ABSTRACT
In an oft-quoted remark, an aging Degas acknowledged that: “In our beginnings, Fantin, Whistler and I were on the same path, the road from Holland.”1 Degas’s imposing The Bellelli Family (Plate 22) and Whistler’s smaller-scaled but equally compelling At the Piano (Plate 15) attest not only to the allure that seventeenth-century Dutch interiors held for both artists but also reveal strikingly similar processes of selection and adaptation of its lessons. Both paintings are portraits of the artist’s family and are imbued with deep, psychological resonances that bespeak intimacy with the sitters portrayed. In effect, the domestic interior doubles as a domain for psychic interiority, a metonomyic substitution that fuses subject and object – as well as artist and viewer – sundering the division between objectively rendered architecture and subjectively experienced space. The painted interior assumes liminal status and complex signification as objects encode a multiplicity of meanings. Both images portray the room as a context to evaluate whether the occupants are ensconced within a “felicitious space,” to borrow a phrase from Gaston Bachelard,2 or whether they are disconnected and uncomfortable within the space, using the room and its contents as text to read. In each painting, the middle-class interior functions like a “topography of our intimate being,”3 a second skin enveloping its occupants and delineating the boundaries between public and private self. For Whistler and Degas, Dutch art served as catalyst and filter that linked an idealized past with the very pulse of contemporary experience to forge a modern conception of portraiture.
