Paintings are in their own way magical, transporting the mind of the observer to the worlds envisioned by the painters. Small wonder that a number of authors have turned metaphor into literal phenomenon, writing about paintings that literally transport observers from location to location or even from world to world. Examples abound! Consider these five.
Delicious in Dungeon by Ryoko Kui (2014- )
Having been saved from certain death-by-dragon thanks to the self-sacrifice of mage Falin, Falin’s brother Laios and his crew of dungeon-delving adventurers are determined to find and resurrect Falin before she is fully digested by the dragon. This simple quest is complicated by the fact that the dungeon is more complex than expected.
Among the unexpected phenomena encountered: paintings so realistic that observers are literally drawn into them. The events depicted provide valuable insight into how the dungeon became as it is. The magic paintings can also serve as traps for the unwary, people who (like Laios) are more inquisitive than careful.
Readers may be distracted by Laios’ frankly disturbing willingness to treat the various monsters encountered as food. In fact, his go-to solution for most challenges seems to be to see if they can be consumed. Were I one of his teammates, I would be careful about sleeping near Laois.
“A Young Lady in a Make-Believe Landscape,” from Alberic the Wise and Other Journeys by Norton Juster (1965)
A disaffected young Claude habitually frequents a museum. His attention is particularly focused on a painting of Elena, a young woman. On closer examination, he discovers he can enter the painting to join the alluring Elena in her world.
Despite Elena’s initial reluctance to share her problems with Claude, he discovers that the world beyond the frame of the painting is one filled with political turmoil, a world in which he is well-suited to play hero. At least, for a time.
Claude runs up against two problems: he jumps to conclusions on the basis of sketchy or incomplete evidence and he is disinclined to reconsider his conclusions once he has made them. I am sure there are no general lessons to be learned here.
“The Night of the Surreal McCoy” from The Wild Wild West, director Alan Crosland Jr., writers Michael Garrison and John Kneubuhl (1967)
Agents West (Robert Conrad) and Artemis Gordon (Ross Martin) are assigned to guard the Herzberg jewels. Despite their extreme vigilance, the jewels vanish. All evidence suggests that this should have been impossible … and yet someone has managed the impossible.
Recurring antagonist Miguelito Loveless is an amoral genius for whom the word “impossible” is merely a challenge. A conventional theft is impossible? Simply invent the means to enter paintings, arrange for the painting in which one is hidden to be placed in the museum, steal the jewels, then escape when the painting is conveyed back to the home of its owner. This would have been a slam dunk…were it not that West and Gordon are on the case.
The Wild Wild West was a pre-steampunk Steampunk Western TV show in which super-science inventions that would impress even Toronto’s Inspector Murdoch appeared, facilitated a single episode’s plot, and then vanished forever (even though they would have made millions if put on sale). Since a number of these inventions were weapons of mass destruction, this may be for the best.
Monet’s Ghost by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (1997)
Geena Howe loves art. Her discovery that she can enter paintings comes as a delight. Geena can appreciate the painter’s world from a perspective no other living person experiences. This is such a marvelous development that she never stops to wonder how her adventures might go wrong.
Within the world of a Monet painting, there is a castle. Not only is the castle haunted, it is mutable. Eerie enough when limited to the internal layout of the structure, but to Geena’s considerable alarm, the location where she entered the painting vanishes. Without it, she may never be able to return home.
Generally speaking, this is where I usually mock protagonists for making choices that might result in (a) adventure and/or (b) a horrible death. But how was Geena to guess that this could be dangerous? It’s not as if Geena had stepped into a Goya or a Bosch. What could possibly go wrong in a Monet? As it turns out, lots.
An Illusion of Thieves by Cate Glass (2019)
Magical talents are seen as evidence of demonic entanglement; people with such talents are arrested and executed by Cantagna’s excessively prudent government. Romy has concealed her magic her whole life…until her idiot brother brought catastrophe on their family and cost Romy her position as mistress to Sandro, Cantagna’s Shadow Lord.
Romy is now eking out a marginal existence as a scribe. Her former lover’s wife, Gilliette, approaches her with a dangerous request: help Gilliette conceal a theft. (If that doesn’t work, Gilliette would be happy to blame Romy for said theft). Gilliette will not take “no” for an answer. Romy tries to placate Gilliette by assembling a team of sorcerers, each with their own special talent—including Dumond, who is able to draw and paint perfectly detailed doorways and portals, infusing them with magic for ingress or escape. Maybe they’ll help her do what Gilliette wants; maybe they’ll save her from her tormentor.
***
There are many books I could have mentioned, even if I were to leave out the ones I have not read but of which I am sufficiently aware to know they have portal paintings. Many of you may have favourites not mentioned above. Feel free to remind me of them in comments, which are as ever below.
In the words of fanfiction author Musty181, four-time Hugo finalist, prolific book reviewer, and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll “looks like a default mii with glasses.” His work has appeared in Interzone, Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis) and the 2021 and 2022 Aurora Award finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by web person Adrienne L. Travis). His Patreon can be found here.
How about this one: C.S. Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
@1: Yup. That’s what I came here to add too!
If you’re doing TV, the third story in the “Night Gallery” pilot, with Richard Kiley as a fugitive Nazi would could here.
The Asylum of Dr. Caligari by James Morrow and Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol storyline, The Painting That Ate Paris.
See also “The Painting that Ate Paris” story-arc comprising DOOM PATROL Vol. 2, issues 26 – 29, scripted by Grant Morrison. The Brotherhood of Dada, a supervillain team devoted to absurdism and intent on unleashing chaos for its own sake, unveil a mystical recursive painting next to the Eiffel Tower that absorbs the entire city of Paris. The Doom Patrol follows them into the painting, only to find themselves in “worlds” of various painting “schools:” Impressionism, Futurism, Cubism, etc. before being able to complete their mission.
Roger Zelazny’s Amber series use the trumps to communicate and move from place to place, and the original sets are hand painted.
Sphinx Daybreak by Robert Wilfred Franson, which is a prequel to his Shadow of the Ship, has tapestries that act as gateways to other places. Many of the Aircats are making use of one to emigrate. having read the book I can see why his colleagues stranded Reinhallt on the meadow.
Passing Strange by Ellen Klages. (The magical painting is what makes it SFF)
In The Death of the Necromancer, by Martha Wells, Nicholas Valiarde is an art dealer. Secretly Nicholas is plotting revenge for the wrongful execution of his godfather Edouard, framed on false evidence by Count Montesq. Key to this plot is a magical painting placed in Montesq’s manor. Montesq doesn’t know that Valiarde is observing him through the painting. Nicholas knows every crime that Montesq commits. Which is frustrating. It would be simple to have Montesq executed for his crimes. But true vengeance can be achieved only if Montesq is framed for a crime he never committed.
Folks, help me out. There was a fantasy book with three authors about paintings. One of the authors also wrote a book with a very striking cover– a dragon blasting white fire upwards. What impressed me about the cover was that it was in medium bright covers, and yet the white dragon fire showed up wonderfully.
Fortunately, I’ve remembered a book that almost fits– _the Sun, The Moon and the Stars_ by Stephen Brust. Half the book is folk tales, and the other half is a detailed description of an artist making a painting with a mythological subject. The book worked surprisingly well.
Related concept: the transporting tapestries in Lawrence Watt-Evans’s Ethshar series.
THE BLACKHOPE ENIGMA, Teresa Flavin. Young adult contemporary fantasy. A painting hanging in Blackhope Castle by Renaissance genius Fausto Corvo is said to be magical, but Sunni Forrest is more fascinated by the painter’s skills until her younger brother Dean accidentally activates its magical qualities and is sucked into the painting. Soon, she and her friend Blaise go in after him, and they are followed by evil Angus Bellini who wants the other magical paintings said to be hidden within this one. Dean, Sunni, and Blaise must face monsters, pirates, betrayal, and other dangers as they try to find their way out of the painting and back home. A really fun adventure story.
WAKING THE DEAD, Heather Graham. Book 2 of the “Cafferty and Quinn” series. Paranormal mystery with strong romance elements. Danielle Cafferty and Michael Quinn are once more after an evil art object that brings death to those around it. The evil painting “The Ghosts in the Mind” has gone missing, a large family has been slaughtered, and an evil fog brings death to random people in New Orleans. The heroes must find the painting and destroy its evil.
THE ALCHEMIST’S ILLUSION, Gigi Pandian. “Accidental Alchemist.” Book 4. Paranormal mystery. Alchemist Zoe Faust finds a clue to the location of her long-missing mentor Nicholas Flamel in a painting, but it goes missing. She, Dorian the gargoyle, and her friends are on the case when a murdered artist’s death investigation puts them in danger. A great series with charming characters, a carefully plotted mystery, and plenty of paranormal weirdness. Spoiler Alert: Someone is trapped in the painting.
THE HOUND OF ROWAN, Henry H. Neff. Book 1 of “The Tapestry.” Young adult contemporary fantasy. Ten-year-old Max McDaniels sees something magical in a tapestry in a museum, and before you can say “Harry Potter,” he’s being attacked by monsters and sent to a small private school for young wizards where he must deal with the usual problems of school as well as various magical ones. Meanwhile, the school and Max himself have enemies circling. The book definitely has a Harry Potter as well as a Percy Jackson feel to it, but Neff creates a detailed history and magical beings which gives the story some originality, and Max is a good kid. The whole series revolves around that tapestry.
Nancy @7: I think you have in mind The Golden Key by Melanie Rawn, Jennifer Roberson, and Kate Elliott. Rather an impressive book that I liked, and there was a fair amount of people being painted into paintings and brought out of paintings in that book.
Not so much travel into paintings, but The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde certainly deserved a mention.
And I think the cover you were thinking of was Rawn’s Stronghold:
Dr. Pedant says: That’s Inspector Murdoch, not Murdock. #sorrynotsorry
@14–Fixed, thanks!
This made me remember a story, but I can’t for the life of me remember where I read it. I think it was like a story within a story. Like someone was trying to convey some secret information through three stories. In the one I’m thinking about, there’s a guy who can turn people into paintings by painting them. He turns I believe a king and queen into paintings, but the princess escapes. She goes to find her older brother, I think, who was banished or got stuck on an island. Something about crossing the sea to get there is very dangerous. Does that ring a bell for anyone else?
@6: not just the trumps; their creator (Dworkin) also does wall paintings suitable for stepping through.
I have mental images of stories of people getting sucked into paintings permanently and being visible to people outside the painting (usually very unhappily — this is not Purple Rose of Cairo territory) but can’t put a name to any of them. Does this ring any bells?
Paint by Magic by Kathryn Reiss, sort of.
@16
That sounds a bit like one of the Rasmussem books by Vivian Vande Velde. Maybe User Unfriendly.
@17
Maybe Too Many Curses by A. Lee Martinez?
Ursula Vernon’s _Illuminations_ (by her T. Kingfisher pseudonym) has magical drawings, some that can come to life and do stuff.
A truly lovely example is “Lovers on a Bridge”, by Alexandra Seidel, a romantic story about a woman visiting an art museum and seeing a painting she thinks she recognizes, with a man in it — and then she’s in the painting. (And more than that goes on, of course.)
It’s about science fictional paintings, not a magical painting, but it involves paintings (or “evolutive art”) this might as well be magic — “Endless Forms Most Beautiful”, by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro.
17 triggered a memory of a not books situation. In “The Day of the Doctor” a number of Zygons are hiding in paintings, and assorted Doctors and assistant use “Gallifrey Falls (No More)” to access the UNIT Black Archive and are visible in the middle distance of the painting while in there.
I’ve only seen a few episodes of Disney’s “Sofia the First”, but in one of them Sofia and friends were learning how to move in and out of magic pictures and got stuck because the know-it-all friend actually didn’t know it all. Being Disney fluff, it was just inconvenient and a chance to learn some life lessons.
And we must not forget that Wile E. Coyote can paint tunnels with such realism that the Roadrunner can run through them.
Fritz Leiber’s “The Ghost Light” has a spectre that emerges from her own portrait, if that counts.
There are also some peculiar paintings in the House Absolute, but I can’t recall if they’re supernatural or not. With Wolfe, it’s often hard to tell.
Dorian Gray.
The Books of Elsewhere by Jacqueline West features an old house with mysterious paintings. Paintings that a curious young person can climb inside and explore. Immortal portraits of people which mimic their real-life personas. And a few people who were trapped in the paintings because they got on the wrong side of the painter.
16 – I read a book when I was a kid (ie, back in the Seventies) about the lord of some big keep who acquires a mistress after his wife dies.* She traps the souls of the various other people living in the castle by drawing their portraits, leaving just soulless automatons (once she draws in the eyes, the transition is complete). It’s up to the lord’s children to save the day. I’ve never been able to track down that book (not surprising, as I don’t remember its title etc).
* with hindsight, the evil mistress reminds me a lot of wicked women a la Diana Wynne Jones.
I expect there are several stories where paintings swallow people. A much disliked Doctor Who story has that, another had aliens turning people into wall art and not back again, and in Sarah Jane Smith spinoff episode “Mona Lisa’s Revenge” it turns out that Mona was painted using evil paint from outer space and she comes to life and some other people are sent out of it. This didn’t come up in the Doctor Who with six or seven Mona Lisas, I forget – a time travel art fraud story. Maybe there is only one evil one.
“The Painted World” is an episode of the earlier “Charmed”.
Do we count “Ghostbusters 2”?
Do we count “Who Killed Roger Rabbit?”
Do we count Clive Barker’s “Weaveworld”, which is tapestry or carpet but anyway I suppose not painted, per se?
It’s not clear how the Harry Potter world has animated paintings, but it seems to be meant literally. A painting of somebody partakes of the actual person. So do photographs. Apparently it doesn’t hurt.
In The Box of Delights by John Masefield the magician escapes his enemies by entering a picture showing a string of mules & riding away. Later, he can bring to life pictures the boy draws – the boy can only draw horses, so they have to break his chains[with teeth or hooves ,I forget]
In the previous book, The Midnight Folk pictures sometimes come to life. Twiney Pricker undoes his shirt to show an identifying tattoo.
The Book of Kells by R.A. MacAvoy used a specific cross image with 1000 spirals and a specific tune to traverse time from 1000 years ago, when the original cross was made, to the artist’s flat in Dublin as he draws the image.
One of the Grimes space opera novels by A. Bertram Chandler had a psychic couple paint Ayers Rock (that’s what they called it in the novel; don’t hurt me) in an attempt to reach Earth after a mutiny damaged the ship. They got the timing a little off and wound up back in prehistory where a few crew members named Thor and Romulus and Remus and others decided to stay.
I recall a character in Thieves’ World that was an artist and everything he painted came to life.
Does “Pickman’s Model” by H.P. Lovecraft count?
@27 Dorian Gray is an unforgivable omission. It should have been in the article.
From the previously mentioned Night Gallery, the second season episode “The Painted Mirror” has the eponymous mirror opening out into a lush prehistoric world (which is shown as such by the T-Rex and other wildlife we see pass in the distance) after the antiques dealer who buys it scrapes off the covering layer of paint. After his hateful business partner chases her annoying small dog through the portal, he quickly repaints the mirror, trapping her in that prehistoric world.
Dorian Gray occurred to me, then I realized it didn’t fit into James’ actual theme of “paintings that literally transport observers from location to location or even from world to world”.
(Then I realized this was a Tor.com thread, and people would ignore that and mention it anyway.)
@26 I counter with a significant number of magical paintings in ‘Ruddigore’ by Gilbert & Sullivan.
“The Boy who Drew Cats” translated by Lafcadio Hearn. There’s a good audio version on “Myths and Legends podcast.
Much as I hate to recommend it – Piers Anthony’s Castle Roogna has a magical tapestry that can transports people to what it shows, whether another place or the distant past. Ok, it’s a tapestry not a painting, but close enough.
To quote a certain Mr Holmes: “Art in the blood can take the strangest forms.”
I seem to recall one of August Derleth’s “Cthulhu mythos” stories featuring a wall painting which could display, at different times, a number of scenes relevant to the Mythos – Devil Reef at Innsmouth, and so on – with the suggestion that the painting could act as a portal – in either direction, as required. A picture with real depth.
12. tonyz and 13. DigiCom, thank you! That’s it.
A couple of marginal cases: a classic old story about an etching with a shadowy figure that’s getting closer.
“The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury, in which the lions in the giant tv screens (?) get out.
John Donne gave us this sonnet: Witchcraft by a Picture
I fix mine eye on thine, and there
Pity my picture burning in thine eye;
My picture drown’d in a transparent tear,
When I look lower I espy;
Hadst thou the wicked skill
By pictures made and marr’d, to kill,
How many ways mightst thou perform thy will?
But now I’ve drunk thy sweet salt tears,
And though thou pour more, I’ll depart ;
My picture vanished, vanish all fears
That I can be endamaged by that art ;
Though thou retain of me
One picture more, yet that will be,
Being in thine own heart, from all malice free.
[John Donne, Witchcraft by a Picture, 1633]
@42. – I believe that you’re thinking of M.R. James’s “The Mezzotint”. The scene changed with each viewing, showing different consecutive events of a skeletal figure’s invasion of a country house at night and its theft of a child.
Pretty chilling stuff.
Raskos, thanks. I thought it might be M. R. James.
“A Different Light” by Elizabeth Lynn is about a painter, rather than a painting. It is probably 35 years since I read it, but it impressed me; the protagonist is an artist with cancer that could be held in remission if he stayed on his planet, who chooses to travel to widen his experience, even though it will make his disease terminal. Well written and touching, even if a slight plot.
Margaret Rogerson’s An Enchantment of Ravens comes to mind. Since I was a kid I’ve remained captivated by the painter of the Dark in Susan Cooper’s Greenwitch. Another favorite as a kid was Marilyn Singer’s Horsemaster, which features a transportive tapestry.
Oh, I figured out the story I was thinking of! It’s the fairy tales from [spoiler] in Death’s End by Liu Cixin.
Memory and Dream by Charles de Lint, part of the Newford urban fantasy sequence.
For young (or young at heart) readers, The Witch Family by Eleanor Estes. Two girls are fond of drawing, and their drawings have their own life.
A suggestion that is not translated to English, but that you might practice your Portuguese on: Prosérpina, by Anna Martino. The protagonist is Theo Jensen, dutch owner of a paint/pigment shop in England, who has sinestesia and sees emotions/character as color. His friend, a changeling, asks him to have a look at the painting his creepy client wants examined, and Theo figures out what is wrong right away: the woman in the pre-raphaelite painting is alive. Shenanigans ensue. Fun, romantic, queer, available to read online for free.
The Melanie Rawn book is this one.
