Lara Perry, History's Beauties: Women and the National Portrait Gallery

摘要

The National Portrait Gallery (NPG) is a strange institution, half art gallery, half history lesson.It has never quite seemed to have a clear raison d'¨otre, and it is quite gratifying to find fromPerry's fascinating and thoughtful book that this has always been the case, or rather, that itsraison d'¨otre has been disputed and hijacked right from the start. It seems, from her analysis,that the strangeness comes from the fact that it was an aristocratic institution in a 'middle-class'age; that though Victorian, it drew on earlier ideas of 'the nation', and that the vision of theTrustees was disputed by curators and artists. The treatment of class is more sophisticated thanthis bald summary might suggest, and the determination to set the NPG within a longer timeframe than just that of the years studied is very valuable.The book aims to 'elaborate the role accorded to women in the Gallery's representationof the nation's history' (p. 1), and argues that the model of female virtue most often shown wasa civil one, drawing on eighteenth century and aristocratic ideals of womanhood, rather than theexpected Victorian 'angel in the house', or anything more modern. Portraits of suffragists suchas Lydia Becker were not accepted; neither was a group portrait including women's rightscampaigners Emily Davies and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. This may seem like a foregoneconclusion, but women did not in fact have to fit a particularly strict moral model in order to beincluded; they just had to stay away from the masculine realm of politics. The women whoseportraits made it into the NPG were authors, queens, and mistresses, by and large, but therewere quite a few of them. It is surprising that a Victorian institution could devote so much of itscollection of portraits of women to Restoration beauties, with their taint of decadence andimmorality; but, as Perry shows, women's importance to the nation rested largely in theirrelationship to kings - as wives, daughters, mothers and mistresses. Perry's analysis at timesis so subtle as to be hard to follow - she distinguishes between representations of 'good'Restoration royal mistresses and 'wanton' ones, on the basis of very small differences whichI am not convinced make a pattern. However, the strength of the book is its valuable emphasison the contested nature of all gender ideals, and of museum representation itself. This is animportant corrective to analyses which see museums and galleries as transmitting a coherentideology to an undifferentiated audience