Art Matters: ‘Self-portrait’ by William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)
"Self-portrait" 1914
Oil painting
Given by Florence Williams, from her personal collection, in 1965

Location: Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center, 3420 Walnut St., Sixth Floor, Charles K. MacDonald Reading Room

It's a sketched-out painting of a schoolboy: a reedy neck rising out of an unbuttoned collar, its column the same width as the subject's jawline, easing into an oval face with a small, determined mouth and prominent brows beneath a close-cropped mop of hair. This is a self-portrait of William Carlos Williams, best known for his poems-cold plums, red wheelbarrow-that came to define the modernist era.

The painting was done in 1914, when Williams would have been a 31-year-old doctor practicing in Rutherford, New Jersey, and married to his wife, Florence "Flossie" Williams, who would have been either pregnant or tending their newborn son and eldest child, William E. Williams, who later also became a doctor.

A firstborn child is a time for both celebration and reflection, and it may have been this reason that Williams harkened back to his own childhood, to an earlier version of himself. The portrait is of a much younger man, scarcely into adulthood, with the shading of stubble and a prominent Adam's apple, which, judging by the application of paint, Williams went over again and again.

While Williams is known for his poetry, he was deeply interested in art and the art world, possibly influenced by his mother, who trained as a painter in Paris. Around the time of this painting, Williams befriended a group of New York artist and writers, including Marsden Hartley, Charles Sheeler, and Charles Demuth, who later painted "I saw the figure 5 in gold" as a tribute to Williams' poem "The Great Figure," which mentions the number five plastered on a firetruck as it moves through "the dark city."

For his self-portrait, Williams chose to paint himself with reddish accents-nose, ears-on a base of yellow-green. While Williams, who died in 1963, lived before color photography was as common as it is now, the choice to paint himself with olive skin was perhaps a nod to his background. Williams was raised in the Dominican Republic; his mother, of French heritage, was from Puerto Rico. Spanish was Williams' first language, and he felt strongly influenced by the language and by Caribbean culture, although he was a passionate American, once writingto an editor, "Of mixed ancestry I felt from earliest childhood that America was the only home I could ever possibly call my own. I felt that it was expressedly founded for me, personally, and that it must be my first business in life to possess it."

The work has been at the University of Pennsylvania since 1965, when it was given by Florence (Flossie) Williams after her husband's death, along with a collection of papers. One is a letter from Williams written to his brother on stationary from his dorm, Room 318 in Leidy. "Prepare yourself for a long spiel on baseball," Williams writes home, "for that's all you will get out of this letter."

Williams graduated from the medical schoolin 1906, but he also used his time at Penn to explore the humanities, befriending the poets Ezra Poundand H.D., Hilda Doolittle, who were also Penn students at the time.

"His world, and hopefully ours, was one where being a person of science did not prevent you from being a person of letters," says John Pollack, curator of research services at the Kislak Center.