Portraiture and Ethnography in 1898: Hubert Vos's Hawaiian Paintings

In 1898, the portraitist Hubert Vos traveled to the newly annexed U.S. territory of Hawai’i with his new bride, cousin of the overthrown Queen Lili'oukalani, to paint indigenous sitters. The resulting likenesses, done in Vos’s characteristic academic realism, were intended for a gallery of racial "types"—an ambitious global project the artist began after his formative experience at the World's Columbian Exposition. Dissatisfied with photographic depictions of race, which his deemed too incidental and objective, Vos spent years traversing the Pacific, completing over forty portraits of non-western sitters. By analyzing Vos’s paintings against discourses in the nascent discipline of anthropology, I argue that the artist's ambition to turn painting into an ethnographic medium was negotiated through abstract scientific theories and personal experience of American colonization. Although Vos's motivations stemmed from an ethnographic understanding of indigenous individuals as primitive, ahistorical racial types, his portraits instead highlight the cross-cultural complexities of globalization. I suggest that Vos's agenda—an otherwise straightforward pursuit of visual hegemony—gets complicated in 1898 after witnessing in Hawai'i the agency of indigenous elites (his wife's relatives) at a pivotal historical moment. I show that as a result, Vos's exotic gallery becomes increasingly ideologically ambivalent, relying on ethnographic formulas and organization but also employing conventions of society portraiture to showcase indigenous people as modern individuals and historical agents. As a result, Vos's talents were appropriated for contradictory political ends—by Western anthropologists seeking evidence of racial hierarchy and by non-Western rulers disseminating foreign relations propaganda in their own countries.