How Portraiture Can Save Nations (or Advance Careers)

Consider the Effects from the French Revolution to a U.S. Portrait Contest
 

In the days of Terror after the French Revolution, a dark-haired maiden named Thérésia Cabarrus sat in a dank prison waiting to meet the guillotine. With nowhere to turn, she painted the prison guards' portraits, persuading them to help her make urgent contact with her suitor. He was a Mr. Tallien and, desperate to save her, he led a successful overthrow of Robespierre’s terror regime the very next day.

          There’s no telling what a good portrait painter can't do.
         As the story goes, Cabarrus’s “skills as a portraitist enabled her to win over her jailers and obtain the necessary material to communicate with Tallien," writes art historian Amy Freund in the current Art Bulletin, the College Art Association quarterly. "Her draftsmanship, in other words, ended the Terror."
          The Cabarrus drama highlights how portraits help us chronicle events in history. They have always had a social role as well. After the 1789 Revolution in France, painted portraits became vehicles to present former "subjects" as “citizens.” Two years after the Revolution, the number of artists who exhibited portraits in the annual public Salon nearly tripled (to 103 artists showing 252 portraits). The portraits used new gestures, symbols, and compositions, and the so-called “prison portraits” became common enough.
            The Cabarrus story comes down to us vividly because she, shrewdly enough, commissioned her own “citizen” portrait to tell the story of her trials and recall the way her lover, Tallien, rescued the nation. Cabarrus was an astute supporter of the Revolution. She mixed politics, women’s rights and fashion. But her leniency toward the aristocracy (into which she herself was born in Spain) put her at odds with the Terror. She was thrown in prison in 1794, where she languished for several weeks.
            Once freed and upwardly mobile in the new French republic, she chose the politically astute painter Jean-Louis Laneuville to do her own citizen portrait in 1796. He used the rules of female portraiture, but added new features. “By hiring Laneuville,” Freund says, “she allied herself with the kind of male political portraiture he practiced and the kind of active citizenship he pictured." Cabarrus was portrayed in glowing white in a dark prison, sitting amid straw and chains, and (as the title said) “holding her hair which has just been cut” to aid the guillotine.
            Soon after the painting was hung at the 1796 Salon, however, it was taken down. “The portrait apparently recalled too vividly the political passions of the Terror," writes Freund. The bold portrait also inserted a woman into politics. After this, Cabarrus hardly lived the life of an ordinary citizen. She continued to marry up the ranks until she was painted in an imperial-looking portrait of the Napoleonic era.
            If the Cabarrus prison portrait offered in particular what Freund calls “ideological complexity” and an “elaboration of new models of selfhood for a new nation,” in general, it also was an example of how portraiture—and women and portraiture—can play a role in defining the visual story of any country.
            In modern times, one other woman is having an impact on portraits. Virginia Outwin Boochever, wife of an American diplomat, had traveled enough to see many of the national portrait museums and galleries around the world, especially in England, Scotland, and Australia. She noted how they kept the art form vital by holding portrait contests, such as the annual one by the British National Portrait Gallery.
            After her death in 2005, Boochever endowed a triennial portrait contest at the U.S. National Portrait Gallery. Now in its third round, the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition (which takes submission until October 31) has expanded to become “the first national portrait competition to be held in the United States.”
            If there is a revolution here, it’s not necessarily about women, but rather about the diverse media that today make up a portrait. “The work must be based on your direct contact with a living individual, and the human figure must predominate,” says the contest, but any medium will do (including sculptural and digital). “Portraits are created in a dizzying variety of media.” The contest's goal is to discover that variety, and by previous experience, the submissions should exceed 3,000 works.
            In the tradition of the Salon, once the jury-chosen top three artists are given their award next year (the top prize being $25,000 and a gallery commission), they and about 60 finalists will constitute a vast show at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. for most of 2013. Then it will tour.
            The contest is only the latest effort to spur a revival of portraiture in America. While once the Portrait Gallery had a “ten year rule” to control when personages could get into the elite collection, recruitment of portraits now is wider and constant. Donors can adopt one of 300 available portraits (for $10,000). Or, working with the official curators, sponsors can pay the commission to have artists do portraits of notable Americans that the Gallery still wants to add to its comprehensive collection.
            We can only imagine what Cabarrus and her painter-in-arms, Laneuville, would think of today’s American portrait revival. Actually, shorn of the Terror, the system works remarkably the same as it always has. It is driven by personages, painters, patrons, national celebrations—and exhibitions.