A Landscape Painter

A Landscape Painter is one of the earliest published stories by Henry James, written when he was twenty-three and printed in the Atlantic Monthly in February 1866. He never thought much of his very early work and left this one out of the New York Edition, but it is still in print because Henry James writing in his twenties is interesting even when it is unsteady.

The story is told as a journal kept by Locksley, a wealthy young man who has broken off an engagement after he discovered his fiancee only wanted his money. He travels to a small fishing village under a fake name and gives himself out as a poor landscape painter, hoping to find honest people who will value him for who he is rather than what he has. He boards with a sea captain and his daughter Miriam, and the journal entries follow the slow turn of attention between Locksley and Miriam over the course of a summer.

The twist is one a more practiced writer would have shaded differently, and James himself probably would have rewritten it later. Still, the story is full of small flashes of the future James, particularly in the way he watches a smart young woman quietly outmaneuver a young man who thinks he is the cleverest person in the room. Miriam is the first version of a kind of American girl who will keep appearing in his work, from Daisy Miller to Isabel Archer to Maggie Verver.

For anyone curious about how Henry James started, this is one of the better early pieces to read. It is short, it has actual plot, and the journal form means there is none of the late style. It works as a curiosity rather than a major work, and pairs naturally with his other very early stories like My Friend Bingham and Poor Richard.