What Might Have Been…

In the year 1895, Vernon Lee visited the American artist Mary Cassatt at her home in Mesnil-Theribus, about an hour’s journey northwest of Paris. Cassatt had been creating some very remarkable prints and etchings, the majority of which were in the Japanese style that was very popular at that time, but rendered with her own distinctive style and treatment. She asked if Lee would consider writing brief introductions or thoughts about some of her prints, as she thought to collect them in a book for publication.

After the death of her mother in 1895, Cassatt abandoned the idea of a book, and made no more prints of that kind. Vernon Lee never wrote the little essays or reviews of the prints – until now. Writing in the style of Vernon Lee, often with direct quotes from Lee’s works on art, aesthetics, sense perception and the “new science” of psychology, Mary Burns has carefully crafted essays that might have been written by Vernon Lee herself. Complete with color plates of each of the “Set of Ten” prints for which Cassatt has now become famous, this little book of essays will delight readers familiar with Lee’s work, and serve to introduce Vernon Lee to those who have never read the work of this amazing Victorian / Modern intellectual woman.

Click here to purchase this book.

Quotes from “The Psychology of an Art Writer” used in the book.

The quotes are in green.

From the Introduction:

In my youth, I would write about a work of art — substituting the processes of one art for those of another, turning visions into words, in order to distill an essence of it, an affective halo that would reproduce in the reader the feelings awoken in me by the painting or statue.

Mother’s Kiss, Second Viewing

And again, I am drawn to the open planes of the child’s body, the Mother’s hands and neck kerchief. When I was young, I was brought up in unusual isolation, and I had very little taste for grooming and dressing myself, but furniture and the details of the house began to attract my attention as early as thirteen. I never had the least taste for the objet d’art, by which I mean bric-a-brac, but as I grew older, I came increasingly under the tyranny of line and color when it came to the objects around me. I began to look at art, particularly statues and paintings of the human form, and loved them for the arrangement of planes, independently of anatomical structure. In this print, the astonishing rendering of the Mother’s hair is a convolution of overlapping planes of light and shadow, and is thus, for me, a complete delight to behold and contemplate.

In the Omnibus, Second Viewing

With this second look, I find myself paying more attention to the sketched-in background, like the view seen through windows in a Renaissance protrait, of far hills and trees and roads. A bit of an acompaniment of Brahms lilts in my brain: Wie ist doch die Welt so schön. How beautiful the World is, indeed! I find I am beginning to care for background—all beyond the empty middle of a picture. The rounded edges of the river banks hold the women and child in a loose embrace within the triptych of the window frames, curving in concert with the rounded shoulders of the Nurse, and the whole, amusingly rounded ball of infant clothing.

Maternal Caress, First Viewing

As I recall from my art-observation notes made at the turn of the century (I have been re-reading my Vatican Galleries Diary from 1902), I am more keenly aware of my own feelings and state of mind at this moment than I am of the properties of the art work I am observing. For reasons unrelated, I find myself with strong palpitations, a general sense of cat’s fur brushed the wrong way. And a tune—I don’t know what—apparently a bit of symphony, beating itself out inside me. I cannot concentrate on the print, and am subtly aware of a curious impatience with the subject.

The Bath, First Viewing

A woman in a yellow dress with sprigs of black is testing the temperature of the water in a blue tub prior to bathing the baby. That is the “subject” of this print. Normally, when we look at a picture or statue, we think the subject, and feel the form, and may express the first in rich and varied language intelligible to everyone, while we only indicate the effect of the other on us in vague terms not much more than translations of gestures and cries, ‘I love!’ or ‘I’d rather never see it again,’ etc.  I think the easiest thing to find out whether one likes is the colour. Certain blues and lilacs, for instance, catch me at once with a sense of slight bodily rapture, unlocalised but akin to that of tastes and smells. In this case, I find the yellow color of the woman’s dress horrid, off-putting, reminiscent of mustard gone bad in the hot sun.

Woman Bathing, Second Viewing

From the age of fifteen onward, I can remember often posing myself the question of what exactly made the difference between the human figure in reality and in its painted representation. Without being able to formulate an answer, I realized that art had a special way of translating the anatomical structure into lines and planes, and this metamorphosis, whose nature I couldn’t at all guess, pleased me even more.

This is of course often more distinguishable, these planes and lines, when one is looking at a portrait close up,

The Letter, First Viewing

For me, this is the finest of the set of ten prints which I have undertaken to review. Not only does that strong and deep blue predominate, giving the whole an oceanic presence, but the subject itself, The Letter, resonates most strongly with my own sensibilities. I am a literary creature first and foremost, and have been from the beginning of my consciousness. I have come to believe that my youthful literary activities distracted my attention from actual artwork, in that I strove to extract its subject matter and insert it in a parade of associations, filling my verbal consciousness with whatever would lead me to latch onto anything that could lend itself to description or symbolism. Later in life, I was destined to eventually enjoy art in a much more direct and intimate fashion, and to see it take a place in my life analogous to music, landscapes, and all those objects and individuals in my daily surroundings that escaped finer classification. The act of writing—and writing a letter especially—is our attempt to convey to another human creature somewhat of our thoughts, feelings, experiences, pain and joy.

The Letter, Second Viewing

The intimacy of this picture—note the tender curls of hair on her forehwad—like all great pictures is made to be seen at several goes. You possess the whole; but you also possess these exquisite details. These things are made for leisurely living with, not to make one bang! Impression with a visual image banged into your brain like a seal on wax. How utterly have we separated art from living life!