year of the portrait as 1532.1 In contrast to this documentary reference, another inscription, apparently carved on the wall itself behind Gisze’s left shoulder, is more oblique. It reads: ‘Nulla sine merore voluptas’ (‘No pleasure without sorrow’). This motto is signed by Gisze himself. Holbein’s portrait of Gisze gives the effect of providing a definitive image of a specific sixteenth-century London merchant in his work- place. We can gauge some idea of Gisze’s work from these objects: they suggest that he was literate and numerate, that he was busy and pros- perous, and that he conducted his business beyond the confines of Detail of 1 England. But even a cursory examination of the portrait provokes more 9 questions than it answers. Why did Holbein paint this particular mer- chant? To what extent is this representation faithful to the sitter’s likeness? Why use such a chaotic profusion of objects, when a simple set of scales and account books would have been ample to signal his trade? What do the tags on the wall signify? What was Gisze like—are we to see his character as melancholy or arrogant, neither, or both? What appears at first to be a virtuosic exercise in the representation of objects dissolves into ambiguity when we take into account the enigmatic demeanour of Gisze, the cluttered and oppressive surroundings, and 10 introduction 1 Hans Holbein the Younger the conspicuous reminder that life is filled with sorrow. Holbein’s por- George Gisze, 1532 trait of Gisze seems to evoke the literalism of a specific person in a Although associated with Basel, Holbein came to specific time, but its indeterminacy engages the imagination and pre- England twice—in 1526–8 vents a closed and definitive interpretation.