Skin and Bone: Surface and Substance in Anglo-Colonial Portraiture

Abstract

This visual essay takes an exploratory tour through certain aspects of portraiture in Britain, continental Europe, America, and Australia, from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. Investigating the physiognomies of politics and sensibility, class and race, across numerous specific historical circumstances and occurrences, it is very much driven by and dependent upon its pictorial content; on the flicker of images in the mind's eye of the author and in that of the viewer-auditor-reader. This essay considers the relationship between the coastal profile, the silhouette, and the phrenology head; between the theodolite, the pointing machine, and the craniometer; between the contour map, the cameo, and the death mask. It also ventures into the topology of portraiture, the geometries through which portraits and maps are presented: both quadrilateral frames and grids, and oval or circular medallions. By presenting materials which are functionally and materially diverse but clearly related in appearance, and time and place of origin, this essay suggests that the public and popular cultures of the British imperium spread a wider and weirder net than is conventionally supposed. Show more