I Saw Some Paintings With My Friend

I saw some paintings with my friend a few weeks ago. We walked around an art gallery together, admiring the talents of long-dead artists and enjoying each other’s company. Eventually, I stopped at a painting I found interesting.

Well, it wasn’t exactly the painting I found interesting. It wasn’t bad, it was just… normal. It was a portrait of an unspecified Flemish noble who lived some 300-odd years ago.

Unspecified. That’s strange.

“Hey, look at that,” I said to my friend. “They don’t know who the guy in this photo is. You’d think if they took the trouble to paint him, they’d try to remember his name, too.”

“I mean, there’s no guarantee that was anyone important,” she replied. “The elites of the time would use portraits like this to project power. It wasn’t someone important, it was someone with money who wanted to be important.”

“It’s the Flemish equivalent of a photo on the Linkedin bridge,” she quipped.

We walked to the next thing, and I kept thinking.

For the artist, this painting probably wasn’t their masterwork. It may not even have been something they were particularly proud of. It was a job. They went in, did what they were paid for, and went home at the end of the day. They spent the money on food and clothes and shelter.

Back in the 18th century, the point of this art was the noble. It was to be displayed in his halls, gifted to his allies, all to spread his image (and therefore, influence) in a way that would otherwise have been impossible. To the noble, it was likely less ‘art’ than it was a tool. Maybe the artist even thought this way, too.

But what survived? Time stripped the practicality away and now only the art remains. We look at this work, designed to be entirely functional, and it’s now entirely known for the human element. We see this piece of career work, designed to obfuscate the person behind it, and the creativity is all we see. We can’t help but attach ourselves to it.

The noble, meanwhile, has faded into history. We don’t know anything about him. He wanted to borrow the talent and labor of the artist as a proxy for longevity and it did not work.

History teaches us that the makers—the workers—are remembered. The nobles—the owners—are not.

~

I saw some paintings with my friend a few weeks ago. We walked around an art gallery together, enjoyed each other’s company, and talked about the things we’d make that people would see in a museum someday.

Soon, I saw another interesting painting. It was very similar to the last interesting painting I saw, honestly. Maybe I have a type. The difference this time was that this one was a painting of an unknown noble done by an unknown artist.

“Hey, look at that,” I said to my friend. “They don’t know anything about who made this.”

We sat and looked for a bit, a strange melancholy setting over the work.

“Imagine that’s all that’s left of you,” my friend said. “You work your whole life on art you put your heart and soul into, and all that survives is your passionless contract commission of some noble who history won’t even remember. It’s the only chance left to communicate with this person, and they made it incidentally.”

She looked at me out of the corner of her eye. “How would that make you feel?”

I tried to think of an answer.

We sat watching the painting for a while.