OSHER AT JHU, GRACE CHURCH, BALTIMORE : TUESDAY MORNINGS, FEBRUARY 20 TO MAY 7, 2024

Velazquez: Las Meninas (detail)

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SYLLABUS (flat)     SYLLABUS (foldable)     BIOS     BOOKS
FOUR DOZEN SELFIES

Can portraits lie—or conversely, what makes a portrait true? Simple fidelity to outward appearance, or revelation of an inner truth? What should a picture show of the sitter’s social position? How far may the artist flatter, or indulge his or her own pictorial vision? One aim of this class is to consider the aesthetics and idea of the portrait, its many purposes, and this far-from-simple question of truth-to-life.

On the other hand, the painter at the easel is not the only person privileged to convey a sense of someone else. There is the photographer, the film-maker, the dramatist, the writer of biography or biographical fiction, even sometimes the composer or choreographer. Some subjects may also choose to present their own image in painted self-portraits, memoirs, or poetry—yet even here the question of truth-to-life is not automatically answered.

It is a complex concern. Even the six classes primarily devoted to painted portraits will contain some examples of other kinds. Interwoven with them will be three others devoted to particular media (stage, screen, and written word) and three looking at many different ways of representing persons of power (English Queens, French Leaders, and American Presidents). I am still juggling all the pieces, however, and the tentative syllabus below may change as I work through it. I will modify this page accordingly.

NOTE (1/19): I have now learned that there will not be a class on April 23. So I shall omit the final session on film that I had planned, and move the others up. Nonetheless, I am leaving the session in the list below because I will try to incorporate some of its ideas into one or more of the preceding classes.

You will see that the syllabus below has a certain bias in favor of persons of status depicted by artists in the Western tradition. But as these illustrations suggest, this is not the whole story; it is merely the one I am most qualified to tell. Each of the images above will be included in the course somewhere, though few will be discussed in depth. The Eyptian coffin, the African mask, and the Chinese ancestor portrait all come from traditions where the image serves a ritual or sacred function beyond the depiction of a particular individual. The Catlin portrait of a Native American at top right is indeed a portrait, but one that pays homage to the sitter's ritual. All four pictures in the bottom row feature people who would not normally have their portraits made—but here they are painted by artists who treat them with respect as individuals, not as curiosities or mere genre.

Like the clickable images in the gallery above, each the classes below is illustrated with several interchangeable pictures. First, a detail from a relevant portrait. Click it, and you will get to a full-sized version of the same image, plus a second portrait for comparison purposes. A further click takes you to a detail of this second image. Some entries follow a slightly different scheme, but all have three images that can be accessed by clicking. Further information for each class can be obtained once its RESOURCES link turns gold. rb.

These two images—a young aristocrat in Venice and a German merchant in London—both date from the earlier 16th century. Let us assume that both are true to life, in the sense that their contemporaries would recognize them. Why has one artist crammed his picture with detail, while the other leaves his background almost blank? Does it make a difference that we know the name and occupation of one sitter while no biographical details have survived for the other? How has each artist balanced the outer and inner lives of each figure, and if this is a matter of choice rather than skill, why has he made it? These are some of the questions we shall consider in this introductory class, over a span of several centuries and portraits of many different kinds. [top]

Painting a reigning Queen is different from depicting a duchess or even the wife of a king. For you are not just called upon to show something of the person but also to represent her function as Head of State and embodiment of the national myth. Indeed the two goals may be incompatible; the artist must negotiate between them. In the case of Elizabeth II, the third Queen in our class, painted portraits are by no means all we must consider. There are photographs, stamps, and coins. There are documentary films and fictional ones such as the recent The Crown. Her predecessors Elizabeth I and Victoria did not have to deal with most of these things in their lifetimes, but all three were at the center of a carefully choreographed campaign to present a particular image of the royal personage in print, in paint, on the stage, in poetry and music, and in every public appearance. [top]

I may be perverse in choosing details from these American portraits that do not show the sitter's face, but they do indicate the person's occupation—or do they? Paul Revere was indeed a noted silversmith, though he is best remembered for his midnight ride to alert the colonial militia to the advance of British forces on Lexington. Pat Lyon, though, had given up the blacksmith's trade long before he commissioned this portrait, but he had been wrongfully imprisoned in his youth and did not want to be memorialized as a member of the privileged classes he despised. Even when a portrait appears to be giving you information, it may be deliberately misleading. By looking at a wide variety of portraits showing people of all ages, both sexes, and numerous occupations, we shall explore the broad terrain and occasional odd corners of the genre. [top]

From Shakespeare's time to the present, playwrights have depicted real people on the stage. The photographs here show two musical examples. Sir Frederick Ashton's 1968 ballet Enigma Variations takes Elgar's symphonic portrait of a group of his friends (1899), and brings it to life in a meticulous recreation of its place and time. Sir Peter Shaffer is more speculative in his 1981 play Amadeus, fleshing out the rumored antagonism between Viennese court composer Antonio Salieri and the young Mozart to make a profound meditation on music and morality. But so wide is the range of biographical drama that our class will by no means be confined to these two. [top]

Who is this young woman in a straw hat? Click for the full picture, and you will see that it is the artist herself, Élisabeth Vigée le Brun, presumably painting herself to advertise her skills. The comparison is a self-portrait from the previous century: Artemisia Gentileschi, painting herself allegorically as the Spirit of Painting. She has no wish to ingratiate; she is not selling herself as a person, but carving a name for herself in a man's world. In fact, artists have always painted themselves, and for a variety of reasons, including to sign a larger picture, to experiment, to save money on models, perhaps to track the ravages of age, or simply to celebrate themselves as people. [top]

I will have plenty of paintings (plus dance, music, and a lot of film) to color this class on Louis XIV and Napoleon, but here I have chosen two sculptures by Italian artists to vary the pace. Bernini gives the Sun King the full baroque treatment; Louis brought his court to the peak of magnificence at his palace at Versailles. Napoleon was different: a citizen-commander sired by the Revolution, who made his name as a general and continued to take the field with his troops right up to the final defeat. Canova's sculpted head captures this beautifully. So it is a surprise to discover that this is actually a studio copy of the head portion of a full-body sculpture entitled Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker, a confection every bit as grandiose as Bernini's flying draperies! [top]

Who could forget lining up for those annual school photographs? Before cameras, wealthier associations employed painters to make group portraits for them, and the best of these (such as Rembrandt and Hals) found ways to connect the group members other than by arranging them in rows. Such commissions continue to this day, but they have become rather anacronistic. Which is probably why Stuart Pearson Wright chose to arrange the six past presidents of the British Academy almost as a parody of a Dutch table-picture of the kind that Rembrandt finessed so subtly in his famous Syndics. It is important to know, however, that Wright had previously painted all his sitters separately; in terms of portraying their individual qualities, none of them would have had anything to complain about. [top]

A portrait can also be painted in words, whether in scholarly biography or some degree of imaginative biofiction. Writers may also present their own view of themselves, in memoir or autobiography, but even this is not necessarily "true." The three collages shown here all relate to the subject of our second hour, the special case of Emily Dickinson. Her poems may be confessional, but she lived as a recluse, was photographed only once, and left very little for the biographer. Even the primary materials—her poetry and letters—were censored by her first editor, Mabel Loomis Todd. Among the many writers who have tackled her, Marta McDowell filled out her biography by writing about her garden; Joyce Carol Oates turned to fiction to imagine her last days; William Luce put her on the stage as The Belle of Amherst; and two films have come out in the last decade, one sober, the other a tad salacious. [top]

*Unfortunately, having been confined to bed all week, I am forced to modify the class as originally planned below. It will cover much the same ground—portraiture of the late 18th and 19th centuries—but will be confined to paired examples from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, presented for you to discuss rather than for me to lecture about. [The second hour, though, will follow on from last week's class with substantial clips from films about Beethoven and Emily Dickinson.] rb.

Two men, two tables, many books. Arsène Vigeant, the former fencing master to Napoleon III, clearly sees himself as a gentleman of fashion, having retired to a life of style. The writer Émile Zola, however, devotes a lifetime to matters of style (he is also a collector of Japonaiserie), but his personal life is a clutter. I originally intended this class to be called something like "The Height of Fashion," looking at all those 18th and 19th-century portraits of the rich and stylish from Gainsborough to Sargent and beyond; I shall still include a number of these. But I found myself fascinated by the portraits of writers like Zola, actors, dancers, other artists, and want to spend at least as much time in their frankly more interesting company. [top]

Photography will surely have made an appearance in other classes by this point, but I really need to give it a class to itself. Once the medium reached the stage where sitters did not have to hold a pose for seconds or even minutes at a time, artists discovered the value of the camera to take casual snaps, apparently unplanned. And in the business of selling a President to an entire nation, such intimate views into his family life can be even more persuasive than a formal portrait. I shall examine the balance between casual and composed over a variety of subjects, but will devote an hour to First Families, making this (with classes 2 and 6) the third in my series of "Portraits of Power." [top]

The criterion of truth-to-life has been a recurrent motif throughout this course, but by no means a simple one. What happened to portraiture in the twentieth century, with the camera taking over as the provider of verisimilitude? You got a slew of modernist artists—Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, Miro, and others—struggling to find a balance between representation and their personal more abstract styles; this portrait by the Expressionist Otto Dix is one such. But the painting by the younger German artist Gerhard Richter that I put with it—no, it is not a photograph—suggests a move in the opposite direction, where art actually imitates photography. Richter hides his daughter's face, so can we still call it a portrait? And this question takes us right back to where we started. [top]

Since the course is only 11 weeks, this class will not be given as a separate unit. I am leaving the entry in, however, since I hope to incorporate some of its ideas into the preceding classes. The outer figures in each trio are actors from film and television. As it happens, all six look like their originals—but does this matter? Are not the body language, the voice, and inner personality equally or even more important? These are some of the questions I hope to raise in other classes, as relevant.

 
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