Pensive, “La Songeuse” or Day Dreaming,
1875
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841-1919)
Oil on paper on canvas
18-1/8”H x 15”W
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 83.47
© Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
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Introduction
Reality never comes to art wholesale. Whenever we try to portray the world, whether in painted form or in writing, we have to choose among innumerable details ripe for representation, and we manipulate setting and characters—all in order to elicit an emotional response from the viewer or reader.
The VMFA’s special exhibition, Landscapes from the Age of Impressionism, inspired a group of Virginia Commonwealth University undergraduates to write several short pieces of fiction in the fall of 2007. Taught by Professor Susann Cokal, the class was called “Form and Theory of Fiction”—not a workshop per se, but a chance for students to study different literary modes as both critics and creative writers. The Impressionism exhibition, and Sandy Rusak’s guest lecture about the movement’s innovations, sparked discussion about detail and visual and emotional effect in fiction—any kind of fiction, whether realism, magic realism, minimalism, modernism, or any of the half-dozen “isms” we studied that semester. Students visited the VMFA and pored over art books and the Internet. Over the course of the semester, each wrote two pieces of short-short fiction inspired by the paintings in the show or found in art books or the Internet.
Some of the stories bring specific paintings to life, imagining what is going on in the room, say, where a child (or is it a doll?) sits staring vacantly forward. Others dramatize the moment at which the picture was painted, how the artist arranged his subjects and applied the brush to canvas. Still others add a
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