| This dissertation examines British group family portraits in the eighteenth-century, an age when changing social mores redefined the family itself. With the birth of the modern industrial state in Britain, a new concept of the family evolved from the impermanence and formality of earlier times toward an ideal of intimate unity. Whereas public acceptance of this new family model occurred fairly early in the century, the reality of family life changed at a slower pace. In an age when arranged marriages, premature deaths, and “fictive kin” were still quite common, the abundant British family portraits painted between 1730 and 1790 consistently attest to the harmonious unity of family life. Families from across the social spectrum realized that fashioning themselves in accord with this ideal was highly desirable for a variety of reasons. Clothed in deceptively casual visual language, eighteenth-century British family portraits argued for dynastic continuity, increased status, or maintaining high social rank, the same concerns that preoccupied families long before the age of domestic sensibility.; Yet many of these concerns took on a new urgency in this period of increasingly fluid social structures when class distinctions became blurred and long-accepted claims of privilege were challenged—a situation that presented both dangers as well as unprecedented opportunities. The royal family, aristocrats, self-made men, and artists, I argue, all used family portraiture as a means of publicly affirming domestic unity in the pursuit of cultural credentials that would ultimately further their more traditional goals. Major artists, such as Reynolds, Gainsborough, and West, as well as minor masters, including Zoffany, Stubbs, and Devis, endeavored to satisfy these ambitions by producing highly contrived portraits designed to present the family in the most advantageous manner. A flourishing popular culture provided the context for the remaking of reputations that these affectionate family images represent. Thus, this dissertation presents a re-reading of eighteenth-century British family portraits as powerful documents of identity construction infused with the anxieties and hopes of a people of the cusp of the modern era. |
