Filtering of the boating party.

Renoir's "Luncheon of the Boating Party" offers a good example of compelling visual art. The woman near the center is a particular focal point, and one which evokes perhaps the strongest responses in many viewers. I've been playing with visual frequency filters for my research recently, and have found that her face produces a similar effect to that observed in the smile of the Mona Lisa by Margaret Livingstone in her work "Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing".

If you look at versions of the woman filtered for high:


and low frequencies:


the high frequency images appeared to us to show a much happier face looking toward the other revelers at the luncheon, with the low frequency ones evoking a wistful or even sad individual looking straight out from the painting at the viewer.

Now, we're always building expectations. Even over the short period of time while we fixate our eyes on an object in the periphery. We expect to see a more detailed version of whatever we saw out of the corner of our eye just a few milliseconds before. In the case of this painting a viewer looking anywhere around the edges (i.e. at the other people partaking of the luncheon), the incongruous image of a sad person staring wistfully straight out of the image while surrounded by a jovial social scene would be enough to draw the eye. At the end of the saccade to the center of the painting, their brains would expect to encounter a detailed version of the sad woman previously seen in a low-frequency filtered way out of the corner of their eye.

These expectations would be violated however. Not hugely or strongly enough to really cause a double-take, but just a moment of uncertainty. The woman they are now looking at is smiling and appears to be far more engaged in the goings on than an observer would have previously thought.

The rest of the painting seems to be designed to take advantage of this, using long diagonal lines to draw the eye outward from her face in a spiral to the point where she appears to be a somber and detached figure in the middle of revelry, whose unexpected happiness helps to resolve this larger-scale schematic incongruity which led the viewer to focus on her.