painter stainer

An interesting little account of the Painter Stainers was written in 1880 by Mr. G. C. Crace, then Master, and printed for private circulation. He reminds us that a picture on canvas was formerly called a stained cloth, as one on a panel was a table, perhaps from the French tableau.

Lacan conceives the gaze as the subject's objective correlative, a material correlative to the master signifier at the core of a symbolic identification. Subverting the distinction between inside and outside, it describes the point in a tableau from which the subject's gaze is returned, the point where a viewer is "hooked onto" a picture without being able to assume the position of a neutral observer.