Eighteenth-century England possessed a thriving portrait culture: likenesses of particular individuals exhibited at the Royal Academy or in the interiors of public institutions, such as guildhalls and charity foundations, as well as in private houses, were part of a network of visual communication that encompassed print-collecting, popular performance, and figurative acts of speech.

In this original and stimulating book, Marcia Pointon demonstrates how portraiture provided mechanisms both for constructing and accessing a national past and for controlling a present that appeared increasingly unruly. Through detailed historical analyses of particular aspects of portrait representation – images of criminals, the fashions and rituals around the masculine culture of hair and wigs, the gendering of childhood in celebrated paintings like Penelope with or 'Pinkie' – Pointon establishes the rich and complex ways in which portraiture reflected eighteenth-century England. How 'the head' was hung – whether it be a matter of the disposition of an actual body or the image of that body – was determined by social rules of posture and decorum, by artistic convention and commercial practice, and literally by the ways in which patrons chose to arrange particular portraits on walls – paintings that served ritual and symbolic as well as decorative functions.

Hanging the Head makes a major contribution to our understanding of portraiture as a cultural and political phenomenon in eighteenth-century Britain. It will be of great interest to art historians and to those concerned with the history of material culture, to museums specialists and to all concerned with literature, politics, and visual culture in eighteenth-century England.

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Author

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

Yale University Press

Print publication date January 1998 (out of print)

Print ISBN 9780300073683

EISBN 9780300249798

Illustrations 291

Print Status out of print

Publisher (out of print)

WorldCat

Google Books

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