Interiority and Artifact: Death and Self-Inscription in Thomas Smith's Self-Portrait

Since its restoration in 1934, Thomas Smith's Self-Portrait (c. 1680) has become one of seventeenth-century New England's more familiar images (fig. 1).¹ It has been widely reproduced and meticulously described. Ultraviolet fluorescence, X-radiography, and X-ray emissiography have revealed surprising visual details; and the tentative identification in 1981 of two testamentary documents—Smith's will and an inventory of his estate—has lent substance to his otherwise scant biography.² Yet for all of this, Smith and his Self-Portrait continue to be served up corpse-cold, the painting's reception history shaped largely by connoisseurship and by the blander forms of Puritan foundationalism.³ Seldom has it been entrusted with the power to exceed its antiquarian interest as a memorial of someone who was, or of a past that is presumed to have been. It is easy to see that the man in this painting cherished the world he knew. But the painting also reveals Smith's appetite for what he knows he will not live to become or to possess—for what, in the end, remains to be seen. He presents himself as someone to whom it matters how the world will continue to disclose itself, and as someone, furthermore, who can wield techniques of self-presentation as means of extending the consequences of this already extravagant care.⁴

At the same time, Smith's Self-Portrait works to frustrate an insufficiently critical identification with its attractive figure of world-making by manifesting deep ambivalence about the ambition to be seen. As it cleaves to its viewer across the physical and conceptual spaces it opens up, Smith's Self-Portrait seems to shun as well as to invite the shared endeavor of looking. The skull, for example, featured so prominently in the left foreground of the painting is, as memento mori, a precautionary device; its iconographic function is apotropaic, to ward off attention to the visible world. And Smith's own direct gaze functions as another kind of evil eye to the extent that it arrests and mortifies, so to speak, the viewer's mobile look.⁵ To get caught in that stare is to feel implicated, however briefly or skeptically, in another's alienated identity, in the disclosure of another's dying. Smith does not want us to see him as a being that has already come to his end, but he does want us to appreciate the articulation he has given us of himself in word and image. Thus, we may regard his painting as an artifact of its subject's interiority, of its subject's ongoing attempt to recover himself through the phenomenology of disclosure.⁶

Figure 1.

Thomas Smith, Self-Portrait, c. 1680, Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Mass.

Smith's Self-Portrait seems intent upon enlisting the world in his work of self-restoration, his effort to recover an ideal of selfhood from the self-threatening knowledge of death. He gives us an image of himself confronting the viewer as if he were yet a living man conscious of mortality and devoted to the possibility of posthumous self-assertion. Nevertheless, his painting is canny about how the world perennially resists such self-assertions—how the world, that is, seems so often both to betray its possible metaphysical foundations and, conversely, to throw up very material obstacles to its circumscription as personal self-relation or self-regard. Death is a perfect emblem of this multifaceted resistance. Thus, commemorative arts like portraiture and elegy—the arts reflexively combined in Smith's Self-Portrait—constitute a complex and exigent record of the history of interiority. We can and should read that record with respect for the limits of historical self-understanding and for the plight of alterity that makes the historian's task so difficult. But Smith's painting will not brook the historicist paranoia that insists defensively on the estrangements of historical difference to the exclusion of its most challenging intimacies. It reminds us that the reception history of the mourning...