Henry James and American Painting
Listen to the exhibition audio guide narrated by co-curator and acclaimed novelist Colm Tóibín with an introduction by Colin B. Bailey, Director of the Morgan Library & Museum.
Henry James (1843–1916) was fascinated by painters and sculptors. In his novels and stories, he wrote about art and artists. He used the gaze and the creation of scenes in his fiction as though he were a painter. In his travels through Italy, he visited galleries and wrote many letters about the art he saw. Numerous painters, including John La Farge, John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, Frank Duveneck, and Elizabeth Boott, were among his friends. The visual arts were at the very center of his life, and his relationship to painting and sculpture, and to artists, enriched his sensibility.
This exhibition—featuring paintings, drawings, sculpture and photographs by several of the artists in James’s circle, as well as a selection of his own manuscripts and letters—elucidates the connections between one of the supreme novelists of his age and the artists and works of art that nourished and inspired his fiction.
This online exhibition was created in conjunction with the exhibition Henry James and American Painting, on view June 9 through September 10, 2017.
Henry James and American Painting is made possible with a lead gift from the Jerome L. Greene Foundation.
Major funding is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation.
Generous support is provided by Karen H. Bechtel, the Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts, and the Franklin Jasper Walls Lecture Fund, and assistance from Barbara G. Fleischman and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art.
Alice Boughton (1865–1943), Henry James, 1906, gelatin silver print. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C. Gift of Allan M. Price.
Henry James Visits the Library
J. P. Morgan et Amicorum, 1908–96
© The Morgan Library & Museum, ARC 3003. Photography by Graham S. Haber, 2016
This is the guest book for visitors to Pierpont Morgan’s library, spanning the years 1908 through 1996. It is ornately bound in brown leather and elaborately gold-tooled and inlaid with lighter brown leather—the work of the binder Marguerite Duprez Lahey. This book was kept for many years in the North Room of Pierpont Morgan’s library, formerly the o ce of Belle Greene, his librarian and, later, the rst director of the Morgan Library. She began to keep the visitors’ book in 1908 on behalf of her employer. It records the names of all the notable individuals who visited the library over the course of the twentieth century. As this page shows, James visited on 18 January 1911.
This is the visitor's book for the Morgan Library for the 18th of January, 1911. You can see Henry James's signature here when he came to visit. James had an uneasy relationship with the city of New York. He loved the old city of his childhood downtown around Washington Square and 14th Street where his grandmother had lived but he deplored the way the city had developed the skyscrapers and the avenues, the numbered avenues. But yet, when it came to making a collected edition of his work, he wrote to his publisher in 1905, he wrote, "If a name be wanted for the edition for convenience and distinction, I should particularly like to call it the New York Edition if that may pass for a general title of sufficient dignity and distinctness. My feeling about the matter is that it refers to the whole enterprise, explicitly to my native city, to which I have had no great opportunity of rendering that sort of homage."
The Master
John Singer Sargent (1856–1925)
Henry James, 1913 Oil on canvas
National Portrait Gallery, London, bequeathed by Henry James, 1916
© National Portrait Gallery, London
In spring 1912, Sargent drew a charcoal portrait of James (which the artist presented to King George v after James’s death). In March, James wrote to Edith Wharton: “I have sat again to Sargent with complete success, and he has made an admirable drawing. He kept on with the work of the two previous séances—and brought it round, beautifully developed, and redeemed and completed. It’s a regular rst class living, resembling, enduring thing.” Sargent was, therefore, the natural choice when, the following year, a group of James’s friends commissioned an oil portrait to mark his seventieth birthday. James described the nished oil portrait, which captured its subject’s reserve and sensuous intelligence, as “Sargent at his very best and poor old H. J. not at his worst; in short a living breathing likeness and a masterpiece of painting.”
This portrait of Henry James by John Singer Sargent, which was done in 1913 to mark the 70th birthday of James, was paid for by his friends. In a way, it's the culmination of James's close relationship to painting and painters. He posed for it, and he wrote many letters about it.
His relationship with Singer Sargent is in one way a mirror image between writer and painter. They had both wandered in Europe as children. They both moved easily between France and England. They were both very interested in fashion, and they both were workers. They both were two men, two bachelors, who really devoted their lives to their art.
The Suffragette
Henry James (1843–1916)
Autograph letter, signed, to Charles Hagberg Wright, 7 May 1914
Private collection
By the end of June 1913, after approximately ten sittings, Sargent finished his oil portrait of James. When it was first publicly exhibited at London’s Royal Academy, on 4 May 1914, a suffragette named Mary Wood attacked the portrait with a meat cleaver. Wood badly damaged the canvas in three places. In a letter to his friend Jessie Allen, James reported ruefully that “she got at me thrice over before the tomahawk was stayed. I naturally feel very scalped and disfigured.” On 7 May, he wrote this letter to Wright, librarian of the London Library, reflecting that he really owed “the vicious hag & her ravage a good mark for having led to my hearing from you.”
A letter from Henry James to Charles Hagberg Wright.
Lamb House. Rye, Sussex, May the 7th, 1914.
My Dear, Dear Hagberg,
I am deeply moved by your generous letter and have only not assured you of this sooner because of the accursed fury with a cleaver has been the cause of a huge amplification of my daily or hourly postal matter. I've been rather snowed under, condolingly, but I'm now emerging and really owe the vicious hag and her ravage a good mark for having led to my hearing from you in such a particularly beautiful state. The ravage was great but it appears that, very wonderfully, it can be made good to all probability by some master restorer into his hands that is already being put.
Salon de Refusés
John Singer Sargent (1856–1925)
An Interior in Venice (The Curtis Family), 1898 Oil on canvas
Lent by the Royal Academy of Arts, London
In March 1899, James saw this group portrait that had been painted in the grand drawing room of
the Palazzo Barbaro, where both James and Sargent had stayed many times. It shows Ralph Curtis— who had been a student of Frank Duveneck—and his wife to the left, Ralph’s father, Daniel, who was a wealthy Bostonian, to the right, and Ralph’s mother, Ariana, close to the center. James wrote to Ariana to tell her that he “absolutely and without reserve adored [it]. . . . I’ve seen few things that I craved more to possess! I hope you haven’t altogether let it go.” Ariana, however, disliked it— she thought she looked too old in it and believed her son Ralph’s pose was too casual—and refused to accept it as a gift from the artist.
This is the Sargent painting of the Curtis family in their palazzo in Venice, a palazzo that James used in his novel, the Wings of The Dove. The Curtises didn't like it. James particularly did. James had stayed a great deal in the palace. He used the library.
But it's also, I think for James and Sargent, the whole idea of Venice of its beauty, but also of its shadows of the way it was fading, I think, nourished their art in different ways. But both of them, James set novels and stories in Venice, and Singer Sargent made paintings and watercolors of Venice.
A Statue From Rome
Hendrik Christian Andersen (1872–1940)
Count Alberto Bevilacqua, 1899
Painted terra-cotta
© National Trust / Charles Thomas
James purchased this bust from Andersen for £50 (the equivalent of approximately $5,000 today), a figure that James considered “modest for the admirable and exquisite work.” It was shipped from Rome in 1899, shortly after James met Andersen, and placed by the mantelpiece in a corner of the small dining room at Lamb House, Rye, where James had moved in 1897. The young count resembled Andersen, and James wrote of the bust, “I shall have him constantly before me as a loved companion and friend. He is so living, so human, so sympathetic and sociable and curious, that I foresee it will be a lifelong attachment.” James later told a friend that the sculpture was “the first object that greets my eyes in the morning, and the last at night.
Advice to a Young Artist, Pages 3–4
Henry James (1843–1916)
Autograph letter, signed, to Hendrik Christian Andersen, 25 November 1906
Henry James Papers, Albert and Shirley Small Collections Library, University of Virginia; MSS 6251 (46)
Between 1899, the year they met, and 1915, the year before Henry James’s death, James wrote seventy-eight letters to the handsome young Norwegian-American sculptor Hendrik Andersen. This correspondence represents an invaluable account of James’s view of the relationship between the artist and his talent, as well as displaying an ornately affectionate style. Andersen was producing works on a vast scale with unrealistic hopes for the fame they would achieve. He even planned a “world city.” In his letters, James advised the young sculptor to produce work on a more domestic scale to make it more saleable. When Andersen approached the James estate in 1930 for permission to publish the letters, he was refused. The correspondence did not see the light of day until 2000. In this letter, James draws Andersen’s attention to the “benefit of friction with the market.”
Henry James to Hendrik Andersen
Lamb House, Rye, Sussex, November 25th 1906
me as lying in the lonely insanity (permit me the expression, dearest boy,) of your manner of work: the long, unbroken tension of your Scheme itself, the scheme of piling into the air this fantastic number of figures on which you are realizing nothing (neither money, nor judgement—the practical judgement, practical attitude towards them, of the purchasing, paying, supporting, rewarding world;) on which you are not even realizing that benefit of friction with the market which is so true a one for solitary artists too much steeped in their mere personal dreams, and which wakes
Verso: them up to a measure of where they are and what they are doing & not doing—
A letter from Henry James to Hendrik Andersen,
Lamb House, Rye, Sussex, November the 25th, 1906.
Me as lying in the lonely insanity (permit me the expression, dearest boy,) of your manner of work: the long unbroken tension of your scheme itself, the scheme of piling into the air this fantastic number of figures on which you are realizing nothing (neither money nor judgment—the practical judgment, practical attitude towards them, of the purchasing, paying, supporting, rewarding world) on which you are not even realizing that benefit of friction with a market, which is so true, a one for solitary artists too much steeped in their mere personal dreams, and which wakes them up to a measure of where they are and what they're doing and not doing.
Advice to a Young Artist, Pages 5–6
Henry James (1843–1916)
Autograph letter, signed, to Hendrik Christian Andersen, 25 November 1906
Henry James Papers, Albert and Shirley Small Collections Library, University of Virginia; MSS 6251 (46)
Henry James to Hendrik Andersen
Lamb House, Rye, Sussex, November 25th 1906
ever done by them. Stop your multiplication of unsaleable nakednesses for a while & hurl yourself, by every cunning art you can command, into the production of the interesting, the charming, the vendible, the placeable small thing. With your talent, you easily can—& if I were but near you now I should take you by the throat & squeeze it till you howled & make you do my Bust! You ought absolutely to get at Busts, at any cost of ingenuity—for it is fatal for you to go on indefinitely neglecting the Face, never doing one, only adding Belly to Belly—however beautiful—& Bottom
Verso: to Bottom, however sublime.
A letter from Henry James to Hendrik Andersen
Lamb House, Rye, Sussex. November the 25th, 1906.
Stop your multiplication of unsaleable nakednesses for a while and hurl yourself by every cunning art you can command into the production of the interesting, the charming, the vendible, the placeable small thing. With your talent, you easily can—and if I were but near you now, I should take you by the throat and squeeze it till you howled and make you do my bust! You ought absolutely to get at busts at any cost of ingenuity—for it is fatal for you to go on indefinitely neglecting the face, never doing one, only adding belly to belly—however beautiful—and bottom to bottom, however sublime.
The Mentor
John La Farge (1835–1910)
Henry James, 1862
Oil on canvas
Courtesy of the Century Association, New York
Photography by John Bigelow Taylor
La Farge painted this portrait of James in Newport, Rhode Island, when Henry was still in his teens. His relationship with the older artist set the tone for James’s early novel Roderick Hudson. La Farge had come to study with William Morris Hunt, with whom William James also studied. La Farge had lived in France and knew the work of writers such as Sainte-Beuve, Baudelaire, and Flaubert. James wrote: “He revealed to us Balzac. . . . To reread, even after long years, the introductory pages of Eugenie Grandet . . . is to see my initiator’s youthful face, so irregular but so re ned, look out at me between the lines as through prison bars.”
This is a portrait of Henry James by John La Farge. It normally hangs in the Century Club. It was made when I think La Farge and James were very close. La Farge had a great influence on James. He was several years older, and had traveled in Europe, and he really knew French literature. They went for long walks together.
While La Farge was a painter and James was becoming a young writer, I think the influence was, in a way, for James to see what an artist would look like. I think he used some of that relationship between himself and La Farge in his novel, Roderick Hudson. This was a portrait done of him by La Farge when James was a young man.
Meeting Rossetti in London
Henry James (1843–1916)
Autograph letter, signed, to John La Farge, 20 June 1869
Lent by the New-York Historical Society, La Farge Papers, New York; ms 360.
Writing from Lake Geneva in the summer of 1869, James recounted his recent rst visit to England. There, he had met Dante Gabriel Rossetti in his studios, seen the work of Edward Burne-Jones, and visited the National Gallery in London. James admired Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne, which he called “a thing to go barefoot to see!” About Titian’s Ariosto, James wrote: “Ah, John! what a painter. For him, methinks, I’d give all the rest.” While in England, James’s friend Charles Eliot Norton took him to meet the “very amiable” John Ruskin, whose art criticism had deeply impressed James. Ruskin showed James his collection of works by Turner, though James admitted to La Farge that “I think I prefer Claude. He had better taste, at any rate.”
Henry James to John La Farge
Glion, Lake of Geneva, June 20th [1869]
Verso: I did see Rossetti, Chas. Norton having conducted me to his studio—in the most
Recto: delicious melancholy old house at Chelsea on the river. When I think what Englishmen ought to be, with such homes & haunts! Rossetti however, does not shame his advantages. Personally, he struck me as unattractive—poor man, I suppose he was horribly bored!—but his pictures, as I saw them in his room, I think decidedly strong. They were all large fanciful portraits of women, of the type que vous savez, narrow, special, monotonous, but with lots of beauty & power. His chief inspiration & constant model is Mrs. Wm. Morris, [wife of the poet] whom I had seen, a woman of extraordinary beauty of a certain sort—a face, in fact quite made to his hand. He has painted a dozen portraits of her—one, in particular, in a blue gown, with her hair down, pressing a lot of lilies against
Verso: her breast—an almost great work.
A letter from Henry James to John La Farge,
Lyon, Lake of Geneva, June the 20th, 1869.
I did see Rosetti. Charles Norton having conducted me to his studio—in the most delicious, melancholy old house at Chelsea on the river. When I think what Englishmen ought to be, with such homes and haunts! Rosetti, however, does not shame his advantages. Personally, he struck me as unattractive—poor man, I suppose he was horribly bored!—but his pictures, as I saw them in his room, I think decidedly strong. They were all large, fanciful portraits of women of the type que vous savez, narrow, special, monotonous, but with lots of beauty and power.
His chief inspiration and constant model is Mrs. William Morris, whom he had seen a woman of extraordinary beauty of a certain sort—a face, in fact, quite made to his hand. He has painted a dozen portraits of her—one in particular in a blue gown with her hair down, pressing a lot of lilies against her breast—an almost great work.
A Thing Divine
Henry James (1843–1916)
Autograph letter, signed, to John La Farge, 21 September 1869
Lent by the New-York Historical Society, La Farge Papers, New York; ms 360.
Henry James to John La Farge
Venice, Hotel Barbesi, 21 September [1869]
It’s [sic] treasures of course are numerable, & I have seen but a small fraction. I have been haunting chie y the ducal palace & the Academy & putting o the churches. Tintoretto is omnipresent & well-nigh omnipotent. Titian I like less here than in London & elsewhere. He is strangely unequal. P. Veronese is great & J. Bellini greater. Perfect felicity I find nowhere but in the manner of the Ducal Palace & bits of other palaces on the Gd. Canal. One thing strangely strikes me; viz. that if I were an “artist” all these immortal daubers would have anything but a directly discouraging effect upon me. On the contrary: they are full of their own peculiar compromises, poverties, & bêtises, & are as far o from the absolute as Miss Jane Stuart.—I go hence to Florence, via Bologna, in about 10 days. I hope to remain some time at F., to see Rome & Naples & possibly have a glimpse of Sicily. I must stay my hand just now. I only wanted to let you know that if you find it possible to come within a short time, I should like well to do some travelling in your company. Offering counsel is repugnant to the discrete mind; yet I can’t but say that I should predict serious good of your coming. Steady sight seeing is extremely fatiguing, but there is a way of taking it easy—such as I—theoretically—practice.
A letter from Henry James to John La Farge:
Venice. Hotel Barbesi, 21st of September, 1869.
Its treasures, of course, are innumerable and I have seen but a small fraction. I've been haunting, chiefly, the Ducal Palace and the Academy and putting off the churches. Tintoretto is omnipresent and well-nigh omnipotent. Titian, I like less here than in London and elsewhere. He's strangely unequal. Veronese is great, and Bellini greater. Perfect felicity I find nowhere but in the manner of the Ducal Palace and bits of other palaces on the Grand Canal. One thing strangely strikes me, that if I were an "artist" all these immortal daubers would have anything but a directly discouraging effect upon me. On the contrary, they're full of their own peculiar compromises, poverties, and betises, and are as far off from the absolute as Ms. Jane Stewart. —I go, hence, to Florence via Bologna in about 10 days. I hope to remain some time at Florence to see Rome and Naples, and possibly have a glimpse of Sicily. I must stay my hand just now. I only wanted to let you know that if you find it possible to come within a short time, I should like well, to do some traveling in your company. Offering counsel is repugnant to the discreet mind, yet I can't but say that I should predict serious good of your coming. Steady sightseeing is extremely fatiguing, but there's a way of taking it easy—such as I—theoretically—practice.
The Bostonian
Frank Duveneck (1848–1919)
Francis Boott, 1881
Oil on canvas
Cincinnati Art Museum, The Edwin and Virginia Irwin Memorial
Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio, USA, Gift of the Artist/Bridgeman Images
Duveneck was an impoverished artist when he first encountered the wealthy Bostonians Francis Boott and his daughter, Elizabeth. In the summer of 1879, in Munich, Duveneck became Elizabeth’s art teacher. She had been told, she wrote, that Duveneck “had a real genius for imparting to others and had many scholars among young Americans. . . . Joy! Do you not all envy me?” Soon they fell in love. In November 1879, James wrote to his brother, “the natural and logical thing now seems . . . for Lizzie to marry Duveneck.” It took several more years, however, to persuade Francis. At the time Duveneck painted this impressive portrait, his future father-in-law had yet to be convinced.
This is a painting of Francis Boott by Frank Duveneck. James wrote about Duveneck's work first in 1875 and knew him really for the rest of his life. But this is Duveneck's portrait of his father-in-law. Francis Boott was worried about Duveneck. He was provincial as he was from Cincinnati. He spent time in taverns, he was penniless, he was rough. Francis Boott wasn't sure he was a suitable husband for his daughter Lizzie, so Duveneck in retaliation made this magisterial portrait. It's a portrait made to impress his father-in-law. Look what I can do as a painter. Look how much talent I have. Surely I'm the right man for your daughter.
Majestic and Perennial Bronze
Frank Duveneck (1848–1919)
Tomb Effigy of Elizabeth Boott Duveneck, 1891
Bronze and gold leaf
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1927
Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY
Following the premature death of his wife in March 1888, Duveneck set about memorializing her. The tomb effigy was made by Duveneck in Covington, Kentucky, with the aid of the sculptor Clement Barnhorn and placed in the Allori Cemetery outside Florence, where it remains. Duveneck drew upon an early-fifteenth-century figure by Jacopo della Quercia from the cathedral in Lucca. In 1894, James wrote to Elizabeth’s father: “In Florence, where I spent a few days on my way to Rome, I made an intensely pious pilgrimage to the spot where Lizzie lies in majestic and perennial bronze. Strange, strange it seemed, still to see her only so—but so she will be seen for ages to come.” Duveneck made several life-size versions of the effigy in bronze and marble.
This is the tomb that Frank Duveneck made for his wife, Elizabeth Boott. He finally married her and everybody was deeply shocked at how soon afterwards she died, her death was sudden. James studied the relationship between Duveneck and Elizabeth Boott and her father. He wrote letters about it. It was one of the great sources of gossip between him and his mother and his brother, for example. He was deeply shocked at her death, and Frank Duveneck made various versions of this tomb, one of which is outside Florence, in the place where she's actually buried. And James actually went there and he wrote to her father about how sad it was and also how beautiful he thought the tomb was.