Readers of Facing the Late Victorians: Portraits of Writers and Artists from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection by Margaret D. Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and professor of humanities at UD, come face to face with famous British poets, painters, novelists, playwrights and illustrators. Looking at pictures of them is a surprisingly modern experience. Today's media obsession with celebrities began more than 100 years ago with drawings, photographs, paintings, and caricatures just like these, according to Stetz.
Published by the University of Delaware Press, Stetz's book is based on “Beyond Oscar Wilde,” a 2002 exhibition in the University Gallery that she curated using works collected by Mark Samuels Lasner, senior research fellow at the UD Library.
The Mark Samuels Lasner Collection is associated with the Special Collections Department of the University of Delaware Library but is privately owned. The collection, housed in the Morris Library, focuses on British literature and art of the period 1850-1900, with an emphasis on the Pre-Raphaelites and on the writers and illustrators of the 1890s. Its holdings comprise 5,000 first and other editions (including many signed and association copies), manuscripts, letters, works on paper and ephemera.
In her preface, Stetz states that her goal is to open up “to academic specialists and to general audiences alike a glimpse of the richness” of the collection. More than 70 portraits from it are reproduced in this book, many for the first time.
Stetz and Lasner have worked together on a number of other exhibitions at Bryn Mawr College, the National Gallery of Art Library, Harvard University, Georgetown University and the University of Virginia. A new version of Stetz's “Beyond Oscar Wilde” show--to be titled “Facing the Late Victorians”--will be on display at the Grolier Club, a bibliophile organization, in New York in February.
Stetz said that she views exhibitions as narratives. Though objects themselves tell stories, she is there to shape and interpret those stories in the labels she writes. Turning an exhibition into a book, however, she said means using her scholarly knowledge of the Victorian period and its culture to provide a broader historical framework. In her introduction, Stetz explains that new technologies, new audiences, and the new industry of advertising in the late 19th century put public figures under pressure to think carefully about how to present themselves. Her book demonstrates how artists and authors responded.
For example, in her commentary on a woodcut of the artist James McNeill Whistler, Stetz notes that he was “in love with his own image” and that his appearance “was a visual statement designed to attract attention, and it succeeded.”
Included in the book is a self-portrait of Rudyard Kipling. Stetz reveals that “Audiences who snapped up his adventurous tales of India were nonplussed by photographs of the writer which showed him to be not some strapping specimen of Victorian masculinity, but a studious looking gentleman with large, balding head [and] a rather silly moustache....”
Wilde exploited the “craze for portraiture,” because he “grasped the potential of the new publicity industry to manufacture the product he wanted for himself: celebrity.”
As Stetz points out, the late Victorians “believed in becoming portrait-literate....Every aspect of late-Victorian society was gendered and hierarchized and so were facial features, which were anxiously scrutinized first for masculine or feminine characteristics, as well as for those indicating class.” This scrutiny made the subjects of portraits worry about what their faces, bodies and clothes revealed about them. But as is still true today, Stetz said, nobody could control how their images might be used or misused. Caricatures were very popular: “Alongside the market for idealized representations of writers and artists as lofty beings representative of genius flourished an equally strong desire to see the physical appearances of the great and famous treated irreverently.”
In Stetz's opinion, “British culture became the equivalent of a great hall of mirrors. Images of faces, including representations of writers' and artists' faces, were the new and inescapable accompaniments to daily life,” just as celebrity photos are today.
Facing the Late Victorians includes a number of portraits of prominent women in the arts, such as the novelist George Eliot, along with several done by women artists, such as Helen Allingham, Violet Manners, Sarah J. Eddy and the great pioneer in photography, Julia Margaret Cameron. Although opportunities for women to be professional portrait artists were limited--more often, women could “make their livings as illustrators or as painters of landscapes and domestic genre scenes,” Stetz wrote--many did find a way to practice their art.
Stetz began teaching Women's Studies at UD in 2002, and this is her second book to grow out of an event she staged on campus. Earlier this year, Rivendale Press published Michael Field and Their World, co-edited with Cheryl A. Wilson (University of Delaware Ph.D.'05), a volume of essays based on a 2004 conference at UD about two Victorian women poets who used a male pseudonym.
