LitSalon regulars know how meaningful it can be to discuss great works of literature. By engaging with the texts and hearing the thoughts of fellow readers, we can gain a deeper understanding of writers such as Joyce, Proust, Shakespeare — and of ourselves. Recently I have been working with the London LitSalon to develop new studies that will help participants enjoy similar experiences with great art and learn to ‘read’ paintings more deeply.

My name is Sean Forester. I am a classically trained oil painter who studied at the Florence Academy of Art, and I also studied literature at Cambridge after graduating from the Great Books program at St. John’s College in the United States. Currently based near San Francisco, I travel to Europe regularly and, as a new LitSalon facilitator, my aim is to invite you to join me in exploring the language of art: composition, colour, symbolism, visual narrative and more, as well as considering the cultural context in which artworks were created. Together we will look closely at paintings by artists such as Van Eyck, Titian, Rembrandt and Monet, and consider the question: How do the artist’s techniques impact the ideas in the artwork and the emotions we feel?

Unfortunately, my first LitSalon Study: Reading Great Paintings, due to take place in-person at London’s National Gallery in April, did not run entirely according to plan. When I developed Covid on arriving in London from Italy, we tried postponing by a week, but Covid persisted and eventually we had to move the study online using Zoom.

As a group, we looked at paintings ranging in style and period from Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Portrait to Monet’s Water Lilies, via works including Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne and Rembrandt’s Woman Bathing in a Stream. Zoom provided a different experience from the one originally envisaged, but we received positive feedback from those who were able to make the revised date. Anyone who wasn’t part of the event can get a flavour of the study from this link: https://padlet.com/k5jyty77dd/london-literary-salon-at-the-national-gallery-kd8d1jgsmy4w0274.

In The Arnolfini Portrait Van Eyck used a wood panel, a tempera underpainting and many thin layers of glazing in oil paint with tiny brushes. The painting has a perfect central balance, with the figures and the objects balanced across a vertical centre line. Van Eyck painted with astonishing precision, portraying carefully selected details that were likely intended to be significant, even symbolic, opening the work to a variety of interpretation. As one of the first genre paintings in the history of Western art, I feel The Arnolfini Portrait was highly influential on later artists such as Vermeer.

Bacchus and Ariadne is a dynamic painting, a feast for the senses. Titian used almost every colour available to him in 16th-century Venice. The composition is not centrally balanced like the Van Eyck, but rather uses an off-centre “steelyard balance” (as explained by H. R. Poore in his book Pictorial Composition). We can observe how all the warm colours are on the right side of the painting (except for the red sash on Ariadne), while all the cool colours are on the left (except for blue robe on the woman playing the cymbals). The way the story from Ovid is depicted is interesting: the meeting of Bacchus and Ariadne is shown by their eyes meeting across empty space, reinforced by strong diagonal lines. The tiny ship on the ocean horizon alludes to Theseus’ abandonment of Ariadne, while the circle of stars in the sky alludes to the metamorphosis she will experience after joining with the god Bacchus.

In his later work, such as Woman Bathing in a Stream and An Elderly Man as St. Paul, Rembrandt’s painting techniques are essentially the opposite of Van Eyck’s. He worked on canvas instead of wood, painted with thick impasto paint and used large brushes. In comparing Rembrandt with Van Eyck we can ask, “How does technique make possible (and also limit) their artistic vision? How does it impact what we feel when we look at their paintings?”

Finally, we can move forward to the nineteenth century to look at paintings by Claude Monet, the master of French Impressionism. Around 1800, tube paints became available and modern chemistry created many more colours. Artists such as Corot begin to paint en plein air. Monet embraced this, spending most of his time outdoors painting scenes in different weather and lighting conditions. In doing so, he created some striking innovations. He realised that shadows are not brown, but full of colour — purple, blue, red — he also realised that a white shirt is not simply white, that white has colours such as yellow, pink, blue and green, within it. At this time, colour theory began to be developed and Monet embraced that too, using complements and split-complements in his paintings. He also used broken, layered brush work to a greater degree than any artist before him, employing these techniques to explore all the ways a painter can see and feel about the landscape. Rather than traditional subject matter, he explored the play of colour and light and the movement between realism, impression and abstraction. In Snow Scene at Argenteuil we can see the different colours in snow and Monet’s use of a blue-orange complementary colour scheme. In Water Lilies and Water Lilies at Sunset, we see a complex use of complementary pairs (blue/orange, red/green, yellow/purple) as Monet explores the visual impressions created by lilies, surface water, deep water, and reflections.

Looking closely at colour, composition and painting technique provides a strong foundation for exploring our ideas and emotions about a given artwork. Clearly Rembrandt is a great artist because of the depth of his vision — he seems to see into the human heart — as well as his technical skill. This is where group discussions can be so rewarding, as people share their ideas and emotional responses, and I look forward to having more opportunities to explore this with members of the LitSalon – in-person and online – in the future.