There was an interesting genre in the late Victorian age and British painting known as 'problem pictures'. These were paintings which took a specific matter which used the artefact of painting to paint a riddle the audience had to decipher based on clues in the painting and the tone of the signs (semiotic signs) in the image.
I wrote about this for some of my undergrad, so it remains one of those rabbit holes I never seem to have time to fully complete. They are nowadays known as visual narratives and can be seen as one of the major recipients of the New Woman archetype in their subject matter, quite often.
This was most likely an offshoot of the Pre-Raphelite Brotherhood, whose whole thing was being obssessed with caputuring the idea of the medieval period in art before Raphael (1483-1520) made it poopy. This tracks, as the Tudor family used these kind of riddles and hidden messages in their works to give across the idea of promulgating Tudor mythology to the masses, rather like the role AI plays in social media for influencers today. Many knew it was fake, many knew not. The Tudors saw this gaudy display of wealth and power as a more valid form of portraiture which would solidify the throne of the kingdom of England, as the whole point of commissioning these paintings was to embody the mythos and appropriate station.[1]
So a riddle or two to bolster the lore was par for the course in the minds of Tudor progeny, think for example the Memento Mori skull, or the Eyes and Ears on Elizabeth I's rainbow dress. Yes these were just paintings, but they were also much more than paintings. They were images that were artefacts and therefore signs for the people involved in their creation, commission and construction. It was tavern philosophy masquerading as highbrow art in which the messages implicit and explicit became as important in the appropriate reading and comprehension of the visual narrative before the person viewing it. The weird skull is both a reminder of 'funny squinty person, yes you too have an expiration date' and a reflection of the need for painting to exist as a part of statecraft. Hans Holbein after all was an established artist for the royal courts of England, which had their own problems at hand like wars with France and building empires.[2][3] For Elizabeth I have better researched this in my musing post on the earlier blog posts.
For the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, image creation was not just painting pretty pictures and beuatiful dead women, it was the idea that painting was a form of higher human endeavour, and that image creation in this way was an almost spiritual form of engaging from one human to another, via the artefact of the visual and image base, through the symbolic, philosophical, allusional and allegoric as the Tudors had done before them. This ran counter to the need for greater accuracy found in most Italian masters work and other Continental artists they may have admired or known, following the British school of thought that art was not meant to be an exact slavish copy of reality, but a window into another reality and projection of symbolism, sign, signifier (the image, e.g. the skull) and signified (the idea, e.g. momento mori).[4] A proposal issued by the likes of medieval philosophers such as Francis Bacon and Ockham of Surrey.[4]
Thus you can end up with ears on dresses, which meant something quite different as a signifed meaning to one person than another for Elizabeth. Elizabeth in this way controlled her visual and state narratives using the power of drama and gossip in the image she crafted to others in her signifiers (The Rainbow portrait for example).
Victorian problem pictures
In this vein, the Problem picture was borne once again as a genre, something inherently known to seasoned artists. Revivals of this began anew in 1850, reaching their height in 1895 and 1914. Modern versions have also appeared in the great algorithms of today.
They stoked new debates about things many people had written to death, aided by the beating of the same poor horse to the mediocre, uninitiated and uneducated elites and mass social media technologies. For the PRB they went by the idea that
to have genuine ideas to express
to study nature attentively, so as to know how to express them
to sympathise with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parodying and learned by rote
most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues.[1]
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They rejected the slavish copying of reality of Raphael and Michelangelos, and instead took up the mantle of the Northern Mannerists and Low Countries artists like The Arnolfini Portrait. These can be seen in the details of Early Netherlandish painting, which was influenced by the taste changes in the patrons of art patrons, who trips to Italy dictated their taste in what was 'highbrow and lowbrow' art. Jan paints based on previous harmonious and human centered figures with human themes and signified themes. Italian renaissance at was instead a study of every mortuary corpse in the morgue. The lowlanders took up this attention to detail by making all of their paintings extremely detailed and full of large sweeping landscapes later taken up by people like Claude Lorraine. [1]
The problem painters wanted people to not be consumer but enjoyers of their work. They were treating their audience as important thinkers in good faith rather than mortals soul vessels only worthy of indulgences as Lorraine thought.
Women in Picture problems
Women in this way became more interesting subjects of their own stories and decision making processes. Something which consuming art historians would do well to understand. Images such as The Prodigal Daughter 1903 [1] sparked debates over the success of the fallen woman, ie women who do sex work and are successful in their endeavours and who use their favours to assist their families and loved ones. The press at the time of course it as a degrading lower class peasant girl trying to gain social clout. The questions though were the wrong ones to ask with the wrong people pointing the wrong fingers in mislead directions.
By 1910, these pictures were mainstays at the British royal academy.[1] Not too sure where I was going with this other than sticking together signifieds and pre-raphaelites, maybe an incursion into the disrupted medieval art tradition of signifiers and referents, but other than that lol. Dunno.
This has been a musing.
Bibliography
[1] https://eclecticlight.co/2016/02/19/the-story-in-paintings-problem-pictures/
[2] https://thehistorypress.co.uk/article/memento-mori-reminding-the-tudors-of-their-mortality/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portraiture_of_Elizabeth_I
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signified_and_signifier
[5]
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