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| Edvard Munch Portrait of Thorvald Torgersen 1882 oil on panel Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo |
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| Edvard Munch Inger in Black and Violet 1892 oil on canvas Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo |
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| Edvard Munch The writer August Strindberg 1892 oil on canvas Moderna Museet, Stockholm |
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| Edvard Munch Madonna 1894 oil on canvas Hamburger Kunsthalle |
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| Edvard Munch Madonna ca. 1895 lithograph Ohara Museum of Art, Kurashiki, Japan |
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| Edvard Munch Detachment II 1896 lithograph Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin |
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| Edvard Munch Portrait of painter Paul Hermann and doctor Paul Contard 1897 oil on canvas Belvedere Museum, Vienna |
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| Edvard Munch Portrait of Marie Helene Holmboe 1898 oil on canvas KODE (Art Museums Complex), Bergen, Norway |
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| Edvard Munch Woman in Red ca. 1901-1903 oil on canvas Neue Pinakothek, Munich |
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| Edvard Munch Women on Bridge 1902 oil on canvas KODE (Art Museums Complex), Bergen, Norway |
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| Edvard Munch Marie Linde 1902 lithograph Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin |
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| Edvard Munch Thuringian Forest 1904 oil on canvas Dallas Museum of Art |
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| Edvard Munch Portrait of Harry Graf Kessler 1906 oil on canvas Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin |
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| Edvard Munch Portrait of art collector Gustaf Schiefler 1908 oil on canvas Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki |
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| Edvard Munch Portrait of Elsa Glaser 1913 oil on canvas Kunsthaus Zürich |
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| Edvard Munch Portrait of Heinrich Frølich 1931 woodcut Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin |
Even after the development of naturalistic art, the vocabulary of representation shows a tenacity, a resistance to change, as if only a picture seen could account for a picture painted. The stability of styles in art is sufficiently striking to demand some such hypothesis of self-reinforcement. It was in the field of landscape painting, where sight counts for so much more than calculation, that these psychological facts were first discovered and discussed. Eleven years after Fréart de Chambray had told his Poussinist friends of the "paradox" that the good artist must never trust to his vision, the leader of the emergent Rubeniste party, Roger de Piles, pointed to the other side of the case in his Dialogue sur le Coloris (1673). The bad habits of painters, he says, "even affect their organs, so that their eyes see the objects of nature colored as they are used to painting them." We have seen the effect of this mutual induction both in the "pathology" of topographic portrayal and in its transformation into an art. For there is always the credit side to be remembered: nature could never have become "picturesque" for us unless we, too, had acquired the habit of seeing it in pictorial terms. Richard Payne Knight, a clear-sighted art lover of the eighteenth century, knew very well that the search for picturesque beauty that sent poets and painters to the Lakeland was a search for motifs that reminded the art lover of paintings, preferably those of Claude and Poussin.
We are back at the problem of Constable's achievement, the exact character of those visual discoveries that were characterized by Roger Fry as an "advance toward appearances." There is no doubt that Constable saw his work in this light. He rebelled against a public that "looked upon pictures as standards by which nature is to be judged rather than the reverse." But the very violence of his reaction would be unintelligible if it were not for that inevitable pull which the memory of pictures seen also exercised on his sensitive mind. The Victoria and Albert Museum possesses a fine study by Constable of Borrowdale in the Lakeland which he made at the age of twenty-two. On the reverse he wrote the following note to aid his memory: "Fine, blowing day, tone very mellow, like the mildest of Gaspar Poussin and Sir George Beaumont, on the whole deeper toned than this drawing." We can observe how a comparison immediately arises in the painter's mind in front of his motif. He thinks of Gaspar Poussin, whose grandiose mountain scenes had taught the eighteenth century to see the Lakeland in terms of the picturesque. . . . But even when he renounces the picturesque, it is still in terms of pictures that Constable thinks. Of his native Suffolk he writes: "It is a most delightful landscape for a painter. I fancy I see Gainsborough in every hedge and hollow tree."
– E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1960)
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