Conveners:
Peter Funnell (National Portrait Gallery) and Shearer West (University of Birmingham)

This session focuses on British portraiture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although papers will adopt a variety of approaches, common concerns will emerge including portraiture and nationhood, the politics of the portrait image and the historiography of British portraiture. This is the first AAH conference session to be held at the National Portrait Gallery and papers will also address the role of the Gallery itself as a repository of likenesses of the famous. For its third group of papers, the session will combine with that on The Museum and its Metaphors to examine the Gallery's displays, both historical and present.

• Marcia Pointon (University of Manchester): Shakespeare, Portraiture and Authenticity
• John Bonehill (University of Leicester): 'Effigy and Show': the Royal Image in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain
• Sarah Hyde (Courtauld Institute of Art): Portraiture and the Poor in England in the 1770s
• Fintan Cullen (University of Nottingham): Portrait and Religious Uncertainty in Late Eighteenth-Century Ireland
• Ludmilla Jordanova (University of East Anglia): An Unlikely Hero? James Watt and Portraiture for an Industrial Nation
• Gertrude Prescott Nuding (London): Corporate Images: Learned Societies and Portrait Collecting
• Lara Perry (University of York): A Changing View: the National Portrait Gallery in London, 1858-1900
• Charles Saumarez Smith (National Portrait Gallery): In a New Light? The Display of Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery
• Peter Funnell and Honor Clerk (National Portrait Gallery): Tour of the New First Floor Displays at the National Portrait Gallery