Note to the Reader

Lubin, David M.

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Note to the Reader

David M. Lubin

Act of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James

My intention in the following chapters is to take three works of portraiture that originated in the 1880s and show that they were not completed then, nor are they complete now. The book is an attempt to trace not one but numerous paths and byways through these portraits, spreading breadcrumbs and making notches along the way. It is an attempted journey, without predetermined destination; the...

Author

David M. Lubin

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00007.002

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-16292

Note to the Reader

My intention in the following chapters is to take three works of portraiture that originated in the 1880s and show that they were not completed then, nor are they complete now. The book is an attempt to trace not one but numerous paths and byways through these portraits, spreading breadcrumbs and making notches along the way. It is an attempted journey, without predetermined destination; the emphasis is not on where we end but how we go.

I am being vague . . . metaphoric . . . unscholarly. Although much indebted to the work of many fine scholars, a number of whom I cite in footnotes, I must from the outset warn the reader not to expect here a “research” volume, at least not in the ordinary sense. Think of it instead as an act of searching and (re)searching the three texts, a continual dipping into them and extracting from them, but not, I hope, without giving something back in return. Again I am being vague, but then this is only a brief note; in the textual analyses themselves, I am as specific as I can be. Yet even there vagueness makes an occasional appearance, and this is as it should be, for the last thing I want to do is package any one of these portraits, or any part of them, in a neat, airtight container. I do not ever, to use the key animating term of chapter 3, wish to “box” them in.

These portraits, as I started to suggest before, are not closed, immobile systems, static and academically hallowed relics, born (and subsequently deceased) a century ago. Rather they are fluid, ongoing, open systems that are recreated, created anew, whenever researched, or searched anew, with any sort of creative effort, intentional or otherwise. By this last phrase I mean that one need not try to be creative or original in one’s engagement with any of these texts, for in any act of reading “mistakes” or “misreadings” will occur, as in daily life slips of the tongue, dreams, daydreams, faces and forms seen in clouds, and all sorts of odd, untoward, and often unwanted emotions will and do occur.

However. (Yes, here comes the however.) Despite all this emphasis on welcomed misprision, interpretive free play, creative engagement with the text, and so forth, I have no desire to be ahistorical. Rather than attempt, as some critics over the years have been interested in doing, to “liberate” individual works of art from the (perceived-as) dry and dusty realm of social and intellectual history, I am glad to let them linger there, but not languish. (And certainly, for every reader who finds too much history here, there will be others who find not enough.) The historical era I will be focusing upon is that of America between the Civil War and the turn of the century—more specifically, America in the middle of that period, America in the 1880s. Nevertheless, most of what emerges from my readings of the three 1880s portraits has more to do with industrialized nineteenth-century culture generally than with 1880s American culture specifically, inasmuch as, although the three portraitists were American citizens born of American parents, they all trained abroad, and two of them lived much of their lives there as well. Still, I have tried wherever possible to be clear on which factors contributing to the rise of the new portraiture can be traced not simply to general historical trends (urbanization or the drawing together of the nuclear family, for example), but also to the one specifically American event of the century, the Civil War.

Our present needs, concerns, and desires directly impose themselves on the past that we are observing, giving that past a definite present-hued tint that differs from the tint given to it in another period.1 “The facts of history never come to us ‘pure,’ since they do not and cannot exist in a pure form: they are always refracted through the mind of the recorder” (E. H. Carr, What Is History? [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962], 22). Or, “it should be realized that the past, in its real, alive form, is not the same past which was the present when the incidents occurred. The past, as past, is the past as it appears to us now: what happened then as it speaks to us now” (J. H. van den Berg, The Changing Nature of Man: Introduction to a Historical Psychology, trans. H. F. Croes [New York: W. W. Norton, 1961], 37). In a more radical, contemporary mode: “History is substitution, signifier, figure, difference, text, fiction” (Vincent B. Leitch, Deconstructive Criticism [New York: Columbia University Press, 1983], 58). In other words, 1885 as seen in 1935 will have a certain thirties torsion to it, while the same year observed in 1985 will have a distinctly 1980s look. Once the historian accepts the inevitability of this cultural, perceptual relativism, he need not throw up his hands in despair; it has not become pointless to talk about recovering the past, so long as the past is not conceived of as some pristine object that must be had in its purest, most virginal form. Neither should it be treated as a previously abused woman whose redemption to a state of purity is the historian-husband’s holy task. Such regressive Victorian idealism, false and destructive in marriage, is equally unfortunate when it sways one’s approach to history. A preferable approach is to regard the past as that which determines the present, the present as that which determines the past (as far as it can be known), and this organic, imperfect, and symbiotic relationship between the two as the most fruitful focus of our concern.

With this in mind I propose that the best way for us in the 1980s to know the 1880s through its portraiture is to read the portraits with a deliberate and ongoing consciousness that our present needs and values are unavoidably superimposed. In not only recognizing this superimposition but actually thrusting it into the foreground, we keep clear of the illusion—pleasant, but an illusion nonetheless—that it is possible to ascertain the life of the 1880s as it really was. Moreover, continually calling attention to ourselves as historically located readers presently engaged in a culturally determined act of reading is more than simply a way of keeping ourselves honest. It is a way of gauging distance. By saying “I respond to x, y, and z in this portrait,” we are in effect saying, “The culture in which I am now actively reading this text and the culture in which it was previously produced intersect at points x, y, and z.” For it is at the points of intersection, and only at these points, that we in the present may go back to the past.

Thus the three following readings are deliberately self-conscious and deliberately present-tense. We shall view ourselves in the act of viewing. The portraits represent the artists’ views of their protagonists. In each portrait, the protagonists are depicted in the act of viewing either themselves or other fictive individuals (including the implied reader or implied viewer). Therefore, in the following pages we shall be viewing ourselves in the act of viewing the artist’s act of viewing an individual who is himself or herself engaged in viewing. If this approach sounds nervously narcissistic and voyeuristic, perhaps it is, but that should not be surprising, given the times in which we live—as well as the neurasthenic age in which these portraits were produced. This is portraiture squared, cubed, or quadrupled; portraiture to the nth degree.

Hence the title, Act of Portrayal. We are looking not only at how Eakins, Sargent, and James construct portraits, but also at how the subjects within those portraits are the makers of portraits, and how we too, by our constructive, synthetic act of reading, are portrait-makers. At each level we are dealing with acts of portrayal; indeed, at all levels, with “active portrayal.” It will thus be appropriate to stop from time to time to take stock of our mode of perception and our method of construction. We will be asking again and again, how is it that this text (whether written or painted) enables us to perceive the differences between one character and another, or a character and his environment, or a character and himself at an earlier or later point? How is it that we can recognize, or think we recognize, an internal consistency in a character who is sufficiently true to life to be, as people in real life are, a tangle of inconsistencies?

The portraits to be examined are not presented here in chronological sequence. To have done so would have been to convey implicitly the notion that history is a simple unfolding “forward,” a linear progression. Even if I do see the 1880s as being in a different place historically from the 1850s, say, or even the 1870s, I wish to avoid giving the impression that an artist in 1889 would be entirely free of cultural paradoxes, disunities, and anxieties that beset that same artist or his colleagues in 1881. The texts have been arranged, therefore, not by chronology but by my sense of which order works best for the development of issues common to all three that I wish to bring to light. As it turns out, the portraits occur here in a reverse chronology; if they are arranged in any forward order at all, it is only that of the alphabet: The Agnew Clinic, The Boit Children, The Portrait of a Lady.

Criticism, wrote Henry James, “talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance, and makes it always in order.”2 “On Some Pictures Lately Exhibited” (1875), in The Painter’s Eye, ed. John L. Sweeney (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), 88. Concerning the criticism that is about to follow, I set for myself two standards. Does this book succeed in opening new windows or doors on the works considered, letting in fresh air to invigorate the reader and perhaps even reinvigorate the works themselves? And does it succeed in making visible the submerged operations of text through which can be detected moral, sexual, and ideological fissures in a culture historically distinct, but not altogether different, from our own? How well I meet these standards each reader can judge.

Where money is concerned, to be in debt is never a happy experience; yet when the debt is not financial but intellectual, the opposite is true. Thus my joy knows no bounds. The following scholars are those to whom I am especially indebted: R. W. B. Lewis, who guided me graciously, thoughtfully, and always helpfully from the start of my academic interest in American portraiture; Jules Prown, a remarkably capable teacher, for his firm but kind insistence on visual, verbal, and intellectual precision (even when I was not willing or quite ready to give it to him); Bryan Wolf, for his ceaselessly creative, tough-minded, and energetic involvement; and Eddie Ayers, who batted my ideas back at me even faster and more skillfully than he returned my racquetball serves. Certainly each of these friends is well aware of my gratitude without needing to read it here, but all the same, what a pleasure it is for me to set down the words.

Others who have commented on parts of the manuscript at various stages along the way include Peter Brooks, Daniel Camp, Robert Carringer, Charles Feidelson, Jonathan Freedman, Barbara Heins, Elizabeth Johns, Michael Marlais, Judith Mayne, Angela Miller, Joel Pfister, Dianne Sadoff, David Simon, David Steinberg, Ann Warner, and my copyeditor, Nancy Woodington. For what is worthwhile in the following chapters, each of these readers deserves credit and thanks; none of them, however, should be held to account for the inadequacies.

Gerald Burns, Theresa Murphy, and Michael Smith, through friendship and many enjoyable conversations over the years, have done more than I can say to help me develop my ideas concerning the place of art in American history. My friend Bruce Robertson similarly has extended my thoughts about the place of portraiture in art history. Thanks also to Jean-Christophe Agnew, Richard Brodhead, Fredric Jameson, J. Hillis Miller, Alan Trachtenberg, and Robert Westbrook for other conversations I consider to have been important.

Colby College generously assisted me in the preparation of this manuscript. I spent many fine and not so fine hours there using and trying not to be done in by the marvels of word processing, whose technology continues to elude me. Colby’s computer staff—and reference librarians, too, I might add—rescued me from peril more than once.

My editor at Yale University Press, Judy Metro, has been unsparing in her encouragement, her professional counsel, and, when tested, her patience. I feel fortunate to have had someone like her at the other end of my phone calls.

Finally, I wish to thank my family—the Lubins and Warners—and acknowledge here only a small part of my ever-growing affection for the person I live with, learn from, and love, my wife, Libby. This book is dedicated to her and to our daughter, Molly, who, born only a hundred hours ago, becomes by the minute stronger, wiser, and more alive.

1 “The facts of history never come to us ‘pure,’ since they do not and cannot exist in a pure form: they are always refracted through the mind of the recorder” (E. H. Carr, What Is History? [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962], 22). Or, “it should be realized that the past, in its real, alive form, is not the same past which was the present when the incidents occurred. The past, as past, is the past as it appears to us now: what happened then as it speaks to us now” (J. H. van den Berg, The Changing Nature of Man: Introduction to a Historical Psychology, trans. H. F. Croes [New York: W. W. Norton, 1961], 37). In a more radical, contemporary mode: “History is substitution, signifier, figure, difference, text, fiction” (Vincent B. Leitch, Deconstructive Criticism [New York: Columbia University Press, 1983], 58). »

2 “On Some Pictures Lately Exhibited” (1875), in The Painter’s Eye, ed. John L. Sweeney (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), 88. »

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