Photographs can approach the elegance of paintings, but
reproductions can show the distortion of photographs--so The
Tragic Muse (1890) suggests, complicating critical understandings
of James and visual art. Dramatizing artists' fidelity, James
resists assuming that families, races, and genders provide similar
options. Fidelity in art can mean "infidelity" in life, lead to
"adulterated" reproductions, and impugn understandings of
inherited and performed identities--concerns which resurface in
The American Scene (1907) when James contemplates immigrant
populations and in A Small Boy and Others (1913) when a family
daguerreotype becomes evidence of his own fidelity.