Making Sense of Portraits in country houses

Country houses are often full of historic portraits, but for to-day’s visitors it is not always clear who the sitters are, or why they mattered. Visitors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, would have immediately known how to “read” the portraits and understand their visual clues. We will look closely at clothes, poses and accessories, and learn how to decode them. We can understand how they were used to communicate status, networks and identities. Many of Britain’s greatest artists, from Sir Anthony van Dyck to Sir Joshua Reynolds, are known for their portraits and we will explore how they pushed the boundaries of portraiture to depict their sitters in dazzling new ways. We will also look at some puzzles, finding that there is sometimes more to a portrait than meets the eye.