over the cleavage. Jane Stuart called the retouching an act of vandalism, but the patrons’ prudishness trumped the artist’s eye. And she had a widowed mother and several sisters to support.

Occupied by the British during the Revolution, Newport never recovered its former prosperity, despite its popularity as a summering spot for Southern gentry fleeing their native heat and malaria in the first half of the nineteenth century and New England intellectuals seeking one another’s company in the second. Two Pulitzer Prize-winning writers, Maud Howe Elliott (awarded the prize with her sisters Florence Marion Howe Hall and Laura E. Richards for a biography of their mother, Julia Ward Howe) and Edith Wharton, make appearances in this collection. Despite Wharton’s comment that she “did not care for watering-place mundanities,” she followed the trend toward fashionable European painters and sat for the Englishman Edward Harrison May.

By then, the Gilded Age had arrived. The village built on tolerance had become the resort notorious for exclusivity. “Newport was the very Holy of Holies, the playground of the great ones of the earth from which all intruders were ruthlessly excluded by a set of cast-iron rules,” wrote Elizabeth Drexel Lehr, whose husband, Harry, succeeded Ward McAllister as the arbiter of social acceptability.

Sitting for a portrait is an act of hubris. The subject is saying, “I am worth looking at.” It is also a statement of trust in the artist: “I will let you fashion the face I show to posterity.” Even after photography had introduced a less risky road to immortality, the rich, the powerful, the celebrated—and those who wanted to be—continued to take the gamble.

When it comes to showing a fine face to future generations, the modern subjects in this collection who have perhaps fared best were painted by a loved one. Olive Bigelow Pell arrived in Newport as the second wife of Congressman Herbert Claiborne Pell. Her Pells at Tea, 1933, captures the ease and tenderness of a halcyon family moment. Mr. Pell lounges, Mrs. Pell serves, her daughter perches on the arm of Herbert’s chair, her son-in-law bounces her grandchild on his knee. No outsider intrudes to disturb the peace. The artist is one of the family. (The fact that the family is an amalgam of two shattered by divorce, a somewhat unusual state of affairs at the time, adds another dimension to the scene.)

The equally affectionate Herbert and Claiborne Pell, 1927, tells a story as clearly and eloquently as a Norman Rockwell illustration. Pell painted this luminous portrait of her husband and his son, the

future senator Claiborne Pell, shortly after her marriage. The arrangement of hands—Herbert Pell raises his right to make a point while his son clasps his father’s left in his own small fist—creates a magical circle of private love and public duty.

It is a truism that portraits reveal what is important to the sitter—the squire with his horses and hunting dogs, the dowager with her diamonds—but in Pell’s self-portrait, One Lump or Two? , her gorgeous silver tea service and tantalizingly edible sandwiches shimmer with irony as well as exuberance.

Pell saw. A diplomatic colleague of her husband wrote to Franklin D. Roosevelt that she was the embodiment of Ruskin’s remark that “for a thousand who can think there is only one that can see.” She also worked, constantly, painstakingly, passionately. But other artistically inclined insiders found the conflict between the delights of life and the demands of art more difficult to reconcile. An artist neighbor encouraged Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney to pay less attention to her social role and more to her sculpture, and fortunately for the museum-going public, she followed his advice. The Senator Pell pictured here as a boy ascribed his championship of the National Endowment for the Arts to the fact that he was a “frustrated artist.” But for some the good life proved too alluring. The senior Pell, a model of sober statesmanship in the portrait, later wrote his son, “My worst quality was, of course, an almost uncontrollable unwillingness to work except sporadically.”

In a world in which work is an afterthought, or at least a choice, what, then, are the inhabitants thinking when they ask artists, some of them self-proclaimed revolutionaries, to paint their portraits? They are supporting the arts certainly, but they could do that by buying an existing canvas. The answer, I suspect, has something to do with family pride and the aforementioned hubris. The result is often fabulous, but the likeness is not always flattering. Sometimes, it is not even a likeness.

Diego Rivera’s Jojo (Joseph Hudson), 1955, is a beautiful and haunting case in point. The painting is not really a portrait, since the little heir’s face bears an uncanny similarity to the aging Mexican artist’s features, but with its mysterious imagery and arresting composition it is pure seduction.

A 1982 painting by Larry Rivers of Jojo’s sister, Titi, Princess von Fuerstenberg, Portrait of the Princess (Titi Hudson in Blazing Pink), does achieve an individual and immediate resemblance. A lyrical “sketch” in black on a splash of pink, the portrait reveals a wealth of character with an economy of line. Clear-eyed but not unaffectionate, it also illustrates what Rivers called “my conflict with and about the useful rich, toward whom I acted more democratically than I felt.” The catalogue does not reveal what the princess thought of the painting, but it does say that Josephine Bryce was delighted with the way her friend Salvador Dali portrayed

her. Posed in profile like a Renaissance noble, she wears her favorite green velvet dress and holds a red carnation to signify wifely devotion. The background is recognizable Dali: a lurid sky; a surrealistic lake; a miniature Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, and musicians to represent the subject’s interest in the arts. Mrs. Bryce was, in fact, posing against the steel walls of a City Bank vault. She was determined to sit wearing the family emeralds, but they belonged to her brother at the time, and the insurance company would not permit them to leave the premises. The portrait hung in Mrs. Bryce’s dining room for forty years and always disturbed her daughter, who wondered if the artist hadn’t seen a hardness in her mother that she’d missed.

The possibility brings us back to that uneasy relationship. Society portraitists who are insiders tend to send valentines. Avant-garde artists of international standing make no promises, and a sitter who chooses one of the latter takes a chance. It is hard to look at the Dali portrait without thinking he’s having a little fun at his friend’s expense. It is impossible to gaze at the Rivera painting without falling in love with a work of art that resembles no one but speaks to everyone. Sometimes art triumphs and the patron still comes out ahead.