“A Rebuke to Polite Masculinity”: Charles Keiffer on Thomas Patch’s “British Gentlemen at Sir Horace Mann’s Home in Florence”

The Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute presents In the Foreground: Object Studies:  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’s oil painting British Gentlemen at Sir Horace Mann’s Home in Florence (1763–1765), in which caricature is deployed to subversive ends, challenging norms of masculinity and using formal idiosyncrasies to invoke the ephemeral nature of sociability.