Insights on love, marriage and society in 18th century portraiture
Dr Kate Retford shares her insights on love, marriage and society in 18th century portraiture.
Dr Kate Retford, senior lecturer in the Department of History of Art at Birkbeck, will be giving a talk at the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas, in February as part of their series on Love and Marriage in 18th century portraiture. Dr. Retford will be one of five international speakers contributing to the series, courtesy of the Texas Fund for Curatorial Research. Her presentation will develop material from her book, The Art of Domestic Life: Family Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century England (2006).
Dr Retford has also written a catalogue essay ‘'Peculiarly happy at taking Likenesses": Zoffany and British Portraiture' and recorded an interview for the audio guide to accompany the Royal Academy of Arts’ Zoffany exhibition: Society Observed. Johan Zoffany was a German artist who practised in his native country, England, Italy and India. He was a prolific painter, whose wide-ranging work included portraiture, theatrical scenes, landscape and history painting. Dr. Retford’s contribution has been based on research conducted towards her new book on the eighteenth-century conversation piece – a genre to which Zoffany made a major contribution. These small-scale portraits depicted families, or groups of friends, engaged in sociable and leisured pastimes.
Dr. Retford teaches on the BA History of Art and MA History of Art programmes at Birkbeck, and is currently running an undergraduate module on ‘Portraiture in England in the Long Eighteenth Century’
[Image of Zoffany's portrait of The Gore Family with George, 3rd Earl Cowper (c. 1775), courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven]