Storytelling, History, and Identity in William Pars's Portrait of Three Friends

KAREN ST ANWORTH Storytelling, History, and Identity in William Pars's Portrait ofThree Friends William Pars, English (1742-1782) Portrait ofThree Friends, C 1770-75 oil on canvas, 131 x 143 ern University of Toronto Art Collection Three young men, friends, are depicted in repose. The seated one seems to hold forth to his companions on some point of interest. The two standing men listen, not terribly attentively, to their friend. The grove in which they are stand!ng contains a sarcophagus, against which one of them leans in UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 66, NUMBER 2, SPruNG 1997 WILLIAM PARS AND JOHN GRAVES SIMCOE 431 seeming disregard of whoever lies there. What might strike today'5 viewer as curious and worthy of further investigation is their apparent location. One may well wonder who are they and why are they there? The group portrait, Portrait ofThree Friends (c 1770-75) by William Pars, currently hangs in the office of the president of the University of Toronto. Positioned above the wide fireplace in President Prichard's meeting room, the portrait dominates the informal seating arranged in the alcove at the west end of the large room. If the young men could actually listen, they would hear the buzz of talk rising from the business of academic life, and from the more informal chats prompted by the president's explanation of the portrait and the artist. As a genre, the group portrait has always focused on conversation. However,its historiographyis somewhatcontested. Often defined as the 'conversation piece,' the group portrait has taken different forms and responded to various local and temporal conditions in order to represent widely divergent notions of .what constitutes group identity.l Regardless ofthe historic variation in what the grollp portrait was intended to convey, this genre is about conversation. Conversation between individuals defines its common language, not merely in terms of actual words, but also in terms of a shared vocabulary of signs. What this means is that the portrait works to re-present for its contemporary audience as well as its present audience, a narrative of relationships. It is in this sense of the group portrait as a storyteller that I am going to tell my own story of its place in the visual culture of then, now, and the in-between. I, as narrator, will make choices about the story you will read; the subject will shift as I look at the apparent narrative of the painting from its moment of production in the 17705 and then at its changing story over time.2 THE 17705 William Pars, like many young artists of his era, was enjoined to make his living by painting portraits. Although he was successful, it seems his preference was for landscape, particularly with antique ruins such as those he sketched during his Italian sojourn (1775-1782). His friend ThomasJones reported in his memoirs that Pars was appointed by the Dilettanti Society 1 I have dealt with this issue at length in my thesis on group portraiture entitled 'Historical Relations. The Small Group Portrait in Eighteenth-Century England, British India, and America.' For recent work on conversation and conversation pieces, see also Burke, D'Oench, Goldsmith, and Vidal. 2 This self-positioning as 'narrator' is part of an attempt to challenge traditional notions of art historical interpretation, while also holding on to a sense that, as a historian, I am indebted to the archive for providing the bits of 'reality' which help me to 'write' these stories. This article is part of my ongoing research into the relationship between narrative theory, historical inquiry, and the art of rhetoric. 432. KAREN 5TANWORTH of London to accompany a Dr Chandler and Mr Revett on their journey to Greece (73-'74). He also travelled with Lord Palmerston through parts of Switzerland, Germany, and Ireland, in the capacity of draughtsman for the tour group....: literally a kind of recorder of the tour. And this habit of life, notwithstanding his affected Protestations to theContrary, certainly gave him an inward bias in favour of landscape, though brought up to Portrait - [Pars] executed his tinted Drawings after nature, with a taste peculiar to himself - And though, in a fit of...