Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)

Studies - Judit Borbély: The Writer's Paintings and the Painter's Scenes

Ambassadors in the New York Edition, Alvin Langdon Coburn's photograph taken on the basis of detailed instructions from Henry James, and Pissarro's painting of the Pont Royal. Structurally they are the same with the focus on the bridge in both and only the other bank being visible; besides, both the painting and the photo show a boat passing under one of the arches of the bridge and a houseboat. In other words, overall impression and separate details alike seem to be very similar if not completely identical, which is all the more obvious if we add that Lambert Strether's images of Parisian streets during the hero's innumerable walks and especially when he is watching Paris from a balcony strongly remind us of Pissarro's Parisian series. Perhaps the best-known example of a painting that, though not present, plays a central role can also be found in The Ambassadors. It is the small landscape painted by Emile-Charles Lambinet, which enchanted Strether a long time ago at a Boston dealer's, and which he wants to find in the French countryside during his one-day trip. Charles Anderson describes Strether's endeavour as a reverse mirror technique, since in this case it is nature that is expected to reflect art; to which I might add that it is a very strange 'mirror'

—whatever it shows, the reflection cannot be true to the 'model'. For one of the characteristic features of the Barbizon School, to which Lambinet belonged, was a form of generalisation, which means that the artists painted their landscapes in the studio on the basis of sketches made on the spot, consequently, the final painting did not represent a particular place, rather showed its idealised version. In 1872 James saw an exhibition of privately owned paintings by Rousseau, Dupre, Diaz de la Pena, Troyon and Daubigny in the rooms of Messrs. Doll and Richards at 145 Tremont Street, and the enthusiastic review he wrote about 'the admirable aesthetic gifts of the French mind' (The Painter's Eye 43) shows that he regarded the Barbizon landscapists as the masters of modern painting. To illustrate his hero's state of mind and fuse art and reality in rural France, James could have chosen any other picture from the Barbizon landscapes on display in Boston, e.g. a Troyon with a cluster of magnificent oaks, 'with their sturdy foliage just beginning to rust and drop, leaf by leaf, into the rank river-glass, streaked with lingering flowers, at their feet' (The Painter's Eye 43), or a Rousseau with 'an admirable expression of size and space, of 128