In Newport, Artists Turn Tables on the Gilded Age

NEWPORT, R.I. — When visitors tour Stanford White’s Rosecliff this summer, one of the storied historical mansions where HBO’s “The Gilded Age” is filmed, they will find, among the antique heirlooms, a freshly painted life-size portrait of a woman wearing a casual gray pantsuit, a leopard-patterned fedora, and dark sunglasses.

Those hoping for some Gilded Age fairy dust might be thrown off by the sight of Hope “Happy” Hill van Beuren, a multigenerational Newporter, Campbell Soup heiress and philanthropist, who has taken her rightful place — in an Instagram-ready pose — in the salon near a portrait of her father, Nathaniel Peter Hill, from 1905, and her grandmother, Mrs. Crawford P. Hill, from 1910.

Unlike the conventional society portrait, however, this one wasn’t commissioned by its subject. Painted in a soft photorealist style by Sam McKinniss, who is known for his campy transformations of images he finds on the internet, the work is one of some two dozen portraits by contemporary artists now on view in the exhibition “Pictus Porrectus: Reconsidering the Full-Length Portrait,” which has taken up residence this summer in two of Newport’s celebrated “cottages.”

Several blocks north, at the Isaac Bell House by McKim, Mead & White, are portrait subjects that would never have slipped past the notoriously discriminating Gilded Age social gatekeepers. One is Jenna Gribbon’s hot-pink-nippled painting of her partner and frequent muse, the singer-songwriter Mackenzie Scott (who performs as Torres). “The nude body has become so benign to us. I’m partly trying to re-sensitize viewers to it. To convey that it belongs to a person,” Gribbon said.

Their patrons are the writer, curator and native Newporter Dodie Kazanjian, and the curator and art historian Alison M. Gingeras, who organized “Pictus Porrectus” for Art & Newport, an annual art program that Kazanjian founded.

Newport is a fitting locale for a deep dive into portraiture. Enlisting fashionable artists to paint flattering portraits was a way for America’s early tycoons “to embody some of the ideals of their British and European counterparts, who have titles and status but also generational wealth,” said Leslie B. Jones, the chief curator of the Preservation Society of Newport County.

With those propagandistic images in mind, Kazanjian and Gingeras turned their eyes to the present. “The ghosts of Sargent and Boldini are definitely here,” Gingeras said, referring to John Singer Sargent, whose 1890 portrait of Cornelius Vanderbilt II greets visitors at the Breakers, and