Portrait of Jennie by Robert Nathan

First published: 1940

Subjects: Arts, emotions, and love and romance

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Fantasy

Time of work: 1938

Recommended Ages: 13-18

Locale: New York City and Cape Cod, Massachusetts

Principal Characters:

• Eben Adams, a twenty-eight-year-old New York artist who is experiencing a loss of creative inspiration
• Jennie Appleton, a fantasy child who becomes Adams’ model
• Gus Meyer, a New York taxi driver and friend of Adams
• Mrs. Jekes, Adams’ New York landlady
• Mr. Mathews, a sympathetic New York art dealer
• Miss Spinney, the assistant to Mr. Mathews
• Arne Kunstler, a Cape Cod artist and friend of Adams
• Mr. Moore, the owner of the Alhambra, a Manhattan café

Form and Content

Portrait of Jennie is a fantasy that depicts romantic love as a source of artistic inspiration. Its fifteen chapters are narrated in the first person from the viewpoint of the main character, Eben Adams, a New York artist. In the narrative, Adams takes a retrospective on his experience in 1938 from an indefinite future time. The Manhattan setting, beginning in winter during an economically depressed period, contributes to the optimistic theme that love, even tragic love, can enable one to triumph over adversity.

The book opens with Adams confessing that he is experiencing a “winter of the mind” when none of his paintings seems to be inspired and little hope exists that any will be; he suffers from an artistic loss of confidence. Adams paints mostly landscapes during a time when the market for them is poor. During an aimless walk through Central Park on a winter afternoon, he meets a beautiful young girl playing hopscotch alone. In conversation, she identifies herself as Jennie Appleton but puzzles Eben by explaining that her parents are acrobats at the Hammerstein Music Theater, a building that had burned several years earlier. She sings a childlike song that indicates that her origin and destination are shrouded in mystery, and, when they part, she asks Eben to wait for her to grow up.

Eben later makes a few sketches of Jennie and inadvertently places one in a collection of landscape paintings that he hopes to sell to Mr. Mathews, the owner of a small gallery. Although he has little interest in the landscapes, Mathews is taken by the sketch of Jennie and buys it, along with one other painting. The sale provides rent money for Eben, who had been in arrears. Mathews suggests that Eben paint women instead of landscapes, for he might be able to capture something in the feminine form that transcends time. With help from his friend Gus Meyer, a taxi driver, Eben lands a commission to paint a mural, a picnic scene, over the bar of the Alhambra café owned by Mr. Moore; for this work, he receives free meals at the restaurant.

When Eben later encounters Jennie, she is ice skating in the park. She appears to have grown older, as if entering her teens. After making and selling additional sketches of Jennie, Eben accepts her suggestion that he paint her portrait. Each time that she sits for the painting, Jennie seems to have aged more than is normal, and each time she disappears unexpectedly. Efforts to find out where she lives end in failure. In the portrait, Eben paints Jennie as a teenager, but the work manages to capture her childlike appearance and to reflect the beauty of a woman as well. When Mr. Mathews and his assistant, Miss Spinney, see the portrait, they consider it a masterpiece and accept it on consignment, offering Adams a larger advance than he has ever received before. Only after he has concluded the painting does he realize that he and Jennie belong together.

When she returns to his apartment in the spring, Jennie is enrolled in a boarding school. They arrange to spend a day together on a picnic to New Jersey, but their idyll is ended when the prim, disagreeable landlady Mrs. Jekes orders Jennie away from the house in the evening. Jennie sails for France to continue her schooling abroad, and Eben leaves New York to spend the summer on Cape Cod, where he paints fishermen at their work.

In September, he and his friend Arne Kunstler venture out in a sailboat and are almost lost in an intense hurricane that strikes the area. As he watches from the safety of his house, he senses through intuition that Jennie is caught in the angry waves. He approaches the water’s edge and is united with the drowning young woman, but he cannot rescue her. Later in New York, he sees a newspaper account of the loss of a passenger, identified as Jennie, who had been swept from the deck of an ocean liner returning from Europe.

Critical Context

A prolific writer in several literary genres, Robert Nathan is known for celebrating the power of love to transcend time and place. Portrait of Jennie, his best-known work, is known to many readers through a popular screen adaptation in 1948.

The tragic story of lost young love arose early in literature, and its origins are lost in antiquity, but Nathan’s novel bears close resemblance to late nineteenth century and early twentieth century predecessors such as W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions (1904), which captured the tragic fate of Rima, a beautiful girl living in a South American forest. In its aesthetic theme, Nathan’s novel may owe something to George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894), a story of an artist who attempts to transform a young girl into a work of art. Nathan enhances the aesthetic theme through an exploration of the artist’s role. His heroic artist remains the romantic individual, seeking proper inspiration and discovering it in the beauty of the human form.