portrait, Jane Austen’s:
On the last day of our 2011 trip to England, my husband suggested instead of rushing from this place to that, we simply walk from our hotel in Kensington and see where we end up. After having planned our trip to a nicety, I thought it fair he should have one day on which to not follow my timetable. But the path he led me ended outside the National Portrait Gallery and he said, “As long as we’re here.”
Now I’ve made my views on the portrait clear in other places and I must not shrink here from saying I find it ghastly. The portrait, painted by Jane’s sister Cassandra, is the only true likeness we have of Jane. Yes, there is the silhouette and other paintings that are thought (or perhaps more correctly hoped) to represent Jane, but really only Cassandra’s sketch/watercolor shows us a verifiable image of Jane. And either Jane was having a bad day or she and Cassandra were having some disagreement or both. After all, this is not a photograph where you unintentionally captured someone looking cross. This is intentionally painting a look of — what? disapproval, smugness, disdain, gastritis? The parentheses around Jane’s mouth are quite severe. Granted it was painted about 1810 when Jane would be 34, but she still has a blush of youth otherwise.
From the description at the National Portrait Gallery website: “This frank sketch by her sister and closest confidante Cassandra is the only reasonably certain portrait from life. Even so, Jane’s relatives were not entirely convinced by it: ‘there is a look which I recognise as hers,’ her niece wrote, ‘though the general resemblance is not strong, yet as it represents a pleasing countenance it is so far a truth.’”
I also knew the portrait was small — really small (it’s actual size above) — and so I did not expect to be enamored or impressed by it, but the reality was different. After looking at so many paintings of kings and queens and courtiers and generals, usually painted on a very grand scale, I found Jane’s portrait in Room 18, Art, Invention & Thought: The Romantics among the other figures of the Regency. She shares the room with Sir William Herschel, Thomas Paine, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Constable, John Keats, Sir Humphrey Davies, William Blake and Lord Byron. In other words all men forever captured in impressive portraits, usually painted by other “great” men.
And then there’s Jane in a little display stand (I believe she’s on the right-hand side of this picture, but I can’t be certain), undoubtedly overlooked by many who enter the room. Our Jane who gives so much happiness to a chosen few and whose fame outshines many of the men of history in that room, men who still get mentioned in literature or history class (Ode on a Grecian Urn, discovered Uranus!) and who were doubtless important. But Jane still lives and breathes; her life continues while theirs remain the domain of the academics (very few Keats pastiches out there and the Herschel conventions are quite small). And yet her semblance only survives in that little portrait. I haven’t viewed it the same way since.