Portraiture and Risk

Portraiture tends to be regarded as a conservative genre, its purposes being to reinforce the status quo, consolidate power and mitigate absence or death. Conversely this lecture considers ways in which portraits can disrupt social and aesthetic norms even within pre-modern systems of patronage. Risk-taking by sitters and artists is explored through a range of portraits, primarily from eighteenth-century France. At this time of Enlightenment the emergence of capitalist society coincided with new philosophical ideas on human agency.