Wednesday 15 September 2010"A Favourite among the Demireps"
Thomas Gainsborough and the Modern Woman
This beautifully illustrated volume, published by D Giles Limited in association with Cincinnati Art Museum, focuses specifically on Thomas Gainsborough’s portraits of well-known, “liberated”, society women, and the way in which the artist executed these special commissions. Thomas Gainsborough and the Modern Woman draws us away from his predominant reputation as a landscape painter, and shows how such portraits were both an affirmation by Gainsborough of his own position in the artistic world, and of the desire of his sitters (including leading artists, musicians, actresses and intellectuals) to be seen as self-assured progressive women.
Author Benedict Leca takes as his starting point the Cincinnati Art Museum’s famous and newly restored portrait of Ann Ford (1760), widely considered the finest of the masterpiece portraits created by Gainsborough at Bath in the early 1760s. He addresses this early portrait as typifying Gainsborough’s comparatively permissive attitude with regard to how notorious women should be presented, and offers a compelling view of Gainsborough’s peculiar manner of painting, one that established the artist as the foremost portraitist of modern life.
Featuring portraits from international collections, including the J Paul Getty Museum, the Tate, London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the National Gallery, London, this ground-breaking new volume also includes an essay by Aileen Ribeiro examining the portrait of Ann Ford in detail, and by Amber Ludwig discussing the role of feminine identity in 18th-century London.
The publication accompanies the national tour of the exhibition Thomas Gainsborough and the Modern Woman showing at the Cincinnati Art Museum September 18, 2010 to January 2, 2011, and the San Diego Museum January 29, 2011 to May 1, 2011
The Authors
Benedict Leca is curator of European painting, sculpture and drawings at Cincinnati Art Museum. A specialist in the art and culture of 18th- and 19th- century France, he participated in the organization of the exhibitions A Decade of Collecting at the Fogg Art Museum (2000); Cézanne in Provence at the National Gallery of Art (2006) and in Cincinnati organized Rembrandt: Three Faces of the Master in 2008.
Aileen Ribeiro is professor emerita of History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. A leading authority and consultant on 18th- century dress; she is the author of Dress in Eighteenth-Century Europe, 1715-1789 (2002), The Art of Dress: Fashion in England and France, 1750-1820 (1995) and Dress and Morality (1986)
Amber Ludwig is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at Boston University. Her field of study includes the creation and reception of portraits of Emma Hamilton and the ways in which the art of portraiture helped to fashion her public identity.
THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH AND THE MODERN WOMAN
RRP US$49.95/UK£34.95
Hardcover
ISBN 978-1-904832-85-0
196 pages
279 × 229 mm, (9 × 11 in.), portrait
105 colour illustrations
Publication date: October, 2010
Publisher: D Giles Limited, London
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