El Maestro en los Lineamientos Curriculares

By the 1850s, large numbers of bourgeoisie were having their portraits painted and sculpted. They were also having their likenesses represented in the photograph. Photographic studios became widely established and popular at this time, especially in America. Photography brought with it the democratisation of the portrait, a progression from the ideals of the American and French revolutions41 _{– any ordinary person could have} his or her portrait taken quickly and cheaply, and people who would previously not have been considered worthy of immortalising themselves in the painted portrait could have their features recorded for posterity in the photograph (Fig. F14).42

Photography began a new age not only in portraiture, but in visual perception. William A. Ewing puts forth the idea that the “frenzy” accompanying photography in its early years was possibly due to a lack of visual self-awareness; it was only in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries that mirrors began to be commonplace in ordinary homes, “and photography was the best kind of mirror ever invented.”43 _{“Likeness” at first} became valued over ideal representation, but by the end of the nineteenth century, claims Ewing, people were seeking something more expressive than visual information gathering. By 1900, art photography had become aestheticised as an art form.

Both physiognomy of the late eighteenth century and photography of the nineteenth century lay claim to science as truth, albeit in different ways. Physiognomic portraits, employing signs that supposedly interpret a person’s character, claimed to consolidate “external” likeness with “internal” reality, while photography was believed to scientifically close the gap between “external” likeness and the person being depicted, for the material “external” likeness with “internal” reality, while photography was believed to scientifically

41 _{Janson, p. 699.} 42 _{J Woodall, p. 6.}

close the gap between “external” likeness and the person being depicted, for the material outcome of the portrait was not a representation of the sitter, but rather the actual, or trace of, the sitter.44 _{On the one hand, the camera was able to objectify the sitter. Resemblance,} as an indexical quality of the portrait, was determined by the optical and mechanical processes that depend on the coincidence of time, subject and photographer.45 _This, together with the ability of photographic technique to record physical “imperfections”, meant that photography was used in the identification and investigative aspects of criminology and other sciences. On the other hand, photography was by the latter nineteenth century being defined and critiqued by the cultural institutions of art, “institutions designed to address art rather than science or industry.”46 _{It could pose a} threat to other art forms of representations by imaging the “real” better than either painting or sculpture, while at the same time attaining the effects of painting in, for example, colour and blurring of outline.47 _{Photography thus implicitly challenged and} problematised portraiture’s claim to absolute truth and to a certain mode of humanism.48

As the interests, philosophies, and artistic methods of late nineteenth-century artists were changing alongside notions of truth and visual perception, so too was the portrait moving within those changes to position itself “in the politics and theory of art.”49 _Paul Cézanne’s 1866 portrait of his father (Fig. F15) is a painting in which pictorial composition and form take precedence to the sitter’s character and likeness. The artistic freedom to do so, largely as a result of photography’s ability to represent the “real”, was to change the meaning as well as the role of the portrait within art.

44 _{J Woodall, p. 11.}

45 _{Catherine M Soussloff, The Subject in Art: Portraiture and the Birth of the Modern, Duke University Press, Durham and}

London, 2006, p. 11.

46 _{Soussloff, p. 86.} 47 _Ibid.

48 _{J Woodall, p. 7.} 49 _{Beyer, p. 332.}

The democratisation of portraiture not only opened opportunities for the bourgeoisie, but for artists themselves to choose subjects that they considered worthy of portraits beyond commissions and studies, and not because of their public identity. Subjects were often chosen for their relationship to the artist, implying a “lived intimacy between painter and sitter” that would be reproduced imaginatively in the viewer’s relationship to the painting.50 _{This, as Woodall suggests, posed a challenge to the conventions of the portrait} transaction, for it blurred the distinction between portrait sitter and artist’s model. The identity of the woman depicted in Renoir’s Alfred Sisely and His Wife, 1868 (Fig. F16) is ambiguous; it is unclear whether it is the artist’s model Lise Trehot, or Eugenie Lescouezec, Sisley’s companion. As an unnamed portrayal, it raised questions that were to touch portraiture throughout the next century and beyond; specifically regarding this portrait, was Renoir’s motive to “memorialise” the specific couple in a “marriage portrait”, or was he using his subjects as models for a genre painting of the figure in the outdoors?51 In more general terms, does the anonymity of a subject’s identity change the nature of a portrayal to preclude it from the genre, or does it contribute to transforming the nature of the genre?

The subjects in Vincent van Gogh’s portraits, too, seem to have been chosen for reasons other than the traditional motivations attributed to portraiture (Fig. F17). Van Gogh aimed to reach a truth, though that truth was neither to be sought nor found nor searched for in an objective sense of the visible real. The dominance of van Gogh’s mark- making and choice of colour in his portraits and self-portraits is such that the portrait is as much, if not more, about the artist’s emotional content as it is about that of the subject. Here, the portrait had clearly moved away from the role of artistic documentation to the viewing experience of subjectivity.

50 _{J Woodall, p. 7.}

Figure F15

Paul Cézanne

Portrait of Louis-Auguste Cézanne, The Artist’s Father, 1866

Oil on canvas, 198.5 x 119.3 cm,

National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

Figure F16

Auguste Renoir

Alfred Sisley and His Wife (Sisley and Lise?), 1868 Oil on canvas, 105 x 75 cm

Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne.

Figure F17

Vincent Van Gogh

Portrait of Armand Roulin at the Age of Seventeen, 1888 Oil on canvas, 65 x 54.1 cm

Museum Folkwang, Essen.