#18th century portraiture series

More consistently, we see representations of artists who are clearly not at work, but who are rather simply posing with the symbols of their respective specialities and tastes. Perhaps most prevalent was the over-the-shoulder tradition, which was a consequence of painting oneself using a reflecting glass. On the other side of the spectrum was a tradition of self-representation that emerged from Renaissance traditions of portraiture. Beer street presented its workers in an urban setting, but it used Virgilian tropes of pastoral labor - a world of well-fed workers in slightly frayed clothing who signify the virtue of work for a clientele that lives in a world quite apart. However, as in Boucher’s image, this is an idealized vision of labor. And in many ways, this is a rejection of continental fashions. Hogarth chooses to represent a sign painter as the embodiment of an English tradition.

William Hogarth’s Beer Street frames the artist in a slightly different way. But, unlike Collier’s work, the skull of the vanitas tradition has been replaced by a classical bust. The emphasis here is on the labor of the artist. For example, a self portrait by Francois Boucher shows him in his studio - his frayed clothes and attentiveness to his work are clearly of a different order than the Gawen Hamilton’s painting of Thornhill and his friends. This tradition did not disappear in the 18th century. There was a strong moralizing tone to these pieces, which often included symbolic elements from vanitas paintings. To some sense idealized, they nonetheless emphasized the artist as laborer. In the 17th-century, these paintings, such as this example by Edward Collier, often portrayed the artist in the studio.

However, there is a smaller body of work, which emerges from the Dutch genre painting tradition.

#18th century portraiture series

This is achieved through a series of conventions found in elite portraiture from the period. Among paintings and prints which portray artists, the overwhelming majority emphasize their gentlemanly status. Self representation was an important mode for late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century artists to work out the boundaries between labor and leisure.