A Rebuke to Polite Masculinity: Charles Keiffer on Thomas Patchs British Gentlemen at Sir Horace Manns Home in Florence
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The Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute presents In the Foreground: Object Studies:\\xa0 short meditations that introduce you to a single work of art seen through the eyes of an art historian.
Charles Keiffer (Williams College) recounts the heightened atmosphere of intoxicated conviviality on display in Thomas Patch\\u2019s oil painting British Gentlemen at Sir Horace Mann\\u2019s Home in Florence (1763\\u20131765), in which caricature is deployed to subversive ends, challenging norms of masculinity and using formal idiosyncrasies to invoke the ephemeral nature of sociability.