Nude Portrait Symbol Analysis

In The Moon and Sixpence, the nude portrait that Charles Strickland paints of Blanche Stroeve symbolizes the successful sublimation of sexuality into artistic creation. By extension, the nude portrait also represents the novel’s broader position on the artist’s imperative to disregard interpersonal relationships and morality in order to realize their artistic vision. Blanche, married to kind but silly painter Dirk Stroeve, left her husband for Strickland; after Strickland leaves her in turn, she dies by suicide. The existence of the nude portrait of Blanche is first revealed to the narrator when Stroeve tells the narrator that, after Blanche’s death, he returned to the studio that he once shared with Blanche and that Strickland subsequently shared with her, only to find the nude portrait. Stroeve, grief-stricken by Blanche’s desertion of him and subsequent suicide, almost destroyed the painting in a rage—but stopped when he perceived that the painting was a work of genius that expressed “passionate sensuality.” Instead, Stroeve found Strickland and invited Strickland to travel to Holland with him—on the assumption that Strickland, having painted such a genius portrait of Blanche, must have loved her and be grieving her too. However, Strickland turns down Stroeve’s invitation and gives Stroeve the nude portrait as a gift, implying that he feels no grief or nostalgia for the “passionate sensuality” Blanche evoked in him. Later the narrator has a conversation with Strickland in which Strickland—a man fundamentally uninterested in and perhaps incapable of love—suggests that he only had an affair with Blanche because he was overcome by sexual need. Once he had channeled that sexual need into his art, he had “no more use” for Blanche—or the nude painting. Thus, the nude painting represents how Strickland disregards not only Blanche, but also interpersonal relationships in general, in pursuit of of his art.