Representation Through Portraiture

According to art historian Wendy Greenhouse, Motley intended to be a portrait painter. 15 This desire grew out of his studies at the School of the Art Institute, where he took classes in portraiture, figure drawing, and composition with such Chicago artists as Karl Buehr, John Norton, and George Walcott. As a student, Motley learned that, in addition to capturing likenesses, portraits are intended to convey social status, profession, character, and psychological state. For many years, American art academies had been influenced in their teaching by such pseudosciences as phrenology (studying the shape and protuberances of the skull to determine character and mental capacity) and physiognomy (judging character on the basis of facial and other body features). A plethora of publications and manuals appeared in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth to which teachers and students of anatomy could refer. According to Characterology, An Exact Science, for example, the application of phrenological and physiognomic principles made it possible “to diagnose character so accurately that truth and virtue will be cultivated, and evil will be shunned by all for the fear of discovery.” 16 Armed with these kinds of analytic approaches, artists assumed that they could scrutinize an individual’s appearance to expose his or her invisible, internal self. However, the application of these pseudosciences could be pernicious: claiming that there is a direct connection between physical characteristics and mental aptitudes, many of their supporters invoked them to justify the false belief that certain races, including Africans and African Americans, had limited mental capabilities. 17

By the time Motley entered art school, such ideas were standardized in instruction manuals for drawing classes, including those at the School of the Art Institute, where the traditional curriculum followed the lead of New York’s National Academy of Design. 18 Despite the fact that this kind of thinking encouraged countless bigoted depictions of African Americans of the sort that he wished to eradicate, Motley appears to have been influenced by such tenets in his portraits, as were many artists of his era. This is demonstrated by the early self-portrait in the Art Institute (fig. 1), in which he showed himself at work, displaying the trappings of a fine artist, including a dark-brown painter’s smock and a palette arranged with brightly hued pigments. The conventional, half-length, frontal pose communicates Motley’s serious demeanor and academic training. Beneath his protective smock, he is nattily attired in a black vest, white shirt, and black tie embellished with a diamond horseshoe tie tack. With his pomaded hair and dapper moustache, Motley presents himself as the epitome of style and formality.