Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

‘Woman, that fairCopy’: gender and painting in English writing, 1650–1700

2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 25; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/02666280802048271

1943-2178

Will Pritchard,

Historical Art and Culture Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. – Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 38. 2. – Harry Berger, Jr., Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt Against the Italian Renaissance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 110. 3. – Ibid., p. 13. 4. – Ibid., p. 7. 5. – Ibid., pp. 116–17. 6. – Richard Wendorf, Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Painter in Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 4, 6. 7. – Julia Marciari Alexander, ‘Beauties, Bawds and Bravura: The Critical History of Restoration Portraits of Women’, in Painted Ladies: Women at the Court of Charles II, eds Catherine MacLeod and Julia Marciari Alexander (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2001), pp. 62–71. 8. – Ibid., p. 63. 9. – Berger describes those inequities as follows: ‘[P]hysiognomic assumptions based on some version of the outside/inside or body/soul linkage have always had an important ideological function in helping to naturalize the inequities of gender, rank or class, and race or ethnicity. So it seems likely that regardless of what people thought or believed, the credo was operative, was influential, at the level of the discourse networks that continuously transform exploitation into hierarchy. The standing cultural order that the male is both different from and superior to the female gets support from the standing order that their bodily differences index inalterable mental and psychic differences’ (Berger, Fictions, pp. 125–6). 10. – Other scholars have challenged the physiognomic view from a feminist perspective. In ‘Women in Frames: the gaze, the eye, the profile in Renaissance portraiture,’ Patricia Simons views portraits ‘as constructions of gender conventions, not as natural, neutral images’ (History Workshop: A Journal of Socialist and Feminist Historians 25 [Spring 1988], pp. 4–30, 5). Discussing a later century, Marcia Pointon similarly challenges ‘our sense that eighteenth‐century portraiture offers an unmediated view of eighteenth‐century society,’ preferring to see portraits as ‘unverifiable visual documents representing one party, commissioned and paid for (especially in the case of female subjects) by a second party, and produced by a third party’ (Marcia Pointon, Strategies for Showing: Women, Possession and Representation in English Visual Culture 1665–1800 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997], p. 176). 11. – Berger, Fictions, p. 119. 12. – [Thomas Jenner], A Book of Drawing, Limning, Washing or Colouring of Maps and Prints, and the Art of Painting… (London: Printed by M. Simmons for Thomas Jenner, 1652), p. 12. 13. – Roland Fréart, sieur de Chambray, An Idea of the Perfection of Painting… (Idée de la Perfection de la Peinture [1662]), trans. John Evelyn (London: Henry Herringman, 1668), p. A3v. 14. – Charles‐Alphonse Dufresnoy, De Arte Graphica: The Art of Painting… (L'art de Peinture [1668]), trans. John Dryden (London: J. Heptinstall for W. Rogers, 1695), p. 182. 15. – Berger, Fictions, p. 173. 16. – ‘Masks and Faces: Female Legibility in the Restoration Era’ (Eighteenth Century Life, 24:3 [Fall 2000], pp. 31–52) connects the period's concern with female legibility to various Restoration phenomena, among them the introduction of actresses to the public theaters, the rise of the new science and women's wearing of masks and cosmetics. I pursue these topics in greater detail in Outward Appearances: The Female Exterior in Restoration London (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2008). That book shares some sentences with this article, and I am grateful for permission to republish them here. 17. – Dufresnoy, De Arte, p. 32. Restoration portraiture, in the eyes of some, did not seek to ‘make the Soul visible.’ David Piper observes that ‘the Elizabethan painters seem sometimes to be searching for ‘the skull beneath the skin’ — for Lely, the skin sufficed’ (David Piper, The English Face [London: Thames & Hudson, 1957], p. 100). Julia Alexander similarly claims that ‘Restoration practice and understanding of Neoplatonism seem to have been transformed at this time, so that portraits came to evoke not a sitter's “inner beauty” but instead her lovely flesh’ (Alexander, ‘Beauties’, pp. 63–4). 18. – An example of this exhortation directed at women: ‘it is not sufficient for a Christian woman to be pure and chaste, but that she ought to appear what she is; that her Chastity, to be perfect, ought equally to shine forth and shew it self in her Mind, & in her Body; in her Thoughts, and in her Words; and to rebound, as I may so speak, upon her Actions, her Looks, her Behaviour, and her Apparel’ (Jacques Boileau, A Just and Seasonable Reprehension of Naked Breasts and Shoulders [L'abus des Nudités de Gorge, (1675)], trans. Edward Cooke [London: Jonathan Edwin, 1678], pp. 44–5). 19. – Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘counterfeit’, 20. – Charles Cotton, ‘To my Friend, Mr. Lely, on his Picture of the Excellently Virtuous Lady, the Lady Isabella Thynn’, in Poems of Charles Cotton 1630–1687, ed. John Beresford (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927), p. 275 (ll. 7–8). 21. – Joanna Woodall construes these matters somewhat differently (see Joanna Woodall, ‘Introduction’, in Portraiture: Facing the Subject, ed. Joanna Woodall [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997], pp. 1–25). I agree with her claims that dualism (‘the distinction between identity and the material body’ [10]) was a key feature of seventeenth‐century thought and portraiture and physiognomy countered dualism by providing ‘a supposedly scientific way of closing the gap which had opened up’ between ‘“external” likeness and “internal” identity’ (p. 11). I would modify her claims that ‘[t]he dualist subject was implicitly masculine’ and that women were denied ‘the true, fully realized humanity claimed by the dualist subject’ (p. 11). Women were dual, too, but their dualism tended to be depicted as deceit and disguise rather than as depth or ‘fully realized humanity’, It is not accurate, then, to say that ‘[q]uestions of likeness and authenticity … lost their urgency and significance’ (p. 11) when applied to women. If anything, these questions were more likely to be asked with suspicion of women. 22. – The phrase ‘English texts’ requires some clarification. The second half of the seventeenth century saw the publication in England of a significant number of manuals and treatises about painting, many of which plagiarized, translated, consolidated or extended earlier writings about painting. I have considered these works as belonging to this time and this place, even if they were not original to it. The technical aspects of these texts have been scrupulously detailed by M. Kirby Talley in Portrait Painting in England: Studies in the Technical Literature before 1700 (published privately by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1981); Luigi Salerno surveys their key aesthetic premises in ‘Seventeenth‐Century English Literature on Painting’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 14/3–4 (1951), pp. 234–58. 23. – Other scholars have posed versions of these questions. Elizabeth Cropper examines how ‘[i]n the theory and practice of Italian Renaissance painting … the portrayal of a beautiful woman also came to function as a synecdoche for the beauty of painting itself. In this context distinctions between the representation of beauty and the beauty represented are often elided, and, as a result, peculiar problems of identity and efficacy are attached to the interpretation of female portraiture’ (Elizabeth Cropper, ‘The Beauty of Woman: Problems in the Rhetoric of Renaissance Portraiture’, in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, eds Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986], pp. 175–90, 176). Discussing seventeenth‐century French texts, Jacqueline Lichtenstein elucidates the discourse that associates ‘a critique of women with a condemnation of makeup’ and traces the way in which ‘[t]hese figures and analogies … soon invaded the analysis of painting, where they served to denounce certain “corrupt” practices of pictorial representation: an indulgence in the refinements of the brush stroke and the immoderate pleasures of color’ (Jacqueline Lichtenstein, ‘Making Up Representation: The Risks of Femininity’, Representations, 20 [Fall 1987], pp. 77–87, 77, 79). 24. – Dufresnoy, De Arte, p. 153. 25. – J.H., ‘On My Ingenious Friends Most Excellent Piece’, in Alexander Browne, Ars Pictoria: or an Academy Treating of Drawing, Painting, Limning and Etching (London: J. Redmayne, 1669), ll. 5–6. 26. – [William Aglionby], ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, Painting Illustrated in Three Dialogues, Containing some Choice Observations upon the Art Together with the Lives of the Most Eminent Painters... (London: John Gain, 1685). 27. – Thomas Flatman, ‘On the noble Art of Painting’, in William Sanderson, Graphice: the Use of the Pen and Pensil, or, The Most Excellent Art of Painting (London: for Robert Crofts 1658), b1r, ll. 55–60. 28. – John Milton, Paradise Lost, in The Poetical Works of John Milton, 2 vols, ed. Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), vol. 1, p. 81 (Book 4, line 299). 29. – Joanna Woodall argues that portraiture helped enforce a similar gendered hierarchy: ‘Portraiture … articulated the patriarchal principle of genealogy upon which aristocratic ideology was built. The authorizing relationship between the living model and its imaged likeness was analogous to that between father and son, and processes of emulation presumed identity to be produced through resemblance to a potent prototype. The subject was situated within chains or hierarchies of resemblance leading to the origin of Nature herself: God’ (Woodall, ‘Introduction’, p. 3). 30. – The Batchellors Answer to the Maids Complaint… (London: J. Coniers, 1675), p. 4. 31. – Francis E. Dolan surveys the face‐painting debate, connecting it not to portraiture but to poetry. She describes how sixteenth‐ and seventeenth‐century authors ‘render poetry and face painting suspect as analogous effeminate enterprises’ (‘Taking the Pencil out of God's Hand: Art, Nature, and the Face‐Painting Debate in Early Modern England’, PMLA 108/2 [1993], pp. 224–39, 224). See also Lichtenstein, ‘Making Up’. 32. – Flatman, ‘On the noble Art’, ll. 35–38. 33. – John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, 6 vols, ed. E.S. de Beer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), vol. 4, p. 336. 34. – Buckredge, ‘An Essay Towards an English School of Painters’, p. 403. For more on Mary Beale see Elizabeth Walsh and Richard Jeffree, ‘The Excellent Mrs Mary Beale’ (London: Inner London Educational Authority, 1975) and Tabitha Barber, Mary Beale: Portrait of a Seventeenth‐Century Painter, Her Family and Her Studio (London: Geffrye Museum Trust, 1999). 35. – Walsh and Jeffree, Excellent, p. 13. 36. – Frances Borzello, Seeing Ourselves: Women's Self‐Portraits (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998), p. 64. Borzello says of Beale's earlier self‐portrait, ‘the artist sets herself apart from the two males in a manner that has nothing to do with a modest feminine acknowledgment of male superiority. Instead, the son and father are linked in an embrace, the father looks across at his wife, and she looks out to the spectator, pointing to herself with her index finger in a pose similar to that of the young Sofonisba Anguissola in the previous century. ‘I did this’, the artist says, ‘I am the one who deserves the respect’ (Borzello, Seeing, pp. 64–7). 37. – John Dryden, ‘To the Pious Memory of the Accomplisht Young LADY Mrs Anne Killigrew, Excellent in the two Sister‐Arts of Poësie, and Painting. An ODE’ (1686), in The Poems of John Dryden, 4 vols, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), vol. 1, p. 463 (ll. 129–30). 38. – Ibid., ll. 134–35. 39. – Ibid., ll. 157, 159, 149–52. 40. – Sanderson, Graphice, p. 20. 41. – Ibid., p. 20. He names several female painters to underscore his point; in addition to Mr[s]. Beale, he mentions ‘Mrs. Brooman’, ‘Mrs. Weimes’, and ‘Madam Caris, a Brabanne’ (p. 20). 42. – Ian Pears, The Discovery of Painting: The Growth of Interest in the Arts in England, 1680–1768 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 186. Pears observes that ‘the number of women in the upper ranks of society skilled in the use of the paintbrush and the pencil seems greatly to have exceeded the number of men. There were also fewer arguments against their learning such skills, as not only did they also have large tracts of time to fill up, there was also no suggestion in their case that it might be better spent on more worthwhile pursuits…. In contrast, there were very few women who were known as connoisseurs or as collectors’ (p. 187). 43. – Pepys, Diary, vol. 6, p. 174 [29 July 1665]. See also 21 August 1665: ‘I to my wife; and having first viewed her last piece of drawing since I saw her (which is seven or eight days), which pleases me beyond anything in the world, I to bed with great content’ (vol. 6, p. 200). 44. – Pepys, Diary, vol. 7, pp. 115–16 [3 May 1666]. 45. – William Congreve, The Way of the World [1700], in The Comedies of William Congreve, ed. Anthony G. Henderson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 352 (III.i.164–67). 46. – Ibid., pp. 351, 351–2. Andrew Marvell also links the two types of painting as ways of preserving decaying beauty. In ‘The Last Instructions to a Painter’ (c.1667) he directs the artist, ‘Paint Castlemaine in Colours that will hold, / Her, not her Picture, for she now grows old’ (Andrew Marvell, ‘The Last Instructions to a Painter’, The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, 2nd ed., 2 vols, ed. H.M. Margoliouth [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952], vol. 1, p. 143 (ll. 79–80). 47. – William Salmon, Polygraphice, or, The Art of Drawing, Engraving, Etching, Limning, Painting, Washing, Varnishing, Colouring, and Dying in Three Books… (London: E.T. and R.H. for Richard Jones, 1672), p. 288. 48. – See, for instance, Cotton's poem to Lely: ‘Nature, and Art are here at strife; / This Shadow comes so near the life, / Sit still (Dear Lely) th’ hast done that / Thy self must love, and wonder at’ (Cotton, ‘To my Friend, Mr. Lely’, ll. 1–4). 49. – ‘Poor barren Art, / how vainly dost thou strive, / To Rival Natures greater excellence! / While the admir'd Marina does survive, / Whose Beauty dazles the most daring sense. / See how the captiv'd Painters trembling hand / Wanders at large, while his amazed eyes / Dart looks of envy that he can't command / Colours so fair as on her cheeks arise’ (Thomas Duffett, ‘Marina sitting for her Picture’, in New Poems, Songs, Prologues and Epilogues [London: Nicholas Wolfe, 1676], p. 118 [ll. 1–8]). 50. – ‘Great Natures works we do contemn, / When on his [Greenhill's] Glorious Births we meditate: / The Face, and Eies more Darts receiv'd from him, / Then all the Charms she [Nature] can create’ (Aphra Behn, ‘On the Death of Mr. Grinhil, the Famous Painter’, in The Works of Aphra Behn, 7 vols, ed. Janet Todd [Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992], vol. 1, pp. 42–43 [ll. 27–30]). 51. – Sanderson, Graphice, p. 39. Sanderson uses the same pun two pages later, discussing a different painting: ‘Her forehead high, her cheeks so well complexion'd, as never (till now) she could indure (or need they) Painting’ (Sanderson, Graphice, p. 41). 52. – Ibid., p. 46. William Aglionby makes the same claim of the Greek painter, Apelles: ‘Apelles did so strongly take the Idea of those he Painted, that Physionomists and Fortune‐Tellers have often Practised their Art upon his Pictures with Success, foretelling what should befall the Persons for whom they were made’ ([Aglionby], Painting, p. 50). 53. – Berger, Fictions, p. 125. 54. – The OED defines this obsolete word as ‘(1) The quality, state, or fact of appearing or seeming’ and ‘(2) The quality of being apparent to the senses; visibility; apparentness’. 55. – Fréart de Chambray, Idea, pp. 3–4. 56. – Abraham Cowley, in his poem ‘To the Royal Society’, also draws a link between painting and the new science, using the encounter between painter and sitter as an analogue for the Royal Society's experimental method: ‘Who to the life an exact Piece would make,/ Must not from others Work a Copy take; / No, not from Rubens or Vandike; / Much less content himself to make it like / Th’ Idæas and the Images which lie / In his own Fancy, or his Memory. / No, he before his sight must place / The Natural and Living Face; / The real object must command / Each Judgment of his Eye, and Motion of his Hand’. (Abraham Cowley, ‘To the Royal Society’, Poems, ed. A.R. Waller [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905], p. 450 (ll. 79–88). 57. – [Aglionby], Painting, pp. a2v–a3r. 58. – Dufresnoy, De Arte, p. 36. 59. – Fréart de Chambray, Idea, p. A4r. 60. – Jacqueline Lichtenstein shows how metaphors contrasting a healthy, masculine art with an emasculated and effeminate art ‘played a decisive role in the quarrel that opposed the followers of Poussin, the defenders of drawing, to those of Rubens, the partisans of color, in seventeenth‐century France’ (Lichtenstein, ‘Making Up’, p. 79). 61. – This phrase appears in Odoardo Fialetti's Whole Art of Drawing, Painting, Limning, and Etching… (London: for Peter Stint and Simon Miller, 1660), used as a synecdoche for the discriminating viewer. He instructs the artist to ‘observe that one Joynt be not higher or lower then the other; otherwise the Figure will seem to be crooked and deformed and out of proportion to the judicious eye’ (Fialetti, Whole Art, p. 4). 62. – Fréart de Chambray, Idea, pp. 20–1. 63. – [Aglionby], ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, Painting. His book aims ‘to remedy in some measure, this Misfortune of so noble an Art’, 64. – Fréart de Chambray, Idea, p. 4. 65. – Sanderson, Graphice, p. 16. 66. – [Jacques Du Bosc], The Accomplish'd Woman [L'Honneste Femme (1633–36)], trans. Walter Montague, Esq. (London: Gabriel Bedell and Tho. Collins, 1656), p. 92. 67. – Brathwait, Gentlewoman, p. 301. 68. – Sanderson, Graphice, p. 17. 69. – Ibid., p. 17. 70. – [Aglionby], Painting, p. c1v. 71. – Sanderson, Graphice, p. 2. 72. – Count Anthony Hamilton, Memoirs of the Life of Count De Grammont: Containing, in Particular, the Amorous Intrigues of the Court of England in the Reign of King Charles II, trans. Abel Boyer (London: J. Round et al., 1714). 73. – Aphra Behn, The Rover, or The Banished Cavaliers, in Works, vol. 5, p. 471 (I.ii.202–04). Calling the image a ‘Posture’ evokes Pietro Aretino's oft‐mentioned series of pornographic prints. 74. – Behn elsewhere tempers this frank acknowledgement of the pornographic potential of portraiture. In her poem on John Greenhill, she claims that paintings — his paintings, at least — are less sexually provocative than actual bodies: ‘his Beauties do beget / In the inamour'd Soul a Vertuous Heat: / While Natures Grosser Pieces move, / In the course road of Common Love’ (Behn, Works, vol. 1, p. 43 [ll. 31–34]). 75. – Sanderson, Graphice, p. 27. 76. – Ibid., p. 27. 77. – Ibid., p. 37. 78. – Ibid., p. 37. 79. – Richard Head describes a woman who restrains her admirers by becoming portrait‐like: ‘Cornelia made no other return but in bewitching Language of her eyes, which (like the beauty of a good Picture) look'd with the same aspect on them all, and that too with a smileing and serene brow. Every one fancied himself to be the Person whom she would peculiarly admit for her servant’ (Richard Head, The Miss Display'd, with All her Wheedling Arts and Circumventions [London: ‘by the several booksellers’, 1675], pp. 81–2). 80. – [Aglionby], Painting, p. 21. 81. – Ibid., p. 21. 82. – Sanderson, Graphice, p. 5. 83. – Pepys, Diary, vol. 9, p. 119. A similar moment occurs the following year. On 11 April 1669, Pepys views a painting by Simon Verelst of a flower‐pot and calls it ‘the finest thing that ever I think I saw in my life – the drops of Dew hanging on the leaves, so as I was forced again and again to put my finger to it to feel whether my eyes were deceived or no…. [A] better picture I never saw in my whole life, and it is worth going twenty miles to see’ (Pepys, Diary, vol. 9, pp. 514–15). 84. – Edward Phillips, The Mysteries of Love & Eloquence, or, the Arts of Wooing and Complementing… (London: N. Brooks, 1658), p. 61 [Z7r]. 85. – ‘[T]he Copy they wrought by’ is something of a textual crux. Grammatically, ‘they’ should be the women (plural subject), but the meaning is obscure. The phrase would make more obvious sense if it read ‘the Copy he wrought by’, 86. – Dufresnoy, De Arte, p. 32.