Wishing for the gift of conversation

My friend wants to stop exchanging gifts.
It is too late this year, of course. By the time she proposes this moratorium, my meager package – a brown box stuffed with books, an ornament, misshapen Scottish shortbread – has already arrived at her door. I love to imagine her receiving the box, with its silly stickers and festive mailing label. I like the thought of her deliberately placing the wrapped gifts under her tree and waiting, as I know she will, until Christmas morning when she will unwrap them. I like to imagine her reaction – the sigh of recognition that comes when a friend has nourished the morsel of you that the two of you share.
But my friend frets over the time that I spend ferreting out this treasure and fusses, too, though she will not say it, over the money I spend. She cannot know the thrill it is for me to prepare my little package in New England and send it southward, knowing it will meet a receptive audience. She cannot know that she is robbing me of that silly pleasure. We have come to an age, she says, where we don’t need things to attest to our devotion, and maybe she is right.
All of this she tells me in a three-page letter that arrives a week before Christmas. The letter is on good, heavy paper and printed in a jolly red ink. The letter is newsy and discursive, toggling from the health scares of mutual friends, to the meagerness of our last shared salad, to a blunt criticism of a recently finished book that disappointed.
I read the letter at the end of the day, when I have purged my skin of the day’s pollutants and plunged into a pair of fleece sweatpants and flannel top. I am very still when I read the letter, and alone, the only sound the sibilant spray of the shower in which my son sings softly to himself. It is one of those letters that can make you feel that you have dined with a person, looked into their familiar gaze and traced the pattern of their drifting thoughts. With a letter, of course, you have a souvenir. You needn’t rely on memory alone.
A few days before my friend’s request, I sat across from a friend I hadn’t seen in two years in a coffee shop whose cheerful décor bled away as we spoke. His life has been hard and messy, and though there was nothing I could do to tidy the fraying of it, and though I brooded over it for days after, I felt strangely enriched. I realized how few genuinely attentive conversations I had had in the past year. I realized that it was not so much the talking I missed, as the listening.
The day after my friend left for home, I found myself ambling aimlessly in the local mall, needing nothing but looking for something. My gifts had been bought, wrapped and mailed. I had name tags filled out and receipts annotated, but still I dawdled, peering listlessly through the thick glass at the frantic shoppers, dodging parents clinging to the limbs of howling toddlers, picking up baubles and frippery and wondering what an overly disciplined shopper like me was doing in a mall four days before Christmas.
What I was looking for, of course, was a package that would give me the feeling I had when I left my friend at the coffee shop or when I sat transfixed by my friend’s letter. I was looking to purchase the experience of conversation, of the charged energy generated by two people following one another’s lovingly appreciated digressions. It’s impossible to buy that, of course, which hasn’t stopped us from trying.
The rampant debt with which so many of us are wrestling has been engendered in part by a gluttony for objects that substitute for the kind of experience I had with my friend. This year, as in many of the last, the most popular category of gifts was electronic gadgets, most of those relating to communication – Androids, Smart phones, tablets, net books. The irony is that all of these tools, meant to facilitate conversation, only obviate it. They make it easier for us to avoid one another.
I will miss the time I spent prowling about the bookstores and burning myself on oven racks – all part of the care I took to send my friend a gift I delighted myself in imagining that she would enjoy. But the gift of presence, the reward of intimate attention, is one that I long for most. All of the rest, I realize, was only a substitute for that.

Say it again, 'It's about power'

In French, it's called the droit du seigneur.

The phrase was coined in the Middle Ages when French feudal lords reserved the right to have sex with the brides of their subjects on her wedding night.
What luck for the ladies. One day, you're a West African immigrant scouring the tubs of the rich and famous, and than, bam, you're "Maid in Manhattan." Except in this case, the Lord of the Manor is a fat, wrinkly old pervert charging out of the toilet in his altogether, looking about as much like Charles Boyer as Pepe LePew.
When Dominique Strauss-Kahn burst out of his bathroom this week and, according to court complaints, forced himself on a hotel maid, he was not just one more womanizing politician caught with his pants down. He was one more powerful man victimizing a domestic, one more influential force betting on the silence of an underling, one more feudal lord who figured the housekeeper was his for the having.
He was, in that respect, not that different from former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
After announcing that he and the mother of his four children had separated after 25 years of marriage, the Kindergarten Cop dropped the bombshell that he had fathered a child with a member of their household staff.
Conan let out his inner barbarian 10 years ago, and if he didn't exactly grab her by the hair, he doesn't appear to have romanced her with roses, either. Unless you are Jane Eyre, when the boss comes on to you, you are not in a position to object. This is a relationship of power. The Governator had it. His servant did not.
Word is that when Schwarzenegger told his wife, the arresting Maria Shriver, about the love child, she said "Hasta la vista," walking out where too many other women have stayed. When their marriage ended, the wonder was not that it had ended so soon, but that it had lasted so long. So kudos to Shriver for leaving with her self respect intact. The only thing we need less than a priapic politician is another doormat wife.
Like Strauss-Kahn, Schwarzenegger had been dogged by rumors of adultery. In what now seems a foolish errand, reporters who covered Schwarzenegger's gubernatorial campaign chased down rumors that he had groped and molested women throughout his movie career. Had they followed the Diaper Genie, we might have been spared the specter of the Last Action Hero running the most populous state of the union.
The French press has frequently chastised its cross-continental brethren as overly besotted with the extramarital affairs of politicians. For the French, it's money, not sex, that derails public figures. The French were blase about former president Francois Mitterand's extramarital pursuits, until Mitterand put the Other Woman on the public payroll. Liberation journalist Jean Quatremer wrote that he had incurred the wrath about DSK's notoriously predatory relationship with women. "The only real problem with Strauss-Kahn is his relationship to women," he wrote, after DSK's appointment to the International Monetary Fund in 2007. "Too forceful, he often borders on harassment. It's a flaw known about in the media, but nobody is talking about it openly."
It would be so puritanical.
Meanwhile, Wednesday, TMZ announced that it had photos of Schwarzenegger's 'love child,' as well as his mother, whom news organizations have identified as Mildred Patricia 'Patty' Baena, a $1,200 a week housekeeper who had worked for the family for 20 years.
Photos of the woman have got Americans scratching their heads. You're married to a stunner who could dice garlic with her cheekbones and you're hustling the hired help? Why would you?
Why would Thomas Jefferson chase Sally Hemmings? Why did Ethan Hawke marry his nanny when he had Uma Thurman to come home to? Why did Jude Law pursue his nanny when he was engaged to Sienna Miller? Bill Clinton put it best, "because I could."
It's about power. It's about access.
Wednesday, Shwarzenegger's 17-year-old son Patrick changed his Twitter account last name to "Shriver." Perhaps what it takes is having your children look at you with incredulity and revulsion that makes you realize that a woman is not a vial of hotel shampoo. She does not come with the room.

c. Republican-American, 2011

Hell hath no fury like Hell denied

After Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces on May 1, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee had a message for his corpse: "Welcome to hell, bin Laden."
Huckabee is a fundamentalist Christian. He was the youngest president ever of the Arkansas Southern Baptist State Convention. So his views on Hell, as a place of eternal torment, with gnashing of teeth and the burning of unquenchable fire, fit well within his tradition, which stresses a literal interpretation of scripture.
Of course, as a fundamentalist, Huckabee would also have to believe that, as a Muslim, there was no way in Hell Osama was going anywhere but Hell [Dash] the repository for all who do not accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. Under this theology, Osama would have plenty of company, including Buddha, (eventually) the Dalai Lama and Gandhi.
And that's where fundamentalist preacher Rob Bell draws the line.
Bell, the leader of the Mars Hill Bible Church, which typically draws 8,000 to 11,000 parishioners every Sunday, dropped a bombshell into a religious community that believes in the inerrancy of scripture. In "Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived," he claims that the belief in hell as "conscious, eternal conflict," is a "misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus' message of love, peace, forgiveness and joy that our world desperately needs to hear."
And with those words, Bell ignited his own inferno in the evangelical community. Christian blogs were afire with criticism of Bell's assertion. Blogger Karen de Young spoke for many, writing: "We need the doctrine of eternal punishment. Time and time again in the New Testament we find that understanding divine justice is essential to our sanctification. Believing in God's judgment actually helps us look more like Jesus. In short, we need the doctrine of the wrath of God."
Bell, fundamentalists charge, has left the fold and become a Universalist, an assertion Bell denies.
"Love Wins" reads like a breezy, conversational sermon that focuses not on hell and damnation, but on an eternal life, which, Bell writes, "is less about a kind of time that starts when we die, and more about a quality and vitality of live lived now in connection to God."
That's a vision that sits well with many denominations, including Episcopalians and Catholics. "Our theology doesn't posit the devil-with-the-pitchfork mentality as much as it does a state of a loss of grace," said the Mark Suslenko of St. Anthony's in Prospect. "When it comes to our eternal life, being thrust into one element or another is not what God does. It's what we choose," he said.
But Hell offers an effective way to "control people through fear," said Peter S. Hawkins, professor of religion and literature at Yale Divinity School, which made it effective. Hawkins maintains that scriptural references to Hell are few. "It was not Jesus' method or message. This notion of an eternal punishment of torture is obscene to me."
But Hell has had a hold on the human psyche for centuries, if for symmetry alone. If the good guys get heaven, the bad guys must get its antithesis. The Christian tradition is rich with searing imagery of Hell's grisly appointments. It got help from artists and writers, particularly Dante, whose elaborate treatment of the Inferno would scare the evil out of anyone.
But over the years, writers and the general public has grown dubious of Hell as an exit ramp on the after-death highway. Only 59 percent of Americans believe in hell, compared with 74 percent who believe in heaven, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
"What is hell?" T.S. Eliot asked. "Hell is oneself." The more misanthropic Jean Paul Sartre had a different idea. "Hell is other people," he wrote.
For Yale's Hawkins, John Paul II's depiction of Hell, articulated in front of a general audience at the Vatican in 1999, is the keenest, and most sensitive he has heard. "Rather than a physical place, hell is the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy," John Paul said. Hell, he added, is "a condition resulting from attitudes and actions which people adopt in this life."
But that view is at extreme variance, not just for fundamentalists, but for humans frustrated with the inaptness of justice as it is meted out here on earth. Kill the Cheshire killers or consign them to life in prison. Neither seems to compensate for the horror they wrought. Hell sates a lust for vengeance unquenched here on earth.
But does that mean that Hell is the fate of unbelievers, where they are, as Jonathan Edwards preached, to be suspended "over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire? Is it, as Edwards described, a place where God "exercise(s) no love and extends no mercy to any one object there, but pours out upon them horrors without mixture?"
In "Love Wins," Bell asks: Is that the all-merciful, all-compassionate Jesus who died to forgive our sins?
Bell's book may be a watershed for a religious community living too long under the spell of Hell. As he writes "There are individual hells, and communal, society wide hells, and Jesus teaches us to take both seriously."
Wherever Hell is [Dash] in the center of the earth, as Dante posited [Dash] or in the center of men's souls, one thing is certain: No mortal, and certainly no politician, can say for sure who has a first-class ticket. That's a decision that is, mercifully, left out of our hands.

ode to the typewriter

As far as I have been able to sniff out, there are only two typewriters remaining in my newsroom. One is on the fritz and the other is next. I may be one of the few employees to despair over these unlamented mechanical corpses, if only because I still find them functional, and, of course, am a romantic for their staccato vibe. I am told there are more of these artifacts on the "third floor," an eerie, unused repository of pica rulers, compositors' tools, hot type, lead letter fittings and, quite possibly, Grace Poole. I'm really not keen on prowling through the third floor, not only because the place gives me the serious creeps, but because I'm convinced my search would be futile. The typewriter is dead. Or perhaps.... not yet. Like most obsolete objects, the typewriter has been seized from the cliff of extinction by a bunch of hipsters who think the retro machine is cool. The New York Times reported on a subculture of "type-ins," where typewriter devotees gather "in bars and bookstores to flaunt a sort of post-digital style and gravitas<$>, tapping out letters to send via snail mail and competing to see who can bang away the fastest." One disciple of these "Unplug and reconnect" love-ins described the soirees as "a jam session for people who like typewriters." And who could not love a typewriter? I didn't, at least not at first, when I sat in front of a gun-metal Royal typewriter in the ninth grade, attending to Mrs. Henninger's thrumming ruler tapping out letters while she barked, "A,S,D, F, semi." I was not a very good typist, or a very fast one. The metal arms of my letters seemed drawn to one another, like a contortionist's limbs, and I spent most of my time wrenching the twisted arms from the guts of the typewriter, my fingertips caking with sooty ink and Mrs. Henninger casting her censorious glare my way. I knew, of course, that success in typing was critical to my career as a journalist and so labored maladroitly away at the task, haplessly painting my compositions with Wite-Out or [JUMP]slipping correction tape into the machine's sights. I made my first foray into journalism covering the high school girls' field hockey team, and my first belabored report was so caulked with correction fluid that my mother took one look at it, said, "Gimme that," and sat magnificently erect in front of the Smith Corona and began her magic. My mother was a talented woman. She could sing beautifully in front of thousands of people and she could cook up a swell cauldron of meatballs and stuffed shells in less time than it took most people to pour a bowl of cereal. In a pinch, she could take up a quick hem and knew how to scrub the burned gunk off the percolator to make it sparkle. But I don't think I ever admired my mother as much as when she sat down with my pathetic drivel on high school field hockey and turned it into a percussive symphony. Her back erect, her elbows at 90 degrees, a half a stick of Wrigley's Doublemint gum snapping in her teeth, my mother's fingers walloped those keys with a dexterity matched only by the aural majesty of the performance. The keys crackling, my mother's gum snapping, the bell ringing at the end of the margins, and my mother's meaty whack that sent the carriage back again [--] it was symphonic. With a rip, she tore the page out of the typewriter, handed it to me, and placed the typewriter cover back with a satisfying snap. I was dumbfounded. "Honey, when I was growing up, you knew how to type or you were dead," she said. "The girls who typed the most words per minute [--] no mistakes, you didn't get mistakes [--] got the best jobs." "How were you?" I asked, still stupefied. "Me?" my mother said, plucking the gum out of her mouth and stuffing it into a metallic wrapper. "I was the best." I would think of my mother in the lonely night hours in my college newsroom, a sinister-looking well of rows and rows of barely operational manual typewriters lorded over by an AP wire machine that pealed out news alerts with the trill of an ice cream truck. There was something delicious about all those typewriters waiting to be manhandled in a syncopated roar to produce something coherent and credible. Perhaps that is why I still seek out the lone operational typewriter to mash a few words together. I like the thwack of the inked metal on the fibrous paper, the imperfection of the letters, the forceful blurring of the ink, the physical joy of hearing a letter hit its object. My letters are still smeared with correction fluid and sullied by xxxxx's. But I think I'm getting faster. I think I'm catching up to my mother.

Internet TV may give options to cable-averse

I finally ripped the cables out of my house.

They hung in menacing black tendrils all over my basement and I resented them from the minute we bought the house. The cords were a tantalizing reminder that, for a fee, I could bring cable programming into my house, a prospect I saw as tantamount to reversing the sewage lines.
I have resisted cable for 30 years, and clung to my pathetic rabbit ears through the disastrous conversion to digital TV. Digital TV turned my television screen into a patchwork of evaporating Chuck Close-like squares. While some channels [--] all of them in Spanish [--] now come in with a fidelity verging on the photo-realistic, most periodically dissolve like Scotty and Sulu dematerializing on the transporter.
Only about 11 percent of Americans cleave belligerently to their antennae, too cheap or uptight to spring for VH1. But there is a new temptation on the horizon, and it does not require cumbersome black cables slithering through your floorboards.
It's Internet TV, which may do to cable what cable did to broadcast, which was what broadcast did to movies, which was what movies did to vaudeville, and what pretty much everyone has done to newspapers. It will give them competition.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that CBS reached a multimillion dollar deal with video service Netflix to stream classic TV shows like "Cheers" from its library. The news came just days after Amazon.com offered its "Prime" customers movie and TV shows instantly available for viewing over the web.
In other words, never mind the cable and or that puny computer monitor, your entertainment console of the future will be the same one it has been for the last 70 years [--] the boob tube.
Increasingly, televisions are being manufactured to connect to the Internet, allowing viewers to stream video, as Republican-American reporter Sam Cooper reported last week. Twenty-one percent of all TVs shipped last year were Internet enabled, and most of them come with the ability to access a video streaming device, like Netflix or Amazon.com.
If you are tech-savvy, you can also access Internet TV through an electronic device like a game console or Blu-ray player. Through these portals of the imagination, you may access such riveting television as YouTube, Flickr, Facebook or Twitter. Both Google and Apple are also elbowing their way into the game, in many cases partnering with television manufacturers that offer subscription services, many of which, like Hulu, will be free [--] at least initially. So Apple TV, for instance, has a decoder box. If you subscribe to the service, you can download the shows and are charged in the same way as if you had downloaded a song from iTunes. You can access Netlix videos for as little as $8 a month.
That's a lot less than the average $70 fee Comcast's cable customers paid monthly for video services last year.
"Something like this was bound to happen," Carolin Lin, professor of the Department of Communication Sciences at the University of Connecticut, told me. "If cable TV continues to exist, it will have to change the way it exists."
But don't toll any bells, for the cable TV industry is far from doomed. It has billions of dollars invested beneath the asphalt of this country and will not go gently into the wired night.
But Internet TV disarms cable in this respect: Cable companies have obdurately refused to sell their services a la carte. That means that if you're a prude like me and only want CNN and the BBC, you have to navigate through a swamp of drivel to satisfy your particular taste. Internet TV offers an alternative: a small fee for limited viewing [--] particularly attractive to those like me who lack the time, inclination or budget to access an all-you-watch orgy of rubbish.
The trade-off is the same cross we have borne with the Internet all along [--]when the world is at your fingertips, plenty of sludge gets under your fingernails. But at a moment when the colossus of cable TV is gorging on America's checkbook, we can't afford not to get our hands dirty.

What Makes Fred Phelps Christian?

Last week, Paris prosecutors pressed charges against John Galliano after a video of the former Christian Dior designer spewing racial insults went viral.
"I love Hitler," Galliano told a woman at a Paris bar, "and people like you would be dead today. Your mothers, your forefathers, would be…gassed and… dead."
Dior swiftly fired its popular designer, Galliano went reliably into rehab and the French police went into overdrive, charging the devilish-looking dandy with making "public insults based on the origin, religious affiliation, race or ethnicity." Those convicted face up to six months in prison and $31,000 in fines.
Galliano’s implosion came just hours after the U.S. Supreme Court, in an 8-1 decision, ruled that even vile, insensitive speech spewed at military funerals is protected under the First Amendment. The case involved members of the tiny but toxic Westboro Baptist Church, notorious for barking antigay epithets at family members gathered at funeral sites. Venom, no matter how repulsive or merciless, is protected under our First Amendment.
Conceding that the church’s picketing of military funerals fallen soldiers' funerals "is certainly hurtful and its contribution to public discourse may be negligible," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, "as a nation we have chosen … to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate."
We will not, in other words, go the way of France and more Draconian countries, which squelch speech from the heinous to the hopeful, even speech as repulsive and cruel as "God hates fags, "Thank God for Dead Soldiers," and "You're Going to Hell."
The Westboro Baptist Church has bleated such statements during families’ most sacred and vulnerable moments. This flock of profane parrots has got it into their bird brains that God is punishing the U.S. for its increasingly tolerant attitude toward gays. As its spokesman told The New York Times after the Supreme Court decision, "God is punishing this nation with a grievous, smiting blow, killing our children, sending them home dead, to help you connect the dots."
Connecting the dots is what Rep. Peter King (R-NY), insists he is trying to do with his investigation of the "self-radicalization going on within the Muslim community." King was responding to the discomfiting but undeniable fact that a bunch of homicidal fanatics have latched on to radical Islam and twisted it to support their embrace of slaughter.
The Westboro Baptist Church has not yet slaughtered anything but the souls of the grieving, but at some point, a decent Christian has got to ask: what serpent has slithered its way through scripture and surfaced as hatred?
For the first time this week, as a devout Christian, I began to get a sense of what it must be like for a devout Muslim to endure the transgressions of a fraction of its members. While most Christians easily dismiss Fred Phelps and his Westboro mob as a bunch of fringe lunatics, others consider these sanctimonious, scathing scolds as typical Christians.
The Westboro Baptist Church is not Baptist. It is not even Christian. Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, has called the Westboro church "blasphemous" and "verbal terrorism." That is because the Phelps and their like wound Christianity at its heart. This religion, with its insistence on plumbing beneath divine law to the love and mercy that is its source, has no room for hate. None. In 1999, Southern Baptists denounced the idea that "God hates any person," as it condemned "all violent acts upon homosexuals."
Does this country need to muzzle the hate-spewing, merciless frauds? It must not. It cannot. But free speech works both ways. Since 2005, a loose gang of motorcycle riders called the Patriot Guard Riders has shielded grieving family members from protesters. They are not Christian crusaders. But they can be. And they should be.
If hate is not a Christian value, it will take Christians to ensure it does not become one.
Contact: Tosh[AT]Rep-am.com

Let's hope he only painted them

Forget the glimpse of stocking, what really shocked Regency England in 1790 was teeth.
Lustrous, carnivorous and tantalizingly exposed between a pair of moist red lips, these particular teeth belonged to the actress Elizabeth Farren, whose portrait opens the Yale Center for British Art's luscious new exhibit, "Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance."
This is not the sexiest painting Lawrence (1769-1830) ever painted. There are plenty of contenders, including the hunky "John, Lord Mountstuart," just adjacent, who looks as if he has been poured into a pair of Spandex leggings and caressed by a salmon-lined cape. If Mountstuart exudes a moody bravura, balancing daringly on a cliff [--] as the cobalt sea churns beneath him [--] Farren is his coquettish match, embalmed in a fox-trimmed translucent white cloak, caught mid-step as she strides mischievously across a summer field. Showing even a hint of teeth in the 18th century was the province of the mad, the crass and the lustful [--] so Farren's flirty peak made her particularly inviting. Portraits like Farren's led the banker-poet Sam Rogers to quip that if he wanted his wife painted he would go to the capable Thomas Phillips, but "if I wanted my mistress painted I would go to Lawrence."
When Lawrence, the self-taught son of an innkeeper, burst onto the London scene at the end of the 18th century, these sorts of elegant but erotic stunners were what brought him immediate fame. By 20, he was painting Queen Charlotte with unusual candor. By 22, he was elected to the Royal Academy. By 23, he was appointed Painter-in-Ordinary to King George III. By his mid-40s, he was a baronet, roundly considered the heir apparent to the redoubtable Sir Joshua Reynolds.
Lawrence's brilliance stands in contrast to his mid-century branding as a "chocolate-box painter." His doughy, adorable children, all apple-cheeked and fleshy, romping with dogs, play-acting in the forest and lolling about in rich velvet suits, had enough sentimentality to choke a nursery school teacher. Though there is blame enough to go around for 19th-century British schmaltz, Thomas Lawrence could reasonably be charged with leading the charge of the lite brigade.
As the London Observer wrote, "Lawrence painted children the way Disney does deer."
So the curators of this splendid show [--] jointly organized with the National Portrait Gallery in London [--] are to be commended for hauling old Lawrence out of the candy box and out onto the walls again. This canny reassessment does not shy away from Lawrence's excesses, but it reminds viewers of the dash, dexterity and exciting innovations he brought to the canvas in the pre-Victorian era. He may not have had the expressive agency of J.M.W. Turner or the breathtaking atmospherics of John Constable, but Lawrence had something else: a boldness and candor brought to an age of tumult when society itself seemed on the brink of collapse.
We think today of regency England (roughly 1789 to Queen Victoria's ascension in 1837) as the time of Austen and Mozart and classical symmetry. But the fall of the Bastille in 1789, the execution of Louis XVI in 1793 and the onrush of Napoleon's armies had England and Europe terrified that their centuries-old system of power was on the verge of collapse.
Lawrence, a child prodigy who had been charging for his portraits since he was 11, strode into this turmoil with a poise and cockiness perfectly suited for an anxious age. His portraits don't just come alive, they invade your space. They dare you to meet them head on, with a cool, almost defiant confidence that is as unnerving as it is magnetic. His backgrounds are stormy, with deep and abrupt contrasts that lend his subjects an air of immediacy and potency.
Look at the arrogance of "Arthur Atherley," one of Lawrence's most celebrated portraits. The young man doffs his hat with his left hand while placing his right, gloved hand, defiantly on his right hip. He stares directly at the viewer with huge cobalt eyes, his cheeks flushed with red, his mouth truculent and cocky. This is a 20-year-old who seems to say, "You want a piece of me?" Lawrence paints him in his favorite colors [--] a rich crimson, deep blue and dazzling white.
The sense of the primal is repeatedly enhanced by Lawrence's affection for ruby, cobalt and white, often applied with thick daubs of paint that seem to have been hurled on the canvas. Few other painters outside of Sargent have used white with such audacity. It is on fetching display in "Catherine Rebecca Gray," a peculiar full-length portrait of a pale, elegant woman descending a marble staircase, a peacock preening behind her. Mirroring the bird's pose, she holds a pink rose between her finger and thumb, her sapphire eyes in blazing contrast to her diaphanous, alabaster frock.

This is a show-off picture, a bit like the kind the Dutch used to paint in the 16th century.
But a more virtuosic example of Lawrence's adroitness with white is in his portrait of Isabella Wolff. This sumptuous portrait of a woman, most likely his mistress, draws its composition from Michelangelo's image of "Night," at the Medici Chapel. In it, Wolff, her auburn tresses fitfully tucked into a gold silk cap, rests her elbow on a pillow, absorbed in the examination of an open book. The woman's alabaster skin, her long, strong neck, patrician nose and high, rosy cheekbones suggest access to the sitter's private thoughts.
That sort of unfettered access to female sensibilities, which Lawrence achieves with a flurry of flicks and daubs of paint, curator A. Cassandra Albinson argues, "suggest, through the visual language of paint, that [Lawrence] had unfettered access to his sitter and was working directly from the motif."
Women take on a sense of their own sexual agency in Lawrence's portraits, just as men take on their own political agency. Lawrence's penchant for investing his portraits with a sense of theatricality and energy, often purposely leaving backgrounds unfinished, create a flamboyant sense of potency that makes the sitters forceful enough to triumph over the fraught temper of the time.
With the defeat of Napoleon, Lawrence spent time in Europe, then in thrall to the radiant, highly finished paintings of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. Lawrence's dashing color contrasts, his sketchy, halting, epigrammatic brush strokes, and, above all, the psychic intensity with which he rendered his subjects, put off many of the stuffy Salon stalwarts but engaged romantics like Eugène Delacroix. While Lawrence, the French painter wrote in 1829, "could be blamed for sometimes pushing to the point of affectation the search for striking and unexpected contrasts he still captivates; his picture is a kind of diamond which glitters all alone where it is and obscures everything around it."
Lawrence was, by turns, a proto-Romantic and Victorian sentimentalist. He broke the boundary between sitter and viewer and created a new generation of women whose elegance was invigorated by their own sensuality. His portraits of swaggering Adonises (including the portly George Regent, who was anything but) generated just the sort of moxie and patriotism England likely needed with Napoleon breathing down its neck.
If he was a "chocolate box artist," says Lucy Peltz, curator of 18th-century portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, it was only because his works were so heartily embraced. "We lost the ability to love Lawrence because we became cynical and ironic and post-modern," she says. "If we are now beyond post-modernism, then the moment seems ripe to reappraise Lawrence and for people to fully experience his love of paint, surface, color, personality, and materiality."