Zoffany and His Condoms

The dust jacket image of the Zoffany catalog for the recent exhibition (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; Royal Academy, London) catches the essence of his works: The Sharp Family is a Hogarth conversation piece with more people, more detail, meticulously rendered, heads jammed between heads, a horror vacui that foreigners regard as characteristic of English painting. Within the expansive exhibition and catalog, I sometimes regretted not seeing the more modest number of figures in Zoffany’s paintings before he arrived in England in 1760. But this was Zoffany’s way of becoming sufficiently “English” (he was already German) to attract the royal patronage of the Hanoverians.

The Sharp Family, family as orchestra on a river cruise, is a plethora of musical instruments and their players, the first as precisely rendered as the second. Aside from that, there is the joke: Granville Sharp holds up a double flageolet behind his brother James’s head, making cuckold horns. The Sharp family’s delight in the pun, as great as in music, began with the musical pun on their name. But we are not told if there was any reason for thinking that James was a cuckold. His wife, above him on the side of the large equilateral triangle on which Zoffany has structured the family, looks down at him lovingly. There is no evidence of any friction between James and his wife.

It seems possible that Zoffany is characterizing Granville, whose pursuit of radical causes made the family uneasy, as a Lord of Misrule. But we do not know if this particular witticism was family or Zoffany. It seems that the family that signed itself “#” was also given to self-mythologizing. The barge on which the orchestra plays was named The Apollo, and Mr. and Mrs. James Sharp were known as “Vulcan” and “Venus.” One can imagine the detail of the “horns” determined by the myth of Venus and Vulcan. (Zoffany also graphically separates Venus from her Vulcan.) It is most likely, however, that the addition of the flageolet is an example of Zoffany’s playful control as artist, stamped on the picture in the signature of his dog, Roma, bottom center, with eyes fixed on the spectator. The apex of the familial triangle (triangle, of course, is also the name of a musical instrument) is “Captain” William Sharp, owner of The Apollo, and this order is reversed by the down-turned triangle of Roma’s nose at the bottom. Zoffany does something similar in other conversation pieces, another convention he has adapted from Hogarth, who included his dog as a commentary in families not his own.

Jokes distinguish Zoffany’s conversation pieces, but “joke” is an inadequate descriptive. There is something “strange”—rather perhaps deeply private—about Zoffany’s paintings. In the majority of the most successful paintings, the role of the musical instruments is taken by paintings and sculptures. The subject-object relationships of the picture—if we take it to be a picture about people looking at works of art—are put in question as an artifact, equally real, returns the look of the spectator. An overcrowded canvas, with equal emphasis upon objects and humans, signs of the artist himself as an odd distraction, and a plainly public iconography that hints at a private meaning: these are the salient characteristics of the best Zoffany paintings.

Disclosure: up until the 1970s, Zoffany was “appreciated (as he was by George III and Queen Charlotte)” for his “technical accomplishment and keen eye for detail” (16). The essay I published on Zoffany in 1969 in Eighteenth-Century Studies, reprinted as a chapter in my Emblem and Expression in 1975, to judge by the “selected readings” accompanying each catalog entry in Johan Zoffany, was the earliest attempt to show painting that is now “appreciated for its incisive social commentary and irreverent brand of humour, . . . [and its] sophisticated and often guileful commentary, which challenges the parameters of hierarchical structures, national boundaries, and social mores.”¹ At the time I wrote my essay...