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Our photo dating expert, Jayne Shrimpton, analyses your family photos.
Clayton Veale sent us his family portraits and asked:
‘I don’t know if you can date portraits? I was wondering if you could please estimate the date of these portraits from style of dress, etc. This couple probably lived in North Devon, near Okehampton.’
Click to enlarge
Jayne says:
‘The word ‘portrait’ means a likeness of a real person, so strictly it encompasses depictions of our ancestors in all media, including photographs, paintings, drawings, sculpture or silhouettes, yet popularly the term ‘portrait’ is used to describe artworks, like your two paintings. Commissioning a hand-crafted portrait by a professional artist was an expensive undertaking in the past, as it still is today, and so relatively few of our forebears were portrayed in such pictures.
Formal portraiture, once the preserve of royalty, aristocracy and the famous, became increasingly popular from around the mid-1700s onwards, when members of the emerging professions, first-generation industrialists and so on joined their social superiors in having their likeness captured for posterity. Demand rose more sharply during the later 18th and early 19th centuries, as the growing middle classes – those with money and social aspirations – began to follow this trend. Consequently, most artworks surviving in today’s family collections date from between around the 1780s and the 1840s, until photography became firmly established as a new portrait medium. Earlier ancestral portraits like your two paintings are rather rare, and are very special family heirlooms.
Click to enlarge
These two portraits are accomplished half-length oil paintings on canvas – costly and prestigious framed pictures that only the wealthy could have afforded. Commonly there are no inscriptions giving names or dates and this means that for dating and identification we only have the visual image to go on, chiefly the details of the subjects’ (or sitters’) dress.
The female figure is portrayed in the fashionable manner of the 1710s and 1720s – both in terms of the general style of her portrait and her appearance, characterised by long tresses of hair swept forward over her shoulder and her wrapping gown – a ‘timeless’ garment often favoured for early 18th century portraits. The gentleman was also painted in the early Georgian period: he wears the roomy buttoned coat and fine linen cravat of this era, along with a periwig – the short, full-bottomed style of wig was worn chiefly during the 1710s and 1720s.
These two portraits are from a similar period, although I am not sure whether they were painted at the same time and doubt whether they were intended to be a pair as such. Pictures could be re-framed at any time, so the style of a frame is not always indicative of the date of the canvas inside it. The fact that these frames are different does, however, suggest that the pictures did not always hang together. There also looks to be a significant age difference between the young lady and middle-aged man, so I wonder whether perhaps these ancestors were father and daughter.
Jayne Shrimpton
Because their paintings are the work of skilled artists and pre-date the era of popular portraiture, I imagine that the family were well-connected and affluent during the 1700s – probably landed gentry or even titled. I’m afraid there is no way of knowing whereabouts in the country they were painted, but hopefully the timeframe will confirm whether or not these subjects are the past family members from North Devon that you had in mind.’
If you’d like to send your photo to Jayne Shrimpton, please register or opt to receive newsletters in ‘my account’. Jayne only has time to analyse two photos each month, but if yours wasn’t chosen this time, you could be lucky next month!
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Please note: This post has originated from a news feed from an external website.
Family Tree Forum neither endorses nor is responsible for the views of the author or any other content.
Clayton Veale sent us his family portraits and asked:
‘I don’t know if you can date portraits? I was wondering if you could please estimate the date of these portraits from style of dress, etc. This couple probably lived in North Devon, near Okehampton.’
Click to enlargeJayne says:
‘The word ‘portrait’ means a likeness of a real person, so strictly it encompasses depictions of our ancestors in all media, including photographs, paintings, drawings, sculpture or silhouettes, yet popularly the term ‘portrait’ is used to describe artworks, like your two paintings. Commissioning a hand-crafted portrait by a professional artist was an expensive undertaking in the past, as it still is today, and so relatively few of our forebears were portrayed in such pictures.
Formal portraiture, once the preserve of royalty, aristocracy and the famous, became increasingly popular from around the mid-1700s onwards, when members of the emerging professions, first-generation industrialists and so on joined their social superiors in having their likeness captured for posterity. Demand rose more sharply during the later 18th and early 19th centuries, as the growing middle classes – those with money and social aspirations – began to follow this trend. Consequently, most artworks surviving in today’s family collections date from between around the 1780s and the 1840s, until photography became firmly established as a new portrait medium. Earlier ancestral portraits like your two paintings are rather rare, and are very special family heirlooms.
Click to enlargeThese two portraits are accomplished half-length oil paintings on canvas – costly and prestigious framed pictures that only the wealthy could have afforded. Commonly there are no inscriptions giving names or dates and this means that for dating and identification we only have the visual image to go on, chiefly the details of the subjects’ (or sitters’) dress.
The female figure is portrayed in the fashionable manner of the 1710s and 1720s – both in terms of the general style of her portrait and her appearance, characterised by long tresses of hair swept forward over her shoulder and her wrapping gown – a ‘timeless’ garment often favoured for early 18th century portraits. The gentleman was also painted in the early Georgian period: he wears the roomy buttoned coat and fine linen cravat of this era, along with a periwig – the short, full-bottomed style of wig was worn chiefly during the 1710s and 1720s.
These two portraits are from a similar period, although I am not sure whether they were painted at the same time and doubt whether they were intended to be a pair as such. Pictures could be re-framed at any time, so the style of a frame is not always indicative of the date of the canvas inside it. The fact that these frames are different does, however, suggest that the pictures did not always hang together. There also looks to be a significant age difference between the young lady and middle-aged man, so I wonder whether perhaps these ancestors were father and daughter.
Jayne ShrimptonBecause their paintings are the work of skilled artists and pre-date the era of popular portraiture, I imagine that the family were well-connected and affluent during the 1700s – probably landed gentry or even titled. I’m afraid there is no way of knowing whereabouts in the country they were painted, but hopefully the timeframe will confirm whether or not these subjects are the past family members from North Devon that you had in mind.’
If you’d like to send your photo to Jayne Shrimpton, please register or opt to receive newsletters in ‘my account’. Jayne only has time to analyse two photos each month, but if yours wasn’t chosen this time, you could be lucky next month!
More...
Please note: This post has originated from a news feed from an external website.
Family Tree Forum neither endorses nor is responsible for the views of the author or any other content.