The Society Portrait from David to Warhol (review)

The Society Portrait from David to Warhol is three books in one: first, a stunning “coffee table book”; second, an encyclopedia of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European portrait painters (mostly French and English, with a few from other European cultures and the United States); and third, yet another encyclopedia of the subjects portrayed. This book, fluently translated from the French by Barbara Mellor, won the Prix du Cercle Montherlant from the French Académie des Beaux-Arts, primarily for its visual qualities, I suspect, but also for the ample information provided on the artists and subjects of the portraits discussed by the author.

First, the coffee table book (beautifully printed in Singapore). There is no visual aspect that is not entrancing: the color, texture, line, and other nuances of oil paint, pastel, and photography; the selection and placement of visual details; the occasional historical photographs showing where the portraits hung (or hang); the elaborate typeface on pages with black backgrounds spelling out the name of a particular individual and featuring his or her portrait; the full page layout of many of the images and in some cases the double page presentation. We can see an eyelash, the setting of a jewel on a graceful finger, the engraved pattern on the handle of a parasol, the lace on a young master’s shirt and the arabesques on his embroidered breeches, the petals of the flowers that adorn hair and necklines. Designed in Paris by Marc Walter, the layout is not only beautiful but also didactically sound, even if the images collectively submerge the text that meanders among them. Ultimately, of course, it is the selves in the portraits that compel—their faces, bodies, hands, hair, and most of all, their studied regard. These subjects were rich, powerful, famous (or some combination thereof), and they were also fully complicit in their own self-presentation.

Then there is the encyclopedia of nineteenth- and twentieth-century society portrait painters. Badeau-Päun’s definition of “society” is firmly planted in Paris:

In the aftermath of the Terror, Paris society—or what was left of it in the years after 1789—regrouped around those who had managed to escape both the guillotine and exile. Overwhelmingly young, this recently emerged circle of nouveaux riches and prominent members of the new regime and their children was soon to be dubbed la jeunesse dorée, or “gilded youth.” Although Honoré de Balzac was not to coin the term until 1820, le tout Paris had sprung into being. It was now possible to conceive of a fashionable coterie, or monde, that dared to assert its independence from the court, government institutions, and the state. By the early years of the Consulate and the Directoire, it had indeed succeeded in shaking itself free of all three. Though its wings were clipped during the Empire and the Restoration, under the Second Empire it took flight once more. From the Restoration to World War I, the fabric of this monde was to prove serenely and unassailably impervious to all political upheavals, which registered merely as minor inconveniences on the social calendar.

(15–16)

A short discussion follows of the different social and aesthetic circumstances in “the Protestant countries of Europe and North America,” but these are treated as outposts of Parisian practice, as indeed they largely were.

Badea-Päun does look back briefly to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to make historical points, for example, about the hierarchy of genres—in Catholic countries, history painting (meaning grand-scale historical, religious, and/or mythological content) comes first, then portraiture, then landscape, with still life last. He also refers to earlier portraitists who commented on the genre: Hyacinthe Rigaud, Anthony van Dyck, and Joshua Reynolds, among others. With respect to the regard that I mentioned above, the author recognizes the intersubjectivity inherent in all formal portraits: every commission is “a special relationship of identification...