English 1575
Twentieth Century Literature
Assignment One
Art from Virginia Woolf's Time |
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| Throughout much of To the Lighthouse, we return to Lily Briscoe's painting and Virginia Woolf's elusive references to what it might look like. One important precursor to Lily's painting is the Pieta, a type of religious painting recurring in the work of numerous artists. As Bankes considers it, "Mother and child then—objects of universal venearation, and in this case the mother was famous for her beauty—might be reduced, he pondered, to a purple shadow without irreverence" (52). |  |
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Leonardo da Vinci's "Madonna Litta," part of a long tradition of paintings of the Virgin Mary and child. Artists often replaced the Christ child with the dead adult Christ as another form of adoration. |
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Titian's Pieta, c. 1577 (notice the window in the background) In the nineteenth century, artists experimented repeatedly with windows in their paintings, because they were fascinated with the painting's own status as a window to the world. Manet, however, painted the window as an opaque, mysterious background to his family scene. |
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Matisse returned to the image of the window repeatedly in his painting. Consider his 1908 painting "Harmony in Red". |
| The artist whose style most resembles Woolf's descriptions of Lily's painting is perhaps Paul Cézanne. He was a post-impressionist who reduced his landscapes to angular forms such as in this painting of Mont St. Victoire from 1904-1906. |  |
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Of course, Lily would have been painting some time between 1910 and 1913, so her contemporaries would have been approaching the cubist form like Picasso. See the painting "Woman with a Guitar" from 1913 below. |
And, Picasso's 1912 painting titled "Aficionado". All scans are from the Artchive. |
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February 13, 2001