Table Of ContentPORTR AYAL
AND THE SEARCH FOR IDENTITY
marcia pointon
portrayal
PORTR AYAL
AND THE SEARCH FOR IDENTITY
marcia pointon
reaktion books
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
33Great Sutton Street
London ec1v 0dx, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
Copyright © Marcia Pointon, 2013
This book has been published with the support of The Paul Mellon Centre
for Studies in British Art
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, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Printed and bound in China
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Pointon, Marcia R. Portrayal and the search for identity.
1. Portraits.
2. Identity (Psychology) in art.
I. Title II. Portrayal
704.9’42-dc23
isbn: 978 1 78023 041 2
Contents
Introduction 7
1
Portrait, Fact and Fiction 23
2
Slavery and the Possibilities of Portraiture 47
3
Adolescence, Sexuality and Colour in Portraiture:
Sir Thomas Lawrence 75
4
Accessories in Portraits: Stockings, Buttons
and the Construction of Masculinity in the
Eighteenth Century 121
5
The Skull in the Studio 181
References 233
SelectBibliography 258
Acknowledgements 263
Photo Acknowledgements 265
Index 267
1Marysa Dowling for the National Portrait Gallery, Teenage Mother and her Child, 2008.
Introduction
We are surrounded by portraits. Empty your pockets, or your
purse, and forms of pictorial identity spill out, from the cipher-
like profile of a ruler on a coin, postage stamp or bank note to
security passes and library cards, from photographs of family
and friends to the depiction of an author on the back of a
paperback novel. On billboards and tvscreens, in newspapers
and on computer monitors, imagery of human beings, and
especially of their faces, abounds. The largest category of images
accessible by Google Image are portraits of people, while common-
place terms like ‘in your face’, signifying someone or something
that crosses an unseen and unspoken boundary and confronts
you, and names like ‘Facebook’, testify to the pre-eminence in
our systems of communication of representations of real people
who have lived, or do live, as individuals and as collectives.
Above all it is the face that is understood to define portraiture,
and our ability to use advanced technologies to register faces
has huge import for the societies we live in: the Jarrow hunger
marchers, who walked from Tyneside in the north of England to
London in 1936to protest against unemployment and poverty,
were anonymous. The fact that they were defined as a mass,
a ‘crusade’, rather than as individual protestors, lent their cause
weight and conviction. In 2010students protesting in London
and other ukcities against the British government’s plans to
change radically the system of funding universities were individ-
ually identified by barrages of cameras and by police helicopters
with advanced photographic capabilities. Following riots in
London and other English cities in August 2011, the police
mounted huge screens in city centres on which were projected
7
Portrayal and the Search for Identity
cctvimages of those presumed to have participated in looting
and arson. The ‘public’ was invited to identify them. This capacity
for instant mass facial representation fundamentally changes the
relationship between the individual and the State: protestors can
be picked off individually and their cause, it can then be argued,
is not unified but disparate and characterized by individuals
rather than a common grievance and a collective will.
Facial recognition is understandably central to portraiture;
after all, the fact that (almost) everyone is born with the same
constituent parts of the face – nose, eyes, mouth – and yet no
two people look exactly alike is a conundrum at the heart of what
it is to be human. Reconstructive facial surgery may be cosmetic,
archaeological or forensic but its importance for people who have
been born with facial features so variant from the norm as to make
life difficult for them, or those who have suffered accidents,
indicates how vastly more hangs on a face than the ability to
breathe through your nose or eat and speak with your mouth.
Theologically ‘man’ is believed to have been made in God’s image,
and though the face is not especially privileged in early Christian
teaching the idea that the eyes are windows to the soul was firmly
entrenched by the Renaissance. One might have anticipated,
given that dnais now thedefining mechanism for individual
identity, that the face might have begun to diminish in cultural
value but quite the contrary is the case. And it seems that our
need to engage visually through facial encounters, whether with
ourselves or with others, remains central in all societies.
Yet the face and its replication in works of art is contingent
historically and perceptually. In an important piece of research
on legal debates about likeness and copyright in eighteenth- and
early nineteenth-century France, Katie Scott has drawn attention
to a case in which it was argued that accuracy in portraiture could
not be considered a breach of copyright unless the accessories
were of sufficient importance that they formed the composition,
thus dividing ‘into separate domains, the face and the accessories
or framing context’ and setting ‘the latter above the former as
a site of genius’.1Outside of a legal context, acts of portrayalare
bound up with anxieties about betrayal – about inauthentic
representations and about imagery that appears difficult to
8
