Portraits often claim a revered place in worlds remote from their origins, but they also risk anonymity unless accompanied by written supplements announcing who they are and how we are invited to engage with them. Without such contextual information, portraits risk fading into obscurity across generations. A picture may paint a thousand words, as the saying goes, but a portrait, being a picture, still needs words to survive beyond its own generation. Tom Hare’s Out of Character takes its cue from a diverse group of great portraits; among them are images of two Egyptian pharaohs of the nineteenth to eighteenth centuries BCE and revered paintings of several Zen abbots from medieval China and Japan. From there, Hare shifts his focus to a cast of characters from the seventeenth-century Spanish court and, finally, to contemporary images of celebrities from the multicolored carnival of Andy Warhol’s screenprints. At the heart of Tom Hare’s groundbreaking study—accompanied by an array of stunning reproductions of portraits—lies the question rarely asked: What work does writing on (not about) portraits do?
“Out of Character is a unique book, one that doesn’t fit neatly into the category of academic writing. And yet its very ‘mis-fitness’ constitutes one of its many virtues. While deeply attentive to particularities of form, language, and historical and cultural context, it showcases the potential of comparative art history while reading like a philosophy of portraiture and likeness across human history. With deeply analytical rigor, Hare demonstrates high-level expertise across disparate world-historical traditions distilling larger comparative and humanistic observations.”
— Yukio Lippit, Jeffrey T. Chambers and Andrea Okamura Professor of the History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University
