National Portrait Gallery | Face to Face blog

A Portrait of Santa?

This time of year, visitors to the National Portrait Gallery often ask our docents, “Where is your portrait of Santa?” Although the question might sound like a simple one, the answer is actually complex.

First, Santa is truly a universal individual, and as much as we would like to place his picture among the noble Americans on display at the National Portrait Gallery, we simply cannot. “It would be super to have a picture of Santa in the collection, and we’ve tried for many years to get one, but Santa doesn’t like to confine himself to canvas or print—he also, I really believe, is bigger than any way we could possibly portray him,” notes Linda Thrift, keeper of the Catalog of American Portraits. Santa belongs to the whole world, it would seem, and not just to a single country or on a wall in a museum—even a portrait gallery.

Second, Santa is a very busy individual; he rarely has time to sit for the long hours it would take to accomplish a portrait. When Santa is not supervising his elves, he is preparing for his annual toy-delivery tour de force.

Last, painting portraits is a very difficult task, which requires a steady hand and ideal conditions. Most portrait artists cannot paint in cold weather, and Santa spends every night of the year but one at the North Pole. Deb Sisum, National Portrait Gallery new media expert, observes, “Of the portrait painters represented in our collection, I cannot think of a single one who could work in such a cold environment as the North Pole. Imagine painting at the North Pole! Your fingers would be cold, and you would have snow in your oils, inks, and acrylics; it would be tantamount to madness!”

Although the National Portrait Gallery does not have a portrait of Santa yet, the quest continues to locate a picture of the man who brings so much joy to so many. And who knows? Maybe sometime soon Santa will see the letters written by all our curators and historians and leave a special gift in a frame underneath the NPG tree.

 

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

 

NPG Intern Profile: Laura Conte

Q: Where are you attending college, and what are you studying?

A: I am a senior art history major at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Q: Why did you want to intern at NPG?

A: The National Portrait Gallery has a certain charisma that distinguishes it from other museums. As an art history major, I’d taken a variety of classes in different areas of study, but the one that had resonated with me most focused on nineteenth-century American art.

When I first applied, I did so partly because I have always had an interest in American art and portraiture. I’d never visited the Portrait Gallery prior to being selected to my intern position, but I really appreciated the idea of using art to tell a story. I was excited by an opportunity to intern at the NPG because it combined both art and history in telling stories about great Americans.

Q: What do you do typically during your days at NPG?

A: As an intern with the Cultures in Motion performance series, my responsibilities are primarily centered around research. Cultures in Motion creates staged performances from the biographies of sitters from the NPG collection.

I do a lot of reading and searching in the library stacks and through Internet sources seeking interesting biographical information on important Americans for future shows. I have the unique opportunity to sit in on meetings with playwrights and contribute my research, which will be used in the creation of a script.

Q: Tell us about an interesting project in which you have participated here at NPG.

A: I think the most interesting project I have participated in is my research on the first ladies of the Civil War. I don’t think I ever realized how nuanced those five years in American history were. I read a couple of different biographies on Mary Todd Lincoln (below), as well as a plethora of her correspondence. She had a tragic life, but it was so interesting!

My research also included reading the autobiography of a dressmaker named Elizabeth Keckley, who had worked for both both Varina Davis (first lady of the Confederacy) and Mrs. Lincoln. If it were not for this internship, I would never have learned about Keckley, who played a substantial role in Mrs. Lincoln’s life, especially after President Lincoln’s assassination.

Mary Ann Todd Lincoln / Mathew Brady Studio / Albumen silver print, 1861 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Pearl Harbor: The Seventieth Commemorative Anniversary

The following is from President Franklin Roosevelt’s speech to the Congress of the United States, December 8, 1941.

. . . Yesterday, December 7th, 1941—a date which will live in infamy— the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

The United States was at peace with that nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific.

Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in the American island of Oahu, the Japanese ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to our Secretary of State a formal reply to a recent American message. And while this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or of armed attack.

It will be recorded that the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time, the Japanese government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace.

The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost. In addition, American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu…

I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7th, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese empire.

                                                 ********

We recently asked Stanley Weintraub, author of Pearl Harbor Christmas (Boston: Perseus Books, 2011) to give us some thoughts on this commemorative event.

Weintraub will be joining us this evening, December 7, in the “America’s Presidents” gallery on the second floor of the Donald W. Reynolds Center at 6:00 p.m. He will give a short talk in front of NPG’s portrait of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, followed by a book-signing.

Q. Seventy years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, do you see Americans as still appreciating the gravity and resonance of December 7, 1941?

A. No. I think too many catastrophic events have intervened—such as 9/11.

Q. Why did you choose that particular image of FDR for the cover of Pearl Harbor Christmas? Can you tell us a little about that picture? 

A. He appears to be signing the declaration of war against Japan the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The black armband and black tie are in mourning for his mother who had died at age eighty-eight in September 1941.

Q. Are you pleased with the efforts—monumental, written, cinematic, and otherwise—that Americans have made to pay tribute to the men and women who fought and won World War II?

A. Not really. A proliferation of memorials is not as significant as the recognition that peace is harder to make than war.

 

Franklin Delano Roosevelt/Douglas Granville Chandor, 1945/Oil on canvas/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

 

The Atlantic Commemorative Civil War Issue, Featuring Portraits from NPG

“Lincoln is a president I turn to often…” begins President Barack Obama’s essay in the current Atlantic Civil War commemorative issue.  This edition, to released today, features a special partnership with the National Portrait Gallery in which NPG Civil War images, as well as images from other Civil War collections, are paired with original Atlantic features by such writers as Mark Twain, Charles Francis Adams, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. 

Of the many excellent moments in this journal, the first is a short essay by President Obama in which he discusses one of the NPG’s prize works, the portrait of Abraham Lincoln by Alexander Gardner in which the photographic plate is cracked.

NPG Historian David C. Ward and Associate Curator of Photographs Frank Goodyear selected the images and worked with the editors of The Atlantic to place them in historical context. Ward and Goodyear note, “In the writings from The Atlantic and photographs from the National Portrait Gallery . . . one can see a people grappling to make sense of life in the cauldron of war. And one can see, in hesitant and undeveloped ways, the emergence of the modern United States of America.”

In late 2010, Ward gave a tour of the NPG “Hide/Seek” exhibition to the Atlantic editors (Ward was a co-curator of the exhibition). Members of The Atlantic staff returned for a visit to the Patent Office Building and the NPG collections.

“That tour sparked the idea of a cooperative venture in which the magazine drew on the NPG’s intellectual and artistic resources in publishing its commemorative issue on the Civil War. Both sides are very pleased with how things worked and hope to do more of this kind of collaborative programming and publishing in the future,” Ward said.

The 150^th anniversary of the American Civil War is being remembered by institutions across the nation in many ways. Few of them, however, have the memory of the Smithsonian or the Atlantic; fewer still have visual and written archives of America’s most divisive years.

Since the magazine’s inception in 1857, it has documented and commented on America’s progress, status, and past, while the Smithsonian’s mission—“the increase and diffusion of knowledge”—and its collections, such as the Civil War holdings, tell the story of the country’s past through its material culture.

Perspectives in this commemorative issue and the accompanying images are diverse and resonant, and many of the photographs—the scars on the back of the beaten slave, the bodies of dead soldiers in the field at Antietam—implore the viewer to seek out a higher meaning in the horror. President Obama characterizes Abraham Lincoln in terms of this imperative when he writes, “But Lincoln saw beyond the bloodshed and division. He saw us not only as we were, but as we might be. And he calls on us through the ages to commit ourselves to the unfinished work he so nobly advanced—the work of perfecting our Union.” 

 

Abraham Lincoln/Alexander Gardner, 1865/Albumen silver print/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Gordon / Mathew Brady Studio / Albumen silver print, 1863 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

 

Woody Allen’s 76th Birthday, December 1, 2011

By the numbers, he is one of the most successful filmmakers and entertainers of all time. Woody Allen has three Oscars and twenty-one nominations; another twenty-one nominations with ten prizes from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA); eleven Golden Globe nominations with one Golden Globe; and nineteen nominations and four awards from the Writers Guild of America. The litany of his honors begins in 1966, and he has nominations and prizes from each decade since that year.

Allen has scores of other accolades from institutions, domestic and foreign, and, interestingly, he couldn’t care less about them. In his 1991 biography of Allen, Eric Lax writes, “As everyone knows, despite however many nominations he has, Woody will not campaign for them, nor will he attend the ceremony—or any awards ceremony.”

Allen is prolific in his directing and writing, and the roll call of his films contains many monuments of the cinematic landscape. Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and Deconstructing Harry are among his critically acclaimed works. The box office does not necessarily go the way of the critics, however. His films often play on his obsessions and fears—sex and death are two key themes in his work—and however founded or unfounded his neuroses, they serve his comedy well.

As a rule, Allen’s work is set in New York; a notable exception is his 2011 release, Midnight in Paris. He does not film in New York out of a desire to use a familiar setting, but out of an allegiance to his hometown (he was born and grew up in Brooklyn). Of the gestures made to the city after the attacks of September 11, 2001, perhaps Woody Allen’s was one of the most unusual. “I plead with you, please come make the films there; it [New York] remains a great, great city,” he said to the audience at the 2002 Academy Awards. Although he would not ascend the Oscar stage to accept any of the awards he had previously received, Allen did not hesitate to do the bidding of his hometown in its sad hour.

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

 

Woody Allen / John Kascht / Watercolor, colored ink and graphite on pape, 1997 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, © John Kascht

Cited:
Eric Lax, Woody Allen (New York: Knopf, 1991).