Introduction -- English portraiture in context -- Locating the public -- Provincial painters -- Painters' resources: material and cultural -- Heraldry and portraiture -- The provincial vocabulary: 'props' and their meaning -- Varieties of regional experience -- Conclusion
Summary
Robert Tittler investigates the growing affinity for secular portraiture in Tudor and early Stuart England, a cultural and social phenomenon which can be said to have produced a 'public' for that genre. The book places portrait patronage and production in this era in the broad social and cultural context of post-Reformation England, and it distinguishes between native English provincial portraiture, which was often highly vernacular, and foreign-influenced portraiture of the court and metropolis that tended towards the formal and 'polite'
