The Painter Henry James Might Have Been

Henry James considered writing and painting partner arts, for as he said in his famous treatise "The Art of Fiction," one type of artist "paints a picture" and the other "writes a novel."¹ In fact, James spoke of them using similar language, often conflating the two arts through metaphor or analogy, and even used the same criteria to evaluate their merits. Indeed, the only artistic reference more frequent in James' fiction than writing is the trope of painting.² His highest compliment to a writer came frequently in the way of such comparisons. In an early review, James describes Carlyle's "great merits" of expression as striking "tones in the picture,"³ and in his critical study of Hawthorne he claims that The Scarlet Letter has "hung an ineffaceable image in the portrait gallery, the reserved inner cabinet, of literature."⁴ In both cases, the central metaphor of painting is crucial for expressing excellence in writing. In an 1899 letter, James attempts to describe the elusive quality in common with the great writers, saying that they are "big painters."⁵ Continuing in the vein of painterly terms, James admires "the picture of American life on Mr. Howells's canvas" and claims that Howells' talent is based on the fact that his "work is so exclusively a matter of painting what he sees"⁶—yet again conflating the pen and the brush. About his own novel The Bostonians, he speaks of having "drawn" and "painted" a "portrait from life."⁷

He believed, in the final analysis, that the sister arts of writing and painting grew out of the same source and the same creative process. As he contends in "The Art of Fiction," "the analogy between the art of the painter and the art of the novelist is, so far as I am able to see, complete. Their inspiration is the same, their process (allowing for the different quality of the vehicle), is the same, their success is the same."⁸ The implicit assumption is that each art form has the power to evoke a similar response—in part because both can create 'realistic' visual images and patterns.

But for James, greatness in art involved not only the ability to realistically represent life, but the more elusive and complicated skill of uncovering the "essence" of the donnee—this last, his term for subject matter. He explains the concept in a 1902 letter to Owen Wister, describing one's essence as the way a person's "inward & outward presence builds itself up, fills out the picture . . . ."⁹ In short, the true artist, whether painter or writer, must recreate the world before him in a way that reveals inner truths of that subject. John Singer Sargent, who James called a "great painter,"¹⁰ embodied for James the artist's ability to render the essence of his subject; James claims that Sargent is close to an ideal artist because he "sees deep into the subject, undergoes it, absorbs it, discovers in it new things that were not on the surface, becomes patient with it, and almost reverent, and, in short, elevates and humanizes the technical problem" of representing life in art.¹¹

In fact, James did try his hand at painting early in his adult life, at his family home in Newport, Rhode Island, just after his family returned from an "educational session in Europe" in 1858.¹² During this summer he painted and studied painting with his brother William James, William Morris Hunt, John LaFarge, and others, only to discover that he did not have any real technical talent in that art form, though LaFarge claimed he had the "painter's eye."¹³

There is evidence to suggest that James viewed painting, at least in his early years, as a more accessible avenue to the artistic sublime than writing, attaching his most superlative adjectives to painters and to the act of painting.¹⁴ About the time he was writing "A Landscape-Painter," for example, he speaks of art capable of inspiration as "exquisitely sublime,"¹⁵ a term by which he meant to denote a "flash of inspiration intense enough to...