About the Paintings
About the Paintings
Redon spent the first half of his career working exclusively in black and white, convinced that color wasn't his medium. Then, in his fifties, he discovered pastel and oil, and everything changed. Evocation of Roussel belongs to that late "period of light": a man dissolving into floating flowers and apricot clouds, painted not as the world looks but as it feels from the inside. Redon called his method "placing the visible at the service of the invisible," which is as good a definition of creative writing as any. For students about to be asked to make something from nothing, this image offers permission: strange is not wrong, imagination is not indulgence, and the most honest pictures of a person might be the ones that look nothing like them.
In 1766, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing used this very subject (Laocoön and the serpents) as the centerpiece of his Laokoon, arguing that painting and poetry operate in fundamentally different dimensions: painting occupies das Nebeneinander, the side-by-side simultaneity of space, while poetry unfolds through das Nacheinander, the one-after-another sequence of time. El Greco's canvas freezes a single, unbearable instant: the priest's body mid-agony, the Trojan Horse a tiny, ominous detail receding into the golden distance. This forces the viewer to reconstruct the entire narrative arc from one suspended moment.
Joyce understood this too: the "Proteus" episode of Ulysses, in which Stephen Dedalus walks the beach wrestling with nacheinander and nebeneinander as modes of perception, directly echoes Lessing's framework. The painting is also a story about the cost of correct interpretation: Laocoön saw through the Trojan Horse, told the truth, and was destroyed for it. What is the cost of seeing clearly?
Henry Ossawa Tanner's mother had escaped enslavement via the Underground Railroad; his middle name honored the Kansas town where John Brown launched his abolitionist campaign. Tanner studied under Thomas Eakins, won prizes, and still could not find a gallery in America willing to represent a Black artist on equal terms. So in 1891, he moved to Paris where he was judged on his work rather than his race. He never came back.
The Seine is a small, luminous plein-air sketch he painted for a friend eleven years into that exile: the city glowing at dusk in peach and gold, the river holding the light, the skyline rendered in plum and shadow. It is a beautiful painting made by someone who had to cross an ocean to be allowed to make it, which is precisely the kind of story that belongs at the center of an Ethnic Studies classroom.
It should also be noted that this painting is a story of what was lost when intolerance and racism triumphed over acceptance.
Two figures in a cramped, shadow-filled studio: an older artist holds something up for a younger one to study, both rendered present but half-dissolved in the darkness around them. The scene could be Stephen Dedalus and any of the mentors, priests, or father-figures he spends A Portrait of the Artist escaping, or the version of himself in Ulysses who has already escaped and is not sure what comes next. Joyce was obsessed with the cost of becoming an artist in a city that wanted its young people to stay small, stay Irish, stay Catholic; Daumier's painting captures that same interior drama of transmission and resistance, the moment when craft is offered and the young artist must decide whether to accept it on someone else's terms. The painting is also, simply, Joycean in atmosphere: urban, intimate, lit from an unseen source, and deeply preoccupied with what it takes to see clearly.