Art historian Boyle talk is a primer on American art

SALISBURY — Art historian Dick Boyle took a standing-room only audience through a crash course in American portraiture on Saturday, Feb. 25, as part of the Era of Elegance series of lectures sponsored by the Salisbury Association and the Scoville Memorial Library.Boyle broke the subject into two parts — portrait painting from 1750 to 1860 and post-Civil War to the early 20th century.In discussing the antecedants, Boyle said, “American art was not born of nothing — it was an outpost of European art.”Portraits were the dominant format until the mid-19th century, when people started painting landscapes.“The problem faced by the portrait painter is how to marry the likeness to something more indefinable, brought about by style,” Boyle said.“How does the painter get at the real person?” he asked. “The painter has to balance the truth of the likeness with the spirit of the person, through a sense of style.”He then quoted John Singer Sargent, defining a portrait as “a painting of a person with something wrong about the mouth.”A portrait is a historical record, a means of identification, a reflection of social status and a means of political image-making, Boyle said. A portrait is a symbol of power and a gratification of vanity. “A portrait confers immortality on the sitter.”In American portraiture, the first emphasis was on the likeness. Boyle said the paintings in the Salisbury Academy Building are a good example of this style, with engaged couples exchanging portraits and the paintings providing a family record.In antiquity, Boyle said, portraits (sculptures) were usually tied to the official religion. In the Middle Ages in Europe, up-and- coming merchants often donated an altar piece to their local church or cathedral — with the right to be included in it somewhere.But with the Renaissance emphasis on humanism, the portrait was born.Examples of portraitsBoyle gave several examples beginning with Titian, the Venetian Renaissance painter, who used canvas (far more portable than stone or large wooden altar pieces) and introduced psychology into the portrait. (He also cited humorist Robert Benchley’s telegram from Venice to a friend in New York: “Streets full of water, please advise.”)Van Dyck’s portrait of Charles I hunting (1634) is an example of “the political image personified.”The king, looking spiffy in fancy red knickerbockers tucked into expensive boots, his hat at a jaunty angle, has one hand on his walking stick and the other akimbo. He is looking at the observer with an expression in which it would be easy to read a lofty disdain. Charles I was short — “inelegant,” Boyle said tactfully. “Van Dyck gives him a long elegant neck and an arrogant stance. It’s wonderful — ‘To hell with you, I’m the king!’ Of course, they cut his head off later,” he said. “You could say that American portraits are thematic variations on this one.”English painter Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) influenced the Americans. His portraits of the wealthy and notable were in what Boyle called “The Grand Manner” — with the subjects exuding a sense of command and confidence, and usually with an impressive landscape behind them, indicative that the rulers of England were most comfortable at their country estates, not London.Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) — best known for “The Blue Boy” (1770) — was influential. “The Blue Boy” remained a popular image in the U.S. well into the 1920s, with the figure appearing in advertisements and packaging. The figure again has the arrogant stance, with arms akimbo.Boyle, showing Gainsborough’s portrait of Mary, Countess Howe (1763), said the painter used “a more generalized, rather than a specific likeness. It was more real if he kept it a little vague.”Which brings the story to Benjamin West (1738-1820). Born in Pennsylvania, he wound up as historical painter to the court of George III and was the second president of the Royal Academy.Boyle said that West “taught more American artists than anyone else” — including Gilbert Stuart and Thomas Sully.American painting remained Anglocentric. “London was the place to go, both before and after the Revolution,” Boyle said.American style developsBut the American style was developing. Boyle showed one of Stuart’s full-length portraits of George Washington (the “Landsdowne portrait,” 1796).Washington is in a pose that is imperial, on the one hand, and republican — “The Roman republic,” Boyle added, referring to a table leg in the foreground.Stuart’s painting of Washington at Dorchester Heights (1806) was the beginning of Americans looking back with a sense of pride. “We beat them.”Compared with the Van Dyck portrait of Charles I and his horse, the first thing the viewer notices is that Stuart shows the rear end of the horse, and makes no attempt to create an elegant version of Washington.John Singleton Copley (1738-1815) used a synthesis of styles, Boyle said.“He had a feeling for stuff — fabrics, reflections in a polished tabletop, elegant clothing — but he painted a middle class person, warts and all, with no generalized elegance,” he said. “The truth of the likeness was tentatively married to style.”Copley used the grand manner pose as well, Boyle said, but avoided presenting the subjects as arrogant or aristocratic.Thomas Sully (1783-1872) was English-born but thoroughly American in outlook. From a theatrical family, Sully moved from England to Richmond, Va., and then to Charleston, S.C., finally settling in Philadelphia, Pa., in 1806.Philadelphia was the “portrait capital of America,” Boyle said. Sully painted historical portraits (“Passage of the Delaware”) and portraits of the famous and powerful (John Quincy Adams and the Marquis de Lafayette).Boyle zeroed in on Sully’s portraits of actress Fannie Kemble, a woman of considerable accomplishment and some notoriety for her public opposition to slavery, her writings on that subject, and her status as a divorced woman.“Henry James fell in love with her,” said Boyle.Sully painted the teenage Queen Victoria in 1838, shortly before her coronation. Boyle said it was at the behest of wealthy Philadelphians with Tory leanings.“I always had the feeling that Philadelphia preferred a queen,” said Boyle, who taught art history at Temple University from 1987 to 2005. “The town went nuts when Queen Elizabeth visited.”The second phase of American portraiture, after the Civil War, began with John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), whose infamous portrait of “Madame X” almost destroyed his career.The subject, a Madame Gautreau, “wore lavender makeup, showed a lot of decolletage, and had her arm bent funny,” said Boyle. “She raised hell and Sargent had to leave the country.”That didn’t prevent him from becoming the portraitist of choice for the international establishment, even as that cast of characters evolved (see his late 19th-century paintings of newly wealthy industrialists). The American style continued to branch out. James McNeill Whistler’s 1871 “Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1,” also known as “Whistler’s Mother,” was radical for its day.“The mother is simply an object in a painting,” said Boyle.And William Merritt Chase (1849-1916) gave more than a token nod to the French Impressionists with his “Portrait of Miss Dora Wheeler” (1883). Chase also taught Salisbury’s Ellen Emmet Rand. Rand “was very good, not great” Boyle said. He said her portrait of an Episcopal minister “caught something in his look that lends itself to interpretation of his thinking.”The Rand women tended to be the notable members of the family, Boyle said, and when asked about the Rand men, Ellen Emmet Rand said, “Well, they are good-looking.”