In the Eye of the Beholder
When writers apply the word 'portrait' to their work, what exactly are they talking about and to whom?
Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of What’s the Story?
Last weekend, in London, I was lucky enough to see the finalists in this year’s National Portrait Gallery’s annual painting prize. The criterion for these 50 paintings is not likeness or resemblance to the sitter but skill in their presentation. Most of the subjects being friends or relatives of the artists are strangers to the rest of us. But the works are fascinating.
Each painting is accompanied by a brief explanation for the artist’s choice of sitter, such as the one whose mother holds an earthworm because, apparently, she liked to rescue errant worms. Afterwards I felt as though I had been to a party where I had met diverse people, each of whom had shared something of their lives and personalities with me.
Leaving aside the portrait as propaganda, what does a visual likeness of a person seek to achieve? Is it intended to present a character, a mood, a moment in time, or to summarise a life story as revealed in the subject’s posture and expression? I know little about the techniques of painting and so to answer these questions I looked to the literary equivalent, portraits by writers, such as Robert Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ (1842), Jason Allen-Paisant’s, Self-Portrait as Othello (2023), Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady (1880-81) and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), not forgetting perhaps the most (in)famous literary portrait of them all, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) by Oscar Wilde.
In Browning’s narrative poem, the sixteenth century Duke of Ferrara privately shows the image of his late wife, Lucrezia de’Medici (married to him at age fourteen, dead at sixteen) to a guest. He describes the flighty girl, her heart ‘too soon made glad’, behind the formal image, and how he killed her:
That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall, Looking as if she were alive. I call That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf’s hands Worked busily a day, and there she stands. . . . . . . Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt, Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands; Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands As if alive. . . .
Browning sets up an ironic parallel between Fra Pandolf’s painting and the Duke’s self-delusion about his dirty deed. The portrait no longer shows Lucrezia ‘As if she were alive’ but ‘as if alive’, more vividly present but mute and unsmiling. As the Duke finally ushers his companion downstairs to meet his prospective new wife we can’t help wondering whether she, too, might end up on his wall, like a trophy.
Just as the Duchess lives now only in her portrait, Sybil Vane, Dorian Gray’s lover in Wilde’s fable is said to live only when she acts. So, at least, says Dorian’s friend and nemesis, Lord Henry, ‘The moment she touched actual life she marred it and it marred her.’ We all know what happened to Dorian, after making the Faustian pact to remain ever young, while his portrait aged and registered signs of his debauchery and crimes:
But the picture? What was he to say of that? It held the secret of his life, and told his story. It had taught him to love his own beauty. Would it teach him to loathe his own soul? Would he ever look at it again?
Like the Duke, Dorian conceals the portrait but shares it with no one. The image is the obverse of poor Lucrezia’s portrait, which represented a perverse ideal for the Duke. Dorian’s likeness embodies his warped soul, ‘Through some strange quickening of inner life the leprosies of sin were slowly eating the thing away.’
In this tension between man and portrait Wilde dramatises a moral tussle while, typically, allowing himself to satirise it. The arch-cynic, Lord Henry, compares the mind of that ‘modern ideal’ the ‘thoroughly well-informed man’ to ‘a bric-à-brac shop, all monsters and dust, and everything priced above its proper value.’ The old nursery where the portrait resides is a bricks and mortar correlative of that mind. Dorian is a dilettante, dabbling to distract himself. And he reads. The work which most impresses him is a French novel:
It was a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian, who spent his life trying to realise in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own, and to sum up as it were, in himself the various moods through which the world-spirit has ever passed . . . spiritual ecstasies of some mediaeval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner.
So taken is he with the book that he orders nine copies which he binds in different colours to match his moods, as an Expressionist painter uses colour to express emotion. Dorian conceives of the book as ‘the story of his own life, written before he had lived it.’ In effect, a version of the portrait and maybe the book Wilde would have liked to write.
That novel could almost be Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, written ten years before Wilde’s story. In his preface James says the work sprang from ‘the sense of a single character, the character and aspect of a particular engaging young woman, to which all the usual elements of a “subject,” certainly of a setting, were to need to be super added.’ Those elements were found in the secondary characters whose relationship to her form a plot (‘nefarious name’) of sorts.
He loved best Chapter XLII, where Isabel sits ‘far into the night and still further’ at her fireside meditating on the truth of her marriage to Gilbert Osmond, ‘The real offence, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his—attached to his own like a small garden-plot to a deer-park.’ Methinks Osmond and the Duke of Ferrara have much in common.
James shows us the world through what Lord Henry might have called Isabel’s ‘thoroughly well-informed’ mind, had he imagined a woman might have a mind. Because of her class and status Isabel’s mind must remain a closed book to her husband and society. James’s ‘portrait’ gives voice to that oppressed and hidden faculty.
James Joyce’s portrait of the artist is, by contrast, the account of a restless mind, eager to escape ties of family, church and state. The first version of this psychobiography was entitled Stephen Hero: The relentless truth of a young artist’s moral conflict (1904-5). In the final version the word ‘portrait’ stands in for the subtitle. Once again, the ‘portrait’ moves bypasses the visible exterior to present the hero’s aesthetic development.
Like his creator, Stephen is shortsighted which becomes a metaphor for turning his gaze inward and being guided by sound. He savours and plays with words, from the nursery rhyme in the opening chapter to the long-winded sermon on eternal damnation in the middle and his own verses towards the end. Finally he hears the siren voices of his creative ‘kinsmen’ :
The spell of arms and voices: the white arms of roads, their promise of close embraces and the black arms of tall ships that stand against the moon, their tale of distant nations. They are held out to say: We are alone—come. And the voices say with them: We are your kinsmen. And the air is thick with their company as they call to me, their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth.
Jason Allen-Paisant left Jamaica for Europe because ‘a wandering lust for pain/ had driven you to the edge of yourself’. In his Forward prize-winning, Self-Portrait as Othello, he interrogates and identifies with Shakespeare’s hero who embodies the history of the prurient ‘white gaze’, at once fascinated and wary. He tracks the historical figure in Venice, where, feeling their histories ‘conjoin’ he ‘conjures’ him in his own form.
What does it mean to be far more fair than black? Education speech dress learning. You have the brawn of an intellectual rude boy sturdier in brain-work than in war. Know streets and livity talk Shakespeare Baudelaire Dante and Nietzche talk sound system. . . . (From ‘Self-Portrait as Othello II’)
‘Livity’ is a Rastafari principle of righteous living rooted in a harmony that runs through all living beings. Implicitly aligned here with the words of the ‘great (white) men’ of European letters, the concept challenges both received English pronunciation and our received ideas of good and evil.
The genius of Allen-Paisant’s collection is that it allows the reader briefly to experience the complexity of racist opprobrium. In this way his ‘self-portrait’ as a character, created by a white author for a mostly white audience, and, until recently, often played by a white man in black face, becomes an infinite series of mirrors reflecting us back to ourselves, black and white, body, mind and prejudice.
When Browning’s Duke of Ferrara displays his wife’s portrait he reveals more about himself than about her. Isabel Archer, Dorian Gray and Stephen Dedalus commune with themselves, and Allen-Paisant, in the role of Othello, tells us much about ourselves. The best portraits, it seems, engage in a dialogue between artist, subject and viewer. No wonder I felt myself amidst a living throng at the National Portrait Gallery. Those images communicated as clearly as if they had spoken.
PS Further to our discussion of Orpheus and Eurydice, I discovered that the ancient characters are now appearing in a musical on the West End called Hadestown, by Anaïs Mitchell.
Thank you for being here today. If you have any thoughts or ideas on the subject of portraits in paint or words please share them here:
Thank you! And many thanks too for the recommendation. Very apt! Sounds good.
Fascinating! Thank you!