Congratulations to Dawn Kanter whose talk for the Understanding British Portraits Annual Seminar has been published online: https://www.britishportraits.org.uk/events/annual-seminar-2022/
Dawn's research explores twentieth-century British portraiture by focusing on the portrait-sitting - the interaction between artist, sitter and sometimes patron, from which portraits are typically produced. More specifically, she uses digital methods (in the domain of knowledge engineering) to understand and represent a collection of portrait-sittings in terms of social and economic exchanges. In this talk, she discusses how the approach has changed her understanding of both particular portraits – for example, Theodore Spicer-Simson’s medallic portraits of authors (c.1922) and Graham Sutherland’s (now destroyed) painting of Winston Churchill (1954) – and British portraiture 1900–1960 more broadly.
