Monographic exhibitions, particularly those devoted to eighteenth-century portraits, are apt to suffer from two major drawbacks. The first is that exhibitions that focus on portraiture, in which there can necessarily only be a limited degree of variety, can easily amount to little more than a bewildering parade of faces, where biography and art history often jarringly compete. The second is that the featured artist’s work appears in a contextual vacuum, presented in solitary splendor, with little reference to the broader artistic and cultural climate that they inhabited.
Allan Ramsay: Portraits of the Enlightenment, a tercentenary exhibition shown at the Hunterian, University of Glasgow, managed to deftly avoid both the above pitfalls. Firstly, in the words of one of the curators, Mungo Campbell, the exhibition, was ‘extremely concentrated’, featuring a restricted yet judiciously selected range of the artist’s work. The lineup included painted portraits, which chart Ramsay’s artistic development and stylistic diversity, including famous examples such as the tartan-clad, flower-clutching Flora MacDonald (1749) and less well known portraits such as the muted and dignified pair Lord Stanhope and Lady Stanhope (1764). Highly finished preparatory drawings, which point to the artist’s exquisite draughtsmanship, and sketches, which elucidate his studies in Italy, rounded out the concise display. Uniquely, the exhibition also featured copies of Ramsay’s Dialogue on Taste (1762), and the political, constitutional and topical pamphlets, which increasingly occupied Ramsay towards the end of his career in the 1760s and 1770s.
The second pitfall, the unfortunate effect of decontextualisation, which arises from showing only one artist’s work, is strangely fitting in terms of both Ramsay’s career and his subsequent historiography. In the art historical literature, Ramsay often makes only a fleeting cameo appearance. Accounts of British portraiture of the later eighteenth century are dominated instead, to a large extent, by the towering figures of Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, or by the pervasive institutional framework of the Royal Academy, an institution with which Ramsay was conspicuously unconnected.
Ramsay’s liminal position in the existing literature, notwithstanding the voluminous and exhaustive research of his chief advocate, the late Alistair Smart, is partly attributable to the form his career took: Ramsay is, in other words, strangely difficult to situate in the context of his contemporaries, chiefly Sir Joshua Reynolds, who dominate the secondary literature as it has been written since the early twentieth century. Firstly, and most importantly, Ramsay did not publicly align himself with any of London’s emerging artistic institutions or incipient exhibition culture, which figure so prominently in accounts of eighteenth-century British art. In 1757 he was elected to the Society of Arts, but despite becoming the institution’s Vice President, he was conspicuously absent from its exhibitions. Similarly, Ramsay did not court publicity through the painting and exhibition of portraits of the actors, actresses, and courtesans that figure so highly in the output of his contemporaries. In fact the few instances of Ramsay’s portraiture being drawn into the public sphere of periodical and print culture were regrettable, unsolicited and uncomfortable episodes. Ramsay fell foul of the widespread ‘Scottophobia’ of the early 1760s, which festered under the unpopular premiership of John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute; his preferment over the English Joshua Reynolds for the execution of the coronation portraits of George III and Queen Charlotte inspired caustic jibes in anti-Bute literature. The famous Rousseau debacle, in which the friendship between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume was put under enormous strain, and in which Ramsay’s portrait of Rousseau and its engraved reproduction, which irked the testy philosophe, played a central role, may also have inspired Ramsay to shrink from the limelight.
Rather than court publicity, Ramsay assiduously cultivated a network of patrons, and consequently his work tended to reside in private collections, as much of it still does to this day. Compared to Reynolds, for example, few of his portraits were circulated in print form. At the height of his career, when he was no longer financially reliant on portrait painting, Ramsay’s production slowed down to a trickle and the overall impression is of an artist who stood aloof from the cut and thrust of the eighteenth-century portrait market. What strikes Ramsay’s viewers in comparison to the output of his contemporaries, are his portraits’ subdued, and reflective tenor, a trait that was particularly in evidence in the exhibition lineup, which eschewed examples of the artist’s more formal full-length mode. Ramsay portraits seem to invite us to look, to discern and to decipher; unlike the ‘exhibition pieces’ of his contemporaries they do not thrust themselves upon our notice with bravura lighting effects, compositional complexity and strident colouring. Ramsay’s half-length portrait of the stern looking and soberly clad Duke of Argyll (1749) is an apt example. The restricted palette of drab greys and browns, dark background, and feigned oval all conspire to throw the sitter’s expression-tautened face into sharp relief. The portrait reads as a statement of fact, rather than an invitation to marvel.
Allan Ramsay: Portraits of the Enlightenment and its excellent accompanying catalogue explore the familiar notion of the artist’s Enlightenment portraiture. Like his later compatriot, Sir Henry Raeburn, Ramsay’s portraiture is often recruited to ‘flesh out’ narratives of Enlightenment, and as a result his portraits of the male literati tend to predominate in accounts of his output. Portraits of the Enlightenment addressed this bias by devoting attention, and a considerable catalogue essay by Anne Dulau, ‘Women of Sense and Education’, to Ramsay’s female portraits, which Horace Walpole for one considered the artist’s forte. Ramsay’s Frances Boscawen (c. 1747-8), which took its place in the lineup, while an important example of Bluestocking portraiture, is however, an ungainly and stilted example. The generalized blue silk and hand brandishing a leaf containing berries read as generic and conventional. More compelling is Ramsay’s later portrait, Mary, Lady Hervey (1762), whose plump inclined face effectively counterpoints the sartorial splendour of her fur-edged silken dress with a benign and contemplative countenance, a deft depiction of mature femininity.
Despite the inherent difficulties in assessing portraits in terms of likeness when we have no other means of accurately gauging the sitter’s appearance, the portraits that were on display in the exhibition, mostly intimate, highly finished three-quarter or half lengths, at least demonstrate Ramsay’s vision of portraiture. In Ramsay’s portraits the subtle play of light over the features, the minute depiction of detail and an interest in elegantly poised and displayed hands take precedence over pomp and ostentatious painterly effects, classical allusion and old master quotation. Ramsay has traditionally been figured as a ‘painter of the Enlightenment’ yet, while the painting of Enlightenment heavyweights such as Hume and Rousseau cannot be construed as proof of an ideological affinity between artist and sitter, Ramsay’s restrained, meticulous style, broad scholarly interests and his ‘clubability’ impart, if only viscerally, an air of Enlightenment. His portraits of women – poised, subdued and elegantly turned out, rather than the pompous classicizing whole-lengths, which Reynolds exhibited at the Royal Academy – speak of an ideal of enlightened femininity; one which focused on the acquisition and cultivation of talent and refined sociability rather than the exhibition of glamour. While portraiture is not an unmediated way to access the past, a mirror in which we see the eighteenth century reflected, Ramsay’s portraiture has an uncanny aura of truth, a Barthesian ‘reality effect’, surrounding his sitters’ appearance, character, and milieu that we cannot possibly take at face value. Just as Ramsay’s portraits show their sitters to best advantage, this concentrated and scholarly exhibition showcased the work of an extraordinary portraitist in the best possible light.
Allan Ramsay: Portraits of the Enlightenment was at The Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow, from 13 September 2013 to 5 January 2014.