ROBERT TITTLER. Portraits, Painters, and Publics in Provincial England, 1540-1640.

Abstract

This book is a welcome synthesis of Robert Tittler's research on a hitherto neglected dimension of civic society and public culture in England between the Reformation and the Civil Wars. Useful chapters on the more technical “art history” aspects of its topic will serve historians as a guide to the interpretation (often for other purposes) of individual paintings and portraits. Linking these aspects, the author delineates an expanding market for portraiture in a “critically important era … for the formation of a national, English culture in its diverse forms.” He asks “whether cultural conventions, often first received from abroad, were adjusted to fit the English scene, and then disseminated to the rest of the realm through the agency of London as England's one true metropolis” (pp. 7–8). A striking anecdote summarizes the author's general argument. In 1549 a “young Oxford dropout,” Thomas Whythorne, “looking for work as a music tutor in London, went into a painter's shop … looked at sundry portraits in various stages of completion, and bought one of a comely woman playing a lute. Then in the same shop he commissioned one of himself playing the lute.” The anecdote tells us that by 1549, in London, “there were at least some retail shops run by painters themselves where one could either commission an easel portrait or purchase one from stock.” Fifty years later a contemporary verse describes “a virtual open air market for such works along the Strand” (p. 77). Behind a movement that was evidently characteristic of the era, and that Tittler, while noting fifteenth-century anticipations, traces to Hans Holbein's English sojourns in 1526–1543, lay “a strikingly spirited competition for social status and legitimation amongst an increasingly affluent segment of the population.” Tittler describes the emergence of “a much wider [public] involvement, in both geographic and social terms, in portraiture than has conventionally been recognized” (pp. 13–15).