anon., ("Freake painter"): Mr. John Freake, 1680 (or earlier)	anon., ("Freake painter"): Mrs. Freake and Baby Mary, 1674

• Mr. Freake's shoulder-length hair is an important statement about his place in society and his religious beliefs which were not Puritan, as your book suggests, but Calvinist, a variation of Puritanism which would not be important for our purposes other than to note that Freake’s representation went to some length to tell us of his beliefs. Freake’s hair style tells us that he had good social standing – he was a merchant and honored in his community – and he was a Calvinist.
• His clothing likewise attests to his Calvinist beliefs: brown, not black, as most Puritans dressed; stylishly flaired in the sleeves and waist with decorative lace and buttons – tells us again that he had good social standing, could afford to imitate English style, but was neither ostentatious nor austere. Given that there is nothing in the painting but the man himself,
it is not surprising that the details of his clothing and hair style are so important. The individual portrait generally had a single goal: to capture a good likeness of the individual’s face and to demonstrate that the person displayed class-appropriate behavior. In this case, that behavior consisted of presenting his wealth, religious beliefs, and status to the viewer, who was probably himself, his wife, and his children. In the painting of his wife, note the demure position of her eyes -- this was standard in female portraits of the Renaissance but in Europe, it began to change in approximately the mid-16th century. It is not surprising that the style of these portraits suggests an earlier period of European art if we remember that the "anonymous" artists were generally not trained as academic artists.

Mrs. Freak and Baby Mary:
• her blond hair is mostly hidden by the hood; triple strand of pearls typically attests to her chastity prior to marriage and her fidelity after; silver-grey dress of either taffeta or moire with a red-orange underskirt – your book notes that the petticoat was a symbol of her subordination to her husband; together, the fabrics, colors, and jewelry she wears likewise confirm that the Freakes were not Puritans or if they were, they had refused to adhere to the strict dress codes commonly associated with 17th century New England puritanism;
• her clothing and jewelry attest to the existence of trade with Europe and the East – the garnets in her bracelet would have been Indian and the pearls came from the Far East.
• Given that the baby was added later, and also given that these portraits were not made to reveal inner characters, we cannot conclude anything from the stiff position of the child other than the fact that limmers rarely painted active children and that the “model” for a mother and child painting was the religious icon of Mary and the holy child, and he was never shown in an active position

Furniture and paintings alike point to the indisputable fact that whether or not we call the New Englanders Puritans, their lifestyles were not puritan in the sense of how we generally use the word. Just as the Hingham meeting house was probably painted on the interior, wood furniture was usually painted in bright colors and carved with decorative patterns of all sorts. The existence of waterwheel sawmills enabled the growth of carpentry as an industry, and the production of architectural or throne-like chairs which could easily compete with their imported cousins from the British Isles. Furniture was probably more embellished and daring than the paintings, and may have been included in paintings, even when the people themselves did not own them. In other words, we may be wrong to conclude that the Freakes had the furniture we see in the painting, although we do suspect that if they could afford the paintings, they could also afford to own furniture.

As portraits do begin to change in the late 18th century, more questions come up about the reasons for making them: Why were these portraits made? how were they used? what criteria were actually the basis for judging one portrait good and another one bad? Is a good portrait merely an example of exquisite artistry or is it good because it serves as a social document? And if it is a social document, is the portrait conveying actual facts, or is it a testament to the desired social status of the people in the painting? M. Lovell, in her essay on family portraits, argues that we should read these as social documents and in her analyses, she deals primarily with how positions of people, furniture and clothing give us information about changing social norms. Her approach is not unusual but it does seem to ignore the fact that these are paintings.
 

John Copley: Nicholas Boylston, 1767	Copley: Margaret Kemble Gage, 1771

In these portraits, not only has the style become more sophisticated, suggesting a complete spatial setting for the people, along with the possibility of reading moods and thoughts into their expressions, but the symbols in the paintings have been chosen to make analogies to their status through pictorial means. In other words, the paintings continue to affirm social status but the compositions and selection of objects are rhetorical. We must "read" these paintings in a way which isn't necessary in the Freake portraits.

In Boylston's portrait, for example, the books under his arm, the position of his clothing and his body, the opened buttons on his various garments all communicate a message about his presumed success, where it comes from, and how he wants people to see him. Margaret Gage's painting is even more complex since the image of her is the image of a woman engaged in day-dreaming and fantasizing about an activity she can no longer engage in, now that she lives in NY instead of England. One has to wonder what role she played in determining the position and tableau arranged for the painting.
 

Robert Feke: Isaac Royall and Family, 1741	Benjamin West: The Artist's Family, 1770

The family portrait in the late 18th century manifests a change which is taking place in social structure and in attitudes and beliefs about childhood: paintings such as Benjamin West’s portrait of his own family or Robert Feke’s portrait of the Isaac Royalls are not unique in centralizing or emphasizing the maternal core of the family.  Yet Feke’s painting is much more conventional than West’s: the family lined up and facing the spectator, with little informality and little sense that this is how they lived or acted in their family home.  West’s painting, in contrast, not only suggests naturalized sitting postures but also plays off the declining influence of Quakerism against the new motivation to move up in life.
In either case, the family portrait was a more unusual choice than the individual portrait. In most cases, the husband and wife chose to have paired portraits.  They would be treated in almost identical fashion in the two paintings with the primary differences lying in the objects associated with them and the gender-specific associations of those objects.  The overall equality of the couples in many of these portraits and in the less frequent double portrait was new, even if the attributes of gender were not. Manyof these paintings can be roughly dated by the fact that the earlier paintings tended to contrast a vertical male figure who communicated activity through his body position with a horizontally disposed female, who communicated passivity and ornamentation.  The change to a portrayal of two figures who sit or stand in almost the same pose and the suggestion of activity may have reflected the new ideas about a “companionate” marriage in which the bond of affection between husband and wife was stronger, the repression of sexual desire was weaker (meaning that sex was more important), and the belief that each member of the union had something to contribute to the maintenance of the family was also stronger.  In this respect, Feke’s portrait of the Royall family and Smibert’s almost identical portrait of the Berkeley entourage, which is not technically a family portrait, reveal their relationship to the earlier style of portraits and the earlier model of the family.