Portraiture, Selfhood, and the Problem of Recognition in the First Age of Celebrity

Abstract This essay identifies a defining moment in the intertwined histories of portraiture and selfhood: the emergence of the celebrity portrait in mid-eighteenth-century Europe. At its centre is a new phenomenon: sitters who failed to recognise themselves in their portraits and reflected, with unprecedented length and depth, on the experience. Focusing on Denis Diderot’s response to Louis-Michel Van Loo’s portrait, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s to Allan Ramsay’s, the essay argues that celebrity transformed portraiture from affirming social identity within fixed hierarchies into a paradoxical enterprise that promised to reveal authentic interiority, while turning the self into a spectacle for mass consumption, creating irresolvable tension between inner self-conception and public image. Diderot’s ambivalence exposes the self as multiple and performative; Rousseau’s rejection reveals anxiety about authenticity and exposure. Their divergent reactions — contrasted with David Hume’s pragmatic embrace of relational identity — show how portraiture became a critical site for negotiating selfhood in the emerging economy of celebrity.