Book Review: The Painter from Shanghai

Title: The Painter from Shanghai
Author: Jennifer Cody Epstein
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2008
Category: Historical Fiction
Number of Pages: 408 pages

What it is about:
Pan Yuliang was a mid 20th century Chinese artist, renowned for her Post-Impressionist self-portraits and paintings of nude women. She had been sold to a brothel by her uncle at age 14 after her parents died and was rescued from working as a prostitute by an idealistic customs officer Pan Zanhua. He married her and ultimately supported her artistic journey in Shangai, Paris and Rome. This book is the fictionalized story of her life (b. 1895 d. 1959).

Favourite Passage:
"Has it ever occurred to you that our wounds are what drive us to create?" He looks thoughtfully back at Goya's Saturn. "After all, loss in one arena compels us to compensate in others. Think about the senses. The way Loss of sight leads to heightened senses of smell, touch, and hearing for the bling. What if the same is true of the creative process? What if those who've lost comething compensate for it in their work? In that case their damage helps them. It's what compels them to create" He turns back to her." And it might explain why the best artists tend also to be the poorest." (page 251)

Rating:
I read the first chapter of this novel in the bookstore and was breathless with anticipation. I love reading about artists, because I understand the exquisite agony that accompanies creation. The first chapter really seemed to resonate with me and I really enjoyed the chapters that followed Yuliang through the brothel and onto her voyage of self-discovery as an artist.

Ultimately, I finished the book only out of a sense of duty. Something was missing for me and I am struggling now to explain what that was. Pan Yuliang seemed hollow, without real emotion or real dimension especially towards the end of the book. Artists are anything but hollow. I've never met a real artist who did not feel things deeply. I'm not sure a non-artist would really understand or even notice what I am talking about, but in the end, I felt dissappointed. And I really wish that the author had bothered to get permission to use one of the artist's paintings for the cover or as an appendix in the book. A picture is worth a thousand words they say.... (To that end, I've included a couple of her paintings here).

Portraits of an Artist

Oscar Wilde once said "Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not the sitter."

I used to paint a lot of portraits and here are a couple of my favourites:


Portrait of a Young Woman, by Ingrid Mida Oil on canvas, 30x90 inches, 2007 (Model Holly in front of her portrait)


The Lacemaker after Vermeer by Ingrid Mida, 2006 Oil on canvas 20x20

Blue Jean Babes (#3 and #1) by Ingrid Mida 2006 Oil on canvas, 30x40

What these works say about me, I'm not sure....

Portraits of Marie Antoinette

Portrait of the Archduchess Marie Antoinette by Martin van Meytens the Younger, 1767-1768 (Schonbrunn Castle, Vienna)

In the many portraits of Marie Antoinette, she is portrayed with smooth, white skin, blonde hair, pretty blue eyes, a high forehead, and an aqualine nose. In the Portrait of the Archduchess Marie Antoinette by Martin van Meytens the Younger shown above, painted before she left for the French court, she seems to be perfection personified.

In spite of this lovely image, it's been said that Marie Antoinette was not considered especially beautiful. Apparently, her "Habsburg jaw and prominent nose were a bit heavy for eighteenth-century taste" (Source: "The Art of Dress" by Aileen Riberio, Yale University Press, 1995). As well, there are few images of MA in profile because she was self-conscious about her aqualine nose.

In the letters between Marie Antoinette and her mother (1770-1780), she makes several references to the portraits being painted of her and that she does not think they have achieved a proper likeness. Here are two extracts from her letters to her mother:

Marie Antoinette to Maria Theresa, 13 August 1773
"I am being painted, right now; it is true that no painter has yet caught the way I look: I would happily give all I own to anyone who could express in a portrait all the joy I would feel in seeing my dear Mama; how hard it is to be able to kiss her only by letter." (page 117).

Marie Antoinette to Marie Theresa, 16 November 1774
"The painters kill me and make me despair. I delayed the courier so as to allow my portrait to be finished; it has just been brought to me; it looks so little like me that I cannot send it. I hope to have a good one next month." (page 155)

(Source: Secrets of Marie Antoinette by Olivier Bernier, 1985)

As an artist, I know how difficult it is to achieve a likeness when painting a portrait. And even if all the features are precisely in place, considerable skill is required to capture the spirit of the sitter and translate that onto canvas. I wonder if the portrait artists mentioned in Marie Antoinette's letters failed to flatter her sufficiently to win her approval or were lacking in sufficient skill to capture her likeness.

After her mother's death, Marie Antoinette sat for several portraits with Elisabeth-Louise Vigee Le Brun. One of her portraits of Queen Marie Antoinette was exhibited at the Salon of 1783 and depicted the Queen wearing a chemise gown causing tremendous controversy. The portrait was withdrawn. To read more about Madame Vigee Le Brun, please refer to my earlier posting on the subject.

Queen Marie-Antoinette by E.L. Vigee-Lebrun, 1783, National Gallery of Art, Washington

I'd hazard a guess that Marie Antoinette would not have liked the contemporary portraits of her painted by Elizabeth Peyton.