FORD MADOX FORD ON HANS HOLBEIN, THE YOUNGER: WRITING ON PORTRAITS AND PORTRAITS IN WRITING

Abstract

Portraits in words and portraits in paint are opposites, rather than metaphors for each other. A painted portrait is an artist's record, construction, of a physical presence, with a skin of colour, a layer of strokes of the brush, or the point, or the pencil, on a flat surface [....] A portrait in a novel or a story may be a portrait of invisible things - thought processes, attractions, repulsions, subtle or violent changes in whole lives, or groups of lives.'True to her title Portraits in Fiction, the novelist A. S. Byatt omits the portraits rendered in non-fictional prose such as biographies, memoirs, or critical monographs, though in writing about Ford she takes these genres into account:Portraits can represent the past in novels, both directly and indirectly. An unusually subtle historical novelist was Ford Madox Ford, who spent much of his childhood in the studio of his grandfather, Ford Madox Brown. As a young man Ford Madox Ford wrote a life of his grandfather, a study of Rossetti and a book on the Pre-Raphaelites. In 1905 he published an excellent and still surprising book on Holbein.2So before establishing his reputation as a historical novelist with The Fifth Queen Trilogy Ford learned the trade of ?representing] the past' through portraits in a series of non-fiction books. He thus began writing portraits of artists at the start of his literary career. It was during the Edwardian period that he developed this mode, and extended it to include writers as well as visual artists: especially the PreRaphaelites, who were both; and whose lives and milieu he recounted in his first book of reminiscential portraits, Ancient Lights (1911).It was also during the Edwardian years that he began to develop the ?literary portrait' - a form honed over three series of review articles, in the Daily Mail, the Tribune, and - the most sustained and incisive - in the Outlook. The literary portrait was to remain Ford's chief technique for writing about writing; sometimes extended, as in the books on Henry James or Joseph Conrad; more often essay-length sketches, worked into longer narrative sequences as in his literary memoirs Return to Yesterday and It Was the Nightingale; or gathered into volumes, as in New York Essays, and especially Portraits from Life (published in England as Mightier Than the Sword).This chapter will concentrate on Ford's 1905 study Hans Holbein the Younger, because it is the best of his books of art criticism; but also for its profound insights into Ford's Edwardian thinking about art and literature, about the nature of portraiture, and about himself. (Like much portraiture, and especially portraits in words, and above all Ford's, it also constitutes a form of refracted selfportrait.)3The impulse to write about both Flolbein and ancestry can be found in his first novel The Shifting of the Fire (1892), whose protagonist, ?a wealthy young chemist, Clement Hollebone, is of foreign descent which he traces back to Holbein'.4 The surname is an anglicization of?hoi', that is, ?empty' and ?Bein', meaning ?Knochen', that is, ?bone'. This act of transposing into fiction his own father's anglicization of ?Franz Huffer' to ?Francis Hueffer' may have been unconscious. But Ford's reflections, from an anonymous review he published in 1906, on his grandfather Ford Madox Brown (who had died in 1893), make clear the centrality of Holbein's example both to Brown and to himself:Madox Brown's figure is one of a singularly luckless man whether as an artist or an individual. It seems likely that he never did justice to the remarkable powers that were his; it is certain that he never received any material reward at all commensurate with his diligence, his sincerity, or his very considerable achievements [....] He produced a portrait that he called a ?modem Holbein'. With this not otherwise very remarkable picture he really did initiate modern art. He seems to have been the first man in modem days to see or to put in practice the theory that aesthetic salvation was to be found, not in changing the painter's subject, but in changing his method of looking at and rendering the visible world. …