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Brushstrokes: a summary history
Until the nineteenth century, most oil paintings intended to be seen by the public concealed the brushstrokes and other marks made by the artist during their creation. As that changed most noticeably...
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Portraits of trees: Willow
Willows are a number of subtly different species with long, narrow leaves that most commonly grow close to water and thrive in wet land. Some species droop their shoots in a characteristic manner and...
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Hero or hooligan: Heracles in drag
With his twelve labours for King Eurystheus completed, Heracles was absolved of his sin of killing his wife Megara and their children, and was granted immortality by Hera and Zeus. He then fell in love...
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Painting la Manche: le Havre to Ouessant
This weekend’s journey along the north French coast started yesterday at the ferry port of Calais, and had almost reached another major port of le Havre, where we resume in the company of some of...
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Painting la Manche: Calais to Étretat
Almost a month ago I took a trip along England’s Channel coast in paintings. This weekend is the return match, travelling west along the north French coast of la Manche, again in the company of some of...
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Henri Regnault’s too brief history paintings
Today the best-known artist to die in the Franco-Prussian War is the French Impressionist Frédéric Bazille, but he wasn’t the only promising young painter to fall victim to that brief conflict: also...
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Painting a good story: Multiplex to 1600
A multiplex narrative painting contains representations of two or more moments in time from a story, merged together in a single image. In its heyday during the Renaissance it was relatively common,...
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Brushstrokes: Avant-garde and the psychology of perception
One of the many revolutions brought by the nineteenth century was the development of psychology, and the insights it and the early neurosciences started to give into perception. This blossomed during...
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Portraits of trees: The Fallen
Like all living organisms, trees are designed to reproduce and propagate their species. Unlike many animals, they are capable of doing that over periods of hundreds of years. Around the world, wherever...
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Hero or hooligan: Heracles’ labours 9-12
When Heracles returned to King Eurystheus with the mares of Diomedes, he should have had just two remaining labours to complete, making a total of ten. The next he was assigned was to acquire a belt...
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Anarchy in paint: the politics of Neo-Impressionism 2
Although Camille Pissarro had been forced to return to mainstream Impressionist style by 1890, to support his family financially, the remaining Neo-Impressionists were a close and thoroughly anarchist...
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Anarchy in paint: the politics of Neo-Impressionism 1
The late nineteenth century was a period of great turmoil in European politics. Protests often became violent, as in the Paris Commune of 1871, and strikes in the mining areas of north-east France and...
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Dennis Miller Bunker, American Impressionist
Several of the American Impressionists are now little-known, but one of the most promising of them, Dennis Miller Bunker (1861-1890), has become almost completely forgotten. Few of his paintings are in...
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Painting a good story: Series after 1800
Most accounts of the history of narrative painting claim that it died during the nineteenth century. Although the stories told in visual art certainly changed, if anything there was more narrative...
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Brushstrokes: Lovis Corinth’s narratives
While landscape painters were racing through Impressionism, Neo-Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, those who painted figures in narratives, like Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), were negotiating their way...
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Portraits of trees: Monet’s poplars
Claude Monet was a central figure among the French Impressionists and a prolific landscape painter. Although he was most attracted to other motifs, there were periods during his long career that his...
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Hero or hooligan: Heracles’ labours 4-8
With the first three of what he thought were to be his ten tasks for King Eurytheus completed, Heracles went on to attempt to capture the Erymanthian Boar and bring it back alive to the king. Capture...
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Paintings of caves: beauty and reality
Before the early nineteenth century, caves had been sacred places where hermits lived, legendary and mythical hidey-holes for sibyls and dragons, and had recently been added to the itinerary of the...
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Paintings of caves: myth and religion
Given that our earliest recorded paintings were made in caves, it’s only appropriate this weekend to look at more modern paintings of the caves that our art, and our ancestors themselves, started in....
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Painting a good story: Series to 1800
The simplest way to tell a story in visual art is over a series of images, with each in the series depicting a single instant in time, then read by the viewer in sequence. This has been used throughout...
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