InPortraiture, Richard Brilliant makes a point of distancing his approach from both the historian’s interest in “how individual portraits can be identified” and the collector’s preoccupation with attribution and dating. This is a modest but important methodological move because it allows him to confine his attention to the way “the oscillation between art object and human subject … gives portraits their extraordinary grasp on our imagination. Fundamental to portraits as a distinct genre … is the necessity of expressing … [the] intended relationship between the portrait image and the human original.” Thus his study concentrates on “the vital relationship...

In the study of portraiture that follows, we shall never encounter the eerie pitch, the spookiness, the theatricality, of the assault upon the interlocutor who, Keats imagines (correctly), will outlive him and suffer for it. Nevertheless, I conceive the emotion expressed in “This living hand” as the deeply repressed—or much overpainted—ground of feeling that undertones the more lustrous glazes of the motives for posing we attribute to portrait sitters. I begin here because I want to state in the starkest and most hyperbolical terms my sense that what matters most in the interpretation of portraiture is awareness of...

Different genres construct different spatial and temporal fictions of interaction between figures or models and observers. From now on I’ll call the figures in narrative genrescharactersin order to distinguish them from thesittersin portrait genres. The element of deferral constitutes the dilemma peculiar to sitters in the scenario I imagine for them. When painted figures engage the virtual observer in scenes we take to be narrative, we don’t consider them to be sitters aware of being looked at while posing for their pictures. The sitter’s situation differs from that of the characters in such narrative modes as...

Imagine an outdoor scene in which a large number of people are getting ready to be photographed. The photographer is encouraging them to settle down and arrange themselves in proper formal pose, a pose appropriate for The Big Happy Family the picture is supposed to represent. He waits patiently as they squeeze together or space out and try not to get in each other’s way, so that everyone will be in the picture with minimal overlap.

Next, imagine that while this is going on, the photographer has hidden his assistant in some bushes behind him. The assistant’s assignment is to...

In turning from my account of group portraits to Riegl’s inThe Group Portraiture of Holland, I plan to consider his approach to two topics already discussed in the preceding chapters: first, the problem of disaggregation; second, the relation of the concept of the participant viewer to my basic distinction between posing as if posing and posing as if not posing. I begin with an outline of his evolutionary scheme, which is organized along several overlapping sequences. The sequences are structured by changing relations both among sitters and between sitters and the observer: politico-formal relations of coordination and subordination, socioformal...

Under the pressure of the posographical imperative, the interaction of sitters comes to seem more contestatory. The painter of group portraits doesn’t merely acknowledge this conflict. He accentuates it. The real purpose of the fiction of collective posing is to pretend to overcome, but actually to feature, the separateness of the individual participants who vie for the observer’s attention. Painters depict sitters posing bothwitheach other andagainsteach other, sitters who vie with each other in their efforts to strike attitudes of social attentiveness—sitters, in short, whose pretense of collective posing is itself conspicuously competitive, By concentrating...

The Dutch Republic “was the creation of war and war was its primaryraison d’être.”¹ No one doubts this proposition. Nevertheless, it hasn’t kept scholars from questioning Dutch Republican manhood. In 1998 Gary Schwartz reported the complaint of J. B. Kist that “in the course of the nineteenth century Dutch history was demilitarized.” Schwartz noted that this tendency has persisted (“Huizinga wrote offhandedly of ‘the unwarlike character of the Dutch people’”) and that Kist was “waiting for the balance to be restored, for a new recognition that the United Provinces was a militaristic state.”² On this topic, historians have been...

“[W]omen give birth to babies, but men give birth to adult human beings.”¹ The phallus is artificial, and it may be that—like Pinocchio’s fabulous nose—the bigger it is, the more it lies. It signifies the desire for a power its bearer lacks and must try to control in the domestic perimeter dominated by woman’s productive and reproductive powers. It is through woman’s “natural” power that the domestic group reproduces itself, but the power structure of male corporate groups is not “naturally” reproduced. They cannot easily avail themselves of the body of reproductive practices, the practices of the reproductive...

“Pendant pairs were much more common in seventeenth-century Holland than double portraits (where a husband and wife are shown in the same painting). This may be because pendant portraits maintained the autonomy or individuality of both husband and wife.”¹ The explanation implies that wives got a better deal in pendants simply because they occupied their own picture space, and it also implies that they had enough input and influence to affect the production ratio. But David Smith has shown in his wonderfully illuminating “Rhetoric and Prose in Dutch Portraiture” that painters often treat the wife in a double portrait reasonably...

The pendants reproduced in figures 25 and 26 were painted by the Haarlem portraitist Johannes Verspronck and dated 1641 (his) and 1640 (hers). A popular genre in seventeenth-century Holland, pendants feature a limited repertory of poses or pose conventions that reflect—reassert, rather—the assumptions, laws, and interests of gender, class or rank, and status:

The paintings would have faced one another, perhaps on either side of a chimneypiece. Almost invariably, the woman’s portrait would hang at right, the man’s at left. From the perspective of the sitters, this convention placed the woman on the man’ssinister(left-hand) or lesser...

Pendants are a synecdoche of the nuclear household and family. In representing the domestic center, they not only emphasize its two normative features, hierarchy and companionship, but also exploit the possibilities for competition and resistance inherent in the conventions used to depict these features. But they are confined to the spousal couple. What happens when the couple are depicted as parents with children and other members of their household in family group portaits? More specifically, what happens in the rare instance in which pendants are part of a family portrait?²

The instance in question is a group portrait painted in...

The most famous and certainly the weirdest of all shooter portraits, the one that most fully tests the limits of disaggregation, was not originally known asThe Night Watch(frontispiece). It acquired that title in the late eighteenth century, partly because the picture had darkened and partly because by then night patrol was virtually the only function the militias still performed. In accordance with the standard practice of identifying militia portraits by their leaders, the title scholars prefer is something likePortrait of the Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq and Lieutenant William van Ruytenburgh. Having said this, I’ll continue...

In recent times, three major interpretive scenarios have been proposed, primarily in order to identify and assess the means by which Rembrandt unified the portrait, but also to reduce or neutralize the painting’s strangeness.

1. AlthoughThe Night Watchis a portrait, the conventions of portraiture are subordinated to those of the history genre in that the company is shown participating in a particular event: falling in at the Captain’s command and preparing to set out at night to guard the city gates or to greet a visiting dignitary.¹ A few years ago, for example, the curators of the Rijksmuseum put...

The tendency to allegorize is facilitated by the fact that the actions of the three shooters in the plane just behind the captain and lieutenant correspond roughly to movements depicted and described in Jacques de Gheyn’sWapenhandelinghe.¹ Since earlier group portraits allude to de Gheyn’s figures, it’s possible thatThe Night Watchcontains allusions to those allusions—allusions that may glance ironically at the bravado of pseudomilitary postures.² If Rembrandt’s musketeers evoke three of the manual’s illustrated positions, it seems relevant to wonder how the painter and his patrons evaluated poses that recall those de Gheyn designed primarily for the...

Captain Cocq performs his pose with authority, as if he knows it derives both from “the tradition of Amsterdam guard Captains” and from a predominantly aristocratic tradition of full-length individual portraits. But his performance only makes his relation to what goes on around and behind him more peculiar.¹ He seems unaware of the confusion behind him as he exhorts and leads his troops onward, while people run about in different directions, shoot off or clean their guns, stare dreamily at their banner, and, in general, pay him no attention whatsoever. According to Norbert Schneider, the confusion is what makes the...

Carroll resists the traditional view that unity was a positive value and that Rembrandt achieved it by “conveying the present-day activities of Amsterdam’s militia companies and at the same time recalling their historical role as armed and trained troops in service to the city and the republic.”¹ In particular, she mounts a compelling argument against the claim (quoted and discussed above) thatThe Night Watch“expressed forcefully the preparedness of the individual men represented and thereby of Amsterdam’s citizens to defend the independence of the city against any adversary, including the Dutch republic itself”—the claim, in short, that “Banning...

In the preceding paragraphs I have been discussing sitters, not the patrons they represent—have been trying to characterize sitters on the basis of their posing performances. But the questions with which this study began were oriented toward the hypothetical reactions of the patrons who commissioned the portrait and saw themselves represented in it. If interpretations that defend the unity ofThe Night Watchand sweep its disorder under the rug of allegory fail to persuade us, and if we premise that the patrons could see what we see, why should we thinkThe Night Watchgave them what they...

Schama no doubt remembers Paul Claudel’s description ofThe Night Watchas a crumbling sandbank when he adverts to the danger of its “Rabelaisian inclusiveness,” the rule-breaking conflation of genres that makes it “a noise, a brag, a street play…. But because it’s all that, it’s a picture that keeps threatening to disintegrate into incoherence, for it takes the chance that all the picture types that it wants to bring together will end up, not in agreement, but at war with each other. Instead of a sublime synthesis, there might be a dissonant rout.”¹

The appreciation and apprehension aroused by...

Riegl praises Rembrandt for the discipline with which he maintains the pattern of subordination that foregrounds the two officers and isolates them from the remainder of the company:

Large in stature, towering well above the others in the exact center of the painting, … [the captain] steps straight toward the viewer, his left hand extended authoritatively in the direction of the line of march, his head half-turned toward the lieutenant who is walking beside him on the right at a shorter pace. The lieutenant is receiving orders, his head held at a deferential angle, his eyes directed respectfully toward the...