The Story
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the second book and first novel of Irish writer James Joyce, published in 1916. A Künstlerroman written in a modernist style, it traces the religious and intellectual awakening of young Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's fictional alter ego, whose surname alludes to Daedalus, Greek mythology's consummate craftsman. Stephen questions and rebels against the Catholic and Irish conventions under which he has grown, culminating in his self-exile from Ireland to Europe.
The work uses techniques that Joyce developed more fully in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). A Portrait began life in 1904 as Stephen Hero—a projected 63-chapter autobiographical novel in a realistic style. After 25 chapters, Joyce abandoned Stephen Hero in 1907 and set to reworking its themes and protagonist into a condensed five-chapter novel, dispensing with strict realism and making extensive use of free indirect speech that allows the reader to peer into Stephen's developing consciousness.
Executed in Plumbago on vellum, measuring Oval, 4 3/8 x 3 5/8 in. (112 x 92 mm), the surface rewards close looking. Thomas Forster builds the composition through layered glazes and a tightly controlled palette, letting cool shadows recede so that the warm, lit passages step forward. The brushwork shifts from the precise to the almost dissolved — a hallmark of mature Baroque practice.
“A silence so complete it becomes its own witness.”
