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

[...] the sense of a freedom of contact and appreciation really too big for one [left] such a mark on the very place, the pictures, the frames themselves, the figures within them, the particular parts and features of each, the look of the rich light, the smell of the massively enclosed air, that I have never since renewed the old exposure without renewing again the old emotion and taking up the small scared consciousness. (Autobiography 198) This quotation shows not only the crucial role the Louvre played in his aesthetic development and the effect of art on his perception but also the interplay between picture and reality that characterises Henry James's vision. .As we can see, the concrete physical setting where the pictures were placed, the light and even the frames were just as memorable for him as the paintings themselves. This fusion of art and the living present can be found in his art criticism as well where he always discusses a work of art in context, which means on the one hand the 'contribution' of the surrounding pictures to the quality and interpretation of the one in question, and on the other the larger context, i.e. the gallery itself, the area where the gallery is situated, the audience, the owner of the painting and sometimes even the fee to be paid. (As an example, I can mention James's discussion of the Wallace Collection at Bethnal Green that he wrote for the Atlantic Monthly in 1873 in which we can find all these details, along which he then strings his exhaustive analysis of a number of paintings.) The emphatic interrelationship between art and reality sheds light on the complexity of the painter's eye in Henry James. For it means more than his sensitivity to colours and forms; James's visual sense is strongly connected with his imagination, he does not merely see something but thinks about it. In other words, pictorial elements are never separated from intellectual meaning. In his art criticism, he was most positive about paintings which, in his opinion, showed beauty found by a painter with imagination in an observable reality

, imagination in this case depending on the presence of literary, historical and psychological associations raised in the beholder. That is why the ekphrastic scenes I have selected are so rich, as T hope to show, and are open to various interpretations. The wealth of artistic connotations in James's works makes it really hard to pretend to have found a logical organising principle if you want to analyse certain scenes approaching them from this 125