Three Women Are Staring at Something We Never See

Three women are gathered across a drawing room, turned away from everything else in it. Two are seated. One leans over the back of a chair. All three face the easel beside the window, towards something this painting never shows us. The picture is called Admiration. It was painted by Vittorio Reggianini, and almost every surface in it exists to be looked at. Pink satin, gilt, marble, a carpet worked in red and green, a vase of white blossom. What the three women are looking at is the one thing kept outside our view. Nobody here is looking at us. Three women are looking at that easel, and a dog is turned the same way. We find the women because of the dog. So, start there. The greyhound stands at the dead centre of the floor, back to us, head lifted and turned to the right. It is the darkest shape in a room of pale fabric, and it is placed where the eye is likely to land first. Everything about its posture carries attention to the right-hand side of the canvas. It is not pointing, of course. This is a sighthound, not a gundog, and it indicates nothing deliberately. The effect is compositional. Our eye goes where its head goes. The auction catalogue describes the same movement in plainer terms. The dog, it says, directs the viewer's attention to the second group of three women, who sit enthralled before a large painting on an easel, which the catalogue calls, hidden from view by the marble column. So the easel is not something read into the picture. It is in the written record, set down by the people who catalogued the canvas. The dog takes us to the women. The women are looking at the easel. Count the acts of looking, and the room sorts itself into two halves. On the left, the man leans in with his chin near his hand, wholly occupied with the woman beside him. That is one look, and it ends at her face. She does not return it. Her head is tilted down and away, toward the leaf of her own fan. That is the second look, and it ends about a foot from her lap. Across the carpet, the three women face the easel by the window. One in striped pink holds a closed fan. The one in cream, sitting forward, holds hers open. The one in blue stands behind them, leaning in over the chair back. None of them is watching the couple, which is what they appear to be doing at first, and what I assumed for some time. Their heads are turned toward the window and the easel, and the dog looks the same way. Four looks then. Only two of them arrive at the same place, and that place is the one we are not permitted to stand in. Follow the dog's line and it reaches the women, and just to the left of them, beside the window, the easel. We can see the back of it, dark stretcher and canvas, with the edge of a gilt frame catching the light. The marble column crosses in front of part of it. The catalogue says the column hides the painting. The column does cross part of the easel, but what keeps the painting from us, in this picture, is that the canvas is turned away from us, toward the women. Its back faces the room. A column could be an accident of the furniture. A canvas turned away is part of the arrangement. There is no mirror in this room. No glass, no reflection in the marble. No sliver of painted face along the edge of the stretcher. However long we look, the geometry does not shift. What we are given instead is furniture. The stool at the right holds a straw hat with ribbons and a soft wrap thrown over it. Beneath the easel, a palette and brushes lie on a small chest, as the catalogue notes. They suggest a painter has been at work. None of it tells us what the painting is. There is another picture in this room we are refused, and it has been on the left of the frame all along. The fan. The catalogue notes that the woman on the sofa is observing her painted fan, avoiding the man's gaze. Its leaf carries a painted scene, and she holds it tipped down into her lap, the scene too small and too slanted for us to make out. Turn toward her, rather than toward us, as the canvas on the easel is turned away. The room does contain images we are allowed. An oval landscape in a gilt frame on the green-striped wall. A marble bust at the right. Further frames at the edge. I don't think those are coded, and I'd rather describe them as what they are. The furnishings of a household that buys pictures. But the two images this painting withholds are the two that people inside it are actually looking at. One of them holds the attention of a single woman. The other holds the attention of three. The catalogue offers two explanations for the easel, and then declines to choose. Either the painting has just been finished, in which case the three women are its first audience, or, they are themselves sitting for a portrait, and what we are watching is a session in progress. In one, they are an audience. In the other, they are sitters. The expression Reggianini has given them, leaning in, absorbed, close together. fits either one, which may be why the catalogue stops where it does. My own reading is that the painting is built to keep both alive. He has given the three women enough attention to carry the weight of the scene, and not quite enough information to settle it. The same even hand runs through the whole canvas. The sheen on the satin train, the gilt of the settee, the carpet border, the marble, the cheek, nothing is less finished than anything else. He declines to rank the contents of the room. The one thing he does not paint, is the picture on the easel. Reggianini was born in Modena in 1858, some references give 1853, and trained at the academy there under Antonio Simonazzi, alongside Gaetano Bellei and Eugenio Zampighi, later becoming a professor of the same academy. His early work was local historical realism. In 1885 he moved to Florence, and with the support of the dealer Pisani, his subjects turned towards luxurious 18th-century interiors. Hooke and Paltimore, writing on popular 19th-century painting, describe compositions of this type as a pretext for showing extremely elegant people in utterly luxurious surroundings. A room made to be admired, in other words. And the one thing it withholds is the picture its three women appear to be admiring. The lot page from the 2011 Sotheby's sale of 19th century paintings, where this was lot 61, records the physical facts. Oil on canvas, 25 by 33 and three quarters inches, signed at the lower right, no date given. A provenance running from Richard Green in London in 1976, to a private collection in the United Kingdom in 1977, and a conservator's report from Simon Parks, describing an unlined canvas with a clean, varnished paint layer, and no visible retouches. So, we come back across the carpet, to where the dog sent us. Two seated, one leaning in behind them, all three turned toward the easel by the window. The catalogue tells us what is in front of them. A large painting on an easel, with a palette and brushes close by. A picture either just finished, or the reason they are sitting there. Their stillness reads differently at the end than it did at the start. They are not idling in the background of somebody else's flirtation. On the first reading, they are the only people People in the room place to see the face of that canvas. We are given its back. There are other rooms like this one, with other things left out of them. Subscribe, and we will keep looking.