New Book | Danish-British Consort Portraiture, c.1600–1900
From Lund Humphries:
Sara Ayres, Danish-British Consort Portraiture, c.1600–1900 (London: Lund Humphries, 2023), 176 pages, ISBN: 978-1848225183, £60 / $100.
This is the first book to address the long art history of dynastic marriage exchange between Denmark and Britain between 1600 and 1900. It explores an intersection of three themes trending in early modern studies: portraiture, gender, and the court as a centre of cultural exchange. This work re-evaluates the construction and staging of gender in Northern consort portraiture over a span of three hundred years, examining the development of the scientific and social paradigms inflecting consort portraiture and representation, with a view to excavating portrait images’ agency at the early modern moment of their conception and making. The consort’s liminal position between royal houses, territories, languages, and sometimes religion has often been equated with political weakness, but this new work argues that this position endowed the consort with a unique space for innovation in the representation of elite identity. As such, consort imagery drew upon gender as a generative resource of motifs and ideas. Each chapter is informed by new archival research and introduces the reader to little known, yet astonishing works of art. Collectively, they seek to trace a shift in practices of identity formation over time: the transition from an emphasis on rank to an increasingly binary emphasis on gender.
• The book builds on the recent interest around the quatercentenary in 2019 of Anna of Denmark’s death, and the burgeoning interest in Nordic history and art history.
• Anna of Denmark was born 12 December 1574; so the year 2024 will mark the 450th anniversary of that occasion.
• The tercentenary of Louise of Great Britain’s birth takes place in 2024.
• The centenary of Alexandra of Denmark’s death takes place in 2025.
Sara Ayres obtained her doctorate in Art History from Birkbeck College, University of London, in 2012. She has published in the Oxford Art Journal, the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, and the Court Historian. Between 2016 and 2018 she held the position of the Queen Margarethe II Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Recent publications include the co-edited volume Sculpture and the Nordic Region (2017).
C O N T E N T S
Acknowledgements
Figure List
Introduction
1 Anna of Denmark (1574–1619)
2 Prince George of Denmark (1653–1708)
3 Louisa of Great Britain (1724–1751)
4 Caroline Matilda of Great Britain (1751–1775)
5 Alexandra of Denmark (1844–1925)
Bibliography
Endnotes
Call for Papers | Women, Art, and Early Modern Global Courts
From ArtHist.net:
Challenging Empire: Women, Art, and the Global Early Modern World, ca. 1400–1750
The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, and the Birmingham Museum of Art, 1–2 March 2024
Organized by Tanja Jones, Doris Sung, and Rebecca Teague
Proposals due by 1 September 2023
The symposium Challenging Empire: Women, Art, and the Global Early Modern World, part of the project Global Makers: Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts of Europe and Asia, aims to extend and expand knowledge of cultural production by and for early modern women—particularly those associated with courts—on a global scale. While numerous conferences, symposia, and resulting publications in the past several decades have addressed women as producers, consumers, and subjects of European art during the early modern period (ca. 1400–1750), less consideration has been given to women’s roles in the courts—particularly as informed by the steadily increasing cross-cultural interactions (i.e. between Europe and Asia, the Americas, Africa, etc.) that characterized the period. This symposium aims to address this lacuna whilst simultaneously de-centering the traditional Euro-centric model of study in the analysis of women’s cultural production, presentation, and consumption surrounding courts and empires (institutions associated with ruling power). The goal is to encourage a more equitable view of early modern women’s experiences of and with art globally, across traditionally held national and continental boundaries.
We invite paper submissions from scholars (including advanced graduate students) whose work addresses topics including, but not limited to:
Early modern (court) women’s roles in
• transcultural artistic production, movement, and collecting across geographic or temporal spaces (across or between Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas)
• moments of cultural exchange, intersection, or reciprocity
Those that, in relation to early modern women’s roles in artistic production
• problematize or challenge long-held notions surrounding early modern gender, ‘court’, and ’empire’ as hegemonic and culturally conditioned concepts; encourage consideration of cultural differences in the definition, production, or reception of visual and material culture
• address issues of colonialism, imperialism, or patriarchy
• approach concepts of the body, exoticism, or gender performance across cultures
• address the movement of people, ideas, or objects
Those that incorporate emerging methods in the study of early modern (esp. court) women and art on a global scale (including digital humanities tools such as mapping and social network analysis)
While identifying the ‘early modern’ as the period from around 1400 to 1750, we recognize this datation as a Euro-centric, historiographic concept; therefore, we encourage papers addressing the central themes of the symposium, but with dates that may deviate slightly, especially those problematizing epochal differences in varied geographical and cultural contexts in Asia, Europe, Africa, the Americas, and beyond. Following the conference, a selection of papers will be chosen by the organizers for inclusion in a proposed edited volume. A limited number of travel subsidies will also be available for advanced graduate student presenters. This symposium is made possible by the generous support of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the College of Arts and Sciences at The University of Alabama, and the Alabama Digital Humanities Center.
To submit a proposal, please send the following in one PDF file to the symposium organizers by Friday, 1 September 2023:
• Paper title
• Paper abstract (250-word maximum)
• CV with your full name, institutional affiliation (if applicable), title, and email address
Organizers
Dr. Tanja L. Jones, The University of Alabama, tljones10@ua.edu
Dr. Doris Sung, The University of Alabama, dhsung@ua.edu
Rebecca Teague, PhD student, University of California, Riverside, rteag001@ucr.edu
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