I walk through the galleries of the TMA and even when I am by myself I am not alone. Those eyes, they are following me from across the centuries. The man raising his glass in Valentin’s Fortune Teller with Soldiers, the father with his lively family in Frans Hals’ Van Campen Family Portrait, the young girl with Hester, Countess of Sussex by Gainsborough. Our eyes lock and I am drawn into their lives and long to know more.

I play a game of looking at them looking at me and then I move and look at them from a different angle and there they are….still looking right back as if their eyes have shifted. Others snub me. I try to get their attention by viewing them from many different angles and yet their eyes refuse to meet mine. Why is this? How is this? As a docent who is not an artist herself, I am intrigued and amazed.

As it turns out, it wasn’t too difficult for me to satisfy my curiosity with a little bit of research on the ubiquitous gaze. The ubiquitous gaze is defined as “a phenomenon where the artist positions the eyes of a portrait in such a way that the viewer experiences a sense of being followed by the eyes in the portrait.” In order for this to happen, our brain gets a little confused as our eyes view a two dimensional work of art but visually perceive it as if it is in the three dimensional world.

In real life if you are looking at a person who is looking right at you, you will see more of their iris and less of the whites of their eyes. If they are looking away from you, the white to iris ratio will increase. Since a person painted into a portrait is unchanging, their gaze is locked into either looking out to the viewer or away from the viewer. When an artist has mastered linear perspective and the replication of light and shadow the brain processes the two dimensional subject as if they were three dimensional. When the white to iris ratio doesn’t change when viewing the painting from different angles as the brain expects it to, the subject’s eyes appear to follow the viewer. Conversely, if the subject isn’t looking at you when you are right in front of them, regardless of angle, your eyes will never lock. The directional cues are fixed either one way or the other regardless of where you as the viewer is positioned.

I wander the museum and watch the eyes. I try to reason with my brain by paying attention to the fact that this is a 2D image and encourage it not to fall for this trick. Nevertheless the gazes of those 2D people hanging on the wall are trained on me as much as mine, in the 3D world, are trained on them. They look back at me as if to welcome me into the depth of their stories. And even if I am the only visitor in the gallery, I have the sensation that I am not entirely alone.

Sources:

The Ohio State University. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://news.osu.edu/study-reveals-why-eyes-in-some-paintings-seem-to-follow-viewers/

Smallwood, K. (2019, January 15). Why Do the Eyes in Some Paintings Follow You Around the Room? Retrieved from http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2019/01/whats-deal-paintings-eyes-follow-around-room/

Williams, K. (2020, January 30). The Mystery of Portraiture: Why Do the Eyes in Paintings Seem to Follow You Sometimes? Retrieved from https://www.nashvillechatterclass.com/the-mystery-of-portraiture-why-do-the-eyes-in-paintings-seem-to-follow-you-sometimes/47216/

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