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Portraits of trees: Camille Pissarro
The French Impressionist who was most influenced by Camille Corot’s paintings of trees was Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), who had been born and brought up on the Caribbean island of Saint Thomas, in a...
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Brushstrokes: Swirls of Vincent van Gogh
In the last three years of his life, Vincent van Gogh created some of the most distinctive paintings in the European canon, dominated by swirling strokes of vivid colour. This article looks at how they...
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Orient: the bicentenary of Alberto Pasini 1
Two centuries ago Europeans saw Turkey and the countries of the east Mediterranean seaboard as the Orient, about as far east as even the most adventurous should go, and much of Asia and the Indian...
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Painting a good story: Origins
For many centuries much of the population of Europe was illiterate, and their only sources of stories were those told orally, or depicted in paintings. With the exception of the Dutch Golden Age, those...
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An unnatural history of footwear in paintings 1
When Imelda Marcos, former First Lady of the Philippines, fled into exile in 1986 she left her personal collection of shoes behind. All 1,220 pairs. But that is modest compared to the late Darlene...
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An unnatural history of footwear in paintings 2
For those who could afford to wear fashionable clothing, outrageously impractical footwear was and remains a sign of their affluent disdain for working and walking, tasks of the proletariat....
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Hero or hooligan: Heracles’ labours 1-3
After the infant Heracles astonished his parents Amphitryon and Alcmene by strangling a couple of serpents in his crib, the seer Tiresias told them that he would vanquish numerous monsters, so it was...
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Portraits of trees: Sisley’s poplars of Moret
Alfred Sisley was born and brought up in a prosperous Anglo-French family of merchants in Paris. Although intended to take over the family business, when he was sent to London to study in 1857, he was...
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Brushstrokes: Henri-Edmond Cross
Each of the painters now referred to variously as Neo-Impressionists, Pointillists or Divisionists adopted and developed their own distinctive brushstroke techniques and styles. In Georges Seurat’s...
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Orient: the bicentenary of Alberto Pasini 2
Two hundred years ago today, the Italian Orientalist artist Alberto Pasini (1826–1899) was born. By the time he turned fifty in 1876 he had undertaken a series of travels through the Middle East, most...
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