Paintingness

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The quality of being painterly. uncountable

    "One cannot enough praise the expression and paintingness of the style, that realization to the mind of the thing described, that lyric plasticity of manner and sympathetic metamorphosis of diction, […]"

  2. 2
    The property of being a painting. uncountable

    "Vermeer is also a great lover of the picture within a picture, a motif that insists that the viewer confront the paintingness of painting."

Example

More examples

"One cannot enough praise the expression and paintingness of the style, that realization to the mind of the thing described, that lyric plasticity of manner and sympathetic metamorphosis of diction, […]"

Etymology

From painting + -ness.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.