Placing faces

The portrait and the English country house in the long eighteenth century

Edited by Gill Perry, Kate Retford, Jordan Vibert

Publication date:

31 October 2013

Length of book:

320 pages

Publisher

Manchester University Press

Dimensions:

240x170mm

ISBN-13: 9780719090394

This book explores the rich but understudied relationship between English country houses and the portraits they contain. It features essays by well-known scholars such as Alison Yarrington, Gill Perry, Kate Retford, Harriet Guest, Emma Barker and Desmond Shawe-Taylor. Works discussed include grand portraits, intimate pastels and imposing sculptures. Moving between residences as diverse as Stowe, Althorp Park, the Vache, Chatsworth, Knole and Windsor Castle, it unpicks the significance of various spaces – the closet, the gallery, the library – and the ways in which portraiture interacted with those environments. It explores questions around gender, investigating narratives of family and kinship in portraits of women as wives and daughters, but also as mistresses and celebrities. It also interrogates representations of military heroes in order to explore the wider, complex ties between these families, their houses, and imperial conflict.

This book will be essential reading for all those interested in eighteenth-century studies, especially for those studying portraiture and country houses.

Introduction: placing faces in the country house
Part 1: A walk around the house
1. The topography of the conversation piece: a walk around Wanstead – Kate Retford
2. Life in the library – Susie West
3. Marble, memory and theatre: portraiture and the sculpture gallery at Chatsworth – Alison Yarrington
PART 2: Women’s space?
4. Dirty dancing at Knole: portraits of Giovanna Baccelli and the performance of ‘Public Intimacy’ – Gill Perry
5. ‘Necessary, usefull, easy and delightfull’; the production and display of pastel portraits in the English country house – Ruth Kenny
6. Georgiana at Althorp: Spencer family portraits 1755–1783 – Emma Barker
PART 3: Imperial Designs
7. Commemorating Captain Cook in the country estate – Harriet Guest
8. Framing Sir Francis: Lady Anne Stanhope and the corruption of civic masculinity – Jordan Vibert
9. The Waterloo Chamber before the Battle of Waterloo – Desmond Shawe Taylor
Bibliography
Index

"the book provides valuable information that increases the reader's understanding of the crucial place portraits occupy in the political and familial role of the country house"

(Hugh Belsey, Art Newspaper, 01/07/2014)