The Painter - Analysis

A fable about wanting the world to paint itself

At the poem’s center is a stubborn, almost mystical hope: the painter wants the sea not to be represented but to take over representation. He sits between the sea and the buildings, physically placed between nature and society, and he enjoyed painting the sea’s portrait—yet his pleasure is tied to an impossible expectation. He waits for his subject to seizing a brush and plaster its own portrait on the canvas. Ashbery makes that desire sound both childlike and devout, linking it to the odd logic that children imagine a prayer is merely silence: an act that feels like doing nothing, yet claims to address something immense. The poem’s main argument is that this wish—art erased by nature’s direct presence—can’t be granted without also destroying the painter, the audience, and finally the idea of a portrait at all.

The buildings as audience, employer, and chorus of common sense

The people in the buildings become a pressure system around the painter: they are practical, managerial, and faintly condescending. When they put him to work, their advice is not just aesthetic but ideological: Try using the brush as a means to an end. They want a subject that is less angry and large, something subject to a painter’s moods—small enough to be controlled, domesticated, and made into “art.” Their final suggestion—or, perhaps, to a prayer—sounds like a compromise with his spirituality, but it’s really a way of shrinking the sea’s terror into something manageable. The poem sets up a clear tension here: the painter’s devotion is to an overwhelming subject that refuses to sit still, while the buildings demand a subject that will behave, pose, and flatter human intention.

His answer: a wife turned into ruins

When the painter tries to comply, he chooses his wife, an intimate and socially acceptable subject. But the attempt goes wrong in a revealing way: he makes her vast, like ruined buildings. The comparison is startling because the buildings are the very place the audience lives; to paint his wife as their ruin is to smuggle his conflict with them into the portrait. The poem hints that “acceptable subjects” are not actually safer—they just relocate the same struggle. And the phrasing—As if, forgetting itself, the portrait had expressed itself—keeps insisting on a fantasy of self-expression without tools, art without art-making. Even in the “human” portrait, he wants the image to occur without him, as if the true goal were to be replaced by the subject’s own force.

The hinge: praying for the canvas to be wrecked

The poem turns sharply when he returns to the sea with a new, darker prayer: My soul, he says, Let it be you who wrecks the canvas. This is the moment the painter’s longing stops being merely naive and becomes self-destructive. He no longer hopes the sea will politely paint itself; he asks to be annihilated by the act. The buildings register this as scandalous news—The news spread—as if the painter has violated an unspoken contract: art is supposed to transform wildness into a product, not invite wildness to destroy the product and the person. What the painter calls prayer, the buildings experience as a threat to the whole economy of spectatorship: if the subject can “wreck” the canvas, then the audience loses the stable surface on which meaning is displayed.

Crucifixion, mockery, and the problem of authorship

Ashbery then stages the painter’s ordeal in a single vivid line: Imagine a painter crucified by his subject! The sea becomes not only subject but executioner; devotion becomes punishment. The painter is Too exhausted to lift his brush, and this helplessness provokes malicious mirth from other artists leaning from the buildings. Their joke—We haven't a prayer—twists the poem’s key word into cynicism: prayer is no longer a sincere reaching toward the immense, but a measure of professional helplessness. They want to put ourselves on canvas or getting the sea to sit; both aims assume that art is a matter of control, either self-branding or taming nature into a pose. The painter’s suffering exposes the contradiction beneath that: if the sea truly appears as itself, it won’t “sit,” and the artist’s authority collapses.

The white canvas: purity as erasure, not triumph

When Others declared it a self-portrait, the poem shows how quickly interpretation rushes in to fill uncertainty. If there is no stable subject, critics and onlookers will supply one—especially the modern favorite, the artist himself. Yet the poem doesn’t reward that reading with revelation. Instead, all indications of a subject begin to fade until the canvas is Perfectly white. This whiteness could sound like artistic purity, a clean modernist reset, but Ashbery frames it as a loss so complete that it triggers communal panic. The painter put down the brush, and immediately a howl—also a prayer—rises from the overcrowded buildings. The audience’s prayer is not for transcendence but for something to look at, something to anchor them. In other words, the poem flips the roles: the painter’s prayer seeks disappearance of art into nature, while the buildings’ prayer seeks art’s reassuring presence against their crowding and noise.

A sharper question the poem forces: who benefits from a portrait?

If the painter wants the sea to usurp the canvas and the buildings want a subject subject to his moods, then the portrait becomes a battleground over ownership. Is a portrait meant to honor the subject’s reality, or to give the viewers in the buildings a manageable substitute for reality? The poem makes it hard to avoid the suspicion that the demand for a portrait is also a demand for possession.

The final violence: the painter becomes the portrait

In the ending, the confusion between man and artwork becomes literal: They tossed him, the portrait, from the tallest building. Calling him the portrait is chilling—he has become the object the crowd can finally handle. And the sea’s response is absolute: it devoured the canvas and the brush. This is the painter’s wish granted, but not in the form he imagined. Nature does not paint; it consumes. The last line—decided to remain a prayer—lands on a bleakly elegant conclusion: the sea will not be turned into a picture, and the painter’s reaching toward it can only take the form of prayer, a longing that never becomes possession. The poem’s deepest tension stays unresolved on purpose: art depends on separation (subject over there, canvas here), while the painter’s desire is for union so complete that it erases the very conditions that make a portrait possible.