Director’s Choice — Interior With Portraits by Thomas LeClear

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Smithsonian American Art Museum Director Elizabeth Broun shares her thoughts about personal favorites from the museum collection. Learn more about Interior with Portraits by Thomas LeClear.

BETSY BROUN: “Interior with Portraits” by Thomas LeClear records the arrival of a new technological form of virtual reality into the painter’s traditional territory. For three or four centuries, you hired a painter to capture your loved ones’ features for posterity. But then, after daguerreotypes were introduced in 1839, suddenly, you had a choice. You could have a colorful, often life-sized painted likeness that looked more or less like your relative, or you could have a tiny, monochrome, but startlingly real photograph.

This picture is unsigned and undated. What we know about it comes from family history. Those stories say it was painted by Thomas LeClear sometime around 1865. Supposedly, LeClear was commissioned to make the picture by an elder brother of these two children in the picture. Simple enough so far, but it gets more complicated. The little boy had just died when the picture was requested, but he was not then the small child shown here. Rather, he was a 26-year-old volunteer firefighter who had just perished in a hotel fire. His older sister had already died when she was an adolescent, more than fifteen years before the picture was made. Most viewers today think the little boy looks definitely dead, even stuffed.

One possibility is that the painter, for lack of live models to get likenesses, used a daguerreotype of them as a substitute so he could get the features right. If so, he must have known he was entering a highly charged arena of controversy. Painters everywhere were threatened by the new photography. They vowed never to use photos as aids. Instead, they were celebrating the very special qualities that made painting so superior. LeClear obviously decided he would engage this issue. Here’s the villain of this game, the photographer himself. Should we read anything into the fact that he’s portrayed from the rear and conceals his face from us, under his cloth? Incidentally, his wet collodion camera was not manufactured before 1860, and this helps us date the painting.

Landscape painting now becomes merely a background foil for photography. This must have been a rude jibe at all the heroic Hudson River and Western landscapes that were dominating the public exhibition rooms just then.

This old patriarch, with altar-like frame, presides disapprovingly over the scene. Could a photographer make a likeness of an ancient patriarch? Unlikely. But now he’s almost obscured by the backdrop, relegated to the past.

All the paraphernalia of the professional artist is arrayed in this studio, which, by the way, we know was in a famous artist building called the 10th Street Studio Building, in New York. An ideal bust, animal sculptures, prints and copies after the old masters. There’s plenty of evidence here that the inhabitant of this sky-lit studio was no mechanical hack. He was a student of the ancient triumphs, like the “Borghese Gladiator” and the “Venus de Milo.” All of these must now make way for an insolent photographer who has only learned to manipulate machines and chemicals.

Suddenly, we become aware of three empty chairs. One clearly belongs to the painter who was recently painting this bearded gent. Another holds a lady’s hat, shawl, and purse. And this chair must belong to “Daddy Bear,” with its walking stick and discarded newspaper. But where has everybody gone? They’re all out here with us, the viewers. We’re standing together, just outside the picture frame, watching the scene before us. Mom and Dad are getting ready to say, “Cheese!” LeClear manages to let us know he has six people in his studio today, not just the three you saw at first, and that was before we dropped by.

So, the painter shows a scene within a scene, and then implies another, still larger view from outside the canvas. Pretty clever, although he’s not being entirely original. LeClear has used the occasion of this commissioned portrait to make an homage to the 17th century Spanish master Velazquez, whose painting “Las Meninas” used the same device. By implication, LeClear was paying homage to the art of painting.

Okay, but does this really prove the superiority of painting to photography? Well, early photographers, with their long exposures, had to go to great lengths to keep their subjects still, so the image wouldn’t come out blurry. Kids were a special challenge. There were braces and ties and other tortures intended to keep people from moving. But what happens when the dog chooses just that moment to come in? Well, if you’re a painter, you freeze-frame him in the doorway. If you’re a photographer, you have to start over.

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Director’s Choice — Interior With Portraits by Thomas LeClear

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