Portraiture in Motion: Edward Penny's "Marquis of Granby" and the Creation of a Public for English Art

Abstract

It is amazing how fond the English are of having their pictures drawn..1 When Jean Andre Rouquet voiced this opinion in 1753, he was repeating a belief that had long been held, and frequently lamented, by those concerned with the state of the visual arts in England. True, the popularity of portraiture in the British art market guaranteed steady employment for many native-born painters and sculptors; but it was widely agreed that this kind of work, as the product of mere mechanick skill, shed little if any honor on its numerous practitioners. Furthermore, face-painting represented an essentially selfish genre which catered to personal vanity, and as such its predominance reflected poorly on the nation as a whole. As one commentator noted in 1761, Portrait-painters will succeed in every country, but don't let them imagine that they owe their encouragement to their merit, or to the general good taste of the nation. No, no; it is to the vanity and self-love of their employers that they are chiefly obliged,-to passions which must ever be gratified, and for the indulgence of these persons are ever ready to open their purses to the irresistible flattery of portrait-painting. . . .It is chance or fashion, self-love or vanity, and not a love of the arts, or the true principles of taste in the people, that gives success to the artist.2 That self-love, or what today we might call self-interest, stood in the way of a serious and dignified artistic production, was a well-known English fact. But starting in 1760, with the advent of the annual exhibitions of works by contemporary painters and sculptors, this fact took on the dimensions of a highly visible and urgent problem. The exhibitions gave artists a long-sought opportunity to demonstrate that their cause was one