In this thesis I seek to challenge the authority of the visual narrative implied in small group portraiture in order to open up the apparent clarity of the depicted relations of the sitters to each other and to their place. The mediating role of territorial or boundaried constraints is questioned, particularly the ways in which political or gendered lines of demarcation serve to delimit the potentially unlimited narrative of the group. The objects of my research were chosen according to the time and place of production, and not in respect to any predetermined hierarchy of artistic excellence. The images are the products of diverse situations, places, and periods. Moving diachronically through the century, I look first at the early appearances of the mode as practised by Gawen Hamilton and William Hogarth. This is followed by a consideration of the significance of gender and class in the construction of storytelling around the small group portrait. In the next chapter, I examine the role of contested boundaries --personal, political and religious --- in the production of several portraits realised in 1780s British India. The final chapter focuses upon the rhetoric of familial and political representation in the portrait of George Washington and his family. The inherent characteristics of the genre, first identified in England as a 'conversation' or conversationpiece, were aligned with a widespread concern for conversational strategies in general during the 1720s and 30s. A close reading of George Vertue's comments about conversations suggests a different version of the historiographic account of the genre in that I find that the artists were praised by their contemporaries, vertue in particular, for their ability to visually re-present those desired strategies. If the genre can be understood as an historically-specific practice, as Vertue's remarks would suggest, then the continued utilisation of the mode through the century begs the question of whether there is likewise a mediating or constituting presence of local realities in the represented relations of the sitters. The particularity of small group portraiture in eighteenth-century English homes, whether in England, British India, or America resides both in the genre-based differences between group and individual portraiture, and in the visualisation of historicallyspecific narratives of the group

When I started the doctorate programme in 2002 I had a long-standing interest in vanitas paintings, both historical and contemporary. This developed into an interest in creating contemporary iconic images of celebrity personalities. I also started to explore ways of portraying 'iconic unknowns', which involved transforming ordinary, working women into modem icons. In the first year I was interested in celebrity icons, such as David and Victoria Beckham, Kylie Minogue and Cher. I was interested to portray these celebrities as more anonymous as people, but more familiar as brand images . . Also at this time I was developing an interest in what I have termed 'localised celebrities'; these were the wealthy women of Essex. I made paintings of the glamour and style of these Essex women and their' chic kitsch' . The work evolved with experiments in ways of portraying women, attempting to subvert the conventions of the male gaze by portraying women in a highly ambiguous manner. The conventions of clothing and 'styling' are exaggerated versions of the kind of sexualized to-be-Iooked-at-ness associated with the male gaze and yet the women in the paintings are refusing to be positioned as the to-be-Iooked-at-by men. They are defying the spectator to dare to consume her image in that way. I have attempt~d to complicate the relationship between the male spectator and the female image as well as opening up new ways in which women might assume the position of spectator. Laura Mulvey, a feminist film theorist, published an article in 1975 called 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' in which she employed the term 'the male gaze'. Mulvey's analysis was concerned with the cinematic gaze, but certain parallels may be drawn with conventions of portraying women, for example in paintings and photography. She was primarily interested in the relationship between the image of woman and the 'masculinisation' of the position of the spectator. By this, she means that images of women are constructed according to patterns of pleasure and identification that assume masculinity as the 'point of view' (Mulvey: 1989: 29-38). Later, however, Mulvey began to think about how women could occupy the position of spectator.

This dissertation considers the significance of the non-somatic for the representation of identity and character in late eighteenth-century English portraits of the new manufacturing middle classes. The men whose portraits are discussed 'in this work were the pioneers of the new factory systems, mass production and industrial processes. Although many portraits of these men and of others in the same sphere of influence exist, the works examined here are those in which the subjects are depicted accompanied by objects related to their industrial or manufacturing businesses. This juxtaposition of the human figure and the material object, both in life and as represented subjects, will be explored in this dissertation. Chapter One forms an interrogation into the semantic effect of and on objects related to the industrial process when they are represented in portraits. It is a consideration of where such objects might more usually be depicted and the codes governing their representation in those visual spheres. Chapter Two examines how the social identity of wealthy men was shaped by their depiction with objects related to the manufacturing process. It suggests that the desire by such men to construct their portrayed identities through the newly understood institution of industry comprised the performance of a new form of public masculinity. Chapter Three considers the relevance of location to the construction of social identity. It examines the representation of industrial location as spectacle, inquires into the implication of this for industrially located portraits and examines the way in which established conventions of portraiture were drawn upon to restrain this effect. The fourth chapter inquires into the representation of the indispensable (yet often visually absent) industrial workforce asking how the body of the worker was implicated in the construction of identity for the employers.

Between 1890 and 1948, Umrao Singh Sher-Gil (1870–1954) a philosopher, Sanskritist, Persianist and father of India’s greatest modernist painter Amrita Sher-Gil, produced a remarkable body of photographic self-portraits. The photographs, usually very small were always of himself in aristocratic-bourgeois settings, which ranged from Paris, Budapest, Simla and Lahore. These images prove to be the starting point for my own research into self-portraiture and a re-appraisal of the term ‘cosmopolitanism’. Central to my re-figuring of ‘cosmopolitanism’ is a refutation of the Kantian ideal of the self-identical, self-sufficient, immune and transcendental subject. I intend to map out how the term has been re-claimed and recalibrated by myriad postcolonial academics and scholars in contemporary critical and cultural theory. My own participation in the on-going re-evaluation of ‘cosmopolitanism’ is done through the detailed study of the lives and works of my three case studies: Sher-Gil, the painter Bhupen Khakhar (1934- 2003), and photographer Raghubir Singh (1942–1999). In my discussion of their respective oeuvres, place and location are foregrounded, taking into account physical movement, but more crucially modes of affiliation and belonging. In my research, a rethinking of ‘cosmopolitanism’ rests on the assertion that a ‘cosmopolitan self’ evolves from correspondences between disparate parties and places. Community, friendship, networks of affiliation and interpersonal exchange are critical to study and acknowledge. The other fundamental concern of this thesis is an emphasis on emotion, and emotional connections to spaces. Geography can and should be read as being populated by emotions, and the narratives of lives can be told through the emotional connections to certain places and spaces. With this research I do not wish to establish a definition or a model of a South Asian cosmopolitan or cosmopolitanism, which is a dangerous and limiting gesture. With the aid of Sher-Gil, Khakhar and Singh I hope to make apparent that for a cosmopolitan sensibility to be formed, physical travel, affluence, and privilege are not necessities. Neither is relinquishing an attachment to place or, inversely, claiming multiple attachments to places, but rather advocating for a recognition of the connection between space and emotion, and how the affects produced from these lived conditions and experiences are manifested, materialised and should be appreciated. Another aspect of this research project is an engagement with a mode of heuristic inquiry, where there is an emphasis on the researcher’s internal frame of reference, the researchers present. Thus, the temporal frame of the thesis produced by my selection of case studies, spans from India’s transition as a colony to an independent nation, but continuing on consciously to my own locatedness, at a moment when it is emerging as a global capitalist power led by a Hindu nationalist government. All of which prompts a continued consideration of the tension between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. It begs the question, how has and can one continue to arbitrate between local attachments and the world at large?

This study demonstrates how royal portraiture functioned during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars as a vehicle for visualizing and processing the contemporary political upheavals. It does so by considering a notion of the 'sovereignty of the portrait', that is, the semiotic integrity (or precisely the lack thereof) and the material territory of royal portraiture at this historical juncture. Working from an assumption that the precariousness of sovereignty which delineated the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars goes hand in hand with the precariousness of representation during the same period, it reframes prevailing readings of royal portraiture in the aftermath of the French Revolution by approaching the genre less as one defined by the oneway propagation of a message, and more as a highly unstable intermedial network of representation. This theoretical undertaking is refracted through the figure of Maria Carolina, Queen of Naples (1752-1814), close sister and foil to Queen Marie- Antoinette of France, and who, as de facto ruler of the Kingdom of Naples, physically survived revolution but was twice dethroned and thrice exiled. A diverse ecology of royal portraiture revolving around Maria Carolina is presented across five case studies. Close attention to the materiality of a hyperrealistic wax bust of Maria Carolina reveals how portraiture absorbed the trauma of the French Revolution; Maria Carolina’s correspondence in invisible ink is used as a tool to read a highly distinctive visual language of 'hidden' silhouettes of sovereigns and to explore the in/visibility of exile; a novel reading of Antonio Canova's work for the Neapolitan Bourbons through the lens of contemporary caricature problematizes the binary between ancien régime and parvenue monarchy; and a unique miniature of Maria Carolina offers itself as a material metaphor for post-revolutionary sovereignty. Finally, Maria Carolina’s death mask testifies to how Maria Carolina herself became a relic of the ancien régime.