Interpreting Portraiture Collections

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Beningborough Hall Case Study

Family Matters

This room offers more interpretation than the country-house period rooms that visitors will have so far visited at Beningbrough Hall. 'Family Matters' is intended as a transitional experience between the country house and the interactive galleries on the top floor. It is principally aimed at families with children and schools groups, although other visitors are catered for and may engage through observation.

The gallery's main aim is to involve visitors in the 'deconstruction' of three family portraits, through hands-on activities, allowing people to decode the particular stories of the paintings and their subjects, as well as learning transferable skills for viewing eighteenth-century portraits.

These displays are supported by more in-depth thematic In Focus pick-ups on each of the three portraits.

http://www.npg.org.uk/live/beninfocus.asp

The room offers five activities based on three family portraits:

Christopher Anstey and his Daughter

Christopher Anstey (1724-1805) was a poet best known for his humorous New Bath Guide (1766), a poem which commented on life in the fashionable resort of bath.

He is shown here with one of his four daughters who playfully tries to distract him from his work. To get his attention, she holds up her doll which is dressed in the latest styles. Its towering feathered hairstyle is clearly meant to recall Anstey's satire of such extremes of modern female fashion.

The Shudi Family

An activity about the meanings of props and costumes in eighteenth-century portraits. This tactile activity uses facsimile props with questions on lift-up flaps, and four dressing up costumes with a mirror to encourage visitors to look more carefully family portraits.

The main text for the dressing-up activity reads:

Are the family in their best or everyday clothes?

Do you wear your best clothes to have your picture taken?

Does the younger child look like a girl or a boy?

This was the costume for little boys in those days.

• Try on the dressing-up clothes.
• How do they make you look and feel?

These are the question and answer for the lift-up flap about the cat:

• What is the cat looking at?
• The little boy is tempting the cat with a titbit. Perhaps there were not enough mice about!

The Talman Family

An activity about the meaning conveyed by the background and composition in an allegorical eighteenth-century portrait. A specially made jigsaw looks the composition of the picture, and visitors are challenged to use their imaginations to create a story about what is going on in this very strange painting, write a short story and post it in a box.

A regularly updated selection of previous visitors' stories is presented in a loose-leaf folder.

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