If, as Flaubert insists, a story cannot be illustrated without being diminished, or perhaps I should say, without diminishing the reader’s experience, then is the reverse also true? Does it follow that pictures are somehow diminished when they are “storied?” 

Pictures can, of course, be ‘read.’ Each one displays its message to the viewer,  a message we translate for ourselves from our own personal vocabulary “. . . of words and images through which we can recognize the experience of the world we call real,” as Manguel puts it. Every piece of art—every picture, every story—is in some sense a mirror in which we peer to find ourselves. And just as we can describe novels as “vivid” (meaning pictorial) we also often find pictures to be “narrative.” A picture is always in the now—what we see is a frozen moment, and we are left to wonder at the events that came before, or that a poised a breath away, to come after. When that sense of what was before, after and beyond the frame is especially strong, the picture is narrative—it suggests a story.

Not surprisingly, narrative pictures often inspire novels. What is surprising is how often I am disappointed in them. Consider Tracy Chevalier’s popular novel The Girl with the Pearl Earring, the story of a girl in a picture. She is given a name—Greit—and artistic ambition and talents beyond her station and out of the reach of her sex. The reader learns about painting techniques, religious tensions, the roles of women and life in general in seventeenth-century provincial Dutch towns.

One learns all about Greit, but very little about the picture that is the foundation for the novel. The painting is treated as if it were simply an illustration for the story—an illustration from which it benefits greatly. It cannot be said that the painting itself benefits from the narrative that has been hung around it.  Chevalier took something universal and made it specific—after all, Vermeer called his picture “Girl with a Pearl Earring” and not “Greit with a Pearl Earring.” The author offers a theory about what the picture is of, but can say nothing about what it means to stand in front of the painting and look at it.

This, then, is what most novels about paintings do—take a picture and invent a story for it. And while it might not “diminish” the original painting in any way (Vermeer’s reputation carries rather more weight than Chevalier’s—there will always be more people who have seen the picture than have read the book) neither does it enhance it. The book remains an entertainment, largely unconcerned with the eternal and transcendent experience of art.

Harriet Scott Chessman’s Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper is a welcome exception. It is, of course, a novel about a painting—several paintings—by the famous impressionist Mary Cassatt. Cassatt has always been a favorite of mine because she painted so many women reading things.

Like writers before her, Chessman is conscious of the story suggested off the canvas in Cassatt’s work, and attempts to bring the world it implies to life. This she does by writing a story, like Chevalier, not about Mary Cassatt, but about the woman in her pictures—her sister Lydia. Lydia was Cassatt’s favorite model while they lived in Paris. But unlike poor Greit, who is only interesting because she lives in Vermeer’s house, Lydia is a fully realized and engaging woman. It is the artist Mary Cassatt who is off the canvas here—the reader will have to look at the paintings to discover anything about her artistic goals.

Lydia is older than the vivacious and brilliant Mary, but quiet and reflective. She would have been called a spinster if she weren’t terminally ill with Bright’s disease. Always conscious of her own tenuous existence, Lydia marvels at the apparent permanency of her life on canvas. Although it tires her to pose, and frequently makes her ill, she can’t help but hunger for the chance to help her sister create something beautiful and remarkable—sitting still is for her an act of defiance, an affirmation of life.

Over five years, and through five different paintings the reader learns to see Lydia as Lydia sees herself—not a quiet, reserved and lady-like woman, but a vivacious and passionate person who desires to make a difference in the world. The focus of each chapter is a painting, which has been carefully reproduced in full color so that the reader can see what Lydia sees when she steps around to look at the canvas. Unlike other novels about paintings however, Chessman’s story is about our experience of the work. Each chapter is an extended contemplation of a picture, framed by Lydia’s own preoccupations and concerns with her quicksilver existence. In a way, reading the book  is like looking at each picture in reverse. Instead of wondering who the woman reading in the picture is, we are that woman, our arms tired from holding the paper just so, then standing up stiffly when the portrait is finished, only to gaze at it and ask, “Where does the artist see this in me?”

Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper isn’t a long book. At a mere 163 pages it is shorter than some of the catalogues that have be created for retrospectives of Cassatt’s work. It is, however, a highly personal and emotionally intense story, mirroring the highly personal and intense way we respond to Cassatt’s paintings. Lydia is a woman with a strong inner life—filled with love for her brilliant younger sister, curiosity and concern about her artistic ambition and strange relationship with the painter Edgar Degas, and even sexual desire—forever out of reach—for the man who loves her sister but finds Lydia to be “magnificent.” But she is mostly concerned with solving the puzzle of her own mortality. “She has pictured something red flowing out of my chest,” she notes about a painting of her driving a carriage, with a little girl. She thinks the painting is a message between sisters—“I know you’re on a journey, the painting says, to another darker place. But I promise at least to record your passage.” For Lydia, each painting becomes a signpost pointing her on a journey she must learn to accept:

“I see now that May’s painting creates a kind of memory. Whether or not anyone ever knew me, she will offer a memory of me, for the world to claim. And I see something else: she pictures me as a woman who has had her wishes fulfilled. The day is luminous, the woman’s dress is a meadow, as she bends to her creation, on her own, desirous simply of what she already has. I yearn to be like this, to have the grace of such satisfaction.

    ‘You’ve made a whole world, May.’”