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For many centuries if not a couple of millennia, narrative painting relied on depicting stories the viewer already knew, and knew the ending. Because painting a single synchronous image can only show one moment in time, most artists accepted that the viewer would have to set that into a narrative sequence in their mind. If they didn’t recognise the story, then the painting was lost on them.
Knowing the underlying story to a narrative painting is required for closure. Even the most skilled narrative painters like Nicolas Poussin were unable to achieve full closure in a painting alone. But without closure, the viewer would be left wondering and unsatisfied.
During the nineteenth century storytelling in literature changed. New genres such as detective and ‘mystery’ novels started to challenge the convention of narrative closure. Readers of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories in the first half of the century, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels towards the end, developed a taste for something rather different. In this week’s two articles about reading paintings I demonstrate how some of the finest problem pictures can be read.
As far as I can discover, one of the earliest major paintings lacking narrative closure is William Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience, painted during the period 1851-53. As with most masterly narrative paintings, its story is assembled from the multitude of clues to be found in its image.
It shows a fashionable young man seated at a piano in a small if not cramped house in the leafy suburbs of London, in reality Saint John’s Wood. Half-risen from the man’s lap is a young woman who stares absently into the distance. They’re clearly a couple in an intimate relationship, but conspicuous by its absence is any wedding ring on the fourth finger of the woman’s left hand, at the focal point of the painting. Thus their relationship is extra-marital.
Around them are signs that she is a kept mistress with time on her hands. Her companion, a cat, is under the table, where it has caught a bird with a broken wing, a symbol of her plight. At the right edge is a tapestry to while away the hours, and her wools below form a tangled web in which she is entwined. On top of the gaudy upright piano is a clock. By the hem of her dress is her lover’s discarded glove, symbolising her ultimate fate when he discards her into prostitution. The room itself is decorated as gaudily as the piano, in poor taste.
The couple have been singing together from Thomas Moore’s Oft in the Stilly Night when she appears to have undergone a revelatory experience, causing her to rise. For Hunt this is associated with a verse from the Old Testament book of Proverbs: “As he that taketh away a garment in cold weather, so is he that singeth songs to an heavy heart.” Hunt leads us to imagine that this kept mistress has had a religious moment, seeing the route to her redemption as her conscience is awakened. The image brings hope, but without resolution.
Three years later, Philip Hermogenes Calderon exhibited Broken Vows (1856) at the Royal Academy, where the painting proved a great success, and remains his best-known work. It’s also the earliest true ‘problem picture’ I have come across, as it goes out of its way to encourage the viewer to speculate as to its reading.
A beautiful young woman, displaying her wedding ring, stands with her eyes closed, clutching a symbolic ‘heart’ area on her chest to indicate that her love life is in trouble. On the ground near the hem of her dress is a discarded necklace or ‘charm’ bracelet. The ivy-covered wall behind her would normally indicate lasting love, her aspiration.
A set of initials are carved on the fence, and on the other side a young man holds a small red flower in front of his forehead, which a young woman is trying to grasp with her right hand. The wooden fence appears tatty, and has holes in it indicating its more transient nature, and it provides glimpses of the couple behind.
Whereas clues in Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience lead to consistent if unresolved narrative, Calderon has here deliberately introduced considerable ambiguity. The eyes of the shorter person behind the fence are carefully occluded, leaving their gender open to speculation. Most viewers are likely to conclude that the taller figure behind the fence is the unfaithful husband of the woman in front, but that requires making assumptions unsupported by visual clues. Whose vows are being broken? Calderon leaves us to speculate.
Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin tales became highly popular across Europe when they were published from 1841 onwards, and in 1868 Émile Gaboriau’s serialised detective story Monsieur Lecoq shot to fame throughout France. That same year, Degas started work on his own detective story.
Degas’ Interior (1868-9), also known as The Interior and even The Rape, appears strongly narrative, but has so far defied all attempts to produce a reading consistent with its details.
A man and a woman are in a bedroom together. The woman is at the left, partly kneeling down, and facing away from the man. Her hair is cropped short, she wears a white shift which has dropped off her left shoulder, and her face is obscured in the dark. Her left forearm rests on a small stool or chair, over which is draped a dark brown cloak or coat. Her right hand rests against a wooden cabinet in front of her. She appears to be staring down towards the floor, off to the left.
The man stands at the far right, leaning against the inside of the bedroom door, and staring at the woman. He’s well dressed, with a black jacket, black waistcoat and mid-brown trousers. Both his hands are thrust into his trouser pockets, and his feet are apart. His top hat rests, upside down, on top of the cabinet on the other side of the room, just in front of the woman.
Between them, just behind the woman, is a small occasional table, on which there’s a table-lamp and a small open suitcase. Some of the contents of the suitcase rest over its edge. In front of it, on the table top, is a pair of scissors and other items which appear to be from a clothes repair kit or ‘housewife’.
The single bed is made up, and its cover isn’t ruffled, but it may possibly bear a bloodstain at the foot. At the foot of the bed, on its large arched frame, another item apparently of the woman’s clothing (perhaps a coat) hangs loosely. On that end of the bed is a woman’s dark hat with ribbons, and her corset has been dropped on the floor by the foot of the bed.
She clearly arrived in the room before the man, removed her outer clothing, and at some stage started to undress further, halting when she was down to her shift or chemise. Alternatively, she may have undressed completely, and at this moment have dressed again as far as her chemise.
The suitcase appears to belong to the woman; when she arrived, she placed it on the table, and opened it. This indicates that she was expecting to stay in the bedroom overnight, and brought a change of clothing and travelling kit including the housewife.
The man is obstructing the door, the only visible exit to the room. Although he looks as if he may have come no further across the room, his top hat says otherwise.
The man and woman appear to be a couple, who have met in that room to engage in a clandestine sexual relationship. However, the bed is a single not a double, and shows no sign of having been used, nor has the bedding been disturbed in any way. There is a mature fire burning in the fireplace behind the woman and the lamp.
There are four paintings or similar objects hanging on the walls, of which only one appears to be decipherable. This is the large rounded rectangular one above the fireplace. Although that appears to be a mirror, the image shown in it doesn’t resemble a reflection of the room’s interior, but looks to be a painting. This might show a bright figure, resembling the woman, in front of some shrubs, behind which are classical buildings. This doesn’t resemble any of Degas’ paintings, nor any well-known work.
Degas provides a lot of small details, just as in a detective story, none of which points clearly to a resolution. You can discuss and debate its narrative endlessly, as has been done for the last 150 years.
Berthold Woltze’s Der lästige Kavalier (1874), best rendered into English as The Annoying Bloke, is a fine example from a German specialist in the sub-genre.
The story takes place in a railway carriage, where there are two men and a young woman. She’s dressed completely in black, and stares towards the viewer with tears in her eyes (detail below). Beside her is a carpet-bag, and opposite is a small wooden box and grey drapes.
Leaning over the back of her seat, and leering at her, is a middle-aged dandy with a brash moustache and mutton-chop whiskers, brandishing a lit cigar. He appears to be trying to chat her up, entirely inappropriately and much against her wishes. Behind him, and almost cropped off the left edge of the canvas, is an older man with a dour, drawn face.
The young woman appears to have suffered a recent bereavement, and may even be travelling back after the funeral. She looks too young to have just buried a husband, so I think it more likely that she has just lost her last parent, and is now living alone, and prey to the likes of this annoying and abusive bloke. Woltze tackles a modern theme that became popular in ‘problem pictures’: relationships between men and women at a time when society was changing rapidly, and most particularly the changing roles of women.
My last example for today comes from the American genre artist Eastman Johnson at about the same time as Woltze’s encounter in the railway carriage.
Johnson’s painting only makes any sense when you know its title of Not at Home (c 1873), and apparently shows the interior of the artist’s home. Without those three words of the title, all you see is a well-lit and empty parlour, and the presumed mistress of the house starting up the stairs, in relative gloom in the foreground. At the right is a child’s push-chair, parked up and empty.
Those three words, of course, are the classic excuse offered in someone’s absence – “I am sorry, but the Mistress is not at home” – even when they are very much at home, but simply don’t want to see the visitor. So the title could imply that the woman is ascending the stairs in order not to see the visitor. Or, if we know that this is the artist’s home, could it be that it’s Johnson himself who is not at home?
Reference
Fletcher PM (2003) Narrating Modernity, the British Problem Picture 1895-1914, Ashgate. ISBN 978 0 754 63568 0.
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© Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
Soon after the Commedia dell’Arte had spread across Europe, travelling performers started entertaining the public with a different but related show, that of Punch and Judy. Mr Punch, the lead male, is based on Pulcinella, who is now a trickster figure who batters his wife Judy. The first recorded show in Britain was on 9 May 1662, using marionette puppets. For the last two hundred years or so, a stylised version performed using glove or other puppets has been popular with children visiting British resorts. In 1827, George Cruikshank made a series of sketches of a performance that were turned into the first illustrated and printed script.
Punch and Judy not only developed its own stereotype characters, but evolved its own plots. At first these shows appeared in street circuses around the towns and cities of Europe, then gravitated towards seaside resorts as they became popular in the summer. Characters from the Commedia also appeared as clowns in more established travelling circuses across Europe and North America.
Philip Hermogenes Calderon’s French Peasants Finding their Stolen Child (1859) draws on the troubled lives of those itinerant players. Various characters from a popular street theatre play are seen at the side of their stage. A couple are embracing a young girl, with the girl’s apparent mother kissing her somewhat reluctant daughter on the cheek.
In the background are the audience, and other stalls of a travelling fair. Entertainers in such fairs were vulnerable to crimes such as child abduction, or it may be that the couple and their daughter aren’t part of the fair, but locals who had their daughter abducted by its travelling performers.
Honoré Daumier’s The Parade, or Street Circus from about 1860 shows a group of mountebanks, theatrical performers, musicians, and clowns who drew large crowds. The crocodile is one of several novel characters from these Punch and Judy shows.
One of Émile Friant’s earliest works is this 1881 painting of The Entrance of the Clowns, showing the interior of the Big Top at the moment that the clowns, acrobats, and other entertainers parade. At the front is Pierrot, with Harlequin sprawling on the ground.
Among Paul Cézanne’s figurative paintings is this of Mardi Gras (Pierrot and Harlequin) from 1888.
The smaller of Fernand Pelez’ two paintings of Grimaces and Miseries: the Acrobats follows the pattern of a traditional ‘ages of man’ image, where its figures increase in stature from the start at the left edge, to the centre, then diminish again with advancing years, to the right. Standing in the middle are Pierrot and Harlequin.
Les Saltimbanques (Acrobats) had been a successful show in the theatre fifty years earlier, and had lived on in entertainments staged in fairs around France. Rosenblum summarises this painting as presenting “a glum view of the contrast between the goals of rousing entertainment in a popular Parisian circus troupe and the actual melancholy and isolation of the performers.” That sounds about right for Pierrot, at least.
Pelez’ later La Vachalcade (The Cow-valcade) (1896) is a reversal of a portrait of an affluent family by way of parody. Thirteen young revellers are taking part in a carnival procession, perhaps one of the Vachalcades which took place in Montmartre at the time. Some wear masks, others have the close-shorn hair characteristic of the poor, a measure against endemic parasites.
At the centre is a boy wearing an adult’s jacket and a huge hat. Behind him is a Pierrot character, and in the background a banner bearing the word Misère, misery. Dangling on that is a dead rat, a reference to a well-known café on the Place Pigalle. The ‘vache’ (cow) in the title refers to the French phrase manger de la vache enragée, meaning to live in poverty.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted this full-figure portrait of his son Jean as The White Pierrot during 1901-02.
Like Watteau earlier, the British painter Walter Sickert became interested in traditional pantomime, another derivative of the Commedia and Punch and Judy, seen in this gouache of Pierrot and Woman Embracing from about 1901. This is a preliminary sketch for a painting now in a private collection, Venetian Stage Scene.
Sickert spent much of the summer of 1915 visiting Brighton, where he made studies for Brighton Pierrots. This is a commissioned copy of his original, which remains in a private collection, and like that was painted following his return to his London studio. It shows a small group of entertainers who performed daily on a temporary stage set up on the beach.
Although William S Horton was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and trained in Chicago, Paris, and New York, he painted almost entirely in Europe. In about 1917, he arrived in Britain, and in 1920 painted this Punch and Judy show taking place on the beach at Broadstairs, Kent, a traditional family seaside resort at the extreme eastern tip of the south-east coast of England.
Edmond Aman-Jean’s Festival of Venice from 1923 is set at an open-air performance involving a Harlequin character with a moustache, who is offering a woman a pink flower, presumably in an effort to woo her. At the right is a chorus of three women, and another sits asleep in a chair at the far right. A young woman seated at the front of the wooden stage is playing a hurdy gurdy, and a girl to the left of her is making a floral decoration.
The descendants of the commedia dell’arte live on, five centuries after the first Pierrots and Harlequins brought laughter to audiences.
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