This last article – for the time being – in my series on the life and work of Lovis Corinth looks at some of his narrative paintings across his entire career. I have generally excluded his religious works, in particular his many paintings of the Crucifixion, which really merit an article to themselves.

Corinth’s first really successful narrative paintings were the two that he made in 1890, showing the Old Testament story of Susanna and the Elders – a subject which he returned to as late as 1923. Identical in their composition, they have an unusual setting, as this scene of the two elders acting as voyeurs is more commonly shown in Susanna’s garden, or even woodland, as described in the original story.

Towards the end of his time in Munich, Corinth painted this first version of another famous story, this time the temptations which Saint Anthony was reported to have undergone, a theme which I have examined in detail here and here.

This is more typical of Corinth’s mature work, with many figures crammed into the composition in a raucous and highly expressive human circus. Although very painterly in parts, he is careful to depict fine detail in the joint of meat being held by Saint Anthony, and the saint’s amazing face.

Corinth’s narrative paintings reached their peak at the time that he moved to Berlin, in this second version of Salome. Not only was it highly influential on a wide range of other artists and their arts, but its use of gaze is remarkably subtle and its success based on being implicit rather than explicit.

Corinth was not as restrained when he tackled the story, from Homer’s Odyssey, of Ulysses Fighting the Beggar. He packs a crowd in, gives every one of them a unique and intriguing facial expression, and then pits Ulysses against the beggar in almost comic combat. Note too how his figures are becoming looser.

If Corinth’s first Temptation of Saint Anthony showed a human circus, the rest of the animals and performers came for this his second. Those figures are now becoming significantly more painterly too, and the Queen of Sheba has similarities with his earlier figure of Salome.

Of all his narrative paintings, his Homeric Laughter must be the most complex. It refers to a story within the story of Homer’s Odyssey, which is told by the bard Demodocus to cheer Odysseus up when he is being entertained by King Alcinous on the island of the Phaeacians. It is another raucous spectacle, in which we join the other gods in seeing Mars and Venus caught making love.

Corinth turned to narrative after his stroke, painting The Blinded Samson with its obvious autobiographical references. Samson’s body is painted more roughly, although the artist has taken care to give form to the drops of blood running down Samson’s cheeks. This version of Samson contrasts with his others in showing the man alone.

Less than two years after his stroke, Corinth returned with another elaborate and wild painting, this time depicting the story of Ariadne on Naxos. I have examined this in detail here, and looked at some other versions here.

This painting is another highlight of Corinth’s career, particularly as it condenses several different moments in time into its single image, using multiplex narrative; that might have been fairly commonplace during the Renaissance, but was exceptional for the early twentieth century. And it works wonderfully, too.

Late during the First World War, Corinth moved on from crowded and vivacious narrative paintings, and became more autobiographical again. The huge and stark figure of Cain heaping rocks onto the body of his brother Abel fits with Corinth’s growing horror and despair as the war went on.

Corinth’s last painting of Susanna and the Elders is a remarkable contrast with his first, from over thirty years earlier. He still avoids a pastoral or garden setting, and his figures are now fading forms in patches of colour and texture.

For what must have been his last great narrative painting, Corinth looked to the events leading up to the fall of Troy, in particular The Trojan Horse. The great walls and towers of the city appear as a mirage, their forms indistinct from the dawn sky. Although roughly painted in using coarse marks, the soldiers and the horse itself are more distinct in the foreground.

As with his self-portraits and nudes, Corinth’s style evolved throughout his career, but he also continued to paint stories right up to the last. Together, they form one of the most sustained and brilliant series of narrative paintings of any artist since Rembrandt.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)

George Frederic Watts was born two centuries ago. Although not as popular or well-known as the Pre-Raphaelites, he was a major influence on British painting over the second half of the nineteenth century. His work – both paintings and sculpture – has also remained very accessible, largely because he gave many of his paintings to the Tate Gallery in London, when it was founded in 1897.

In this article and the next I will give a brief overview of his career, together with a small selection of his better-known paintings.

Watts was born in London to a relatively poor family, but was a precocious artist. He first started to learn sculpture with William Behnes, and quickly fell in love with the Elgin Marbles, in the British Museum. He enrolled in the Royal Academy Schools at the age of 18, and was soon painting portraits of his friends.

Ruth and Boaz (c 1835–7) is one of his earliest surviving paintings, which he started as he entered his training at the Royal Academy. It tells the gentle romance between a wealthy landowner and his poor, widowed relative Ruth, who comes to glean in his fields at harvest-time. Boaz shows her kindness, deliberately leaving grain for her to glean, and inviting her to eat with him and his workers. She eventually asks him to marry her, which he does.

Watts made friends with some who were to become artists and their patrons, and was commissioned to paint them in portraits such as his delightful The Family of Alexander Constantine Ionides (c 1840). The Ionides family, like the Spartalis and others in the Greek community in London at the time, had fled from oppression in the Ottoman Empire, and established successful trading companies in the city. As Alexander Ionides grew wealthy, he invested some of his money as a patron of the arts.

Watts’ first public success was the first prize in a competition to design new murals for the Palace of Westminster, in 1843, although he did not get particularly involved in the project. He used the prize money to travel to Italy, where he painted some landscapes and made some important friends, including the British ambassador at the time.

When in Florence, Italy, Watts painted A Story from Boccaccio (c 1844–7), which shows one of the hundred tales from Boccaccio’s Decameron, a popular Florentine book from around 1350. These had long been a source for narrative paintings, and proved popular subjects for those in the Pre-Raphaelite movement too.

He returned to London in 1847, where he started making grand, if not grandiose, history paintings for prominent buildings in the city. He joined the circle of bohemians centred on the Prinsep family, and spent time with them and Julia Margaret Cameron, a pioneering photographer of the era.

Orlando Pursuing the Fata Morgana (1846-48) is a composition which was to recur in Watts’ paintings, of an arcuate nude forming the letter C, with a man – here Orlando – reaching for her from the centre of the semi-circle. The Fata Morgana is a complex optical phenomenon like a mirage, whose name is derived from Morgan le Fay, an enchantress from Arthurian legend, and it is that which Watts seems to be referring to. She was to appear frequently in paintings by the Pre-Raphaelites in the coming years.

Life’s Illusions (1849) includes related graphical elements in the chain of nudes at the left. They are crossed by the arc of a rainbow, which is presumably one of those illusions.

In 1850, Watts moved into Little Holland House, living as a house-guest of the Prinsep family who leased it, and remaining at the centre of their artistic circle. He also took on a small number of pupils, including John Roddam Spencer Stanhope (1829–1908) and Valentine Cameron Prinsep (1838–1904).

This undated study for Una and the Red Cross was probably painted as one of the studies which Watts made for his commissioned painting for the Palace of Westminster, The Triumph of the Red Cross Knight (1852-53), based on Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. These are stories drawn from the first book, in which the Redcrosse Knight and his lady Una travel to meet a succession of challenges which prove their holiness. Such mediaeval stories were to become very popular during the last half of the century.

Immediately after he had completed that commission, Watts (accompanied by John Roddam Spencer Stanhope) returned to Italy for a short visit, then in 1856 they went to Halicarnassus, the ancient Greek city at Bodrum in Turkey, to take part in archaeological excavations there.

Watts also enjoyed a flourishing portraiture business, although the majority of his famous portraits are in London’s National Portrait Gallery, which sadly does not permit free reproduction here. Mrs George Augustus Frederick Cavendish-Bentinck and her Children (1860) shows the wife and young children of a barrister, politician, and cricketer, who lived from 1821-1891. The couple had married in 1850, and she died on Brownsea Island, in Poole Harbour, Dorset, in 1896.

Sir Galahad (1860-62) is another painting which draws on Arthurian legend, which by this time was very popular in the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

Watts’ Portrait of Edith Villiers (1862) shows the 21 year-old who two years later married Robert Bulwer-Lytton, who became Viceroy of India in 1876, and retired in 1880 to become the first Earl of Lytton. Edith led the Indian Imperial court in her role as Vicereine of India. On her return to Britain she became lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria, and eventually died in 1936, at the age of 94 or 95. This was painted in the Prinseps’ property, Little Holland House, where Watts continued to live as a guest.

References

Wikipedia.
Watts Gallery.

Today it is exactly two hundred years since the birth of George Frederic Watts (1817–1904). This article concludes my short account of his life and selection of his paintings to celebrate his bicentenary.

By 1864, when Watts was 46 years old, he was at the hub of London’s arts circles, and prospering. He went to the Haymarket Theatre in London, to see the young actress Ellen Terry, who was only sixteen at the time, but was already an experienced performer in Shakespearean and other plays. Watts painted portraits of Ellen and her older sister Kate. Soon, Watts proposed to Ellen, and they married just a week before her seventeenth birthday.

Watts painted several portraits of his wife, of which the most famous is Choosing, A Portrait of Ellen Terry (1864). She is shown making the choice between large, showy but unscented camellia flowers, and humbler but fragrant violets, symbolising the choice between the material and spiritual. Their marriage was as ephemeral as those flowers: after only ten months, Ellen left him. She returned to the stage in 1866, and eventually re-married after their divorce was finalised in 1877. She retired from the stage in 1920, and was made a Dame in 1925. She died in 1928.

Fata Morgana (1865) is another version of his earlier painting of the enchantress Morgan le Fay. This lacks the sweeping arc of the first work, making the composition less formal, and I think rather weaker. The knight grasping out for her is also much older, perhaps reflecting Watts’ recent domestic events.

In the early 1870s, Watts had a new home built for himself near Frederic, Lord Leighton’s house and the Prinseps’ in London. He also obtained a house in Freshwater, on the Isle of Wight, close to Julia Margaret Cameron’s house, and the small estate of Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

I do not know whether Watts’ painting of Endymion (1872) refers to the original Greek myth or to John Keats’ poetic reinterpretation of that myth. However it shows the shepherd Endymion making love with the Titan goddess of the Moon, Selene or ‘Cynthia’ (Keats). This is one of Watts’ most painterly works, and appears to have come straight from his emotions. This also marks his transition from painting Pre-Raphaelite staples such as mediaeval knights and legends, to his later works which were more allegorical and even frankly symbolist.

From 1877, Watts exhibited most of his paintings at the Grosvenor Gallery, London, which was opened then by a friend.

Chaos (c 1875–82) is one of his early symbolist paintings, which was part of an intended series of murals representing what he referred to as ‘the progress of the cosmos’. Chaos itself is here represented by the giants at the left, who are struggling to free themselves from the elements of fire and vapour; on the right other figures struggle for release from the earth. The chain of much smaller figures at the lower right represents the establishment of ordered time and space.

Watts saw his Love and Life (c 1884–5) as his clearest portrayal of his message to the Victorian age, that life (the nude female) can only reach summits when it is protected and guided by love (the angelic male). The similarities with images in Louis Janmot’s epic series Le Poème de l’âme (1854) is striking, although there is no evidence that Watts ever saw Janmot’s work.

The Minotaur (1885) was Watts’ criticism of the worst side of Victorian society and moral values. Using the figure of the monstrous cross between and man and bull which devoured victims in its labyrinth on Crete, the artist indicates human bestiality and lust. The Minotaur has crushed a small bird in its left hand, and gazes out to sea, awaiting the next shipment of young men and virgin women from Greece.

Shortly before Watts painted this, a journalist had published a series of articles exposing the industry of child prostitution, referring frequently to the myth of the Minotaur. Apparently Watts was so moved by this that he painted this work early one morning. It was exhibited in the autumn in Liverpool, but was not sold; Watts then donated it to the Tate Gallery at its foundation in 1897.

Throughout his career, Watts was very influential on other artists, although he had few pupils of his own. It is often stated that he had only two – Val Prinsep and John Roddam Spencer Stanhope – but late in his career he had a third (and possibly more). Marie Spartali Stillman, who had long been a friend of Watts, brought her step-daughter Lisa Stillman to Watts for further training after she had studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London.

Hope (1886), which Watts painted with the help of assistants, is probably the best of his symbolic works. One of a series intended for a grand ‘House of Life’, Watts broke with tradition and shows this personification blind, her ear bent to listen intently to the one remaining string of a lyre. She sits on the globe, one tiny star twinkling faintly above, her efforts seemingly in vain, but always in hope.

This painting has been influenced by several works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Albert Moore, and Burne-Jones which were part of the Aesthetic Movement. This second version was exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889. It proved popular with both the critics and the public.

As Watts grew older, his paintings became more concerned with the inevitability of death. From his earlier Love and Life, in about 1885-87 he moved to Love and Death. He rejected the notion that death was the terrible gift of the grim reaper, and here shows its personification as inevitable, crushing Cupid’s roses, but not disturbing the nearby dove. This less morbid treatment generated a lot of discussion, and Watts ended up painting several versions of this image.

Watts married again in 1886, and in 1891 the couple had a house built for them near Guildford, Surrey. Nearby they built the Watts Gallery to exhibit his work; it opened two months before the artist’s death, and continues to house the largest collection of his work.

‘She shall be called woman’ (c 1875–92) is from a remarkable series of paintings which he completed very late in his career, looking at Eve and the image of woman. These works are decorated richly with flowers and other potential symbols, and Watts’ style has changed considerably from his usual precise detail, with their forms becoming more diffuse and evanescent.

Time, Death and Judgement (1900) evolved over a series of versions first started around 1870. Surprisingly, Watts retained the same composition in all of them, and they differ only in small details.

The figure of Time is at the left, holding the traditional scythe; unusually, Watts depicts Time as a young and muscular man, rather than the more conventional ‘Father Time’ with white hair and beard. At the right, Death is a young woman, the lap of her dress containing fading flowers. Time and Death are linked by holding hands. Behind, and towering over them, is the figure of Judgement, holding the scales of justice in her left hand, and brandishing a fiery sword.

Watts died, at the age of 87, in his home at Compton, near Guildford, Surrey, in 1904. With more than 20 of his paintings in the Tate and over 50 of his portraits in the National Portrait Gallery, he was never forgotten. Unlike the Pre-Raphaelites, who have undergone a major rise in popularity during the late twentieth century, his work has not seen any significant revival. Perhaps the occasion of his bicentenary gives us a chance to re-appraise his art and its influence.

References

Wikipedia.
Watts Gallery.

The myth of Phaëthon is one of the longest stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Cunningly, it is introduced in the last lines of Book 1, but told in full at the start of Book 2. It balances the account of the Flood with that of the earth laid waste by fire, a myth which is much less common across different cultures, and may have its roots in one of the catastrophic volcanic events which occurred in the Mediterranean in ancient times.

Ovid’s lead in to this story is through Io, who at the end of Book 1 is driven to Egypt, where she is transformed from being a cow back into human form. She is then supposed to have become Osiris, the Egyptian goddess, whose son following Jupiter’s rape of her is Epaphus.

The Story

Epaphus has a friend and rival who, like him, is the child of a single-parent family, with a god as the absent father. In Phaëthon’s case, his father is reputed to be Phoebus, the god of the sun, and his mother is Clymene. Epaphus mocks Phaëthon, who in turn reports this to his mother, who despatches Phaëthon to visit his father in the Land of Dawn.

Book 2 opens with a description of the Palace of the Sun. Phaëthon then asks his presumed father Phoebus to give him a token to prove his paternity. Phoebus promises Phaëthon anything which he desires, so the youth asks to take charge of his father’s chariot of the sun for a day.

The mythical model of the sun portrays it as being drawn across the heavens by Phoebus’ chariot, with four horses (named by Ovid as Eous, Aethon, Pyrois, and Phlegon) in harness. In trying to dissuade Phaëthon from his wish, his father explains the great challenges which lie in controlling the chariot, as it crosses the constellations, and how difficult it is to restrain the team of horses.

Despite Phoebus repeatedly telling his son how dangerous and disastrous his wish would prove, Phaëthon is insistent, and his father is bound by his oath. Phaëthon then leaps into the chariot, and departs on its course. He immediately loses control, and the sun runs off track. The chariot comes too close to the earth, and starts melting the polar regions, and scorching its surface:
Phoebe is wondering that her brother’s steeds
run lower than her own, and sees the smoke
of scorching clouds. The highest altitudes
are caught in flames, and as their moistures dry
they crack in chasms. The grass is blighted; trees
are burnt up with their leaves; the ripe brown crops
give fuel for self destruction—Oh what small
complaints! Great cities perish with their walls,
and peopled nations are consumed to dust—
the forests and the mountains are destroyed.

The Ethiopian people have their skin darkened as a result, and all the rivers of the earth are turned to vapour in the heat. The goddess of the Earth appeals to the gods, and Jupiter responds by throwing one of his thunderbolts at Phaëthon, who is killed instantly and falls to earth in flames. The chariot lies broken, its horses scattered.

The scorched remains of Phaëthon are buried by Naiads in a distant tomb, and his mother Clymene is left to mourn his death. Phaëthon’s lamenting sisters are then transformed into poplar trees, and their tears into amber (electrum). Phaëthon’s beloved friend Cycnus is transformed into a swan:
There, as he made complaint, his manly voice
began to pipe a treble, shrill; and long
gray plumes concealed his hair. A slender neck
extended from his breast, and reddening toes
were joined together by a membrane. Wings
grew from his sides, and from his mouth was made
a blunted beak. Now Cycnus is a swan,
and yet he fears to trust the skies and Jove,
for he remembers fires, unjustly sent,
and therefore shuns the heat that he abhors,
and haunts the spacious lakes and pools and streams
that quench the fires.

Phoebus then recovers his horses, and vents his rage on them.

The Paintings

One of Ovid’s most dramatic and vivid stories, the myth of Phaëthon has resulted in several superb paintings, but in recent times has been surprisingly unpopular with narrative painters. JMW Turner, for example, appears to have made a sketch of Phaëthon’s sisters being transformed, but I have been unable to trace any work of his showing the fall of Phaëthon.

Poussin’s Helios and Phaeton with Saturn and the Four Seasons (c 1635) is an early exploration of the scene in the Palace of the Sun. At first, this may seem puzzling, as Poussin does not actually show a palace as such, although Phaëthon is on his knees in front of Phoebus (Greek Helios), pleading with him to be allowed to take charge of the chariot of the sun, shown behind and to the left.

The artist does, though, use this as an opportunity to depict the four seasons in detailed personifications. Spring is Flora-like in front of Phaëthon, wearing a crown of flowers. Summer sits to the left, next to some ripe corn. Autumn is the older man slumbering in the right foreground, with fruits. Winter is opposite him, frosty and shivering in front of a small brazier.

Poussin also unintentionally highlights an issue which pervades these relatively modern depictions of the myth: the god Phoebus, or Helios, has become transformed into Phoebus Apollo, a fusion which seems to have occurred after about 200 CE.

This may have provided some motivation for later depictions of the house of the rising sun and similar motifs.

Phaëthon’s death and fall from the chariot have been depicted in a series of works from classical times. This superb marble panel from a sarcophagus made in about 250 CE is very atmospheric, for example.

Rubens’ The Fall of Phaeton, which was started in about 1604, is undoubtedly the best of several superb paintings of Ovid’s story. He seems to have reworked this over the following three or four years. Rubens has elaborated the scene to augment the chaos: accompanying Phaëthon in the chariot are the Hours (Horae, some shown with butterfly wings), who are thrown into turmoil, and time falls out of joint as Phaëthon tumbles out of the chariot.

The painting’s only slight weakness is in the distant image of fires raging above the surface of the earth, which does not really do justice to Ovid’s lines or the overall theme of the Great Fire.

In Gustave Moreau’s brilliant watercolour The Fall of Phaeton (1878) everything is searing orange. The sun chariot is just about to crash to the ground, Phaëthon stands in distress within the chariot, and the horses are in total disarray. Phoebus 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 Jupiter is flying down to kill Phaëthon.

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

Unusually for the Metamorphoses, this myth doesn’t contain any real transformation as such, but results in two which have been painted very infrequently. Santi di Tito’s fresco of The Sisters of Phaethon Transformed into Poplars, from about 1570, shows the four young women with leaves sprouting from their hands and heads, as they lament the death of their brother. A swan makes a cameo appearance in the foreground, referring to the transformation of Cycnus.

Paul Barolsky has explained why this painting should appear where it does, on the wall of a small windowless study used by Francesco de’ Medici in his Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. Francesco would retreat to this little room to study his collection of precious stones, which would have included specimens of the resin amber, believed by the Greeks to have been petrified sunlight. The myth of the creation of amber from the tears of Phaëthon’s sisters would there have been highly appropriate.

The English translation of Ovid above is taken from Ovid. Metamorphoses. Tr. Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922, at Perseus. I am very grateful to Perseus at Tufts for this.

… 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.)

There’s one Impressionist that we all know of, whose work few of us know: Frédéric Bazille (1841–1870), who was tragically killed in the Franco-Prussian War, just short of his twenty-ninth birthday. At that stage, he had only been painting in oils for around seven years, and the Impressionist movement was only just developing.

This and the next article look at Bazille’s brief life, and a selection of his paintings.

Jean Frédéric Bazille was born into an affluent family in Montpellier, France, a city on the Mediterranean coast with one of the oldest universities in the world. He was inspired to paint when he saw some paintings by Delacroix, but his family wanted him to study medicine. An accommodation was reached, and in 1859, he started his medical studies at Montpellier University.

In November 1862, Bazille left his home city to transfer to medical studies in Paris. A friend introduced him to Charles Gleyre’s studio, and some time in early 1863, he seems to have started as a pupil there, in addition to his medical course. He met Claude Monet there in March or April of that year, and started painting en plein air with him, probably with Sisley and Renoir too. By the end of 1863, he seems to have been making good progress with Gleyre, although his parents were keen to remind him of the precedence of his medical studies.

In January 1864, he started renting his first studio, and that summer travelled to Normandy with Monet. Shortly after that, he failed his medical exams, and dropped out from those studies, leaving him painting full-time.

In the late summer, in an effort to convince his family that he was serious about his career in art, Bazille started work on his La Robe Rose (The Pink Dress) (1864). Using his cousin, Thérèse des Hours, aged fourteen, as his model, he painted this from a drawing which he made at Méric, looking towards the village of Castelnau-le-Lez, near Montpellier.

In his drawing, the model was looking to the right and out of the picture plane, with her head rotated by about ninety degrees from that shown in this painting. As this was his first painting of a figure set in a landscape, Bazille seems to have wanted to avoid tackling her face, and opted for her to look away from the viewer, at the view.

This painting was not seen by the public until 1910, but since then has become accepted as one of his major works – which is surprising for such a challenging motif and such a relative novice.

In the autumn of 1864, when he returned to Paris, Bazille did not go back to Gleyre’s studio, but painted mostly from the models in Monet’s studio. In January 1865, the two painters moved into a new studio together, above Delacroix’s former flat in rue de Furstenberg.

It is not clear exactly when Bazille painted his Self-Portrait with Palette, but it was most probably in 1865. It is a remarkably accomplished work, given the complexity of arranging the mirror and canvas to result in this unusual pose.

In May, Bazille left the city for the Forest of Fontainebleau, where the Barbizon School had been centred. There he painted Landscape at Chailly (1865) in company with Monet, and possibly Renoir and Sisley. Although clearly influenced by the Barbizon School, Bazille’s colours are much brighter, and escape the rather sombre browns and greens which dominated much of the work of that school.

In May 1864, Bazille and Monet had travelled to the Channel coast, to Le Havre. This was Monet’s home ground, but the first time that Bazille had explored this coast. Oddly, Bazille painted The Beach at Sainte-Adresse a year later, in May 1865, as one of a pair of paintings for an uncle. It appears to have been partially copied from a painting of the same name by Monet, which was made when the two visited Sainte-Adresse the year before. Bazille re-arranged the yachts and changed the staffage of the beach, but the sea, sky, and coastline are essentially the same.

During the summer of 1865, Bazille painted Monet lying in bed, injured, at the Lion d’Or Inn, in The Improvised Field Hospital (1865); sadly I have been unable to find a good image of that painting.

In the late autumn, Gustave Courbet visited Monet and Bazille, and congratulated them on their work. However, in January 1866, Bazille left their shared studio, and set up in his own studio at last. In the Spring, he submitted two paintings to the Salon, of which one, Still Life with a Fish, was accepted. During the winter of 1866-67, Monet lodged in Bazille’s studio for a while.

During this period, he started to paint The Little Gardener (1865-67), but seems to have abandoned it with the foreground incomplete. It was another step in his development of figures in landscapes, and a precursor to his paintings of 1868.

Bazille first wanted to paint at Aigues-Mortes, east of Montpellier, in the summer of 1866, but did not get there until May 1867. He then produced one of his most painterly and brilliant landscapes of The Western Ramparts at Aigues-Mortes (1867), as well as several other works, including many sketches.

I include this Portrait of Paul Verlaine (1867) because of its controversial history. On the strength of the signature on it (which is not legible in this image, I am afraid), it had been attributed to Gustave Courbet. Most recently, though, it has been claimed to have been painted by Bazille. If that is accurate, its painterly style is surprising, but very impressive.

In the Spring of 1867, Bazille submitted two more paintings for the Salon, but both were refused. He drafted a petition calling for a new Salon des Refusés, which was signed by Daubigny, a distinguished member of the Salon jury at the time.

During the summer of 1867, Bazille started work on Portraits of the *** Family also known as The Family Gathering, which he did not complete until January 1868. This seems to have been one of his most carefully-composed paintings, and he devoted a series of sketches to getting the arrangement of the figures and the terrace just right.

The figures include the artist, squeezed in last at the extreme left, an uncle, Bazille’s parents seated on the bench, Bazille’s cousin Pauline des Hours and her husband standing, an aunt and Thérèse des Hours (model for The Pink Dress) seated at the table, his brother Marc and his partner, and at the right Camille, the youngest of the des Hours sisters. This painting marked a special version of a regular summer meeting, as Pauline des Hours and Bazille’s brother Marc married the partners shown in the late summer of 1867.

At the time, such group portraits were exceptional in French art, although they were popular in Britain, and had been so in the past in the Netherlands, of course. It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that it was exhibited at the Salon in 1868, and remains one of Bazille’s finest and most innovative works.

In January 1868, Bazille moved into a new studio with Renoir, at what was renamed the following year rue La Condamine, in the Batignolles. He was a regular attender at the Café Guerbois with Manet, Degas, Duranty, Zola, Astruc, and Cézanne.

Bazille painted another of his best-known works, View of the Village, during the summer of 1868. He based this on sketches which he made in the Spring at Saint-Sauveur, of a farmer’s daughter in her Sunday best dress, in Bel-Air Wood, overlooking the River Lez, near Montpellier. Its location and composition are variations of the theme he first developed in The Pink Dress, and he was also reminded of his model for that painting, his cousin Thérèse des Hours.

He probably completed this painting in the autumn and early winter of 1868, and the following year it was exhibited at the Salon. Puvis de Chavannes and several of the critics were full of praise for it, and for Bazille. He also made an etching of it – the only print made from one of Bazille’s paintings during his lifetime. It remains his greatest success.

References

Wikipedia.

Hilaire, Michel, & Perrin, Paul (eds) (2016), Frédéric Bazille and the Birth of Impressionism, Flammarion. ISBN 978 2 080 20285 7.

My account of the too-brief life and works of Frédéric Bazille (1841–1870) has brought him to the summer of 1868, with his successful and still-famous paintings of his family, in The Family Gathering, and most of all View of the Village (both 1868).

Another painting of figures in a landscape which he made that summer is Fisherman with a Net (1868), which was refused by the Salon jury of 1869. This was painted on the banks of the River Lez, close to Bazille’s family’s estate at Méric. Unlike most of his other figures in a landscape, it was executed quite quickly, with only one preparatory drawing.

The stark contrast between the flesh figures and the rich greens of the surrounding vegetation makes the two men pop out almost incongruously.

Bazille remained very productive that winter, in part because he and Renoir reorganised their shared studio. His portrait of Pierre Auguste Renoir (1868-69) was a quick oil sketch which probably filled in some free time when waiting for models to become available. It was painted over an abandoned still life – a wonderfully painterly snapshot in oils.

His growing success ensured that he had no difficulty finding models. Woman in Moorish Costume was painted during the winter of 1868-69, and is a nod towards the vogue of ‘orientalism’ at the time.

He also painted his second portrait of Edmond Maître in early 1869. Bazille met Maître (1840-1898) in 1865. Like Bazille, he had moved to Paris to study, in his case law in 1859, but had become a civil servant to provide him with sufficient free time to enjoy his pursuits, which included music and art. They were to remain close friends until Bazille’s death.

He was visited by Daubigny, and Alfred Stevens invited him to his evening meetings. With continuing hostility from some members of the Salon jury, notably Jean-Léon Gérôme, Bazille had only one painting, View of the Village, accepted for the Salon of 1869. However, he was not discouraged, and seems to have relished the continuing battle between the Impressionists and Gérôme.

Bazille started painting Summer Scene, also known as Bathers, during the summer of 1869 when he was on holiday in Montpellier. He had already made a series of compositional studies, from as early as February that year, but when he was working on the canvas, he did not find it easy going, and complained of headaches and other pains.

He eventually opted for a composition based on strong diagonals, in which the bathers in the foreground are in shade, while the two wrestlers in the distance are lit by sunshine. The landscape background was painted from the hot green mixture of grass with birch and pine trees, typical of the banks of the River Lez, near Montpellier. He completed this painting in early 1870, and it was accepted for the Salon of that year, where it was well-received by the critics.

La Toilette (1870) was one of his three planned projects for the winter of 1869-70. However, with three models required, he had to ask his father for money to cover their cost. It was refused by the Salon jury of 1870, the year in which Daubigny resigned from the jury in protest at its refusals.

Bazille’s Studio, or The Studio on the Rue La Condamine, was another project which he worked on during the winter of 1869-70.

Bazille clearly liked painting his studio, but the three canvases which he completed showing his different studios are not as simple as they might at first appear. Inspired by Fantin-Latour’s A Studio in the Batignolles Quarter (1869-70), which includes Bazille, it is in some ways its antithesis in the space shown.

Bazille was careful in the choice of paintings shown, which include View of the Village on the easel, Fisherman with a Net, Terrace at Méric, and La Toilette as yet unfinished. The largest painting hanging is Renoir’s Landscape with Two Figures, and there is also a small still life by Monet. Bazille used these as pictures within a picture to map his career, from the past to his aspirations for the Salon in 1870, not in his successes so much as in the paintings which were refused, and were the better appreciated by the colleagues who he shows in his studio.

Flowers (c 1870) is one of a small group of floral paintings which Bazille made during the Spring of 1870, when he moved to his own studio in the rue des Beaux-Arts.

Bazille painted two related but different versions of La négresse aux pivoines (Young Woman with Peonies) in the Spring of 1870. The model, a professional, is the same as that used for La Toilette. She is normally read as being a servant who is engaged in making the floral arrangement, although in the other version (at the National Gallery of Art in Washington) she appears to be a flower seller.

At the time, the dominant flower, the peony, was a relatively recent import to France, and would probably have been seen as bringing exoticism to the two paintings. The striking vase may have been borrowed from Fantin-Latour. Rishel has proposed that this painting, in Montpellier, was intended as homage to Gustave Courbet, and that in Washington was homage to Eugène Delacroix.

In the summer of 1870, Bazille worked on three paintings when he was staying at Méric, alone. Study for a Young Male Nude appears odd because it was painted over an unfinished painting of two women in a garden, and the lower third of the canvas shows the lower part of their dresses.

On 19 July 1870, France declared war on Prussia. Within a month, Bazille had enlisted in the Third Zouave Regiment. He spent September training with the regiment in Algeria, then returned into combat in France. On 28 November 1870, Bazille was killed at the Battle of Beaune-la-Rolande. He would have celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday just over a week later.

In but eight years of painting, Bazille had shown great technical skill, originality, and high promise for his future in the Impressionist movement. Unlike his close friends Monet and Renoir, he was particularly interested in and adept at depicting figures in landscapes. That brilliant future, which could so easily have changed Impressionism too, was abruptly ended in a futile attempt to relieve the Siege of Paris.

Exhibition

Frédéric Bazille (1841-1870) and the Birth of Impressionism is still open at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris until 5 March 2017. It then travels to the USA, where it opens at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. on 9 April 2017, and closes on 9 July 2017. With nearly 60 of his oil paintings and many of his drawings and sketches, it is not to be missed.

Its catalogue, cited below, is a unique account of his life and work, and has been invaluable to me in preparing these articles. I highly recommend it.

References

Wikipedia.

Hilaire, Michel, & Perrin, Paul (eds) (2016), Frédéric Bazille and the Birth of Impressionism, Flammarion. ISBN 978 2 080 20285 7.

There aren’t many twentieth century painters whose work I can show here, but one of my favourites, Paul Nash (1892–1946), came out of copyright this year. I am seizing the opportunity to show some of his paintings in this and the subsequent articles in this short series about him.

He was born into an upper middle-class family in London, and when he was a boy the family moved into the countryside of Iver Heath in Buckinghamshire – 17 miles to the west of London, and intended to relieve his mother’s worsening mental illness. She died when Nash was only eighteen. It had been hoped that her son Paul would join the Royal Navy as an officer, but he failed the entrance exam, returned to school, and considered a career in art.

After a couple of years at college in London, mostly studying print-making, he enrolled at the Slade School of Art at University College, London, just eight months after his mother’s death. Henry Tonks, a former surgeon, was then the professor of drawing there, and Nash had several contemporaries who became well-known, including Stanley Spencer, Ben Nicholson, Dora Carrington, and CRW Nevinson. But he had great difficulties with figure drawing, started concentrating on landscapes, and dropped out after only a year.

Nash’s earliest substantial works date from about 1911, when he was strongly influenced by William Blake, The Ancients, in particular Samuel Palmer, and the Pre-Raphaelites, most notably Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The Pyramids in the Sea (1912), made in ink and watercolour, could easily have come from Palmer’s early years, such as his time at Shoreham in Kent.

During the remaining years prior to the First World War, Nash built his reputation for his landscape paintings, largely from motifs near his home at Iver Heath. He worked for a while in Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops, and when war broke out enlisted in the regiment for artists, the Artists’ Rifles, in the part-time ‘Territorial Army’. He underwent training as an officer in 1916, and the following year was sent to the Western Front. At the end of May, he fell heavily in a trench, broke a rib, and was back in London by 1 June. A week later, most of his former colleagues were killed during the Battle of Messines.

Nash made a series of drawings from his experiences at the front, and was commissioned as an official war artist in late 1917. He returned to Ypres that winter, where he drew in pen and ink for six weeks before returning to develop his sketches into finished pieces.

The Cherry Orchard (1917) is a watercolour which Nash probably painted at that time, most likely back in England, whose original title is unknown. However, it could date from as early as 1914. It shows a geometrically-rigorous orchard of cherry trees in the late winter, with a small clump of snowdrops in flower at the lower right corner.

His model is thought to have been an orchard which had been owned by the Georgian poet, John Drinkwater. The trees and barbed wire fence are strongly reminiscent of the military defences used during the war, which has encouraged the opinion that Nash painted it in response to his service in 1917.

More typical of the paintings which he made of the Western Front is Nash’s watercolour Wire (1918), which had originally been titled Wire – The Hindenburg Line. It shows a characteristically deserted and devastated landscape, pockmarked with shell-holes, and festooned with wire fencing and barbed wire. Its only landmarks are the shattered stumps of what was once pleasant pastoral land.

A Howitzer Firing (1918) is one of Nash’s early oil paintings, and was commissioned by the Ministry of Information. It shows a four-man British guncrew working under a canopy of camouflage netting. In the sky, flying high above the flash of exploding shells, is a biplane. Behind this howitzer is another in the same battery, pounding away during the barrage.

Nash’s lithograph of Men Marching at Night (1918) shows a strong design influence, drawn from Blake and amplified by the regularity of military life. The long column of tight-packed soldiers is seen moving along an avenue of poplar trees, lit by an unseen full moon. CRW Nevinson helped Nash learn the process of lithography at this time.

Rain, Lake Zillebeke (1918) is a lithograph which Nash made from a drawing of soldiers walking along duckboards zig-zagging over the mud. Again it shows design influence, with the treestumps and flooded shell-holes arrayed in patterns.

Not all of Nash’s paintings from the front line were as bleak and stark. Spring in the Trenches, Ridge Wood, 1917 (1918) is based on drawings which he made slightly earlier, perhaps before he fell and broke his rib. Some of the trees in the distance still have branches and foliage on them, and the three soldiers appear idle.

Nash’s pen and ink drawing of Sunrise: Inverness Copse, showing the aftermath of heavy fighting during the Battle of Langemarck, became his finished oil painting of We are Making a New World (1918). Although richer in colour, the slime green furrowed mud dominates the lower half of the canvas. Its intensely ironic title and use of the early morning sun makes the artist’s response to the war very clear, and it has remained one of the strongest images of that war.

The Menin Road (1919) was commissioned by the British War Memorials Committee in April 1918 for its Hall of Remembrance, for which John Singer Sargent’s Gassed was also intended. It shows a section of the Ypres Salient known as Tower Hamlets, after what is now a part of eastern London. This area was destroyed during the Battle of the Menin Road Ridge. Nash started work on this large canvas in June 1918, completing it the following February.

After his war commissions were complete and he was ‘demobilised’, Nash returned to the Buckinghamshire countryside to live, but often worked in London. His oil landscape Behind the Inn (1919–22) set him on a new course, to recover from the horrors of war by painting the English countryside which he loved so much.

He developed his wood engraving skills, and in 1920 was involved in the first exhibition of the Society of Wood Engravers. He also started teaching on an occasional basis in Oxford.

Exhibition

There is still time, if you are in or near London, to catch the last few days of the exhibition of his work at Tate Britain, which closes on 5 March 2017. Sadly it is not planned to move on to another location, but the Tate has the largest single collection of his work.

References

Wikipedia – an excellent and detailed account.

Chambers, Emma (ed) (2016) Paul Nash, Tate Publishing. ISBN 978 1 84976 491 9.

After the Chariot of the Sun had almost destroyed the earth by fire, Ovid tells us that Jupiter checked the walls of heaven, then surveyed the land to assure himself that it was recovering properly. During that excursion from the heavens, he caught sight of Callisto, a nymph who (as so often happens) inflamed his fancy.

What follows is, on the face of it, one of the cruellest stories in the whole Metamorphoses. Jupiter rapes Callisto, who falls pregnant. Diana then throws her out of her band of chaste followers. Once her son is born, Juno drags her away by her hair, and turns her into a bear. Later, when Callisto’s son is just about to kill her, Jupiter finally takes pity on them and catasterises them into the Great and Little Bear constellations, but even then Juno adds a bitter twist to the end.

Is this just a story of sadistic misogyny, though?

The Story

Callisto, who is remarkably never named by Ovid in his account, is apparently a daughter of Lycaon, the wolf-man who fled from Jupiter well before the flood. Here Ovid appears to have made a minor error in continuity, as we were told that the only humans who survived the flood were Deucalion and Pyrrha.

Jupiter watches Callisto rest from the heat of the noon sun, and decides that this time he will get away with deceiving Juno, his wife. He therefore appears to Callisto as Diana, the chaste goddess of the hunt. When Callisto tells him (in the guise of Diana) that Diana is even greater than Jupiter, he knows that she is all but conquered:
Jove heard and smiled, well pleased to be preferred
above himself, and kissed her many times,
and strained her in his arms, while she began
to tell the varied fortunes of her hunt.—
but when his ardent love was known to her,
she struggled to escape from his embrace:
ah, how could she, a tender maid, resist
almighty Jove?—Be sure, Saturnia
if thou hadst only witnessed her thy heart
had shown more pity!

The rape complete, Jupiter flies back up to heaven, leaving a bewildered and shocked Callisto to return to Diana and the other nymphs. But Callisto falls pregnant, and one day, when she is quite obviously pregnant, when out with Diana and the other nymphs, they stop to bathe. Callisto’s pregnancy is the ultimate demonstration that she has not been chaste, and Diana throws her out of the group:
Diana in a rage exclaimed, “Away!
Thou must not desecrate our sacred springs!”
And she was driven thence.

Juno had also sensed the situation, and worked out her husband’s role. Instead of taking it out on him, though, she aims her wrath at Callisto. Juno waits until Callisto’s son, Arcas, is born, then vents her wrath not on the rapist, but his victim:
So saying, by her forehead’s tresses seized
the goddess on her rival; and she dragged
her roughly to the ground. Pleading she raised
her suppliant arms and begged for mercy.—While
she pled, black hair spread over her white limbs;
her hands were lengthened into feet, and claws
long-curving tipped them; snarling jaws deformed
the mouth that Jove had kissed. And lest her prayers
and piteous words might move some listening God,
and give remembrance, speech was so denied,
that only from her throat came angry growls,
now uttered hoarse and threatening.

Transformed into a bear, Callisto is distraught, and roams the woods alone. When her son Arcas reaches the age of about 15, he comes across his mother, still a bear, but neither knows the identity of the other. Arcas is just about to kill the bear when Jupiter finally takes pity:
but not permitting it the god of Heaven
averted, and removed them from that crime.
He, in a mighty wind — through vacant space,
upbore them to the dome of starry heaven,
and fixed them, Constellations, bright amid
the starry host.

With Callisto and Arcas as the Great Bear and Little Bear, Juno wants one final act, to ensure that her husband cannot sneakily turn Callisto back into a human, when her constellation has set below the horizon. She therefore instructs the gods of the sea that they shall not let either constellation pass the waters (sink below the horizon). Indeed, in Greece and Italy at that time, neither Ursa Major nor Ursa Minor ever set below the horizon.

As Juno puts it, “thus the guilty rue their chastisement!” and she sails off through the heavens in her chariot with peacocks.

A short story involving three metamorphoses, two of which form constellations (‘catasterisation’), there are two remarkable features about it: Ovid’s utter depersonalisation of Callisto by never mentioning her name, and the stark contrast with Io’s rape.

I believe that Ovid has left enough in the way of clues to make it clear that Callisto’s story is a parody of what all too often happens after a rape. Both men and women twist the facts to somehow lay the blame not on the rapist, but on the victim, just as Diana and Juno did. This stigma only grows when they become pregnant as a result, and they are seen as guilty harlots to be chastised and ejected from society.

The Paintings

Although others have lauded the many paintings which depict this story, I am afraid that I am going to be more critical. Neither the scene in which Jupiter, as Diana, rapes Callisto, nor that in which the real Diana casts Callisto out, are an excuse for fleshly titillation for male patrons. To ignore the narrative (even if you do not read it as I have) is not good history painting, it is very artistic, even exquisitely beautiful, soft porn.

My first choice for the depiction of Callisto with Diana/Jupiter is therefore Rubens’ more subtle and thought-provoking Jupiter and Callisto from 1613. Diana actually looks a tad more masculine than in most depictions, and the facial expressions are more serious, and Callisto hesitant and suspicious. She also has her right hand on her quiver, and her left hand holds one end of her bow.

Most importantly, Rubens tells us that this Diana is more than meets the eye: parked in the background is Jupiter’s signature eagle, with its own prey in its talons.

Jean Simon Berthélemy’s much later Jupiter, in the Guise of Diana, and Callisto, which was probably painted around 1800, may have been inspired by that Rubens, but has a slightly different twist. Callisto appears coy and cautious, and Diana very persuasive. If only Callisto were to turn around and see Jupiter’s eagle, she might understand the trap she is in.

Although Callisto and Diana/Jupiter are not as sensitively shown in this Jupiter and Callisto from about 1630, attributed to Karel Philips Spierincks, and there are plenty of misleading Cupids, the artist has used multiplex narrative to great effect. For in the distance, we see Juno dragging Callisto along by her hair.

There are somewhat fewer paintings of the discovery of Callisto’s pregnancy by Diana. Most are, sadly, barely disguised romps of naked women in a stream.

Titian’s Diana and Kallisto from 1556-59 is far better than the rest. Diana is shown just right of centre, with her characteristic coronet, pointing down at the nymph at the left who seems to have fallen into a swoon while being undressed, and whose belly suggests that she is quite possibly pregnant. Some of the other nymphs are actually wearing robes, too.

Having sorted through dozens of paintings and prints which claim to depict this story, I was surprised that none alluded to the rest of the story by showing a bear wandering sadly at the edge of a wood. Perhaps the patrons paid better for exposed flesh than good narrative.

The English translation of Ovid above is taken from Ovid. Metamorphoses. Tr. Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922, at Perseus. I am very grateful to Perseus at Tufts for this.

The western part of Norway, with its immense fjords and ice-capped mountains, must be one of the best locations for any landscape painter to work. Nikolai Astrup (1880–1928) was born and lived there, and in the next few articles in this series, I hope to show you a selection of his paintings of life in the Norwegian countryside in the first quarter of the twentieth century.

Astrup’s father was a Lutheran pastor, and when Nikolai was still an infant, the family moved to Ålhus on Jølstravatnet, Jølster Lake, a long fjord-like fresh water lake surrounded by rugged hills and mountains. At the end of the nineteenth century, rural life in Norway was still quite primitive, and the parsonage in which Astrup was brought up was in a poor state of repair. As a boy he suffered from asthma, which could only have been exacerbated by living conditions.

When he was fifteen, Astrup was sent off to school in Trondheim, a growing city much further north, in the hope that he might pursue a career in the church like his father. After a couple of years there, he flunked Latin, and returned home, where he wanted to become an artist – much against his family’s wishes. He finally left home to study at the Royal School of Drawing in Oslo (then known as Kristiania) in the autumn of 1899.

Kjerringa med lykta (Old Woman with Lantern) is one of his earliest surviving paintings, probably from before 1899, and was painted on a home-made canvas prepared using a patch of cloth from a pair of trousers.

Astrup did not stay long at the Royal School of Drawing, and moved on to study at Harriet Backer‘s private art school in Oslo. Backer is one of Norway’s greatest painters, who trained in Munich and Paris, and for some years divided her time between France and Norway. She ran her school between 1890 and 1912.

Astrup had a broad training, which included figurative painting, as in his marvellous portrait Olaves (1900). Looking at its richly-textured surface, it makes me wonder what other portraits he might have painted had he not devoted most of his career to landscapes. He also learned print-making during this period in Oslo.

From the outset, though, he seems to have set his course to become a landscape painter. Vårkveld ved Jølstervannet (Spring evening by Jølster Lake) (1900) gives a very good idea of what must have been one of his primary motivations, with its broad view of the lake and hills which surrounded his home in the parsonage in Ålhus.

In 1901, Astrup was awarded a grant by Olaf Schou, a Norwegian industrialist who was also a painter himself and a patron of the arts. Schou had earlier studied with the great Norwegian landscape painter Hans Gude. Astrup left Norway at the end of the year for Germany, where he particularly admired the paintings of Böcklin, and arrived in Paris just in time for Christmas.

He studied at the Académie Colarossi, with Christian Krohg, where he was influenced by Maurice Denis and Henri ‘le Douanier’ Rousseau. He then returned to Norway in May, even more determined to paint landscapes around his home.

With his love of Rousseau, Astrup painted landscapes with an assumed naïvety, understating or omitting aerial perspective, and incorporating multiple perspective projections into the same image, as in his Farmstead in Jølster (1902). Two women, sheltering from the rain under black umbrellas, are walking up a muddy path which threads its way through the wooden farm buildings, guiding a young girl with them. Astrup delights in the colourful patches which make up each of the turf roofs, and the contrasting puddles on the grass.

Warmth Comes to the Ground (1903) shows a woman carrying a pail full of glowing embers beside a stream, in the early spring, as the ground thaws from the past winter. This illustrates a folk tale that the ground is thawed out using those embers, ready for the spring weather to complete the job.

Originally known as Dark Sunlight, Astrup’s Landscape with Children (c 1903) shows the bold colours typical of the early summer. Despite the naïve appearance of the countryside, he has constructed the large tree at the left according to taught anatomical principles.

Astrup made his first woodcut prints in 1904, and throughout the rest of career he created many woodcut prints, most based on his finished oil paintings.

Fjøsfrieri (Early Courting) (1904) is a complex and humorous painting showing an early phase in courting in the country. The young couple at the far left are engaged in ‘clothed courting’ in the unromantic surroundings of a cowshed. He has a bottle of drink in his pocket; whether that is to give him courage or to weaken the resistance of his girlfriend is unclear.

The couple have hidden themselves in the cowshed, out of everyone’s way, but the boyfriend appears unaware that they are being watched by someone from up in the rafters of the roof. From the apparent direction of gaze of the girlfriend, and the blush on her cheeks, she has just noticed the peeping tom (or watchful relative).

The setting is enhanced by the sunlight pouring through the far window, which illuminates two rows of the back-ends of cows. The wood floor between the cows appears decorated with small sketches, which are in fact piles of cow dung. Courting seems to have been a sensorily rich experience!

Going to the Mill (c 1900-05) is a complete essay on watermills, pictured in perfect rainy milling weather, with the streams in spate during the autumn/fall. A mill race, running down its wooden channel, feeds a small undershot paddle in the centre, used to turn a millstone for sharpening knives and tools. Water flow to that is regulated by the simple valve upstream, which is currently in the off position, shedding the water to either side.

The man and his son are taking a sack of grain up to another mill – possibly the small shed seen in the centre distance – to grind flour for the family’s baking.

Svanøybukta (before 1905) shows a sheltered bay (bukt) of Svanøy, one of the many islands which are scattered off the deeply-incut coast to the west of Ålhus. Astrup’s aerial perspective is gentle but effective here.

Storehouse in Jølster (1902-05) was originally titled Sad Autumn Day by Astrup, although there seems no explanation for that reading. It was certainly far from being a sad painting, as it was and remains one of his most acclaimed works.

In 1905, Astrup had his first one-man exhibition in Oslo. He achieved instant critical success, selling many of the works which he exhibited there, this canvas being purchased for the national collection. Fittingly, on 26 November, Norway gained its independence from Sweden.

Kollen, translated as The Barren Mountain, or simply The Fell, (1905-06) shows one of the huge rocky outcrops which tower over the coast of fjords and lakes in this part of Norway. This must have been painted during the late winter.

References

Wikipedia (brief).
Nikolai Astrup research (English and Norwegian).
Astruptunet, the artist’s house and museum (Norwegian with some English).

Carey, Frances, Dejardin, Ian AC, & Stevens, MaryAnne (2016) Painting Norway, Nikolai Astrup 1880-1928, Scala. ISBN 978 1 85759 988 6.

Tinderbox may be Storyspace’s bigger sibling, but that doesn’t mean that every Storyspace document works wondrously in Tinderbox – even the latest Tinderbox 7. I am aware that some of my Storyspace hypertext documents, particularly those using included text, are less than optimal when opened in Tinderbox.

This article describes first explorations of some of Tinderbox 7’s new features to try to make Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book 1 more accessible: in short, to implement parallel text using Composites.

Composite notes are a new and exciting feature of Tinderbox 7, which hopefully will come to a future version of Storyspace too. They are very easy to make: in the Map view, just drag one note to touch another and they become a Composite, which you can move around as a unit, and most usefully which displays the contents of both notes together.

The idea started from a simple observation: make the Latin and English versions of the same section of text into a Composite, and when that Composite is selected, you get exactly the same effect as achieved using Storyspace’s ^include feature, with the added bonus of a neat dividing line.

So I restructured my document, taking the Latin and English notes out of their containers, and forming them into Composites within a series of containers representing each story within the whole text. Because this did not affect the content of the individual notes, but was a structural re-organisation, it was remarkably quick and simple.

This left the issue of how to incorporate links to the paintings. In the original Storyspace hypertext, they are appended to the writing spaces containing ^include links, which I was then removing.

My solution is to put them in a separate note, then add that to the side of the appropriate Composite. Before doing that, I needed to make new text links for each of the paintings. This was done in the usual way, selecting the link anchor first, and taking it over to the parking space.

I then located the painting in the Gallery container, and dragged the link down to the appropriate note containing the painting, making it a text link. Once I was there, I could repeat the process with the return text link from the foot of the note containing the painting.

Again, those were made into text links, going back to the original note.

The Map view confirms that there is now a link in and one out. Once all the links were completed, the note containing them was added to the side of the Composite.

Select the Composite, and you now see the Latin source at the top, the English translation below, and (for those notes with associated paintings) the links to paintings at the foot.

With the text notes and paintings all bound into Composites, the next task was to give the user some easy navigational pathways through the text. At present, you cannot link the whole of a Composite to another, only the individual notes within Composites. So the user who wants to read the entire text in parallel form will need to select Composite notes in sequence to be able to do that.

However, many users will be happy to read using one of the languages, choosing which sections for which to view the parallel text (and painting links). I therefore linked the complete Latin text using default links, and the whole English translation likewise. Making links between notes which are part of a Composite is not difficult when you use Command-click to select just the individual note. Drag the link and drop it on the correct destination (here, green L to green L), and Tinderbox places the link correctly.

I also got to use the Quick Link method for adding text links – another of the exciting new features in Tinderbox 7. These allow you to make text links from the comfort of a note, without having to drag links around or use a Parking Space.

Although I made text links to and from paintings in the conventional way, as I needed to re-use existing anchor text, new links from the Start note were made as Quick Links: insert two (square) brackets [[ into the text content of a note, then type the first letter of the note name for the destination of the link, and up pops the menu from which to select the destination.

There is one important point to remember here: you must double-click the correct line in the popup menu to make the link. If you just select the menu item with a single click, then click away from the menu to dismiss it, the name of the destination note will be inserted without a link.

You may also want to provide different anchor text for that link. This is simple to do using the cursor keys to bring the insertion point within the blue anchor text, where you can add and edit as you wish.

I then spent a little time prettivating the opening Map view and Start note, which hopefully makes the document a little more inviting.

From that Start note, the user can use one of the text links to take them to a reading of the document in Latin, English, or the paintings alone. At any stage during that, they can select the current Composite to switch from single language to parallel text, with painting links.

Click on one of the text links to a painting, and the user is taken to the Gallery, and that work displayed. The text link at the foot then returns them to the painting link note within the Composite where they started. To show the whole Composite again, they need to select that Composite, from which reading can be resumed.

Being a Tinderbox document, you can now use it to add your own notes, perhaps summarising content from one of the excellent commentaries on Metamorphoses. Those can be added to the relevant Composite notes, for example, to customise your own copy.

I welcome suggestions for other ways in which this parallel text can be implemented in Tinderbox 7. I also hope that Tinderbox users find this version a bit more useful and usable than that for Storyspace. It is available here: Ovid Metamorphoses Book 1 (Tinderbox 7) and in the Downloads page, listed in the menu at the top of this article.

If you haven’t upgraded to Tinderbox 7 yet, these are excellent reasons to do so now.

In the years following the First World War, Paul Nash (1892–1946) struggled to recover from the stress which the war had imposed.

Cotswold Hills (c 1920) shows a view of the rolling countryside of the Cotswolds, near the family home in Buckinghamshire. Although it breaks from the military regularity and desolation of his war paintings, the shafts of sunlight are worryingly reminiscent of those in his Menin Road of just a couple of years before.

The Nash family moved to Dymchurch, on the south coast of Kent, to help Paul get over the war and its inevitable mental wounds. In the early 1920s he concentrated on motifs which he found along that stretch of the Kent coast, produced a volume of wood engravings (Places, 1922), and started to paint some floral still lifes.

Eventually Nash was able to free himself more from his war images. Berkshire Downs (1922) shows his return to more conventional landscapes, here seen in the autumn, probably when he was visiting his father in his home at Iver.

Granary (1922-23) has a more exotic look to it, with the trees appearing more like palms, although it shows a small farm pond somewhere in the Home Counties in south-east England. His brushstrokes in the foliage of the central trees may have been influenced by Cézanne’s ‘constructive’ brushstrokes, which were prominent in Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist concepts at the time.

The Shore (1923) is one of the many strongly geometrical paintings and prints which Nash made of the south Kent seafront and coastal defences. The stark straight lines of concrete divide the canvas up into a series of flat planes; even the sea, caught in a moment of calm, forms a plane.

In 1924 and 1925, Nash taught part-time at the Royal College of Art in London. Among his students there were Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden, who were both greatly influenced by Nash’s work. He enjoyed some commercial success in his exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in London, which generated sufficient income for the Nashes to overwinter on the Mediterranean coast of France, and visit Florence and Pisa.

Later in 1925, he moved west and inland to the village of Iden, near the Romney Marshes in East Sussex, which became the focus of his paintings in the later 1920s.

St Pancras Lilies (1927) is one of a series of combined floral still lifes with views of the strongly geometric facade of Saint Pancras railway station in London. Nash’s choice of flower is curious, and probably to deliberately merge the white of the lilies with the pale stone and windows of the building, to bring their images together rather than make them contrast. Other paintings used more abstract grid effects as well.

Oxenbridge Pond (1927-28) is one of Nash’s last conventional landscape paintings, and I think one of his best. It shows a pond at Oxenbridge Farmhouse, Iden, not far from his home. Patterns of brushstrokes are assembled into the textures of foliage, ivy covering a tree-trunk, even the lichens and moss on the trunk closest to the viewer, at the right edge.

The mirror-like reflection on the water’s surface makes a contrast, although Nash does not appear to have been concerned with the optical fidelity of the reflected image. Like Cézanne, he painted what he saw in his mind, not from the laws of optics.

Towards the end of the 1920s, Nash became more experimental in his painting, incorporating more abstract elements, and showing signs of surrealism.

About a year later, Landscape at Iden (1929) shows the transformation which had taken place in Nash’s landscapes. This is also a view of Iden, that from his studio. The barren fruit trees are a reminder of his Cherry Orchard from twelve years earlier. They are set in the middle of an odd, faintly surrealist, collection of objects.

A pile of logs for firewood looks as if it has reversed perspective and great foreshortening of the logs. The grass forms a flat plane, uniform in colour and devoid of texture. Two purposeless panels frame the view and exaggerate the perspective, while in the distance is a bank of hills which look almost flat. In the middle of the foreground, a smooth woodbasket containing logs looks completely out of place.

Nash’s Lares (1929-30) takes this geometric abstraction even further. Its title refers to the Roman protective deities most characteristically associated with roads and crossroads, but often confounded with household deities associated with the hearth. The painting is based on Nash’s fireplace, within which flames have been represented as thin upward zig-zags. Upward-pointing triangles of the fire are associated with drawing instruments (a T-square and set-square) in the foreground, which would otherwise be completely out of place.

Nash saw the work of Giorgio de Chirico at the first exhibition of his work in London in 1928, and this probably motivated him towards this type of surreal composition.

In 1929, following his father’s death, the Nashes moved from the village of Iden to nearby Rye. The following year, Paul started writing for The Listener magazine, which had a reputation for highbrow art criticism and was widely respected. Nash was not only becoming a practical pioneer of modernism, but was helping to shape opinion of it.

In his overtly surrealist painting Nest of the Siren (1930), Nash again brings the incongruous together. The painting is framed by brightly-painted walls with pillared decorations, perhaps ornate wainscot panelling. In the middle of these is what might be a painting, but also seems to be a three-dimensional plant trough containing sinuous shrubs. In the middle of those is a small nest, like an acorn cup.

Standing in front of this is a structure resembling a weather-vane, mounted on a turned wooden shaft. At the weather end of the vane is a faceless figure of a Siren; the leeward end appears purely decorative. Three red rods appear to have detached themselves from the walling, two protruding from the plant trough, the third resting on the floor.

In a decade, Nash’s art had come a very long way.

Exhibition

There is still just time, if you are in or near London, to catch the last few days of the exhibition of his work at Tate Britain, which closes on 5 March 2017. Sadly it is not planned to move on to another location, but the Tate has the largest single collection of his work.

References

Wikipedia – an excellent and detailed account.

Chambers, Emma (ed) (2016) Paul Nash, Tate Publishing. ISBN 978 1 84976 491 9.

After the dreadful story of Callisto’s abuse, Ovid returns to the image of Juno riding high in her chariot with peacocks adorned with the eyes of dead Argus. This leads on to one of the more intricate and interwoven sections of Metamorphoses, with the overall theme of the penalties of gossip and telling tales about others.

This first section starts with the story of how the raven was changed from a white bird to black, and in the course of that Ovid embeds the stories of Minerva and Ericthonius, the daughter of Coroneus changed into a crow, Nictimene’s incest, and Apollo killing Coronis. Added as a sequel to the end is the related story of Ocyroe and Aesculapius, bringing a total of six myths and four transformations in less than 150 lines of Latin verse.

The Story

The outermost story starts with the raven, then white and devoted to Apollo, learning that Coronis, who was Apollo’s lover, had been unfaithful to the god. The raven then rushes off to tell Apollo, only to be chased by an inquisitive crow. The raven tells the crow about Coronis, to which the crow cautions the raven from reporting it to the god, telling the raven that it was his ‘faithful’ reporting of such incidents which caused his downfall.

The crow then tells the raven part of the myth of Ericthonius, who had arisen without a mother (from the spilled semen of Hephaestus when he tried to rape Minerva, which Ovid omits). Minerva had left a small basket containing the infant Ericthonius in the care of three maiden sisters, the daughters of Cecrops, named Herse, Pandrosos, and Aglauros, with strict instructions not to open the basket.

The last of these could not resist the temptation, and discovered that the basket contained the baby and a snake. The crow saw this, and hurried off to Minerva, who promptly stopped protecting the crow, and degraded him in the order of birds to be below an owl, which she brought into her protection.

The crow then reveals that he (or she) was originally the beautiful daughter of Coroneus, king of Phocis. One day she was pursued by Neptune, who intended to rape her. When she called for divine assistance (much in the the way of Daphne and Syrinx), Minerva responded by changing her into a crow, and adopting her:
“I fled from that sea-shore,
to fields of shifting sands that all my steps
delayed: and in despair upon the Gods
and all mankind I called for aid, but I
was quite alone and helpless. Presently
the chaste Minerva, me, a virgin, heard
and me assistance gave: for as my arms
implored the Heavens, downy feathers grew
from out the flesh; and as I tried to cast
my mantle from my shoulders, wings appeared
upon my tender sides; and as I strove
to beat my naked bosom with my hands,
nor hands remained nor naked breast to beat.
“I ran, and as I sped the sands no more
delayed me; I was soaring from the ground;
and as I winged the air, Minerva chose
me for a life-companion; but alas,
although my life was blameless, fate or chance
deprived me of Minerva’s loving aid;

The crow then explains that Minerva’s owl, who displaced him, was created when Nictimene committed incest with her father: her punishment was to be transformed into an owl.

The raven dismisses the crow, and hastens off to tell Apollo, who immediately falls into a rage, picks up his bow (with which he had killed Python just after the Flood, in Book 1), and looses an arrow into the breast of Coronis, his unfaithful lover:
And when Apollo, Phoebus, heard the tale
the busy Raven made such haste to tell,
he dropped his plectrum and his laurel wreath,
and his bright countenance went white with rage.
He seized his trusted arms, and having bent
his certain bow, pierced with a deadly shaft
that bosom which so often he had pressed
against his own.

As she lies dying, Coronis reveals that she is pregnant with his child. Apollo is then filled with remorse, but unable to revive his lover, whose funeral pyre is already built. Apollo then rescues the unborn baby from the body of Coronis, and carries the child to Chiron the Centaur for him to look after.

Apollo then vents his anger on the raven:
Then to him
he called the silly raven, high in hopes
of large requital due for all his words;
but, angry with his meddling ways, the God
turned the white feathers of that bird to black
and then forbade forever more to perch
among the favoured birds whose plumes are white.

The story of the raven and the crow now complete, Ovid leads us straight into the next, about Ocyroe, the beautiful daughter of Chiron the Centaur. Centaurs have the upper body (head, arms and chest) of a human, and the body (forelegs and hindlegs) of a horse, giving them a total of six limbs.

Ocyroe has the gift of ‘second sight’, and as soon as she sees Aesculapius, the infant son of Apollo and his dead lover Coronis, Ocyroe pronounces that the baby will grow to bring health to the world (he became god of medicine), but would be destroyed by Jupiter before being returned as a god. She also warns her father, Chiron, that he would be tormented by the blood of a serpent to the point of imploring his death, which will be granted him by the Fates.

These prophecies are not welcomed by the Fates, who take away her gift and her power of speech, and she is transformed into a mare:
And as she wailed the words became confused
and scarcely understood; and soon her speech
was only as the whinny of a mare.
Down to the meadow’s green her arms were stretched;
her fingers joined together, and smooth hoofs
made of five nails a single piece of horn.
Her face and neck were lengthened, and her hair
swept downward as a tail; the scattered locks
that clung around her neck were made a mane,
tossed over to the right. Her voice and shape
were altogether changed, and since that day
the change has given her a different name.

Ovid not only threads the consequences of gossip and ‘telling tales’ through these stories, but plays on names too: Coronis and Coroneus are derived from the Greek root for crow and raven, for example the noun κοράκι (koráki) which can mean either bird. Latin uses a related root starting in cor-.

The Paintings

These stories have not appealed much to painters, although they have appeared more in literary works.

Rubens, the most prolific painter of myth, saw the opportunity for two versions of Erichthonius Discovered by the Daughters of Cecrops, of which this, from about 1616, is the better. Aglauros has just given way to temptation and taken the top off the basket entrusted to the three sisters by Minerva, revealing the infant Ericthonius and a small snake inside.

To the right is a fountain in honour of the Ephesian Artemis (Roman Diana), distinctive with her multiple breasts, each of which is a source of water. At the left, in the distance, is a herm, at the foot of which is a peacock, suggesting that Juno may not be far away either, although this myth concerns a crow and Minerva, neither of which are visible.

The only story of these which has attained any popularity in painting is Apollo’s murder of his unfaithful and pregnant lover Coronis.

Foggini’s fine pen and ink drawing of Apollo and Coronis, probably from around 1690-1700, shows a moment just after Apollo’s arrow has left his bow. His lyre is at his feet, dropped in haste and anger at the message brought by the raven, who is flying above him. Coronis holds her hands up in self-defence, and the arrow is presumably in mid-flight; her fate is now sealed.

This superb section of fresco by Domenichino, showing Apollo slaying Coronis from 1616-18, depicts the couple a moment later, with Apollo’s arrow embedded deep in Coronis’ chest. She is here trying to draw it out from her. This fresco was originally in the garden pavilion of the Villa Aldobrandini, in Frascati, Italy.

My final painting I offer in two different copies. The original, painted in miniature onto copper, was made by Adam Elsheimer: Apollo and Coronis from 1606-08. However, this now appears very dark, and its details are clearer in a contemporary copy (below) attributed to Johann König, a follower of Elsheimer. Coronis, who is visibly pregnant but hardly at full term, is laid out naked at the left, Apollo’s arrow having been extracted and left on the ground. Next to her is a tiger (or similar).

Apollo is bent down, picking herbs with which to anoint her, from a bed of plants which have wilted and are dying. In the distance, a small party of satyrs is busy making a funeral pyre on which to lay the dead Coronis.

There are some paintings of the later life of Aesculapius, which I have discussed in another article, but none which appears to depict any of the story in this part of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

The English translation of Ovid above is taken from Ovid. Metamorphoses. Tr. Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922, at Perseus. I am very grateful to Perseus at Tufts for this.

How did you learn the order of the colours of the rainbow? In my case, even though it was more than fifty years ago, I still remember the mnemonic: Richard of York gained battles in vain. I’m still not really sure who Richard of York was, nor who he was fighting, but ever since childhood I have known that the colours progress from red (outermost), through orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, to violet (innermost).

These haven’t changed, certainly not since humans started to migrate from east Africa, and every observant visual artist has seen the same rainbows as you and I, and Isaac Newton. But it was not until 1762 that Newton first established scientifically the order of colours, and even then he only noticed five, adding orange and indigo slightly later.

In the Renaissance, there was little interest in painting realist or realistic landscapes, let alone capturing transient effects such as rainbows, no matter how wondrous they remain even today. There were occasions when a rainbow was mandatory in a religious work, perhaps, such as its symbolic role for the new covenant with the Old Testament God after the Flood.

This wonderful watercolour from the Augsburger Wunderzeichenbuch from about 1552 illustrates that covenant, but paid no attention to the order of colours seen in nature.

Also from the sixteenth century, Crispin van den Broeck’s The Last Judgment is similarly unnatural.

With the Age of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century came greater efforts to show nature more faithfully, and many painters did exactly that when forming their rainbows. There were still some exceptions, notably local artists who decorated churches and other buildings.

In 1730, Johann Georg Schall painted the ceiling fresco shown above in the church of St. Philippus und Jakobus in Bergatreute, and in 1770, Joseph Christ painted a ceiling fresco in the Catholic Church of St. Anna in Dinkelscherben, below.

By this time, Newton’s objective knowledge was being spread far and wide, but it obviously did not reach the engravers Caspar Wolf, Charles-Melchior Descourtis, and Rudolf Samuel Henzi when they made this colour print of Chute de la Tritt in 1785.

William Blake is a fascinating problem here. Although never known for realist or naturalistic art, preferring to paint his visions rather than what appeared in nature, until about 1803, he painted rainbows with their colours in the correct, Newtonian order.

Then, according to John Gage, Blake saw George Romney’s painting Newton and the Prism (1794), and decided to paint his rainbows in the exact reverse order from them on.

Blake had a great respect for Newton as an intellectual and scientist, but saw (and painted) him as a prime example of the soulless world without vision. I wonder whether his reversing the order of colours in the rainbow was less influenced by Romney’s painting, and more a statement against science.

There were other artists who, even in the nineteenth century, just seem to have got the order of colours wrong.

Alexei Savrasov did in his Landscape with a Rainbow (1881).

So too did Konstantin Fyodorovich Bogaevsky in his rather later Rainbow.

Double rainbows

I don’t recall being taught anything about the order of colours in double rainbows. Naïve logic might argue that the secondary bow, the outer one, should have the same order, with red outermost. In fact, the order is the reverse of normal, with red innermost, as shown so clearly in Eric Rolph’s photo from Alaska, below.

One of the best-known paintings featuring a double rainbow is John Millais’ The Blind Girl of 1856, which gets the order correct.

You can also expect the great nineteenth century landscape painters to get this right, as did Frederic Church, whether in his Rainy Season in the Tropics of 1866 (above), or The Aegean Sea (c 1877), below. Both feature superbly faithful depictions of double bows.

The same can be said of Domenico Morelli’s depiction of the aftermath of the flood, in his undated Noah’s Thanksgiving after Leaving the Ark.

But double rainbows have caught a few artists out. Joseph Anton Koch’s Heroic Landscape with Rainbow (1812) seems modelled after Poussin’s idealised landscapes, but shows both primary and secondary bows with the same order of colours, which never occurs in nature.

Once we move into the twentieth century, all bets are off again. Those who practised faithful realism generally showed the order of colours as seen in nature. Others didn’t even feel constrained to the seven colours of my old mnemonic. Richard of York had certainly gained that battle in vain.

There’s more to classical Greek and Roman myths than rape, murder, and metamorphoses. Sometimes they tell touching stories of true love, like that of Acontius and Cydippe. You will not have heard of them, because their story is tucked away in a couple of imagined letters in Ovid’s Heroides (letters 20 and 21), and in his Art of Love (1, from line 457 on).

Acontius was a young man from the lovely Greek island of Keos, who fell hopelessly in love with the beautiful young woman Cydippe. Sadly, she was of higher social standing than he was, and such a marriage was unthinkable to her family. He came up with an ingenious plan to trick her into making a commitment to him: he wrote the words I swear before Diana (Artemis) that I will marry only Acontius on an apple.

He then approached Cydippe when she was in the temple of Diana, and threw the inscribed apple in front of her. Her nurse picked it up, and handed it to Cydippe to read his words aloud before the altar, so binding her to the vow. She then seemingly overlooked this inadvertent commitment that she had made.

But Cydippe’s family had other ideas, and found her a prospective husband of appropriate status. Shortly before the couple were due to marry, Cydippe fell ill with a severe fever, and the proceedings were postponed. After she recovered, another attempt was made to marry the couple, but again Cydippe fell ill just before the ceremonies, and so a third time the wedding had to be called off.

Unsure of what to do next, Cydippe’s parents consulted the oracle at Delphi, who told them the whole story. Recognising the strength of the vow that she had made, Cydippe and her parents finally accepted the match, and Acontius and Cydippe married with their blessing.

I felt sure that some artist would have depicted some of that story, but my reference sources only pointed to poetry and operas. These include an allusion in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, verse by Edward Bulwer Lytton and the artist and designer William Morris. There had been no less than six operas written about the story, including Hoffman’s Acontius und Cydippe, first performed in 1709.

Eventually, I found two paintings, both of which have strange histories.

The wonderful Swiss painter Angelica Kauffman exhibited a painting titled Acontius and Cydippe at the Royal Academy in London in 1771. Like so many of her paintings, it was very popular, but now appears to have been lost. A copy was made by someone from her circle, and that has survived, although it was earlier thought to be of Orestes and Iphigenia.

This surviving version of Acontius and Cydippe Before the Altar of Diana shows Cydippe with Acontius behind her, armed with his inscribed apple. There is no nurse shown, though.

Kauffmann’s painting was engraved, and the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm has what I understand to be a hand-coloured print made by the Swedish painter Johan Fredrik Martin.

These are fine narrative works which do the story justice, but I then stumbled across a painting of Cydippe in the Rijksmuseum, by a little-known Dutch artist Paulus Bor.

His Cydippe with Acontius’s Apple is undated, but probably from around 1630-40. It puts a very different slant on the story: here, Cydippe leans on the altar, alone, the inscribed apple held up in her right hand. But she is not reading Acontius’ words: she has clearly already said those out aloud, and now seems to be thinking through the vow she has just made.

Bor paints the details of the altar exquisitely. Cydippe’s dress may be anachronistic, but Bor brings in the skull of a sacrificed goat and festoons of flowers.

Apparently Bor is known for his early Caravaggism and late classicism, for unusual compositions and mysterious subjects.

His Ariadne (1630-35) is still reminiscent of Caravaggio, and certainly mysterious. When Theseus came to Crete to kill the Minotaur, she helped him by giving him a ball of golden thread, which he used to retrace his route out of the labyrinth after he had killed the Minotaur (her half-brother). Ariadne fell in love with Theseus, and the couple eloped to Naxos, where he abandoned her.

This can only show Ariadne on Naxos, immediately after she has been abandoned, still clutching the thread by which she thought she had tethered Theseus, which now hangs at a loose end. On the wall above her are sketches she has made of her lover. She looks even more deeply lost in thought, and gloomy, than Cydippe.

Ovid includes an imaginary letter from her to Theseus in his Heroides (letter 10).

Even more puzzling at first sight is Bor’s portrait of Medea.

The Disillusioned Medea (The Enchantress) (c 1640), in the Met in New York, appears unique among the images of the enchantress who used her magic to support Jason in his quest for the Golden Fleece. She fell in love with Jason, married him on his voyage home, and bore him two children. Ten years later, Jason divorced her for the King of Corinth’s daughter Glauce.

This was too much for Medea, who sent Glauce a poisoned wedding dress which killed her, and her father, horribly. She then killed her two children, and fled to Athens, where she had a child by King Aegeus. Ovid includes an imaginary letter from her to Jason in his Heroides (letter 12).

Medea sits, her face flushed, resting her head on the heel of her right hand. In her left, she holds a wand made from bamboo or rattan. The wand appears poised, ready for use as soon as she has worked out what to do next. Behind her is a small altar, very similar to Diana’s in Bor’s painting of Cydippe, and Walter Liedtke has identified the statue at the left as Diana.

Liedtke has proposed that the many common features of Bor’s Cydippe with Acontius’s Apple and The Disillusioned Medea (The Enchantress) make it most probable that they were painted as a pair, to hang together, as two women from the Heroides. The altars to Diana, the figures’ poses, even the gold tassles on red cushions make this most likely. But where, then, does Ariadne fit in?

Three women, two of them abandoned by their lovers, the third wondering what to do about her vow of marriage – all from Ovid’s Heroides. I wonder if Bor painted any others from that book? Perhaps those paintings are not as mysterious as they may seem.

For the young Nikolai Astrup (1880–1928), 1905 had been a year to celebrate: he had his first one-man exhibition in Oslo, which sold many of his paintings, including one into the national collection, and Norway had gained its independence from Sweden.

The following year, he was hailed as one of the most promising artists of a group exhibition of Norwegian art in Copenhagen.

A Clear Night in June (1905-07), above, and A June Night and Old Jølster Farm (before 1911), below, are two of more than a dozen paintings which Astrup made of this farm after about 1902. These were painted early each summer, when in some years there were still the remains of the winter’s snow on the rugged hills behind. The waterfalls cascading down the scarps are still in spate from the melting snow.

Astrup painted this view when the blossom was on the trees, and the meadows were a patchwork of yellow with the first of the summer flowers. Comparing these two paintings reveals a few differences in detail, such as the low fence in the foreground in the lower painting which is omitted in the upper, but by and large Astrup seems to have been very consistent, suggesting that his paintings were true to nature.

Astrup also recorded the public rites of the community, as in his Funeral Day in Jølster (before 1908). With the grandeur of the hills behind, a small party escorts the coffin of one of the villagers. His father, the pastor, leads the procession to the small churchyard – a rite which had taken place many times over the preceding centuries, and which was to continue for more.

Ålhus Church (date not known) is the church for which his father was pastor, and appears to have been in better condition than the parsonage was at this time. There is a large bonfire on the slopes behind, which might have been a part of the celebrations for Midsummer Eve, which was to become a favourite subject for Astrup.

Ålhustunet, Jølster (early 1900s) gives an excellent overall view of the scattered farms which made up the ‘village’ of Ålhus, and shows the river cutting through them on its way down to the lake. This appears to have been painted in the late summer, as the first of the autumn colours are starting to appear.

Astrup painted several nocturnes, some of which are strongly atmospheric, such as Night (before 1908), which shows the dark and vague form of a tree in front of the parsonage in Ålhus.

The Shady Side of the Jølster Parsonage (before 1908) is one of several unusual compositions which Astrup made of buildings, emphasising their perspective projections. This was the house in which he had been brought up, and in which he had begun his career as an artist.

The old parsonage at Ålhus was finally condemned as being insanitary in 1907, and was then demolished. Just before Christmas, Astrup married a fifteen year-old local Jølster girl, Engel Sunde.

Grey Spring Evening (before 1908) is one of Astrup’s finest paintings of Jølster Lake. In its suffuse light, the hill dominating the opposite bank has rich earths and a shallow strip of green fields near the water’s edge. The pale green spring foliage on the trees in the foreground is muted, and a rowing boat out in the middle of the lake seems a tiny speck lost in the midst of nature.

Early in 1908, Astrup visited London for four months, where he frequented the major galleries. He was particularly interested in Constable’s landscapes, which he felt depicted a similar nature to that in western Norway. He later wrote that Constable was “the first landscape painter who understood landscape in colours.”

On his return to Norway, his second solo exhibition opened in Bergen. It was another success, with many of his paintings sold.

By the Open Door (before 1911) is an unusual painting for Astrup, and shows the influence of his former teacher Harriet Backer. It frames a landscape painting within an interior, and features two figures and some tricky reflections on the glass of the door. One of his most technically-demanding works, it demonstrates that beneath his assumed naïvety was considerable technical skill.

If you only remember one of Astrup’s paintings, it should surely be his Foxgloves (1909). Twin birch trees stand out unnaturally in the light at the edge of a dark wood, their leaves shimmering against a defocussed and vague background, with grazing cows. At the foot of the trees are the spindly stalks of foxgloves, their flowers hanging delicately from them. Small rocks are encrusted with rich growths of lichen, completing the gently magical scene.

Astrup was to paint a similar motif in 1920, and to make a series of woodcuts, some of which are almost as rich in detail and colour as this painting.

A Night in Spring (1909) is a nocturne from a series of paintings which Astrup made of these two figures working their small garden by the light of the moon, on the shore of Jølster Lake.

But Astrup’s most enduring and magical series of nocturnes show the celebrations which take place on what may be known as Midsummer Eve, but is actually named Saint John’s Eve, which should be the night prior to the Christian feast day of Saint John the Baptist on 24 June, slightly later than the summer solstice.

Known in Norway as Sankt Hansbål, and shown on the shores of Jølster Lake in Astrup’s St. Hansbål ved Jølstravatnet (c 1909), the occasion is marked by a large bonfire in each community.

At the end of 1910, Astrup was busy preparing his works for his third solo exhibition, which was to open in early 1911 in Oslo.

References

Wikipedia (brief).
Nikolai Astrup research (English and Norwegian).
Astruptunet, the artist’s house and museum (Norwegian with some English).

Carey, Frances, Dejardin, Ian AC, & Stevens, MaryAnne (2016) Painting Norway, Nikolai Astrup 1880-1928, Scala. ISBN 978 1 85759 988 6.

Having considered the consquences of gossip and telling tales about others, Ovid turns in the later sections of Book 2 of his Metamorphoses to consider related sins. He leads into this with a short story about Mercury’s theft of Apollo’s herd of cattle resulting in Battus being turned to stone, then tells the last complete myth in this book, of Mercury’s love for Herse leading to her sister Aglauros suffering the same transformation.

The Story

Apollo has a herd of cattle, but instead of watching them carefully, he has fallen in love and is more interested in playing his reed pipes. The herd wanders off to Pylos, Mercury spots them, and seizes the opportunity to drive them into a wood. The only witness to this is an old man named Battus. Mercury takes him aside and gives him a cow in return for his silence about the theft.

Mercury then goes away, and returns in disguise. He offers Battus a cow and bull if he gives him information about the missing herd. Battus immediately tells him where they are, so Mercury transforms him to stone:
And, laughing, Mercury said,
“Thou treacherous man to me dost thou betray
myself? Dost thou bewray me to myself?”
The god indignant turned his perjured breast
into a stone which even now is called
“The Spy of Pylos,” a disgraceful name,
derived from days of old, but undeserved.

Mercury flies off, to witness the crowds attending the festival of Apollo. Among them, he sees a beautiful young woman, Herse, who takes his fancy. He flies down to her house, which has three bedrooms decorated with ivory and tortoiseshell, for each of the three daughters of Cecrops, Herse, Aglauros, and Pandrosos.

When he arrives at the house, Aglauros is the first to greet him. Mercury explains who he is, and tells her that he has come to visit and marry her sister Herse. Ovid here reminds us that it was Aglauros who had earlier broken Minerva’s instruction to not open the basket containing Ericthonius. As Aglauros now asks Mercury to pay her a fortune to let him in to visit her sister Herse, Minerva sees the opportunity to get revenge on Aglauros by putting envy into her heart.

Mercury now courts Herse, with jealousy brewing in her sister Aglauros’ heart. Aglauros then sits herself outside Herse’s door, and refuses to move to allow Mercury past:
“Enough,” she said, “I will not move from here
until thou hast departed from my sight.”
“Let us adhere to that which was agreed.”
Rejoined the graceful-formed Cyllenian God,
who as he spoke thrust open with a touch
of his compelling wand the carved door.
But when she made an effort to arise,
her thighs felt heavy, rigid and benumbed;
and as she struggled to arise her knees
were stiffened? and her nails turned pale and cold;
her veins grew pallid as the blood congealed.
And even as the dreaded cancer spreads
through all the body, adding to its taint
the flesh uninjured; so, a deadly chill
entered by slow degrees her breast, and stopped
her breathing, and the passages of life.
She did not try to speak, but had she made
an effort to complain there was not left
a passage for her voice. Her neck was changed
to rigid stone, her countenance felt hard;
she sat a bloodless statue, but of stone
not marble-white — her mind had stained it black.

For her obstruction of Mercury, and her festering jealousy, Mercury transforms Aglauros into stone. This leads us into the final section of Book 2, the start of the story of the rape of Europa.

The Paintings

The first brief story of Battus being turned to stone seems to have been little-painted, but that of Mercury, Herse and Aglauros has been quite a popular theme. Sadly, paintings by Poussin, JMW Turner and other major narrative artists seem not to be available as usable images. Perhaps the most famous depiction, by Veronese, is in the Fitzwilliam Museum, in the University of Cambridge, which does not permit free use of its images. You can, though, see the painting here.

Veronese shows Mercury, with his distinctive winged hat, trying to push his way past Aglauros, who is guarding the doorway to Herse. He has altered the composition to place both women in the same room, and does not try to show Aglauros changing into stone.

Huysmans and Quellinus, in their Mercury Turns the Jealous Aglauros into Stone (c 1700), cram the action into the relatively small entrance of their inventive image of the Cecrops house. It is hard to know who is doing what, or to whom, but Mercury appears to be standing inside the threshold, with Aglauros running towards him from outside. Herse sits and watches from a window at the left.

Pierre’s Mercury, Herse and Aglauros of 1763 is much clearer, and devotes the whole of the canvas to the figures and their story. Mercury has just arrived at the right, amid a cloud of smoke. Aglauros is falling at the right, under Mercury’s caduceus, and is presumably in the process of being transformed into stone, although there are no visible signs of that.

Few of the remaining paintings seem intended to show this myth in narrative form. Many simply show Mercury flying near a group of women, presumably the Cecrops sisters, set in a landscape. Jacob Pynas’ Mercury and Herse (c 1618) is a tiny work in oil on copper which does that, and is among the better of the group.

A few show an earlier scene in the narrative, such as Hendrick van Balen the Elder’s Herse and her Sisters with Mercury (c 1600-32). This uses a form of multiplex narrative: at the right, Mercury is seen negotiating his way past Aglauros. The majority of the painting shows the sisters preparing Herse to welcome Mercury in her best sandals and finest clothes.

Overall, I would choose the Veronese for its skilful narrative, and showing the climax of this moralising tale of the envy of Aglauros.

The English translation of Ovid above is taken from Ovid. Metamorphoses. Tr. Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922, at Perseus. I am very grateful to Perseus at Tufts for this.

In the decade to 1930, Paul Nash’s art had come a very long way, and as an art critic for the respected weekly magazine The Listener, and the Week-end Review, he was in a position of influence. In the next eight years, he was to become both a leading practitioner and advocate for modernism and internationalism in art.

Blue House on the Shore (c 1930-31) is set on the French Mediterranean coast, which Nash visited around 1927 and in 1930. It explores the surrealist principle of incongruity, in placing a simple blue building, with contradictory perspective, on a sandy Riviera beach, among fishing boats.

Whiteleaf Cross (1931) may appear unreal, but is quite an accurate depiction of a cruciform hill carving in Whiteleaf Hill near Princes Risborough in Buckinghamshire, not far from Nash’s old family home. On a down set between small woods, a chalk escarpment has been cut with a trench, which extends to the symbol of a cross above. It is late autumn, with trees devoid of leaves, or their foliage a deep brown.

Nash’s watercolour Mansions of the Dead from 1932 is an illustration for an obscure and mystical essay titled Urne Buriall (1658), by Sir Thomas Browne, which concerns itself with death and immortality. Nash also made a second version which was shown at the International Surrealist Exhibition four years later.

Nash described this painting as showing “aerial habitations where the soul like a bird or some such aerial creature roamed at will”. In addition to those ‘souls’, there are regular geometric constructions which resemble bookshelves with a spacious and airy hangar above.

In 1933, Nash, together with Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, and others, founded the Unit One art movement, which started to breathe life back into art in Britain before the Second World War. He also exhibited alongside the works of Jean Arp, Joan Miró, Georges Braque, Max Ernst, Paul Klee, and Pablo Picasso.

In the summer, he visited the neolithic landscapes of Silbury Hill and Avebury, in Wiltshire, England, whose magic and sinister beauty were to inspire him in several works.

In the late autumn, the Nashes went to London, then on a long trip through France to Gibraltar and North Africa. They returned to England the following summer, living in a cottage on the coast of Dorset near Swanage. Paul Nash was promptly invited by John Betjeman to write a guide to Dorset for the popular Shell Guide series. That was published just over a year later, in 1936.

Voyages of the Moon (1934-37) develops ideas which Nash first expressed in a drawing of light bulbs reflected repeatedly in the mirrored walls of a restaurant in Toulon, France. He combines multiple spheres with a forest of vertical rods, which is reminiscent of a lunarium, a form of orrery showing the movements of the moon. This is set inside a spacious hangar or warehouse with high skylights.

Equivalents for the Megaliths (1935) was inspired by the neolithic landscapes of Wiltshire, here the massive standing stones of Avebury in particular. Nash provides rolling downs and ripe grainfields as the basis for this painting. In the distance is a geometric representation of Silbury Hill, and in the foreground are clean and precise modern solids, the more recent equivalents, perhaps, of the standing stones which they appear to have replaced.

In 1936, Nash took part in the first International Surrealist Exhibition in London, showing among other works photocollages and an objet trouvé of a piece of wood retrieved from a stream, as well as several of his paintings. The Nashes moved again in the autumn, this time to a large house in Hampstead, near London. The following year, he had a large solo exhibition at the Redfern Gallery in London, and visited the White Horse hill figure cut into the chalk down at Uffington in Berkshire.

Landscape from a Dream (1936-38) is one of Nash’s most complex and elaborate surrealist paintings, inspired by Freud’s theories of the significance of dreams as reflections of the unconscious. Nash locates this collection of incongruous objects on the Dorset coast, a landscape which he associated with the praeternatural. Dominating the scene is a large framed planar mirror, almost parallel with the picture plane.

Stood at the right end of the mirror is a hawk, which is staring at its own reflection, which Nash explained is a symbol of the material world. To the left, the mirror reflects several floating spheres, which refer to the soul. The reflection shows that behind the viewer, a red sun is setting in a red sky, with another hawk flying high, and away from the scene.

To the right of the hawk is a five-panelled screen which is made of glass, through which the coastal landscape can be seen: it is a screen which does not screen.

Nash’s watercolour Three Rooms of 1937 was a response to the International Surrealist Exhibition of the previous year. The three rooms have become taken over by the sky (top), a forest (middle), and the sea (bottom). The work’s graphic elements are reminiscent of the paintings of William Blake.

Circle of Monoliths (1937-38) is one of a pair of complementary paintings of the same title, which Nash made over the same period. The other (currently in a private collection) shows a similar arrangement of rock-like objects on a coast with cliffs.

What might at first appear to be a collection of completely abstract images turns out to have strong roots in the physical world. Like its companion, the landscape is of chalk cliffs (upper left) and sea, with a large chalk pinnacle just to the right of centre; these are inspired by the coast of Dorset, but made to appear unnatural by their unusual colours.

Two broken ridges run from the foreground into the sea. These are composites of old hedges, stone walls, and the rock spines which are embedded in beaches along the Dorset coast, with occasional trees, again in strange colours. The forms of the larger objects scattered across the pale blue beach are those of rocks and other found objects, which Nash collected. Their surfaces appear to be ‘silvered’ to act as mirrors, and reflect spheres which symbolise the soul.

Nocturnal Landscape (1938) was another response to the International Surrealist Exhibition. Nash populates a sparse desert-like landscape with a collection of incongruous objects. These have their inspiration in forms he saw in nature, and in found objects, At the upper left is a grille, which echoes his earlier geometric forms. The moon’s crescent shape has been distorted, as if bites have been taken from it.

By 1939, as another major war looked imminent, Nash was at the height of his surrealism, and on the threshold of once again becoming a war artist.

References

Wikipedia – an excellent and detailed account.

Chambers, Emma (ed) (2016) Paul Nash, Tate Publishing. ISBN 978 1 84976 491 9.

Tinderbox and Storyspace are different, and serve completely different purposes. Although they share a common file format, as we have seen in my documents containing Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book 1, creating a document in one doesn’t mean that it is necessarily that usable in the other. This article rises to the challenge of creating a single document – with just one copy of the content – which delivers parallel text to both Storyspace and Tinderbox 7 users.

My starting point was the last two versions of this document, one using included text to work well in Storyspace, the other using new Composite notes to work well in Tinderbox.

From those, I wanted to produce one document which would use just one copy of the text and pictures, but offer the reader a choice as to how they are presented. Initially I wondered if it would be possible to determine which app the document was running, but there doesn’t seem to be an accessible attribute for that. In any case, I am strongly in favour of user choice, so would prefer to give the user control over how the text and pictures are presented to them.

My intention is to provide two modes of progression from the title page: one to take Storyspace users through to the chain of included text writing spaces, the other to take Tinderbox users through to the nested chain of Composite notes.

I opened the latter in Tinderbox 7, created a note which was to become the container for the Composite notes, and moved them into that. I then created another note to contain the Storyspace writing spaces, selected those in the Storyspace version of the document, copied and pasted them into their container.

The result is much neater, with all the structured notes tucked away inside their two containers. I also added a note to act as a toggle, to control a user attribute in the me note, $ShowIncludes. When true, this would direct the reader through the Storyspace writing spaces relying on included text; when false, the user would enter the container named tinderbox and be offered the Composite notes there.

Inside the storyspace container, the layout of writing spaces is identical to that in the Storyspace-only version. Each includes text from the individual notes in the Composites within the tinderbox container. That required me to edit the references for these writing spaces to use their new paths, which was a surprisingly quick and simple task.

At the top are the hide/show buttons for the English and Latin versions of the text, which only make sense here, for Storyspace users.

Inside the tinderbox container, everything looks the same as it had been in the Tinderbox-only version. Thankfully when you move notes like this, all the links are properly updated, so there was nothing to be changed in here.

The painting Gallery remained the same, with its text links from and to Composite notes. The problem here is that the return link from each painting goes back to the Composite note in the tinderbox container. I had originally hoped that I would be able to place a condition on that, using the $ShowIncludes attribute of the me note. That would have disabled the link back to the Tinderbox version when the reader was in Storyspace mode.

When working with links, I have edited the document in Storyspace, which contains more extensive support for link surgery such as guards, and where the function of those links is also more critical.

The best solution for the return links from paintings was thus to provide two text links, one to the referring note for those following the Composite path in Tinderbox, the other to the referring writing space for those following the included text in Storyspace. This has built-in forgiveness: if a reader clicks on the wrong link, they can immediately return to the painting and use the correct one.

While the document was open in Storyspace, I took the opportunity of checking all the links. This showed that, almost certainly the result of operator error, I had doubled up many of the default links taking the reader through the Storyspace version, so I deleted those duplicates.

I also had to set up the most important links of all, the Sharks guarded on the value of the $ShowIncludes attribute leading on from the title. Unfortunately both lead to a writing space / note named Invocation, although those are in different containers. Adding the guard in Storyspace was straightforward.

Where link destinations have the same name, it is simplest to add and guard the links one at a time.

At the end of this process, the document worked as expected whether opened in Storyspace or Tinderbox, according to the setting of the $ShowIncludes attribute chosen by the user. However, my Storyspace options for showing Latin and English text were not working correctly, with the English text always appearing no matter what the setting.

It transpired that, somewhere in the process of combining the content from the two documents, the prototype for the parallel text writing spaces had gained an OnVisit action which kept changing this setting. This highlights the importance, when working with content from different documents, of checking these hidden details. As soon as I had corrected that prototype, the reader’s choice functioned properly again.

The overall size of the document has increased only very slightly. It seems to work well in Storyspace and Storyspace Reader 3.3, and Tinderbox 7.0.1, and it is here for you to download and try for yourself: Ovid Metamorphoses Book 1 for Tinderbox and Storyspace

Having worked with it for some hours now, I can see that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. For users with both apps, they can add notes and commentary to the Tinderbox Composite notes, for example when studying the text. Opening it in Storyspace still allows them the benefit of uncluttered parallel text which they can configure as they wish. I think the end result is well worth the slight greater effort.

Early in 1911, Nikolai Astrup (1880–1928) had his third solo exhibition, this time in Oslo. After his previous runaway successes, he was perhaps a little disappointed that some critics were less enthusiastic than before. This fuelled his self-doubt, and he used the support of a travelling scholarship to study in Berlin.

Berlin was at the height of the Secession at the time, and while he was there, Astrup studied the works of major contemporary painters including Henri Matisse, Max Slevogt, and of course Lovis Corinth. He also spent some time in a private art school, but later wrote that Corinth and the ‘other professors’ were of no help to his development.

Astrup’s time in Berlin led to more experimentation in his painting, including the use of strident colour and more complex perspective. Moonlight at Hegrenes (c 1911) marks the start of these changes, with its light orange moon glimpsed through the trees, its reflection broken on the lake beyond the village.

Although Rabarbra (Rhubarb) (1911) has more muted colours, its projection is complex, and the distinctive fell in the background has no aerial perspective, bringing it closer to the viewer. This also must be one of the first paintings to show the cutting* of rhubarb stems in a garden, which appears to be similar to the patch seen being worked in his A Night in Spring (1909).

Rhubarb was originally grown for the medicinal properties of its root, and at the time of Marco Polo was one of the more costly imports to Europe. When sugar was hard to come by, its bitter stems were seldom used for cooking. This changed in the eighteenth century, and as sugar became more plentiful, rhubarb stems were first a delicacy, then a popular crop in kitchen gardens throughout Europe and America.

The Astrups’ first child, a daughter, was born in 1911, and the family moved over to the other (south) shore of Jølster Lake, to live in Myklebust. In early 1912, some of his paintings were exhibited in Vienna.

Jonsokbål (1912) is one of the finest of his paintings of the Midsummer Eve celebrations. It has now grown quite dark, and this bonfire is well back from the lake shore, where the land is rough, and rising into the hills. Clumps of flames are shown breaking away from the main column of fire, as if they have a life of their own. The event has become more magical, reverting to its pagan origins, perhaps.

In 1913, the Astrup family had to move from Myklebust along the south shore of Jølster Lake to Sandalstrand. They had bought a smallholding there, but it lacked suitable accommodation and a studio, which they had to build over subsequent years.

A Bird on a Stone (1913) is a motif which probably originated in his painting March Atmosphere at Jølstravatnet (before 1908), with which it has many similarities, although that earlier painting shows a slightly different background, and lacks the greenery in the foreground of this painting. Astrup then turned that into at least two different woodcuts, with a strong element of japonisme.

Following success with woodcuts, Astrup quite often revisited his original painting, and made a new version of the painting which was derived more from the print than the original painting. He followed this unusual sequence with several other motifs, including Going to the Mill (c 1900-05) which became the painting Milling Weather (1916), which is reversed from the original, and Foxgloves (1909).

Summer and Playing Children (1913) shows how his more familiar motifs were being expressed with looser brushstrokes during this period.

In 1914, the Astrups’ second child was born, a boy. Nikolai started making woodcuts more seriously, and in greater quantity.

Astrup’s experiments with strident colour and sketchy facture reached their peak in this, The White Horse in Spring (1914-15). In parts his application of paint has become so thin as to miss areas of canvas altogether. The white horse is echoed in the blossom of the trees opposite, and a figure in red who is descending the hill becomes a brief daub of contrasting hue.

Astrup’s work was exhibited in Gothenburg and Copenhagen, and in the Norway section of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, in San Francisco.

Few of his woodcut prints can be dated particularly precisely, so I will show most in a later article, out of chronological sequence. However, Christmas Eve at Sandalstrand seems to have been confidently dated to 1918, and shows his wife and young son asleep in their home.

His prints were clearly influencing his painting style at this time, too. Kari – Motif from Sunde (c 1918) shows an elfin figure of a girl who has been painted as if in an illustration, or perhaps one of Carl Larsson’s popular albums.

Birthday in the Parsonage Garden (1911-27) is one of Astrup’s most personal paintings, which he started in 1911 and continued to work on for the rest of his life. It shows what must have been one of the last of the family gatherings in the garden of the parsonage at Ålhus, and the scene and its figures were his visual link to his past.

It too adopts an almost illustrative style, which has been compared to the work of Carl Larsson and Maurice Denis. Larsson was a commercially-successful Swedish artist whose paintings were published in the period 1899-1920 in albums such as A Home, which sold very well throughout the Nordic countries and in Germany.

Self-Portrait at Sandalstrand with Engel and Her Sister (1919) gives another glimpse into Astrup’s personal life. Here he sits, puffing on his pipe and staring into the distance. Deeper into the painting, Engel, his young wife, is nursing another baby at her breast. At the right, dressed in blue and clearly at a great distance from the world around her, is Engel’s sister.

However, that image of tranquillity in the landscape was idealised. Astrup’s health had not been good, and he was clearly unhappy. In 1919, he had to postpone indefinitely plans to travel abroad using a travel grant. For a while, he seriously considered emigrating to the US.

* An anonymous reader points out that you do not “cut” rhubarb but “pull” it.

References

Wikipedia (brief).
Nikolai Astrup research (English and Norwegian).
Astruptunet, the artist’s house and museum (Norwegian with some English).

Carey, Frances, Dejardin, Ian AC, & Stevens, MaryAnne (2016) Painting Norway, Nikolai Astrup 1880-1928, Scala. ISBN 978 1 85759 988 6.

There are plenty of good reasons for wanting to record accurately-timed events in an app which you use. You may need records so that you can bill clients according to time spent on certain activities. You might be investigating a bug or error in a script. This article explores an easy way of instrumenting documents in Tinderbox and Storyspace to record and analyse user actions in great detail.

This scenario supposes that you have authored a Tinderbox or Storyspace document, and want to test it with users. You want to examine which notes (or writing spaces) the user visits, in which order, and how long they dwell on each. It is simple to do this, using two free tools available from here, together with a spreadsheet or other app to analyse the results.

What you need

• macOS Sierra, preferably the current version. This uses log features which are not available on El Capitan or earlier.
• Consolation version 2, the latest release, from the Downloads item in the menu above. This does not work with version 1.
• Blowhole, the latest release, from the Downloads item in the menu above.
• Storyspace and/or Tinderbox. I have tested this with Storyspace 3.3 and Tinderbox 7.0.1. Previous versions may also work.
• Microsoft Excel, Apple’s Numbers, or another app capable of importing CSV files.
• My Fall of Icarus document, available here: FallOfIcarus2 or you can create your own using this tutorial.

To run the full demonstration, including browsing the document and data analysis, should take less than an hour from scratch.

Setting up

First install Blowhole using the Installer package supplied. If you have problems with that, you can manually install it from Terminal’s command line, in /usr/local/bin. You’ll need root privileges to do that, so the command will be prefaced by sudo. Blowhole has a simple text readme file which explains what it does. It can only be run from the command line, or in scripts calling it as a command, and has no other user interface.

Move Consolation to the folder in which you keep apps, normally the main Applications folder.

Principles

The example document is an old tutorial project from this blog, which looks at paintings telling the story of Daedalus and Icarus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. You can use any Storyspace or Tinderbox document in which you can run a macOS terminal command using a script such as
runCommand("/usr/local/bin/blowhole -s "+$myID)
where $myID is an attribute with a numeric value. You could alternatively hard-code numbers, such as in
runCommand("/usr/local/bin/blowhole -s 42")

macOS Sierra incorporates a new and very high-performance log system which can record entries with a resolution of a nanosecond, and an accuracy of around 10 microseconds. It is also used to coping with very high volumes of traffic: it is usual for thousands of entries to be made in the log every minute. Adding a few of your own is not going to affect macOS in the slightest.

Blowhole is a simple command tool which does one job when it is run: it writes an entry into Sierra’s new log. Your Tinderbox/Storyspace document can thus make custom log entries automatically, using a script.

Although Sierra’s new log is enormously capable and powerful, retrieving entries from it has been very difficult. Over the last few weeks I have developed a free tool, Consolation, which does just that. What is more, it can now process log entries into a form which can be imported into many apps such as spreadsheets, in which you can analyse those entries.

Instrumenting a Tinderbox/Storyspace document

Every note (writing space) in Tinderbox/Storyspace has a unique integer ID which is accessible as the read-only attribute $ID. However it is a large number, and somewhere between that and the log it gets mutilated, so it is better to label the notes that you want to track with a smaller number of your own. This is easily done by creating a user attribute which I have called somewhat unimaginatively $myID.

This is best done in the prototype of the notes which you want to track, making that a key attribute for that prototype. In my case, I have set it for the prototype for notes containing text, and that for paintings. Ensure that this attribute is a number, and make it sequential: Tinderbox/Storyspace will then automatically assign a unique number to each note made from those prototypes.

The next task is to build in a script which will call Blowhole to write a note’s number out to the log at an appropriate moment. In Storyspace, this is simple: again setting this for each prototype to be tracked, add an OnVisit action reading
runCommand("/usr/local/bin/blowhole -s "+$myID)

Although Tinderbox does not expose this attribute in the same way, you can still set the $OnVisit attribute with that script, and it is still honoured and run when the note is selected.

Now each note with a $myID value and that OnVisit script will trigger the script, which calls Blowhole to make an entry in the log whenever you select or enter it.

You could equally write a different number to the log for a different purpose: provided that you pass an integer value in the same way, Blowhole should write that into the log whenever that script is run.

Testing it out

Having saved your document, or using the Fall of Icarus hypertext provided, it is time to test the system out. In Tinderbox or Storyspace, open that document, making a note of the clock time on your computer when you do so. You will use that later to narrow the period over which you will extract log entries.

Now browse the document, and work through it at a steady pace, as if using it normally. Once you have finished, close the document, and open Consolation.

When Consolation starts up, it usually does so without opening any windows. Use the New command in the File menu to open a new window.

Set the controls up similarly to this:

• On the top line Filter, select the radio button for pattern (below). This sets the app to filter log entries according to the predicate which you are going to set up in the line below those three radio buttons.
• On the next line with popup menus, set the first popup to subsystem, leave the next at ==, and type in co.eclecticlight.blowhole in the text box as shown. This will select only those log entries which come from Blowhole, as determined by its app signature.
• Further down, on the line Style, ensure that the default settings are set, with the radio button set to syslog, and the box to include info messages is checked (ticked).
• Further down again, on the line Period, set the number next to that to 0 (zero) and press the Tab or Return key to confirm that (if you don’t, the change from 2 will not be recognised).
• On that same line, edit the Start time to slightly before that when you started testing the document out. Ensure you enter it in HH:MM:SS format, using the 24-hour clock. The End time is set automatically when you open the window, and should therefore be well after you finished using the document.

Check those settings against those above, and click the Run command button. After a brief pause, the bottom two text areas should contain output text. The first (on grey) shows the command which Consolation submitted, and is here for interest only. The bottom scrolling panel should show the log entries during your short test, in a format similar to that shown above.

The log format used here is concise but not sufficiently detailed for further analysis. To export the log extract for another app to use, you must change the Style setting from syslog to json. Do that now, and without altering any of the other controls, click the Run command button again.

The bottom scrolling text panel should now be filled with more copious entries in standard JSON format, which is harder to read. However, the button to the right of the Run command button will now have changed from N/A to Export. To export your log extract in CSV format, click that button.

The contents of the bottom text panel are transformed to the lines of CSV data ready to import into Excel or whatever. Save these to a text file using the Save command in the File menu.

The final step is to import that text file into Microsoft Excel, or whatever you are going to use for data analysis. Here I will take you through the steps for import into Excel, which shows the principles involved. If you want to import the data into Apple’s Numbers, you must rename the text file with the extension .csv instead of .text for it to recognise its content properly, although that makes little difference to Excel.

Open Excel, let it open a new blank spreadsheet, and use the Import command in the File menu to select and open the text file saved from Consolation. Excel will then step you through its Import Wizard. In most of this, you can leave the options set to the defaults, but there are two important steps which are slightly different.

The file exported by Consolation is traditional CSV, which separates the values using a comma delimiter. When Excel offers to use Tab delimiters, uncheck the Tab option and check the Comma.

The other non-default option is to ensure that Excel imports the timestamp column as Text and not General. If it tries the latter, it is likely to get a little too smart for itself, and make a mess of converting those time values into times.

The data exported from the logs are very extensive, and most of the columns are of no interest to you. I have here deleted all the others, leaving just the datestamp, timestamp, machTimestamp, and eventMessage.

The first two of these should be self-evident. The very large integers given in machTimestamp are system ticks, which are in nanoseconds – there are a billion (thousand million) for every second. Dividing them by 10^9 converts to decimal seconds. The eventMessage is the number which Tinderbox/Storyspace wrote to the log, in my case the value of $myID. It is then easy to work out, for example, how long you spent reading or looking at each of the notes, according to the note numbers.

How precise are the times given?

There is inevitably a small time lag between your selecting a new note, and the time of that action being entered into the log. One way to get an estimate of that is to call the script invoking Blowhole repeatedly, and to work out the time that each call takes, as that should account for most of the lag.

Using this script, I got Storyspace to write five consecutive log entries for one visit. Typically, the lag time between those calls ranged from 0.04 to 0.1 second, with most around 0.04 to 0.05 seconds. So you should expect the log times to be accurate to better than 0.1 second. Unless you are trying to measure response or reaction times, I think those are quite sufficient for anything that you might want to use this system for.

Blowhole also has a command option for it to write a series of log entries out as quickly as possible. Testing on this iMac shows that the fastest response times are less than 15 microseconds, and typically around 2-3 microseconds: Sierra’s new logs are very quick in use indeed!

Further information

Consolation does a great deal more with your logs, and its documentation explains some of the other things that you can do with it.

Currently, Blowhole can only write integer numbers to the log, because of limitations in the new log system and a bug (not in Blowhole) which prevents it from passing arbitrary strings of text. When those are fixed, it should be able to write much more informative entries too.

Rights

Consolation and Blowhole are free to use, and free to distribute for non-commercial purposes. You are also welcome to use them in commercial environments for testing, etc. However if you wish to supply either or both as part of a commercial arrangement (one in which you are paid), please contact me first.

I hope that you find them useful.