Description: Act of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James
Act of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James
David M. Lubin
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.
Author
David M. Lubin
PublisherYale University Press
Print publication date January 1986 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300032130
EISBN 9780300235845
Copyright© 1985 by Yale University
Illustrations 23 Illus.
Print Status out of print
Publisher (out of print)
WorldCat
Google Books

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List of illustrations

  • The Agnew Clinic
  • The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp
  • The Agnew Clinic, detail
  • The Rape
  • The Agnew Clinic, detail
  • Thumbs Down! (Pollice Verso)
  • The Agnew Clinic, detail
  • Las Meninas
  • The Artist in His Museum
  • Pietà
  • Self-Portrait of the Artist in His Studio
  • The Nightmare
  • Before the Operation
  • Man Drawing Reclining Woman
  • The Boit Children
  • The Boit Children (detail)
  • The Boit Children (detail)
  • The Boit Children (detail)
  • Madame Pierre Gautreau
  • Mrs. Edward D. Boit
  • The Hatch Family
  • The Brown Family
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Contents
David M. Lubin
Description: Act of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James
Act of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James
Contents
Author
David M. Lubin
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 1985 by Yale University
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Note to the Reader
David M. Lubin
Description: Act of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James
Act of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James
My intention in the following chapters is to take three works of portraiture that originated in the 1880s and show that they were not completed then, nor are they complete now. The book is an attempt to trace not one but numerous paths and byways through these portraits, spreading breadcrumbs and making notches along the way. It is an attempted journey, without predetermined destination; the...
Author
David M. Lubin
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 1985 by Yale University
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1. Introduction
David M. Lubin
Description: Act of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James
Act of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James
~Why portraiture? Some time ago I found myself wanting to explore three sets of differential oppositions in American art: (1) “masculine” and “feminine” character (nature, sensibility, what have you); (2) “past” and “present” notions concerning the first opposition; and (3) “verbal” and “visual”...
Author
David M. Lubin
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 1985 by Yale University
Subjects: PortraitsAlienation (Social psychology)Ambivalence in artIndustrial revolutionJames, Henry, 1843-1916Eakins, Thomas, 1844-1916Sargent, John Singer, 1856-1925

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2. The Agnew Clinic
David M. Lubin
Description: Act of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James
Act of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James
~The Agnew Clinic (fig. 1) today hangs high on a wall in the foyer of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. The painting cannot be taken in all at once; approximately six feet high by eleven feet long, it is exceptionally large. What first attracts the eye is the white-clad figure standing in isolation in the foreground, left...
Author
David M. Lubin
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 1985 by Yale University
Subjects: Eakins, Thomas, 1844-1916Surgery in artMetaphor in artPortraitsAgnew, D. Hayes (David Hayes), 1818-1892

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3. The Boit Children
David M. Lubin
Description: Act of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James
Act of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James
~When we look at The Boit Children (fig. 16), we see four attractive, healthy, fair-skinned girls posed variously in a sumptuous and elegant interior uncluttered by Victorian bric-a-brac, unpapered, and uncarpeted save for a patterned blue-gray rug on the floor. These girls are clean-scrubbed, well-bred,...
Author
David M. Lubin
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 1985 by Yale University
Subjects: Sargent, John Singer, 1856-1925Children in artPortraitsFamilies in artFather figures

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4. The Portrait of a Lady
David M. Lubin
Description: Act of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James
Act of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James
~Now that we have discussed two portraits painted in the 1880s that revolve around related questions of sexual identity and portrait-making, we shall turn to James’s novelistic portrait of 1881,...
Author
David M. Lubin
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 1985 by Yale University
Subjects: James, Henry, 1843-1916Portraits in literatureFictionCharacter

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5. Conclusion
David M. Lubin
Description: Act of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James
Act of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James
~A conclusion should be cool, quiet, and colorless, summoning a sterile array of precision tools to complete the operation by stitching up the patient—either the texts considered or the readers—with the neatest, most elegant of sutures. But here there is no conclusion, only inconclusion.
Author
David M. Lubin
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 1985 by Yale University

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Bibliography
David M. Lubin
Description: Act of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James
Act of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James
Bibliography
Author
David M. Lubin
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 1985 by Yale University
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Index
David M. Lubin
Description: Act of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James
Act of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James
Index
Author
David M. Lubin
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 1985 by Yale University
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Act of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James
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