Keywords:
Modelling, database methodology, social art history
Abstract:
My research approaches twentieth-century portraiture through the experience of the portrait-sitting: a transaction between artist, sitter and sometimes patron from which portraits are (typically) produced. Participants’ accounts of portrait-sittings are important to art history as they offer (subjective) insights into portraiture as a social practice, which entails negotiations of the gaze, subjectivity and agency, and often an exchange of money. Precedents for studying this material include The Open University’s Reading and Listening Experience Databases, which use linked data methods to collate individuals’ experiential feedback of reading and listening respectively. They promote a new approach to research, grounded in personal experiences (Brown et al. 2015). This paper will discuss how a comparable methodology might be used to understand and represent the multi-faceted portrait-sitting, and re-evaluate experiential accounts as important art-historical data (that is nevertheless part of a wider cultural history). More specifically, and based on my research to date, it discusses modelling as a way of identifying and formally representing the constitutive elements of sitting experiences. By working empirically and iteratively from 50-100 accounts of sittings for portraits in the National Portrait Gallery, 1900-1960, I am modelling the portrait-sitting experience (an unprecedented archival object) from the ‘bottom up’. The particularity of the data to this period and the Gallery (and their attendant understandings of the portrait and the individual in society) is more important than the size of the population, as my aim is not to describe a ‘universal sitting experience’ but produce a historically-grounded model that balances usability with the rich complexity of this subjective material. I will argue that this methodology supports an approach to portraiture from the 'social art history', inasmuch as a database of portrait-sitting accounts can be used to both describe the contingency of portrait production on historically-specific social and cultural factors, and capture idiosyncrasies.