Just A Pot Of Basil

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I was in the museum, in my little world.
Therein lies the significant difference between seeing and imagining, and being told or influenced, that is, being mystified. Mystification, as the art critic John Berger in Ways of Seeing explains, “is the process of explaining away what might otherwise be evident” (Berger 112). I was instantly captivated from the moment I saw the tied-together skeletons stretching as high as my own house; should I have cared about the petty details that would have distracted me from my own imagination?
“Original paintings are silent and still in a sense that information never is” (Berger 125). The skeletal remains of ancient beasts strung up give only a portion of what such creatures really were millions of years ago. The color of their skin, the texture of their bodies, or even the size of their internal organs are just a few of the endless questions that remain unanswered, lost over time. But museums give something more than any book could ever ...

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add to our overall perception of the world around us. This is why Berger claims that we see things differently and therefore there exists no definitive account of exactly the way things were at any specific moment in time. It is lost forever, and at best, can only be saved in an altered form.
There is something magical about the power of the atmosphere of a museum. The silence is filled with a sea of thoughts running through viewers’ minds’. When I first saw John White Alexander’s painting Isabella and the Pot of Basil I was immediately captivated. Even my first glance told me that there was something more to the large pot in the painting than meets the eye. “In a painting all its ...

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