Marcia Pointon’s scholarship over the past three decades on eighteenth-century British portraiture has shaped art-historical understanding of the genre in that period. Her most recent publication, Portrayal and the Search for Identity, compiles five essays that return to the topic while also examining materials across a wide chronological and geographic span. Defining portraiture as “a tool that makes possible the registering of identity in relation to the social” (11), Pointon’s essays strongly move to sever the implicit connection between the portrait image and its subject, a connection that too often structures interpretations of works in the genre. Her case studies, dizzying in their scope, address overlooked categories of portraits and aspects of those pictures that often go unnoticed, ranging from engraved frontispieces within historical biographies to images of slaves and privileged British schoolboys, and from accessories included in eighteenth-century portraits of fashionable dandies to symptoms of disease in twenty-first-century self-portraits. In both its theoretical mapping of the field and its broadening of the materials that can be considered within it, Portrayal and the Search for Identity is a welcome addition to the existing literature on this subject.

Pointon characterizes portraiture as “an unstable, de-stabilizing and potentially subversive art through which uncomfortable and unsettling convictions are negotiated” (9). In her first chapter, which focuses on nineteenth-century political portraits in a variety of media, she tests this definition against commonly reproduced images that often are treated as uncomplicated documents of such historical figures’ visual appearance. For example, she examines portraits of Habsburg Emperor Franz Joseph, works that can seem static and immutable (given that his characteristic mutton-chop whiskers and field marshal uniform remained unchanged from the 1880s onward). Pointon takes an unusual but effective approach to these works, using as her primary evidence Joseph Roth’s 1932 novel Radetzky March, an account of the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A character in Roth’s novel, just before entering into an early battle of the Great War, fixates on a painting of Emperor Franz Joseph displayed in his officers’ club. As he stares at the portrait, the latter transforms from an image of dependable and permanent leadership to a senile old man, doomed to decay alongside his crumbling empire. Though Pointon does not engage with the existing literature on Habsburg portraits, her inventive detour through Roth’s text usefully resuscitates these frequently dismissed works, and demonstrates the psychic instability that portraits can activate in the imaginations of their viewers.

From portraits of nineteenth-century political elites, Pointon turns in her second chapter to pictures of slaves, subjects whose representations strain the very parameters of the genre. If portraits are understood to affirm and document the individual identity of a subject, how should portraits of persons who were seen to have no identity outside of their relationship to an “owner” be considered? Much of the visual culture surrounding slavery centers on the horrors of the institution, rather than the unique identities of its subjects. Pointon offers a literature review that illuminates the difficulty of interpreting these images through current methodological frameworks. She also analyzes a series of author portraits of slaves or former slaves in which the subject’s current or past enslavement highlights questions of their agency and individuality. The engraved frontispiece to Phillis Wheatley’s 1773 Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, for example, depicts the author, who was formerly enslaved to a Boston family, in the act of signing her name at a small circular table. Pointon notes that this physical context, which for eighteenth-century women was a sign of leisure rather than labor, functioned to demonstrate the authenticity of Wheatley’s work as well as her assimilation into an Anglo-American culture. In this chapter, Pointon also explores the question of doubling, an activity in which “the viewer (in which we may include the artist) is drawn, through the recognition of a human Other, into at some level envisioning him/herself as duplicated or reproduced” (72). Given that most slave portraits were intended for non-slave audiences, such portraits would create a complicated dynamic for a viewer; unfortunately, Pointon does not support this line of inquiry with the same quality of visual evidence offered in the rest of the chapter.

The highlights of Portrayal are, perhaps not surprisingly, the subsequent two chapters on eighteenth-century portraits of British men, where Pointon’s ability to link subtle painted details to rich histories of material culture shines. For a chapter on portraits of male adolescents, Pointon’s primary evidence comes from Thomas Lawrence’s school-leaving portraits: portraits of boys presented to the headmaster upon their graduation, a practice especially popular at Eton. Here, the difficulties of depicting boys at the brink of adult life are solved through visual strategies that counter the uncertainties of androgyny to thereby assert the masculinity of the subjects. In Lawrence’s circa 1799 portrait of Andrew Reid, small details of crimson at the subject’s neck and groin become the basis for a web of cultural evidence demonstrating the maturity of the young man. These flashes of red indicate a hidden pocket in Reid’s breeches that was linked to his neck by a ribbon. This device was used to secure a seal, a popular Regency accessory that suggested both the agency and sensuality of its owner. Pointon extends this interpretation through an analysis of Lawrence’s erotic linking of the subject’s face and genitals through this judicious use of color. Her conclusion is strengthened by the association of the color crimson with battlefield violence, a connotation that works to secure Reid’s masculinity.

Pointon’s analysis of accessories continues into the next chapter, which focuses on seemingly trivial objects such as silk stockings and buttons as sites for the construction of masculine identity through the vehicle of the portrait. Stockings, for example, created an artificial skin, simultaneously concealing and revealing the shape of calves that would otherwise be exposed by popular breeched pants of the ubiquitous three-piece suit. The quality and cleanliness of the stockings also served as markers of class, and the stockings themselves may have been the determining element of entire ensembles—the item chosen first, around which everything else was built. This emphasis on stockings extended into portraiture, where Pointon argues that artists used leg coverings as tools to imaginatively interpret the character of their subjects. In Johann Zoffany’s 1780s portrait of Patrick Heatly, the crisp white stockings distinguish Heatly from his dusty Indian environment and suggest the purity of a marble statue. Pointon employs eighteenth-century literary puns to illuminate the sexual connotations of buttons; at the same time, she argues that the interest in buttons remained mainstream, as both respectable men and “macaronis” attended to this detail of their wardrobe. This linking of literary and visual evidence suggests that accessories were significant and versatile resources for artists as they worked to evoke the personal and social identities of their subjects.

Pointon’s final chapter turns to contemporary self-portraiture, specifically examples in which artists confront their own mortality. She frames the argument with Jacques Derrida’s description of the impossible statement, “I am dead”—impossible because it points to the future while remaining grammatically in the present. Within self-portraiture, Pointon argues, signifiers of sickness are proxies for this statement. Such motifs create contradictions between the living artist and the inevitability of death. Ian Breakwell’s Parasite and Host (2005) is Pointon’s most compelling example. In this photographic self-portrait, Breakwell depicts himself bare-chested with a crab-legged flower blooming over his left lung, a reference to the lung cancer that imminently would take his life. Though his eyes retain the spark of life, the position of the body and perspective of the viewer suggests that we are viewing his corpse lying within a coffin. Simultaneously alive yet also referencing his impending death, this portrait embodies the impossibility of “I am dead.”

The overarching themes of identity and mortality pull together the wide-ranging topics in this collection, though each chapter can stand alone. The broad literature review will prove useful to students of portraiture, but Pointon’s greatest contributions are the sensitive readings of male portraits by Lawrence and his peers. While these canvases were commissioned with the hope that they would confirm or amplify the elite status of their subjects, Pointon’s analysis reveals what she describes as “portrayal’s betrayal” (9). In her descriptions of these dashing portraits of young men, Pointon reveals a deep anxiety over inauthenticity within representation and the resistance of even the smallest fashion details to remain fixed in their meaning. These concerns are relevant to the recent portraits of her final chapter, but they also link the book to contemporary debates on forms of self-portraiture that are omnipresent in our digital age.