Connecting to People through Portraits

Something that students may observe in portraits from this era is that the image doesn’t look very realistic to them and perhaps looks different than other portraits they may have seen.The artists represented in the Fielding Collection are primarily self-taught or learned alongside others who may have had some formal training. They were not academically taught in an art school but did possess artistic skill. Unlike the formally trained artists of the time, such as John Singleton Copley or Gilbert Stuart, these “limners” or artisans, as they are now more frequently called, often traveled from place to place to earn a living painting portraits rather than establishing a studio in an urban setting. Works by these artists generally look flattened or planar, without the sense of realism and shading seen in more realistic portraits. They often have more rigid lines and frequently follow a limited color palette. But even like the more formal studio portraitists, many of the artisans had standard poses, props, and costumes that they used for their portraits.

To best “read” a portrait, it helps to know about the sitter’s identity and their accomplishments, and the contextual information about the portrait itself. This can be a lot harder to do because we don’t always have all the information we need.

Of all the stories an object can tell, how would you decide which stories are the most important?