Though a distinctive genre, scholarly treatment of seventeenth-century Dutch group portraits has been infrequent following Alois Riegl’s 1902 Das Holländische Gruppenporträt. Twentieth-century engagement with group portraits has largely focused either on the example of Rembrandt, as in the contributions by Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann (Rembrandt: The Nightwatch, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982) and Margaret Carroll (“Rembrandt’s Nightwatch and the Iconological Traditions of Military Company Portraiture in Amsterdam,” PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1976), or else considered the paintings as straightforward historical documents of the groups represented, as in the catalogue to the 1988 exhibition Schutters in Holland at the Frans Hals Museum. Harry Berger’s Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief offers an alternative interpretative model by considering their highly constructed nature, the role of posing in production and reception, and the often particularly masculine interpersonal relations registered by the group portraits, though he too centers his study on Rembrandt’s paintings.

Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief closely follows literary historian Berger’s initial foray into the visual arts, Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt Against the Italian Renaissance (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2000). Indeed, the first section of the book, nearly half of its total length, stands as a description, defense, and extension of the methodology Berger introduced in Fictions of the Pose. As in his earlier work, Berger probes group portraits through the lens of the act of posing. Following Erving Goffman and Stephen Greenblatt, as well as those who have applied their writings to the subject of Dutch art, such as David Smith (Masks of Wedlock: Seventeenth-Century Dutch Marriage Portraiture, Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982) and Perry Chapman (Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits: A Study of Seventeenth-Century Identity, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), Berger thoughtfully explores how sitters self-consciously adopted stances, gestures, and expressions when having their portraits painted. Berger differentiates between two types of posing—posing as if posing and posing as if not posing. The first category refers to conventional postures where a sitter is statically calm and reserved. In the latter, a sitter appears active and/or seemingly interrupted. In both cases, the portrait records the act of posing and the staging of a constructed identity. Through posing, the sitter conditions, if not controls, viewers’ responses by fashioning an image of her or himself as she or he wished to be seen. The artist then paints the sitter as she or he poses in order to convey an image to subsequent audiences. Berger proceeds further to make the arresting claim that portraits therefore are not so much images of individuals or groups in reality as they are images of sitters posing. Thus, Berger propels the study of portraiture beyond issues of identification, attribution, and dating by focusing attention on sitters’ motivations for, and their role in, crafting their image.

Applying his primacy of posing, or as he calls it the “posiographical imperative,” to group portraiture, Berger probes the tension between individual and collective identity. While Riegl identified internal coherence—figural unification, often through an imaginative narrative component—as the ideal of group portraiture in giving primacy to the corporate body represented, Berger provocatively questions whether unity and cohesion were actually the foremost criteria for a picture’s success. Instead, he argues that sitters attempted to individualize themselves through distinctive postures or gestures that disrupt the image of corporate unity. Berger suggests that group portraits therefore register the conflict between individuality and individual submission to collective groups. By raising the issue, Berger offers a new call to consider how the emergent individuality of early modernity operated within various religious, political, and social collectives.

After the extended discussion of posing and its application to group portraiture, Berger briefly turns in part 2 to address the cultural contexts in which these images were created. Chapter 7 sketches civic militias and the Dutch military as historical realities. Chapter 8 attempts to identify issues of masculine identity and situates them in relation to new notions of the family. As this material arrives 113 pages into the book, then receives a mere 18-page treatment, and moreover relies heavily on secondary sources, readers can easily determine that Berger’s concerns are not heavily invested in this arena. Indeed, the contexts traced in part 2 successfully illuminate neither the preceding methodological excursus nor the more directed reading of images that follows.

Part 3 analyzes domestic group portraits. Here, Berger devotes a short chapter each to pendants, double portraits, and family groups. As he acknowledges, Berger employs marital and familial imagery as gendered foils for the all-male civic guard groups and, to a lesser extent, the largely male boards of regents that dominate group portraiture in the seventeenth-century northern Netherlands. As such, part 3, like part 2, functions primarily as an introductory framing device for Berger’s extensive interrogation of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch (1642), which constitutes the fourth and final section of the book.

Berger begins his study of Rembrandt’s painting by reexamining the myth that The Night Watch was not appreciated by its initial audiences. While this myth has been debunked for some time, Berger sees the existence of the myth as evidence of the disruptive features of the picture. To be sure, when one reads the image closely, as Berger does, numerous elements strike a disjunctive chord: the pint-sized musketeer who fires a shot just over the heads of the guards at right, the spotlighted young girl wearing a dead fowl from her waist, the sharply defined shadow of Captain Cocq’s hand that appears suggestively over his lieutenant’s crotch, among others. Berger argues that modern interpretations of the picture that follow Riegl’s lead assume that the unusual features operate within some sort of narrative or allegorical schema that unifies the painting. Alternatively, Berger posits the disruptive features as intentional, even comedic.

Following Margaret Carroll (“Accidents Will Happen: The Case of The Nightwatch,” in Chong, Alan and Michael Zell, eds., Rethinking Rembrandt, Zwolle: Waanders, 2003, 91–105), Berger understands The Night Watch as parody. For example, three generic musketeers are not portraits of Cocq’s company but rather are drawn from Jacques de Gheyn’s illustrations for a 1607 firearms manual; yet they do not follow the model for proper practice. Instead, these figures demonstrate how not to handle, load, and fire a musket, which leads Berger to call The Night Watch an image of ineffectual guardsmanship. Carroll has proposed that such an ironic portrayal would have been appreciated by the militia officers, since the Amsterdam elite was then lobbying against military campaigns on the grounds that such events undermined their economic well-being. Berger agrees wholeheartedly with Carroll and even pushes the argument further, suggesting that the image is also a “parody of militant manliness.” By this Berger means that the indecorously humorous elements and the individualized posing of various figures operate as a send-up of a martial masculine ideal. Whether such an ideal actually existed for seventeenth-century Dutch viewers remains to be seen and is not addressed in the book.

Berger labels The Night Watch a “homosocial pastoral.” With the exception of the girl with the chicken, all the participants are men. Berger sees the men as playing soldiers rather than depicting actual militia activity, which by this point focused more on boisterous feasting of the type Frans Hals painted. In turn, Rembrandt’s portrayal offered his sitters a retreat from reality akin to those of traditional pastoral art and poetry. Against the backdrop of domestic imagery, such as marriage and family portraits, and the home as an increasingly feminized institution (according to Berger), Berger considers civic guard service and its representation as fictitiously active to be an escape from what awaited these men at home. In short, they practiced male bonding as a counter or a balance to the domestic, if not domesticated, portions of their existences. This assertion intrigues, but Berger supports his theory with too many potentially anachronistic suppositions to convince this reader of The Night Watch’s masculine escapism.

Though his full range of interpretations may not be entirely convincing, Berger’s framing of civic guard imagery in gendered terms is illuminating. Recent decades have seen a flourishing of scholarship on representations of women and the varied issues of feminine identity raised by these images, but an understanding of comparable issues of masculinity in Dutch art has lagged behind. Recent sessions at the annual conferences of The Renaissance Society of America and The College Art Association suggest that scholars are in the process of rectifying this discrepancy. For now, however, Berger’s discussion of civic guard portraiture as marking occasions and sites of male bonding as well as perhaps expressions of distinctly masculine identities is particularly welcome and deserves further consideration.

Similarly, Berger’s articulation that portraiture ultimately relies on the primacy of posing merits further scholarly investigation. That said, Berger grants sitters almost singular agency in crafting their images. Only briefly in his extended reading of The Night Watch does Berger consider Rembrandt’s role. Due to his extensive work in literary criticism, this position is not surprising, but it relegates artists to the act of merely painting what they saw. To discount or avoid the artist’s mediation is to neglect part of the complex interactions between sitter, artist, and viewer that occur with all portraits. Greater account of artistic agency need not necessarily shift attention from Berger’s “posiographical imperative,” however. Artists could have encouraged particular poses or even directed figures to adopt specific postures, gestures, and expressions to achieve desired ends.

One wishes that Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief were better illustrated. Sixteen pictures are reproduced in color, while another thirty-six appear in black and white. A greater number of color illustrations would enable readers to follow Berger’s clear, jargon-free, and imminently accessible close reading of the images more easily. Berger writes with verve, maintaining a brisk pace in sharing a truly innovative vision of seventeenth-century Dutch group portraiture that will prove provocative for specialists and non-specialists alike.