Museum and gallery education practices are often premised on an assumed need to ‘translate’ the visual artwork into an equivalent verbal form for the viewer – the two most prevalent examples being the traditional museum label or the narrated guided tour given by a person or recording via a device. Here they share something with the ancient Greek tradition of ekphrasis’, literally meaning to ‘speak out’ the artwork, or find it’s equivalent in words. Some galleries in the U.K. have taken this idea even further by instituting creative writing classes as a way of engaging their visitors with the artworks in the collection. Here art is taken as the inspirational starting point for a short story or poem, for example. This paper draws on the author’s long-term ethnographic research with one such adult creative writing class based at a major urban art gallery in Scotland, United Kingdom. The education programme in question was organized as a repeating cycle of a) a gallery tour of carefully chosen artworks to inspire the group usually led by an artist/art historian, then b) a workshop which took place two weeks later and was led by a professional writer in which the resulting poems and fiction were read and discussed. This paper seeks to understand how one particular genre of painting – the portrait – is presented to members of the class by their guide, as well as how they respond to it - both in the moment of viewing and through the creative writing that results from that encounter. In order to draw this out, the author focuses in depth on two specific portraits, both of famous Scottish women: the first is of Mary Queen of Scots by Unknown Artist (1607), the second is of Dame Muriel Spark by Alexander Moffat (1984) which were viewed in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in the run up to the Scottish Independence Referendum in 2014. The questions explored in this paper are:

1. In what ways is an engagement with the portrait as a genre of painting distinctive? In what ways does it differ from an engagement with other genres such as landscape, for example?
2. How does the context of the viewing (both historical and institutional) affect the response of the viewers?
3. Given that both portraits discussed are of well-known Scottish women, what roles do reputation and gender play in the process of engaging with, and writing about, these artworks?

The author contextualizes the argument briefly within the theory and history of portraiture (Breckenridge 1968; Woodall 1997; Sousloff 2006; Tanner 2008; Belting 2011) to establish what is widely argued to be the inherent sociality of portraiture as a genre, but then goes on to draw the analytical framework from social anthropology (Gell 1998). Alfred Gell’s theory of the ‘art nexus’ (1998) allows a nuanced study of the complex agencies between - to use Gell’s terminology - the ‘Artist’, the ‘Index’ (portrait), the ‘Prototype’ (sitter) and the ‘Recipient’ (viewer). In particular, the paper is interested in the ‘intersubjective milieu’ (Strathern 2018) created in the encounter between writer/viewer, portrait, sitter and the sitter’s (gendered) reputation. While the research was based in Scotland, its findings are applicable to broader European and international contexts of museum education.

The project is carried out within an anthropological tradition of ethnographic research (Rabinow, Marcus, Faubion, & Rees, 2008). In Green and Bloome’s sense of ‘doing ethnography’ in education, this followed the process of ‘framing, conceptualizing, conducting, interpreting, writing and reporting associated with a broad, in-depth, and long-term study of a social or cultural group’ (1997:4). In such approaches the researcher themselves acts as the main research tool, investing long periods of time in the field and a commitment to building trust and relationships with participants (Walford 2008). The project was not an institutional ethnography but rather an ethnography of a class; the ‘field’ therefore was simply wherever that class, or its members, happened to be when participating in its activities – whether that meant following a tour guide around the gallery, or sitting in one of the gallery education rooms; it also involved attendance at any peripheral related activities that class participants undertook, for example, poetry readings or social events such as a group annual Christmas lunch. The main fieldwork was undertaken between 2011 and 2017. Over this time, the group was composed of 12 – 16 members (only 3 or 4 of whom were men), most of whom had retired from middle class professions within the last twenty years. The membership of the group remained surprisingly stable during this time with very few changes. The fieldwork involved participant observation (of tours, workshops, poetry readings) and the taking of detailed field notes; a range of semi-structured and informal interviews with the participants, tour guides and professional writers involved; the collection of their creative writing, copies of the notebooks they carried with them in gallery and a visual record of the artworks that inspired them to write e.g. postcards, digital images, exhibition catalogues. In line with ethnographic The broader aim of the research project was to investigate the nature of participants’ engagement with artworks, their creative writing and editing processes, museum pedagogies (tours and workshops) and the relationship between the participants’ time of life/age and their creative pursuits (see various publications: Sabeti 2015a, 2015b, 2016, 2018). The paper is drawn from a tour and writing session which took place in 2013; however, the author has revisited the particular session described in this paper with participants and conducted a recent interview with the guide.

The research reveals that the way group members engaged with portraits was qualitatively different from the way in which they had engaged with other genres of art. The agency of the sitter was found to play a strong role in the discussion around both portraits and the creative writing produced. Furthermore, the intersubjectivity of portrait viewing is complicated in these particular cases by the reputations of the particular sitters – Mary Queen of Scots and Muriel Spark (a famous Scottish writer of the twentieth century). Both of these women were known, not just for their achievements/position, but also because of their relationships with men, and in Spark’s case, her eventual rejection of her child. The contexts in which the portraits were viewed, including the way the guide set up the viewing, the institutional context of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, the importance of the city of Edinburgh to the lives of both sitters, and the biographies of the viewers will also be discussed as exerting agency in their responses to the paintings. The paper makes several contributions to literature within art/museum education: firstly, it focuses on the distinctiveness of particular genres of painting (in this case the portrait) in bringing out educational engagements with art works; secondly, it attempts to describe the complex agencies at work in the viewing of such portraits and the significance of the context of viewing which provide insights into broad concepts such as ‘meaning-making’ which are often deployed in literature in museum education (Silverman 1993; Hooper-Greenhill 1999; Hubard 2014). Thirdly, it brings Gell’s ‘art nexus’ - with its focus on social relations and the agency around artworks – to bear on matters of both theoretical and practical concern in museum education and art education more broadly.

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