Tome & Plume: Tinge From Artists’ Brush Finds Voice In Authors’ Canvas

A beautiful countenance or a chiselled body, steeled with a few drops of tinges oozing out from the strokes of a brush on the table of an aching heart, has inspired many authors to render their thoughts into words.  The novels – though do not often occupy the theme of those paintings – they explore philosophy, history, sociology, and the condition of man through those brush strokes.  Now that the rainy season is slowly bidding goodbye, you can spend some time in a park or on the banks of the Upper Lake with a few books from thrillers to romance. You may find the ideas of many of them associated with paintings. One such work is Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

A Canadian artist, Frances Richards drew a portrait of Wilde in 1887 in her studio in London. Wilde described the painting as an inspiration behind the novel. Wilde said, “I gave a sitting to a Canadian artist who was staying with some friends of hers and mine in South Kensington. When the sitting was over, and I had looked at the portrait, I said in jest, ‘what a tragic thing it is. This portrait will never grow older, I shall. If it was only the other way! The moment I had said this it occurred to me what a capital plot the idea would make. The result is Dorian Gray.”

Similarly, according to some critics, a novel Rebecca (1938) by Daphne du Maurier resulted from a painting of French artist Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863). The novels of Sir Walter Scot inspired Delacroix so long as he was alive. The painting that inspired Maurier limns a scene from Scot’s novel, Ivanhoe. The beautiful Jewish heroine Rebecca, imprisoned in the castle of Front de Boeuf, is freed and carted off by two enslaved Muslim warriors, and a Christian Knight Boi-Guilbert commanded these two fighters to carry out his orders. Amidst the rumpus, Rebecca remains calm. 

Perhaps, Maurier found the main character of her novel – Rebecca – in the tinges of this painting. A portrait in Pride and Prejudice gives a new turn to the volume – though it is not directly connected to any painting. One of the main characters of the novel, Elizabeth Bennet comes across a portrait of a man with a handsome face which has a stark resemblance with that of Mr Darcy, hero of the tome.

The reader of Pride and Prejudice knows well that in her previous meeting with Mr Darcy, she curtly refuses the proposal to marry him. The face of the portrait sports a benign smile that reminds her of someone she had already met, so she looks at it several times, and returns to the painting again before leaving the room in Pemberly, a fictional country house in an imaginative village Lambton where the picture was kept. Behind English author Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty stands a painting, Maitresse Erzulie, by Haitian artist Hector Hyppolite (1894-1948).

The novel of Smith searches for beauty through this portrait. The idea for another classical work, To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) throws the glimpses of how a brush work can turn into a volume. The novel portrays her meditation on life, love, and struggle for creativity, and nature of memory. Various guests come to stay with the Ramsay family during a summer, and one of them, Lily Briscoe, begins to draw a portrait featuring Mrs Ramsay, centre of attraction of the guests.

Ten years later, when Mr Ramsay dies, Lily returns to the family and finishes the painting which holds life stand still and becomes one of the themes of To the Lighthouse. According to critics, still-life paintings of French artist Paul Cezanne were an inspiration behind: To the Lighthouse.  Latin poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus (BC 65 - BC 8) made a comparison between painting and writing.

This comparison is apt to The Moor’s Last Sigh as a parallel between two forms of art in its quest for freedom of imagination and expression. Rushdie has used the painting The Moor’s Last Sigh by Pradilla Franscisco Ortiz as a metaphor for his novel The Moor’s Last Sigh.  The subject of the narrative is known as Moraes Zogoiby, usually called Moor, who is forced to leave India in a haste to save his life. Only this much portion of the novel is associated with the painting. Else, throughout the volume, individual and family history intertwine with that of India and Europe – mainly the history of Renaissance Spain – from 1492 to 1993.