Painting and literature:

V. Woolfs To the Lighthouse & Tracy Chevaliers Girl with a Pearl Earring

Georgiana Narcisa Ghi Englez-Spaniol An III, Sem I

To the lighthouse
There have always been influences from painting to literature in either techniques or themes, and the representation of the same themes and emotions by using different materials and tools has been a challenge to artists. Some artists tried both forms of art, for example William Blake, one complementing the other. The major difference between these two forms of art reminds of the difference between space and time, since painting is represented in space,
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while literature is represented in time. This means

that they can be perceived differently, painting is perceived instantaneously as a whole, while literature is flowing in time. As regards the two literary works, there are tight connections with painting in both cases: Virginia Wolf, whose sister was a painter and who showed much interest in pictorial techniques, especially post-impressionistic ones, created a character that is a woman painter in the novel To the Lighthouse and also used techniques reminding of postimpressionism. Some critics consider her interest in painting also a reaction to some peoples belief that women cannot paint. This statement is worded by Nick Greene on the beach in To the Lighthouse: women cant paint, women cant write. Tracy Chevaliers novel Girl with a Pearl Earring is obviously inspired by Johannes Vermeer's painting and created after much research. As Virginia Woolfs essays and letters reveal, she felt much admiration for and attraction to paintings and their ability to communicate in silence, she felt the emotions colours and forms can transmit without using words. This had a great impact on her writing which seems to flow like colours from a brush. She wrote in a letter: As a writer, I feel the beauty, whish is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin (in Goldman 138). Woolf, like her sister, Vanessa Bell, shows the same aesthetic preoccupations: their concern with nonphysical experiences, their effort to emphasise feminine experience and their attempt to represent communication between people as material events. All these are related to colour for both artists.

Critics have noticed pictorial and musical influences on her style and a certain rhythm of her writing that brings together the three arts. Gruber considers that into her writing, she infuses now painting and music, two arts distinct from her own. Characteristic of her mature thought and style, she combines structure with rhythm, shape with dark flowingness and permanency in space with the flux of time. (Gruber 123) V.Woolfs sentences in To the Lighthouse, though short and sometimes elliptical, are harmoniously related to each other and flow into each other like the colours on a canvas. This idea is very well illustrated in the following fragment: Lily repeated, turning back, reluctantly again, to her canvas. Heaven be praised for it, the problem of space remained, she thought, taking up her brush again. It glared at her. The whole mass of the picture was poised upon that weight. Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly's wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron. It was to be a thing you could ruffle with your breath; and a thing you could not dislodge with a team of horses. And she began to lay on a red, a grey, and she began to model her way into the hollow there. At the same time, she seemed to be sitting beside Mrs. Ramsay on the beach. (To the Lighthouse) The fragment above shows the flow of Lily Briscoes thoughts while trying to finish Mrs Ramsays portrait, revealing the artists creative suffering and incertitude. It presents the artists feelings in words, and is a description of the painting too. It establishes an interrelation between space and time because it suggests the time needed to fill in the hollow which rather a temporal hollow, than a spatial one, the painting being worked on in Mrs Ramsays absence and Lily had to remember her. Therefore the text is a proof of V.Woolfs ability to render spatial elements and colours into words while demonstrating that women can both paint and write.

The painting Girl with a Pearl Earring is one of Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer's masterworks and as the name implies, uses a pearl earring for a focal point. Today the painting is kept in the Mauritshuis gallery in the Hague. It is sometimes referred to as "the Mona Lisa of the North" or "the Dutch Mona Lisa". In general, very little is known about Vermeer and his works. This painting is signed "IVMeer" but not dated. It is unclear whether this work was commissioned, and if so, by whom. In any case, it is probably not meant as a conventional portrait. More recent Vermeer literature points to the image being a tronie, the Dutch 17thcentury description of a head that was not meant to be a portrait. After the most recent restoration of the painting in 1994 the subtle colour scheme and the intimacy of the girls gaze on to the spectator have been greatly enhanced. On the advice of Victor de Stuers, who for years tried to prevent Vermeer's rare works from being sold to parties abroad, A.A. des Tombe purchased the work at an auction in the Hague in 1881, for only two guilders and thirty cents. At the time, it was in poor condition. Des Tombe had no heirs and donated this and other paintings to the Mauritshuis in 1902. The other novel, Girl with a Pearl

Earring, is a 1999 historical novel written by Tracy Chevalier has a different, historical and more concrete relation to painting. Set in 17th century Delft, Holland, the novel was inspired by Delft school painter Johannes Vermeer's painting Girl with a Pearl Earring. Chevalier presents a fictional account of Vermeer, the model, and the painting. The novel was adapted into a 2003 film of the same name and a 2008 play of the same name.
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The novel has a strong plot and engaging firstperson narrative voice. It centres on Vermeers

prosperous Delft household during the 1660s but also the poorer household of the narrators family. Griet, the quiet and perceptive heroine, is hired as a servant. Later Vermeer employs her as his assistant and eventually has Griet sit for him as a model. He realizes she has a painterly eye and an instinctive affinity emerges between the maid and the master. One character refers to her as wide-eyed, suggesting both her innocence and her keen vision. The novel seems to be concerned more with the perception of art and with emotions and communication that are above words power, yet very well grasped in the painting. The girl seems to understand Vermeers work better than anyone else in his family. She is able to speak to him more and more as an equal and give him advice: The colours fight when they are side by side, sir. The light might change the painting if I clean them (the windows). There needs to be some disorder in the scenery to contrast with the tranquillity. Finally Vermeer says: I had not thought I would learn something from a maid. (Girl with the Pearl Earring) The novel also raises interesting questions about art and patriarchy: Vermeer is a Master both of painting and of all the women in his family. His female models must be totally passive before his gaze as Subject. (Yet his mother-in-law seems to be the power behind his throne!) And while no one in the novel ever enunciates the possibility (we understand how no one then could imagine it!), the novel raises the question of why Griet could not become an artist herself. These two novels demonstrate the fact that arts are interrelated in techniques and themes and they can be sources of inspirations for each other. On the other hand there are many examples of transposition from painting to literature, either descriptions of interpretations for visual images, as there are various visual echoes of literary works, especially films. In the examples presented above, the artists show sensitiveness to both arts.

Bibliography:
Laura Mareike. Writing and filming the painting: Ekphrasis in literature and film. Sager, The University of Texas at Austin. Comparative Literature, 2007. Jane Goldman. The Feminist aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: modernism, postimpressionism, 1999 John Batchelor. Virginia Woolf: the major novels, 1991 Ruth Gruber. Virginia Woolf: the will to create like a woman. NY, Carroll and Graf Publishers, 2005. Tracy Chevalier. Girl with a Pearl Earring. HarperCollins (UK), 1999.