File:Benjamin Curtis Porter - The mandolin-player.jpg

Identifier: americanpainters00shel (find matches)
Title: American painters: with eighty-three examples of their work engraved on wood
Year: 1879 (1870s)
Authors: Sheldon, George William, 1843-1914
Subjects: Painters Painting, American
Publisher: New York : D. Appleton and company
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Internet Archive

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received the honor of an electionas Associate of the National Academy of Design. Iu carrying out his effort after picturesqueness, Mr. Porter undoubtedlytries to steer midway between the so-called real and the so-called ideal—thatis to say, he endeavors to be loyal to his sitter, and, at the same time, to pre-sent those larger and better aspects which often are discernible only by theeye of faith. His portraits transcend the real, and yet are not precisely ideal.Overbeck, who abandoned the careful study of the model, preferring to paintout of his consciousness of the fitness of things, would have thought Mr.Porters pictures too life-like; and some of the old Dutch masters, whostudied the model until the latter was almost shriveled with fatigue, wouldhave pronounced the Boston artists works to be not life-like at all. The stricttruth about the matter is, that Mr. Porters portraits sometimes get far enoughaway from the real to be inadequate as likenesses ; inadequate chiefly because,
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THE MANDOLIN-PLAYER.From a Painting by Benjamin Curtis Porter. p. 79. BENJAMIN GURTIs PORTER. 7., in his struggle for the picturesque, he has been sorelj tempted to natter mensand womens faces—to flatter them not only as an ordinary photographer doesby toning down his negative, by removing all traces of wrinkles, sens, andso on, and by giving improvised tints to the hair, the cheeks, and the lips, bulalso after the manner of a photographic artist who, putting a transparentsheet of paper upon a photograph, and placing it so that the light shall shinethrough it, makes a crayon-drawing concerning the portraiture of which 11 it-most that can be said is that it is founded upon a photograph. The pictureof the Lady, with Dog, for example, is said, by persons who know theoriginal, to be incorrect as a likeness. Its excellences in other respects theyrecognize, but its deficiency in this respect they assert to be obvious. It isrelated that, at a recent exhibition of oil-paintings, a visitor,

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