ABSTRACT
This chapter acknowledges that the conditions outlined in the previous chapters may seem to constitute an insurmountable burden to gaining historical understanding from paintings, but it argues that this is not so. In the end, people tell stories about paintings and those who make, view, and use them. This study concludes with one such story, an informal one that existed in the tradition of painters’ own stories about themselves and their predecessors. The artists concerned are Paul Cézanne (about whose paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire the story was told), Patrick Heron (the originator of the story), and David Ward, to whom Heron told it, and who, in turn, told it to the author of this book. This oral transmission reminds readers, in conclusion, of the fragility of access to the past, and the frailty of history, for if history is not the past, neither is it what historians alone say it is any more than art is what artists claim art to be. This chapter refers to scholars Erle Loran, John Rewald, Stephanie Ross, and Richard Wollheim; and artists Paul Cézanne, Patrick Heron, Henri Matisse, Giorgio Vasari, and David Ward.
