Henry James and the Lust of the Eyes: Thirteen Artists in His Work (review)

Book Reviews 99 Adeline R. Tintner. Henry James and the Lust of the Eyes: Thirteen Artists in His Work. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U P, 1993. 158 pp. $39.95; pb $16.95. By Susan Van D'Elden Donaldson, College of William & Mary Henry James once wrote that he was "the incurable student of loose meanings and stray relics and odd references and dim analogies." Taking him at his word, Adeline R. Tintner in Henry James and the Lust of the Eyes explores analogies between selected novels and short stories by James and works by artists including Thomas Couture, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Giovanni Bellini, Hans Holbein the Younger, Agnolo Bronzino, Jan Vermeer, William Hogarth, and Lord Frederick Leighton. One would have thought that this ground had already been well trodden by Viola Winner in her definitive Henry James and the Visual Arts, but Tintner's study does provide a host of valuable information on paintings and exhibitions that James undoubtedly saw and art criticism that he very probably read and appropriated for his own art. At its best, then, this volume provides a solid, old-fashioned source study, but at its worst it occasionally resorts to mechanical correspondences and strained interart comparisons. Based on seven previously published essays from the 1980s, Tintner's volume offers an introduction and twelve chapters organized in chronological order on the various forms taken by James's flirtation with the visual arts. Each chapter, Tintner informs us in her introduction, "explores how a given work of art penetrates the tissues of a tale and lends it meaning." Tintner is particularly interested in what she calls James's "analogy-invoking technique," his penchant for "sometimes revealing the name of the encoded work of art, sometimes concealing it." These references to specific artists and art works, from Gérôme's portrait Rachel as the Tragic Muse to Pietro Longhi's rococo pictures, serve, according to Tintner, as subtexts in James's novels and tales, occasionally providing ironic contrasts and at other times anticipating or foreshadowing motifs in the fiction. Hence, Tintner argues in her opening chapter that "The Siege of London," James's tale of an American woman invading London society, can be read as a tale slyly invoking Thomas Couture's The Romans of the Decadence, one of the young James's favorite works. Similarly, The Reverberator by Tintner's lights echoes with allusions to French Renaissance sculpture, particularly Jean-Léon Goujon's most famous work, The Fountain of the Innocents. An 1888 story called "A London Life" is read as James's interpretation of William Hogarth's Marriage à la Mode, and The Tragic Muse is seen as drawing much of its power from James's 1889 encounter with Gérôme's Rachel as the Tragic Muse in the famous greenroom of the Théâtre Français. Tintner also pleads the case for the "subterranean" presence of "Gianbellini's" Madonna and Child in the 1891 story "The Chap- 100 The Henry James Review eron" and of Lord Leighton's paintings in "The Private Life." The earlier chapters of the study threaten at times to disintegrate into mere lists of visual allusions periodically popping up in James's fiction, but Tintner is on firmer ground in her discussion of interart parallels in James's later works, where she argues the master grew more adept in invoking the visual arts and engaging them in dialogue with his own art. In her chapter on The Ambassadors, for instance, Tintner makes quite a strong case for Holbein's The Ambassadors as a pictorial source for the novel. In 1900, Tintner tells us, the double portrait by Holbein hanging in the National Gallery in London was revealed by Mary F. S. Hervey to be a portrait not of Sir Thomas Wyatt and John Leland, as previously believed, but of the French ambassadors to the court of Henry VIII. This revelation would have undoubtedly interested James, who might very well have seen both the painting and his own novel of the same title as a joint "tribute to French civilization," as Tintner argues. Also provocative and potentially valuable are the "dim analogies," in James's words, that...