(Figures 46–50)

Dos Passos's portraits are often difficult to date, but it appears that he was most drawn to the form during the 1920s and 30s. Figure 49, Adelaide Lawson, stems from his close working relationship with Lawson in the early 1920s. Figure 46, “The Blacksmith,” has a price of $25 on its mat, which suggests it might be one of the paintings Dos Passos showed at one of the several exhibitions he participated in during the mid and late 1920s. Figure 47, Man Eating a Banana, probably dates from Caribbean travel during the 1930s. And figure 48, “Pepe Giner,” is perhaps from the summer of 1933, when Dos Passos and Katy Dos Passos spent about two months traveling through Spain and saw much of José (Pepe) Giner.

As is true of many successful portraitists, Dos Passos's strength in this genre lies in his ability to render both character and social context by a greater than lifelike depiction of his subject. Color and composition are deployed for effect rather than verisimilitude.

In figure 46, the subject's cocky head angle and bulging facial features create a powerful image of assertiveness, while the pencil sketch of Lawson suggests, in the somewhat masculine features of the large smiling head in repose, an enigmatic Sphinx-like element in her nature.

The portraits also often display Dos Passos's ability to grasp the comic paradoxes and ironies lurking in most aspects of human experience. In figure 47, this quality lies in the juxtaposition of the well-turned out black man and the peeled banana, and in figure 48 in the private joke of portraying the intellectual José Giner in peasant costume, and in figure 50 in the rather doleful countenance of the professional clown. [DP]