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Picturing "Samuel Richardson": Francis Hayman and the Intersections of Word and Image

2002; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 14; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ecf.2002.0033

1911-0243

Janet E. Aikins,

Visual Culture and Art Theory

Picturing "Samuel Richardson": Francis Hayman and the Intersections ofWord and Image Janet E. Aikins Paul Klee said, beautifully and movingly, that art does not render the visible but renders visible, which means that we see by means of art something not to be seen in other ways, something in effect that must be made visible. So art attains here the level ofthought, and the artwork is a thought given a kind ofsensuous embodiment.1 Viewing art as the "sensuous embodiment" of thought to which we would not otherwise have access invites a fresh look at Francis Hayman's portrait of the novelist and printer Samuel Richardson with his family (figure 1). Precisely what does Hayman "embody," in Arthur C. Danto's sense, within this image completed at some time early in the 1740s when Richardson himself was actively engaged in writing, revising, and printing Pamela? Hayman was among the immediate spectators of that event in literary history. Is Richardson 's act of producing the verbal text of Pamela, then, in some way "rendered visible" in Hayman's painted image? In the past two decades, Norman Bryson, Mieke BaI, Peter Wagner , and others have forged radical links between the disciplines of literary analysis and visual art theory in order to rethink the interrelations between verbal and visual expression and representation. In 1 Arthur C. Danto, "Description and the Phenomenology ofPerception," Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation, ed. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (NewYork: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 211. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 14, Numbers 3-4, April-July 2002 466EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION an essay summarizing the state of this collective project, Wagner offers useful distinctions among three terms now used to describe the intersections of word and image. He first identifies "ekphrasis," a term that originated in the field of rhetoric, as not merely the verbal description of the subject matter in a picture but "all verbal commentary /writing (poems, critical assessments, art historical accounts) on images," as well as "what Wolfgang Kemp terms 'the ars conversationis of the eighteenth century, i.e., the public discussion (in coffee houses and taverns) of art works and the mentalités that informed it." By that definition, the present essay itself is "ekphrastic" in method, as were the conversations, now entirely lost to us, that took place between Hayman and Richardson. Wagner distinguishes "ekphrasis" from the "iconotext," or "the use of (byway of reference or allusion, in an explicit or implicit way) an image in a text or vice versa." Finally, and most relevant here, is his definition of "intermediality ": "the 'intertextual' use of a medium (painting) in another medium (prose fiction)" which can include iconotexts but also the actual insertion of a book illustration, for example, into a printed verbal text.2 Each of these terms helps interpreters describe the meaning, visual content, or experiential dynamic ofworks ofvisual art through the medium of words. W.J.T. Mitchell, however, raises the following concern: "The very notion of a theory of pictures suggests an attempt to master the field of visual representation with verbal discourse ," thereby unaccountably privileging the truth value of "word" over "image." As an alternative, Mitchell proposes, "But suppose we reversed the power relations of 'discourse' and 'field' and attempted to picture theory" instead. His rationale lies, in part, in his "realization 2 See "Introduction: Ekphrasis, Iconotexts, and Intermediality—the State(s) of the Art(s)," in Icons—Texts—Iconotexts: Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality, ed. Peter Wagner (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1996), pp. 13, 14, 17. See also a special issue of CriticalInquiry 6:3 (1980), devoted to "The Language of Images"; SpatialForm in Narrative, ed.Jeffrey R. Smitten and Ann Daghistany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981); Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting : The Logic ofthe Gaze (London: Macmillan, 1983); W.J.T. Mitchell, IconOlogy: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History : Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Mieke BaI, Reading "Rembrandt": Beyond the Word-Image Opposition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); J. Hillis Miller, Illustration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); Peter Wagner...