(Pennsylvania State University Press, 2024)
BOOK REVIEW
by John Cooper
Given that the most familiar impression of Oscar Wilde derives from photographs taken by Napoleon Sarony, a retrospective of the famous nineteenth-century portraitist should be much anticipated by Wildeans, particularly as Sarony has for some time been a neglected figure. Erin Pauwels’s new book attempts to redress the balance.
The title Napoleon Sarony’s Living Pictures serves a dual purpose: first in recalling the short-lived magazine that Sarony produced towards the end of his career entitled Sarony’s Living Pictures, which was an attempt, pre-dating that of Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946), to translate photographs into accessible, half-tone, staged works of art, and to which the book devotes a thorough chapter. Secondly, the term ‘living pictures’ neatly alludes to the book’s theme of portraiture and cultural life.
The promotional notes tell us that the book will appeal to anyone interested in Sarony’s celebrity subjects. As Sarony photographed over 40,000 celebrities, the book must necessarily be selective. Thus, devoting three or four pages to Wilde can be regarded as generous. Those familiar with the Sarony photographs of Oscar Wilde will know the principal reason to focus on Wilde is the landmark copyright law case that centred on a plagiarized image of him. This topic is adequately covered, although the photograph relevant to the case is the only one of Wilde reproduced in the book. As there were thirty-two images of Wilde made by Sarony, the suggestion is that we are presented with only as much of his work as necessary.
Such economy of treatment is the first signal of what the book is not: an album. Of course, any attempt at even a representative gallery would be an entirely different, and possibly improbable, proposition. And the publishers are no doubt aware that many Sarony images can be found on the Internet, which may also explain why the only previous attempt at a limited album, The Theatrical Photographs of Napoleon Sarony (Ben L. Bassham, 1978), remains out of print. Instead the book prides itself on ‘featuring never before published portraits’ – which it does and which, usefully, are not readily found online either. There are, in fact, about ninety illustrations in the book, and their judicious placement in proximity to the relevant text enriches the reading experience.
This idea of a reading experience is appropriate because Napoleon Sarony’s Living Pictures is highly analytical – not a simple work of reference, which would have been difficult since all of Sarony’s records and negatives are presumed lost. So we find no chronology, no lists, and an incomplete sketch of Sarony’s known premises. One might have hoped for a limited inventory of celebrity sitters, but even that might have been redundant as he probably photographed everyone. As for any technical reference, while Sarony’s studio process is touched upon, this is not a book for the camera enthusiast, and accordingly there is only one mention in passing of Sarony’s long-time technical assistant, Benjamin Richardson. These qualifications are not intended to be detrimental. They are merely to note for the casual reader that despite the subtitle’s allusion to the mass-media topics of celebrity and New York’s Gilded Age, this book’s natural habitat is not the coffee table. It is destined, no doubt as intended, to be a valuable addition to a library of Victorian studies. However, a final caveat for that setting is that the book is too discursive to be read strictly as a biography – certainly not the type consisting of personal anecdote. Paradoxically, however, the information about Sarony’s life and work interspersed throughout its pages does constitute the most complete profile of him that has yet appeared.
The perverse reason for elaborating what this book is not is to suggest that it succeeds in varying degrees in being a little of everything. Above all, though, it is an academic treatise. The work ambitiously reviews Sarony’s career in the contemporary and future contexts of lithography, photography and artistic culture, and molds an expansive remit into a focused piece of scholarship. Pauwels provides an excellent rationale for her thesis by highlighting the disparity between Sarony’s massive presence in the nineteenth century and the paucity of subsequent scholarship. Her study examines both the artistic and the commercial development of imagery during the period, and nominates Sarony as an ideal yardstick. The justification for Sarony’s candidacy lies not merely in recognizing that Sarony took the daguerreotypes of Matthew Brady (the pioneering photographer of the American civil War) a step further. Pauwels’s vision is more contextual: she observes that Sarony’s talent was to realise that portraiture could reshape reality, not just reflect it, and she appreciates, as did Sarony, that commercialism and creativity cannot be understood in isolation from each other.
While Pauwels provides a detailed analysis of how Sarony continued to be an important figure throughout his career, she remains objective about his historical contribution. For instance, at the beginning of her timeline Pauwels accepts that Sarony was not the first to turn photography into an art form – although she does credit him with directing it towards portraiture and costume; and by the end she also accepts that he did not quite manage to realise photographic art in the way that Steiglitz did later.
Pauwels takes pains to provide a studious guided tour, occasionally taking the scenic route, but ensuring that the reader visits all of the important stops along the way. Sarony’s career, beginning in Canada, then taking in New York and a spell in England with his brother Oliver, is well laid out. We learn there was more to Sarony than portraiture, and there is extensive coverage of his other roles as putative artist and lithographer. We also learn of his proximity to trends such as spirit photography, which purported to show ghostly background apparitions – most notably featured in the 1869 William Mumler fraud case. Pauwels also cleverly uses ideas of identity in Sarony’s distinctive signature as a segue into copyright law, and considers the authorial and moral aspects of an act of creation. She contrasts the copyright law in Europe with the nuances of its counterpart in the United States, where courts tended to recognize the right to profit over the acknowledgment of a creator. More practically, we also gain an insight into Sarony’s studio surroundings, including the layout of his premises, the use of his patented posing rest and retouching frame, and his penchant for the painted backdrop. In this last respect she identifies Lafayette W. Seavey’s work and provides a potted biography. The references here to Mumler and Seavey are examples of interesting characters who may be new to those less familiar with the genre, and it is a mark of good scholarship to prompt readers to learn more. In summary, there is much to commend in Pauwels’s study, which is admirably researched and based on an extremely thorough bibliography.
The only misgiving for some readers might be the work’s origin in the world of academia. The self-referential output of university presses can often deter the lay person and occasionally daunt even the more scholarly minded. For instance this book, which is nominally about Gilded Age celebrity, invokes the philosophy of thinkers such Diderot, Darwin and Derrida, and draws upon theories in William James’s 1890 Principles of Psychology to interpret a sitter’s costume and possessions as a ‘concrete articulation of this multifaceted model of self’. This depth of analysis, along with expressions such as ‘traditional hermeneutics of experience, consciousness, and motivation’, often results in lengthy syntax. One occasionally comes across a sentence that demands a second reading so as to admire its complexity; but requires a second reading in order to understand it. Admittedly it is a conjectural style. But meaning might be better served without jargon such as ‘paradigm of skeptical vision’, ‘schematized empirical data’ and ‘relative immutability in hybrid media creations’. While such terminology does not occur too often in the book, a general question to academia is: need it occur at all? In revisiting this book’s predecessor, The Theatrical Photographs of Napoleon Sarony, also published by a university press, we find none of this language.
This point could be pursued, but it would be churlish to be over-critical of the academic style because without the university press this much-appreciated reappraisal of Napoleon Sarony would probably not exist. One advantage of academia is its built-in alliance with literate prose, and we can admire Pauwels’ assonant phrase ‘the period prior to that point was a golden age for plagiarism’, which sits rather well; as does her balanced observation that photography supplied Sarony’s sitters with ‘strategies for fitting in but also with an increasingly acceptable platform for standing out’
Napoleon Sarony’s Living Pictures is a very welcome publication. It may well be a book more studied than browsed; yet despite its sometimes formidable language it is, nevertheless, a formidable piece of work. Wildeans and others besides should be grateful for a book that eruditely redresses the neglect of a key figure in the Wilde story and his importance to the various realms of nineteenth-century visual arts.
© John Cooper, 2024.
This article first appeared in The Wildean, No. 65
(Journal of the Oscar Wilde Society, July 2024).
Erin Pauwels, Napoleon Sarony’s Living Pictures: The Celebrity Photograph in Gilded Age New York (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2024), hbk $69.95, 268pp, ISBN-13: 978-0-271-09506-6 : LINK