By Dr. Lionel Cavendish-Smythe | Lecturer in Symbolic Aesthetics, University of St. Ives & Hove
The history of Western portraiture is, by and large, a history of faces: expressions, gazes, coiffures, and the conspicuous placement of rings, robes, or regalia. Yet beneath these grand visual gestures lies an often-ignored, unassuming but persistently present detail: the left foot, frequently—though not always—shod.
In a remarkable number of 17th-century aristocratic and mercantile portraits, one finds the left shoe peeking forward, extended just enough to catch the viewer’s attention without entirely demanding it. This essay will argue that the left shoe is not merely a compositional flourish, nor an accident of pose, but a semiotic device—a footnote, quite literally, in the ontology of identity.
I. A Gentle Lunge Toward Posterity
The placement of the left foot slightly forward in full-body portraits, particularly among Dutch and English sitters, may first appear to stem from painterly convention: it opens the body, creates dynamism, avoids bilateral stiffness. Yet this compositional convention repeatedly favours the left foot over the right. Why?
We must consider the symbolic valence of “leftness” in early modern thought. The left was long associated with disorder, intuition, otherness—and in religious contexts, even sin. And yet, in these paintings, the left foot is given pride of place. Not the “noble” right foot, but its shadowed twin, tentatively presented to the world.
This may suggest that the sitter is offering the self not as already whole and resolved, but as ambivalent, unfolding. The forward left shoe becomes an ontological marker of becoming, rather than being.
II. Shoe as Sovereignty
Portraits of aristocratic men—particularly those influenced by the Spanish Habsburg court—often depict the sitter with an ornate, even effeminate left shoe thrust forward, sometimes absurdly so. In Portrait of a Flemish Nobleman in a Slashed Doublet (c. 1641), the left foot is so prominent it borders on anatomical protest.
Here, the shoe serves not only as adornment but as territory. The extended foot claims space, like a personal peninsula extending into the viewer’s domain. But again: why the left?
One theory lies in courtly etiquette manuals, which often instructed the subject to approach superiors or sacred spaces with the left foot first—a gesture of humility and intent. Thus, the painted forward left shoe paradoxically blends dominance and deference, a foot poised between conquest and courtesy.
III. The Ontological Footprint
The left foot, especially when adorned with an elaborate buckle or ribbon, becomes a quiet signature, a declaration of selfhood at the margins of the canvas. Unlike the hands or face, which are performative and socially coded, the foot—particularly the left one—remains grounded, subtle, almost unconscious.
In some portraits, the left foot appears with slight imperfections: scuffed leather, an untied lace, a crooked angle. These may be mistakes, or they may be the sitter (or painter) asserting a truth claim—an ontological gesture that says, “I am not merely my regalia. I am my imbalance, my awkwardness, my leftness.”
IV. Case Study: The Anxious Dandy
In the 1662 English portrait Gentleman in Blue with Spaniel and Pained Expression, attributed to the school of Peter Lely, the left shoe protrudes awkwardly beyond the hem of the doublet. It is noticeably too small. This disproportion has troubled art historians for decades.
Recent psychosemiotic analysis suggests that the ill-fitting shoe is a coded representation of the sitter’s discomfort with inheritance—both familial and epistemological. The left shoe, unable to contain the foot, becomes a metaphor for inherited status chafing against individual ontology.
V. Conclusion: Stepping Out of the Frame
In an era when identity was framed (literally) by oil, canvas, and lineage, the left shoe allowed for a subtle but profound intervention. It is the body’s murmur of subjectivity, a gentle whisper of dissent from the obedient mirror of portraiture.
To walk into history, it seems, one did not lead with the right foot, but the left.
And so we must ask not only what these figures faced, but what they stepped toward—and why, more often than not, they did so in an exquisitely rendered, gently awkward left shoe.
