The Marriage Portrait in 18th-Century England

This study examines the development and social function of the eighteenth-century English marriage portrait in the context of the complex popular debate about marriage ideals and practices that occurred throughout the period. It also analyzes the iconography of the marriage portrait in relation to traditional English models and to continental sources in portraiture, genre and allegory. Organized thematically, the thesis groups together images that share a pictorial strategy, and considers them in light of visual influences and relevant ideas about marriage, as described in periodicals, plays, fiction, satires and letters. For most of the eighteenth century, the financial and social status of the family superseded personal considerations in marriage among the elite in England, a preoccupation which appears in marriage portraits in the form of a marked preference for settings which place the couple in relation to an estate or a landscape garden. The settings in paintings by Devis, Hayman, Gainsborough and Romney are examined for their cultural currency as potent symbols of prestige and productivity and are interpreted in light of the predominant economic and dynastic ideals of marriage at the time. Marriage portraits also present behavioral paradigms. Conventional activities in these portraits draw on traditional sources in portraiture and genre, but modify them to articulate contemporary markers of class and to define distinctly separate roles for husband and wife, as disseminated in popular literature and conduct manuals. A small but significant group of equestrian double portraits signify landed privilege, but also connote propriety in marriage, a theme that underlies many of the portraits set in interiors by Zoffany, Cotes, Ramsay and others. The study also considers significant exceptions to the conventional marriage portrait, examining the individualistic approaches of Hogarth and Wright of Derby to the companionate portrait, and the development, by Mercier, Gainsborough and Reynolds, of the strolling couple as a special motif in English portraiture. Innovations in the marriage portrait that foreground personal interaction and affection over material situation parallel significant changes in popular attitudes about marriage, and also reflect the move to a more expressive purpose in general for portraiture in England after 1750