Picture and Text

Picture and Text is a small collection of Henry James’s writing on visual art, gathered and published in 1893. James cared deeply about painting and illustration and he wrote about both for most of his career. The pieces here include essays on contemporary illustrators, on John Singer Sargent, on Edwin Abbey, and on Charles Dana Gibson, along with shorter notes on art exhibitions.

The Sargent essay is the most famous piece in the book. James was a friend of Sargent and the essay does some of the work of explaining the painter to a public that did not always know how to read his portraits. James focuses on Sargent’s technical command and on the way his pictures appear to have been done at speed even when they were not, and he is good on the difficulty of putting modern dress on a great formal portrait without making it look like a costume study. The piece helped establish Sargent’s reputation as a serious painter rather than a fashionable society artist.

The essays on illustrators are less remembered but more revealing of James’s actual taste. He writes admiringly about Abbey, who illustrated some of his own work, and he is sharp about the way photography was starting to push wood engraving out of the magazines. His complaints about declining print quality and rushed weekly deadlines feel surprisingly current.

The collection runs to about a hundred and fifty pages and works best read piece by piece rather than straight through. For readers who only know James as a novelist, this side of him is worth knowing. He thought about pictures the way he thought about everything else, with a slow patient attention to surface and to what the surface was hiding. The book pairs naturally with his Italian Hours, where the same attention is turned on Italian Renaissance painting and on the cities that produced it.