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.

By about 1862, most artists had abandoned trying to paint Pre-Raphaelite landscapes because of their impossible demands. To conform to the prescriptions of critic John Ruskin required long weeks painting painstaking details of a view in front of the motif, and an independent income. The only artist who proved able to sustain this was John Brett (1831–1902), who continued to produce paintings conforming to Ruskin’s ideals and keeping the same ‘look’ until at least 1870. This weekend’s two articles look at those exceptional landscapes, and how they changed later.

Brett was a relative latecomer to the Pre-Raphaelite circle. Although he and his older sister Rosa started painting professionally from about 1850, John Brett wasn’t admitted to the Royal Academy Schools for training until early 1853, by which time the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was dissolving. When in London, he made contact with artists of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and discussed their art and techniques with Holman Hunt in particular. He read Ruskin, and admired the paintings of John Constable.

After painting portraits to bring in some income, he went to Switzerland in the summer of 1856, where he ascended to the glacier above the village of Rosenlaui, and painted his first real landscape work.

Glacier of Rosenlaui (1856) is an extraordinarily accomplished first landscape painting. Influenced by the fourth volume of Ruskin’s Modern Painters, and the nearby work of John William Inchbold, who was painting about ten kilometres away at the time, it appears to have been painted entirely en plein air, in front of the glacier. Despite its great detail, particularly in the foreground, as prescribed by Ruskin, he signed and dated it 23 August 1856.

He also painted a few impressive watercolours before returning to England. In December, this painting had impressed Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Holman Hunt, and had even received praise from Ruskin himself. But the painting didn’t sell.

The following summer, Brett started work on a less technically-challenging and hopefully more marketable painting, which was possibly inspired by Gustave Courbet’s now-lost painting of stonebreakers, first shown in 1851.

The Stonebreaker (1857-58) was painted closer to home, at a popular beauty spot in the south of England, near Box Hill, which dominates the distance. The milestone at the left shows the distance to London as 23 miles, and David Cordingly considers this places it along a historic track known as Druid’s Walk, leading from the Pilgrim’s Way over the Leatherhead Downs to Epsom and London.

This time, perhaps following his experience in Switzerland, Brett made extensive sketches and studies of the motif, worked on the final oil painting for at least twenty days en plein air, but then completed it in the studio during the following autumn and winter. The painting was shown at the Royal Academy in 1858, where it aroused considerable critical interest.

In the summer of 1858, Brett set off again to the Alps, where he ended up painting a second remarkable mountain view, this time at Val d’Aosta in north-west Italy.

Val d’Aosta (1858) was painted from a hill about a kilometre north-east of where Brett was lodging, according to Christopher Newall. In contrast to Glacier of Rosenlaui, Brett augments the geological details in the foreground with a sleeping woman and a brilliant white goat. Surprisingly, it omits the fortress of Châtel Argent and the Château de Saint-Pierre, although they appear in sketches he made at the time. The only buildings shown are smaller rustic farms and dwellings, set among finely detailed orchards, vineyards, and pastures.

Probably started in a series of studies and sketches, Brett seems to have worked on the oil version in front of the motif, then brought it back to England for completion during the late autumn of that year. He considered it finished by Christmas, and it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1859. Ruskin’s remarks were uncommitted, and the artist wasn’t made a single offer for its purchase.

Brett then tried for success with figurative and genre painting, and it wasn’t until 1861 that he returned to attempt any more proper Pre-Raphaelite landscapes. He first visited Florence in November 1861, and a year later left England to work on his next major work, a view encompassing almost the whole of the city that had been the cradle of much of the southern Renaissance.

He probably started on Florence from Bellosguardo (1863) in January 1863, and painted without the aid of significant preparatory studies, working entirely from the motif. Even with Brett’s apparent eye for fine detail at a distance, much of it must have been painted with the aid of a telescope, and it has been suggested that he may also have used a camera lucida and/or photographs. Regardless of how he managed to paint such great detail, it’s a triumph of painting, both technically and artistically, and it came as a shock when it was rejected by the Royal Academy in 1863.

Thankfully for Brett, the painting was purchased in May that year by the National Gallery, and he was acclaimed in the press as “head of the Pre-Raphaelite landscape school”, although by that time he must have been the last of its practitioners. Brett had also intended the painting as homage to the Brownings, as he had enjoyed the support of Robert Browning through that difficult period.

Brett didn’t hang around in England after this, but later that summer was back in Italy working again.

Near Sorrento (1863) is a watercolour that Christopher Newall believes to have been painted from the Via del Capo, and shows the coastline at least five kilometres from that point, making it almost certain that its fine foreground detail was painted with the aid of a telescope. It still conforms to the basic requirements of a Pre-Raphaelite landscape, with fine detail, bright colours, and its careful rendering of geology.

Massa, Bay of Naples (1863-64) is perhaps the most spectacular of the oil paintings Brett completed during this Mediterranean campaign, and appears to have been painted from a vessel on the water.

He had travelled there on board the SS Scotia, although it’s unclear whether that ship served as his floating studio, or he transferred to another vessel. The Scotia arrived in the Bay of Naples by 9 September, following which he went to stay in Sorrento, then on to Capri by November. It’s therefore probable that he continued to work on this canvas during the following winter.

To his delight, Alfred Morrison bought this painting on 6 May 1864, for the substantial sum of £250, although Morrison may actually have paid in guineas. Brett was to benefit further from Morrison’s generous patronage, and by August in 1865 could afford to buy his own yacht. That enabled him to concentrate on painting in British waters.

During the winter of 1865-66, Morrison remained on or near the Isle of Wight, where Brett’s new boat had been built. He painted two watercolour landscapes of the Island, of which only February in the Isle of Wight (1866) has been traced. Although a superb painting, its style is starting to drift away from the principles laid down by the Pre-Raphaelites.

References

Barringer T (2012) Reading the Pre-Raphaelites, revised edn, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 17733 6.
Cordingly D (1982) ‘The Stonebreaker’: an examination of the landscape in a painting by John Brett, Burlington Mag. 129, March 1982, pp 141-145.
Newall C (2007) ‘Val d’Aosta’: John Brett and John Ruskin in the Alps, 1858, Burlington Mag. 149, March 2007, pp 165-172.
Newall C (2012) Review of Payne (2010), Burlington Mag. 154, July 2012, pp 498-499.
Payne C (2010) John Brett: Pre-Raphaelite Landscape Painter, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 16575 3.
Prettejohn E (2000) The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, Tate Publishing. ISBN 978 1 854 37726 5.
Staley A (2001) The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape, 2nd edn, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 08408 5.

This third and final article devoted to paintings of Easter covers the events after the entombment, from Christ’s body in the sepulchre and the harrowing of Hell, to the Resurrection. Although less frequently painted than the Crucifixion, the Resurrection is the whole purpose of Easter.

William Blake’s The Angels hovering over the body of Christ in the Sepulchre; Christ in the sepulchre, guarded by angels from about 1805 elaborates the gospel accounts of Christ’s body in the sepulchre with reference to the description of the tabernacle in Exodus, chapter 25 verse 20:
And the cherubims shall stretch forth their wings on high, covering the mercy seat with their wings, and their faces shall look one to another; toward the mercy seat shall the faces of the cherubims be.
This may have been in the light of Hebrews, chapter 9 verse 5:
And over it the cherubims of glory shadowing the mercyseat; of which we cannot now speak particularly.

Just before the end of the sixteenth century, Jan Brueghel the Elder collaborated with Hans Rottenhammer in Christ’s Descent into Limbo (1597). This is set in a grand vision of a dungeon at the edge of a fiery underworld that could have been painted by Hieronymus Bosch.

William Blake’s Christ Appearing to His Disciples/Apostles After the Resurrection is one of his large colour print series from 1795, referring to the gospel of Luke, chapter 24 verses 36-40:
And as they thus spake, Jesus himself stood in the midst of them, and saith unto them, “Peace be unto you.” But they were terrified and affrighted, and supposed that they had seen a spirit. And he said unto them, “Why are ye troubled? and why do thoughts arise in your hearts? Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.” And when he had thus spoken, he shewed them his hands and his feet.

William Holman Hunt’s Christ and the Two Marys is an early Pre-Raphaelite painting from 1847, the year before the formation of the Brethren, and a time when religious themes were popular among them. The two Marys are Mary Magdalene and “the other” Mary, while Christ, his stigmata plainly visible, has cast off the bandages his body was wrapped in for burial.

Nikolai Ge’s Heralds of the Resurrection, from 1867, probably shows Mary Magdalene rushing to tell the disciples of the news that Christ’s body was missing, and that he was resurrected. At the right are the guards who were placed at the tomb, perhaps.

Several impossible legends grew about Mary Magdalene; here Albert Edelfelt’s Christ and Mary Magdalene, a Finnish Legend (1890) dresses her in contemporary clothing, and transports the two to the lakes and forests of Finland, where the first pale leaves of Spring are on the trees.

Fritz von Uhde has a similarly modern approach in Touch me not. John 20:17 from 1894, this time outside a small town in Germany.

John Roddam Spencer Stanhope’s Why seek ye the living among the dead? (St Luke, Chapter 14, verse 5) (1896) refers to the version in which Mary Magdalene and companion(s) return to Christ’s tomb, only to find its door open and the tomb empty. They are then greeted by two men who inform them that Christ has risen from the dead. Stanhope depicts this in the style of a frieze, the four figures arranged across the painting in a single parallel plane. Although part of a complex narrative, he depicts only a limited window from the story, and in doing so makes his painting simpler and more direct.

Late in the nineteenth century, Eugène Burnand’s most successful painting was The Disciples Peter and John Running to the Tomb on the Morning of the Resurrection from 1898, now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Their faces and hands tell so much, surprisingly for an artist who had concentrated for his whole career on landscapes.

Albin Egger-Lienz painted a thoroughly modern account in 1923-24. He developed the study above, known simply as Resurrection, into the finished painting of Resurrection of Christ below.

I close with a wonderful painting of a more recent Easter Sunday, by the Ukrainian artist Mykola Pymonenko.

Waiting for the Blessing (1891) shows the scene at a country church at dawn on Easter Sunday. The local population is crowding inside, while the women gather with their Paska, traditional ornamental bread that must be blessed before it can be eaten as a brunch. Note how defocussed the crowd in the background appears relative to the women and children in the foreground.

May all our Easters be peaceful, wherever we are!

The history of clocks is a story of largely unwanted technical capability driven by the requirement for accurate navigation, until the arrival of railways in the middle and late nineteenth century. Until people needed to catch a train run according to a timetable, even towns and cities could proceed at their own pace, and as long as they got the right day, the country could amble along too. Clocks were mostly features of churches and public buildings, and often weren’t even synchronised with the next town. Accordingly, clocks were rare, and were more items of furniture than rulers of the day.

Where they do appear in paintings before the nineteenth century, they’re normally an anachronism.

The title given to this painting by Domenico Maroli from about 1655 is Euclid of Megara Dressing as a Woman to Hear Socrates Teach in Athens, which is baffling enough. Given that Euclid of Megara lived between about 435-365 BCE, the ornate clock at the upper right corner is badly out of time and place. No one is too sure of the time that such clocks first appeared, but it must have been at least 1500 years later.

It gets worse, though. Euclid of Megara was a real figure, a minor Greek philosopher and a pupil of Socrates. He ended up wearing women’s clothing because citizens of Megara were banned from entering Athens, so in order to hear his master’s teaching, he dressed as a woman and entered the city after dark. But Marolì confused that Euclid with the much better-known Euclid of Alexandria, the famous mathematician and geometer, and surrounded the minor philosopher with everything you might associate with the other Euclid, including his anachronistic clock.

When we reach the nineteenth century, clocks feature in remarkably few interiors.

One of the earliest is William Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience, painted during the period 1851-53. Sat in its glass bell case on the top of the piano it an ornate gilt clock, its face turned away but apparently showing the time as five to twelve.

The fashionable young man seated at the piano in this small house in the leafy suburbs of London is clearly in an extra-marital relationship with the young woman, who has half-risen from his lap and now stares absently into the distance. Around them are signs that she’s 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 with which to while away the hours, and her wools below form a tangled web in which she is entwined.

Thomas Brooks’ painting of The New Pupil from 1854 shows a disorderly rabble in an English country school, as a mother introduces her reluctant son to his new class. Behind the teacher, at the left, one the boys reaches up to adjust the time on the pendulum clock on the wall, no doubt moving its hand forward to bring a premature end to classes for the day.

Charles Hunt’s Visit to the Schoolroom from 1859 shows a more impressive educational establishment, with a grandfather clock supervising the class from the middle of the back wall. To the left of it is a barometer, even more unusual in a school at that time.

In Rebecca Solomon’s The Appointment from 1861, a beautiful woman stands in front of a mirror and looks intently at a man, who’s only seen in his reflection and stands in a doorway behind the viewer’s right shoulder. The woman is dressed to go out, and is holding a letter in her gloved hands. The clock on the mantelpiece shows that it’s about thirteen minutes past seven, either on a summer’s evening, or in the morning.

Another splendid longcase clock, of a type known as Comtoise or Morbier, appears in the right background of Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret’s An Accident from 1879. At this time, the factory making them in the Franche-Comté region of France was delivering over sixty thousand of them each year, but they’re unusual in paintings.

Viktor Mikhailovich Vasnetsov’s Russian Preference (1879) shows three players of the game known as ‘Russian Preference’ or Preferans. According to the grandfather clock at the right it’s just after four o’clock, which could be in the afternoon or the small hours of the morning. Cast natural light in the doorway suggests it’s still daylight outside, though, as these three play cards to while away the time.

Like those homes, that in Évariste Carpentier’s undated The Reprimand may lack signs of material wealth but they have given their grandfather clock pride of place in the living room. The son is sat on the corner of a simple table with one of his wooden clogs dropped onto the floor. Dressed in multiply patched clothing, he’s being reprimanded by a figure out of the image, beyond its left edge. His mother stands preparing food to the right, and his grandmother sits at the table. Even the family’s black and white dog faces towards the wall, as if in disgrace.

Long before the days of radio let alone television, reading became popular entertainment. LA Ring’s Housewife’s Evening Party from 1905 shows a very different sort of party from those being painted at the time in cities like Paris. This housewife sits knitting, as her husband and a friend discuss a book by the light of the kerosene lantern. They aren’t poor by any means: there are portrait paintings on the wall, and a clock ticking softly above them, showing the time as seventeen minutes to eight.

During the twentieth century, mantelpiece clocks became almost universal, as timekeeping became the rule rather than an exception, but longcase clocks grew increasingly rare. Now it seems few younger people can even read the face of an analogue clock.