About the Project

Background to the PhD research project, Collecting and Connecting Portrait Sittings: A Re-evaluation of Portrait-Sitting Accounts in Enhancing Knowledge and Understanding of British Portraiture 1900-1960

It is often claimed that the twentieth century saw the death of ‘traditional’ portraiture in Britain. Supposedly, such portraiture was collaborative, functional and prescribed, whereas ‘modern’ portraiture was experimental and artist-led. While revisionist scholarship has challenged this binary by highlighting artists and artworks that are neither ‘traditional’ nor ‘modern’, there remains a gap in research into British portraiture 1900-1960 as a socially embedded practice. I address this gap by focusing on the portrait sitting: the interaction between artist, sitter and sometimes patron, from which portraits are produced. Textual accounts of sittings, which appear in sources including biographies and correspondence, give insight into these interactions. They show that participants used sittings to trade on each other’s status, exchange favours and repay debts.

To support systematic analysis of twentieth-century sittings, I develop a portrait-sitting ontology - a formal specification of the constitutive elements of sittings, and a portrait-sitting database - information about 60+ sittings, expressed using the ontology. I do so with reference to works in the National Portrait Gallery, since the gallery’s emphasis on noteworthy sitters is conducive to the documentation of rich interpersonal exchanges during sittings. An approach from my portrait-sitting database shifts attention away from stylistic differences between portraits and towards shared social and cultural ideas that underpin particular types of portrait production. In doing so, it supports new groupings of portraits and new periodisations of portraiture. The database is also itself a theory of portraiture insofar as it visualises a network of portrait-sitting exchanges (rather than a linear progression of artists and styles).

Overall, my thesis enhances knowledge of British portraiture 1900-1960 as a socially embedded practice. In doing so, it demonstrates both the value of the portrait sitting as a research object for the socio-historical study of portraiture, and that of a specifically digital approach to the sitting as such.