“Portrait is a curious bastard of art, sprung on the one side from a desire which is not artistic, nay, if anything, opposed to the whole nature and function of art: the desire for the mere likeness of an individual,” wrote in 1885 the art critic Vernon Lee in an essay entitled, somewhat self-contradictorily, “The Portrait Art” (212).¹ While in ancient times the desire “for the mere likeness of an individual” could have been judged useful since the individuals depicted were “great men,” whose example could inspire posterity,² in the modern period this is no longer the case: everyone can...

As we have seen in the introduction, portrait stories expanded their scope in the nineteenth century to include, besides the viewer and the portrait, the painter and his subject. This means not only that the story of the portrait’s production is now added to that of its after-effects but also that the portrait can no longer be considered as purely referential. The attenuation of the portrait’s referential status, in turn, means that viewing it cannot be reduced to an identification of its subject. Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Oval Portrait” (1845; originally published as “Life in Death” in 1842)...

Henry James had a strong and enduring interest in the portrait as a particular kind of representation, and we find in his fiction a large number of texts dealing with portraits and portrait painters. If this fact has not received, on the whole, the attention it deserves, it is, at least in part, because portraits and portrait artists feature prominently primarily in his short fiction, which is still less studied than his novels.¹ But another reason is critics’ tendency, when discussing portrait stories, to subsume the portrait within a larger category—such as painting, picture, visual representation, art—rather than...

As we have seen, the nefarious effect the portrait has on the real woman in the main narrative of Poe’s “Oval Portrait” is related to the painter’s desire to transcend the real, that is, the contingent, ephemeral, imperfect individual. It is through this transcendence that a representation would become “art.” In this respect, Poe’s story resembles portrait stories by E. T. A. Hoffmann, such as “Der Artushof” (1816), “Die Jesuiterkirche in G.” (1816), and “Die Doppeltgänger” (1822). All feature a portrait painter who tries to merge the real woman with the ideal one—the painter’s two “brides” in Poe’s story...

With the exception of James’s “The Tone of Time,” all the stories I have discussed in the previous chapters tell of a male painter who produces the portrait of a woman. This, of course, is not the only possible configuration (indeed, the stories I will be discussing in the last three chapters of the book all present us with different scenarios), but it is a very common one, and we find it also in the two stories that are the subject of this chapter, Honoré de Balzac’sLa Maison du chat-qui-peloteand Henry James’s “Glasses.” What sets these two stories...

The three stories I will be discussing in this chapter—Heinrich von Kleist’s “Der Findling” (published 1811); Thomas Hardy’s “Barbara of the House of Grebe” (1890); and Oscar Wilde’sThe Picture of Dorian Gray(1891) are not usually read together.¹ But when read as stories about portraits (which is not the way the first two are usually read), they show surprising similarities. Each text features a full-body representation (rather than a representation of the face alone)² of an idealized male figure (portraits in the case of Kleist and Wilde, a statue in the case of Hardy); in all three, a...

Many portrait stories are based on a scenario that Maurizio Bettini called “the lover’s story,” where the lover paints the beloved (the ideal, the muse) because he is in love or, conversely, falls in love because he paints. We have seen versions of this scenario in several stories—for example in Balzac’sLa Maison du chat-qui-pelote, where Sommervieux’s friend, finding him hard at work on Augustine’s portrait, concludes that the painter must be in love, or in Hoffmann’s “Die Doppeltgänger,” where the young painter Haberland falls in love with Natalie because he paints her. James’s “The Tone of Time” also...

Gogol’s “The Portrait” (1835; 1842) is a double story, told backward: in its second part, it tells of an old painter who paints the portrait of a mysterious, diabolic moneylender, with terrible consequences to himself and others; in its first part, it tells of a young painter named Chartkov (Chertkov in the 1835 version), who, many years later, buys this same portrait and his life is changed for the worse.¹ The story presents in an especially forceful way two of the commonplaces about portraits: its entire plot depends on the idea that a portrait “extends” a person’s life, re-presenting him...

In the preceding chapters, I have analyzed the way portraits function in the fictive world created by the literary texts in which they feature. I have argued that in one way or another portrait stories raise the question of the relation between representation and subjectivity (and therefore the question of how the power to represent is gained, kept, or lost); I have also showed how the portrait serves as a site for intersubjective relations among painter, sitter, and viewer(s). In all this, I was concerned with the fictive characters’ experience and with the portrait as a particular kind of visual...