Word: portraited
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Gilbert Stuart tartly maintained that "no one would paint history who could do a portrait," but as the chief depicter of George Washington, he showed that to paint portraits is often to paint great history. Over the centuries, on a less exalted plane, an amazing amount of homely personal history also stuck to the brushes of the portrait painters, but the daguerreotype and the photograph in the end reduced this broad popular stream of American art to a trickle. The rise and decline of portraiture is the most striking theme of a World's Fair exhibit called "Four Centuries...
More Doll Than Boy. The first New World painters called themselves artisans and drew picture signs for taverns, or coated fire buckets, depending on the state of business. In that stern and frugal age, a commission for a portrait was a plum. "Limning" a portrait meant producing a flat two-dimensional likeness, and what gives tang to these works now is the period flavor and not any sureness of craft or conviction of life. Primitive, untutored and serene, the anonymous 1670 Portrait of Henry Gibbs is a charming example of the limner's style. The floor is in perspective...
Artists of loftier vocation expatriated themselves to study in England and to absorb the classic mastery of Renaissance portraiture. John Singleton Copley was one such, but before he left U.S. shores, he had already put together a masterly portrait gallery of some of his fellow Bostonians. His Portrait of Nathaniel Hard, a famed silversmith and engraver, stares back at the observer with a keen, curious, probing intensity that is uncannily lifelike. As John Adams said of Copley's portraits: "You can scarcely help discoursing with them, asking questions and receiving answers...
...mother in Hartley's picture resembles a woman only in the way that an eerie echo resembles a voice. The intentional distortions of the 1939 picture ironically complete the cycle begun with the unintentional distortions of the 1670 picture. Perhaps fittingly, the decline of portraiture ends without a portrait...
Ungovernable Temper. It was the character of Beethoven that most fascinated Thayer, however, and he left a portrait of the man that every biographer, with varying degrees of embarrassment, has had to reckon with since. Thayer's Beethoven is a man of atrocious manners, immense ego and ungovernable temper who at one time or another turned on virtually every one of his friends and alienated most of the musicians of Vienna. His idea of a joke was to dump a bowl of gravy on a waiter who had brought him the wrong dish...