# The Arts/Volume 1/Issue 1/Glackens' Walter Hampden

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GLACKENS' WALTER HAMPDEN
By Mary Fanton Roberts
PAINTING a portrait of a man in character is, from a purely physical point of view, a difficult achievement; for the artist must realize on his canvas two personalities, the actor and the character the actor portrays. As for instance, in Glackens' portrait of Hampden as Hamlet, he must see Walter Hampden himself definitely—his qualities of dominating spirituality and his fine understanding of the complexity of life, its poetry, its sordidness; a certain remoteness, too, from actual existence, the quality that made him play The Servant in Rann Kennedy's "Servant in the House" with an art so noble and yet so subtle that you slipped into the character with him, and saw the actual world as unreal. But the artist must realize, too, the character which the actor is portraying. Glackens must realize Hamlet fully, that beautiful Prince with the delicate machinery of his brain disarranged by the horror of his mother's treachery—a young poet in love, suddenly smitten to the very soul by his mother; then shrinking from all love, all womankind, made distraught by the cruelty of the Queen.
In the Glackens portrait of Hamlet, so imaginatively is the work handled that this miracle of painting the two personalities in one figure is achieved. First, Hampden, the man, the mystic, a rarely sensitive soul, with fine physical beauty, is depicted, and through this personality shines Hamlet, that splendid youth torn with grief, bewildered with the torment by which Fate had so suddenly eliminated all joy. In fact, Glackens has done a most extraordinary thing, he has painted Walter Hampden's conception of Hamlet.
To do this, he has painted with poetic delicacy, his very technique so fluid that you feel the merging of one personality into another. And you particularly feel the struggle in Hamlet's mind, that sways him back and forth from belief to doubt, from love to hatred. Glackens' figure to me seemed almost detached from the canvas, moving through space, producing a disembodied sensation that sometimes emanates from the human being who is suffering spiritually almost beyond the power of endurance.
I know of no other portrait more completely setting forth the very essence of a human soul, not even Whistler's "Sarasate"—which has in its painting the very emotion which was awakened in one's soul listening to Sarasate play. But Whistler had an easier problem. He was painting one personality, not two. Yet he painted with an amazingly fluent technique, giving that sense of unreality which rare music itself creates, or, in fact, any supreme art achievement.
I have seen Glackens' painting of Hamlet many times, and I have seen Walter Hampden play Hamlet many times, and to me they seem an identical expression. In no other painting of any man's playing of Hamlet have I seen so full a realization of Shakespeare's intention. This Glackens portrait has physical beauty, spiritual bewilderment, a quality almost unearthly, and these characteristics are all in Shakespeare's Prince.
The portrait is particularly well hung in the Gimpil & Wildenstein Galleries. It stands alone in a panel space, with fine clear space overhead. And as you enter the room the first impression of it is that a figure is moving toward you, a little indeterminate, with a consciousness only of thought, not of environment; a figure wholly self-absorbed, dreaming, troubled, but alive; indeed, with a fine gesture of beautiful life. The coloring is close to Walter Hampden's costume, which is the simplest, most regal, I have ever seen worn by any Hamlet. The background has a certain delicate beauty which holds the figure lightly, as though it might escape with the escape of Hamlet's soul into other realms.
WALTER HAMPDEN AS HAMLET BY WILLIAM J. GLACKENS