UC San Diego

This dissertation explores British portrait ensembles, collecting practices and framing in the period of 1760-1790. It contains three case study chapters, each of which centers on an individual, their portrait ensemble, and display practices: Lord Chesterfield’s library portraits and their subsequent resurrection (1741), Horace Walpole’s extensive historical, literary, and aesthetic project Strawberry Hill (1760-1776), and finally, Hester Thrale’s short-lived collection of celebrity portraits in her salon. (1772-1781). Together, the chapters illustrate a deeper intersection of atypical portrait collections, collecting practices, literary biography, and criticism. The ways in which these portrait collectors frame their historical views, social contributions, and conversations is a point of contention against the emerging public sphere. Their acts of interiorizing the self as a rejection of increasingly modern life coexists in an uneasy way, as the eighteenth century becomes socially democratized. The Mid Georgian period of 1760-90 shows not just a continuation of the seventeenth-century Augustan cultural practices, but a questioning and reevaluation of those adopted values. The pervasiveness of the painted portrait since the Renaissance continues to this period. Portrait studies within art history often do not attempt to address the collective, nor the inherent signals or messages that the patron espoused in relation to the larger systems and aesthetic histories that preceded them. This departure point acts as an opportunity to reconfigure and redress the connections between art, cultural standing, and commodity in the Mid Georgian period. These factors would eventually go on to influence nineteenth century artistic production. This dissertation aims not only to give a more comprehensive (or individuated) account of portrait collections, their reception, but also their varied functions, ephemerality, and in some cases, their resuscitations as a way to examine paintings’ collection, framing and display in the eighteenth century.