Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief : Rembrandt's 'Night Watch' and Other Dutch Group Portraits / Harry Berger.
Berger, Harry, author.
2022
Available Online

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Title Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief : Rembrandt's 'Night Watch' and Other Dutch Group Portraits / Harry Berger.
Author Berger, Harry, author.
ISBN 9780823292127
DOI https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823292127
Published New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2022]
Copyright ©2006
Language English
Language Note In English.
Description 1 online resource (192 p.) : 42 color and 58 black and white illustrations
Item Number 10.1515/9780823292127 doi
Summary 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.
Access Note Access limited to authorized users.
System Details Note Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics text file PDF
Source of Description Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 03. Jan 2023)
In Fordham University Press Complete eBook-Package Pre-2014
Fordham University Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
Available in Other Form print 9780823225576
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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

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