Sitter and Portrait

by CHAUNCEY B. TINKER

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OF ALL the vices to which poor human nature is prone, none surely is more disagreeable than self-consciousness or mauvaise honte. It is at once a folly and the punishment of folly, since it makes the victim hateful to himself and a spectacle to others. Whatever it be, nothing generates it so promptly as sitting for one’s picture. A “sitter” has delivered himself over to the inquisitor; he is “on trial,” and has no appeal to a higher court. If the painter’s view of him is mortifying, there is nothing to be done about it. The sitter can never hope to answer the artist back, for the artist has always a ready retort — “Such is the way you look to me.”

If the painter, with sly courtesy, asks your opinion, your comment, however diffidently expressed, your modest appeal for amelioration at one point or for merciful softening of a line or shadow at another, only sinks you deeper into the quicksand of your own self-conceit and your ill-concealed desire to appear handsomer or cleverer than you are.

Nor does the painter’s explanation that he is not so much recording a likeness as interpreting a character put a sitter at his ease. This only makes matters worse, for it announces the painter’s right to manipulate the evidence before him. It may result very happily if the painter enjoys what he is doing; but what, oh what, will happen when he grows weary or disgusted with the work to which he has set his hand? What will the painter (as interpreter) do when the horrible realization steals over him that his sitter is a fool or worse, and certainly not worth all this study and fuss?

What wonder if, at such a crisis, a portraitist should succumb to the temptation to tell more than actually meets his eye, should hint at what the sitter is so anxiously attempting to hide, and satirize or even caricature the person before him. What fun to deflate the ridiculous creature! What subtle pleasure (and what deadly sin) to paint that hidden folly, and yet, at the same moment, somehow delight the victim, so that he shall share in the dirty work!

I recall a great satirist’s portrait of a lady posed before a length of Flemish brocade into which had been woven the rose and the crown of the Blessed Virgin. The lady was so placed that in the finished picture the rose became a shadowy halo behind her head, and the crown a symbol of suppressed selfesteem. All this smiling comment, with its hint of malice, is addressed, as it were, by the artist to the amused spectator. The result is rather a picture of “mooned Ashtoreth” (Heaven’s queen and mother both) than a likeness of the great lady who had commissioned the picture and remunerated the artist for what he had made of her.

What a disastrous record of one’s folly and commonplaceness a portrait can be! — like that awful series of portraits of the entire Wertheimer family (the tribe of Ashur) in which Mr. Sargent ministered to the vanity of the founder. And there is Mr. Augustus John (of the Academy), who can make a portrait as libelous as one of Mr. Lytton Strachey’s brief biographies. But what is the miserable sitter to expect? He has delivered himself over. Sitters must be content. Their dissatisfaction, if they are fool enough to give it utterance, is a fitting punishment for their presumption in sitting at all.

The artist can of course be the very opposite of a satirist and adopt the way of mercy. A lucky sitter may find himself before the easel of an idealist, a painter who conceives it to be his duty to make the most of the terrified person staring at him. Such a man will have the gift of putting the sitter at his ease, after which he may pursue the pleasant task of recording him as he would like to be. In this way the artist comes into cooperation with the Creator himself and softens or corrects His handiwork. No one has expressed this function of the merciful portraitist more aptly than Tennyson: —

I never see one of Romney’s portraits of a man without thinking of these lines; for the artist has, as it were, looked with the eye of God, “divinely thro’ all hindrance,” and painted the sitter as he was meant to be. None surpassed Romney as a painter of boys, for he set them down on canvas in all the glowing promise of early youth. Thus his portrait of Lord Henry Petty, painted in the boy’s eighth year, is an old bachelor’s dream (in a happy moment) of what a son of his might have been.

Romney shines among the authors of the portraits of Eton schoolboys such as were presented to the Provost on leaving the college for the university. The pictures, in kit-kat size, hang in the Provost’s study to this day, and constitute such a glorified record of youth as is unrivaled elsewhere. Portraits such as these are the artist’s compliment and gift to the happy sitter.

Ideally, of course, a painter may become deeply indebted to his sitter, who may stir his imagination and send it out upon the wing. The result of this flight will be something other than the mere likeness of a model. Call it a fancy picture if you will: it is at least a subject that has released him from the drudgery of reproduction — the dull, difficult, and ignoble task of “face-painting” — and has enabled him to create; that is, to give local habitation and a name to the figures that haunt his dreams, since

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As A spur to the imagination the best sitters are children, actors, and courtesans — persons, that is, who are free from the restrictions and neutralizing conventions of society. Think what the painters through all time have owed to their mistresses! To George Romney, Emma Lyon (afterwards Lady Hamilton) was more than a mistress (if indeed she was ever that). To him she was alternately a Bacchante, a Cassandra, a nun in an ecstasy, Ariadne (or Contemplation), Medusa, a young girl reading the morning paper, and what not. David Garrick was a never failing inspiration to Reynolds and other painters, for he was no man, but Proteus, changing his expression and, let us add, his personality at will. He was that ideal sitter who coöperates with the artist in forwarding the work.

Children, actors, and courtesans, I say, for they are all compounded of pride and eager at any moment to exhibit themselves. They are without the mauvaise honte that makes a person hateful to himself and repellent to the painter. These happy beings delight in dressing up and pretending, for an intoxicating moment, to be something that they are not. Thus Reynolds surpassed himself when he painted Master Crewe (at the age of five?) as King Henry VIII, and Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse.

Strange to relate, Sam Johnson, who was neither child nor actor, had this stimulating effect upon Reynolds, who painted him again and again, and on one occasion even depicted him as the Infant Samuel. It must at some time have occurred to Sir Joshua to wonder how Johnson had looked at the age of two. The vision came, and he painted the Doctor as a baby seated on the ground, with his head sunk in profound meditation on the insoluble problem of existence. At another time he painted Johnson as he fancied he must have appeared in his young manhood (long before the artist had ever seen him) as an aspirant in the literary world. He holds a copy of Irene in his hands, and rests his chin upon it.

He appears yet again in a purely imaginary role in that huge canvas which the President of the Royal Academy painted for Catherine of Russia, where he serves as a model for the figure of Tiresias (with the addition of a beard) in the lower left-hand corner of an allegorical scene. It is the “Infancy of Hercules,” where the baby (Russia) is depicted as crushing the serpents in his cradle, and Tiresias is present as prophesying the future glory of the Empire.

Keen must be the pleasure in the life of a model. It must be fun to dress up — or undress — and play for a time at being heroic warrior or sportive nymph, and there is no doubt that this childish pleasure has left its important mark upon portraiture. Courtiers, like children and actors, once delighted in it, as the popularity of the court masque and the hallo in maschera may serve to show. In such courtly amusements ladies and gentlemen found an opportunity to make themselves up as gods and goddesses and other desirable incarnations. The popularity and success of such entertainments afforded a stimulus to the painter, and the works of the Venetian and Parisian artists may be laid under contribution for examples.

I recall a portrait by Nattier in the Louvre, in which the Due de Chaulnes, with a wicked-looking club for a weapon and in the scanty attire of a lionskin, is represented as Hercules. It is all very surprising, if not absurd, till one realizes the significance of the subject as varying the tiresome routine of court portraiture and affording the artist a respite.

A painter will interest himself in anything to escape from the weary inspection of the countenance before him, which he has been hired to perpetuate on canvas. The temptation becomes acute when he is painting a portrait en plein air, for the landscape may well interest him more than the person in it, as is so often the case in the great landscape portraits of Gainsborough. He will even find relief in painting fabrics, as do the Dutch painters Vermeer, Dou, Terborch, and the rest. In Romney’s portrait of Lady de la Pole (in Governor Fuller’s collection) the seven folds of satin in her startling dress were said by contemporary opinion to be “more precious than any other folds of satin in the world.” Vermeer’s delight in a Persian rug or a nail-studded chair testifies to the universal Dutch delight in still life, in flowers, and in fish and vegetables and even the half-carved blushing ham.

A portrait painter is, by his very subject, limited to the depiction of the lesser passions and to such emotions as may safely be exhibited to the public. Since he can seldom hope to have a sitter of heroic spiritual stature, he is cut off from the sublime. Not for him is the legendary or epic grandeur of battle and tragedy; he cannot show the triumphant ecstasy of the saint, the spiritual corruption of a once noble character, the glory of the martyr or the fall of the tyrant. Death and transfiguration are beyond his sphere. At best, he may but seize and perpetuate the momentary as did Hogarth — once and once only — in his picture of the Shrimp-seller.

What interests us in portraits is the skill of the painter, not the charm or vigor of the ladies or gentlemen who have the ridiculous notion that they somehow are the picture. Sir Thomas Lawrence painted a glorious portrait of Pope Pius VII (at Windsor Castle), and Van Dyck a yet more glorious one of King Charles I (in the Louvre), but the spectator will find as he dwells upon the likeness that his interest passes from pope or king to the artist with his “seeing eye.” It is for the sitter, who must for one reason or another get himself painted, to pose a problem or issue a challenge to the painter, who will be a great fool if he is betrayed into producing merely a “speaking likeness.”

I remember having been told an anecdote about Rodin, who had accepted a commission to carve a statue of the President of a South American republic. Since the completed figure was by no means a good likeness, the marble did not give satisfaction to the committee, who protested, “Mats ce n’est pas notre Président,” to which the sculptor is said to have retorted, ”Je l’ai vu comme ça.”I cannot vouch for the historicity of this incident; but, true or false, it embodies the principle that in all portraiture the important thing is that which the artist sees.

Of what lasting importance is the sitter’s satisfaction or that of his friends and admirers (if he has any) with their insistent demand for a likeness? In fifty years, of what account will the most accurate likeness be? Who will care for the mere resemblance when the person shown is already dust and ashes? The only matter of importance then will be what the painter found, or detected as of more than passing significance in the sitter before him.

And so in those audacious creatures who sit for their picture a certain humility is becoming. The painter will be remembered and praised for his divine skill; the sitter will be forgotten or faded into a mere historical document. A merciful oblivion may reduce the proud beauty to nothing more than an anonymous entry in some future catalogue, “Portrait of a Lady,” while what the artist was at pains to learn about us and took his precious time to tell — this will endure. The glowing eulogy, the stinging satire, will live on, and it is thus that the artist shall at last attain, and triumph over the employer who hired him.