For much of early modern history, the opportunity to be immortalized in a portrait was explicitly tied to social class: only landed elite and royalty had the money and power to commission such an endeavor. But in the second half of the 16th century, access began to widen to the urban middle class, including merchants, lawyers, physicians, clergy, writers, and musicians. As portraiture proliferated in English cities and towns, the middle class gained social visibility--not just for themselves as individuals, but for their entire class or industry. In Citizen Portrait, Tarnya Cooper examines the patronage and production of portraits in Tudor and Jacobean England, focusing on the motivations of those who chose to be painted and the impact of the resulting images. Highlighting the opposing, yet common, themes of piety and self-promotion, Cooper has revealed a fresh area of interest for scholars of early modern British art. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

The field covered by this volume includes the work and influence of foreign-born painters such as Holbein and Van Dyck as well as native masters from Gower and Milliard to Gainsborough, Stubbs, and Sandby. We can follow step by step the development and flowering of British painting, and can compare, for example, the work of the English Sir Joshua Reynolds with the Scottish Allan Ramsay. Portrait and landscape, history piece, miniature, watercolour, there is a record of them all. The text is both scholarly and readable and the illustrations include well known examples of British painting and others seldom or never before reproduced between the covers of a book. This is the fifth edition of this work, newly enhanced with colour illustrations.

"Conversely, Retford shows, there remained the requirement to promote traditional values of patriarchy and hierarchy, notably in the context of the country-house collection. Here, eighteenth-century portraits took their place in displays that emphasised ancestry and inherited virtue. However, in the later part of the century, the morals of the aristocracy were increasingly subject to political satire and caricature. Retford argues that some members of the nobility fought back with portraits that emphasised their domestic merits." ""The Art of Domestic Life" contributes a wealth of visual evidence to ongoing debates about the history of the family. It offers important insights into both innovations and traditions in the genre of family portraiture in this period, based on in-depth research into paintings, the lives of the sitters depicted and the domestic spaces in which those images were hung."--BOOK JACKET.