Clarissa’s Painter: Portraiture, Illustration, and Representation in the Novels of Samuel Richardson (review)

At the outset it should be noted that this is an important book. Lynn Shepherd advances a line of enquiry that was initiated by Margaret Anne Doody, Janet Aikins, Janine Barchas, and myself, among others—all of us stressing, in various ways, Samuel Richardson’s fine understanding of the graphic arts as well as the influence and application of that understanding. Shepherd, however, posits a much greater influence, one that extends well beyond anything initially observed by Doody in A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), or, for that matter, in any other interested scholarship to date.

This not to say that Clarissa’s Painter is accessible only to Richardson specialists. Shepherd’s first chapter introduces ways of discussing the intentions operating in mid-eighteenth-century portraiture and more specifically the marriage portrait and family portraiture, as well as conversation pieces, that are productive to the greater understanding of any number of eighteenth-century novels. Extending her discussion even to galleried presentations of female subjects for the marriage market, Shepherd brings all to bear not only on Richardson’s novels and what is represented there but also on the illustrations of the texts themselves as well as upon their mutual interplay; in turn, she offers numerous examples and compelling arguments that these painterly compositional models and contexts are intentionally integrated throughout all of Richardson’s fiction with increasing sophistication and effect. “The most obvious example in the texts is Clarissa, where one of Lovelace’s subtler strategies to exert control over the heroine is to see her—and make us see her—not as an individual, but as a series of female portrait archetypes” (23).

In chapter 2, Shepherd briefly turns to all five of Richardson’s portraits but concentrates on Francis Hayman’s conversation piece and family portrait (1740–41) and discusses how all relate in compositional terms and how the novelist expresses his intentions. She then brings this discussion to bear on Richardson’s choice of plates when he reissued Pamela. Fundamentally, Shepherd argues that the detailed presentation of a subject’s physical person, let us say, what one might otherwise understand as a kind of effictio, rhetorically speaking, even as Richardson’s characters themselves stress and consciously employ the trope, is also available and perhaps best understood according to contemporary painterly compositional models known to Richardson by way of Hayman, Joseph Highmore, and others, and known within the novels by the characters themselves. So that when Harriet Byron, who possesses a painterly sensibility, offers a description of Charlotte Grandison, that description is expressed and best understood in painterly terms (198).

Chapter 3 treats Pamela’s illustrations with great care. Shepherd incorporates discussion of the family portrait/conversation piece in detail with regard to Richardson’s placement of characters, their gestures, movements, and physical attitudes. She continues this close analysis with respect to representative examples of engraved illustrations prepared for the texts.

In her fourth chapter, Shepherd asserts the influence of the graphic arts on Clarissa, noting “how often and how consistently [Richardson] resorts to the vocabulary of painting and portraiture in describing his art” (112). She argues that “the novel can be read as a sequence of inverted and distorted family pictures in which Clarissa moves, literally and metaphorically, from being the subject of the piece to its beholder, an outsider,” and one who is forced to read the composition—or to assume “the place designed for her” within it (115). She then essentially untangles what was somewhat confused with regard to Joseph Highmore’s sketch books (119) and additionally discusses three of his drawings that were mostly unknown (or not previously discussed) in terms of their verbal or written expression in the novel. Shepherd expands her discussion beyond Lovelace’s manipulation and mastery of many literary forms and argues that Lovelace and Clarissa essentially...