Browsing by Subject "Portraiture"
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Item Draftsmanship, social networking, and cultural history : the portrait drawings of Hans Holbein the Elder (ca. 1465-1524)(2015-05) Carlson, Alisa Louise McCusker; Smith, Jeffrey Chipps, 1951-; Hess, Peter; Holladay, Joan A; Morrall, Andrew; Waldman, Louis AHans Holbein the Elder (ca. 1465-1524) was a successful and prolific painter and draftsman, who lived and worked mainly in the southern German city of Augsburg. In addition to being master of a workshop that produced large-scale religious works, Holbein produced numerous drawings, of which over two hundred have been preserved from throughout his career. The vast majority of Holbein’s surviving drawings – about one hundred sixty – are portraits or head studies, originally made in silverpoint in small, portable sketchbooks. The quantity and medium of his drawings indicate that taking portraits was a habitual part of Holbein’s practice, if not a preoccupation for him. His portrait drawings depict a range of Augsburg’s populace, including men, women, and children, representing a variety of social classes and professions. On several drawings he even identified his sitters clearly with inscriptions of their names, ages, occupations, or other claims to fame. Collectively, they offer the artist’s perspective on the bustling urban center in which he lived and worked as well as suggest his place within that milieu. This dissertation examines Holbein’s portrait drawings in terms of their material and technical production as well as their potential historical, social, and cultural significance. This study describes the characteristics that typify Holbein’s portrait drawings and establishes standards for attributing works to him, his workshop, and others, as well as offers paleographical analysis of his drawings’ inscriptions. Because his portraits present so much textual information that has otherwise been overlooked, questions of who the people of Holbein’s portraits are and what their portrayals reveal about themselves and about the artist can be considered. Applying sociological theories of social capital and networking, this study proposes that Holbein’s portrait drawings survive as important records of his social network and reveal insights into his social experiences and practices. Holbein’s portrait drawings also offer numerous social and cultural cues through his depictions of the clothes and adornments of his sitters. Finally, this project considers Holbein’s legacy in European portraiture, especially as inherited by his more famous son, Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/98-1543).Item Kiss me like you mean it(2014-05) Scheuren, James Anthony; Collette, AnnaThroughout my work I have always sought/ wished to talk about a love between people with no actual connection. Emmanuel Levinas' description of the face-to-face echoes throughout my work: "Face, as I have always described it, is nakedness, helplessness, perhaps an exposure to death."(Levinas, "Intention, Event, and the Other"). Indeed, the face then is not the literal face but a vulnerability that we can feel and almost touch. For me, Levinas' description of the face applies not only to portraits but also to the things and marks the other makes with a secret sort-of-love, a private ritual when no one watches. I observe their marks on surface as gratuitous flourish. These marks can be anything: tire grease, metrics of hair, ad hoc assemblage. This inadvertent history the makers cast on objects allows me to project thoughts about them, recreate a fiction of who they are and conjecture why they made a mark that is just a mark. With the people un-pictured I hope the objects become stand-ins, projections of the people and their labor, functioning as flocculent afterthoughts of their human reality. I think objects may possess their own agency such as in Heidegger's The Thing, "The Potter forms the clay. No--he shapes the void." This paper will trace my attempts and line of questioning with regard to knowing. My mapping of objects and people meet at the cross-section of agency and failure. Despite the disparate subject matter I photograph, I want to convey a sense of unwavering empathy with my work.Item “Now exhibiting” : Charles Bird King’s picture gallery, fashioning American taste and nation 1824-1861(2012-12) Dasch, Rowena Houghton; Rather, Susan; Charlesworth, Michael; Kamil, Neil; Neff, Emily; Smith, JeffreyThis dissertation is an exploration of Charles Bird King’s Gallery of Paintings. The Gallery opened in 1824 and, aside from a brief hiatus in the mid-1840s, was open to the public through the end of the antebellum era. King, who trained in London at the Royal Academy and under the supervision of Benjamin West, presented to his visitors a diverse display that encompassed portraits, genre scenes, still lifes, trompe l’oeils and history paintings. Though the majority of the paintings on display were his original works across these various genres, at least one third of the collection was made up of copies after the works of European masters as well as after the American portraitist Gilbert Stuart. This study is divided into four chapters. In the first, I explore late-colonial and early-republic public displays of the visual arts. My analysis demonstrates that King’s Gallery was in step with a tradition of viewing that stretched back to John Smibert’s Boston studio in the mid-eighteenth century and created a visual continuity into the mid-nineteenth century. In a second chapter, focused on portraiture, I examine what it meant to King and to his visitors to be “American.” The group of men and women King displayed in his Gallery was far more diverse than typical for the time period. King included many prominent politicians, but no American President after John Quincy Adams (whom King had painted before Adams’ election). Instead he featured portraits of many men of commerce as well as prominent women and numerous American Indians. In the third chapter, I look at a group of King’s original compositions, genre paintings. King’s style in this category was clearly indebted to seventeenth-century Dutch tradition as filtered through an eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century British lens, in particular the works of Sir David Wilkie. My final chapter continues the exploration of Dutch influences over King’s work. These paintings draw together the themes of King’s sense of humor, his attitudes towards patronage and his methods of circumventing inadequate patronage through the establishment of the Gallery. Finally, they prompt us to reconsider the importance of European precedents in our understanding of how artists and viewers worked together to establish an American visual cultural dialogue.Item Portraiture and feminine identity(2011-05) House, Felice Louise; Petersen, Bradley; Sutherland, Dan; Charles, Michael Ray; Canright, SarahTo portray women without objectifying them is an intentional, political act. The art historical tradition is to paint women to extol their sexual beauty and to encourage possessiveness. There is a new guard of women painters who provide a counterpoint to this tradition by depicting a more multifaceted version of the female psyche. I align myself as an artist with them by attempting to broaden the depiction of women as subjects in painting. My subjects are beautiful and observable, but not consumable. They are more public than private and more iconic than intimate. My paintings have a strong connection to traditional portraiture in both style and technique. However, my subjects are contemporized through the use of modern fashion, unexpected facial expressions, unique color relationships and photographic cropping.Item Predatory portraiture : Goethe's Faust and the literary vampire in Gogol's [P]opmpem and Wilde's The picture of Dorian Gray(2010-12) Anderson, Matthew Neil, 1983-; Garza, Thomas J.; Richmond-Garza, Elizabeth M.Despite the fact that there seems to be no direct link between the works of Nikolai Gogol and those of Oscar Wilde, Gogol’s novella, Портрет (The Portrait) and Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, share many elements in common, most notably the device of the predatory portrait. This report explores the parallels that exist between these two texts and argues that they mutually derive from elements found in Goethe’s Faust and the trope of the literary vampire.Item Remembering where you came from : portraits of rural students in higher education(2014-05) Sutton, Melinda Jan; Kameen, Marilyn C.; Sharpe, Edwin Reese; Holme, Jennifer J; Somers, Patricia A; Muller, Chandra LThe number of studies related to students from rural backgrounds in higher education has waned in recent decades; however, over one-third of children in the United States continue to be educated in rural locales and their college-going and college-completion rates lag behind those of their urban and suburban peers. Because many rural students are white, they are typically considered part of the white majority on campuses, but they often encounter challenges unique to students from rural backgrounds and unlike those of their majority white peers from urban or suburban backgrounds. Therefore, a number of researchers have called for additional, qualitative studies regarding students from rural backgrounds as a unique cultural group and their experiences with higher education. The current study utilizes portraiture, the qualitative methodology developed by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot and Jessica Hoffmann-Davis, and a cultural framework combining social capital and critical standpoint theories to explore factors that affect students' enrollment, persistence, experiences, and perceptions related to higher education. Six students from one rural Texas high school who graduated in the top ten percent of their high school classes participated in the study, which included in-depth interviews, observations, and analyses. Each of the students collaborated in the creation of his or her portrait as well; these portraits portray the students' higher education experiences in considerable detail. Several factors are shown to have an impact on the experiences of rural students in higher education, including social capital, relationships, tacit knowledge, and finances. The study also demonstrates that female students from rural backgrounds face additional barriers related to higher education, such as romantic relationships, limitations on their future plans, and self-confidence. Implications for research, practice, and policy are also offered as opportunities to improve the experiences of rural students in higher education, and ultimately, their college enrollment and persistence rates.Item Treasures and damages : portraits of veteran teachers with/in the standards era(2014-05) Flint, Mary Jo; Salinas, CinthiaThis project examined the life narratives of four veteran teachers, each of whom began their careers before the onset of the Standards Era and were still teaching in 2013. Seeking to surface both their ways of resilience and negotiations of their identities as teachers through their decades-long careers, the question is positioned in the neoliberal turmoil of high-stakes accountability, national curriculum standards, and widespread, large-N assessment, to determine if resilient, long-career teachers exhibit particular characteristics and support systems that enable their accomplished status. Using the postmodern, interpretivist methodologies of portraiture and oral history, richly contextualized narratives for each teacher were crafted as an initial analysis. A secondary analysis revealed three manifestations of identity: the socially constructed identity, the bureaucratically informed identity, and the emotionally shaped identity. Findings suggest that having a fully developed and robust set of identities might encourage teacher resilience and longevity, supporting existing bodies of research, and that storytelling is an important aspect of identity development and maintenance. An additional finding was the absence of adversity through veteran teachers’ careers, which pushes against current research on resilience, as it positions resilience against adversity. An interesting question remains, which is in what ways might these veterans have renamed themselves—through the development of multiple and fluid identities—and renamed the challenges and disruptions of their world of work so that they might continue in the classroom. As school leaders typically rely on the knowledge base of seasoned veterans—to inform curriculum development, novice teacher support, and professional learning communities—it seems important to consider the power of storytelling in those venues. In conclusion, the author suggests that the addition of research from the field of knowledge creation, usage, and stewardship could be useful to future research of veteran teachers and the ways their professional knowledge might be better leveraged for improved educational outcomes.