Realism as Style?: Art History, Artificial Intelligence, and the Search for the Styleme

Manas Mehta, Elizabeth C. Mansfield, Shuhua Yang, Zhuomin Zhang, Jia Li, John Russell, James Z. Wang

Abstract: The term 'Realism' was not yet in use by art critics during Constable's lifetime, so they understandably fell back on words like 'singular' to describe the artist's style. Style mattered in the art world of 19-century Britain. Appraisals of style allowed contemporary works of art to be assessed in relation to familiar aesthetic standards and artistic precedents. This historical concern for style warrants consideration by researchers today. Scholarly attention to Constable's style—both as it manifests itself in his works and as it has been perceived historically—enhances our understanding of the cultural and social significance of his artistic practice. Art historians have taken various approaches to understanding what made Constable's style seem so unusual to critics at the time. Analysis of published reviews, along with consultation of other documentary sources (much was written by and about Constable in his lifetime), provides useful insight, but it is the artist's works themselves that provide the clearest evidence of his style. This record, preserved in Constable's own works and occasionally evident in landscapes produced by his followers, offers visual testimony of the painter's style. Now, in addition to essential practices of close looking and technical analysis, the visual evidence of Constable's style can also be explored computationally via computer vision. Preliminary to such research, however, is the development of a computer vision model that can reliably recognise and then emulate algorithmically `Constable's style'. This chapter describes the art historical and computational potential, as well as the limits, of this approach.