A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words

I’ve spent this trip trying to look at paintings in a new way.  Rather than viewing them as static images and admiring them primarily as objects, I’ve been looking at them as still frames from a movie.  What has happened, is happening, will happen in the world of the painting?  It is essentially a narrative creation based on the contextual clues in the work.  Painting as story.

Yesterday at the Louvre, we went through the works of the Dutch masters.  I came across a picture that I would have generally passed quickly by if I had been merely looking for the beautiful.  I stopped though, looked for a moment, and a compelling story emerged.

The picture was of a portrait being painted.  It is a fairly common motif, perhaps because it not only allows the painter to paint the subject but also themselves.  In this work, there were a lot of people included.  The artist looked at the canvas and held a few brushes.  The subject also looked at the painting and to help the artist had a single brush in his hand.

But there were others there as well.  A family member looked on from behind the subject.  On the left hand side of the scene, there were two servants.  One was busy playing a musical instrument for the enjoyment of everyone.  The other had in his hand a single cup of tea that appears destined for the man whose portrait is painted (why the artist doesn’t get one, I don’t know, perhaps he is just more hired help).

A very ordinary painting all told.  A rich man with the world at his feet.  Surrounded by servants and family as he is immortalized on canvas.

But the artist, perhaps he didn’t appreciate being skipped by the tea service or perhaps because his social conscious pricked him, includes one small detail that is easily missed.  In the background there is either a painting or a window.  It is impossible to tell which.  While everything else is clear and detailed through the small/frame and window things are indistinct and hazy.  All that can be seen are three or four faces that appear to be crying out for help.  It is almost a painting within a painting.

The artist decided that the world of the rich man needed to have the poor at his window.  Perhaps it is an echo of Lazarus and the Rich Man.  Living in lavish luxury, the people in the house are totally unaware of the suffering in the world just outside.

I wonder what happened when the subject picked up the painting.  Did the inclusion of the faces in the frame/window anger him?  Or as in the rest of his life, did his eyes focus mainly on himself and he didn’t notice them at all?