Reading Eighteenth-Century American Family Portraits: Social Images and Self-Images

Abstract

Combining close visual analysis of eighteenth-century American and British portraits with insight into social attitudes and practices, Margaretta Lovell extends our understanding of the group family portrait as a primary document in the history of American colonial culture. Lovell departs from familiar historical accounts of early American art that tend to attribute the greater naturalism and complexity of composition in many late eighteenth-century American group portraits to either individual artistic achievement or increased technical mastery among colonial painters as a group. Instead, she suggests a more complex reading of these images as embodiments of a variable social order in which evolving conceptions of gender and family relations generate new kinds of pictorial arrangements. Lovell argues that both the growing interest in family group (as opposed to individual) portraits and the shift from a rigidly patriarchal model of the family to one structured around animated children and motherhood as the center of domestic harmony signal an altered sense of values and beliefs about the nature of the family and the meaning of childhood. These patterns are traced through the gradual modification of portrait conventions that actively contributed to a new social consensus regarding gender and family dynamics.