Painting

Use in the book

The painter’s choice of how many figures to use depends on whether an event or a single passion is depicted. The distinction concerns compositional purpose, not an absolute preference for many or few figures. Painting’s planes and stippling then model the difference between the soul’s larger apprehension and the mind’s points. In history, painting a time or portraying an era is contrasted with the narrower portrait of a single life. The undated wish to express himself through painting, music and dance goes beyond communication: Joubert imagines acquiring ideas and feelings otherwise unavailable to him.

Places to read

1. I, p. 59, entry 2, ¶1Compositional quantity depends on event or single passion.
2. II, p. 507, entry 7, ¶1Planes and stippling model different powers of apprehension.
3. I, p. 316, entry 7, ¶1Painting an era defines history’s wider task.
4. II, p. 922, entry 4, ¶1Different expressive arts could make different ideas available.

Translation in this edition

The English translation clarifies ne saurait trop as “no number … too great/too small.” Plans means planes, not plans of action, and pointillé is stippling. The supplied French [employer] has no isolated English verb counterpart in that revised construction.

Use in the book

The narrator begins with an inventory of absent pictorial variety: prospects, landscapes, historical pieces, portraits, flowers, still life. These genres collapse into the line along which a Flatlander sees. His dissatisfaction establishes a specifically aesthetic deficiency after chapters devoted to how much information skilled observers can extract from that line. Scientific adequacy has not made existence beautiful.

Chromatistes's invention answers the lack through decoration rather than dimensional escape. His painted house and household make ordinary social encounters more legible and attractive. Fashion spreads faster than conservative objections can resist it. The sequence takes art from an individual's practice to a shared environment: domestic meetings, churches, theatres, and military reviews. Painting is not confined to separate objects contemplated in repose; it enters the moving body and the collective arrangement of society.

The military scene intensifies the double effect. Each class has a characteristic palette, and motion transforms the visible sequence. Rotating artillerymen, turning Isosceles, and mobile professional attendants produce rhythm as well as hue. The narrator's prose becomes correspondingly animated. Dashing, flashing, and careering make linguistic movement imitate the lost spectacle. His response shows that the pleasure of the period survives even in the supposedly more scientific language that succeeded it.

The ruler who exchanges baton and crown for a brush crystallizes the possibility that beauty can redirect authority. The story is offered as something the spectacle renders credible, not as independently verified biography. Its force is emblematic: artistic attention can make command and rank seem relinquishable. That possibility sits awkwardly beside the Square's willingness to call the age immoral or anarchical.

The account closes by connecting sensuous richness with poetry. Colour's period is a childhood that never becomes youth or maturity because it is forcibly ended. The developmental metaphor is therefore not a simple inevitable progression from primitive beauty to superior science. The art has been arrested. Aesthetic loss persists after political order is restored, and the narrator's elegiac language makes that cost audible even when his formal judgment favours suppression. Painting preserves the book's strongest evidence that the established system impoverishes its beneficiaries as well as its victims.

Places to read

1. §82“æsthetically and artistically, very dull indeed”
2. §82“first his house, then his slaves”
3. §82“the glorious childhood of Art”
4. §82“the artist’s pencil”
5. §82“our finest poetry”

In this edition

Notes 84 and 872 relate the language to the Aesthetic Movement and a historically mixed painter's palette, including contemporary mauve. Note 88 glosses pencil. Note 89 offers a period comparison for poetry as cultural youth. These are editorial contexts, not claims that Flatland's ancient chronology is Victorian chronology.

Aides-de-camp

Military officers serving as assistants to a commanding officer. The painted Pentagons and Hexagons move across the field in these and other professional roles. Printed form: aides-de-camp (§ 82). See Painting.

Burnt umber

A darkened reddish-brown earth pigment produced by heating umber. It completes the Square artillerymen’s four-colour palette. Printed form: burnt umber (§ 82). See Painting.

Constituents

The ingredients or components of something. Chromatistes discovers the materials needed to produce simple colours. Printed form: constituents (§ 82). See Painting.

Corporal decoration

Decoration of the body. Corporal is bodily here, without the rank implied by the military noun corporal. Printed form: corporal decoration (§ 82). See Painting.

Gamboge

A yellow pigment derived from a gum-resin, and the colour it produces. Here it is one of four colours assigned to the Square soldiers. Printed form: gamboge (§ 82). See Painting.

Historical pieces

Paintings representing historical, legendary, or elevated narrative subjects. They belong to the list of pictorial genres whose variety Flatland’s ordinary vision cannot reproduce. Printed form: historical pieces (§ 82). See Painting.

Licentious

Unrestrained, especially by accepted moral rules. It is one of the hostile labels the narrator concedes against the age whose beauty he admires. Printed form: licentious (§ 82). See Painting.

Marshal’s baton

The ceremonial staff signifying high military command. The legendary Circle gives it up, together with his crown, for the painter’s brush. Printed form: marshal’s baton (§ 82). See Painting.

Mauve

A pale purple colour, one of the Square artillerymen’s four hues. The modern annotation identifies its strikingly recent Victorian dye-history. Printed form: mauve (§ 82). See Painting.

Military review

A ceremonial display or inspection of troops. The coordinated movement of differently painted bodies makes this an especially rich artistic spectacle. Printed form: military review (§ 82). See Painting.

Pencil

A fine paintbrush in the older sense. The Circle’s adoption of the artist’s pencil represents the abandonment of command for painting. Printed form: pencil (§ 82). See Painting.

Prospect

The view presented to the eye, rather than a future possibility. Here every prospect resolves into a visible line. Printed form: prospect (§ 82). See Painting.

Rudimentary

Elementary or imperfectly developed. The inventor’s first painting method has not yet become a refined art. Printed form: rudimentary (§ 82). See Painting.

Sensuous

Appealing to or developing the senses. The term describes the age’s intensified experience of beauty, without necessarily asserting sexual sensuality. Printed form: sensuous (§ 82). See Painting.

Ultra-marine

A deep blue pigment or colour. The hyphenated form belongs to this copy-text’s list of the artillerymen’s hues. Printed form: ultra-marine (§ 82). See Painting.

Vermilion

A brilliant red pigment or colour. In the military tableau it colours the guns, distinct from the four colours worn by their Square operators. Printed form: vermilion (§ 82). See Painting.

Æsthetic

Pertaining to beauty and its appreciation. The Square separates Flatland’s artistic dullness from the intellectual interest of its mathematical life. Printed form: æsthetic (§ 82). See Painting.

pure from the pollution of paint (contextual phrase)

Exact wording: “pure from the pollution of paint” (§82).

The repetition of p makes the verdict memorable, almost proverbial. Pure turns the absence of pigment into moral cleanliness, while pollution makes an applied colour sound like contamination. The narrator assigns this purity to Women and Priests together, even though their shared exemption arises from very different social positions. What the Women confess as deficiency, the Priests proclaim as perfection: neither is conventionally credited with distinct sides requiring distinct colours. The phrase therefore exposes how the same visual condition can carry opposite social values before receiving one convenient moral name. It also jars with the narrator’s delight in the lost painted world. His evaluative vocabulary condemns what his description makes desirable.

Related: Colour; Painting; Universal Colour Bill.