Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist NovelArt of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel. Ruth Bernard Yeazell . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Pp. xx+252.
2010; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 108; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/655421
ISSN1545-6951
Autores Tópico(s)Financial Crisis of the 21st Century
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeBook ReviewRuth Bernard Yeazell, Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel. Ruth Bernard Yeazell . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Pp. xx+252.Francis-Noël ThomasFrancis-Noël ThomasTruman College Search for more articles by this author Truman CollegePDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMore “Dutch painting,” Ruth Bernard Yeazell says, explaining her subtitle, “became [in the nineteenth century] a kind of shorthand for many of the characteristics we now associate with the bourgeois novel” (xv). She reminds us that nineteenth-century critics used this shorthand widely. The first one she cites is Walter Scott reviewing Jane Austen's Emma (1815).1 She recalls that the novelists themselves used the same shorthand and sometimes even called their writing “painting.” Her chapter on Thomas Hardy, for example, pointedly calls attention to the subtitle of his second published novel, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872): “A Rural Painting of the Dutch School.” What did this mean to Hardy? Why did writers of realist novels want to associate their work with painting, and why “Dutch painting”?This book, then, takes the connection between Dutch painting—painting in the seventeenth-century Protestant Dutch Republic—and realist fiction seriously and sets out both to explore a fascinating terrain and to answer some specific questions. “What did the art of the Dutch Golden Age mean to the nineteenth century, and what was at stake when critics invoked its precedent…to justify or attack the realistic fiction of their day? Why should the novelists themselves have been drawn to seventeenth-century Dutch art, and why nonetheless did Dutch painting in fiction remain a source of deep ambivalence even to those who most obviously looked to Dutch painting for a model?” (xv).Realistic fiction is represented here by four novelists—Balzac, George Eliot, Hardy, and Proust—who are examined in successive chapters. Yeazell recalls links between them and regards Proust as a sort of culmination of what the first three achieved in “Dutch painting.” Although she does not explain how she came to settle on these four writers, the choice may have been partly guided by the ease of connecting these writers to Dutch painting and even to specific Dutch paintings. George Eliot and Hardy directly claim the association, at least in some of their early work. Balzac, famous for his striking evocation of setting, was compared to the painters from the outset and either admired for or admonished for “painting.” Proust, in the famous scene of Bergotte's death, brings his invented writer face-to-face with a real painting, Vermeer's View of Delft (1659–60). There the dying writer discovers how he ought to have written. “There is little question,” Yeazell says, “that Proust identified his own art with the ideal to which Bergotte belatedly aspires” (186).Yeazell says that she is addressing “a problem in the history of taste” (xv), and in the course of her discussion she provides historical documentation. She is careful to remind us that nineteenth-century critics and novelists had conceptions of seventeenth-century Dutch painting that are, in some ways, quite different from our own, partly because the range of such painting readily accessible to us was not readily accessible to them. Which paintings did they see? Which ones did they make use of in their writing? She makes a conscientious effort to supply precise answers.She deals with the question of what seventeenth-century Dutch painting meant to the nineteenth century largely by offering two fundamentally opposed views: Ruskin's admittedly eccentric, extravagant, and not especially well-informed excoriation of the whole school; and the encomiums of the exiled French radical democrat Théophile Thoré, who, as one prominent art historian has put it, “viewed politics and art criticism as part of a single whole.”2 Thoré is sometimes credited with rediscovering Vermeer, although he merely made Vermeer—who, as Yeazell notes “ had never been entirely lost” (189)—known to a wide international public for the first time even as he “interpolated into Vermeer's œuvre the works of other painters…[resulting in] a most contradictory image of the painter's style.”3 Thoré, does not, any more than Ruskin, look at Dutch painting with a discriminating eye.Even George Eliot and Proust, both of whom admired Ruskin, dismissed what he had to say about Dutch painting. Proust benefited from what Thoré had written inasmuch as Thoré was instrumental in making Vermeer widely known in France in the mid-nineteenth century—by the time Proust wrote Du côté du chez Swann (1913), Vermeer's name could serve as an emblem of superior taste—but Thoré's praise of Dutch painting for being the product of a society that had liberated the interpretation of human life from the constraints of Christianity and paganism alike certainly had no influence on Balzac, Eliot, or Hardy.Perhaps the contrasting eccentric views of Ruskin and Thoré have such prominence in Art of the Everyday because it is a ruling assumption in this study that “‘Dutch painting’ in fiction [remained] a source of deep ambivalence even to those who most obviously looked to painting for a model” (xv). Yeazell says she will address the question of why this should be so, but I have missed any convincing answer. This deep ambivalence is not mentioned in her treatment of Proust, and the claim itself is not so evident that it can be assumed without argument.That all of the writers she examines in detail have explicit connections with Dutch painting may account for Flaubert's not being among them. Still, Flaubert was said in Sainte-Beuve's famous review of Madame Bovary (1856) to have painted Flemish and Dutch genre scenes, and the author of Madame Bovary is, perhaps even more than Proust, an inventive and ingenious student of these models however he came to know them.Even if there is no one seventeenth-century Dutch painting that can serve as a source for the following passage from Madame Bovary in which “nothing happens,” anyone who has seen paintings of elegant seventeenth-century Dutch “ladies” writing letters or sitting at a writing table will be able to recognize that Flaubert has integrated this familiar subject of Dutch “genre painting” into his novel. He put into this image what lies at the heart of his narrative, Emma Bovary's naïve ambitions and her hopelessly ineffective attempts to fulfill them:Elle portait une robe de chambre tout ouverte, qui laissait voir, entre les revers à châle du corsage, une chemisette plissée avec trois boutons d'or. Sa ceinture était une cordelière à gros glands, et ses petites pantoufles de couleur grenat avaient une touffe de rubans larges, qui s'étalait sur le cou-de-pied. Elle s'était acheté un buvard, une papeterie, un porte-plume et des enveloppes, quoiqu'elle n'eût personne à qui écrire; elle époussetait son étagère, se regardait dans la glace, prenait un livre, puis, rêvant entre les lignes, le laissait tomber sur ses genoux. Elle avait envie de faire des voyages ou de retourner vivre à son couvent. Elle souhaitait à la fois mourir et habiter Paris.4If there is deep ambivalence here, it is not in the novelist. There is no conflict between the movement of narrative and the stasis of painting. This is an example of the way a conflation of images ultimately derived from the tradition of seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting was put to ingenious use in a landmark of nineteenth-century realistic fiction. It does not support the claim that “Dutch realism in the novel is a realism of the past” (162).Over sixty years ago, Erich Auerbach, taking another passage from Madame Bovary, offered what has become a classic analysis of “pictures” in realistic fiction.5 Yeazell does not discuss Flaubert's inventive use of “painting”; she does not mention Auerbach. Art of the Everyday is a serious and welcome book (handsomely produced too) that would have been better had it offered a wider consideration of the ways that painting entered the fabric of realistic fiction and had it been less assured about “deep ambivalence” in the novelists who “painted.” Notes 1Scott's unsigned article appeared in Quarterly Review 14, which is dated October 1815 but was not issued until March 1816. Emma is dated 1816 on its title page but was published in December 1815. Scott does not use the term “Dutch painting” but refers to “the Flemish school of painting” (1). Yeazell notes that “nineteenth-century writers did not often distinguish closely between the Dutch and the Flemish in this connection” (1). Théophile Thoré, with characteristic vigor, complained that French critics confused the Dutch with the Flemish: “Il y a là une hérésie historique et artistique à la fois, un inexplicable oubli de l'histoire, une perversion de la géographie, une vue tout à fait fausse de l'art lui-même” (There is here a heresy at once historical and artistic, an inexplicable forgetting of history, a perversion of geography, a view altogether false of art itself) (Musées de la Hollande, vol. 1, Amsterdam et La Haye: Études sur l'école hollandaise [Paris: Renouard, 1858], 320, my translation). These terms can still cause confusion, as can others such as the Netherlands, Flanders, Holland, and the Dutch Republic. Consider the place names in this sentence: “From Reynolds's journey to Holland and Flanders in 1781 until Marcel Proust's visit to the Netherlands in 1902, travel made possible other resonant encounters with Dutch painting” (xvi). A note distinguishing these terms would have been useful.2Albert Blankert, Vermeer of Delft (Oxford: Phaidon, 1978), 67–68.3Ibid., 69.4“She wore a dressing gown, completely open, showing between the lapels a pleated blouse with three gold buttons. Her belt was a cord with large tassels, and her little slippers the color of garnet had a tuft of wide ribbon that spread over the instep. She had bought herself a blotter, a writing case, a pen holder, and some envelopes, although she had no one to write to; she dusted her shelves, looked at herself in the mirror, took up a book, then, dreaming between the lines, let it fall into her lap. She wanted to travel or to go back to live in her convent. She wanted at once both to die and to live in Paris” (Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary [Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966], 94, my translation).5Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der Abendländischen Literatur (Bern: Fischer-Verlag, 1946). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 108, Number 2November 2010 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/655421 Views: 314Total views on this site © 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected] Crossref reports no articles citing this article.
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