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How a Hidden Detail Changes Everything About This Unsettling Painting
A “problem picture” with a surprise in store
I learned recently about a curious and fascinating genre of painting that emerged in the 19th century, known as Problem Pictures.
In these paintings, the artist would conjure up awkward or ambiguous scenarios between different characters, often confronting taboos and occasionally depicting unsettling events, which the viewer was invited to speculate over.
Typically, a narrative mystery sits at the heart of each work: a lover receiving a letter whose contents are unknown, a child being punished for an undisclosed misdeed, or a husband and wife in pained discussion on a topic we can only guess at.
The category was linked to the popularity of the Problem Play, a similar exercise in moral equivocation that emerged in the theatre during the Victorian age. Here, a controversial issue — from the treatment of women to the issues of social class — was acted out in dramatic terms.
With paintings, the static nature of the medium meant that much of the work had to be done by the viewer, often by spotting symbolic clues in the image and postulating a connection between them — with suggestive titles like The Letter and The Departure to assist with the decoding.
