This curious answer, valuable, as it came from a man -- scientist, explorer, enthusiast, and egotistic altruist -- interested in the expression of every human endeavor, but with a preference for those conditions that concern the welfare of the masses, and therefore looking at everything from an utilitarian point of view, contains more truth than one is at first willing to credit to it. It suggests many of those contradictions inherent in portraiture that have never been satisfactorily explained. In this article I shall endeavor to state the intricacies of the problem rather than to solve it.
Lessing, who, with scientific accuracy in his Laocošn and Hamburgische Dramaturgie, laid down fundamental laws for modern art which will resist the tide of many a century to come, did not grant portraiture a very high rank in the art of painting, because portraiture, although allowing ideality of expression, must be dominated by the necessity of producing a likeness, and thus it can only represent the ideal of a human being, not the ideal of humanity at large. Neither the Greek nor the Japanese -- the two styles in which Western artists like best to mask their incompetence to create a new style of their own -- cultivated portraiture in the sense we do.
The aim of portrait painting is to produce a likeness -- a likeness that reveals in one attitude as much of the sitter's individuality as is possible in a flat surface view. Beauty of outline, correctness of drawing, harmony of coloring, truth of tonal values, division of space, the individuality of brush work, contrast of light and shade, virility of touch, variety of texture, all become secondary attributes, because first of all the sitter will demand a likeness, and ought to have one for the time and money he spends.
But that this is rarely the case, everyone knows who has ever sat for a portrait painter; consequently, I have come to consider it as a somewhat crippled branch of art, which cannot be brought into perfect harmony with the demands made on it by the public, on whom it is after all dependent. Portraiture as it is practised to-day is, when at its very best, nothing but an aesthetic enjoyment for the few who like to see a personality delineated as another personality sees it, and which enjoyment increases the oftener it is repeated. Who would not, out of sheer vanity, like to have himself painted by Whistler, Sargent, Bonnat, Boldini, Lenbach, Watts, etc.?
It seems a portrait becomes a work of art only when sitter as well as artist have a strong and decided individuality. If these conditions do not exist, the portrait invariably becomes a conventional interpretation.
To produce a likeness of an ordinary vapid being is impossible without ignoring the laws of art in some way or other, and, sad to state, a portrait that is a work of art is rarely a perfect likeness.
The cinque cento masters nearly all made a habit of portrait painting, but at that time portraiture was not exercised on its present democratic plan, when everybody who has a smattering taste for art and can afford it has himself painted. Portraiture restricted itself (largely by the conditions of the time) to men and women of prominence, of character or rare beauty, and such types as the artist himself thought worthy of delineation. For this reason nearly all Dutch and Italian portraits of the Renaissance show good workmanship. How far they are correct as likenesses is, however, beyond our capacity of judgement. I believe people were formerly more easily satisfied. Photography had not yet taught them how their faces looked on a flat surface, as it has to our generation. The demand for a likeness has thereby become much stronger and more difficult to satisfy than ever. The sitter himself, the members of his family, his friends and acquaintances, all have formed their opinions about his looks, and the portrait painter must possess the gift to discover and perpetuate those characteristic traits which appeal to the sitter's inner circle of friends.
Portrait painting, like modern art in general, is divided into three distinct phases. I can best explain them by mentioning three men who wield the brush to that purpose: Bonnat, Boldini, and Sargent.
Of all the Frenchmen, Bonnat was always the most congenial to me. He is a fighter for truth. His portraits are always brutally correct; they are like confessions involuntarily made by his sitters. His art never lies; it is cold but sincere, and sometimes has a touch of grandeur. To represent man as he is, entirely, so to speak, dug out with the very roots of his existence, with all that blackish soil from which his personality has sprung up -- for that Bonnat has striven in restless work and passionate ardor all his lifetime. With him painting approached science. He wanted to grasp the whole truth, theoretically apprehend it, and convince the world by painting the results of his investigations. Imagination had but little room in his art.
Eccentric Boldini is, at times, not less faithful to Nature, but in another direction. He paints the desires, theories, and dreams of a decaying civilization, the thirst for pleasure, the pessimism of a period of dissolution. His flowing lines, his grotesque poses, his instinct for the brilliant, capricious, sensuous charm of life are unexcelled. He can, however, only paint highly seasoned personalities, like Whistler, the Count Montesquieu de Fezensac, and the capricious mondaines. Just as Raefelli, the painter of proletarian socialism, can only depict tramps, indulging in his portraits even in the idiosyncracy of making men like Zola and Huysmans look like emaciated loafers on the verge of anarchism.
Paul Bourget once said, taking up the cudgel for the Psychological School of Literature, which began with Stendahl: "La vie qui dŽpasse l'imagination en brutalitŽs la dŽpasse aussi en dŽlicatesses." Boldini also believes in this. Like Henry Gervex, Blanche, Jan van Beers, he symbolizes only in a superior, more clearly defined manner, our modern intellectual life, in which we find treasured up the whole wealth of the past, what millenniums have created. And despite our soaring ambition to create something new, we know no better than to waste our time by playing and flirting with the stored up treasure of dead ages, and exclaiming in hours of despondency: "Oh, could we but forget all we have learnt, be naive again like children, open to all new impressions, without everlastingly thinking of what has happened before us!" It is the disease of the century, and Boldini is one of the artists who endeavors to represent it.
The third phase is represented by John S. Sargent, expressed in the resistless desire to attain a perfect technique that has taken possession of all studios. We all know his breadth of method, his ostentatious brushwork, his dashing schemes of color, his masterly handling of accessories, tapestry, silk hangings, etc. His ambition is to permeate every stroke of his brush with color and virility, independent of an idea, a work of art in itself. Every picture was merely a step forward in attaining this ideal. Sargent is a fanatic of technique, who sacrifices even facial characteristics to suit his own taste. He does not care a jog about the sitter's individuality if it does not harmonize with the decorative fancies of his marvelous execution. Whoever wants a sober, characteristic portrait should surely not go to Mr. Sargent.
The man who combines the characteristic faculties of these three men is James McNeill Whistler, in my opinion with Chavannes, Manet, and Monet the greatest artist of this century. He combines the fanaticism of a perfect technique, the search for truth, and the refinement to create new sensations. Boldini also is curious to analyze what the French call La ModernitŽ, which in one word expresses our breathless, nervous modern life with all its intricate desires; but he merely courts it, Whistler masters it. His art revels in the realms of imagination unknown to Bonnat's realism, and Sargent's pyrotechnical displays of technique look crude and barbarous in comparison to Whistler's unobtrusive, unerring brushwork, which masters all the optical illusions of this world with wizard-like dexterity. Are you acquainted with Paganini? That is not the Paganini of ordinary life, nor is it the one we know from the concert hall. The artist has attempted to give us the whole atmosphere that surrounds an artistic genius. And how has he accomplished such a task? By a male figure in an ordinary dress suit with a shimmering shirt front, the outlines of which are lost in a space of vibrant emptiness.
In his masterpiece at the Luxembourg Whistler does not merely represent his old mother. He endowed this old woman, sitting pensively in a gray interior, with one of the noblest and mightiest emotions the human soul is capable of -- the reverence and calm we feel in the presence or our own aging mother. And with this large and mighty feeling, in which all discords of mannerisms are dissolved, and by the tonic values of two ordinary dull colors, he succeeded in writing an epic of superb breadth and beauty, a symbol of the mother of all ages and all lands, slowly aging as she sits pensively amidst the monotonous colors of modern life. Nothing simpler and more dignified has been created in modern art.
Two other interesting phases of portraiture are expressed by George Frederick Watts and Franz von Lenbach. Since Leonardo da Vinci nobody has expressed the soul life of a human being in a face as well as Watts. It shines from the eyes with an intensity that is appalling. Watts seems to concentrate all his feeling upon them. Take his Burne-Jones. Does not everything that is valuable in that man seem to radiate from the eyes and exist in their direct and searching glance? Color is not his strength. As delightful as his deep greens and browns and dull golds sometimes are, so unpleasant at times is his flesh painting. Even his vigorous drawing is secondary to his breadth of conception, which neglects all outside characteristics in order to reveal the inner life. All his portraits -- I may mention his Sir Panizzi, Stuart Mill, Dr. Martineau, Spottiswoode, Lord Shaftsbury -- suggest the grandeur of mental labor, the peculiar noble traits of their specific characters, be they men of action or study, scientists, political economists or philanthropists. In this lies the intrinsic value of Watts' art, and also its limitation. He is the painter of the human soul.
The keynote of Lenbach's portraits is intellectuality. He is an exceedingly faithful reproducer of facial characteristics, but unsatisfied with merely copying them, he invariably makes his lines, so to say, a commentary on the sitter's personality; they are his means of telling what he thinks about them. Every turn and bend of his lines bristles with thought; that is his claim to originality. And with these lines -- the other qualities of his technique are rather too dependent on the old masters -- he endeavors to write history, and as he has created for himself the opportunities to paint more representative men than any other portraitist living, he has succeeded to some extent; the more so as he, realizing that it is well nigh impossible to do justice to and exhaust individualities like Bismarck, the Pope or Duse in one picture, has made various commentaries on each person. His portraits of Bismarck will become trustworthy documents, because he has painted the statesman so often that future generations will be able to deduct from them a reliable composite likeness.
On this occasion, I also want to mention two of our American painters, who even among such illustrious company fairly hold their own. It afforded me a special pleasure to note that the two best portraits at the last portrait show -- one of those peculiar institutions where only personages of the most exclusive circles are hung on the line -- were painted by two Americans, F. P. Vinton and Thomas W. Dewing. Vinton is our American Bonnat; his vigor and power of characterization of men are marvelous, while Dewing is to me, with Stevens, the most remarkable depictor of ladies of the elegant thinking world. He is the interpreter of aristocratic womanhood. A painter cannot describe the melodramatic situations of a woman's life in colors; his brush can only dwell upon her sensuous, flirtatious charms, and the atmosphere and the environment in which she lives. This Dewing has accomplished. His best pictures have something so curious and delicate about them as almost to suggest the vague dreams and aspirations of womanhood. With what sentiment can that man imbue the texture of a simple gown! And what chaste voluptuousness can he suggest in some lady's languid face or furtive movement of her hands or neck!
My particular favorite among modern portrait painters -- although he is little known in the vocation -- is Bastien-LePage. Of all the great naturalists who have enriched painting since Courbet and Manet seized the pallette, Bastien-LePage was the greatest, because his naturalism disdained all pose, always possessed simplicity and dignity, and still was something beyond mere faithfulness to nature, for which we usually seek in vain among the ardent followers of this creed. Also Manet and Courbet love truth, but not so much for truth's sake as to affront conventionality and the old methods. Bastien-LePage was a naturalist, neither by intention nor theory, and least of all for effect, but because he had to be one; with him it was unconscious intuition, the natural way of expressing himself.
I have seen four of his portraits -- his Albert Wolff, AndrŽ Theuriet, Prince of Wales, and Sarah Bernhardt. His remarkable -- one might almost say clairvoyant -- power of characterization, which saw the most minute details, as well as his superior traits, made him change his entire method of brushwork with each sitter. In the first portrait his style is coquettish, capricious, brilliant, and intellectual, like that of the famous Parisian art critic; in the second reticent in gesture and of bourgeois dignity; in the third, loud, lavish, aristocratic, and ceremonious, and at last grotesque, nervous, electric-like genius. Bastien-LePage's Sarah Bernhardt is one of the few portraits which are likenesses and works of art at the same time. Observe the purity of the profile, the elegance of the nervous hands, the originality of the attitude, the virility of the line of the back! And the variety of texture! Dress, face, hair, background, statuette, each treated differently. And in regard to conception, is it not Sarah Bernhardt as we imagine her in her private life -- bizarre, exotic, enigmatic, the supreme of artifice? Looking at this picture, we might come to the conclusion that there was, after all, a possibility for a harmonious union of art and portraiture.
Yet we cannot overlook the fact that even Bastien-LePage and all the other artists mentioned, Whistler included, find it impossible to adapt themselves to more than half a dozen types congenial to them, or to men and women of striking individuality. They have all produced numerous clever pieces of painting, and often masterpieces, but only on the rarest occasions, however, a likeness, and then generally of a personality of whom the public has always formed an ideal conception.
There is a great danger for portrait painters in being too individual. Boldini shows this most clearly. In short, nothing is rarer than a portrait painter who has the power simply to repeat nature and thereby produce a work of art. I only know of one who could take any ordinary human being -- the first best one he meets -- and simply by studying the color and modeling, accomplish an interesting and artistic likeness. That is Anders Zorn. He simply paints what he sees. He desires to reproduce nature as far as it is possible.
M. Chartran remarked to me one day: "I have no patience with artists who say that 'such and such persons have no interest for me. I can't paint them,' for in every person burns a flame that appears now and then at the surface." Chartran thought that a portraitist should not have too much individuality in his technique, but that he should be a man of individuality enough to find something of interest in every person. Now, as much as I despise Chartran, and as little as he can claim his "say" for himself -- his portraits are like poems dedicated to the sitters; there is nothing genuine in them, yet one accepts them smilingly because they flatter one's vanity -- he was perfectly correct in his statement (which proves that a bad artist can be a wise critic at times). There is undoubtedly something of interest in the physiognomy as well as pathognomy of everyone, of my grocer or coalman, for instance, however insignificant and faint it may be, which at times flares up and can be reflected on the canvas.
Well, Anders Zorn can to that, but he fails when he attempts to paint a striking personality; then he gets nothing but virility and color and a general outside resemblance, nothing of the inner man. There lies the rub. It is his individuality to comprehend the appearances of ordinary life.
To have the power to comprehend all types of humanity, to grow enthusiastic enough about them, and to paint them faithfully, subordinating one's flights of fancy to the necessity of the moment, would take a man of Whitman-like love for humanity. If such a man would appear, he would undoubtedly be a stronger individuality than all these others. And individuality makes an artist, as I have shown above, unfit for getting a likeness. And that art without individuality is no longer art is equally clear.
Yes, Kropotkin made an approximately true statement when he said: "A man cannot be a portrait painter and an artist at the same time."
The aim of portrait photography is also likeness, and the camera is capable of producing it. True enough, not one lens is like the other, and each camera has therefore a certain individuality of its own, but in certain things it is always correct; for instance, a man with a Cyrano de Bergerac nose will never be represented by any lens as having a Roman or Grecian nose, as at times happens in portrait painting.
The reports of the cameras in producing a portrait might differ, for instance, in the facial expression. But as it is impossible to take the same subject with several cameras at the same time and from the same point, and as the subject and the light are continually changing, one cannot know precisely how much is the work of the camera and how much that of its manipulator.
And the majority of us are such bad observers of facial expression. Not only the Chinese all look alike to us; not, we do not even remember the lines and plastic peculiarities in the faces of the members of our own family. How little one man knows another was shown by the remark of Mr. Keiley, who so gracefully crossed swords with me in Camera Notes, Vol. II, No. 3, in which he was pleased to call me "a man who never laughs." Now I believe there are few men who laugh and smile more than I do, for I do it all the time, on all occasions. It is a racial trait, as Lafcadio Hearn has so deftly explained, that unconsciously plays its part in my facial expression. The reason why I looked so glum in Mr. Keiley's presence was his own peculiar sanctimonious appearance, which dampened within me all feelings of joy in so forcible a manner than I did not even dare to smile. And such gentlemen want to photograph each other and produce likenesses! No -- a careful, intelligent system of posing, lighting, and retouching is not sufficient.
A portrait photographer should be even a better character reader than a portrait painter. He should put into practice the theories of physiognomists like della Parta or Lavater, Piderit, Claus Harms, or Shyler, as he is continually confronted by people he has never seen before. He cannot get acquainted with them like a painter, who commands numerous sittings; he has to rely on his general judgement.
There is no art which affords less opportunity to execute expression than photography. Everything is concentrated in a few seconds, when after perhaps an hour's seeking, waiting, and hesitation, the photographer sees the realization of his inward vision, and in that moment he has one advantage over most arts -- his medium is swift enough to record his momentary inspiration. Right at the start I must confess that I have never met such spontaneity of judgement in a man, who was a competent character reader, artist, and photographer in one person.
At present the art of portrait photography can be divided into three distinct classes, the amateur, the professional, and the artistic photographers.
About the first class, consisting of all those hundreds of thousands who press the button or hide themselves under the focusing cloth for their own amusement, I have nothing to say. The second class, made up of those who are willing to photograph us for money, from 25 cents upwards, figure very prominently in the thoroughfares of our metropolitan life. But they have, excepting two or three, nothing whatever to do with art. They merely reproduce our face and figure in the most inane aspects, and retouch the plate until all resemblance is lost. Hollinger, with his delicate modeling of half tones in light tinted grays, is one noteworthy exception.
The third class is the one which interests me. They endeavor to make photography an independent art, a new black and white process to represent the pictorial elements of life. There is much agitation among them. There are clubs and leagues and societies of artistic photography, and lectures and debates on the subject. There are dozens of magazines exploiting artistic photography, and exhibitions galore. An artistic photograph is, nevertheless, the rarest thing under the sun.
The majority of these ladies and gentlemen represent objects indiscriminately, or take bad painters as models for their compositions, and the results, of course, are dire. Others imitate, by all sorts of trickery, black and white processes, and the pictorial side of painting in general, and produce something which in my opinion is illegitimate.
There are a number of artistic photographers in town, who devote themselves to portraiture, and make you look like a Holbein or a DŸrer painting, or like a Japanese ghost, all wrapped up in mist. I had the pleasure of being photographed by one of these ladies -- Emmeline Rives, Anthony Hope, and Rosenthal were posing for her in the same week, so I was in good company -- and the result was a print that she pronounced one of the best she ever made. True enough, it was an excellent likeness, but the position of the head, bending forward, was so peculiar that nine out of ten of my acquaintances asked me if I had lately become a bicycle fiend, for the picture looked very much as if it had been taken by a snapshot when I was scorching away from some picture exhibition which had done its best to make me melancholy. Now this lady is one of the best artistic photographers we have, and my portrait is one of her best efforts. That, it seems to me, does not speak very well for artistic photography.
I also do not like their peculiar attitude. Instead of simply managing their business like ordinary professionals they avoid advertising, and act as if money is of no consequence to them, and yet contradict themselves by charging twenty-five dollars per dozen. They bother celebrities to come to their studio, as they would be ever so proud to focus the author of such and such a book and give them, after long waiting, two or three prints as a reward. These photographs are shown to the other customers, and of course, if this great man had himself photographed by so and so, why should not the humble Mrs. X have herself depicted by the same photographer for twenty-five dollars?
Equally absurd it seems to me that a limited number of prints of a photograph should make it more valuable. The producing of prints from a plate is an exceedingly delicate art, but after all, a mechanical process. One can make several hundred just as well as one (perhaps not all up to one's standard, but they can be made), and it would therefore fall into the vocation of photography to exercise its influence in an unlimited instead of a limited edition. A good photograph does not get less valuable because a hundred other copies of it are scattered throughout the world. With a painting or even a general drawing it is quite different; that can't be repeated, just as little as a photographer can pose a sitter twice in exactly the same way. But after the plate has once been made, the rest should be an ordinary printing process. That the plates have not yet reached the state of perfection to accomplish this may be an excuse for the present mania of retouching. I have a great weakness for artistic photography, but I must confess that I do not like its present ways of asserting itself, although I give due admiration to works of such portrait photographers as F. H. Day, Mrs. Gertrude KŠsebier, J. T. Keiley, and Frank Eugene.
F. H. Day, apparently a man of wide aesthetic culture and of genuine, highly-developed, artistic insight, has the peculiar gift to render everything decorative. Sensitive to a high degree (I fear even oversensitive), he can only satisfy his individual code of beauty by arranging and rearranging his subject with all sorts of accessories and light effects, which show an extensive knowledge of classic, as well as contemporary, art. There is no photographer who can pose the human body better than he, who can make a piece of drapery fall more poetically, or arrange flowers in a man or woman's hair more artistically. He would have made (seriously speaking) an excellent manager of the supers of a dramatic company like the Saxon-Meininger. Even Irving could learn something from him. There are passages in his portraits which are exquisite, but all his representations lack simplicity and naturalness. He has set himself to get painter's results, and that is from my view-point not legitimate. He has pushed lyricism in portraiture as far as it can be without deteriorating into a mannerism; even his backgrounds speak a language of their own, vibrant with rhythm and melody; they are aglow in the darkest vistas. Day is indisputably the most ambitious and most accomplished of our American portrait photographers.
Lately he has managed to astonish the photographic world by making a series of photographic representations of the Crucifixion, of scenes at the Sepulchre, and the dies of Christ's head. In depicting this extremely difficult subject he has followed, as far as conception goes, absolutely conventional lines; I mean he has not interpreted Christ in a new manner, as, for instance, Uhde and Edelfelt have done. for such an innovation he has probably neither the inclination or the nerve. His is, nevertheless, an innovation in the photographic field worthy of unlimited praise. Anything to deliver us from the stagnancy of commonplace, stereotyped productions! And Day took a step, however short and faltering, toward Parnassian heights. Pictorial representation of a classic subject on classic lines has spoken its first word in artistic photography, and no one knows where it may lead to.
