Portraiture Now and Then

Today in Canadian Art History, we talked about portraiture, ending the class with this painting:

The Woolsey Family by William Berczy (1813)

This portrait, like many others at the time, was painted to demonstrate the wealth of this well-to-do family. The virginal daughter, baby and mother, the family patriarch at the top of the compositional triangle, the well educated sons and the pure bread dog... Oh, and the mother in law. All these figures elegantly posed in a controlled british setting (oh and look there's a mirror on the wall!) emulate near perfect neo-classicism that would make Jacques-Louis David himself oh so proud.

And then we saw this awesome Art Thoughtz video by Hennessy Youngman in fourth year seminar class today:

Both of these combined (and contrasted!) called back from the deep dark crevases of my mind the forbidden love baby of these two unlikely bedmates: painter Kehinde Wiley. This guy makes highly naturalistic portraits of contemporary urban African, African-American, Afro-Brazilian, Indian and Ethiopian-Jewish men in heroic poses, to borrow the succinct words of Wikipedia. What they have in common with Berczy's painting is that both put an emphasis on creating and upholding a person's status and societal value. They praise the people featured, wether by posing them in the latest hip hop fashions or by making sure that mirror I mentioned earlier was present. Hey, those were tha' shit in 1813.

Images clockwise from top-left:

Wiley, Kehinde. (2009). Abiel McIntosh and Mark Shavers (After Pontormo’s Two Men with a Passage from Cicero’s “On Friendship”).

Wiley, Kehinde. (2009). Kofi Graham (After El Greco’s The Annunciation).

Wiley, Kehinde. (2009). Keshawn Warren (After Giovanni Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert).

Wiley, Kehinde. (2009). Sharrod Hosten (After Sir Anthony van Dyck’s Le Roi a la Chasse).