American Faces: A Cultural History of Portraiture and Identity

By Richard H. Saunders

Portraits. We know what they are, but why do we make them? Americans have been celebrating themselves in portraits since the arrival of the first itinerant portrait painters to the colonies. They created images to commemorate loved ones, glorify the famous, establish our national myths, and honor our shared heroes. Whether painting in oil, carving in stone, casting in bronze, capturing on film, or calculating in binary code, we spend considerable time creating, contemplating, and collecting our likenesses. In this sumptuously illustrated book, Richard H. Saunders explores our collective understanding of portraiture, its history in America, how it shapes our individual and national identity, and why we make portraits—whether for propaganda and public influence or for personal and private appreciation. American Faces is a rich and fascinating view of ourselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of New England
• Release date: Sep 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9781611688931

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© 2016 Richard H. Saunders

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Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-61168-892-4

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61168-893-1

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FRONTISPIECE

Buick Convertible and Family,

Chicago, 1959. Photograph by

Mickey Pallas.

Gelatin silver print, 37.9 × 38 cm. Collection Center for Creative Photography, © 1995 Center for Creative Photography, the University of Arizona Foundation.

In the years after World War II, as soldiers returned home to start families and find employment, there existed an enormous pent-up demand for new housing and private automobiles. A burgeoning national interstate highway system, developed in the 1950s, made possible suburban subdivisions as an alternative to urban apartment living. A single-family home and a new car became synonymous with personal achievement and many Americans, as here, recorded their good fortune with a family portrait. A major study in 1957 found that most Americans believed parenthood was the route to happiness, while family togetherness and a focus on children signaled a successful and wholesome personal life (Elaine Tyler May, Myths and Realities of the American Family, 573). Photographer Mickey Pallas (1916–1997) was commissioned to take this image as part of a series by a Chicago-area Buick dealer to promote its vehicles.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 ★The Rich

2 ★Portraits for Everyone

3 ★Fame

4 ★Propaganda

5 ★Self and Audience

6 ★Rituals, Power, and Memory

7 ★The Gallery

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

The inspiration for this book came many years ago, in a course in American art at Yale for which I served as one of several teaching assistants. At one point Professor Theodore (Ted) Stebbins observed that there was no adequate survey of American portraiture to assign as part of the course bibliography and he added obliquely, looking at me, You are interested in portraits; you should write that someday. So over the years I kept thinking of such a possibility, until an academic leave at Middlebury seemed the right time to tackle such an ambitious challenge. After some months of writing and two completed chapters, I became disillusioned with the project and thought that what I had hammered out was going to be tedious reading for even the most ardent devotees of the subject. Really, does one want to write a book only a handful of people might read? Particularly not, since my wife told me I had already done that. Over lunch one day with Professor David Napier, a good friend and colleague then teaching in Middlebury’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology, I happened to mention my frustration. When I shared with him what I had done so far, he suggested that a more engaging alternative might be to reorganize the book along thematic lines that were likely to have a broader appeal. So if this book does have meaning to more than a handful of readers, it is because I have gotten good advice from many colleagues all along the way.

My belief is that authors who work on projects such as this, which take years to complete, occasionally have moments of self-doubt. Certainly, it happened to me. Consequently, I am particularly grateful to colleagues Ellen G. Miles, chief curator emerita at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC., and Kenneth L. Ames, professor of American and European decorative arts and material culture at the Bard Graduate Center, who read an early draft and gave words of encouragement along with numerous suggestions for improvement. I also want to thank the Smithsonian Institution, from which I received a Short-Term Visitor Grant to conduct research at the National Portrait Gallery in 2007.

For additional assistance, I wish to thank Peter Brant; Eric Byron, Museum Division, Statue of Liberty National Monument / Ellis Island Immigration Museum; Keith Davis; Pablo Delano, Trinity College, Hartford; Mrs. Charles A. Marrin; George R. Rinhart; and Elle Shushan.

All along the lengthy and circuitous journey that has led to this book I have benefited enormously from the generous support of Middlebury College. This has taken numerous forms. Students both in and outside the classroom have provided ideas and assisted with research. In 2004 and again in 2009 I taught The American Face, which aided my direction. Over ten years I received repeated support from the Faculty Research Assistant Fund and the Undergraduate Collaborative Research Fund, which enabled me to hire a number of students: Marissa Williamson ’04.5, Erin McCormick ’08, Nicole Conti ’09, Nicole MacMillan ’09, Thomas Ladeau ’11, Isabel Howard ’12, and Samuel Tolzman ’14.5. In addition, the college provided funding for academic leave in 2000–2001 and 2006–2007. I also benefited from research funds provided through my appointment as the Walter Cerf Distinguished College Professor. And I received great support from the present and former members of the college administration, particularly Tim Spears, vice president for academic development; James Ralph, dean of faculty development and research; Alison Byerly, former vice president for academic administration; and John M. McCardell, Jr., college president emeritus. Perhaps most of all I have benefited from the support of my colleagues at the Middlebury College Museum of Art, particularly Emmie Donadio, Margaret Wallace, Ken Pohlman, and Doug Perkins. Over the past decade a number of different kinds of portraits—some of which are illustrated in this book—have made their way into our museum’s permanent collection. It is a great privilege to work at an institution blessed with such resources and wonderful students and colleagues.

In a project such as this, in which telling a large and complex visual story is heavily dependent on the images that inform that narrative, assembling those images is daunting. And in this instance, the acquiring of images and the associated copyright permissions became—as anyone who has traveled this path knows—a long, unpredictable, and often tedious task. To assemble these images required a number of hands, and I owe an enormous debt to my friend and colleague Megan Battey, visual resources curator in our Department of History of Art and Architecture, who oversaw this process over many months with the finesse and authority of a military strategist. Assisting in this process were three recent graduates: Michael Gaffney ’13, Hannah Ostrow ’14, and Peter Moore ’14. And I would be remiss if I did not thank my colleagues Rebekah Irwin and Danielle Rougeau in special collections and archives at Middlebury’s Davis Family Library for providing images of works in their collection.

A major element in assembling photographs for this book was paying for them. Today, there is no way to publish a large number of images without enormous expense. I will be forever grateful to those who helped provide funding. Special thanks to the University Press of New England, the Middlebury College Scholarly Publication Subvention Fund, and the Middlebury College Museum of Art. I also want to thank those individuals and institutions that provided a variety of forms of assistance by either reducing or eliminating fees or charging very modest ones for images and their copyright permissions. These include: A & A Studios, Inc., Chicago; American Antiquarian Society, Worcester; the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Archive of Modern Conflict, Toronto; Art Resource, New York; Artists Rights Society, New York; Geoffrey Batchen; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; George C. Berticevich; Brant Foundation, Greenwich; Bridgeman Art Library International; Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona; James Childs; Chuck Close; The Colbert Report courtesy of Comedy Central; Susan Conway Gallery, Santa Fe; Denver Public Library; David Diaz, University of Vermont; Eastman Kodak Company; Shepard Fairey; Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown; Audrey Flack; the Frick Collection; Jon D. Hair; Lyman Hardeman; Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College; Independence National Historical Park, Philadelphia; Jeff Koons; Library of Congress; the Mariners’ Museum, Newport News; Massachusetts Historical Society; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Oren and Andrea Milgram; National Academy of Design; National Archives; National Portrait Gallery, London; the National Trust; Nebraska State Historical Society; New York State Museum, Albany; the Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum; Patrick Oliphant; Pace Gallery; David Pelland, publisher, CTMonuments.net; The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; PhillyHistory. org; Princeton University Library; Harry E. Roberts; John Howard Sanden; Gary Schneider; Smith College Museum of Art; Wayne Tudor; U.S. Senate Collection, Washington, D.C.; University of Texas at El Paso, Special Collections Department; the Valentine, Richmond History Center; The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore; Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland; White House Historical Association (White House Collection); Kehinde Wiley; Wisconsin Historical Society; and Yale University Art Gallery.

Lastly, as any author knows, a book is ultimately dependent on its publisher. In my case, I have had the good fortune to work with the talented staff at the University Press of New England. Michael P. Burton, director, has embraced this project from the moment he learned of it and has given solid counsel along the way. I have also benefited from the general advice and close reading of the manuscript by Amanda Dupuis, managing editor. And essential to the result has been the thorough, sensitive, and razor-sharp copyediting of this text by Lisa Sacks Warhol and Peter Fong. To each of you I am eternally grateful.

Richard H. Saunders

Introduction

Perhaps no people in the world have such a taste for portraits as the Americans. Go where you will, you find these memorials of affection hanging against the walls of their dwellings. There is of course every variety of style to be observed in them, from the daub of the itinerant artisan, who paints for his board and lodging, to the noble specimens from the pencil of superior artists. In the State of New York the feeling is so strong that the statute protects portraits from the profaning hands of the sheriff’s officer, and when every thing else is gone, the likenesses of the buried ancestor still have their counterfeit presentments untouched, and follow their owners through every change of conditton [sic]. Our portraits are, to use the language of another, the immortality of domestic life.

★ CORNELIA WELLSWALTER, Portrait Painting, Boston Evening Transcript, May 6, 1846

Portraiture. As Daniel Boorstin once said about another topic: this is a large subject for a small book. Yet it is also a large subject for a big book. What this study proposes to do is make sense of some of the most significant developments in the evolution of the American portrait over the past three hundred years, correct misconceptions about portraits that have become ingrained in our view of them, and analyze the crucial relationship between portraiture and identity in American culture. My primary goal is to broaden the definition of portraiture to include many images often dismissed as simple likenesses, unworthy of scrutiny, and in so doing enable us to make better sense of the more common types of portraits that routinely pass before our eyes—in the media, in public places, and in the home.

By attempting to deal with such a vast subject, I make myself an easy target for those who will argue I have oversimplified some aspect of portraiture or attempted to tackle something too vast and complex for such an approach. This book, however, is not a conventional history but rather an intentionally partial and suggestive exploration of the phenomenon of portraiture in the United States. Nevertheless, I think this is a worthy goal. If this book falls short, then perhaps others will be able to pick up the pieces and make this subject more comprehensible than I have been able to do.

The actual definition of portraiture is a prickly subject. For centuries prior to the advent of photography, a portrait was invariably painted, sculpted, or engraved and most often depended upon a direct and often lengthy interaction between artist and sitter. It was assumed that the experience would result in a realistic image that could be easily identified as the subject. But since the invention of photography this definition of a portrait has become antiquated. The only thing that is readily clear about the definition of portraiture today is that there is little agreement about what should be included and what should be excluded in this category of images. Historically, photographic images have not always been accepted as portraits because some who reject them insist that they only capture a physical exterior and may not reveal the emotional interior. But this definition is really nothing more than an elitist attempt to retain a hierarchy that no longer makes sense in light of almost 175 years of photographic likenesses.

A portrait is indeed a likeness, but the forms portraiture has taken and the intentions behind them have been many and varied over time. I would wager that the majority of professional painters, sculptors, and photographers would also make a strong distinction between portrait and likeness. Richard Avedon’s definition of a photographic portrait is, A picture of someone who knows he is being photographed.¹ While I imagine that many of us continue to believe that portraits are the result of perceptive analysis by the artist, or as another contemporary photographer has described it, an implicit agreement between the subject and the photographer and the camera, what then are we to make of the provocative and probing street portraits by the photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia?² For most of us, photographic likenesses seemingly result from someone pushing a button to take a snapshot or some other mundane image, like an identification photograph. But in the age of electronic social media, where everyone with a smart phone is a potential portrait photographer, the more compelling issue is: what are we to make of all these images?

So rather than argue how studied or knowing a portrait should be, this book is written to examine our lengthy, complicated, and often intense relationship with images of ourselves. But this is not a survey—an epic undertaking by any measure—merely an attempt to make sense of the enormous appetite we have for recording our faces and how that helps to define us as Americans.

The important thing to keep in mind is that portraits do not occur in isolation: they occur for specific, identifiable reasons. We should think of the greater phenomenon of portraiture as a bit like a spider’s web, with the center as the self, connected to an ever-larger series of concentric rings that link many types of portraits in overlapping categories. For that reason, the structure of this book is of necessity the result of careful but at times subjective choices. It is an attempt to divide the world of portraits that we inhabit into comprehensible groups. Others who have previously attempted this task (see, for example, Richard Brilliant, Portraiture, and Shearer West, Portraiture) have made different choices. Future writers will probably do the same.

Years ago, when I first read Neil Harris’s enormously influential book, The Artist in American Society, I was troubled by his use of the chapter title, The Burden of Portraiture, to describe the experience of the American artist through about 1825. I felt this way because I believed that, for many artists in this period, including John Singleton Copley and Gilbert Stuart, portraiture may have been less a burden than a catalyst for success. Of course, I was ignoring the main premise of his argument, which was that many artists during these years wanted to do much more than paint portraits, but numerous social and cultural obstacles prevented them. Nevertheless, I was still haunted by this title a few years ago, when I taught a course about American portraits to a group of college students.

In fact, the burden of portraiture, and our enormous appetite for portraits, is really one aspect of a much larger national burden that has been central to our culture and is seemingly hard-wired in our national psyche—the premium we place on personal achievement. Our culture demands we be happy and successful, and the criteria by which we measure these things are often provided by those who wish to sell us something. As a consequence, many Americans in search of this elusive success are often ambitious, supremely independent, self-confident, highly motivated, and risk tolerant. And it is these very traits, along with others, that may help to mask our internal anxieties about the future—as well as any possibility of failure.

But the reality is that we seek tangible goals to gauge our success, and portraits were and continue to be a meaningful measure. Further, given the kaleidoscopic society through which Americans continue to move, portraits—painted, at first, then later photographic—became familial totems or reassuring markers for those far away.

For many years I have believed that most people do not find portraits—other than those of themselves, their friends, family, and the famous—particularly compelling. In fact, when I developed a course on portraits a few years ago, I sensed that few, if any, art or cultural historians had devoted a semester exclusively to the American portrait. How could this be? Worldwide, portraits still carry tremendous symbolism, as evidenced by the need of American soldiers to topple portraits of Saddam Hussein during the 2003 invasion of Baghdad. It also seemed odd because some of the most recognizable and popular works of art in the world are portraits, although these examples have transcended their original role as likenesses and stand as works of enormous aesthetic achievement. Whatever we think of da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Velásquez’s Las Meninas, Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, or Stuart’s George Washington, they all are in fact portraits.

Most of the American portraits that have become well known over time have done so because the person or persons depicted have been highly visible in society. However, a small group of images that are among America’s best-known portraits have achieved popular-icon status not because of the prominence of the sitters, but rather because the compositions are so compelling. In several instances the original context of the picture is now completely secondary to its appeal. In some cases the portrait has evolved into a symbolic image that may now be better known as a source for caricature and advertising. In others, the portrait simply stood out from its peers. In virtually all of these instances, however, the pictures were not commissions for a private home, office, or institution; rather, they were created for public exhibition. As a consequence, the artist controlled the subject, the composition, and the details. The only person who had to be pleased was the artist.

FIGURE I.1

Grant Wood (1891–1942). American Gothic, 1930.

Oil on beaver board, 78 × 65.3 cm (30¾ × 25¾ in.). Art Institute of Chicago 1930.934. Photograph ©Art Institute of Chicago.

"The persons in the painting, as I imagined them, are small town folks, rather than farmers. Papa runs the local bank or perhaps the lumber yard. He is prominent in the church and possibly preaches occasionally. In the evening, he comes home from work, takes off his collar, slips on overalls and an old coat, and goes out to the barn to hay the cow. The prim lady with him is his grown-up daughter. Needless to say, she is very self-righteous like her father. I let the lock of hair escape to show that she was, after all, human.

"These particulars, of course, don’t really matter. What does matter is whether or not these faces are true to American life and reveal something about it. It seemed to me that there was a significant relationship between the people and the false Gothic house with its ecclesiastical window.

Incidentally, I did not intend this painting as a satire. I endeavored to paint these people as they existed for me in the life I knew. It seems to me that they are basically solid and good people. But I don’t feel that one gets at this fact better by denying their faults and fanaticism. (Grant Wood in a letter. See Longman, Better American Art.)

Few people, for example, will recall the original context of Grant Wood’s avatar of regionalism, American Gothic (fig. I.1). Wood conceived the composition with the express purpose of exhibiting it at the Art Institute of Chicago’s annual exhibit in 1930. It became an immediate sensation and crowds formed in front of it. The picture, which depicts his sister, Nan Wood Graham, and his dentist, Dr. B.H. McKeeby, is believed by some to be a gentle parody of an Iowa farming couple, posed to mimic the somber tone of a fifteenth-century Flemish portrait.³ The demeanor of the couple also recalls the stiff posture, unblinking eyes, and mute, stony faces characteristic of families that proudly posed in front of their homes for the nineteenth-century photographers who traveled the countryside.⁴

Whatever Wood’s enigmatic intent, the result hit a chord with the American public. Regardless of whether they applauded or denigrated American Gothic, viewers agreed that the painting said something fundamentally American. Because it sparked so many different observations and points of view, American Gothic has been adopted as a sort of national portrait. It has embodied multiple mythic strains of the American experience for over eighty-five years and has been a consistent source for commercial advertising and popular culture—more so than any other American portrait in history.⁵

A handful of other American portraits stand out because their inventive designs complement the artists’ considerable ability to capture a likeness or create images that transcend normal expectations. Such is the case with The Staircase Group (fig. I.2), Charles Willson Peale’s 1795 portrait of two of his artist sons. The picture is unique in Peale’s career and was painted specifically for exhibition at the Columbianum, or American Academy of Painting, Sculpture, Architecture and Engraving. The exhibition opened in the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia in 1795 and was the first contemporary group exhibition in America.

Peale depicted Raphaelle and Titian Ramsay Peale meeting on a staircase. Raphaelle ascends as his brother, only partially visible, descends. Peale’s motivation was to display his dexterity as a painter and promote his sons as rising stars of Philadelphia painting.⁶ He framed the portrait with an architectural molding to heighten the trompe l’oeil (literally, fool-the-eye) effect. To further enhance its reality, a single wooden step projects out into the room. In one of the tallest tales in American art, designed to inflate Peale’s artistic dexterity, President Washington, upon passing the picture, is said to have bowed politely to the painted figures, which he afterwards acknowledged he thought were living persons.⁷

The best known of James McNeill Whistler’s portraits, Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (fig. I.3), known to many as Whistler’s Mother, was, like Peale’s Staircase Group, painted to please himself, and with public exhibit of it in mind. In 1871, while the artist was living in London (with his mother sharing the same residence), he was able to paint a portrait without the traditional limitations of social conventions. Whereas most of Whistler’s commissioned portraits depict standing figures that clearly dominate the composition, the figure of his mother is painted seated and—like an element in the Japanese prints he so admired—more as a motif, with the surrounding elements, such as the cropped pictures hanging on the wall behind her, given considerable weight.

Unlike American Gothic, Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 was not initially popular, either with critics or the general public. (In 1872, it was rejected by the hanging committee at the Royal Academy.) Exhibited in Philadelphia in 1881 and in New York the following year, it received little public acclaim, then was purchased by the Louvre in 1891. Although the composition did inspire other portrait painters to imitate it, the painting achieved iconic status only after the Louvre agreed to ignore its own prohibition on loans and allow it to travel to a 1932 exhibit on American painting organized by the Museum of Modern Art. A triumphant year-and-a-half national tour followed, including the picture’s exhibition at Chicago’s Century of Progress Exposition in 1933. By the time Arrangement in Grey and Black returned to France, more than 2 million Americans had seen it. Humorous adaptations followed, and the picture entered the pantheon of pop portrait icons.

Thomas Eakins’s grand-scale portrait, The Gross Clinic (fig. I.4), was painted for the Centennial Exhibition, held in Philadelphia in May 1876. Scholars have conjectured that his primary motivation was to exhibit his considerable painting prowess and attract future portrait commissions, as he had sold few paintings before the exhibition. (Eakins’s status as one of America’s most insightful and inventive portrait painters only was acknowledged late in his life.) But both the startling subject of a surgical operation—an event rarely witnessed by the public—and its explicit realism, which includes the blood-covered hand of Dr. Gross, were deemed unacceptable for display with the other paintings at the Centennial. It was instead relegated to the model U.S. Army Post Hospital, where it was shown with beds and medical equipment.⁸

FIGURE I.2

Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827). The Staircase Group (Portrait of Raphaelle Peale and Titian Ramsay Peale), 1795.

Oil on canvas, 227.3 × 100 cm (89½ × 39⅜ in.). George W. Elkins Collection, 1945. Philadelphia Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY.

FIGURE I.3

James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903). Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, 1871.

Oil on canvas, 144.3 × 162.5 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

Almost twenty years after painting this portrait of his mother, Whistler argued in his Red Rag that the portrait was misunderstood: Take the picture of my mother exhibited at the Royal Academy as an Arrangement in Grey and Black.’ Now that is what it is. To me it is interesting as a picture of my mother; but what can or ought the public to care about the identity of the portrait?

At the conclusion of its American tour (1933–1934), the picture was exhibited for one final day in New York, where the media fanned its notoriety when it was paid a visit by President Franklin Roosevelt’s mother. Whistler would have been appalled that in 1934 the federal government issued a three-cent stamp depicting a modified version of the painting (described by some as a mutilation) as a tribute to motherhood.

While the picture was initially controversial, Eakins’s mastery of composition, context, and technique has established this work as one of the pinnacles of American art. Its setting within a surgical amphitheater marked a bold departure from the legions of American portraits that preceded it, and the bravura moment is enhanced by the dramatically lit figure of Gross, who stands out in the otherwise dim surroundings.

Given that many of this nation’s most revered or recognizable works of art are portraits, why don’t we appreciate portraits in general? There are very good reasons for this. First, portraits are by nature about the individual. If a person is famous, such as President Barack Obama, his or her portrait may have appeal beyond a small circle. Otherwise, portraits pass into anonymity because they depict the rest of us—people who have not made a lasting footprint in the course of history. While some portraits in America have risen to the status of icons—that is, images worthy of devotion—these are relatively rare.

FIGURE I.4

Thomas Eakins (1844–1916). Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (The Gross Clinic), 1875.

Oil on canvas, 8 feet × 6 feet 6 inches (243.8 × 198.1 cm). Gift of the Alumni Association to Jefferson Medical College in 1878 and purchased by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2007 with the generous support of some 3,600 donors. 2007–1-1. The Philadelphia Museum of Art/Art