Laboring to represent sights and the impressions they make, travel writers often use pictorial or painterly figures of speech; as Henry James wrote of one landscape, "It is a matter for the brush and not for the pen." Such devices may appear formulaic in isolation; across a writer's career and its historical span, however, they register a shifting field of reference in art, taste, and civilization.
Famous as the author of The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and other celebrated novels in the "Great Tradition" of Anglo-American literature, Henry James wrote a voluminous body of travel writings in which his touring persona often seeks out works of art and uses terms and values from their styles to frame observations on his surrounding culture. Yet the artistic styles to which he refers and the attitudes these styles index change rapidly and significantly across James's career, which began in the mid-nineteenth-century dusk of Romanticism, progressed through the heyday of Realism and Impressionism, and concluded in the early-twentieth-century dawn of Modernism. In his early travel pieces, under the nostalgic sway of John Ruskin's Stones of Venice (1851-3), the young James finds works by the Renaissance painter Tintoretto in obscure corners of Venice, the classicist Claude in the suburbs of Rome, and the Romanticist Turner in English galleries; simultaneously he flees the rising bourgeois society around him to cultivate anachronistic aesthetics of "the picturesque" and "the gothic." As James matures, however, he develops more complex and current "impressions" of the human landscape, and for analogy he turns, in his words, to "modern `impressionist' pictures . . . of Manet, of Degas, of Claude Monet, of Whistler, or of other rare recent hands." At last, in James's "Major Phase" at the turn of the century during which he created early Modernist masterpieces such as his novel The Wings of the Dove (1902), the author in his travel writings increasingly abandons direct references to painting; yet, as he returns to sites in Venice and America he had earlier visited, the ways he depicts these places mirror developing trends in art. Finding himself and society in revolutionary upheaval, his solitary consciousness registers the vision of a rapidly expanding yet fragmenting civilization, abstracting his style in such a way as to parallel that of non-representative paintings by contemporaries like Kandinsky and Picasso.
Excerpts from James's work in the travel genre-from his early Transatlantic Sketches (1875) to the late American Scene (1907)-will be coordinated with slides of contemporaneous art in order to reveal his travel writing as a record of aesthetic and cultural change.
The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and
employer.
© Regents of the University of Minnesota, 1997.