Art: Skin-Deep

George Healy was a poor Boston boy who grew up to be one of the most polished and widely admired portraitists of the Victorian age. When he died in 1894 his fame died with him. Last week it was revived, temporarily, by an exhibition of 67 Healy portraits at Richmond’s Virginia Museum.

On the walls hung eleven U.S. Presidents, from John Quincy Adams to Chester Alan Arthur, a squad of Civil War generals, a covey of society ladies and a coachload of kings, queens and courtiers. There was the bland map of Healy’s greatest patron—King Louis-Philippe of France. There were Andrew Jackson’s maned, hard head and the bristle-bearded”, tormented and flinty face of General William Tecumseh Sherman. There were Franz Liszt, Henry W. Longfellow, Jenny Lind,

Otto von Bismarck, and Lincoln minus his wart.

Healy had been more concerned with accuracy than with art. His likenesses were invariably “like” and a bit flattering besides. In photography’s infancy that in itself was enough to make him a success. But only naw & then, as in his Sherman and Jackson, did Healy’s brush go more than skin-deep.

Jackson was ill when Healy painted him. He tried to conceal his suffering while the work was in progress, apologized for not being a better sitter. When the painting was finished Jackson examined it and remarked: “I am satisfied, sir, that you stand at the head of your profession. I feel very much obliged to you, sir”, for the great labor and care that you have been pleased to bestow upon it.” Nine days later the old. general died.

Healy evoked for posterity a shadowy host of 19th Century greats. His portraits, reproduced in-textbooks across the land, had given successive generations of U.S. schoolchildren a notion of what Healy’s sitters looked like, but not, necessarily, of what they were like.