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Temperamental!: Prints in the Collection of Bryn Mawr College

John Singer Sargent (American, 1856-1925), Miss M. Carey Thomas (July, 1899). Oil on canvas; Gift of the Portrait Committee of Alumnae and Students, Bryn Mawr College; X.205.

Whereas John Singer Sargent’s other portraits of women are set in domestic spaces and softened by swathes of shimmering fabric, mild colors, and reserved gazes, M. Carey Thomas dominates this painting. Her face and hands are the picture’s clearest elements, emerging luminously from the dense black and blue passage of her academic robes. The dark composition and Thomas’s sober expression likely informed Mamie Gwinn’s assessment of the painting as “very melancholy.” Yet rather than expressing the introversion of the melancholic temperament, her depiction is quite confrontational. Sargent’s contrast between the dark background and Thomas’s white flesh foregrounds her physical presence, while her direct gaze outward is severe and authoritative. Tensely posed, Thomas’s hands twist in her lap or commandingly clutch the throne-like chair in which she sits. The painting’s monumental size reinforces the impression of domination. Certainly, its subject was well-known for her choleric and domineering nature, constantly clashing with faculty, friends, and fellow administrators during her career at the College. As Bryn Mawr’s second president, Thomas strove for a women’s education that would rival in quality the best male universities, and she enacted her vision in uncompromising terms—that is, for white, economically-privileged women. Thomas’s deeply racist and anti-Semitic beliefs informed her actions at the College. These convictions constituted her vision of Bryn Mawr and remain formative of the College’s identity.

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1. Hendrick Goltzius (Netherlands, 1558-1617), The Adoration of Shepherds (c. 1599). Engraving and drypoint, state ii/iv, Gift of Richard C. Bull, 2012.22.1. Goltzius, known for his highly finished Mannerist prints, is unlikely to have left this engraving incomplete intentionally. Yet the print is enhanced by what is left to the imagination. Joseph, Mary, and two shepherds enclose the luminous space where the cradled baby Jesus would have emerged. The wonder in their expressions perhaps mirrors the viewer's own joyful experience of looking at the print. The candle in Joseph’s outstretched hand seems to beckon the viewer forward, inviting us not only to bear witness to the event, but to generate in our mind the missing child—the true subject of the print.
2. Charles Amand-Durand (French, 1831-1905), after Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (Dutch, 1606-1669); Jan Cornelis Sylvius (1882, after 1646 print). Heliogravure from newly engraved copperplate, X.332 This posthumous portrait of the Dutch preacher Jan Cornelius Sylvius (1564-1638) employs a trompe l’oeil (or trick the eye) effect in the subject's right hand, which appears to penetrate the picture plane. His oratory gesture beckons to the viewer—perhaps with a choleric exhortation or sanguine moral guidance. The Latin inscription encircling and below the subject describes his exemplary Christian life. This eulogy is not merely a moralizing device, but perhaps another gesture inviting the viewer’s emulation of the deceased figure.
3. John Singer Sargent (American, 1856-1925), Miss M. Carey Thomas (July, 1899). Oil on canvas; Gift of the Portrait Committee of Alumnae and Students, Bryn Mawr College; X.205. Whereas John Singer Sargent’s other portraits of women are set in domestic spaces and softened by swathes of shimmering fabric, mild colors, and reserved gazes, M. Carey Thomas dominates this painting. Her face and hands are the picture’s clearest elements, emerging luminously from the dense black and blue passage of her academic robes. The dark composition and Thomas’s sober expression likely informed Mamie Gwinn’s assessment of the painting as “very melancholy.” Yet rather than expressing the introversion of the melancholic temperament, her depiction is quite confrontational. Sargent’s contrast between the dark background and Thomas’s white flesh foregrounds her physical presence, while her direct gaze outward is severe and authoritative. Tensely posed, Thomas’s hands twist in her lap or commandingly clutch the throne-like chair in which she sits. The painting’s monumental size reinforces the impression of domination. Certainly, its subject was well-known for her choleric and domineering nature, constantly clashing with faculty, friends, and fellow administrators during her career at the College. As Bryn Mawr’s second president, Thomas strove for a women’s education that would rival in quality the best male universities, and she enacted her vision in uncompromising terms—that is, for white, economically-privileged women. Thomas’s deeply racist and anti-Semitic beliefs informed her actions at the College. These convictions constituted her vision of Bryn Mawr and remain formative of the College’s identity.

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Introduction: The Four Temperaments
The Four Temperaments
Heemskerck’s series The Four Temperaments helped establish a standard visual language for the temperaments, an iconography shared in part with their representation in the emblem books displayed nearby. Heemskerck gathered iconographic elements from a range of sources and consolidated these into a concise and comprehensive template.
The upper register of each print labels the temperament and aligns it with a specific planet, Roman God, and zodiac sign. The lower register of the print combines seemingly unrelated scenes to depict moods and actions associated with the temperament. Notice the references to suicide and geometry in Melancholici, water and fishermen in Phlegmatici, lovers and festivity in Sanguinei, and combat and smoke in Cholerici.

The gallery’s four colors reinforce the diagrammatic quality of Heemskerck’s own prints. Each color carries unique associations, tracing the emergence of the temperaments from the four bodily humors: red blood (sanguine), black bile (melancholy), yellow bile (choleric), and white phlegm (phlegmatic).
Imagine Temperaments
In the early modern period, the beginnings of empirical science competed with Platonic distrust of the senses. Could the senses be trusted? Where do the things seen in the mind’s eye come from? Thomas Hobbes considered imagination (phantasia) to be a particularly dangerous faculty of the mind for its ability to cloud reason and deceive the sense of sight (Leviathan, 1651). He feared an imagination ungoverned by reason, which plunged the mind into darkness and left it vulnerable to witchcraft and the Devil. As both Robert Burton (The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621) and Timothy Bright (Treatise of Melancholy, 1586) earlier cautioned, the melancholic temperament was especially vulnerable to the “monstrous fictions” of imagination.

Even earlier, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Cennino Cennini (c.1360–before 1427) recognized the generative potential of the imagination’s chimerical images. “Painting...,” Cennini wrote, "calls for imagination ... in order to discover things not seen, hiding themselves under the shadow of natural objects, and to fix them with the hand, presenting to plain sight what does not really exist.” The works in this section represent the outcomes of artistic imagination, yet they require the viewer to complete their interpretation. These prints beckon the mind to “discover things not seen”: to experience beauty, sadness, and rage; to interpret meaning; to finish an image for the artist, and even to envision our own.