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Effortless Art: The Sketch in Nineteenth-Century Painting and Literature
Criticism, Summer, 1999 by Alison Byerly
Its provisional status gives the sketch a powerful sense of presence; it occupies a space halfway between reality and art. Thackeray says of Daumier's caricatures that while "the figures are very carelessly drawn," the people seem "real," and the scenes "remain imprinted on the brain as if we had absolutely been present at their acting."(48) The carelessness of the style approximates the liveliness and individuality of actual people. Thackeray's narrative style in these sketches strives for a similar effect. He involves the reader in the sketches by narrating some passages in the second person: "About twelve o'clock ... you perceive, staggering down Thames street, those two hackney-coaches, for the arrival of which you have been praying, trembling, hoping, despairing.... Your wife smiles for the first time these ten days; you pass by ship-masts, and forests of steam-chimneys...."(49) Other times, the reader is addressed directly, as if he were literally Thackeray's companion on his travels. At the Palais des Beaux Arts, he advises: "Before you take your cane at the door, look for one instant at the statue-room."(50)
Thackeray's sketches have a structural unevenness that reinforces their sense of immediacy by suggesting that they are "unfinished" because of the impromptu circumstances of their production. Thackeray, like Dickens, often organizes his observations around his supposed perambulations and makes no apologies for the arbitrariness and incompleteness of his account. The sketches are in fact self-consciously fragmentary. Many of them purport to be parts of letters or sections of stories: one piece concludes in mid-sentence, with a few dashes followed by the parenthetical explanation that "the editor would insert no more of this letter."(51) Another story ends with the narrator's promise that "the moral of this story will be given in the second edition."(52) Like visual sketches, these verbal sketches present themselves as tokens of the artist's impressions and intentions rather than autonomous, self-contained works. Their value is derived at least partially from the extrapolated value of an imaginary future work of which they appear to be mere samples or prospectuses. This tendency toward extrapolation is so strong that today, Dickens's Sketches by Boz and Thackeray's Sketch-Books are usually analyzed and evaluated retrospectively, with a view toward uncovering the nascent presence of themes and techniques that appear in later works by the two authors. The fragmentary form of the sketches supports, if it does not promote, this tendency, with its allusion to more finished work that is either withheld or promised in the future.
Both of these authors have been praised, in their own time and ours, for the "realism" of their sketches. It must be acknowledged, however, that this realism does not arise from their unmediated reflection of the world, but from the mediated reflection of established tropes in visual art: the focus on material objects that metonymically represent their owners; the presentation of isolated moments that visually emblematize deeper moral issues; the association of incompleteness with spontaneity and authenticity.
