Billy the Kid

Welcoming New Snippets IV –
Billy the Kid


(Picture: tias.com)

The One Painting of, the One Painting by Billy the Kid

No, we have no painting by Billy the Kid. – What we have (or at least believe to have) is one authentic picture of Billy the Kid. The one picture that everybody does know, that appears in every history of the Wild West (and also in the Pictorial History of the Wild West of 1954; see picture above; the first picture within that history, by the way, who would have thought of that… is indeed the picture of… a rifle).
Of course we do not have that one photography in a literal sense (it has recently been sold, as everybody does know, for a good price).

But what is interesting is that other people believe (wish) to have pictures of Billy the Kid, or even are convinced indeed to have such pictures.
But how to authenticate such pictures? And here of course visual properties come in. The one authentic photograph does serve as the one reference, and the one pictures gets processed by any kind of forensic programmes etc. (watch for example this interesting programme here, which has all the classic motifs of a classic authentication campaign).

What might this all have to do with Giovanni Morelli?
Well this is to remind not to confuse things that, even in Morellian studies, got and still get, occasionally, confused. It is one thing to ascertain the identity of a person (by comparing a real person’s ear, for example, with the ear shown in a passport’s photograph; or by comparing the ear shape shown by the one authentic Billy the Kid photograph with the ear (or face shape etc.) shown by another photograph); and it is another thing to compare how the ear shape is rendered in the painting by one artist (because this one artist is ›imposing‹ his notion of ear anatomy upon form) with how the ear shape is rendered by another artist. And here the one painting by Billy the Kid comes in.
Because in order to speak about stylistic consistency (now in the context of art) it would not be enough to have just one painting by Billy the Kid. If we assume that the style of one artist shows stylistic regularities (that serve us as clues in authentication processes), we have to show series (unless we have at best single similarity, which is something, but not more than single similarity, which also can be accidental; regularity is only made plausible by the series). And if the consistencies that shine out in such series have something to do with for example the consistency of ear shapes within the real family of Billy the Kid, is another question. But this (only seemingly) absurd question has to be raised because all to many art historians have just assumed that stylistic consistencies in art do show as consistent (or nearly as consistent) as they show ›in the flesh‹ (or at least as consistent as a fingerprint). One has seen and still tends to see the connoisseurial practices of Giovanni Morelli and the forensic practices of Sherlock Holmes in analogy, although the Sherlock Holmes of the classic Holmes stories was never concerned with Morellian properties. The Holmes of the Holmes stories did in fact compare anatomical shapes (shapes ›in the flesh‹ with painted shapes for example in the Hound of the Baskervilles novel; see Cabinet II of the Giovanni Morelli Study, here on this website), but, as said, this is something else than checking for, and comparing of Morellian properties. What these practices have in common is the comparing of form (and also the working with types; the family type on the one hand; the ›basic type‹, which may be equalled with the inner notion that a painter has of form, on the other; and in both cases these types are mere mental constructions and do show only in terms of phenotypes, that is: actually realized forms, realized by hereditary laws of nature, or by artists’ practices).
But that painters actually painted ears as consistent as ear shapes appear within families must not be assumed by principle, but must be shown in every single case. By showing series. And by explaining why (based on what exact comparisons) a work in question should be placed into such series that make the oeuvre of a particular artist. (Moreover: it does bear repetition (compare Cabinet II and Cabinet III) that Giovanni Morelli did not base his attributions on the observing of single shapes alone, that is: he did not recognize painters by the way they painted ears or other detail alone, and did in fact also explicitly recommend twice not to do so, but to consider the close observation of such details as a mere aid and as a control of one’s general impression, apart from the reasonable general concern for provenance information and historical documentation that was more or less taken for granted.)

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