Changing Perceptions - Elizabeth Cayzer

This book examines the extraordinary metamorphosis that has occurred in the presentation of the human face during the twentieth century. A series of essays charts the portraits that are Milestones' to that change, while the discussion which follows -- Changing Perceptions' -- endeavours to identify its nature, its causes, and to show how the manner in which the artists reveal this transformation when painting their sitters.

Elizabeth Cayzer studied at Birkbeck College, University of London, and completed an MA in Victorian Studies. She has worked in the Department of Prints and Drawings at The British Museum, in commercial art galleries researching and writing exhibition catalogues, and as a private art dealer.

"As we approach the end of the twentieth-century, it becomes increasingly clear that portraiture has continued to hold a central place in artistic practice, in spite of the fact that, for much of the century, it has been regarded as marginal by the majority of writers and critics of the avant-garde. How this has happened has not been much studied and we very much lack good quality analysis of the changing status of portraiture and of the ways in which it has been regarded by artists. I therefore very much welcome Elizabeth Cayzer's well documented study of a number of key portraits of the century in which she weaves together the lives of representative artists and sitters into an effective narrative of twentieth-century portraiture as an art form." -- Charles Saumarez Smith, Director of the National Portrait Gallery.