The Metapictorial Portrait in Early Modern Britain, 1520-1620

My dissertation, “The Metapictorial Portrait in Early Modern Britain, 1520-1620,” investigates portrait paintings produced during a transformative historical period in which artistic techniques and tenets from the Continent converged with the pictorial traditions of a geographically peripheral region. I critically examine how English and émigré (primarily Netherlandish and German) artists forged eclectic and resourceful visual strategies during a time in which portraiture became the dominant genre in painting. By analyzing a variety of Tudor and Jacobean paintings, I argue that these portraits exhibit metapictoriality because they not only record the likenesses of the sitters but also problematize referential and reflexive concepts of art and representation. My framework of metapictoriality contributes to a changing scholarly understanding of Tudor and Jacobean portraiture by analyzing how artists grappled with complex issues of representation, art, and artifice. I draw attention to the reflexive qualities of these portraits by examining the artists’ conceptualizations of frames, surfaces, and spaces. I explore myriad devices such as textile motifs, heraldry, images of art objects, and embedded pictures by interrogating how these devices can be understood beyond iconographic readings through their negotiations of conceptual dichotomies such as surface/depth, word/image, and naturalism/abstraction. I delve into how expressions of intertextuality and referentiality can be detected in paintings. I also examine how portraits reveal the praxis of painting through a hybridity of techniques and conventions, the copying and repurposing of pre-existing visual sources, and engagement with other art forms and artistic media. My research reframes the scholarship on Tudor and Jacobean portraiture and asks if there are new ways to understand these portraits within the context of innovation, artistic reflexivity, and inter-artistic referentiality.