Writing Visual Histories by Florence Grant Ludmilla Jordanova

Author:Florence Grant, Ludmilla Jordanova [Florence Grant, Ludmilla Jordanova]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350023451
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2020-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 18 James Watson after Robert Edge Pine, John Wilkes Esqr, 1764, mezzotint, 39 × 28 cm (15⅜ × 11 in.). British Museum, London, 1950,0520.159 (artwork in the public domain; photograph © The Trustees of the British Museum).

The title on the spine of one book and the roundel at bottom left refer to the seventeenth-century Whig political writer Algernon Sidney, who, like Wilkes, was arrested after an illegal search of his papers. Wilkes looks up to the left, in the direction of a female figure who holds a mirror and stands behind a shield decorated with a sunburst. This is not a reference to Wilkes’s voracious sexual appetite but an allegorical figure representing Truth. Like the cap of liberty (also known as a Phrygian cap), such figures formed part of a complex system of signs (an iconography) whose meanings drew on a shared European heritage that ultimately looked back to Greek and Roman antiquity.

The study of iconography forms a sub-discipline of art history in and of itself. Pine’s usage is rather loose; Truth’s other props, or attributes, are missing. Although the Sidney references are pointed, it seems fair to assume that the allegorical figure is intended simply to suggest that Wilkes’s education and character are elevated enough to make allusions to classical civilization appropriate. Not all artists shared Pine’s view: when William Hogarth produced his engraving of Wilkes he included a cap of liberty, albeit satirically, drawing it as if it were a chamber pot (Figure 19). Pine’s portrayal, however, is clearly intended to present Wilkes as a gentleman of letters; the pose and setting are similar to those found in Pine’s portrait of the playwright and actor David Garrick. By directing Wilkes’s gaze up to Truth, rather than out to the viewer, Pine creates the impression that we are voyeurs, observing the sitter in a private reverie, further supporting the claim that what we see is the true man, not a pose.

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