Proud parents order paintings of their children but don't make them dress up
Ginia Bellafante
New York Times
Among the works in the online portfolio of a New York portrait artist named Gerald Slater is a commissioned oil painting, 22 by 28 inches in dimension, titled "Eric at the Window." A shaggy-haired boy of about 5 or 6, Eric is shown wearing a plaid shirt and denim overalls. His head tilted, he looks skeptically at the viewer while his tiny hands grab at the window frame, as if to suggest that Eric has had quite enough of bedtime and root vegetables and is preparing to relocate.
A 13-year-old boy depicted in one of Marina Goldberg's recent oil portraits appears more at ease with his domestic arrangement. Slouched in a black leather chair with a towel draped behind him, he seems to have wrested himself out of a long shower in time to watch "South Park." His presentation, like Eric's, had none of the eternizing formality of traditional painted portraits. Instead of a brass-buttoned blazer, say, the boy is wearing jeans, his right hand is tucked into a pocket, and a short-sleeve button-down shirt is open to reveal a white T-shirt bearing the Champion sporting goods insignia. He could not be confused with a child of the 19th century; he would probably not be confused with a boy of 1992.
Americans' interest in commissioned portraiture -- in oil, charcoal and pastel -- has marched on unabated since the 1980s, when a new culture of wealth and traditionalism and a renewed interest in figurative painting brought it back into vogue. But a new style of family portraiture has emerged; not, it seems, in reaction against the grilled-cheese-in-hand temporality of pictures taken with cell phones, but in mirrored accord with it.
A survey of the genre yields a great number of images of young children and teenagers surrounded by the paraphernalia of their extracurricular lives -- soccer balls, bass guitars, fishing rods -- and outfitted in T-shirts, Converse basketball shoes, Ugg boots, little sneakers with Velcro closures, Polo logos and all variants of the hiking shoe.
If commissioned portraiture in the 18th and 19th centuries and much of the 20th was intended to idealize children, the current style seems to idealize the parents who raise them, romanticizing in particular the modern impulse to free children from any hindrances to their self-expression.
"We are so anxious now to see our children as individuals, to listen to them, to really hear what they have to say, and I think that's all playing out here," said Wende Caporale, a children's portrait artist in North Salem, N.Y., who is considered a leader in the field.
The casual style has its roots partly in the changing economics of an art form that has been significantly democratized. In the late 1970s and 1980s a handful of agencies sprang up in the North and the Southeast, with the goal of matching portrait artists with prospective clients. A mother in Wichita, Kan., who wished to have her daughter's likeness rendered was no longer dependent on the one or two portraitists in her immediate vicinity. She could contact a brokerage house that might send an artist from Dallas or Atlanta best suited to her tastes and budget. A broader price structure eventually emerged (prices have typically ranged from $4,500 to $50,000, but it is now possible to find portraits for $1,500 to $2,000), allowing portraiture to extend its reach beyond the precincts of the ancestrally wealthy, to teachers and insurance people, to occupants of exurban McMansions and, in recent years, to those of comparatively more modest means.
"The biggest change in the past 10 years has been the increase in the number of middle-income people wanting portraits," said Jean Daniel, president of Portraits South, a brokerage in Raleigh, N.C.
"I've had couples who don't have dining room furniture but would have a portrait done of their 4-year-old," said Gordon Wetmore, chairman of the Portrait Society of America.
The fashion for lax dress codes and comfortable settings has also taken hold among the well-to-do. For the past two years Caporale has been working on the portraits of Kathryn and Elsie Widing, the teenage daughters of Eric P. Widing, the head of the American paintings department at Christie's. On a recent day off, Kathryn, 15, traveled for one of her final sittings from a boarding school in New Jersey to Caporale's carriage house in North Salem, the home she shares with her husband, Daniel Green, who is among the country's most prominent portrait artists.
Like most portraitists, Caporale works from life and from photographs. Kathryn's portrait, near completion, depicts her by a stream in her parents' former backyard, wearing jeans, a hot pink sweater, a digital watch and a long striped wool scarf. Her family's golden retriever, Jester, is at her side. The composition and costuming in her sister's portrait is almost precisely the same.
"One of the things I was trying to replicate was the naturalness and ease of the girls," Eric Widing explained. "We wanted to capture them really as they are, and painting captures something far more powerful than any photograph can aspire to."
The depiction of children in ordinary circumstances has some precedent in American portrait painting. While dress was typically formal, outdoor settings were popular until the Civil War. Mary Cassatt painted children nude or in nightclothes. In the early 1950s Fairfield Porter painted a portrait of his son playing the piano in jeans and high-top sneakers.
To a great extent, though, the classic children's portraits of John Singer Sargent and other turn-of-the-century artists were meant to denote the status of the families who commissioned them. Today's portraits, with their meticulous attention to branding and everyday detail, seem intended to convey something else, a will toward commonality.
In thinking about these new portraits, Barbara Gallati, who curated the show "Great Expectations: John Singer Sargent Painting Children" at the Brooklyn Museum last year, is reminded of a portrait presented in 2000 to the Queen Mother that showed the young princes in unceremonious poses and clothes.
"There's some embarrassment in modern society of having too much money, and if you present yourself as having money this way, you open yourself up to a certain kind of criticism," she said.
What there is little embarrassment about in modern society is heaping attention on children. One common feature of contemporary family portraiture, Angela Mack, chief curator of the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, S.C., points out, is the general absence of adults. Children generally consume the frame.
Perhaps it is not surprising at a time when two television series are devoted to the subject of infertility that a portrait may also be a testament to a child hard won.
Not long ago Daniel Arredondo, an artist and dentist in San Antonio, was asked to paint a portrait of a 6-month-old. Arredondo, who once painted a portrait of Henry G. Cisneros, the former secretary of housing and urban development, and his grandson, balked because babies cannot, of course, sit still. But the mother insisted, he said. She worked as a medical technician, taking sonogram pictures. She had been told she could never have children. This, as he put it, was her miracle baby.
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