Museums: Looking at History

Nathaniel a Bowditch rollicking was a Massachusetts astronomer and mathmetician.In 1799 he wr50te the U.S.’s first authoritative mariner’s manual. Did he look like a rollicking seafarer or a pinch-faced accountant? How pretty was Charlotte Cushman,the American stage’s most beguiling actress of the 1840s?Gold was first discovered in California at Sutler’s Mill, but who was this German-born idealist, John A. Sutter? And what was his appearance after the gold rush had, paradoxically enough, ruined him?

The answers to such questions about historic personages, along with other more or less fascinating oddments of Americana, now await tourists and trivia enthusiasts at Washington’s new National Portrait Gallery. For its opening exhibit, called “This New Man: A Discourse in Portraits,” the gallery assembled 173 likenesses of figures from American history (see color pages). Though the gallery already owns some 500 pictures, it reached outside its own store and borrowed about three-quarters of the portraits now on show. Paintings, busts, daguerreotypes, cartoons, and even occasional photographs are arranged in rooms that were liberally draped with flags and bunting for opening week. Each room is meant to illustrate a national trait; together, the exhibits are intended to answer the question posed by the French-born essayist Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur near the beginning of his 1782 Letters from an American Farmer: “What then is the American, this new man?”

Board-Room Banalities. “Only an American museum,” says Director Charles Nagel, “would organize an exhibition of this kind; only Americans would undertake such self-analysis so unashamedly.” To find the portraits they needed, Nagel and his assistants fanned out to museums as far away as Basel’s Kunstmuseum, where they discovered the only known likeness of Andrew Johnson painted while he was in office. It was the work of the itinerant Swiss artist Frank Buchser. The scouts brought it back, together with the Buchser portraits of California’s Sutter and Poet William Cullen Bryant, who looks as though he was caught in the very act of writing “To a Waterfowl.”

The only U.S. President not included —at his request—is Lyndon Johnson. However, the gallery owns the portrait of him commissioned from Peter Hurd and then rejected by Johnson as “the ugliest thing I ever saw.” It will go on view in February.

The show offers many Peales, Copleys, Eakinses and Stuarts, a delightful Epstein bust of John Dewey and a droll Manship version of John D. Rockefeller. But artistically, the exhibition as a whole is unfortunately at least 50% junk. In their zeal to obtain a painted likeness of every last historical figure, the directors of the exhibition have been forced to fall back upon dozens of oil portraits that are either pitifully inept, cloyingly sentimental, or else the sort of sycophantic banalities that normally decorate board rooms and government antechambers.

“We are a gallery of history, not a gallery of art,” maintains Director Nagel. But bad art is also apt to be bad history. Is it presenting a valid picture of the past to show crusty old Andrew Carnegie looking like a stuffed kewpie doll? To show Harry Truman as a wistful waif? To make Warren Gamaliel Harding look like a cross between St. Augustine and Galahad? The plain fact is that any one of the powerful daguerreotypes made by Mathew Brady of Abraham Lincoln would have been infinitely superior—both esthetically and historically—to the insipid version of that President painted by G.P.A. Healy 24 years after Lincoln’s assassination. Yet even Brady himself must needs be enshrined in oil.

On the other hand, what camera would have depicted Commodore Matthew Perry as a rapacious Japanese warlord? It took a Japanese woodcut artist to do it, but then perhaps he saw that the adventurous Perry was, in his way, the Yankee equivalent of a shogun. And, though Nikol Shattenstein transforms the irascible H. L. Mencken into a dreamy romantic, it is probably an honest appraisal—for it takes an incurable romantic to play the lifelong role of gadfly in hopes of bettering his fellow man.