A selection of reviews taken from the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies appears here. JECS reviews books, electronic resources, exhibitions and other items relevant to eighteenth-century studies. The Journal’s contents can be accessed online, although you will generally need to be a member of the Society or an individual or institutional subscriber to view the full text of reviews and articles. To suggest a book, exhibition or other product for review contact the Journal’s General Reviews Editor: Dr Matthew Grenby, School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE2 2QT, U.K.

The following reviews have free access online:

• A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England 1783-1846. By Boyd Hilton
• Handel's Operas 1726-1741. By Winton Dean
• Nicolas François de Neufchâteau, Paméla, ou La Vertu récompensée. Critical edition by Martial Poirson
• Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period. Tilar J. Mazzeo

On this page:

• Exhibition review: Citizens and Kings: Portraits in the Age of Revolution, I760-1830. Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1 February-20 April 2007 from Vol.30:Iss.3
  

Exhibition review: Citizens and Kings: Portraits in the Age of Revolution, I760-1830. Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1 February-20 April 2007. Catalogue: London. Royal Academy Publications. 2007. 431 p. £45 (hb). ISBN 1-9039-7323-6; 978-1- 9039- 7323-3

Reviewed by Shearer West, University of Birmingham

The thoughtful display of portraits in the Citizens and Kings exhibition at the Royal Academy offers a meta-narrative of European political and social change between 1760 and 1830. The visitor is greeted at the entrance to the exhibition by an intimidating array of state portraits - from Ingres’ Napoleon on his Imperial Throne (1806) to Reynolds’ George III and Queen Charlotte (1779-1780). The panopticonic effect of nine such massive objects in the RA’s daunting octagonal room dwarfs the visitor with the imposing gazes, elaborate formal robes and grandiloquent postures of the crowned heads of old Europe. Turning left to enter Room 2, we face Gilbert Stuart’s famous portrait of George Washington in a no less magnificent pose and setting, but whose accoutrements include stars and stripes and a copy of the American Constitution, rather than crowns and sceptres, and whose visage is more redolent of dollar bills than aristocratic supremacy.

The story told by the Citizen and Kings exhibition (and presented less coherently in the multi-authored catalogue accompanying the show) is of the transformation of an ancien régime of absolute monarchy and visual displays of power to a new world order in which the authority of ‘citizens’ (by which we should understand the middling sort in its broadest sense, rather than in terms of the democratically inflected post-revolutionary nomenclature) created new varieties of visual display signifying the changing priorities in identity politics and its artistic presentation. According to the late Robert Rosenblum, whose brainchild the exhibition was, the effect of the French Revolution and its aftermath ‘transform[ed] even kings and countesses into earthbound mortals’ (p.23).

This is a neat story, and one which contains some truth. To an extent, the thematic arrangement of the exhibition lends credibility to the idea that a representational coherence in ancien régime portraiture was eradicated by a more pluralist approach to taking a likeness. But this is not fully borne out by the chronology of the works on display. For example, if we compare Thomas Lawrence’s grandiloquent portrait of George IV, enveloped by the weight of his state robes and exhibiting a self-confident hauteur, to Joseph Wright of Derby’s businesswoman Sarah Clayton with her unprepossessing visage and discreet but expensive attire, we seem to be looking at a story about the prosperity of a down-to-earth, middle-class culture overtaking the posturing of an old order under threat. However, Sarah Clayton was painted in c.1769, 53 years before George IV’s state portrait (1822). so this is not a matter of a simple chronology.

If you disregard the rather muddled history that underlies the exhibition’s theme, this is an extraordinary visual feast that reveals much more about portraiture than about social class and political change. The works on display belie the commonly held notion that portraits are merely functional, documentary and utilitarian. In fact, variety dominates this exhibition and appears in the distinctions of pose, dress, setting, accoutrements, as well as in the differences in the physical size of the portraits themselves. On adjacent walls, for instance, are Greuze’s portrait of the financier and dilettante Claude Henri Watelet (1769, wearing a flamboyant silver silk coat and trousers declaring sumptuary vanity, and Henry Raeburn’s portrait of the natural philosopher James Hutton (c.1789-1790). whose austere brown attire matches his prim, cross-legged posture, severely cropped hair and stern expression. Wright of Derby’s Brooke Boothby (1781), reclining androgynously in a wooded landscape with his copy of Rousseau’s Confessions, could not be more dissimilar in pose, setting and format to James Barry’s extraordinary fantasy portrait of himself and Edmund Burke as characters in The Odyssey, painted only five years earlier. Idiosyncrasy, rather than convention, is the quality that characterises the portraits in this exhibition.

A partial explanation for this uninhibited variety does indeed lie in one of the exhibition’s key themes: during this period, more people could afford portraits, and artists in collaboration with publicity-seeking sitters therefore competed for a distinctiveness that would give their portraits the edge at public exhibitions or in the engraved versions sold in printshops. There is therefore some accuracy in Sebastien Allard’s assertion in the catalogue that ‘the cult of the great man had been succeeded by the cult of the individual’ (p.38). To put it a different way, Coleridge’s idea that this was an ‘age of personality’ actually denoted an age of celebrity, in which the fleeting fame of individuals created a demand for public expression of their distinctiveness.

Portraitists during this period had both Reynolds’ idea of the Grand Manner and Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy to contend with. While Reynolds insisted in his Discourses that portraiture could be elevated through idealisation and classical allusion, Lavater argued for representing the specific features of each individual in a ‘warts and all’ manner. These competing, and indeed opposing, theories of portraiture underlay many of the works in the exhibition. At one extreme is Reynolds’ Montgomery Sisters (1773) generalised into the Three Graces: on the other is David Martin’s Benjamin Franklin (1767), with receding hairline, rubicund features, furrowed brow and undisguised warts. However, most works on display represent an uneasy mix of the Grand Manner and Lavaterian particularity. If it were not for Lavater, we would probably not have Lawrence’s portrait of Pius VII (1819) slumping on his papal throne with a rheumy glance out of the picture, or Goya’s Ferdinand VII (c.1815), with his prominent Habsburg chin and suspicious stare. However, both of these portraits also accord with the Grand Manner in their size, style, traditional format and, in the case of Lawrence’s clear nod to Titian’s portrait of Paul III, in an allusion to old masters. Perhaps the most ambivalent mix of generalisation and particularity appears in Francois Rude’s sculpture of the artist David with the deforming cyst visible on his left cheek, cast in the incongruously idealised form of a classical bust.

This exhibition offers a great deal of inspiration for any historian interested in portraiture, as well as affording enormous visual pleasure. The catalogue, furthermore, makes up for some inconsistency in the thematic chapters by highly rigorous entries on the individual portraits. But the thematic thrust of the exhibition presents a misleading impression: the octagonal room with the crowned heads inaugurates the exhibition with a theatrical display of glory and power: whereas the final room gives a sense of sitters in dark, sombre clothes, posing formally or uncomfortably in their post-Revolutionary settings. The visual impact is of an ancien régime of imagination and confident authority being swept away, leaving rather a colourless and utilitarian world behind.