Henry James's Portrait-Envy

"There is no greater work of art than a great portrait," Henry James flatly declared in his essay on John Singer Sargent of 1887. This is an extraordinary statement, especially from an artist who is himself known above all for the representation of human consciousness rather than appearances. Not only did one of the century's greatest writers thus sweepingly undo the traditional hierarchy of word and image, whereby the work of the poet had long trumped that of the painter, but he did so on behalf of a genre whose limitations had often troubled even its most celebrated practitioners. Nor was he just indulging a bit of public hyperbole on behalf of a friend, since he recorded his envy of the other's work still more extravagantly in private. What accounts for this striking case of portrait-envy? This essay argues that James's fascination with the painted portrait reflected his deep ambivalence toward the art of the novel, especially the ways in which the fiction of narrative omniscience threatened to destroy the very illusion of autonomous human life he most sought to create.