Miss Dawn Kanter

Professional biography

My research focuses on the portrait-sitting, the interaction between artist, sitter and sometimes patron, from which portraits are typically produced. More specifically, I investigate textual accounts of portrait-sittings, which I argue give valuable insights into the social and commercial negotiations involved in portrait production.

My project is an interdisciplinary one, as I use methods from the digital humanities and knowledge representation to address this art-historical subject. Specifically, I build a picture of British portraiture 1900-1960 as a network of interpersonal and interdisciplinary portrait-sitting exchanges; in doing so, I revise and extend existing, artist-centric narratives.