George Lincoln Hendrickson

I’ve never liked this guy, though of course I know nothing about him. But portraits are more than just a drawing or a painting of someone. They can also be “a representation or impression of someone or something.” So when I look at Hendrickson and his cold, joyless stare, his skin more oily under those garish lights, and his leather-bound library collection and map of Italy behind him, I don’t see a man so much as a figure meant to be imposing. I think of the artist, in this case former Yale School of Art professor Deane Keller, making a conscious decision to depict GLH this way. GLH is a stoic steward of the classics–in his time the Lampson Professor of Latin and Greek Literature and Chairman of the Department of the Classics–whose unwelcome visage befits the monotonous undertaking of Ovid, Homer, and Cicero translations. He’s no nonsense like the rigid, dense, and guarded realm of academia he presided in. That brown jacket and gray suit combination makes GLH seem like a relic, wrapped up in harsher, darker, more inequitable times.

Born on May 15, 1865, GLH wore many hats, as a classicist, philologist, and an educator. It’s clear from the piece he’s a distinguished man; you’d nod your head without surprise if you learned he studied at Bonn and Berlin. His teaching career at Yale spanned more than 55 years, until his death at 98 in 1963. This stuffy and imperial rendering of the man leads us to subconsciously canonize him; his sheer impersonality elevating him above us as one of the greats who will always have their perch no matter how many years by and how much the campus roils with change. It might be unfair to shove him in the stereotypical “dead white man” box. But Deane Keller doesn’t leave us much choice, much room to interpret. The neat, glossy paints, the realistic proportions, the lack of flair or whimsy, the effortlessly penetrating gaze, everything about this painting is meant to be fixed and immaculate. In a lot of ways, it evokes a photograph, not meant to engage with history like a more fluid piece of art but simply capture it and reaffirm it. In the absence of our own ability to choose, I read Keller’s potential choices. There’s just not much about this Hendrickson guy I can find to like.