GLR May-June 2023

BOOKS

The Well-Painted Life

H ENRY JAMES believed both the novelist and the painter should “compete with life.” James competed by delineating the ways in which ruthless psychological and social forces determined the fate of his characters, an insight that permanently se cures his place as a major American novel ist. Studies of James can be as daunting as his own late novels. This book is an excep

culine” James, now sporting a beard, his “neck and head ramrod straight.” The draw ing, like many Alexander did for The Cen tury Magazine , was never published. As James’ reputation grew, artists sought him out, hoping he would agree to sit for a portrait. James usually said Yes. Anna Lee Merritt, a young artist from Philadelphia liv ing in London, aspired to paint portraits of “the greatest men of my generation.”

D ANIEL A. B URR

HENRY JAMES FRAMED Material Representations of the Master by Michael Anesko Univ. of Nebraska. 224 pages, $60.

Anesko notes that prior to the 20th century, female artists could not study with the best teachers and certainly not in studios with nude models. They could compete with men for portrait com missions, but the subjects they secured were usually families, not public figures. Like a Jamesian heroine, Merritt persisted in her aspirations, and in 1889 she completed a portrait of James, hav ing earlier done James Russell Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes. The story comes to an ironic conclusion when we learn that “the whereabouts of the original painting remains unknown” (though an engraving survives). Careers in art ran in the James family. He was painted by three relatives, his nephew Billy and two cousins, Ellen and Jane Emmet. The chapters on these works reveal the affection James felt for his young relatives and their fond amusement at his “finicky habits of speech” and odd table manners. No one, in cluding the artist, considered the portrait by Billy a success. It was done in 1911 when James, who was not well, had returned to America with his ailing brother William, who died soon after they arrived. Ellen Emmett painted her cousin in 1900 at Lamb House. Hers is the first portrait of James without the beard he had sported for three decades. After the author’s death, the James family kept the portrait. In 1968, a dissolute great-nephew, dis

tion. Michael Anesko has dedicated a prodigious amount of scholarship to produce an accessible, highly entertaining ac count of the 24 times that James sat for his portrait. He tells the story behind each occasion, describes the results in nontechni cal language, and traces the provenance of each work. This is a book for anyone interested in Henry James and cultural objects associated with him. James sat for his first portrait in 1877, when he was 21 years old. The artist was John La Farge, whom Henry and his brother William met in an art class. Near the end of his life, James would recall the summer afternoons he sat for LaFarge as “in sistently romantic.” For his part, LaFarge recognized that Henry had more talent with the pen than the brush and told him so. Be fitting the youth of both subject and artist, the portrait is the most sensuous of all the representations of James. What Anesko calls the “Queer Provenance” of the painting makes for a great story about a married heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune and his closeted relationships with two young men. One, a sculptor whose work was decidedly homoerotic, re sembles Hendrik Andersen, the young sculptor with whom James became romantically involved when he was almost sixty. Ander sen produced an uninspired bronze bust of James in 1907 that

still resides in the dining room of Lamb House, James’ residence in Rye in East Sussex, England, now part of the National Trust. When they were discovered in the 1950s, James’ letters to Andersen provided convincing evidence of his attraction to young men—so convincing that twenty years earlier the James family had tried to suppress them. A number of early representa tions of James began as drawings and were made into engravings so his picture could appear in the mag azines where works by and about him were being published. In 1886, John White Alexander produced a notable drawing of a “sternly mas Daniel Burr, a frequent G&LR contrib utor, resides in Covington, Kentucky.

33 John La Farge. Henry James , 1877. Morgan Library. John Singer Sargent. Henry James , 1922. National Portrait Gallery.

May–June 2023