Theseus was the founder of the city of Athens, or perhaps more accurately the person responsible for its early development and growth, and Plutarch’s biography of him was selected for comparison with that of Romulus, the founder of the city of Rome.

Although not the first of the Lives to be written by Plutarch, its events predate all the others. It also presents Plutarch with some of the greatest difficulties in establishing fact. He writes at its start that he hopes to “succeed in purifying Fable, making her submit to reason and take on the semblance of History.”

Even before he starts his account of the life of Theseus, Plutarch makes clear that both Theseus and Romulus were far from perfect gentlemen, with a record of multiple rapes and worse. Yet, for a long time, the life of Theseus was as celebrated a series of myths as those of Heracles, Jason or Aeneas. In about 1340-41, Giovanni Boccaccio wrote a very long (almost 10,000 line) epic poem Teseida, or The Theseid, which in turn inspired The Knight’s Tale in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

Paolo da Visso (1431–1481) painted these three scenes from Boccaccio’s epic on the front of a cassone – the visual equivalent of Plutarch’s account of the adventures of Theseus.

Theseus was the result of the incestuous union of his father Aegeus, the king of a much smaller Athens, with his daughter Aethra. The king justified this with the cryptic words of the high priestess at Delphi, although no one else appears to have interpreted them in the same way. Aegeus then left a sword and a pair of sandals under a large rock, telling the pregnant Aethra that, should she bear a son, then the boy should travel to Aegeus with those items as proof of his identity.

In one of his rare collaborative paintings, Nicolas Poussin worked with Jean Lemaire to show the scene of Theseus Recovering his Father’s Sword (c 1638). They draw a marked contrast between the two actors: Theseus, destined to be a great hero, looks rough and brutish, whilst his mother Aethra wouldn’t look out of place standing in for the Madonna, perhaps.

Aethra told her son to take the sword and sandals to his father in Athens, travelling by sea, but he chose to travel overland instead. His inspiration for this was the adventures of Heracles.

Like his hero, Theseus had a series of adventures on this journey. He first killed Periphetes, who had wielded a large club at him; impressed by this club, he took it and killed another opponent, Sinis, raped his daughter and made her pregnant. Theseus went out of his way to meet the fearsome Crommyonian Sow, which he also killed. Coming to the borders of Megara, Theseus met Sciron, whom he threw down a cliff to his death, and killed another two people before coming to Athens.

Theseus found the city, and his father’s court, in disarray, with the king cohabiting with the sorceress Medea, who had promised to cure his lack of children. Aegeus was still unaware of Theseus’ true identity, but invited him to a banquet, at which Medea acting in conspiracy with the king tried to get Theseus to drink a goblet laced with the poison aconite.

Luckily for Theseus, just before he was going to drink from the goblet, he drew his father’s sword, making as if to carve the meat with it. Aegeus recognised the sword, realised that his guest who was just about to drink poison was his son, and knocked the goblet from Theseus’ hand to stop him from touching it with his lips.

In Antoine-Placide Gibert’s Theseus Recognised by his Father (1832), the three principal actors are arranged almost linearly across the canvas. Just left of centre, Theseus stands, his head in profile, the fateful cup in his left hand, and his father’s sword in his right. The king is just right of centre, looking Theseus in the eye, and appearing animated if not alarmed. At the far right is Medea, her face like thunder, sensing that her plot to kill Theseus is about to fall apart.

Hippolyte Flandrin’s Theseus Recognized by his Father (1832), which beat Gibert’s painting for the Prix de Rome, has a more neoclassical look, as if influenced by Jacques-Louis David. With a view of the Acropolis in the background, this shows the moment immediately after Aegeus has recognised his son, and the cup of aconite lies spilt on the table. Theseus, conspicuously naked, stands in the middle of the canvas, his father’s sword held rather limply in his right hand. Aegeus stands to the left of centre, talking to his son quite emotionally.

But of all the characters shown in this painting, it is Medea who is the most fascinating. Stood at the far left, she appears to be on her way out. She is po-faced, and looks as if she has come not from Greece, but from central Asia, perhaps.

Aegeus then declared Theseus to be his heir, and successor as King of Athens. This was opposed by the sons of Pallas, who tried to attack the city. Theseus was tipped off by one of their men, surprised his opponents, and killed them all. Like his hero Heracles, Theseus then set out to deal with the problem posed by the Marathonian Bull, captured it, and drove it through the city of Marathon before sacrificing it to Apollo.

Theseus’ greatest claim to fame was in killing another bull: the half-bull, half-human Minotaur which lived at the centre of the Labyrinth on the island of Crete. King Minos of Crete had been exacting a tribute of nine young men and nine maidens from Athens every nine years, who were taken to the Labyrinth and died there. On the third such call for eighteen of Athens’ finest, its citizens accused Aegeus of being its cause. Although a matter of dispute as to how he accomplished it, Theseus went to Crete as one of those eighteen.

Because the Athenians knew that their young people were not going to return, the ship which carried them to Crete had black sails. On this occasion, though, Theseus gave its crew a white sail, telling Aegeus and the crew that when they returned, if he had been successful in killing the Minotaur, they would set that white sail as a sign.

Gustave Moreau’s painting of Athenians Being Delivered to the Minotaur (1855) shows the victims as they were preparing to enter the Labyrinth. Wearing laurel wreaths to mark their distinction and sacrifice, the young men and women hold back while Theseus crouches, waiting to do battle with the beast, seen at the right.

Left to his own devices, Theseus’ chances were not good. However, Minos’ daughter Ariadne had fallen in love with him when she saw him compete in the funereal games which had preceded the act of sacrifice, and promised to assist in return for his hand in marriage afterwards. It was she who provided Theseus with a ball of thread which he deployed as he entered the Labyrinth, enabling him to retrace his steps once he had killed the Minotaur at its centre.

In Henry Fuseli’s spirited mixed-media sketch of Ariadne Watching the Struggle of Theseus with the Minotaur (1815-20), Theseus appears almost skeletal as he tries to bring his dagger down to administer the fatal blow, and Ariadne looks like a wraith or spirit.

Theseus, Victor over the Minotaur (c 1791) is one of only three paintings by Charles-Édouard Chaise known to survive. With its crisp neo-classical style, it shows Theseus standing in triumph over the lifeless corpse of the Minotaur. He is almost being mobbed by the young Athenian women whose lives he has saved. At the left, his thread rests on a wall by an urn, which suggests that the young woman by it may be Ariadne; she is being helped by a young man.

In the next article, I will conclude my summary of Plutarch’s biography of Theseus.

Reference

Whole text in English translation at Penelope.

In the first half of this summary of the biography of Theseus given in Plutarch’s Lives, I traced his story from birth to his killing of the Minotaur on the island of Crete. To accomplish the latter, he entered into a pact with Ariadne, daughter of King Minos, that they would marry.

There are conflicting stories as to what happened next, but Theseus and Ariadne departed from Crete, ending up on the island of Naxos, where Theseus abandoned her and sailed on. This has been depicted by many painters.

Lovis Corinth’s Ariadne on Naxos (1913) is one of his most sophisticated and masterly mythical paintings, inspired by the first version of Richard Strauss’s opera Ariadne auf Naxos (1912). The left third of the painting (detail below) shows Ariadne lying in erotic langour on Theseus’ left thigh. He wears an exuberant helmet, and appears to be shouting angrily and anxiously towards the other figures to the right.

John William Waterhouse paints the moment that Ariadne (1898) starts to wake, as Theseus’ ship has just sailed. As she hasn’t yet realised that she has been abandoned, she lies back at ease. On and under the couch are a couple of leopards, a clear reference to the imminent arrival of Dionysus, although his chariot is more usually drawn by lions or tigers.

Having called in briefly at Delos, Theseus and his ship returned to Athens. In their delight and celebration, though, they forgot to hoist the white sail to indicate accomplishment of their mission. Seeing their ship with its black sail still set, King Aegeus threw himself from a cliff in despair, and died.

Theseus’ return to Athens thus brought an odd mixture of celebration at his success, and lamentation at the death of Aegeus. Their ship was carefully preserved as a monument to Theseus’ accomplishment, and he set about transforming and growing the city by settling all the citizens of Attica in it. He promised government without a king, by means of democracy, making himself its commander in war and the guardian of its laws. He also had its currency struck into coins, and instituted the Isthmian (Olympic) Games.

Later, Theseus led a campaign into the Euxine Sea, where he took the Amazon leader Antiope captive, which led to the Amazons waging war on Athens. After three months of fighting, the sides agreed a peace treaty through Hippolyta.

Theseus had taken Antiope as his bride, and by her had a son named Hippolytus, or Demophoön. Antiope then died, and Theseus married Phaedra, who fell in love with her stepson Hippolytus, who had sworn to lead a chaste life so rejected his stepmother’s advances. Phaedra then wrote a note to Theseus claiming that Hippolytus had raped her and, in some versions, committed suicide.

Pierre-Narcisse Guérin’s Phaedra and Hippolytus of 1815 tells this story. An angry Theseus sits beside an alarmed Phaedra, on whose lap is a sword. Whispering secrets into Phaedra’s ear is her old nurse. At the left is Artemis, who holds up her left hand as if to stop Theseus’ thoughts.

Theseus must here be angry because of Phaedra’s lie about her rape by Hippolytus, and Artemis must be trying to tell him of Hippolytus’ chastity. Phaedra and her nurse must be discussing the situation, perhaps that Hippolytus has vowed not to reveal who told him of Phaedra’s love for him; the sword on Phaedra’s lap could perhaps be ready for her intended suicide.

Theseus became a close friend of Peirithoüs when the latter drove Theseus’ cattle away from Marathon; although the two looked as if they would come to blows, they ended up admiring one another’s boldness and swearing to friendship. When Peirithoüs married Deidameia, he invited Theseus to the wedding in the country of the Lapiths.

Unfortunately, Peirithoüs also invited some centaurs to the feast, and when they had too much to drink, they started to carry off the Lapith women. The Lapiths killed many of the centaurs on the spot; others died in the subsequent war between the Lapiths and centaurs. Theseus fought alongside the Lapiths both at the wedding and afterwards.

Peter Paul Rubens’ The Rape of Hippodame (Lapiths and Centaurs) (1636-38) shows an early part of the action at the wedding. At the right, Eurytus the centaur is trying to carry off Hippodame (Deidameia), 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 Lapith woman.

When Theseus was fifty, he became involved in what was, perhaps, his most disreputable act, the abduction and rape of Helen, the daughter of King Tyndareüs, and later best-known as Helen of Troy. She “was not of marriageable age” at the time.

Perhaps inevitably, Plutarch relates conflicting accounts. The version which Plutarch considers to be the most credible is that Theseus and Peirithoüs visited the temple of Artemis in Sparta, where they saw the young Helen dancing, abducted her, and fled the city. Once the two friends had left their pursuers behind them, they made a pact that one should have Helen as his wife, and would then help the other to get another wife.

They drew lots, and Theseus won the young Helen. He took her to his mother Aethra, and made a friend guard the two women in secrecy. Theseus then returned to Peirithoüs, to assist him in obtaining Cora, the daughter of the king of the Molossians. That went badly wrong, leaving Theseus a prisoner of the king, and Peirithoüs was killed by the king’s fearsome dog Cerberus.

Meanwhile, back in Athens, Helen’s brothers Castor and Pollux, the Dioscuri or Tyndaridae, were looking for their missing sister. At first, the Athenians rightly denied all knowledge of Helen, but one, Academus, had learned of her captivity, and told the Dioscuri of her whereabouts. Castor and Pollux took a force off to where Helen was being held by Theseus’ friend, killed many of their guards, and took Theseus’ mother and friend captive.

This rescue is shown well in the painting of Helen Delivered by Castor and Pollux which secured Léon Cogniet the Prix de Rome in 1817.

In return for her son’s offence, Aethra, mother of Theseus, was made a slave of Helen, and was not freed until after the fall of Troy many years later. Heracles visited the king of Molossia who was holding Theseus captive, and pleaded successfully for his release. Theseus returned to Athens, where he dedicated much of the city to Heracles in gratitude for his rescue.

Athens had changed a great deal since Theseus had last been there, and he was constantly under fire from dissenters. He therefore sent his children to Euboea, and travelled to the island of Scyros where his ancestors had held estates. Theseus applied to the king there to have those estates restored to him. Instead, that king took him up to a high point of those lands, threw Theseus down a cliff, and killed him.

Later, the high priestess at Delphi told the Athenians to locate Theseus’ remains and give them an honourable burial in Athens. This was done, and Theseus was commemorated on the eighth day of every month, eight being a good number as it is “the first cube of an even number and the double of the first square, fitly represents the steadfast and immovable power of this god, to whom we give the epithets of Securer and Earth-stayer.”

At the start of his biography of Theseus, Plutarch warned that he had raped women and worse. At a conservative estimate, Plutarch’s account credits Theseus with five murders of men and one of the Minotaur, and at least two rapes, and possibly one rape of a minor. He also duped Ariadne into what she thought would be marriage, abducted Antiope and possibly raped her, and seems to have been a serial bigamist with at least three other marriages to his name.

Such was the Greek hero of the time.

Reference

Whole text in English translation at Penelope.

Artists’ materials have been a major influence on the history of art. Impressionism couldn’t have followed the Renaissance, because the high chroma colours and portable painting kit simply weren’t available.

Painting centres on the application of pigments to the ground. Whatever the intent of the artist, what the viewer sees is determined by the painter’s skill in using and combining the right pigments. As pigments have changed, so art has been able to change.

I have previously looked at the effects of changing availability of pigments on the type, style, and look of paintings. This series looks at something complementary, but quite different: the history and use of different pigments, and the paintings in which they have been used.

Ultramarine is a well-known example. Once more expensive than gold, it was the ultimate deep blue pigment for several centuries. Its use determined the price of paintings, and its cost was often an extra specified in a commission and paid for separately by the customer. The colour of fine quality natural ultramarine dominates the look of many paintings of the Virgin and Child, and has come to be almost inseparable from that motif.

How do we know which pigments an artist used?

Most art materials, particularly pigments, have been the subject of instructional books, compilations of recipes for preparation and use, secrecy, and great speculation. As you will see in some of the articles, pigments have sometimes been claimed to have been used, but objective evidence of their use is either very limited, or lacking altogether.

Unless I indicate otherwise, where a specific pigment is reported as being used in a given painting, it means that conservation specialists have demonstrated its presence using specific and reliable techniques. The methods now include chemical analysis of paint samples, their examination under a microscope, X-ray diffraction, various forms of spectroscopy, X-ray and gamma-ray emission methods, even a Star Trek-like instrument known as XRF.

There are also written records, contemporary and later, by artists themselves, their assistants, and others who may be more of less familiar with the artist’s palette and techniques. Unfortunately, these are often much less reliable. Where it has been claimed that a particular painting was made using a pigment, but that is not currently supported by physical or chemical evidence of the presence of that pigment, I will make that clear, and where possible give the source of that claim.

References given for each article will take you to the technical source which I have used when compiling the article. These are normally chapters in the superb series Artists’ Pigments, A Handbook of their History and Characteristics, sometimes supplemented by others, such as detailed discussions of written records and other claims. If you want more information, please ask in a comment or send me an email.

References

Robert L Feller, ed (1986) Artists’ Pigments, vol 1, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 74 6.
Ashok Roy, ed (1993) Artists’ Pigments, vol 2, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 75 3.
Elisabeth West Fitzhugh, ed (1997) Artists’ Pigments, vol 3, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 76 0.
Barbara H Berrie, ed (2007) Artists’ Pigments, vol 4, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 23 4.
Margriet van Eikeina Hommes (2004) Changing Pictures, Discoloration in 15th-17th Century Oil Paintings, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 873 13239 5.

The first three volumes of Artists’ Pigments are available as free downloads (large PDFs) from:
Volume 1
Volume 2
Volume 3

Articles in Chromatic Order

11, The Forgotten Yellow of the Masters (lead-tin yellow)

From about 1300-1750.

3, A tale of two yellows, Indian and Chrome

Indian Yellow – used between about 1600-1910.

Chrome Yellow – used between about 1800-1900.

6, Arsenic, Orpiment and Realgar

Orpiment – used between about 1275-1890.
Realgar – used between about 1500-1800.

4, Vermilion, the red of heaven

Used between about 1300-1900.

8, Crimson, Madder and Alizarin

Madder Lake – between about 1450-1870.
Alizarin – from 1891 to the present.

1, Cobalt Blue, the 19th century sky

From about 1806 to the present.

7, Ground glass (Smalt)

From before 1500 to the present.

13, The first modern pigment, Prussian Blue

From 1710 to the present.

14, The blue from over the sea, Ultramarine

From about 1300 to the present.

9, Indigo the unreliable

From before 1450 to the present.

15, Poison Greens, Scheele’s and Emerald Greens – coming soon

5, Copper rust, Verdigris and Copper Resinate

Verdigris – used between about 1300-1850.

Copper resinate glaze – used between about 1400-1880.

2, Asphalt, an unfortunate habit

Used intermittently between about 1600-1900.

10, Blackest Black

From the dawn of painting to the present.

12, A white less toxic, Chinese white

From about 1780 to the present.

The war years were hard for Ferdinand Hodler. Ostracised by former friends and colleagues in Germany, after he criticised the bombardment of Reims, he travelled little outside Switzerland. His lover Valentine Godé-Darel was wasting away in front of his eyes, dying of cancer. But Hodler’s art continued to progress towards his vision of unity and harmony, and in these final years he painted some of the most sublime landscape works of the century.

Although some accounts portray Hodler’s last few years as being racked by illness and filled with depression, he actually seems to have weathered the challenges well, and far from his output or quality declining, his late works are among his best.

He documented the relentless decline in his lover’s health in a series of more than twenty harrowing paintings made in her home in Vevey, at the eastern end of the north shore of Lake Geneva, including this, of Valentine Godé-Darel One Day Before Her Death (1915). She finally died in January 1915.

Hodler then started to teach drawing at the École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva, which he continued until the middle of the following year.

In the summer of 1915, Hodler suffered from shortness of breath, and travelled to recuperate in the central French spa town of Néris-les-Bains. While there, he painted this Self-portrait at Néris (1915). It was to be the last time that he ventured outside Switzerland, and the first of a series of late self-portraits.

This undated Landscape of the Swiss Alps was probably painted before the First World War, but serves as a good reminder of the rhythm and symmetry which had come to dominate recent landscapes.

Now, in about 1915, he emphasised simplicity in his views of the Alpine peaks and ridges. His Summit in the Morning, from about 1915, demonstrates well how he discarded what he saw as unnecessary detail, to capture just the salient forms and colours.

He seems to have spent at least part of the summer of 1915 at Champéry, a village on the border of Switzerland and France, close to the spectacular ridges of the Dents du Midi and Dents Blanches. Mountain Stream Near Champéry (1916) appears to have been a more conventional painting made in front of the motif.

He seemed generally optimistic about his art and life, and in fair health, at the time. He wrote with characteristic modesty “I am starting to get a better grasp of the Alpine landscapes”, which must be the understatement of his career.

Hodler painted his more detailed and less simplified view of the ridge of The Dents Blanches in 1916, presumably during his time at Champéry, Switzerland.

Easily mistaken for a watercolour, the optical effect in Hodler’s Rising Fog Over the Savoy Alps, painted in the summer of 1917, heralds his change to extreme simplification, as the valley mist obliterates detail.

During that summer, Hodler had his largest one-man exhibition to date, with more than 600 works on display at the Kunsthaus Zürich. He wrote that he considered that he was finally getting closer to what he termed the “great unity” in his paintings – his aim of unity and harmony in his art, including, in his figurative work, the harmonies of mankind.

Another fine landscape from the summer of 1917 was The Grammont in the Morning Sun. This shows one of the highest peaks overlooking Lake Geneva on its southern shore, which rises to a summit of 2,172 metres (7,126 feet).

During the winter of 1917-18, Hodler’s health worsened considerably, but he continued to paint landscapes from the window of his room in Geneva, completing more than eighteen during these final months. Here I show three as examples.

In Lake Geneva with Mont Blanc by Morning Light (1918), one of the more complex paintings of this series, bands represent the lake shore, four different zones of the surface of the lake, the lowlands of the opposite bank, the mountain chains, and two zones of colour in the dawn sky. The lower section of the sky and the foreground shore echo in colour, and contrast in their pale lemon-orange with the blues of the other bands.

Lake Geneva with Mont Blanc in the Morning Light (1918) has a much simpler structure, with the water, a band of reflections, the mass of the far shore and mountains merged, and the dawn sky. The dominant colour is the yellow to pale red of the dawn sky and its reflection.

Lake Geneva with Mont Blanc in the (Red) Dawn Light (1918) is also simpler in its structure, with the water coloured by the sky, a zone of blue reflections of the far bank, the merged distant shore and mountains, and the sky.

In Hodler’s ultimate and most sublime landscapes, he has eliminated the unnecessary detail, stating just the elements of water, earth, air, and the fire of the rising sun, in their natural rhythm.

On 19 May 1918, Hodler died in Geneva, at the age of 65. He had painted around 600 landscapes.

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 most important event in 1893 for Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) was his meeting with the young Maria Boursin, in Montmartre. She lived under the name of Marthe de Méligny (1869-1942), and was first to model for Bonnard, then to become his partner for life. They didn’t marry until 1925, when he discovered her real name. At the time, she claimed to be sixteen, but if the year of her birth is correct, she would have been ten years older.

If Bonnard remains something of a mystery, Marthe was a closely-guarded secret.

Although Bonnard remained with the Nabis, he became a prolific oil sketcher, most particularly of scenes in and around Paris. Those sketches were controversial at the time, receiving quite a mixed reception, and more recently have been relatively ignored. In them we see the evolution of his mature style and some of his most important themes, so this article shows a selection drawn from a short period.

Bather (Bather near a Boat) (1893) is a quick oil sketch on paper in which his style is just starting to drift away from his earlier Nabi works. It is also one of his earliest paintings to evoke the feeling of the voyeur, as the viewer watches this naked woman descending a bank to bathe.

On the Boulevard (1893) is a dark sketch on cardboard of a street scene in Paris. There’s a crowd outside a café at the left, with some children standing at the edge of the pavement. Moving towards the viewer is a man pushing what is most probably a market barrow, in front of which a dog is sat in the road. Behind them is a horse-drawn cab, and in the background an enclosed carriage passes from right to left.

Three Ages (Maternity) (1893) is a Nabi treatment of a classical theme, with a newborn infant sat on its mother’s knee, and grandmother behind. Bonnard’s decorative effect on the mother’s dress is applied flat, rather than being projected over her 3D surface. This gives the painting the look of collage.

In his Woman Pulling on her Stockings (1893), Bonnard returns to his theme of the voyeur, watching his model (Marthe, perhaps?) dressing on the crumpled sheets of her bed. There may be little flesh exposed, but we are here witnessing something very private.

In 1894, Bonnard met Thadée Natanson and his wife Misia. Thadée had co-founded La Revue Blanche, an arts magazine which published writing by and aided the careers of Marcel Proust, André Gide, Octave Mirbeau, and others. He came from a wealthy banking family, and his wife Misia was to become Bonnard’s close friend, muse, and patron.

That year, The Nabis – Bonnard, Denis, Ibels, Ranson, Roussel, Félix Vallotton, and Vuillard – exhibited as a group in Paris.

Bonnard was by no means confined to the city of Paris, and continued to visit the area around his family’s country property in Le Grand-Lemps. Dauphiné Landscape (c 1894) is a vigorously-painted oil sketch of the countryside there, made on cardboard.

A Red Roof (1894) appears to be an even quicker oil sketch of the same view, this time with dense yellow flowers in the hedgerow of its foreground.

Back in the capital, On the Street, Woman with an Umbrella (1894) is another oil sketch on board. A woman in the foreground is handling her umbrella, as her two dogs with blue bows around their necks run around her. Behind her is an open carriage drawn by a single white horse, and in the background a second carriage passes by.

The Large Garden (1894-95) is one of his few larger studio works from this period, now in the Musée d’Orsay. It shows the large grassy orchard garden of a house in the country, possibly in the Dauphiné. As well as three children and the mother/housekeeper, there is a rich collection of domestic creatures. The woman has gathered in and folded white sheets, which have been drying on the fence which crosses the canvas.

The third child has been cropped as if at the edge of a photograph. This enhances the impression of her running briskly to the right.

In 1895, the dealer Ambroise Vollard commissioned Bonnard and other Nabis to make lithographs for albums. Just after Christmas, Bonnard and several other Nabis exhibited at the First Salon of Art Nouveau organised by Siegfried Bing.

Bonnard’s The Barrel Organ (The Organ Grinder) (1895) shows a familiar street scene from any town or city in Europe: a street musician playing a small hand-cranked pipe organ, which played set tunes automatically. A woman dressed in red is leaning down looking at him from the window above. These barrel organs remained quite a popular means of earning a living well into the late twentieth century.

The Carriage Horse (1895) is a literally brilliant exploration of light and shadow on the street. The sun is behind the viewer, shining brightly into the far side of the street and the cafés beyond. Close to the viewer, in the shadow cast by the buildings behind the viewer, is a woman holding an umbrella, and to her left the blinkered carriage horse of the title.

Bonnard’s indoor works were slower to evolve away from their Nabi beginnings. His Child Eating Cherries from 1895 is painted more sketchily, as with his street scenes, but he still uses collage-like decorative patterns to flatten the image, as in the boy’s check shirt.

Some of Bonnard’s quick oil sketches became quite cartoon-like, such as this group of half a dozen children On the Way to School, from 1895.

Woman at the Window (Among the Seamstresses) (c 1895) has little other than the suppressed patterning of its surfaces to refer back to his Nabi paintings. Two women, identified as seamstresses by Bonnard’s title rather than any real visual clues, sit by a window looking out into the street, although neither is actually looking out. The building on the other side of the road is very similar to that shown in The Barrel Organ above.

Finally, another voyeuristic view of a Woman Putting on Her Stockings from 1895 is even more likely to feature Marthe as its model, and is a more overt precursor to the many paintings that he was to make of her later.

At the end of 1895, Bonnard was busy preparing for his first solo exhibition, which was to open on 6 January 1896 at Durand-Ruel’s gallery in Paris.

References

Guy Cogeval and Isabelle Cahn (2016) Pierre Bonnard, Painting Arcadia, Prestel. ISBN 978 3 791 35524 5.
Gilles Genty and Pierrette Vernon (2006) Bonnard Inédits, Éditions Cercle d’Art (in French). ISBN 978 2 702 20707 9.

Rumours still abound as to the cause of Napoleon’s death almost two centuries ago. One theory – not currently in favour – is that he was poisoned by arsenic in the wallpaper. At the time, that would have been unusual, but by the 1860s, such deaths were significant enough to be reported in newspapers. Their ultimate cause was also one of the factors behind the success of Impressionist landscape painting: Emerald Green.

Getting a good range of green pigments was vital for landscape painting, and more generally for coloured commercial products such as wallpaper and clothing. The first of the ‘poison greens’ to be discovered was that named after Carl Wilhelm Scheele, the Swedish chemist who made it in 1775: copper arsenite, a highly toxic salt of arsenic. Soon after its introduction from about 1780, it became clear that it tended to darken with age, and the search began for a replacement.

Little attention has been paid to the use of Scheele’s Green, and it is not clear how widely it was used, or even when it was first used in painting.

JMW Turner’s early oil sketch of Guildford from the Banks of the Wey, painted in about 1805, has been found to contain Scheele’s Green. Given its range of greens, that could be quite extensive.

Wilhelm Sattler, a paint manufacturer in Schweinfurt, Germany, worked with Friedrich Russ to discover an even better arsenic compound for use as a colourant, and from 1814 Sattler’s company manufactured Schweinfurt or Emerald Green, the equally toxic copper acetoarsenite. Its alluringly brilliant green colour appears very stable, with only slight darkening resulting from reaction with hydrogen sulphide, which has been a common atmospheric pollutant.

By about 1830-32, when Turner painted Going to School, as an illustration for Rogers’s Poems, he had switched to using Emerald Green. That is obvious from its characteristic colour standing out from the small bag on the boy’s back.

Turner used Emerald Green again in this watercolour painting of Rouen, Looking Downstream from about 1832, here in combination with other pigments, so less brashly.

Concerns over the established toxicity of these two greens were raised by 1839, when warnings were first issued in Bavaria. Despite those, the use of Emerald Green became more widespread, and it was even ‘fixed’ to ball gowns using albumen or dextrin, which allowed its poisonous dust to brush free from the garment when dancing.

It became particularly popular, and insidiously toxic, in coloured wallpapers. When applied on damp walls (as were common at the time), fungal products could produce trimethyl arsine gas, which is thought to have been responsible for many of the symptoms and deaths which were reported.

Édouard Manet’s Music in the Tuileries (1862) is an unusual example of a painting which contains both Scheele’s and Emerald Greens. Manet used them in combination in two different glazes which he applied to the areas of foliage. In one transparent glaze, they are mixed with yellow lake, small amounts of ivory black, and yellow ochre; the other more opaque glaze consists of the two greens, with yellow ochre and white.

The last recorded use of Scheele’s Green was by Edwin Landseer in 1866.

The Impressionists relied heavily on Emerald Green for its brilliance and intensity of colour. Frédéric Bazille’s Self-Portrait with Palette (1865) shows some Emerald Green on his palette, squeezed out and ready to paint vegetation such as sunlit grass.

Claude Monet used Emerald Green among other green pigments and mixtures in his famous Bathers at la Grenouillère, painted in 1869. It has also been found widely in the landscapes of Cézanne, Gauguin, Pissarro and Vincent van Gogh.

By the late nineteenth century, concern over the consequences of using Emerald Green in household products had risen to the point where the pigment was banned in a succession of countries.

Paul Gauguin’s Arlésiennes (Mistral) (Old Women at Arles) (1888) uses Emerald Green for the band of bright green grass which sweeps up across the painting from the right. It is also mixed for the skin and hair of some of the figures, and in the foliage more generally.

Odilon Redon’s pastel painting of Sîta from about 1893 uses Emerald Green, Chrome Yellow and chalk in the prominent yellow-green halo surround the woman’s head. Working with soft pastels containing this pigment was particularly hazardous, because of the likelihood of inhaling their dust. At least today we have effective respiratory protection available.

During the twentieth century, genuine Emerald Green was withdrawn from use as a pigment, although it wasn’t completely discontinued until the 1960s. Since then, paints sold as being Emerald Green have contained alternatives which are far less toxic than the original pigment.

Emerald Green has been found in mixtures used by Paul Cézanne in the patches of vegetation in his huge The Large Bathers (1906). Alongside Lead White, Vermilion and Ultramarine Blue, this pigment appears to have been among the most frequently used by Cézanne.

Childe Hassam’s watercolour of White Mountains from Poland Springs from 1917 is one of the last major paintings which appears to have relied on Emerald Green. Its use in the meadow in the foreground is perhaps the pigment’s last brash farewell.

Reference

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

One century ago today, the Swiss artist Ferdinand Hodler, died in Geneva.

He was Switzerland’s first great modern painter, who remained and worked in his home country but created art which reached far beyond its borders. Most other major Swiss painters have either not achieved much of an international reputation, or have spent a lot of their careers outside Switzerland. Examples of the latter include Jean-Etienne Liotard, Henry Fuseli (who even changed his name from Johann Heinrich Füssli), Charles Gleyre, Arnold Böcklin and Alberto Giacometti.

Hodler’s early paintings were landscapes after the strict realist style of Alexandre Calame, and sold to tourists. They show his technical skills – here at the age of only 18, before he had received much formal tuition.

Most famous now for his symbolist figurative paintings, he was also a prolific landscape artist who showed how that genre can break away from slavishly copying from nature.

As his art matured, he developed a fascination for rhythm and symmetry in nature, and in human society. These became central and enduring themes in his mature and late figurative and landscape painting.

Some of his figurative works used multiple images of models arranged to provide rhythm, and carefully ordered so as to maintain symmetry. Hodler saw these as reflecting the inner harmonies and unity in humans and society, and termed this Parallelism.

He had a particular fondness for views over Lake Geneva looking at the far shore and the distant mountains. Although he painted a wide range of motifs in and around the Alps, it was Lake Geneva to which he kept returning.

Hodler’s figures are shown in movement and postures which reflect a kinesthetics, most probably that of eurhythmics, which was being developed by Émile Jacques-Dalcroze at the Conservatoire in Geneva from 1892. This involves musical expression through movement, and is now known as Dalcroze Eurhythmics.

Early in the twentieth century, rhythm and symmetry started to dominate many of his landscapes too.

Later figurative work in easel paintings tended to show single figures or pairs, with variations based on one woman dressed in blue, as shown here, or a young girl and older boy from Spring.

Hodler’s late landscapes moved away from rhythm and symmetry, and he started to simplify, discarding what he considered to be unnecessary detail.

Hodler painted a succession of very large murals inside public buildings in Switzerland and Germany, including Unanimity, which he completed in 1913, in the New Town Hall in Hannover, Germany. These were particularly popular during his lifetime.

After painting a harrowing series of works documenting the illness and death of his lover in early 1915, Hodler concentrated on landscapes. In his final few months he achieved sublime simplicity in a series of views over Lake Geneva.

Inevitably, there are those who claim that Hodler’s late work was a forerunner of abstract painting. Throughout his career, though, he painted his representations of the figures and landscapes in front of him. Far from being abstract, Hodler expressed what he saw as the deeper truth and the inner unity of the world around him.

Hodler’s paintings are some of the most fascinating and enduring visual art created after Impressionism.

Articles in this series

Early Realism, to 1885
Transition, 1886-94
Distant mountains, 1895-1902
View to Infinity, 1903-1906
Rhythmic Landscapes, 1906-1910
Unanimity and Change, 1911-1914
Death and Eternity, 1915-1918

Related artists

The Awe of the Alps: Alexandre Calame 1
The Awe of the Alps: Alexandre Calame 2
Emil Orlík: the artist who didn’t start hodlering
Albin Egger-Lienz: early Naturalism, 1887-1903
Albin Egger-Lienz: Work and War, 1904-1926
In Memoriam Gustav Klimt, 1862-1918
Gustav Klimt’s colleagues: paintings of the Vienna Secessionists

Reference

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

In the early years of the twentieth century, the Austrian artist Albin Egger-Lienz (1868–1926) had several influences, including the social realism of Millet, and the great Swiss artist Ferdinand Hodler.

Egger-Lienz followed Hodler’s example and moved steadily away from his earlier strict realism, but continued to paint the country people of the Austrian Tyrol. He now concentrated on their often arduous work.

Woodcutters (1906-08) shows a theme common to Hodler, but painted in Egger-Lienz’s new earth palette, with the figures and trunks outlined.

The figure of The Sower re-appeared, here in a version for which I have no date. It appears, though, to have been painted in some form of pastel, with a limited earth-based palette.

Reapers I (1907) seems to have been inspired by Hodler’s paintings of reapers, and is surprisingly colourful for this period of Egger-Lienz’s career.

Egger-Lienz was an accomplished painter of portraits, and his brilliant Portrait of Lorli from 1907 shows his own daughter, who was seven at the time.

He travelled extensively in Austria during the period before the First World War. In 1908, he finally joined the Vienna Secession.

Egger-Lienz’s agricultural workers were not always at work. In his Lunch (The Soup II) (1910), the four working men in a family sit down to eat a minimal meal of soup in the middle of the day, before returning to the fields.

His full-length portrait of a Husband and Wife (1910) follows similar conventions to Naturalist portraits, in placing its subects against a non-decorative, almost ‘clinical’ background, in their quest for objectivity.

In 1911, Egger-Lienz had been expected to be appointed as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, but was blocked by the heir to the throne. Instead, the following year he was appointed professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Weimar.

The two labourers shown in Egger-Lienz’s Reapers in a Gathering Storm (c 1912) are desperately continuing with their work before they have to seek shelter from the torrential rain which will shortly fall from the black clouds behind them.

Two Reapers reappeared in another colourful work from 1913.

Shortly before the start of the First World War, Egger-Lienz moved to a village just over the border from Austria into Italy, near the town of Bolzano. He also met Ferdinand Hodler, whose influence proved important to his later work.

In 1915, Egger-Lienz was drafted into the military, and was initially put to work as an artistic advisor. Although I have been unable to discover anything more of his war record, he appears to have served as a war artist, thereby gaining first hand experience of the horrific carnage which was taking place at the front lines. Unsurprisingly, this changed his art permanently.

Totentanz (Dance of Death) IV (1915) is a motif which he painted in several different versions, showing the skeletal figure of death walking out with three men armed with hefty clubs and other weapons. This version was made using casein paint, which uses milk protein as its binder. This was and remains an unusual choice of medium for a fine art painter, but was in wider use among illustrators.

Egger-Lienz’s lithograph of 1915, produced in that year, presents a disturbing vision of the organised thuggery of combat.

Then in Die Namenlosen (The Nameless) from 1916, those troops crouch among low mud ridges as they try to move forward under enemy fire. The man in the centre is already bleeding from a wound in his left thigh, and has splashes of blood on his left arm.

Finale (1918) shows the end, with a pile of mangled and contorted bodies in a trench.

After the war, Egger-Lienz was offered a professorial post at the Vienna Academy, but turned it down, preferring to continue living in South Tyrol.

Egger-Lienz was one of the few war artists to draw attention to the wives and mothers who had to work on in the countryside during and after the war. His War Women (1918-22) is particularly moving, showing a group of women who had, like so many, lost their menfolk, either to the carnage of the battlefield, or in the influenza pandemic which followed.

Egger-Lienz also appears to have been influenced here by Cubism, with a planked floor which seems to be anything other than flat, and variable perspective projection across the painting.

In Mothers (1922-23), Egger-Lienz has revisited the crucifixion narrative, with a young mother and her swaddled infant referring to the nativity.

Boy at the Spring (1923) shows a peasant boy lying to lick and suck up the last few drops of water from a feeble spring.

In 1925, his work was shown at the Venice Biennale, where it was acclaimed. Following that success, he had a solo exhibition in the Vienna Künstlerhaus.

Egger-Lienz’s last major project was an even more disturbing portrait of The Family, for which this is a study made in 1925-26. He did add facial details in the finished work.

Egger-Lienz died on 4 November 1926 near Bolzano. He was only 58. His paintings of the First World War remain some of its most important images. If only the world had heeded them.

The early history of the city of Rome is shrouded in myth. Although there is consensus that twin brothers Romulus and Remus played a key part, Plutarch admits that some ancient authorities didn’t even believe that the city was named after Romulus, let alone acknowledge his existence. He opens his biography of Romulus with a short review of different accounts of the origin of the name Rome, before telling the story with the widest credence, about the twin brothers.

If there was a Roman counterpart to Theseus, in his role as the developer of Athens, it’s most likely to be Romulus. Although he doesn’t seem to have engendered the same cult following as Theseus, Romulus was revered by the Romans, and well into more modern times. The three Carraccis, Ludovico (cousin), Annibale and Agostino (brothers), told his story in a magnificent series of frescoes which they painted on the walls of the Palazzo Magnani in Bologna, Italy, between 1589 and 1592, two of which I show below.

Aeneas, survivor of the fall of Troy, became king of the Latins and went on to found the city of Alba; his descendants ruled in their turn, until it came to the brothers Numitor and Amulius. They divided their inheritance, with Amulius taking the treasure which had been brought by Aeneas from Troy, and Numitor ruling Alba. Amulius then used his wealth to wrest the throne from Numitor; to ensure that Numitor’s daughter couldn’t produce any male heirs, Amulius made her a priestess of Vesta, so she was sworn to remain a virgin.

Soon after that, Numitor’s daughter was discovered to be pregnant. Although this traditionally would have led to the death of any Vestal Virgin, Amulius’ daughter interceded, and she was merely kept in solitary confinement. She gave birth to twin boys, who were superhuman in their size and beauty. Amulius ordered one of his servants to take the twins away and drown them in the river, but they were put first into a trough which functioned as a boat. As a result they were washed ashore downstream still alive.

A she-wolf then fed the babies, and a woodpecker watched over them; both were later considered to be sacred to the god Mars.

One of the frescoes in the Palazzo Magnani, probably painted by Ludovico Carracci and/or Annibale Carracci, shows the She-Wolf Suckling Romulus and Remus (1589-92). The twins are still inside the trough in which they had survived their trip down the river, and on the opposite bank a woodpecker is keeping a close watch.

At the far right, a now rather diaphanous figure may be Faustulus, one of Amulius’ swineherds who discovered the twins, and took them to his wife.

Peter Paul Rubens shows Romulus and Remus being discovered by Faustulus in his painting of 1615-16. Not only is the she-wolf taking care of the twins, but a family of woodpeckers are bringing worms and grubs to feed them, and there are empty shells and a small crab on the small beach as additional tasty tidbits. Rubens also provides a river god and water nymph as guardians.

Nicolas Mignard shows The Shepherd Faustulus Bringing Romulus and Remus to His Wife (1654), in which Faustulus has become a keeper of sheep rather than swine, and his extended family appears most welcoming.

Romulus and Remus, as they were now named, were brought up without Amulius’ knowledge. Although both remained large and fine specimens of humans, Plutarch tells us that it was Romulus who appeared to have the better judgement, and behaved in a more commanding way. As they grew older, the brothers became renowned for their hard work and good deeds.

Their early life was not without further incident, though. When Romulus was busy with a sacrifice, Numitor’s herdsmen captured Remus and handed him over to Numitor. The latter recognised that Remus was special, and Remus in turn was open with Numitor over his mysterious origins. As a result, Numitor decided to talk to his daughter in secret, to try to determine whether the twins might have been hers.

Faustulus, their adoptive father, tipped Romulus off, and he went to Numitor with the trough in which the two had been carried downriver when babies. One of Numitor’s guards recognised the trough, and it became more widely suspected that Romulus and Remus were the grandsons of Numitor. Amulius raised a small force to try to deal with the developing crisis, but Remus incited revolt in the city, and Romulus attacked at the same time. Amulius was seized and killed.

Numitor was restored to the throne, Alba returned to order, and the twins’ mother was released and paid the respect she had been due.

Romulus and Remus then set out to found their own city, which they intended to populate with the slaves and other outcasts from Alba. The brothers couldn’t agree on its site, though, so decided to settle the matter by ‘the flight of birds of omen’: Remus said that he saw six vultures, but Romulus won with a claim of twelve, which was a lie.

When Remus discovered his brother’s deceit, Romulus was busy digging a trench for the city’s walls. Remus ridiculed his brother’s work, got in his way, and finally leapt across the trench, which triggered a battle between them, involving their supporters. Remus, their adoptive father Faustulus, and others were killed, and some claim that it was Romulus who killed his own brother.

After burying his brother, Romulus started to build the city of Rome.

He yoked a plough with a bronze ploughshare to a bull and a cow, and drove a deep furrow around the city’s boundary. This is shown in Annibale Carracci’s fresco in the Palazzo Magnani of Romulus Traces the Boundaries of Rome (1589-92). The bronze ploughshare is at the left, being fixed to a wheeled plough, with Romulus at the right, ready to lead the bull and cow around the boundary.

When the city was complete, Romulus took charge and formed legions from its male population, set up a senate consisting of one hundred patrician councillors, and brought order. There was only one problem, though: its inhabitants were almost entirely male. I will conclude this summary of Plutarch’s life of Romulus in the second article, which starts with the shocking solution to that, the abduction of the Sabine women.

Reference

Whole text in English translation at Penelope.

With the newly-founded city of Rome built and populated by the slaves and outcasts from Alba, it faced a serious problem: its inhabitants were almost entirely male, and were in desperate need of wives.

Plutarch’s account of the solution, the abduction (or rape) of a group of Sabine women, makes it clear that this was a planned and calculated act by Romulus. First, rumours were spread that an altar had been discovered hidden underground. Romulus then decreed that this would be celebrated with games and festivities, as well as sacrifices, which were attended by many from a neighbouring and friendly tribe, the Sabines.

When Romulus gave the signal at the celebrations, armed Romans rushed in, put the Sabine men to flight with their swords, and abducted their women. Plutarch reports the number of women taken by the Romans was between thirty and 683, all of whom were maidens, with the notable exception of one married woman, Hersilia, who was apparently captured by mistake (really?!).

The ‘rape of the Sabine women’ has become one of the great motifs in painting, a set piece on a grand scale with many figures and rapid action in a classical setting. Nicolas Poussin painted two versions which survive, the earlier of which is his Abduction of the Sabine Women from about 1634-35, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

A bearded Romulus stands, other dignitaries behind him, at the left, watching the scene below. Assorted Romans are there carrying off young Sabine women, whose arms are raised in protest. In the foreground is a woman with her two young babies and an old nurse, who is most probably Hersilia, although her abduction appears quite deliberate. Swords are raised in the air behind, as the Romans chase Sabine men away from their daughters.

The Sabines demanded that Romulus returned their women, disavowed the shameful act, and made peace. He refused, making a counter-demand that the Sabines should allow their marriage to Romans. The two sides prepared for war.

Before they could join in battle, though, Acron king of the Caeninenses led his army against Rome. Acron and Romulus met outside the city, and agreed to settle the matter between themselves, rather than with their forces.

Before the fight, 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’ painting of Romulus’ Victory over Acron (1812) shows him doing just that, as he carries Acron’s golden suit of armour in the first Roman-style ‘triumph’. In the background, Acron’s city is in flames, and his army annihilated in the battle that ensued.

Romulus invited the defeated Caeninenses to join the Romans in their new city, which many did. Afterwards, other neighbouring tribes challenged Romulus, and each was defeated, their lands and people being absorbed into Rome.

Eventually, the Sabines were ready for war under their king and general Tatius, who led them in their march against Rome. Their task wasn’t easy, as in those days its citadel was on the Capitol hill, a strongpoint for defence. The captain of the guard there had a daughter named Tarpeia. In return for the golden armlets which Sabine warriors wore on the left arm, Tarpeia betrayed the city of Rome by leaving its gates open at night, allowing the Sabines to enter.

As the Sabines swarmed in, Tatius told them to leave what they carried on their left arm with Tarpeia. As they also carried their shields, many misunderstood the command, and Tarpeia was buried under so many shields and golden armlets that she was crushed to death. She was buried where she fell, and that became known as the Tarpeian Rock. It was the place from which traitors and other enemies of Rome were thrown to their death.

With the Sabines in possession of the Capitol, Romulus challenged them to fight. There followed a series of indecisive battles, until Romulus was struck on the head by a rock, and his troops started to retreat to the Palatine hill. He had just regained order and commanded his forces to stand and fight, when the abducted Sabine women invaded the battlefield.

That is the remarkable scene depicted in Jacques-Louis David’s The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799), which is sometimes mistakenly assumed to show an event immediately following their abduction.

Looming over the city is the rugged Tarpeian Rock, where the traitorous Tarpeia had just been buried. Highlighted in her brilliant white robes in the foreground, and separating two of the warriors, is the daughter of Tatius, Hersilia, whom Romulus had married. The warriors are, of course, her father and her husband, and the infants strategically placed by a nurse between the men are the children of Romulus.

Guercino’s Hersilia Separating Romulus and Tatius (1645) concentrates on the three figures of Tatius, Hersilia, and Romulus, and tucks the rest of the battle away in the distance behind them.

Plutarch summarises the Sabine women’s words as beginning “with argument and reproach”, and ending “with supplication and entreaty”. These forced a truce, allowing the women to bring food and water to those who needed them, and to tend the wounded.

When negotiations were completed, the women were allowed to continue to live with their husbands if they wished, and they were freed from all work other than spinning. Rome became a joint city of the Romans and Sabines, with Romulus and Tatius its joint sovereigns.

One hundred Sabines were added to the patricians, and a code of conduct with women was introduced. The latter included men giving women the right of way when walking, and not uttering indecent words in the presence of a woman. The new Roman forces adopted Sabine armour, including their rectangular shields, in place of the earlier circular ones.

Tatius was later killed by the relatives of some ambassadors who had been killed by robbers, leaving Romulus as the sole king of Rome. When a plague bringing sudden death was affecting the Romans, they were attacked by the people of Cameria. Romulus defeated them, and once again they were used to augment the population of Rome, and to increase its territory. This was repeated with the Fidenae, but in their case Romulus was unable to achieve a victory over them, and arranged peace instead.

When the grandfather of Romulus, King Numitor of Alba, finally died, Romulus inherited his throne. He tried appointing an annual ruler for that city, and encouraged Rome to adopt a similar system. This brought suspicion and opposition, in the midst of which Romulus, then aged fifty-four, suddenly disappeared.

Plutarch gives various accounts as to how Romulus could have vanished, including claims that he was murdered and his body dismembered and dispersed.

The story which remains strongest in the myths about Romulus is that of his apotheosis, painted here by Jean-Baptiste Nattier in his Romulus being taken up to Olympus by Mars from about 1700. Mars is embracing Romulus, with the standard of Rome being borne at the lower left, and the divine chariot ready to take Romulus up to the upper right corner, where the rest of the gods await him.

Comparing Theseus with Romulus

Plutarch warned us at the start of his biography of these two founding fathers of great cities and nations that they were far from being perfect gentlemen.

Had Theseus wished, he could have ruled Troezen, and it was his choice to embark on the course that he did. He had other options which would have spared him killing the robbers and others than he met on his first journey to Athens. Romulus, though, was driven from fear to kill the tyrannical Amulius, king of Alba.

Theseus accomplished many daring deeds: his battle against the Centaurs, campaign against the Amazons, and most notably his courage in killing the Minotaur.

Plutarch stresses how Romulus rose from the humblest of beginnings, as the adopted son of a swineherd. Although there is uncertainty as to whether it was he who killed his brother Remus, Romulus saved his mother’s life and restored his grandfather to the throne.

It was Theseus’ neglect that led to his father’s suicide, and his conduct with women was inexcusable. Plutarch lists his abduction or rape of Ariadne, Antiope, Anaxo of Troezen, and finally Helen when she was still a child and Theseus was too old for lawful marriage. The only reason for these was the “lustful wantonness” of Theseus the man.

The abduction of the Sabine women was perhaps the worst of Romulus’ deeds of violence and injustice. But Plutarch finds mitigations for this act, and claims that it resulted in stable marriages and the union of the Roman and Sabine peoples.

Finally, Plutarch recalls the support given the two men by the gods: Romulus “was preserved by a signal favour of the gods”, while the very birth of Theseus “was not agreeable to the will of the gods” – quite a damning conclusion.

Reference

Whole text in English translation at Penelope.

For Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947), 1896 was a momentous year. On 6 January, his first solo exhibition opened at Durand-Ruel’s gallery in Paris. His forty-nine paintings, posters, and a screen were positively reviewed by critics such as Gustave Geffroy, but described as “hideous” by Impressionists such as Camille Pissarro.

He exhibited again that year in Brussels, at the successor to the Salon of the XX, and at the thirteenth and final exhibition of the Nabis.

Bonnard’s Views of Paris (c 1896) turns its board into a small screen for three separate scenes from the streets of the city. Each is viewed from a high point such as the window of an upstairs room. At the left is a view along a narrow cul-de-sac. In the centre is a bustling broader street near an intersection, with a market barrow and several carriages. At the right is a view of families in one of the city’s parks.

Rue Tholozé or Montmartre in the Rain (1897) shows one of the streets at the heart of Montmartre in Paris, not far from the famous Sacré-Coeur. Seen from the third or fourth floor, it’s a grey and wet evening in which the lights of the windows provide a pervasive warm glow.

Narrow Street in Paris (c 1897) is another aerial view of a narrow and bustling backstreet.

In 1898, Bonnard illustrated a serialised novel, published in Natanson’s La Revue Blanche. Renoir wrote that he found those illustrations “utterly exquisite”.

Bonnard painted various sidewalk scenes in Paris, such as this view of a Café Terrace from 1898.

Le Grand Boulevard (c 1898) is one of at least two versions of this motif, seen from closer to the ground.

In 1898, Bonnard painted the first of his controversial works revealing his private life with Marthe, in Man and Woman in an Interior (1898), a motif known better from his later version of 1900. He stands naked, looking away, as Marthe is getting dressed on the bed. Its post-coital implications are clear. The image has also been cropped unusually, as if it was a ‘candid’ photo, which enhances its voyeuristic appearance.

In the Spring of 1899, Bonnard visited Venice and Milan, in company with Vuillard and Ker-Xavier Roussel.

Bonnard’s Paris concentrates on the street life away from its most famous landmarks, but his view of The Arc de Triomphe from about 1899 is an exception. Even here, though, the arch is quite far into the distance, dominated by the trees to the right, and figures on the sidewalk.

He continued to paint occasional country landscapes, such as Dauphiné Landscape (c 1899), which was most probably made when he was visiting his family’s country house in Le Grand-Lemps. This was painted during the late summer, with the harvest under way in the closest field.

Neither had Bonnard cast aside his Japonisme. Flowered Branches (c 1899) is painted as if it was a hanging silk scroll or a panel from a screen, with the popular Japanese Spring motif of the blossom on trees.

Most of Bonnard’s indoor paintings at this time showed meals or tables set for eating. The Lamp (c 1899) is unusual for its chiaroscuro lighting and his detailed depiction of the reflection on the globe below the light.

A mother, cropped at the left edge, is sat with her child at the dining table. Another figure is lost in the darkness to the right of the lamp, and at the right edge there is a large cat sat on the table. Above the bowls of fruit, other food, and two wine bottles is an ornate lamp which rises to a green shade cropped through at the top.

Set between four ornamental scrolled arms is a reflective near-sphere. Its reflection shows two of the arms, one of the bottles of wine, and the bowl of fruit on the white tablecloth.

Following from Man and Woman in an Interior, Bonnard’s first painting of Marthe nude is this study for Indolence made in about 1899.

The finished work, Woman Dozing on a Bed or Indolence of 1899, shows Marthe lying relaxed on a double bed. As with Man and Woman in an Interior, the implication is that this is post-coital.

Marthe lies with her right hand tucked behind her neck and her left hand below her right breast. As her right foot dangles off the side of the bed, her left almost grips her lower right thigh, spreading her legs and exposing her sex. A brown blanket lies at the foot of the bed, it and the sheet wrinkled where the couple had been in bed together. The artist makes his presence known by wisps of blue smoke from his pipe, which are scattered around the edges of the painting.

In just two years, Bonnard and Marthe have shared with us some of the most intimate moments of their life. And that was only the start.

References

Guy Cogeval and Isabelle Cahn (2016) Pierre Bonnard, Painting Arcadia, Prestel. ISBN 978 3 791 35524 5.
Gilles Genty and Pierrette Vernon (2006) Bonnard Inédits, Éditions Cercle d’Art (in French). ISBN 978 2 702 20707 9.

If you have ever enjoyed a cold Tuborg beer, you may be familiar with this classic poster advertising it. It is now the only well-known work by the Danish ‘social realist’ painter Erik Henningsen (1855–1930). This article looks at some of his other surviving work, which may not quench the same thirst, but was far more important at the time.

Henningsen was born in Copenhagen, and his potential recognised early. His father, a grocer, had him apprenticed to a decorative painter, and he had private drawing lessons too. As a result, he was successful in being admitted to the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1873. He graduated from there in 1877, and pursued a career as an illustrator as well as a painter.

During the 1880s, he was a member of a group of realist artists who tried to encourage debate through their art, in the hope of creating a better society.

His first major painting appears to have been this, with the enigmatic title of Summum jus, summa injuria. Infanticide (1886). The Latin quotation comes from Cicero’s De Officiis I, 33, and literally means the highest law, the greatest injustice. It is a warning still used that strict application of rights and the law carries the danger of doing some people a huge injustice, and Henningsen’s narrative is an important example of a serious social and legal problem at the time.

Two labourers are digging a small pit at the side of a track across sand dunes. They are supervised by two policemen, one of whom keeps a written record. Behind and to the right is another policeman who holds a young woman by the elbow. She looks down as she is petting a dog.

The subtitle provides the clue as to what is going on. The labourers are trying to find the body of a baby, who is the subject of a police investigation. The young woman is the child’s mother – unmarried, she had the baby in secret, smothered it at birth, and disposed of its body. She knows that if her baby is discovered, her punishment will be severe. But this was the only course open to her, as having a baby out of wedlock was against accepted religious and moral standards of the day.

The following year, Henningsen courted less controversy with his Farmers in the Capital (1887). This shows a country family who have arrived in Copenhagen, complete with a large chest and their farm dog. Around them city-dwellers dress more fashionably, and stare at the outsiders with their rough clothing and filthy wooden clogs.

The Dance Pavilion from 1891 show a festival of social awkwardness, a summer’s evening dance, with its curious mixture of participants. The backgrounds of each are revealed by the style of their clothes: young women from the country still wear dull-coloured shawls and aprons, while the more sophisticated wear fashionable dresses and exuberant hats.

In the left background is a carriage and pair of horses driving past, the coachman wearing a top hat with tails, and his passengers dressed up in their finest.

Evicted from 1892 returns to a theme more appropriate to ‘social realism’, as a family of four is evicted into the street in the winter snow. With them are their meagre possessions, including a saw suggesting the father may be a carpenter. In the background he is still arguing with a policeman.

In An Injured Worker (1895), Henningsen tackles another major social issue. The scene is a gravel or sand pit outside a town (in the distance at the right). A worker has been injured there, and is being carried away on a stretcher. By his side is his wife, who is in tears and being comforted by one of her husband’s managers. Behind and to the left are a policeman, and a doctor who wears a top hat and is wiping his hands after dressing the man’s wounds.

Henningsen’s realism was appreciated by institutions such as the University of Copenhagen. In 1895, he completed a mural in the Aula of that university showing a major international event, The Nordic Natural Science Research Meeting 14 July 1847. Presiding was the great Danish physicist and chemist Hans Christian Ørsted, who was nearly seventy at the time.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, socialism and other radical movements swept across Europe and the Nordic countries. In An Agitator (1899), Henningsen shows one of the many campaigners of the day standing and trying to move the crowd in front of him. Interestingly the audience here appears drawn from across society, and not just from men of the working class.

Mounted police are present to ensure that nothing gets out of hand.

Henningsen’s poster of The Thirsty Man was his submission in Tuborg’s 1900 competition to celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary. Surprisingly, it was unsuccessful, and the prize of 10,000 Danish Kroner was awarded elsewhere. However, it was this poster which was actually used to advertise Tuborg’s beers, and which remains in use well over a century later.

Henningsen returned to social issues in this painting of another family set out in the street with their possessions, this time the result of The Fire (1901). As firemen continue to damp down the blaze in a house, in a country town, two children comfort one another on their salvaged bed. Behind them their mother is pointing accusingly at an older, well-dressed man, who appears to be to blame for their predicament.

Bystanders from the rest of the street stand back watching from the other side of the road.

Henningsen also painted some conventional history paintings, and in the twentieth century apparently turned to genre scenes of the bourgeoisie, but this series of ‘social realist’ or Naturalist works puts him alongside the likes of Christian Krohg, and the many French artists who followed the lead of Jules Bastien-Lepage in the 1880s and 1890s. Yet I haven’t seen Henningsen or his paintings included in accounts of Naturalism in Europe or the Nordic countries.

It’s curious that so many of the most frequently and extensively used pigments are also the most poisonous. Not only have painters been dicing with death in using lead white, but for many centuries they used another highly toxic lead salt, lead tetroxide, or Red Lead, albeit in smaller quantities.

Red Lead was also one of the earliest synthetic pigments. Although it does occur as a natural mineral, it was probably being made from Lead White about two thousand years ago, in both Europe and China.

One of the earliest examples of oil painting in Europe, the Altar Frontal of the ancient Norwegian church of Tingelstad dating back to 1275-1300, has been found to contain Red Lead. This is a modern full reconstruction, which suggests quite extensive use.

Even older European examples include some of the Roman Fayum funerary portraits, which were made in the period 100-400 CE.

As a pigment in most painting media, Red Lead is usually an orange red in colour. When used in fresco or watercolour, it tends to blacken over time, or to develop a dull, chocolate brown hue, probably from its conversion to brown lead dioxide. Used in the drying oils of oil paint, it has generally proved more stable, although it may form lead soaps in the paint layer, which can in turn be associated with structural weakness.

In the early Renaissance, Red Lead was already established as one of the fundamental reds of the tempera palette. This is shown well in the extensive brighter reds of Spinello Aretino’s Virgin Enthroned with Angels from about 1380.

Paolo Uccello also used it in his masterpiece Niccolò Mauruzi da Tolentino at the Battle of San Romano from about 1438-40, where it appears in the bright orange objects at the upper left. In this case, it is in egg tempera combined with drying oils.

Red Lead has been found in Peter Paul Rubens’ Deborah Kip, Wife of Sir Balthasar Gerbier, and Her Children, where it was probably used in the upholstery of the chair, and possibly in combination with other pigments in the drapery at the upper left.

This painting has a very complex history. Originally made by Rubens between 1629-30, it seems then to have been reworked by Jacob Jordaens, probably in the 1640s, after Rubens’ death, by which time the infant shown in the arms of Deborah Kip would have been a ten year-old, at least.

Red Lead remained in widespread use, both in combination with other red pigments, and alone for colour highlights. A good example of the latter use is Jan Miense Molenaer’s A Young Man playing a Theorbo and a Young Woman playing a Cittern (c 1630-32), where the young woman’s sock, underskirt, and other details stand out thanks to their orange-red colour.

It also appears in the red of sealing wax in Gerbrand van den Eeckhout’s Four Officers of the Amsterdam Coopers’ and Wine-rackers’ Guild (1657).

Many of the Old Masters used Red Lead in more complex paint layers and mixtures. It makes an appearance in the flesh of Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait from 1659.

There was only limited progress in the discovery of alternative red pigments well into the nineteenth century, when cadmium salts became available.

The red stains of the low cliffs in Arnold Böcklin’s second version of Villa by the Sea from 1865 are made using Red Lead.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir used Red Lead in the portrait of a Woman at the Piano in 1875.

Medical and scientific developments in the latter half of the nineteenth century brought greater understanding of lead’s toxicity, but its pattern of use seems to have changed quite little. It is hard to know now quite why Red Lead was so slow to be removed from the palette.

Vincent van Gogh’s Plain near Auvers from 1890 is a good example of the confusion which had arisen. Van Gogh was novel in his use of Chinese White as a non-toxic alternative to Lead White. Oddly, though, as van Gogh was replacing toxic lead in his whites, he continued to use other lead salts in his reds, which here include Red Lead, albeit in small parts of his canvas.

During the early twentieth century, Red Lead fell from favour completely among fine arts painters, who had only ever accounted for a small proportion of world total pigmemt production. It remained common in decorative and protective use until the later half of that century, in particular for its use to protect ferrous metals from rust. During the 1960s it was still very popular on all ferrous metal which were liable to rust.

Perhaps its most fortuitous use was in miniatures and illumination in books, where the pigment impregnated the book’s pages, protecting it from attack by silverfish and other pests. One man’s paint is another pest’s poison.

Reference

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

For some, gambling is a vice and a quick way to perdition; for others it’s their main social activity and favourite entertainment. Many nations and societies have tried to ban it: it was illegal in the Roman Republic, except during the Saturnalia in December, and is strictly forbidden under Muslim law. It has been endemic in other societies and eras, including east Asian nations such as China during much of its recorded history.

In this and the next article I explore how gambling has been portrayed in European paintings, from Hieronymus Bosch to Félix Vallotton. Because there are so many works showing games of cards, I focus more on other forms of indoor gambling, such as dice, table gaming, and gambling houses.

For Hieronymus Bosch and his patrons, gambling was definitely one of the cardinal sins. It appears in the garden of Hell in the right panel of Bosch’s magnificent Garden of Earthly Delights from about 1495-1505. In this damning conclusion, figures are mutilated and tormented in a nightmare landscape dominated by non-human creatures and alarming objects, where gambling takes the foreground.

In this foreground, a huge blue bird, wearing a cauldron on its head and swallowing a whole human, presides over the scene. That bird is sat on an elevated commode, defaecating blue bubbles containing the people it has been ingesting. Faces stare up from the foul brown waters of the cesspit underneath.

The two main groups of victims here are clustered around objects associated with gaming and gambling, and those for making music – then associated with the work of the devil, and immoral activities such as dancing. There are playing cards scattered on the ground beneath an overturned gaming table, and dice balanced precariously on an index finger and on the head of a naked woman. From among that cluster of figures, a pair of dark blue non-human arms holds high a backgammon board with three dice.

Attitudes to gambling were very different in Caravaggio’s Italy. In The Cardsharps of about 1595, a well-heeled androgynous boy has been tricked into a game of cards with a pair of crooks. The older of the cheats stands behind the boy’s left shoulder, signalling the cards in his hand to his accomplice, a younger boy who is playing the game. The younger cheat has a couple of cards tucked behind him, and is reaching for one of them with his right hand. Secured very visibly to his belt is a small dagger.

At the lower left corner is a backgammon set, with three tiny dice on the board.

Caravaggio’s painting was a great success, so was copied with various degrees of fidelity, and inspired other similar works.

Valentin de Boulogne’s Soldiers Playing Cards and Dice (The Cheats), from about 1618-20, elaborates the motif with a larger group of men, the signalling accomplice seen at the upper left, and another pair playing dice. From long before the Roman army, soldiers had been identified as being specially prone to gambling.

Georges de La Tour’s The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds (c 1635) develops the motif further. There are now three figures playing cards, and their money is laid on the table. At the right is the victim, another androgynous boy, his eyes cast down at his hand of cards, and a large pile of gold coins in front of him.

At the right, a dashing man glances sideways at the viewer, his cards almost concealed in front of him. His left hand reaches behind him to pluck the ace of diamonds from under the belt on his back.

But the courtesan sitting opposite in a low-cut dress isn’t above suspicion either. She looks shiftily towards the maidservant who has just filled her drink, and the maid looks sideways towards the victim, as if the two of them are also conspiring to cheat him of some of those coins. He is just about to learn the hard way of that dangerous combination of gambling, loose women, and alcohol.

Alcohol, and that other vice tobacco, are cited in David Teniers the Younger’s The Dice Shooters (1630-50). In common with many other paintings of card-playing and gambling in the Dutch Golden Age, it is set in a dingy room in a rough tavern. Drawing on their clay pipes and with glasses of beer in hand, a group of men appear completely absorbed in gambling their large stacks of coins on the throw of their dice.

Salvator Rosa is more neutral in showing his almost timeless version of Soldiers Gambling, from about 1656-58. Change the dress, armour and weapons, and this could have been at almost any time in the last couple of millenia.

Murillo’s Young Boys Playing Dice of about 1675 takes up a new theme, of gambling among the extremely poor and vulnerable. Two scruffy urchins from the streets of Seville are throwing dice for the small piles of change which are probably their entire fortunes. A third stands over them, chewing at a bread roll while his dog looks up longingly at the food.

Gambling was seen by the British moralising narrative artists of the eighteenth century as one more step on the road to sinful death. Tom Rakewell, the lead in William Hogarth’s series A Rake’s Progress, saves himself from his first decline by marrying money in the form of an ugly old spinster.

He then takes his new wife’s money off to a gambling den, where, surrounded by London’s low-life, he pleads to the Almighty for one last chance to recover his fortune (in both senses of riches and luck).

Hogarth’s successor Thomas Rowlandson finds a less chaotic scene at The Gaming Table, which he painted in watercolour in 1801. It still doesn’t look a friendly place, though, and there are no women present. The players here are putting their stakes on dice, which are about to be revealed by the man at the far right of the table, who seems to have been raking the money in.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, though, some forms of gambling attracted a wider range of participants. Eduard Swoboda’s Va Banque or Gambling from 1849 shows a salon in which the card game of Pharo or Faro is being played by a group containing several women, and more respectable men too.

The term vabanque or va banque refers to a player betting a sum equal to the size of the current bank, in an effort to gain the whole bank, or go bust in the process. Swoboda shows a moment when the bank is currently in the hands of the older man wearing a skullcap (presumably a kippah to indicate that he is Jewish) to the left of centre. The young woman wearing a white dress and standing to the right of centre is thinking about whether to vabanque against him.

I wonder whether she did, and whether she won or lost.

Prior to the middle of the nineteenth century, gambling had generally been depicted in painting as sinful, a step on the road to damnation, vulnerable to cheats and crooks, the preserve of the reckless, poor and despicable. Its narrative was that of ruin, not redemption.

Although Gustave Courbet’s portrait of the operatic singer Louis Gueymard (1822–1880) as Robert le Diable (1857) shows the last scene in Act 1 of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera Robert le Diable (1831), its message is clear. In this scene, Gueymard’s character Robert gambles away his entire estate on dice; in the opera this is marked by the aria L’or est une chimère: ‘gold is but an illusion’.

Albert Anker turns to classical times to put his spin on gambling games in his Knucklebone Players (1864). Three youths are here playing a game of greater skill, but which was still frequently the basis of gambling. The distinguished-looking men in the background are hardly the sort to frequent a gambling den, are they?

Dante Gabriel Rossetti is less convinced. In his watercolour of Hesterna Rosa from 1865, he shows a moment from the contemporary play Philip van Artevelde, written by Henry Taylor in 1834. Van Artevelde was a Flemish patriot who lived between about 1340-1382, who led the Ghent rebellion in 1381, only to be crushed to death in battle the following year.

In Taylor’s play, van Artevelde has a relationship with a woman of lower class; in this scene, his lover has paused to reflect on her life, whilst he plays dice with a friend. The painting’s title means yesterday’s rose, and draws on the theme of the fallen woman, which was so popular with Rossetti.

Unlike Murillo’s young boys, those in Eugène Siberdt’s The Little Gamblers (1876) aren’t particularly poor, nor are they underprivileged. A satchel, open book and slate at the lower right confirm that at least one of them is still attending school and literate, but they still engage in a game of cards in the afternoon sunshine.

William Quiller Orchardson sounds a more cautionary note in his Hard Hit (1879). The fashionably-dressed young man about to open the door on the left is walking away from a group of older villains, who have stopped at nothing (including perhaps cheating) to beat him repeatedly at cards, and have relieved him of his wealth.

A Venetian Gaming-House in the Sixteenth Century shows far more opulent and fashionable surroundings, but is a scene of confrontation between two young men at the card table of this gambling den in Venice. The man seated on the left, whose family appear to be backing him, has accumulated substantial winnings, and is reaching across the table for more. The man standing on the right, who seems to be losing badly, has an accusative look, and is clearly unhappy with his opponent’s success.

Both men are armed, and under the table is a large collection of cards which may have been involved in a cheat.

In the sixteenth century, gambling took place in Venice in private premises. But in 1638, the city fathers opened Europe’s first public casino in a wing of the Palazzo Dandolo, known as Il Ridotto. It aimed for the most affluent, with high stakes and a strict dress code, requiring tricorn hats and masks at its tables. It closed its doors in 1774, to preserve “piety, sound discipline and moderate behaviour”.

Of all these paintings, the Caravaggio included, it is Jean-Eugène Buland’sLe Tripot (The Dive) from 1883 which is my favourite.

Set in a seedy, downmarket gambling den, it is a group portrait of five hardened gamblers at the table. Each is rich in character, and makes you wonder how they came to be there. A little old widow at the left, for example, looks completely out of place, but is resolutely staking her money. Looking over her shoulder is a man, whose face is partially obscured. Is he perhaps a son, or a debtor?

A young spiv at the far right is down to his last couple of silver coins, and looks about to lose them too. The air is thick with smoke, the walls in need of redecoration, and a pair of young streetwalkers prowl behind them, looking for a winner who will spend some of their cash on them.

Although their game appears to be roulette, the old and burnt-out croupier in the centre doesn’t appear to be spinning any wheel. The markings on its grubby green baize resemble those for roulette, but the numbers only go from from 0 to 10.

Gambling had broken out of those dives, and had come to obsess many members of society. Anna Palm de Rosa’s atmospheric painting of A game of L’hombre in Brøndum’s Hotel from 1885 shows a late-night session of this popular card-game between two couples staying at this hotel in Skagen, the remote fishing village which at the time was the summer home of the Danish (and other Nordic) Impressionists.

As in the Dutch Golden Age, gambling is here associated with both alcohol and tobacco.

L’hombre or Ombre are not the choice of more modern, hardened gamblers like those in Félix Vallotton’s Poker session, painted in 1902. Tucked away in a plush back room behind a club or bar, these four are in full evening dress, playing for stakes which could be breathtaking and bankrupting.

In the late nineteenth century, fast railway connections from cities like Paris to the Mediterranean coast of France led to the latter’s rapid growth and transformation. With those visitors came the need for their entertainment, and casinos were built to drain rich tourists.

The famous casino at Monte Carlo opened its doors in 1863, taking over from the original establishment which had started there in a small mansion in 1856. This colour lithograph by Sem shows Roulette in the Casino, and is taken from his second series of scenes in Monte Carlo, from about 1910.

Sem’s wicked caricature shows one gambler operating a successful system, and piling up his winnings as he analyses the spin of the wheel in his notebook. The two near-identical croupiers are watching him carefully, as affluent onlookers mill about behind.

This increasingly attractive vision of the casino was promoted by prints such as Gwendolen Harleth at the roulette table, an anonymous illustration to George Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda published in a special limited edition in 1910. It took another half century for the likes of James Bond to promote the casino further, though.

Few painters seem to have been impressed by the glittery image which casinos tried to manufacture during the late nineteenth century. Although not all have depicted gambling as a dangerous sin, there has been a fairly consistent consensus that gambling is not good, and all too often leads to financial disaster, and destitution.

The second great Greek civilisation was Sparta, with its unique society and culture. In the second pair of biographies in his Parallel Lives, Plutarch tackles that of the founding father of Spartan law and culture. In doing so, he provides one of the best sources of information about both Lycurgus and the society which he built. However, he warns us at the outset that almost everything claimed of Lycurgus is the subject of dispute.

Lycurgus was born into a Spartan family, although quite which is unclear. It is most probable that he was the son of a reigning king of Sparta, who lost his life when he was stabbed with a butcher’s knife as he intervened in a riot. Lycurgus’ older brother Polydectes inherited the throne, but died shortly afterwards.

Polydectes’ wife was pregnant at the time, so Lycurgus could only reign until that child was born: if a boy, then Polydectes’ child would succeed to the throne. After eight months of Lycurgus’ rule, a son Charilaüs was born, and Lycurgus proclaimed him king. To allay suspicion that he might try to usurp the authority of the new king, Lycurgus left Sparta and travelled. This gave him the opportunity to visit other kingdoms to learn of the strengths and weaknesses of the laws and institutions of Crete, the Ionians, and Egypt.

Lycurgus resolved to revolutionise Spartan society by introducing a completely new regime. He therefore visited the oracle at Delphi to discover whether his ideas were sound.

Eugène Delacroix’s Lycurgus Consulting the Pythia (1835-45) shows Lycurgus with Pythia, the high priestess at Delphi, who is here listening intently to Lycurgus as he describes his proposals, before giving her verdict on them.

The high priestess addressed Lycurgus as “beloved of the gods, and rather god than man”, and endorsed his proposals, which she said would be the best in the world.

Lycurgus’ next task was to win the senior Spartans over, so that they would be happy to implement his laws. Once he had convinced many of them, Lycurgus got thirty of those chiefs to go into the marketplace at dawn, and with their weapons to strike terror into those who opposed the proposals. King Charilaüs fled to a refuge, but then returned and gave Lycurgus his support.

The changes made to Spartan law, institutions, and society were fundamental and extensive. Lycurgus established a Council of Elders with twenty-eight senators, to ensure that no king could become tyrannical, and the state couldn’t drift towards democracy. Land was redistributed uniformly and equally in lots: 30,000 in Laconia, and 9,000 in the city of Sparta.

Lycurgus withdrew all gold and silver coinage, leaving only iron in circulation. He then devalued that currency, so that being rich in it would require a large store-room full of heavy iron coins. This forced equality in terms of money and possessions, and helped banish superfluous arts and trades, making luxury die away. To ensure a communal life for the good of society as a whole, he introduced common messing, so that Spartans all ate in large groups, on a simple but healthy diet.

Wealthy Spartans grew incensed with these changes, and started to stone Lycurgus, who was forced to flee from the marketplace. However, one young Spartan, Alcander, managed to blind him in one eye before he reached safety. Rather than have Alcander put to death, Lycurgus took him in as a servant and companion, so that the young man became his most devoted follower, and convinced other opponents to support the reforms.

Plutarch then provides considerable detail of the diet provided by these common messes, and the fact that Spartan boys attended them, and there learned to withstand others jesting at them.

Lycurgus didn’t put these laws into writing, but established an educational system which would instill them into future generations. Other unwritten laws included the requirement for all laws to remain unwritten, and the avoidance of extravagance in property, by the use of common building materials and standards.

The narrative in Caesar van Everdingen’s Lycurgus Demonstrates the Benefits of Education from 1660-62 doesn’t appear to relate directly to Plutarch’s text, but shows a young Lycurgus with a couple of young Spartan men, their hair cropped short.

The new law also regulated marriages and births. As Spartan men were away on military expeditions much of the time, Lycurgus gave their wives sole control when their husbands were away, and the title of Mistress. He ensured that unmarried Spartan women kept healthy, by prescribing that they undertook running, wrestling, throwing the discus, and the javelin.

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.

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 is here talking with the mothers of the young Spartans in the foreground.

Degas had undoubtedly read Plutarch’s life of Lycurgus, including the passage:
He freed them from softness and delicacy and all effeminacy by accustoming the maidens no less than the youths to wear tunics only in processions, and at certain festivals to dance and sing when the young men were present as spectators. There they sometimes even mocked and railed good-naturedly at any youth who had misbehaved himself; and again they would sing the praises of those who had shown themselves worthy, and so inspire the young men with great ambition and ardour. For he who was thus extolled for his valour and held in honour among the maidens, went away exalted by their praises; while the sting of their playful raillery was no less sharp than that of serious admonitions, especially as the kings and senators, together with the rest of the citizens, were all present at the spectacle.

Marriages became open, in allowing both husband and wife to have relations with the partners of others. Sons were considered not to be ‘owned’ by their fathers, but by the state itself. Newborn infants were taken to a place called Lesche, where they were examined by elders, who decided whether the child was healthy and sturdy. If it was, it was assigned one of the 9,000 plots of land, and reared by its parents. Babies deemed frail or ill-formed were abandoned at Apothetae, a chasm at the foot of Mount Taygetus, to die.

The examination by elders at Lesche is the subject of two little-known paintings which appear to have a common origin. The first, claimed to be by Jacques-Louis David and titled Lycurgus of Sparta (1791), shows this process taking place, with a queue of young parents. A newly-born infant is being presented to the elders for their verdict, perhaps with Lycurgus acting as the organiser.

This painting by Jean-Jacques-François Le Barbier is titled The Magnanimity of Lycurgus and was apparently made in the same year of 1791. I apologise for its poor image quality. All its key elements correspond to those in the David, as if one artist partly copied the other.

Plutarch provides lengthy details of the rearing and education of Spartan children, and the effects on Spartan culture. These he summarises thus:
[Lycurgus] trained his fellow-citizens to have neither the wish nor the ability to live for themselves; but like bees they were to make themselves always integral parts of the whole community, clustering together about their leader, almost beside themselves with enthusiasm and noble ambition, and to belong wholly to their country.

When these laws were all in place and in practice, Lycurgus told an assembly of all Spartans that he needed to return to the oracle at Delphi to consult on one final measure. He made the Spartans take an oath to abide by these unwritten laws until his return, then departed for Delphi. There he obtained the approval of the oracle, which he recorded in writing and sent back to Sparta.

This undated painting of Lycurgus Gives the Laws to the Spartans has been attributed to either Jacopo Palma il Vecchio (c 1480-1528) or Bonifazio Veronese (1487-1553). It shows an elderly Lycurgus apparently giving a volume of written law to the Spartans in the marketplace, but could equally be of Lycurgus addressing his last assembly of all Spartans before he left for his second visit to Delphi.

Merry-Joseph Blondel’s portrait of Lycurgus of Sparta from 1828 also shows him as an older man, here with written scrolls on his right thigh. Given the oral nature of Lycurgus’ laws, this can only be interpreted as the moment that Lycurgus has written his message reporting the oracle’s approval of his laws, ready to send it back to the city.

Lycurgus then did something extraordinary in its selfless ingenuity: having put the whole of Sparta under oath to keep his laws until his return, he then starved himself to death, ensuring that that oath could never expire.

The laws of Lycurgus lasted through fourteen kings, and five hundred years, without change, until gold and other spoils of war entered Sparta during the reign of King Agis.

Reference

Whole text in English translation at Penelope.

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As the nineteenth century drew to a close, Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) had given viewers the first of many glimpses into the intimacy of his life and love with his model and lover, Marthe: first in an initial version of the couple getting out of bed in Man and Woman in an Interior, then in Woman Dozing on a Bed or Indolence of 1899.

Although At the Park (1900) is not an easy painting to read – I don’t know what the prominent pale blue object at the left is – this is another of Bonnard’s explorations of high-contrast lighting. It reverses the progression more commonly seen in landscapes, with bright foreground and darker distance. Its heaped cumulus clouds are lit by wonderfully warm sunlight of a late autumn afternoon.

In Bonnard’s Young Woman by the Lamp (1900), the artist explores a very different light, cast by table lamps. In the foreground a woman is busy sewing under the lamp’s glow. In the background, at the left, a couple sit by another table lamp with a green shade.

The light in Bonnard’s Nude with Lamp (c 1900) is different again, as his model (from her hair and stature, not Marthe) basks in the bright light of the lamp.

Light and shade have important roles in Bonnard’s next painting of Marthe, where she lies prone on their double bed during Siesta (1900). This is almost an exact complement to Indolence: the head of the bed (and of Marthe) is reversed, she is prone rather than supine, and her left foot is drawn up to rest on the right behind her knee. A small dog is asleep among Marthe’s clothes on the floor.

Bonnard’s earlier Man and Woman in an Interior developed into another major work, Man and Woman (c 1900). Marthe is not getting dressed, but sat up in the sunshine with her legs in a position reminiscent of that in Indolence, spreading her thighs. On the bed in front of her are small stuffed toy animals, including a cat with a red ribbon around its neck. A folded wooden screen divides the painting into two. Bonnard stands at the right edge of the painting, his legs appearing skeletal in the sunlight.

It was about 1900 that Bonnard started to make such frequent oil sketches of Marthe that they first became a visual diary. Many, like Marthe on a Divan (c 1900), record the everyday, just like snapshots.

In 1900, Vollard brought him a commission to illustrate a deluxe edition of Paul Verlaine’s Parallèlement.

In the Spring of 1900, Bonnard and Marthe left Paris for the country, something which became a habit in subsequent years. On this occasion, they stayed with Bonnard’s brother-in-law, the composer and musician Claude Terrasse, in the family property at Noisy-le-Grand, to the east of Paris. The Terrasse Family (1900) shows Claude Terrasse at the left edge, together with sundry children, wife, grandparents, cat, and dog, and a maid at the upstairs window.

This richly-coloured and mature painting was first exhibited at the Salon d’Automne at the end of 1903.

In February and March of the following year (1901), Bonnard accompanied Edouard Vuillard with the brothers Emmanuel and Antoine Bibesco on a tour of Spain, including Seville, Madrid and Toledo. After their return, a whole room at the Salon des Indépendants was devoted to Bonnard and the other Nabis.

The Family in the Garden (c 1901) is another view of the Terrasse family, this time from an upstairs window. I suspect that the colours are here rather more intense than in the original painting, although it still appears to be rich in chroma.

Daphnis and Chloe from about 1900-02 is an unusual work for Bonnard, as a mythological narrative. It was produced for a deluxe edition of the story, another commission arranged by Vollard. During Bonnard’s research for this, he and Marthe embraced what they considered to be the harmony of Arcadia, and started to enjoy being outdoors naked, which Bonnard also recorded in photos.

The story of Daphnis (boy) and Chloe (girl) is a pastoral romance. When they were both babies, they were abandoned, rescued by different families, and brought up together to herd flocks for their adoptive parents. They fell in love, but were too naïve to recognise their own emotions. They each underwent various tribulations and near-disasters before being recognised by their natural parents. They finally married and lived happily ever after.

Bonnard’s painting shows Chloe in the foreground, with two other figures running through the wood behind.

After the Theatre (1902) shows a patron of the theatre, and no doubt of its actresses too, at the stage door. It provides a glimpse of another world, rather like the disturbing paintings of older men with young ballerinas, although here, at least, everyone is of an appropriate age.

In 1902, Bonnard stayed at Colleville in Calvados, on the north coast of France. He also visited the Netherlands, in the company of Edouard Vuillard, Ker-Xavier Roussel, and a patron and his wife. He started to create his first sculpture.

Bonnard’s Misia at the Piano (Portrait of Misia Natanson) from about 1902 shows Misia Natanson née Godebska, who had married Thadée Natanson in 1893. She had become the muse of Bonnard and the Nabis.

He did not abandon landscape painting, and this winter view of Vétheuil from about 1902 has a wonderful twilight sky. This village is to the north-west of Paris, and had been home to Claude Monet between 1878-81, a period during which he painted many local landscapes.

The Pont du Carrousel from about 1903 is another of Bonnard’s paintings exploring light – here the golden fire of an autumn dawn/dusk near the Louvre and Tuileries in central Paris. This shows the bridge before its reconstruction in 1906.

Bonnard’s scenes of street life in Paris were also maturing well. In The Intersection: Boulevard de Clichy and the Corner of the Rue de Douai (c 1904) he takes advantage of an elevated point of view and a bustling winter’s day, with plenty of pedestrians and various vehicles. Among the latter is a red car with fashionable whitewall tyres, and an open-top horsedrawn bus.

In the Spring, Bonnard stayed with Ker-Xavier Roussel in l’Etang-la-Ville, not far from Paris, then in July he went with Marthe to Varengeville, on the north coast. He also visited Saint Tropez, on the Mediterranean, where he met up with Roussel and Paul Signac, the Divisionist painter.

Bonnard’s portrait of Ambroise Vollard (c 1904-05) shows one of the most important art dealers of the time, embracing his cat. Vollard lived between 1866-1939, and brought Bonnard valuable work, including the illustrations he had made in 1900 and 1902. He was killed in mysterious circumstances when his car left the road, just a few weeks before the start of the Second World War. Although his portraits by Cézanne and Renoir are well-known, Bonnard’s has remained a well-kept secret.

References

Guy Cogeval and Isabelle Cahn (2016) Pierre Bonnard, Painting Arcadia, Prestel. ISBN 978 3 791 35524 5.
Gilles Genty and Pierrette Vernon (2006) Bonnard Inédits, Éditions Cercle d’Art (in French). ISBN 978 2 702 20707 9.

Following the rather sudden death of the artist the previous autumn, a retrospective exhibition of his paintings at the leading gallery in Oslo was a huge success. Edvard Munch himself praised the works with the words “no finer works are being painted today”. His widow was already dying of cancer, and when the exhibition closed, those ninety paintings went into storage. None was seen again for the next sixty-seven years.

It’s only since 1990, and thanks largely to the work of Haakon Mehren, that the moving paintings of the Norwegian Aksel Waldemar Johannessen (1880–1922) have been rediscovered.

Johannessen was born in Oslo, Norway, on 26 October 1880, in one of its poorer districts. He wanted to be a sculptor, and by 1900 had worked in the furniture industry and was attending the Academy of Art and Design, where he mainly studied under the sculptor Lars Utne. Over the next seven years, he exhibited at the autumn exhibition of sculpture, but failed to attract attention with his work.

He seems also to have started painting at that time, and this Self-portrait is claimed to date from 1905, while he was still struggling to establish himself as a sculptor. If the date is accurate, it indicates that his painting skills were already advanced well before his other surviving work was made.

He married Anna Gjermine Nilsen (1879-1923) in 1907, and the couple moved to Gjøvik, a small town in central southern Norway, where he was able to get work in a local furniture factory making their models. Then in 1911, he decided to try to establish himself as a painter, so the couple moved back to Oslo. There, Anna started running a textile workshop.

Man on a Diving Board from 1912 is, apart from the self-portrait above, Johannessen’s earliest surviving painting, I understand, and one of his most visually startling. A well-muscled man in bathing trunks bends forward as he sits on the end of a diving board. Below him, just under the surface of the water, is a young woman wearing a bright red costume, including a hat.

This is a remarkably modern motif, and anticipated swimming pool motifs from much later in the twentieth century.

In Oslo, Johannessen avoided associating with other painters, who he felt remained aloof and exclusive, but had more literary and humanist friends, including the sculptor Trygve Thorsen, who acted as a model for some of Johannessen’s paintings. Johannessen and his wife were actively involved in the design of ‘bunader’, Norwegian folk costume, and in the theatre, with the newly-formed Det Norske Teatret. In 1912, the couple founded Heimen Husflid, specialist costumiers, which continues to trade today from central Oslo.

Johannessen’s diptych of Mother and Children from 1915 appears quite innocent, but a closer reading is more sinister. In the left panel, a young woman, modelled by the artist’s wife, stands in a park at night. She is a prostitute waiting for a customer, and the two suspicious-looking men in the distance are pimps keeping a watch over her.

In the right panel, her children are at home, tucked up in bed, waiting for her to return from her night’s work. Two girls cuddle together in bed, while her son looks out of a window at the starry night. An empty plate and an old shoe establish their poor status, in spite of their mother’s smart working clothes.

In Workers from about 1915, a stream of working men are making their way through a cutting below a wood, as they walk to work. Their faces say it all: drawn, haggard, half asleep, and agonised. The artist painted his self-portrait for the man at the right.

Forced into Prostitution, also known as Night Wanderer, from 1915, shows Anna Johannessen in a very similar pose and role to that in the diptych above. Here an odious-looking client with bushy eyebrows and a thick-set face is pressing against her from behind, wanting to pick her up.

I suspect that Johannessen’s The Gravedigger (1915) was inspired, at least in part, by the famous grave-diggers scene from Hamlet, in which Hamlet laments the death of Yorick, his friend, while holding a skull. In the distance is an ethereal light which may represent a ghost or spirit.

By 1916, the Johannessens were spending their summers in a rented house in Asker, a rural area just outside Oslo which was already popular with artists including Harriet Backer. It kept them close to their friends, such as the poet Kristofer Uppdal.

Rain (1915-16) is an evocative painting of a thoroughly wet day there. Asker is on the bank of Oslo Fjord, and ideal for family coastal sailing, and walking.

Landøen in Asker (1916) is a view of part of the dissected coastline near Asker.

The Artist’s Summer House in Asker (1916) shows their rented property, with Anna Johannessen making her way up its steps.

Back in the city of Oslo, Johannessen painted colourful street scenes, such as this Market Scene from about 1916.

As with Edvard Munch and so many other artists, Johannessen was prone to bouts of heavy drinking. In The Drinker’s Family from 1916, perhaps painted during a period of remorse over his drinking, the artist here includes two self-portraits, as the young man at the right, and the wrecked alcoholic at the left.

The Morning After (1916) is another self-portrait as a drunkard, his arm around a woman who pokes her tongue out in disapproval of his addiction.

Reference

Haakon Mehren’s website with details of books and more.

Aksel Waldemar Johannessen (1880–1922) seems to have sold few paintings during his lifetime, and hardly any – even following his rediscovery – have been bought for public collections. Most were sold after they were found stored in a barn in about 1990, and are now in private hands.

Path by the Wood (1916-18) is one of two or more of Johannessen’s paintings which show the forest at Nesodden, a promontory on the opposite bank of Oslo Fjord from Asker, where the artist and his family rented a house for the summer. The woods here were owned by Johannessen’s patron Karl Granerud, who was later to be guardian of Johannessen’s work and children, following his death.

During the later years of the First World War, Johannessen turned to rural scenes more, such as this of Ploughing in the Spring (1916-18). A single farmer with a plough hooked up to a single horse would have been typical of the small scale of many of the farms at the time.

Peasant with Cabbages, also known as Peasant with Cauliflowers, from 1918, shows a farmer with a wheelbarrow full of either cabbages or cauliflowers. His face is closely observed, and magnificent in its detail. Behind and to the right of him, though, is what appears to be a well-dressed young woman, who doesn’t look entirely human.

The Johannessens remained heavily involved in the theatre. After the Performance (1918) shows an actor from their favourite Det Norske Teatret being congratulated following a production.

By the end of the war, Johannessen was struggling with worsening bouts of heavy drinking, and this took its toll on his family. He returned to paint more social themes, some again in remorse at his alcoholism. Mother and Child (1918-20) is set in the Hammersborg district of Oslo in which Johannessen had been brought up, and where he and his wife first set up home together. A care-worn working class mother is seen walking out at night, her young child held firmly within her shawl.

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.

Johannessen also painted several religious works. My favourite among them is Christ and the Blind and Dumb Man (1921-22), with its powerful effect of the light thrown up at the figures and their faces.

This undated Adam and Eve is probably from earlier and happier times, showing the couple in a colourful paradise, with a pair of sheep grazing peacefully by them.

In 1921, Anna Johannessen was diagnosed with cancer.

Without Peace (1921-22) is recognised as being Johannessen’s late masterwork, telling his life story in multiplex narrative. That is to say that it shows several scenes from different moments in his life, past and future, in its single image. Johannessen is at the centre, cradling the body of his dead wife on his thighs. Above are three separate self-portraits of him enduring crises, and other figures from his past crowd much of the rest of the large canvas.

The Artist’s Daughter Aasa at the Window (1922) is similarly loaded with symbols of death: the black sails on the yachts, and an image of a Nordic church minister at the upper right, as the Johannessens’ daughter Aasa looks wistfully through the window.

Girl Putting on her Shoes (1922) also shows daughter Aasa, who in these later paintings was Johannessen’s favourite model.

Finally, he states his greatest fear and premonition, that he should die before Anna, in Mourning (1922). His wife and daughters are here left as he sails in the black ship seen on the left horizon.

Strangely, that is exactly what happened. In the autumn of 1922, with Anna’s cancer bringing her life to a premature end, Aksel Johannessen rapidly developed pneumonia, and died from that on 25 October 1922, the day before his 42nd birthday, in Oslo. Anna survived him by only four months, which at least gave her time to ensure that their two daughters were properly provided for. She was only a year older than him.

Aksel Johannessen’s artistic legacy was left in the hands of the artist Ola Abrahamsson. He arranged for a retrospective exhibition to be held at Blomqvist’s gallery in Oslo, the best. His collection of paintings attracted high praise from critics like Jappe Nilssen, who had recognised Munch’s talent, and Edvard Munch himself.

Then everything went wrong. The paintings from that exhibition, indeed almost the entire life’s work of Aksel Johannessen, were put into storage in a barn. It wasn’t until 1990 that they were rediscovered. Since then they have been shown across Norway and as far afield as Italy, and have started to achieve the recognition that they deserve. At last.

Reference

Haakon Mehren’s website with details of books and more.