She appears to be staring down towards the floor, off the left of the canvas. Her right hand rests against a wooden cabinet which is in front of her. Her left forearm rests on a small stool or chair, over which is draped a dark brown cloak or coat. Her hair is cropped short, she wears a white shift which has dropped off her left shoulder, and her face is obscured in the dark. The woman is at the left, partly kneeling down, and facing away from the man. Wikimedia Commons.ĭegas’ Interior (1868-9), also known as The Interior and even The Rape, appears strongly narrative, but has so far defied all attempts to produce a reading consistent with its details.Ī man and a woman are in a bedroom together. Edgar Degas (1834–1917), Interior (‘The Rape’) (1868-9), oil on canvas, 81.3 x 114.3 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA. That same year, Edgar Degas started work on his own detective story. Auguste Dupin tales became very popular across Europe when they were published from 1841 onwards, and in 1868 Émile Gaboriau’s serialised detective story Monsieur Lecoq shot to fame throughout France. For all the painting tells us, the woman could continue down the slippery slope to prostitution: we’re encouraged to speculate and debate, and people did on a surprising scale.Įdgar Allan Poe’s C. It brings hope without any resolution, and doesn’t even commit itself to being a moment of change. The image provides detailed references to her past, but leads to no conclusion about her future. Hunt leads us to imagine that this kept mistress has had a religious moment, seeing the route to her redemption as her conscience is awakened. For Hunt this is associated with a verse from the Old Testament book of Proverbs: “As he that taketh away a garment in cold weather, so is he that singeth songs to an heavy heart.” Ironically, his model was his girlfriend at the time, Annie Miller, an uneducated barmaid who was only sixteen herself. The couple have been singing together from Thomas Moore’s Oft in the Stilly Night when she appears to have undergone some revelatory experience, causing her to rise. The room itself is decorated as gaudily as the piano, in poor taste. By the hem of her dress is her lover’s discarded glove, symbolising her ultimate fate when he discards her into prostitution. On top of the gaudy upright piano is a clock. At the right edge is a tapestry with which she whiles away the hours, and her wools below form a tangled web in which she is entwined. Her companion, a cat, is under the table, where it has caught a bird with a broken wing, a symbol of her plight. This is, therefore, extra-marital.Īround them are signs that she is a kept mistress with time on her hands. They’re clearly a couple in an intimate relationship, but conspicuous by its absence is any wedding ring on the fourth finger of the woman’s left hand, which is at the focal point of the painting. Half-risen from the man’s lap is a young woman who stares absently into the distance. It shows a fashionable young man seated at a piano in a small if not cramped house in the leafy suburbs of London, in reality Saint John’s Wood. As with most masterly narrative paintings, its story is assembled from a multitude of clues which are to be found in the image. © The Tate Gallery and Photographic Rights © Tate (2016), CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported), Īs far as I can discover, one of the earliest major paintings which intentionally lacks narrative closure is William Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience, which he painted during the period 1851-53. William Holman Hunt (1827-1910), The Awakening Conscience (1851-53), oil on canvas, 76.2 x 55.9 cm, The Tate Gallery (Presented by Sir Colin and Lady Anderson through the Friends of the Tate Gallery 1976), London. In their heyday, between about 18, such unresolved narrative paintings became so popular that they frequently featured in the press. Among them was the visual equivalent of Poe’s short stories, or a sophisticated riddle, later known as the problem picture, which left the viewer speculating. While those narrative painters who catered for conservative tastes of events like the Salon in Paris stuck to their traditional approach, as seen in winning entries for the Prix de Rome, the more innovative tried new approaches. Readers of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories in the first half of the century, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels towards the end of the century, developed a taste for something rather different. New genres such as detective and ‘mystery’ novels started to challenge the convention of narrative closure. In the nineteenth century, storytelling in literature changed.
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