After visiting the Library of Congress (see previous post), our next destination in Washington, D.C., was the National Portrait Gallery. It is our niece’s favorite cultural destination in the city, and she was excited to share it with us, particularly her favorite section, Presidential Portraits.
This visit was in March. Just the month before, I read “The Bohemian Girl” for the Willa Cather Short Story Project. Sigismund de Ivanowski (1874-1944) illustrated that story for its publication in McClure’s Magazine in 1912.
A couple of years before, he had painted a portrait of Theodore Roosevelt, which I included in the reading reminder post for that story. Besides the illustrator connection, the presidential portrait had nothing to do (or so I thought) with the short story, but it intrigued me.
It was a wonderful surprise to turn the corner at the National Portrait Gallery and come face-to-face with it!
Above: My selfie with Ivanowski’s Theodore Roosevelt. Below: The portrait’s placard.
Similar Composition
Looking back at Ivanowski’s illustrations for Cather’s story, I am struck by a similarity I did not initially notice.
The left or black and white image is Ivanowski’s illustration from “The Bohemian Girl.” It didn’t strike me as creepy when I first saw it, but after reflecting on the portrait of Roosevelt, the bush does look a bit ominous.
In the scene above, Nils and Clara sit at a table in her father Joe’s beer garden. “Joe kept beer tables and wooden benches among the gooseberry bushes under his little cherry tree.” It’s almost like the local foliage is pressing down on the Nils, which is thematically in line with the story. It also seems like it has eyes and is watching the couple. Clara turns away from both Nils and the bush.
In Cather’s fiction, things don’t often go well for characters under cherry trees. When they were younger, Clara used to hang out in the beer garden and talk to the boys, but now that she’s married, her husband Olaf does not like her to do that. She only goes on Sundays when she can be alone with her father. Those little white dots in the bush could be cherries or gooseberries; perhaps they also symbolize the watchful eyes of the community, similar to the red eyes in the presidential portrait.
To learn more about this portrait, check out Mindy Farmer, “Sigismund Ivanowski: Illustrating Teddy Roosevelt,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 10, no. 1 (Spring 2024), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.18941.
To learn more about Ivanowski, check out Sigismund de Ivanowski – Illustration History, https://www.illustrationhistory.org/artists/sigismund-de-ivanowski.
To see Ivanowski’s illustrations and read “The Bohemian Girl,” visit the Willa Cather Archive, https://cather.unl.edu/writings/shortfiction/ss004
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I love how you studied the two pieces and arrived at an even deeper appreciation for Cather’s short story! Very cool.
Thanks, Robin! I had an art history class in college where we had to compare two pieces of art — this post took me back to that experience. Granted, this post just skims the surface. But I was surprised how his illustration includes much more of the story’s themes than I originally thought.