Julia 1914

John William Godward made this oil painting, Julia, with a muted, classical palette. It feels like a rendering of antiquity, but also like Godward is rendering his own way of seeing beauty. Look closely, and you see how the paint handling has an almost photographic surface. The gradations of tone in the flesh are like a soft-focus filter on reality. The folds of the gown have these perfect, almost mechanically drawn lines. It’s a kind of surface, but it's a concealing surface. Take the marbled pillar, for example. It's so smooth and glassy, yet captures a certain kind of truth about the thing it is trying to represent, a kind of dream of perfection. Think of Alma Tadema, also swimming in the same sea of looking, dreaming, and painting. Ultimately, what is painting but a rendering of a feeling?