The meaning of pictures

by John C. Van Dyke

XI.—TURNER, The Fighting Téméraire. National Gallery, London.

But now observe, if you please, that the painter, in looking over his sitter, does not necessarily see him as the lens of a camera might see him. The imagination may insist upon his seeing less accurately and more positively—perhaps abnormally. The man before him may have a peculiar breadth of forehead, an unusual width between the eyes, a hollowness in the cheek, a pinched look in the nose and mouth; or it may be he has a foxy eye, a puffed cheek, a flabby, vicious-looking lip, and a sensual-looking hand. These may be the very features that the imagination seizes upon and emphasizes. Then when the painter takes up his brush he paints these features strongly because they appeal to him strongly. And what is the result? The look—perhaps in the one case scholarly and thoughtful, like Van Dyck’s “Cornelius Van der Geest” (Plate [3]), or in the other case crafty-looking like Velasquez’s “Innocent X” (Plate [13])—the look that betrays the character of the sitter appears in the picture, appears more strongly emphasized than in the original; and all through the proper exercise of the imagination.

The pictorial imagination almost always lays emphasis upon prominent features, and may at times distort them without falsifying them as art. The very first act, the seeing of things pictorially—that is, as they would appear in a picture rather than as they appear in real life—is necessarily a translation if not a free rendering. Everyone knows that George Morland, who saw English tavern-life cut up into beautiful pictures and hanging upon the walls, did not see accurately or scientifically; but he certainly saw pictorially and imaginatively. The actual would have left us cold, where the imaginative excites admiration.

We can see something akin to this even in the work of the camera. The ordinary photograph of a flock of sheep is prosaic enough, but we have all seen photographs of sheep taken when the camera was a little “off-focus,” when some of the sheep at the side did not get into the line of light and were somewhat distorted and magnified in bulk. In this “off-focus” view the sheep immediately become pictorial in appearance, and we notice how much like Millet’s sheep they look. Of course the unusual appearance is caused by a perversion of light in the camera, but I do not know that Millet’s sheep are not caused by a perversion of sight in the man. Genius is supposed to be closely allied to insanity; and imagination may be allied to distortion.

Certainly there is in the pictorial view something of the distorted view. A modern athlete in the gymnasium is a very different athlete from those that writhe upon the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Did not Michael Angelo’s imagination see the model abnormally, and thus persuade his hand to emphasize all the powerful attributes? A running horse as seen by the instantaneous camera is no doubt accurate enough in all respects, save the sense of motion. He does not run. The camera arrests his flight, holds him poised in air momentarily. But Fromentin’s imagination, as shown in his pictures, saw the horse running, saw him distorted, drawn out in body from head to tail. You know from the report of the camera, again, how human beings fall through the air in jumping, diving, plunging; but what a different report you get from Tintoretto’s fall of the damned in his “Last Judgment.” There is a tremendous rain of elongated bodies falling from heaven to hell. The exaggeration of the imagination is here most apparent, but the result is wonderfully effective. We are made to feel that the bodies are really falling.

The reason for the pictorial distortion in the instances cited must be obvious enough. There is no great attempt to present things precisely as they are in nature. We have already arrived at the conclusion that this would be impossible. The object presented to the imagination is sought to be represented by the sign or symbol, and it requires the radical translation, possibly the distortion of the sign or symbol to show the imaginative conception. What was the actual bulk of the battle-ship Téméraire I do not know, but I feel quite sure that Turner in painting that vessel (Plate [11]) saw it in exaggerated proportions, saw it lifted high out of the water, its height additionally emphasized by the smallness of the towing tug. In the same way Claude and Poussin saw trees and groves of phenomenal height and thickness (Plate [26]), as Courbet saw sea waves of astounding bulk, and Claude Monet saw exaggerated lights and colors upon the towers of Rouen Cathedral. The exaggeration is quite within the province of the imagination—quite necessary to all imaginative art. It is more apparent in some painters than in others, and yet is not the less existent in almost all pictorial expression. From the caricature of the child to the conception of the skilled artist there is apparently only a step. The boy in school who draws the face of a companion on the fly-leaf of his book, giving it perverted features and a wide smile of countenance, is distorting the sign to convey a certain ludicrous impression; but the Egyptian sculptor who carved the mysterious smile upon the face of the Sphinx—that face which under burning suns and midnight stars has looked out across the silence for so many centuries—was using the distorted sign, too, using it imaginatively to tell people his idea of the majesty and serenity of the sun-god Harmachis.

But however the imagination may distort, it cannot originate anything entirely new nor create anything outside of human experience. We are sometimes led to think, by the common use of the word “imagination,” that it can

“Body forth the forms of things unknown,”

as Shakespeare has put it; but it must be apparent that “out of nothing, nothing comes,” and that it is impossible to make a body from things unknown. All the originality of all the great originals in the world’s history goes no further than the dividing up or the adding to of things already known. You may make a novel landscape perhaps by shutting out the sky with a high sky-line, or you may make an angel by adding bird wings to a human form; but you cannot make an absolutely new form or create one thing that has not some basis in human life or experience. To be sure, you may bring to mind the image of a character in fiction or poetry—Sir Galahad or Roland of Brittany or Amadis de Gaul, for instance—but after all your image is based upon some previous memories of knights in armor. Just so with the likeness of Christ. There is no authentic record of how he looked, either in picture or worded description, and the type of Christ which we accept to-day has been derived from Italian art, which in turn received and blended together two types—one from the Eastern Church at Constantinople and one from the Western Church at Rome. As for the abnormal creations that seem at times quite original—the witches of “Macbeth,” the fairies of “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” the water babies of Kingsley, the elves and gnomes and dwarfs of Grimm—they are all founded upon the distortion of the human figure. The wonders of the “Thousand and One Nights,” the City of Brass, the diamond windows, the hanging gardens, the genii of the clouds, are not different as regards the manner of their construction. Animal life too, is made monstrous by the quips of the fancy, but again the dragons are all snake-formed and the goblins all bat-winged; the centaur is a combination of man and horse, and Ariosto’s hippogriff is the familiar winged Pegasus of Greece translated into Italian.