The novel is, to some degree, a roman à clef. The author filled a part-time teaching position at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, during the 1946-1947 academic year. He worked sporadically on Pictures from an Institution from that time until 1954, when it was published in its final form. Appearing in the novel under fictional guises are Henry Taylor, then-president of Sarah Lawrence, and his wife; Jarrell’s New York friends Jean Stafford, Hannah Arendt, and her husband, Heinrich Bleucher; Sara Starr, the daughter of longtime Jarrell friends from Nashville, Tennessee, the place of Jarrell’s birth; and the author himself. Which real person’s behaviors and personality traits have been given to which fictional character is, however, problematic. For example, in Pictures from an Institution, Gertrude Johnson uses her six and a half months at Benton to gather material for a withering novel she will write about the place. The narrator looks somewhat askance at this behavior. In real life, though, it was Jarrell himself who used his year at Sarah Lawrence as Gertrude uses hers at Benton.

Characters are presented in the round, but since the novel is a satire, it is their foibles that are emphasized. President Robbins is a former Olympic diver, a Rhodes Scholar, and the recipient of an LL.D. from a college in Florida that also awarded a “doctor of humor” degree to Milton Berle. Mrs. Robbins affects British superiority, but she is a faux Englishwoman. She is liked by no one. The Robbinses have a little boy named Derek with a passion for snakes, and they also have Afghans named Yang and Yin that are described as “very pretty and very bad.”

Other Benton couples prominently featured are Flo and Jerrold Whittaker and Gottfried and Irene Rosenbaum. Flo is the complete liberal-progressive activist. She subscribes to every left-wing shibboleth and belongs to every organization that idealizes the proletariat. She refuses to read any novel more than fifty years old because of the status of women depicted therein. She loves humanity and will love individual human beings if humanity is unavailable. She is as widely liked as Pamela Robbins is disliked. Her husband, Jerrold, is a sociology professor. For him, there are no discrete experiences in life. He deals with everything he encounters by generalizing it into part of some abstract theory, about which he then drones on endlessly. The Whittakers have two children: John, described by the narrator as a “good and agreeable, if inhuman, boy,” and Fern, a “proto-Fascist.”

Gottfried Rosenbaum is a professor of music and a composer of twelve-tone pieces. Gertrude comes to dislike him (as she comes to dislike almost everyone) and would like to refer to him as a “Nazi.” Unfortunately for her purposes, he is an Austrian Jew, thus rendering that particular epithet unusable. His wife, the former Irene Letscheskinskaya, was a Russian opera singer. The narrator suggests that the Rosenbaums do not really live in Benton, for they have brought Europe with them to America. Constance Morgan is a young woman who comes to work at Benton after finishing college elsewhere. Although she is almost like family to the narrator and his wife, once she discovers the Rosenbaums and they her, she virtually becomes their adopted daughter.