Many of the books on Chinese landscape painting, and visual art in general, stop short at the end of the Ming dynasty in 1644. If they cover any work after that time, it is patchy and sporadic compared to their much denser coverage up to the fall of Beijing in that year.

The subsequent dynasty, the Qing, lasted until 1912, and saw dramatic changes in painting. Most authors dismiss them as resulting in repetitive, formulaic works which were stifled by the straitjacket of convention. In the early years, though, several artists achieved distinctive styles: in particular, the Six Masters of the early Qing. Among them was Wú Lì 吳歷 吴历, who had been born in 1632, well before the collapse of the Ming, and who died on 24 February 1718 or thereabouts – three centuries ago today.

In this article, I trace Wú’s life, and show a few of his surviving works. In tomorrow’s article, I show some of the better examples of the work of the other five of the Six Masters.

Wú learned to paint with two of the other Six Masters, and learned poetry too. He seems to have been particularly productive in the years up to 1681, during which he made the following works.

Spring Comes to the Lake (1676), like most of Wú’s paintings, is accompanied by what I suspect is the artist’s own poetry. It shows a lake, at the foot of some grassy hills, as the birds become more active, and the trees come into bud for the Spring. Simple pale greens show the rounded forms of the land, with rhythmic details of the plants and fine features like the path, which rises across the upper section of the scroll.

In the summer of 1679, one clear morning after rain, Wú was sitting alone in his studio, when he envisaged the panorama which he then painted in Whiling Away the Summer. This is thought to have been inspired by one of Wú’s favourite painters, Huang Gongwang (1269–1354), but is expressed in his own distinctive style, using intricate patterns of pale ink textures built in gentle cadence.

The following three images show its sections from right to left.

Overall, its landscape is a dream surrounding a scholar, who sits alone, absorbed in his reading, as shown in this detail of the middle of the scroll.

Much of the colour has sadly faded from Wú’s Boat Trip on the River Below a Buddhist Temple.

Wú’s undated painting of Travellers Among Streams and Mountains contains more passages with close cadences of soft brushstrokes, for example in the dark trees adorning the ridges.

Wú’s colours have survived much better in his undated White Cloud, Green Mountain, where the trees form into a dragon-like structure which curls over the foothills. The contrast between those trees and the softer forms of the hills is impressive, as are the birds at the upper left.

In middle age, Wú switched his allegiance from being the close friend of a monk in the Xing Fu Buddhist monastery, to two Jesuit missionaries and their Catholic community. In 1681, he was baptised, and later that year travelled to Macau with one of the missionaries, intending to go on to Europe. Wú returned to his studio in 1682, but with the death of his wife and his Masters he returned to Macau to learn Latin and train as a Jesuit priest.

Wú was ordained in 1688, and the following year started work as a missionary in the country around Shanghai. For thirty years he travelled from village to village preaching his faith. He continued to write poetry, and seems to have painted as well, although I have not been able to locate any of his works which are dated to those later years in his career. He died in Shanghai at the age of 86, on (about) 24 February 1718.

What an extraordinary life, and such beautiful paintings.

Yesterday, I commemorated the three-hundredth anniversary of the death of one of the Six Masters of the early Qing period in China: Wú Lì, promising today to show the work of the other five.

Wáng Shímǐn 王時敏 王时敏 (1592-1680) was one of Wú Lì’s Masters, and the oldest of the six. He originally worked as a government official, but fell ill in 1630 during a visit to Nanking. He then devoted himself full-time to his art. His grandson was Wáng Yuánqí, another of the Six Masters.

This painting by Wáng Shímǐn is an untitled leaf from an album of twelve leaves in which he illustrated poems by Du Fu, from 1666.

In this, Wáng Shímǐn has painted after Wang Wei’s Snow Over Rivers and Mountains (1668).

In 1674, Wáng Huī painted an album of twelve paintings for his Master Wáng Shímǐn, who three years later responded in his own album, which included this painting. By this time, Wáng Shímǐn had grown old, and his ageing eyesight led to a broader style. Since then, individual leaves from those two albums, by Master and pupil, have become lost, and a single composite was created, in which there are ten surviving paintings by Wáng Huī, and two by Wáng Shímǐn.

This untitled folding fan was painted by Wáng Shímǐn in 1677.

Wáng Jiàn 王鑒 王鉴 (1598-1677) was the second of Wú Lì’s Masters, and the other of the Six Masters from the first generation. I have been unable to find any usable images of his work.

Wáng Huī 王翬 王翚 (1632–1717) was from the next generation, which included Wú Lì, with whom he shared a Master, Wáng Shímǐn.

This detail from Wáng Huī’s The Southern Journey of Emperor Kangxi shows one of his populated landscapes, and was painted between 1691-98.

The third of a series of scrolls showing The Kangxi Emperor’s Southern Inspection Tour, this shows the section from Ji’nan to Mount Tai, and was completed in 1698.

Wáng Huī’s Dream Journey to the Mountains and Rivers is one of his later paintings, from 1702.

Yun Shouping 惲壽平 (1633–1690) was originally a landscape painter, but when he saw the art of Wáng Huī, he felt that his paintings could only be second best to those. He then changed direction, and became one of the great flower painters of China. He founded the Ch’ang-chou school of painting.

His undated Peonies is a good example of his bold use of colour, and the high botanical quality of his work.

Yun Shouping’s later Sunset Along the Floral Embankment from 1671 shows a compromise between the floral and landscape.

Wáng Yuánqí 王原祁 (1642–1715) was taught to paint by his grandfather, Wáng Shímǐn. He became a court official to the Qing Emperor Kangxi, whose responsibilities included curation of the imperial collection.

Two details (above and below) from Wáng Yuánqí’s long handscroll of Free Spirits Among Streams and Mountains, painted in 1684, show an immature style influenced strongly by his Master Wáng Shímǐn and Huang Gongwang.

Wáng Yuánqí’s The Fuchun Mountains from 1699 is more typical of his mature style, and strongly influenced by Huang Gongwang’s great handscroll of Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains of 1350.

I hope that this quick dip into paintings from the early Qing dynasty has provided better context for the previous article on Wú Lì, and perhaps encouraged you to look afresh at these neglected artists.

In his Metamorphoses, Ovid is retelling episodes from Virgil’s Aeneid, in which the hero Aeneas has reached the coast midway between Naples and Rome, at Caieta (Gaeta). There he went ashore, and two of the survivors of Ulysses’ crew meet to tell stories from Homer’s Odyssey. In the previous article, Achaemenides gave an account of Ulysses’ encounter with the Cyclops Polyphemus; next, Macareus tells his story of transformation by the sorceress Circe.

The Story

Following Achaemenides’ account of the encounter with Polyphemus, he hands over narration to Macareus, who provides some details from later parts of the Odyssey.

Macareus first tells of Aeolus, and the bag of winds which he gave to Ulysses/Odysseus. For nine days, Ulysses and his crew experienced favourable winds, but on the tenth day the crew opened the bag, in search of riches. They released the winds, which promptly blew the ship back to Aeolus.

Then there were the cannibal Laestrygonians, who ate one of the three crew sent to meet them. Their chieftain led a party in pursuit of Ulysses, bombarding his ships with trees and rocks and sinking two of the three. That allowed just one ship, containing Ulysses, Macareus and others, to escape to safety.

They then sailed to Circe’s island, where given their recent experiences the surviving crew refused to go beyond its beach. Lots were drawn to form a group to go to Circe’s palace, and they set off. On the way they came across enchanted animals, lions, bears and wolves, which rushed at them but did not attack.

Macareus and his party were taken in to see Circe sat on her throne. She was busy making a herbal concoction, and arranged for Ulysses’ men to be served with a barley drink, into which she poured her concoction:
We took the cups presented to us by
her sacred right hand; and, as soon as we,
so thirsty, quaffed them with our parching mouths,
that ruthless goddess with her outstretched wand
touched lightly the topmost hair upon our heads.
(Although I am ashamed, I tell you this)
stiff bristles quickly grew out over me,
and I could speak no more. Instead of words
I uttered hoarse murmurs and towards the ground
began to bend and gaze with all my face.
I felt my mouth take on a hardened skin
with a long crooked snout, and my neck swell
with muscles. With the very member which
a moment earlier had received the cup
I now made tracks in sand of the palace court.
Then with my friends, who suffered a like change
(charms have such power!) I was prisoned in a stye.

Only one, Eurylochus, had refused to drink and remained in human form instead of being transformed into a pig. He warned Ulysses, who came to Circe bearing a flower which he had been given by Mercury. Circe took Ulysses into her hall, where she tried to lure him to drink her concoction. He drew his sword, and forced her to back off.

Circe and Ulysses then married, and she took him off to her bed. As a wedding gift to him, she transformed his crew back into human form, to their great relief and gratitude. Ulysses and his crew stayed on Circe’s island for a whole year before resuming their journey.

The Paintings

Circe has been painted extensively since the Renaissance, right up to modern times, and a fair proportion of those works have shown the transformation of Ulysses’ men into pigs, and Ulysses’ meeting with Circe. Here is my selection of the best.

Jan van Bijlert’s Ulysses and Circe from around 1640 shows the couple at the banquet, looking intently at one another. Circe holds her wand, and between them is the goblet containing her magic concoction.

At the right, one of the serving maids looks directly at the viewer. At her heels are Ulysses’ crew, in the form of pigs.

Salomon de Bray makes this a more intimate meeting, in his slightly later Odysseus and Circe (1650-55). Here it is Ulysses who is seated, clutching a krater-like goblet into which a maid is pouring clear liquid from a bottle. The hero looks quite haggard, and decidedly unimpressed by Circe. Below Ulysses’ left arm, two pigs are drinking more of Circe’s concoction.

Giovanni Andrea Sirani, the father and teacher of the great Elisabetta Sirani, painted his account of Ulysses and Circe at about the same time as de Bray, and advances the story a few moments to the point where Ulysses is about to draw his sword. Here Circe is still holding the glass which she is trying to get him to drink from, with her wand in the other hand.

The crew are seen in the background, in the form of pigs. Another woman holding a wand is with them: this could represent their transformation into pigs, or back into humans, which would form multiplex narrative.

The last of the paintings from this period of popularity is Matthijs Naiveu’s Circe and Odysseus from 1702. This is set in a grand banquet inside Circe’s palace, with some peculiar clusters of figures which allude to Circe’s role as a sorceress. For example, there is a table just to the left of the couple at which a satyr and a demon are engaged in conversation.

Circe has moved forward from her throne to embrace Ulysses, whose sword is pointing at her body to force her back. The goblet from which she has been trying to get him to drink is held by a maid at the far right. A couple of boars are feeding from fruit laid on the marble floor.

The story then seems to have lost its popularity with painters, until the end of the nineteenth century. Although Gustave Moreau painted one work which shows Circe, it was John William Waterhouse who developed a sophisticated account.

Waterhouse’s Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus from 1891 is perhaps the most complex work showing this story. Circe sits on her throne, holding up the krater for Ulysses to drink, and her wand in the other hand. The viewer is Ulysses, seen in the large circular mirror behind the sorceress, preparing to draw his sword.

On the left side of the mirror is Ulysses’ ship, and scattered on the ground at Circe’s feet are the herbs and berries which she used to prepare the concoction with which she transformed the crew. To the right, one of those pigs lies on the ground, behind a small incense burner.

Waterhouse has not only told the story using the ingenious confluence of objects, but encourages the viewer to consider their role in his painting, and more profoundly about the action of looking, and the image.

Briton Rivière’s rather simpler painting of Circe and her Swine (before 1896) has been used as an illustration for several versions of the Odyssey, and unusually casts Circe as a magic swineherd, her wand resting behind her.

Finally, Alice Pike Barney’s very painterly portrait of Circe from about 1915 was most probably made in pastels. Her streaming golden hair almost fills the painting, and wraps the head of a large boar which she is embracing. I apologise for the poor image quality here, which is the best that I have been able to locate.

Although not apparently tackled by many of the Masters of narrative painting, this fascinating myth from the Odyssey has been well-told, and Waterhouse’s account stands out as a major work of the nineteenth century.

The English translation of Ovid above is taken from Ovid. Metamorphoses. Tr. Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922, at Perseus. I am very grateful to Perseus at Tufts for this.

I can’t think why I hadn’t heard of George Hendrik Breitner (1857–1923). He was a major figure in painting in the Netherlands at the time, he painted with Vincent van Gogh, was an early adopter of photography as an aid to his painting, and an innovative photographer in his own right. In this and the next article, I will try to make amends by showing a small selection of his works, many of which are in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

Breitner was born in Rotterdam in 1857, and was a brilliant student at the Art Academy in The Hague until he was expelled in 1880, for destroying the regulations board. Although at first associated with the Hague School of landscape art, he drew away from that and today is normally termed an Amsterdam Impressionist, a group which included Isaac Israëls and Jan Toorop.

After leaving the Academy in 1880, he went and worked on the vast panorama being painted in The Hague by Hendrik Mesdag, the Panorama Mesdag.

In 1882, Breitner met Vincent van Gogh, and the pair went out sketching and painting in the poorer parts of The Hague. Among Breitner’s paintings of that campaign is his watercolour Distribution of Soup (1882), which tackles a similar theme to Christian Krohg’s last great Naturalist work The Struggle for Existence (1889).

This was the period when Vincent van Gogh was living with Sien Hoornik, an alcoholic prostitute, and her young daughter, after he had fallen out with Anton Mauve.

The undated Ground Porters with Carts is another of Breitner’s watercolour paintings showing the rough side of life at the time. He appears to have been influenced at this time by the Naturalist literature of Émile Zola, and felt that it was his task to depict the common people and their lives.

During this time, he also painted several works showing military Cavalry (1883-88). I do not understand how they fitted with his Naturalism, but these works are both technically and artistically impressive, particularly for a painter so early in his career.

Breitner also appears to have been influenced by Jules Bastien-Lepage and the French Naturalist interest in children living in poverty. This wonderful painting The Wooden Shoes (1884-85) show a young girl proudly displaying her new wooden clogs.

He chose his models from among the poorer in society not because he couldn’t afford to pay them, but because of his emphasis on painting common people. Among them, Marie Jordan (1866-1948) next became his partner, then the couple married.

This photographic print of Marie Jordan Nude, Lying on the Bed from about 1888 is one of a series which he made at about the same time that he was working on a painting of her.

Although conventionally dated to about 1887, there can be little doubt that Breitner’s Reclining Nude was based on that print.

His figurative painting, like his plein air landscape sketches, was rough in a style that anticipated the great figurative painters of the twentieth century. Although his motifs and themes were strongly Naturalist, his painting style was never the detailed realism normally considered to be associated with the Naturalist movement.

Breitner entered the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in 1886, but by that time he had progressed well beyond anything which it could offer him. He went out onto the streets of Amsterdam sketching discreetly, as shown in An Evening on the Dam in Amsterdam (c 1890).

Two Servants on an Amsterdam Bridge at Night (1890) is another nocturne showing some of the people that he met on the streets.

Through the 1890s, Breitner established his reputation with those atmospheric oil sketches, and some larger studio paintings such as this View of the Oosterpark in Amsterdam in the Snow from 1892.

Breitner was also an enthusiast for Japonism(e), which was most obvious in his figurative paintings like The Earring, from about 1893. His model was most probably one of his favourites, Geesje Kwak, who was to appear in some of his most important figurative work over the coming few years.

His Standing Nude (1893) is a variation on the same theme, less the Japonism(e), apparently painted against the same mirror in his studio, probably with the same model.

In this second article about the Dutch Naturalist and Amsterdam Impressionist painter George Hendrik Breitner (1857–1923), I resume a small selection of his works from the mid 1890s, when he had an ardent enthusiasm for Japonism(e).

Between about 1893-96, Breitner took a large series of photographs of Geesje Kwak, one of his favourite models, wearing several different kimonos. Girl in a Kimono (Geesje Kwak) in Breitner’s Studio on Lauriersgracht, Amsterdam is an undated gelatin silver print from that series, which inspired a series of paintings.

Girl in a Red Kimono, Lying (Geesje Kwak) (1895-96) is one of fourteen surviving paintings which he made from those photos and studio sessions with the model. For Breitner, photography didn’t replace conventional preparatory work, though, and he also made many drawings and sketches of these sessions.

All fourteen known paintings, many of the photos and other material were shown together for the first time at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in 2016. Breitner’s paintings remain among the most classical works of Japonism(e).

When in Amsterdam, Breitner continued his paintings of the common people, including those working on this Building Site in Amsterdam (after 1880).

His plein air sketching was not confined to fine and sunny weather. One of the reasons that many of his paintings appear muted in colour is that so many were made outdoors when the sky was overcast. It has also been suggested that the sepias and dull colours used in contemporary monochrome photography were another influence.

Lunch Break at the Building Site in the Van Diemenstraat in Amsterdam (1896-1900) seems to have been painted on a brighter day, as the workers sat outside during their short lunchtime.

Breitner took hundreds if not thousands of photos of street scenes in Amsterdam, and made many paintings of them too. Among the best-known is The Singelbrug Near the Paleisstraat in Amsterdam (c 1897), which has the look of a photo, with those passing by frozen in their motion.

The Rokin in Amsterdam (1897) is a canal and street in the centre of the city which was a particular favourite of Breitner.

Promenade Deck with Three Ladies (c 1897) is another of his quick paintings apparently in front of the motif, here on the open deck of a ship off the coast.

Breitner remained faithful to his original ideal of painting the common people, as in these Factory Girls (c 1898), even as he achieved fame in the Netherlands at the end of the nineteenth century.

His Winter in Amsterdam (c 1900-01) is quite dark, as it would be on a typical overcast day during the middle of winter, but his snow highlights on the boat in the foreground give it an unusual effect of eerie stillness.

Breitner relied quite heavily on photography when painting the city in rain and wet conditions, as in The Rokin with the Nieuwezijdskapel, Amsterdam (c 1904).

During the early years of the twentieth century, Breitner enjoyed a highly successful retrospective exhibition (1901), and travelled more, visiting Paris, London, and Berlin. He also visited the USA in 1909. But the modernists were in the ascendant, and he refused to change his style to follow the trend.

The Rokin in Amsterdam was painted in early 1923, and was probably one of his last works. He died in Amsterdam on 5 June 1923. Many of his photographs were not discovered until 1996, when it became clear how talented and innovative a photographer he was. Oddly, his reputation has largely remained confined to the Netherlands, despite his involvement in the career of Vincent van Gogh and his importance as a Naturalist, or social realist.

Most appropriately, his name has entered the Dutch language, at least among those in Amsterdam, who still refer to dull and overcast weather as weer typisch Breitner Weer – typical Breitner weather again!

There’s one red which looks as brilliant today as when it was first brushed out five hundred or even two thousand years ago. It’s a pigment which was known to, and used by, the Romans, and in ancient China was not only extensively used in art, but used to be scattered in graves. Vermilion is one of the most toxic pigments, and over the last century has been displaced by Cadmium Red and more recent organic pigments. Look at many paintings made before 1870, and their reds are likely to be dominated by Vermilion.

For a long time, Vermilion paint was made using powdered Cinnabar, naturally-occurring mercuric sulphide, and is then technically referred to as Cinnabar rather than Vermilion. Its manufacture from liquid mercury was probably brought from China to Europe, since when much of the Vermilion pigment used in Europe has been synthetic.

In Europe, the main source of Cinnabar, and of the metal mercury, were the mines at Almadén in Spain. These were used by the Romans, and until their closure in 2000 had produced more Cinnabar and mercury than any other location. In 1563, deposits were discovered in Huancavelica in Peru, and they were the second largest source over the following three hundred years. Other important sources have been located in China, Slovenia, Italy, Mexico, and the USA.

The mining of Cinnabar has long been recognised as hazardous, due to its great toxicity – something known as far back as the Romans. Locked in pigment particles in oil paint it is less hazardous than in water-based paints such as egg tempera; it is wisest not to use Cinnabar or Vermilion in dry form, such as in pastels, even with good respiratory and skin protection. Even with careful handling, pigment residues pose a serious threat to the environment.

The brightest of the reds in Duccio’s Transfiguration, from the Maestà Predella Panels painted in 1307-11, have the distinctive colour of Vermilion. It is often associated with holy people, and holy objects, and contrasts with the other brilliant pigment of Ultramarine, which is conventionally used in the clothing of the Virgin Mary.

Its one unfortunate habit is a tendency to blacken, by forming the black version of Cinnabar known as metacinnabar. This tends to happen more often in the thinner, less protective paint films of aqueous media, particularly egg tempera, as shown in Nardo di Cione’s Saint John the Baptist, Saint John the Evangelist and Saint James from 1363-65.

The lining of the clothing of the saint at the right is painted using Vermilion, and has darkened in patches as a result of this effect.

Masaccio’s panel of Saints Jerome and John the Baptist from the Santa Maria Maggiore Altarpiece, from 1428-29, is another fine example of the use of a lot of Vermilion (as Cinnabar). The robes of Saint Jerome, on the left, may also show a little darkening in patches, but contrast well with the paler and pinker red of Saint John the Baptist at the right.

Cinnabar saw extensive and highly effective use by the van Eycks in The Ghent Altarpiece (c 1432). Because this was painted in oils, the chances of discoloration are much lower.

Botticelli used Cinnabar in several passages in his Mystic Nativity (1500), where its persistent colour contrasts with his use of other red pigments, which have not retained their colour as well.

All the Masters and most other significant artists of the past used Cinnabar, or Vermilion when it was being manufactured in Europe by the early seventeenth century. Tintoretto, whose five hundredth anniversary we will be celebrating later this year, was no exception, as shown in these two examples: Jupiter and Semele (1545) above, and The Origin of the Milky Way (c 1575), below.

Peter Paul Rubens’ centre panel of the Descent from the Cross (1612-14) in the huge triptych in Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathedraal, in Antwerp, is one of the most spectacular demonstrations of the use of Vermilion, and its lasting chromatic brilliance.

Rembrandt is another Master who used Vermilion to great effect, here in the dress of the woman at the right, in his Belshazzar’s Feast (c 1635-38). The colour draws attention to her as she is so shocked as to empty the goblet she is holding in her right hand. A duller colour might have allowed this dramatic action to pass unnoticed by the viewer.

Aelbert Cuyp’s Hilly River Landscape with a Horseman talking to a Shepherdess from about 1655-60 is one of the few oil paintings in which darkening of Cinnabar has become obvious. The pigment serves well in the huntsman’s coat, but has become darkened in patches.

William Hogarth played on another common association of the colour red in the third painting, The Inspection, from his series Marriage A-la-Mode (c 1743). Although in English we usually refer to a scarlet woman, rather than a Vermilion one, his use of Vermilion here is effective in portraying the woman as a prostitute.

Vermilion remained popular well into the latter half of the nineteenth century – long enough for it to grace the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite movement and the French Impressionists.

Although Claude Monet used just a few dabs and strokes of Vermilion in his landmark painting Bathers at la Grenouillère (1869), he continued to use it well into the latter years of his career. By that time, though, the new Cadmium Reds were replacing Vermilion, a process which is almost complete today, and seeing Cadmiums themselves being replaced by modern organic pigments.

But for me, with its long history of use in the clothes of saints, it remains the red of heaven.

Reference

RJ Gettens, RL Feller & WT Chase (1993) Artists’ Pigments, vol 2, ed Ashok Roy, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 75 3.

There can be no more hapless lovers than Hero and Leander. It’s bad enough that his parents would have disapproved, so the relationship has to be kept secret. But when the couple are separated by one of the world’s treacherous stretches of water, the Hellespont (now the Dardanelles), that left Leander only one option: to swim.

The legendary crossings which Leander made of the Hellespont were about a mile as the crow flies. Given the strong and often conflicting currents which rip through the strait, and its surprisingly cold water, they might seem almost suicidal.

So on 3 May 1810, the twenty-two year-old British poet and writer Lord Byron tried it for himself: it took him seventy minutes, during which he reckoned that he swam further than the direct mile, as he was drawn to zig-zag by the currents. Now swimming the strait has become an annual event, entered by those who have swum the Channel or accomplished similar demanding feats, and is held on 30 August each year.

Legend tells us that Leander, a young man living in Abydos on the south-eastern (Asia Minor) bank of the Hellespont, and Hero, a beautiful young woman living in Sestos on the north-western (European, Thracian Chersonese) bank of the Hellespont, fell deeply in love. But in fear of Leander’s parental disapproval, they had to meet in secret, so he took to swimming that hazardous mile each evening that he visited Hero, and later its return.

Their relationship developed, and was consummated, and they appear to have established a reliable routine. Leander navigated his way across not using the stars, but by the light which Hero provided on top of the tower in which she lived – an ancient lighthouse.

Edward Burne-Jones shows her bent over, placing small kindling on a fire, in his Hero Lighting the Beacon for Leander (1875-77). Three little flowers suggest that this is at ground level rather than on top of a tower, though.

A decade later, Evelyn De Morgan’s Hero Holding the Beacon for Leander (c 1885) places Hero down on the shore, holding a small torch aloft, looking out for her lover as he makes his way through the choppy water. Interestingly, there is a red thread, wool perhaps, which runs from her clothing, under her left hand, which may be a reference to the thread of life, or that of time.

William Etty painted two works based on this legend. The first, The Parting of Hero and Leander (1827), shows the two lovers embraced, at the moment that Leander is about to start his swim back over the Hellespont to Abydos, one night.

Ovid devotes a pair of letters in his Heroides (Heroines) to this tragedy.

The first is written by Leander to Hero, after a week of stormy weather had prevented him from swimming over to her. He explains the situation, tells her that he set off three times, only to be beaten back by the waves, and how he yearns for calm weather so that they can be together again. In its last lines he asks that Hero keeps her light constant, where he can see it – ominous words.

Hero’s reply is hardly reassuring: she can’t bear their being apart, her passion burns, and if he doesn’t get there soon, she writes that she will surely die. In its later lines she urges him to be cautious, and to wait for better conditions, but the damage has already been done.

Soon after receiving her letter, Leander gives it another go, although the storm has hardly abated. As he is in the middle of the Hellespont, the wind and rain extinguish Hero’s beacon.

Frederic, Lord Leighton’s Last Watch of Hero (1880) shows Hero watching anxiously for Leander to complete the crossing.

JMW Turner’s The Parting of Hero and Leander (1837) is a dramatic and complex work with elements of both the precursor to the climax, and the climax itself. Sestos is on the left, with a couple of towers visible on the coast, neither of which contains Hero’s light. Leander is seen swimming across the narrow straight (its width shown far smaller than in reality), from right to left, to join Hero. Behind him on the bank at Abydos are spirits emerging, indicating his imminent death.

Turner shows Hero holding up a lantern, conflicting with accounts of the legend which place the beacon at the top of Hero’s tower, and ignoring the important detail of the beacon being extinguished by the storm, so leading to Leander’s death.

Turner exhibited this painting in 1837, providing his own verse to tell the story, which was most probably based on Lord Byron’s account in his Written After Swimming From Sestos To Abydos.

The legend continues that, deprived of the guidance of Hero’s beacon, Leander couldn’t reach Sestos, and drowned. Hero saw her lover’s lifeless body, so threw herself from the top of her tower to join her lover in death. This is the climactic scene which has been most favoured in art.

Peter Paul Rubens quite youthful account in his Hero and Leander of about 1604 is big on storm and drama, but difficult to read clearly. Leander’s body is being brought through the huge waves by a team of Naiads, as Hero, wearing a brilliant red gown, plunges to her death at the right.

My favourite painting of the climax is Domenico Fetti’s slightly later Hero Mourning the Dead Leander (1621-22), despite its curiously calm waters. A more modest group of Naiads in the centre are tending to Leander’s corpse, as a winged Cupid cries over them. At the right, Hero falls head-first from her tower to inevitable death.

On the left, Fetti provides a couple of evil-looking sea monsters, and Venus making her way onto her large clam shell.

William Etty’s second painting of the story, Hero, Having Thrown herself from the Tower at the Sight of Leander Drowned, Dies on his Body (1829), also shows the ending: Leander has already drowned, Hero already thrown herself from the tower, and is now in the (rather unconvincing) throes of death, just about to join her lover in the afterlife.

The legend has also given rise to some sparklingly terse summaries. In Shakespeare’s play As You Like It (Act IV, Scene I), the character Rosalind summarises the tale with extreme cynicism:
“Leander, he would have lived many a fair year, though Hero had turned nun, if it had not been for a hot midsummer night; for, good youth, he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont and being taken with the cramp was drowned and the foolish coroners of that age found it was ‘Hero of Sestos.’ But these are all lies: men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love.”

The most succinct, though, is John Donne’s epigram:
“Both robbed of air, we both lie in one ground,
Both whom one fire had burnt, one water drowned.”

When passions burn fiercely, we all too often follow the impetuousness of the heart.

The more prescient painters of the nineteenth century could see where the upstart technology of photography was heading. Even before 1850, photographers were setting up portrait studios and stealing their business. Until well into the twentieth century, and even to a degree still today, there were genres in which painting remained unsurpassed.

One had started back in 1502, with Albrecht Dürer’s watercolour of a Young Hare: wildlife. It was a genre which didn’t really exist until the nineteenth century, despite Dürer’s superb pioneering works, because few really took much interest in the birds and animals which lived in the countryside, until the biological sciences developed and flourished in that century.

The nineteenth century saw the development of a new, objective style of painting in botanical and ornithological work in particular. Artists like Edward Lear illustrated multi-volume scientific publications classifying and describing different species.

One of the pioneers who painted rather than illustrated wildlife was the Swedish artist Bruno Liljefors (1860–1939), revered today as one of the genre’s most influential figures. In this article and the next, I show some examples of his paintings which, a century later, are still some of the finest artistic depictions of wildlife in the history of art.

Liljefors was born in Uppsala, in the east of Sweden, in the same year that Anders Zorn was born. He doesn’t appear to have been quite as precocious a painter as the young Zorn, and started his studies at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in Stockholm four years later than Zorn, in 1879. He left the Academy after three years, and went on to Dusseldorf to learn to paint animals.

Sledging (1882) is one of Liljefors’ early works, from these student years. During this period, he travelled to Rome, Naples, and Paris, and was particularly inspired by the artists’ colony at Grez-sur-Loing, then dominated by the ideas and style of Jules Bastien-Lepage. Liljefors perfected his plein air painting technique, and was influenced by the Japanese woodcuts which were so popular at the time.

Liljefors aligned himself with the ‘Opponents’, a large group of Swedish artists who effectively seceded against the conservatism of the Academy.

During the early 1880s, Liljefors started to paint highly Naturalistic works showing wildlife set in realistic surroundings. Hawk and Black Grouse (1884) is a good example of these, showing a hawk attacking the gamebirds in a winter landscape. Although he had a deep affinity with his subjects, Liljefors was also a hunter, and many of his paintings explore the predator-prey relationship, as here. His hunting also provided him with dead specimens which he used as subjects.

This intimate Portrait of the artist’s father from 1884 shows his skill as a portraitist, something which he seems to have exercised seldom, but which demonstrated that he could paint humans just as well as wildlife.

This portrait of Anna Olofsson was painted in 1885, when they were courting; they married in 1887, but broke up in the early 1890s, and in 1895 he married her younger sister Signe.

In 1885, he demonstrated his virtuoso skills in what he described as ‘five studies in a single painting’. Above is A Cat with a Young Bird in its Mouth, and below is A Cat and a Chaffinch. These were assembled from observations of living and dead animals and birds, and sketches, to produce composites which photography could not challenge for decades, even in monochrome.

Following the tradition established by Dürer, one of Liljefors’ favourite species was the elusive hare. This page of Hare Studies from 1885 shows a tiny part of the image library which he assembled, as well as the spring antics of hares.

Liljefors also assembled his own wildlife park, with living and apparently quite tame creatures, including foxes, badgers, hares, squirrels, weasels, an eagle, eagle owl, and others.

The fox also appears in many of Liljefors’ paintings, here A Fox Family (1886) in their role as predators, as they feast on an unfortunate bird. The rich floral setting appears to have been influenced by the paintings of Jules Bastien-Lepage.

Liljefors’ paintings were often very painterly, such as in Jays (1886) which gives the impression of having been painted en plein air, in front of the birds and landscape.

Even for the modern amateur photographer, the fleeting form of Common Swifts (1886) is a great challenge. Set against a riot of flowers, these birds are the product of field observation, museum specimens, and careful studies, and look real.

Liljefors enjoyed great insight into the species that he painted. The five Red-Backed Shrike Chicks (1887) shown here may not, at first sight, appear in keeping with their popular name, the ‘butcher bird’, but the chick at the left end of the branch is already taking an interest in a passing bee or fly. When a little older, it will catch it and impale the corpse on thorns in its larder.

During the 1880s, Bruno Liljefors (1860–1939) excelled as a wildlife artist, and was appointed head of the art school in Gothenburg, Sweden, in succession to Carl Larsson. But his personal life was in turmoil, and the 1890s were barren years when he often ran short of money.

His Common Snipe at its Nest from 1891 is a fine painting, but lacks the brilliance of his earlier work, with its loose backgrounds inspired by the work of Jules Bastien-Lepage.

Hooded Crows (1891) captures these northern members of the crow family well, though.

Some of his finest paintings from this period are almost pure landscapes, such as his Hunting Geese (1896) with its superb mackerel sky.

He seems to have recovered his earlier form in the early twentieth century, as his new family grew around him. Spectacular paintings such as this Sea Eagle’s Nest from 1907 were often set around the fragmented coast of the Baltic. Although photographic technology was advancing rapidly, wildlife photography was still in its infancy: for instance, the National Geographic magazine published its first monochrome wildlife photos in 1906.

This is one of the many paintings that Liljefors made of a Winter Hare, here from 1910.

His later works include some substantial groups of birds, such as these Long-tailed Ducks in the Outer Archipelago (1911).

When Liljefors painted this Portrait of Zorn, in about 1916, his subject was in his mid fifties, the same age as the artist. Liljefors seems to have benefited from the long days and nights that he spent out in the country. Anders Zorn died four years later, at the age of only 60.

In 1917, Liljefors moved his studio to the village of Österbybruk near Uppsala, but continued to work from hunting lodges when necessary. Some of his landscapes became more post-Impressionist, as seen in this Autumn Landscape with Fox (1918).

His dedicated wildlife works didn’t weaken, as he concentrated on coastal wetlands, as in these Bean Geese Landing (1921).

Some of these late paintings have wonderful dialogues between the sky and water, as in these Geese in Wetlands (1921).

Liljefors never lost his fascination for the relationship between predators and prey, as seen in his Sea Eagles Chasing an Eider from 1924.

Eider on the Islet, painted in 1937, must be one of his last works from the coast.

Liljefors was also an accomplished gymnast, acrobat, and variety artist. With his two brothers, he formed the Manzodi Brothers, an acrobatic group who entertained Swedish audiences.

He died in Stockholm on 18 December 1939, a few months after the start of the Second World War. He had outlived Anders Zorn by almost twenty years.

Liljefors’ paintings have not, as far as I am aware, been generally recognised as Naturalist, although in 2016 Carl-Johan Olsson of Stockholm’s Nationalmuseum proposed that he was influenced by contemporary French Naturalist art such as the paintings of Bastien-Lepage. Recent accounts of Naturalism don’t include any references to Liljefors’ paintings, nor to the work of other wildlife artists of the time.

However, Liljefors’ art blossomed during the heyday of Naturalism. He was apparently influenced by Jules Bastien-Lepage and the art of the colony at Grez-sur-Loing, which was the heart of Naturalism. His paintings are robustly realist throughout, and their subjects are usually rendered in quite fine detail even though his settings are often more painterly. Olsson considers this to be his skilful balancing act in focus, apparent even in his portrait of his future wife Anna, for example.

Liljefors’ paintings explore the relationships between different species, particularly that between predator and prey, although he neither falls victim to sentimentality nor does he overdramatize. Indeed, his wildlife paintings are paragons of the objectivity which the late nineteenth century sought, and with which Naturalism was most concerned.

Could Liljefors have been a Naturalist painter of nature?

References

Wikipedia (in Swedish).
Carl-Johan Olsson (2016) Art Bulletin of Nationalmuseum Stockholm, vol. 23, available here.

Macareus, one of the survivors of the Odyssey, has been telling his account of the sojourn of Ulysses and his men on Circe’s island. Having told of their arrival and transformation into pigs, he completes his story with a cautionary tale of what happens to those who don’t submit to Circe’s desires.

The Story

One of Circe’s assistants showed Macareus a marble statue of a youth with a woodpecker on his head. When Macareus asked why that was in the shrine, the assistant explained that it all came about as a result of Circe’s magic powers.

Picus had been the king of Latium, and drew admiring glances from nymphs wherever he went. He fell in love with a beautiful young woman who sang so wonderfully that she was named Canens (Latin for singing), and they lived in wedded bliss. One day, Picus was out hunting on his horse when Circe caught sight of him from the undergrowth. Her desire for him was immediate and intense, so she worked her magic to lure Picus into a thicket, in pursuit of a phantom boar which she had conjured up.

Circe confronted him, and told of her desire for him, but he refused her in fathfulness to Canens. Despite Circe repeatedly pleading with him, Picus stood firm and refused her time and again. The sorceress became angry, warning him that he would pay for his obstinacy, and would never return to his bride:
Then twice she turned herself to face the west
and twice to face the East; and three times then
she touched the young man with her wand,
and sang three incantations. Picus fled,
but, marvelling at his unaccustomed speed,
he saw new wings, that spread on either side
and bore him onward. Angry at the thought
of transformation — all so suddenly
added a strange bird to the Latian woods,
he struck the wild oaks with his hard new beak,
and in his rage inflicted many wounds
on the long waving branches his wings took
the purple of his robe. The piece of gold
which he had used so nicely in his robe
was changed to golden feathers, and his neck
was rich as yellow gold. Nothing remained
of Picus as he was except the name.

With Picus turned into a woodpecker, his courtiers were out searching for him. Stumbling across Circe instead, they accused her of being responsible for his disappearance. She promptly worked her spells upon them too:
The men all quaked appalled. With magic rod
she touched their faces, pale and all amazed,
and at her touch the youths took on strange forms
of wild animals. None kept his proper shape.

Picus’ wife Canens was beside herself with worry, and roamed the countryside looking for her husband:
Distracted she rushed forth and wandered through
the Latin fields. Six nights, six brightening dawns
found her quite unrefreshed with food or sleep
wandering at random over hill and dale.
The Tiber saw her last, with grief and toil
wearied and lying on his widespread bank.
In tears she poured out words with a faint voice,
lamenting her sad woe, as when the swan
about to die sings a funereal dirge.
Melting with grief at last she pined away;
her flesh, her bones, her marrow liquified
and vanished by degrees as formless air
and yet the story lingers near that place,
fitly named Canens by old-time Camenae.

With the King of Latium transformed into a woodpecker, his courtiers into sundry wild animals, and his wife vanished into thin air, Ulysses and his men finally left Circe’s island, and Macareus finished his stories.

The Paintings

The story of Picus, Canens, and Circe with its multiple transformations would appear to be ideal for the visual artist. Ovid’s account is quite vivid, and the story appears in both Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid. Oddly, it has remained little-known, and seldom-painted.

The only dedicated account available is Luca Giordano’s Picus and Circe, probably painted around 1670. This shows Circe trying to seduce Picus, and the king resisting her advances. By their expressions, she has just told him that he will pay for his refusal, and is working her magic to transform him into a woodpecker. Already he has grown feathery wings, and at the upper right there is the silhouette of a woodpecker as an ominous reminder of the fate that awaits him at any moment.

There are more paintings, though, which show Circe in the company of various enchanted birds and animals, including the former King Picus. Two of the more remarkable examples are both by Dosso Dossi, one painted in about 1515, the second probably fifteen years later.

Dossi’s Circe and her Lovers in a Landscape (c 1514-16) is a remarkably early and realistic mythological landscape, with deep rustic lanes, trees, and a distant farmhouse.

Circe leans, naked, at the foot of a tree going through spells on a large tablet, with a book of magic open at her feet. Around her are some of the men who she took a fancy to and transformed into wild creatures. There’s a spoonbill, a small deer, a couple of dogs, a stag, and up in the trees an owl and what could well be a woodpecker, in the upper right corner.

Dossi’s later painting of Melissa (Circe) (c 1518-1531) is also set in a richly detailed landscape. Circe sits inside a magic circle, around which are inscribed cabalistic words. In the upper left corner are small homunculi apparently growing on a tree. On the left is a large dog, and perched on top of a suit of armour is a bird, most probably a woodpecker.

Disappointingly, although Circe inspired paintings by several of the Pre-Raphaelites, none came close to the story of Picus and Canens, or of her bad habit of collecting in animal form those men who refused her desires.

The English translation of Ovid above is taken from Ovid. Metamorphoses. Tr. Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922, at Perseus. I am very grateful to Perseus at Tufts for this.

Studies of Naturalism, Realism, or Social Realism differ in their definitions, the period during which it flourished, artists and even countries involved, and more. But there is one painter whose work is generally agreed to have dominated Naturalism, at least until his sudden and premature death in 1884: Jules Bastien-Lepage.

I have previously written about his work and career in more general terms. This article and the next look in more detail at those paintings which led up to and formed his high Naturalism in the years 1880-83, in which he was the avatar of Naturalism (Richard Thomson).

Important precursors to Naturalism were the realist paintings of the rural poor by Millet and Breton, the realism of Gustave Courbet, and Gustave Doré’s perceptive insights into city life, particularly in his book London: A Pilgrimage (1872). What had previously been viewed as genre painting now took on social concerns.

Bastien-Lepage was born and brought up amid the rural poor of the north-east of France, in Damvillers, an area which was to be invaded by Prussian forces in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, and ravaged during the First World War. He first intended to become a history painter, but was twice deprived of the Prix de Rome, and turned to portraiture and rural genre scenes.

Bastien-Lepage returned to the Salon in 1878 with Les Foins (Haymakers or Hay making) (1877). It provoked debate over what was considered to be its harsh portrayal of life and work in the country. It was also a pioneer composition for Bastien-Lepage, with its high horizon and fine detail in the foreground. Together these give the visual impression that the whole canvas is meticulously realist, although in fact much of its surface consists of visible brushstrokes and other more painterly forms.

At the same time, its deep recession and broad inclusion of land gives it the illusion of a very wide-angle panorama, which enhances the exhaustion and desolation of its figures.

The following year, Bastien-Lepage returned with what is now sometimes known as October or Potato Gatherers (1878), but was originally shown as Saison d’Octobre: Récolte des Pommes de Terre. He employed the same compositional scheme: high horizon, fine foreground detail, deep recession (here enhanced by the distant figures), and broad land. This time, though, his rural poor are smiling and happy in their labour, and it was a huge success.

La Toussaint (All Souls’ Day), also completed in 1878, was a more sentimental incursion into the outskirts of the city, as its grandfather is taken for a walk by two of his young grandchildren. They are strolling through land which was, until recently, open fields. It has now been transformed as smoky factories sprawl from the edges of the cities, with a narrow no-man’s-land of allotments and smallholdings as seen here.

Then in 1879, Bastien-Lepage revisited history painting with his new formula, in Joan of Arc (1879). Its horizon is so high that little sky is visible beyond the trees. The lower half of the canvas is its intricately-detailed foreground, even down to the clutter of woolworking apparatus (an ingenious link to the thread of fate) and the unkempt garden.

The corner of a house sharply divides the painting into halves. On its right is the very real and tangible figure of Joan of Arc, her piercing blue eyes staring into the distance, as she receives her call to arms. On the left are the ethereal figures of Saints Michael, Margaret, and Catherine, which gave rise to a surprisingly hostile reception by critics.

Bastien-Lepage was still not completely committed to Naturalism, though. This pure landscape of Night on the Lagoon (1880), presumably painted in Venice, uses none of the devices of the works above.

The Grape Harvest, also known as Harvest Time, (1880) varied the compositional formula, and doesn’t produce the same effects. Its horizon draws the eye more strongly, distracting from the foreground detail, and the land rises too soon to achieve the deep panorama of his earlier paintings.

In his native Damvillers, Bastien-Lepage painted portraits of the poor. The Beggar (1880) shows an old man who has apparently been knocking on doors in his quest for charity. A well-dressed young girl stares sadly at him as he walks away from her house, and she is closing the door on him.

Bastien-Lepage’s The Wood Gatherer (Father Jacques) (1881) is one of the key Naturalist works of art, also one of the most successful examples of his compositional formula. Its high horizon and woodland break the thin slice of sky into fine fragments. The detailed foreground includes both of the figures, who are diametric opposites – an old man bent with his load of firewood, who at any moment could keel over and die, and a young child (probably a girl) who runs free among the wild flowers. The perception of depth is enhanced by the recession of tree forms, although here the space is enclosed rather than open.

From 1880, Bastien-Lepage visited London repeatedly, as if following in the footsteps of Doré. Blackfriars Bridge and the Thames, London (1881) is a fine depiction of this stretch of the River Thames, and has much finer detail in its foreground than in the distance, but does not follow the rest of the formula.

Bastien-Lepage’s formula can be seen in progress in his Ophelia (1881), showing the character from Shakespeare’s play Hamlet as her anguish is about to drive her body down into the water, and drown her. At the time of his death, Bastien-Lepage still had to paint all the foreground detail. This would have covered the lower half of the canvas, and given it a finely-detailed overall appearance.

Bastien-Lepage continued his portraiture during this period. This painting of Marie Samary of the Odéon Theatre (c 1881) shows clearly his use of differential detail: the fine white scarf is painted in crisp detail, when compared with the background of papers, etc.

Back in Damvillers, Bastien-Lepage returned to the rural poor, now focussing on children, the innocent victims. The formula was applied again, this time with the superimposition of a leafless sapling and the thyrsus-like flower-heads of the teazle. The tree is placed most unusually over the grazing cow, and the whole painting cropped as if a photograph.

The following year marks the high-point of Bastien-Lepage’s Naturalism.

The first of these two articles looked at the paintings made by Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848–1884) leading to his ‘high Naturalism’. This article moves on to consider the remarkable series of paintings that he made in 1882, before his declining health took its toll on his output.

Not all his paintings were typically Naturalist. He continued to make some fine landscapes, of which Snow Effect, Damvillers from about 1882, is arguably his finest, and most Impressionist.

The relationship between Impressionism and Naturalism is an interesting and controversial issue; Claude Monet was particularly influenced by Bastien-Lepage’s Naturalism, although there was very little overlap between their work. Of the core Impressionists, it was probably Pissarro whose paintings came closest to Naturalism.

The figures caught in the late dusk of Bastien-Lepage’s Evening at Damvillers (1882) are a reminder that people were still at the centre of his art, though.

Bastien-Lepage pushed his formula to the limit in this enchanting painting of Roadside Flowers or The Little Shepherdess (1882). The sky has been reduced to a thin sliver, and almost the entire canvas is devoted to its detailed foreground.

Like the weeds behind her, this little girl has a wide-eyed and slightly sad beauty. Although her clothing is visibly tatty, her face and hair are idealistically clean, in keeping with a romantic sentimentalism rather than the objectivity which is characteristic of true Naturalism.

Going to School (1882) takes us into the village, but again this girl is a little too clean and perfect to be objective.

Pas Mèche (Nothing Doing) (1882) is nearer the mark: a cheeky ploughboy equipped with his whip and horn, on his way out to work in the fields. His face is grubby, his clothing frayed, patched, and dirty, and his boots caked in mud and laceless.

Many of Bastien-Lepage’s paintings from 1882 were single-figure portraits, mostly of children, but in Love in the Village he shows a young couple on either side of a tumbledown fence, chatting intimately among the vegetable patches.

One early reading, by Mette, the wife of Paul Gauguin, held that the girl was under age, and the relationship accordingly beyond the pale. The girl not only faces away from the viewer, but her whole body is turned away, leaving that issue unresolved and unresolvable.

Bastien-Lepage visited London, where he again painted the river in The Thames, London (1882). This maintains fine detail right into the far distance, except where it is affected by the smoky and hazy atmosphere, and its horizon is kept well below the middle of the canvas.

In London, he painted one of his most characteristically Naturalistic works, showing a young boy working on the street as a London Bootblack (1882). This could have been taken straight from the journalistic accounts of London’s streetlife by Henry Mayhew, or their fictional reworking in the novels of Charles Dickens. The documentary realism of the foreground gives way to a more sketchy and jumbled background.

Bastien-Lepage’s portrait of a flower seller in a Flower Market in London (1882) is The Little Shepherdess of the city, posed against dull brown stonework. In the background is a reminder of how the other half lived, as an affluent man in a pale top hat walks alongside a woman wearing an exuberant blue hat.

I have been unable to read the date on this portrait of The Blind Beggar, painted in Damvillers again, but guess that it was most probably painted between 1880 and 1883.

Bastien-Lepage continued to paint during his final illness in 1883-84, although his output appears to have fallen dramatically. I suspect that most of his surviving works from those years are in private collections, and seldom pass into public view.

Dated in 1883, The Little Chimneysweep (Damvillers) is unusual as its subject isn’t shown standing, face-on to the viewer, but he sits and looks down at the kitten at the lower right. This young boy is also the dirtiest of Bastien-Lepage’s waifs, his left hand still being black with soot from his work. He appears to be living in a hovel, with the embers of a fire at the left edge.

Although signed, and presumably complete, the prominent white cat in the foreground remains very sketchy, and contrasts with the careful detail of the boy and his large bread roll. Bastien-Lepage seems to have been moving on to a looser style, perhaps, when he died the following year.

After his death at the end of 1884, the influence of these paintings lasted well into the 1890s. His work couldn’t define Naturalism, but it had certainly come to dominate it, both in France and elsewhere.

Wherever we use metallic copper, it weathers and corrodes. As most copper salts are blue-green in colour, ‘copper rust’ turns statues, rooves, pipes, and every other copper object exposed to the air steadly blue-green. Before recorded history, people noticed that the colour produced by exposing copper to vinegar (acetic acid) was a useful pigment. Thus green Verdigris (copper acetate) became used as a pigment.

Green is a vital colour in painting. Although not a primary colour, it is commonplace in nature. There’s a well-known principle in the use of pigments that you should mix the fewest different pigments to achieve a given colour; the more pigments that you use, the muddier the colour will be, until its hue is eventually lost in a muddy mid-grey. So, although you can always make greens from a mixture of blue and yellow, if you’re painting a landscape, or brilliant green garments, or a still life with leaves, you’ll welcome a good green pigment.

Verdigris was easy and cheap to produce. In Europe, its manufacture centred around Montpellier, in the south of France, where there was a plentiful supply of waste products from winemaking to provide vinegar. By the seventeenth century, consumption of copper there had to be satisfied by imports from as far away as Sweden. Verdigris production was also unusual in being predominantly the work of women.

Verdigris is typically more blue when it is first applied, and develops its full green hue over the first month or so following application.

Nardo di Cione’s The Saints John the Baptist, Egidius, Gerard of Villamagna, Paul and Catherine (or Miniato) from about 1350 is one of the earlier paintings known to use Verdigris, presumably in the intricately patterned floor. It may also have been used in the habit of Saint Paul.

One of the earliest paintings to show the full capabilities of Verdigris is Michael Pacher’s Altarpiece of the Church Fathers which was painted between 1471-75. The founding fathers shown are, from the left, Jerome, Augustine, Gregory, and Ambrose. Although Pacher uses Verdigris in each of the panels, that of Ambrose (shown below) demonstrates the brilliant green which can result.

For much of the period that Verdigris was in common use, the only real alternative was Green Earth, which could never attain the same chromatic intensity. This detail from Piero di Cosimo’s The Myth of Prometheus from about 1510 shows Verdigris in another intensely green garment, and probably in the distant vegetation too.

Several of Titian’s works have been found to include Verdigris, including his unusual Vanity (c 1515), where it most probably appears in the green dress.

Verdigris has also been found in Albrecht Altdorfer’s panoramic ‘world view’ of The Battle of Issus (1529).

One of its later uses is in Herman van der Mijn’s Garden Flowers (1715), where a range of natural-looking greens was clearly essential.

Verdigris was also known as an accelerant of the drying of oil paint, and was frequently added to dark and black paints, which are notoriously slow to dry, in order to shorten their drying time. Many paint samples from dark or black passages have therefore been found to contain Verdigris, although it there has no function as a pigment.

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Verdigris was replaced by better, brighter greens, such as Prussian Green (mixed using Prussian Blue after 1708), Scheele’s Green (1775), Emerald Green (1814) and Viridian (1859).

From the fifteenth century onwards, Verdigris pigment was mixed with natural resins for use in glazes. This produces a different pigment from normal Verdigris, as the copper combines with the resin acids to form what is known as Copper Resinate. A popular technique among many Masters to produce an intense green was to paint an underlayer using Verdigris, over which several glazing layers of Copper Resinate were then applied.

Although generally reliable and stable, Verdigris and Copper Resinates have a tendency to turn brown on the surface. Thankfully this affects relatively few paintings.

Tintoretto used Copper Resinate glazes in several of his paintings, most notably the rich, varied, and often lush vegetation in his Saint George and the Dragon from about 1555.

Studies at the National Gallery, London, have found Copper Resinate in three of the four paintings in Paolo Veronese’s series The Allegory of Love. In the third of these, Respect (c 1575), the pigment was found in the man’s intense green cloak, and the duller gold-brown brocade patterning on the wall behind his hand (detail, below). The surface of that wall has superficial brown discoloration of the paint layer.

One of the last major uses of Copper Resinate is in Arnold Böcklin’s Triton and Nereid from 1874. This is reported as being painted in tempera, but Copper Resinate glaze appears to have been used to develop the intense green patterns on the sea monster in the foreground. This is consistent with Böcklin adhering to traditional techniques despite working in the late nineteenth century.

True Verdigris gradually vanished from the palette during the early twentieth century. However, there’s still nothing quite like the intense green which was achieved by glazing Copper Resinate over a base of Verdigris.

Reference

Hermann Kühn (1993) Artists’ Pigments, vol 2, ed Ashok Roy, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 75 3.

After the Virgin Mary, Helen is probably the most famous and most frequently-painted woman. She is also one over whom there has been no consensus: was she abducted, seduced, or seducer? Victim or whore?

Ovid’s contribution to the debate comes in a pair of imaginary letters, the first from Paris to Helen, the second her reply, in his Heroides (Heroines). They are among his wittiest and most entertaining works, and skilfully leave it to the reader to decide the virtues and vices of the two figures, a solution which is much more difficult for the visual artist.

Both Helen and Paris had – even for legend – very peculiar origins.

This interpreted copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Leda and the Swan, probably painted in the early 1500s and now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, summarises Helen’s unique birth. The outcome of the union of Leda, wife of the king of Sparta, with Jupiter, in the form of a swan, Helen did not have a human birth, but hatched from an egg laid by her human mother. Some accounts claim that Leda had intercourse with both the swan and her husband Tyndareus on the same night, and produced one or two eggs containing Helen, Clytemnestra, Castor and Pollux, as shown here.

When pregnant with him, Paris’s mother, Hecuba queen of Troy, dreamed that she gave birth to a flaming torch. This was interpreted as revealing that her child would be responsible for the destruction of Troy by fire, so he was abandoned on Mount Ida to die. He was rescued and raised by country folk, and was eventually welcomed back into the royal household.

When still under age (according to most accounts), the beautiful Helen was abducted by Theseus (the ‘hero’ who abandoned Ariadne on the island of Naxos). Helen’s brothers were not happy with that, so paid Theseus a visit and persuaded him to return the girl. Léon Cogniet’s Helen Delivered by Castor and Pollux (1817), which secured the artist the Prix de Rome, shows her rescue.

In return for her son’s offence, Aethra, mother of Theseus, was made a slave of Helen, and was not freed until after the fall of Troy many years later. During that time, Helen’s beauty only grew, and her hand was sought by many suitors in a contest organised by her brothers Castor and Pollux. Among those suitors were many prominent figures, including Odysseus.

Helen’s father, King Tyndareus, feared that in choosing between her suitors he would offend and cause trouble. The suitors therefore agreed to swear an oath, under which they would all defend the successful suitor in the event that anyone should quarrel with them – this was the crucial Oath of Tyndareus. Under that, Menelaus, king of Sparta, was chosen as Helen’s husband, and the couple later had a daughter, Hermione, and possibly sons too.

Paris’s nemesis came with the Judgement of Paris, the beauty contest which resulted from the Apple of Discord being put between Juno (Hera), Minerva (Athena), and Venus (Aphrodite). Venus successfully bribed Paris with the promise of the most beautiful woman in the world (Helen, still married to Menelaus), and was awarded the apple. Paris then had to claim his prize, and suffer the wrath of Juno and Minerva.

Given its importance to subsequent events (the Trojan War) and the whole story, you might have expected clarity over how Helen and Paris became partners. Instead, there are multiple and conflicting accounts which leave everything in doubt.

Most of the early paintings, such as Primaticcio’s The Rape of Helen from about 1530-39, show Paris abducting Helen against her will. Here, a youthful Paris is carrying her from the city of Sparta into one of his ships, ready to sail off to Troy with his prize.

Maerten van Heemskerck’s magnificent Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the Ancient World (1535) puts the same story into a world-view panorama which includes classical ‘wonders’ such as the Colossus of Rhodes. Helen is here part of a small raid on Sparta in which various other prizes are also being taken.

For Tintoretto, The Rape of Helen (1580) was nothing short of war. As an archer is about to shoot his arrow, and another Trojan fends off attackers with a pike, Helen, dressed in her finery, is manhandled onto Paris’s ship like a stolen statue.

By the seventeenth century, the story shown in paintings was starting to change. Guido Reni’s The Rape of Helen, from about 1626-29, shows Paris leading Helen away with her maids and courtiers in attendance. She doesn’t look at all happy, and is far from willing, and Cupid stands with a finger raised as if to say that he will be using his bow very shortly.

Juan de la Corte’s The Rape of Helen (c 1620-50) is also a bit more ambiguous. Helen is being grasped around her waist by one of the Trojans, but seems to have resigned herself to her fate.

By 1776, when Benjamin West painted Helen Brought to Paris, this has started to look very consensual, if still a seduction by Paris. As Paris kneels before her in supplication, Venus and her son Cupid draw the figure of Helen towards him. Note how Helen is wearing predominantly white clothing, and unlike Venus shows but a modest amount of flesh.

A few years later, Angelica Kauffman pursues a very similar line in her Venus Persuading Helen to Fall in Love with Paris (1790). So maybe Paris didn’t have to abduct Helen after all, but Venus and Cupid had to persuade the queen to allow herself to be seduced.

For Jacques-Louis David, it was all about The Love of Helen and Paris (1788). The couple pose in front of their bed with its rumpled sheets. He is naked and playing his lyre, his cheeks flushed. She wears diaphanous clothing which has slipped off her right shoulder, and her cheeks are distinctly flushed too. Watching over them is a small statue of Venus.

In the late nineteenth century, fewer paintings showed Helen and Paris together, and Helen became the more popular subject for portraits.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Helen of Troy (1863) shows her against an almost suppressed background of Troy burning. Both her hands grasp a pendant at her neck, of a firebrand, which can only be a reference to Paris and his symbolism in his mother’s dream.

In contrast, Gaston Bussière’s Helen of Troy (1895) poses against a backdrop of Troy before its fall, modelled after the great ancient cities of the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East. She wears an elaborate headdress with a band of peacock feathers, and her abundant jewellery is flashy rather than regal, more typical of a courtesan than the head of court.

Evelyn de Morgan’s Helen of Troy (1898) admires herself in a mirror, the back of which bears the image of Venus. Around her are white and red roses for love, and five white doves, two of which are ‘courting’. In the distance are the lofty towers of the fortified city of Troy.

Ovid portrays Paris as naïve and inept, desparate to impress Helen despite the fact that Venus has already promised her to him. She comes across as far more experienced, and obviously duplicitous. At this stage, with her husband away visiting Crete, she has already let her dress slip to show Paris her breasts. In her reply to Paris, she reveals that she is in love with him and prepared to have a clandestine affair. However, she portrays herself as a virtuous wife who is inexperienced at adultery, and skilfully leads Paris to his death, and the destruction of Troy.

Cogniet painted Helen in the margins of his Oenone Refuses to Rescue Paris at the Siege of Troy (1816), his first and unsuccessful entry for the Prix de Rome. Oenone had been Paris’s first wife, who seems to have been overlooked in many of the accounts of Helen and Paris. As he lies dying from his wound from Philoctetes’ poisoned arrow during the Trojan War, Paris looks imploringly towards Oenone.

She, though, has refused to try to heal him with her herbal arts, has turned her back on him, and walks away, leaving him to the care of Helen, who stands at the right edge wearing her golden crown.

Myth and legend are similarly undecided as to Helen’s ultimate fate, following the fall of Troy. Homer has her return to Menelaus in Sparta, and resume her former role as queen and mother, almost as if nothing had happened. Perhaps Euripides was closer to the truth in his Trojan Women, where she is shunned by the other women who survived the fall of Troy, and is eventually taken back to Greece to face a death penalty for her actions.

Gustave Moreau’s Helen at the Scaean Gate (c 1880) shows her faceless, and standing amid the smoking ruins and rubble, which is perhaps the best place to leave her.

Reference

Wikipedia’s lengthy and well-referenced article about Helen.

He’s been called the Last Naturalist, and like many of the Naturalists whom I have featured here, was both popular in his day and almost forgotten now. Émile Friant (1863–1932) rebelled against the academic style of the 1880s, and is one of the major artists discussed by Richard Thomson in his account of French painting between 1880-1900 (see below).

He was born in the far east of France, in the town of Dieuze, not far from the modern border with Germany. His father was an artisan, a locksmith who was also commissioned to design bespoke clothing, and his mother a dressmaker. Fortunately, he acquired second ‘parents’ who were more affluent, and being childless themselves, looked after him as if he were their own.

When Prussia defeated France in the war of 1870-71, Dieuze became lawless and was annexed by Prussia. In 1871/72, Friant fled with his adoptive mother to Nancy, and his biological family followed. He did not fare well in academic subjects, but showed an early aptitude for art, so he was taught still life and landscape painting in Nancy.

He showed his first works locally in 1878, earning himself financial support to go to Paris and apply to the École des Beaux-Arts there for admission. He was successful in that in 1879, and there studied in the studio of Alexandre Cabanel, where Jules Bastien-Lepage, Henri Gervex, Henri Regnault, and Benjamin Constant had studied previously.

Friant’s time with Cabanel was not happy, and he emerged a bitter critic of academic painting and the École system. He entered the Prix de Rome in 1883, but had to settle for second prize. As was so often the case, there were suggestions that Cabanel and others had arranged for their favourites to be successful there, and in the Salon.

In these early years, several of his surviving works are mythological, but his 1881 painting of The Entrance of the Clowns stands out with its unusual theme, which is associated with other Naturalist art. It shows the interior of the ‘big top’ of a circus, at the moment that the clowns, acrobats, and other entertainers parade.

Friant demonstrates that he has already acquired the technique of putting the foreground into relatively sharp focus and detail, and leaving the background blurred and sketchy, as may have been influenced by photography.

Friant first exhibited at the Salon in 1882, but after his disappointment in the Prix de Rome the following year, he returned to set up his studio in Nancy.

The Drinkers, or Monday’s Work (1884) is one of his first ‘social realist’ paintings, showing two unemployed and unskilled men sat drinking together against an exterior wall. The hands of the more distant man are conspicuously grubby and unkempt, and the small dog looks on accusingly.

During these early years of his career, Friant painted his own and other studios, including this Portrait of the Sculptor Ernest Bussière (1863-1913) in 1884.

In 1885, Friant met a future patron, the successful comedian Constant Coquelin and his theatrical family, who worked with actress Sarah Bernhardt, who in turn had been friends with Jules Bastien-Lepage. But Friant’s career was interrupted by his compulsory military service until the following year. After that, he was awarded funds to travel, and visited Belgium and Holland. In the Spring of 1887, he went to Italy and Tunisia, and Coquelin took him on to visit London with him.

Friant painted several works which are now valued for their regional interest. Among them is this portrait of a Young Woman of Nancy in a Snowy Landscape from 1887. This follows the compositional formula which had been popularised by Jules Bastien-Lepage, with its very high horizon, careful foreground detail, and more painterly background. However, his subject here was very different from Bastien-Lepage’s poor children.

The Meurthe Boating Party, also known as Reunion of the Meurthe Boating Party or The Oarsmen of the Meurthe, from 1887 is one of Friant’s first key works. It shows the artist’s watersporting friends eating a meal together on the river Meurthe in Nancy. Friant was an enthusiastic participant in several watersports, including rowing and canoeing.

This painting can be read as a broad message of well-being and conviviality: healthy, fit young men engaged in team sports; fraternity; and harmony across different classes within society. It was exhibited at the Salon in 1888, and as a result of its success there was featured as a full page in the popular magazine Le Monde Illustré, bringing Friant instant fame across the country.

Friant’s Self-portrait in Light Grey (1887) shows the artist as a young man (24) in his studio in Nancy.

Spring (1888) shows a young man, standing in a barn, talking to two young women, who are walking with their arms around one another. It has a curious detail of the small trap-door just to the right of the man, which presumably marks the entrance to a kennel, but there is no dog.

Much more successful was Friant’s The Lovers also known as Autumn Evening, or Idyll on the Bridge of the same year. His lovers contrast with Bastien-Lepage’s Love in the Village (1882), though: both are well-dressed, and there is no doubt about their maturity, and the propriety of their relationship.

Friant’s next major work was All Saints’ Day (1888). This shows a young girl about to give a blind beggar a coin, as her family passes on their way to pay their respects at the Nancy municipal cemetery, the conventional activity on All Saints’ Day. In the vaguer distance, there is a dense procession of similar families clad in black, making their way through the cemetery.

It was exhibited at the Salon in Paris the following year, and won a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle later that same year. It has photographic traits in its composition, being a seized moment, which crops through the figure at the right edge, with a background that is blurry and lacking the same crisp detail as its foreground. Its central gap, between the donor and recipient of charity, marks the gulf between their status.

Reference

Richard Thomson (2012) Art of the Actual, Naturalism and Style in Early Third Republic France, 1880-1900, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 17988 0.

For the Naturalist artist Émile Friant (1863–1932), 1889 was a watershed. His painting of All Saints’ Day (1888) had been a great success at the Salon in Paris, and received a gold medal at the following Exposition Universelle. On the strength and proceeds of this, he travelled to the Netherlands, Spain, and Algeria.

Friant followed this success with two more important works. Political Discussion (1889) shows four rural workers engaged in debate about some issue of the day. Their thoughts and tongues suitably liberated by glasses of cognac, one looks passionately involved, waving his hand in the air, with a newspaper in front of him. Two others look intently at him, apparently keeping out of the argument, and the fourth, at the right, looks away in disagreement.

The rich golden light in the nearby tree and fence suggests that this is late on a summer’s day, although there are surprisingly few clues from shadows.

This can be read as an endorsement of free expression of political opinions and debate in the Third Republic.

The Fight, or Wrestling, from the same year, is another rural scene from near Nancy. A group of boys have gathered by a small river, and look ready to enter the water. Two are in the foreground, on the opposite bank, engaged in a fight. They are strained over, as one holds the other in a wrestling lock, with their legs spread wide apart and tensed.

Friant appears to have been an early and enthusiastic photographer, who used photographic prints as an aid to his painting. By the 1890s, some of his paintings bore the hallmarks of optical experimentation, such as his Ombres portées (Cast Shadows) of 1891. This shadowplay of a couple lit by a bright point source shows the man looking imploringly up at the woman, who looks aside. The shadow of his head is about to kiss her left cheek, but her shadow is distant from his.

The Frugal Meal (1894) returns to a more social theme, as a poor family with four daughters sits down to a meal consisting of a bowl piled high with potatoes, and nothing else. More worryingly, the pot on the floor at the left is empty. Friant’s sketchy backdrop includes an area void of plaster, above the father, and a small bird in a cage, at the top right.

Friant’s motifs became increasingly eclectic towards the end of the nineteenth century. The Small Boat (1895) is an idealistic view of a young couple sailing below cliffs, with a dreamlike softness to the sails. The couple are dressed in immaculate whites, interestingly with the woman at the tiller, and the man leaning back against her thigh.

Chagrin d’Enfant (A Child’s Disappointment) (1897-98) is an insightful double portrait of a young mother smiling at, and embracing, her grumpy young daughter.

Friant’s Sorrow (1898) returns to the municipal cemetery of All Saints’ Day, this time for a funeral, and a very intimate study of the grief of a widow, who is being helped by two younger women. Their overt reactions contrast with the cluster of men, with their stern beards, at the left.

In the 1890s, Friant became a passionate aviation enthusiast. Together with a friend from Nancy – one of the oarsmen in Friant’s painting of 1887 – he founded an aviation society, and flew in balloons and early aircraft.

Journey to Infinity (1899) is an extraordinary flight of fancy in a balloon, which is soaring high above a bank of grey clouds (or possibly a rugged mountain ridge) which contain the forms of five nude women, one of them apparently performing a handstand. I suspect that this painting may have been made for Marie Marvingt (1875-1963), an athlete, mountaineer, and pioneer aviator, who had moved to Nancy in 1889 (see below).

In 1900, Friant was awarded his second gold medal by an Exposition Universelle, and the following year he was appointed to the Legion of Honour. After this he spent more time working on prints than he did painting, as reflected in his few surviving paintings from the twentieth century.

Maternal Tenderness (1906) is another intimate double portrait of a mother with her daughter, this time out in the sunshine of a fine summer’s day. At their feet is the family dog, looking faithfully up at them, and the girl’s doll.

Atonement (1908) is an even greater contrast, showing a condemned man about to walk to the guillotine for a public execution. His arms are tied behind his back, and he strains forward towards an elderly priest, who is holding a small crucifix aloft as he strives to save the man’s soul. At the foot of the guillotine are three bearded executioners, dressed in black with top hats. Crowds are packed onto the rooves and at the windows of the buildings in the background. It is snowing.

I find it hard to read Friant’s In Front of the Psyche (1912), which shows a nude woman stroking her hair in joy. Beside her on a chair are her clothes, with smart black shoes and a floridly feathered hat. At the left edge are the posts of a bed, but there is no clue as to whether someone else is there. The background is very vague and sketchy, and what looks like a circular mirror on the wall shows no clear reflection.

Friant was too old to serve in the First World War, and despite the proximity of Nancy to some of the major battlefields, he seems to have stayed there for much of the time. He engaged in activities to help the war effort, particularly with respect to aviation.

In the years before the war, Friant had apparently become friends with Marie Marvingt, and helped her develop her flying skills and experience. In 1909, she had become the first woman to pilot a balloon across the North Sea and English Channel from mainland Europe to England, and the following year became the third French woman to have a pilot’s licence.

In 1910, Marvingt had proposed the concept of fixed-wing air ambulances to the French government. Friant helped her promote the idea in this drawing of Marie Marvingt and her Air Ambulance (1914). She then disguised herself as a man so that she could serve as an infantry soldier for France during the war, but was discovered and sent home. In 1915, she became the first woman to fly combat missions, as a volunteer bomber pilot, for which she was awarded the Croix de Guerre.

She continued to campaign for, and help develop, air ambulances, establishing a civil air ambulance service in Morocco in 1934, and the following year became the first certified Flight Nurse. To celebrate her eightieth birthday in 1955, she was flown over Nancy in an US Air Force fighter jet (F101).

Friant’s late paintings including other disjoint themes. The Birds (1921) is a brilliantly colourful and detailed erotic fantasy which demonstrates his great technical skills, but has drifted far away from his earlier Naturalism and social concerns.

In 1923, Friant was appointed a professor of drawing at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and he died in that city on 9 June 1932.

References

Wikipedia on Marie Marvingt and her extraordinary achievements.

Richard Thomson (2012) Art of the Actual, Naturalism and Style in Early Third Republic France, 1880-1900, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 17988 0.

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Achaemenides and Macareus have been telling stories from the Odyssey. With those complete, Aeneas (hero of Virgil’s Aeneid) moves on to found Alba, the precursor to Rome itself.

The Story

When Macareus had completed his narrative, Aeneas’ nurse was buried there in a marble sepulchre. Aeneas and his crew then set sail on the final leg of their journey from Troy to Latium.

Once they had arrived, Aeneas and his former Trojans had to fight Turnus, king of the Rutuli, for Latinus’ throne and the hand of Lavinia in marriage. This proved a long and bitter struggle, in which Aeneas was aided by others. Among those who refused to assist him was Diomede, in Apulia.

In defending his refusal to aid Aeneas, Diomede told the story of his return from the Trojan War, which had proved a desparate journey. His colleague Acmon had rashly speculated what more Venus could have done to harm them, and taunted her:
With language of this kind Pleuronian Acmon,
Provoking Venus further than before,
revived her former anger. His fierce words
were then approved of by a few, while we
the greater number of his real friends,
rebuked the words of Acmon: and while he
prepared to answer us, his voice, and even
the passage of his voice, were both at once
diminished, his hair changed to feathers, while
his neck took a new form. His breast and back
covered themselves with down, and both his arms
grew longer feathers, and his elbows curved
into light wings, much of each foot was changed
to long toes, and his mouth grew still and hard
with pointed horn.
Amazed at his swift change
were Lycus, Abas, Nycteus and Rhexenor.
And, while they stared, they took his feathered shape.
The larger portion of my company
flew from their boat, resounding all around
our oars with flapping of new-fashioned wings.
If you should ask the form of these strange birds
they were like snowy swans, though not the same.

Acmon and his friends were thus transformed into white seabirds. Aeneas’ envoy to Diomede, Venulus, also saw a grotto where a shepherd had offended Pan, and been turned into an oleaster tree.

During the war with Turnus, enemy forces had been sent to set alight to Aeneas’ fleet of ships. Built with pinewood frames, they burned well. But Juno intervened:
When the holy mother of the gods, recalling
how those same pines were felled on Ida’s crest,
filled the wind with a sound of cymbals clashed
and trill of boxwood flutes. Borne through light air
by her famed lion yoke, she came and said,
“In vain you cast the fire with impious hand,
Turnus, for I will save this burning fleet.
I will not let the greedy flame consume
trees that were part and members of my grove.”
It thundered while she spoke, and heavy clouds,
following the thunder, brought a storm
of bounding hail. The Astraean brothers filled
both air and swollen waters with their rage
and rushed to battle. With the aid of one
of them the kindly mother broke the ropes
which held the Phrygian ships, and, drawing all
prow foremost, plunged them underneath the wave.
Softening quickly in the waters quiet depth,
their wood was changed to flesh, the curving prows
were metamorphosed into human heads,
blades of the oars made feet, the looms were changed
to swimming legs, the sides turned human flanks,
each keel below the middle of a ship
transformed became a spine, the cordage changed
to soft hair, and the sail yards changed to arms.
The azure color of the ships remained.
As sea-nymphs in the water they began
to agitate with virgin sports the waves,
which they had always dreaded. Natives of
the rugged mountains they are now so changed,
they swim and dwell in the soft flowing sea,
with every influence of birth forgot.

That was a reverse of the normal type of transformation, with inanimate ships being changed to sea-nymphs.

When Turnus was killed by Aeneas, so the city of Ardea fell, and from its ashes and ruins arose a bird, the heron.

With the end of Aeneas’ life in sight, his mother Venus campaigned among the gods and goddesses for him to be transformed into a god when he died:
The gods assented, and the queen of Jove
nodded consent with calm, approving face.
The father said, “You well deserve the gift,
both you who ask it, and the one for whom
you ask it: what you most desire is yours,
my daughter.” He decreed, and she rejoiced
and thanked her parent. Borne by harnessed doves
over and through the light air, she arrived
safe on Laurentine shores: Numicius there
winds through his tall reeds to the neighboring sea
the waters of his stream: and there she willed
Numicius should wash perfectly away
from her Aeneas every part that might
be subject unto death; and bear it far
with quiet current into Neptune’s realm.
The horned Numicius satisfied the will
of Venus; and with flowing waters washed
from her Aeneas every mortal part,
and sprinkled him, so that the essential part
of immortality remained alone,
and she anointed him, thus purified,
with heavenly essence, and she touched his face
with sweetest nectar and ambrosia mixt,
thereby transforming him into a god.
The throng of the Quirini later named
the new god Indiges, and honored him.

Ovid then lists the successor rulers of Latium and Alba, which had been founded by Aeneas, up to the reign of King Proca, in which his next story is set.

The Paintings

Whether viewed from the final books of Virgil’s Aeneid or Ovid’s retelling at the end of his Metamorphoses, the adventures of Aeneas in Italy have been painted very seldom indeed, although his apotheosis to a god has been more popular.

Antonio Tempesta’s etching of Acmon and his Friends Changed into Birds by Venus from about 1600 is the only pictorial representation which I have been able to find of that story told by Diomede, and for its period it tells it well.

The single illustration that I have been able to find of the transformation of the burning Trojan ships into nymphs comes from one of the most precious documents featured in this series: the Vergilius Vaticanus manuscript of the Virgil’s works dating back to about 400 CE. Three ships are seen already transformed into the head, arm, and body of nymphs at the far right, although there is no sign of any fire or hailstorm. The left and centre show Aeneas fighting Turnus.

The Vergilius Vaticanus is very special, as one of the oldest surviving sources for the text of the Aeneid, and one of only three ancient illustrated manuscripts containing classical literary works. At one time, it belonged to Pietro Bembo, an Italian scholar who is commemorated in the font name.

Luca Giordano’s Aeneas and Turnus from the late 1600s is one of the few paintings showing the battle between Aeneas and Turnus. The Trojan hero here has Turnus on the ground, under his right foot. At the lower left is one of Aeneas’ ships, which has not been transformed into a nymph. Venus, Aeneas’ mother, and Cupid, his half-brother, are at the upper left, and the goddess at the upper right is either Minerva (with her owl), or Juno – as losers in the Judgement of Paris, both bore a grudge against the Trojans.

Of the more numerous paintings of the apotheosis of Aeneas, I have chosen two.

Peter Candid’s Aeneas Taken to Olympus by Venus from around 1600 shows Venus at the right, in her chariot with Cupid, anointing Aeneas, on the left, with nectar and ambrosia. Above them is the pantheon, arrayed in an imposing semicircle, and above them Jupiter himself, clutching his thunderbolts and ready to receive the new god.

Tiepolo’s sketch for a fresco ceiling in the Royal Palace in Madrid, The Apotheosis of Aeneas from about 1765, is another impressive account. The artist made this a little more elaborate by combining the apotheosis with the presentation of arms to Aeneas by his mother Venus.

Aeneas is to the left of centre, dressed in prominent and earthly red. Above and to the right of him is his mother, Venus, dressed in white, ready to present the arms which have been forged for him by Vulcan, her partner, who is shown below supervising their fabrication. Aeneas’ destination is the Temple of Immortality, glimpsed above and to the left of him, through a break in the divine clouds.

With Aeneas turned into the Roman god Indiges, Ovid moves on with the story of the foundation of the city of Rome.

The English translation of Ovid above is taken from Ovid. Metamorphoses. Tr. Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922, at Perseus. I am very grateful to Perseus at Tufts for this.

Artists are sometimes known for a single work, one which may be quite atypical of most of their lifetime output. Henry Lerolle (1848–1929) was a painter who, in most of his easel paintings, showed Impressionist style, but whose sole well-known painting is a prime example of Naturalism. He was also a close friend of several of the French Impressionists, and composers including Claude Debussy.

He started his training in the Academy Suisse, before entering the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he studied in the studio of Louis Lamothe. Among Lamothe’s more famous pupils are Edgar Degas, Elie Delaunay, Henri Regnault, and James Tissot.

Lerolle first exhibited at the Salon in Paris in 1868, and again in 1885 and 1895. A businessman and friend of the Rouart family of artists and industrialists, he had independent means and did not rely on his painting to pay the bills.

Early works include By the Riverside, which he painted before 1881, and appear influenced by the Barbizon School.

Lerolle’s singular masterpiece is The Organ Rehearsal, completed in 1885 and exhibited at the Salon that year. A very large canvas, it shows the choir loft of the church of Saint-François-Xavier in Paris. A singer is rehearsing there with the organist, and a small audience drawn from Lerolle’s family and friends. Lerolle had already painted one monumental work, The Communion of Apostles, for that church in 1878, and ten years later painted a second for it.

The singer is one of Lerolle’s sisters-in-law, the other is in the left foreground propping her head on her right hand. His wife sits between her two sisters, sheet music on her lap. The organist is the husband of the sister-in-law at the left, and the artist is also at the left, facing the viewer. The woman standing behind the organist is Lerolle’s mother, and together with the younger man in the background were late additions to the painting.

Viewed as a very detailed realist representation of a scene of contemporary life, it fits the model of Naturalism. The painting was exhibited alongside Impressionist works in New York in 1886, and was purchased by the banker George I. Seney (1826–1893), who gave it to the Metropolitan Museum there. A smaller version is now in Stockholm’s Nationalmuseum.

The infra-red reflectogram below shows Lerolle’s construction lines which ensured meticulous perspective projection, and were probably scaled up from a final study, although no preparatory work has been discovered.

During the 1880s, Lerolle painted several brighter rural scenes which appear to have been influenced by the work of Jules Bastien-Lepage and the Naturalists of the day. Harvesters (c 1890) is among them, and one of those which retained the more sombre colours of his Barbizon past.

Lerolle painted several large murals, two of which can be seen in the Paris City Hall (Hôtel de Ville), with others in the Sorbonne, and in the Schola Cantorum, a music conservatory in Paris in which Lerolle was involved. Most of his surviving easel paintings appear to be Impressionist still lifes, such as this from about 1890.

He seems to have developed a liking for painting still lifes with apples, such as those above and below, from about 1900.

He painted at least two works of a Woman Reading, this being dated to about 1900.

This undated work is perhaps an inevitable La Toilette.

This Still Life with Apples and Baskets from 1905 appears to be one of his later works.

His circle

Although his own artistic career may now appear relatively undistinguished (it actually wasn’t at the time), his circle of friends included many far more famous: Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Debussy. Among the other composers he knew were Sergei Prokofiev, Maurice Ravel, Erik Satie, Igor Stravinsky and Paul Dukas.

I believe that this may be a hand-coloured photographic print made in 1893, showing a musical gathering in the home of his sister-in-law and her composer husband, Ernest Chausson. From the left are Yvonne Lerolle (daughter), Mme Madeleine Lerolle (wife), Raymond Bonheur, Henry Lerolle, Ernest Chausson (brother-in-law), Claude Debussy, Christine Lerolle (daughter), Mme Chausson (sister-in-law), Etiennette Chausson (the Chaussons’ daughter).

Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted this portrait of Henri Lerolle in about 1895.

The Lerolles were also involved with Edgar Degas’ experiments with photography in the 1890s. This is an albumen print of Henry Lerolle with two of his daughters, Yvonne and Christine, taken by Degas in 1895-96.

Degas took this self-portrait with Christine and Yvonne Lerolle in the same period.

In about 1897-98, Renoir painted Lerolle’s two daughters Yvonne and Christine Lerolle at the Piano. The two paintings behind them are both by Degas: that on the left is one of his paintings of horse-racing, and that on the right of ballet dancers, which were presumably in Lerolle’s collection.

His collection

Lerolle was an early and enthusiastic collector of the modern art of the day, and was a patron to Degas, Renoir, and Maurice Denis. Among the other artists represented in Lerolle’s collection were Claude Monet, Pierre Bonnard, Gustave Moreau and Édouard Vuillard.

Degas’s famous Woman in a Tub (c 1883), now in the Tate Gallery, was bought by Lerolle from the artist.

Among the paintings by Maurice Denis which were in Lerolle’s collection was Le mystère catholique (1889). Denis said that Lerolle was his first patron, who enabled him to pursue his career in art.

If Naturalism and Impressionism seem in some respects to have been fundamentally opposed, perhaps Henry Lerolle demonstrates their coherence and continuity.

Naturalism is regarded as a predominantly literary phenomenon, centred on the novels of Émile Zola, which are visually vivid in their descriptive passages. In painting, it has almost slipped altogether from art history, and is normally viewed as being a limited and local phase. In these articles, which I have been publishing here over the last couple of months, I hope that I am starting to convince you otherwise.

This article looks at the work of another almost forgotten Naturalist painter, Alfred Philippe Roll (1846–1919), whose work was sometimes highly political, and who was probably one of the few artists to have influenced Zola, and inspired him to write one of his greatest novels, Germinal.

Roll’s teachers at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris were among the Masters of the day: Jean-Léon Gérôme the realist, Charles-François Daubigny the great landscape artist, and Léon Bonnat who was a favourite of Zola, and remained a friend of Roll’s. After some fine landscapes and narrative works in the style of Rubens, and successes at the Salon, Roll decided that he would focus his attention on everyday life.

Stop There! (1875), which is described as being a photogravure print on canvas, shows his early rather romantic style.

One of Roll’s initial interests in his painting of everyday life was a miners’ strike, most probably that at Denain in the Nord-Pas de Calais coalfield in 1880. He seems to have visited the strike, and painted a large canvas showing the scene at the pithead.

This reproduction, printed in Le Petit Journal on 1 October 1892, of Roll’s Miners’ Strike (1880) is the best current image, as the original has apparently been badly damaged. After its exhibition, probably at the Salon that year, Roll agreed to sell the work to the state at cost price, on the understanding that it would be hung in Paris.

Roll was promised that it would hang in the Ministry of Commerce, but it was actually sent to the local museum in Valenciennes.

Roll shows the desperate and increasingly worrying gathering of striking miners and their families. A woman is restraining one man from throwing a rock at the pithead buildings. Most of those present are barefoot. Mounted soldiers or police are present, apparently putting handcuffs on one of the strikers.

The date of this reproduction in Le Petit Journal has led to the misunderstanding that this painting was made in 1892, and shows the Carmaux miners’ strike of that year; in fact, the original painting was completed by Roll in 1880.

By early 1884, Émile Zola had decided to write a novel in his Rougon-Macquart series about a miners’ strike, and in February 1884 Zola visited a strike near Valenciennes (where Roll’s painting was on display) for his research. He started writing Germinal on 2 April 1884, and the book was published in serial form from November of that year. Its story centres on a miners’ strike in the Nord-Pas de Calais coalfield very similar to that painted by Roll, and it remains Zola’s most successful work.

Roll next embarked on a series of large-scale figurative works, the first of which shows celebrations on the 14th of July – the Fête Nationale or Bastille Day – in 1880. The resulting work is 6.5 metres high, and nearly ten metres across, and was shown in the Salon of 1882. Above is a study for that which shows the atmosphere but not the detail of the finished work.

If that did not establish Roll as a Republican artist, then its successors Work (1885), Centenary Festival of the States (1893), and Commemorative Souvenir of the Laying of the First Stone of the Alexander III Bridge (1899) must have done so. Sadly I have been unable to locate usable images of any of those.

Roll’s undated sketch of A Large Town of Smoke probably dates from this period, and continues his social concerns. At the time, most French towns and cities didn’t separate industrial zones, and it was common for industrial pollution to be set in the midst of crowded poorer residential accommodation.

A Woman and a Bull from 1885 appears mythological, perhaps a fresh take on the famous story of the rape of Europa. However, no clues to its narrative are given, and it may well just be a painting of a nude woman with a playful bull.

Roll’s evocative painting of The Funeral Of Victor Hugo (1885) shows the procession from the Arc de Triomphe, accompanied by more than two million people. Following Émile Zola’s death in 1902, he was interred in the same crypt within the Pantheon.

Some time before 1888, Roll painted this small portrait of the Danish ‘Skagen’ Impressionist painter Peder Severin Krøyer, who in turn painted a group portrait of a committee for an exhibition of French art in Denmark. As Krøyer was a member of that committee, he copied Roll’s portrait for his own image in his group portrait.

Roll doesn’t seem to have been particularly attracted to paint the rural poor, in the way that Jules Bastien-Lepage did. However, Manda Lamétrie, Fermière (1887) is a working portrait of a woman farmer, who has just milked the cow behind her. She is quite well-dressed and clean, with smart working shoes, and the modern metal milk pail is clean.

Given his earlier social paintings, Roll’s portrait of Adolphe Alphand from 1888 may appear out of place. Alphand was a French engineer who worked with Baron Haussmann in the rebuilding of Paris between 1852-1870, and this work was shown at the Exposition Universelle in 1889. Alphand was responsible for the gardens of the Champs-Élysées, the Bois de Vincennes, and the Bois de Boulogne.

Poetry, from about 1890, appears to be a ceiling painting in full-blown Romantic style.

Roll also painted some more unusual occupations, including this portrait of Louise Cattel, Wet-nurse (1894).

Roll’s undated painting After the Ball may have been made as Naturalism faded during the 1890s.

In 1905, Roll became president of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts (SNBA).

By the outbreak of the First World War, Roll was in his late sixties. He seems to have spent some of it in the city of Reims, where in 1915 he painted Reims Under Bombardment, 1915, Vision of a Cavern. The city of Reims had first come under shelling on 4 September 1914, and the German army continued to bombard it at irregular intervals through the remainder of 1914, 1915, and into 1916, reducing its ancient cathedral to ruins.

Roll shows locals taking shelter in a capacious cellar under the city, as a veiled and ethereal woman bearing a lantern walks through. Although she may resemble a vision of the Virgin Mary, she appears naked beneath her almost transparent clothing. Her light illuminates an infant sleeping on its mother, in the centre foreground.

Alfred Roll died in Paris in 1919, probably the only Naturalist painter to have inspired one of the great Naturalist literary works by one of his paintings, and one of the few artists prior to the twentieth century to have painted himself into political debate.

Reference

Richard Thomson (2012) Art of the Actual, Naturalism and Style in Early Third Republic France, 1880-1900, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 17988 0.

Spike Bucklow’s marvellous book The Alchemy of Paint describes well how paint-making and painting were, and in many respects remain, alchemical mysteries. Oddly, though, it omits two pigments which, by their very names and history, are part of that alchemical tradition: Orpiment and Realgar. You can’t imagine those words appearing on a modern factory-made tube.

Both are arsenic sulphide: Orpiment is a yellow form, and Realgar an orange-red. Orpiment has been widely used from ancient times, and is found in a great many paintings and painted objects. Realgar is rather less frequent in European painting, at least. Being arsenic salts, they are both extremely toxic, and fell out of use during the nineteenth century, replaced by less toxic pigments.

Derived from natural minerals which are found locally in volcanic areas on most continents, both pigments were available and used in East Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern, Ancient Egyptian, Russian, and European art. As dry pigments they were among those traded on most routes leading into and out of Europe, and elsewhere. They were also used in early alchemy, being termed the two kings by Arab alchemists.

Both pigments have been manufactured at some time in the past, although very little is known of synthetic Realgar. Unfortunately, one of the key ingredients in their synthesis is arsenic trioxide, which is inevitably left as a residue in synthetic Orpiment; it is even more toxic than arsenic sulphide, and more readily absorbed. Several of the mines which were sources of the pigments were manned by criminals, because of their inevitably brief working lives.

Neither pigment has proved particularly stable, and they are both susceptible to colour change over time. Realgar is the more fugitive, and can turn yellow as it gradually changes to Orpiment. Nevertheless, Orpiment was extremely popular with many Masters, and some – Tintoretto in particular – seem to have used it in most of their paintings, and to have used Realgar not infrequently too. In general, though, Realgar is seen rarely and in small quantities.

Orpiment has been found in the painted Altar Frontal of the ancient Norwegian church of Tingelstad, which dates back to 1275-1300, and is among the earliest oil paintings to have survived. In this full reconstruction, it would have been the basis for the many yellow passages.

Orpiment was quite commonly combined with Indigo to make a dark, rich green. A fine example of this is in The Wilton Diptych (c 1395-9), another very early European painting, this time in egg tempera. The green cloak at the left appears to have been painted using Orpiment.

The garments in Raphael’s Sistine Madonna from 1513-14 were painted using Orpiment as yellow, although I don’t know in this case whether it was mixed with blue for the greens.

Giovanni Bellini used both Orpiment and Realgar in The Feast of the Gods (1514-1529), which was his last painting and completed after his death by Titian. In the detail below, I suspect that they may have used Realgar in the orange-red garments of the god with the ass at the left, and the god drinking at the right. Orpiment was probably used in some of the green and yellow garments too.

Paolo Veronese was another enthusiastic user of both pigments, which have been found in his vast Feast in the House of Levi from 1573. They are most probably responsible for the conspicuous yellow and orange-red clothing of several of the guests.

Judging by the number of his paintings which have proved positive for both Orpiment and Realgar, their most enthusiastic user has been Tintoretto.

In The Origin of the Milky Way (c 1575), they appear in small details, such as the Orpiment yellow stars.

Tintoretto’s Portrait of Vincenzo Morosini from about 1575-80 is a well-studied example of the use of Orpiment in its details. As shown in the detail below, the Orpiment used to form the brights on Morosini’s embroidered stole include small patches of the orange-red which is characteristic of Realgar.

Tintoretto’s unfinished sketch for the much larger painting of Doge Alvise Mocenigo (1507–1577) Presented to the Redeemer, abandoned in 1577 on the artist’s death, has been found to contain Realgar. I suspect that is in the orange clothing details at the right.

Both Orpiment and Realgar have been found in Antoine Watteau’s The Italian Comedians from about 1720. It is tempting to suggest that they saw relatively extensive use in the golden costume at the right, and the orange-red one at the lower left.

Goya used Orpiment for the metallic highlights of the decorations worn by The Duke of Wellington in this portrait from 1812-14. By this time, Realgar seems to have fallen into disuse, but some artists continued to use Orpiment during the remainder of the nineteenth century.

Although most of the yellows in Cézanne’s landscape View of the Bay of Marseille with the Village of Saint-Henri of about 1883 appear to be earths, paint samples from this tested positive for his use of Orpiment, making it one of its last known uses in a major painting.

Despite their wonderful names, their links back to real alchemy, and Tintoretto’s reliance on them, the loss of Orpiment and Realgar has been no real loss to the painter. It has, though, been a big step forward in reducing the toxicity of paints, and in improving their retention of colour.

Reference

Elisabeth West Fitzhugh (1997) Artists’ Pigments, vol 3, ed Elisabeth West Fitzhugh, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 76 0.