Painting's functions in the 18th Century

In 1735 William Hogarth painted this last of eight pictures in his great series "The Rake's Progress".  The Rake has wasted his fortune on gambling, whoring, drinking, and false friends; he has jilted his pregnant fiancee, been thrown into the Fleet Prison for debt, and ends up in this picture on the floor, sans everything, pox-ridden and mad, in Bedlam - The Bethlehem Hospital for the Insane, in London.  It's a morality picture; it shows the wages of sin and debauchery.  Hogarth was genuinely disgusted by the excesses of the metropolitan beau monde of the early 18th century and painted his series of images as a warning about the results of those excesses.

So in some ways this picture is not too different in intention from the devotional works of earlier centuries, although it's unlikely that it would ever find a home in a church.  Like the paintings in my last post this shows how to live a good life - or rather, in this case, what to avoid in order to live a good life.  It is, for most of us in the 21st Century, a more powerful image than a picture of the Holy Family, or a saint or two, no matter how much gold-leaf the latter may display.  But this is still a "morality picture" in a tradition which stretches from mediaeval church wall paintings through both Breugels, Goya, and such 20th century painters as C R W Nevinson, Paul Nash ("We Are Making A New World"), and even Picasso ("Guernica").

Another form of painting which changeded over the three hundred years between 1450 and 1750 is portraiture.  Always slightly questionable as a display of wealth and egoism, the only portraits with which the mediaeval peasant would have been familiar were those of the patrons of their local church who paid the artist to insert them into a corner of the altarpiece, perhaps next to an obscure saint or martyr, possibly in the belief that the painting would predict their stature in the afterlife.  But now, look at this fine portrait by Thomas Gainsborough from around 1786:

This is Mrs Richard Brinsley Sheridan.  As the famous soprano Elizabeth Linley, and a lifelong friend of Gainsborough, she had eloped with Sheridan, the playwright and politician twelve years before this portrait was painted.  It is a "speaking likeness" - she was instantly identifiable.  But Gainsborough has taken her out of the studio in which he painted her, and given her an invented rural setting.  It is an utterly romantic portrait, and the wild brush-strokes with which the Artist has built up the almost impressonistic background and the details of the costume give way to a careful and masterly rendering of Mrs Sheridan's face.  It is a wonderfully tender portrait.  But who was it for?  Only for family and friends, not for continuous public display.  This is private Art, not public.  You could say it is still devotional Art, but only in so far as it expresses the devotion of her husband - and of her friend the artist. The great shame is that this painting in the Mellon Collection in the USA is not on display.

Of course some portraits become famous over time, and have been adopted into the public consciousness.  But there is a distinction between the portrait for public consumption (think Queen Elizabeth, Horatio Nelson, T E Lawrence) and the portrait for private satisfaction, the "this is me, this is my Wife, this is my child" sort of likeness - of no great personal interest to anyone outside the sitter's circle.  Here are those public images:

The "Armada Portrait" attributed to George Gower is absolute Elizabethan propaganda.

The 1800 portrait of Nelson by Lemuel Abbott, already a National hero five years before Trafalgar.

The Augustus John portrait of T E Lawrence from 1919; taken up by a nation desperately in need of heroes who hadn't drowned in the mud of the Ypres Salient.

In contrast here's my favourite private portrait, William Chalmers-Bethune and Family painted by David Wilkie in 1804.

As a "warts and all" depicton this can hardly be beaten.  And yet such tenderness is in this family portrait; I see it as a triumphant artefact of the Enlightenment in Scotland, brilliant in its unflinching honesty.  Initially its appeal must have been limited to the family and friends of the Chalmers-Bethunes.  Now, we see it as a window on its period, fascinating precisely because of its humanity. 

(Originally published 21/09/2010)