Portrait of Mrs Congreve with her Children

It is often written that a ‘conversation piece’ is usually a ‘family piece’ – but there are two problems with this idea...

~Ever since the pioneering work of Roy Strong in the 1960s on dynastic Tudor portraiture, it has been well understood that the relationship between the pictorial composing of portrait subjects in an illusory spatial setting, and the position in which the portrait was hung relative to the ceremonial use of internal architectural spaces, served to determine how such portraits signified contemporaneously. Strong’s examination of Holbein’s portrait of the family of Henry VIII as it must have been seen in the Presence Chamber at Whitehall is an exemplary exploration of this...