Although rulers and other powerful individuals characteristically com-
missioned portraits, portraiture was also the province of lower ranks of
society. The middle classes—as we now know them—used portraiture
to help them project a distinct identity; this level of society became
most closely associated with portraiture in the modern period. Scores
of books have been written about the so-called ‘rise of the middle class’
and what constitutes a middle-class identity. In this book, it is only
possible to give the most basic summary of this complex area. Histori-
ans have variously attributed the formation of a bourgeoisie, or a
middle class with its own particular characteristics and attributes, to
the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. However, it has
been debated whether or not we can talk about a middle class before the
sixteenth century, and there is some disagreement about what consti-
tuted this amorphous social group in any given period. Whatever
argument is adopted, it is usually agreed that in America and western
European countries by the end of the nineteenth century there was an
identifiable middle class or ‘bourgeoisie’, with a separate sense of iden-
tity from both the aristocracy and lower classes such as servants and the
poor. By the nineteenth century as well, portraiture was coupled with
the projection of this middle-class distinctiveness. As the art critic
Théodore Duret put it in 1867 , ‘The triumph of the art of the bour-
geoisie is the portrait.’
It is worth investigating how, when, and why
portraiture came to have this association.
Portraits of members of the middle ranks of society appear only
rarely in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but there are some ex-
amples, especially in northern European portraiture. Jan Van Eyck and Holbein are two artists who did not concentrate exclu-
sively on regal or aristocratic sitters, but nearly all portraiture of this
time was commissioned by those who could afford it and employed it
for purposes of establishing or reinforcing their status. In the following
centuries, northern Europe continued to be an important centre for
portraits of the middle social ranks. This was especially prevalent
during the seventeenth century when a plethora of portraits was pro-
duced, many of which were commissioned by citizens who had plenty
of worldly wealth and a bevy of excellent artists to choose from. Por-
traitists in this period usually avoided the large-scale full-frontal,
equestrian, and seated formats in favour of more varied and often infor-
mal compositions, a greater attention to qualities of expression and
gesture, and a more creative approach to the blemishes, foibles, and fal-
libilities of the human countenance. These tendencies became more
widespread by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when portrai-
ture in Europe and America was no longer the province of a few
privileged or powerful individuals, but had a much broader class profile,
including artisans and other working people. Associations between
class of the sitter and the style and emphasis of the portrait could be
used effectively. Copley’s portrait of Paul Revere, the American hero of
the War of Independence , does not depict him making his famous
midnight ride to warn Bostonians that the British were approaching,
but in his workshop practising his trade as a silversmith, holding a
teapot he has just completed. Copley chose a half-length format to rep-
resent Revere in his work clothes and with an evocative gesture of
contemplation. Although Revere is not shown in a heroic moment, he
is nevertheless associated with the anti-monarchical rebellion through
a pose and gesture that clearly contrast with the more formal portraiture
of monarchs. Copley’s superb handling of the textures of the teapot and
Revere’s work clothes give this portrait some affinity with the materials
and emphasis of Holbein’s portraits of London merchants [see 1 ].
Holbein’s paintings were not available for Copley to see in colonial
America, but it is interesting that both artists saw the mode of detailed
observation as most appropriate for their portraits of middle-class
sitters.
There are significant differences between portraits of these middle
ranks of people and those of rulers. If portraits of powerful individuals
had affinities with the moral, elevated qualities of history paintings, so
portraits of the middle classes could be indistinguishable from genre
painting or scenes of everyday life.
Such portraits shared with genre
painting an emphasis on communicative, even theatrical, expression
and gesture, and a focus on the trivial, familiar, or ordinary qualities of
the scene. Group compositions especially allow for both a contempo-
rary setting and a communication between the figures in the painting
and the viewer that is ordinarily characteristic of genre painting. The
light-hearted atmosphere of some portraits also contributes to the effect
of making the sitters seem less like symbolic objects and more like real
people. Such liberties were less often taken in portraits of rulers, even in
more domestic settings. The blurring between portraits of the middling
sort and genre painting was practised with finesse by the French
Impressionists, who often used the opportunity of painting their friends
and acquaintances to experiment with compositional formats and
modern-life gestures and expressions. Degas’s Place de la Concorde[46],
for example, bears little imprint of portrait traditions. The gestures are
indeterminate, and the bodies are cut off at peculiar angles. There is a
snapshot quality to this portrait that gives it an impromptu, everyday
feel, rather than being composed and regulated. Its outdoor setting
seems to relate more to the leafy park scenes of Impressionist urban
landscapes than to the typically interior spaces of formal portraiture.
Linda Nochlin has suggested that in works such as this, Degas was
updating portraiture by introducing the varied and expressive gestures
of modern life, which had replaced the limited and conventional lan-
guage of social gestures of the past.
It was in the period of Degas’s Place de la Concorde that portraiture
became firmly associated with a self-conscious bourgeoisie. This coin-
cided with social and political change in industrialized western Europe,
which led to the middle classes gaining more power and influence, as
the roles of monarchs were superseded by the authority of parliaments
and ministers.
However, although the iconic and talismanic aspects of
portraiture could be extolled as appropriate for rulers, portraits of the
middle class were frequently disparaged by writers and critics as being
empty symbols of vanity. This critical reaction began as early as the
sixteenth century with Lomazzo’s attack on the debasement of portraits
that represented merchants rather than heroes, but by the seventeenth
century such attacks were commonplace. For example, the French
writer Charles Sorel’s Description de l’île de portraiture(Description of the
Island of Portraiture , 1659 ) creates a futuristic dystopia inhabited by hair-
dressers, tailors, and professional portraitists. The idea here is that
human vanity has spread to all levels of society to the point where self-
image and self-presentation becomes more important than higher
values. This denigration of portraiture intensified as the middle classes
gained first greater wealth and power and then a distinct identity and
increasing political authority.
The eighteenth-century Swiss artist
Henry Fuseli expressed most cogently a prevailing distaste for a power-
ful but vain middle rank of society that felt the need to commission
portraits. Speaking in his capacity as Professor of Painting at the
English Royal Academy, Fuseli attacked a form of art practised by the
majority of his fellow Academicians:
Since liberty and commerce have more levelled the ranks of society, and more
equally diffused opulence, private importance has been increased . . . and hence
portrait-painting, which formerly was the exclusive property of princes, or a
tribute to beauty, prowess, genius, talent, and distinguished character, is now
become a kind of family calendar, engrossed by the mutual charities, of parents,
children, brothers, nephews, cousins and relatives of all colours.
This separate and identifiable class of sitters often called for a different
type or style of portraiture. Portraits of the middle classes could take on
the attributes of portraits of rulers, attempting by association to elevate
their sitters. Alternatively, sitters could declare their difference by com-
missioning portraits that stressed their physical imperfections (like
stoutness) or showed them in informal or intimate settings (similar to
genre).
One of the factors that contributed to the growth of bourgeois por-
traiture in the nineteenth century was the increasing specialization of
professionals in medicine, law, the military, education, and science.
Although some women managed to achieve this professional status
before the twentieth century, the majority of working professionals
were men. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, tech-
nological advances and political change gave such professionals an
unprecedented amount of public recognition, as well as greater author-
ity. Their public roles were defined by their jobs, but they were also
earning an income that classified them as part of the middle classes.
The development of what might be called occupational portraits can
be traced back to the associations between middle-class portraiture and
human vanity made in the sixteenth century. Lomazzo wrote of the
need for decorum in portraiture, by ensuring that soldiers and clerics
were depicted in appropriate dress, surrounded by the accoutrements of
their position.
This was easily achieved by artists who produced por-
traits of religious or military figures, as they could be shown wearing the
uniform of their trade. Although portraits of people who had specific
occupations were not new to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
it was in these periods that greater specialization in activities such as
medicine and law meant that portraits played an increasing role in insti-
tutional structures. Portraits were hung in the halls of learned societies,
or civic or educational institutions. Through signals that linked their
sitters to particular professions, portraits could thus become an affir-
mation of group identity. Frequently they projected a sombre image,
and they often included gesture, props, or poses that were redolent of
the superior wisdom, intelligence, or gravity attributed to their sitters.
While portraits of middle-class men in the nineteenth century fre-
quently showed them in their public, professional roles, portraits of
middle-class women tended to stress their beauty or their sense of
fashion. In this period middle-class women were less frequently
employed than men or women of the lower classes, and their associa-
tions with the domestic environment led them to be placed in these
settings more frequently than men. Such portraits often contained evi-
dence of affluence in the furnishings and dress of the sitters. It was this
dwelling on the specifics of clothes, furniture, and fashion in portraits
of middle-class women that led many to condemn such portraiture as
vulgar demonstrations of possessions.
However, portraits of middle-class sitters did not simply reflect a
society’s hierarchy, they helped give it visual expression. The large
number of portraits of professional men, and middle-class women in
sumptuous and fashionable domestic interiors, projected a sector of
society that was gaining power and influence. The nineteenth century
was a key period in the development and dissemination of this kind of
portraiture.
missioned portraits, portraiture was also the province of lower ranks of
society. The middle classes—as we now know them—used portraiture
to help them project a distinct identity; this level of society became
most closely associated with portraiture in the modern period. Scores
of books have been written about the so-called ‘rise of the middle class’
and what constitutes a middle-class identity. In this book, it is only
possible to give the most basic summary of this complex area. Histori-
ans have variously attributed the formation of a bourgeoisie, or a
middle class with its own particular characteristics and attributes, to
the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. However, it has
been debated whether or not we can talk about a middle class before the
sixteenth century, and there is some disagreement about what consti-
tuted this amorphous social group in any given period. Whatever
argument is adopted, it is usually agreed that in America and western
European countries by the end of the nineteenth century there was an
identifiable middle class or ‘bourgeoisie’, with a separate sense of iden-
tity from both the aristocracy and lower classes such as servants and the
poor. By the nineteenth century as well, portraiture was coupled with
the projection of this middle-class distinctiveness. As the art critic
Théodore Duret put it in 1867 , ‘The triumph of the art of the bour-
geoisie is the portrait.’
It is worth investigating how, when, and why
portraiture came to have this association.
Portraits of members of the middle ranks of society appear only
rarely in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but there are some ex-
amples, especially in northern European portraiture. Jan Van Eyck and Holbein are two artists who did not concentrate exclu-
sively on regal or aristocratic sitters, but nearly all portraiture of this
time was commissioned by those who could afford it and employed it
for purposes of establishing or reinforcing their status. In the following
centuries, northern Europe continued to be an important centre for
portraits of the middle social ranks. This was especially prevalent
during the seventeenth century when a plethora of portraits was pro-
duced, many of which were commissioned by citizens who had plenty
of worldly wealth and a bevy of excellent artists to choose from. Por-
traitists in this period usually avoided the large-scale full-frontal,
equestrian, and seated formats in favour of more varied and often infor-
mal compositions, a greater attention to qualities of expression and
gesture, and a more creative approach to the blemishes, foibles, and fal-
libilities of the human countenance. These tendencies became more
widespread by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when portrai-
ture in Europe and America was no longer the province of a few
privileged or powerful individuals, but had a much broader class profile,
including artisans and other working people. Associations between
class of the sitter and the style and emphasis of the portrait could be
used effectively. Copley’s portrait of Paul Revere, the American hero of
the War of Independence , does not depict him making his famous
midnight ride to warn Bostonians that the British were approaching,
but in his workshop practising his trade as a silversmith, holding a
teapot he has just completed. Copley chose a half-length format to rep-
resent Revere in his work clothes and with an evocative gesture of
contemplation. Although Revere is not shown in a heroic moment, he
is nevertheless associated with the anti-monarchical rebellion through
a pose and gesture that clearly contrast with the more formal portraiture
of monarchs. Copley’s superb handling of the textures of the teapot and
Revere’s work clothes give this portrait some affinity with the materials
and emphasis of Holbein’s portraits of London merchants [see 1 ].
Holbein’s paintings were not available for Copley to see in colonial
America, but it is interesting that both artists saw the mode of detailed
observation as most appropriate for their portraits of middle-class
sitters.
There are significant differences between portraits of these middle
ranks of people and those of rulers. If portraits of powerful individuals
had affinities with the moral, elevated qualities of history paintings, so
portraits of the middle classes could be indistinguishable from genre
painting or scenes of everyday life.
Such portraits shared with genre
painting an emphasis on communicative, even theatrical, expression
and gesture, and a focus on the trivial, familiar, or ordinary qualities of
the scene. Group compositions especially allow for both a contempo-
rary setting and a communication between the figures in the painting
and the viewer that is ordinarily characteristic of genre painting. The
light-hearted atmosphere of some portraits also contributes to the effect
of making the sitters seem less like symbolic objects and more like real
people. Such liberties were less often taken in portraits of rulers, even in
more domestic settings. The blurring between portraits of the middling
sort and genre painting was practised with finesse by the French
Impressionists, who often used the opportunity of painting their friends
and acquaintances to experiment with compositional formats and
modern-life gestures and expressions. Degas’s Place de la Concorde[46],
for example, bears little imprint of portrait traditions. The gestures are
indeterminate, and the bodies are cut off at peculiar angles. There is a
snapshot quality to this portrait that gives it an impromptu, everyday
feel, rather than being composed and regulated. Its outdoor setting
seems to relate more to the leafy park scenes of Impressionist urban
landscapes than to the typically interior spaces of formal portraiture.
Linda Nochlin has suggested that in works such as this, Degas was
updating portraiture by introducing the varied and expressive gestures
of modern life, which had replaced the limited and conventional lan-
guage of social gestures of the past.
It was in the period of Degas’s Place de la Concorde that portraiture
became firmly associated with a self-conscious bourgeoisie. This coin-
cided with social and political change in industrialized western Europe,
which led to the middle classes gaining more power and influence, as
the roles of monarchs were superseded by the authority of parliaments
and ministers.
However, although the iconic and talismanic aspects of
portraiture could be extolled as appropriate for rulers, portraits of the
middle class were frequently disparaged by writers and critics as being
empty symbols of vanity. This critical reaction began as early as the
sixteenth century with Lomazzo’s attack on the debasement of portraits
that represented merchants rather than heroes, but by the seventeenth
century such attacks were commonplace. For example, the French
writer Charles Sorel’s Description de l’île de portraiture(Description of the
Island of Portraiture , 1659 ) creates a futuristic dystopia inhabited by hair-
dressers, tailors, and professional portraitists. The idea here is that
human vanity has spread to all levels of society to the point where self-
image and self-presentation becomes more important than higher
values. This denigration of portraiture intensified as the middle classes
gained first greater wealth and power and then a distinct identity and
increasing political authority.
The eighteenth-century Swiss artist
Henry Fuseli expressed most cogently a prevailing distaste for a power-
ful but vain middle rank of society that felt the need to commission
portraits. Speaking in his capacity as Professor of Painting at the
English Royal Academy, Fuseli attacked a form of art practised by the
majority of his fellow Academicians:
Since liberty and commerce have more levelled the ranks of society, and more
equally diffused opulence, private importance has been increased . . . and hence
portrait-painting, which formerly was the exclusive property of princes, or a
tribute to beauty, prowess, genius, talent, and distinguished character, is now
become a kind of family calendar, engrossed by the mutual charities, of parents,
children, brothers, nephews, cousins and relatives of all colours.
This separate and identifiable class of sitters often called for a different
type or style of portraiture. Portraits of the middle classes could take on
the attributes of portraits of rulers, attempting by association to elevate
their sitters. Alternatively, sitters could declare their difference by com-
missioning portraits that stressed their physical imperfections (like
stoutness) or showed them in informal or intimate settings (similar to
genre).
One of the factors that contributed to the growth of bourgeois por-
traiture in the nineteenth century was the increasing specialization of
professionals in medicine, law, the military, education, and science.
Although some women managed to achieve this professional status
before the twentieth century, the majority of working professionals
were men. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, tech-
nological advances and political change gave such professionals an
unprecedented amount of public recognition, as well as greater author-
ity. Their public roles were defined by their jobs, but they were also
earning an income that classified them as part of the middle classes.
The development of what might be called occupational portraits can
be traced back to the associations between middle-class portraiture and
human vanity made in the sixteenth century. Lomazzo wrote of the
need for decorum in portraiture, by ensuring that soldiers and clerics
were depicted in appropriate dress, surrounded by the accoutrements of
their position.
This was easily achieved by artists who produced por-
traits of religious or military figures, as they could be shown wearing the
uniform of their trade. Although portraits of people who had specific
occupations were not new to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
it was in these periods that greater specialization in activities such as
medicine and law meant that portraits played an increasing role in insti-
tutional structures. Portraits were hung in the halls of learned societies,
or civic or educational institutions. Through signals that linked their
sitters to particular professions, portraits could thus become an affir-
mation of group identity. Frequently they projected a sombre image,
and they often included gesture, props, or poses that were redolent of
the superior wisdom, intelligence, or gravity attributed to their sitters.
While portraits of middle-class men in the nineteenth century fre-
quently showed them in their public, professional roles, portraits of
middle-class women tended to stress their beauty or their sense of
fashion. In this period middle-class women were less frequently
employed than men or women of the lower classes, and their associa-
tions with the domestic environment led them to be placed in these
settings more frequently than men. Such portraits often contained evi-
dence of affluence in the furnishings and dress of the sitters. It was this
dwelling on the specifics of clothes, furniture, and fashion in portraits
of middle-class women that led many to condemn such portraiture as
vulgar demonstrations of possessions.
However, portraits of middle-class sitters did not simply reflect a
society’s hierarchy, they helped give it visual expression. The large
number of portraits of professional men, and middle-class women in
sumptuous and fashionable domestic interiors, projected a sector of
society that was gaining power and influence. The nineteenth century
was a key period in the development and dissemination of this kind of
portraiture.
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