the magnificent ambersons by booth tarkington

Portia in a Pink Blouse is by far the most captivating of the portraits chosen for this exhibition. Still, the label also explains that, despite Tarkington’s opinion of modern art as “noisy” and “violent,” he found this painting “haunting.” Indeed it is. The curators of A Gentleman Collector from Indiana: Portraits from the Collection of Booth Tarkington (on display now through February 26, 2017, at the Indianapolis Museum of Art) hazard a guess in their label to Portia in a Pink Blouse: Portia Novello Le Brun, the painting’s subject, was a fellow writer, and Tarkington seems to have been inspired by writer portraits, as his collection attests. But one cannot help wondering what about the impressionistic painting spoke to Tarkington, whose collection of portraits otherwise reflects a preference for the traditional, those highly formalized and painstakingly lifelike compositions perfected by seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth-century masters. Of course the author, who purchased Portia in a Pink Blouse in 1944, would not have made this connection, for he had completed his Pulitzer-winning work nearly thirty years earlier. Du Bois’ Portia in a Pink Blouse (1942), in an attempt to further probe this incongruity, I am reminded of George Amberson Minafer, the protagonist of Booth Tarkington’s 1918 novel The Magnificent Ambersons, a haughty young man who stoically accepts his fate, resigning himself to the changing times, even as the fire of his passionate character, fed by a misguided, aristocratic “theory of life,” burns unceasingly below the surface. What a contradiction: that calm, wistful mien - steadfast, even ageless - rendered in bold, brisk lines, as if racing headlong toward the future.Īs I plunge into this painting, Guy P. (Then she must be looking down.) And here, at the nose, thin yet furious black strokes radiate across the strong outline of her chin.

It is distant, one cannot follow it except by following the line of her nose down to her full lips, which have a certain sad turn at the corners. A fine black blot composes the eye, indistinct, almost a void, and yet her gaze beguiles. The figure, that of a well-dressed woman with aristocratic bearing - witness the tightly coifed hair, the high cheekbones, the patrician nose - sits against a velvety mauve background, her face turned away.

The magnificent ambersons by booth tarkington