A Note on Explaining Impressionism as a Result of Astigmatism (1872)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2907  (Overall Post 5116)

Years ago I wrote short post here on the influence of eyesight and modern art, something along the lines of Impressionism owing itself to artists with poor/uncorrected vision. It was along the lines of alien outer space space aliens determining that for the USA the most revered object in society was what we called "automobiles"--we feed them, wash them, take them out for exercise, work long hours to afford them, get them regular checkups plus occasional doctor visits, etc.--and so in this light Impressionism is born of astigmatism by an artist who thought that their color symphony was what everyone was seeing, and not just a product of their poor eyesight, and lo! a revolution in imagination is created.

After this bit the subject really never came up...until last night, when I happened on a story by Richard Liebreich in several 1872¹ articles in the early years of publication of the great science journal, Nature. Between an article on the new Yellowstone Park and another on adaptive coloration of mollusks is "Leibreich on Turner and Mulready", and on the face of it there's not much in the title to excite an interest, unless you knew that the first name was that of a celebrated ophthalmology person, suggesting something-or-other in the science/art realm. This appearance is a report on Liebreich's lecture to the Royal Institution on 8 March 1872 "On the effects of certain faults of vision on painting, with special reference to Turner and Mulready", the title here getting straightaway to the point, which was basically explaining the creation of Impressionism due to abnormalities in artistic vision.

Liebreich (1830-1917) was a fine anatomist, an artist and sculptor, an assistant to one of the 19^th century's greatest minds in von Helmholtz, creator of his own ophthalmoscope, and creator of the first atlas of ophthalmology, and so had the chops to look deeply into the possible physiological aspects of vision. He applied this talen to the pre-Impressionist JMW Turner, and evidently found that was people find to be genius in Turner was to Liebreich the possible result of astigmatism. He writes:

• "It was particularly important to ascertain if the anomaly of the whole picture could be deduced from a regularly recurring fault in its details. This fault is a vertical streakiness, which is caused by every illuminated point having been changed into a vertical line. The elongation is, generally speaking, in exact proportion to the bright- ness of the light; that is to say, the more intense the light which diffuses itself from the illuminated point in nature, the longer becomes the line which represents it on the picture."

Giving Liebreich the benefit of the doubt here, it should be noted that when he was working this out in 1871/2 Impressionism was still a very young idea, and Turner (1775-1851) was already dead for 21 years. His access to other examples of Impressionist works was no doubt extremely limited, as the first exhibition of Impressionist painters was still two years away in 1874. (This show displayed works by Degas, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Cezanne, Sisley, Morisot and others, and resulted in sales of only 1000 francs for Monet, 200 francs for Renoir and Cezanne, 130 francs for Pissarro, with Degas and Morisot selling nothing. The second exhibition—two years later in 1874—would do a little better.) Anyway my guess is that there wasn't much for Liebreich to compare Turner to, and so relied on his interpretation of physiological evidence to explain Turner's revolutionary depiction of light and form. I've wondered what people tried to make of Turner in the 1830s—now I know a little of that story, from a little later on. Liebreich writes:

• "Everything that is abnormal in the shape of objects, in the drawing, and even in the colouring of the pictures of this period, can be explained by this vertical diffusion of light. Till the year 1830 all is normal [re Turner]. In I831 a change in the colouring becomes for the first time perceptible, which gives to the works of Turner a peculiar character not found in any other master. During the last years of Turner's life this peculiarity became so extreme that his pictures can hardly be understood at all."

He does defend Turner from folks who simply see his work as "deranged"--it isn't, as the "derangement" is just the result of the artist rendering exactly what it was he saw, which was a twisted version of what everyone else was viewing, though it was beyond his control.

" It is a generally received opinion that Turner adopted
a peculiar manner, that he exaggerated it more and more,
and that his last works are the result of a deranged intel-
lect. I am convinced of the incorrectness, I might almost
say of the injustice, of this opinion. According to my
idea, Turner's manner is exclusively the result of a change
in his eyes, which developed itself during the last twenty
years of his life. In consequence of it the aspect of nature
gradually changed for him, while he continued in an un-
conscious, I might almost say in a naive manner, to re-
produce what he saw. And he reproduced it so faithfully
and accurately, that he enables us distinctly to recognise
the nature of the disease of his eyes, to follow its develop-
ment step by step, and to prove by an optical contrivance
the correctness of our diagnosis."

Liebreich ends another version (appearing in the first volume of Popular Science Monthly, NYC) two months later in June 1872:

• "It would be more important to correct the abnormal vision of the artist, than to make a normal eye see as the artist saw when his sight had suffered. This, unfortunately, can only be done to a certain extent."

This is a complicated story and I'm just making a note of it here. Liebreich overall—I think—makes a defense for understanding and even defending Turner as a fine artist who does not have control over his painting field because of a visual impairment, rather than a revolutionary artist introducing a new way of representing the world.

A few weeks later a response by W. Mattieu Williams² appears in Nature in which he conducts some of his own experiments, and finds that some of the Turner imagery were results of deformation in the crystalline lens and of prolonged exposure to the Sun and viewing a scene through excessive tears.

• "The other phenomena represented by Turner are, I think, simply a faithful copying of the effects of glare and suffusion produced by painful sun-gazing and the looking at a landscape where the shadows are, so to speak, nowhere, or all behind one's-back."

Liebreich lived to 1917, which means that he was able to see the full development of Impressionism and then of non-Representational painting. I wonder how his opinions changed when when seeing Braque and Kandinsky and all he rest...

And as an aside, Turner does get "cleaned up" in a way, when his artwork appears as engravings. There is of course much more definition given the scene as the engraver puts in hard lines on the soft non-edges of the original. For example, here we have "Rain, Steam, and Speed":

Before:

After:

The "after" version here is actually much more representative of the original than generally found in Turner engravings. 

Anyway there's nothing that quite takes the "impression" out of "Impressionism" than cutting a hard line of it in a steel plate.  

(Again, this is just some outside thinking on the topic, limited to about the timeline of three cups of coffee.  Maybe four.)

Notes:

1. "Dr. Liebreich on Turner and Mulready", Nature, March 21, 1872

2. Williams, W. Mattieu. "Turner's Vision", Nature, 25 April 1872, p 500.