return HENRY JAMES (1843-1916) by Jacques-Émile Blanche (1861-1942) Henry James spent a large part of his childhood abroad, and after graduating from Harvard in 1865, he spent the following decade alternating between Europe and America. He settled permanently in England in 1876. There he began a series of novels, among them Roderick Hudson, The Americans, and Daisy Miller, that dealt with the relationship between Europeans and Americans, and the moral questions such encounters created. James moved in affluent, fashionable circles, and his portraitist was part of the same social set. In April 1908, when he traveled to France in order to visit his longtime friend, American author Edith Wharton, Jacques-Émile Blanche entertained him in Passy, a suburb of Paris. At Wharton's suggestion, James agreed to pose for the artist. Blanche's initial full-face portrait of James was not pleasing to either the author or the artist. The artist then painted this second, profile likeness, completing it in time for a London exhibition in the autumn of 1908. He described James in this portrait as "a Poet-Laureate, with a faraway, meditative look, against a William Morris wallpaper of gilded vine leaves and grape clusters the sort you'd find in the study of an Oxford or Cambridge don." Oil on canvas, 1908 National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution Bequest of Mrs. Katherine Dexter McCormick NPG.68.13 return