The Artist's Perspective: On the Inside Looking Out...

I owe a debt of gratitude to Sharon for the comment she contributed to my previous post describing the New York Metropolitan's exhibition of 19th century European artists who discovered a new perspective of looking through the romantic motif of the Open Window to see beyond.  As the CBS video on the exhibition explains, these artists created the perspective of seeing beyond the "threshold" windows captured by the earlier painter Johannes Vermeer, and of depicting not only a room -- but a room with a view.  This new perspective allowed the artists to create "a picture within a picture" through their paintings where, for the viewer, "everything at a distance becomes romantic...distant people, events, landscapes.  'Romantic' for these artists and their contempories meant impossible dreams, unrequited love, yearning, longing -- what better prop than the window...because a window frames a question -- What does it mean, how does it feel, to be on the inside looking out?"  Sharon included the link to the video in her comment, but it is worth a reposting for the record: 

Window Treatments: Rooms with a View (CBS News Video)
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7366106n&tag=mncol;lst;1

Sharon also posted in her comment the link to the Website for the Met. Exhibition itself:

Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century (The Met. Special Exhibitions)
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/open_window/images.asp

Here are a few of my favorites from the site:

















The final black and white painting pasted above coincidentally connects to the vital role of the Open Window for women (and particularly for women writers) during that time period, as shown with Emily Dickinson's poem #579 copied in the previous post.  Kate Chopin also featured the window prominently in her 1894 work "The Story of an Hour."  She depicts the window much as the 19th century European painters do -- as a threshold to another world beyond the confines of the tiny room the main character, Mrs. Mallard, inhabits:

There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair.  Into this she (Mrs. Mallard) sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul.  She could see in the open square before her house the tops of tress that were all aquiver with the new spring life.  The delicious breath of rain was in the air.  In the street below, a peddler was crying is wares.  The notes a distant song which some one was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves.  There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met and piled one above the other in the west facing her window.

This passage gives the sense that Mrs. Mallard has newly discovered the "distant people, events, and landscapes" that she had previously found impossible to imagine or realize. 

The Met Exhibition and the CBS video also brings out the fact that the figures in the 19th century paintings becoming mere faceless "window dressings," often with their backs to the viewer, as depicted in the final black and white painting pasted above.  This was most decidely not the case with Johannes Vermeer's earlier paintings.  Although Vermeer did not capture what was happening beyond/outside the windows as these later artists did, he was nevertheless brilliant in experimenting with light and position to capture the essence of the figures themselves, often focusing on re-creating a specific moment -- as in a still life photograph today.  This is poignantly evident in his most famous work, The Girl with the Pearl Earring, which notably provided inspiration for a contemporary novel by Tracy Chevalier, and its 2003 film adaptation starring Scarlet Johannson.

 

I was introduced to this painting through the Chevalier novel and its film adaptation during my freshman or sophomore year at Bryn Mawr, and, about a year later, while on vacation in Rome with my family, saw in person another gorgeous painting by the 15th century Italian painter Guido Reni that is eerily similar.  It is a still life of the teenage Italian noblewoman Beatrice Cenci (a relative of Ginvera Cenci -- the subject of a well-known Leonardo Da Vinci painting done some decades earlier) who was tragically abused by her father, plotted his murder along with her family, and was beheaded after a riveting trial.  I was so ennamored with her portrait that I wrote a short story called "The Daughters of Reni" inspired by the painting for my graduate writing program. 

While neither of these paintings depict windows or the view beyond, they capture the powerful enigmatic glances of two young women who are "on the inside looking out" with the unmistakable romantic yearning and longing for "impossible dreams..." 

A yearning and longing Charles Dickens carried into his own portrait of 21 year old Amy Dorrit, a seamstress born into a debtors' prison who sacrificially endures years of parental abuse and unrequited love in his novel Little Dorrit -- made into a gorgeous BBC T.V series in 2008 (ADORE IT!):