Among all the other things that were going on in narrative painting in the 1800s – as seen in the works of Delacroix, Moreau, Gérôme and others – there were the remarkable paintings of Honoré Daumier (1808-1879).

Daumier was an established caricaturist, print-maker, and even sculptor, whose oil paintings were something else, something strongly pre-Impressionist in their painterliness, gestures and marks. Yet for all that looseness, many of his oil paintings were strongly narrative.

At the time, he was best known for his biting political and anti-establishment caricatures, which were most savage in their portrayal of lawyers and judges. His lithographs show his drawing skills, and his frequent reliance on facial expression.

The French Republic was proclaimed on 24 February 1848. Within a month, a competition was launched to produce the “painted face of the Republic”. Daumier entered this oil sketch, which came eleventh out of more than 700 entries, but was never worked up into a more finished painting.

Based on an earlier sketch of his from about 1844 entitled Charity or Caritas, the goddess of clemency, it shows a mother nursing children and holding the French tricolour flag. In this, she sums up the ideal of a strong republic, in her fertility, serenity, and glory, as a development of the female figure dominating Delacroix’s most famous Liberty Leading the People (1830).

It was in the 1860s that Daumier painted many of his narrative oil paintings. Among the best-known is The Drama (1860), which was chosen by Martin Meisel (1983) as a “brilliant” example of narrative painting.

Unusually, the narrative is shown in a stage scene viewed from within (and including) the audience. On stage, a man lies dead, while a woman faces away, showing theatrical body language indicating her distress. Between them a second man points with his left arm down at the corpse, and with his right arm at the woman. But their facial expressions are not seen. In contrast, members of the audience show exaggerated facial expressions of shock at the scene in front of them.

I do not know whether Daumier intended to separate the classical elements of narrative painting laid down by Alberti, but as a play within a painting, this deceptively simple image presents a debate between those elements which appears timely in view of the changes which were taking place in narrative painting at that time. It is also worth noting that the play, a tragedy, has reached a moment of peripeteia.

Meisel wrote:
The figures are faceless and ideal, for it is not their individual passion that counts, but the ensemble. Their facelessness and ideality are appropriate because we are given just the form of the situation, not the specifics of the play.” “It is the audience, one notes, that is marked with individual passions, set into physiognomic masks and – where the reflected light of the stage reveals it – vivid in diversity and character.” (op cit p 8.)

Daumier’s Le Malade Imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid) (c 1860-2) is also based on theatre, but in a very different way. Referring to a still-popular Molière play of the same name (1673), it shows Argan, the hypochondriac hero of the play, suffering his imaginary illness in his armchair, his physician feeling his pulse at the right wrist, and the physician’s assistant poised behind, wielding a large enema syringe.

The facial expression of each of the figures is carefully crafted, with rich brushstrokes left visible. Argan appears ill, drawn, and worried; the physician wears an expressionless mask beneath tousled almost Medusan hair, and his assistant is gaunt and grimly eager to engage. By Argan’s left elbow, on a small table next to the armchair, a clutch of medicine bottles stands ready.

Although Daumier’s oil paintings became increasingly gestural and sometimes hard to read as a result, his watercolours were more plainly drawn, if their narratives often seem more tricky. This shows a group of mountebanks, theatrical performers, musicians, and clowns who drew large crowds – a theme which he often returned to.

Their facial expressions and gestures are theatrically exaggerated, but the narrative less apparent. The crocodile suggests it may be one of the Pulcinello or Punch and Judy shows which were popular among street performers in several European countries, including France, and North America from the 1700s onwards.

No less than thirty of Daumier’s oil paintings show scenes from Cervantes’ epic Don Quixote (1605, 1615), tracing the adventures of a man who, under the influence of chivalric romances, sets out on his own hilariously misguided knightly quest. Here Alonso Quixada, alias Don Quixote de la Mancha, and Sancho Panza, his squire, come across a dead mule (Book I chapter 23) while crossing the Sierra Morena.

In the book, the dead mule is described as being still in its full harness and saddle, which Daumier here omits. Quixote, much of Panza’s mount, and the dead mule are shown in sketched outlines, just sufficient by way of marks to enable their identification. There are no faces, and body language is minimal. As Daumier’s eyesight faded into complete blindness by 1873, his narratives were also supported by the most minimal painted marks.

Conclusions

Daumier took narrative painting in yet another direction. Using his great skills in caricature, he examined the classical approach of Alberti, used sophisticated theatrical settings, and his technique became almost purely gestural. Although none of these was able to resolve the problems faced by narrative painting at the time, they offer points of departure which can still be valuable.

References

The Daumier Register, online catalogue raisonné, and copious information.

Meisel M (1983) Realizations. Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England, Princeton UP. ISBN 978 0 6916 1293 5.

This series has, quite accidentally, come to highlight the problems which came to dominate if not overwhelm narrative painting during the 1800s, and how they somehow seem to have become resolved by the late 1900s.

The problems fell into two groups: what narratives should be used, and what techniques should be used to represent them.

As I hope has been clear, during the 1800s and early 1900s, a wide range of narratives were used, including traditional myths, religion, and history, and more contemporary stories of all kinds. At the end of the period, problem pictures even invited viewers to engage in speculation and debate.

Although classical Greek and Roman myths and religious stories continue to be used to this day, those based on moral and social issues of the time became more popular. Narratives have also been derived from a wider range of sources, including the theatre, and most recently movies.

The issue of how to paint narratives was much harder to settle, and still remains controversial. This divides again into two problems: what rhetorical tropes to use (if any), and how realist the painting had to be.

Symbol and allegory

The use of symbols and their assembly into allegory had long been popular, but added another level of reading which was expected of the viewer.

Even when painted in very clear terms, works like Bellini’s Allegory of Winged Fortune (1490) look weird and are hardly good reading for most viewers. There is also the problem of misinterpretation. In this case, for example, the following symbolic devices could be read:

• the blindfold represents Fortune’s salient characteristic, her blindness in dispensing good fortune and misfortune;
• ill fate is normally associated with a peacock tail, wings, and lion’s paws;
• the two pitchers represent the dispensation of good and bad fortune;
• abundant and long hair at the front of the head, and little at the back, symbolises Kairos, the moment of opportunity, which can be seized by the hair when approaching, but once passed cannot.

Other viewers may miss some of those allusions, or interpret them completely differently. When you then try to express more complex topics or narrative in allegory, the end result can be bizarrely cryptic, as seen in Lotto’s Allegory of Prudence and Wisdom (1505) below.

Despite the lessons which should have been learned about the use of allegory and symbols in narrative, a few artists persisted, and Moreau finally took it to phantasmagoric excess, in paintings such as his Jupiter and Semele (1895). I cannot help thinking that such canvases were never intended to be seen by the crowds that attended the more popular exhibitions of art in Salons, expositions, and public galleries.

One solution to the problem of symbols in narrative paintings was that claimed by Picasso: that it was not up to the artist to determine how to interpret the symbols, but a matter for the viewer/reader.

In this particular case, the clear reference to the horrific destruction by bombing of the Spanish Basque town of Guernica channels readings in a limited range of directions. Where an external narrative is not directly referenced, or may even be obscure or absent, the range of readings opens up, and many viewers find it hard to discover any coherent narrative at all. This is exemplified in much of the painting in the middle decades of the twentieth century, such as Kandinsky’s Gentle Accent (1934), below. Is it ‘just’ an abstract, or is it rich in symbols which are intended to convey narrative?

This problem of reading images came to a head, though, with photographs. During the twentieth century, these became far more accessible and popular than paintings, even (or perhaps more particularly) when they were in monochrome. Not only did it become very cheap, quick, and easy to take your own photographs, but photojournalism reached mass markets in weekly new magazines.

At first, the public appeared content to be steered into reading photographs in the way that editors (and sometimes photographers) intended. Images such as Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother (1936) were seen by tens of millions of people around the world.

Read in connection with its dry and ‘factual’ official caption
Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California.
it is so convincing and conclusive that, as popularly held, ‘the camera cannot lie’. But even this image has become controversial, with other images from the same series implying rather different readings, and some scholars claiming that its subject, Florence Thompson, was not a farmworker at all, but a ‘Dust Bowl migrant’ with quite a different narrative.

In the last few decades, the widespread availability of techniques for photomanipulation, particularly digitally using apps such as Adobe Photoshop, have if anything negated the old adage, and encouraged scepticism in readings. Many viewers now appear to consider the photoreal to be potentially as fictional as the painterly.

Realism

Where narrative paintings depend on subtleties such as facial expression, and relatively small cues which may be scattered over different passages, the simple solution to conveying narrative had been meticulously detailed realism, of the kind used by Gérôme. It is easy to demonstrate how quickly the necessary details can be lost by manipulating an image such as Poussin’s Rinaldo and Armida (c 1630) using Adobe Photoshop CS6 to produce appearances of ‘brushwork’.

But with a skilled brush, Waterhouse and Gérôme himself in a small study showed that painterliness was not necessarily contraindicated in narrative.

Others, including the pioneers Delacroix and Daumier, had also painted narratives eloquently despite their use of visible brushstrokes, even quite basic mark-making.

But this did not work as a general rule. Where the narrative to which the painting referred was well-known and the cues relatively clear, it could hold good, as in Cézanne’s example.

However, anything which relied on subtle details, such as the thumbs-down gesture in Gérôme’s splendid and authentically-detailed Pollice Verso (1872), would fail unless it employed a meticulously detailed realism. It is also worth noting that this was painted within just three years of the Cézanne above, which make fascinating comparison.

Once such ‘Salon’ paintings fell from favour, many narratives could simply not be expressed in paintings. As realism became more acceptable again in the middle of the twentieth century, so the way was open for the likes of Paul Delvaux, and ultimately the new generations represented by Paula Rego, Peter Doig, and Stuart Pearson Wright.

Today’s more liberal attitudes to realist, painterly, and gestural styles now invite the artist to use whatever is best suited to the narrative, rather than being bound to what is deemed acceptable – just as novelists, playwrights, and other artists have been enjoying for a lot longer.

A remaining puzzle

I find it mystifying that, despite their classical training and unsurpassed technical skill, the more traditional masters John Singer Sargent, Joaquín Sorolla, and Anders Zorn, almost completely avoided making any narrative works. (There are some exceptions to this, such as Sargent’s murals, but they are remarkably few in number and atypical for their work.) Each paid the bills from their lucrative portraiture commissions, and preferred to obtain their pleasure from landscapes and genre scenes rather than anything remotely narrative.

Perhaps that is more a reflection of the state of narrative painting at the turn of the century.

I have already considered some of the highly detailed and ‘finished’ paintings of Jean-Léon Gérôme in the context of narrative. In taking me back to look at his work again, I realised that there was a lot more that needs to be said. I will here try to cover a bit more about his work and its importance.

Gérôme was, along with the likes of Bouguereau, the ‘enemy’ in the wars of Impressionism during the latter half of the 1800s. As Manet, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and the others were struggling to get their radical paintings seen and accepted, Gérôme was exhibiting several works each year at the Salon, selling through Goupil in the lucrative US market, and teaching at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Gérôme was a cornerstone of established painting in France, and his work was exactly what the Impressionists opposed.

In the final decades of the 1800s, as Impressionism became ascendant, Gérôme’s popularity faded. Gérôme himself was as bitterly opposed to Impressionism as the Impressionists were to Gérôme. He insulted the Impressionists when Caillebotte’s bequest of his collection to the French state was being debated, just as the Impressionists had insulted his work when the need arose. After Gérôme’s death, his paintings and sculpture became largely forgotten. Twentieth century critics like Roger Fry helped ensure that – even though they had entered many public collections – they rested in store, unseen by the public.

It is largely through the lifelong work of one man, Gerald Ackerman, that Gérôme’s paintings are starting to appear again in the galleries and exhibitions. I agree that these paintings should be seen again, without the bitter hatred that grew in the 1800s, as works of art not conflict.

Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) – biography

The son of a goldsmith in Vesoul, France, he showed precocious talent for drawing when at school. His early paintings were seen by a friend of Paul Delaroche, and in 1840 he went to Paris to study in the studio of Delaroche. In 1843, following an accident, his master closed his studio and traveled to Italy, where Gérôme joined him and fell in love with Rome and the gladiators of classical times. However, this was cut short when Gérôme suffered typhoid fever, and had to return to Paris.

There, he joined Charles Gleyre’s studio for a period of three months, in preparation for his entry to the Prix de Rome, the prestigious prize for history painting. In 1844, Delaroche returned from Rome and Gérôme went back to his studio for a further year. In 1846, Gérôme moved in with the group of artists sometimes known as the ‘Néo-Grecs’ (Neo-Greeks), including Hamon, Picou, and Boulanger. They had a preference for subjects of antiquity, but opted for lighter, witty themes, feeling that classicism and neoclassicism were too serious and sober.

That same year, he entered the Prix de Rome, but one entry was only listed third, and his other was unranked. In 1847, he entered The Cock Fight for the Salon, earning a third-class medal, and selling it for a thousand francs. He started to achieve favourable reviews from critics, particularly Théophile Gautier. The following year he started to receive lucrative commissions, including a sale to the City of Paris for 12,000 francs.

He started to travel again in 1852, first visiting central Europe including Austria, but his plans were altered because of the Crimean War. In addition to annual success in the Salon, he showed at the Exposition Universelle in 1855 (the same boycotted by Courbet), and was appointed to the Legion of Honour. In 1856 he spent eight months in Egypt, presenting a group of the resulting paintings at the Salon the following year, to great acclaim.

In 1859, Gérôme entered into a business arrangement with Adolphe Goupil, for the Goupil galleries to represent him, make reproductions of his work, and to promote it, particularly in the US. Four years later, he married Marie Goupil, Adolphe’s daughter. In 1862 he travelled to Egypt and Syria, crossing the desert for the first time.

After the scandal over the Salon des Refusés in 1863, teaching at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris was reformed into separate studios; Gérôme was named the head of one of the three. In 1868, he toured Egypt and Asia Minor, with visits to Cairo, Giza, Jerusalem, and crossing the Sinai desert. He returned for the opening of the Suez Canal the following year. He sheltered from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1 in England, where he exhibited at the Royal Academy.

In 1874, he was awarded a gold medal for three paintings at the Salon, but critics protested that such a medal should not be awarded for genre works. Gérôme tried to decline the medal, but the jury had already awarded it and would not rescind. In the end, Gérôme donated the medal for the benefit of students at the École des Beaux-Arts.

He was a late-comer to sculpture, but in 1878 showed his first large-scale sculpture alongside his paintings at the Exposition Universelle; his paintings were awarded a medal of honour, and the sculpture a second-class medal. In 1884, he publicly criticised Manet’s decadent lifestyle in opposing a retrospective exhibition of Manet’s paintings at the École des Beaux-Arts. He was forced to back down, and admitted that they were not as bad as he had feared. In 1894, he tried to block Caillebotte’s bequest of his collection of Impressionist paintings to the French State. He also launched an attack on Impressionism at the Exposition Universelle of 1900.

Among his more famous pupils were Mary Cassatt, Thomas Eakins, J Alden Weir, and even Odilon Redon, although the last for only a short period.

Early success

I have previously explained the narrative behind The Duel After the Ball (1857), which was based on a real duel in Paris. This painting was his most reproduced work, and one of his few narrative paintings which depicted a moment after the peripeteia. It is also unusual for the atmospheric vagueness in its background.

The Death of Caesar (1859-67) is another narrative work, showing the aftermath of the assassination of Julius Caesar on the Ides (15th) of March 44 BCE. Curiously he again shows a moment after the peripeteia itself, with the gloom of the Theatre of Pompey’s columns behind – strong parallels with The Duel After the Ball.

I have also explained the narrative in Phryné before the Areopagus (1861) in my other article about Gérôme. In essence, it concerns a well-known courtesan who disrobes in front of a court to arouse their pity. Although the cynical might consider this an elaborate packaging of, and excuse for, a nude, there is much more to this painting than its basic narrative or the female figure.

I think that it is one of the first of Gérôme’s works to explore themes which would occupy many more in the future: those of what is seen, visual revelation, and truth, particularly to nature. It is also a superb example of the importance of facial expression in narrative, and a demonstration of the power of Alberti’s ‘laws’.

This fine pencil study, presumably made from life, shows an early stage in Gérôme’s process. This might be followed by compositional sketches, then a reduced-size oil study. Several of the latter have survived, and show that even at that stage, his facture was quite highly ‘finished’, with little evidence of brushstrokes.

The final result, Dance of the Almeh (The Belly-Dancer) (1863) is one of his many Orientalist paintings, based on experiences during his trips to Egypt. Today these may seem trite, but at the time very few images were made of such places, and some showed locations which were hardly visited by Europeans.

Gérôme painted relatively few religious works, but of those Golgotha (Consummatum Est, or Jerusalem) (1867) is striking for its use of the shadows of the crucified, and for its exploration of the play of light, which was to become so central to Impressionism.

He produced several paintings showing Napoleon in Egypt, including this highly detailed and intricate version of General Bonaparte and his Staff in Egypt (1867). The French Campaign in Egypt and Syria had been in 1798-1801, so this was still relatively recent history, even when viewed from the distance of the final years of the Second Empire.

Sights and signs

Rapidly becoming a favourite painting of mine, Gérôme’s Pollice Verso (1872) was started after he had returned from the safety of London during the Franco-Prussian War, but was in no way intended as a comment on that war. Instead it is Gérôme the perfectionist looking again at the power of expression – this time, a small gesture of the hand – in his favourite context, the Roman gladiatorial arena, which he had fallen in love with when he was first in Rome in 1843.

Earlier attempts to show events in the arena had been somewhat marred by difficulties in achieving historical accuracy, in armour, weapons, and other details. Far from being a flight of fancy, Gérôme had spent a great deal of time and effort trying to make everything shown in this painting as historically accurate as possible at the time. Once again, the success of the painting depended on its fine details.

Gérôme painted at least two quite different views of The Wailing Wall (Solomon’s Wall) (1877) in Jerusalem, of which this is my favourite. Showing a single person at the Wall, it is an unusually simple motif, but I think the more moving in that simplicity.

His The End of the Pose (1886) is one of a series of very unusual compound paintings, which are at once self-portraits of Gérôme as a sculptor, studies in the relationship between a model and their sculpted double, and further forays into issues of what is seen, visual revelation, and truth.

Here, whilst Gérôme cleans up, his model is seen covering up her sculpted double with sheets, as she remains completely naked. Apart from various diversionary entertainments, including a couple of stuffed birds and a model boat, there is a single red rose on the wooden platform on which the model and statue stand. Presumably this is a symbol of thanks from the artist to his model.

Gérôme’s The Carpet Merchant (of Cairo) (1887) is one of the best of his many Orientalist paintings. It gives the carpets a grandeur from their display in very everyday surrounds. There is also a little mystery in the white-robed figure shown in the deep shadow of a doorway just to the right of the centre of the painting.

Faithful to reality

As his painting was reducing, and becoming less popular than those of the Impressionists, Gérôme turned more to sculpture, particularly that of polychrome marble. Those paintings that he did produce, though, were increasingly profound.

This version of Pygmalion and Galatea (1890) was an unsuccessful study, and he decided instead to paint a less controversial view from behind the couple, who are acting out the story of the sculptor who created a female figure in ivory, only to fall in love with it, and by kissing, transforming it into a real woman. This is, perhaps, the logical conclusion of his series of paintings of the sculptor at work, only in this one, Gérôme himself is of course absent.

The Colour Grinder (1891) is another Orientalist view, but one which refers very obviously to Gérôme’s painting, and perhaps to the Impressionists and their use of high chroma colours too.

Sculpturae Vitam Insufflat Pictura (Painting Breathes Life into Sculpture) (1893) is an interesting combination of manifesto for his polychrome sculpture, and a celebration of the archaeological discoveries at Tanagra, Greece. In doing so, it starts to approach the long-running theme of visual revelation and truth, with its painted miniature humans, mimicking reality, and the wooden box of masks in the foreground. The latter may also refer to some of his previous paintings.

His polychrome marble head of Sarah Bernhardt (1894-1901) is one example of his sculpted works. She lived from 1844 to 1923, and was at the height of her fame as an actress at the time. She had toured the world to great acclaim, and was particularly popular throughout Europe and the US, touring the latter on several occasions before and after Gérôme made this. The product of several years work, it remained in his possession at his death, and he bequeathed it to the French nation. Bernhardt was an accomplished sculptor and painter herself.

Truth Coming out of her Well to Shame Mankind (1896) is another oddity, this time the last of a short series of paintings which started with the naked figure of Truth at the bottom of the well. These are based on a quotation from Democritus, Truth lies at the bottom of a well, but knowing that reference is of little help in understanding these paintings.

It has been suggested that these relate to the Dreyfus affair in France, but as they predate Zola’s famous article J’accuse! of 1898, that seems implausible. I agree with more recent proposals that this Truth is the culmination of his themes of what is seen, visual revelation, and truth, particularly to nature. It is, perhaps, his last word on Impressionism, and his final defence of his life-long painting style.

It was not, though, Gérôme’s most unusual legacy. For that we must look to his entry for a competition, in his Optician’s Sign (1902). I have been unable to source a usable image of that, but refer you to this interesting article. I wonder whether that painting might have had any influence over more radical twentieth century works by the likes of Marcel Duchamp, perhaps?

Summary

It is easy to see how Gérôme could be dismissed as tawdry, populist, and devalued. But looking more carefully at his paintings now, they are not only masterful expressions of rich (and often contemporary) narratives, but many have a lot more to be found in them. His reliance on meticulous detail was often dictated by the painting as much as his style; that detail often carried important cues and clues which make his works so interesting.

His behaviour towards the Impressionists was unacceptable, but was reciprocated, and such artistic intolerance has marred much of the history of art. But there is no good reason to pretend now that Gérôme never existed. Let’s enjoy and appreciate his work for what it is.

References

The Story in Paintings: Jean-Léon Gérôme and the spectacular

Ackerman GM (2000) Jean-Léon Gérôme, Monographie révisée, Catalogue Raisonné Mis à Jour, (in French) ACR Édition. ISBN 978 2 867 70137 5.
de Cars L et al. (2010) The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904), Skira. ISBN 978 8 85 720702 5.

Sometimes you use a term over which you think there is longstanding general agreement, only to discover that others have used it with very different meaning. This is a particular danger in fields in which the literature is very weak, as it is in narrative painting. This article re-examines what is understood by a narrative painting, and narrative in paintings.

Although there are ongoing disputes as to the exact definition of narrative, I think that it is fair to say that it consists of the expression in some form or forms of a story, which itself is a sequence of events. The sequence of events requires that there are at least two, and more usually at least three (Aristotle’s beginning, middle, and end, which have served us so well). The sequence almost always occurs over time: I am not sure that many of us would recognise two momentary events occurring simultaneously at different locations as forming a narrative, but I am confident that at least one person has experimented with that in writing.

Events themselves involve some kind of action: a static presence alone, without at least implicit action, can hardly be narrative.

Although I have claimed that a painting of an apparently static landscape can have rich implicit narrative, and stand by that, such cases are marginal at best when considering narrative paintings. Similarly, allegory can be rich in rhetoric and symbols, but if it remains static and does not tell a story, it is not narrative.

The literature

Sacheverell Sitwell (1937) in his survey of British narrative painting offers the definition that narrative painting is “the painting of anecdote. It is the chosen moment in some related incident, and looking more closely into its details we must see hints or suggestions of the before and after of the story.” However in the next line he states that Frith’s Derby Day (1856) is “a perfect example of this genre of painting”, and later adds Frith’s The Railway Station (1862), populated landscapes by Cotman and Turner, and Samuel Palmer’s The Shearers (c 1833-5) to this list.

Inevitably when you read his discussion of each of those paintings, he does not reveal the action taking place at the moment of the painting, nor any hints or suggestions as to what action might have taken place before or after the moment of that painting.

Older accounts of paintings made in Victorian Britain are no better. Lister (1966) defines a “Victorian narrative picture” as concerning “a story, idea or anecdote” which usually “had a moral importance, sometimes it was comic, often it was a puzzle” and “more often still it was extremely pathetic”. Although some of those elements are clearly intended to narrow his choice of paintings, his inclusion of ideas and anecdotes as alternatives to a story is odd, and appears unjustified.

Notable among the paintings which he includes as being examples of Victorian narrative works are street scenes, landscapes, Frith’s Derby Day (1856) and The Railway Station (1862), examples of Ford Madox Brown’s ‘baa-lambs’ paintings, and John Singer Sargent’s beautiful double portrait Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (1887).

Anecdote was derived from the Greek word ἀνέκδοτα (anecdota), meaning unpublished, and the Oxford English Dictionary gives a general meaning of secret, private, or hitherto unpublished narratives or details of history, and an art-specific meaning of the narrative of a detached incident, or of a single event, told as being in itself interesting or striking.

Julia Thomas (2000) is far more careful in what she considers to be narrative painting over the same period, but does not venture any further with a definition than “story-telling”. She also includes Frith’s Derby Day (1856) and The Railway Station (1862) without identifying any temporal sequence of events shown in those works.

In her otherwise excellent introductory account of narrative painting, Anabel Thomas (1994) does not attempt to define it. Erika Langmuir (2003) devotes a whole section to its definition, where she writes:
a narrative relates a sequence of particular events unfolding through a given period of time, and involving real or fictional individuals.
Both of these educational guides adopt a conventional approach, with Langmuir even discussing the issue of the artist’s intent.

The paintings in question

William Powell Frith’s (1819–1909) Derby Day (1856) is shown here in the form of an earlier and very similar study. Like many of Frith’s social panoramas, there is a lot of action disseminated throughout the crowd which he assembles on the canvas. However, there is no evidence or cues of preceding or subsequent linked events which might form a narrative as such. We know from the title of the painting in general terms that this crowd gathered for the Derby horse race, and we know that they will eventually disperse. But those are vague generalities, not specific events linked in time to form a story.

This version of Frith’s The Railway Station (1862) was engraved by Francis Holl in 1866 and has been finished with hand colouring. In concept, it is very similar to his Derby Day, but here shows a view of a crowded and busy Paddington railway station in London. It has the same problem establishing a narrative.

Take, for example, the incident happening at the extreme right, where a man dressed in brown clothes is apparently in the process of being arrested whilst trying to board a train. We do not know what event has preceded or precipitated his arrest, nor do we have any inkling as to whether he will try to run off, or be taken into custody. It is a single event, not a temporal series of two or more events linked together.

Frith painted other panoramas like these, including his rustic An English Merrymaking a Hundred Years Ago (1847). Here he offered a quotation from John Milton’s l’Allegro in explanation:
When the merry bells ring round,
And jocund rebecks sound
To many a youth and many a maid
Dancing in the checquered shade,
And young and old come forth to play
On a sunshine holiday.
There is not a shred of narrative to be seen, unless we care to invent it in our own minds.

Frith’s The Crossing Sweeper (here an 1893 copy of the 1858 original) looks as if there could be narrative constructed around it, but was one of a very large number of similar genre paintings, in this case linked to various similar characters in Dickens’ novels about London. But no specific character in Dickens appears to be referenced, so it lacks the support of narrative text.

The problems with Ford Madox Brown’s (1821–1893) Pretty Baa-Lambs (1851/9) are even more apparent. A sickly-sweet over-sentimental pastoral, there can be few figurative paintings which have less narrative content. Perhaps I am missing something obvious.

Samuel Palmer’s (1805-1881) The Shearers (c 1833-5) is a beautiful pastoral painting which might contain some symbolic references, although they remain obscure despite several expert attempts to read them. However, it lacks any coherent references to preceding or subsequent events, and once again fails to connect with a story sequence.

John Singer Sargent’s (1856-1925) Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (1885-6) is an impressionist double portrait of two young girls, which has been discussed in detail on Wikipedia and the Tate Gallery. Neither proposes any accompanying narrative.

If you were to accept Frith’s The Railway Station (1862) as a narrative painting, then it would seem hard not to include those of Claude Monet (1840–1926) painted in front of the motif at the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris: works such as his Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare (1877).

Equally if you are able to discover narrative in other pastorals and landscapes, surely Monet’s Grainstacks: Snow Effect (1891) is a narrative within a narrative series. That would in turn make the Impressionists devoted narrative painters, and rewrite the history of art.

Conclusions

In addition to being few in number, published studies on narrative painting are not consistent in the definitions that they give, and frequently include works which are inconsistent with their own definitions.

It can be difficult to know whether some paintings are narrative, particularly when there is little or no evidence of the artist’s intent. However, the examples quoted above appear quite clear cut. If the text accompanying a painting fails to reveal or suggest narrative as is generally understood, then the author has failed to support their claim, which must be rejected.

References

Langmuir E (2003) Narrative, Pocket Guide, The National Gallery Company. ISBN 978 1 8570 9257 8.
Lister R (1966) Victorian Narrative Paintings, Clarkson N Potter. No ISBN.
Sitwell S (1937) Narrative Pictures. A Survey of English Genre and its Painters, B T Batsford. No ISBN.
Thomas A (1994) Illustrated Dictionary of Narrative Painting, John Murray. ISBN 978 0 7195 5289 2.
Thomas J (2000) Victorian Narrative Painting, Tate Publishing. ISBN 978 1 8543 7318 2.

In 1881, Winslow Homer, a modestly successful painter in watercolours who had been living reclusively in Gloucester, MA, travelled to England to study the work of JMW Turner. He then lived for over a year in the traditional fishing community of Cullercoats, Tyne and Wear, in the north-east of England. While he was there, his style transformed, so that when he returned to the US at the end of 1882, he had become one of the greatest watercolour painters, and a major American artist.

This short series of articles looks at Homer’s paintings of Cullercoats, the narratives within them, and the stories that they told together, as a group. In this first article, I outline his biography beforehand, what he set out to achieve, and provide some background information about the area.

Winslow Homer (1836-1910)

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1836, his mother was a fine botanical painter in watercolours and his first teacher. He moved to the leafy suburbs of Cambridge at the age of six. He was later apprenticed to a commercial lithographer in Boston for two years, then set up as a freelance illustrator in 1857. He supplied illustrations of life in Boston and the countryside around to Harper’s Weekly and other magazines, for the rapidly growing market. In 1859 he moved his studio to New York, where he took classes at the National Academy of Design and learned fine art painting too. He first read about Chevreul’s colour theories in 1860.

He was sent to the American Civil War from 1861-5, where he made three trips to the front, sketching military life and battle scenes. His painting Home, Sweet Home (1863) was well received when exhibited at the National Academy. He spent the year 1867 in France, where he concentrated on landscapes and rural life, and illustrations for Harper’s Weekly showing life in Paris. On his return to the US he painted more rural and coastal scenes, and his brushwork loosened up.

During the 1870s he gave up illustration to concentrate on watercolours, which became his preferred medium from the summer of 1873, when he stayed in Gloucester, MA, which was then the busiest seaport in the US. At first the critics were disparaging of his watercolours, but they were popular and sold well. He also developed and frequently used a wide range of techniques, including the use of both transparent and opaque watercolour, thin layered washes, scraping, texture, resist, splattering, and even abrasive paper.

From 1877 he exhibited regularly at the Boston Art Club, where his watercolours achieved recognition, although he became more reclusive, living in Gloucester, MA, and at one time in Eastern Point Lighthouse. During this period his watercolour painting progressively shifted from using opaque colours to ‘transparent’ ones, in his effort to improve.

He resolved to travel to London to study the watercolours of JMW Turner, then considered to have been the greatest landscape artist of recent time. Homer had seen Turner’s Slave Ship (1840), which was one of his few paintings in the US at the time, and was aware that Turner had undertaken extensive studies of colour, a subject which remained dear to his heart. In the autumn of 1880, Homer sold as many of his works as he could to raise the funds for his travel to, and stay in, England.

He first went to London, where he studied more than just the unique collection of Turner’s paintings, as he signed in to access the British Museum’s huge collection of watercolour works too. He seems to have completed his studies in London by late March 1881, and then went to the fishing community of Cullercoats to paint. He stayed there until early November 1882. Although it is believed that he rented a house in the village, when he first arrived (at least) he lived in room 17 of the Hudleston Arms. This building was demolished in 2005. He also used a studio just across the road, at number 12 Bank Top, which was demolished in 1930. However, a lot of his painting there was started, if not completed, en plein air.

Cullercoats

Although now part of an urban area which sprawls from Tynemouth to Whitley Bay, in 1881 Cullercoats was a small village of around 2,000 people who were almost entirely dependent on fishing. This was carried out by the men and boys from wooden boats of a regional design known as cobles, which are open-topped and provide no shelter for the crew.

During the 1800s, piers were built on each side of the harbour to shelter many of the cobles, but with around 80 being used actively for fishing, many were still launched from the beach. In 1848, a coble carrying a pilot out to board a ship capsized, and all her crew were lost.

The local landowner of the time, the Duke of Northumberland, provided funds for a local lifeboat which was manned by volunteers from the fishermen, but the following year that lifeboat was lost with all twenty crew. The Duke sponsored a competition to devise a self-righting vessel, which was brought on station in 1852. A proper station building was completed in 1879, and the local railway reached Cullercoats in 1882.

Local women provided extensive shoreside support to the menfolk in their fishing. Known as fishlasses or fishwives, they made a reputation in popular culture, and were celebrated for the strenuous work which they did, including hauling and cleaning fish, mending nets, and more. They were described in a popular music-hall song by Edward Corvan (1862):
Aw’s a Cullercoats fish-lass, se cozy an’ free
Browt up in a cottage close on by the sea;
An’ aw sell fine fresh fish ti poor an’ ti rich–
Will ye buy, will ye buy, will ye buy maw fresh fish?

A plain English version would read:
I’m a Cullercoats fish-lass, so cosy and free
Brought up in a cottage close on by the sea;
And I sell fine fresh fish to poor and to rich–
Will you buy, will you buy, will you buy my fresh fish?

Homer probably stumbled across Cullercoats in the watercolours and illustrations of John Dawson Watson (1832-1892), whose work showing the fisherfolk of Cullercoats was quite well known at the time. Watson’s illustrations for books and illustrated newspapers also reached around the world, and it is possible that Homer had come across his work when he had been an illustrator.

From around 1870 onwards there were a few artists who frequented the village, although it never reached the scale of being an artists’ colony. Others included Henry H Emmerson, Arthur H Marsh, John Falconer Slater, and Ralph Hedley – none as well-known as Homer even at that time.

My next article will consider one of the most enduring themes of Homer’s paintings of Cullercoats, the women who watched for the safe return of their men. Here is a taster.

References

Wikipedia
WikiArt
National Gallery of Art virtual exhibition from 2005.
Winslow Homer’s impressionist paintings, on this blog
Cullercoats local pages, with history and many old images.

Tedeschi M and others (2008) Watercolors by Winslow Homer. The Color of Light, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 11945 9.

Winslow Homer had visited England primarily to study the watercolours of JMW Turner, and to understand his colour theories and their implementation. By mid March 1881, he had completed that phase, and now needed to go somewhere to paint in seclusion, to put what he had learned into practice.

He had seen some of the illustrations of JD Watson showing the distant fishing community of Cullercoats, and – as much by chance as by design – travelled there in late March 1881. He then spent until early November 1882 painting the fishermen and their fishlasses or fishwives.

Life in Cullercoats, like that in the hundreds of similar fishing communities around the coast of Britain at the time, had a natural rhythm. When the conditions were favourable, the men and boys would take their small open boats, cobles, out to sea to fish. Once they had a full catch, or the weather forced them back, they returned, to the relief of the women and their families.

When their men were away, the fishlasses and fishwives would continue with their supporting tasks of knitting and repairing clothing, repairing nets and gear, but that workload was relatively light. Their constant thoughts were with their men, and when they would return. In the days before radio, the only way in which they could know when the boats were coming back was to watch for them.

In the summer, and in fine weather, watching from the tops of the low cliffs around Cullercoats was a pleasant pastime for the children.

The women took turns to act as lookout, who had to keep a close watch on the horizon. In his Fisherman’s Family (The Lookout) (1881), Homer also shows the smoke rising from a steamship on the horizon.

Watching was not just the task of the lookout. The women and younger children spent a lot of their time watching and waiting, taking shelter at the foot of the cliffs when there was a cool wind blowing.

Watching was recognised as being such an important task that the Coastguard started to pay lookouts and providing them with telescopes. That work was often undertaken by older men who could no longer go to sea.

When the weather was deteriorating, the watching became more important, and increasingly anxious. There was always the hope that the boats would return before the wind and waves got up.

Once the boats started to return to harbour, each fishwife had to watch for the return of those carrying her husband, sons, and relatives.

Storms were inevitably the biggest fear. Even though the loss of whole boats was mercifully very unusual, severe weather often took individual members of crew. It also made accidents more common, and the resulting injuries could stop a man from going to sea, leaving his family destitute and starving.

Homer’s many paintings of women watching for the safe return of their men go deeper too. We become the watchers, looking for that next hope in our lives, hoping that we will weather the storm and come home safely.

Although titled Girl with Red Stockings, this fishwife has put her empty baskets down to look at a ship being wrecked in front of her, to the left of the painting. The ship still has all its sails set, and appears to be in the process of being driven ashore in an easterly gale. Such shipwrecks were not uncommon, particularly among sailing vessels, which were at the mercy of the wind. Once driven inshore by an easterly wind and sea, there was little that the crew could do to avoid running aground, and their ship breaking up.

Homer’s Watching the Tempest shows the men in the process of preparing to launch the lifeboat. A large crowd has gathered along the top of the cliff on the left of the painting.

This may have been painted in response to a real-life wreck which Homer witnessed at Cullercoats. In the early morning of 21 October 1881, the 1000 ton barque, the Iron Crown, was driven aground in a storm. In the next hours, the ship’s crew were rescued, following which the derelict broke up. Homer later painted a watercolour showing the rescue, probably constructed from sketches, witness accounts, and photographs. The moment which he shows is the second and final pass of the lifeboat, required to rescue the last member of the crew on board.

However, on that occasion the rescue was performed by the Tynemouth lifeboat, not that at Cullercoats, so Watching the Tempest may refer to a different incident.

Each of these paintings carries its own simple story, but taken as a group they tell of the incessant routine of life in the fishing community: separation, watching, shore life paused in expectation, fear, worry, hopefully resolved in the safe return.

Once the boats and their crew did come ashore, the women then turned their hands to unloading the catch and preparing it for sale. Then there were the men to care for, their nets and gear to get ready for the next cycle, back out to sea, watching…

References

National Gallery of Art virtual exhibition from 2005.

Tedeschi M and others (2008) Watercolors by Winslow Homer. The Color of Light, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 11945 9.

Most who have written about Winslow Homer’s paintings from Cullercoats have noted that a large proportion show the fishlasses and fishwives of the community, and that in those few which show both men and women, the sexes appear segregated.

These result from the course of life in such fishing communities. As much of the time as possible, the men and boys old enough to go to sea would be at sea, catching fish to earn money to keep their families. Fishing was a time-consuming business: the fish were seldom just there for the taking, and long days could be spent in search of a catch. Locating fish was not easy, and took acquired knowledge, experience, and often cunning.

So most of the time that Homer was living in Cullercoats, he was surrounded by the women and their children, and their men were away at sea.

Although watching for the return of the boats was one key role expected of the women, they also had many more demanding supporting tasks to perform.

Some had specific roles: Homer’s Daughter of the Coast Guard (1881) shows a young woman with a fog siren, which she used to provide an acoustic guide from the shore when visibility was poor, to aid navigation of the boats. Lighthouses usually had fixed foghorns, which could be heard over many miles, but such portable sirens were used to guide vessels into small harbours, such as that at Cullercoats.

Fog was a serious problem for the fishermen. The north east coast is prone to thick fog, and it was usually grounds for the cobles to remain in harbour. When caught out in fog, navigation became almost impossible, with only a compass, experience, and the sound of foghorns and sirens like this to help guide them back to port. With little wind to move their boats, the men usually had to resort to rowing in such conditions.

Local fishing used both lines and nets, and the women were responsible for maintaining and preparing them for the men. In A Fishergirl Baiting Lines (1881) a young fishlass is shown baiting the lines, ready for their use. Her hat suggests that this was being done in the yard outside one of the cottages.

Fishergirls Coiling Tackle (Fisherman’s Daughters) (1881) shows three girls, presumably from one family. The youngest is still able to watch her sisters and clutch her doll; the other two sisters are both at work preparing lines, which were carefully coiled in the shallow wickerwork baskets, ready for use.

Behind them is the very gesturally-painted cream ghost of a net, which was probably drying in the sun. At the right, hanging by a door, is a pair of waders, used to keep the feet and legs dry, either when working in the coble, or when wading out to one. The door has scratched marks recording some relevant figures. At the left is a pair of black chickens, the bright red cockscomb of one clearly visible, pecking in the dirt.

Nets, lines, and other fishing gear had to be carried to and from the boats by the women.

Fishlasses and fishwives did some of their own fishing too, although it may not have been particularly productive. Here one is armed with a shrimping net, for catching small crustaceans and fish in rock pools. They also harvested shellfish, which Homer showed in another watercolour.

Wherever the catch, it was left to the women to carry the fish and prepare them for sale.

Some parts of the coast were also suitable for lobster pots, which again would have been maintained and prepared by the women.

Some of the most arduous work involved transferring a catch from the boat into these large wickerwork baskets, then carrying them in teams to the village, where the women could prepare the fish for market.

In the next article, I will look in more detail at those times when the whole community worked together, when the boats came in.

References

National Gallery of Art virtual exhibition from 2005.

Tedeschi M and others (2008) Watercolors by Winslow Homer. The Color of Light, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 11945 9.

This short series has been looking at Winslow Homer’s paintings from Cullercoats.

Life in fishing communities was centred on when the boats came in: the return of the men and boys, hopefully with large and valuable catches which could be sold to pay the bills and feed the family. Just as the women were responsible for watching for the return of the boats, so they knew that they had arduous work to do when they did come in.

The phrase when your boat comes in has entered English as an expression for a time of success and (hopefully rich) reward. It has also been passed down in a traditional song from the north-east of England, the first verse of which runs:
Dance to your Daddy, my little laddie
Dance to your Daddy, my little man
Thou shalt have a fish and thou shalt have a fin
Thou shalt have a codlin when the boat comes in
Thou shalt have haddock baked in a pan
Dance to your Daddy, my little man.

You can hear the song sung here, although that version has variant lyrics which were used as the theme for a British TV series of the same name.

Homer’s Fisher Girls on the Beach, Cullercoats (1881) shows the arrival in progress, the earliest of the cobles being surrounded by their families, but the two fishwives in the foreground still waiting for their boat to come in. Although the boats were usually kept in and around the small harbour, when conditions allowed they would normally be sailed onto the beach, to allow better access to remove the catch and carry out maintenance.

By the time that the last vessels were arriving, the whole beach was bustling with the fishermen and fishwives hard at work. The catch had first to be transferred from each boat into the large wickerwork baskets, then the baskets carried by teams of women from the beach up into the village to be prepared for sale.

Four Fishwives on the Beach (1881) appears to have been one of Winslow Homer’s studies, probably painted en plein air using four models. Although he had a couple of wooden manikins dressed in miniature costumes, he seems to have worked as much as possible from life.

His Four Fishwives (1881) shows a finished version, worked into a moodier background, with sunlight illuminating the four women.

On the Sands (1881) is another quick atmospheric sketch started using pencil and completed in watercolour.

Most of these paintings continued to focus on the women, his most readily available models, but The Return, Tynemouth (1881) is a quick plein air sketch of two of the fishermen, with their brightly coloured oilskins, and carrying some of their gear.

In fine weather the beach became the centre of the community, allowing Homer to paint portraits showing family life – again almost entirely of the fishlasses and fishwives.

The Summer Cloud appears to be out of commission, perhaps awaiting repairs. Its registration number, painted by the name, indicates that it was registered in North Shields, which was the nearest major port to Cullercoats, at the mouth of the river Tyne. It is also likely that fish caught by local fishermen would have been taken by cart for sale at the large fresh fish market in North Shields, just over 2 miles away. This served the nearby industrial city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

The last painting in this group is one of Homer’s most enigmatic. Known as Tynemouth Priory, England (1881), the priory of the title is seen in silhouette on the horizon at the far right, hardly a dominant passage in the painting. Its motif is a boat, presumably from Cullercoats, hauling in its net. But the boat has no sail, so could only have been propelled by oars, which are nowhere to be seen. Stranger still is the apparent woman (with a bright red jacket and tied back hair) at the helm of the boat.

The next article in this series will look at Homer’s paintings after he left Cullercoats, and the influence which this experience and its images had on him.

References

National Gallery of Art virtual exhibition from 2005.

Tedeschi M and others (2008) Watercolors by Winslow Homer. The Color of Light, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 11945 9.

This short series has been looking at Winslow Homer’s paintings from Cullercoats. I have shown how he pictured the fishlasses and fishwives watching for the return of the boats, working ashore, and the bustling activity when their boats came in.

Puzzles

By all accounts, life in Cullercoats changed greatly during the summer, when itinerant musicians and street entertainers toured through the village, and miners from the nearby coalfields visited it as a beach resort. Despite being in the community for two complete summers, Homer showed not even a brief glimpse of that. Instead he concentrated on the fishing community, and its womenfolk in particular.

Every moment that these women and girls are pictured, they are active: here on the cliffs in the summer they are gathering yellow flowers, perhaps to sell to visitors.

Some accounts of Homer’s paintings dwell on the segregation of the sexes which appears in many of them. Apparently drawn further south down the coast from Cullercoats, his sketch Fishing off Scarborough (1882) shows two fishwives at sea with two men.

Although his production of sketches and watercolour paintings appears to have been quite intense and sustained, Homer also painted a few works in oils whilst at Cullercoats. His Hark! The Lark! (1882) was shown at the Royal Academy in London in 1882, but does not seem to have had much impact. It lacks the remarkable freshness and spontaneity of his watercolours, resembling the rustic Realism of Jean-François Millet, perhaps.

It raises the question, though, of how much he travelled away from Cullercoats during the 19 months in which he lived there. Some have claimed that he journeyed significantly further north, perhaps even to Scotland, and as far afield as Wales. In the absence of either paintings or documentary evidence, these appear unlikely.

His production during that time also changed considerably. As most of his sketches and paintings are signed and dated by year, I have looked at the dates attributed to them for the paintings which I have shown here. Twenty-four, almost three-quarters, are dated 1881, and only eight in 1882. The great majority of his paintings included in the references were also dated 1881. Does this mean that he painted fewer in 1882, that many of those painted that year have been lost or destroyed, or that private collectors have amassed his work from that year disproportionately?

Some have pondered Homer’s relationship with his models, although all the evidence is that it was entirely professional. Winslow Homer’s lifestyle was so upright and sober that several potential biographers apparently declined the opportunity to write books about him because of the difficulty they would have in retaining the reader’s interest.

One model, a redheaded girl of 15 years age at the time, has been identified as Maggie Jefferson (later marrying to become Mrs Maggie Storey, and having 17 children), who lived on Bank Top near Homer’s studio. She was often paid the shilling which he gave his models for a sitting. It was a lot of money to them in 1881, and made him a generous donor to the budgets of many Cullercoats families.

Looking through his many gorgeous paintings, there are other faces and figures who start to become familiar too. My own curiosity has been aroused over a young woman, probably slightly older than Maggie Jefferson, with more blonde hair, who is often seen wearing red stockings. The composite image below shows details of what may be the same model from the following paintings:

• A Fishergirl Baiting Lines (1881), which is her most detailed portrait,
• Girl with Red Stockings (1882),
• The Gale (1883-93),
• Three Fisher Girls, Tynemouth (1881),
• Tynemouth Sands (1882-3),
• The Life Line (1884), which I show and discuss below.

Achievements

Winslow Homer was already making the shift from painting in opaque watercolour before he went to Cullercoats, and was adept at the techniques used by Turner and other masters to get the best from them. He had switched to Winsor & Newton’s paints on Whatman paper, considered to be the finest of the day. His studies of Turner’s and other work in London, and his understanding of colour perception, helped him create a succession of superb paintings, with remarkable spontaneity and richness of gesture, masterful composition and use of colour. Individually many are among the greatest watercolours of all time, and viewed as a group they must be almost unique.

He sent paintings home in advance, always mindful of the need to make his market. Initial reception in the US was lukewarm at best. A few critics were positive, but most were dismissive: Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer is often quoted as stating that they were “neither individual nor attractive.”

Superficially, Homer’s response was to turn back and paint more American themes and scenes. In doing so, he transferred what he had learned at Cullercoats, and often revisited its people and their lives.

Early success came with The Life Line (1884), a work in oils which was ostensibly inspired by the rescue of a young woman from shipwreck off Atlantic City, New Jersey, in the summer of 1883. But look carefully at that provocative, almost erotically-charged woman, and is she not one of the fishlasses from Cullercoats, complete with flashes of red in her shawl and legs? This sold almost immediately it went on show, for $2,500, and marked the start of Homer’s commercial success.

There followed a series from the even harsher conditions fishing off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, including The Fog Warning (Halibut Fishing) (1885), again in oils. For these Homer went out with the herring fleet in 1884, which must have stirred fond memories of the fishermen of Cullercoats.

Watercolours such as Sharks (The Derelict) (1885) showed that his time at Cullercoats had brought about lasting change, which ensured his well-deserved reputation as one of America’s greatest painters.

In the next and last article in this series, I will try to assemble the large-scale narrative from a selection of the very best of Homer’s paintings of Cullercoats.

References

National Gallery of Art virtual exhibition from 2005.

Cikovsky, Jr, N, Kelly F et al. (1995) Winslow Homer, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 3000 6555 8.
Griffin RC (2006) Winslow Homer, An American Vision, Phaidon Press. ISBN 978 0 7148 3992 9.
Tedeschi M and others (2008) Watercolors by Winslow Homer. The Color of Light, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 11945 9.

This article rounds off my series looking at Winslow Homer’s paintings from Cullercoats, by setting them into a narrative context.

Many individual paintings have their own, small narratives. What I want to do here is, using some of the best of his work from 1881-2, to see how they assemble into a larger narrative about the life of fishlasses, fishwives, and the fishermen of Cullercoats.

Like many fishing communities at that time, everything in the lives of individuals and the community as a whole was driven by the cycle of fishing activity. This cycle starts with the departure of the men and boys on board their boats, to go in search of a catch – an event which Homer does not seem to have painted.

With their menfolk away at sea, the women and girls returned to their maintenance tasks, of making and mending clothing, nets, and other fishing gear, and of caring for the other members of their families, who were too young or too old to go to sea.

Lighter work, such as preparing lines and tackle, was usually performed by the younger women. When the weather was fine they would sit outside in their yards putting bait onto lines, then coiling the lines carefully into the shallow wickerwork baskets from which they would be deployed.

Once the fishwives thought that the boats might return, they would post lookouts to scan the horizon for them. In fine weather they would take the whole family up on top of the low cliffs, and one would stand and act as lookout.

As they went about their work, wherever they were, they would look out to sea, watching for the boats to come in.

Whenever they had a moment, they would watch, waiting for the next stage in the cycle to begin.

When the weather was bad – in gales, rough seas, or fog – the watching became more tense. They knew that the risks to their menfolk were greater, and that the chances of losing a man overboard, injury, and death were increased.

They knew the violence of the sea, how it could drive large well-found vessels ashore. They feared the winter storms, with easterly gales which could bring shipwreck and disaster. The worse the weather, the more they watched, and the more anxious their watching.

Even when all the Cullercoats boats were safely stowed in harbour, they knew that their menfolk might have to take to the sea in the lifeboat, rowing out to rescue others in distress. They remembered the lifeboat which was lost with all hands, and watched, fearing for their men, and the risks that they took for others.

Once they could see the boats returning, they flocked down to receive them. As the first arrived they looked intently to see their own, poised ready with the fishbaskets, for when their boat comes in.

The whole family went down to greet the boats, transfer the fish to their baskets, and haul the catch back up to the village. There they prepared the fish for despatch to the fishmarket in North Shields, hoping to get good prices so that they could feed and clothe their families. Again, he does not appear to have painted the women processing the fish, nor the catch being despatched for sale.

Their menfolk brought the fishing gear back up, for the women to prepare once again for the start of the next cycle, when those men returned to sea to fish.

There were sometimes a few moments when they could sit up by the boats which were out of service, taking up some of the sunny spells. But always, through force of habit, they remained watching.

So, in eleven of Winslow Homer’s best watercolour paintings from his 19 months spent in and around Cullercoats, he has provided us with the very human and personal story of the fishlasses, fishwives, and fishermen of the community of Cullercoats, on the north-east coast of England, in the late 1800s.

References

National Gallery of Art virtual exhibition from 2005.

Cikovsky, Jr, N, Kelly F et al. (1995) Winslow Homer, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 3000 6555 8.
Griffin RC (2006) Winslow Homer, An American Vision, Phaidon Press. ISBN 978 0 7148 3992 9.
Tedeschi M and others (2008) Watercolors by Winslow Homer. The Color of Light, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 11945 9.

One solution to the problem of paintings being a singular medium for narrative, and not a serial medium like text, is to paint a formal series of works, which are then viewed in a particular order. This happened quite commonly with polyptychs, which often showed a series of scenes through the life of Christ, for example. As these were well-known narratives, such series were not particularly adventurous or novel in technique.

One prolific painter of narrative series, though, stands out: William Hogarth (1697–1764), who from about 1731 until 1754 painted a succession of moralising series, and his influence led several later British painters to create their own.

Hogarth was a largely self-taught painter, having entered the world of art as a copperplate engraver in 1720. His works in oil were usually strongly narrative, showing moments of climax and sometimes peripeteia in theatrical productions or everyday life in London. Many included social commentary, wit, and some overtly caricatured society. One of his reasons for painting was to provide a supply of original images for engraving, and all his series paintings were seen (from a commercial view, at least) as a means to producing lucrative series of prints.

In this article, I will examine his first two series, A Harlot’s Progress (c 1731), and its compliment, A Rake’s Progress (1732-5). The next article will examine his most famous Marriage A-la-Mode (c 1743), and the more unusual Four Times of the Day (1736). The article after that will consider those inspired by his series to tackle their own, including Augustus Leopold Egg (1816–1863) and William Powell Frith (1819-1909) in particular.

One inevitable question – particularly in view of Hogarth’s artistic origins in print-making – is whether these series are narrative paintings, or illustrations in oils. There is no definitive separation, although seen from the point of view of narrative alone, I suggest the following distinction:
a narrative painting, and series of narrative paintings, are by the artist’s intent to stand alone from any oral or written version of the narrative, possibly with the support of the painting’s title and a short excerpt of text; an illustration is intended by the artist to accompany a text version of the narrative; both can equally be works of art (cf. William Blake and many others).

Hogarth’s series of paintings were clearly never intended to accompany text narrative. Indeed, at the time of their production, there was no text version of their narrative available – another unusual feature, as each tells a story which is new to the viewer.

A Harlot’s Progress (c 1731)

The six paintings from which this series is comprised were completed in 1731, and first appeared in engravings in 1732. Tragically all the paintings were destroyed by fire when at Fonthill House in 1755, so we only have prints from which to study Hogarth’s first serially painted narrative.

The general outline of the story is of an innocent country girl, Moll Hackabout, who comes to London, and immediately falls into the hands of a notorious brothel-keeper and madame. Moll becomes the kept mistress of a wealthy merchant, but later slides into common prostitution. She is arrested, and ends up in London’s Bridewell Prison. Having contracted syphilis earlier, the disease progresses, steadily killing her. She finally dies at the age of 23, mourned only by her fellow prostitutes.

Moll Hackabout is first shown arriving at the Bell Inn, Cheapside. Her clothing, with a fine bonnet, white dress, and flower adornments, shows her to be an innocent country girl, but she is here being inspected by Elizabeth Needham, the notorious brothel-keeper and madame. Hogarth gives the latter black skin lesions intended to signal that she has longstanding sexually-transmitted disease (syphilis), and her face is aged. Hogarth tends to use caricature appearances rather than facial expressions.

In the doorway at the right is an equally notorious rake, Colonel Francis Charteris, and his pimp John Gourlay, who are also taking an interest in the arrival of a fresh young innocent. In Moll’s luggage is a symbolic dead goose, which suggests her death as a result of gullibility. The address on a label attached to the dead goose reads “My lofing cosen in Tems Stret in London”, suggesting that Moll’s move to London has been arranged through intermediaries, who may well have profited from her being trafficked into the hands of Elizabeth Needham.

Behind Moll, an itinerant preacher is engrossed in spreading the message to his small ad hoc congregation in the back of a covered wagon. In front of that a pile of pots is just about to collapse, as is Moll’s life.

In each engraving – and even more so in the original paintings – Hogarth packs in an abundance of cue, clues, and symbols to support the narrative.

Hogarth next shows us Moll at the top of the slippery slope to perdition, as the kept woman or mistress of a wealthy Jewish merchant; sadly anti-semitism was endemic at the time. The cues to this are abundant, in Old Testament paintings on the wall, which also seem to prophesy Moll’s fate at his hands.

Enjoying relative luxury at this stage, she has a black serving boy and a monkey. On a dressing table at the far left is a mask, for masquerade balls, and Moll has just deliberately knocked the table over to distract her merchant’s attention, whilst in the background another lover is able to tiptoe out.

Moll’s descent continues as she is here nothing but a common prostitute, her bed being the only substantial piece of furniture in the room. Her maid is already floridly syphilitic, with black pox marks on her face and a sunken bridge to her nose. She keeps a cat, who is posed in the manner of her mistress when at work.

She is surrounded by symbols of her evil, such as the black witches hat and broomstick, and above the bed is a wigbox belonging to a highwayman who was hanged on 11 May 1730. At the right, in the background, Sir John Gonson, a famous magistrate, is entering with three armed bailiffs to make her arrest. Meanwhile she is showing off a new and expensive pocket watch.

Moll ends up in Bridewell Prison, beating hemp to make nooses for hanging. Her jailer, at the extreme left, beats her to make her work harder, while his wife is stealing the clothes off her back. To the right of Moll is a card-sharp who is accompanied by his dog, and possibly the rest of his family. In the background is a black woman who appears pregnant, who could therefore not be executed or transported. In the foreground, at the right, is Moll’s maid, showing off a pair of Moll’s shoes. Moll herself now has growing black spots on her face, indicating the progress of her own syphilis.

With Moll in the final throes of her syphilis, she is attended by Dr. Richard Rock (dark hair) and Dr. Jean Misaubin (white hair), who are arguing over the best treatment. Another woman, possibly her landlady, is rifling Moll’s possessions, while Moll’s young son sits close to the fire. A Passover cake is hung by the door as a flytrap, suggesting that her former lover (the Jewish merchant) may be supporting her in her dying days.

Moll finally dies at the age of 23, on 2 September 1731, and her wake is attended mainly by fellow prostitutes. A parson sits, drunkenly fondling the woman next to him, and spilling his brandy (a sexually explicit symbol). Most of the women bear the hallmarks of syphilis, and Moll’s orphaned son sits innocently playing under her coffin. Various other visual cues and clues are given in Hogarth’s elaborate details.

A Rake’s Progress (1732-5)

No sooner were the prints being made of A Harlot’s Progress than Hogarth was at work with its successor, eight paintings showing the similar downfall of a man.

His outline is again quite simple and strongly moral: Tom Rakewell inherits a fortune on the death of his miserly father. Tom then squanders his money making himself appear grander, engaging in expensive pursuits, and in orgiastic nights in brothels. Pursued by bailiffs, he narrowly escapes arrest when on his way in a sedan chair to a party at St James’s Palace. He then has to marry a rich but ugly old woman for her money to settle his debts. But his descent continues with large losses gambling, and he is put into the Fleet debtor’s prison. There he becomes insane, and ends his days in Bethlehem Hospital (‘Bedlam’).

These are shown in Hogarth’s original oil paintings, now on display in Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, and in the prints derived from them.

Tom Rakewell has inherited a fortune from his father. The latter is portrayed as being extremely miserly by the house full of symbols of meanness, such as a half-starved cat, resoled shoes from the cover of a bible, etc. While he is being measured for new clothes by his tailor, Tom rejects his pregnant fiancée Sarah Young, who is crying at the left edge of the painting, her mother comforting her and remonstrating with Tom.

Tom sets out to make a new man of himself with the aid of many tutors and hangers-on. The composer Handel plays at the harpsichord, then there is a fencing master, a quarterstaff instructor, a dancing master with violin, Charles Bridgeman (a famous landscape gardener), Tom himself, an ex-soldier acting as bodyguard, a bugler from a foxhunt, and a jockey. In the background are others who are busy spending Tom’s inheritance on worthy causes no doubt.

At night, Tom spends more of his money in the Rose Tavern, a well-known brothel in Covent Garden, London. The prostitutes – and there are seven pictured and paid-for – bear Hogarth’s usual black pox marks to indicate their state of ill-health and occupation.

With his inheritance vanishing, Tom’s debts start to mount. Seen being carried in a sedan chair to St James’s Palace, Welsh bailiffs (with leeks on their hats) attempt to arrest him for debt. As it is St David’s Day (1 March), he can only be going to the palace to celebrate Queen Caroline’s birthday. Thankfully, his former fiancée Sarah Young, now a milliner, intervenes and saves his day. In a symbolic twist, a worker who is filling an oil street lantern behind and above Tom anoints him accidentally with oil, marking the ‘blessing’ by Sarah. A young thief is just making off with Tom’s silver-handled cane, though.

Tom’s only recourse is to marry money, in the shape of an ugly old spinster, which he does in St Marylebone. As Tom undergoes the wedding vows, he is already looking towards his new wife’s maid, who is younger and prettier. In the background, Sarah Young has arrived, holding her young child. Sarah’s mother is seen in a disagreement with one of the wedding guests. The two dogs and other details at the right provide further cues and clues to additional narrative.

Despite this influx of his new wife’s money, Tom’s descent continues unabated. Here he is in a gambling den, surrounded by London’s low-life, on bended knee, pleading to the Almighty for one last chance to recover his money.

Tom’s debts finally catch up with him, and he is thrown into the infamous Fleet debtors prison. He is surrounded by those demanding money from him, but is unable to do anything. Beside him is a rejected attempt to raise money by writing a play. In the background are signs of developing madness: an alchemy experiment, presumably to try to turn base metal into gold, and equipment for studying the stars, in the hope that they may signal a change in fortune.

Here Hogarth uses a rich range of facial expressions, together with body language, to heighten the sense of drama and welling crisis.

Tom’s crisis resolves into madness and violence, so he is taken to spend the rest of his days in London’s Bethlehem Hospital, whose common name of Bedlam has entered the English language. Tom is almost naked, tensed and stressed on the floor, with only Sarah Young to comfort him. Again he ignores her. Other inmates show the disturbing signs of their conditions, and two well-dressed ladies have come to watch the antics of those in Bedlam, as a social event.

References

Wikipedia on A Harlot’s Progress
Wikipedia on A Rake’s Progress
Sir John Soane’s Museum on A Rake’s Progress

Hallett M (2000) Hogarth, Art & Ideas, Phaidon Press. ISBN 978 0 7148 3818 2.

In the last article, I examined Hogarth’s first two series, A Harlot’s Progress (c 1731), and its compliment, A Rake’s Progress (1732-5). This article looks at his most famous Marriage A-la-Mode (c 1743), and the more unusual Four Times of the Day (1736).

Marriage A-la-Mode (c 1743)

A summary of the plot covered by the six paintings in this series might run:

A marriage is arranged between the son of the Earl of Squander, Viscount Squanderfield, and the daughter of an Alderman. The Earl of Squander has title and nobility but is near-bankrupt; the Alderman has wealth but no title or nobility. Despite their marriage, both pursue their own lives, she in an affair with Silvertongue, the Alderman’s lawyer, and he in brothels and other places of ill-repute. He contracts syphilis from prostitutes. She rises in society, attending masquerade balls and engaging in liaisons there.

After a masquerade, she takes Silvertongue to a rooming house to sleep with him, but is discovered there by her husband. Silvertongue kills her husband in the ensuing swordfight, and makes his escape through the window, but is arrested later. He is tried for the Viscount’s murder, and hanged. She returns to her father, the Alderman, where she drinks poison and dies, her infant child (who was born with congenital syphilis) reaching out for its mother.

Hogarth employed French engravers to make the plates for printing, and the resulting prints benefited from that. However his original canvases are beautifully painted, and make great use of colour and facture. They are well worth seeing as works of art, not just as a narrative series.

I acknowledge the excellent text and DVD accounts of Egerton (1997) as my sources for the readings of this series.

The Marriage Settlement. Hogarth opens the series in the Earl of Squander’s bedroom, in his town house, where the Earl and the Alderman, and their lawyers, are agreeing a contract of marriage and settlement for the Earl’s son, Viscount Squanderfield, to marry the Alderman’s daughter.

The Earl brandishes his nobility at every opportunity. At his left hand is a family pedigree tracing his ancestry back to William the Conqueror, which is almost certainly spurious. Coronets decorate many items in the room, even his crutches. He is finely dressed in a slightly old-fashioned court style, but his right foot suffers from gout. Outside, the builders of his new, more grandiose, house are idle as he has run out of money to pay them.

The Alderman is something of a social misfit, wearing plain rather than elegant clothes. He clutches the centrepiece of the painting, the document of marriage settlement, whilst he and the Earl continue to haggle over it. However his money, in the form of bags of gold coins, is already spread in front of the Earl.

At the left, backs towards one another, are the groom and the bride. The Viscount is dressed in the latest fashion, but is clearly a foolish fop. On the left side of his neck, he already bears the black poxmark of syphilis. His bride is in intimate discussion with her father’s young lawyer, Silvertongue. She wears her wedding dress in anticipation of the settlement, but is sullen and not engaged in the matter.

In front of the couple, a dog and bitch are chained together, as the bride and groom soon will be. Behind them all, the paintings are ‘dark old masters’, including the ominous Medusa, martyrdoms of Saints Lawrence and Agnes, Cain Slaying Abel, and Judith with the Head of Holofernes. They culminate, by the window, in a huge portrait of the Earl himself. Hogarth uses paintings within his paintings very extensively in this series, to add meaning from their content.

The Tête à Tête. Some months after the wedding, the Viscount has returned from a night in gaming houses and brothels. A dog sniffs at a scented cap from one of the prostitutes, which is in his jacket pocket, and another is wrapped around his sword, which lies broken inside its scabbard on the floor in front of him. He is the worse for wear, and his poxmark plainly visible on his neck.

She is not bothered by the Viscount’s condition, but has a knowing smile which could indicate her early pregnancy (suggested by her posture), or her continuing affair with Silvertongue. Behind her are the loose cards from a whist party. In front of the couple two violins in cases are positioned to suggest the act of copulation. A further cue from the open music has so far resisted identification. The rest of the room exudes bad taste.

In the background, a slovenly footman is loafing idly. On the left, the steward has abandoned any attempt to get the Viscount to settle a thick sheaf of bills.

Further cues are provided by the paintings, most notably one which is largely obscured by a green curtain: the little glimpse we are afforded suggests that it shows sexual activity too explicit to be seen, and a reminder of the couple’s separate couplings.

The Inspection. Hogarth next takes us to a doctor’s consulting room, in which the Viscount – who appears familiar with the room – is in company with a young girl and an older woman who is most probably her mother, both of them being prostitutes. They are seeking the aid of a doctor who is thoroughly foul in appearance, and himself suffering from severe congenital syphilis.

A crucial detail which may be hard to see in the image is of a link between three small boxes of black pills: the young woman holds one box, which is closed; a second closed box is on the seat of the chair just in front of the Viscount’s crotch; the third is open in the Viscount’s right hand, outstretched towards the doctor. The pills are black, in common with the poxmarks which appear on the Viscount and the mother, indicating that they are mercuric salts used to treat syphilis. The implication is that the Viscount is questioning their effectiveness with the doctor.

A skull on the table at the left bears the unmistakeable erosions produced by advanced syphilis. All around the group are various worrying items of medical equipment and specimens. More worrying still, the mother (whose sleeves are made of the same patterned fabric as the girl’s gown) is caressing a cutthroat surgical knife.

Hogarth sets up some revealing facial expressions here, and uses directions of gaze to provide clues as to the interactions taking place.

The Toilette. Some time later, the couple have inherited the late Earl’s title, and are now the Earl and Countess Squander. She is being entertained whilst completing her dressing and preparations for the day. By her right arm hangs a teething coral, indicating that she is now the mother of an unseen infant, who is being raised by a nurse.

To the right of the Countess, Silvertongue rests at ease, his feet uncouthly laid on the sofa, clearly intimate with her. He is offering her a ticket to a masquerade ball, where no doubt he will meet her. His left hand gestures towards a painted screen showing such a masquerade.

At the left an Italian castrato (by his wig and jewellery) is singing, to a flute accompaniment. The rest of the room are disinterested, apart from a woman in white, who is swooning at the singer. Beneath him are various invitation cards scattered on the floor. Servants are in attendance, including a French hairdresser, who is curling the Countess’s hair.

Hogarth’s selection of paintings for this scene is revealing and satirical. Above the castrato is the Rape of Ganymede, and above that a portrait of Silvertongue. Above the Countess is Io in ecstatic embrace with Jupiter, and Lot’s daughters making their father drunk so that he can inseminate them both.

The Bagnio. The climax of Hogarth’s story, and its peripeteia, is set in a bagnio, a room in a rooming house intended for illicit liaisons and gambling. The Earl stands, with the posture of a dying man, possibly referring to the deposition of Christ, mortally wounded in the chest, his sword impaled in the floor in front of him.

The Countess, dressed in bedclothes complete with a small cap, is on bended knee in front of him, apparently praying for forgiveness. Her clothes are scattered around the floor, as if removed in haste, her stays having fallen on a bundle of faggots (then a common term for prostitutes). A man – Silvertongue, also in night dress – is making his escape through an open window, having fought the Earl. His sword, covered in the Earl’s blood, rests in the foreground.

At the far right, a night watchman and constable force their way in, the watchman’s lantern casting the shadow of a cross on the door.

The implicit narrative is that the Countess and Silvertongue met as arranged at the masquerade, and adjourned to the bagnio to consummate their lust. The Earl had tracked them down, and entered the room. Silvertongue fought and killed him, but his attempt to escape will prove unsuccessful now that the police are involved. He will therefore be tried, sentenced to death, and hanged.

For this, Hogarth chose a tapestry of the Judgement of Solomon, and paintings showing Saint Luke, and a parody best described as a portrait of a harlot.

The Lady’s Death. The final scene takes place in the Alderman’s house, to which the Countess has fled in the aftermath of her husband’s murder and her lover’s execution. Its composition matches the first painting, but contrasts with it in the frugal appearance. Its furnishings are minimal and functional, and its floorboards bare.

The Countess is in the throes of death on an armchair, an empty vial of laudanum (tincture of opium) by her feet. Between her fashionable shoes and the vial is a printed broadsheet containing the dying speech of Silvertongue prior to his execution. Her father – wearing the same clothes as he did in the first painting – is removing her rings, as someone who committed suicide then could not retain any property.

A nurse holds the Countess’s infant for one last embrace. The infant bears the tragic marks and deformities of severe congenital syphilis. In the middle of the canvas, an apothecary is berating a servant for obtaining the laudanum. A doctor skulks in the background, powerless to save the dying Countess. A poor breakfast is laid up on the table, with a dog stealing the pig’s head from it.

Four Times of the Day (1736)

Compared with Hogarth’s other narrative series, this appears more experimental in terms of narrative. Instead of showing the same group of characters in a temporal series of scenes, he chose to show four views of various people going about their lives in different parts of London, each at a different time of day, and a different season. Thus their only real link is by time.

A lady, making her way to church, is crossing the west side of the piazza of Covent Garden, early on a winter’s morning. Holding, but not opening, her fan, she stares intently at two couples who are making love, the men fondling the women lustfully. A small group of children by them are warming up over an open fire. Behind the couples is Tom King’s Coffee House, which opened once the tavern doors closed. A fight appears to have broken out inside it, and a wig flies out. People in the background are setting up market stalls ready for the start of the day.

For noon, we move to Hog Lane, in the slums near Saint Giles in the Fields, seen in the background. It is spring. A group of Huguenots are leaving the French Church (now in Soho); they arrived as refugees during the 1680s, and engaged in silk and related trades, hence their fashionable dress and decorum.

Opposite is a contrasting group of Londoners outside a pie shop: a black man fondles the breast of a woman holding a pie, which looks about to fall as quickly as her virtue. In front of her a young boy bawls over his pie, which has broken, dropping fragments to feed a beggar below. The body of a dead cat rests on the dividing line between the two groups.

At dusk, in the warmth of the summer, we are outside the Sadler’s Wells theatre near Islington, then in open fields and countryside. With a background of a cow being milked, a dyer carries his tired young daughter, alongside his large wife. The cow’s horns are positioned so as to appear to be on the dyer’s head, a longstanding indication that he is a cuckold. Two children behind them replay a scene of marital discord. We can see that, inside the tavern, those escaping the oppressive air of the city are sat in the smoke of their pipes.

Here it is late at night on 29 May, Oak Apple Day, which celebrates the restoration of the monarchy. We are now back in the centre of London, in what was then the Charing Cross Road, now known as Whitehall. A bonfire has caused the Salisbury Flying Coach to overturn. In the foreground, the Worshipful Master of a Masonic Lodge, usually identified as the hard-line judge Sir Thomas de Veil, is so drunk that he is being helped home by his Tyler (doorkeeper); a chamberpot is being emptied over them from above. Around them are taverns well known for being brothels, and signs to bagnios of the type featured in Marriage A-la-Mode.

Inside the window at the right, a barber-surgeon is busy shaving a customer haphazardly, as if drunk. Below the window some homeless are settling down for the night, and a child blows on a firework.

I hope that you will agree that, despite their temporal association, these paintings and the scenes shown in them do not constitute any form of narrative as a series, although the individual paintings contain isolated fragments from various narratives.

Hogarth’s narrative series

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Hogarth’s narrative series is the sheer number of them. They included:

• A Harlot’s Progress (c 1731), 6 paintings and prints,
• A Rake’s Progress (1732-5), 8 paintings and prints,
• Four Times of the Day (1736) (non-narrative), 4 paintings and prints,
• Marriage A-la-Mode (c 1743-5), 6 paintings and prints,
• The Happy Marriage (started c 1745), 2 paintings, incomplete,
• Industry and Idleness (1747), 12 prints,
• The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751), 4 prints,
• The Humours of an Election (1755), 4 paintings and prints.

This makes a total of 8 series, of which 7 were narrative, and 5 painted narratives. The latter included no less than 27 paintings in total.

At the time, they were successful mainly, as he had intended, for the production of prints. Pirated copies of his prints became such a problem to him that he pressed for better protective legislation: the Engravers’ Copyright Act became law on 25 June 1735 to provide just that, and has since flourished into modern copyright law. The original act was known as Hogarth’s Act.

Hogarth used Alberti’s ‘laws’, but enhanced them with the addition of facial caricature, and most distinctively the use of paintings within paintings to develop his narrative.

However, his paintings are now full of puzzles and problems for the modern reader, as the references in his satire and fine details are largely forgotten. Thus narrative which, at the time, was seen as being topical, and hugely successful, has not stood the test of time, and now just appears mystifying.

There is a trade-off here: topical references often bring immediate popularity and commercial success, as well as making contemporary viewers see their relevance; longstanding classical references may be seen at the time as being hackneyed and irrelevant, but are more likely to stand the test of time. This is particularly true when trying to tell stories which are unlikely to be familiar to the viewer, either at the time or in the future.

Despite these issues, which must have been obvious to Victorian artists, these unique narrative series were to influence several British painters a century later – the subject of the next article.

References

Wikipedia on Marriage A-la-Mode
Wikipedia on Four Times of the Day

Egerton, J (1997, 2010) Hogarth’s Marriage A-la-Mode, National Gallery Company. ISBN 978 1 8570 9510 4. Complete with a DVD.
Hallett M (2000) Hogarth, Art & Ideas, Phaidon Press. ISBN 978 0 7148 3818 2.

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Hogarth’s painted narrative series proved to be a significant influence on later artists. Among those listed by Martin Meisel (1983) are:

• George Morland (1763-1804) – his Laetitia series (1786) of 6 paintings and prints;
• James Northcote (1746-1831) – his Diligence and Dissipation series (1790-6) of 10 paintings and prints;
• William Etty (1787-1849) – his Judith triptych (1827-31) of paintings;
• Augustus Leopold Egg (1816–1863) – his Past and Present series (1858) of 3 paintings;
• William Powell Frith (1819-1909) – his Road to Ruin series (1877-8) of 5 paintings and prints, and his The Race for Wealth series (1877-80) of 5 paintings and prints.

George Morland was a painter with a life as colourful and rich in lessons about morality as any of these narrative series. His Laetitia series of about 1786 apparently used his wife as a model, and was summarised by Meisel as being a genteel version of Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress with a more forgiving ending. I have been unable to trace any images of the paintings, or the prints derived from them.

James Northcote‘s long series Diligence and Dissipation is described by Meisel as being “a synthesis of Industry and Idleness, A Harlot’s Progress, and Richardson’s novel Pamela”, which traces the careers of a modest girl and more wanton fellow servants in a gentleman’s house. Again, I have been unable to trace any images of the paintings or prints.

William Etty‘s triptych of paintings showing Judith and Holofernes, known in Farr’s catalogue raisonné simply as Judith, survives, but is in a very poorly state now, due to his extensive use of bitumen. The left wing shows Judith’s maid waiting outside Holofernes’ tent; the central canvas shows Judith taking hold of the hair of Holofernes’ head ready to decapitate him; the right wing shows Judith giving her maid the head to put in a meat bag. Hopefully these will undergo the necessary conservation treatment to recover their original appearance.

Augustus Egg‘s series Past and Present has thankfully received the care of the Tate Gallery, and is thus the most accessible of these series. It is also the least conventional, and does not follow Hogarth’s approach. As Meisel points out, the three paintings are not intended to be a sequence of three scenes: instead the first is the first scene, and the other two are later scenes which are simultaneous with one another.

The first shows an ordinary middle-class drawing room, in which there are mother, father, and two young daughters, each well-dressed. Most striking is the mother, who is stretched out across the green carpet, prone. Her arms are stretched beyond her head, which is buried face down between her upper arms, and the hands are clasped together in tension.

The father is sat at a substantial circular table, facing the viewer. He is staring, brow furrowed, looking extremely tense and worried. His left hand holds a small note; his right hand is clenched, and rests on the table. His left shoe presses a miniature painting into the carpet.

The daughters are playing together at the left, opposite their father. One kneeling, the other sat, on the carpet, they are building a house of cards, which appears to be just about to fall. One stares, her mouth slightly open in anxious surprise, looking towards where her mother might have been standing before she fell to the floor. The other girl is still looking intently at the house of cards.

As with Hogarth’s narrative series, the room is full of cues, clues, and symbols to the narrative. Among the more visible are: the collapsing house of cards; an apple has been cut in two, one half left on the table, the other on the carpet by the mother; the reflection of an open door indicating the imminent departure of the mother.

Egg also uses Hogarth’s technique of paintings within the painting. On the wall at the left is the expulsion of Adam and Eve titled The Fall, below which is a miniature portrait of the mother; at the right is a shipwreck by Clarkson Stanfield titled Abandoned, below which is a miniature portrait of the father.

Egg’s three paintings have no individual titles, but when exhibited were accompanied by the text:
August the 4th. Have just heard that B______ has been dead more than a fortnight, so his poor children have now lost both parents. I hear she was seen on Friday last near the Strand, evidently without a place to lay her head. What a fall hers has been!

The clear implicit narrative is that the mother was in an adulterous relationship, which was revealed to the father in this moment of peripeteia. The other two paintings show the consequences.

The two daughters are shown significantly older now. The senior is sat, staring vacantly out of the open window at a three-quarter full moon, while her younger sister buries her face between the older’s knees, kneeling partly in prayer, and partly in grief. On the wall, separated by the window, are the miniature portraits of their parents. The sparsely-furnished room, with bare floorboards, indicates their fall into relative poverty.

Meanwhile the mother is homeless, sat among the debris under the arches of one of London’s bridges. She stares wide-eyed and fearful at a star in the sky, cradling a young baby to her, under her thin cloak. Behind her, on the side of the arch, are old posters, one with the word VICTIMS prominent, another advertising excursions to Paris.

Although Egg’s departure from simple sequential narrative is innovative, and perhaps influenced by other narrative media at the time, he uses the same tools and techniques as did Hogarth, to good effect. Because the three paintings were (and remain) viewed together, we can enjoy his experiment with non-serial storytelling, a strength peculiar to narrative painting.

William Frith, whose more famous panoramas I considered here, painted two narrative series, both of which were turned into prints. Even now, critical opinion of these series is divided, but the difficulty in seeing those paintings individually, let alone as complete series, makes it impossible to form a reliable view.

The Road to Ruin series was first shown at the Royal Academy in 1878. Meisel (1983) shows Leopold Flameng’s 1878 etchings of the series, but the reproductions in the current reprint are too poor to make out much detail in them. Christopher Wood’s books (e.g. 1976) contain monochrome illustrations of the paintings, but I have yet to see good, large colour images of any of them. As far as I can tell, they remain in a private collection.

The first, shows the hero at College, playing cards all night with his circle of friends in a college room. The second shows him at Ascot, placing bets on the horse-racing there, and well on his way to ruin. The third shows him at the moment of Arrest by a bailiff, when in a gambler’s house. The fourth shows his Struggles, after he has fled to France, where he tries to write a play whilst his wife paints watercolours to try to pay for their accommodation. The fifth shows The End, with him locking the door of a poor room, his play rejected, and about to blow his brains out with a pistol.

Frith’s pictorial account of the downfall of an addicted gambler is well executed, and thoroughly in accordance with the tradition of Alberti and Hogarth. It lacks the latter’s brilliant satire, and his use of paintings within paintings. Its prints apparently sold very well.

The Race for Wealth series was first exhibited in 1880, and attracted much attention. Unfortunately its prints were produced using photogravure, and Frith considered them “far from satisfactory”. He did not attempt another narrative series. The paintings ended up in the Baroda Museum and Picture Galleries in India, apparently modelled on the more famous museums in South Kensington, London. Not only has one departed for Birmingham, England, but the remaining four do not appear to be viewable on the Internet.

Their story centres on a corrupt financier, the Spider. In the first, The Spider and the Flies, he is persuading prospective investors in an office in the City of London. In the second, The Spider at Home, he is entertaining in his drawing room, which is lavishly decorated with paintings (which sadly seem to lack Hogarth’s narrative cues). The third, Victims, shows one of the investors from the first canvas, a clergyman, devastated at his family breakfast when he learns that the company in which they invested their savings has suddenly collapsed. The fourth, Judgement, shows the Spider’s trial for fraud at the Old Bailey, with the ruined clergyman giving evidence.

The fifth and last, Retribution, shows the Spider exercising in the yard of Millbank Prison, during his imprisonment for fraud. This is also one of only two images of the inside of a Victorian prison. The other, according to Christopher Wood, is an illustration by Gustave Doré.

Conclusions

Attempts to repeat Hogarth’s success with narrative series of paintings were far from failures, but showed how much had depended on his sharp satire, and ingenious touches, particularly the use of paintings within paintings. Frith came to series late in his career, when he had tired of panoramas, at a time when huge changes were taking place in painting, with the arrival of Impressionism. Had the prints from his second series not been so disappointing, they would probably not have affected the sharp fall in his market value in the mid 1890s.

Britain in Victorian times loved a good serial: it was the publication of Dickens’ novels in serial form which first brought him popularity and commercial success. It is therefore surprising that there were not many more attempts at narrative series of paintings. The Victorians also had a great affection for stories of morality, which were the basis for all these series of paintings. It is consistent with contemporary morals that Frith kept a mistress, who lived just down the road, and bore him seven of his total of nineteen children, and that Morland’s life would have made several enthralling moral tales.

It is a crying shame that we are not able to enjoy any of these series now, except for that of Augustus Egg in the Tate Gallery. Those who are privileged enough to own paintings should treat them as works of art, and not just movable property.

References

Farr DLA (1958) William Etty, Routledge & Kegan Paul. No ISBN.
Meisel M (1983) Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England, Princeton UP. ISBN 978 0 6916 1293 5.
Wood C (1976) Victorian Panorama, Paintings of Victorian Life, Faber and Faber. ISBN 0 571 10780 X.

Thomas Cole (1801–1848) is generally accepted as the founder of the Hudson River School of landscape painting, and is one of the founding fathers of American landscape painting. A migrant who arrived at the age of 17 in 1818, he was taught by an itinerant portrait painter, and in 1825 helped found the National Academy of Design in New York City.

Many of his landscapes were very narrative, and his paintings bear comparison with the works of Poussin and Claude Lorraine in the early development of European landscape painting, and their themes.

The Course of Empire (1833-6)

In 1833 he started work on a series of five paintings intended to tell the story of an idealised civilisation, reflecting popular sentiments of the day. Another important inspiration for the series was Byron’s poem Pilgrimage (1812-8), and he quoted the following lines from that when advertising exhibition of the series:
There is the moral of all human tales;
‘Tis but the same rehearsal of the past.
First freedom and then Glory – when that fails,
Wealth, vice, corruption – barbarism at last.
And History, with all her volumes vast,
Hath but one page…
(Canto IV)

I have not been able to discover whether Cole was influenced by Hogarth or others to embark on such a series. At that time he had not visited Europe, and such influence would appear unlikely, so it is more probable that this was simply the logical extension of his previous narrative paintings.

The Savage State shows dawn, with a rainstorm clearing over a broad river estuary. In the distance, on the other bank of the estuary, is a rocky crag, dominated by a massive block. In a clearing at the right there are the native people’s tipis clustered around an open fire, and files of those natives are seen streaming through uncleared land to return to that camp. In the left foreground they are seen hunting with a bow and arrows, and they are also shown paddling along small rivers in canoes. These appear to refer to the original peoples of North America.

The Arcadian or Pastoral State is set in the morning of a spring or summer day, the showers having cleared. The landscape shows the same landmarks, although from a slightly different view than in the previous painting. In the middle distance, a stone circle (clearly modelled after Stonehenge, England) contains a large open fire. Boats are under construction on the bank of the river, and the land has been partly cleared to provide pasture and mature patches of deciduous trees. The inhabitants are scattered through the pastures, tending flocks of sheep in an idyllic European pastorale setting.

The Consummation of Empire is a complete transformation, with only the rocky crag in the distance and the river giving any clue that it is the same location, but much later in time. It is now noon on a fine summer’s day. The banks of the river are filled with majestic buildings in marble in classical Roman style, with many colonnades. Their steps descend to the water’s edge, where there are small sailing boats and throngs of people. The inhabitants appear opulent, wearing toga-like dress, feasting and feting throughout the city. Large golden statues are decorated with fine textiles, there are exuberant fountains and potted plants. In the distance terraces above the buildings contain further trees and plants. Smoke rises from chimneys of a prominent building at the left, which is presumably an analogue for the previous stone circle.

Destruction shows a slightly wider and shifted view of the same scene, but now in the process of physical destruction. During a short break in an autumnal storm, in the afternoon, many of the buildings are burning vigorously, others damaged and collapsed, and the people fleeing in desperation. The river is choppy in the strong wind, and several of the boats on it are ablaze. In the foreground, one span of a bridge has been destroyed, and has been replaced by a sagging wooden pier. Everywhere there are crowds jamming the open spaces, some trying to board already full boats. Closest to the viewer are bodies of those who have been killed in the catastrophe.

Desolation shows the remains of the city at dusk on a winter’s day. The ruins of its buildings are being overgrown by vegetation. The bridge has a great gap where the arches have been lost. There is not a person in sight.

Unlike Hogarth’s disjoint temporal sequence in Four Times of the Day (1736), Cole’s slightly different views are clearly of the same location: the distant rocky crag with its distinctive massive block is a repeated point of orientation, as is the river. In these he plays out the sequence of development of civilisation, through to its collapse and return to nature. The whole series thus forms a coherent narrative, which is of course an allegory.

The Voyage of Life (1839-1842)

With that ambitious if not grandiose series behind him, Cole was commissioned to paint another series showing a Christian allegory of the stages of life. He divided this into childhood, youth, manhood, and old age, and in 1839 produced a set of sketches which are now in the Albany Institute of History and Art.

Those were soon followed by his first version, starting with Childhood (1839-40). These are now in the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute.

When he was in Rome in 1842, fearing that he would not see his series again, nor be allowed to exhibit it, he painted a second version, which is now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

Childhood establishes the scene: the lush coastal undercliff, rich in flowers and the vibrant green of vegetation. A boat has emerged from a large cave in the cliff (symbolic of the mother’s birth canal and the process of birth). A young baby is standing in the boat, which has an angel at its tiller. A carved angelic figure forming the prow holds out an hourglass as the symbol for time.

In Youth, the young man has taken the helm of the boat, leaving the angel on the bank. The morning light is bright, and the weather fair. The young man is navigating the boat along the river, through lush waterside meadows and avenues, towards a distant vision of a celestial temple. The coastal cliffs are now in the background on the right, and in the centre distance is a rocky mountain spire.

By Manhood, the hero has noticeably matured, and his boat is on a fast-flowing river just approaching dangerous rapids which pass through a rocky chasm. It is now dusk, and the angel is watching over from a break in the dark and forboding clouds. The man no longer holds the tiller – indeed the rudder is missing – but both hands are clasped in prayer, as he looks anxiously up towards the heavens. In the foreground on the right are twisted trees, splintered by storms, with autumnal leaves.

Old Age shows the man in the boat far older, bald and with a grey beard. His boat is now in placid waters at the coast again, making no way. The boat itself is battered, its figurehead missing. He sits in the boat talking with the angel, who beckons him up through a parting in the black clouds, to a distant angel, far up in the heavens, rising through beams of sunshine towards brightness at the top left.

It is also worth studying the great detail which Cole has included in the man and his boat: the following detail views show the sequence of changes.

As with his The Course of Empire, there are sufficient consistent threads running through this to ensure that it remains a narrative. Overall it is comparable to, if much simpler than, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, and was well received given the religious views prevailing at the time.

Conclusions

Cole’s two narrative series presented Romantic visions of the development and collapse of human civilisation, and of the phases of a pious life. He did not use identical backgrounds in each, but was careful to provide sufficient cues to ensure the viewer saw each painting as part of the overall narrative.

His figures were too small for facial expressions to be visible, but body language and other cues proved good tools for his expression. The paintings are not as rich in cues, clues, and symbols as those of Hogarth’s series, but still make good use of timeless symbols to support their stories.

In short, they work well as narrative series, and each painting is both impressive and expressive. It is tragic that Cole died so soon after completing the second version of the second series.

References

Wikipedia on The Course of Empire
Wikipedia on The Voyage of Life
The Thomas Cole National Historic Site.

Time is the warp through which we weave narrative. Though we can directly visualise most other elements within a narrative, we cannot see time, and can only represent it indirectly in the form of a timeline, against which we can place the events which together compose the narrative.

A timeline, sibling of the time series chart, is a display of events against an axis representing the passage of time. The term is also widely used to describe a textual and chronological listing of events, as were the antecedents of modern timelines, such as Eusebian Tables. It is more appropriate to distinguish such tabulations as sequences of events or timetables, as they lack any conventional representation of time along a line.

Early timelines did not always give the time axis a uniform scale, Gerardus Mercator’s ancient examples being highly non-linear, but by the late 1700s several major figures of the Enlightenment had arrived at what we recognise today as a mature timeline. Among them was the pioneer scientist, Joseph Priestley (1733-1804). The history of timelines has been beautifully documented by Rosenberg & Grafton (2010).

From then on, historical timelines became longer, larger, and increasingly elaborate, culminating in the monster drawn up by Sebastian C Adams in 1878.

There have been many variants used over the last couple of centuries, some of which are illustrated by Rosenberg & Grafton. Although primarily for the depiction of sequences of discrete events, many have produced timelines which graph more continuous variables over time, as in a time series chart.

Trees, particularly those of taxonomy, natural evolution or artificial constructions modelled after nature, have also been incorporated, as shown in Bashford Dean’s timeline of the ‘evolution’ of armoured helmets.

The time axis can run horizontally or vertically, although printing and computers have tended to make the horizontal format more popular and almost a standard. In countries whose languages primarily read left to write, it is conventional for the earliest moment in time to appear to the left, and for the latest to be at the right; I do not know whether this convention extends to countries whose script runs from right to left. The direction of the time axis is more variable when it is vertical: historically these have tended to place earliest time at the top, but there is little rationale for doing so.

Because time as a concept passes at a uniform rate – despite its much more uneven perception – the great majority of timelines use a simple linear scale. Where the application makes it more appropriate, perhaps when dealing with extremely long periods, logarithmic scaling may be used instead, but that is both exceptional and poses most viewers conceptual difficulties.

The period represented in any given timeline is as variable as the intervals of time which we can measure. In physics it could be as short as the twinkling of an eye, or nanoseconds, and in geology as long as the existence of the earth. Being anthropocentric, most timelines apply to recorded human history, or windows of a few generations length within that.

Although Edward Tufte’s outstanding books examining the visual display of data do include several example of timelines, and there is no reason to suggest that timelines should be exempt any of his design principles, he avoids more specific discussion of this type of chart.

Manual construction of timelines, whether using physical materials such as paper or on a computer, is usually both time-consuming and tedious. The first step is to determine the physical length of the time axis, and the period in time which it needs to represent. The distance along the time axis from its origin is then calculated by proportions; on a computer this is conveniently performed using a spreadsheet.

There is a curious twist, that most computer users are more likely to use timelines as tools in other applications, than will ever use tools intended to produce timelines themselves. This is because the timeline has become established as a primary control in applications to edit serial media, such as audio and video: you will find and use them in products such as iMovie, GarageBand, Final Cut Pro, and even in OS X’s Time Machine backup app.

The single most important factor in determining whether a more dedicated application is suitable for the automatic generation of timelines is the required export format. As there appears to be no standardised format for exchanging timeline data between applications, there is little point constructing a superb timeline in an application which cannot export it in a form which can then be used for its display and viewing. Some dedicated timeline tools are unable to generate usable HTML, for example, and cannot therefore be used to develop web pages containing those timelines.

ChronoZoom is an open source environment which enables direct web development, but (being sponsored by Microsoft Research) requires Windows-based development tools and is hosted on Microsoft server products.

In subsequent articles in this series, I will focus on the use of applications which support the inclusion of rich media, such as images, within timelines, as they are most generally useful, and fewer in number. If you do not need such sophistication, then any of the wide range of project management tools could be suitable, provided that they support an appropriate export format.

Reference

Rosenberg D & Grafton A (2010) Cartographies of Time, A History of the Timeline, Princeton Architectural Press. ISBN 978 1 61689 058 2.

In an earlier article on Winslow Homer’s nineteen months stay in Cullercoats, on the English north-east coast, I mentioned some remaining puzzles.

Among these were whether he had travelled much beyond Cullercoats, and his apparently uneven production of paintings in 1881 and 1882. I wrote there:
His production during that time also changed considerably. As most of his sketches and paintings are signed and dated by year, I have looked at the dates attributed to them for the paintings which I have shown here. Twenty-four, almost three-quarters, are dated 1881, and only eight in 1882. The great majority of his paintings included in the references were also dated 1881. Does this mean that he painted fewer in 1882, that many of those painted that year have been lost or destroyed, or that private collectors have amassed his work from that year disproportionately?

I have now been able to analyse the drawings and paintings listed by the late Tony Harrison in his monograph on Homer’s sojourn in England. Throughout this, I will assume for the sake of simplicity that none of those works has been lost or was destroyed, thus that Harrison’s list is a complete account of Homer’s work in and on English locations.

Excluding rough sketches and undated works, Harrison shows a total of 85 paintings made in England or using motifs from his stay in England, of which 24 were drawings, 54 watercolours, and 7 oils. In 1881, he made only 5 drawings, but 31 watercolours, and 2 oils; the following year he made 15 drawings, 9 watercolours, and three oils, including Hark! The Lark! (1882) for exhibition at the Royal Academy in London.

This is a curious reversal of what might have been expected, with earlier production of more drawings, and later of more watercolours and oils.

Of the 54 watercolours he produced, 57% date from 1881, 17% from 1882, and 26% from 1883, when he was back in the USA. In 1881, he painted an average of 3.4 watercolours per month, which fell to less than 1 per month in 1882.

Looking at the main themes in his drawings and paintings, 10 out of his 11 complex motifs with fishwives and boats were made in 1881, when his work was more varied and included 3 of fishermen in oilskins, and 3 of fishermen and boats, for example. In 1882, nearly two-thirds of all his works were of women walking and watching (1881, only 21%).

Harrison reviewed previous considerations of Homer’s activity during the winter of 1881-2, and concludes that there is good, but not conclusive, evidence that Homer was away from Cullercoats for a period between late November 1881 and February 1882. He suggests that Homer did not return to the US, but met with his brother Charles and his wife in France.

Unfortunately this still does not explain the very small number of watercolours which remain from Homer’s work in 1882, as it only shortens his time in Cullercoats in 1882 from 10 to 8 months, for which a total of 9 watercolours remains exceedingly low, and low in comparison with his output the previous year.

One explanation may be in the dispersal of his paintings from the two years. In October (or early November) 1881, Homer sent 30 watercolours to his New York agent, J Eastman Chase, via Samuel T Preston of New York. These included his watercolour output for 1881, except for the Wreck of the Iron Crown (1881), which was sent in February 1882. Together, these match the 31 watercolours recorded by Harrison for 1881, suggesting that (almost) all are accounted for and still exist today.

There do not appear to be any records of the shipping or dispersal of Homer’s watercolours painted in 1882. It is quite feasible that the majority of them did not arrive in the US, or perhaps that, on arrival, the majority was purchased by a single collector, whose collection has yet to become known. I would hazard a guess that those potentially missing watercolours include a wider range of motifs, including complex scenes of fishwives with boats, and some more showing fishermen.

Now there’s a tantalising thought, that someone somewhere might have a number of unseen watercolours painted by Winslow Homer in Cullercoats.

References

Cikovsky, Jr, N, Kelly F et al. (1995) Winslow Homer, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 3000 6555 8.
Griffin RC (2006) Winslow Homer, An American Vision, Phaidon Press. ISBN 978 0 7148 3992 9.
Harrison T (1983, 2004) Winslow Homer in England, Hornby Editions. ISBN 978 0 9636 4143 4.
Tedeschi M and others (2008) Watercolors by Winslow Homer. The Color of Light, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 11945 9.

The first and simplest of the apps which I have used for creating media-rich timelines is Timeline 3D, which I briefly covered earlier. Free from the Mac App Store, you need to make in-store purchases to enable its rich export features. Unless you are on a very tight budget, the full unlock seems excellent value for £18.99.

To some degree, Timeline 3D is a one-trick pony, but in the most wonderful of ways. You can customise much about the appearance of your timeline, but its underlying format is fixed: it consists of a whole-timeline overview; then when you select any event or item from that timeline, that zooms into view as a hinged page, with the rest of the timeline turning into the background.

Entering the data for each event is quick and simple. Click the + button at the top left of the window to add a new event. Give it a title, start date and optional end date (which can be displayed in custom formats), drag and drop any image, and add the text which you want to appear next to the image. You can assign events to colour-coded categories, include weblinks, and tags.

The appearance of the timeline and its events is set by themes, which can be set separately for screen and print. The standard themes are very pleasant, but here I have set up my own custom theme for this example.

The theme editor gives you control over font, colours, and the background, for which you can use an image if you wish.

One slight niggle with the current underlying format for timelines is the way in which it handles period events: these are marked at the start, with the period dates given, but there is no continuous bar extending to the end of the period, neither is the end marked. I will suggest some good styles for showing such periods in a later article.

Once you are happy with the ingredients for your timeline, click on the 3D button at the top right, and the timeline will be generated ready for viewing.

As I warned in the first article, Timeline 3D is only as useful as its export options. Thankfully these seem to cater for almost all requirements, including print, presentation, and web.

Exporting to PDF (or print) generates a single large page of the whole timeline, as seen in its main view. Because you can use a different theme more suited to paper, including a different font as well as black/colour on white, this is eminently usable and useful.

Exporting to a movie gives you a wide range of formats, ranging from iOS devices up to full 4K. The resulting movie starts by showing the whole timeline, and then steps through each event in time sequence, with lovely smooth animation. For standalone presentations I think this would be my first choice because of its excellent quality.

You can export the timeline in PowerPoint’s native PPTX format, which is also fully accessible by Keynote. The standard output then features the whole timeline as the first slide, and each subsequent slide shows the events in time sequence and close-up. For the diehard presenter, this is again a lovely result.

Exporting to images simply generates the same sequence (whole timeline, then each event in order) into JPEG files at your chosen resolution. These would be suitable for embedding in other presentations, websites, etc.

The final export option is as WebGL, which generates a folder with all the images and JavaScript necessary to produce a beautiful interactive animated website, which works just as the app does. The only snag with this is that it is inevitably browser-dependent. I could not get mine to work with the current version of Safari, for example, as it decided to block the script displaying the images. However it worked a treat in Firefox. Such are the vagaries of the web.

Verdict

There is a great deal to like about Timeline 3D, if you like the way that it presents its timelines. If you use timelines anywhere, I recommend that you install it, try it out, and see whether you get on well with it. If you like its approach, you can then purchase export options to make it truly productive.

The second app which I have used to create timelines with is Aeon Timeline, at £29.99 one of the Mac App Store’s middleweights. Whereas Timeline 3D exports similarly laid-out timelines in a rich range of formats, Aeon Timeline has a huge range of features and controls to vary structure and layout, but a more limited range of export formats.

For a start, it is not just concerned with events (and event periods). It also has entities – typically people in a narrative, for example – and arcs, which are groups of events and entities. It thus copes with very complex timelines by allowing you to structure them, and has tools such as filters which help further.

It also does simple jobs, such as my timeline of paintings of trees, very well. Starting at that basic level, you just click the Add New Event tool at the top left of its window, and fill in the blanks for your first event. This new event editor does not give access to all the data for an event, but gets it on the timeline ready for completion using the Inspector.

Adding an image, or any other external link, is performed neatly using the tools provided in the Inspector’s External Links section. Because adding images to the document would quickly blow it up in size, Aeon Timeline makes a smart link to the original image file. You will also need to adjust the size of the images displayed on the timeline, using the Settings tool; by default they are tiny thumbnails, but can be grown to almost any size you might wish.

Double-clicking an image in a timeline event enlarges it using QuickLook, and you can click the button to open the image to full size in Preview if you wish.

Period events are shown as proper time bars, occupying the duration determined by the start and end times. However for some odd reason there appears to be no way to get them to extend a vertical line to the time axis at the top, marking their end. I did try to see if this could be performed better using entities, or in arcs, but it does not.

The settings tool offers a wide range of document settings, including date formats, display widgets, fonts, and more. However it does not appear capable of revealing the note text attached to events, which is only shown in the Inspector. This seems a curious omission, which means that the only text displayed is that of the date and the event label.

You can set all sorts of calendars and delimiters to determine the window of time which is shown on the timeline. Although it takes a little getting used to, the neatest way to do this is using the tool at the foot of the window: drag the right edge of the magnifier to alter the period shown in the timeline view above, and drag over it to move through time. At first this felt clumsy, but I quickly got the hang of it, and it is really ingenious and neat: an excellent piece of interface design.

Once you have tweaked your timeline to look right, you need to choose the best export format, and this is where Aeon Timeline cannot compete with Timeline 3D. It supports a range of image formats, PDF for viewing or printing, HTML tables rather than any graphical rendering, OPML and RTF, and some data interchange formats covering Timeline 3D (Bee Docs) and Simile (an open source Javascript timeline library). With no animation, there is no need for movie format export, and there is no more sophisticated web format.

That said, image and PDF output are exactly what you would expect, and would cater well for display wherever you want to use a timeline: they are just not interactive in any way.

This is just scratching the surface of a very powerful tool which is as useful for analysis (for example of literary works) as it is for creating display timelines.

Opinion

If you are looking for animation and clever tricks, Aeon might look relatively dull. But it is very sophisticated and capable, creating a very wide range of timeline types, with rich display and layout options. It is essential for anyone working seriously with timelines and chronologies.

When I covered Hogarth’s narrative series here and here, I mentioned two which were not painted, but which went straight to prints. Since then I have been able to obtain images of the original drawings which he did for those two series, and thought that it would be worth looking at those in more detail, both from the point of view of their narrative, and to see inside his print making process.

This article covers the first half of the longer and earlier series, Industry and Idleness (1847). The next concludes that series, and the final one covers The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751), his penultimate narrative series.

Industry and Idleness (1847)

For all his previous series, Hogarth had made paintings from which engravings were then made. Although it is sometimes stated that this series was created “solely” as engravings, the engravings were of course made from Hogarth’s drawings, and most of the latter remain, in the British Museum. Its set was owned by Horace Walpole (1717-1797), son of the first Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole. They were acquired by the Museum in 1896.

It has been suggested that Hogarth was inspired for the series by the play Eastward Hoe! by Marston, Chapman and Jonson, which was reprinted prior to his starting the drawings in 1747. The prints sold very well indeed, and spawned a pantomime, another play, and abundant literary comment at the time.

The story runs:
Two apprentices (‘prentices in Hogarth’s usage), named Francis Goodchild (the industrious ‘prentice) and Thomas Idle (the idle ‘prentice), start on equal terms, apprenticed to their Master, a Mr West. They behave true to form, with Goodchild diligently working and attending church, and Idle being idle whenever he could, gambling and cheating out in the churchyard rather than going to church. Goodchild is rewarded by promotion at work, gaining more of his Master’s trust; Idle, though, ends up going to sea and abandoning his apprenticeship. Goodchild then marries his Master’s daughter, in contrast with Idle, who returns from sea to lodge in a garret with a common prostitute.

Goodchild just continues to rise, growing rich from the family business, and becomes Sheriff of London. Idle, though, has progressed from highway robbery to murder, but is betrayed by his prostitute partner. The former apprentices meet again, when Idle is brought before Goodchild following his arrest, for committal to prison while awaiting trial. Idle is found guilty and hanged at Tyburn. Goodchild is made Lord Mayor of London in return for his hard-working and virtuous life.

The prints

In the first print, Hogarth shows the two apprentices together at their work, their Master at the far right. Goodchild, to the right of centre, is labouring away at a hand loom, which has not yet incorporated the fly shuttle invented by Kay in 1733. By his feet is an open book, with the title The Prentice’s Guide.

Idle is at the left, his eyes closed in sleep. His loom is locked off, and his clay pipe wedged into the loom handle. A cat plays with the idle shuttle, and a beer mug is balanced on its frame. His copy of The Prentice’s Guide is torn and tattered, and above his head is a ballad sheet titled Moll Flanders. Symbolic items decorate the frame: a mace of high office (for Goodchild), and the hangman’s noose (Idle).

The prints now trace their separate ways, first with Goodchild’s pious and upright lifestyle, in church (probably St Martin’s-in-the-Fields) on a Sunday. He stands in a pew, sharing a hymnal with the Master’s daughter. By Goodchild is a large and buxom woman, possibly the Master’s wife, keeping a close eye on the couple. At the left is a caretaker and pew-opener with her bunch of church keys. The preacher is in the distant pulpit, under which are a clerk and a reader.

While Goodchild is inside attending the service, Idle is seen gambling on a tombstone, in the company of three other aspiring minor villains. The church shown here is probably St Michael’s in Crooked Lane, or St Paul’s in Shadwell. In the foreground is an open grave which is planked over, with skulls and other remains behind. At the rear left is an irate churchwarden, with his cane raised, who has come to break up the group and move them on.

Back at work, Goodchild has been promoted from the loom, and now assists the Master in book-keeping and overseeing the factory, shown by the backs of women spinning and weaving in the background. Mr West, the Master, is shown in Quaker dress. He and Goodchild are stood in front of the escritoire which contains the factory ledgers. The pair of gloves in front of them are locked in a handshake symbolising the growing bond between the two men.

At the left is a porter from the City of London (whose arms he bears on a shield on his chest), carrying three rolls of cloth. Between the porter and the others a cat arches its back in response to a dog. Attached to the lower side of the escritoire is the London Almanack calendar.

Idle has abandoned his apprenticeship, tossing his indenture papers into the waves at the far left, and goes to sea. Hogarth shows him being rowed out to join his ship at Cuckold’s Point on the River Thames, opposite what were then the West Indian docks, between Limehouse and Greenwich. With Idle in the boat is his mother, who appears to be protesting his departure.

His colleagues in the boat are sailors, who are teasing him with a cat o’ nine tails whip, and pointing out a body hanging on distant gallows, as a portent of Idle’s future. On the shore in the distance, there are also four windmills, which were common in the area at that time.

Meanwhile Goodchild has successfully completed his apprenticeship, making him a journeyman weaver, and has joined his Master in partnership, their business sign hanging at the top of the print. The previous day, the Master’s daughter married Goodchild, and they are seen here handing out the remains of their wedding banquet to the poor.

Goodchild himself is handing out money through the open window, to the leader of a drum band, his wife being behind him inside. A footman at the door drops food from a plate into the apron of a poor woman, and at the left a legless ex-soldier in a tub holds out a songsheet headed “Jesse or the Happy Pair. A New Song”. The London Monument is seen in the background.

The drawings

I have been able to find preparatory drawings for all the prints in the series, apart from the twelfth and last. In most cases, there is an early rough sketch and a late or even final drawing from which the plate was made. In the series below, I add a final version which is the print mirrored, as if it were the plate. I provide those because the prints shown above are mirrored from the drawings, an artefact of the printing process; showing a mirrored print makes it easier to compare the drawings with the final printed version.

As would be expected, the sequence for each print adds increasing amounts of detail. Differences shown between the ‘finished’ drawing and the print indicate that Hogarth made the engravings himself, or was intimately involved in their engraving. He did not, though, select the Biblical quotations which were added: he trusted those to a friend, the Reverend Arnold King.

References

Wikipedia on Industry and Idleness
A short MA dissertation here.

Hallett M (2000) Hogarth, Art & Ideas, Phaidon Press. ISBN 978 0 7148 3818 2.
Ayrton M & Denvir B (1948) Hogarth’s Drawings, London Life in the 18th Century, Avalon Press. No ISBN. [This has been my source for images of many of the scans above. The book bears no information about copyright, the press has long since vanished as far as I can tell, and I assume ‘fair use’ of these orphaned images. If you know any different, please contact me.]