The meaning of pictures

by John C. Van Dyke

Now this agreement to understand the sign is what might be called the recognition of the convention. All art is in a measure conventional, arbitrary—unreal if you please. Everyone knows that Hamlet in real life would not talk blank verse with his latest breath. The drama (and all poetry for that matter) is an absurdity if you insist upon asking: Is it natural? It is not natural; it is very artificial. And unless you accept the artificial as symbolizing the natural, unless you recognize the convention of metre and rhyme, you are not in a position to appreciate verse. The name of those who “do not care for poetry” is legion, because they have not the proper angle of vision, because they are out of focus. And this is equally true of music. Tristan and Isolde singing their loves at each other is sheer insanity from a realistic standpoint. Everyone knows that love in real life may do a good deal of sighing and sobbing, but it does not burst forth into song. The opera is a most palpable convention, and the flow of music, which so beautifully suggests the depths of passion and the heights of romance, is but an arbitrary symbol of reality. Recognize this and you have taken the first step toward the understanding of art; fail to recognize it and art must always be a closed book to you. You will not perceive the artist’s intention.

As a matter of fact we all do accept the convention in one form or another. If a child standing at the blackboard should draw a horse with four chalk-lined legs and a chalk-lined body and head we should have no trouble in making it out as a horse. And should we know it as a horse because of its truth to nature? Is a horse flat, hairless, colorless, shadowless? And has he a chalk line about him? Not at all. The representation is but a sign or symbol which we have agreed to recognize as a horse. It is a child’s representation, and it differs from a painter’s representation of the same animal largely in the matter of trained skill and imaginative conception. The fine portraits of Holbein—than which there is nothing finer in painting—have that same rim about them (Plate [1]). We call it Holbein’s “clear outline,” but it is substantially the same thing. And the etched landscapes of Rembrandt—what could you have more arbitrary? Merely a few lines drawn with a swift hand, a few scratches in a copper plate to represent sunlight, and some cross-hatchings to represent shadow; but how quickly we recognize their meanings! If you will look closely at the wood engravings of Timothy Cole you will see the modelling of the faces brought out sometimes by long, waving, diagonal lines, sometimes by dots and sometimes by checks and squares. Again could anything be more conventional? But we have no trouble in making out the artist’s intention. We accept the convention from the start.

So it is that we do not necessarily grasp the intention by the fulness or elaborateness of the sign. The painter, from long experience, from being more expert of hand, is perhaps better able to exploit the sign than is the child; but we do not fail in understanding the meaning of the childish outline. There is a difference in sign making, to be sure, and that may make a great difference in art; but there is little or no difference in the intention—the meaning of the sign. The flat figures upon the Greek vases are not quite like the outlined figures of Raphael and Ingres, and still less like the figures of Manet; but they are all signs nevertheless. Manet used the patch of color instead of the rim or outline, which is supposed to be a very fetching piece of realism; but none of the representations is to be mistaken for reality. The real is one thing; the sign or symbol for it, quite another thing.

What then is realism in art—this drawing of eyes that follow you about the room, lips that seem parted as if to speak, and hands that you could shake? What is this painting of pots and pans to be picked up, and cows that walk out of the canvas? Can we not define it as merely the adding-to, the rounding, the perfecting of the sign? Is it anything more than the telling of all the truths, both great and small, so that the veriest dunce in conventions shall not fail to recognize them?

I.—HOLBEIN, Portrait of a Man. Belvedere, Vienna.

To revert to our former illustrations, perhaps Ingres’s rigid outline contains less truth—less important truths—than Manet’s color patch. Why? Because the figure in full light really has no rim about it. It looks more like a patch of color relieved against other colors. The rim or outline is childish, primitive, and originally came, not from a direct study of the model but from studying the model’s shadow or silhouette. People of childish intelligence, like the Egyptian fellaheen, for instance, understand it very readily because of its simplicity and its arbitrary utterance; but the more complex sign that deals with sunshine rather than the flattened shadow contains the greater truth. Therefore as regards the whole truth there is more of it in Manet’s figure than in Ingres’s. Additions to the sign, such as effects of light-and-shade, of color, of surface texture, of contour, may tell us more about the object and add to the sum of truth and the perfection of the sign; and yet these may not change in any way the significance of the sign. The most elaborate human being that a Meissonier could paint would still be only the individual symbol of a man, and in that respect would not be different from the incised outline of Rameses the Great upon a Theban wall.

You will understand, of course, that there are painters who use the sign to convey a meaning—use it as one might words and sentences. Millet, in writing to a friend, said: “All art is a language and language is made to express thoughts.” Of that I shall have something to say later; but just now I wish to call your attention to the fact that the realist does not agree with Millet, that he is not concerned with ulterior meanings, that in fact he rather despises them. For realism, broadly speaking, means a pot for a pot’s sake, or a cow for a cow’s sake, which is to say a sign for a sign’s sake. The Gerard Dous and the Meissoniers rather plume themselves upon being expert sign-makers. Their art usually goes no farther than excellent craftsmanship. They draw and paint skilfully, decoratively, telling everything about the model before them, from an eyelash to a boot-strap; and there they stop. They give forth an official report which may be true enough from their point of view and yet contain not an idea worth the contemplating, not a thought worth the thinking. But that does not in any way disturb the poise of the realist. He is ready to answer you that “beauty is truth and truth beauty”—an aphorism that sounds like argument and yet is only assumption. But let us look into the matter a little farther and ask: What is the truth which they claim to have? Is it the vital truth or the only truth, and are there not varieties, grades, and degrees of truth in painting as in the other departments of art and life? I have no wish to deny that realism, so-called, makes up one kind of art; but let us push our inquiry farther afield and find out if possible what is the basis of the realistic picture.

“Truth,” we have already affirmed, “is the report of nature made by man.” We may cast out the child’s report about the horse because it is incomplete, immature. It is made up of all the errors of the untrained hand and eye, and though it has a certain personality about it, and gives us a child’s idea of a horse, yet it cannot be considered as an entirely truthful record. The report of the camera, if it be true or false we do not know. Light flashes and the horse’s silhouette is instantly caught and fixed upon the plate; but I need not tell you that light does not flash into the human eye, and the silhouette is not instantly fixed upon the human retina in the same way. Nor need I tell you that eyes vary more widely in the way they see than do cameras. Which then tells the truth? That the camera always records the same does not prove that it always records truly. It may always record falsely. At least the human eye sees differently from the camera, and the ultimate decision as to truth must be referred back to the eye. It may not be an infallible register, but it is the best we have. For all human knowledge must base itself upon human sensation.

The horse of the child being incomplete and that of the camera misleading, we return to the work of the painter and ask: What of the horse of Apelles? Can that stand as the final truth? The story of its deceiving other horses we may put aside as pure romance, but undoubtedly the picture was emphasized in its modelling—pushed hard in its high lights—to make the horse “stand out.” Granted a truth of relief and perhaps a truth of surface, are these the only truths about the horse? And do they make the standard to which art and artists must bow? Not necessarily. We have had hundreds of painters since Apelles’s time who have painted hundreds of horses, perhaps quite as true to nature as his, but never a one of them saw or painted a horse in just the way Apelles did.