Curator's Essay
by Talia Shiroma (Class of 2019)
Although portraits proliferate today through the smartphone and digital photography, the painted portrait remains a rarefied object. While the genre ranked hierarchically low for painters since the Italian Renaissance, it has long been embraced by patrons of high social rank as an instrument for fashioning their elite identity. This was no less true during the American Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, when the expense and aristocratic associations of commissioned portraiture made it an attractive item among affluent Americans eager to display old wealth and new industrialist fortunes alike. They sat for a variety of American and European artists and displayed their likenesses publicly and privately. Bryn Mawr College's own quest for cultural capital likely informed the Portrait Committee of Alumnae and Students' decision to commission a portrait of M. Carey Thomas in 1898. Not one to ignore prestige, Thomas, Bryn Mawr College's second president, selected John Singer Sargent to paint her, traveling to London in July of 1899 to sit for six days for the artist. Sargent was one of the most renowned portraitists of his time, adding to the symbolic value of Thomas's depiction.
This is an exhibit about image—portrait, self-portrait, self-image—in relation to both people and institutions. The question of who was allowed to be physically present on campus, to pass into the College's historical record, or to be structurally included in dominant narratives can also be translated into the question of visibility. The portraits of past presidents on campus may be understood as instances of this dominant narrative. They are sanctioned by the institution and also valued as costly objects with historical and sometimes artistic value.
It is also an exhibit about erasure—the power of visibility, and the question of whose images are allowed to enter the historical record and whose are excluded or repressed. This question becomes particularly important in consideration of the invisibility of Black labor at the College—a subject explored by Black at Bryn Mawr and Dorm Culture and Domesticity at Bryn Mawr—and the historical exclusion and ongoing repression of the voices of students of color at the College.
The College's tradition of commissioning portraits can be traced back to Bryn Mawr College's second president, M. Carey Thomas, whose portrait by John Singer Sargent was commissioned by the College in 1898. M. Carey Thomas had two prestigious objects crafted of her likeness, one a marble bust from the eminent sculptor Paul H. Manship and the other a large portrait in oil paint by John Singer Sargent.
The motives for the painting's commission are suggested by Martha G. Thomas, the head of the committee, in a letter to her cousin M. Carey in September 1899:
Upon completion of the Library, the Sargent portrait moved in 1906 to hang in the Reading Room—the present day Great Hall."It has given me the greatest pleasure while working to make the portrait a possibility to feel that I could help give to the College something that would be of lasting value, and that would keep before future generations of students one that we of to-day feel has done so much toward making Bryn Mawr, the College that we love and are proud to have been connected with." (Martha G. Thomas to M. Carey Thomas, Sept. 1, 1899)
Apparently, it was hung high up in the Great Hall; its current placement [in 2019], in the words of former College Curator Carol Campbell, at “salon” level in the Rare Book Room of Canaday Library offers quite a different view. One perhaps closer to that which it had in the Deanery. In a 1898 letter to her close friend Mary E. Garrett, Thomas wrote of her delight to peer through her bedroom window one November day and find “a perfect presentation of myself sitting at the window of your room. It was the portrait through the window. It really looked alive."
Another reading of the portrait followed its unveiling a year later, this time by a student, who wrote that
This painted portrait was a site of image-formation for the College. It remains a prized object in the College's collections due to its author and his display of painterly skill."the portrait—our portrait—belongs to the college and to the future. But that future, past and present of Bryn Mawr are one, I think we cannot doubt, as authorities and student-body, faculty and students, graduates and undergraduates, upper-classmen and lower-classmen, are one, in standing for the idea of women’s education, for which it is our pride that Miss Thomas pre-eminently stands.” (Content Shepard Nichols, Class of 1899, The Fortnightly Philistine, November 24, 1899)
But just as the different hangings of Thomas's portrait changed our points of view, so too has historical distance changed "our portrait" and its reception. Indeed, "our portrait...belongs to the college and to the future," and in the century to follow Thomas would certainly remain on the minds of Bryn Mawr College's students—just not always in the way she had hoped and they had anticipated. This has been particularly true since 2017 as student activists pushed the reluctant College to acknowledge Thomas's racism and anti-Semitism and its effects on the school.
The problem of visibility raised by the College's Presidential Portraits, of who or what is sanctioned in representations at the College and who is not, is reflected in other parts of the campus as well. Many buildings on campus bear the names of the same persons depicted in College portraiture—Park, Taylor, Rockefeller, Rhoads, and formerly Thomas—while the laborers who constructed and maintained the buildings remain absent from the archive and the historical narrative.
........................................."Portraits tell stories: they are interpretations of their sitters, visual narratives for which we assume sitters and painters are, in varying degrees, responsible." (Harry Berger, "Fictions of the Pose: Facing the Gaze of Early Modern Portraiture," Representations 46, Spring, 1994.)
See more...
http://greenfield.blogs.brynmawr.edu/2012/05/25/memory-and-absences/
http://brynmawrcollections.org/greenfield/exhibits/show/residinginthepast/dormcultureanddomesticity/maidsandporters
http://blackatbrynmawr.blogs.brynmawr.edu/2015/03/09/black-labor-at-bryn-mawr/
http://archives.tricolib.brynmawr.edu/repositories/6/archival_objects/99418
This page has paths:
- The Presidential Portraits Collection at Bryn Mawr College Carrie Robbins