Dangerous beauty: Painted canvases and painted faces in eighteenth-century Britain

In eighteenth-century Britain, "paint" referred not only to artists' materials, but also derogatively to make-up worn by fashionable society. The acts of applying paint to canvas and skin formed part of the contemporaneous understanding of "painting," defined as "to represent in colours. To lay colours on the face." The lexical links between paint, color and representation suggest that the act of painting portraits could easily be conflated with the act of applying make-up. The overlap in terminology extended to an overlap in materials.; Although the lexical and material overlap of artists and consumers materials was not unique to the eighteenth-century, their use as artificial embellishments was increasing in the 1750s because of their growing affordability, a result of England's burgeoning economy. According to discourses of the day, a thriving commerce was necessary to achieve a civilized society; conversely, it could be dangerous if it only served to propel more spending. Thus, England formulated a campaign for social and cultural refinement in an attempt to reconcile commerce with virtue. The cultivation of the arts and one's appearance fell under this rubric. The materials and the methods utilized in the cultivation of the arts and beauty were strikingly similar; a connection no scholar has made in the context of British art. Establishing the social and cultural history of "paint" and identifying the shared materials between artists and consumers forms the focus of part one of this dissertation.; As the century progressed, the similarities between painted canvases and painted faces became more visually apparent as portraits by fashionable painters grew more vivid in color keeping pace with the sitters own artificially enhanced exteriors. Part two of the dissertation chronologically tracks increasing colors on canvases and faces through case studies from the 1750s through the 1780s, and links these visual shifts to the highly mobile dialogue on beauty as well as the theoretical discourses on portraiture. Through this process, I reveal how the period's preoccupation with beauty facilitated social mobility, a subject intimately entangled with the ways in which discourses on beauty affected the practices of painting canvases and painting faces in eighteenth-century Britain.