INTIMACY IN FRENCH 18TH-CENTURY FAMILY PORTRAITS

A historian who researches the history of the intimate in Western culture must look at paintings as an archeologist looks at a particularly complex site, or dig. As each layer of objects is carefully uncovered and inventoried, the exact place is noted in order to establish possible relations among the objects, their use, and the meaningful relations between these objects and the bones with which they lie. Thinking of eighteenth-century family portraits in this way has the advantage of raising questions of interpretation that can only be answered if the proximity of the objects to the bodies of individuals is determined — a very important first step in any study of intimacy. Beloved things and persons, on whom we depend for affective support and through whom humans survive or at least skirmish with death, constitute the space or sphere of intimacy in private life. © 1990 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.