Henry James was fiercely protective of his privacy and, despite achieving preeminence as a novelist by the end of the 19th century, gave only four interviews over the course of his career. He expressed a “dread of the assault of the interviewer.” Nevertheless, he sat for numerous portraits, and was photographed by some of the leading photographers of his day. In less than a decade James used the word “portrait” in three book titles—The Portrait of a Lady (1881), his first literary masterpiece; Portraits of Places (1883), a collection of travel essays; and Partial Portraits (1888), a collection of essays on writers that argued for the inclusion of narrative fiction among the fine arts. In 1862, at age 19, James sat for John La Farge, a painter eight years his senior, in Newport, Rhode Island. At the time, Henry James was attending Harvard Law School, after which he redirected his focus to essays and fiction. His relationship with La Farge set the tone for his early novel, Roderick Hudson (1875), a coming-of-age story of a young law student from Northampton, Massachusetts, who aspires to be a great sculptor in the classical tradition. It was La Farge who helped James to gain “the dawning perception that the arts were after all essentially one and that even with canvas and brush whisked out of my grasp I still needn’t feel disinherited. That was the luxury of the friend and senior with a literary side.” [http://arthistorynewsreport.blogspot.nl/2017/06/henry-james-and-american-painting.html]