An Original is the Eccho of the Voice of Nature, a Coppy is the Eccho of that Eccho.159
Every achievement in science or the arts ‘either repeats or refutes what someone else has done,’ wrote Valéry, ‘ – refines or amplifies or simplifies it, or else rebuts, overturns, destroys, and denies it, but thereby assumes it and has invisibly used it.’160
No nation or individual can ever be purely original: ‘since each has received material transmitted by earlier generations’, creative activity is never ‘purely innovative but rather modifies the heritage’, Wilhelm von Humboldt observed.161
While a vast array of factors contributed to artistic success and survival for artists in eighteenth-century Britain, a work did not need to be ‘unique’. Value was placed on the information a portrait conveyed rather than any claims to originality. The information communicated in motifs and ideas, often borrowed from earlier works, enabled the portrait to act as a social asset. The creation of multiple versions of many portraits, sometimes by the same artist, reinforced social connections, and increased the potential market for the artist. The duplication of works and the borrowing of ideas were common and acceptable practices. Dance produced a number of copy portraits which were distributed among the people depicted or hanging in multiple venues, serving to promote the artist amongst the sitters’ peers at the same time as promoting the sitter within their sociable networks. This chapter details Dance’s use of multiple copies and addresses the views of authenticity and originality.
The commonplace practice of producing duplicate portraits implies that originality was not as highly prized as it was for later generations, and the practice of
159 Richardson, Two Discourses, p. 177.
160 David Lowenthal, The past is a foreign country (Cambridge Cambridgeshire ; New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1985), p. 70. Lowenthal quotes Paul Valéry’s Letter About Mallarmé, 8: 241.
161 Lowenthal, The past is a foreign country, p. 70. Lowenthal quotes Wilhelm von Humbolt, Linguistic
duplicating portraits has tended to be relegated to footnotes in scholarly discourse.162
Among his contemporaries, Dance’s production of multiple works of the same portrait formed a surprisingly substantial portion of his output and deserves closer scrutiny. The duplicated works by Dance considered in this chapter were all autograph works by Dance’s own hand, not by other artists or engravers.163 These works are more than
simply reproductions, they served specific purposes of their own as I argue below. To explore Dance’s practices of creating duplicates, this chapter will use as examples several of Dance’s works, including four conversations pieces that are near identical. Close examination of these works will enable consideration of possible reasons why there are so many duplicate works, and include these portraits’ potential purpose in sociable society. Differentiation is made between different types of duplication, including the place of copying, replicating and borrowing of motifs and painting formats. All these duplication issues impact on the concepts of ‘originality’ and ‘authenticity’. Notions of the definition of originality and authenticity have changed in the past 200 years, these terms are also defined in the section below. In discussing the changing concepts of originality and authenticity, I begin with nineteenth century ideas introduced by Robert Carlyle, as these have influenced the perceptions of definitions enduring into the present day. The discussion will then move back into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to explain how twenty-first century judgements of duplicated works varies from the past and incorrectly devalues the work and the artists.
162 For further reading that mentions the duplication of portraits see: Diana. Dethloff, "Lely, Sir Peter
(1618–1680)," in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew, Brian Harrison, and edited by Lawrence Goldman Online ed., May 2009 (Oxford: OUP: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004); Goodreau, "Nathaniel Dance, R.A. (1735-1811)."; Pointon, "Portrait-Painting as a Business-Enterprise in London in the 1780s."; Pointon, Hanging the Head.
163 It cannot be definitively stated that all versions of duplicated works of Dance’s portfolio are by his
hand, as Dance often did not sign his works. Stylistically, the majority of Dance’s duplicated works appear to be by the same hand. Of the works discussed in this chapter, there are no extant copies attributed to anyone other than Dance.
Before entering my major discussion on the duplications of Dance’s portraits, it is important to note the popularity of collecting engravings of portraits of notable people during the eighteenth-century. Many artists and their patrons had their portraits
engraved and then reproduced for sale by print sellers. These works were part of the fashion for the collection of print portraits, which blossomed in the second half of the century. Peltz and Pointon note that Horace Walpole was an avid collector of engraved portraits of eminent people. He wrote the forward to Reverend James Granger’s
Biographical History of England (1769), which fuelled the craze for collecting and the
development of ‘extra-illustrating’ books. What became known as ‘Grangerising’, extra-illustrating entailed inserting additional images or text into books and then eventually rebinding the combined pages.164 These prints are a form of portrait
duplication and indicate portraiture’s popularity during this period. Though many of Dance’s portraits, particularly of professional and military men, were engraved and printed, this thesis, limits the discussion to portraits produced in oil paint.165