2009 AAANZ Conference Abstracts - The Art Association of Australia ...

Portraiture at the University of Sydney. She is interested in
unraveling the meaning behind the introduction of dwarfs to
royal Hapsburg portraits. Katherine has worked professionally in
Learning and Development for ten years.
3. Macaroni Caricature: Portrait of Itself as a Genre
Professor Peter McNeil
The development of the caricature as a specific form of
humorous print in eighteenth-century England can be viewed
not simply as social commentary on politics and manners,
but also by considering its opposite, the respectful portrait
and contemporary understandings of idealised aesthetics.
Connected to ideas about fashion, it also rested upon a
metropolitan notion of the beau monde in which the elites could
recognise references to each other. My paper will focus on the
fashionable miniature-portrait painter Richard Cosway, mocked
at the time as the ‘Miniature Macaroni’ and ‘The Macaroni
Painter’ (an allusion to both his preferred medium and his small
physical stature), and will consider relationships between the
masculine self-portrait and the caricature. It will proceed by
reading inter-connected notions of gender, theatricality and
artifice that structured a set of caricature figures presumed to
represent Cosway and his contemporary Angelica Kauffman. The
macaronis, a specific type of foppish figure who was prominent
for thirty years from 1760, are best known through graphic and
some painted caricature, but the public understanding of this
type was also negotiated through a range of media and sites
including the theatre, the masquerade, the press, popular songs
and jokes, and newly designed products including massproduced
ceramics and textiles.
Alongside this position that is largely a social one, my essay
will foreground the nature of caricature as a genre so that
the figure of the macaroni might emerge more appropriately
from the exaggeration, fantasy and comic elements of these
lampooning words and images. Both caricatures and macaroni
were concerned with the distortion of appearance, through an
exaggerated or excessive depiction of that appearance on the
one hand, and a self-conscious and excessive performance of
that appearance on the other. Indeed, a caricature of a macaroni
is effectively a caricature of a caricature, and therefore a portrait
of itself as a genre. This would surely go a long way towards
explaining the proliferation and fascination with these images.
Did viewers necessarily have to be familiar with the nuances
of the subjects they observed How we can we use new
understandings of eighteenth-century distinctions between the
merely ‘fashionable’ and those of the ‘ton’ to read an image in
which clothing is significant Caricatures of Cosway perpetuate
his new socially-esteemed standing no less readily, if not more
respectfully, than his own exquisite self-portrait (Metropolitan
Museum of Art New York). Did he himself become his greatest
work of art
Peter McNeil is Professor of Design History in the School of
Design. Trained as an art historian, his research encompasses
design and cultural history with a focus on comparative
perspectives. In 2008 he was appointed Foundation Chair of
Fashion Studies at Stockholm University, a Research Centre
funded by the Erling-Persson Foundation.
4. Victorian Family Life: Maria Elizabeth O’Mullane and Her
Children
Dr Elisabeth Findlay
Maria Elizabeth O’Mullane and Her Children was painted in
Australia in the mid-nineteenth and is now in the collection of
the National Gallery of Victoria. It is an awkward and strangely
disconcerting image. The unusual oval or ‘fish-eye’ group
portrait is a conversation piece but a conversation piece
underpinned by tension and dislocation. The painting is full of
confounding passages: from the dark void beside the mother, to
the rather uneasy grouping of her four children, not to mention
their miserable expressions.
The aim of this paper is to unravel some of the ambiguities of the
portrait, starting with an analysis of who actually painted it. The
image has been attributed to no less than three artists – William
Strutt, Julie Elizabeth Agnes Vieusseaux and Ludwig Becker. In
this paper I will add a fourth name to the list and will contend
that it is the work of Conway Hart.
Beyond the detective work of attribution, the main aim of
my research on Maria Elizabeth O’Mullane and Her Children
is to understand it as an image of family life. Why has this
‘upwardly mobile’ colonial family been depicted in this way
Why is it such an uncomfortable painting and what does the
portrait reveal about Victorian ideals of family Such images of
domesticity, which have existed in many forms from Egyptian
tomb sculptures through to the popular conversation pieces of
eighteen century Britain, are intriguing and highly revealing.
Elisabeth Findlay is a Lecturer in Art History at The Australian
National University. Her major area of research and teaching is
the theory and history of portraiture. She is currently working on
a history of Australian portraiture.
5. Painting the Monarch: John Longstaff and George
Lambert’s Portraits of King Edward VII
Kate Robertson
In the early twentieth century, John Longstaff and George
Lambert were commissioned to paint King Edward VII. This
was a major achievement for the Australian men, signalling their
recognition as talented artists and cementing their status as
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