Kate Retford's The Art of Domestic Life: Family Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century England treats the subject of eighteenth-century paintings of different groupings of family members with sociological sensitivity as to the cultural meanings of these groupings as well as with an art historian's eye for gestural meanings and for the iconographic echoes of other paintings. She provides information about the circumstances of the families whose portraits are interpreted on these pages and tells us where the paintings were to be displayed as well as other historical details that place the work. “It is only through the case study that the meanings accrued in a portrait can fully be explored” she avers wisely (6). This contextualized approach makes the book interesting to the nonspecialist as well as to those knowledgeable about art and portraiture, for the pictures she looks at are all embedded in stories of families and eighteenth-century English culture. The book treats portraits of married couples—those in which they are painted together and those in which they are painted separately but in pendant pairs intended to be shown together—portraits of mothers and children and of fathers and children, monumental dynastic family portraits of aristocrats filled with mementos of national history, and family portraits of the elite whose private lives were the subject of public scrutiny and gossip. The lucid writing makes the whole a pleasure to read.

The only disappointment in this sensible and well-researched book is that Retford has followed Lawrence Stone's lead too closely in choosing her objects of inquiry. He was the historian who argued that during the eighteenth century English couples experienced “companionate” marriages as never before and that parents felt more affection for their children than they had earlier in history. Retford reports some of the criticism of Stone's position (his thesis was savaged by historians although uncritically accepted by literary critics) and notes that representations, like the prescriptive formulas of conduct book literature, do not tell the whole story. Nevertheless, the portraits she investigates are depictions of the relationships that we in our century care most about and that Stone focused on—relationships between married couples and those of parents and their children—rather than the relationships of brothers and/or sisters, or children with their aunts and uncles or their grandparents, or in-laws and stepchildren, or any other of the complex familial relations that existed then and now. Unsurprisingly, she finds in these portraits of couples and their children a reflection of the eighteenth-century ideological emphasis on “maternal tenderness, fatherly concern, and affectionate marital unions” (233).

But Retford also sees the other side of this coin, and her interpretations are much more complex and interesting than Stone's one-sided thesis. She points out, where relevant, the commanding, authoritative gestures of husbands, and suggests that the new companionate poses of couples being painted represented “a sugaring of the pill of patriarchy, rather than a new equality between husband and wife” (75). She notes that the children most often depicted with their doting mothers were sons, and that these doting mothers sometimes wore miniatures of their husbands so that the image of the paterfamilias was present even in maternal portraits. Fathers, too, were apparently represented alone with their sons but were rarely depicted with a gender-mixed group of their own offspring (boys and girls together) without the mother present—unless the mother was dead and the man was a widower. It was with female subjects alone, the female half of those matching portraits, says Retford, that artists let loose their wildest metaphorical flights of fancy.

The last two chapters of the book focus on the family portraits of aristocrats and how these eighteenth-century paintings fit into the tradition, whether quoting earlier family portraits or well-known portraits of heroic figures by mimicking their poses, their dress, or their background details. Retford's wide-ranging familiarity with the history of English portraiture makes these chapters fascinating. She also investigates high-society portraiture as displayed in exhibitions and print shop windows for its publicity value, to counteract scandalous accounts of adultery or parental neglect or to promote political agendas. Again, her knowledge of these families and of their historical circumstances makes these narratives come alive. For example, she shows us the portrait commissioned by Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, of herself playing with her daughter, in which the gesture of the infant daughter throwing up her pudgy hands is taken almost directly from a satiric print by Thomas Rowlandson the previous year, which showed Georgiana suckling a fox (Charles Fox, for whom she campaigned) while her neglected infant on the floor throws up her hands asking to be picked up. Thus the portrait, which was painted by Reynolds, quotes the print, reaffirming Georgiana as a good mother despite her political work, with Fox nowhere to be seen.

This is a fine book: entertaining, learned, and beautifully produced in conjunction with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, with plentiful and gorgeous large color plates as well as excellent smaller black-and-white reproductions of the paintings Retford refers to. The book is a model of how to contextualize family portraiture and integrate art into the history of the times.