The Future of the Madonna

I have been reading Taine’s Italy—which made me hungry for works of art.

—Henry James to William James, May 21, 1867

Altogether the story is a masterpiece.

—William James to Henry James, February 13, 1873

Henry James gave his story, “The Madonna of the Future,” the form of an after-dinner anecdote, addressed over cigars and port to gentlemen who knew a thing or two about art. It contributes a vivid illustration to the topic of conversation, provoked by a painting small enough to be handed round, but even so a masterpiece and perhaps the artist’s only work to occupy that station. The participants to the discussion presumably know enough art history to be able to come up with other cases of the one-masterpiece master, but the anecdote—the term means “unpublished”—offers an example none of those assembled would know about, albeit for curious reasons. It is the general character of anecdotes to narrate, briefly, a humorous or unusual episode, and the tone of this one indeed lies somewhere between caricature and grand opera, as if James could not make up his mind as to whether its chief character—the painter Theobald—was an aesthetic buffoon or a figure tragic enough to move tender hearts to tears.

The anecdote here is clearly intended to do more than report a fact outside the published canon of art historical facts. It is offered as a kind of parable about deferral, of preparation protracted beyond reason, even if the projected work is intended as a masterpiece and defined by the highest ideals of beauty and goodness. As parable, the story has application to persons of talent in any age, who are tacitly enjoined not to dally but—in the narrator’s words—“‘Invent, create, achieve!’” (205). Perhaps it had a particular meaning for James, who, living in Rome in 1873 when the story was published, had not, at the age of thirty, as yet produced a piece of work substantial enough to validate his determination to be an artist. But the theme of protracted deferral haunted James well after he had achieved major works: at least two of his most celebrated stories—“The Beast in the Jungle” and “The Figure in the Carpet” are built around cases of metaphysical procrastination. For me, however, the immediate meaning of the story lies in the differences it makes salient between the way Theobald and his contemporaries think of the history of art, living as they do in mid-nineteenth century, and our own sense of that history, living in the twilight of a modernism they could not have imagined. This could not, of course, have been James’s meaning, since he knew no more about the future history of art than the listeners in the prologue, or Theobald himself. The 1870s was for the most part not a great age of art, and though Modernism had begun, of course as a scandal, when the Salon in Paris created the Salon des refusées in order to be able to show and not to show Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, it was as yet scarcely visible. The painters and sculptors James knew in Rome would have been neoclassicists or academic narrativists, whose ambitions might at best be to make a masterpiece within these arid styles, but not to drive art history forward. The first Impressionist exhibition took place a year after “The Madonna of the Future” was published in The Atlantic Monthly.

The fact that Theobald is referred to only by his given name—like Raphael or Michael or Guido or Claude—proclaims the dimension of his ambition. It is to produce a great Madonna, and one moreover which bears comparison with Raphael’s Madonna of the Chair, painted three and a half centuries earlier, in 1514. For Theobald, for the circle of aesthetes on whom he made at first a singular impression, and for the narrator himself, the past differed in principle from the present only in terms of our distance from it, so that it was possible, in their present, to think of re-enacting the...