"No greater work of art": Henry James and Pictorial Art

Henry James was an amateur critic of the pictorial arts most of his life, frequently publishing his thoughts on the topic. ¹ Peter Rawlings emphasizes the importance of those publications:

The reactions to painting, in particular, regularly seek to imply the perspective of a supine, archly self-conscious critic revelling in the guise of a leisured dilettante whose trade is levity and irony. But as the workshop of James's literary apprenticeship and, as they develop, the site of his theoretical and technical introspections, they are much more than a marginal adjunction. (1)

However, John Sweeney notes in the introduction to The Painter's Eye that from 1882 to 1897 James's painting criticism markedly slackened. In fact, from 1882 to 1888, the years studied in this essay, James published only four essays on art, a notable difference from the previous seven years in which he had published approximately thirty-six essays and notes (v-vii, 262-64). Sweeney remarks, "The gap is regrettable because it was between 1882 and 1897 that his sense of artistic experiment was sharpened and developed by his own exercises" (25). As Sweeney highlights, during these years of artistic development James published several notable works of fiction and non-fiction, including "The Art of Fiction" (1884), The Bostonians (1886), The Princess Casamassima (1886), "The Aspern Papers" (1888), and The Tragic Muse (1890). Yet, using painting concepts in some way in each, James indicates that he did not disregard painting while working on these projects.

While the published record of 1882 to 1888 suggests James was uninterested in the critique of painting, the largely unpublished record indicates exactly the opposite. Between 1882 and 1897, James was in fact acquainted with many artists, several of whom were his close friends. By no means the least of these friends was Elizabeth Boott Duveneck, "Lizzie" or "cara Lisa" as he called her. Of the eighty-three existing letters James wrote to Lizzie from 1871 to 1888, I have chosen portions of thirteen of the twenty-five letters from the last six years of her life, years in which the artistic talent she had been developing all of her life was most polished. These letters show James's enthusiastic participation in and support of the art world and offer another way to uncover his thoughts on art.

Elizabeth Boott was born in Boston in 1846, the second child of wealthy parents. Her mother and older brother both died before she was a year old; consequently, her distraught father took the infant Lizzie from Boston to Italy to raise her. He was a devoted father who took delight in her education. Her talent as an artist was recognized early, and she pursued this passion all her life. Lizzie's first major tutor in the 1850s was Giorgio Mignaty, a Greek-born history painter (Osborne 188-89). After she and her father returned to Boston in 1865, she joined a class for women artists taught by William Morris Hunt (Osborne 191), from whom, while Henry tagged along and observed, William James had also taken formal lessons in early 1861 (NS 79-80). Later Lizzie studied in France under Thomas Couture. The letters James wrote to his friend in the late 1870s reveal he supported her career by placing her paintings for sale in the London art market, with which he was very familiar (see EB1, EB2, EB3). ² Her years of study earned her a well-received, large, one-person show at the Boston gallery of Doll and Richards in 1884 (Osborne 195). After this success Lizzie returned to Europe, where she studied under Frank Duveneck, whom she married in 1886.

James corresponded with several artists and was friendly with many more, but of these, his letters to Elizabeth Boott best exemplify in a sustained record his thoughts on art during this period. While James does not directly relate his artistic observations to fiction...