John Singer Sargent's celebrated portrait of M. Carey Thomas, Bryn Mawr College's second president, is housed in the Rare Book Room. Curator Carrie Robbins seeks to place the painting in dialogue with current exhibitions. 

 

While this portrait is visually similar to contemporary portraits of male college presidents, it is transgressive for its particular subject. Thomas’s face and hands carry the compositional weight, emerging luminously from the dense black and blue passage of her robes. Yet, these robes were likely the most powerful signifier for contemporary American viewers, asserting this woman’s membership in the country’s then-almost-exclusively male club of academic elites. Whereas the painter’s other portraits of women are often set in domestic spaces and softened by swathes of shimmering fabric, flowers, mild colors, averted gazes, and vulnerable postures, Sargent rejected these symbols of femininity and replaced them with the masculine prestige of Thomas’s academic regalia.

Consider the choices made here in comparison to this roughly contemporary photograph by the Goldensky Studio, also held in the College’s collections. Its use of flowers, placed under the sitter’s breast and in her hair, as props to symbolize her femininity, especially when combined with her pastoral costume, might have celebrated a “return to nature.” Such values, which the photographer shared with the Arts and Crafts movement more broadly, drew inspiration from nature and pre-industrial society. In contrast, Thomas’s portrait reveals her faith in cultural progress and even human capacity to “improve” upon nature. Her robes, while dyed and sewn fabric of cotton, wool, or silk, are decidedly not depicted for their material connection to nature, but for their transformation into a symbol of her cultural achievement.