That’s a brilliant (and in my eyes very funny) example. Thank you!
Looks like an alien spaceship doing a scan.
Guitars often show up misshapen or worse in paintings, especially in older ones. Typically, if they’re being played, there will be more mistakes. I poked around online and didn’t find much. In this one by Renoir, the guitar is all out of proportion. I’ve seen others, though, that show some number of strings at the headstock (where the tuning pegs are) and a different amount at the other end (where they’re anchored).
A talented artist I used to know drew a portrait of a guitarist in action entirely from his imagination, without photographs. The hands and fingerings were realistic, the proportions and perspectives were right, and he even nailed the placement of the frets, which get progressively closer together from the headstock to the other end. But, as he pointed out when he gave me the drawing, there was a mistake. I spent some time looking for it and, much to his delight, I finally had to ask. There were no strings! I’ve shown it to a few people over the years and nobody has spotted that. He said that, after drawing everything else, he was having a hard time adding the strings and, at that point, he realized that it looked better without them.
Folksy art, not fine art, but Norman Rockwell once accidentally painted three legs on a person. This article shows the painting in question.
Rockwell should have said he was hiding a lupara under his apron.
Speaking of legs in paintings in John Trunbull’s Declaration of Independence (1819) there is a leg that appears under the table and from the way it is positioned it doesn’t appear to from the man above it: File:Declaration of Independence (1819), by John Trumbull.jpg - Wikipedia
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There’s an engraving of the Circle of Ulloa (actually a phenomenon now called the Glory) that was done in 1752 – not the usual one that pops up when you Google “Circle of Ulloa”, but one done by . In it the Circle of Ulloa is depicted as an ellipse – as if the circle itself were a solid disc that the engraver, standing off to one side, saw as an ellipse because the circle is foreshortened. As with the rainbow, of course, you can’t see it that way, no matter where you stand. The engraver wouldn’t have seen it at all, looking in that direction. The glory only appears as a circle around your own head.
Also interesting in this engraving are three arcs in the foreground. I have argued that these arcs are actually another case of the engraver drawing the phenomenon as he imagined they would look to him. I contend that the thing he’s trying to depict is a set of three rainbows (one primary, one secondary, and a reflected primary) formed by dewdrops supported on grass. This is a well-attested phenomenon (I’ve seen it), Of course, the primary rainbow is at the usual angle of 42 degrees. We perceive a rainbow as a circle because it’s the intersection of the 42 degree cone with the flat “screen” we imagine the sky to be. But when the thing lies on the ground, as this appears to do, we perceive it as the intersection between a flat plane and the cone, slightly off-axis. That’s a hyperbola, which these three rainbows form.
I presented this argument to the original authors, but for some reason they denounced me viscerally. and refused to print my suggestion. But I finally got a chance to put my theory in print for my column in Optics and Photonics News, and published it in my book How the Ray Gun Got Its Zap!
When I try to link to the engraving I get a page telling me I have to =sign in for the article, but here’s another try
This is very true. I’m a not-very-good guitarist myself. You’re right to point out that very few artists have either the patience or skill needed to depict a guitar correctly.
Thank you SO much for bringing this example to my attention! I am a huge fan of Norman Rockwell’s paintings and used to get a bit annoyed whenever his work was sneered at as ‘not proper art’ or ‘commercial tat’. The largest, heaviest and most expensive book I own is a sumptuous collection of his paintings.
The ‘three-legged man’ in ‘Stock Exchange Quotations’ is possibly the best example anyone has suggested in this thread. It’s from a modern work of art and it’s clearly and unequivocally a mistake. I can’t believe I didn’t know of this before. Thank you.
Fun random anecdote about those tapestries. The docent at Blenheim Palace (from a generation older than us) who pointed out that dog, introduced them with the line “I’m sure you remember mnemonic device you were taught at school to remember the names of these battles”. I didn’t have the heart to mention that not only are we no longer taught that mnemonic device, we are no longer even taught about that war in history class at school (though as another generation has passed since I was at school maybe they have started again, I doubt it).
I know about the three-legged man because when I was a teen I read Norman Rockwell’s autobiography and loved it. He had a very folksy, humorous, self-deprecating writing style.
Whether the book has stood the test of time or not, or whether a discerning adult would enjoy it as much as a wide-eyed teen, I can’t say. But if you are a Norman Rockwell fan I highly recommend trying to find a copy. It was so good that I still remember a number of vignettes from it half a century after reading it, including the 3-legged man!
In lighter fair: a few panels in Disney comic books accidentally had four nephews of Donald Duck. Nicknamed “Phooey” to match the other three’s rhyming names, he has since become canon, but not entirely “real.”
To be fair, a guitar is probably a very hard thing to draw or paint accurately. The “figure-eight” shape alone must entail several challenges insofar as perspective in an oblique view of the instrument. And if it’s being played, it’s probably not easy to capture all the nuances of a human body in that position and achieve a lifelike representation.
In the Renoir painting I linked to, part of the freboard is white, which actually seems somewhat accurate to me, because that part of the guitar will sometimes reflect light if it’s smooth enough.
ETA: Whoops, I meant to reply to @ianzin; don’t know how to fix it.