Ruth Bernard Yeazell , Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist NovelArt of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel by Ruth Bernard YeazellReview by: Francis-Noël   ThomasModern Philology, Vol. 108, No. 2 (November 2010), pp. E135-E138Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/655421 .

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B O O K R E V I E W

Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel. Ruth BernardYeazell. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Pp. xxþ252.

‘‘Dutch painting,’’ Ruth Bernard Yeazell says, explaining her subtitle, ‘‘be-came [in the nineteenth century] a kind of shorthand for many of the char-acteristics we now associate with the bourgeois novel’’ (xv). She reminds usthat nineteenth-century critics used this shorthand widely. The first one shecites is Walter Scott reviewing Jane Austen’s Emma (1815).1 She recalls thatthe novelists themselves used the same shorthand and sometimes evencalled their writing ‘‘painting.’’ Her chapter on Thomas Hardy, for exam-ple, pointedly calls attention to the subtitle of his second published novel,Under the Greenwood Tree (1872): ‘‘A Rural Painting of the Dutch School.’’What did this mean to Hardy? Why did writers of realist novels want to asso-ciate their work with painting, and why ‘‘Dutch painting’’?

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1. Scott’s unsigned article appeared in Quarterly Review 14, which is dated October1815 but was not issued until March 1816. Emma is dated 1816 on its title page but waspublished in December 1815. Scott does not use the term ‘‘Dutch painting’’ but refers to‘‘the Flemish school of painting’’ (1). Yeazell notes that ‘‘nineteenth-century writers didnot often distinguish closely between the Dutch and the Flemish in this connection’’ (1).Theophile Thore, with characteristic vigor, complained that French critics confused theDutch with the Flemish: ‘‘Il y a la une heresie historique et artistique a la fois, un inexpli-cable oubli de l’histoire, une perversion de la geographie, une vue tout a fait fausse del’art lui-meme’’ (There is here a heresy at once historical and artistic, an inexplicable for-getting of history, a perversion of geography, a view altogether false of art itself) (Museesde la Hollande, vol. 1, Amsterdam et La Haye: Etudes sur l’ecole hollandaise [Paris: Renouard,1858], 320, my translation). These terms can still cause confusion, as can others such asthe Netherlands, Flanders, Holland, and the Dutch Republic. Consider the place namesin this sentence: ‘‘From Reynolds’s journey to Holland and Flanders in 1781 until MarcelProust’s visit to the Netherlands in 1902, travel made possible other resonant encounterswith Dutch painting’’ (xvi). A note distinguishing these terms would have been useful.

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This book, then, takes the connection between Dutch painting—paint-ing in the seventeenth-century Protestant Dutch Republic—and realist fic-tion seriously and sets out both to explore a fascinating terrain and to an-swer some specific questions. ‘‘What did the art of the Dutch Golden Agemean to the nineteenth century, and what was at stake when critics in-voked its precedent . . . to justify or attack the realistic fiction of their day?Why should the novelists themselves have been drawn to seventeenth-century Dutch art, and why nonetheless did Dutch painting in fiction re-main a source of deep ambivalence even to those who most obviouslylooked to Dutch painting for a model?’’ (xv).

Realistic fiction is represented here by four novelists—Balzac, GeorgeEliot, Hardy, and Proust—who are examined in successive chapters. Yea-zell recalls links between them and regards Proust as a sort of culminationof what the first three achieved in ‘‘Dutch painting.’’ Although she doesnot explain how she came to settle on these four writers, the choice mayhave been partly guided by the ease of connecting these writers to Dutchpainting and even to specific Dutch paintings. George Eliot and Hardydirectly claim the association, at least in some of their early work. Balzac,famous for his striking evocation of setting, was compared to the paintersfrom the outset and either admired for or admonished for ‘‘painting.’’Proust, in the famous scene of Bergotte’s death, brings his invented writerface-to-face with a real painting, Vermeer’s View of Delft (1659–60). Therethe dying writer discovers how he ought to have written. ‘‘There is littlequestion,’’ Yeazell says, ‘‘that Proust identified his own art with the ideal towhich Bergotte belatedly aspires’’ (186).

Yeazell says that she is addressing ‘‘a problem in the history of taste’’(xv), and in the course of her discussion she provides historical documen-tation. She is careful to remind us that nineteenth-century critics andnovelists had conceptions of seventeenth-century Dutch painting that are,in some ways, quite different from our own, partly because the range ofsuch painting readily accessible to us was not readily accessible to them.Which paintings did they see? Which ones did they make use of in theirwriting? She makes a conscientious effort to supply precise answers.

She deals with the question of what seventeenth-century Dutch paint-ing meant to the nineteenth century largely by offering two fundamen-tally opposed views: Ruskin’s admittedly eccentric, extravagant, and notespecially well-informed excoriation of the whole school; and the enco-miums of the exiled French radical democrat Theophile Thore, who, asone prominent art historian has put it, ‘‘viewed politics and art criticismas part of a single whole.’’2 Thore is sometimes credited with rediscover-ing Vermeer, although he merely made Vermeer—who, as Yeazell notes

2. Albert Blankert, Vermeer of Delft (Oxford: Phaidon, 1978), 67–68.

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‘‘had never been entirely lost’’ (189)—known to a wide international pub-lic for the first time even as he ‘‘interpolated into Vermeer’s œuvre theworks of other painters . . . [resulting in] a most contradictory image ofthe painter’s style.’’3 Thore, does not, any more than Ruskin, look atDutch painting with a discriminating eye.

Even George Eliot and Proust, both of whom admired Ruskin, dis-missed what he had to say about Dutch painting. Proust benefited fromwhat Thore had written inasmuch as Thore was instrumental in makingVermeer widely known in France in the mid-nineteenth century—by thetime Proust wrote Du cote du chez Swann (1913), Vermeer’s name couldserve as an emblem of superior taste—but Thore’s praise of Dutch paint-ing for being the product of a society that had liberated the interpreta-tion of human life from the constraints of Christianity and paganismalike certainly had no influence on Balzac, Eliot, or Hardy.

Perhaps the contrasting eccentric views of Ruskin and Thore havesuch prominence in Art of the Everyday because it is a ruling assumption inthis study that ‘‘‘Dutch painting’ in fiction [remained] a source of deepambivalence even to those who most obviously looked to painting for amodel’’ (xv). Yeazell says she will address the question of why this shouldbe so, but I have missed any convincing answer. This deep ambivalence isnot mentioned in her treatment of Proust, and the claim itself is not soevident that it can be assumed without argument.

That all of the writers she examines in detail have explicit connectionswith Dutch painting may account for Flaubert’s not being among them.Still, Flaubert was said in Sainte-Beuve’s famous review of Madame Bovary(1856) to have painted Flemish and Dutch genre scenes, and the authorof Madame Bovary is, perhaps even more than Proust, an inventive and in-genious student of these models however he came to know them.

Even if there is no one seventeenth-century Dutch painting that canserve as a source for the following passage from Madame Bovary in which‘‘nothing happens,’’ anyone who has seen paintings of elegant seven-teenth-century Dutch ‘‘ladies’’ writing letters or sitting at a writing table willbe able to recognize that Flaubert has integrated this familiar subject ofDutch ‘‘genre painting’’ into his novel. He put into this image what lies atthe heart of his narrative, Emma Bovary’s naıve ambitions and her hope-lessly ineffective attempts to fulfill them:

Elle portait une robe de chambre tout ouverte, qui laissait voir, entre lesrevers a chale du corsage, une chemisette plissee avec trois boutons d’or.Sa ceinture etait une cordeliere a gros glands, et ses petites pantoufles decouleur grenat avaient une touffe de rubans larges, qui s’etalait sur le cou-de-pied. Elle s’etait achete un buvard, une papeterie, un porte-plume et

3. Ibid., 69.

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des enveloppes, quoiqu’elle n’eut personne a qui ecrire; elle epoussetaitson etagere, se regardait dans la glace, prenait un livre, puis, revant entreles lignes, le laissait tomber sur ses genoux. Elle avait envie de faire desvoyages ou de retourner vivre a son couvent. Elle souhaitait a la fois mouriret habiter Paris.4

If there is deep ambivalence here, it is not in the novelist. There is noconflict between the movement of narrative and the stasis of painting.This is an example of the way a conflation of images ultimately derivedfrom the tradition of seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting was putto ingenious use in a landmark of nineteenth-century realistic fiction. Itdoes not support the claim that ‘‘Dutch realism in the novel is a realismof the past’’ (162).

Over sixty years ago, Erich Auerbach, taking another passage fromMadame Bovary, offered what has become a classic analysis of ‘‘pictures’’in realistic fiction.5 Yeazell does not discuss Flaubert’s inventive use of‘‘painting’’; she does not mention Auerbach. Art of the Everyday is a seriousand welcome book (handsomely produced too) that would have beenbetter had it offered a wider consideration of the ways that paintingentered the fabric of realistic fiction and had it been less assured about‘‘deep ambivalence’’ in the novelists who ‘‘painted.’’

Francis-Noel ThomasTruman College

4. ‘‘She wore a dressing gown, completely open, showing between the lapels a pleatedblouse with three gold buttons. Her belt was a cord with large tassels, and her little slip-pers the color of garnet had a tuft of wide ribbon that spread over the instep. She hadbought herself a blotter, a writing case, a pen holder, and some envelopes, although shehad no one to write to; she dusted her shelves, looked at herself in the mirror, took up abook, then, dreaming between the lines, let it fall into her lap. She wanted to travel or togo back to live in her convent. She wanted at once both to die and to live in Paris’’ (Gus-tave Flaubert, Madame Bovary [Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966], 94, my translation).

5. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der Abendlandischen Literatur (Bern:Fischer-Verlag, 1946).

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