About this work
*R. D. Shepherd as Shylock* is a pastel on paper, measuring 17¼ × 13½ inches — an intimate scale that pulls the viewer into direct confrontation with the subject. The work captures Rezin Davis Shepherd, known professionally as R. D. MacLean, an American actor in his most celebrated role: Shakespeare's Shylock from *The Merchant of Venice*. Shepherd was particularly well known for this character, having played Shylock more than 400 times. Barney renders him in costume, the pastel medium lending itself to the theatricality of the moment — chalky, charged strokes that suggest stage light and greasepaint without literalizing them. The portrait is confrontational in posture and intent, more a study in dramatic presence than a conventional likeness. The compressed format and the directness of the gaze give the piece the focused intensity of a close-up in a darkened theater.
Dated 1927 and now held in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, it was gifted by Barney's daughters Laura Dreyfus Barney and Natalie Clifford Barney in memory of their mother. By this point in her life, Barney had relocated to California and was deeply embedded in both theatrical production and visual art simultaneously. By the 1920s, shifting tastes toward abstraction and modernism had begun to eclipse her Symbolist-inflected work, yet she remained undeterred — turning her attention to the performers and characters who populated the world she loved. Barney had earned a reputation in Washington, D.C., for her lavishly detailed, artistically rendered ballets, mimes, tableaux, plays, and other theatrical productions, and this portrait of Shepherd belongs squarely to that world — the painter and the actor as collaborators, the canvas as a kind of permanent stage.
This is a work for a viewer who lives with books and is comfortable with ambiguity — someone drawn to images that carry narrative weight without spelling it out. It hangs well in a study or a reading room, where warm directional light can activate the pastel's texture and where the drama of the subject doesn't compete with its surroundings but deepens them. The confined format commands its wall without overwhelming it, and the theatrical gravitas of the image rewards extended looking. It suits a collector attuned to the crossroads of performance and fine art — a portrait that is also a document of two creative lives briefly, memorably, in the same room.
