Pictured Together? Constructions of Gender, Race, & Social Rank in The Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle & Lady Elizabeth Murray

“Pictured Together?” places the Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle and Lady Elizabeth Murray within the pictorial and social conventions of Georgian Britain. The portrait presents the two cousins together, yet invokes classic formulas for the depiction of white and black sitters, offering a complicated family portrait that also reveals late-eighteenth century conceptions of social rank, race, and gender.