About this work
In Stettheimer's hands, Joseph Hergesheimer is rendered in a surreal setting that blends reality and fantasy — a seated male figure enclosed by a menagerie of oversized blooms and abstract shapes , all set against a blue background animated by vibrant, abstract elements. The composition is quintessentially Stettheimer: ornamental, compressed, and alive with decorative energy. Rather than the staid conventions of the society portrait, the figure floats within a world of her own invention — subject and setting equally weighted, each refusing to recede. The original measures 30 × 26 inches, painted in oil on canvas , a scale that gives the lush surface just enough room to breathe.
Stettheimer painted this work in 1923 , at the precise moment when her subject was at the height of his cultural powers. Hergesheimer's literary career reached its peak during the 1920s, and a 1922 Literary Digest poll had designated him "America's best author."
He was known for his novels of decadent life among the wealthy — a world of ornament and surfaces that found its uncanny visual twin in Stettheimer's own aesthetic. That shared sensibility makes this portrait something more than a likeness: it's a conversation between two practitioners of deliberate excess. The portrait was part of a trio of works — alongside *Portrait of Carl Van Vechten* (1922) and *Studio Party (or Soiree)* — that remained within Stettheimer's circle before passing into institutional hands.
It now resides in the Yale University Art Gallery, transferred from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library as a gift from Ettie Stettheimer to the Yale Collection of American Literature. It was featured in *Florine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry* (2017) and the landmark biography by Barbara Bloemink (2021), cementing its place as a key document of Stettheimer's portrait practice.
This painting belongs in a room where ideas are taken seriously — a library wall, a study anchored by dark wood and warm light, or a reading room where its electric blue ground can charge the air around it. It speaks directly to anyone drawn to the literary and artistic world of interwar New York, or to the rare pleasure of a portrait that tells you as much about the painter as it does the sitter. There's wit here, and genuine tenderness — Stettheimer painting one aesthete's vision of another, both of them now refracted through nearly a century of hindsight.
