Fashionable Portraits in Europe

Drawn primarily from the collection of the Cornell, Fashionable Portraits in Europe brings together works spanning five centuries and investigates the historical tradition of portraiture in Europe, its function and formats, and the clothes worn by the sitters. The way in which identity was defined and dictated by social norms and expectations is another aspect of interest in this exhibition. “Fashionable portraits of the past record and preserve not only their likenesses but also their most cherished attributes, be they fame, wealth, status, family, talent, or faith. They are objects with enormous rhetorical power that helped the sitters fashion themselves. Self-fashioning through portraiture is as subject to the sociocultural and religiopolitical circumstances of the time as the individuals’ personal backgrounds,” states Rangsook Yoon, Dale Montgomery Fellow at the Cornell and curator of the exhibition. The Portrait of Charles IX of France after François Clouet (ca. 1561), The Countess of Beaufort by Louis Michel van Loo (ca. 1760), and the Portrait of Harriet Gordon attributed to Thomas Lawrence (ca. 1820) are some of the works on display. Loans from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, Houston; and the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven augment the exhibition.