The idea that great painting is paid for in suffering usually comes attached to a famous picture, and it is rarely checked. Checked here twelve times, it holds for Rembrandt, ruined in his last years, and for Max Beckmann, driven out of Nazi Germany.
It falls apart for Caspar David Friedrich and Vincent van Gogh. Elsewhere the pain belonged to a model, or was added long after the painter's death, and in Vermeer's case it came from a war.
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How These Were Chosen
The belief took its modern shape in the nineteenth century, when critics began to read paintings as confessions of their makers, as if each canvas recorded what the painter had lived through.
It lasts because a sickbed or an unpaid bill explains an image in one sentence, and a life is easier to tell than a picture. Some painters, too, really did lose their money, their health or their country.
Each of the twelve works below is usually explained by the life of the person who made it, and the archives answer in two ways. Sometimes the suffering was invented, or borrowed from someone else. Sometimes it was real, and the question becomes whether it made the picture.
12. John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1851 to 1852
Borrowed suffering is easiest to see in Ophelia, by the English painter John Everett Millais. A young woman floats on her back in a stream among flowers, her hands open and her dress spread on the water.
Millais took her from Shakespeare's Hamlet, where Ophelia, driven mad by grief, drowns, and he worked on the picture in 1851 and 1852. A scene this sad seems to call for a painter who suffered with her. His paperwork shows instead a careful planner in his early twenties, who began with the landscape, not with the girl.
On June 7, 1851, Millais bought his canvas from Charles Roberson, a London art supplier, and set to work outdoors on the bank of the Hogsmill, a small river at Ewell, a village in Surrey, south of London.
He stayed with that one stretch of water for about five months, so flowers that bloom in different seasons open side by side in the picture.
Only then did Ophelia herself go in, painted indoors in his London studio on Gower Street. His model was Elizabeth Siddal, about twenty two, who had been found working in a hat shop. To look like a drowning woman she lay in a tub of water that oil lamps, set underneath, kept warm.
One day the lamps went out. Millais was too absorbed to notice, and the water cooled around her until she grew very cold and fell ill. Her father called in a private doctor and ordered the painter to pay the bill, and she recovered quickly.
The suffering behind Ophelia, then, was the model's, and the painter's share was the doctor's bill.
At a Glance
Artist: John Everett Millais (1829 to 1896)
Painted: 1851 to 1852
Medium: Oil paint on canvas
Size: 76.2 × 111.8 cm (30 × 44 in)
Where to see it: Tate Britain, London
11. Henry Wallis, The Death of Chatterton, 1856
Dead across a narrow attic bed, a young man lets his right arm hang to the floor in The Death of Chatterton, painted by Henry Wallis in 1856. Torn sheets of paper lie scattered at his feet, and an open window behind him looks out over the roofs of London.
He is Thomas Chatterton, an English poet who had died at seventeen, 86 years before the picture, and this canvas made him the emblem of genius killed by poverty.
Yet no portrait of Chatterton was known when Wallis painted him, so the face on the pillow had to come from someone else.