The Pensive Image: On Thought in Jan van Huysum's Still Life Paintings

Author(s): Hanneke Grootenboer

Source: Oxford Art Journal , 2011, Vol. 34, No. 1 (2011), pp. 13-30
Published by: Oxford University Press

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The Pensive Image: On
van Huysum's Still Life Paintings
Hanneke Grootenboer

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1 . This article grew out of discussions held in my
research seminar entitled The Pensive Image at the
Jan van Eyck Academy's Theory Department in
Maastricht, The Netherlands, from January 2006
to July 2008. I am grateful to all participants for
sharing their thoughts with me on this subject, as
well as audiences at the Convention of the CAA in
February 2007, the annual Eikons conference in
Basel in November 2007 and the London Seminar
for Early Modern Visual Culture for responses on
a shorter version of this text. I thank Craig
Clunas, Geraldine Johnson, Maria Loh, Robert
Maniura, Gervase Rosser, and Alastair Wright for
their stimulating feedback on this essay's final
state.
Published
© The Author 2011. by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. OXFORD ART JOURNAL 34.1 2011 13-30
doi:10.1093/oxartj/kcr01 1
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The Pensive Image: On Thought in Jan van Huysum's
Still Life Paintings1
Hanneke Grootenboer
But painting interposes a problem: there is the thought that sees and can be visibly
described.
- Rene Magritte, 1966
Flower still lifes such as Jan Van Huysum's abundant bouquet of 1724 confront
us with a methodological quandary: how might we make sense of the sheer
splendour of the blossoming flowers, the almost blinding freshness of the
colours, or the breathtaking transparency of the canvas effected by the
artist's technique of fine-painting, the secrets of which he jealousy guarded
(Fig. 1). How do we look at this quite overwhelming tableau, which,
apparently, despite its abundance of species, richness of colour, and
meticulously rendered details, does not immediately answer to the conditions
of pictorial legibility demanded by figurative painting. Any concrete starting
point for a reading of this painting is denied, yet our gaze is allowed to creep
in, welcomed by the dwarf morning-glory in the lower left corner that
is suspended from the marble stone ledge holding up the terracotta
pot containing the bouquet. Climbing over the peony leaves and the
white-and-red anemone, our eye is suddenly arrested by the peculiar position
of the tulip, which has taken a nosedive. The tulip's inverted direction is
further emphasised by the slight diagonal starting in the stem and continued
in the red streak on its petals, the sprig, and the delicate twig of the honesty.
Following the tulip's stem, we arrive at the centre of the arrangement that,
remarkably, shows a cut: the tulip has snapped and the bare ends of its stem
are exposed.
The displacement of the tulip has left an indentation in the floral
arrangement, which opens up in the upper left corner to the wooded
background. If the tulip had not been snapped, it would have completed the
symmetry of the floral arrangement as a counterpart to the fritillary on the
right. However, as it is now, the tulip is pendent, revealing a lack that the
otherwise full and lively arrangement has only partly managed to cover up.
We might say, in fact, that lack is the general condition of this image. Our
reading may have been arrested by the tulip's upside-down position, but our
wanderings have not quite come to a full stop. For something is pending in
this image. It is as if something has been set in motion, an ultimate meaning
that the painting keeps in reserve. What exactly does this still life wish to
show by means of the snapped tulip at its composition's heart? Not only the
gap in the bouquet, but also the painting as a whole reveals a kind of
openness that does not necessarily call to be * filled' with meaning. Rather,
the indeterminacy of the picture's lack invites an understanding of this
painting as governed by a more abstract or theoretical paradigm that offers us
room for contemplation, or we may even say, for a thought.
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Hanneke Grootenbocr

Fig. 1. Jan van Huysum, Flower Still Life, 1724, oil on panel, 80 x 69.6 cm. Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, Los Angeles. (Photo: c SCALA, Florence.)

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2. Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective (MIT
Press: Cambridge, MA, 1994), p. 446. Yve- Alain
Bois, 'Painting as Model', review of Hubert
Damisch, Fenetre jaune cadmium, ou, les dessous de la
peinture (Editions du Seuil: Paris, 1984) in October ,
vol. 37, Summer 1986, pp. 125 - 37, reprinted in
Bois, Painting as Model (MIT Press: Cambridge,
MA, 1990), pp. 245-58. See also 'Tough Love',
Oxford Art Journal , vol. 28, no. 2, 2005, pp.
245-55.
3. The term 'thought effect' was coined by
Naomi Schor in her article on 'Pensive Texts and
Thinking Statues: Balzac with Rodin', Critical
Inquiry, vol. 27, no. 2, Winter 2001, pp. 239-65.
4. In The Emancipated Spectator (Verso: London,
2009), Jacques Ranciere has used Barthes'
expression of the pensive image to describe
the role of the political image in contemporary
democracy. Evidently, my use and understanding
of the pensive image significantly differs from
Ranciere 's use of the term.
5. The distinction between theory, philosophy,
and criticism recently has been very well
articulated by Rodolphe Gasche in his The Honor
of- Thinking: Critique, Theory, Philosophy (Stanford
University Press: Stanford, 2007).
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On Thought in Jan van Huysum's Still Life Paintings
In The Origin of Perspective (1987), his exhaustive treatment of the
philosophical question of perspective's multiple origins, Hubert Damisch
concludes that 'painting not only shows but thinks'.2 He explains that
perspectives provided the painter with a formal apparatus equivalent to that
of a sentence. In assigning the subject a position within its paradigm, a
perspective opens up the possibility of something like a statement in painting.
'What is thinking in painting?' Damisch asks. 'What are the implications of
such "thinking" for the history of thought in general?' (446). Although I do
not wish to speculate here on the implications of such a notion for the
history of thought, I would like to take a few steps towards sketching
the consequences as well as the potential of Damisch 's conclusion
for art-historical modes of approaching painting. If there is such a thing as
a 'thought' in painting, how can it be detected or articulated? In this essay,
I propose that there is a corpus of pictures offering us something that
lies beyond narrative or meaning, a place kept free of signification, from
which a thought arises.
Pensiveness denotes a state that is neither active nor passive, but remains in
between the activity of thinking and the passivity of being lost in thought. In S/Z
(1970), a painstakingly close reading of Honore de Balzac's short story
'Sarrasine', Barthes ponders at length over the narrative's concluding
sentence: 'And the marquise remained pensive'. Intrigued by this closing
line, Barthes explains that there is an infinite openness in Balzac's use of the
notion of pensiveness, an illusion of polysemy, of multiple meanings unsaid
and unexplored that we may call a thought-effect.3 This sentence, especially
because it is a closing line of a story, functions for Barthes as the degree zero
of meaning, escaping any closure, any code, or any classification. Balzac's last
sentence is a theatrical sign of the implicit, indicating that the preceding text
does not give all meaning away. Part of the text's signification has thus been
held back by a line suggesting where the plenitude of meaning or a depth of
sense may be found. The term pensive denotes a semi-passive state that is
filled with unease. A pensive Marquise entails a thread, or a continuous
inquiry: what could she possibly be thinking about? Indeed, within the
context of the sentence, we find no denouement here, resulting in Balzac's
story as such taking on a state of indetermination, which is to say that it
itself becomes pensive. The question arises as to whether we can find the
same unsaid expression and unexplored openness as Barthes finds in texts as
a state of pensiveness in images as well. Partly departing from Damisch 's
assertions that painting actively thinks, I follow Barthes in stating that Van
Huysum's still life is a pensive image.4
This essay proposes an approach to images which goes beyond semiotic
interpretation by recognising in our close analysis of such pictures a kind of
profundity - an interiority different from their meaning or narrative through
which these images become thoughtful. My investigation into this group
of pensive images is a response to the recent reconsideration of the
philosophical foundations of art history. Within the larger scope of this
project, the pensive image may be the vehicle through which we examine the
ways in which thinking is conflated with critique, theory, and philosophy, by
asking what role painting as a form of thinking may play in disentangling
these overlapping undertakings.5
I am particularly interested in exploring the notion of the pensive image as it
may be differentiated from similar terms accrediting painting with profundity.
As we will see in Van Huysum's painting, such profundity or philosophical
depth ultimately results from a virtual 'take off' of tiny blobs of paint from
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 34.1 2011 17
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their support. This 'departure' of spots of paint creates a minimal, shallow

space between the paint and its support, where meaning, or rather, a
thought, has become suspended. A close examination of Van Huysum's6. Mieke Bal has described visual thought most
dewdrops and highlights will show how in his still lifes in general, and in clearly in Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art,
particular in the flower piece with which we began, in certain parts of the Preposterous History (University of Chicago Press:
Chicago, 2001), p. 117.
composition paint seems to lift itself from its support, creating a thickness
that allows for a meditation on surface and ground, as well as on
7. 'O bloosend Fruitgewas, met zil'vren daeu
beladen! Nachtdruppen die de blonde Apollo
transparency and the status of the pictorial sign, yet in paint. Pensive images
zomers zweet!' Johan van Goolen, De Nieuwe
thus show us thought in painting, not expressed in it (as with narrative), Schouburg
or der Nederlandsche Kunstschilders en
behind it (as with iconographic meaning), but visual thought as it is fully Schilderessen vol. 2 (The Hague, privately
embodied in form and materiality; they are able, as I will show, published,
to 1751), p. 26.

philosophise about their status as images, as such performing a kind of

8. Philostrates, Eikones, vol. I, p. 23; see also De
thinking through their material form.6 The analysis of Van Huysum's painting
Verleiding van Flora: Jan van Huysum 1682-1749 ,

will be framed by a discussion of What Is Philosophy (1991), in which Gilles

ed. Sam Segal, Mariel Ellens and J oris Dik
(Waanders Uitgevers: Zwolle, 2006), p. 95.
Deleuze and Felix Guattari offer a theory on thought in painting largely
based upon Damisch's essay on Paul Klee's painting Equals Infinitj (1932,
Fig. 2). I will argue on the basis of a juxtaposition of Klee's Equals Infinitj
with Van Huysum's flower still lifes that the work of both artists ultimately
touch on similar issues, or to put this more precisely, that their work, in a
comparable operation, attempts to think though issues of finitude and infinity
through the application of dots of paint on a surface, however different the
results.

Let us return to the arrest of our reading by the bare stems of the snapped
tulip in Van Huysum's painting. The artist used a similar device in a series of
flower still lifes, for instance, in a piece created in 1723 (Fig. 3). But the
result is rather different. In the 1723 image, the twig of a grapevine appears
to have been deliberately placed in a fixed, almost organic composition. In
contrast, in the still life of 1724, the tulip position seems accidental,
subjected to an unforeseen change, as if the flower had been snapped
unintentionally while the bouquet was in the process of being arranged, or
even during the process of its being painted.
The tulip may seem as if it has been displaced by sheer chance, but it
has triggered a series of effects. For instance, its upside down position
has caused a dewdrop on one of its petals slowly to slide off (Fig. 4).
Gravity's effect is well depicted by Van Huysum: the dewdrop is about
to roll off the petal, apparently straight into the scallop that the female
putto, on the relief adorning the terracotta pot, offers her male
companion. The presumed accident of the snapped flower has been
carefully planned. By letting the drop roll off its petal into the scallop,
Van Huysum is playfully shifting mimetic registers, creating a realm of
fanciful fiction within his hyper-realistic mastery of pictorial resemblance,
delving deeply into the notion of a faithful image as such by means of a
virtually moving dewdrop.
The sudden micro-focus on a dewdrop is no accident. Dewdrops have
been considered the hallmark of Van Huysum's technique. In an ode
written at the time of the artist's death in February 1749, the
artist-biographer Johan van Gool celebrates Van Huysum's enchanting
images, claiming that they would surprise even nature that had inspired
them. Van Gool describes how in Van Huysum's paintings fruit plants
were richly laden with silver dew, which were 'night drops sweated by
blond Apollo during the summer'.7 Such praise had venerable roots. For
the second- century Greek sophist Philostratus (c. 170-245), the dewdrop
is the sign, par excellence, of the realism of flower painting.8 In his

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Fig. 2. Paul Klee, Equals Infinity, 1932, oil on canvas mounted on wood, 51.4 x 68.3 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. (Photo: ©SCALA, Florence.)
9. This shift may be typed in literary terms as an
anacoluthon, which 'designates any grammatical
or syntactical discontinuity in which a
construction interrupts another before it is
completed' . Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading:
Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and
Proust (Yale University Press: New Haven and
London, 1979), p. 289.
10. On 26 December 1655, Poussin wrote, 'Je
travaille autour de la pensee et distribution de la
Vierge en Egypte de madame de Montmort' and
on 30 May 1641, he wrote '. . .je vous enverrai le
pensement du frontispice de la grande bible'.
Lettres de Poussin , 295 and 30, respectively.
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On Thought in Jan van Huysum's Still Life Paintings
Imagines , Philostratus instructs that should one wishes the image to aim at
absolute verisimilitude, dewdrops should be found on flowers. However, in
Van Huysum's image, this particular drop appears to be 'sliding' off the
mimetic level and onto the fictional level of the relief; or rather, it is
tending towards such a shift of registers.9 In suggesting that the drop's
intentional fall outside the system of truth (or outside the system of
deceit, for that matter) arrests the painting's mimetic function as an
image to be interpreted, we see here how some of its elements may
figure as a 'proposition', or statement, where the painting starts to
becoming pensive. Does it, then, offer us a thought?
The idea that painting can have a thought has a long history. Nicolas Poussin
(1594-1665) frequently used the phrase le pensement or la pensee when referring
to a thought of the image. For this genuine painter-philosopher, the thought of
the painting appears at the very beginning of the artistic process as that which
initiates its design, all the while forming the picture's armature. In his
correspondence with Chantelou of the 1640s and 1650s, Poussin mentions
regularly that he is working on the thought of a particular painting, or that
he is sending a thought to his friend.10 A letter of 22 December 1647 is
particularly revealing in this regard, where the artist remarks that he has
'found' a thought for a painting he was commissioned to do for Monsieur de
Lisle:
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Fig. 3. Jan van Huysum, Flower Still Life , 1723, oil on panel, 80 x 60.5 cm. The State Hermitage
Museum, St Petersburg. (Photo: © The State Hermitage Museum, Photo by Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard
Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovets.)

I have found [. . . Monsieur de Lisle] the thought, that is to say the conception of the
idea, and the work of the mind has been completed. The subject is the Passage
11. Je vous ai ecrit que, pour votre respect, je
through the Red Sea by the escaping Israelits. Principally, it is composed of 27 servirais Monsieur de Lisle. Je lui ai trouve la
figures.11 pensee, je vieux dire la conception de l'idee, et
l'ouvrage de 1' esprit est conclu. Ce subject est un
Passage de la Mer Rouge par les Israelites
fugitives. Le compose est de 27 figures
As this fragment demonstrates, Poussin obviously distinguishes la pensee,
principalement. Lettres du Poussin , p. 244.
consisting of the conception of its idea which is the work of the mind, from
12. See Hubert Damisch, 'The Underneath of
the painting's subject matter, in this case a story from the old Testament, as
Painting', trans. Francette Pacteau and Stephen
well as from its composition.12 Though linked, Poussin s pensee differs as well Bann, Word and Image, vol. 1, no. 2, April- June
from the Italian term pensiero , by which is meant a sketch revealing the 1985, p. 204.
thoughts of the studious artist in trying out various compositions.13 It is
13. According to Francis Junius who wrote
reminiscent of a rather unpoetic version of Bernini's concetto , yet it precedes 'Many who have a deeper insight in to these Arts,
invention. What is more, it anticipates disposition , the first of nine parts that delight themselves as much in the contemplation
of the first, second, and third draughts which
make up painting that Poussin recommends as an artist's starting point.14

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great Masters made of their workes, as in the
workes themselves. . . seeing . . . the very thoughts
of the studious Artificier'. Francis Junius, The
Painting of the Ancients, 1638. Claire Pace, 'Nicolas
Poussin: 'Peintre-Poete'?', in Katie Scott and
Genevieve Warwick (eds), Commemorating Poussin:
Reception and Interpretation of the Artist (Cambridge
University Press: Cambridge, 1999), pp. 76-
113.
14. Oskar Batschmann, Nicolas Poussin: Dialectics
of Painting (London: Reaktion Books, 1990), p.
12. Another instance in which this difference is
made is in a letter on 15 November 1655
regarding a painting for Madame de Montmort of
the Virgin in Egypt.
15. Damisch, 'The Underneath of Painting'
(1985), p. 204.
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On Thought in Jan van Huysum's Still Life Paintings
Fig. 4. Jan van Huysum, Flower Still Life, 1724, oil on panel, 80 x 69.6 cm. Los Angeles Country
Museum of Art, Los Angeles. (Photo: ©SCALA, Florence (detail).)
Preceding any manual action on the artist's part, le pensee is a forethought rather
than a thought which can be visualised in a sketch, but can never coincide with it
as if it were a blueprint of the work as a whole.15 For Poussin, therefore, la
pensee comes before the painting, as well as before the disposition of which it
is constituent. Standing at the pre-history of a work, Poussin 's pensee does
remain visible in the distributions of the figures and in the disposition for
which it provides a foundation. Apparently, Poussin 's thought emerges as the
very element that binds the various parts of painting's process together.
Following Louis Marin's influential reading of Poussin 's dictum 'to read the
tableau and the story' about his work The Gathering of the Manna (1637-39,
Paris, Louvre), Thomas Puttfarken has argued that it is indicative of the
artist's conviction that his pieces should not be watched from a distance but
studied with great attention in order for his pensees (Puttfarken uses the
plural) to be discovered in them.16 For Poussin, le pensee refers in fact to a
particular mode of seeing. Inspired by a perspective treatise by Daniele
Barbaro and the work on optics of Alhazen, the artist may have distinguished
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 34.1 2011 21
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Hanneke Grootenboer

simple aspect- seeing, which was a general glancing, from a scrutinised and
focused studying. Puttfarken concludes that the pensee anticipates the artist's
management of the viewer's visual attention such that significant details will
be explored within the composition as a whole. But is a pensee that can be
'found' rather than thought, which stands at the beginning of a painting, and
frequently finds the artist rather than the other way round, identical to
pensees which for Puttfarken are small details indicative of Poussin's erudition
that when closely observed would fit in surprisingly well with the
composition as whole? Can we thus find these telling details before the
image's production as well as in it? The question arises as to what precisely is
thoughtful about these details other than the viewer's studious absorption.
We may better understand what a thought in painting is when we look at the
frontispiece of the Bible engraved by Claude Mellan after a design by Poussin
(Fig. 5). As is evident from his letters, Poussin worked carefully on this
piece's pensee. From May 1641 onwards, he writes Chantelou regularly about
finding and drafting la pensee , and by the beginning of August, it is in such
completed state that the artist can ask his friend for advice on the image's
pensee as well as on its disposition. Poussin's original sketch is lost, but
looking at Mellan 's engraving may give us a glimpse of the pensee in its
Fig. 5. Claude Mellan (after Nicolaes Poussin),
abstract form, without the intervention of the artist's hand, so to speak.
Frontispiece of the Bible, after 1641,
Poussin's design is an allegory on the obscurity of meaning and the
Bibliotheque National, Cabinet des Estampes,
never-ending process of interpretation that the Bible evokes.17 We see theParis.
figures of History, holding a large volume and Prophecy, carrying a small
book. Hovering over both figures is God the Father who seems to be blessing
both publications. History looks backwards, away from her partner and into16. Louis Marin, Sublime Poussin (Stanford
the past about which she scribbles with her quill in her big book.
University Press: Stanford, 1999), p. IS. Thomas

Apparently, she does not seem to notice her interlocutor Prophecy, who in Puttfarken, 'Poussin's Thoughts on Invention
and Disposition', in Thomas Puttfarken, The
turn cannot see her companion as she is a blind seer with her head and face
Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual
heavily veiled, whose enigmatic oracles may foretell the future. The design
Order in Painting 1400-1800 (Yale University
revolves around the oppositions of blindness and insight, and the great book
Press: New Haven, 2000), pp. 201-28.

of history versus its smaller counterpart the Bible, which accumulate in the
17. ' Cependant j ' envoie a Monseigneur le squitze
figure or the sphinx who uses as his pedestal the small book which, du front de la Bible , mas sans correction, car

according to Poussin's description, should have carried the title Biblia devant que de le terminer, j'ai desire que voes
Regia
l'ayez vu, afin que [si] dan la pensee et disposition
on its spine. If History looks backwards towards the past, the sphinx is facing
totale ou particuliere des figures, il etai besoin d'y
the future and its bottom is almost touching the back of History's folio. alterer quelque chose, vous m'en donniez votre
Poussin wrote to Chantelou that the sphinx represents 'nothing other thanavis. La figure ailee represente 1' Histoire; elle
ecrit de la main gauche afin que la planche la
the obscurity of enigmatic things'18 The sphinx is a rather silent - we may
remettre a droite; 1' autre figure voilee represente
even say pensive - creature that if it speaks talks in fatal riddles. For the la prophetie; sur le livre qu'elle tient sera ecrit:
sphinx as much as for the blinded figure holding it, the obscurity of
Bible Regia' .

enigmatic things is not something that can be solved. The stories of the BibleMellan 's engraving mirrors the original as
may be explained, yet without the enigmatic things being revealed. If we History is writing with her right hand, and
Poussin describes her as scribbling with her left
read this engraving as if it were a visual definition of what la pensee actually
hand.

is, we could say that the obscurity of the enigmatic in the written word will
18. 'Le sphinx qui est dessus ne represente autre
in principle never be resolved as it is always already an integral part of story
que l'obscurite des choses enigmatiques'. Nicolas
telling, and therefore of image making. It is with great clarity that the
Poussin, Lettres et propos sur l'art, ed. Anthony
enigmatic appears in painting, but apparently, for Poussin, it will not lose its
Blunt (Hermann: Paris, 1989), p. 57.

obscurity, not even under the attentive eye of the beholder. We may say that 19. See Milovan Stanic, 'Le mode enigmatique dans
the thought in painting is its enigmatic mode , to use Milovan Stanicl'art
's de Poussin', in Olivier Bonfat et al. (eds)
expression. 19 Poussin et Rome (Reunion des musees nationaux:
Paris, 1996), pp. 93-118. Regrettably, Stanic
As a consequence, we can properly circumscribe the thought in art neither in
does not discuss the frontispiece of the Bible.
structural terms, as distinguished from the composition, nor in semiotic terms,
as a meaning to be found. When the artist writes about having to make a new
composition of the Fall of St Paul as a thought different from the initial one has

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20. In a letter to Chantelou on 25 November
1658, Poussin writes 'J'ai fait une nouvelle
composition pour la Chute de Saint Paul, m'etant
venue une autre pensee qua la premiere' . Lettres de
Poussin, p. 300.
2 1 . Gilles Deleuze and Pierre-Felix Guattari,
What Is Philosophj? (Columbia University Press:
New York, 1996), p. 194.
22. I have elaborated on the significance
of perspective's invisible structure in my Rhetoric
of Perspective Realism and Illusionism in
Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still Life Painting
(University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2005).
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On Thought in Jan van Huysum's Still Life Paintings
come to him, la pensee appears less as a meditation and more as a kind of insight
that comes to the artist as an impulse, or we may say as a flash.20 Clearly, for
Poussin, the thought of painting, standing at the beginning of artistic creation,
remains implicated in its entire process as something somehow superimposed
on the painting's ground, in between the layers of composition, content, and
colour, woven in as a kind of texture or plane, as an armature remaining
underneath the image's surface all the while supporting it.
In What is Philosophy (1991), Deleuze and Guattari offer a theory on thought
in painting which revolves around what they call the underneaths of painting.
The authors assert that philosophy and art are, in fact, complementary
modes of thought. Early twentieth-century abstract art, such as the work of
Mondrian, is a recent attempt to bring together art and philosophy, the
writers claim. To them, the materiality of abstract art has elevated the
painting's ground by having raised it to the surface so that the 'underneath'
comes through.21 In contrast to the transparency of figurative painting in
which brush strokes are largely meant to remain imperceptible as we have
seen in Van Huysum's flower piece, the visible application of paint in abstract
art makes the painting's background thick and opaque, which Deleuze and
Guattari see as an instance of thought in art. Abstract art's struggle with
giving up the figure /ground opposition so fundamental for figurative art is an
effort to redefine thought as a new, alternative way to confront what they
call chaos. Reading their text vis-a-vis Poussin's letters, we observe that a
picture's thought as a kind of armature lying underneath the many layers of
paint has started to surface in the early twentieth century. On the surface of
abstract art, the picture's bone structure lays bare and hence makes visible a
thought that until then has remained obscure, covered up by realistically
rendered figures. In abstract art, the material has thus 'ascended', Deleuze
and Guattari argue, thickening the painting's background into an opaque
entity, a process that has resulted from the breakdown of the perspectival
system which is the invisible skeleton of composition par excellence.22
Deleuze and Guattari 's theory of pictorial thought relies heavily on the work
of Damisch, in particular on his essay on Balzac's 'The Unknown Masterpiece' .
In this text, Damisch ponders over the phrase uttered by one of the characters
who is a painter: 'No one gives us any credit for what is underneath
[our brushstrokes]'. Whereas in early modern art the superimposition of
preparations, undercoatings, and varnishes ultimately covers up what is
underneath, in modernity, Damisch explains, this skill of layering paint has
been replaced by a craft immersed in the picture's flatness. What has been
given up is thus the art of layering paint as much as the application of
(linear) perspective as a means to make sense of these layerings. However,
modernist painting has retained something of its thickness, Damisch writes,
a kind of depth which has turned into a surface effect.
I would like to suggest that this kind of depth, essentially a surface effect
celebrated by Deleuze and Guattari as a particular quality of modernist
painting, is operating in Van Huysum's work as well, despite, or even
because of, its verisimilitude. From the vantage point of twentieth- century
art, and painting's radical turn to materiality and flatness, and in the light of,
for instance, Paul Klee's Equals Infinity, it is even more relevant to return to
Van Huysum in order to see what these flower pieces actually are capable of
articulating in striving for an extreme surface effect. It is most likely on the
surface of the painting, I argue, that a thought in painting may be found.
Van Huysum's flower still life and Klee's Equals Infinity (or for that matter,
Mondrian 's work) occupy two poles of painting as laid out by Deleuze and
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Hanneke Grootenboer

Guattari in their attempt to define thought in painting. For the authors, a

painting is a 'bloc of sensations', a mode in which sensations can be
perceived as cut off or independent from humans who experience them.23. Deleuze and Guattari, 'What Is Philosophy'
A spark of joy as captured in the eyes of a seventeenth- century portrait (1996), p. 193.
continues to shine today, outside of and independent from its sitter.
24. Deleuze and Guattari, 'What Is Philosophy'
Perceptions people may have had end up in a work of art as percepts, while(1996), p. 194.
affectations derived from feelings are preserved in art as affects. Sensations
25. Philostratus, Descriptions , trans. Arthur
consisting of percepts and affects can either be realised in the material, in theFairbanks (Heinemann: London, 1931), p. 89.
case of a figurative works such as a portrait or Van Huysum's still lifes,On Philostrates' Narcissus, see also Stephen
making up one pole in the scale of sensations, or the material 'passes into' Bann, 'Philostratus and the Narcissus of

sensation as Deleuze and Guattari see happening in non-figurative art ofCaravaggio', in Ewen Bowie and J as Eisner
(eds) Philostatus (Cambridge University Press:
Mondrian or Klee, where the 'underneath' comes through.23 Contesting the Cambridge, 2009).
idea that abstract art is pure flatness, they assert, following Damisch, that it
26. See De Verleiding van Flora, cat. no. 27 and 28.
maintains a 'thickness', which as an imaginary space between foreground and The bee mentioned in Philostrates Imagines
background, ground and surface, or point and support, is evidently a trace ofsprawled the motif of the trompe l'oeil fly in early
linear perspective, or rather, of its removal. The artist no longer covers upmodern painting, mentioned by Vasari in the Life
the ground of the picture to render the picture plane invisible, but rather of Giotto, among other places. Interestingly, Van
Huysum seem to rely on the original written
foregrounds its material by piling it up, folding it, or going through it. Insource rather than the pictorial motif it has grown
modern painting, one no longer paints on but under, Deleuze and Guattari into by placing a bee rather than a fly on the tulip's
write.24 petal.

At the other end of the scale, Van Huysum's exquisitely rendered flower
painting is clearly an instance of painting on rather than under, in Deleuze
and Guattari 's terms. Called the 'phoenix of flower painting', Van Huysum
was the master of what has been called 'fini' or 'finish', the extremely
polished surface on which brush strokes have become truly invisible. The
artist was reputedly secretive about his working methods, always painting in
total isolation, refusing even to accept pupils. Van Huysum's breathtaking
'fini' technique culminates in his rendering of dewdrops that are generously
- we may say a little too generously - applied to the leaves in virtually
every flower piece he ever made. It is very likely that Van Huysum is
wittingly 'quoting' Philostratus by scattering numerous dewdrops over a
single piece as if he is obsessed with his own virtuosity in applying his prized
technique. One tulip petal in a flower piece of c. 1730 (Fig. 6) is a particular
striking reference to Philostratus' famed description of a painting of
Narcissus bending over a pool which 'painted' his face. Immersed in the
reflection of his face in the water as if waiting for his mirror image to start a
conversation, Narcissus does not hear what we, as viewers, say, Philostrates
writes. 'We must interpret the painting for ourselves', he concludes.
Apparently, this work about reflection, image making and meaning
production, had such a regard for realism 'that it even shows drops of dew
dripping from the flowers, and a bee settling on the flowers'.25 For
Philostratus, the illusionistically painted bee holds a genuine sense of play:
whether the viewer is supposed to perceive the trompe l'oeil insect as a real
bee deceived by the painted flowers, or will be fooled into thinking that a
painted bee is real is ultimately of no importance. After all, he writes, a
viewer may or may not be fooled, but Narcissus himself has never been
deceived by painting, but only by the pool's reflection. For Van Huysum,
however, a tricky bee may be a nice and playful detail, but it is the deception
of the reflection of his dewdrops that really matters.
By putting the bee right next to his dewdrops, Van Huysum calls attention
to the difference between trompe l'oeil effects and the reflection of pure
transparency.26 There is no confusion as to whether the drop is on the petal
or the picture's actual surface, and so there is no corresponding impulse

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 On Thought in Jan van Huysum's Still Life Paintings

Fig. 6. Jan van Huysum, Flowers in a Vase Against a Landscape , c. 1730, oil on panel, 80 x 61 cm.
Noortman Master Paintings, Maastricht. (©Noortman Master Paintings.)

to wipe it off. Trompe 1'oeiVs illusionism can be defined as a extreme consequence

27. I have extensively commented on this
of (or departure from) realism, as a heightened truth in painting, one that
distinction in The Rhetoric of Perspective.
radically goes beyond verisimilitude by ultimately fooling the eye into
believing that something is what it is not.27 Obviously, Van Huysum's
dewdrops are not trompe Voeil features, though the line demarcating realism
and illusionism runs extremely thin here. The translucent drops appear as if
they are somehow located at the interval of realism and illusionism. To get a
clear sense of how Van Huysum's treatment of these details differs from
those of other still-life painters, let us compare his water drops with those of
the seventeenth- century Dutch still-life artist Abraham Mignon (1640-79).
As we see in Mignon 's elaborate Still Life with Fruit and Oysters of
approximately 1670 (Fig. 7), water drops falling from a plate of oysters are
placed within the pictorial realm as being suspended from the marble rim of
the table. However, we observe, just below, that others have been 'caught' in

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Hanneke Grootenboer

Fig. 7. Abraham Mignon, Still Life with Fruit and Oysters, 1670, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
(©Rijksmuseum Amsterdam (detail).)

their descent. Remarkably, this state of suspension leads not to the effect of
movement, but to the illusion that there are actual water drops spilled on
28. Another remarkable example is Diego
the paint's surface.28
Velazquez's famous Waterseller of Seville of c. 1620
In contrast, Van Huysum's dewdrops never acquire the status of trompe l'oeil. (Apsley House: London), where the drops on the
His rendering of water drops searches for realism's limits in his attempt, I surface of the large jug realises a sensation of

suggest, to find its superlative expression. He seems to be seeking dampness, whereby the surface of the drops
simultaneously seem to lie on the picture plane.
hyper-realism, a kind of extreme realism that becomes visible especially in This is not a conscious trompe l'oeil effect, but
the dewdrops painted on light backgrounds, as we see on the pale pink petal rather an example of hyper-realism on the level of

of a rose in the 1730 still life (Fig. 8). This is Van Huysum's genuine tour de transparency as a surface quality (rather than
pictorial depth).
force : he creates translucence by applying highlights that barely contrast with
their underlying colour. His breathtaking technique is even more apparent in 29. Elmer Kolfin, Voor koningen en prinsen: De
stilllevens en landschappen van Jan van Huysum
moments like this when the rim of white paint indicating reflecting light
(1682-1749) (Museum Het Prinsenhof: Delft,
casts an actual shadow that makes a painted shadow redundant, as is clearly 2006), pp. 74-5. See also Van Huysum's, A Basket
visible on the rose petal.29 Can we formulate this tour de force as an with Flowers, c. 1732 - 33, Museum Boijmans Van

attempt to visually think what remains unthought in the visual? Have his Beuningen, Rotterdam. De Verleiding van Flora,
cat. no. F26.
shadow -casting dewdrops become expressive not in that they tell the
unexpressed in painting, but rather the inexpressible? 30. In John Raphael Smith's mezzotints after Jan
van Huysum's still lifes (which were well-known
In rendering these tiny blobs of translucent liquid, Van Huysum could not
in eighteenth-century Britain), it is even more
have left a more superficial trace. We could not be much farther from apparent how Van Huysum's dewdrops do not
Deleuze and Guattari's exemplary abstract painting, yet paradoxically, under seem to have any outlines and are genuinely
translucent. Smith engraves Van Huysum's flower
the highlight indicating the drop's reflection, the thin layers of superimposed
pieces 'to the letter' and has an eye for every
paint, often applied wet on a wet surface, seem to thicken, summarising the small detail. He faithfully copies each of the far
idea of mimesis as transparency that is pure saturation. How many invisible too numerous dewdrops, yet cannot possibly

layers of paint shine through its reflection? In spite of their small size, these capture the level of their transparency. New
Haven, Yale Center of British Art, B
dewdrops blow up the notion of transparency to gigantic dimensions, raising 1977.14.14217-8.

the issue of the readability of pictorial transparency as such.30 Neither purely

realistic nor illusionistic, the dewdrop articulates some kind of a split on the
level of the surface; it is at once visible - primarily by means of its
highlight, which indicates the presence of reflecting light, a dot on a dot -
and invisible in its double transparency. This split, I believe, prevents a
simple visual perception of this painting as image. For where does the

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31. Hubert Damisch, 'Egale infini', Critique
315-16 (aout-septembre 1973): numero special
' Histoire / theorie de l'art', pp. 691-723.
Translated in English by R.H. Olorenshaw as
'Equals Infinity', XXth Century Studies, vol. 15 -
16, 1973, 56-81, special issue on "Visual
Poetics."
32. Will Grohmann, Paul Klee (Lund Humphries:
London, 1954), pp. 283-309.
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On Thought in Jan van Huysum's Still Life Paintings
transparency of the painting under the highlight stop, and where does the panel
begin? What is painted on as 'seen through' and what is painted under its
immediate image, shining through? Though not representing trompe Voeil
effects, the dewdrops, through their transparent quality, differentiate
themselves from the other signs on the panel by designating a limit, a
frontier for various pictorial units that may open new developments of their
capacities. The question arises of what exactly is the status of dewdrop as
sign, as the mark it leaves is a mere reflection of the transparent drop we
imagine. The drop itself cannot be wholly a sign to the extent that it is pure
transparency, acquiring the dubious status of a virtually invisible sign, only
visible in so far it appears as a consequence of the mark, a mere dot or
point, of another sign, the highlight. The dewdrop seems to be vanishing
before our eyes and yet it is there as we see through it.
Another well-known sign that has an even more ambiguous reputation as sign
is the vanishing point. A comparison between the two points may shed light on
what exactly Van Huysum's drop expresses. For Deleuze and Guattari, the
notion of thought in art is heavily tied up with the extent to which the
vanishing point can be a sign. Philosophy, science and - crucially, for us -
art are three different modes that define thought in their respective dealings
with 'the infinite'. Art, they propose, defines thought as passing through the
finite to 'rediscover' or 'restore' the infinite, or indeed to equal it - an
argument apparently exclusively inspired by Klee's 1932 painting Equals
Infinity (Fig. 2). 31
On Klee's painting a title, gleich Unendlich , and a date have been inscribed at
the margin of the canvas. It belongs to a group of the artist's so-called divisionist
works which grew out of his investigation of whether it was possible to render
space in painting with colour alone. Characteristic for the works of this period is
the series of rows consisting of colour dots which cover the entire picture plane.
Unlike Seurat and the divisionist painters, Klee does not split his colours but
often uses the same colour for all dots in one row. In Equals Infinity , the dots
are laid out on a plane that is attached to an ochre support that seems to
frame it. The general problem he struggled with in this period is whether
colour could be the proper tool for the conquest of finding 'infinity within
the finite.32 This problem is tackled head on in Equals Infinity.
Deleuze and Guattari 's great strength lies in their genuine reliance on (a
rather narrowly defined corpus of) paintings for developing their theory of
thought in painting. Klee's painting, as much as Damisch's reading of it, is
taken seriously, and serves as a foundation for the two writers, or rather a
map that assist them in orienting their complicated ideas on the restoration
of infinity. Thus following closely Damisch's detailed discussion of this piece,
Deleuze and Guattari see the blobs on the surface as the infinite passage of
what they call chaos in which the mathematical signs 'equals-infinity' (=0°)
indicate the restoration of infinity (197). Thus, Klee's picture is a
modern(ist) attempt to metaphorically inscribe the infinite in the finite.
Evidently, grasping the infinity in the finite is nothing new to painting, as
linear perspective has been utilised as a system of representation which does
precisely that. As a finite mode of representation, linear perspective
embraces infinity in its configuration laid out by the point of view on the one
side of the picture plane, and the vanishing point within in. In this system,
infinity is inscribed under the guise of a point, a trace in paint on the
picture's surface that marks the limit of representation within its system.
Despite the fact that it is called the vanishing point, this mark is not a
proper point at all, if we follow Alberti's theory on perspective. Damisch
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observes an inconsistency in the text when Alberti writes at the very beginning
of his treatise that: 'I here call sign anything that belongs to the surface such that
the eye can see it', a definition that clearly contradicts the indivisibility of
infinity (which had been argued by Aristotle and Roger Bacon, among
others).33 In the same breath, Alberti insists that 'a point is a figure which
cannot be divided into parts'.34 Damisch has examined at length the
consequences of the paradoxical status of the vanishing point in Alberti 's
treatise. Is the vanishing point in painting a sign, a point, or a mere symbol?
And can it be made visible? If we understand the vanishing point as a sign or
symbol of infinity, it should be visible in painting at least as a tiny dot which
differentiates itself from the surface to which it adheres, as well as from the
support that it now 'marks and grooves', as Damisch writes (65). To
become visible in painting, the infinity-point should therefore 'depart' from
Fig. 8. Jan van Huysum, Flowers in a Vase
its support, so to speak, and it is this differentiation that gives infinity its
Against a Landscape, c. 1730, Noortman
metaphorical character. However, the 'departure' from its support makes it
Master Paintings, Maastricht. (©Noortman
divisible rather than indivisible and as such it will not qualify as point
Master Paintings (detail of the rose).)
according to Alberti 's definition. Damisch argues that, simultaneously
indivisible, as Alberti claims a sign to be, and divided from its allotted spot,
the vanishing point is thus theoretically split. However, as Damisch 33. Grohmann, 'Paul Klee' (1954), p. 285.
demonstrates exhaustively in The Origin of Perspective , in the practice of
34. Leone Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans.
painting, the construction of perspective precisely conceals this split. In
John R. Spencer (Yale University Press: New
theory, the convergence of the orthogonals we see only in painting, however,
Haven and London), p. 43. Quoted in Damisch,
the point of convergence cannot possibly be visible as point to the extent that
p. 65. See also on this issue 'Hubert Damisch and
Stephen Bann: A Conversation', Oxford Art
it is vanishing. We may imagine this split between the vanishing point and its
Journal , vol. 28, no. 2, 2005, p. 177.
support as a division continuously levelled by the picture's ground, as if the
painting's support, in the process of depth's recession, is constantly moving35.
a Damisch, 'Equals Infinity' (1973), p. 67.

tiny bit away from us so as to not coincide with the dot of paint that signals it.35
Contrary to Deleuze and Guattari, who decided to read Klee's image quite
literally according to what it 'says' in terms of the mathematical signs that have
been written on its surface, Damisch is less interested in the equal sign and the
s- shaped curve that bluntly state Klee's title, and more concerned with the
interpretive status of the dots on the surface as points. The picture is an
example of 'concrete research in art' (the phrase is Klee's) in which Klee, in
his own words, analyses painting's anatomy, its skin and bone- structure.
What we thus see here, Damisch asserts, is a study on the collection of
points, among other things raising the issue of the limit of semiotics for
non- figurative images. Though abstract, Klee's painting operates within the
figurative realm, much as perspective operates, where the signifiers seem to
'work on' infinity, tending towards it rather than signifying or rendering it.
Referring to Seurat's divisionism, the division here prevents the viewer from
considering the painting as a finished whole. Klee's dots are colour-points
that function not as an image or symbol of the infinity-point but as its
equivalent. The colour dots stick to their surface so that they can be seen
while remaining 'within the bounds of the sign in Alberti 's sense of the
word' (76) and so that they are visible as well as indivisible from their
ground. Klee's dots thus have acquired qualities that they thus share with a
perspectival vanishing point. However, the theoretical split has become
concrete. The split between vanishing point and ground that produces the
'thickness' of depth is no longer a division between figure and ground as in
figurative painting, but in Klee's painting reveals itself as between figure and
colour. 'Whereas for thought, figure is divisible to infinity', Damisch writes,
'color [sic], from which painting starts, can be brought to a point, that is
indivisible to the senses'. It is within this 'thickness' of the colour as

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Fig. 9. Jan van Huysum, Basket of Flowers,
c. 1732, oil on panel, 24 x 16.5 cm. Museum
Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (detail of
a leaf).
Fig. 10. Jan van Huysum, Flowers in a Vase
Against a Landscape, c. 1730, Noortman
Master Paintings, Maastricht. (©Noortman
Master Paintings (detail of the tulip).)
36. I follow here Damisch's idea of truth in
painting, as he most clearly formulated in 'Eight
Theses For (or Against?) A Semiology of
Painting', The Oxford Art Journal, vol. 28, no. 2,
2005, pp. 257-67. This idea has been explored in
a different way by Jacques Derrida in The Truth in
Painting (University of Chicago Press: Chicago,
1987).
37. De Verleiding van Flora , chapter 6. Kolfin,
'Voor koningen en prinsen' (2006), pp. 74-5.
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On Thought in Jan van Huysum's Still Life Paintings
substance that a weaving or plaiting of thought and painting takes place, when
thought gets inscribed in paint.
If we look again at Van Huysum's painting, I suggest that in the dew drops we
see a forking on' infinity that may be similar to what we see in Klee's painting.
Van Huysum is less interested in the dewdrop as realistically rendered figure,
and more in what he can do with it in pushing the limit of representation to
its extremes. If we look again at a bead of moisture on a green leaf in Basket
of Flowers of around 1732 - 33 (Fig. 9), we see that the highlight showing
reflected light is paired with a weaker patch of white within the drop,
marking its refraction. As a point, this tiny point of refraction is as
ambiguous as a vanishing point, and as ambitious as Klee's colour dots.
Initially appearing as the ultimate pictorial touch of Van Huysum's brush, the
water drop, in its invisible materiality, opens further outward, not so much
marking the limit of transparency as, by widening its boundaries, tending
toward it. I suggest that Van Huysum's dewdrops as the hallmarks of his
virtuosity offer an attempt at thinking through the opposition of opacity to
transparency, and the importance of the collapse of the latter in favour of the
former, observed by Deleuze and Guattari. The translucent water drop
collides with the opaque white dot of a highlight, forming a new spatial
entity that would permit a thought to fit in it, or perhaps provide a slight
'movement' or 'vibe' around which the entire composition appears to
revolve, just as it does around a vanishing point.
If there is indeed a 'thought' rather than a narrative or a meaning in this
painting, it should be found neither on nor under the picture's ground.
Rather, it should be grasped as somehow departing from it in the shape of a
dot, as a patch of colour that seems to be raised from its support as if it
were acquiring a dimensionality, however minimal. This is an instance of
paint taking off, marking a translucence that cannot even be properly
indicated. This thought may lead us to rethink the notion of truth in
painting, especially as, in the particular case of Van Huysum's flower pieces,
this reflection does not stand alone but is supported (one may even say
further argued) by another moment of 'contemplation' in paint, one again
typical of Van Huysum.36 Several of Van Huysum's paintings include
exceptional passages rendering petals of tulips or other flowers, in which the
extreme smoothness of the painting's surface is interrupted. If we look
closely at a detail of the flower piece with the trompe l'oeil bee of 1730
(Fig. 7), we see that the tulip petal's fine veins have been marked by tiny
incisions, as if an actual petal has left an imprint on the wet paint. The
incisions, barely visible in reproduction, have been slit by Van Huysum with
a single brush-hair, which pierced the wet paint so that the layers underneath
would come to the surface through its grooves.37 Here, in the treatment of
the petal - considered in the light of the ultimate moment of transparency
in the dewdrop that tends towards the mimetic limit - Van Huysum seems
to have found another variation in such a limit, having pushed it away from
transparency and towards the actual layer of paint as such. The purely optical
invisibility of the dewdrop becoming visible only in its reflection has been
complemented, to a certain extent, by the illusion of a petal's imprint in
paint, which introduces a sense of touch in this otherwise diaphanous
tableau. If there is a truth in painting, we may propose, on the basis of Van
Huysum's flower still life, that if it cannot be told (as Cezanne famously
suggested), it may be thought. Van Huysum lets the underside of painting
come through, and does so without losing any of the extreme realism that he
achieved.
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Damisch has argued that the problem of what is underneath painting has only
been displaced or transformed by modernity in painting, which has retained
something of painting's 'thickness' even though it claims to strive for surface
38. Damisch, 'The Underneath of Painting'
effects.38 Whereas in figurative painting the split between the vanishing point
(1985), p. 205.
and its mark remains purely theoretical because it cannot be shown, in
39. This is a remark originally made by Seurat,
modern art it becomes visible, or rather 'figured' as paint. Though adopting and quoted by Deleuze and Guattari, What Is
radically different modes of applying colour dots to a flat picture plane, Van
Philosophy, p. 194.

Huysum and Klee are in agreement in that their works attempt to think 40. See Martha Hollander, An Entrance for the
through issues of infinity, colour, and transparency or opaqueness. Van Eyes: Space and Meaning in Seventeenth-Century

Huysum 's still life with its undercoatings, glazes, and varnishes aims Dutch
at Art (University of California Press: Berkeley
and London, 2002), pp. 8 and 46.
surface effects, just as Klee's flat painting does. Indeed, Van Huysum 's dot
departs neither from the translucent ground of the water drop's surface nor
from the background of the green leaf, but from the entire painting as such.
In turn, Equals Infinity, although it has given up depth, has lost nothing
of painting's 'thickness'. The profundity of Klee's and Van Huysum 's
paintings is marked on as well as under, as a kind of 'ploughing' of the
surface.39 This is what we may call these images' 'pensiveness', which
encompasses inconclusiveness not as something that remains unexpressed, but
as that remains inexpressible, even though it has been ploughed into the
surface of the painting. The notion of 'ploughing' the picture's surface
originally derives from Seurat, yet, already in the sixteenth- century Dutch
art theorist Karel van Mander used the term to describe the way in which
the viewer's eye would penetrate a landscape painting, a process he called
insien (looking in) or doorsien (looking through).40 Perhaps, Klee's 'seed-bed'
(his own term), and Van Huysum 's water drops thrown together under our
ploughing eyes will provide fertile ground for thought as well as for its
provocation. If 'the eye thinks, even more than it listens', as Deleuze and
Guattari write, paraphrasing Paul Claudel and Klee in one breath, we may
wish to contemplate the possibility of painting as mute philosophy rather
than mute poetry - to become aware that, according to Van Huysum 's
flower still life, there are plenty of issues still waiting to be visually thought
or philosophically seen.

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