Visiting a portrait show can be like standing in a room full of people you don’t know. But with prolonged contact, artworks, like people, reveal themselves. A fascination with portraits led Virginia Outwin Boochever (1920 – 2005), a docent at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, to endow a portrait competition at the museum where she led tours for almost 20 years.

As a painter, Stuart Davis (1892-1964) represented a trailblazing strain of 20th-century American optimism. His jaunty canvases extended European modernism over a wide range of territory and human subject material. He celebrated urban streetscapes, shorelines and mundane life with an eye-popping sense of jazz-influenced rhythm and invention.