Kit-cat portrait

A kit-cat portrait or kit-kat portrait is a particular size of portrait, less than half-length, but including the hands. The name originates from a famous series of portraits which were commissioned from Godfrey Kneller for members of the Kit-Cat Club, a Whig dining club, to be hung in their meeting place at Barn Elms. They are now mostly in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London, with a selection of about twelve displayed in London and others at their satellite locations, including twenty on display at Beningbrough Hall in North Yorkshire.[1]

Sir John Vanbrugh in Godfrey Kneller's Kit-cat portrait, considered one of Kneller's finest portraits.

Size

Each canvas is thirty-six inches long, and twenty-eight wide.[2] The special Kit-cat portrait size is said to have been determined because the dining-room ceiling of the Kit-cat Club was too low for half-length portraits of the members. Slightly larger than the traditional head and shoulders format, it allows enough space to include one or both hands. So, while the poses in the Kit-cat portraits may look similar, none is actually repeated. When hung together, the overall effect is of a unified club of equals, though each man retains his individuality through distinct gestures, props and costumes.[3]

Types

The Kit Kat portraits, as a whole, can be broken down into three separate types. The first group may be represented by the portrait of John Vanbrugh.[4] Vanbrugh's portrait is the most famous and the style of the painting is the most common.

Subjects wear huge stately wigs and formal clothing. The men painted in this style often look down and off to the left of the view, if to be day-dreaming or thinking of some grand political scheme. These men are also painted with a ring or pendant, depicting their family crest.

William Cavendish[5] represents the second most popular pose in the series. He is painted with the same stately wig and fine clothing but he holds his staff of office as Lord Steward. His face is also more ruddy than Vanbrugh's, suggesting that he may be younger.

Thomas Hopkins represents the third most popular style. Instead of a wig, Hopkins is bald and sports a red cap but his clothes are the same as his fellow Kit Kats.[6]

gollark: ```PotatOS OS/Conveniently Self-Propagating System/Sandbox/Compilation of Useless Programs We are not responsible for- headaches- rashes- persistent/non-persistent coughs- virii- backdoors- spinal cord sclerosis- hypertension- cardiac arrest- regular arrest, by police or whatever- death- computronic discombobulation- loss of data- gain of data- frogsor any other issue caused directly or indirectly due to use of this product. Best viewed in Internet Explorer 6 running on a Difference Engine emulated under MacOS 7. Features:- Fortunes/Dwarf Fortress output/Chuck Norris jokes on boot (wait, IS this a feature?)- (other) viruses (how do you get them in the first place? running random files like this?) cannot do anything particularly awful to your computer - uninterceptable (except by crashing the keyboard shortcut daemon, I guess) keyboard shortcuts allow easy wiping of the non-potatOS data so you can get back to whatever nonsense you do fast- Skynet (rednet-ish stuff over websocket to my server) and Lolcrypt (encoding data as lols and punctuation) built in for easy access!- Convenient OS-y APIs - add keyboard shortcuts, spawn background processes & do "multithreading"-ish stuff.- Great features for other idio- OS designers, like passwords and fake loading (set potatOS.stupidity.loading [time], est potatOS.stupidity.password [password]).- Digits of Tau available via a convenient command ("tau")- Potatoplex and Loading built in ("potatoplex"/"loading") (potatoplex has many undocumented options)!- Stack traces (yes, I did steal them from MBS)- Backdoors- er, remote debugging access (it's secured, via ECC signing on disks and websocket-only access requiring a key for the other one)- All this useless random junk can autoupdate (this is probably a backdoor)!- EZCopy allows you to easily install potatOS on another device, just by sticking it in the disk drive of another potatOS device!- fs.load and fs.dump - probably helpful somehow.```
gollark: <@236628809158230018> https://pastebin.com/RM13UGFa
gollark: It, um, teaches you not to trust any OSes?
gollark: Not even Windows is this crazy… yet.
gollark: PotatOS is actually unique and quite complex.

References
  1. "Portraits of members of the Kit Kat club by Sir Godfrey Kneller". Art Fund. Retrieved 15 February 2019.
  2. Malone wrote in Dryden 534 (1800)
  3. "Room 9: The Kit-cat Club - National Portrait Gallery". www.npg.org.uk. Retrieved 15 February 2019.
  4. "Sir John Vanbrugh - National Portrait Gallery". www.npg.org.uk. Retrieved 15 February 2019.
  5. "William Cavendish, 2nd Duke of Devonshire". National Portrait Gallery. Retrieved 15 February 2019.
  6. "Thomas Hopkins". National Portrait Gallery. Retrieved 15 February 2019.


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.