Seeing and Knowing: From Landscape Painting to Physics (and Back Again)

I t ’s a series of average paintings, produced by an evidently average painter. Rendered between 1894 and 1901 by Ogden Rood, the chair of physics at Columbia University, watercolor landscapes unfold in flecks and smears of color. Splotches of trees materialize from the embrace of fog-filled valleys. Distant mountains shimmer hazily against vibrating foliage. A sharply drawn church steeple and a tall, blurry, pine tree vie for compositional primacy against splashes of rolling farmland. A low stable (or is it a peat hut?) protrudes from a copse of shrubs. An occasional lightning bolt or radiantly illuminated cloud— rendered in opaque, white gouache—splits the sky (see fig. 1). The scenes are in every way conventional—every way, that is, except for their justification. For rather than simply representing mountains and trees, or pastoral beauty—or, for that matter, reflecting a certain pride in facility with paint, or even the sheer pleasure of daubing pigment on paper—these paintings were an attempt by the aging scientist to prove to himself that his work in physics could not have inspired French impressionism.