Towards the end of the nineteenth century narrative painters in Europe and North America followed the popular trend set by detective and mystery literary narrative, and produced paintings that:

• told a story previously unknown to the viewer, although they were likely to be familiar situations;
• intentionally didn’t resolve their narrative;
• deliberately offered several resolutions;
• often referred to contemporary moral and ethical concerns.

The only work for which William Frederick Yeames is now remembered, And when did you last see your Father?, painted in 1878, is unusual for its historical rather than contemporary setting, although its moral issues are timeless.

For anyone familiar with costume at the time of the English Civil War, and the Puritan dress of conical hats and plain clothes, this immediately places the event shown at that time. Contrasting with those are the opulent silks of the mother and children, who are clearly Royalists, the other side. Yeames tells us what the young boy is being questioned about in the painting’s title, without which the narrative would be largely lost.

The unresolved question is whether the boy did reveal the whereabouts of his Cavalier father, an act which is clearly bringing great anguish to his sisters and mother.

Hans Andersen Brendekilde’s Cowed from 1887 also requires careful reading that would have been considerably easier for viewers of the time. Superficially, it shows gleaners at work in a field after the harvest, but there’s more to its story than that.

Being gleaners, the figures seen are among the poorest of the poor. The owner of the large farm in the left distance has gathered in their grain, and their harvesters have been paid off for their effort. Then out come the losers, to scavenge what they can from the barren fields.

The family group in front of us consists of three generations: mother is still bent over, hard at work gleaning her handful of corn. Her husband is taking a short break, sitting on the sack in his large blue wooden clogs. Stood looking at him is their daughter, engaged in a serious conversation with her father, as her young child plays on the ground.

The daughter is finely dressed under her coarse gleaning apron, and wears a hat more appropriate to someone in service as a maid, or similar, in a rich household in the nearby town. She looks anxious and flushed. She may well be an unmarried mother, abandoned by her young child’s father, and it’s surely she who is oppressed or cowed. Their difficult family discussion is being watched by another young woman at the far left, who might be a younger sister, perhaps.

Yeames’ Defendant and Counsel, from 1895, was exhibited in London, illustrated as an engraving in newspapers, and so became the first mass-market painting of this kind.

It shows an affluent married woman wearing an expensive fur coat, sat with a popular ‘tabloid’ newspaper open in front of her, as a team of three barristers and their clerk look at her intensely, presumably waiting for her to speak.

As she must be the defendant, the viewer is encouraged to speculate what she is defending: a divorce claim, or a criminal charge? This also opens the thorny issue of counsel who discover that their defendant is lying, but still mount their defence in court, and may succeed in persuading the court to believe what they know to be false.

The press quickly seized on the ambiguities and oddities in Yeames’ picture. A critic in the upper-class newspaper The Times claimed that the painting was mistitled, and should have referred to the woman not as defendant, but as the respondent in a divorce case. They also questioned why the lawyers were still wigged and gowned when so obviously outside the courtroom, an issue the artist was forced to explain.

Yeames was besieged with inquiries from people who claimed they were unable to sleep because they couldn’t resolve the painting’s narrative. The following year, he agreed to judge the best explanation for one of his later paintings in The Golden Penny, a popular journal mainly about football, and had to wade through about seventy entries. It became clear that Yeames himself had little idea of the resolution of the story he’d painted, and awarded the prize to an account that didn’t actually resolve it at all.

While the chattering classes in Britain were puzzling over those paintings, the public in Spain were trying to resolve José Uría’s After a Strike, also from 1895. This story revolves around a strike and its violent consequence, and I have no supporting information about the artist’s intent.

The scene is a large forge that’s apparently standing idle because of a strike. At the far right is a row of mounted police or military, and what may be lifeless bodies laid out on the ground. Inside the factory a woman, presumably a wife, kneels and embraces her child, beside what is presumably the dead body of her husband, who was a worker there. Close to his body is a large hammer, apparently the instrument of his death. In the distance, one of two policemen comfort a younger woman.

This might show the tragic consequence of the violence resulting from a strike. Was the deceased trying to continue working when his colleagues had withdrawn their labour in a dispute, then came to blows with one of them, when he was struck and killed? Although in a sense the story has a form of resolution, it’s unclear how it got there, and invites speculation on the part of the viewer.

The most successful of all the British painters of problem pictures was John Collier, whose work reached a peak in The Sentence of Death in 1908.

At first, this disappointed the critics, but it quickly became enormously popular. Sadly the original work hasn’t lasted well, and I rely here on this contemporary reproduction that does it better justice.

A young middle-aged, and presumably family, man stares blankly at the viewer, having just been told by his doctor – visual clues given include a brass microscope and sphygmomanometer – that he is dying. The doctor appears disengaged, and is reading from a book, looking only vaguely in the direction of his doomed patient.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a time of great advances in medicine, but the big killers in Europe and North America like tuberculosis remained common and barely affected by improvements in surgery and hospitals. In some ways, this painting may at the time have seemed quite everyday, but Collier’s genius was in confronting the viewer with mundane reality.

Not only did this problem picture tackle the great Victorian obsession with death and mortality, but it did so with an adult male patient, assumed by society to keep a ‘stiff upper lip’ and not to be emotional. This led to speculation as to the expected male response to such news, and questions as to what condition might be bringing about his death. There was even public debate about interpretations of the doctor-patient relationship.

Problem pictures lingered on in the early decades of the twentieth century, but were well past their peak.

William McGregor Paxton, a great admirer of Vermeer who adopted the Dutch master’s optical techniques, seems to have painted The Breakfast in 1911 as a ‘problem picture’. As their maid walks out of the dining room, a young wife stares thoughtfully away from her husband, who is showing no interest in her at all, as he hides behind the pages of a broadsheet newspaper. You could cut the atmosphere here with a knife, which is perhaps what this wife would like to do.

My final example is one that breaks the rule of this narrative not being known to the viewer, although in the case of Félix Vallotton’s Chaste Suzanne from 1922, that requires decoding of its carefully obscured reference to the Old Testament tale of Susanna and the Elders. Once that has clicked, you might presume this shows the two elders trying to blackmail Susanna into being unfaithful. But should we assume that Vallotton’s retelling ends in the same way as the ancient original?

Reference

Fletcher PM (2003) Narrating Modernity, the British Problem Picture 1895-1914, Ashgate. ISBN 978 0 754 63568 0.