With Julius Caesar transformed into a star following his assassination, Ovid ends the fifteenth and final book of his Metamorphoses with some remarks in praise of his current emperor, Augustus, and his own aspirations to immortality.

The Story

Before the transformation of Julius Caesar into a star, Jupiter foretells some of the accomplishments of his adopted heir, Augustus, then still known as Octavius or Octavian:
“The valiant son will plan revenge on those
who killed his father and will have our aid
in all his battles. The defeated walls
of scarred Mutina, which he will besiege,
shall sue for peace. Pharsalia’s plain will dread
his power and Macedonian Philippi
be drenched with blood a second time, the name
of one acclaimed as ‘Great’ shall be subdued
in the Sicilian waves. Then Egypt’s queen,
wife of the Roman general, Antony,
shall fall, while vainly trusting in his word,
while vainly threatening that our Capitol
must be submissive to Canopus’ power.
Why should I mention all the barbarous lands
and nations east and west by ocean’s rim?
Whatever habitable earth contains
shall bow to him, the sea shall serve his will!
With peace established over all the lands,
he then will turn his mind to civil rule
and as a prudent legislator will
enact wise laws. And he will regulate
the manners of his people by his own
example. Looking forward to the days
of future time and of posterity,
he will command the offspring born of his
devoted wife, to assume the imperial name
and the burden of his cares. Nor till his age
shall equal Nestor’s years will he ascend
to heavenly dwellings and his kindred stars.”

Ovid then looks ahead to Augustus’ own future apotheosis:
far be that day — postponed beyond our time,
when great Augustus shall foresake the earth
which he now governs, and mount up to heaven,
from that far height to hear his people’s prayers!

In a brief epilogue to the fifteen books and many transformations, Ovid considers his own fate, and hopes for everlasting fame:
Wherever Roman power extends her sway
over the conquered lands, I shall be read
by lips of men. If Poets’ prophecies
have any truth, through all the coming years
of future ages, I shall live in fame.

The Paintings

The emperor Augustus seems to have preferred to see himself in statues and on coins, and more recent visual art has tended to respect that. A few fine paintings have, though, shown episodes from his reign, from 27 BCE to 14 CE.

Cleopatra’s legendary beauty has been expressed in paint by several artists, among them Louis Gauffier, whose Cleopatra and Octavian of 1787 shows the young Augustus and Queen Cleopatra conversing under the watchful eye of Julius Caesar’s bust. Cleopatra allied herself with Antony, and was eventually defeated at the Battle of Actium, which ended years of civil war in Rome. Antony fell on his sword, and Cleopatra is reputed to have killed herself with the bite of an asp.

It is Jean-Léon Gérôme who reminds us of the great events which were taking place at the eastern end of the Mediterranean during the reign of Augustus, in The Age of Augustus, the Birth of Christ (c 1852-54). The emperor sits on his throne, overseeing a huge gathering of people from all over the Roman Empire. Grouped in the foreground in a quotation from a traditional nativity is the Holy Family, whose infant son was to transform the empire in the centuries to come.

Sadly for Ovid, and even Virgil, Gérôme’s throng doesn’t appear to include distinguished poets from the Augustan age.

Several painters have, though, shown Augustus’ favourite Virgil at the emperor’s court. Jean-Joseph Taillasson’s Virgil reading the Aeneid to Augustus and Octavia from 1787 shows the poet, at the left holding a copy of his Aeneid, reading a passage to the emperor Augustus and his sister Octavia. Augustus has been moved to tears by the passage praising Octavia’s dead son Marcellus, and his sister has swooned in her emotional response.

Ovid was in no position to commit Augustus’ eventual death and apotheosis to verse, but this is shown in an exquisite sardonyx cameo known as The Great Cameo of France from the first century CE. Augustus is here being brought up to the gods at the top of the scene.

Although a fan of Virgil and a minor author in his own right, Augustus was not a strong patron of the arts. Until 8 BCE, his friend Gaius Maecenas acted as cultural advisor to Augustus, and was a major patron of Virgil. Tiepolo’s Maecenas Presenting the Liberal Arts to Emperor Augustus from 1743 shows Maecenas at the left introducing an anachronistic woman painter and other artists to the emperor.

Ovid’s major patron was Marcus Valerius Messalia Corvinus, and is thought to have been friends with poets in the circle of Maecenas. But all this became irrelevant when he offended Augustus, and in 8 CE was banished to Tomis, on the western coast of the Black Sea, at the north-eastern edge of the Roman Empire.

It is perhaps JMW Turner who has best epitomised this in his Ancient Italy – Ovid Banished from Rome, which he exhibited in 1838. In a dusk scene more characteristic of Claude Lorrain’s contre-jour riverscapes, Turner gives a thoroughly romantic view of Ovid’s departure by boat from the bank of the Tiber.

Ovid died in Tomis in 17 or 18 CE, and by a quirk of fate his banishment from the city of Rome was not formally revoked until 2017.

But Ovid saw his road to immortality not by apotheosis, rather through his work being read, and living on in the minds of those countless readers. In that, he undoubtedly succeeded: his Metamorphoses and other poems continue to be read, both in their original Latin and in translation into many languages.

I hope that this series has shown how his Metamorphoses also inspired visual artists over a period of two millenia to depict the stories which he told – and how Ovid’s poetry has itself been transformed into a vast gallery of paintings.

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.

In the first years of the twentieth century, Ferdinand Hodler‘s (1853–1918) international reputation became firmly established. He had moved studio within Geneva in 1902, where he started the first version of The Truth. A succession of fine landscapes followed in the summer, when he stayed in Reichenbach: I showed a selection of those in the previous article in this series.

Early the following year (1903), Hodler was in Vienna, where he painted his second version of The Chosen One for Anton Loew, a famous physician whose lavish private clinic cared for the rich and famous, including Gustav Mahler and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Hodler had painted the first version between 1893-94.

The Chosen One (version 2) (1903) shows Hodler’s high Parallelism, with six women dressed identically in light blue gowns forming a rhythmic and near-symmetrical array. Each has angel’s wings, and their feet are raised above the floral alpine meadow. At their centre is a nude boy with a monastic haircut, apparently praying or worshipping by a small and barren sacred tree.

The symmetry is less formal than previously: Hodler has not arranged the angels in matched pairs, and each has slightly different hair, although all are brunettes. Four of them hold flowers, which also add to the compositional informality.

At the end of his seven week stay, Hodler returned to Geneva via Munich, where he officially joined its Secession.

Hodler’s second version of The Truth, painted in 1903, stands in contrast to The Chosen One, with a similar rhythm and symmetry but very different content. As is traditional in art, Truth is a nude woman. She is surrounded by six daemons, who wear black cloths and face away from her.

The traditional basis for depictions of Truth is rooted in Lucian’s description of the Calumny of Apelles, where they represent Ignorance, Envy, Treachery, Deceit, Slander, Suspicion, Fraud, and Conspiracy. While Truth stands in the middle on a small patch of meadow, the figures around her are on hard rock instead.

I don’t know whether Hodler’s View of the Fromberghorn from Reichenbach (1903) was painted from sketches and studies he had made when staying there the previous summer, or he might have returned to the same town in the Bernese Alps in the summer of 1903.

Although this landscape retains the detail of his earlier work, Hodler has narrowed his palette considerably, with most of the painting either being a bright yellow-green, or a darker brown-green, broken only by a few flowers, and distant red rooves.

In early 1904, Hodler was an honorary guest exhibitor at the nineteenth exhibition of the Vienna Secession, with a total of thirty-one works. This marked the attainment of his international reputation, and financial security at last.

Although Hodler stayed in Baden near Vienna during that summer, one of his finest landscapes of 1904 is Lake Thun with Symmetrical Reflection Before Sunrise. This lake, sometimes known by its German name of Thunersee, is also in the Bernese Alps. This introduces into Hodler’s landscapes the same rhythm and symmetry which had come to dominate his figurative paintings.

Early in 1905, Hodler was at last able to visit Italy, in a tour which included Florence, Assisi and Padua.

Hodler’s third version of View into Infinity from 1905 is strongly reminiscent of some of the mountain paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, such as his Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818). Standing on a rock pinnacle above Hodler’s sea of fog is a naked young man. Behind him long red mountain ridges pierce through the fog, and the pale lemon sky of dawn has parallel strips of red cloud.

The Grammont (1905) shows this mountain in the Chablais Alps, to the south of the eastern end of Lake Geneva, towards which many of Hodler’s favourite views over that lake were aimed. Again he has a very limited palette; the lake itself reminds me of Gustav Klimt’s wonderful paintings of Attersee from 1900, although Hodler’s darker blue ripples quickly vanish as the lake recedes from the viewer.

Song From Afar (1906) returns to Hodler’s long-running series of paintings showing women walking in alpine meadows. On this occasion, she holds out her arms almost like The Truth. She may hear a song coming from afar, but her mouth is closed and she is not singing, as she walks down from the rolling green pasture.

Hodler appears to have worked on The Sacred Hour over a protracted period, from about 1901 or 1902 to 1911 or even 1916. Here are two women, establishing another rhythm with its pervasive yet informal symmetry. Both were apparently painted from the same model, but the head of the woman at the left looks older and more masculine.

They are dressed in blue eurhythmic dance costumes, referring to rhythmic motion. Around them are swirls of poppy flowers, forming arcs and circles which also show symmetry.

Tree on Lake Brienz from Bödeli (1906) shows the lake adjacent to Lake Thun in the Bernese Alps, viewed from the spit of land which divides the two lakes. On this same spit is the popular resort of Interlaken, named from its position between the lakes.

The following year, Hodler was to return to painting large commissioned murals.

Reference

Hans-Peter Wipplinger (ed) (2017) Ferdinand Hodler, Elective Affinities from Klimt to Schiele, Leopold Museum / Walther König. ISBN 978 3 96098 220 3.

Ferdinand Hodler was a member of artistic circles which extended well beyond Switzerland, to Vienna and Germany in particular. Among his most important associates were Gustav Klimt, Emil Orlík, Albin Egger-Lienz, and Koloman Moser. I will look at Egger-Lienz another time, and at Kolo Moser later this year when I commemorate the centenary of his death. This article looks briefly at Emil Orlík (1870–1932).

Orlík was born and brought up in Prague. He moved to Munich to attend the private art school run there by Heinrich Knirrs, then gained a place at the Munich Academy of Fine Art. It is sometimes claimed that he trained alongside Paul Klee, but Klee was nine years younger than Orlík and their training didn’t even overlap.

During his training, Orlík became interested in print-making, and learned engraving too. Early in his career, he worked for the German art magazine Jugend which was famous for its Art Nouveau style. He then took most of 1898 away from Munich, travelling to the Netherlands, Britain, France, and Belgium. On his return, he joined the Vienna Secession, and worked on its publication Ver Sacrum.

Orlík had become particularly interested in Japanese art, and decided to go to Japan to learn woodcut techniques there. He left Munich in the Spring of 1900, and returned a year later. Rest in the Mountains (1900) is one of the prints which he made in Japan, showing his progress in mastering techniques.

Soon after Orlík’s return, he and Hodler became friends through their mutual involvement with the Vienna Secession.

In 1904, Orlík painted this unusual Model, in which his model appears to have become shy or distressed. The model’s gown, screen, floor and hanging masks are evidence of the artist’s Japonisme.

The following year, Orlík moved to Berlin, where he was appointed to the School for Graphic and Book Art, and taught at the College of Arts and Crafts.

Orlík mainly painted portraits and landscapes. The latter, like this Castle in Front of Hilly Landscape from about 1905, remain quite traditional and realist, and show none of the style or features which were manifest in either Klimt’s or Hodler’s landscapes of this time.

In 1911, Hodler was working on a large commissioned mural for the new Town Hall in Hanover, Germany. Orlík stayed with Hodler in Geneva for four weeks as he worked on that and other pieces, and made a series of paintings, drawings and photographs of Hodler at work. At least one of those Orlík turned into this drypoint print of Ferdinand Hodler at the Easel (1911).

In 1912, Orlík returned to East Asia, where he visited China and Korea as well as Japan.

I suspect that Orlík’s portrait of A Chinese Woman from 1912 was painted during that visit.

Corner in my Atelier from about 1912 provides further insight into Orlík’s fascination with East Asia.

Orlík and Hodler did not meet again until Hodler visited Berlin and Hanover in 1913, to progress work on the large mural in the latter city. Once again, Orlík was ready to capture the Master at work, in his pastel of Ferdinand Hodler Working on the Hanover Mural (1913).

Shortly after that, Hodler completed the mural, which was then visited formally by the Emperor Wilhelm II, who is reported to have remained completely silent.

Orlík once reassured a friend that, in spite of his exposure to Hodler’s work, he didn’t start “hodlering”. Although true, his landscape of Winter from 1914 shows compositional influence, with the rhythm of its trees, and subtle symmetry.

Orlík was also inspired to paint in the mountains, as is demonstrated by one of his finest surviving landscapes, of Sunrise from Wendelstein (1917). The Wendelstein is in the eastern part of the Bavarian Alps, and this view looks towards the south-east from its peak. Orlík did not have to climb the Wendelstein, as a rack railway to its summit had been opened five years earlier.

Orlík was well-known for his portraits of eminent people in the arts, which include Lovis Corinth, Max Slevogt, Max Klinger, Koloman Moser, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, and Thomas Mann. His print of the Portrait of Albert Einstein made in 1923 is another important work.

During the winter of 1923-24, Orlík appears to have visited North America, where he made this etching with drypoint and roulette of Central Park, the Lake in Winter (c 1923–24).

Orlík died in 1932 in Berlin.

Reference

Hans-Peter Wipplinger (ed) (2017) Ferdinand Hodler, Elective Affinities from Klimt to Schiele, Leopold Museum / Walther König. ISBN 978 3 96098 220 3.

The Greeks and Romans knew well how poisonous lead is to humans. The symptoms and signs of lead poisoning were first detailed in the second century BCE, and when the Romans built aqueducts they recognised that water supplied through lead pipes was not as ‘wholesome’ as that from earthenware.

By 1656, the German physician Samuel Stockhausen had recognised that lead dust and fumes were responsible for the symptoms which were widespread among lead miners, smelter workers, and others who were exposed to lead and its salts.

For painters, though, Lead White was and remained the white pigment of choice for oils until the end of the twentieth century. Both dangerous and difficult to prepare, large quantities of Lead White pigment had to be produced for the preparation of oil-painting grounds, as well as its use as the colour white.

All that time, though, there was a non-toxic alternative in the form of zinc oxide, the same white that (more recently) makes zinc oxide plaster white. It took until 1780 for artists to look seriously for alternatives to Lead White, and even then zinc oxide was only very slowly adopted in oil painting. It did, though, become popular in watercolour, where it was known as Chinese White when first marketed by Winsor & Newton in 1834. It is, of course, neither Chinese nor of Chinese origin.

George Morland’s Fishermen Pushing a Boat into the Water or Beach Scene from 1793 appears to be one of the first oil paintings to have used Chinese White. Unfortunately, natural sources of zinc oxide are overwhelmingly in the impure mineral form of zincite, which is red in colour. Small-scale production had taken place since ancient times, but it wasn’t until the early nineteenth century that industrial manufacture brought quantity and more consistent quality.

Johann Georg von Dillis’ delightful oil sketch of Triva Castle from 1797 is another early example of the use of Chinese White.

Initial experience was that the paint didn’t dry well, and was not as opaque as (‘had lower hiding power than’) Lead White. These were not so noticeable in watercolour, where darkening in Lead White was a serious problem resulting from its exposure to hydrogen sulphide in the air. So Chinese White was quickly adopted in watercolour and gouache, but remained relatively unused in oil paints.

Caspar David Friedrich painted his rather uncharacteristic The Summer (Landscape with Lovers) in 1807 using Chinese White.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, when Franz von Lenbach painted this oil sketch of the Village Street, Aresing (1856), zinc oxide was being manufactured for use as a pigment, and offered at last in oil paint as well as watercolour. This was the result of the work of Leclaire in France between 1835-44, and it was he who improved its hiding power and incorporated drying agents to overcome its initial problems.

Arnold Böcklin’s Triton and Nereid from 1874 shows the use of Chinese White in another medium, that of tempera, where it rapidly displaced Lead White.

By the height of French Impressionism, Chinese White oil paint was quite popular, although in many applications it was used in mixtures with Lead White to ensure its hiding power and rapid drying. Paul Cézanne used it in this Self-portrait from 1881-82, most obviously in the white hat which he is wearing (detail below). He has applied the paint quite thickly, so there is no risk of it losing its hiding power over time.

Vincent van Gogh used Chinese White in several of his paintings. Perhaps the best example is his wonderful Plain near Auvers from 1890, also shown in the detail below.

Chinese White enjoyed its most popular period of use in oil paint between about 1890 and the 1920s, before its replacement, Titanium White, came onto the market. Lead White was becoming increasingly difficult and expensive to manufacture, and where it was still popular it was normally mixed with Chinese White.

Being white, cheap, and largely non-toxic (except by inhalation), zinc oxide was widely used to bulk other paints, and to increase their hiding power. Artists who still avoided Chinese White as a pigment in its own right were often unwittingly using it in their white grounds, and in other colours.

Gustav Klimt’s Music from 1895 uses little pure white, but has been found to contain zinc oxide pigment.

Ferdinand Hodler also used Chinese White in his Landscape at Lake Geneva from about 1906.

The arrival of Titanium White in the 1920s has not resulted in the disappearance of Chinese White. Although now commonly used in oil and water media, Titanium White alone doesn’t make for a good paint layer, but one that is rather spongy. Many modern paints labelled as Titanium White contain quite substantial amounts of zinc oxide to deliver optimal handling and performance. Zinc oxide is still widely used to bulk other colours too.

There is, though, a recently-reported danger in the use of Chinese White oil paints, particularly in oil grounds. Zinc oxide paint layers are now known to become very brittle, and can become involved in a process of saponification, particularly if water is present in the paint layer. Soap-formation is an ever-present risk in oil paint as it ages, and results in mechanical weakness of the paint layer, leading to oozing of paint from lower layers, sometimes even gross delamination and paint loss. There are some experts who consider that the use of zinc oxide in oil paint is hazardous to its longevity.

Perhaps Lead White, for all its toxicity, wasn’t such a bad pigment after all.

Reference

Hermann Kühn (1986) Artists’ Pigments, vol 1, ed Robert L Feller, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 74 6.

Control of fire is one of the fundamental skills of being human, and loss of its control is one of the common disasters to affect human habitation. Ever since we domesticated fire, it has had a habit of taking control and destroying our dwellings, property, and even ourselves.

Artists have also depicted those fires. Here I have selected some examples of paintings which show fires on land in real life. There are scores more which depict fires that the artist has not witnessed – the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the sack of Troy, the burning of Rome, for instance – but each of these works was painted by someone who is very likely to have witnessed the fire that they are painting, and may even have started their painting of it when the fire was still burning.

Among these are some of the earliest examples of what the Impressionists specialised in, depictions of the transient effects of light, often painted en plein air. They are also good examples of fine art being used to record historical events. Until the advent of colour photography well into the twentieth century, painting was the only effective way to do that.

Painting flourished during the Dutch Golden Age, and the proliferation of landscape paintings led to specialisation and sub-genres. Among them was the painting known as a brandje – a fire, usually seen at night.

Frans de Momper’s A Fire in Antwerp was probably painted around 1640, and shows a large fire occurring at night in the centre of Antwerp. de Momper not only shows the crowds of people bringing ladders and tools to help, and the bright white light of the fire itself, but the huge pall of black smoke rising over the city.

In mid 1652, Jan Abrahamsz Beerstraaten seems to have witnessed the destruction by fire of part of the centre of Amsterdam, which formed the basis of his studio painting of The Old Town Hall of Amsterdam on Fire, 7 July 1652 (1652-55). Local inhabitants are walking in orderly queues to boats, in which they escape from the scene.

de Momper and Beerstraaten did not specialise in brandjes; Egbert van der Poel did, and probably painted more than any other artist in history. Van der Poel moved to Delft in 1650, and four years later was a victim of the massive explosion in a gunpowder store there on 12 October 1654. That killed one of his children, and he moved again to Rotterdam.

It has been thought that most of van der Poel’s Fire of a Church with Staffage and Cattle from 1658 is a carefully-composed fiction. A small church at the edge of a village is well ablaze, and the inhabitants are abandoning it, taking all the possessions they can, including their horses and livestock, and leaving the fire to burn itself out.

Van der Poel’s undated A Fire at Night shows a similar scene and composition, set this time on the bank of a canal.

One exception to this is van der Poel’s Fire in De Rijp of 1654, completed in 1662. This shows a fire which worked its way through more than eight hundred buildings in the town of De Rijp during the night of 6 January 1654. This left only the northern section of the town standing and inhabitable, and resulted in more casualties than did the more famous explosion in Delft at the end of that year.

Doubt is cast on this received account of van der Poel’s work by sketches such as this, of The Fire in the Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam, in 1645, made in front of the motif using washes with touches of pen and brown ink. Perhaps he was the first ‘ambulance chaser’ who travelled out to sketch fires, from which he painted his famous brandjes in the studio.

Adam Colonia and Philip van Leeuwen were followers of van der Poel who also specialised in brandjes, although both also painted other nocturnes, or maneschijntjes (moonshines) as they were then known.

In 1720, the cathedral in Rennes caught fire, and burned from 22-30 December. The scene was painted in this View of Notre-Dame de Bonne Nouvelle (1720-21), shown here in a copy by Jean-François Huguet, which is claimed to be in watercolour on canvas. As with some earlier depictions of burning churches, the patron is shown watching the scene from the heavens. This painting underwent extensive conservation work in 2013, performed by Catherine Ruel and Kiriaki Tsesmeloglou.

In the winter of 1789, Venice’s oil depot at San Marcuola caught fire. Although Francesco Guardi was 77 at the time, he painted the scene in his Fire in the San Marcuola Oil Depot, Venice, 28 November 1789. This is one of three versions of his painting; this is believed to be a copy made between 1789-1820, and is now in the Rijksmuseum, the others being in the Alte Pinakothek, and the Gallerie dell’Accademia.

During the Napoleonic Wars, between 1803-15, civilians living in European cities were dragged into battles as their homes came under bombardment, and buildings were set alight. One example of this is the Second Battle of Copenhagen, in which the Royal Navy attacked the Danish fleet when in Copenhagen harbour. This brought much of the city under bombardment, which caused serious fires.

The Danish painter Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg was a student in the city at the time, and painted several works in which he depicted the effects of the bombardment, including The Terrible Bombardment of Copenhagen (1807), which shows the Church of Our Lady well ablaze.

In Copenhagen, the night between 4 and 5 September 1807 seen from Christianshavn (1807), Eckersberg gives a broader impression of the effects on the port area at the height of the bombardment.

When Napoleon’s army approached Moscow in the summer of 1812, most of the city’s residents fled. When the French army was entering the city on 14 September, following their success at the Battle of Borodino, on the orders of Count Rostopchin, the few remaining Muscovites set fire to some of its major buildings before fleeing. By the following day, a massive fire was burning in Kitay-gorod, at the heart of the city, and that didn’t burn itself out until 18 September.

There are many paintings showing different views of this catastrophic fire, but A. F. Smirnov’s Fire of Moscow on 15-18 September, 1812, after Napoleon takes the city (1813) is probably one of the best.

It is thought that two-thirds of all private dwellings, most shops and warehouses, and more than a third of all churches, in the city of Moscow were destroyed by the fire over those four days, and 12,000 bodies were recovered.

With the Napoleonic Wars concluded, many hoped that Europe could look forward to a period of peace, and its peoples would be spared involvement in battles and their resulting fires. Instead, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought even more devastating fires, many of which were witnessed by artists and committed to canvas.

The city of London had seen its last immense fire in 1666 – ‘the Great Fire of London’ – but like many cities was no stranger to more limited destruction.

In about 1826, when he was staying in Hampstead overlooking London, John Constable painted this marvellous oil sketch of Fire in London, Seen from Hampstead.

But it was on 16 October 1834 that Constable had his greatest opportunity, when fire completely destroyed the Old Palace of Westminster, the seat of the English parliament at the time.

When the old Palace caught fire, most of London turned out to watch the flames. John Constable was in a cab, stuck in a jam on Westminster Bridge, where he painted this Fire Sketch (1834), showing the north end of the building ablaze. He did not, apparently, try to develop it into anything more substantial.

With Constable, his arch-rival, stuck in a cab on Westminster Bridge, JMW Turner was still on the ‘south’ bank, at the far end of that bridge. From there, or rather later, he painted one version of The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16th October, 1834 (1834-5) in oils, which is now in Philadelphia. The two prominent towers behind the fire are those of Westminster Abbey.

The other canvas shows a view from near what is now Hungerford Bridge, still on the ‘south’ bank of the Thames because of the traffic jam. At that time there was no Hungerford Bridge: the first bridge built at that point in 1845 was a suspension footbridge designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and was replaced with a more massive structure to carry trains to Charing Cross Station, in 1864.

In this view, Westminster Bridge is silhouetted against the flames, instead of being lit by them, and the massive towers of Westminster Abbey appear ghostly in the distance. This version is also in the USA, in Cleveland.

Turner capitalised successfully on this spectacle, although these paintings were not the atmospheric sketches that they might appear. A lot of the oil paint has been applied wet on dry, showing that Turner must have worked on each for several weeks, at least, in the studio.

In 1837, the French landscape painter Pierre Marie Joseph Vernet was working in Saint Petersburg, Russia, when the Winter Palace, official residence of the emperor, caught fire. Vernet’s Fire in the Winter Palace, 1837 is a studio painting showing that spectacular event, from observations and sketches made at the time of the fire.

It is not only man’s buildings which burn. When dry prairies are struck by lightning, they too can catch alight, and that is the scene which Charles Deas narrates so well in his masterly painting of Prairie on Fire from 1847.

A bolt of lightning, at the far right, tells us how the prairie came to be aflame. From this low viewpoint, the fire itself is fairly unimpressive, but is very close behind these three people riding two horses in their flight. On the nearer white horse is a young man, facing behind and away from the viewer, looking back at the fire. His left arm is wrapped around a young woman, who appears to have swooned away.

Behind is a black horse, with an older, bearded man in the saddle. He points to the left, exhorting the others to head that way to safety. The tension is produced by implication: that the unimpressive flames at the right represent a much larger and imminently threatening danger, and that it is progressing rapidly to the left, chasing the horses and their riders.

Even when you’re on an idyllic Pacific island, as this anonymous painting of The Burning of the Harbor Master’s House, Honolulu (1852) reminds us, the dangers of fire are never far away.

Johan Christian Dahl’s Burning Windmill at Stege (1856) adopts contemporary style and use of colour, but is fundamentally a brandje in the Golden Age tradition of Egbert van der Poel of two centuries earlier. Although painted well before Impressionism, Dahl echoes the red of the flames in the field and trees to the left of the windmill, and even in his signature.

Jules Breton’s The Burning Haystack from 1856 shows a very minor blaze, but an important change in the approach to fire. Here the people of Courrières are making frenetic but closely co-ordinated efforts to extinguish a fire which has broken out in one of their grainstacks. Each of its multitude of figures is playing their role as part of the whole, working from an unseen script.

During the nineteenth century, organised fire brigades were established in cities, starting with Edinburgh in 1824.

My next group of paintings show the devastating fire which struck Frederiksborg Castle, near Hillerød in the north of Sjælland (Zealand), Denmark. Set in a huge deer park, the castle was used as King Frederick VII’s residence during the 1850s. When he was resident on the night of 16 December 1859, the weather was bitterly cold. The king asked for a fire to be lit in a room; because its chimney was being repaired, this allowed the fire to spread.

It was so cold that the moat around the castle was frozen, preventing any serious attempts to control the fire, and allowing it to spread quickly to most of the buildings. Thankfully the king’s collection of more than three hundred paintings were saved.

This anonymous painting of Frederiksborg Castle on Fire (1859) was probably made in the relative comfort of a studio shortly afterwards.

Another anonymous view of Frederiksborg Castle on Fire (1859) appears to be a quick oil sketch made at the height of the fire during that night.

Ferdinand Richardt’s The Castle on Fire, 1859 (1859) was certainly a more protracted work from his studio, but was probably made from sketches and notes at the time.

There is no question that Nikolai Dmitriev-Orenburgsky’s detailed realist depiction of Fire in the Village (1885) was painted entirely in the studio. Its emphasis on people and their loss and suffering is characteristic of Naturalism. Most significantly, Dmitriev-Orenburgsky lived and worked in Paris between 1875-85, during the height of Jules Bastien-Lepage’s success; the latter had only died a few months before Dmitriev-Orenburgsky completed this painting.

William A Coulter had been born in Ireland, and travelled to the USA as a seaman. In 1869, he settled in San Francisco, trained in Europe as a marine artist, then from 1896 worked on the art staff of the San Francisco Call newspaper. He witnessed and painted the San Francisco Fire of 1906, which remains his only well-known work. It was clearly made in the studio, presumably from previous observation and sketches.

My final painting is one of the best-documented: Edvard Munch’s The House is Burning! from 1927. On the morning of 31 August 1927, the maids working in a manorhouse close to Munch’s studio were using an electric vacuum cleaner when fire broke out in that room. The maids and occupants of the house fled. Munch and other neighbours helped the owners rescue many of their possessions.

The local fire brigade attended promptly, and the fire was soon brought under control. Although there have been claims that Munch set his easel up during the fire, this painting is more probably based on a photograph published in a newspaper the following day, carefully recomposed and augmented to heighten its drama.

My story has reached modern times: in Munch’s example, with fire brigades, electricity, vacuum cleaners, and photographs. And fire still.

For the last seven months, I have worked through each of the stories in the second half of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, summarising their verbal narrative and showing some of the best paintings which tell those stories.

As I did at the halfway point, I have selected for this and the next article a dozen of the very best stories and finest paintings.

The full listing of articles and an index of all the characters involved is provided here. If you want to look back at the best of the first half, this article covers from Daphne to Echo and Narcissus, and
this from Pyramus and Thisbe to the Calydonian boar hunt.

Nessus, Deianira, and Hercules (Book 9)

Hercules married the beautiful Deianira, and was returning to his native city with her. The couple reached the River Euenus, which was still in spate after the rains of the previous winter. Hercules feared for his bride trying to cross the river, and the centaur Nessus came up and offered to carry her across for him.

Hercules had already thrown his club and bow to the other bank and had swum across the river when he heard Deianira’s voice calling. He suspected that Nessus was trying to abduct her, so he shouted warning to Nessus before loosing a poisoned arrow at the centaur’s back. Nessus tore the arrow which had impaled him through, and the blood running from his wounds mixed with the poison which Hercules had taken from the Lernaean hydra.

As he was dying, Nessus gave his blood-soaked tunic to Deianira, saying that he would not die unavenged, and instructing her to keep the tunic to use when she needed to strengthen waning love.

Years passed after Nessus’ death, and Hercules was away in Oechalia, intending to pay his respects to Jupiter at Cenaeum. Word reached Deianira that her husband had fallen in love there with Iole. At first she was upset, but recalling Nessus’ dying words, she devised a strategy to address his rumoured unfaithfulness. She therefore impregnated a shirt with the centaur’s blood, and gave that to Lichas, Hercules’ servant, to take to her husband.

Hercules donned the shirt as he was about to pray to Jupiter. He felt warmth spreading throughout his limbs, which quickly grew into intense pain. As that pain became unbearable, he cried out so loud that he could be heard for miles. When he managed to rip a little of the shirt from him, it tore his skin, even muscles, away with it. The searing heat penetrated deep into his bones, where it dissolved their very marrow.

Hercules wandered through Oeta like a wounded beast, still trying to tear the shirt from his body. He came across Lichas, and accused him of being his murderer. His servant tried to protest his innocence, but Hercules picked him up, swung him around, and flung him out to sea. As Lichas flew through the air, he was transformed into flint, and became a rock in the Euboean Sea.

Hercules cut down trees and built himself a funeral pyre. Ordering this to be lit, he climbed on top, and lay back on his lionskin. Jupiter came to his aid, calling on the gods to consent to Hercules being transformed into a god; they agreed, and Hercules’ immortal form was carried away on a chariot drawn by four horses, into the stars above.

This marvellous painting was probably made by Rubens’ workshop around the time of the Master’s death in 1640. It views events from the bank on which Hercules is poised to shoot his arrow into Nessus. This has the centaur running across the width of the canvas, his face and chest well exposed for Hercules’ arrow to enter his chest, rather than his back.

To make clear Nessus’ intentions, a winged Cupid has been added, and Deianeira’s facial expression is marvellously clear in intent. An additional couple, in the right foreground, might be intended to be a ferryman and his friend, who improve compositional balance.

Link to the full account.

Orpheus and Eurydice (Book 10)

The wedding of Eurydice to the outstanding musician and bard Orpheus was marred by tragedy: after the ceremony, as Eurydice was wandering in joy with Naiads in a meadow, she was bitten by a snake on the heel, and died.

Orpheus was heart-broken, and mourned her so badly that he descended through the gate of Tartarus to Hades to try to get her released from death. He reached Persephone and her husband Hades, and pleaded his case before them. He said that, if he was unable to return with her to life on earth, then he would rather stay in the Underworld with her.

He then played his lyre, music so beautiful that those bound to eternal chores were forced to stop and listen: Tantalus, Ixion, the Danaids, even Sisyphus paused and sat on the rock which he normally tried to push uphill. The Fates themselves wept with emotion.

Persephone summoned Eurydice, and let Orpheus take her back, on the strict understanding that at no time until he reached the earth above must he look back, or she would be taken back into the Underworld for ever.

The couple trekked up through the gloom, and were just reaching the brighter edge of the Underworld when Orpheus could resist no longer, and looked back to make sure that his wife was still coping with the journey. The moment that he did, she faded away, back into Hades’ realm. As he tried to grasp her, his hands clutched at the empty air. She was gone.

Orpheus tried to persuade the ferryman to take him back across the River Styx into the Underworld, but was refused. For a week he sat there in his grief. He then spent three years avoiding women, in spite of their attraction to him.

Ary Scheffer’s moving painting of Orpheus Mourning the Death of Eurydice was one of his early works made in about 1814. The snake is still visible at the far left, and Orpheus cradles the limp body of his new bride, and breaks down in grief. Scheffer’s handling of complex limb positions is masterful, with the symmetry of their right forearms, and the parallel of her left arm with his left leg. Orpheus’ lyre rests symbolically on the ground behind his left foot.

Link to the full account.

Pygmalion and his statue (Book 10)

Pygmalion had seen the Propoetides, who were turned into prostitutes by Venus because they had denied her divinity, and was so revolted that he became celibate. He still wanted married love, though, and carved himself the most perfect and lifelike statue of a woman in ivory. He kissed it lovingly, spoke to it, and dressed it in fine clothing.

When the festival of Venus arrived, Pygmalion prayed that he should have a bride who was the living likeness of his statue. Venus heard this, and the sacred flame rose to indicate her response. Pygmalion returned home, rejoicing that his prayer might be answered. He went to his statue and kissed it repeatedly, which seemed to impart some warmth to its cold ivory.

He continued to kiss the statue, whose surface softened like beeswax in the sun. He was amazed by this, stood back, and touched the statue again. It felt like flesh, and its skin was perfused with blood. Pygmalion praised and thanked Venus for answering his prayer.

His marriage to the former statue was blessed by Venus, and nine months later they celebrated the birth of their daughter, whom they called Paphos, after whom the island was named.

Jean-Léon Gérôme was both a realist painter and a sculptor, and in a series of paintings explored the relationships between the sculptor, their model, and their sculpture. Among these were his first studies for the most brilliantly narrative depiction of this myth.

This study for Pygmalion and Galatea from 1890 was an early attempt at the composition, in which Pygmalion’s future bride is still a marble statue at her feet, but very much flesh and blood from the waist up. That visual device was perfect, but Gérôme recognised that his painting would be shunned because of its full-frontal nudity, so reversed the view.

Gérôme’s finished Pygmalion and Galatea (c 1890) extends the marble effect a little higher, and by showing Galatea’s buttocks and back and concealing the kiss, it stayed on the right side of what in the day was deemed decent. His attention to detail is, as always, delightful, with two masks against the wall at the right, Cupid ready with his bow and arrow, an Aegis bearing the head of Medusa, and a couple of statues about looking and seeing.

Link to the full account.

Hippomenes’ race with Atalanta (Book 10)

When Cupid was kissing his mother Venus, one of his arrows grazed her breast, and set her heart on fire for the beautiful young Adonis. Venus shunned her place with the gods, preferring to spend her time on earth with Adonis. She warned her lover to keep clear of wild beasts, in order to remain safe. When he questioned that, Venus told him the story of the race between Hippomenes and Atalanta.

As a girl, Atalanta had always outrun the boys. But she had been told by an oracle that she should not marry; she had to refuse every suitor’s kisses, or she would be deprived of her self. She therefore lived alone, and issued the challenge that she would only marry the man who could beat her in a running race.

Hippomenes was the great-grandson of Neptune, a fast runner, and when he saw Atalanta’s lithe body, fancied he might be able to beat her, so winning her hand in marriage. When he saw her run, though, he realised just how fast, and beautiful, she was.

He challenged her. When she had looked him over, she was no longer sure that she wanted to win, thinking whether she might marry him. But she was mindful of the prophecy, and left in a quandary. Hippomenes prayed anxiously to Venus, seeking her help in his challenge. She gave him three golden apples from a tree in Cyprus, and instructed him how to use them to gain the advantage over Atalanta.

The race started with the sound of trumpets, and the two shot off at an astonishing pace. Atalanta slowed every now and again, to drop back and look at Hippomenes, then reminded of the prophecy she accelerated ahead. Hippomenes threw the first of the golden apples, which Atalanta stopped to pick up. This allowed Hippomenes to pass her, but she soon caught him up and went back into the lead.

He repeated this with the second golden apple, and again Atalanta stopped to retrieve it, lost her lead, and caught him back up. On the last lap, he threw the third apple far away. Venus intervened and forced Atalanta to chase the apple still further this time, and made it even heavier so to impede her progress. This allowed Hippomenes to win the race, and claim Atalanta as his prize.

Hippomenes failed to give thanks to Venus for her intervention. This angered the goddess, and when the couple were travelling back a few days later, Venus filled Hippomenes with desire for Atalanta. They were passing by a temple to Venus, next to which was an old shrine in a grotto. There Hippomenes made love to Atalanta, so defiling the shrine, and offending the goddess.

For their desecration of a holy place, Atalanta and Hippomenes were transformed into the lions which now draw Venus’ chariot. The goddess completed her story by telling Adonis that this is the reason to beware of lions and other savage beasts.

Noël Hallé’s The Race between Hippomenes and Atalanta (1762-65) shows a race of almost epic proportions, spread across a panoramic canvas. At the right are the local dignitaries, and a winged Cupid as a statue, watching on. Atalanta is picking up the second golden apple, with Hippomenes holding the third behind him, in his right hand, as if he is ready to drop it.

Link to the full account.

Orpheus battered to death by Bacchantes (Book 11)

Almost all the stories told in Book 10 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses were sung by Orpheus, following his loss of Eurydice to the Underworld. His song was then interrupted as he was attacked by a mob of frenzied Thracian women – Maenads, or Bacchantes. They accused Orpheus of scorning them, as indeed he had.

The first of the Bacchantes threw her thyrsus at him, but it only bruised his face. She then fell to the ground, enchanted by his voice and lyre. His music was quickly overwhelmed by the mob, with their drums and deafening screams. The women first killed the birds which Orpheus had charmed, then the snakes around him, before turning on the bard.

A nearby group of farmworkers had run away, abandoning their tools in the field. The Bacchantes seized those, and used them as weapons to bludgeon the body of Orpheus. He made one last plea for his life before they killed him, and tore his body limb from limb.

The mortal remains of Orpheus were then dispersed into the rivers: his head and lyre ended up in the river Hebrus, where they still made sorrowful sounds, as they made their way downstream and over the sea to the shores of Lesbos. Orpheus’ soul descended to the Underworld, where he was at last reunited with his wife Eurydice.

The god Bacchus couldn’t let this crime pass, so transformed those Bacchantes into an oak wood.

Émile Lévy’s Death of Orpheus (1866) shows the moment just before the first wound is inflicted: Orpheus, remarkably young-looking, has been knocked to the ground, and looks stunned. Two Bacchantes kneel by his side, one clasping his neck almost as if feeling for a carotid pulse, the other about to bring the vicious blade of her ceremonial sickle down to cleave his neck open.

Another wields her thyrsus like a club while pulling at the man’s left hand. Their priestess, her head thrown back to emphasise her extraordinary mane of hair, is entwined with serpents, and officiates at the sacrifice. In the shadows at the top left stands the figure of Bacchus, looking away from the scene below as a naked celebrant cavorts behind him.

Link to the full account.

The Greeks attack Troy (Book 12)

The thousand ships of the massed Greek fleet gathered at Aulis in Boeotia, where its leaders made sacrifices to Jupiter in preparation for their departure. During these, they observed the omen of an azure snake which ate eight chicks and their mother bird in a tree. This was interpreted by Calchas as indicating that the Greeks would eventually conquer Troy, but only after nine years of war.

In spite of attempts to propitiate the gods, the seas remained stormy, and the fleet unable to sail. Some claimed this was because Neptune had helped build the walls of Troy, but Calchas said that it would require the sacrifice of a virgin to satisfy Diana whom Agamemnon, leader of the Greek forces, had offended.

Agamemnon had to put his duties as a king over those of a father, and sacrifice his virgin daughter Iphigenia to placate Diana. The goddess took pity on them, though, and shrouded the sacrificial ceremony in mist. Some said that she went further, in substituting a hind for the victim, and carrying Iphigenia away with her; Ovid is careful to leave this possibility open.

This sacrifice finally brought the favourable winds needed by the fleet to sail against Troy.

Tiepolo’s The Sacrifice of Iphigenia from 1770 shows Iphigenia sitting almost spotlit with her pale flesh, as the priest, perhaps Agamemnon himself, looks up to the heavens, the knife poised in his right hand. In a direct line with that hand comes Diana in her characteristic divine cloud, ready with the deer. Below is a group of women, already holding the sacred bowl up to catch the sacrifical victim’s blood, and in the left distance are some of the thousand ships of the Greek fleet, waiting to sail.

Link to the full account.

This is the second of two articles summarising the very best stories and finest paintings from the second half of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The first, covering Nessus, Deianira and Hercules through to the Greeks attacking Troy, is here.

The Lapiths and the Centaurs (Book 12)

When Pirithous married Hippodame, the couple invited centaurs to the feast. Unfortunately, passions of the centaur Eurytus became inflamed by drink and lust for the bride, and he carried off Hippodame by her hair. The other centaurs followed suit by each seizing a woman of their choice, turning the wedding feast into utter chaos, like a city being sacked.

Theseus castigated Eurytus and rescued the bride, so the centaur attacked him. Theseus responded by throwing a huge wine krater at his attacker, killing him. The centaurs then started throwing goblets and crockery, and the battle escalated from there.

Nestor, as the narrator of this story, gives a succession of grisly accounts of Lapiths and Centaurs killed. Gryneus the centaur ripped up the altar and crushed two Lapiths with its weight, only to have his eyballs gouged out by a Lapith using some antlers. Not content with using the objects around them as weapons, they started using their own lances and swords.

When the centaur Petraeus was trying to uproot a whole oak tree, Pirithous, the groom, pinned the centaur to the tree-trunk with his lance. Nestor tells of the centaur couple, Cyllarus and Hylonome: Cyllarus was struck by a javelin at the base of his neck, and died in Hylonome’s arms from his wound.

Nestor also tells of the success of Caeneus, formerly Caenis, in killing five centaurs. The centaur Latreus taunted Caeneus, so the latter wounded the centaur with his spear. Latreus thrust his lance in Caeneus’ face, but was unable to hurt him, so he tried with his sword, which broke against the invulnerable Caeneus, leaving him to finish the centaur off with thrusts of his own sword.

The centaurs then united to try to overwhelm Caeneus by crushing him under their combined weight, but Caeneus was transformed into a bird with golden wings. The survivors finally dispersed, and the Lapiths had won the day.

Towards the end of his life, in about 1637-38, Peter Paul Rubens painted a brilliant oil sketch which was turned into this finished painting, The Rape of Hippodame (Lapiths and Centaurs) (1636-38). At the right, Eurytus is trying to carry off Hippodame, the bride, with Theseus just about to rescue her from the centaur’s back. At the left, Lapiths are attacking with their weapons, and behind them another centaur is trying to abduct a woman.

Link to the full account.

Galatea’s lover crushed by jealousy (Book 13)

When Aeneas landed on Sicily, he found Scylla combing the hair of Galatea, as the latter lamented her tragic love-life. Wiping tears from her eyes, Galatea told her story.

When he was only sixteen, Galatea had fallen in love with Acis, the son of the river nymph Symaethis, but the Cyclops Polyphemus fell in love with her. The latter did his best to smarten his appearance for her, though he remained deeply and murderously jealous of Acis.

Telemus, a seer, visited Sicily and warned Polphemus that Ulysses would blind his single eye. This inevitably upset the Cyclops, who climbed a coastal hill and sat there, playing his reed pipes. Meanwhile, Galatea was lying in the arms of her lover Acis, hidden behind a rock on the beach.

Polyphemus then launched into a long soliloquy imploring Galatea to come to him and spurn Acis. When he spied the two lovers together, Polyphemus grew angry, and shouted loudly at them that that would be their last embrace. Galatea dived into the sea, but the fleeing Acis couldn’t escape so easily. Polyphemus flung a huge rock which he had torn from the mountain at the young man, burying him completely.

With the purple blood of Acis flowing from under the rock, the latter was split into two, and Acis transformed into a river-god, ending Galatea’s sorrowful tale.

Pompeo Batoni’s Acis and Galatea from 1761 shows the Cyclops, his reed pipes at his feet, hurling the boulder at Acis, making clear his tragic fate. From behind the legs of her lover, Galatea looks up at Polyphemus in fear.

Link to the full account.

Dido and Aeneas (Book 14)

Heading north-west from the Straits of Messina, Aeneas and his crew encountered a fierce northerly storm which blew them south to the city of Carthage, on the Libyan coast. Ovid summarises the disastrous love affair between Aeneas and Queen Dido of Carthage – which fills a whole book of Virgil’s Aeneid – in a few pithy lines:
And then Sidonian Dido, who was doomed
not calmly to endure the loss of her
loved Phrygian husband, graciously received
Aeneas to her home and her regard:
and on a pyre, erected with pretense
of holy rites, she fell upon the sword.
Deceived herself, she there deceived them all.

My favourite painting of Dido’s spectacular death is probably the only conventional history painting ever made by Henry Fuseli, and is known simply as Dido (1781). Dido has just been abandoned by Aeneas, has mounted her funeral pyre, and is on the couch on which she and Aeneas made love. She then falls on the sword which Aeneas had given her, and that rests covered with her blood beside her, its tip pointing up towards her right breast.

Her sister Anna rushes in to embrace her during her dying moments, and Jupiter sends Iris (shown above, wielding a golden sickle) to release Dido’s spirit from her body. Already smoke seems to be rising up from the pyre, which confirms visually to Aeneas that she has killed herself, as he sails away from Carthage.

Link to the full account.

The Wrath of Polyphemus (Book 14)

After killing Acis, Polyphemus, the savage one-eyed man-eating giant, spent his days alone, tending his flock of sheep.

When Ulysses arrived on Sicily, Polyphemus held him and his crew captive, then devoured several of them, so Ulysses got the Cyclops drunk in order to engineer their escape. Polyphemus asked Ulysses his name, and the latter replied Οὖτις (Outis, Greek for nobody). Once the giant had fallen into a stupor, Ulysses drove a hardened stake into the Cyclops’ one eye, blinding him.

The following morning, Ulysses and his men tied themselves to the undersides of the sheep in Polyphemus’ flock so that he couldn’t feel them escaping. Recognising that he has lost his captives, Polyphemus called out for help from the other Cyclops, telling them that ‘Nobody’ had hurt him. The other Cyclops therefore didn’t come to his aid.

Ulysses and his men made their way back to their ship and sailed off into the dawn, deriding the blind Polyphemus as they went. Polyphemus flew into a rage, and hurled huge rocks at Ulysses in his ship.

JMW Turner’s magnificent Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus is probably his finest narrative painting, and the product of a long gestation. He seems to have started work on rough sketches for this in a sketchbook which is believed to date to 1807, and this finished painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy over twenty years later, in 1829.

The massive figure of Polyphemus is wreathed in cloud above the wooded coast towards the upper left, as the rays of the rising sun light the whole scene from Apollo’s chariot.

The entire crew is dressing the masts and rigging, and Ulysses brandishes two large flags, to deride the blinded giant. The orange flag on the mainmast bears the Greek letters Οὖτις (Outis), the name that Ulysses told Polyphemus was his. Below it is another flag showing the wooden horse of Troy, a reference to Virgil’s Aeneid. In front of the bows of the ship are ghostly white Nereids and sea creatures, presumably a reference to Neptune, Polyphemus’ father, whose curse results from this incident.

Link to the full account.

Pomona Seduced (Book 14)

Pomona was a devoted and very capable gardener, who cared for her plants with passion. However, she shunned male company, and had no interest at all in the many men who sought her love. One, Vertumnus, the god of seasons, gardens, and plant growth, loved Pomona more than any other, but had no success in attracting her.

Vertumnus was able to shape-shift at will, and in his quest for Pomona’s love he had posed as a reaper, a hedger, and in various other gardening roles. Through these, he had been able to gain entry into her garden, but had made no progress in winning her hand.

One day, Vertumnus came up with a new disguise, as an old crone with a bonnet over her white hair, and leaning on her walking stick. This too got him into the garden, and he was able to engage the beautiful Pomona in conversation. Vertumnus almost gave himself away when he kissed her overenthusiastically, but managed to control himself and tried to give Pomona some womanly advice about marriage.

Dropping subtle hints as to his true identity and desire for her, the old woman commended Vertumnus as a husband, and told Pomona the cautionary tale of Iphis and Anaxarete to press his case. Vertumnus was still getting nowhere with Pomona, though, so transformed himself back into his own form, as a young man, which finally won her heart.

The outstanding depiction of this wonderful story is Rubens’ Vertumnus and Pomona from 1617-19. Vertumnus has assumed his real form, that of a handsome young man. Pomona looks back, her sickle still in her right hand, and her rejection of his advances is melting away in front of our eyes.

Rubens even offers us a couple of rudely symbolic melons, and provides distant hints at Vertumnus doing the work in the garden while Pomona directs him, at the upper left.

Link to the full account.

The death of Julius Caesar (Book 15)

The closing story of the final book of his Metamorphoses must have been the most challenging to Ovid. Here, he had to tell of the assassination of Julius Caesar, whose adopted heir Augustus was the current emperor of Rome. Doing so without causing offence required all of Ovid’s poetic skills.

Ovid accomplishes this by using the story to praise Augustus. He writes that it was the unquestioned divinity of Augustus which made Julius Caesar similarly divine, although Augustus wasn’t actually the son of Caesar. His handling of Caesar’s assassination is similarly finely balanced.

Ovid casts the murder of Julius Caesar by a pact of Roman senators in the Senate itself as an inevitable consequence of the plots against him, which even the gods could not avert: it was fated. When Venus pleads the case for Julius Caesar to be transformed into a god, Jupiter confirms that Caesar had reached his alloted time, that his years of life on earth were at an end, and that his “son” Augustus was the cause for Caesar to be elevated to the gods.

With that, the dying Julius Caesar was transformed into a god and star by the process of catasterisation.

In Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Death of Caesar from 1859-67, Caesar’s corpse lies abandoned on the floor below the steps of the portico, as his joint assassins make their way out, brandishing their daggers above their heads in unity and triumph.

Link to the full account.

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.

In the years before the First World War, Ferdinand Hodler still found time between commissioned murals and other major figurative works to develop his landscape paintings.

Painted in about 1906, Landscape at Lake Geneva continues his previous realist style, with considerable detail throughout the depth of the painting, from the flowers of the meadow in the foreground, to the textures of the distant mountain ridges.

Transfiguration (c 1906-07) shows a similar motif to that in Song from Afar (1906), with the same model in a similar blue dress. However, this is more closely-cropped, and instead of her arms being held out, as if pushing away, they point downwards.

In 1907, Hodler was commissioned to paint another large mural, this time for a new university building in Jena, showing the departure of students from Jena to the War of Independence against Napoleon, in 1813.

Spring (1907) is a further version to the first from 1901, in which there have been small changes in the rendering of the two figures, and the background has changed completely to become a dense mass of yellow flowers.

Aareschlucht (1907) shows a spectacular gorge in the Bernese Oberland region of Switzerland, where the River Aare carves its way through a limestone ridge for about a mile. Its cliffs rise to 50 m (over 150 feet) above the bottom of the gorge, and it is not far from the Reichenbach Falls, which Hodler had painted at the very start of his career, in 1871. A walkway was constructed along the gorge between 1887-1889, but Hodler chooses to show the gorge from above.

Evening Mist on Lake Thun (1908) is an early and clear example of Hodler’s late reduction of landscapes to their basic elements of form, colour, and light – a radical change from his previous emphasis on detail, and a marked contrast from Landscape at Lake Geneva above.

This reduction is visible in this superb view of the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau in Morning Sun, which he also painted in 1908. Although the Eiger Massif is depicted faithfully, Hodler instills rhythm into the wispy clouds in the foreground. He also painted a companion view in moonlight which has more marked symmetry and rhythm.

One of the clearest examples of Hodler’s Parallelist landscapes is his Rhythmic Landscape on Lake Geneva from 1908. This was a second version of a view which he had previously painted in 1905, when he wrote “This is perhaps the landscape in which I applied my compositional principles most felicitously.”

Most of his symmetry and rhythm is obvious; what may not be so apparent are the idiosyncratic reflections seen on the lake’s surface. The gaps in the train of cumulus clouds here become dark blue pillars, which are optically impossible, but are responsible for much of the rhythm in the lower half of the painting.

In the Spring of 1908, Hodler met Valentine Godé-Darel (1873-1915), a Parisian, who modelled for him at first, then became his lover, and an important figure in his later work. In the autumn, he was commissioned by the Swiss National Bank to produce designs for its banknotes, which he based on versions of his next major figurative works, The Woodcutter and The Reaper.

Hodler painted several versions of The Woodcutter (1910), above, and its pendant The Reaper (1910), shown below, before he could select those on which the banknotes were based. In both he has all but eliminated the distractions of his earlier paintings of similar figures, and placed emphasis on the form and movement of the figures as they work with their traditional tools at age-old tasks.

In 1910, Hodler was commissioned to paint a mural for the staircase of the Kunsthaus in Zurich, which he based on A View to Infinity (three versions to 1905).

Between about 1910-11, Hodler was fascinated by an Italian singer, guitarist and dancer, Giulia Leonardi. She played regularly in a café in Geneva, where they first met. Hodler painted a series of portraits of her, of which Portrait of the Dancer Giulia Leonardi (1910), above, is perhaps the finest, with its carefully-worked skin tones and colours, and her coquettish look.

A second Portrait of Giulia Leonardi (1910) is shown below.

In the summer of 1910, Hodler was again busy painting landscapes in the Bernese Oberland. In Lake Thun with the Stockhorn Range (1910), he is on the north-eastern side of the lake, probably not far from the town of Thun, looking to the south-west over the lake at the Stockhorn and its lofty ridges.

For this view of the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau from Beatenberg (1910), Hodler moved along the shore of Lake Thun, up to the small town of Beatenberg. He then looked to the south-east at the Eiger Massif, with the eastern end of Lake Thun in the foreground. The Lauterbrunnen road then passes from left to right in front of the Eiger and Mönch.

His style has become significantly more gestural, with white marks resembling lettering on the foothills on the far side of the lake. The peaks themselves have been rendered in simplified form even when compared with his view in the morning sun from just two years before.

The Eiger is notorious for its challenging ascent by the north face, which is that shown here and in the previous view. Although the mountain was first climbed in 1858, the route up the north face was not accomplished for another 80 years, and unsuccessful attempts continue to result in deaths. It rises to an altitude of almost four thousand metres (13,000 feet), of which three thousand metres (over 9,000 feet) are from the surface of Lake Thun.

Reference

Hans-Peter Wipplinger (ed) (2017) Ferdinand Hodler, Elective Affinities from Klimt to Schiele, Leopold Museum / Walther König. ISBN 978 3 96098 220 3.

William Frederick Yeames (1835–1918), who died a century ago today, is one of the many painters who is now known by a single work: in his case And when did you last see your Father? (1878). As a history painter in the day of the Pre-Raphaelites, his career was something of an uphill struggle, and in some ways, it is fortunate that one work is still remembered.

The son of a British consul in Russia, he was born in Taganrog, on the shore of the Sea of Azov, to the north of the Black Sea, then in the Russian Empire. His father died when he was only seven, so he was bundled off to Dresden in Germany to be educated, and to start learning to draw and paint. His family brought him back to Britain, where he received private tuition before travelling to Florence at the age of only 17. He studied there, and copied the Masters, before returning to London in 1859.

In England, he formed what became known as the Saint John’s Wood Clique, with Philip Hermogenes Calderon, Frederick Goodall (1822-1904), and George Adolphus Storey, who are today even less well-known that him. At the time, though, his paintings had quite a decent following, and he exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1859 on.

Yeames’ particular interest, and the basis for many of his best paintings, was the Tudor and Stuart period. In Hiding the Priest (1868-74), he shows a ‘priest hole’ used to hide Catholic priests during several purges which took place in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. The room shown here is now known as the Punch Room, in Cotehele House, a superb sixteenth century manor house on the border between Devon and Cornwall, to the north of Plymouth, England.

A priest is shown ascending into the hidden chamber by ladder, as one of the family, at the left, watches for the arrival of ‘pursuivants’ who pursued Catholic priests during a purge.

For the Poor from about 1875 shows two nuns collecting food door-to-door to feed the poor during a bitter winter, probably at the edge of Dartmoor, Devon.

Like most of Yeames’ history paintings, And when did you last see your Father? (1878) is plausible but imaginary rather than based on historical records. It shows a Royalist household during the English Civil War between 1642-51. The men present are Roundheads, Parliamentarians, who are trying to locate and capture the head of the household, the small boy’s father.

The boy is based on Gainsborough’s famous portrait of The Blue Boy (1779), modelled here by the artist’s nephew. Although he is being questioned quite amicably if not sympathetically, the question put to him in the title of the painting exploits the openness of childhood in an effort to get the boy to betray his father’s whereabouts, an unpleasantly adult trick. Next in line is an older girl, who is being comforted by a Roundhead soldier, but is already upset.

Their mother and an older daughter wait anxiously at the far left.

Yeames was particularly fascinated by the strange story of Amy Robsart, shown here in his 1877 narrative painting of her. She was the first wife of Lord Robert Dudley, a favourite of Queen Elizabeth and allegedly one of her loves if not lovers. Elizabeth acceded to the throne late in 1558, and Dudley was called to court as her Master of the Horse. His wife Amy, née Robsart, did not follow him to court, and hardly ever saw her husband.

On the morning of 8 September 1560, when she was staying at a country house near Oxford, she dismissed all her servants, and was later found, as shown here, dead with a broken neck at the foot of the stairs. Although an inquest found no evidence of foul play, and returned a verdict of accidental death, Amy’s husband was widely suspected of having arranged her death. Speculation continues to this day.

Yeames shows Amy’s body at rest at the foot of the stairs. In the gloom above, Anthony Forster, one of Dudley’s men, is leading his manservant down the stairs when they discover Amy’s body. The implication here is that Forster murdered Amy on Dudley’s orders, which is one of many speculative accounts.

Later, Yeames painted this portrait of Amy Robsart (1884).

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, problem pictures became popular, in which viewers were encouraged to speculate over their underlying, usually melodramatic, narrative. Defendant and Counsel (1895) is one of Yeames’ several problem pictures, which would have been exhibited in London, and illustrated as an engraving in newspapers.

It shows an affluent married woman wearing an expensive fur coat, sat with a popular newspaper open in front of her, as a team of three barristers and their clerk look at her intensely, presumably waiting for her to speak.

As she is the defendant, the viewer is encouraged to speculate what she is defending: a divorce claim, or a criminal charge? This also opens the thorny issue of counsel who discover that a defendant is lying, but still mount their defence in court, and may succeed in persuading the court to believe what they consider to be false. Like And when did you last see your Father? this may be an exploration of truth and the problems posed by it.

Yeames died at the age of 82, on 3 May 1918, in the Devon Riviera resort of Teignmouth. And when did you last see your Father? was bought by the Walker Gallery in Liverpool shortly after it opened. A tableau of the painting has been in Madame Tussaud’s wax museum in London for most of the intervening years too.

Further reading

The Story in Paintings: Philip Hermogenes Calderon 1, the Bible and morals
The Story in Paintings: Philip Hermogenes Calderon 2, Shakespeare and the naked saint
The Story in Paintings: Problem pictures, John Collier and others

Until the advent of chemistry in the eighteenth century, the vast majority of pigments occurred in nature, even if the minerals or plant matter from which they were derived had to be specially processed.

The first true synthetic pigment was in fact so ancient that it was forgotten completely in the Middle Ages: Egyptian Blue was first made before about 3000 BCE by heating together powdered limestone, malachite, and quartz sand, to form calcium copper silicate. But that was an exception. It wasn’t until the early years of the eighteenth century that a hydrated iron hexacyanoferrate complex known quickly as Prussian Blue was synthesized.

No one knows who first made Prussian Blue, nor exactly when it was first synthesized. It seems to have appeared initially around 1704, and its origins have been attributed variously to Diesbach in Berlin, or Mak in Leipzig. For once its name is appropriate, as it was a product of the Prussian Empire. Its potential as a colourant was recognised by 1710 when it went on sale in Berlin, and by about 1724 it was being manufactured in several countries across Europe.

Among the very first surviving oil paintings to use Prussian Blue is that by Adriaen van der Werff and Henrik van Limborch, of Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph. This was started by van der Werff before he died in 1722, and the blue paint is thought to have been applied by him to the curtain at the upper left; it is that paint which has been shown to contain Prussian Blue. After van der Werff’s death, his pupil Henrik van Limborch finished the work between 1727-28.

Another early example of the proven use of Prussian Blue is Antoine Watteau’s The Italian Comedians from about 1720.

Canaletto is one of the first Masters to have used Prussian Blue extensively. Grand Canal from Palazzo Balbi toward the Rialto from 1720-23 has been attributed to him as one of his earliest surviving works, and its blues have been found to contain Prussian Blue.

Canaletto was quickly using the pigment in almost all his paintings, including this view of the Rio dei Mendicanti from 1723-24, above, and his famous The Stonemason’s Yard (c 1725), below.

As experience was gained in using this pigment, it became the subject of controversy. Some artists were confident that its colour was stable and did not change or fade, but others experienced problems as bad as or even worse than those of Indigo Blue, which it had generally replaced.

It has gradually become understood that adverse results of lightfastness testing (and experience in paintings) have depended on the mixture of Prussian Blue with other colours, particularly with white paint, and the presence of impurities in the pigment itself.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, Prussian Blue was widely used in a range of binding media, with the exception of fresco and other alkaline media with which it proved incompatible.

William Hogarth’s paintings in his Marriage A-la-Mode series have been found to contain both Smalt and Prussian Blue. In The Tête à Tête (c 1743), Smalt has been found in the ornate carpet, and I suspect that the ornamental pillars behind the woman rely on Prussian Blue, at least in part. Hogarth trained as Prussian Blue came to the ascendant, and wouldn’t have painted much before it became widely available.

Jean-Baptiste Perronneau’s A Girl with a Kitten from about 1743 is a fine example of the use of Prussian Blue in pastels: the girl’s blue dress and the background have both been found to contain the pigment.

Prussian Blue also became popular in water-based media. William Blake’s Lucia Carrying Dante in his Sleep, from series depicting Dante’s Divine Comedy painted in watercolour between 1824-27, is a good example. In this and several other of his paintings, Blake used the pigment on its own and mixed with Gamboge as what was known as Prussian Green.

Prussian Blue pigment has been found in the blue passages in Whistler’s The Princess from the Land of Porcelain (1863-65), from his Peacock Room, shown above and in the detail below.

The use of different blue pigments varied markedly among the French Impressionists and their successors. Paul Cézanne and Georges Seurat appear to have used Prussian Blue seldom, if at all, but it is well known in the work of Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, and Vincent van Gogh.

Although Claude Monet’s Bathers at la Grenouillère (1869) contains Cobalt Blue in the brighter mid-blues of the water surface and details in the boats, darker blues towards the left, and in the clothing of some of the figures and their reflections, are almost certainly Prussian Blue.

Vincent van Gogh’s portrait of La Mousmé from 1888 illustrates some of the difficulties of identifying pigment use. (Its title is derived from the Japanese word musume, meaning girl; at the time the French word was understood to mean an ‘easy’ girl.) Infra-red images demonstrate the use of at least two different blues, one of which has been identified as Prussian Blue.

The two (or more) blue pigments are not distributed at all evenly: on the girl’s jacket, the three blue stripes to the left of the row of buttons contain the most Prussian Blue, while the three under her right armpit, which look darker blue, contain little or no Prussian Blue. Van Gogh also mixed yellow with Prussian Blue to form the green of the flowers she holds in her hand.

Prussian Blue remained a popular pigment in oil and watercolour paints well into the twentieth century, and is still offered in many commercial ranges. For many artists, though, it has been replaced by much more recent synthetic blue pigments, such as Phthalocyanine (‘Phthalo’) Blue, introduced around 1970. It is seldom used in Prussian Green now.

Reference

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

There have always been people who are poorer than poor, and have nothing more than they stand in and carry. They made occasional appearances in paintings, but most artists carefully ignored them, until the late nineteenth century. Like so many of the poor, they were drawn to the cities, where they tried to live on the streets, and in derelict buildings, moving on when forced.

By the late nineteenth century, major cities such as London and Paris had substantial populations of vagrants and the homeless, augmented by those rejected by the city, evicted when they were too poor to even live in squalor, cast out by an increasingly materialist society. Artists who had perhaps been introduced to the problems of the rural poor now started to paint the lowest of the low in the city, where their contrast with the increasingly obscene affluence of the rich was greatest.

Before looking at some paintings, the following photograph brings a cautionary tale.

Oscar Gustave Rejlander’s photo of Poor Jo from 1864 shows a young streetboy, in a pioneering collection of images showing homeless children in England. Being an early photo, it cannot of course lie, but it does. This photo, as with all Rejlander’s other images of poor and vagrant children, was a fiction created in his studio, using props and models, and heavily retouched. We tend to think of such trickery as a modern phenomenon enabled by the likes of Photoshop; although the techniques were different, visual deception is much older.

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo is one of the earliest artists to have paid particular attention to vagrants and the homeless. The Young Beggar, painted by him in about 1645, shows a young boy apparently squatting in a tiny bare nook in a building. By his filthy feet is a bag full of rotting fruit, and some sort of worms, which apparently form his diet.

Such social concerns in paintings then faded until the middle of the nineteenth century.

In 1862, Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables was published. Émile Bayard drew Young Cosette Sweeping (1862) for its first edition, and it has since become the best-known image associated with the original novel and the more recent popular musical. Cosette is the daughter of Fantine and Félix Tholomyès, who is used as forced labour for an inn owned by Thénardiers and his wife. She is rescued by the hero Jean Valjean. Bayard shows Cosette sweeping outside the Thénardiers’ inn.

It was an English writer, Charles Dickens, who was probably the greatest literary influence over Augustus Edwin Mulready, whose reputation was built on paintings of street sellers and vagrants in London, such as his Uncared For from 1871. Mulready’s approach was very different from either Dickens or Murillo, in being laden with sentimentalism. Here a young girl with exceptionally large brown eyes stares straight at the viewer as she proffers a tiny bunch of violets.

Both the girl and her brother are sparklingly clean, their hair well cared-for, and their clothes relatively smart. There is nothing to suggest that Mulready used real vagrants as his models.

More convincing, though, are the remains of posters on the brick wall behind them: at the top, The Triumph of Christianity is attributed to the French artist and illustrator Gustave Doré, who illustrated an edition of the Bible in 1866, visited London on several occasions afterwards, and in 1871 produced illustrations for London: A Pilgrimage, published the following year, which showed London’s down and outs.

Mulready’s Wandering Minstrels from 1876 shows a young boy and girl sleeping, exhausted, in one of London’s parks. Here at least they look as if they might be genuine, but his sentimentalism remains.

The same theme occurs in Mulready’s later paintings, such as Fatigued Minstrels from 1883, where his sentiment has perhaps grown into full-blown romanticism.

Léon Bazille Perrault adopted a similar approach in his undated Out in the Cold, as snowflakes are falling on these two remarkably clean children.

The Romanian Impressionst Nicolae Grigorescu is far more true to nature in his undated oil sketch of a Breton Beggar.

It was the development of Naturalism, or Social Realism, which brought a rush of apparently faithful paintings of vagrants.

In what turned out to be the final few years of his life, Jules Bastien-Lepage progressed from the rural poor to those in villages and more urban environments. Although undated, his The Blind Beggar was most probably painted in the early 1880s.

One of Bastien-Lepage’s last paintings, from 1883, The Little Chimneysweep (Damvillers) has the air of authenticity. A young chimneysweep is sitting in a tiny hovel, with the embers of a fire at its left edge. He doesn’t look at the viewer, but down at the kitten to the lower right. He is also the dirtiest of Bastien-Lepage’s waifs, his left hand still being black with soot from his work. This is perhaps the first painting to be a worthly successor to the work of Murillo.

The year after the death of Bastien-Lepage, Fernand Pelez painted A Martyr – The Violet Vendor (1885), showing another child of the street. We are left in doubt as to whether we are looking at the boy asleep, or dead. One of his small bunches of violets has fallen from his tray. His eyes are closed, and his mouth agape.

In tomorrow’s concluding article, I look at paintings of the homeless.

The paintings of vagrants in the first article in this two-part series are matched by depictions of those homeless families who lived entirely on city streets.

In Philippe-Auguste Jeanron’s early painting of this theme, Paris Scene from 1833, a family of four is living rough on one of the banks of the River Seine. The young woman nearest the viewer appears dressed to work in a café, with a surprisingly white apron. A more affluent couple have just walked past and are now in the distance, leaving the poor behind them.

Augustus Leopold Egg’s narrative series of moralistic paintings, Past and Present (1858), traces the downfall of a once-prosperous but adulterous wife.

In his third and final canvas, the woman is now living under one of the Adelphi arches beside the River Thames. She is sat among the debris, staring wide-eyed and fearful at a star in the sky, cradling a young baby to her, under her thin cloak. Behind her, on the side of the arch, are old posters, one with the word VICTIMS prominent, another advertising excursions to Paris.

When the great French illustrator and painter Gustave Doré visited London, he was shocked by its large population of vagrants and homeless. His print of A Couple and Two Children Sleeping on a London Bridge (1871) is one of several objective records which he made at the time. A selection were included in his illustrated book on London which was published the following year.

The homeless lived rough in the cities of Britain, France, Spain, Italy, and other countries in Europe. Luigi Nono’s sketchy study of April 1875 for his finished painting Abandoned shows a couple asleep in a quiet corner of Venice.

Themes of homelessness entered literature and other arts. Among Laura Theresa Alma-Tadema’s generally genteel, indoor scenes is an exceptional view of the outdoors: With a Babe in the Woods (c 1879-80). This explores the popular Victorian theme of the young, homeless unmarried mother.

It was perhaps Fernand Pelez who shocked the public most profoundly, with his chillingly realist Homeless from 1883, showing a worn and weary mother and her five children living on the street. She stares from sunken eyes straight at the viewer, as her children huddle in filthy blankets and sacking around her. Only the mother and her oldest daughter (who is presumably already at work) wear any shoes.

Homelessness continued to inspire the work of those painters with a social conscience, including Marianne Stokes. Her Homeless (On the Way to the Fields) from 1885 avoids the overt sentimentality of Mulready’s waifs, although the two children are incredibly clean and well-groomed, and their clothing appears theatrically worn and patched.

In Thomas Benjamin Kennington’s Homeless from 1890, the late Victorian period in Britain replaced sentimentality with melodrama. A young homeless and starving boy has collapsed on the pavement (sidewalk) in winter. A young woman, who had been carrying a large bundle of washing, so is presumably a servant herself, has stopped to try to revive the boy, cradling him in her arms.

Social concerns became an important theme in Nordic art with the work of Christian Krohg and other Naturalists. The Danish painter Erik Henningsen made a series of works examining social issues of the day, including Evicted (1892).

This shows a family, complete with their meagre possessions, cast out into the snowy street of a Copenhagen winter. The father is seen distant, still arguing his case with a policeman who is standing between him and the entrance to a shoe factory. The rest of the family, three women, stand shocked by the sudden cold and their homelessness.

Antoni Piotrowski’s Homeless (Country girl at the fence) (1896) shows a young pregnant Polish woman standing barefoot by the side of a country road. Her few possessions are laid out around her: a pair of worn boots, a bundle of clothes, and a stick.

My final painting in this selection is by the Norwegian artist Aksel Waldemar Johannessen, who painted many works showing areas of social concern. His Streetboy from 1918-22 shows a homeless boy asleep on some packing cases in the docks, his small dog looking equally hard done by, beside him.

From its humble origins in the paintings of Murillo, during the latter half of the nineteenth century, artists increasingly raised awareness of the growing problem of homelessness and vagrancy among the poorest of the poor. Although many paintings lacked authenticity and reeked of sentiment, the romantic, or melodrama, an objective social realism, ‘Naturalism’ if you like, developed in the 1880s, which increased the impact of these works.

The paintings of Mulready and other sentimentalists helped transform the image of the poor from being idle good-for-nothings who only merited a little small change, to cute unfortunates worthy of more organised charity, but did nothing to challenge the society which created them. It was the raw and objective images of the Naturalists which brought some of the affluent to examine the causes of social inequality, and what should be done to change society.

At last, artists were engaging with the major social issues of the day, and taking a role in the changes which were to occur in the twentieth century.

Literary sources were (and still are) crucial to a great many artists. Until the late twentieth century, most had been thoroughly educated in the Classics and the Bible. Most studios and workshops contained bookshelves with key reference works, including the Bible, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, and Plutarch’s Lives (or Parallel Lives).

Patrons who wished to select a motif for their purchase from the painter could choose from the thousands of stories contained in those books. The details of the narrative to be painted could be checked before the first studies were drawn. And finally, on delivery, the artist could expound the virtues and fidelity of their work.

Having just completed my account in paintings of the stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and his less well-known Heroides, I now turn to its successor, Plutarch’s Lives.

The Lives are a unique resource compiled by one of the finest Greek writers of classical times. Plutarch attempted to combine history, biography, and moral philosophy by writing them in pairs, one Greek, the other Roman, and appending a comparison. As history they vary in quality and reliability, but provide some of the best source material on the history of Sparta, as well as several lives including Antonius, Pompey, and Caesar.

As biography they bring to life some remarkable characters who might otherwise have vanished into the past, including Themistocles, Alcibiades, Cato, and Alexander. Although Plutarch’s moralistic comparisons might seem strained at times, they too are generally insightful and historically significant.

Most importantly for the artist they provided a repertoire of characters and events with which every educated person would have been familiar – much as with the better-known Bible narratives, and the myths of the Metamorphoses. With the decline of the classics, though, the majority of Plutarch’s figures have become forgotten and unfamiliar. How many people now know who Alcibiades was, or have more than a passing acquaintance with the turbulent life of Theseus?

Edgar Degas’ famous painting of Young Spartans Exercising from about 1860 includes two important details in its background: Mount Taygetus, at the left behind the group of girls, and at its centre a group of women talking with a man wearing white robes. Without knowing Degas’ literary reference to Plutarch’s biography of Lycurgus, this is an almost impenetrable painting, and easily misread.

Mount Taygetus was the place where the feeble babies born to Spartan families were abandoned, so as to ensure that the only children who survived were those who would make the best elite warriors or mothers, according to their gender.

The old man in the white robes is Lycurgus himself, who, while refusing to become Sparta’s king, laid down its rules and institutions, including those governing the abandonment of babies. Most relevant here is that it was Lycurgus who introduced the teaching of wrestling to Spartan girls, which has empowered the girls here to taunt the boys opposite.

Eugène Delacroix here shows Lycurgus Consulting the Pythia (1835-45), in which the lawgiver visited the Oracle at Delphi before implementing his reforms to the Spartan state. Pythia, the high priestess at Delphi, is here listening intently to Lycurgus as he describes his proposals, before giving her verdict on them.

Ingres’ painting of Romulus’ Victory over Acron (1812) shows an episode taken straight from Plutarch’s account of the life of Romulus. After the rape of the Sabine women, in which the early Romans attempted to rectify their desperate shortage of women, it was Acron, king of the neighbouring Caeninenses tribe, who waged retaliatory war on the Romans under Romulus.

Before battle, Romulus made a vow that, if he should conquer and overthrow Acron, he would carry home the king’s armour and dedicate it in person to Jupiter. Ingres here shows him doing just that, as he carries Acron’s golden suit of armour. In the background, Acron’s city is in flames, and his army annihilated.

Jules-Élie Delaunay shows one of the most memorable moments from Plutarch’s account of the life of Julius Caesar, in his Caesar and His Fortune of 1855. During the civil war fought between Caesar and Pompey, in 49 BCE, Caesar crossed the Rubicon (a phrase which has entered English and other languages) as he drove Pompey from Italy.

When Pompey fled to Greece, Caesar tried to pursue him, and is here attempting to cross the straits of Brindisi disguised as a slave. His boat was caught in a storm, though, and forced to turn back. According to Plutarch, Caesar tried to reassure his companions of their safety, by telling them: Fear not, you are carrying Caesar and his fortune.

In 1774, Jacques-Louis David competed unsuccessfully for the prestigious Prix de Rome, which that year had set the story of Antiochus and Stratonica as its subject, taken straight from Plutarch’s life of Demetrius.

When Antiochus’ father, King Seleucus I of Syria, was relatively old, he married the young and beautiful Stratonice (or Stratonica). Antiochus fell mysteriously ill, and was confined to his bed as a result. The eminent anatomist and physician Erasistratus was summoned to assess the young man, and recognised that he had fallen in love with Stratonice, his stepmother.

David shows Antiochus propped up in bed, Erasistratus (in a red cloak) by him and pointing to the beautiful Stratonice at the foot of the bed. Little is shown in facial expressions, apart from Stratonice’s bashful expression with her eyes cast down. Body language and composition combine to tell the story, with Erasistratus’ pointing index finger helping to put Stratonice metaphorically and literally in the spotlight.

Most of Plutarch’s characters reveal the frailties of humans. Alcibiades was a major statesman and general, shown undergoing surgery on the battlefield in The Wounded Alcibiades (1743-1800) above. It remains unclear whether that was painted by Jean-Charles Nicaise Perrin or one of Joseph-Marie Vien’s school.

But Jean-Baptiste Regnault’s Socrates Tears Alcibiades from the Embrace of Sensual Pleasure (1791) below is one of a succession of paintings which shows the general’s teacher, and apparently lover, Socrates dragging him away from a brothel, when he was a young man. Alcibiades couldn’t give up the company and pleasure of courtesans even after marriage: when his wife Hipparete started divorce proceedings against him, he dragged her away from the court, so ending the case.

Plutarch’s Lives have not only been a great source and influence for artists, but have been instrumental in changing history. Charlotte Corday, who assassinated the French Revolutionary Marat in his bath – a scene painted by David and many others – was reputed to have strolled in her garden near Caen, her copy of Plutarch’s Lives in her hand as she decided what she had to do in Paris.

So she is shown here by Tony Robert-Fleury.

The books which make up what survives of Plutarch’s Lives, given in their pairs of Greek life – Roman life, are:

• Theseus – Romulus
• Lycurgus – Numa
• Solon – Publicola
• Themistocles – Camillus
• Pericles – Fabius Maximus
• Alcibiades – Coriolanus
• Timoleon – Aemilius Paulus
• Pelopidas – Marcellus
• Aristides – Cato the Elder
• Philopoemen – Flamininus
• Pyrrhus – Marius
• Lysander – Sulla
• Cimon – Lucullus
• Nicias – Crassus
• Eumenes – Sertorius
• Agesilaus – Pompey
• Alexander – Caesar
• Phocion – Cato the Younger
• Agis & Cleomenes – Tiberius & Caius Gracchus
• Demosthenes – Cicero
• Demetrius – Antony
• Dion – Brutus

There are also four additional lives, which remain unpaired:

• Artaxerxes
• Aratus
• Galba
• Otho

I hope that you enjoy them.

Until recently, Pierre Bonnard’s paintings have been covered by copyright, and inaccessible to the blogger. With the release of images of hundreds of his paintings and photographs into the public domain, it gives me great pleasure to show a small selection in this new series.

Bonnard (1867-1947) is one of the most individualistic and fascinating artists of the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Best-known for his sparkling gardenscapes of the south of France and obsessive intimate paintings of his wife, he is my favourite post-Impressionist alongside Vincent van Gogh.

Born the son of a senior civil servant, and living in an affluent suburb to the south-west of Paris, he underwent a classical education and progressed to study law. In the late 1880s he also started attending classes at the Académie Julian, and at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He started practising as a barrister once he had graduated, but quickly abandoned that career to be an artist.

Bonnard’s family appear to have owned a property in Le Grand-Lemps, in the south-east of the country not far from the city of Lyon. Among Bonnard’s earliest surviving paintings are several landscapes painted in this area, including In the Countryside (Grand-Lemps) from about 1888. Already he had started to use quite high chroma colours, as seen in this sunset view of a house there.

Le Grand-Lemps had been transferred to the Isère Department during the French Revolution a century earlier. This Landscape of Dauphiné, also made in about 1888, was presumably painted when he was staying in that town.

Japonisme was all the rage at the time, and soon came to dominate Bonnard’s early paintings. He came to admire panelled screens which were widely shown at the time, and which he adopted for several of his first significant works. Probably the earliest of these is this exquisite three-panelled screen of The Stork and Four Frogs completed around 1889. To mimic the appearance of east Asian lacquerware, Bonnard painted this in distemper on red-dyed cotton fabric.

Its story is, though, thoroughly European, based on the fable retold by Jean de la Fontaine of The Frogs who Demand a King. This has a long pedigree, being first recorded by Phaedrus in the first century CE, and attributed to Aesop.

The version retold by La Fontaine centres on a colony of frogs, who ask Jupiter for a king. The god’s first response to their request is a laid-back and gentle leader, whom the frogs reject as being too weak to rule them. Jupiter’s second attempt is a crane, who kills and eats the frogs for his pleasure. When the frogs complain to Jupiter, he then responds that they had better be happy with what they have got this time, or they could be given something even worse.

Bonnard’s panel is traditionally interpreted not as showing the evil crane of the second attempt, but the first and gentle ruler.

Remarkably, Bonnard did not try to exhibit this screen, but gave it to his sister.

Also dating from 1889 is his first Self-Portrait, which he painted in tempera on a panel.

This shows the influence of his new group of friends, which included Édouard Vuillard, Félix Vallotton, Maurice Denis, and Paul Sérusier: the Nabis. Formed when they were still students at the Académie Julian in Paris, they took their name from a term coined by a linguist to describe their aim of rejuvenating art in the same way that the ancient prophets had rejuvenated Israel: nabi was derived from a Hebrew and Arabic word for prophet. Although their style lived on in the work of former members of the group, like the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the Nabis soon started to break up, by about 1896.

Bonnard also started to paint street scenes, such as The Street in 1889, in which the figures are overlapping areas of colour.

A little later, in 1890, he returned to his vertical panel format, in The Dressing Gown. This incorporates decorative elements, in which pattern rather than colour or outline is used to distinguish figure from ground.

Bonnard’s Afternoon in the Garden from 1891 shows his intense innovation during these years with the Nabis. Working in oil with pen and black ink, he has here successfully combined colour and patterning in an image which has lost all depth, but retains clear pictorial structure.

Later that year, Bonnard announced his intent to paint “a screen that will also be an exhibition”, which became his first major work and brought him critical appreciation: a four-panel screen titled Woman in the Garden (1891). This finished version in oil on paper mounted on canvas was exhibited as his debut at the Salon des Indépendants in 1891, and later that year was shown at a gallery too. It is now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

Bonnard’s four panels are separate paintings, rather than the continous image of The Stork and Four Frogs. Each shows a young woman dressed in the latest fashion, with rich colours and patterning again. Bonnard also left his studies for this work, and appears never to have been entirely happy with the result. However, the critics were laudatory, and they launched his career as an artist.

Bonnard continued to paint in Nabi style, albeit with a strong Japonisme. The Croquet Game, from 1892, is less crowded than Afternoon in the Garden, but no less Nabi.

He painted at least two versions of Young Woman in a Landscape, sometimes known as Madame Claude Terrasse in the Enclosed Garden at Grand-Lemps, from about 1892. In this version, the woman stands out by virtue of the colours and patterns of her clothes; in the other she too is green, as is her entire background, which makes the figure very difficult to distinguish.

Reference

Gilles Genty and Pierrette Vernon (2006) Bonnard Inédits, Éditions Cercle d’Art (in French). ISBN 978 2 702 20707 9.

One of the admittedly flawed measures of the ‘importance’ of an artist is the strength and extent of their influence. In Ferdinand Hodler’s case, this is difficult to assess because of our current limited insight into the arts in central Europe in the early twentieth century.

Few people outside Austria, for instance, have heard of Albin Egger-Lienz (1868–1926), who at the time was regarded as being as important an artist in Austria as Gustav Klimt. Despite Egger-Lienz’s protestations, there can be no doubt that Hodler’s paintings were a major influence over his art. In this article and its second, concluding part, I hope to show you how.

Egger-Lienz was born close to the mediaeval town of Lienz in the Austrian Tyrol, in the south-west of the country. Initially named Ingenuin Albuin Troja, he was the illegitimate son of a local church painter and photographer, and the daughter of a farmer. He first learned to draw and paint with his father, before going on to more formal tuition from other artists.

In 1884, he started studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany, and was based in that city until he married in 1899, and moved to Vienna. Egger-Lienz arrived in Vienna shortly after the Secession, but decided to ally himself with the conservative Künstlerhaus. While there, he spent quite long periods in Ötztal, in the Austrian Tyrol.

Many of Egger-Lienz’s surviving early paintings have religious motifs. Saint Sebastian was painted in 1887 when he was still a student in Munich, and is a dark and relatively objective treatment of a widely-shown martyrdom.

During his time in Munich, Egger-Lienz returned to the Austrian Tyrol, painting there most summers. The Gate from about 1890 shows the entrance to the grainstore in the Tammerburg, one of several old castles in the middle of Lienz. Although I can find no reference to him painting en plein air, this appears at least to have been started in front of the motif.

Egger-Lienz’s The Church Choir of Lienz Parish Church of St Andrä from 1890 may have been inspired by Henry Lerolle’s huge The Organ Rehearsal, which had been exhibited at the Salon in Paris in 1885. Its dominant perspective and detailed realism are suggestive of Naturalism, which was popular throughout Europe at the time.

Farm in Grafendorf, also from 1890, shows the deeply rustic conditions on a farm in Styria, Austria, as a young woman sits churning butter on a stone platform in a dilapidated barn.

Although not described as such, I suspect that The Portrait Painter in the Countryside (1891) may have been a self-portrait of Egger-Lienz at work, painting the young woman who is seated rather tensely to the right. The cameo view through the window suggests that this was also painted in the Austrian Tyrol, or perhaps in Bavaria.

Egger-Lienz’s A Farewell in the Tyrol in 1809, which he painted between 1894-97, is set in a graveyard, where an elderly man is filling in a grave, presumably that of his wife. His hands are clenched together in prayer as he leans, half-kneeling, on a traditional spade.

The year 1809 was a troubled time in the Tyrol, when Napoleon re-occupied Vienna and Austria was defeated at the Battle of Wagram. Much of the Tyrol was taken to form Napoleon’s Illyrian Provinces, and Austria was in effect a French possession. This triggered a series of popular revolts.

The Cross (1898-1901) was one of Egger-Lienz’s most successful paintings of his early career, for which he was awarded the Grand State Medal in Gold when it was exhibited at the Künstlerhaus in Vienna in 1901. This too refers to the period of discord during Napoleon’s occupation in 1809. Here, a Tyrolean Capuchin priest, Pater Joachim Haspinger, is leading a peasants’ revolt against the occupation.

Haspinger appears to be the man in a broad-brimmed hat in the centre of the painting, holding aloft the large crucifix to the left of him. He is surrounded by a dense throng of country men armed with scythes and the occasional old sabre. Egger-Lienz shows what is clearly a very angry mob. Inevitably, perhaps, Haspinger’s revolt failed, and he was forced to flee to Switzerland. He eventually returned to Austria, and died an old man in 1858.

In complete contrast, Egger-Lienz’s The Venison Dealer from 1902 is a portrait of a young woman with a radiant smile, surrounded by a rich still life of game, but not a sign of any venison.

Christmas Eve (1903) is an effective re-interpretation of the traditional adoration of the shepherds, apparently set in a Tyrolean cowshed, with skilful use of light. This and the next two paintings mark Egger-Lienz’s transition to a looser style, which also appears to have been influenced by the social realist paintings of Jean-François Millet.

The Tyrolean Waitress (c 1903) shows a young woman pouring a drink for a customer, who is seen smoking a pipe in the well-lit room behind. Slung from a thin leather belt around her waist is her black leather purse.

Millet’s influence is most manifest in one of Egger-Lienz’s first versions of The Sower, from 1903, a motif which was to recur in the artist’s later works. The earth colours, increasing looseness, and emphasis on simplicity were to set the style for much of the rest of his career.

Egger-Lienz hated being accused of being a follower of Hodler, seeing him more as a competitor than ally, but his first exposure to the paintings of Hodler in 1900 marked a turning point in his work.

In the period to 1910, Hodler’s style had loosened and his paintings, landscapes in particular, eliminated detail to present simplified and stylised images, in what Hodler considered “a magnified, simplified nature, freed from all irrelevant details”.

Hodler was close friends with Gertrud Dübi-Müller, the daughter of a family of industrialists from Solothurn in Switzerland, who was an important art collector and patron. In 1911, he painted this full-length Portrait of Gertrud Müller, which shows the influence that Gustav Klimt’s portraits had over his late style. Hodler, though, avoided the flamboyance of gold leaf, and lacks Klimt’s dense decorative embellishment.

Dübi-Müller and Hodler spent the winter of 1911-12 together in Grindelwald, during which time he painted en plein air by the Upper Grindelwald Glacier. She was an avid photographer, and took more than 100 photos of Hodler at work in his studio, and many of him at leisure too.

Hodler’s painting of The Breithorn of 1911 is unusual for the dominance of its almost cloudless sky, and lack of symmetry and rhythm. This mountain is in the Pennine Alps, on the border between Switzerland and Italy, and rises to a peak of 4,164 metres (13,661 feet). It is accessible from Zermatt in Switzerland, which was presumably Hodler’s base when painting the mountain.

In 1912, Hodler painted four self-portraits for the collector Theodor Reinhart. I believe that this, probably his best-known Self-portrait, is among that group.

In the Spring of 1912, Hodler rented an additional studio in Geneva to support his work on large murals, including that for the new town hall in Hanover, Germany, which he completed just over a year later.

In early 1913, he was made an officer of the Swiss Legion of Honour.

In 1911, Hodler had been commissioned by the city director of Hanover, Heinrich Tramm, to paint a very large mural in the city’s new town hall, a work which kept him occupied for a lot of the period until its completion in 1913. This small-scale study for Einmütigkeit Unanimity must have been painted in 1912-13, and gives a clear idea of the finished work.

Emil Orlík shows Hodler at work on the mural during the summer of 1913 in this pastel.

Remarkably, Hodler’s completed mural has survived the adverse criticism of the day, the Nazi regime, and the bombing of the city of Hanover during the Second World War.

At its centre is the figure of Dietrich Arnsborg (1475-1558), who on 26 June 1533 brought together an assembly of the (male) citizens of Hanover in its market square, by the old town hall. Together they swore to adhere to the new Reformation doctrine of Martin Luther, as shown here in their unanimous raising of right hands.

In the autumn of that year (1913), Hodler’s lover Valentine Godé-Darel gave birth to the couple’s first child, a daughter. Hodler continued to live with his wife Berthe, though, and later in the year they moved into a luxurious apartment in Geneva.

Hodler had continued to paint landscapes throughout the period that he had been working on his Hanover mural and other large commissioned works. Le Grand Muveran from Villars, painted in the Bernese Alps in 1912, shows this peak which is just over 3,000 metres (10,000 feet) in height. It is to the south-east of Lake Geneva, overlooking the Rhone valley, and among some of the distant peaks seen in his views over the lake.

The Song From Afar is the 1913 version of his 1906 painting, showing a woman walking alone through the alpine meadows. This is further simplified, with a sparse background and heavily-outlined figure. Her arms are in an almost identical position to those in the earlier version.

By 1914, personal tragedy had started to overtake Hodler. His lover had been diagnosed as suffering from cancer, and from then until her death the following year, Hodler was driven to draw and paint the progression of her illness. Already, as shown in his painting of Valentine Godé-Darel in her Sick-Bed from 1914, she was largely confined to bed by her cachexia.

That same year, Hodler painted this portrait of The Mönch, which sits between the Eiger and the Jungfrau in the Bernese Alps, rising to a summit of 4107 metres (13,474 feet). Even in these great mountains, though, there had been change: in 1912, this peak had been pierced by the long tunnel carrying the Jungfrau Railway through its rock.

Hodler, and the whole of Europe, was moving to a darker place. For the artist, Valentine Godé-Darel’s rapid deterioration could only bring more grief, as Europe entered the First World War. When German forces directed their heavy artillery fire at the French city of Reims, all but destroying its cathedral and setting the city alight, Hodler was among those to speak out in public. He was criticised for doing so, and many German galleries retaliated by excluding his work.

Reference

Hans-Peter Wipplinger (ed) (2017) Ferdinand Hodler, Elective Affinities from Klimt to Schiele, Leopold Museum / Walther König. ISBN 978 3 96098 220 3.

Of all the pigments used in European and Western painting, Ultramarine Blue remains the queen. Originally made by crushing and grinding the semi-precious stone lapis lazuli, its cost has exceeded that of gold. Seen in paintings, it produces a rich slightly reddish blue which stands the test of time, as distinctive and effective today as when it was first used. And its use has unmasked fakes and forgeries.

The sole source of lapis lazuli in Europe and the West were quarries in Badakshan, described by Marco Polo and now in Afghanistan. It appears that wall paintings made around 507-554 CE adjacent to the great Buddahs of Bamiyan were the first to have used the mineral as a pigment. It was then used in early Persian miniatures, and in early Chinese and Indian paintings too.

The powdered pigment had made its way, first along the Silk Road, then by sea, to traders in Venice by about 1300. By the Renaissance, it was established as one of the most important and precious of all the pigments used in European art.

Because of its beauty and high cost, Ultramarine Blue was used for the robes of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary. Duccio’s panels from the Maestà Predella, including this of The Healing of the Man born Blind, show this tradition in its earliest years, around 1307-11. As a pigment, it proved practical in egg tempera (as here), oils, watercolour, and fresco.

Ultramarine Blue has been found in the van Eyck brothers’ Ghent Altarpiece from about 1432 (above), and particularly in its most famous panel, known as The Mystic Lamb (below).

Sandro Botticelli’s early tempera on panel painting Adoration of the Kings from about 1470 (made with Filippino Lippi, apparently) shows two different blue colours and purple. He painted the purple with an opaque underpainting of Lead White tinted with a Red Lake derived from Madder, to create pink. That was then glazed with quite coarse particles of Ultramarine Blue, so the pigment was thinly dispersed.

Peter Paul Rubens used Ultramarine Blue quite widely in his magnificent triptych now in Antwerp Cathedral. In its centre panel, Descent from the Cross (1612-14), it has been found to have been combined with Indigo and other pigments.

In van Dyck’s Charity from 1627-8, its most obvious use is in the blue cape, where Ultramarine Blue was painted over Indigo, applied as both a tint and a glaze over the top.

Visit any of the larger galleries with substantial collections of paintings made before 1700, and you will see works with drapery which I can only describe as arresting in the brilliance of their Ultramarine Blue. One stunning example in the National Gallery in London is Sassoferrato’s The Virgin in Prayer from 1640-50. The Virgin’s cloak looks as if it was painted only yesterday, and that colour makes you stop in your tracks and draws you into the painting, like no other pigment can.

Given its importance, and limited supply, considerable effort was devoted to ensuring that natural Ultramarine Blue was of the highest quality, and alternative sources were sought. Deposits in the Chilean Andes, and near Lake Baikal in Siberia, were not opened up until the nineteenth century, and attempts to make synthetic Ultramarine were unsuccessful until 1828, when Jean Baptiste Guimet was awarded a prize of six thousand francs for his discovery. Almost simultaneously, C G Gmelin of Tübingen discovered a slightly different method.

Commercial production had started by 1830, and it became known as French Ultramarine, to distinguish it from the natural pigment. Although almost identical in colour and performance, there are significant differences between natural and synthetic Ultramarine when tested in the laboratory. This has enabled the examination of paintings to determine the source of their pigment, and has brought some surprises.

These most often relate to later overpainting during restoration. For example, two areas of much later painting have been discovered in the van Eycks’ Ghent Altarpiece.

Examination of Édouard Manet’s Corner of a Café-Concert, from 1878-80, has shown that he used synthetic Ultramarine in its blue passages, for example.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s The Umbrellas, from about 1881-86, uses synthetic Ultramarine in a very methodical fashion. The first stage in its painting used only Cobalt Blue, but in its second stage synthetic Ultramarine was applied extensively.

Vincent van Gogh’s A Wheatfield, with Cypresses (1889) contains synthetic Ultramarine in its deepest blues, and in some areas of green. It is unusual to find Ultramarine mixed to form green. Before synthetic pigment became available, this would have been far too expensive a way of making any significant amount of green, but once much cheaper pigment came onto the market, that became more feasible, if still unusual.

The ability to distinguish synthetic Ultramarine, which did not exist before about 1828, and the natural pigment has proved important in detecting some forgeries. Only the most ignorant would attempt to pass off a painting made with synthetic Ultramarine as being very old, but a few fakes fell at that hurdle.

Han van Meegeren was far too knowledgeable and cunning to be caught so easily. He used natural Ultramarine, for example when he sold The Men at Emmaus (1937) to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen as a Vermeer. What no one knew at the time was that his Ultramarine looked genuine, but had been contamined with a small amount of Cobalt Blue, which wasn’t discovered until 1803-04, and was first used as a pigment in 1806.

In 1960, the modern artist Yves Klein worked with a paint supplier, Edouard Adam, to ‘invent’ a paint which he termed International Klein Blue (IKB). Although its formulation is a secret, it is almost entirely synthetic Ultramarine Blue pigment in a polyvinyl acetate binder.

Like all the best queens, Ultramarine Blue has an unnerving habit of revealing the truth.

Reference

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

Now that Spring has arrived in the UK, so has the season of the umbrella. We shelter under it when we’re being treated to a Spring shower, and enjoy its shade on those increasingly hot and sunny days. In this article and the next I look at paintings of umbrellas, with the occasional person thrown in for good measure.

The origin of the umbrella is lost in the mists of time. They have certainly been around for a couple of millenia, in some form, but didn’t start to become popular until the eighteenth century. They have ecclesiastic relations in what is known as an umbraculum: a small canopy placed over someone like the Pope to indicate their importance.

It’s not immediately obvious whether the umbrellas in Louis-Léopold Boilly’s Passer Payez, or Pay to Pass, from about 1803, are intended to provide shelter from rain or sun. However, the family shown are just about to pay the man at the far left, so that they can walk across the muddy street on the comfort of the wooden plank on which they’re standing. This spares them and their clothing a coating of mud from the street.

Umbrellas grew steadily in popularity in Paris, and the painting below, Paris Street, Rainy Day (1877), is probably the first masterpiece to show them in such widspread use. Gustave Caillebotte’s study for that finished work below has survived and is shown above.

As the rain continues to fall, all the larger figures in the painting are shown holding umbrellas, most of which are standard black.

Realist artists like Jean Béraud painted street scenes in the capital, in his case forming a Paris chronicle. Out in the provinces, painters like Nicolas Sicard were doing the same. Sicard’s Entrance to the Guillotière Bridge in Lyon (1879) captures the scene at rush hour on a wet day, as many are rushing around under the canopies of their umbrellas. Note how even the cab drivers are sheltering under umbrellas: those operating open cabs normally provided them for their passengers too.

Just before the Norwegian Naturalist Christian Krohg went to Grez-sur-Loing in France, he seems to have visited Normandy, where he painted this view of a Village Street in Normandy (1882). Its curved recession of umbrellas with disembodied legs is very unusual.

Edgar Degas’ superb narrative pastel painting Waiting (c 1882) shows two women sat side-by-side on a wooden bench in a corridor or similar area within the ballet of the Paris Opera. Sat to the right of the dancer is a woman wearing black street clothing, holding an unrolled black umbrella, and with black walking or working shoes. Degas here invites the viewer to speculate and to construct their own narrative.

Jules Bastien-Lepage’s brilliant protégé, the tragically short-lived Marie Bashkirtseff, featured an umbrella in this, one of her best portraits, The Umbrella (1883). This girl’s tenacious stare at the viewer quickly becomes quite unnerving, an effect enhanced by the severe black background of the umbrella that she is carrying.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s The Umbrellas from about 1881-86 is packed not only with people, but their umbrellas too. In parts they are so crushed together that the taller pedestrians are raising them high, to avoid bumping into others. Together they form a dark blue-grey band between the people below and the grey sky above.

Just over a decade later, the post-Impressionist Maurice Prendergast found another jostle of Umbrellas in the Rain (1899) when he was painting in Venice. Here they are of any colour but dark grey, and form a brilliant arc across the painting.

Christian Krohg’s later painting is a strange one-off: The Umbrella (1902), a view looking down from the window of a building, on a lone woman. She is walking up a rough earth track, strewn with rocks, in windy weather. Her umbrella has been blown out by a fierce gust.

My final painting of umbrellas used to shelter from rain is one of Nikolai Astrup’s early works: Farmstead in Jølster (1902). Two women, sheltering from the rain under black umbrellas, are walking up a muddy path which threads its way through the wooden farm buildings, guiding a young girl with them.

In the next article, I look at a selection of umbrellas used not to provide shelter from rain, but to provide shade when outdoors in fine weather.

The umbrella may now be most often used to shelter from rain, but historically its most sustained purpose has been to shelter from sun. Yesterday’s modest collection of paintings of umbrellas in the rain reflects the difficulty of making good paintings of wet conditions. It follows, then, that there are many more paintings showing umbrellas and parasols being used in fine and dry weather.

In complete contrast to the story of the umbrella in rain, its use in the fair weather of Europe has become a matter of fashion, as an accessory almost exclusively to shade women. I will here ignore its specialist applications in plein air painting and fishing.

Girolamo dai Libri’s Umbrella Madonna, or more prosaically titled Madonna Enthroned with Jesus between St. Joseph, St. Raphael the Archangel and Tobias from 1530, shows an intermediate step between the ecclesiastical umbraculum and an ornate parasol. The winged putto supporting the umbrella seems to be skewering it into the top of the Virgin’s throne, and Raphael the Archangel is wearing an ancient precursor of the modern printed T-shirt.

Umbrellas and parasols were adopted by many women of the nobility, as shown in Anthony van Dyck’s Portrait of Marchesa Elena Grimaldi Cattaneo from about 1623. The Marchesa was a Genoese aristocrat, whose appearance and deportment reinforce her status, from her matching scarlet cuffs to the gold braid around the lower edge of her underskirt.

When people started to gather on the beaches of Europe, it was only natural that the ladies should take their parasols with them. Eugène Boudin’s marvellous paintings of these incongruous soirées show participants seated on upright chairs, wearing heavy outdoor clothing, their parasols superfluous under the overcast sky at dusk – here in The Beach from 1864.

When Claude Monet’s family and friends took to The Beach at Trouville in 1870, they too brought their parasols. The woman on the left is thought to be Monet’s first wife Camille, and that at the right is probably Eugène Boudin’s wife. This was painted during the Monets’ honeymoon.

It also marks an interesting period of transition: Madame Boudin wears black and holds a black parasol, similar to those seen in her husband’s earlier beach scenes. Camille Monet wears white and holds a white parasol, attributes of the younger generation.

The following year, Jules Breton and his family spent much of the summer and autumn in their customary haunts in Brittany. Breton there painted his wife Élodie with a Sunshade, Baie de Douarnenez (1871), with its magnificent view over that bay to the low hill of Ménez-Hom in the far distance. Although Breton was closer to Boudin’s generation than that of Monet, his wife opted for a more modern look than that of Madame Boudin.

Camille Monet appears again in fashionable white, with a white parasol, in Monet’s La Promenade, or Woman with a Parasol, from 1875.

Édouard Manet’s portrait of Jeanne Demarsy in his Spring from 1881 shows this actress who lived from 1865-1937, and modelled for both Manet and Renoir. At the age of just sixteen, and here still aspiring to the stage, she wouldn’t have been seen dead with an old black parasol.

So far, these parasols and umbrellas have declared their roots in the umbraculum, with their lacy trimmings and plain fabrics. In the 1880s, a new fashion took Paris and the rest of Europe by storm: Japonisme.

In 1888, Olga Boznańska painted her sister in this Portrait of a Young Woman with a Red Umbrella, holding a brightly decorated east Asian parasol complete with its bamboo ribs.

John Singer Sargent’s model for his painting of her Morning Walk (1888) remained more conventional, though, and Sargent himself was never really smitten by Japonisme, despite the subtle references in his Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose of 1885-86.

A few years later, in 1892, Olga Boznańska painted this ingenious Self-portrait with a Japanese umbrella.

Victor Gabriel Gilbert’s undated Loving Flower Care was most probably painted at around this time, and features another Japanese parasol with more subtle colours than those of Boznańska. His model is hardly dressed for the task of gardening, though!

Paul Helleu’s wife Alice was his favourite model, and features in his very loose oil sketch in blue and white of Portrait of Mrs Helleu with an Umbrella (1899).

Several of the many sketches made by John Singer Sargent of his friends during their travels in the Alps and elsewhere include their white parasols, as in this Group with Parasols (A Siesta) from about 1905.

In Helleu’s panoramic view On the Beach from 1908, his model’s parasol reclines on its own, apparently deployed as a compositional device.

Joaquín Sorolla, another of the virtuoso painters alongside Sargent at the turn of the twentieth century, shows the white parasol as part of full dress for a formal promenade of the beach at Valencia, Spain, in his Strolling along the Seashore (1909).

William Orpen’s Midday on the Beach (1910) shows a British day out before the First World War, with lighter dress, parasols, and a large wicker hamper containing a packed lunch.

When crossing the Simplon Pass through the Alps, in The Tease (1911), Sargent’s friends still travelled in their voluminous dresses, hats, with a white parasol.

Meanwhile, down at the coast on Good Harbor Beach (1915) in Gloucester, MA, large brightly-coloured beach umbrellas had become a feature of a more modern beach scene, as painted by Louise Upton Brumback in her bold and crisp style.

Japonisme was not dead yet, though. Painted after 1915, Anna Ancher’s Young Woman in the Garden with an Orange Parasol shows an umbrella at least inspired by east Asian style, and once again bright in its colours.

My final example was painted in 1918, at the end of the First World War, far from the mud and blood of Europe’s battlefields. Colin Campbell Cooper’s Summer (1918) is inspired by Japonisme, fortified here by the east Asian influence of California, and by Monet’s paintings of his garden at Giverny.

One accessory with two contrasting purposes and histories, the umbrella lives on in the hands of many.