Portraitists have also depicted people distinguished by their creative
work or reputation for intellect. Many of these individuals would have
been part of what we would now recognize as the middle class in the
sense that they were only infrequently leaders of nations or religions and
only occasionally members of the aristocracy or gentry. Portraitists
often attempted to express something of their inner spirit or creative
power, and thus portraits of writers, philosophers, composers, theolo-
gians, and scholars could be different in emphasis from portraits of
rulers and other categories of working professionals.
Bust portraits of philosophers and writers were prominent in por-
trait collections from the ancient world. During the Renaissance, collec-
tions of imaginary sculpted portraits of famous writers from antiquity
often graced libraries and private studies. Noble families found these
individuals worthy of admiration and emulation, and patrons could
thus reinforce their own learning and education by possessing such
collections of sculpted bust portraits. Such works were frequently part
of room or garden decoration, and they could include recent or con-
temporary thinkers or influential figures. One of the most famous
examples of this is the Temple of British Worthies at Stowe in England.
This collection of bust portraits of famous contemporaries was exhib-
ited in the grounds of the estate of Viscount Cobham, and his choice of
subject reflected his affiliation with the opposition to the corrupt Whig
government of Prime Minister Robert Walpole.
Such sculpted portraits of writers, philosophers, and political theo-
rists projected a noble image of superiority, largely through the
association of the bust portrait with ancient Roman virtues. By the late
eighteenth century, however, artists were producing portraits of schol-
ars and writers that displayed idiosyncrasies as a means of emphasizing
the intellectual power of their subjects. Reynolds’s famous collection of
portraits of men such as the writer Samuel Johnson and the mus-
ician Charles Burney, painted for his friend Mrs Thrale, are clear
examples of this. Following in the tradition of the portrait bust collec-
tion, Reynolds painted this intimate circle of writers, musicians, and
thinkers for a library, adopting a standard canvas size and half-length
format for each painting. However, the similarity between the different
portraits ends there. Each one represents something individual about
the sitter: Johnson’s ungainly figure; the author Giuseppe Baretti’s
short-sightedness; the musician Charles Burney’s manically intense
expression. By drawing attention to physical imperfection and eccen-
tricity, Reynolds seems to denigrate rather than exalt his sitters, but the
physical fallibility and distractedness of these intellectual men was tied
up with contemporary ideas of genius.
A genius was felt not only to be
above normal human beings in their intellectual or literary powers, but
their concentration on higher things was seen to place the qualities of
the mind above those of the body. The association of ‘genius’ with
imperfect body and great mind enabled portrait artists to experiment
more readily with their mode of representation.
This was particularly true in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, when Romantic ideas of genius consolidated the notion of an
anti-hero whose prowess was intellectual rather than physical. In the
late nineteenth century the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche
fully explored the Romantic idea of the creative ‘superman’ (Über-
mensch), whom Nietzsche saw as the salvation for the mindless medi-
ocrity of a bourgeois society slavishly obeisant to the rules of church and
state. The ‘superman’ of Nietzsche was this kind of genius, whose
power was in the mind rather than the body and who was above
ordinary human rules. The idea of genius was frequently coupled with
that of insanity, and this further reinforced the idea that geniuses did
not behave like ordinary people. The combination of Romantic notions
of the anti-hero with Nietzsche’s idea of the ‘superman’ provided an
inspiration for portraitists to attempt to convey something of this
quality of intellectual superiority bordering on insanity.
It is instructive to look at and compare two different Romantic
attempts to produce the portrait of a genius. Rodin’s monument to the
French novelist Balzac, completed in 1898, and Max Klinger’s
statue of Beethoven, exhibited in 1902 at the Fourteenth Vienna Seces-
sion exhibition , offer parallel but contrasting responses to the
representation of creative energy. In Balzac’s case, his genius was said to
rest in his prolific novel writing and penetrating views of human nature.
Beethoven was a cult figure whose dramatic music was apparently
enhanced, rather than checked, by the debilitating deafness of his later
years. In each of these sculptures the artists have used traditional mate-
rials in a non-traditional way. Rodin did several versions of his Balzac as
both a carved and a cast figure. The final bronze casts emphasize the
irregularities of the material. The imperfections in Balzac’s face are
stressed rather than hidden, and the body becomes an amorphous mass
of robe rather than a carefully composed human figure. Klinger’s
Beethoven monument is carved rather than cast, employing a variety of
different materials to create a polychrome effect. Beethoven emerges
like a pale spirit from amidst the rich textured marbles and jewels that
make up the throne-like chair on which he sits.
Both monuments display their subjects in unorthodox dress and
poses. Balzac is represented in a voluminous cloak that stands for the
bathrobe he was known to wear while he was writing. The intimate
nature of this garment contrasts with the public forum in which the
sculpture was meant to be displayed. The slightly unsteady posture,
combined with the high angle of the head, gives a sense of someone in
the throes of concentration and creation. Like Balzac, Beethoven is
shown in a state of déshabillé . He is naked from the waist up, with a
loose cloth draped about his lower body. The hint here is that there is
a pure creative power in the body of this man, whose musical genius
transcended his own deafness. Beethoven’s seated position echoes
portraits of emperors and popes seated in state, but the combination of
semi-nudity with this regal theme undermines the analogy.
Both Rodin and Klinger attempted to use their monumental por-
trait sculpture as a way of projecting ideas about the creative power and
genius of their subjects, and they did so by a mix of signals that was not
necessarily palatable to their audiences. Rodin’s monument to Balzac
was commissioned in 1891 by the Société des gens de lettres (Literary
Society), who proceeded to reject the monument as inappropriate once
it was completed. Klinger’s Beethoven statue was part of an elaborate
homage to Beethoven that comprised the Fourteenth Secession exhibi-
tion in Vienna, and the innovative display that framed this statue
enabled greater experimentation with the image of genius. In each
case, states of mind such as distraction (Balzac) and concentration
(Beethoven) are evoked to transcend the impression of mere likeness.
In the case of Balzac, as with Reynolds’s portrait of Johnson, bodily
imperfection is also used as a metaphor for the genius of the mind.
The idea of the imperfect body of the genius also appeared in por-
traits of talented women, but here there could be different effects.
Michele Gordigiani’s 1858 portrait of the poet Elizabeth Barrett
Browning is a key example. In some ways this could be considered
a typical bourgeois portrait, as it lavishes attention on the details of
Browning’s attire, including the lace at her cuff and the silky sheen of
her dress. But unlike other portraits of bourgeois women, which stress
their beauty and sense of fashion, Browning is depicted with her hair
unfashionably down and awry, dark smudges under her eyes, and
with a face where the signs of age appear quite prominently. Browning
was known for her unorthodox lifestyle and especially for her elope-
ment with the younger poet, Robert Browning. Gordigiani painted
this portrait of her in the last years of her life when she was succumbing
to a prolonged nervous disorder and opium addiction. The impression
given here is certainly that of an atypical woman, but the means of
achieving this effect in the portrait are much more subdued than in
those of Rodin and Klinger. The difficulty here was that the Romantic
conception of genius, and especially its Nietzschean variant, was specif-
ically connected with men.
The social constraints on women’s
behaviour further hampered the experimentation of portraitists who
might have wished to represent talented women in an unusual way.
The notion of genius that made its way into portraits of philoso-
phers, writers, and composers has not disappeared, but in the last
decades of the twentieth century the whole idea of genius has been
strongly challenged. Genius has come to be conceived as a combination
of innate ability and social construction. More recent portraits of men
and women, who might once have been thought of as geniuses, some-
times stress their ordinariness. Jane Bown’s photographic portrait of the
playwright Samuel Beckett, for example, could easily be mistaken
for the portrait of an older man whose leathery face shows signs of years
of outdoor work rather than long hours in a study. Bown was known for
her ‘spontaneous’ and unedited photography, and supposedly photo-
graphed Beckett in an unplanned meeting. On the other hand, one
could argue that portraits like this still couple the notion of physical
imperfection with the idea of intellectual superiority. This could there-
fore be seen as serving a similar function to Reynolds’s portrait of
Johnson or Gordigiani’s portrait of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The
more extravagant signs of genius that characterized late Romantic por-
traiture have perhaps become somewhat subdued, but there remains a
fascination with the ‘difference’ of famous creative people and how that
might be expressed in a portrait.
Celebrities
If the idea of genius has been somewhat discredited in the late twenti-
eth and early twenty-first century, the notion of celebrity has been in
the ascendant. Portraiture has been very important to celebrity, as the
cultivation of celebrity depends to an extent upon the familiarity and
dissemination of likeness. Portraits of celebrities often focus less on
class and social status and more on the uniqueness or star quality of the
represented individuals. This is not to suggest that power, authority,
class, and status are no longer key components in portraits, but that the
fame of the sitter has become a new kind of authority.
A developed notion of ‘celebrity’—or the public recognition of an
individual’s unique qualities or contribution—can be traced to the eigh-
teenth century and is inextricably linked with the growth of western
European technology and commercialism. The economic growth of
countries such as Britain, France, and Holland was accompanied by a
greater circulation of newspapers, pamphlets, and other kinds of pub-
lications that paid greater attention to both the lives and personal
qualities of public figures such as politicians and actors. The role of por-
traiture in fuelling the celebrity of individuals also appeared in this
period. In Britain, for example, portraits of famous actors, actresses, and
politicians became showpieces at Royal Academy exhibitions and were
disseminated to a wider audience through sales of engraved versions in
print shops. Portraits of performers were particularly useful to artists, as
they both drew attention to their work by association and enabled them
to experiment with different modes of representation, as performers
could be shown in different guises without breaching decorum. In the
late nineteenth century, the English artist Walter Richard Sickert built
his early reputation on his representations of music halls, including
portraits of well-known contemporary performers. Gaining inspi-
ration from his French Impressionist contemporaries, Sickert’s works
drew upon depictions of everyday life, rather than the conventions of
portraiture, for their formats. Taking named individuals as his subjects
he nevertheless emphasized the painterly qualities of brushwork and
surface, using the notoriety of the singers and comedians of working-
class music halls as a springboard for artistic experimentation.
The role of the celebrity in portraiture was enhanced by the inven-
tion of photography in the nineteenth century, which made the acqui-
sition of images of famous people much easier. Portraits of well-known
people were frequently collected and stored in elaborate albums.
Although this habit bears some relationship to public display of portrait
busts of famous poets and philosophers, or paintings in public insti-
tutions, the very fact that such photographic portraits were collected
and displayed for a more intimate gazing indicates rather a different
purpose. Such collections could make a celebrity seem accessible and
stimulate the fascination or fantasies of observers who had perhaps
never seen the celebrities they admired.
This combination of accessibility and distance also appears in
painted portraits after the invention of photography. The unusual por-
trait by Lev Bakst of the Russian impresario Diaghilev is an example of
a work that blurs the boundaries between public and private. The
portrait shows Diaghilev with his nanny and appears to give a glimpse
into the intimate life of a famous man, but it also links him with his
childhood, possibly reinforcing the idea of talent being spawned in
infancy. However, unlike Sickert’s work, this painting was intended for
an intimate circle of friends rather than public consumption. The
context and commissioning history of celebrity portraits must be taken
into account when assessing their impact and reception.
Portraiture, commercialism, fantasy, and celebrity all came together
in the twentieth century with the advent of Pop Art in the 1950 s and
1960 s. Andy Warhol’s silkscreen impressions of contemporary icons
such as Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe , and Jackie Onassis are key
examples. Like much traditional portraiture, Warhol’s work is founded
on likeness. The viewer is supposed to be able to identify the famous
people they represent. The photographs on which his prints were
based, however, were not taken by Warhol himself but were drawn from
newspapers and magazines. Here mechanical reproduction takes over
the task of representation, and the repetition of imagery and the con-
sequent dulling of individuality become explicit themes. In the second
half of the twentieth century, with the explosion of curiosity about the
private lives of stars, these works served the sort of iconic function that
portraits of Queen Elizabeth I did in the sixteenth century. Warhol
chose his icons from among celebrities whose lives were associated with
tragedy: Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley both died young, and Jackie
Onassis witnessed the assassination of her husband, President John F.
Kennedy. But Warhol’s repetitious impressions of them neutralizes this
sense of tragedy. So although they are portraits, Warhol’s works are also
a comment on the iconic nature of celebrities and the function of mass
media as a means of creating a false sense of accessibility.
work or reputation for intellect. Many of these individuals would have
been part of what we would now recognize as the middle class in the
sense that they were only infrequently leaders of nations or religions and
only occasionally members of the aristocracy or gentry. Portraitists
often attempted to express something of their inner spirit or creative
power, and thus portraits of writers, philosophers, composers, theolo-
gians, and scholars could be different in emphasis from portraits of
rulers and other categories of working professionals.
Bust portraits of philosophers and writers were prominent in por-
trait collections from the ancient world. During the Renaissance, collec-
tions of imaginary sculpted portraits of famous writers from antiquity
often graced libraries and private studies. Noble families found these
individuals worthy of admiration and emulation, and patrons could
thus reinforce their own learning and education by possessing such
collections of sculpted bust portraits. Such works were frequently part
of room or garden decoration, and they could include recent or con-
temporary thinkers or influential figures. One of the most famous
examples of this is the Temple of British Worthies at Stowe in England.
This collection of bust portraits of famous contemporaries was exhib-
ited in the grounds of the estate of Viscount Cobham, and his choice of
subject reflected his affiliation with the opposition to the corrupt Whig
government of Prime Minister Robert Walpole.
Such sculpted portraits of writers, philosophers, and political theo-
rists projected a noble image of superiority, largely through the
association of the bust portrait with ancient Roman virtues. By the late
eighteenth century, however, artists were producing portraits of schol-
ars and writers that displayed idiosyncrasies as a means of emphasizing
the intellectual power of their subjects. Reynolds’s famous collection of
portraits of men such as the writer Samuel Johnson and the mus-
ician Charles Burney, painted for his friend Mrs Thrale, are clear
examples of this. Following in the tradition of the portrait bust collec-
tion, Reynolds painted this intimate circle of writers, musicians, and
thinkers for a library, adopting a standard canvas size and half-length
format for each painting. However, the similarity between the different
portraits ends there. Each one represents something individual about
the sitter: Johnson’s ungainly figure; the author Giuseppe Baretti’s
short-sightedness; the musician Charles Burney’s manically intense
expression. By drawing attention to physical imperfection and eccen-
tricity, Reynolds seems to denigrate rather than exalt his sitters, but the
physical fallibility and distractedness of these intellectual men was tied
up with contemporary ideas of genius.
A genius was felt not only to be
above normal human beings in their intellectual or literary powers, but
their concentration on higher things was seen to place the qualities of
the mind above those of the body. The association of ‘genius’ with
imperfect body and great mind enabled portrait artists to experiment
more readily with their mode of representation.
This was particularly true in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, when Romantic ideas of genius consolidated the notion of an
anti-hero whose prowess was intellectual rather than physical. In the
late nineteenth century the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche
fully explored the Romantic idea of the creative ‘superman’ (Über-
mensch), whom Nietzsche saw as the salvation for the mindless medi-
ocrity of a bourgeois society slavishly obeisant to the rules of church and
state. The ‘superman’ of Nietzsche was this kind of genius, whose
power was in the mind rather than the body and who was above
ordinary human rules. The idea of genius was frequently coupled with
that of insanity, and this further reinforced the idea that geniuses did
not behave like ordinary people. The combination of Romantic notions
of the anti-hero with Nietzsche’s idea of the ‘superman’ provided an
inspiration for portraitists to attempt to convey something of this
quality of intellectual superiority bordering on insanity.
It is instructive to look at and compare two different Romantic
attempts to produce the portrait of a genius. Rodin’s monument to the
French novelist Balzac, completed in 1898, and Max Klinger’s
statue of Beethoven, exhibited in 1902 at the Fourteenth Vienna Seces-
sion exhibition , offer parallel but contrasting responses to the
representation of creative energy. In Balzac’s case, his genius was said to
rest in his prolific novel writing and penetrating views of human nature.
Beethoven was a cult figure whose dramatic music was apparently
enhanced, rather than checked, by the debilitating deafness of his later
years. In each of these sculptures the artists have used traditional mate-
rials in a non-traditional way. Rodin did several versions of his Balzac as
both a carved and a cast figure. The final bronze casts emphasize the
irregularities of the material. The imperfections in Balzac’s face are
stressed rather than hidden, and the body becomes an amorphous mass
of robe rather than a carefully composed human figure. Klinger’s
Beethoven monument is carved rather than cast, employing a variety of
different materials to create a polychrome effect. Beethoven emerges
like a pale spirit from amidst the rich textured marbles and jewels that
make up the throne-like chair on which he sits.
Both monuments display their subjects in unorthodox dress and
poses. Balzac is represented in a voluminous cloak that stands for the
bathrobe he was known to wear while he was writing. The intimate
nature of this garment contrasts with the public forum in which the
sculpture was meant to be displayed. The slightly unsteady posture,
combined with the high angle of the head, gives a sense of someone in
the throes of concentration and creation. Like Balzac, Beethoven is
shown in a state of déshabillé . He is naked from the waist up, with a
loose cloth draped about his lower body. The hint here is that there is
a pure creative power in the body of this man, whose musical genius
transcended his own deafness. Beethoven’s seated position echoes
portraits of emperors and popes seated in state, but the combination of
semi-nudity with this regal theme undermines the analogy.
Both Rodin and Klinger attempted to use their monumental por-
trait sculpture as a way of projecting ideas about the creative power and
genius of their subjects, and they did so by a mix of signals that was not
necessarily palatable to their audiences. Rodin’s monument to Balzac
was commissioned in 1891 by the Société des gens de lettres (Literary
Society), who proceeded to reject the monument as inappropriate once
it was completed. Klinger’s Beethoven statue was part of an elaborate
homage to Beethoven that comprised the Fourteenth Secession exhibi-
tion in Vienna, and the innovative display that framed this statue
enabled greater experimentation with the image of genius. In each
case, states of mind such as distraction (Balzac) and concentration
(Beethoven) are evoked to transcend the impression of mere likeness.
In the case of Balzac, as with Reynolds’s portrait of Johnson, bodily
imperfection is also used as a metaphor for the genius of the mind.
The idea of the imperfect body of the genius also appeared in por-
traits of talented women, but here there could be different effects.
Michele Gordigiani’s 1858 portrait of the poet Elizabeth Barrett
Browning is a key example. In some ways this could be considered
a typical bourgeois portrait, as it lavishes attention on the details of
Browning’s attire, including the lace at her cuff and the silky sheen of
her dress. But unlike other portraits of bourgeois women, which stress
their beauty and sense of fashion, Browning is depicted with her hair
unfashionably down and awry, dark smudges under her eyes, and
with a face where the signs of age appear quite prominently. Browning
was known for her unorthodox lifestyle and especially for her elope-
ment with the younger poet, Robert Browning. Gordigiani painted
this portrait of her in the last years of her life when she was succumbing
to a prolonged nervous disorder and opium addiction. The impression
given here is certainly that of an atypical woman, but the means of
achieving this effect in the portrait are much more subdued than in
those of Rodin and Klinger. The difficulty here was that the Romantic
conception of genius, and especially its Nietzschean variant, was specif-
ically connected with men.
The social constraints on women’s
behaviour further hampered the experimentation of portraitists who
might have wished to represent talented women in an unusual way.
The notion of genius that made its way into portraits of philoso-
phers, writers, and composers has not disappeared, but in the last
decades of the twentieth century the whole idea of genius has been
strongly challenged. Genius has come to be conceived as a combination
of innate ability and social construction. More recent portraits of men
and women, who might once have been thought of as geniuses, some-
times stress their ordinariness. Jane Bown’s photographic portrait of the
playwright Samuel Beckett, for example, could easily be mistaken
for the portrait of an older man whose leathery face shows signs of years
of outdoor work rather than long hours in a study. Bown was known for
her ‘spontaneous’ and unedited photography, and supposedly photo-
graphed Beckett in an unplanned meeting. On the other hand, one
could argue that portraits like this still couple the notion of physical
imperfection with the idea of intellectual superiority. This could there-
fore be seen as serving a similar function to Reynolds’s portrait of
Johnson or Gordigiani’s portrait of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The
more extravagant signs of genius that characterized late Romantic por-
traiture have perhaps become somewhat subdued, but there remains a
fascination with the ‘difference’ of famous creative people and how that
might be expressed in a portrait.
Celebrities
If the idea of genius has been somewhat discredited in the late twenti-
eth and early twenty-first century, the notion of celebrity has been in
the ascendant. Portraiture has been very important to celebrity, as the
cultivation of celebrity depends to an extent upon the familiarity and
dissemination of likeness. Portraits of celebrities often focus less on
class and social status and more on the uniqueness or star quality of the
represented individuals. This is not to suggest that power, authority,
class, and status are no longer key components in portraits, but that the
fame of the sitter has become a new kind of authority.
A developed notion of ‘celebrity’—or the public recognition of an
individual’s unique qualities or contribution—can be traced to the eigh-
teenth century and is inextricably linked with the growth of western
European technology and commercialism. The economic growth of
countries such as Britain, France, and Holland was accompanied by a
greater circulation of newspapers, pamphlets, and other kinds of pub-
lications that paid greater attention to both the lives and personal
qualities of public figures such as politicians and actors. The role of por-
traiture in fuelling the celebrity of individuals also appeared in this
period. In Britain, for example, portraits of famous actors, actresses, and
politicians became showpieces at Royal Academy exhibitions and were
disseminated to a wider audience through sales of engraved versions in
print shops. Portraits of performers were particularly useful to artists, as
they both drew attention to their work by association and enabled them
to experiment with different modes of representation, as performers
could be shown in different guises without breaching decorum. In the
late nineteenth century, the English artist Walter Richard Sickert built
his early reputation on his representations of music halls, including
portraits of well-known contemporary performers. Gaining inspi-
ration from his French Impressionist contemporaries, Sickert’s works
drew upon depictions of everyday life, rather than the conventions of
portraiture, for their formats. Taking named individuals as his subjects
he nevertheless emphasized the painterly qualities of brushwork and
surface, using the notoriety of the singers and comedians of working-
class music halls as a springboard for artistic experimentation.
The role of the celebrity in portraiture was enhanced by the inven-
tion of photography in the nineteenth century, which made the acqui-
sition of images of famous people much easier. Portraits of well-known
people were frequently collected and stored in elaborate albums.
Although this habit bears some relationship to public display of portrait
busts of famous poets and philosophers, or paintings in public insti-
tutions, the very fact that such photographic portraits were collected
and displayed for a more intimate gazing indicates rather a different
purpose. Such collections could make a celebrity seem accessible and
stimulate the fascination or fantasies of observers who had perhaps
never seen the celebrities they admired.
This combination of accessibility and distance also appears in
painted portraits after the invention of photography. The unusual por-
trait by Lev Bakst of the Russian impresario Diaghilev is an example of
a work that blurs the boundaries between public and private. The
portrait shows Diaghilev with his nanny and appears to give a glimpse
into the intimate life of a famous man, but it also links him with his
childhood, possibly reinforcing the idea of talent being spawned in
infancy. However, unlike Sickert’s work, this painting was intended for
an intimate circle of friends rather than public consumption. The
context and commissioning history of celebrity portraits must be taken
into account when assessing their impact and reception.
Portraiture, commercialism, fantasy, and celebrity all came together
in the twentieth century with the advent of Pop Art in the 1950 s and
1960 s. Andy Warhol’s silkscreen impressions of contemporary icons
such as Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe , and Jackie Onassis are key
examples. Like much traditional portraiture, Warhol’s work is founded
on likeness. The viewer is supposed to be able to identify the famous
people they represent. The photographs on which his prints were
based, however, were not taken by Warhol himself but were drawn from
newspapers and magazines. Here mechanical reproduction takes over
the task of representation, and the repetition of imagery and the con-
sequent dulling of individuality become explicit themes. In the second
half of the twentieth century, with the explosion of curiosity about the
private lives of stars, these works served the sort of iconic function that
portraits of Queen Elizabeth I did in the sixteenth century. Warhol
chose his icons from among celebrities whose lives were associated with
tragedy: Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley both died young, and Jackie
Onassis witnessed the assassination of her husband, President John F.
Kennedy. But Warhol’s repetitious impressions of them neutralizes this
sense of tragedy. So although they are portraits, Warhol’s works are also
a comment on the iconic nature of celebrities and the function of mass
media as a means of creating a false sense of accessibility.
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