Tag: Britain

Danish-British Consort Portraiture, c.1600–1900. By Sara Ayres. London: Lund Humphries. 2023. pp. 176. £60.00 (hardback), ISBN 9781848225183. Review by Miriam al Jamil.

The title of this superbly illustrated book ostensibly indicates an overview of a specific group of royal portraits, produced over the course of three hundred years. An unusual focus on consorts who united the Danish and British royal families through marriage reveals the deep bonds between European dynasties, but also presents exemplary models for the author’s argument across otherwise broad and unmanageable periods of time. The book remains disciplined and centred, while at the same time offering a variety of evidence and new readings to make it a compelling and authoritative contribution to art history and visual culture. The chosen cover image, if unfamiliar to the reader, is assumed to represent one of these royal individuals in eighteenth-century military costume and with all the expected accoutrements of assertive might and power. However, it is soon revealed to encapsulate the far more complex narrative of the book. It subverts our expectations and challenges us to reassess what a portrait can tell us.

The 1770 portrait by Peder Als shows Caroline Matilda of Great Britain (1751–1775), the daughter of Frederick, Prince of Wales and Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, who was married to King Christian VII of Denmark. She wears the uniform of the Life Guards, with red coat, sash and spurs, and sword at her side, about to take her tricorn hat from the table and to stride out through an arched doorway to inspect a line of soldiers drawn to attention in the courtyard. Her story forms chapter four of the book. By then, the reader has followed the writer’s close readings of three other consort portraits and traced the postures, settings and iconography which connect them to tell a history of transformation in the art of embodying the royal image (p. 10). The portrayal of rank shifted into one based exclusively on gender, a shift which affects our ability to understand and interpret a portrait even today. The argument is original and intriguing, underscored by research references drawn from a broad range of visual culture and historical sources, in particular Walter Benjamin’s writings on the work of art in an age of technological reproducibility. The argument relies on detailed observation to find new connections. Of the five Danish royal consort subjects of this study, only one, Prince George of Denmark (1653–1708), is male, but the book aims to explore how the royal image “rhetorically incorporated the most functional, symbolic qualities of maleness and femaleness” (p.22). It centres on uncovering the “complex palimpsest” of royal portraiture as embodiment, centring on the 1617 Paul van Somer portrait of Anne of Denmark (Royal Collection Trust) as its starting point.

Anne’s full-length portrait incorporates elements of the traditional male hunting portrait, the horse, dogs and distant view of a royal palace and park, as part of her self-fashioning. It was importantly designed to “instruct and nurture” (p.44) her son Charles in the noble and princely arts necessary for kingship. Charles I’s dismounted equestrian portrait by Anthony van Dyck, dated to c.1635, can be construed as a pendant. The crooked elbow which features in these and later royal portraits is an important sign derived from emblem book symbols of female perfection. When added to examples of extended elbows in male portraits suggesting greater male heat and virility, a feature of the ancient four humours medical theory, it is clear that there was more gender fluidity and layered meaning in the royal portrait than we might have realised.

The book explores the construction of royal embodiment and its image through the physical nature of the medium. The discussion on Prince George of Denmark centres on his youthful Grand Tour which included England on its itinerary, and the shaping of a cultured and refined royal figure. The wax medium used for the clothed and wigged waxwork of the young prince by Antoine Benoist (undated), now in Rosenborg Palace, Copenhagen, indicates the pliable mind of the prince as he was prepared for a role of power. The advances in scientific and Cartesian methodology, while essential elements of a modern royal education, changed the nature of royal embodiment. Louisa (1724–1751), daughter of George II, married Crown Prince Frederick V of Denmark-Norway. Her death during a late stage in pregnancy was followed by an autopsy which her doctors described in detail, changing the sacral body into a pathological case study. As the author notes,“The artisanal epistemology that had been the province of the consort and the artist as they together crafted the contours of the royal body as a work of art now became the property of the man of medical sciences” (p.80). The work of the anatomist reinforced the changing balance of power and the female body was laid open to a newly authorised male gaze.

The final two chapters consolidate the narrative of change. The author offers a new interpretation of a scurrilous woodcut lampoon of Caroline Matilda, printed in 1772, which “heralds the hygienic exclusion of the influence of women from political, public life, regardless of their rank, and their exile en masse to the seclusion of the domestic sphere” (p.88). The crude woodcut shows the queen on horseback, alongside a nurse holding her baby, and a male figure looking out of a window. The queen is construed as an “unnatural, sexually incontinent woman” (p.87) in the tradition of world turned upside down satire. The author suggests that the nurse represents the king, “left holding the baby” (p.89), the offspring of the queen’s affair with Johann Friedrich Struensee, the king’s doctor and prime minister. The threat to the royal bloodline at the centre of the print and the failure of masculine authority is embodied in the subversive and unruly woman. However, the king approved of Caroline’s wearing male attire, so contrary to a simple reading of the satire, the author suggests “the queen’s transvestism [is] a performative fall into masculinity responding to the king’s desire”, and a form of “sympathetic magic of mimesis” which constitutes the “body of the absolute king for him” (p.100–101). This reading questions and complicates the satire, based on traditional forms of unruly female representation and possible interpretations. However, the final example of consort portraiture is taken from an age of reproduction by means of photography. The narrative was reinvented for a new audience with irreconcilable binary gendered expectations determining its reception.

Alexandra of Denmark (1844–1925) married Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, in 1863. Her elaborate reception in the capital “created a topological phantasmagoria within which ancient ceremony and industrial modernity comingled” (p.113). The rise of the carte de visite form popularised the image of the consort but also enabled comparisons and imitations in its mass availability and reproducibility. Following this, “fashion and the photographic image” defined the image of the consort and made her “a visual commodity”, a development that has ultimately made the represented female body “simultaneously object and abject” (p.128). Though beyond the scope of the book, clear contemporary examples can be found in the consorts of the current British royal family. The book does not falter in its structured and thorough exploration. Each chapter contributes new material and builds on its central premise of change over several centuries. However, while the title is precise, the breadth of the subject may not be anticipated by the browser in a library or book shop. But the book is a rewarding study as part of the Northern Lights book series, and the portraits examined cannot be seen in isolation again.

Miriam Al Jamil is on the WSG committee, chairs the Burney Society UK, and is Fine Arts editor for BSECS Criticks online reviews. She has published on women travel writers, Horace Mann and his circle in Florence and Rome, on Frances Burney, and on Eleanor Coade. There will be a chapter on Coade in the forthcoming WSG book.

Domestic Space in Britain, 1750–1840: Materiality, Sociability and Emotion. Freya Gowrley. Review by Penelope Cave

Domestic Space in Britain, 1750–1840: Materiality, Sociability and Emotion. Freya Gowrley. London; New York; Dublin: Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. Pp 266. 8 colour plates, and further illustrations. £80 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-5013-4336-0.

One should not assume that the pretty cottage ornée, on the cover of this book, is an eighteenth-century version of ‘Your Home made Perfect’. Freya Gowrley explores the notion of homely spaces with a depth of scholarship that is exceptional; it is a masterclass in close reading, as she provides ‘thick’ descriptions, going beyond the undoubted charm of her four visual case studies, to find and interpret, within each house, the rarefied history, context, and the particular emotions of its owner/s. In her excellent introduction, she outlines her intention to use a micro-historical methodology, one that interrogates large issues within the confined limits of her chosen material objects, in the wake of Clifford Geertz’s 1973 essay in The Interpretation of Cultures. Her opening image of a small, ceramic pastille burner, in the shape of a cottage, is a nice conceit to introduce the houses of the unconventional, heteronormative subjects that she will go on to study.

Her first section is entitled ‘Representation’, as she is particularly interested in how owners flaunted their homes and contents, and how others viewed and described what they encountered— letters and print are quoted as a crucial element in the dissemination of style and influence. The display of taste in conspicuous materiality, both in ownership and in its critical appreciation of contemporary culture, was thus made more widely available. Gowrley also uncovers interesting aspects of hospitality, sociability, gifting, tourism, letter-writing and identity formation, that are closely related to ownership of the country house, which are as significant in a study of the cottages and small houses presented here.

The four individual dwellings she has chosen, unique as each is in itself, connect to each other through their owners, whose exceptionally creative lives all side-stepped marital convention in their rural retirement, to lend a satisfying homogeneity to the collection. The first to be considered is Sandham Cottage, the ‘villakin’ at Sandown on the Isle of Wight that was owned by the former rake, radical journalist, and politician, John Wilkes, during the last decade of his life, from 1788–97, when his most valued relationship was with his daughter. Gowrley makes a very convincing case for the cause of a change in Wilkes’ previously wild reputation, owing much to the many written words about his expanded island property and its hospitality. Both private letters and contemporary publications inspired tourists to continue visiting, long after he died.

A la Ronde, near Exmouth in Devon, and Plas Newydd, Llangollen, in Wales are the case studies that form the second section of this book. Gowrley exemplifies the movement of both people and objects; tourism that commemorated personal travel in the first example, and the movement of objects in the form of gifts both incoming and outgoing in the second. A la Ronde was built from the specifications of two first cousins, Jane and Mary Parminter, after their extensive tour of the Continent from about 1784—91. Unlike Sandham Cottage, the unusual, sixteen-sided building has been conserved by the National Trust, but the alterations it underwent, after the deaths of the cousins (whose intention had been that it should pass only down the female line), by the Reverend Oswald Reichel, mean that the original thatched roof and limewashed exterior, so typical of the Devon vernacular, is no longer evident. Gowrley has chosen a building which I would describe as, itself, a ‘cabinet of curiosities’, that houses a highly distinctive collection of personal and, indeed, curious, meticulously displayed souvenirs of their European experience, memorials of loved family members, and feats of female craftwork that, as she says, “evoke memory, experience, and narrative, and therefore … function biographically” (106).

Plas Newydd is taken into consideration as the setting for its occupiers, Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, whose intimate friendship, domestic crafts and hospitality led to a generous gift exchange with their friends and visitors. As elsewhere, Gowrley airs diverse opinions on the nature of their relationship building a cultured friendship circle that included the Romantic poets, Wordsworth and Southey. All chapters are well-supplied with illustrations, such as images of the original cottage, gothicised, but boasting the original stone outer walls, and the gift from Anna Seward of Romney’s Serena. Missing, I felt, was the addition of one of the many later items, merchandised as ‘The Two Ladies of Llangollen’ in their matching top hats, which would have emphasised the lasting celebrity of their ‘shrine to friendship’.

In the third section of the book, subtitled ‘Ownership’, Gowrley uses Horace Walpole’s highly creative, gothic masterpiece, Strawberry Hill, to explore legacy, and what she has earlier described as “a gesture of queer heirlooming” (13). The reasons for his decision to leave this property to Anne Damer, the daughter of his cousin (and close friend at Eton), Henry Seymour Conway, substantiate Walpole’s manner of assembling and personalising the idiosyncratic collection, and continuing the private theatricals. We are persuaded that it could only have been similarly perpetuated by the related sculptress whose work was already represented at “his darling Strawberry”, as Mary Berry, another major legatee, described it (205). Walpole described Mary and Agnes Berry as his “sister wives” (211), who were not only left Little Strawberry (once owned by another Walpole friend, the actress, Kitty Clive), but also his literary estate for them to produce a new edition. Walpole thus extended his coterie of cultural and emotional ties, to ensure longevity; the lamentable sale of Strawberry Hill’s contents in 1842 was probably what he most dreaded.

The Conclusion completes the book with descriptions of a valedictory dinner party given by Anne Damer’s mother before leaving her family home of Park Place, and following her departure, noting the emotional and material loss to her friends, of emptying the house, and a later description of a ball held there by the new inhabitants. Gowrley emphasises the strength of identity formed by the change of ownership. She quotes the text from the Parminters’ pottery jug, which perfectly aligns the life of an earthy object to that of the human span and reiterates the value of evocative objects in bereavement. Gowrley’s intention to view the four houses and their owners, through an historical and contextual lens, is meticulously achieved in this richly fascinating study; the multi-layered, emotional sub-texts invested in material objects are sensitively extracted and interpreted, to display meaningful domestic spaces, three of which outlived their owners.  

Penelope Cave

Penelope Cave gained her PhD from the University of Southampton in 2014, with a thesis on music in the English country house, and she was accepted as an Attingham Scholar, before working as a music advisor for the National Trust. She was also a visiting scholar at Wolfson College, Oxford from 2018–20, and in addition to numerous conference papers, her essays appear in a number of recent and forthcoming academic publications.