Portraiture

In 1832, Philip Hone, businessman, art collector, celebrated diarist, and sometime mayor of New York, recorded his impressions of a current exhibition of paintings with characteristically caustic wit: "There was the usual display of horrid portraits," he wrote, "like enough in all conscience to the originals, who I wish were hanged in their places." Hone's observation is noteworthy in ways beyond its dismissive archness: while "horrid portraits" evokes the generally low esteem in which the genre already was held in Jacksonian America, his equation of the portraits with "the originals" they represent nevertheless expresses their ongoing signifying power. Hone may not have liked to look at them, yet his statement suggests that portraits, as representations of ourselves, connote something especially meaningful in art‚—all the more so in an age before mechanical reproduction rendered them increasingly obsolete. I think of Hone's remark from time to time as I pursue my own, rather more enthusiastic, study of portraiture. For it was not long after he wrote these words that Princeton University began its sustained involvement with the genre, along with other American institutions of similar venerability, commissioning and displaying portraits of its worthy leaders in the chapel‚—the space at the back of Nassau Hall originally intended for prayer. It was a lackluster beginning: an 1848 entry in the trustees' minutes notes only, "The committee on fitting up the Old Chapel with rooms for students reported that nothing had been done, and recommended the Chapel be fitted up for a Portrait Gallery, and the report was adopted." However tentative the start, portraits of University notables have been displayed in Nassau Hall for all of the more than 160 years since then‚—a remarkable continuity, in this country. Together, these images convey more than individual identities; they construct institutional history through the collective countenances‚—and the lives they represent‚—of those depicted. There are many ways, now, to tell history‚—we do so through economic, social, intellectual, and any number of other lenses, including that of art. But for most of the past, history was essentially a matter of biography, structured around the lives and deeds of the few deemed to have affected its course. This mode was given an influential boost by British historian Thomas Carlyle just as Princeton's portrait collecting got underway. "Universal history," he wrote, "the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men, those...creators of whatsoever the general mass of men has contrived to do or to attain."The visual correlative of such an approach is portraiture, through which institutions like Princeton have represented their history and thereby helped shape their identity. Spaces, too, have identities and biographies. None on campus is more revered than the place in Nassau Hall where Princeton's portraits have always been displayed. At first a chapel, then successively library, museum, and finally the University's Faculty Room‚—where professors, administrators, and trustees still meet to chart the institution's course‚—the history of this central location itself tells a story, its changing use reflecting Princeton's shifting orientation from religious to more broadly humanistic concerns. Ultimately, with the Faculty Room, the space has been devoted to the institution itself, Princeton having attained an age when it could provide and sustain its own internal logic. The thirty-three portraits on its walls follow a similar trajectory, from a ruling monarch, George II, who granted the University its charter, to staunch Calvinists like Jonathan Edwards and Samuel Finley, who consolidated it in accordance with strict religious beliefs, to theologian-scholars such as James McCosh, who sought to reconcile Darwin with Christianity, and finally to modern-day, secular academics like Robert F. Goheen and William Bowen. The portrait of Princeton's nineteenth president, Shirley M. Tilghman, currently hangs in the Princeton Club in New York City; upon her retirement it will break the gender barrier in the Faculty Room and add another distinguished scientist to the group. Through the cumulative display of these portraits, the broad sweep of Princeton's institutional narrative is laid out in a single space. The effect is impressive. Years ago, the first time I was in the Faculty Room, a large tour group came through, as they do more than once daily on their campus rounds. Quickly the bustling crowd grew still in the hushed space, taking it all in‚—the aged paintings, the wood- paneled walls and pew-like benches, the ceremonial mace protected behind glass, each imparting dignity and a certain remove. This led me to think more about the room, its portraits, their combined history, and how they continue to communicate powerfully even today.