Hanging the Head

Gender and National Identity in David Allan's Small, Domestic and Conversation Paintings

“…While some art historians may have argued that conversation pieces represent a move towards informality in the depiction of family relations, and there is solid basis for that argument, they were in many ways deeply conservative, concerned with dynasty and 'the articulation of social and familial propriety'. 66 That the men and women, and boys and girls, who people Allan's works may (or may not) have rebelled against the gendered expectations of their time is not the point. Allan's works articulate his own contemporaneous attitudes and habits precisely because a conversation piece is a site where the prescriptive and descriptive fuse; real people are depicted acting out a society's gendered ideals.…”

Hair, Authenticity, and the Self-Made Macaroni

“…Wigs had always had barely latent sexual meanings; hair had long been associated with sexuality, and because wigs were made from women's hair, gender confusion was always possible. 9 Yet it was the macaroni wig that seemed to expose the gender play and artifice that was latent in the wig-wearing of more sober and virtuous men. A 1780 comedic "lecturer" on wigs, Edward Beetham, in discussing the gross "quantity of powder lavished upon" the macaroni wig, went on to claim that "grammarians are at a loss whether to rank them with the masculine or feminine, and therefore put them down as the Doubtful Gender."…”

A Faceless Society? Portraiture and the Politics of Display in Eighteenth‐century Rome

“…On the contrary, he most probably conceived the genre's duplicate roles and possibilities as both aesthetic and social objects. 7…”