ABSTRACT
Breaking the News by John Longstaff, 1887, oil on canvas is published with the permission of the Art Gallery of Western Australia. A great deal of written and spoken discourse is in the form of stories, or word pictures. Newspaper reports, historical records, speeches, jokes and even a conversation between two people create a reality that can be grasped as a whole and recreated in our minds like a scene from a film. As the famous American advertising slogan says, a visual display—whether a painting, a drawing, a cartoon, a photograph or a web-site image—conveys more information at a single glance than the linear narrative of a written or spoken story, however long. The painting is "meaningful" to a large number of people—the reproductions of Breaking the News are by far the most popular of those sold in the shop of the Art Gallery of Western Australia.
