Act of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James

Abstract

BOOKAct of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, JamesDavid M. Lubin https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00007 Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-16289Copy In the post-Civil War Era, American portraiture began to show a new complexity of character, a character at odds with itself and brimming with tensions between masculine and feminine sensibilities. David M. Lubin here examines three major works of portraiture, two paintings and one novel, from the 1880s: Thomas Eakins' The Agnew Clinic, John Singer Sargent's The Boit Children, and Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady. Discussing several contradictory tendencies evident in the three works, Lubin probes at greatest length the contradiction each artist sensed between masculine power and feminine passivity and relates this troublesome dichotomy to issues of property, propriety, social and authorial control, formalism, realism, and patriarchal family life. He argues that the conflict enacted depicts the pressures of a masculine-ordered bourgeois ideology and speaks of social problems in American culture both a century ago and today.Act of Portrayal reveals not only how Eakins, Sargent, and James construct portraits but also how the subjects within those portraits view themselves or others, and how we, by our constructive, synthetic act of reading, add ourselves to the portrait-making process.AuthorDavid M. LubinPublisherYale University PressPrint publication date January 1986 (out of print)Print ISBN 9780300032130EISBN 9780300235845Copyright© 1985 by Yale UniversityIllustrations 23 Illus.Print Status out of print Publisher (out of print) WorldCat Google Books

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