Henry James and American Painting by Colm Tóibín, Marc Simpson, and Declan Kiely (review)

I will preface my review of the exhibition catalog with an account of the exhibition, June 9 through September 10, 2017, that gave rise to it. It might be said that the constraints of mounting an exhibition in one large room presaged limitations in the catalog. Following the Morgan Library and Museum's well-received exhibitions dedicated to homebody literary geniuses, Charlotte Brontë and Emily Dickinson, curators and staff attempted to encompass the cosmopolitan visual culture of Henry James. The curators required an organizing theme that would limit the scope of the exhibition to a manageable size. Even so, "Henry James and American Painting" seems a bit of a misnomer. The artists featured in the exhibit were expatriated Americans rather than members of the indigenous Hudson River or Ashcan Schools. John Singer Sargent was reared and trained in Europe; J. A. M. Whistler studied in Paris and lived abroad; American painter William Morris Hunt studied with Frenchmen Thomas Couture and Jean Francois Millet; John La Farge, the son of French émigrés, drew inspiration from Japanese art; Frank Duveneck, the son of German immigrants, received training in Munich; his student and later wife, Elizabeth (Lizzie) Boott, spent much of her time in Europe before settling in Italy. The curators employ the term "expatriate" as a label but ignore the exiles' quests for a richer cultural and historical background than America could supply in the 1870s. Two autograph letters from Henry James to La Farge deplore the painter's poverty of inspiration in "toney" Newport (HJL 1: 119–22, 133–35), but this commentary is omitted from the information tag. A handful of reviews of American artists (Winslow Homer, Duveneck) exhibiting on American shores obscure the fact that James's principal engagement with pictures occurred in England and on the continent. If American painting is a red herring, the exhibition and catalog aim to shed light on James's personal relations with American artists and how these friendships informed his writings on art and, more important, his formulation of characters and plots.

The exhibit's didactic panels and object captions, charmingly anecdotal and suggestive, have a unifying theme: James's friendships with artists, acquaintance with locales, and other biographical data. There is little formal analysis on offer, either of individual paintings or of the correspondences between the pictorial and literary aesthetic. Impressionism is mentioned briefly in the context of Lila Cabot Perry's acquaintance with Monet's circle rather than Sargent's brushwork. The quality of the works showcased at the Morgan is high. The museumgoer is greeted by Sargent's famous portrait of Henry James (1913), which belongs to the National Portrait Gallery, London. With its appraising gaze, bald dome of genius, and sensual lips, the portrait shows James at the height of his powers, though advanced in years. The curators playfully identify the quality of masculine arrogance that incited a suffragette to plunge a dagger into the freshly painted portrait. A wall displaying photographs of James (plus sketches and amateur portraits in oils) supports the thesis that James's reticence about his private life and destruction of personal papers did not interfere with his sitting for his portrait. James was clearly a figure, or rather a visage, of fascination for his artistic circle. An array of gorgeous Sargent pictures of Italian scenes and interiors reinforces the notion that James and Sargent, a bachelor expatriate of uncertain sexuality who took an interest in fashionable women, were "mirror images." Among these pictures, An Interior in Venice (The Curtis Family) of 1898 attests to James's critical acumen in signaling Sargent's disregard for faces. James's friend Mrs. Ariana Curtis took exception to her portrait (and something louche in her son's bearing) and rejected the artist's proffered gift, whereas the sterling tea service is an example of bravura painting. The curators summarize James's championship of Sargent and career-boosting recommendation that...