Gustave Moreau had a successful Salon in 1876. I have already considered two of the paintings which he showed there, Saint Sebastian and the Angel and Hercules and the Lernean Hydra. The other two were an oil and a watercolour work based on the story of Salome and the execution of Saint John the Baptist. These generated a lot of critical comment, and are still among his best-known paintings.

The narrative is biblical, and straightforward. The unnamed daughter (subsequently identified as Salome) of Herodias performed a dance at a birthday feast thrown by King Herod. The dance so pleased Herod that he offered her anything that she wanted, up to half his kingdom. She asked not for riches, but for the head of Saint John the Baptist, the earthly messenger sent to announce the birth and ministry of Jesus Christ. Reluctantly, Herod agreed, John was beheaded in prison, and his head brought to her on a plate; the dancer gave the head to her mother.

This has been a very popular story for religious paintings, and by far the most common scene involves John’s head being brought on a plate, or variations around that. Moreau was clearly interested in other parts of the story, and particularly in Salome herself.

Moreau had probably started work on a painting of Salome during the Franco-Prussian War, and this is one of several sketches which he made exploring ways in which he could depict its femme fatale. Although these drawings differ slightly, he was quickly concentrating on an image of her which would show her dancing, with her left arm stretched out and up, but which would still seem quite static, as opposed to an action position.

Salome Dancing before Herod (1871) is one of his earlier paintings developing the theme, focussing not on the head – which is nowhere to be seen – but on Salome, with King Herod shown on his throne in the background. The tattoo-like forms on the body of Salome are intended to be developed into her intricate jewellery and other adornments, and show the rich cross-cultural symbols which he was intending to incorporate.

Another theme which Moreau considered was that of the dancer being present when John was actually beheaded, as seen in Salome at the Prison (c 1873-76). With its figures crammed into the lower left quadrant of its canvas, it is a radical composition, with John kneeling and the executioner’s sword about to behead him at the far left, and a very pensive Salome in the foreground.

Salome Carrying the Head of John the Baptist on a Platter (1876) is a much more traditional scene, which may have led Moreau on to the motif of his Apparition. Notable in these paintings is that Salome is shown not as an evil or lustful woman, but almost as the heroine of the story.

As Cooke establishes, Moreau must also have decided to base his King Herod on the contemporary painting of Pope Formosus and Stephen VI (1870) by the great history painter Jean-Paul Laurens. The full story is told in this article, but it involves the trial of the corpse of Pope Formosus, shown dressed up in his papal vestments.

The culmination of Moreau’s quest for the right scene to show the story of Salome the dancer is this extraordinary oil painting, which was one of the two shown at the 1876 Salon.

The cadaveric King Herod sits on this throne whilst Salome is almost static on her points, and pointing towards the right. The executioner stands at the foot of the throne, and a couple of other women (including, perhaps, Salome’s mother) are at the left. Salome holds a lotus flower in her right hand, and other flowers are strewn on the floor. John’s head is nowhere to be seen, so we must presume that the moment selected by Moreau is when Salome chooses to receive that as her reward.

The rest of the painting consists of an unprecedented fusion of images, icons, and objects drawn from a diverse range of cultures. Detailed examination has shown these to be associated with the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, the Alhambra in Granada, the Great Mosque of Cordoba, and several mediaeval cathedrals. Motifs have been identified from Etruscan, Roman, Egyptian, Indian, and Chinese art and culture.

But Moreau was not content to show only that scene from the story. The other painting was to consider Salome with the head of John the Baptist as an apparition, and is now represented in three different versions.

The Apparition (1875) in the Musée National Gustave-Moreau is one of Moreau’s earliest attempts to express this. It takes the central part of Salome and adds the floating, severed head of John. Salome has now been transformed into the provocative, under-dressed femme fatale shown by other artists. King Herod’s throne has been moved to the left of the painting, and he now looks in the direction of the apparition.

This watercolour painting of The Apparition (c 1876), now in the Musée d’Orsay, was that shown at the Salon, although its colours are far weaker now than when it was first exhibited. The cadaveric King Herod sit on his throne, overseeing the scene from the left edge. Herodias, presumably, sits by his feet, and a musician (for Salome’s dance) is also shown further back. At the right edge is the executioner, John’s blood still on his sword.

Salome is now nearly nude, her body decorated by an abundance of strategically-placed jewellery and adornments. She points at the apparition with her left hand, trying to stare it out, her face as blank as everyone else’s. She stands on her points, but there is no sign of movement. The floor is not just strewn with flowers, but is now stained with the dripping blood from the severed head.

Facial expressions are not theatrical as might have been expected in the work of a more conventional history painter of the day.

This slightly later oil version of The Apparition (1876-77), now in the Fogg Museum, gives a better idea of the original effect of Moreau’s watercolour, although the panther has moved across to replace the musician, and the background is quite different.

Moreau had not painted Salome and The Apparition as a pair. Their compositions are individual, and mutually conflicting in the details of the palace, the position of Herod’s throne, and much more. Salome is one of the most iconographically-rich paintings ever made, and it is not surprising that some critics found it phantasmagoric. The Apparition is dominated by the same eye-to-eye contact that made Moreau’s Oedipus and the Sphinx so compelling, but here it is between a notorious dancer and the severed head of the holiest man after Christ himself.

I consider these two paintings to be major works in the Christian canon, and the 1876 Salon to be the watershed in Moreau’s art.

You may also find it fascinating to compare these paintings of Salome with those by Lovis Corinth, from 1899 and 1900, which I will show tomorrow.

References

Cooke P (2014) Gustave Moreau, History Painting, Spirituality and Symbolism, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 20433 9.
Mathieu P-L (1998, 2010) Gustave Moreau, the Assembler of Dreams, PocheCouleur. ISBN 978 2 867 70194 8.

Lovis Corinth didn’t just spend his time in Munich drinking red wine and champagne, but experimented in his painting and evolved his mature style. In 1897, he moved studio within Munich, and started to make increasingly frequent visits to Berlin, where he was able to obtain lucrative commissions for portraits. When the Berlin Secession was founded in 1898, Corinth was among its members. By 1900, he was renting a studio in Berlin, and in the autumn of 1901, he closed his studio in Munich and moved to Berlin.

He had no shortage of attractive young women, like Ellÿ (1898), to paint. But he pressed on with his campaign to improve his style and technique.

Reclining Nude (1899) is usually considered to mark the peak of Corinth’s nudes, and was painted during one of his visits to Berlin. Its brushwork is so painterly that it has sometimes been mistakenly supposed that it was made well into the twentieth century, but is now securely dated to the end of his time in Munich.

Morgens (Morning) (1900) shows another very modern nude, in personal and intimate surroundings.

In Max Halbe’s Garden (1899) shows a group of friends in a very informal setting, chatting as they eat fruit next to the washing line. Max Halbe (1865-1944) was a German playwright with a growing reputation at the time, and is seen to the right of centre, with his wife at the right.

Portrait of Mother Rosenhagen (1899) shows, I think, the mother of one of Corinth’s friends in Munich.

In addition to single-person portraits, Corinth was commissioned to paint a few group portraits, including this of Die Logenbrüder (The Lodge Brothers) (1898-99). He modelled this after Rembrandt’s smaller group portraits, placing the Master of the Lodge in the centre, where his gaunt face stares up to the heavens.

In these last few years in Munich, Corinth worked on a series of two paintings which explored the story of Salome and John the Baptist’s execution. He seems to have started this work with a drawing in 1897, which eventually led to one of his greatest paintings.

The narrative is biblical, and straightforward. The unnamed daughter (subsequently identified as Salome) of Herodias performed a dance at a birthday feast thrown by King Herod. The dance so pleased Herod that he offered her anything that she wanted, up to half his kingdom. She asked not for riches, but for the head of Saint John the Baptist, the earthly messenger sent to announce the birth and ministry of Jesus Christ. Reluctantly, Herod agreed, John was beheaded in prison, and his head brought to her on a plate; the dancer gave the head to her mother.

A very popular story for religious paintings, Corinth decided to paint the scene close to that most commonly chosen, in which John’s head has been brought to Salome on a platter. This contrasts with the choices of Gustave Moreau almost twenty-five years earlier, which I discussed in yesterday’s article here.

The basic cast and arrangement of figures is the same in each: the severed head of John the Baptist is at the centre, Salome leaning over and touching it with her right hand. Behind her are two women. The receptacle containing John’s head is itself on the head of a slave, who kneels at the feet of the executioner, who stands holding the bloodied sword in his right hand. He faces Salome. To the lower right, three other figures are partly cropped out: the feet of John’s dead body, and another slave bent over them to look at the head of an older man.

Corinth’s first painting of Salome from 1899 shows the dancer dressed as a tart, her breasts hanging loose, her face sneering down at John’s face with contempt as she touches it. The young woman at the top right laughs as she looks towards the left, apparently detached from the gruesome scene in front of her. No gazes meet, thus the figures do not integrate into a whole.

The second Salome from 1900 is less roughly worked and more finished to show finer detail. Although its figures have not moved, subtle changes have transformed the painting and its reading.

Salome has a more neutral facial expression, and she is staring intently at the lower abdomen of the executioner. Her right hand is stretching open the left eye of John’s head, which appears to be staring up at her. The executioner and the young woman at the top right are laughing at one another, but the third woman beside her has a serious, almost sad expression, as she stands holding a very large peacock fan. Visible at the top of her clothing, directly below her chin, is the small image of a human skull.

Corinth has also added detail to the cropped figures at the lower right. John’s legs are spattered with his blood, and possibly bear wounds or sores from his imprisonment. The two figures there are engaged in eye-to-eye contact, and there is a profusion of hands there too, as the older man appears to be raising John’s right arm.

The chain of gaze here is central to the painting’s narrative: John’s eye stares at Salome, who stares at the executioner’s crotch, who laughs at the young woman at the top right, who laughs back at him. Watching sombre and detached from behind is the figure of death.

Oscar Wilde’s one-act play Salome had been first published in French in 1891, and was soon translated into English and German. Banned from public performance in Britain, it received its premier in Paris in 1896, but was not performed in public in England until 1931. Wilde had been influenced by Gustave Moreau’s paintings of Salome, and in turn influenced both Corinth’s paintings and Richard Strauss’s later opera (1905).

In Salome’s words at the end of Wilde’s play (he calls John the Baptist Jokanaan):
But, wherefore dost thou not look at me Jokanaan? Thine eyes that were so terrible, so full of rage and scorn, are shut now. Wherefore are they shut? Open thine eyes! Lift up thine eyelids, Jokanaan! Wherefore dost thou not look at me? Art thou afraid of me, Jokanaan, that thou wilt not look at me?
If thou hadst looked at me thou hadst loved me. Well I know that thou wouldst have loved me, and the mystery of love is greater that the mystery of death.

At the centre of Wilde’s play is the perversion of lust and desire in Salome, which Corinth captured so well in the chain of gaze. Indeed several commentaries on the play refer explicitly to the role of gaze within it.

This second painting was rejected by the Munich Secession, but welcomed by the Berlin Secession. The result was that Corinth was dubbed ‘the painter of flesh’: his reputation was established, and his future secured in Berlin.

References

Wikipedia.
Wikipedia on Wilde’s play, which curiously does not mention Corinth’s paintings.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.

So far, I have related my collection of images of paintings to the two main storylines about Herod, Herodias, Salome, and John the Baptist. In this article, I am going to add several different art forms, including books, plays and theatrical productions, and movies.

These are different, because unlike the paintings, I don’t want to start embedding hundreds of megabytes of movie, or many pages of text. Rather I want to provide the reader with some carefully chosen links to web pages where they can consult copies. There are several ways to add URL links like these, of which the simplest is to drag and drop the link from the browser onto the writing space content.

Before going any further, I need to add some prototypes, with suitably distinct colours and badges, for books (and other textual forms such as poetry, but not play scripts), ‘live’ theatre productions (including operas, dance, but not movies), and movies. Each of them has key attributes of $StartDate and $EndDate so that they will appear on the timeline in due course.

This is a matter of creating writing spaces like this one, to give essential and relevant details of the work, and adding the links. When you first drop a URL from your browser into the content, it is shown with the regular title of that page. Although a bit tedious, I use the cursor keys to drive in and edit each link title, giving it my distinctive link symbol at the beginning, and pointing out at the end that this is only available when that system has an internet connection.

This works a treat, of course, even when the link takes you to a downloadable or streaming movie.

I thought that another way of making these links was through the Note menu command Make Web Link…. If you copy the URL from your browser, then select the anchor text and use this command, you will be asked to set the link up.

This works fine for the first such link in a document, but thereafter, even though further links look right, they do not actually link. I tried doing this using several variations, but I think for the moment that feature doesn’t work as I had expected it to. Dragging and dropping the URLs interestingly doesn’t create a link like this, but is far simpler and works a treat with as many URLs as you care to add.

I also added more containers for these different art forms, rather than load them into the already crowded gallery.

The next task is to link those new works to the existing storylines. This presents a problem, as, unlike paintings which usually depict a single scene, these generally cover the complete story as shown in the existing scenes. I could add them to the TextSource writing spaces at the top, but those are used to identify the different texts in the composite scenes. Adding text links to those would mean that they appeared on almost every writing space in the composite story – definitely not a good idea.

The solution is to add another writing space between the TextSource and the first scene in the Mark and Wilde storylines, and to interpose one between start and first scene in the composite story. This sounds like a lot of work, but because of Storyspace’s superb toolset, it only takes a couple of minutes.

First, I select the three tiles – start, Mark, and Wilde: Salome – which need to be moved up to accommodate the extra writing spaces. I then drag them up, providing sufficient room below to add the new tiles.

I then select the Mark tile, which selects the link between it and the first scene, and click on the ⓧ attached to that link to delete it. I repeat that with the two other downward links that I need to remove. I then create three new writing spaces to insert, and link them in. The only link which is in the least bit messy is the text link from the start writing space down to the beginning of the composite storyline – that simply has to be remade using parking spaces.

With those Whole story tiles in place, I can now create text links out from them to the added art forms, and back again, just as I did with the paintings in the last article.

Selecting the Whole story (M+W) tile at the head of the composite storyline now tells me which books, plays, etc., were derived from which basic story.

Over the next few days, during which you can enjoy my account of the paintings themselves as they are posted here, I will be adding further content to the hypertext document. When that is complete, I will return with the following steps, and provide an updated copy of the whole document for you to use.

It is most unusual, perhaps unique, for a painting to have changed the account of a significant event in history, and to have generated a popular archetype which has since pervaded many other stories across all the arts. In this and the next couple of articles I am going to trace what happened, as I ask who was responsible for the execution of the second most holy figure in the Christian gospels.

The answer is a story in itself, involving revolution, decadence, and perverse sexual fantasy, and a cast of famous paintings, plays, and operas.

The Original Story

The New Testament Gospels give accounts of two major martyrdoms: the most extensive, of course, is that of Jesus Christ, but second to that was the earlier execution of Saint John the Baptist. The most complete story is given in the gospel of Mark, chapter 6 verses 14-29:

And king Herod heard of him; (for his name was spread abroad:) and he said, “That John the Baptist was risen from the dead, and therefore mighty works do shew forth themselves in him.” Others said, “That it is Elias.” And others said, “That it is a prophet, or as one of the prophets.” But when Herod heard thereof, he said, “It is John, whom I beheaded: he is risen from the dead.”

For Herod himself had sent forth and laid hold upon John, and bound him in prison for Herodias’ sake, his brother Philip’s wife: for he had married her. For John had said unto Herod, “It is not lawful for thee to have thy brother’s wife.” Therefore Herodias had a quarrel against him, and would have killed him; but she could not: for Herod feared John, knowing that he was a just man and an holy, and observed him; and when he heard him, he did many things, and heard him gladly.

And when a convenient day was come, that Herod on his birthday made a supper to his lords, high captains, and chief estates of Galilee; and when the daughter of the said Herodias came in, and danced, and pleased Herod and them that sat with him, the king said unto the damsel, “Ask of me whatsoever thou wilt, and I will give it thee.” And he sware unto her, “Whatsoever thou shalt ask of me, I will give it thee, unto the half of my kingdom.”

And she went forth, and said unto her mother, “What shall I ask?” And she said, “The head of John the Baptist.” And she came in straightway with haste unto the king, and asked, saying, “I will that thou give me by and by in a charger the head of John the Baptist.” And the king was exceeding sorry; yet for his oath’s sake, and for their sakes which sat with him, he would not reject her.

And immediately the king sent an executioner, and commanded his head to be brought: and he went and beheaded him in the prison, and brought his head in a charger, and gave it to the damsel: and the damsel gave it to her mother. And when his disciples heard of it, they came and took up his corpse, and laid it in a tomb.

The short summary is that Herodias harboured a grudge against John the Baptist, as he had dared to tell Herod that he should not have married Herodias, who had been his brother’s wife. At Herod’s birthday party, Herodias’ daughter had danced so well that Herod had offered her anything up to half his kingdom as a reward.

Herodias told her daughter to ask for the execution of John, and his head to be brought to her on a plate. Although very reluctant to do so, Herod was bound by his oath, so ordered the execution. When the dancer was presented with John’s head on a large platter, she gave it to her mother.

Some additional detail was provided by Flavius Josephus in his Jewish Antiquities, book 18 chapter 5, who mentioned that Herodias’ daughter was named Salome, and confirmed that Herodias had divorced herself from her husband when he was still living, then married his brother. That also mentions that Salome married Philip, her cousin. On his death, she married Aristobulus, who I think was her second cousin. Josephus does not suggest any alteration to the account of John’s execution given in the gospels.

In this article, I provide some examples of paintings which appear to show the narrative much as given in the gospel accounts, with Herodias being the person who instigated John the Baptist’s execution, to avenge his criticism of her second marriage.

The Paintings

As with most martyrdoms, this is well-illustrated in manuscripts through the Middle Ages, but I will start my account at the beginning of the Renaissance, with Masaccio.

Masaccio’s The Martyrdoms of St Peter and of St John the Baptist (1426) is one of the surviving panels from the large and complex polyptych altarpiece in the chapel within Santa Maria del Carmine in Pisa, from 1425-26. This shows the gruesome scenes of the inverted crucifixion of Saint Peter, and the beheading of Saint John the Baptist. The latter is in accordance with the gospel account above, showing none of those attending Herod’s birthday party, and a bowl ready to receive John’s severed head.

Benozzo Gozzoli’s The Dance of Salome (1461-62) provides an interesting account of events at the party, using multiplex narrative. Salome is shown twice in the single frame: once dancing in front of Herod, and again giving Herodias the head of John at the back of the room. The middle event in the chain, the beheading of John, is shown in a side-room at the left.

The left panel of Hans Memling’s St John Altarpiece (1474-79) shows the beheading of John the Baptist, with the executioner placing John’s head on a platter held out by Salome, who averts her eyes from its sight. Note that the eyes on John’s head and those of Salome are closed.

Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Salome with the Head of St. John the Baptist (c 1510) is a curious painting, as it has apparently been subtitled as casting Katharina of Saxony (1468-1524) in the role of Salome. Katharina married Sigismund, Archduke of Austria, in 1484, when she was just sixteen and he was 56 and regarded as senile. I can see no obvious reason for her to be used as the model, but she looks ahead and to the left, avoiding eye contact with the half-open lids of John’s head, whose face is pointed in the same direction.

Multiplex narrative is used again in this painting attributed to Jan Rombouts I, The Beheading of St John the Baptist, from 1500-1550. In the distance, John baptises (possibly Jesus Christ); in the middle distance is Herod’s feast, and in the foreground the executioner places John’s head in the salver held by Salome. Her whole head is averted, and John’s eyes are closed.

Titian’s Salome (c 1550) is as sparse as Cranach’s painting of Katharina of Saxony. Salome holds the platter high and looks round towards the viewer, as if she is carrying it out to a full banqueting hall. The connections with and cues to the biblical story are few and becoming stretched, but he provides nothing to contradict the biblical account.

This story became an obsession with Caravaggio in his final few years of painting. His first work, Salome with the Head of St. John the Baptist (c 1607), now in Madrid, shows the muscular executioner, Herodias, and Salome grouped tightly around John’s head (with its eyes closed). Herodias and the executioner look down at the head, but Salome looks decidedly uncomfortable, even distressed, and averts her eyes.

In Caravaggio’s second painting, The Beheading of St. John the Baptist (1608), now in Malta, the executioner has already killed John, and is just about to lift his head onto the platter which Salome has put down in front of her. She looks down at her platter, and avoids looking at the corpse beyond. An older woman with her, presumably her mother Herodias, clutches the sides of her head in grief, which is puzzling. Others look from their cell through bars at the scene, and Herod’s agent stands behind the executioner, pointing down at the platter, to direct the head to be placed in it.

Caravaggio’s third painting, completed shortly before his death, is a more closely-framed variant of the first: in Salome Receives the Head of John the Baptist (c 1609-10), now in London, Salome averts her eyes as the executioner places John’s head on the platter. Herodias looks down at the head, but its eyes are closed and it too faces the viewer.

Artemisia Gentileschi’s Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist (1610-15) omits Herodias, but shows the executioner placing John’s head on the platter held out by Salome. She looks at the head (this is possibly the first painting to show Salome looking at John’s face), but her expression gives little away, and although John’s face is pointed towards her, its eyes are firmly shut.

Bartholomäus Strobel’s long panoramic view of Decapitation of Saint John the Baptist at Herod’s Banquet (c 1630-33) concentrates on the grand banquet, with many ranks of nobles gathered there. At the far right, the executioner stands by John’s headless corpse, a large pool of bright blood on the ground where its head once lay. A young woman (who might be Salome) looks up to heaven, her hands clasped in prayer, while an older woman (presumably Herodias) chats with the executioner.

Meanwhile John’s head has been brought out to Herod, who rises from the right end of the top table, to greet that salver. It is held by a woman in fine dress, but there are other candidates for Salome and even Herodias nearby.

Bernardo Strozzi’s Salome (after 1630) features Salome and another woman who cannot – by her youth – be Herodias, but presumably must be Salome’s servant, and holds the platter on which John’s head rests. Its eyes are closed, although Salome is both looking at the head, and she holds a lock of its hair in her fingers. Although this is getting towards the margin of the biblical story, it doesn’t yet conflict with it.

William Dobson’s The Executioner with the Head of John the Baptist (c 1640-43) returns to the original version more solidly, as the executioner lowers John’s head onto the platter held by Salome. John’s eyes are closed, but Salome looks intently at his face, her facial expression quite neutral. Behind her, Herodias also stares at the head, but her face does not show whether her vengeance is sweet: it too is surprisingly neutral in expression. The scene is lit dramatically by a boy holding a burning brand, facing into the picture plane.

Subsequent paintings of this story add little to those above, until we reach the late nineteenth century, when there are two significant paintings to see.

An acclaimed history painter at the time of Gustave Moreau, Henri-Léopold Lévy painted quite a different scene in his Herodias (1872) – whose title makes it clear that he adheres to the biblical story. Salome holds the platter containing John’s head with her arms fully extended, and she averts her eyes. A youthful Herodias sits on Herod’s right side, and looks straight at the head. At their feet, a servant has fallen back and to the ground in shock at the hideous sight in front of them.

During Gustave Moreau’s preparatory paintings for The Apparition (1876), he painted several different scenes from the story. This work appears to be one of his later preparatory paintings, showing Salome Carrying the Head of John the Baptist on a Platter (1876). Its single figure is Salome, who here is expressionless and if anything seems heroic. She carries the platter bearing John’s head, as if to take it to Herodias.

The head oozes blood, which hangs in strings from its edge. Its eyes are closed, and Salome looks to the viewer’s left, her face expressionless. John’s eyes are also closed, but the head is surrounded by a bright gold spiculate halo.

I make two general observations about the above paintings. First, with the possible exception of Lévy’s, all these depictions of Salome show her wearing modest dress, and do not portray her as licentious or provocative. This contrasts with her modern reputation as a femme fatale, and with the paintings in the following articles.

My other remark is that eight of the fifteen paintings show Salome collecting John’s head from the place of his execution, although the biblical account clearly states that the executioner brought John’s head back to the party from the prison, implying that Salome did not leave Herod’s and Herodias’ company during John’s execution. It would appear that those eight paintings varied the story in order to provide what the artist thought was a more appropriate setting for the painting, including in several instances the headless corpse of John the Baptist.

The next article will look at paintings which are more ambiguous over the underlying story.

References

Wikipedia.

Neginsky R (2013) Salome: The Image of a Woman Who Never Was; Salome: Nymph, Seducer, Destroyer, Cambridge Scholars. ISBN 978 1 4438 4621 9.

The great majority of paintings showing the story of Herod’s party, Salome’s dance, and the execution of Saint John the Baptist prior to the nineteenth century drew on the traditional account given in the gospels, in which it was Salome’s mother, Herodias, who was the villain of the piece.

There are a few, though, which are less clearly committed. This article looks at some of those.

Sebastiano del Piombo’s Salome, or The Daughter of Herodias, from 1510, is a surprisingly early painting to start exploring the role of Salome. She is shown carrying John the Baptist’s head on a platter, but does not seem to be going anywhere in particular with it, and her facial expression raises questions about what she is doing. Although relatively neutral, her face has a certain hardness about it. She is modestly dressed, and looks directly at the viewer, not at John’s head, whose eyes are closed in any case.

Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist from about 1530 is another ambiguous portrait of Salome bearing John’s head on a platter. This is a woman dressed in all her finery, with a slight sneer and smile which hardly fit the gravity of the situation. Again, she is not looking at John’s head, and his eyes are only partially open, and not looking at her.

The other early painting which could raise doubt in the viewer’s mind is Leonaert Bramer’s Salome Receiving the Head of Saint John the Baptist (c 1635-40). Salome is just being presented with the platter bearing John’s head, and, true to the biblical account, is still at Herod’s birthday party. Although there is no requirement for Herodias to be present, there is no sign of her in the painting. For her part, Salome does not appear taken aback as she looks down at John’s head.

If the title is that given by the artist, Paul Delaroche’s Herodias (1843) should be read entirely in accordance with the biblical story, as the nearer woman – despite her relative youth – must be Herodias, and the younger woman in the shadows would be Salome. Perhaps Delaroche is the more accurate, if Salome was still in her teens at the time, but traditional accounts (as seen in the previous article) make Herodias considerably older in appearance.

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes painted two different versions of The beheading of John the Baptist. This is the earlier, from 1856, alternatively known as The Daughter of Herodias Gives the Signal for the Ordeal of Saint John the Baptist, which in itself raises questions.

Salome dominates the painting, her right hand holding the empty platter high above her head as she is about to drop it to signal John’s execution. John the Baptist is still alive at this stage, seen in the murky distance at the left. Another figure, perhaps Herodias, is hiding in Salome’s robe, behind her.

His later painting, from about 1869 and in the National Gallery in London with a smaller version in Birmingham, is more in accord with the biblical account.

Reading the facial expression of Jan Adam Kruseman’s Salome with the Head of John the Baptist (c 1861) is also crucial to his intended narrative. Salome’s brows are knitted, her face almost scowling at the viewer, and John’s face is discreetly covered with a white cloth.

Victor Müller’s Salome with the Head of John (1870) (I apologise for the blurred image) also rests on the interpretation of her facial expression. Salome’s face is flushed, with anger, distress, or other emotion, and her head is tilted back.

More ambiguous still is Gustave Moreau’s Salome at the Prison (c 1873-76), another of the series of paintings which he made when he was working on The Apparition (1876). Salome stands pensive in the foreground as the executioner’s sword is about to behead John at the far left.

Alfred Stevens’ Salome from 1888 shows a new theme which developed in the late nineteenth century, in which Salome is shown with the executioner’s knife and her platter, before the execution takes place. She has assumed much greater involvement in the beheading: it is no longer the executioner who is sent by Herod to perform the task, but Salome who is in charge.

The next and final article will consider those paintings and literature which unambiguously put Salome at the centre of the story.

References

Wikipedia.

Neginsky R (2013) Salome: The Image of a Woman Who Never Was; Salome: Nymph, Seducer, Destroyer, Cambridge Scholars. ISBN 978 1 4438 4621 9.

In my last article, I reported experiencing some limitations when using Web Links. Following further assistance from Mark Anderson, I can explain more clearly how they should work, even though in that particular (now pretty large and complex) Storyspace document they don’t appear to do so.

Once I have explained that, I will move on to what will be, I hope, the climax in this particular story, when I explore all the information that I now have in my hypertext document.

Text Web Links and ‘smart’ web links

There are two fundamentally different ways in Storyspace 3 of putting web links into writing spaces. The method that I have been using so far is based on the ‘smart’ link which comes with the rich text provided in writing space content, but does not involve a true hypertext link. Although it works fine in Storyspace – which is intended for authoring hypertext for others to read using its reader app – it is a problem in sibling app Tinderbox, because that is designed with a view to exporting its notes. And ‘smart’ links don’t export at all well.

Thus the better way ahead, which enjoys full support in Tinderbox too, is to use Web Links from the Note menu command Make Web Link…. These are readily created and maintained (there is little you can do to update a ‘smart’ link other than to make it afresh). A straightforward workflow is to insert the anchor text which is going to be used for the link (as a text link), and select it.

Here the upper blue text is an existing ‘smart’ link for comparison, and I have selected the text in the line below which will form the anchor for the proper Web Link. Then, bring up the page to which you are linking in your browser, select its URL and copy it, as if you were going to paste that URL into a document. Instead of pasting it, go to the foot of the Note menu, and select the Make Web Link… command.

The link panel will then appear, just as if you were creating a regular link, which you are. Set the Type to text, as it is a text link that you want, and check that the URL given is correct. Then click on the Create Link button.

When you then browse the links (View menu) for that writing space, you will see, and can edit, that link, together with any other links for that writing space. But you cannot see the ‘smart’ link, as it is not a link in this sense.

The reason for my problems in getting text Web Links to work here is the use of non-ASCII characters in the URL: this will be fixed in the next release of Storyspace 3. In the meantime the workarounds are to use ‘smart’ web links, or to limit characters in URLs to plain old ASCII text, which is usually not difficult. Thanks to Mark Bernstein for diagnosing and fixing that amazingly quickly.

Telling stories apart

I have now got all my paintings, several text sources, some plays, operas, and movies all added to my hypertext. Looking through it, I want to be able to distinguish which works followed the Biblical story, and which followed the modified story told most clearly in Wilde’s play Salome.

There’s been quite a lot of work which has looked at how narratives have changed over time. Although some like to draw conclusions about more symbolic issues – and there’s a lot you can examine in these stories in that respect – in pure narrative terms the most basic difference is in the actor who wanted John to be executed.

The traditional story makes it clear that was Herodias, wife of Herod and mother of Salome, because of John’s attacks on her second marriage to Herod. Wilde’s story relegates the role of Herodias and makes Salome the villain of the piece, because she wanted John to love her, and he refused.

Story-telling in paintings has been viewed as being tied to a verbal (oral or text) original. Although painters can and do embellish their visual representations, because they can only fully represent a single scene (a moment in time) from the whole narrative, their ability to bring about radical change, or to tell a completely new story, is usually believed to be extremely limited.

What I want to do is to see which work(s) of art – verbal, visual, or whatever – caused the traditional story to become forked, giving the new story told by Wilde.

Key to this is being able to see readily which works appear to conform to the traditional story, and which are so inconsistent with that, that they must be telling the story given by Wilde. Extensive studies of, for example, classical vase paintings, have shown that visual artists often embellish and may stray a little from the verbal story, particularly in the days when that story was transmitted orally. But it is unusual, perhaps very exceptional, for a visual artist to contradict the main storyline.

One easy way of doing this here is with badges and the timeline view. To help do this, I have created some custom badges which are just standard icons, but coloured blue (for the traditional storyline, with Herodias as the villain) and red (for Wilde’s storyline with Salome as the villain).

Put those PNG files into the Library in your Home folder, in the path Application Support/Storyspace/badges, and they will be accessible when you use Storyspace.

I now set the default badges to be used for each of the prototypes to be the blue version. This switches all the current badges in use to blue.

I now work through each of the works in the Gallery, etc., and switch those which are based on the Wilde storyline to use the red badge.

This works well in the Timeline view. If you’re new to Storyspace and have not used this view yet, it is a little tricky to enter. You will first need to go to the Window menu and Show Toolbar. In that, you can select the Timeline view.

Although this works well in its defaults, one immediate issue is that it is cluttered by all the links shown. To fix that, open the Inspector, select the Document Inspector tool, and the Links tab. Work through each of the Link types in the popup menu, turning off the visible setting below, and your links will become invisible. If you need to turn them back on, just enable the visible item again.

The other important control for the Timeline view is the window of time to be shown. Still using the Document Inspector, select the System tab, set the Category to Events, and the Attribute popup menu will list all the standard attributes that affect the Timeline. The two important attributes here are $TimelineStart and $TimelineEnd: set those to the dates to determine the time window.

Viewed with a wide time window, to include all the works, it is clear that the traditional story was popular for depiction in paintings through the Renaissance, and from the nineteenth century onwards. I admit to not having included every painting which I could, but like all hagiographic portrayals of saints, the period of popularity was the Renaissance.

The extreme popularity in the nineteenth century reflects the increasingly diverse depictions and to a certain extent my own interest, but there is no doubt that paintings and other works based on these stories became unusually popular at that time. Compared with the martyrdoms of Saint Catherine or Saint Erasmus (which had been popular during the Renaissance), the death of John the Baptist was hugely popular from about 1850 onwards, when the red-badged works start to appear. But this resurgence of popularity occurred using both the traditional and Wilde storylines.

Honing in on that period, and selecting the earliest of Moreau’s paintings of The Apparition, it is clear that, of the depictions, portrayals, and tellings of the stories, his were the first to use the storyline told in full by Wilde, some years later.

The one fly in my ointment is, perhaps inevitably, Mallarmé. Although I have left his poetic version with a blue badge, and its title Hérodiade would suggest that he was following the traditional story, he actually confounds the whole story. In his later introduction to the poems which he wrote and rewrote for much of his life, over thirty years, he claims that he actually wanted to write about Salome, but in order to make a clear distinction between his version of Salome and the Biblical version, he decided to give her a new name – Hérodiade, which is the French name more usually given to Herodias (as in Massenet’s opera of that name).

So although I am confident, on the evidence that I have seen, that it was Moreau’s paintings of The Apparition which led to this new storyline, as with all good stories, it isn’t quite as simple as that.

I will complete my Storyspace document over the next few days, and post it here so that you can decide for yourselves.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, some ambiguity had been developing in the traditional biblical story of Herod’s party, Salome’s dance, and the execution of Saint John the Baptist. Although the underlying story still put Herodias as the driver behind John’s beheading, attention had been steadily transferred to Herodias’ daughter, Salome.

This drift was most apparent in Henri Regnault’s Salome (1870), which caused a sensation when shown at the Salon that year, only a few weeks before France was embroiled in the Franco-Prussian War, in which the artist was killed.

Most unusually, Regnault shows Salome alone, equipped with a short sword with which to behead John, and the large platter to contain his head. She is dressed as an ‘oriental’ (North African) dancing girl, and Regnault had originally intended to make her appear North African too. On her face is a knowing smile, of someone who is about to get just what they wanted. But this is all implicit, and there is nothing here which actually contradicts the biblical account, or explains why it might be Salome, rather than her mother, who wants John dead.

We do not know exactly what motivated Gustave Moreau to paint a series of works culminating in the two of Salome which were exhibited at the Salon in 1876. He seems to have started work on them just prior to the outbreak of war in 1870, and it may be that his long-standing interest in the femme fatale converged with his reading of Regnault’s Salome

Moreau developed two different but related scenes in these paintings: one shows Salome as a dancer, and culminated in an oil painting of Salome during her dance in front of Herod, prior to the execution of John; the other shows Salome and the floating, severed head of John. I will here concentrate on the latter, as you can read about the other painting here.

Salome Carrying the Head of John the Baptist on a Platter (1876), which I included in the first article in this series, seems to have been a starting point for The Apparition.

This oil study from 1875 takes the central part of Salome and adds the severed head of John, floating in mid-air. Salome is almost more naked than nude, with her jewellery and other adornments, and points accusingly at the head, while holding a lotus flower in her right hand. Herod and Herodias are lost in the shadows somewhere on the left, and John’s executioner stands to the right.

Central to the composition, though, is the eye-to-eye confrontation between Salome and the head of John the Baptist. Moreau has moved on from the traditional story about Herodias and her marriage: John’s martyrdom is now about Salome, and she is the author of his execution.

The watercolour version of The Apparition (c 1876) exhibited at the Salon, now in the Musée d’Orsay, is that shown above, which has sadly lost its former rich colours. It adds the details of the cadaveric King Herod sat on his throne, with Herodias at his feet, and the musician who accompanied Salome’s dance is shown too. In the midst of the flowers strewn on the floor is a large bloodstain, from John’s severed neck above, which still drips blood.

This slightly later oil version of The Apparition (1876-77), now in the Fogg Museum, gives a better idea of the original effect of Moreau’s watercolour, although the panther has moved across to replace the musician, and the background is quite different.

Moreau’s new story of Salome and the execution of John the Baptist was well-timed. It coincided with a revival of interest in spectacular deaths and gruesome scenes, and the increasingly overt sexualisation which occurred in all the arts towards the end of the century.

Maurycy Gottlieb soon showed his Salome with the Head of St. John (1877-78), in which Moreau’s battle of the gazes becomes a loving embrace. In 1877, Gustave Flaubert published three short stories, including an extended account of the traditional biblical narrative with Herodias at its centre. The British writer Oscar Wilde was introduced to that by Walter Pater (the philosophical leader of Aestheticism), and in 1884 Joris-Karl Huysmans’ À rebours was published – a novel which included a description of Moreau’s Salome paintings.

Wilde’s one-act play Salome was first published in French in 1891, and was soon translated into English and German. Banned from public performance in Britain, it received its premier in Paris in 1896, but was not performed in public in England until 1931. At the centre of Wilde’s play is the perversion of lust and desire in Salome, best summarised in her words at the end of the play (he calls John the Baptist Jokanaan):
But, wherefore dost thou not look at me Jokanaan? Thine eyes that were so terrible, so full of rage and scorn, are shut now. Wherefore are they shut? Open thine eyes! Lift up thine eyelids, Jokanaan! Wherefore dost thou not look at me? Art thou afraid of me, Jokanaan, that thou wilt not look at me?
If thou hadst looked at me thou hadst loved me. Well I know that thou wouldst have loved me, and the mystery of love is greater that the mystery of death.

Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations for the published script included this, The Dancer’s Reward (1893).

In Franz von Lenbach’s portrait of Mary Lindpaintner as Salome (1894), the model (who was the widow of a physician, and later married the artist) is more modestly dressed and avoids any eye contact with John’s head, but holds it with her right hand.

Growing decadence in the last years of the century brought increasingly explicit images, such as Wilhelm Trübner’s Salome (1897) with her dressed hitched up to reveal much of her right buttock.

Jean Benner’s Salome (1899) is slightly more modest, but as with von Lenbach it makes no use of the gaze, which is so crucial in Moreau’s paintings and Wilde’s play. It was Lovis Corinth who developed that further, in his second painting of Salome, in 1900.

The severed head of John the Baptist is at the centre, with Salome leaning over and touching it with her right hand, her bare breasts pendulous over John’s beard. The platter containing John’s head is itself on the head of a slave, who kneels at the feet of the executioner, who stands holding the bloodied sword in his right hand, facing Salome. Salome is staring intently at the lower abdomen of the executioner. Her right hand is stretching open the left eye of John’s head, which appears to be staring up at her.

Behind Salome are two women. The executioner and the young woman at the top right are laughing at one another, but the woman beside her has a serious, almost sad expression, as she stands holding a very large peacock fan. Visible at the top of her clothing, directly below her chin, is the small image of a human skull.

To the lower right, three other figures are partly cropped out: the feet and legs of John’s dead body, which are spattered with blood and wounds, and another slave bent over them to look at the head of an older man.

The chain of gaze here is central to the painting’s narrative: John’s eye stares at Salome, who stares at the executioner’s crotch, who laughs at the young woman at the top right, who laughs back at him. Watching sombre and detached from behind is the figure of death. This is now Wilde’s Salome in paint.

Pierre Bonnaud combined the power of gaze with near-explicit nudity in his Salome (c 1900). She has become Decadence personified.

Despite Henry Ossawa Tanner’s religious paintings, his Salome (c 1900) used new electric lighting effects to make the diaphanous gown of his dancer model more sensuous, and relegated John’s head to a corner of his canvas.

After seeing Wilde’s play performed in Berlin in 1902, Richard Strauss resolved to turn it into an opera. He started work on this in the summer of the following year, and Salome was completed and premiered in 1905. A year later, the dancer and choreographer Maud Allan produced a show called Vision of Salomé in Vienna, which featured a notorious version of the Dance of the Seven Veils, Wilde’s title for the dance of Salome before Herod, included in Strauss’s opera. The name quickly became a euphemism for a striptease, and the growing popularity of Salome as an erotic figurehead was named Salomania.

These are exemplified in Franz von Stuck’s Salome (1906), where John’s severed head is held by an ape-like creature in the shadows behind the topless dancer.

Some artists still recognised the power of the gaze, while continuing to push the boundaries of eroticism: this is Éder Gyula’s Salomé holding the severed head of John the Baptist from 1907, in which John’s head becomes Salome’s dancing partner.

Gustav Klimt’s Judith II from 1909 shows Salome, bare-breasted, with John’s head at the lower right, its eyes closed.

Strauss’s opera arrived in New York in 1907, and inspired Robert Henri to invite a Mademoiselle Voclexca to perform the notorious Dance of the Seven Veils in his studio. He then interpreted her dance into a series of paintings, including this Salome (1909), in which John’s head has been omitted altogether.

Painters continued to develop more explicit images of Salome in which sex and death were further entangled. This is Bela Čikoš Sesija’s Salome from 1919.

Julio Romero de Torres’ disturbing Salome (1926) took this even further.

In around fifty years, from the appearance of Moreau’s The Apparition at the Salon in Paris, the traditional story of Herodias obtaining her vengeance by exploiting her daughter’s dance before Herod has been all but forgotten. The martyrdom of the second holiest figure in the gospels has been transformed into a perverse confusion of sex and death. The anonymous daughter of a woman who married her divorced husband’s brother has become the ultimate femme fatale: beautiful, sexy, and dangerous to know.

Most unusually this change in story has largely been triggered and driven by paintings: Moreau’s The Apparition, which influenced Wilde’s play, thus Strauss’s opera, and out to permeate and influence movies, novels, paintings, even people’s fantasies. Stories are very powerful.

References

Wikipedia.

Neginsky R (2013) Salome: The Image of a Woman Who Never Was; Salome: Nymph, Seducer, Destroyer, Cambridge Scholars. ISBN 978 1 4438 4621 9.

William Blake’s unique vision and genius still required inspiration, role models, and peers. This article gives a brief overview of some of the contemporary artists who are believed to have been of greatest influence over his work.

By far the most obvious influence, both as a teacher and later a friend, is that of Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), some of whose paintings I have featured in this article.

John Hamilton Mortimer (1740-1779) was just a year older than Fuseli, but died when still young in the same year that Blake completed his apprenticeship as an engraver. Mortimer’s Death on a Pale Horse (c 1775) was an obvious inspiration for Blake’s painting of the same name. Mortimer was at his best as a history painter, but very few of his works seem to be accessible any more.

James Barry (1741–1806) was of a similar age to Fuseli and Mortimer, and rather more of his works have survived to show their influence on Blake. Barry looked set for an even more distinguished career than Fuseli, and was appointed Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy in London in 1782. He hoped to build interest in history painting in the Academy, but none was forthcoming.

In 1777, Barry offered to paint extensive histories for the Great Room of what is now the Royal Society of Arts in London at the cost of only his canvas, paint, and models. He produced six paintings, for which he was paid a total of 250 guineas over a period of seven years, which bankrupted him. He became increasingly bitter about the Royal Academy under Sir Joshua Reynolds, and in 1799 published a critical letter. As a result he was expelled from the Academy – the only full academician to be expelled until 2004.

Unlike most paintings of Shakespearean subjects, Barry’s King Lear Weeping over the Dead Body of Cordelia (1786–8) did not show an indoor stage scene, but attempted to recreate the playwright’s vision of what he tried to portray on the stage. The figure of Lear is almost certainly a model for Blake’s Urizen in The Ancient of Days, below.

Outside of the Royal Society of Arts (where his original paintings remain, seldom seen), one of Barry’s few surviving accessible works is his Venus Anadyomene (c 1772). This is the same Venus/Aphrodite rising from the sea which had been painted by Apelles and, in about 1486, by Botticelli as The Birth of Venus.

John Flaxman (1755–1826) was only slightly older than Blake, and trained in the Royal Academy Schools just before him. Although he was primarily a sculptor, and made his early money from producing grave monuments, he drew quite prolifically, and painted a little too. He was elected a member of the Royal Academy in 1800, and the Academy created the post of Professor of Sculpture for him. He produced several sets of drawings for engraving, and was an important patron to Blake, who engraved a set about Hesiod for him.

Flaxman’s Get Thee Behind Me, Satan (1783-87) gives an idea of some of his drawings which had common themes and style with Blake’s work.

Thomas Stothard (1755-1834) was another contemporary who knew Blake from their time at the Royal Academy Schools, and was effectively a competitor. Stothard’s career advanced more quickly, was much more lucrative, and is now largely forgotten, as are his paintings. He was elected a full member of the Royal Academy in 1794, and later became its librarian.

His book illustrations became very popular, and generated him a good income. In total, around three thousand of his illustrations were engraved, and he contributed to alderman John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery.

Typical of Stothard’s better Shakespearean paintings are Prospero, Miranda and Ariel, from The Tempest, Act I, scene 2 (c 1799), above, and Oberon and Titania from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act IV, Scene 1 (1806), below.

William Blake painted relatively few scenes from Shakespeare, and was not among those selected by Boydell for his Shakespeare Gallery. But it was Stothard’s The Pilgrimage to Canterbury (1806–7) which caused most friction with William Blake, who seems to have assumed that he would be commissioned to paint this subject. It shows the pilgrims from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales on their journey.

I am afraid that this image appears too high in chroma, and you may find that below is more useful.

In 1805, Blake was commissioned by Robert Cromek to produce illustrations for Robert Blair’s poem The Grave. Blake seems then to have proposed the idea of his painting Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims for Cromek, but Cromek commissioned Stothard to undertake the work shown above. Blake pressed on and completed his painting without a commission, sadly using glue tempera which has not survived the years well.

Stothard also produced a later, similar treatment of Shakespearean Characters (1813), below, which is a summary of many of his individual Shakespearean scenes.

The figures and scenes shown include (from the left) Twelfth Night (Olivia, Malvolio, Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek), The Merry Wives of Windsor (Falstaff and friends), As You Like It (Celia and Rosalind), The Tempest (Prospero and Miranda), King Lear (Lear and Cordelia), Hamlet (Ophelia and Hamlet), and Macbeth (Macbeth and the witches).

The other two painters who were important to William Blake were John Linnell (1792-1882) and Samuel Palmer (1805-1881). Both became friends with Blake during his later years, and Linnell gave him substantial financial support, encouragement, and supported his widow. They both deserve separate articles in the near future.

References

Wikipedia on Thomas Stothard.

Vaughan, William (1999) William Blake, British Artists, Tate Publishing. ISBN 978 1 84976 190 1.

William Blake’s highly individualistic paintings and illuminated books have been a pervasive influence on painting and other arts ever since. The Pre-Raphaelites, particularly the Rossetti brothers, were among Blake’s most devoted followers (after his death), and William Rossetti was an early Blake scholar, cataloguing many of his works.

This article is a brief introduction to the paintings of two of Blake’s friends and supporters, who in turn have influenced art well into the twentieth century: John Linnell and Samuel Palmer. Although not well-known today, both were important British painters in the nineteenth century, and creators of many superb paintings in their own right.

William Blake (1757–1827)

In 1805, William Blake was commissioned by his loyal patron Thomas Butts to paint a series of twenty-one watercolours showing the story told in the Old Testament Book of Job. In these, he depicted this faithful and pious man undergoing a series of horrors, calamities, and torments at the instigation of Satan, in an attempt to destroy his faith in God. Job does not break, and is eventually restored to health, prosperity, and happiness.

Job and His Family is Blake’s opening painting for the series, from about 1805-6, and shows Job, his wife and family stood in prayer around an old oak tree, before the awful events were brought upon him. The family is surrounded by sheep in a pastoral landscape, the sun setting at the left, and a thin crescent moon at the right. Musical instruments hang in the lower branches of the tree, and a traditional English country town is seen in the background at the left.

John Linnell was by no means an affluent artist, but when he got to know Blake really well in 1820-21, he was determined to bring him some relief from his desperate poverty. He saw an opportunity in Blake’s work, in particular the set of paintings of the Book of Job. From about 1821, Blake painted a second complete set for Linnell, and in 1823, Linnell and Blake signed an agreement under which Blake would engrave them for a fee of £100, plus a further £100 from any profits resulting from their printing and sale.

There Was a Man in the Land of Uz is the equivalent watercolour which Blake painted for Linnell in 1821, with few and minor changes from that in the set owned by Thomas Butts, such as the family kneeling rather than standing in prayer.

This became the second plate of The Book of Job when printed in 1825-6.

John Linnell (1792–1882) not only supported William Blake in his later years, but also introduced promising young artists to him, including several who went on to form the Ancients, a group with aims similar to those of the later Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Linnell’s paintings show subtle Blakean influences, such as in his Noah: The Eve of the Deluge (1848).

Several show common themes and style with Palmer and the Ancients, such as this rich golden pastoral, The Sheep Drive (1863).

Samuel Palmer (1805–1881) first met Linnell in 1822 when he was still a student, and Palmer first met Blake in 1824, when the latter was working on his illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy, and the engravings for the Book of Job. Blake and Palmer became good friends and enjoyed many discussions together before Palmer’s career moved on, and Blake became more frail and then died.

Blake’s influence in Palmer’s work is more obvious, and appears decisive in his style. In 1825, Palmer painted six signal landscapes known now as the Oxford Sepias, which are in the Ashmolean. Of these, the composition of The Skirts of a Wood (1825) echoes Blake’s Job and His Family from the Book of Job. Others in the series also borrow from Blake.

Between 1826-35, Palmer lived and painted in the village of Shoreham, Kent, a formative period in the development of his art. Moonlight, a Landscape with Sheep is taken from one of his Shoreham sketchbooks, from around 1831-33, and progresses from Job and His Family to explore an enchanted rolling countryside which became characteristic of many of Palmer’s best paintings.

When engraved by Welby Sherman, it became the beautiful and placid Evening (1834), repeating the process which Blake’s Book of Job had undergone into engravings.

Unlike Blake, Palmer did not avoid using oil paint, although many of his early works used water-based media. The Harvest Moon (c 1833) was also painted at Shoreham, and shows a team of mainly women cutting corn by moonlight, stacking the sheaves on the wagon seen at the right. Its soft light, night sky, and rich golds and greens create a strong feeling of enchantment and eternity.

Oak Trees, Lullingstone Park (1828) is a very detailed watercolour study from earlier in Palmer’s Shoreham years. Painted the year after Blake’s death, perhaps Palmer could see Job and his family in prayer at the foot of this ancient oak.

Palmer’s watercolour Rustic Contentment reworks some of the elements in Job and His Family, with a small group sat under an old oak, by the flock of sheep which they are tending. It lacks the magical night light of those harvest fields in Kent, though.

After the Pre-Raphaelites, Blake’s and Palmer’s influences extend to the likes of Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, John Piper, and even Maurice Sendak. My favourite, though, is Eric Ravilious, many of whose paintings were set in similar chalk downland in the south-east of England, and who admitted to being moved by Palmer’s enchanted countryside. Thanks, of course, to William Blake.

References

Wikipedia on the Book of Job
Wikipedia on John Linnell
Wikipedia on Samuel Palmer

Linnell, David (1994) Blake, Palmer, Linnell & Co., The Life of John Linnell, Book Guild. ISBN 978 0 8633 2917 3.
Vaughan, William (1999) William Blake, British Artists, Tate Publishing. ISBN 978 1 84976 190 1.
Vaughan, William (2015) Samuel Palmer, Shadows on the Wall, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 20985 3.

The 1876 Salon was the watershed in Gustave Moreau’s art. In four paintings, of which two featured Salome, he had re-established himself as one of the leading artists of the day. His next major focus was the Exposition Universelle of 1878, which was France’s demonstration to the world that it had renewed after the disastrous Franco-Prussian War.

From his previous works, Hercules and the Lernean Hydra, Salome, and The Apparition were all chosen for Moreau’s prominent appearance there. So too were three new paintings: The Infant Moses, Jacob and the Angel, and King David, forming a cycle on the ages of mankind, times of the day, and contemporary French politics.

Infancy and dawn were represented by Moïse Exposé sur le Nil (The Infant Moses) (c 1876-78), a radiantly beautiful depiction of the infant Moses asleep, prior to his discovery in the bullrushes. Moses is new life, new Judaeo-Christian beliefs, new law, and the new regime. Set against a background – derived from photographs of Egyptian ruins – symbolising the ancient, pre-Jewish, and decaying – it laid out Moreau’s hope for the French nation.

The baby Moses is marked out as being holy by the rays emanating from his temples, and surrounded by exotic flowers and birds. Most unusually, Moreau does not show the traditional and popular moment of discovery of the infant in the bullrushes, but the static scene before.

These three paintings did not suddenly emerge from Moreau’s mind onto the canvas. For example, Jacob and the Angel is a watercolour study which he made around 1874 for the second in the cycle, showing maturity, night, and the ceaseless struggle both spiritual and political.

This refers to a story from the Old Testament book of Genesis, chapter 32 verses 22-31, when Jacob is on his journey to Canaan:

And he rose up that night, and took his two wives, and his two womenservants, and his eleven sons, and passed over the ford Jabbok. And he took them, and sent them over the brook, and sent over that he had.

And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day. And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob’s thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him. And he said, “Let me go, for the day breaketh.” And he said, “I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.” And he said unto him, “What is thy name?” And he said, “Jacob.”

And he said, “Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.” And Jacob asked him, and said, “Tell me, I pray thee, thy name.” And he said, “Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name?” And he blessed him there.

And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved. And as he passed over Penuel the sun rose upon him, and he halted upon his thigh.

Jacob and the Angel (1874-78) is the finished oil painting shown in the Exposition, and shows the young Jacob wrestling heroically with the invisible power that is God, the angel standing nonchalantly by.

The third painting, King David (1878), symbolises old age, the evening, and the experience of a wise tradition, both spiritually and politically. Moreau’s textual reference was not the Psalms of David, but according to Cooke it was Joseph de Maistre’s Les Soirées de Saint Petersbourg of 1821. Joseph-Marie, comte de Maistre (1753-1821) was a staunchly conservative Savoyard writer and philosopher; this Platonic dialogue of his was published posthumously, and devoted no less than fifteen pages to his eulogy of the Psalms.

The elderly David the King sits on his throne, an angel at his feet. An ornate oil lamp has already been lit as the twilight starts to fade into the evening. There are rich symbols embedded in the ornate decor, including a set of symbols of the four evangelists, taken from a Byzantine book cover, which appear on the capitals (atop the pillars): these are an eagle, angel, lion, and ox (also used by William Blake, for example).

According to Moreau, David is here engaged in contemplating his “faults and crimes” in an act of expiation, just as he did in various of his Psalms. The angel has gathered up David’s famous harp, and represents his soul and personifies his poetry.

Unfortunately these elaborate symbols were lost on Moreau’s critics, who, although full of admiration for the painting, failed to read its mediaeval signs.

Moreau had a total of eleven paintings selected for the Exposition in 1878. Another of those – this time a magnificent watercolour – was his The Fall of Phaeton (1878).

This refers to the classical myth involving Apollo, the sun god, and his son Phaethon. As the god of the sun, Apollo drove its chariot across the heavens each day. His son Phaethon was challenged by his peers to prove this. When Phaethon asked his father, he promised to grant his son whatever he wanted in proof. Phaethon asked to drive the sun chariot for a day, and despite Apollo’s concerns, did so. Once Phaethon was in charge of the chariot, he lost control of the horses, and Zeus had to kill him with a thunderbolt to prevent the chariot from crashing to earth and burning it up.

Moreau’s painting shows the sun chariot just about to crash to the ground, Phaethon in distress, standing in the chariot itself, and the horses in total disarray. Apollo, shown in one of his representations as a lion, pursues the chariot in alarm, and a huge serpentine basilisk or dragon rises up from the earth. At the left the moon is shown just peeping over the horizon, and the thunderbolt from Zeus is flying down to kill Phaethon.

This is probably the most action-packed narrative painting in the whole of Moreau’s works, and was the start of a short series of paintings which examined classical myths about the sun.

Phoebus and Boreas (1879) is a sketch showing Phoebus Apollo in his sun chariot at the left, and Boreas, the cold north wind, to the right of centre. This results in the cold, windy and changeable weather typical of the winter, as shown in the clouds.

The Chariot of Apollo, or Phoebus Apollo (c 1880) is a finished version probably derived from that, just showing Apollo driving his sun chariot.

Moreau also revisited his new myth of Salome and John the Baptist, in his strange watercolour of Salome in the Garden (1878). A beautiful and decorated figure of Salome is walking in an overgrown garden, carrying the severed head of John the Baptist on a large platter. Her eyes are closed, or perhaps looking down at the head, and John’s eyes are closed. Beside her is a headless statue of a man crawling, which could perhaps be the body of John, and outside is a man, possibly the executioner waving his sword.

This was also shown in the Exposition, but lacks the power of the two other works featuring Salome which were shown there, and possibly only led to confusion as to its reading.

Over this period, Moreau was also working on the depiction of the sixth labour of Hercules, in which he dispersed the man-eating birds of Lake Stymphalia in Arcadia. That started with his Hercules and the Stymphalian Birds in about 1872.

According to the myth, the Stymphalian birds had beaks of bronze and metallic feathers which functioned as arrows. They had migrated to Lake Stymphalia, where they took over the countryside, destroying the inhabitants, their fruit and crops, and leaving their toxic droppings to poison the land. The lake had become a swamp, which could not bear Hercules’ weight, so Athena assisted him with a rattle which scared the birds into the air. Once in flight, he was able to shoot them down with his arrows, and the few survivors then fled.

Here Moreau shows Hercules shooting his arrows at the birds, with some dead birds and several human corpses in the lake.

This later study or incomplete painting, Hercules at Lake Stymphalos (c 1875-80), places the scene in a gorge, and the birds here have human heads and chests.

Following Moreau’s success at the Salon in 1876 and his strong showing at the Exposition two years later, he was commissioned to paint a large series of watercolours illustrating the fables of La Fontaine for the very rich Antoni Roux. These remain in a private collection and are only accessible as a handful of engravings, which are hardly fair reflections of Moreau’s originals. Much of the painter’s time from 1879 to 1884 was occupied with the more than sixty paintings that he contributed to the series.

He still found time to exhibit at the Salon in 1880, which I will consider in the next article in this series.

References

Cooke P (2014) Gustave Moreau, History Painting, Spirituality and Symbolism, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 20433 9.
Mathieu P-L (1998, 2010) Gustave Moreau, the Assembler of Dreams, PocheCouleur. ISBN 978 2 867 70194 8.

With the success of his painting of Salome, and his move to Berlin, Lovis Corinth was reaching the peak of his career. He relished his new-found reputation as ‘the painter of flesh’, and was now at the centre of Germany’s vibrant city of modern arts. In 1902, he opened a painting school for women, and among his first pupils was Charlotte Berend (1880-1967), then just twenty-one and the daughter of a rich textile merchant.

Corinth formally joined the Berlin Secession in 1901, and quickly found himself involved with its direction.

The Family of the Painter Fritz Rumpf (1901) is a wonderfully informal family portrait, which sadly omits Fritz Rumpf (1856-1927) altogether, but Corinth painted him in a separate portrait. The mother, at the right, is Margarethe née Gatterer, and all six of their children are included.

In the summer of 1902, Corinth painted Charlotte for the first time, and the couple travelled to Pomerania together. That autumn they became engaged. Charlotte had already become Corinth’s muse and preferred model, as she was to remain for the rest of his life. That year, Corinth also visited Paris, Anvers, and the Netherlands.

Self portrait with Charlotte Berend-Corinth (1902) is the earliest portrait that he painted of his fiancée and himself. Its original title in German means self-portrait with his wife and a champagne glass although the glass that he is holding clearly doesn’t contain champagne. This refers to Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait with Saskia (The Prodigal Son) (1636), in which Saskia is sat on Rembrandt’s lap, and he raises a large fluted glass of beer in his right hand.

Charlotte, in the role of Saskia, looks quiet and calm, against Corinth/Rembrandt’s alcohol-fuelled mirth.

Swimming in Horst – Ostsee (1902) shows swimmers in the Baltic Sea at what was then known as Horst, and is now the Polish resort of Niechorze.

Presumably Paddling (1902) shows Charlotte’s turn to take to the waters there.

Charlotte Berend and Lovis Corinth married in the spring of 1903. He was 44, she was only 22. In the autumn of the following year, their first child, Thomas, was born, and in 1909 their daughter Wilhelmina.

Self-portrait with Model (1903) is the couple’s second joint portrait, and the first after their marriage. This time her pose refers to the classical images of muses by Rubens and Ingres, alluding to the story of Pygmalion.

Corinth was a left-handed painter, so this image has not been painted directly from a mirror. He may well have used photographs instead.

Max Reinhardt moved to Berlin at the same time as Corinth, and in 1902 his Little Theatre staged what I think was the German premiere of Oscar Wilde’s play Salome. Richard Strauss saw the play there, and it inspired him to write his opera of the same name the following summer.

Corinth painted this wonderful portrait of its star and title role, Gertrud Eysoldt as Salome (1903). This makes an interesting contrast with his 1900 painting of the story. Although during this period he painted fewer mythical and other narrative works, the next painting is, I think, one of his most vivid stories.

Ulysses Fighting the Beggar (1903) shows a story from book 18 of Homer’s Odyssey, before the slaughter of the suitors (painted much earlier by Gustave Moreau, but never completed).

Odysseus/Ulysses has finally returned to his home city of Ithaca and is now determined to kill the many suitors to his wife Penelope. As he plans this, he goes around disguised as a beggar. This fragment of the elaborate story starts with the arrival of a real beggar named Arnaeus or Irus, who most unwisely picks a fight with Odysseus. The hero promptly floors the beggar, stopping just short of killing him.

Corinth captures the fight as Odysseus (centre) is getting the better of Irus (left of centre), with various suitors and bystanders watching. Although painted loosely, the artist has taken care to give each face its own expression, ranging from amusement to apprehension. The end result is a raucous collage of human emotion.

Corinth seems not to have taken this study of abduction, Frauenraub (1904), any further, and I do not know its narrative context.

Landscapes are relatively infrequent over these years, but I could not resist including his delightful Blühender Bauerngarten (Blooming Farm Garden) (1904).

Corinth’s reputation as ‘the painter of flesh’ was maintained by two groups of nudes. The Harem (1904) uses an ever-popular ‘oriental’ setting for an abundance of female flesh, but has some distinctive touches too. The cat sat in the foreground ignores – in the way that only cats can – some sort of horseplay taking place behind, while a guard looks as bored as the cat. This is not the sumptuous silk and divan lounge shown in the nineteenth century, though – indeed, it all looks rather tawdry.

In complete contrast, Charlotte Berend in a Deck Chair (1904) is a tender and intimate sketch of his wife relaxing away from their son, her wedding ring prominent on her left hand.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.

John Linnell (1792–1882) is perhaps best known now as a patron and supporter of William Blake in his later years. In his day, he was a successful and prosperous painter, of the generation after JMW Turner, John Constable, and James Ward. He made a good living from portraiture, but his most significant genre was the landscape.

He was born in London, into an artistic family, and was a precocious artist himself. His early training took him to the best teachers of the day, including Benjamin West and John Varley, before he was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools in 1805, at the age of just thirteen. There he was taught by Fuseli, who recognised his talent.

He also trained as an engraver, and throughout his career was involved in engraving projects. Samuel Palmer married his daughter Hannah; as a father-in-law and older artist, Linnell seems to have earned himself a fierce reputation.

Linnell’s first exhibited works were two small landscapes, which were shown at the Royal Academy in 1807, and the following year he sold his first landscape for twenty guineas.

Kensington Gravel Pits (1811–12) gives a good idea of the quality of Linnell’s early paintings, and is an important historical record. When he painted this, Linnell was living in what is now known as Notting Hill Gate, in London – but was then the village of Kensington Gravel Pits. These open quarries had supplied gravel for the construction of London since the early sixteenth century. The Kensington area was then quite rural, which was an attraction to Linnell and his colleague and friend, William Mulready (1786-1863), with whom he shared accommodation at this time.

Exhibited at the British Institution in 1813, it enjoyed some favourable comments, but did not sell until later that year.

In the summer of 1812, Linnell embarked on his first painting tour of north Wales, where he saw his first mountain, and made more than a hundred watercolours and chalk drawings. The following winter, he made finished paintings from some of those. However, he was beginning to realise that landscape painting was unlikely to bring him a secure income, sufficient to raise a family. In 1813, he started to paint portraits, which quickly took up much of his time.

A Landscape in Snowdonia with a Tree in the Foreground (1813) is an example of his fine watercolour paintings made during his summer painting tours at this time.

He also seems to have visited the Peak District of England, where he made preparatory sketches for this detailed view In Dovedale (1814-15).

Landscape with Figures (1816) appears to have been based on sketches made during May 1815 in Windsor Forest. Linnell, his fiancée Mary Palmer, and a chaperone stayed for a month in the village of Winkfield, allowing him excursions into the ancient woodland nearby. Later in the summer he toured the Isle of Wight, where he also painted landscapes.

Linnell was deeply religious, but fiercely non-conformist in his beliefs. He had learned Hebrew and Greek so that he could read the Bible in ‘original’ versions, as he did not trust translations into English. Unhappy with conventional church wedding ceremonies, he took his bride to Scotland so that they could be married under a civil ceremony in 1817. The couple stayed on for Linnell to paint some portraits there, and to sketch some mountain views.

At the end of 1817, Linnell started his first religious painting, and the following year he met William Blake for the first time.

Evening, Bayswater (1818) appears to be another view of the then rural parts of London, out to the west of what is now Paddington Station. It also shows Linnell’s delicate handling of the light of gathering dusk, something that was to develop further later in his career.

During the 1820s, Linnell’s portraiture flourished, thanks to some fortunate introductions to suitably affluent customers. He also got to know Blake very well, and found ways of bringing relief to Blake’s dire poverty, by bringing him commissions and joint ventures. Linnell first commissioned Blake to paint a second set of the paintings of the Book of Job which he had previously produced in 1805, then in 1823, Linnell and Blake signed an agreement under which Blake would engrave them for a fee of £100, plus a further £100 from any profits resulting from their printing and sale.

Linnell also fostered the development of younger artists. He met his future son-in-law Samuel Palmer (who was no relative of Linnell’s wife, despite having the same surname) in 1822, and introduced him to William Blake in 1824.

Linnell’s portraits were also available in unconventional media. He had for several years been painting miniatures on ivory, and this informal portrait of Mrs. William Wilberforce and Child (1824) was painted in watercolour on a gesso ground. Barbara Ann Wilberforce (1777-1847) was the wife of the abolitionist MP William Wilberforce, who led the parliamentary campaign against slavery.

Blake’s Book of Job was finally published in 1826. It had cost Linnell a grand total of £266, much of which had gone straight to William Blake, but Linnell never recouped that cost. Blake’s health was deteriorating at the time, and Linnell persuaded the Blakes to stay with his family for a while to recuperate. When Blake died in 1827, it was Linnell who paid his funeral expenses, and supported Blake’s widow.

Linnell also painted a few rustic genre scenes, such as his Shepherd Boy Playing a Flute (1831).

On one of his trips to the north-east of England, Linnell seems to have stopped at the fishing village of Cullercoats, where he painted Coast Scene at Cullercoats near Whitley Bay (c 1834). This was the village that Winslow Homer lived in during 1881-82.

Linnell continued to paint finished works, such as his Windsor Forest (Wood-Cutting in Windsor Forest) (1834-35), from his earlier sketches. In this case, he used work which he had originally completed nearly twenty years previously, when he had stayed in Winkfield with his then fiancée.

In 1837, Samuel Palmer eventually – after several years of engagement – married Linnell’s daughter Hannah. His former pupil was now part of the family.

References

Wikipedia

Linnell, David (1994) Blake, Palmer, Linnell & Co., The Life of John Linnell, Book Guild. ISBN 978 0 8633 2917 3.

Prior to 1846, John Linnell (1792–1882) had prospered as a painter only by working mainly in portraiture. His great love was landscape painting, and he also made some religious and narrative works. Then in 1846, his fortunes changed, thanks to a wealthy dealer and collector who seemed happy to part with hundreds and even thousands of pounds when he wanted Linnell’s paintings.

The artist could now, at last, afford to be more selective in the portrait commissions which he accepted, and to devote more time to landscapes.

Buoyed by this sudden increase in sales, Linnell started work on the large canvas of Noah: The Eve of the Deluge in the spring of 1847. Although on a religious theme, it is also a dramatic landscape which set the mood for many of Linnell’s remaining works: the rich colours of twilight. It was sold only a couple of months after Linnell had started work on it, for £1000.

It was exhibited at the Royal Academy, considered by the artist himself to be one of his major works, and was even criticised by John Ruskin, in the second volume of his Modern Painters. Unfortunately Ruskin appears to have misunderstood its subject, and dismissed it (characteristically, perhaps) as being “devoid in invention”. This did not affect Linnell’s popularity with collectors, though.

In 1851, Linnell moved his family to a house which he had built for them just outside Redhill, Surrey, where he spent the rest of his life. Living in the rolling North Downs, in the rich agricultural belt around London, provided him ample opportunity for the landscape painting which he so enjoyed, and which was now so well appreciated. Linnell also recognised the talent of the Pre-Raphaelites, and he gave Holman Hunt and Millais support and friendship from 1852 onwards.

Harvest Home, Sunset: The Last Load (1853) shows the final wagonload of cut grain leaving the fields at dusk, as the harvest is completed. Its composition and lighting could put it among the works of Samuel Palmer and the Ancients.

Like John Constable before him, Linnell’s oil sketches and studies have rich and expressive brushstrokes. If the chroma in his A Finished Study for ‘Reaping’ (1858) were turned up, it might easily be mistaken for an Impressionist work. However, it was not intended for the eyes of the public, for which Linnell provided Salon-quality finished paintings.

The Prophet Balaam and the Angel (1859) shows one of the more obscure stories from the Old Testament Book of Numbers, revisited briefly in Revelation. Balaam was a non-Israelite who declared himself a prophet. Although he would not curse the Israelites, the Biblical account claims that he went to King Balak of Moab and explained to him how he could get the Israelites to fall into sin by enticing them with prostitutes and unclean food.

When Balaam had set out to go and curse the Israelites, an angel appeared, first to the donkey that he was riding, and then to Balaam too. The angel told Balaam that the donkey was the only reason that Balaam had not been killed. Balaam then repented, but the angel told him to continue. That is the scene shown in Linnel’s painting, as Balaam (who at this stage cannot see the angel) beats his donkey to move on, but the angel will not allow the donkey to pass.

The Harvest Cradle (1859) is an ingenious rustic scene, in which the children of those cutting wheat are tucked up in freshly-cut stooks.

Wheat (c 1860) was painted for the dealer Thomas Agnew, and was one of Linnell’s favourites. It was shown at the Royal Academy shortly after completion, then at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1867.

Homeward Bound (1861) shows sheep and cattle being brought back from pasture at dusk.

The Sheep Drive (1863) is another idyllic pastoral landscape typical of Linnell’s later work.

Linnell continued to paint strongly until 1878, when his failing eyesight and the other problems of old age got the better of him. His last exhibit at the Royal Academy was in 1881, of a painting from 1876. He died in early 1882, just short of his ninetieth birthday.

References

Wikipedia

Linnell, David (1994) Blake, Palmer, Linnell & Co., The Life of John Linnell, Book Guild. ISBN 978 0 8633 2917 3.

Much of Moreau’s time from 1879 to 1884 was occupied painting more than sixty watercolours illustrating the fables of La Fontaine for a very rich patron. However, he still found time to exhibit at the Salon in 1880, which turned out to be his last. The two new paintings which he exhibited there were Helen (1880) and Galatea (1880).

Unfortunately Helen seems to have been missing for many years, and this tiny image of part of it is all that I have been able to trace. The whole painting shows Helen of Troy standing serenely by the ruins of the once-mighty city, at her feet a pile of dead and dying warriors. Although it lends itself to political interpretations in the light of the Franco-Prussian War, those are left open to the viewer.

Galatea refers to the myth recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: she is a sea-nymph who falls in love with Acis. However, the cyclops Polyphemus also lusts after the beautiful Galatea, and spies on her, particularly when the couple are together. In a fit of jealousy, Polyphemus crushes Acis with a boulder. Galatea then turns his blood into the River Acis, on Sicily, making him the river’s spirit.

As with Odilon Redon later, Moreau chooses a scene in which Galatea is resting naked in the countryside with her eyes closed, and the cyclops playing sinister voyeur. Surrounding them is a magical countryside, filled with strange plants recalling anemones, as would be appropriate to a sea-nymph. Polyphemus is shown with two ‘normal’ eyesockets and lids, his single seeing eye staring out disconcertingly from the middle of his forehead.

It was in the early 1880s that Moreau had the canvases enlarged of his earlier abandoned paintings of The Suitors, The Daughters of Thespius, and Tyrtaeus Singing during the Combat, and he re-started painting them, only to abandon them again.

Nyx (1880) is a watercolour portrait of the goddess or personification of the night, surrounded by associated symbols and objects. Its gilt frame is an effective trompe l’oeil in paint.

Over the following few years, perhaps as a result of his work painting fables, Moreau seems to have worked predominantly in watercolour rather than oils. I am unsure whether his The Peacock Complaining to Juno (1881) was included in that commissioned series, or was painted in addition to it. It refers to one of Æsop’s fables, in which the peacock, Juno’s favourite bird, complained to the goddess Juno that it did not have the voice of a nightingale. Juno responded by saying that fate had assigned each bird its properties, and the peacock should be content with its lot.

Moreau’s painting of The Prodigal Son (c 1882), another watercolour, is unusual not only for its departure from his colourful ornate style, but for its choice of scene. Almost every painting made of this New Testament parable shows the moment that the prodigal son is reunited with his father, on his return.

Instead, Moreau shows the prodigal towards the end of his period of separation, when famine strikes, and the son has become destitute, working as a swineherd. It is when the son starts envying the pigs’ food that he realises that he must return to his family and face the consequences of his behaviour.

Not only is Moreau’s style so different here, but there is a complete lack of symbols, ornament, and decoration: it is a simple depiction of that scene.

That contrasts with his watercolour painting of The Sirens (1882), referring to the dangerous creatures who lured sailors to their death on the shores of their island in the Mediterranean, particularly as told in Homer’s Odyssey. In keeping with the approach in Galatea and Nyx, Moreau paints them as beautiful figures in a static scene, with a saturnine setting sun reminiscent of his Hercules and the Stymphalian Birds. There is, though, a lone sail on the horizon, which does not seem to have attracted their attention yet.

Their lower legs turn into the writhing coils of sea serpents, but the beach is not littered with human remains so as to give them real menace. Unlike many other paintings of the Sirens, Moreau does not give them wings, or musical instruments.

Leda and the Swan (c 1882) revisits this myth as another static display of female beauty, with the added twist of a large, dark aquiline bird by Leda’s feet. Although this could be an eagle, the bright red at its base suggests the flames of a phoenix just starting to self-combust. This is a curious combination of symbols of self-renewal through cyclical combustion, and a woman who laid eggs. I have yet to see a coherent explanation.

Pasiphaé (1880s) appears to have been started but then abandoned. It shows another nude female protagonist, this time embracing the head of a bull. This refers to the story of Pasiphaë, the doublet of Europa, who also had a fondness for white bulls. Given in marriage to King Minos of Crete, Poseidon cursed her to lust for bulls, and she had sex with a white bull sent by Poseidon, producing Asterion, known by the Greeks as the Minotaur, the curse of Crete.

Chimera (1884) uses the coastal backdrop of The Sirens, with its setting saturnine sun, to show another chimeral figure, with a long-haired woman riding on its shoulder. This time the chimera has a human head and body, angelic wings, and a serpent’s (or dragon’s) tail.

The Chimaeras was started and abandoned by Moreau in 1884. Another large oil painting with epic figurative content, it is set among classical ruins which may have been based in part on Tivoli, thirty kilometres from Rome, and a popular area for landscape painters, which Moreau had visited. Its foreground is densely packed with figures of great variety.

The vast majority – perhaps all – of the figures are of women, many naked, from a wide variety of myths and stories. Some appear mediaeval, and are dressed in decorated robes. Others are more classical in their appearance, and a few apparently come from east Asian art. With them are mythical creatures such as a unicorn, a prancing white bull, and some chimeras too.

Opinion is that this painting was intended to be a philosophical and symbolic meditation on Woman, which was perhaps the next inevitable step after the paintings above.

On 31 July 1884, Moreau’s mother – with his mistress Alexandrine Dureux, one of only two women in his life – died in her sleep. Moreau abandoned The Chimaeras, The Suitors, The Daughters of Thespius, and Tyrtaeus Singing during the Combat, stopped painting altogether, and cut himself off from the world.

References

Cooke P (2014) Gustave Moreau, History Painting, Spirituality and Symbolism, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 20433 9.
Mathieu P-L (1998, 2010) Gustave Moreau, the Assembler of Dreams, PocheCouleur. ISBN 978 2 867 70194 8.

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been putting together a hypertext document using Eastgate’s superb authoring environment, Storyspace. I think that it is pretty well ready now, and invite you to download it and try it out, please.

You will need a demo version of Storyspace 3, or the Storyspace Reader app, from Eastgate, in order to read the document. If you already have Eastgate’s Tinderbox, you can read it in that, but it is designed for use in Storyspace.

Download it from here: salomestory6

Significant changes

I have added quite a few writing spaces since I last wrote here about this project. These include an additional painting by Rogier van der Weyden, which I had omitted from my blog articles, and is rather wonderful. That includes multiplex narrative – in which two different moments in time are shown in the single image – which is often thought to be unusual, particularly in northern Renaissance paintings. In fact, it is quite common, and there are now three examples in this hypertext which demonstrate it well.

I have paid particular attention to web links, which have formed a lot of the work since I last wrote here. I have tried to ensure that all its web links work properly no matter which (recent) version of Storyspace or its Reader app you are using. And this has been an excellent demonstration of how Storyspace encourages reliable rhythmic workflows.

The web links used here are all ‘proper’ Web Links using text links, not the embedded ‘smart links’. The URLs which they use are crafted to ensure that they do not include Unicode characters outside the normal ASCII set. They should therefore work with all recent and future versions of Storyspace. My fingers are crossed.

To do this rhythmically is easy. I set up my browser (Safari) with the desired page to which I wish to link. I then copy that link into a text processor (BBEdit) so that I can inspect it for any non-ASCII characters, in this case typically the e-acute on Salomé. If there are any, I select each, copy and paste it into the Emoji & Symbols floating pane, and use its search feature to find the correct Unicode character. I then use the UTF-8 codes given there to hand-convert the character in the URL to escape format using %. So é becomes %C3%A9, and my desired URL for the web link is then ready in my text processor.

I then switch to the writing space into which I am going to place the web link, type its anchor text, and select the anchor.

I switch to the text editor and select the web link there, and Command-C to copy it. With that in the clipboard, I drop down the Make Web Link… command in the Note menu, which brings up the link editor pane.

All that I now have to do in that pane is change the type of link to text, verify that the URL has been correctly included, and click on the Create Link button.

When you are adding quite a lot of web links, this generates a lovely steady rhythm in which you can work through dozens of links in very few minutes, error-free – or so I hope I have shown in the document!

I have now added the end-matter, and linked to that from the start writing space, as shown.

With all the additional content, the timeline view looks really exciting, and shows how useful badges can be there. I have set the cursor line at the first of Moreau’s radical Salome paintings in 1875. Note how all the works whose badges are shown in red (indicating that they tell the ‘Wilde’ version of the story) appear to the right of that line, and the blue badges (works telling the Biblical version of the story) peter out over that period.

I hope that you love the look of the various views available, and find this an interesting and absorbing story about stories.

I intend making final fixes to this document, then releasing it as version 1.0.

… Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.
(William Shakespeare, Macbeth Act 5, scene 5.)

The most famous artist to die in the Franco-Prussian War was the French Impressionist Frédéric Bazille, but he was not the only promising young painter to be a victim of that brief conflict: also killed was Alexandre-Georges-Henri or just plain Henri Regnault (1843–1871).

Son of one of France’s most distinguished chemists and physicists, he trained with Montfort, Lamothe, and Alexandre Cabanel, and first competed unsuccessfully for the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1863.

His Orpheus in the Underworld (1865) appears to be based on the popular opera by Offenbach, which was first performed in 1858. Orpheus is seen at the left, his lyre in his hand, singing to the dead. Behind him, at the left edge, are two of the heads of Cerberus, who guards the entrance to the underworld.

In 1866, he competed again in the Prix de Rome, and won it with his Thetis Bringing Achilles the Weapons Forged by Vulcan. This set title for the painting was taken from a famous painting, generally known as Thetis Receiving the Weapons of Achilles from Hephaestus, by Anthony van Dyck, from 1630-32.

It shows a scene from the story of the Shield of Achilles, drawn from Homer’s Iliad, book 18, lines 478-608. In this, the sea-nymph Thetis, Achilles’ mother, pleads with Hephaestus/Vulcan for replacement weapons for Achilles in the Trojan war, after his original armour and weapons are taken by the Trojans from the corpse of Patroclus. Here, the bare-breasted Thetis brings those impregnable weapons to Achilles. Among them is the famous decorated Shield of Achilles.

Automedon with the Horses of Achilles (1868) also draws from the stories about Achilles during the Trojan War, in the Iliad. Automedon was Achilles’ charioteer, who rode into battle in command of Achilles’ horses Balius and Xanthos, to support Patroclus, when he was wearing Achilles’ armour. When Patroclus was killed, Automedon was driven to the rear of the fighting, where he tried to console the bereaved horses, as shown here.

Oddly, Regnault does not associate the horses’ names with their appearance: Balios probably means dappled, and Xanthus means blonde.

Regnault was probably the first winner of the Prix de Rome to be given dispensation to not spend the obligatory three years in Rome. Instead he travelled to Spain and North Africa for the latter years, for example painting this fine realist portrait of a Castilian Mountain Shepherd (1868).

When he was in Granada, he painted this view of the Colonnade of the Court of the Lions at the Alhambra (1869). I suspect that this was unfinished, and that he intended to complete the detail in its lower half.

More famous was his Summary Execution under the Moorish Kings of Grenada (1870), which catered for the growing public taste for spectacular gore. This shows the immediate aftermath of a summary beheading performed on the steps of the Alhambra, during the Moorish kingdom prior to the Christian Reconquista of 1492.

Regnault uses contrasting colours to great effect here, with the green robes of the victim making his blood seem intensely red. The low angle of the view also enhances the stature of the executioner and gives immediacy.

Regnault’s other painting shown in the Salon that year caused even more of a sensation: it was his Salome (1870).

Most unusually, Regnault shows Salome alone, equipped with a short sword with which to behead John, and the large platter to contain his head. She is dressed as an ‘oriental’ (North African) dancing girl, and Regnault had originally intended to make her appear North African too. On her face is a knowing smile, of someone who is about to get just what they wanted. Although it questioned the Biblical account, Regnault was careful not to contradict it.

Sometimes those who won the Prix de Rome all but disappear. In Regnault’s case, he was clearly destined for much greater paintings in the future, and promised to be just what history painting most needed. Then on 19 January 1871, during the second Battle of Buzenval, near St Cloud to the west of the city of Paris, he was among the defenders and was killed in battle. He was 27.

His tragic death was commemorated by other artists who had fought in the war.

Carolus-Duran, who had fought in the same battle, painted his oil sketch of Henri Regnault Dead on the Battlefield (1871).

Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, who commanded an infantry regiment which defended Paris during the war, included Regnault as the soldier slumped on the white plinth in The Siege of Paris in 1870 (1884). Camille Saint-Saëns, another veteran of the defence of Paris, dedicated his Marche Héroïque (1871) to Regnault’s memory.

Reference

Wikipedia.

Sometimes we see things in paintings which are strange and unexplained. A few weeks ago, I noted that there are a couple of tortoises in Moreau’s painting of Orpheus (1865)

The only explanation that I can find is that “they may be read as symbols of immortality (but also of silence)” (Cooke, p 62), which left me more puzzled than before. This article is a short pictorial journey to discover a little more about the significance of tortoises in paintings.

Outside Europe, and particularly in east Asia, tortoises have a long and glorious history of depiction in art. One relatively recent example is Shibata Zeshin’s Jurōjin, Deer and Tortoises in a Landscape (1889), where three tortoises seem to have swept up at speed towards the wizened figure of Jurōjin; compared with the static deer, they are part of an enigmatic reversal of reality.

In European painting, they have inevitably appeared in portraits as new faunas have been discovered, as in Albert Eckhout’s Study of Two Brazilian Tortoises (c 1640). Edward Lear, the British writer and watercolour painter, produced beautiful illustrations of various species for reference books.

They appear occasionally in still life paintings too, where they are probably one of the most appropriate animals for the genre. Pieter Claesz’s Still Life with Musical Instruments (1623) seems an ideal setting, matching the shape of the body of a lute, and the colour of wood.

Felix Esterl’s Still life with Skinned Hare, Chicken, Fish and Turtle (1929) provides more worrying company for a tortoise or turtle, though.

In ancient times, tortoises have had a more fundamental role in the cosmos, almost as much as in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, where Great A’Tuin is a vast turtle who bears four huge elephants, who in turn bear Discworld itself. Marco Marchetti’s Putti with a Tortoise (1556-58) is far more modest in scale.

The Romans and Greeks of Classical times associated the tortoise with love, and reproductive fertility, and made the animal an attribute of Aphrodite. That may explain the goal of Marchetti’s putti, and the diminutive tortoise crawling across the lap of these Elegant Lovers (c 1550).

It might also provide a reason for Félicien Rops including a prominent tortoise with butterfly wings in his ribald The Love Fair (The Cage) (1878-81). However, Rops is, as ever, determined not to provide us with a simple reading.

There are two famous classical stories involving tortoises which might be relevant.

The first is Æsop’s fable of the Tortoise and the Hare, who race against one another. Although the hare is much faster, the tortoise is more persistent, and eventually wins. This is one of relatively few paintings (as opposed to illustrations) showing this race, by Frans Snyders: The Fable of the Hare and the Tortoise (1600-57).

There is also a group of tales concerning tortoises being dropped by birds, including the claim that the playwright Æschylus was killed by a tortoise which had been dropped by an eagle – which I have been unable to locate in a history painting.

In the early 1880s, Moreau painted an illustration to one of la Fontaine’s fables involving a tortoise and two ducks. In this, the tortoise is taken into the air while holding a stick in its mouth, until it speaks in self-admiration; it then falls to the ground and its shell is smashed.

Tortoises also appear sporadically in situations where their presence seems almost gratuitous. In Vincenzo Carducci’s The Vision of Dionisio Rickel, the Carthusian (1626-32), a black cat is playing with a tortoise, and hinting strongly at allegory. If the cat represents the devil, the hard-shelled tortoise might indicate invulnerability to the wiles of the devil, perhaps.

Dionisio Cartujano (1402-1471), or Denys van Leeuwen, or Denis de Rickel, or Denis the Carthusian, was a pious and ascetic Carthusian monk who wrote more than 150 works, including a complete Bible commentary. He was responsible for building a monastery in ‘s-Hertogenbosch when Hieronymus Bosch was a young man there.

Melchior d’Hondecoeter (1636–1695) painted his vast Portrait of Three Children in a Landscape with Game in the latter half of the 1600s. The children appear to have taken to field sports at a very early age, and have here amassed an impressive ‘kill’, with their muzzle-loading gun – although I suspect (and hope) that an unseen adult may have had a hand in its use.

The lone tortoise, which is being ignored by each of the children and dogs, is slowly crawling its way towards them, as if it has just emerged into the wrong painting. Perhaps d’Hondecoeter just liked tortoises.

John William Godward used the tortoise in one of his aesthetic paintings, The Quiet Pet (1906). One of his languidly beautiful women is seen in repose, offering a couple of cherries to her small pet tortoise, as a means of passing the time. I am unsure whether we should try to read anything more into the painting, but it begs the question as to whether the artist saw the tortoise or the woman as the ‘quiet pet’, and whether the offer of cherries should be interpreted any further.

My final painting is by far the most important, with the exception of Moreau’s Orpheus, and was an exciting discovery on this journey: it is Osman Hamdi Bey’s magnificent The Tortoise Trainer (1906). Trained in Paris during the 1860s by Jean-Léon Gérôme and Gustave Boulanger, I am sure that they would have been proud of his technique, style, and the work as a whole.

Its ingenious allegory can be read in at least two ways. The artist may have been self-critical of his painstakingly slow work; tortoises are not only inherently slow, but in the early eighteenth century had been used to bear lit candles for evening outings. However, it also had a greater political meaning, as the tortoise trainer wears traditional Ottoman religious costume from before the middle of the nineteenth century, and is training the tortoises with a traditional ‘ney’ flute.

In that sense, it is a satire on the slow, faltering, and often ineffective reforms made to the Ottoman Empire during the late nineteenth century. This led a time of increasing social and political upheaval, preceding the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 which changed the basis of rule in the empire, then after the First World War the empire’s breakup.

In 2004, this painting set a new Turkish record, when it was sold for $3.5 million.

It has been proposed that Osman Hamdi Bey may have been inspired by this print created by “L. Crépon”, of the Tortoise Charmer of 1869.

Having spent a day studying paintings of tortoises and struggling to make sense of it all, I went back and looked at Moreau’s Orpheus. It then struck me that the tortoise shells are not only not identical, but appear to have been deliberately fashioned to accommodate initials: perhaps a g then a large and clear M on the left, and A D on the right.

Gustave Moreau had met his partner/mistress/muse Alexandrine Dureux in about 1860. By the time that he painted Orpheus, he had accommodated her in a nearby flat. If he saw himself, perhaps in the role of Orpheus, torn apart by Maenad art critics because he refused to worship their gods, maybe Alexandrine was his Thracian woman. And the two tortoises of Aphrodite were him carving their initials on an old tree: GM ❤️ AD.

References

Wikipedia on Osman Hamdi Bey
Wikipedia on The Tortoise Trainer

Cooke P (2014) Gustave Moreau, History Painting, Spirituality and Symbolism, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 20433 9.

Since Corinth had joined the Berlin Secession in 1901, and two years later married Charlotte Berend, his career had not looked back. Although early family and social life had reduced the number of paintings he produced, their quality remained consistently high, and he was living up to his reputation as ‘the painter of flesh’.

The Childhood of Zeus (1905-6) shows Zeus, the senior god among the Greek pantheon, as a young boy at its centre. According to various myths, he was the son of the Titans Cronus (not Chronos, personification of time) and Rhea. Cronus swallowed his other children, so to save Zeus from that fate, Rhea gave birth to him in Crete, and handed Cronus a rock disguised as a baby, which he promptly swallowed.

Rhea then hid Zeus in a cave, where he was raised by one or more of a long list of surrogates, including Gaia, a goat, a nymph, and others, several of which are shown in this raucous painting. Corinth adds Dionysus to provide an abundant supply of nourishing grapes, and give the scene its ironic humour.

In 1906, he took his wife Charlotte to his home village of Tapiau, and the city of Königsberg where his training and career had started, and the following year they travelled to Florence, where he copied frescos using pastels.

Following his earlier paintings of the Deposition (or Descent from the Cross), Corinth came even closer to harsh reality in The Great Martyrdom (1907). Here taking the example of an ordinary man being crucified, he secularised the image and placed it in a vivid historical context. This makes clear the vicious inhumanity of crucifixion.

In The Capture of Samson (1907), Corinth revisited another of his favourite subjects, who he had painted in 1893 in company with Delila, and in 1899 with a related scene of his capture. Here, with some simple props including an eclectic and anachronistic range of headgear, he shows the chaotic brawl which resulted in Samson’s bondage. Corinth places himself in the left foreground, as one of Samson’s captors, and Delila kneels, naked, at the top centre.

From 1907, he led formal teaching sessions in life classes in Berlin.

To celebrate his fiftieth birthday in 1908, Corinth painted several canvases, including Die Nacktheit (Nakedness) to reflect his fleshly reputation. This was completed over a few days at the end of March, 1908, and the following month was delivered to the Secession’s exhibition, where it was very well received.

Bacchante Couple (1908) is, of course, a self-portrait with his wife Charlotte, apparently enjoying their wild lifestyle at the time. This may also have been another birthday celebration.

Female Half-Nude by a Window (1908) is one of a popular sub-genre of ‘woman at the window’ scenes, and a less roughly-hewn nude shown in delicate lighting. The model also appears to have a goitre.

Corinth’s second painting of The Temptation of St Anthony after Gustave Flaubert (1908) gives insight into how his work had changed over a period of just a decade, when compared with his first painting (above it) from his time in Munich, in 1897.

This second version is now based on Flaubert’s account La Tentation de Saint-Antoine, and focusses on a scene in which the Queen of Sheba appears in the saint’s visions. With her – and shown here – is a train consisting of elephant, camels, and naked women riding piebald horses. This new Saint Anthony is a much younger man, and is surrounded by this outlandish circus of people and animals. In his left hand, he holds a heavy chain, and there is a skull in his right hand.

According to later recollections of the artist’s son Thomas, Corinth painted this from professional models in his studio on Berlin’s Handelstraße. Charlotte modelled only for the arm and hand of the Queen of Sheba. This painting (together with Nakedness, above) must have been completed by the end of March 1908, and was also shown at the Secession’s exhibition from April to June. It was among Corinth’s works representing Germany at the thirteenth Venice Biennale in 1922, and he made an etching after it in 1919.

Self-portrait, painting shows the artist at work when he was 51, in 1909. He has signed his name using Greek letters, and on the right side has inscribed aetatis suae LI, meaning his age 51.

Another of his most popular paintings from this period is this group portrait of The Artist and his Family (1909). All dressed up for what may have been intended to be a more formal group portrait, Charlotte sits calmly cradling daughter Wilhelmine, then just five months old, as the artist seems to be struggling to paint them. Their son Thomas, aged five years, stands on a desk so that he can rest his hand on mother’s shoulder. I suspect that this was made possible by a photograph.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.

For the previous twenty-five years, there had been two women in Moreau’s life: his mother, who in her old age had grown so deaf that the artist wrote her notes explaining each of his paintings, and his partner/mistress/muse Alexandrine Dureux, whose very existence was a close-kept secret. When his mother died in 1884, Moreau’s grief caused him to stop painting altogether for some months, and he became a temporary recluse.

Over the next couple of years, his paintings reflected his emotions as he came to terms with that grief. As part of that process, he seems to have revisited some of his previous grand themes, and some of his recurrent motifs.

Contrasting with the triumph of Oedipus over the Sphinx in his first great Salon success, The Triumphant Sphinx, or The Victorious Sphinx (1886) considers the opposite, with a succession of corpses of those who failed to solve the Sphinx’s riddle. A very similar depiction of the Sphinx itself dominates the gloomy scene, in which the brightest colour is the distant sea.

Moreau returned to his consideration of the suicide of the classical poet Sappho in this watercolour of Sappho at the Leucadian Cliff (c 1885), showing her clinging to her lyre as she falls to her death on the rocks below. This is lit by another of his saturnine suns.

He also developed his group portrait of three Sirens into a fuller account of the story of Odysseus/Ulysses in his oil painting of The Sirens (c 1885). This is quite a conventional depiction, and is a marked contrast to his other works of this period in its lack of symbols and decorations, as if he had originally intended it for public exhibition, perhaps.

He continued his series of paintings of beautiful nudes with Eve (1885), a watercolour in which a small winged Satan is whispering temptation into her ear, as the coils of the serpent rest at the base of the tree’s trunk. Eve’s unnaturally bent neck is a pose which had become popular among the Pre-Raphaelites, although here it grants access to her ear.

This period also saw the development of the most legendary beast of all, The Unicorn (1884-85), as a theme in his paintings. With its rich symbolic associations and strong showing in art of several cultures, Moreau repeatedly painted a single unicorn being fondled by an almost nude woman, alluding to the expansive complex of mediaeval myths which associate the animal with a virgin or the Virgin, who seem to be the only humans capable of trapping a unicorn.

Unicorn (1885) is a variant, here probably executed in watercolour.

A trio of elaborately-decorated winged angels, one playing a lyre, forms the centre of his Voices Of Evening (1885), sketched in oils.

Surprisingly, Moreau’s more substantial paintings from this period seem to have escaped much attention, perhaps because they were not exhibited in public at the time, and have not entered major public collections. His oil painting of Apollo Vanquishing the Serpent Python from 1885 tells a rather obscure classical Greek myth concerning the earth-dragon Python (not the snake known as a python).

Probably the best-known of the classical oracles, that at Delphi, was located at an ancient place named Pytho, considered to be the centre of the earth. The Python was the dragon who guarded the precious stone, or Omphalos, marking this sacred point. Much later, the god Apollo took a dislike to Python, possibly because of its previous actions pursuing his mother, the goddess Leto. Apollo came and fought Python, killing the dragon, and enabling Apollo to make Delphi his own.

Moreau shows Apollo, the sun god, in his full glory and ready to do battle with Python below.

The Abduction of Ganymede (1886) tells the more than risqué story of the classical myth of Ganymede, which is centred on child abduction and what we would now know as paedophilia, but the classical Greeks somehow normalised as pederasty.

Ganymede was the son of Tros, and one of the early citizens of Troy, long before the war. One day during his youth, Ganymede was tending a flock of sheep near Mount Ida, not far from Troy, when Zeus abducted him using an eagle; the bird is variously described as Zeus himself or his agent. Ganymede was taken to Mount Olympus, the home of the gods, where he was given eternal youth and immortality, and served as the cupbearer to the gods.

Zeus compensated Ganymede’s father by having Hermes deliver him fine horses. Since then, the eternally beautiful youth became a poetic symbol for an adolescent male who was the partner of an older male, something which became socially acceptable.

Although Moreau does not show any sheep, Ganymede’s dog is left baying at the huge eagle as it steals its young and androgynous master up through the large trees of a flooded wood.

The Sacred Elephant (Péri) (1885-6) is a magnificent watercolour showing Moreau’s best-developed painting of a thoroughly Indian motif. The Indian elephant has a long history as a sacred animal, at the heart of Hindu cosmology in supporting and guarding the earth (echoed by Terry Pratchett’s cosmic model of his Discworld).

Traditionally, the elephant is the mount (vāhana) for Lakshmi, Indra, Indrani (Shachi), and Brihaspati – goddesses, apart from the last who is a sage. Indra’s mount is a white elephant named Airavata, and Indrani is the goddess of wrath and jealousy, so I suspect that Moreau intends the figure mounted on the elephant to represent Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth, fortune, and prosperity, and wife of Vishnu.

The elephant itself represents wisdom, divine knowledge, and royal power. It is walking in a shallow lake which is rich in exotic vegetation, including lotus and lilies, as the sun is setting. Surrounding the mounted figure are four winged angelic creatures.

The mounted goddess holds a stringed instrument, probably a sitar or near-relative, and is elaborately decorated. Although at first sight the angels might appear European, they too are drawn from the Indian sub-continent, and are richly embellished, apparently paying tribute to the goddess with flowers and a musical instrument.

Later in 1886, he completed a major project which he had started in 1879.

References

Cooke P (2014) Gustave Moreau, History Painting, Spirituality and Symbolism, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 20433 9.
Mathieu P-L (1998, 2010) Gustave Moreau, the Assembler of Dreams, PocheCouleur. ISBN 978 2 867 70194 8.

The nineteenth-century artist who was most influenced by Blake and his work is Samuel Palmer (1805–1881). Although much less well-known that JMW Turner or the Pre-Raphaelites, Palmer had quite a long career, painting very distinctive landscapes which have proved influential on twentieth century art. I hope to show that they are original and beautiful too.

Palmer was born in London just after the start of the Napoleonic Wars. He was a precocious artist, and by the time that he was fourteen, he had three paintings accepted for exhibition by the Royal Academy. This compares with the famously-precocious JMW Turner, who was fifteen when he had his first work accepted.

Unlike Turner, though, Palmer never studied at the Royal Academy Schools. Because success in the Schools and at the Royal Academy had a very poor link with a successful artistic career, Palmer resolved that he would avoid what he saw as ‘the pit’ of the Academy and London’s contemporary art scene, and pursued a more independent course. He received some private tuition from the obscure William Wate, but for the most part, Palmer seems to have been self-taught with the aid of advice and criticism from friends and contacts.

Remarkably, some of his earliest paintings have survived, including At Hailsham, Sussex: a Storm Approaching (1821), a powerful watercolor sketch. From this he seems to have made a finished oil painting, which was exhibited at the British Institution the following year. This shows Palmer’s increasing interest in the effects of light, no doubt inspired by JMW Turner.

When still learning his trade, Palmer adopted the young but experienced painter John Linnell as his mentor, who in turn introduced him to William Blake, and to the works of the late Gothic and early Renaissance. Palmer was also influenced by Henry Fuseli, and studied the collection of Old Masters at London’s Dulwich College, and a private collection of ‘primitive’ paintings in London, including a copy of a wing of van Eyck’s Ghent altarpiece. These drew Palmer towards what was then considered to be ‘primitive’ art, rather than the more contemporary styles which had been fostered by the likes of Joshua Reynolds.

Palmer’s weakness lay in his lack of training in the figure, a topic which he would have learned at the Royal Academy Schools. He set his early aim as showing how nature and the material world were a portal for his higher artistic and spiritual vision, which was at odds with Linnell’s faithful transcription of the material world, but closer to Blake’s visionary work, and to the goals of the Romantic movement.

His first concerted expression of his artistic vision came as early as 1825, when he painted a series of six densely-worked sepia landscapes now known as the Oxford Sepias, in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (whose images are frustratingly not available for inclusion here). That same year, Palmer inherited sufficient money to provide him with security and independence for some time to come.

He then joined an artistic brotherhood known as The Ancients, with George Richmond, Edward Calvert, Frederick Tatham, the engraver Welby Sherman (who later engraved some of Palmer’s paintings) and others. Like the later Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), it aimed to return to older and ‘purer’ styles, but unlike the PRB The Ancients did not succeed in changing the direction of British painting, and its members are now largely forgotten.

In 1826, Palmer moved to the rural village of Shoreham in Kent, in the valley of the River Darent to the north of Sevenoaks, where he spent much of the next decade producing some of his most distinctive work. This was well before the Barbizon School in France made this strategy of living in the country a popular choice for painters. For Palmer, the village and its environs became his ‘land of milk and honey’, in the Biblical vision of Beulah.

Palmer still painted some fairly conventional works during his Shoreham period, such as the finely-detailed Oak Trees, Lullingstone Park (1828). This shows ancient oaks in the deer park of Lullingstone Castle, in the Darent Valley of Kent, between Eynsford and Shoreham. it was painted at the instigation of his mentor Linnell, who was trying to get Palmer to paint more directly from nature.

He lived alone in a tumbledown cottage in Shoreham, without a wife or partner, and was remote from the other Ancients and his mentor Linnell.

With the Oxford Sepias as his starting point, many of his early works in Shoreham are local views, such as this ink drawing of Cornfield and Church by Moonlight (c 1830).

From these he developed his characteristic golden watercolours seen in Harvesters by Firelight (1830).

When the fruit trees came into flower, he captured their blossom exuberantly, as In a Shoreham Garden (c 1830).

But it was his drawings and paintings of twilight and night which best showed his vision of an enchanted countryside, as in Moonlight, a Landscape with Sheep, from one of his Shoreham sketchbooks (c 1831-33).

The Gleaning Field (c 1833) shows the local poor who have moved in, once the harvest has been completed, to gather any remains that they can salvage to feed their families.

The Harvest Moon (c 1833) is an oil sketch on paper which is one of the best of his paintings from the Shoreham period. It shows local village people, predominantly women, cutting the ripe crop in the traditional way, forming it into stooks, which are then taken away in the cart, still drawn by oxen. The combination of golden corn and moonlight transforms the scene with a deep enchantment.

From about 1830, he seems to have got out of the village more, and walked up the nearby downs to paint views from the rolling hills looking over the Weald of Kent, such as The Timber Wain (1833-34). Here a team of oxen is being used to draw a heavy wagon bearing a huge tree trunk down to the village in the valley.

The Weald of Kent (c 1833-34) is a similar watercolour using the repoussoir of the trees to frame the distant view beyond.

Towards the end of his time in Shoreham, Palmer’s views started to open out into more conventional landscapes, such as The Golden Valley (c 1833-34).

The Shearers (c 1833-35) is the most ambitious of his works from this period. He still used a tempera underpainting in conformance with the aims of The Ancients, but here makes the modern concession of painting with oils on top.

This shows the seasonal work of a shearing gang, in a sophisticated composition which draws the gaze to the brilliant and more distant view beyond. The curious collection of tools to the right was the subject of preparatory sketches, and seems to have been carefully composed. However they have defied any symbolic interpretation, and may just ‘look right’.

The timelessness and rural peace shown in Palmer’s Shoreham works was not an accurate reflection of the more worrying changes which had been taking place in the countryside. There was strife in the rural economy, peasant protests, and Palmer unwisely dabbled in local politics. When he benefitted from another legacy, he found himself with sufficient funds to buy a house in Paddington.

In 1835, he left Shoreham and returned to London.

References

Wikipedia

Vaughan, William (2015) Samuel Palmer, Shadows on the Wall, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 20985 3.