IV. FRAUDS IN HISTORICAL PORTRAITURE, OR SPURIOUS PORTRAITS OF HISTORICAL PERSONAGES. By CHARLES HENRY HART. FRAUDS IN HISTORICAL PORTRAITURE, OR SPURIOUS PORTRAITS OF HISTORICAL PERSONAGES. By CHARLES HENRY HART. The subject I shall present for your consideration seems to me to be one of the first in importance. If it is of any interest for us to know how the men and women of the past appeared in life to their friends and contemporaries, it is imperative that we should be satisfied that the representations given to us are true and not false, for unless implicit reliance can be placed on the authenticity of the likeness a portrait is worthless. This untilled field is a much larger and a much more fertile one than its title may convey to those persons who have paid little or no regard to its cultivation. Few who have not had their attention particularly called to the facts have any idea of the number of spurious portraits that are passed off for true likenesses. Many of the best-known portraits purporting to be authentic likenesses of our great men and women are nothing more or less than apocryphal. Not only are many of these portraits not authentic, as likenesses of the individuals whose names are given to them, but in innumerable cases portraits of other well-known persons have been used as substitutes, so that the number of so-called portraits that have been proved false is well calculated to astonish one unacquainted with the facts. Were this familiarly known it would be recognized that to have a verified likeness of a person is quite as material as to have a true history of his life and actions. A life portrait of a real man is the nearest we can get to the individual's personality. We each one and all know this by the cherished portraits that we possess of those near and dear to us either among the living or the dead. Thomas Carlyle, one of the most philosophical among historians, has said: Often I have found a portrait superior in real instruction to half a dozen written biographies, as biographies are written. In all my poor historical investigations it has been and always is one of the most primary wants to procure a bodily likeness of the personage inquired after, a good portrait if such exists; failing this, even an indifferent, if sincere, one. In short, any representation made by a faithful human creature of that face and figure, which he saw with his eyes and which I never can see with mine, is more valuable to me and much better than none at all. It is not the untrue imaginary picture of a man and his work that I want, but the actual natural likeness, true as the face itself; nay, truer in a sense, which the artist, if there is one, might help to give and the botcher never can. These sentiments so aptly expressed by Carlyle, which is more than can be said for the expression of many of his sentiments, find response in nearly every one. Dr. Daniel G. Brinton, the eminent anthropologist, said on one occasion when presenting a medal to a prominent man: The portrait transmits the features, the physical individuality of the person to future generations. Without such a record, without the power of picturing to our mind the individual as he was, his name and fame are vague abstractions to us and we lose half the force of his personality. A portrait, it must be remembered, is not a mathematically exact reproduction of the features and form of the person portrayed. It is the expression of the character that must dominate the portrait to be of real value-the inner man must be written on the outward form. As Tennyson so beautifully expresses it in the "Idylls of the King": As when a painter poring on a face, Divinely thro' all hindrance finds the man The shape and colour of a mind and life, Lives for his children even at its best And fullest. In the expression of a man's countenance we can almost always trace his character, and we retain a more correct recollection of his actions by keeping in our mind a lively impression of his appearance. It is the lack of expression that makes camera portraits generally so unsatisfactory, although doubtless they are nearly mathematically correct. As Sir Joshua Reynolds said in one of his masterly discourses, so masterly that his enemies contended they must have been written for him by Edmund Burke: In portraits the grace, and we may add the likeness, consists more in taking the general air than in observing the exact similitude of every feature. A French writer, carried away by his national love for epigrams, has derisively written: "Portraiture is nothing more than art placed at the service of vanity." He then seeks, irrationally, to place portraiture below works of the imagination, as being a mere copying of the subject or model, and to controvert Lessing's argument that in the portrait it is sought to represent the ideal of a determinate person and not that of men in general. While vanity may be the mainspring instigating many persons to have their portraits preserved, it is not only a pardonable vanity but it is a laudable one and far from degrading art and the artist to the plane of a mere copyist, elevates both; portraiture being in pictorial art what biography is in letters-its highest department. As I said on another occasion," how dead the past would be but for the 'counterfeit presentments' that we have of the men and women who lived in the days that have gone before. We see the faithful effigies of those who have played extraordinary parts and proved themselves select men among men. We read their countenances; we trace their characters and conduct in the unreal image, and then, as if made free of their company, follow on with redoubled animation the events in which they lived and moved and had their being." Therefore it is in portraiture that both painter and public find the keenest satisfaction and the greatest works of art, of the past and of the present, are portraits. Carlyle hit the nail squarely on the head when he said, "Any representation made by a faithful human creature of that face and figure he saw with his eyes." In other words, for the portrait to be of sterling value it must have the guinea mark of originality and truth. Were these qualities always present in the portraits inscribed "Mr. A and Mr. B," there would not be any opportunity for my present discourse. It is the fact that there are so many effigies of the illustrious dead that are not representations made by a faithful human creature of the face and figure he saw with his eyes that provides a text for my preachment. While we know that the ancients, especially the Assyrians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, handed down conventional effigies of their ancestors from generation to generation that pass for portraits, yet even this practice fell into disuse, and there is a hiatus during which we find few or no effigies, except some, most crude, in mosaic, metal, or glass, that are wholly indeterminate in their iconographic value, and this is one of the possible reasons that we have no veritable portrait of the founder of the Christian Church or of any of his apostolic followers. At the same time it must not be forgotten that Christ was a Jew and that all imitations of the human form were strictly prohibited to the Jews. So far, indeed, was this prohibition carried that artists were excluded from the Jewish provinces. Whatever the cause, there is not known today any representation of Christ in art that dates before the fifth century; so that the first apocryphal portraits we have to note are the multitude of fictitious heads that pass, and have passed and will continue to pass, as portraits of the Savior. This subject has been so elaborately and ably discussed from the artistic side, the archæological side, the literary side, and the religious side, that all necessary here is to state the result of the most competent investigators.2 Likewise the so-called portraits of the early potentates of Europe are mere effigies without any attempt at real portraiture, and bonnie 1" Hints on Portraits and How to Catalogue Them," Philadelphia, 1898, pp. 8-9. 2 This paper was illustrated by lantern slides. |