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

Lynn Shepherd opens her book with the poetic tribute that Urania Johnson, daughter of Aaron Hill, paid to "the celebrated 'author of Clarissa.'" Its "most striking" feature, she says, is "Johnson's insistence that Richardson's texts operate upon the reader as 'Paintive Art'—as 'active Pictures' that are 'Turgid with speaking life, and thinking Woe'" (1). Shepherd builds upon this idea, offering an alternative to the accepted notion that Richardson achieved, in the words of Mark Kinkead-Weekes, "the equivalent in the novel to the experience of drama" (1-2). She argues instead that his fiction is a "manifestation of that 'broadly based surge of interest in the relationships between verbal and visual means of communication that first becomes noticeable, particularly in England, during the 1740s,'" thus joining other critics who have "revisited" the "visual elements" (2-3) of Richardsonian narrative.

Shepherd argues in her first chapter that between the end of seventeenth century and the time of Jane Austen, portraiture "undergoes a tectonic shift...from aristocratic to bourgeois, from full-size to small-scale, from dynastic to domestic" (34). Among the portrait templates she lists are pre-nuptial paintings of young women, typically commissioned by fathers as vehicles for displaying their marriageable daughters, thus metaphorically reflecting patriarchal power. Paintings of married couples were either "pendant," a pair of separate portraits of husband and wife, or "promenade" portraits showing couples walking through a landscape. Shepherd also analyzes the iconography of portrait medals, explaining that viewers studied them in systematically arranged collections. Finally, the "conversation piece," she explains, is a family group portrait displaying interrelations among its members through a carefully composed visual narrative, "the icon of a new ideology of the family" (36). Shepherd thus teaches the reader how to "read" eighteenth-century portraiture so that she can refer to its templates in her analysis of Pamela (chapter 3), Clarissa (chapter 4), and Sir Charles Grandison (chapter 5).

She introduces her thesis by observing that Henry Fielding's novels possess a "two-dimensional quality," so that "we experience [his] scenes as 'flat,' from a single perspective" (6), as is true in the early scenes of Pamela. In Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison, however, we experience a "rich three-dimensionality" because in these novels, as in portions of Pamela II (volumes 3 and 4 of that novel), "the representational conventions of portraiture function as a kind of spacial form in the text" (9). Shepherd attributes this change in Richardson's approach to two related episodes in his life. First, "he sat for his own portrait for the first time in 1741 or 1742." Second, "this direct experience of the practice of portraiture almost certainly coincided with Richardson's preparatory work for the lavishly illustrated sixth edition of Pamela" (9), in collaboration with his portraitist Francis Hayman and the book illustrator Hubert François Gravelot.

Shepherd returns to this point in chapter 2: "Richardson's First Portrait: The Hayman Conversation Piece." Although only seven pages long, this is the linchpin in her two-part argument, linking her analysis of the history of portraiture with her discussion of Richardson's "Paintive Art." Here she enters into conversation with my own essay about the Hayman portrait of Richardson, in which, as I suggest, the author holds a volume of Pamela. My contention is that "Hayman's painting of the Richardson family 'renders visible' the processes of Hayman's own thought and creative procedures as an artist as well as the dynamic intermediality in and through which Richardson's collaboration with Hayman in illustrating the sixth edition of Pamela in 1742 shaped certain aspects of Richardson's own evolving epistolary method" (467). Shepherd seconds this idea, presenting her own full-scale argument about the development of Richardson's compositional strategies. She also illuminates Richardson's debt to other artists, notably the portraitist Joseph Highmore, who also painted illustrations of Pamela.

She turns to this novel in the next...