The Novel as Dutch Painting

In a memorable review of Jane Austen’s Emma (1816), Walter Scott cele­ brated the novelist for her faithful representation of the familiar and the commonplace. Austen had, according to Scott, helped to perfect what was fundamentally a new kind of fiction: “the art of copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life.” Rather than “the splendid scenes of an imaginary world,” her novels presented the reader with “a correct and striking representation of that which [was] daily taking place around him.” Scott’s warm welcome of Emma has long been known to literary historians and fans of Austen alike. But what is less often remarked is the analogy to visual art with which he drove home the argument. In vividly conjuring up the “common incidents” of daily life, Austen’s novels also recalled for him “something of the merits of the Flemish school of painting. The subjects are not often elegant and certainly never grand; but they are finished up to nature, and with a precision which delights the reader.”1 Just what Flemish paintings did Scott have in mind? If it is hard to see much resemblance between an Austen novel and a van Eyck altarpiece or a mythological image by Rubens, it is not much easier to recognize the world of Emma in the tavern scenes and village festivals that constitute the typical subjects of an artist like David Teniers the Younger (figs. 1-1 and 1-2). Scott’s repeated insistence on the “ordinary” and the “common” in Austen’s art—as when he welcomes her scrupulous adherence to “common inci­ dents, and to such characters as occupy the ordinary walks of life,” or de­ scribes her narratives as “composed of such common occurrences as may have fallen under the observation of most folks”—strongly suggests that it is seventeenth-century genre painting of which he was thinking; and Teniers was by far the best known Flemish painter of such images.2 (He had in fact figured prominently in the first Old Master exhibit of Dutch and