Art in the Present

In part one of Elizabeth Bowen’s The House of Paris, Henrietta and Leopold—ages 11 and 9, respectively—first encounter one another as their paths cross through Madame Fisher’s home in Paris, France. As Leopold waits to reunite with his estranged mother, Henrietta is making her way to her grandmother’s, and upon “waking, [and opening] her eyes” after having arrived to Paris that day—during which she learned about Leopold’s familial circumstances from Miss Fisher—Henrietta first meets Leopold (14-15). This first brush between the two has resonated with me because both children compare their counterparts to works of art, and I am an avid lover and studier of art history. Given the time period in which the novel was written and the (present) setting in which it occurs, the references to Western art are understandable; however, I believe that they also help to more fully flesh out the characters’ physical appearances as well as their temperaments. Henrietta regards Leopold as “dark-eyed” and either “French or Jewish,” with “the stately waxen impersonal air of a royal child in a picture centuries old,” and “[wearing] a . . . dark blue sailor blouse, blue knickerbockers and rather ugly black socks” (15). This description urgently conjures up an allusion to Thomas Gainsborough’s painting The Blue Boy from the Rococo period of art (as pictured below).

The Blue Boy, Thomas Gainsborough, 1779

History states that while the subject of the painting does appear to be royalty, he is not, but rather the son of a hardware merchant. This situation can be compared to how Leopold presents himself. Gainsborough was an artist from England, and so the idea that Leopold would be moving to England with his mother fits well in the context of the painting. The Blue Boy neither gained fame for its literary or historical allusions, or lack thereof, nor for its portrayal of a celebrity; rather, it is Gainsborough’s clear mastery of the medium which makes Blue Boy so distinguishable. Similarly, it is not necessarily only Leopold’s history which draws Henrietta in; instead, it is Leopold’s personality itself which does.

In the same vein, Leopold initially regards Henrietta as reminding him “of a little girl he had once seen in a lithograph, bowling a hoop in the park with her hair tied on the top of her head in an old-fashioned way” (16). The idea that Henrietta’s hairstyle appeared to Leopold as outdated suggests that Henrietta’s upbringing was surrounded by these old-fashioned ideas, or that she simply styled her hair in this fashion in order to appeal to her grandmother, Mrs. Arbuthnot’s, standards. While this description is not as specific as Henrietta’s about Leopold, I connected the characterization to French artist E. Doistau’s engraving Le Bon Genre, n°115: Promenade Sous Le Berceau (pictured below).

Le Bon Genre, n°115: Promenade Sous Le Berceau, E. Doistau, 1827

Although Henrietta is English, not French, the link still reigns true as Henrietta is, in fact, in France throughout the entire novel. In the lithograph, two young girls are depicted jumping rope, connecting to Leopold’s description of Henrietta as “levitated, rigid on air,” as one is essentially suspended in the air when captured as they are jumping rope (16). Henrietta “at once took on a touch of clear-sighted, over-riding good sense, like Alice’s throughout Wonderland,” which parallels the joy painted onto the girls’ faces in Doistau’s engraving.