People in portraits know they’re being observed and present themselves to the artist as they would like to be portrayed. While the artist’s decision to actually paint them as they would like stands apart from the establishment of the work as a portrait, artists with artistic merit tend to provide their own interpretations of their subjects. However, the artists who created many of the Yale Dining Hall portraits painted their subjects exactly how they wanted to look and that’s exactly what makes the works so tasteless. The artists painted like boring photographers yet did so with deliberately old-fashioned, pretentious verve.

Take the oil on canvas portrait of Calhoun College’s founding father, Master Arnold Whitridge. His fingers hold his place inside a book as if he couldn’t bear to set it down for the portrait. His gentle eyes and slightly raised brows beg the question, “Do you have something insightful to add?” His perfectly-trimmed half-oval, snooty mustache looks more like a thin piece of greyish paper stuck to his upper lip with double-sided adhesive tape than a realistic stache.

Dressed in a suit, tie, and royal-blue cape, the man evokes the peak of the elitism he sought to represent. Cramming as many generic symbols of intellectual and economic power into the work as possible appears to be the artist’s goal. While he does so flawlessly, the work remains devoid of sensibility and artistic taste.

Despite lacking artistic quality, the work should not be removed from the Hopper Dining Hall. Moving it to some distant corner instead of its current prime position at the entrance wouldn’t be the worst decision, but forgetting that the work represents a part of our university that still influences administrative decisions today would be a mistake. We must remember our overwhelmingly white, bourgeois roots, so we don’t repeat past wrongs and constantly move towards a more inclusive campus culture.