Between Interior and Exterior, Emblematic Pictorial Windows

In a Platonic way, and according to the Russian poet Andrei Bely, we might figure the present instant like a mobile window between the past and the future, open toward a virtual eternity. Usually though, windows possess a spatial rather than a temporal value. With an easier symbolism, they may work as a communicating interface, between an outer space and an inner one. For instance, let's remember a metaphorical and mystical description of the “House of Love” in the Bible, Ezekiel's Book, Chapters 36-41: “And there were windows in it and/ In its arches around to stand/ Like those windows before it and/ The length was fifty arm lengths and/ The width twenty-five arm lengths grand...” (40:25, and passim).

No wonder, also for their light and shade effects, windows were not only descriptive details, but also inspiring subject matters in the artworks of not a few painters. Indeed, those depicted windows seem to possess both a spatial and temporal value. At once, they frame or illuminate an internal scene or external landscape depending on the point of view, and fix that view almost for ever, preserving it from the lapsing of time. In sum, it's this will to representation which allows us to watch those scenes or admire those landscapes, often so long after. That's a wish of representation and of “re-presentation”, at the same time.

Above, two examples dating to the age of Baroque painting: on the left, Two Women at a Window by the Spanish Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (National Gallery of Art, Washington; ca. 1655-60); on the right, Girl at a Window by the Dutch Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (Dulwich Picture Gallery, England; 1645). In both cases, the sight is from outside. Standing out against a dark background, the portrayed subjects are gazing at us. Whereas in the former scene, also known with the eloquent title Girl and her Duenna, there is something ironic and equivocal, the musing girl painted by Rembrandt looks somehow aware that her young and nice aspect is a gift to enjoy for our eyes of remote viewers in space and time. So much, that, we might insinuate, in her gaze there is some glance of the artist's gaze.

Realistic more or less, other times the sight from outside may work as a means for a voyeuristic curiosity: that of penetrating into the intimacy of private lives, like for the painter's gaze in Night Windows by the American Edward Hopper, where the foreground becomes dark in contrast with a lit interior; what's also an inverted perspective, with respect to the examples afore displayed (Museum of Modern Art, New York; 1928). Yet, now, let's jump to the Romantic age, when a window in itself, and what's possible to see or to imagine through and beyond it, could grow the main theme. This is the case of some paintings by Northern Europe artists, as the German Caspar D. Friedrich or the Danish Martinus R?rbye.

Here, rather we like to show a window with view depicted by the German Franz Ludwig Catel: View of Naples through a Window (Cleveland Museum of Art: 1824; see above). More than a simple window this is a balcony, and through that open balcony-window we can see a landscape with the Vesuvius, in the surroundings of Naples. No human figures, but only a black dog on the floor of the balcony, in a full sunlight contrasting with the twilight within the chamber in the foreground. In part, a transparent curtain covers the high window, not so much that we can't clearly discern the volcano smoking in the distance.

A similar Mediterranean view – in this case, more a seascape than a landscape – can be enjoyed through the balcony-window, represented in another painting by Catel: Schinkel in Naples (Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin; 1824). This time, the visible portion of room in the foreground is larger and, sitting on the right, we may discern also the personage who is mentioned in the title of the artwork: the Prussian architect and painter Karl Friedrich Schinkel, especially renowned for both Neoclassical and Neo-Gothic buildings. On the left, on the floor of the room, a few pieces of antiquities concur to denote his artistic involvement.

The window as indirect source of light may well evoke the concept of artistic inspiration, as an intermediate experience between nature and culture. Not only nor merely sunlight or moonlight, but also the transcendental light of art, like it will be interpreted by the American thinker Ralph W. Emerson. Such a Proto-Romantic sensibility or symbology is perceivable in portrayals as those, the images of which are displayed above: Paul Sandby by the English Francis Cotes (Tate Gallery, London; 1761), and Young Woman Drawing by the French Marie-Denise Villers (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; 1801).

Paul Sandby was an English landscapist, and that painted by Marie-Denise Villers is thought to be a self-portrait. Thus, in both cases we have an artist portraying an artist. In either case, he or she is portrayed by an illuminated and illuminating window, while creating their artworks. Whereas the former is looking out of the window, in order to behold a landscape he is sketching, the latter is gazing at us, like the women depicted by Murillo and Rembrandt, we have seen in the images above the title of this post. This time though, gazes from inside and from outside are interconnected in the painting, associated in our minds.

This time, a young female is protagonist and author of the painted view, at once. Moreover, we can notice how the view inside the view, that out the window, isn't a country landscape but a foreshortening of cityscape. In other words, in its apparent simplicity, the originality and complexity of the whole composition is remarkable. Aesthetic beauty is the fruit of intuition, as well as of a long and hard work, deep inside the history of art anyway.

No doubt, for well known traditional reasons, the representation of female subjects in an interior, behind or by a window, prevails over that of male ones in the history of painting. The artist, portrayed by Marie-Denise Villers, is an exception. Mostly they are common women, not seldom reading ones. Often, what they read is a letter: presumably familiar or love letters, the contents of which aren't always the best one can expect. Reliably, this is the case of Saudade (in Portuguese, longing melancholy or nostalgia: Pinacoteca do Estado de S?o Paulo, Brazil; 1899), by the Brazilian José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior. Actually, the standing and reading young woman in the picture is weeping and dark dressed too.

A precedent and prototype is Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, by the Dutch Johannes Vermeer (Gem?ldegalerie, Dresden: 1657–59; see above, on the right). There, the circumstances don't look to be sad, however. The nice maiden is frontally exposed to the daylight shed through a window, dressed elegantly enough. Notoriously, at her times literate women weren't so frequent as later or, all the more, nowadays. Some scholars have discovered, originally the image of a little Cupid – ancient god of love – was depicted on a room wall, on the right of the picture, later covered with a curtain by the painter himself.

Below, the images of two ladies gazing out of a window, both of them seen from their back: Woman at the Window by Caspar David Friedrich (Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin; 1822), and Girl at a Window by the Catalan Salvador Dalí (Museo Nacional Reina Sofía, Madrid; 1925). About a century after, a few details and colours look really changed in the latter painting. The variants between the two scenes seem influenced by their contingent locations, even more than by different epochs. Painted by Friedrich, his wife is watching the boats moored at a quayside in a northern harbour, whereas Dalí's sister, depicted by him, is contemplating a Mediterranean seascape and, on the horizon, the opposite shore of a bay.

In both scenes painted by Friedrich and Dalí, there is something familiar and atemporal at the same time. Instead, with difficulty we would find a homely dimension around not a few windows depicted by Edward Hopper. Above, we have mentioned his estranging Night Windows. Below, we can admire his diurnal Morning Sun and Excursion into Philosophy (respectively, Columbus Museum of Art and private collection; 1952 and 1959). Both of them work as anticipations or introductions to one of his last paintings: Sun in an Empty Room (private collection; 1963), where the daylight shed through a window illuminates an interior once more, but every human presence or even object has disappeared. Hardly, beyond that window we may discern some vegetation, a foreshortening of nature.

In Morning Sun, what we can guess out of the window is an urban view. The internal viewer is a pensive middle aged woman, scarcely dressed and sitting on her bed, who is told to have been modelled after Hopper's wife. Estrangement and loneliness, especially personal isolation in modern cities, are recurring features in the figurative and realistic art of Hopper (about Hotel Window, a 1955 nocturnal scene, he himself said: “Lonely? Yes, I guess it's lonelier than I planned it really”). Nonetheless, in this quasi-masterpiece we could or should speak of solitude better than of loneliness, so much the illumination from the window resembles a spiritual enlightenment.

What's implicit in Morning Sun, an artist's interest in philosophy, becomes explicit enough in Excursion into Philosophy. In a similar context, there, the pensive subject is a fully dressed man seated on an edge of the bed, while the woman is lying and resting behind him. He has stopped reading a book, which is still open close to him. Out the window, this time, just a clue of country landscape. Which kind of philosophy? Rather than the American pragmatism, a Neoplatonism revisited and updated through the transcendentalism of R. W. Emerson, according to Hopper himself and to a later, indeed somewhat sibylline comment of his wife Josephine, a painter she herself: “The open book is Plato, re-read too late.”

“Miss Bartlett only sighed, and enveloped her in a protecting embrace as she wished her good-night. It gave Lucy the sensation of a fog, and when she reached her own room she opened the window and breathed the clean night air, thinking of the kind old man who had enabled her to see the lights dancing in the Arno and the cypresses of San Miniato, and the foot-hills of the Apennines, black against the rising moon”: this is a passage from the first chapter of the novel A Room with a View, published by the English E. M. Forster in 1908.

Have you recognized a view of Florence? That's the story of how a personal solitude may break the shell of loneliness, by rediscovering the bare love of a shareable existence. Furthermore open over people's everyday life, that window plays a not trifling role, in such a late Romantic journey. What makes us step back to Romantic paintings, once again. Those are a detail of Couple at the Window, by the German Georg F. Kersting (Museum Georg Sch?fer, Schweinfurt, Germany; 1817): a specialist in scenes with windows, like the Danish Vilhelm Hammersh?i or the American Childe Hassam later; and, last but not least, The Red Cape (Madame Monet) by the French Claude Monet, currently housed in the Cleveland Museum of Art, USA.

A novelty is that the red caped lady is portrayed while standing beyond the window, a high one, presumably in her home garden. We can see her, through the transparent glasses. She is looking straight on, into the hall. Is, she too, glancing at us, random spread in our spots and times? She is the main viewer, anyhow. We are occasional visitors, or else the varying objects of her gaze and of the artist's gaze. That was, in one sense is, a cold day outdoor, in winter 1870. And Monet's fresh spouse Camille Doncieux – a model for Manet, Renoir and Monet himself – is well clothed, but it isn't fair to make her wait. Let's hasten to open the windowed door, so that she may enter the warmer, atemporal mansion of art.