Chapter 1
Henry James, Painterly Impressionism, Publicity, and Spectacle
In two essays that frame his career as a novelist, Henry James moved from sardonic derision to cautious celebration of French impressionist painting. In August 1876, James slated Georges Durand-Ruelâs second official impressionist exhibition in the Salon des RefusĂ©s for âabjur[ing] virtue altogether, and declar[ing] that a subject which has been crudely chosen shall be loosely treatedâ (PE 115). Twenty-nine years later, in the essay, âNew England: An Autumn Impression,â he offered a quite different appraisal, celebrating âwondrous examples of Manet, of Degas, of Claude Monet, of Whistlerâ (AS 45â6) for offering the erotically charged âmomentary effect of a large slippery sweet inserted, without a warning, between the compressed lips of half-conscious inanitionâ (AS 46). Jamesâs complicated shift in appreciationâthe paintings are now âwondrousâ but their force is âmomentaryâ and comes in a âhalf-consciousâ stateâsuggests his growing sense of a joint critical investment in the âimpression.â Read in the context of their publication history, these essays also reveal his sense of how pictorial and novelistic experiments shared a critical engagement with the perils and promises of a publicity-conscious marketplace.
Jamesâs brief unsuccessful stint as a foreign correspondent in Paris for the New-York Tribune in August 1876 no doubt informed his initial disapproval of the Durand-Ruel exhibition. As he broke from the Tribune, decrying its demands for a more âânewsyâ and âgossipyââ style (HJL II.64), James also shrank from, what he described in The Galaxy as, Parisâs âtolerably unprofitable spectacleâ of artists and critics embroiled in âmutual feuds and imprecations and heart-burningsâ (PE 90â91). Indeed, the impressionistsâ rise capitalized on opportunities for promotion presented by the French pressâs expansion, in small reviews and journals, after increased financial investment and a brief respite on censorship under the Third Republic (White 121â2). If the impressionism of the 1876 exhibition represented, for James, an unhealthy product of such âunprofitable spectacle,â his belated discovery of âwondrous examplesâ (AS 45) in a private collection in Farmington offered, in contrast, a sheltered refuge from the cultural monotony he attributed to American publicity.1 The âconsummateâ preparation (AS 46) of the paintings contrasts favorably, for James, with his localized âimpression of a kind of monotony of acquiescenceâ to the traditions of the âcommon manâ (AS 44). But this realignment of impressionism with resistance to publicity takes place in an essay James contributed to the North American Review, a publication he had previously critiqued for its scant appreciation of literature and its tendency to deal âwholly with subjects political, commercial, economical, scientificâ (LC I.684). While the essays that became The American Scene bespeak Jamesâs desire, as the âimpressible story-seekerâ (AS 57), to resist solely accounting for the âmere monstrositiesâ of âorganisation, political, educational, economicâ (AS 297), they are written with a sense of their dependency on journals attuned to such âmonstro[us]â subjects.
Falling between these documented encounters with impressionist paintings, Jamesâs own publicizing of a fellow expatriate artist, in his 1887 article on John Singer Sargent in Harperâs New Monthly Magazine, probably informed his developing identification with visual impressionists. Here, he lauds efforts â[t]o render an impression of an objectâ but claims success depends on what âthe impression, may have been.â Suspecting impressionists of âseekingâ a âsolutionâ through âsimplification,â James identifies this practice as courting the danger of âbeing arrested by the cry of the spectator: âAh! but excuse me; I myself take more impressions than that.ââ Fortunately, James finds Sargentâs simplification to be carried out with âstyle,â making âhis impression in most cases ⊠magnificentâ (JSS 684). James sets his personal appreciation against the general publicâs resistance, seeking to popularize those erudite paintings as entrances into high culture. Sargentâs âlanguage of paintingâ is a medium âinto which a considerable part of the public, for the simple and excellent reason that they donât understand it, will doubtless always be reluctant and unable to follow himâ (JSS 686). In the face of such âprodigies of purblind criticism,â James suggests Sargentâs paintings perform a âgenuine service,â reminding âpeople that the faculty of taking a fresh, direct, independent, unborrowed impression is not lostâ (JSS 691). In Jamesâs opinion, Sargent, at his best, engages a diverse viewing audience, âarous[ing] in even the most profane spectator something of the painterâs sense, the joy of engaging also, by sympathy, in the solution of the artistic problemâ (JSS 685). Jamesâs account of the educative value of Sargentâs impressions presents the painterâs oeuvre as a model for the kind of public-forming work he advocates in âThe Art of Fiction.â
Jamesâs three recorded responses to painterly impressionism, in 1876, 1888, and 1905, document, then, his incrementally more complex, contingent appreciations and refusals of the medium and practice of this contemporary moment in visual art. This chapter offers readings of three sets of fictional texts in which James grapples with the specter of painterly impressionism as a double for his own literary enterprise, arguing that reading and partaking in the reception and circulation of experiments in visual art proved a productive force in Jamesâs gradual theorization of his own aesthetic and its place in the public sphere. Firstly, I read a series of fictions in which James treats the impressionist painter as a character, a series that traces Jamesâs shift from disparagement of impressionist art to guarded identification with its practitioners. Against the background of this shift, my second section considers a set of texts self-consciously labeled âimpressionisticâ by James himself, demonstrating the ways in which Jamesâs work came to ambivalently draw on the language of visual impressionism to elucidate its own narrative ventures. Finally, I read The Ambassadors, a text imbued with recognitions of the imaginative and cultural territories shared by impressionist art and the novel as explorations of vision in an age of spectacle.
In his analysis of literary impressionism, John G. Peters warns against drawing âtoo close a tie between the techniques of the visual and literary artsâ (14) and suggests that literary impressionists sought not to âsimply represent visual perceptionâ but rather render âa much broader epistemological experienceâ (15). But while Petersâs work offers an important shift away from pictorial readings of impressionist writing, it also downplays painterly impressionismâs basis in and negotiation of its social environment. In 1960, E.H. Gombrichâs Art and Illusion linked the psychological objectives of impressionist artââteas[ing] us with incomplete formsâ in order to lay bare âthe transitory and elusive features of visual realityâ (179)âto their grounding in the social milieu of their day: impressionist painters âlimited themselves to the motifs and scenes of la vie contemporaireâ because âthey could ⊠rely on the beholderâs knowledgeâ (181). Gombrich later conceptualized the painting as a scene of dialogue, an interspace moving from private visual experience, the âmapâ of a âvisual field,â to the public inscription of shared codes of visual understanding, to a âmirrorâ of the artistâs initial impressions (Image 181). But Gombrichâs arguments oversimplify the relationship between art-object and the culture that âbehold[s]â it. Rather than merely appealing to unifying public understandings of the visual, impressionist artâs interrogation of the âvisual fieldâ frequently involved a vexed response to the makeup of a shifting public sphere and to the decorum that policed its representation.
John House describes how the âcharacteristic viewpointâ of âthe Impressionistsâ modern life scenes ⊠involved, and implicated, the viewer in unfamiliar ways, by collapsing the barrier between the viewersâ space and the action within the picture,â a defamiliarizing process that âimplicatedâ nineteenth-century viewers âas historical subjects,â as âsocial, political and moralâ agents. Through unsettling strategies (by use of frontal-facing figures, indeterminate spatial mapping of the observerâs presence, or by focus âon the play of visual sensationsâ [House 103]), impressionist paintings install a sense of both optic and political uncertainty. In his formative work, T.J. Clark examined how artists of the period, such as Ădouard Manet and Camille Pissaro, grappled with the new publicity granted to such class-defying figures as the prostitute and the petite bourgeoisie in the modern public spaces of Haussmanâs Paris (such as the park and the cafĂ©). Impressionism, as Clarkâs reading suggests, emerges at the moment of a shift into a âspectacular society,â a ânew phase of commodity productionâthe marketing, the making-into-commodities, of whole areas of social practice which had once been referred to casually as everyday lifeâ (9). Through their protomodernist attention to flattened perspectives and blurred borders, these artists sought to both accommodate and resist the spectacular demands of the cityâs shifting demographic, of a public sphere in which conventional understandings of class and gender appear to collapse. At the same time, as Griselda Pollock has argued, the predominantly male impressionist artistâs ability to traverse established class borders by bringing such marginalized figures as the prostitute into the public viewing space of the gallery also served to reinscribe and extend the already gendered demarcation of private-public space that repeatedly made women the objects rather than subjects of art from this period.
Impressionism, as this brief critical survey suggests, occupied uneasy territory, both resistant to, and complicit with, the spectacular and regulatory forms of Parisâs public sphere in the late nineteenth century. This chapter seeks to account for Jamesâs shifting attitudes toward impressionist aesthetics as symptomatic of his developing awareness of how his own literary art shared with such paintings a perceptual vocabulary, suspicious of, yet fascinated with, the imaginary structures of spectacle.
Jamesâs Impressionist Painters and Publicity
In âThe Art of Fiction,â James announces that âthe analogy between the art of the painter and the art of the novelistâ is âcompleteâ and claims these figures âmay learn from each other, they may explain and sustain each otherâ (AF 504). At various stages in Jamesâs career, the impressionist artist, as a character in his fiction, appears to offer an âanalogyâ that might âexplain and sustainâ his literary project. Three texts are pivotal to this argument: the two tales, âA New England Winterâ (1884) and âFlickerbridgeâ (1902), and, between these, the much-neglected novel, The Reverberator (1888). These three texts trace Jamesâs initial distrust of visual impressionism as an aesthetic pose, his eventual attraction to the figurative potential of the American expatriate impressionist as an interstitial private-public figure, and his complicated alignment with the impressionist artist as a bastion of privacy, a professed enemy of publicity.
In âA New England Winter,â first published in Century Magazine in 1884, Florimond Daintry returns from a circle of artists in Paris to his childhood home in Boston where his mother plots to retain his company by introducing him to an intriguing young woman, Rachel Torrance. Jamesâs tone is satirical and dismissive as Florimond Daintryâs âimpressionistâ persuasion gives itself away by his reputation in Paris for seeking out, however sketchily, âthe visual impressionâ: âHis power of rendering was questioned, his execution had been called pretentious and feeble; but a conviction had somehow been diffused that he saw things with extraordinary intensity. No one could tell better than he what to paint, and what not to paint, even though his interpretation were sometimes rather too sketchyâ (CS III.88â9). As in Jamesâs early review of the Durand-Ruel exhibition, impressionism is here marked out by an obscure attention to âwhat to paintâ (the subject âcrudely chosenâ) and a âsketchyâ interpretation (the painting âloosely treatedâ). Through the ironic observations of Florimondâs aunt, Miss Daintry, Jamesâs tale offers a cutting account of the artist and his âunlimited interest in his own sensationsâ: âIn pursuance of his character as an impressionist, he gave her a great many impressions; but it seemed to her that as he talked, he simply exposed himselfâexposed his egotism, his little pretensionsâ (CS III.93). James turns Florimondâs claims to sensitivity on their head: Miss Daintry ponders setting him up with the attractively mysterious Rachel Torrance in the hope that she will bring him down as âa presumptuous little boy,â thinking to herself that âsince it was his business to render âimpressions,â he might see what he could do with that of having been jiltedâ (CS III.97). To be an impressionist, in âA New England Winter,â is to be a pretender, an actor doing impressions of taste. It is also to be âexposedâ by this very act of self-promotion.
The sending up of Florimondâs and, by extension, impressionist artâs pretensions works hand in hand in this tale with accounts of the artistâs attraction to American publicity. On his strolls down Beacon Street, Florimond is drawn to the âcheerful and commodiousâ intimacy suggested by the housesâ âlarge clear windows,â which give âthe street the appearance of an enormous corridor, in which the public and the private were familiar and intermingledâ (CS III.90). On Washington Street, he finds âmaterial for the naturalistâ (CS III.111) in âthe details of American publicity,â the âexpressively commercialâ housefronts, their âstaring signs, with labels and pictures, with advertisements familiar, colloquial, vulgar,â the âstamp of the latest modern uglinessâ (CS III.112). Jamesâs instinctive distaste for the subjects of Florimondâs âoptical impressionsâ is mockingly present when he describes the painter as comforting himself in the Boston winter with the thought that âit was a fortunate thing the impressionist was not exclusively preoccupied with the beautifulâ (CS III.111).2
Published four years after âA New England Winter,â The Reverberator revolves around a conflict between European (or Europeanized) prizing of privacy and American indifference to exposure. In The Reverberator, James reworks an anecdote he first made note of in 1887 about May Marcy McClellan, an American woman, who at the end of a summer spent in an exclusive Venetian salon went on to expose its clique in an American paper. The anecdote demonstrates, James claims in his notebooks, âthe extinction of all sense between public and privateâ (CN 40). But the âcouple of columns in the vulgar newspaperâ also, as James recounts in his 1908 preface to the New York Edition of the novel, came to offer âthe very largest fund of impressionsâ (LC II.1197). The parallel, established in the preface, between the work of the âgraceful amateur journalist,â gathering her âtreasure of impressions; her harvestâ (LC II.1196) in Venetian society, and that of James, âthe weird harvesterâ (LC II.1202), reaping a âfund of impressionsâ of McClellan and her Americanness, expands on the novelâs ambivalent recognition of ground shared by the journalist and the artist.
Set in Paris, The Reverberator centers around the complicated engagement of Francie Dosson, an American girl reminiscent of Daisy Miller, to Gaston Probert, a devoted seeker of âimpressions of the eyeâ (R 49) and the sole remaining French-born son of an aristocratically gallicized, expatriate American family. Gastonâs âParisian educationâ âopen[s] him muchârender[s] him perhaps even morbidly sensitiveâto impressions ofâ the visual âorderâ (R 48â9). Francie travels to Europe with her domineering sister, Delia, and her passive father, Whitney. At the novelâs outset, she is the subject of a fellow American journalistâs attentionsâGeorge Flack, a correspondent for the burgeoning newspaper, The Reverberator. Flack inadvertently introduces Francie to Gaston when he encourages her to sit for a portrait by the American expatriate impressionist, Charles Waterlow (referred to in the text as a former student of Carolus Duran, Waterlowâs character is, at least in part, modeled on John Singer Sargent). The crisis of the novel comes when Flack encourages her to reveal potentially scandalous familial details about the Proberts. His subsequent publication of these details, for which Francie is castigated by the Proberts, documents New Journalismâs advent in the late nineteenth century, with its increasing use of the interview as a means of exposure. The crisis is resolved when Gaston, acting on advice from Waterlow, breaks free from his familyâs scandalized outrage and rejoins the Dossons as they leave Paris in search of somewhere beyond publicityâs reach.
Charles Waterlow, the impressionist painter, and Gaston Probert, the impressionist beholder, share a distaste for the ânewspaperismâ (CN 86) of George Flack that would appear to identify them with Jamesâs sense of an âinvasionâ (CN 19). In the description of Francieâs first appearance in his studio and of the âimpressionâ she makes as an âadorable modelâ for both Waterlow and Gaston, the narrator, in a subordinate clause, refers to her escort, the reporter âwhom [Waterlow] didnât like and who had already come too often to his studio to pick up âglimpsesâ (the painter wondered how in the world he had picked her up)â (R 38). Gaston is similarly unimpressed when he joins Flack and the Dossons for dinner: he finds that he hates Flackâs âaccent, he hate[s] his laugh, and he hate[s] above all the lamblike way their companions accepted himâ (R 53). Ironically, Waterlowâs antipathy sets the scene for Francieâs exposure of Gastonâs family. Flack, seeking a firsthand view of the Proberts and their society, proclaims his âsensitiveâ awareness of the artistâs dislike of ânewspaper-menâ (R 137) as a reason for Francie escorting him to his studio, the fateful visit after which Francie informally reveals the Probertsâ intimate details. And further to this, George Flackâs appeal to Francie for âgenuine first-hand information, straight from the tapâ (R 134) concerning the Proberts parodies Jamesâs vision, in the revised 1888 version of âThe Art of Fiction,â of the novelist âreceiving straight impressionsâ (PP 399): âainât we interested in the development of our friendsâin their impressions, their transformations, their adventures? Especially a person like me, who has got to know lifeâwho has got to know the worldâ (R 133). While Jamesâs narrative establishes a âsensitiveâ openness to impressions as a state antithetical to the presence of journalism, it also exposes impressionismâs contributions to scenes of exposure, its enmeshment in Flackâs publicity.
Flackâs promotional apparatuses, in fact, frame the first mention of Waterlowâs art, his introduction of Francie and Delia to the commercial viability of his pictures:
Mr. Flack explained to them that it would be idiotic to miss such an opportunity to get something at once precious and cheap; for it was well known that Impressionism was going to be the art of the future, and Charles Waterlow was a rising Impressionist. It was a new system altogether and the latest improvement in art. They didnât want to go back, they wanted to go forward, and he would give them an article that would fetch five times the money in a couple of years. (R 37)
The prior inscription of Waterlowâs art in a teleological narrative of journalistic discovery and progress speaks to Jamesâs sceptical awareness of the contingent status of art in a burgeoning marketplace. But where The Reverberator raises more pressing concerns for James, less containable through parody, is in its attention to parallels between Flackâs promotional co-opting of Waterlowâs art and Gastonâs manipulative deployment of Waterlowâs portrait of Francie as a sanitized introduction of the potentially offensive, American girl to his family. Having fallen ...