You Look Bored
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Courtesy The Yorck Project via Wikimedia Commons.Two Ironing Women, Edgar Degas, c. 1884
Yawning is a common indicator of boredom. No doubt Degas’ ironing woman is fatigued if she’s been sharing in the ironing that her partner is performing. But she isn’t ironing at the moment, and the bottle she holds, though it presumably contains water for dampening clothes, could just as well contain wine, and it conjures up the prospect of escape from such drudgery. Boredom is often produced by repetition, by the kind of work depicted here. There’s no getting away from that ironing. Degas captures the tediousness of the chore by contrasting the yawner with the woman who plows on with her work.
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Wikimedia Commons.St. Jerome in His Study, Jan van Eyck, c. 1435
Elbows that rest on flat surfaces and hands that support dropping heads are also common visual signals of boredom. Jan van Eyck’s St. Jerome, no doubt reading the Vulgate, the Latin translation of the Bible for which he is famous, demonstrates such a posture. His head droops onto his left hand as he makes his way through the translation. And look at his eyes: They are half-closed as if he were fighting off sleep. Is the saint bored? Van Eyck seems to hint that even for the saintly, the spiritual life can be tedious.
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Courtesy The National Gallery.The Agony in the Garden, attributed to Lo Spagna (Giovanni di Pietro), c. 1500-1505
As Christ prays in the Garden of Gethsemane on the evening before the crucifixion, could it be that the apostles Peter, James, and John suffer an attack of boredom? The Good Book is inconclusive on the matter—the Gospels describe the apostles as sleeping away Christ’s last night on Earth. Most paintings of this scene are based on scripture, and thus depict the apostles slumbering . But the Renaissance artist Lo Spagna depicts three apostles before they’ve nodded off—they’re shown here with drooping heads. The apostles shouldn’t be bored—they ought to be full of prayerful devotion. But they have had enough of this terrible garden. Lo Spagna’s brilliant stroke was to add this touch of sinful boredom to the scene: Christ’s disciples aren’t just sleepy, they’re distracted, their minds wandering at a moment that demands vigilance.
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Wikimedia Commons.Mariana in the Moated Grange, Sir John Everett Millais, 1851
Putting your hands on your hips is an obvious indicator of disgust—and without disgust, without being “fed up,” there’s no boredom. Here, John Everett Millais uses the posture to convey the boredom of Mariana from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Rejected by her fiancé Angelo after her dowry was lost in a shipwreck, Mariana lives a lonely life. But she is still in love and longs for her Angelo. Mariana’s pose suggests not just back ache (the result, perhaps, of her embroidery work), but also the distaste that she seems to feel for her solitary existence.
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Courtesy The Yorck Project via Wikimedia Commons.Odysseus and Calypso, Arnold Boecklin, 1882
Bored eyes staring off into infinity during a meeting are said to perform the “12-foot stare in a 10-foot room.” In art, the infinite, or a vista that is apparently endless, is often associated with boredom. Here is one example, by the underrated Arnold Bocklin (1827-1901). His strange picture, based on the first book of Homer’s Odyssey, depicts the exiled Odysseus trapped on Ogygia, the island of the goddess Calypso. Calypso has offered Odysseus a gift, the temporal version of the infinite: immortality. But only if he will stay with her on Ogygia as her lover. Odysseus, however, longs to go home to Ithaca. In Bocklin’s painting, Odysseus appears to be bored stiff in this mythological seaside summer camp. Shoulders hunched, he peers off across the endless vista of the sea. Perhaps he recognizes that even an eternity of sex with an immortal goddess would eventually prove repetitious and predictable.
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CREDIT: The Yorck Project via Wikimedia Commons.Der Kaktusliebhaber (The Cactus Lover), Carl Spitzweg, c. 1850
Clocks are rich symbols of boredom. The clock in Carl Spitzweg’s The Cactus Lover presides over a scene of desolate tedium: mounds of apparently useless, bound papers, watched over by that clock. Then there’s the fatuous figure of the cactus lover himself, his drooping posture strangely echoing that of the phallic, if flaccid, cactus plant that greets him in the window.
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Wikimedia Commons.Solitude, Frederic Leighton, c. 1889-1890
Boredom bred of loneliness is sometimes said to be so powerful as to be spiritual, a state in which an individual feels an unrelieved sense of emptiness. The maid in Lord Leighton’s Solitude would seem to be experiencing this particularly painful strain of boredom.
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Wikimedia Commons.Graver marker in Kerameikos Cemetery in Athens, Callimachus, 5th century B.C.
Occasionally, boredom can be so powerful as to be existential. Consider Hegeso, the woman seated on the right of this grave marker from the 5th century, B.C. A servant stands on the left holding a jewel box. Hegeso’s right hand lifts up a piece of jewelry, but it doesn’t hold her interest. Her right hand rises to support her tired head, and her gaze aims neither at her finery nor at her servant—it peers off into the indeterminate distance. Here, boredom is so profound as to resemble a kind of death.
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Courtesy Yale University Art Gallery.Rooms by the Sea, Edward Hopper, 1951
Several visual themes relating to boredom can be found in Edward Hopper’s Rooms by the Sea. The horizon points to the idea of infinity. The unexpected emptiness, the lack of people and activity, and the use of flat space and strong ordered lines create a sense of containment and tedium. If boredom has a color, then it must be linked to nausea, a feeling conjured by the bilious greens of the carpets. The limitlessness of the ocean—contrasted with the claustrophobia of this living room—perhaps offers a commentary on middle class American life. In Hopper’s eyes, at least, it appears to be drowningly boring.