Multisensory Experience of Paintings

In this paper, I will argue that certain figurative paintings – namely, paintings that depict atmospheres, such as Camille Pissarro’s Snowscape in Louveciennes (1872), can elicit multisensory experiences in their viewers. Viewing such pictures under appropriate circumstances will activate the viewers’ sensory imagination in such a way that they enjoy a genuine multisensory experience. Such an experience does not just involve different sensible qualities. Rather, the different sensible qualities are fused together into a new sensible quality that cannot be experienced through a single sense modality or through the mere co-consciousness of multiple sense modalities.