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  • History's Beauties: Women and the National Portrait Gallery, 1856–1900
  • Janice Helland (bio)
History's Beauties: Women and the National Portrait Gallery, 1856–1900, by Lara Perry; pp. v + 199. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006, £55.00, $99.95.

Over the past thirty years, scholars have analysed the role played by women artists in the production of culture, they have explored the representation of women in culture, and they have discussed and explicated the category "woman" as a nominative entity. In her new study of women and the National Portrait Gallery, Lara Perry builds on such earlier analyses by focusing on a microcosmic place and time and, in so doing, provides readers with a renewed glimpse into the relationship between gender and culture in the Victorian era.

Perry constructs an intimate look at the structuring policies of the National Portrait Gallery as evidenced in their collecting and examines purchases as well as refusals: "Portraits which connoted women's direct challenge to the gendered structure of 'government', that of Lydia Becker or Elizabeth Garrett Anderson as member of an official [End Page 525] body, were unacceptable for the National Portrait Gallery" (16). This close reading of planning and policy within a national institution provides insights into the functioning of representation as a formative characteristic of the nation: as Perry suggests, "The life of the political nation and the founding and development of the National Portrait Gallery are deeply entwined" (20). Thus, her exploration of the gendering of public representation is never removed from the expansion of the nation, and, as a result, Perry's impressive study challenges the reader to complicate the study of "the Victorian." While she analyses exclusions, such as the non-purchase of the Becker portrait, she also investigates moments of inclusion: women served on the governing body of the National Portrait Gallery, for example, and were viewers within the public space of the Gallery. In its focus on a concept of women moving through and in public spaces, Perry's work parallels that of Erika Rappaport's analysis of women shopping in a rapidly expanding urban space, and Diana Maltz's examination of advocates of British aestheticism and their journeys within the metropole's philanthropic spaces.

Perry's study focuses on an elite segment of Victorian society. The National Portrait Gallery vociferously collected aristocrats who were "central to the conception" of the "heart or centre of the nation" (35). Images of the royal family, including pictures of earlier monarchs such as Queen Anne, as well as the expected collection of depictions of Queen Victoria, were all well represented. Perry provides an edifying look at queens, princesses, and duchesses, and also examines "Victoria's queenly femininity" as fundamental to the construction of "national family values" (59). Perry's discussion of Sir Thomas Lawrence's Elizabeth Carter (1788–89) cites the National Portrait Gallery's biography of the sitter as including "statements that are clearly intended to contextualize her intellectual labours within domestic partnership" (70). Perry argues that the formality of this particular kind of portrait is iconographic rather than personal, thereby demonstrating the National Portrait Gallery's collecting agenda.

Perry's two final chapters insightfully capture the attention paid to "beauty," which, as she suggests, might be construed as the "articulation of a contest between the aesthetic and the narrative functions of 'national' images of beautiful women," and the "arts of women," which are articulated in the collection as conjoining with beauty rather than with work (91, 115). William Carpenter's portrait of Margaret Carpenter painting a canvas (c. 1846) at once confirms the subject's femininity and domesticity, and also acknowledges her professional identity as an artist. As Perry suggests in her conclusion: "From the year of its founding, the collection was as diverse in its representation of women from different periods, of varying social status and in many areas of endeavour, but its references to women's role in the nation are consistent in theme and tone" (139). Perry attributes this to the National Portrait Gallery's "resilient and relatively uncontested model of women in the nation," which suggests a "culture of femininity" but also highlights cultural leadership (140). Perry demonstrates the complicated...

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