In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing - “A Rebuke to Polite Masculinity”: Charles Keiffer on Thomas Patch’s “British Gentlemen at Sir Horace Mann’s Home in Florence”

“A Rebuke to Polite Masculinity”: Charles Keiffer on Thomas Patch’s “British Gentlemen at Sir Horace Mann’s Home in Florence”

06/08/21 • 9 min

In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing

The Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute presents In the Foreground: Object Studies: short meditations that introduce you to a single work of art seen through the eyes of an art historian.
Charles Keiffer (Williams College) recounts the heightened atmosphere of intoxicated conviviality on display in Thomas Patch’s oil painting British Gentlemen at Sir Horace Mann’s Home in Florence (1763–1765), in which caricature is deployed to subversive ends, challenging norms of masculinity and using formal idiosyncrasies to invoke the ephemeral nature of sociability.

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“The Color of Emergency”: Joan Kee on Chao-Chen Yang’s “Apprehension”

The Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute presents In the Foreground: Object Studies: short meditations that introduce you to a single work of art seen through the eyes of an art historian.
Joan Kee (University of Michigan) delves into how Chao-Chen Yang’s color photograph Apprehension (c. 1942) captures the feeling of surveillance, silencing, and precarity, particularly as experienced by those who are Asian in the United States, whether during World War II or today.

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“The Erosion of History”: Samantha Page on Hung Liu’s “Migrant Mother”

The Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute presents In the Foreground: Object Studies: short meditations that introduce you to a single work of art seen through the eyes of an art historian.
Samantha Page (Clark Art Institute) explores how Hung Liu’s painting Migrant Mother (2015) reimagines Dorothea Lange’s iconic Depression-era photograph; here the materiality of paint draws attention to layers of mediation and imbues the image’s subjects with renewed agency.

In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing - “A Rebuke to Polite Masculinity”: Charles Keiffer on Thomas Patch’s “British Gentlemen at Sir Horace Mann’s Home in Florence”

Transcript

Caitlin Woolsey (host)

Join us for an immersive, personal encounter with a single work of art as seen through the eyes of an art historian. You're listening to In the Foreground: Object Studies, a podcast series from the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute.

In this episode, Charles Keiffer, a recent graduate of the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art, describes how Thomas Patch's caricature painting British Gen