The Margins and Backgrounds of Portraits

Portraiture studies have traditionally focused on faces, clothing, and accessories as sites of creating and stabilizing identity within art. Layers of oil paint, pastel dust, and engraved ink articulate race, gender, class, and kinship networks on a scale ranging from jewelry miniatures to life-size replicas. Scholars have demonstrated how these representations surrogated for distant power, how collections and exhibitions were political statements, and how portrait iconoclasm could be broadly ideological rather than personal.

However, what happens behind and around the body? This facet of portraiture remains an open field. Our panel thus invites papers that examine the margins and backgrounds of portraits. These spaces vary from roundels or planes of color, to classicizing scenes or imaginary gardens, to draperies or architectural structures. As much as standardized formulas and techniques have developed for the face itself, the (back)ground has been curiously resistant to such strategies. This panel asks what do these diverse environments—a visualized “habitus,” to borrow from Bourdieu—contribute to the portrait? How might painterly surroundings trouble notions of identity and modernity? For group portraits and conversation pieces, how does setting provoke or dismiss relationality? Do specific display or exhibition contexts become extended backgrounds for portraits, especially with sculptures? Ultimately, how do the edges, however they might be defined, (re)frame our understanding of the key genre of portraiture? In addition to paying close attention to the borders and liminal spaces of portraiture as traditionally understood, we also welcome papers that trouble the definitions of portraiture itself through close attention to context.