problems with portraits

Part Two: How Much is Susan Worth? How Much Marilyn?

“You’re not going to believe this,” my old friend Susan Rossen said on the phone, “that portrait Alice Neel painted of me in 1976 is going to be sold at Christie’s London in the fall. The reserve price is 100,000 pounds, or $150,000.”

                  That seems so unfair. Back in ’76 Alice Neel was herself 76, a painter who had been neglected all her life until the feminist art movement of the 1970s led to an effort to celebrate little-known women artists. Susan was a mover and shaker in those heady days when artists and art historians woke up to the fact that they were under-represented everywhere. Susan was on the board of the Women’s Caucus for Art; she met Alice at a conference in New York and Alice immediately announced that she would like to paint her portrait. Susan sat for it in Alice’s studio in Spanish Harlem and when the painting was finished, Alice announced her price: $2,500. Susan didn’t really like the portrait—she was going through a bad time and her clenched fists and tense expression expressed that. And she didn’t have the money either. As Director of Publications at the Detroit Institute of Arts, hers was a modest income.

                  Alice’s reputation grew rapidly. Everyone enjoyed the fact that this plump, proper-looking white-haired lady in a mink pillbox hat had been an outsider artist all her life, struggling with poverty and depression. She painted some sexually explicit portraits, and could swear like a sailor and spoke bluntly whatever was on her mind. She asked the most personal questions of her sitters and they willingly confessed dark secrets to her, no doubt aiding her understanding of their psyche. She called herself a “collector of souls.” By 1979 she was one of several distinguished women artists who were honored at the White House, with Jimmy Carter presenting them with awards for Lifetime Outstanding Achievement.

In 1981, Alice offered the painting to Susan for $10,000, but insisted on cash, immediately. Susan had just taken a job at the Art Institute of Chicago and bought an apartment, and didn’t have ten grand to spare then either. Over the years, Alice’s reputation continued to grow and then the price of her paintings appreciated dramatically when she died in 1984. Museums had begin to collect her work, hoping to show off their tiny efforts at diversity to balance the overwhelming population of works of art by dead white males on exhibit. Susan’s portrait had been purchased by an English collector of modern art who now, in 2010, decided to sell his collection. Christie’s London had googled and then emailed Susan to ask if she was indeed the sitter.

                  “Dumbest thing I ever did, “ Susan said. “I should have bought it. I wish I had, maybe borrowed the money from my aunt.”

Christie’s had mentioned the reserve and suggested that this would be considered a very fair price.

                  “Unfair,” I said, “Not fair at all. You should have it. Now you don’t even look so tortured.” I remembered her struggles in the mid-70s with her job and especially with romance.

                  “Besides,” Susan said, “I could use the money for the grandchildren’s college.”

                  We both agreed that it would be good if a museum bought it, so that it wouldn’t just disappear into another private collection. “I thought the DIA should have bought it when I left,” she said. “A fitting going-away present.”

                  “You have a lot of friends,” I said, “ all you need is for each of a thousand of us to put up a hundred dollars, and then strike a deal with Christies.”

                  By chance, the next day my old friend Marilyn called to chat. Alice Neel had also painted her portrait in 1981, when she was a curator at the Detroit Institute of Arts. I told her about Susan’s portrait going on the block.

                  “That’s nothing,” Marilyn said, “Mine is still at the Madison Avenue gallery and is priced at $250,000. It isn’t even finished—Alice never painted the background. But it’s only worth that if someone actually buys it. Alice wanted $15,000 cash. My parents said they would be willing to skrimp and save if I really wanted it, but I said no, not worth it.”

 Marilyn had an attack of Bell’s Palsy when she sat for Alice; her face has an unnatural asymmetry as a result. But the artist caught an expression that shows Marilyn’s tentative uncertainty about the proceeding when she wasn’t looking her best, but a sort of half-smile is characteristic of her good manners and eagerness to please.

So here is another problem with portraits: there is no cut on the profit of the picture’s sale and resale for the sitter. Nor, of course, for the artist, dead or alive.

Judge Dabney Carr or Overton Anderson?

This is not a portrait of either Judge Dabney Carr or Overton Anderson, but it is a portrait of one of their contemporaries, an unknown early 19th-century Virginian done by a French artist called St. Memin.

Judge Dabney Carr or Overton Anderson?

Shortly before I was planning to head back to Michigan, Maureen showed me something I’d never seen before. She brought out a small round profile portrait in black and white of an elegantly dressed, late 18^th-century gentleman. It was two inches in diameter in a silver frame and inscribed in pencil on the back in an old-fashioned hand: “Judge Dabney Carr, St. Memins.” It had been treasured by both Maureen's late husband Bill Minor and her late brother-in-law Dr. George Minor, who kept it in the centerpiece on his dining room table. 
When Maureen showed me the image of an eighteenth-century Minor ancestor that had descended somehow through the family, it gave me a little shiver of connection with the past of two-hundred years ago.


Both George’s and Bill's grandmother and great-grandmother were Carrs who married Minors, and they were proud to have this elegant little portrait of an ancestor. Maureen was distressed when the picture had seemed lost in the confusion as ignorant, ill-intentioned strangers cleared out George's house, but months later she was very happy to find it tossed in a box with other less significant objects.

                  “I don’t know exactly what this is,” Maureen said. “A drawing? Do you think it’s a photograph of a portrait that George had framed?” I looked at it closely; it didn’t look like a photograph.

                  A quick search turned up plenty of information about the artist. A French aristocrat who fled the Revolution in his own country and came to America in 1796, Charles-Balthazar-Julien Saint Memin  (1770 – 1852) worked with a copying device called a physiognotrace, invented in France in 1783. This allowed the artist to trace a very accurate profile of his sitter, which he then filled in by drawing facial details with a pencil or chalk. This was then transferred to an engraving plate. For $25, the sitter bought the original drawing and twelve copies of the engraving; more could be ordered. In fact, Thomas Jefferson purchased forty-eight copies of his portrait. George Washington, Meriwether Lewis, and Paul Revere sat to St. Memin, as did hundreds of other reasonably well-heeled new American citizens, up and down the East Coast. The charge for women’s portraits was $35, presumably because details of dress required more time. There are only a few examples of women but the artist did portraits of several elaborately dressed Native American chiefs who came to Washington, D.C. to be received by The Great White Father.

                  Judge Dabney Carr (1773-1837) was a nephew of Thomas Jefferson; his father also named Dabney Carr (1743-1773) had married Jefferson’s younger sister Martha. The elder Carr died the year his son was born, and according to the Jefferson Encyclopedia, young Dabney “spent a great deal of his early life at Monticello under the care of Jefferson.” He began practicing law in Albemarle County; by 1824 he was elected to be a judge of the court of appeals in the northern Virginia town of Winchester.

St. Memin spent the years from 1803-09 working in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Richmond, so it seems likely that Carr’s portrait was done then. St Memin returned to France in 1809.

                  It’s not difficult to figure out how the Minors are related to Judge Dabney Carr, and no doubt there are other connections among  old Albemarle County families. I’m descended from a Dr. John Gilmer and Sarah Minor, whose graves are in the same small family cemetery as my mother’s. If I am in any way related to Judge Dabney Carr, it would be distantly and in some highly convoluted fashion. But with a Carr grandmother and great-grandmother, it seems reasonable that the Minors would inherit the little portrait of their cousin.

                 

                  A few days later, Maureen pursued some information about St. Memin and Carr and found that a distant Minor relative had previously done so, but she had come to a different conclusion about the portrait. In a large, expensive book ($400 on Amazon) published by the Smithsonian that includes all portraits by St. Memin in their collection, there is an identical print identified in St. Memin’s handwriting as Overton Anderson. And who was that? His mother too was a Carr, and so he was a distant relative of the Minor family. His fifteen minutes of fame rests on the fact that he was rejected as a juror in the 1807 treason trial of Aaron Burr. He had no children, so it is reasonable to suppose that his twelve portraits might have been handed down through the family, who confused him with Judge Carr. The handwriting couldn’t have been St. Memin’s, as Carr was only made a judge long after the artist had returned to France.

                  If the portrait does in fact represent Overton Anderson, does that change it’s meaning? It is no longer shows a Minor ancestor; no longer Thomas Jefferson’s nephew.  The two elderly Minor brothers, George and Bill who treasured it, both died recently, happily before anyone raised the possibility that it might not be their ancestor at all. The engraving is still an attractive little object, two hundred years old, but it no longer carries the historical significance and emotional meaning that was determined by its misidentification. Bill and Maureen's children and grandchildren will inherit it but I don't think Overton Anderson can have the same resonance for them that Judge Dabney Carr had for the older generation.

kept awake by invasive species

The other night I woke up a 5 a.m. worrying about all the invasive species of plants which seem determined to take over our small world. I couldn't get back to sleep, so I turned on the light, got a book that my cousin Maureen recently gave me All about Weeds by Edwin Rollin Spencer. Published originally in 1940, it was inscribed by her late husband Wm. F. Minor, Arnold Arboretum, Boston, Mass., 4/28/85. It appealed to me for its chatty and judgmental  tone.


For example, "There is no weed worse than the Canada thistle...it is perhaps the worst weed of the entire United States...it is outlawed in every northern state." (p. 293) Canada thistle is trying to take over our field to the west. We are fighting it by repeatedly mowing it down before it flowers, but it is now blooming all up and down Six Mile Road. If it gets established in a hayfield, it renders the field useless, as neither horses nor cows will eat it. And we have eight acres of hay to the east, downwind.


Even the otherwise entirely neutral 1977 Newcomb's Wildflower Guide calls it "A bad weed of pastures and waste places."


Of the Wild Parsnip, Spencer: "a big, bad weed...an ugly worthless, dangerous weed." (p. 172). In its second year, the whole plant is poisonous and produces a sap which severely burns human skin. Wild parsnip's pretty yellow umbelliferous flowers can now be seen all along Six Mile Road and down Dixboro Road. They are potentially more harmful than poison ivy, but few people know anything about this plant, only recently seen here.


You thought you liked the lovely flowers of Queen Anne's Lace? Spencer: "One of the worst weed that has come to the United States from Europe is Queen Anne's Lace...It can take over meadow and pasture lands with the greatest of ease, for no pasturing stock will touch it and it is tall enough to crowd out all the grasses used for hay." (pp. 173-175)


And pretty white flat topped yarrow? "About as worthless as any plant that grows." (p. 284) Ox-eye daisy: "a beautiful, bad weed." (p. 287). Buckhorn (which my parents called "Fly-Trap" as children knew how to weave the stalks to make a sort of cage) is one of the vile species of plantain, "so villainous that it deserves to be declared an outlaw by every State in the Union." (p. 240)


All of these are alien weeds brought by our ancestors from Europe; all are common on our property or at least up and down the road. Garlic mustard, one of the worst problems in Michigan, isn't even mentioned by Spencer. By 1940, it hadn't spread enough to attract attention. And of course there are so many others that are common: dandelions, wild onion and garlic, spotted knapweed, burdock, curly dock, nettles, bull thistle, teasel, reed canary grass and purple loosestrife in wet places. And more, the many grasses, the vines...


Nor of course the shrubs multiflora rose, honeysuckle, buckthorn, and autumn olive are mentioned in a book about weeds.


Unfortunately this all ties in with the sad facts about how we are destroying native plants and our ecosystems in general. It's all keeping me up at night.

to virginia in june

when i drive from michigan to virginia, i feel i've arrived in my homeland when i reach berkeley springs, west virginia. this is a small town under the brow of a mountain with a wonderful hot spring that comes out of a very deep place inside our planet. the water gushes out at about 700-1,000 gallons per minute at a temperature of 74 degrees farenheit. most well water arrives at 56 degrees; the difference is that the spring water is heated by its proximity to the hot core of the earth. there are two pumps available free to anyone, and i have never been there that there wasn't at least one other person filling up jugs with water. i got 12 this time. the soft water has a delicious pure taste and is high in many minerals, especially magnesium. to me, it is the most delicious water in the world, and there it is, free, and not 50 feet out of my way on a drive i must have made almost a hundred times.


i wouldn't have known anything about berkeley springs, except that my mother's mother was from winchester, virginia, which is about 30 odd miles from the town, and my mother went there as a child. while i know a lot about my male ancestors--the henshaws, magruders, minors--my maternal grandmother's maiden name was long, and i know almost nothing about that family. somehow the only contact i have with them is berkeley springs, just knowing that the longs went there makes me feel a small degree of belonging. 

there is an extant letter from george washington saying that he was enjoying "ye warm springs." here is a photo of what is said to be his bathtub.

my cousin maureen minor is kind enough to put me up and put up with me when i visit my home town. she lives near ivy, outside of charlottesville, in an attractive house that was designed by her daughter margaret, an architect in boston. from that porch you can often have a fine view of the blue ridge mountains, but there was so much haze in the humid air every day in june that the mountains disappeared. it is a lovely place to stay and maureen makes me feel very welcome. her husband bill died last year. he was a passionate nature lover, an expert birder, and under an often gruff exterior lay a truly caring individual. more to come...