Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief : : Rembrandt's 'Night Watch' and Other Dutch Group Portraits / / Harry Berger.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Fordham University Press Complete eBook-Package Pre-2014
• VerfasserIn: Berger, Harry,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Fordham University Press, , [2022]; ©2006
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (192 p.) :; 42 color and 58 black and white illustrations

A study of the theory and practice of seventeenth-century Dutch group portraits, Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief offers an account of the genre’s comic and ironic features, which it treats as comments on the social context of portrait sitters who are husbands and householders as well as members of civic and proto-military organizations. The introduction picks out anomalous touches with which Rembrandt problematizes standard group-portrait motifs in The Night Watch: a shooter who fires his musket into the company; two girls who appear to be moving through the company in the wrong direction; guardsmen who appear to be paying little or no attention to their leader’s enthusiastic gesture of command. Were the patrons and sitters aware of or even complicit in staging the anomalies? If not, did the painter get away with a subversive parody of militia portrait conventions at the sitters’ expense? Parts One and Two respond to these questions at several levels: first, by analyzing the aesthetic structure of group portraiture as a genre; second, by reviewing the conflicting accounts modern scholars give of the civic guard company as an institution; third, by marking the effect on civic guardsmen of a mercantile economy that relied heavily on wives and mothers to keep the homefires burning. Two phenomena persistently recur in the portraits under discussion: competitive posing and performance anxiety. Part Three studies these phenomena in portraits of married couples and families. Finally, Part Four examines them in The Night Watch in the light of the first three parts. The result is an interpretation that reads Rembrandt’s painting both as a deliberate parody by the sitters and as the artist’s covert parody of the sitters.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Preface -- Introduction: A Shot in the Dark -- Part One. Group portraits and the fictions of the pose -- 1 Toward the Interpretation of Performance Anxiety -- 2 Portraiture and the Fictions of the Pose -- 3 The Posographical Imperative: A Comparison of Genres -- 4 Group Portraiture: Coming Together and Coming Apart -- 5 Alois Riegl and the Posographical Imperative -- 6 Performance Anxiety and the Belated Viewer -- Part Two. Militias and marriage -- 7 Male Bondage and the Military Imperative -- 8 Social Sources of Performance Anxiety -- Part Three. Picturing family values -- 9 The Preacher’s Wife -- 10 Women with Elbows -- 11 Families Making Music -- Part Four ‘The night watch’ as homosocial pastoral -- 12 The Night Watch: How the Sandbank Crumbles -- 13 Evasive Action: Three Ways to Shore Up the Sandbank -- 14 Captain Cocq and the Unruly Musketeer -- 15 Disaggregation as Class Conflict -- 16 Manual Mischief: The Loneliness of the Red Musketeer -- 17 Between Stad and Stadholder: Captain Cocq’s Dilemma -- 18 Posographical Misfires -- 19 An Odd Couple: The Ghost of Anslo’s Wife -- Coda: Playing Soldier -- Notes -- Index