The Story Of A Masterpiece

The Story of a Masterpiece is a short story by Henry James, first published in the Galaxy magazine in January and February 1868. It is one of his earliest published stories, appearing in his twenties before he had yet found the distinctive subject matter that would define his career. It is also one of his earlier attempts at a story about painting and the relationship between the painter and the subject.

Stephen Baxter is a young portrait painter who has been commissioned to paint a portrait of Marian Everett, the beautiful young fiancée of a wealthy patron named John Lennox. As Baxter works on the portrait he gradually comes to know Marian, and the painting begins to reveal something about her that her fiancé has not yet seen. There is a hardness, a coolness, an absence of warmth at the centre of the apparently beautiful young woman, and the painter’s eye captures it.

The story turns on the question of what the patron will do when the finished portrait reveals more about his future wife than he wants to see. John Lennox is a thoughtful man and the portrait disturbs him. The conversations between painter and patron about the picture, about marriage, and about what art is allowed to know and to show, are the most interesting passages in the story. The ending involves a dramatic action by Lennox that resolves the immediate situation but that leaves the deeper question, what does he now know about Marian and what will he do with that knowledge, deliberately open.

The story is one of James’s early attempts at the painter story, a genre he would return to in The Madonna of the Future and in the late piece The Beldonald Holbein. The treatment here is more conventional than in the later pieces but the basic preoccupation is already in place. James is interested in the question of what a serious artist can see and what use can be made of that seeing in a world where most people prefer not to look too closely. The story runs about forty pages. For readers tracing the development of James’s painter stories, this is the starting point. It pairs naturally with The Madonna of the Future from a few years later.