The final myth in Book 2 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is told very briefly – in less than thirty lines of Latin – and ends part way through the story. This is the famous rape of Europa, although here Ovid only tells us of her abduction, another of Jupiter’s adulterous acts.

The Story

This time, Jupiter assumes the appearance of a white bull, placed among a herd which is visited by Europa and her companions:
Jove laid aside his glorious dignity,
for he assumed the semblance of a bull
and mingled with the bullocks in the groves,
his colour white as virgin snow, untrod,
unmelted by the watery Southern Wind.
His neck was thick with muscles, dewlaps hung
between his shoulders; and his polished horns,
so small and beautifully set, appeared
the artifice of man; fashioned as fair
and more transparent than a lucent gem.
His forehead was not lowered for attack,
nor was there fury in his open eyes;
the love of peace was in his countenance.

Europa falls for his trap, and befriends the white bull:
When she beheld his beauty and mild eyes,
the daughter of Agenor was amazed;
but, daring not to touch him, stood apart
until her virgin fears were quieted;
then, near him, fragrant flowers in her hand
she offered,—tempting, to his gentle mouth:
and then the loving god in his great joy
kissed her sweet hands, and could not wait her will.
Jove then began to frisk upon the grass,
or laid his snow-white side on the smooth sand,
yellow and golden. As her courage grew
he gave his breast one moment for caress,
or bent his head for garlands newly made,
wreathed for his polished horns.

Once she sits upon him, Jupiter edges to the nearby shore, then suddenly whisks her off across the Mediterranean:
The royal maid,
unwitting what she did, at length sat down
upon the bull’s broad back. Then by degrees
the god moved from the land and from the shore,
and placed his feet, that seemed but shining hoofs,
in shallow water by the sandy merge;
and not a moment resting bore her thence,
across the surface of the Middle Sea,
while she affrighted gazed upon the shore—
so fast receding. And she held his horn
with her right hand, and, steadied by the left,
held on his ample back—and in the breeze
her waving garments fluttered as they went.

Jupiter (the white bull) takes Europa off to Crete, where he rapes her. For Ovid, this is a cliffhanger ending to the book which leads the reader into the start of Book 3. He gives a fuller account of this myth elsewhere (in his Fasti), as do many other classical authors.

Even in this succinct summary of the abduction phase, there are some key facts: Jupiter masquerades as a white bull, and lures Europa to sit on his back. When she does, he edges to the water, and suddenly bolts over the sea. These are common to most of the other accounts of this myth.

The Paintings

The abduction of Europa has long been one of the most popular stories for paintings, and innumerable artists have painted its scenes. Many of those are superb paintings, but only a few have made serious attempts to tell this story faithfully to the myth. Doing so requires two actors: Europa, a fair maiden, and a white bull, which the viewer must recognise as Jupiter in disguise.

Titian’s glorious The Rape of Europa of 1560-62 is one of his best-known paintings, and can be seen today in two copies, this larger one in Boston, and a smaller version in the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. These show an unmistakeable Europa on the back of a white bull, which is just starting to bolt out to sea. Europa is not sat astride the bull, but reclines in a manner which anticipates her fate on Crete.

Over sixty years later, in 1628-29, Rubens made a copy which is rightly as famous as the two Titians, in his The Rape of Europa, which is now in rather better condition than Titian’s originals, and one of the treasures of the Prado in Madrid.

The snag with the Titians and Rubens’ copy is that they assume the viewer will recognise the scene, and know that the white bull is actually Jupiter. I also struggle with their use of Cupids, when Europa was not seduced, but abducted and raped.

Rembrandt’s The Abduction of Europa (1632) is almost contemporary with Rubens’ copy, and not one of his better-known works. It conforms to the version in Metamorphoses, but loses dramatic effect by placing the bolting bull in a much larger (and very Dutch) landscape, dominated by Europa’s carriage, large trees, and a distant port. There is also nothing to tell the viewer that this bull is actually the king of the gods.

Tiepolo’s The Rape of Europa (c 1725), a century after Rembrandt’s, not only dilutes its story in excessive ornamental figures, but shows an earlier moment, before Europa has started to make her acquaintance with the white bull. But it does introduce a new and valuable device: on the cliff above Europa is a black eagle, signifying Jupiter’s presence.

Surprisingly few painters felt it necessary to include an eagle in their paintings of Europa. François Boucher’s The Rape of Europa (1732-34) is one which does this favour to the viewer, although he seems to have ignored the fact that the bull was white. Boucher’s voluptuously decorative flowers, Cupids, and scantily-clad maidens may be typical of the Rococo, but seem wholly inappropriate to this story.

A few years later, Jean-Baptiste Marie Pierre painted his The Rape of Europa (1750), which at least advances the story to the point where the bull is accelerating away from the shore. Under the glowering eyes of the eagle, the floral romp of accessory figures is being dispersed in disarray. And, like Boucher, Pierre does not show us the white bull which we had come to expect.

There are dozens of other fine paintings of this myth which fall more significantly short of telling its story. For without a white bull and a visual clue that this is not just a bull, they could just be depicting a beautiful bird on the back of a bolting bull, couldn’t they? As for me, I’ll stick with the Titian/Rubens, which convey Ovid’s words better than any other.

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.

Flower gardens have long been favourite motifs for painters. Long before the Impressionists, artists have painted flowers for their exuberant colour and varied textures. But flower gardens have, over much of that time, been the preserve of the rich. Rural cottages might have fronted a display of semi-wild flowers, but the serious garden has been devoted primarily to vegetables, which pass through the kitchen and onto the table to feed the family.

This article looks at some paintings of vegetable gardens: far less glamorous, occasionally quite exotic, and essential to survival.

Vegetables have, of course, been frequently included in still life paintings. Some of Chardin’s appear to explain how to make a good vegetable soup, for instance.

Among his many flower paintings, Charles Demuth also painted fruit and vegetables, of which the Eggplant (c 1922-23), or aubergine, was a clear favourite. As with asparagus, another favourite in still life paintings, few families sit down to enjoy such special vegetables.

Several artists have had peccadillos for particular vegetables: for Carlo Crivelli, it was cucumbers, with which he decorated his many otherwise fairly conventional paintings of the Virgin and Child. There have been plenty, though, who have made successful motifs from the vegetable garden, most particularly during the nineteenth century.

Sisley’s fog-cloaked flowerbed in the foreground is a small patch of colour in this garden. The woman working away is not tending her nasturtiums, but toiling away at what will, in a few months time, be carefully prepared and cooked in her kitchen.

George Clausen’s gardeners are preparing the soil on a frosty morning in March. As they live in a town, they have to work surrogate plots in allotments, small portions of land unsuitable for dwellings, or (in this case) divided from fields at the edge of the town. For many living in towns and cities, a trip to the family allotment was the closest they would get to going to the country – a brief retreat to escape the concrete and tarmac, and dream of living in more pastoral places. Even small allotments were often decisive to a family’s food supply.

Whereas Clausen enjoyed his gardening, for Gustave Caillebotte it became his life, an obsession. He painted the large vegetable gardens which fed the estates of the rich, as in The Gardeners (1875).

In 1888, when he moved out to his modest estate at Petit-Gennevilliers near Argenteuil, Caillebotte almost stopped painting to free up time for The Kitchen Garden, Petit Gennevilliers (1882), as well as his flowers and other garden landscapes.

Back in the more everyday, Emil Jakob Schindler shows a more typical rural Vegetable garden in Plankenberg in September (1885).

In the more extreme climates of the Nordic countries, vegetable gardens remained essential to nutrition and life. Nikolai Astrup shows a couple probably sowing their small patch in western Norway on A Night in Spring (1909).

Then late in the summer, they come to harvest that most unglamorous of crops, Rhubarb (1911).

Lovis Corinth found a vegetable garden beside Walchensee, up in the Bavarian Alps, which he painted in 1924, just a year before his death.

The production of vegetables was also more organised across villages and small communities, which used larger areas and fields to grow sufficient to subsist, and maybe even a surplus to barter or sell.

Asai Chū’s Spring Ridge 春畝 浅井忠筆 (1889) shows a gang at work in a field at the start of the growing season. For staple root-crops, such as potatoes, this practice was widespread, and a popular subject for social realist artists in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Most of those left in the country were condemned to working from dawn to dusk in a back-breaking effort to save themselves from starvation. Jean-François Millet and others showed this more accurate picture in Potato Planters (c 1861).

What was sown or planted then has to be harvested, as in Jules Bastien-Lepage’s October: Potato Gatherers (1878). Although there are still smiles, those potatoes were all that kept those families from starvation through the coming winter.

Vincent van Gogh painted Woman Lifting Potatoes (1885) and similar scenes during his time in Nuenen, in North Brabant.

János Pentelei Molnár’s The Potato Harvest (1901) takes this on into the early years of the twentieth century, in Hungary.

Across Europe, different crops brought similar scenes: here is Émile Claus’s The Beet Harvest (1890) in Belgium.

Leon Wyczółkowski’s Beetroot Digging II (1911) shows a similar scene in Poland, before the First World War.

If the flower garden was the place for social gatherings and relationships, more everyday events occurred among the cabbages.

Jean-François Millet’s First Steps (c 1858) shows one of the early milestones in a child’s life, as an infant is about to break free from mother’s arms and walk for the first time towards their father’s.

The vegetable garden is also where we learn much about life – about the birds and the bees, of cabbages and kings. Aimé Perret captures this beautifully in her The Lettuce Patch (1893).

The vegetables which are surplus can also be sold on at a market. There are many paintings of conventional European markets, but none is a match for Christian Henri Roullier’s The Vegetable Souk, from the early twentieth century.

No article about vegetables and paintings can conclude without at least one of Arcimboldo’s unique portraits.

This is perhaps his most famous, but he also made a painting which is even more relevant to this article: The Vegetable Gardener (1587-90).

Which all goes to show that we are what we eat.

Not far from the White House, in the President’s Park, Washington D.C., is a large fountain intended to provide drinking water for the horses used by the patrols of the park police. The Butts-Millet Memorial Fountain commemorates two close associates of President Taft: Archibald Butt, his military aide, and Francis Davis Millet, a journalist and painter, who lived together, and died in the sinking of the RMS Titanic on 15 April 1912.

Millet had been a central figure in American fine arts. A trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a member of the advisory committe for the National Gallery of Art, a co-founder of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, deeply involved with the American Academy in Rome, and a founding member of the US Commission of the Fine Arts, there seemed little in the East Coast art establishment that he was not involved with.

He has today largely been forgotten as a painter. Working in mid-century Salon style, he was detached from the dramatic changes which took place in American art in the late nineteenth century. He did, though, paint some wonderful works, including many scenes from classical history and mythology. As an eminent classicist of the day, his motifs were sometimes unusual, and his style comparable to that of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, working over in the UK.

Millet’s Reading the Story of Oenone (c 1883) seems at first sight to have followed the drift into the Aesthetic Movement which was popular in Europe at the time. Four beautiful women in classical robes appear to be engaged in a little dolce far niente, doing sweet nothing. That is hardly an explanation, though: three of them are certainly involved in the reading out loud of an obscure story. So who was this Oenone, and what about her story could possibly be worth reading aloud in this way?

Œnone or Oinone, to be pedantic over her name, was the first wife of Paris (or Alexander), son of King Priam of Troy, who also remains famous for the Judgement of Paris, and his central role in bringing about the Trojan War, and its consequences.

Look her up in Homer, or other early sources on the history/mythology of Troy, and you will find no trace of either her name or her supposed role. Her story is not fully recounted until the compilation of the Bibliotheca by (Pseudo-)Apollodorus some time between about 50 BCE and 150 CE: more than 500 years after Homer.

Oenone was an Oread – a mountain nymph – near Mount Ida, the peak to the southeast of Troy. Paris was abandoned as a baby there, because of dire predictions that he would bring doom to the city of Troy, but was rescued and brought up by local shepherds. When he was living there as a shepherd, the young Paris met and fell in love with Oenone, who then lived together as husband and wife, raising a son, Corythus.

Claude Lorrain’s Landscape with Paris and Oenone, also known as The Ford, of 1648 shows the family living with their livestock in the countryside, with the city of Troy in the distance. In reality, if the modern location of the ruins of Troy is reasonably accurate, those lofty walls and towers should be twenty miles away, over the horizon.

This superb landscape was painted by Claude as a pendant to his Ulysses Returns Chryseis her Father.

One consistent detail which is given in accounts of Paris and Oenone’s relationship, is that he carved her name on the trunk of many trees, as a mark of his love for her. Ovid expresses this in his imaginary letter from Oenone to Paris (after their relationship had ended):
The beech-trees still hold my name with your carving,
And I read “Oenone,” written by your blade.
And as much as those trunks grow, so much my name increases.
Rise up, and grow straight with my glory!
Poplar, live, I pray, planted by the river bank
With, in your furrowed bark, this verse:
“If Paris can still draw breath when he has abandoned Oenone,
Then the waters of the Xanthus shall flow back toward their source.”

Ovid also claims here that Paris inscribed a poplar tree with the prophesy that, should Paris ever leave Oenone while they were both alive, the waters of the river Xanthus would flow backwards, i.e. that is impossible.

Therefore one distinctive feature of most paintings which depict Paris with Oenone is an inscription carved into a tree trunk. In Reyer Jacobsz van Blommendael’s Paris and Oenone (c 1655), Paris appears to be reading one to Oenone.

Jacob de Wit was even more explicit in his Paris and Oenone of 1737, where the lovers, suitably accompanied by a couple of amorini and their flock of sheep, recline by a trunk so inscribed.

Even in classical times, it was apparently common practice for lovers to carve the name of their partner into the bark of a tree trunk to mark their love. It is quite possible that accounts of Paris doing this ensured that the practice was propagated through the Middle Ages, and into the Renaissance.

The couple’s physical relationship was also celebrated as being particularly intense. Here Adriaen van der Werff’s Amorous Couple in a Park Spied upon by Children, or Paris and Oenone, of 1694 makes that clear. As a shepherd, Paris went everywhere with his pipes, here depicted as an instrument resembling a modern recorder.

Oenone had two great strengths apart from her beauty: she prophesied the future, and was able to heal sickness and injury. She foresaw that Paris would abandon her, and that he would bring destruction to the city of Troy – the second such prediction.

When their son Corythus was still young, the gods chose Paris as the judge of the beauty contest which is now known as the Judgement of Paris, one of the most popular mythological subjects for paintings. In the course of that, Paris either seduced or abducted Helen (‘the face that launched a thousand ships’), and returned with her to Troy, where he was restored as King Priam’s heir and the prince of that city. Oenone was now abandoned with her son, which was the scenario envisaged in Ovid’s fictional letter.

During and after the Renaissance, Ovid’s Heroides were extremely popular. Robinet Testard’s beautiful illustrative miniature for a translation made by Octavien de Saint-Gelais in about 1520 shows Oenone (fictionally) writing the letter which Ovid published in around 20 BCE.

Oenone’s role in history/myth was not over, though. Late in the Trojan War, Paris was severely wounded by a poisoned arrow from Philoctetes. Helen (or Paris himself, perhaps) then left the city and travelled to the slopes of Mount Ida, where she found Oenone and pleaded that she returned with her to heal Paris of his wounds. Oenone refused.

This story was set as the subject for the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1816. Although Léon Cogniet did not win it that year, his painting of Oenone Refuses to Rescue Paris at the Siege of Troy (1816) is one of the few surviving works which depicts this scene.

After this refusal, Oenone was overcome with remorse, and changed her mind. However, by the time she had returned to Paris, he was already dead. In her grief, Oenone committed suicide, perhaps by throwing herself on Paris’s funeral pyre.

Millet would probably have been aware of this story, and familiar with Ovid’s account in Heroides. But why should he paint not Oenone herself, but a group of women responding to a reading of her story?

I think the answer lies in Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who wrote two poems about Oenone. The first in 1829 was slated by the critics, and he revised it. However, Millet’s painting is dated from about 1883, well before Tennyson wrote his second version in 1892, the year of his death.

It’s amazing how much history and mythology there can be in a single water fountain. I wonder how many of the current incumbents of the White House know the full story of the memorial just outside – of Butt and Millet, Tennyson, and the link right back to Oenone and the fall of Troy?

References

Wikipedia on Oenone.
Wikipedia on Frank Millet.
Wikipedia on the Butt-Millet Memorial Fountain.

Credit

The excerpt from Ovid’s Heroides letter 5 is taken from the English translation by James M Hunter, published here. Its use is acknowledged with gratitude.

Shortly before the Second World War began in 1939, while Paul Nash was at the height of his surrealism, the Nashes moved from London to Oxford. He was then appointed to a full-time war artist post for the Royal Air Force, which had hoped that he would spend his time painting portraits of aircrew. Nash had other ideas, though.

London: Winter Scene, No. 2 is one of several views which Nash painted early in 1940, of snowy conditions seen from his room in the Cumberland Hotel, near Marble Arch, London.

Nash quickly developed a fascination for the wreckage of aircraft which had crashed. Bomber in the Corn (1940) is one of six paintings known as the ‘Raiders’ series, which he started in the summer of 1940. These developed his initial idea of the aircraft being monsters which had left their natural element of the air. Each of the wrecks took on an individual personality, which Nash’s watercolours explored, using surrealist techniques such as the juxtaposition of the incongruous and improbable.

In his Totes Meer (German for Dead Sea) (1940-41), Nash transformed the sight of a dump of wrecked aircraft at Cowley, near Oxford, into a vision of the Dead Sea with waves created by a storm, but frozen at an instant in time. Working mainly from photographs which he took during a visit to the dump, he created one of the most original images of this phase of the war.

He explained: “The thing looked to me suddenly, like a great inundating sea … the breakers rearing up and crashing on the plain. And then, no: nothing moves, it is not water or even ice, it is something static and dead.”

From the end of June 1940 for four months, the German Luftwaffe (Air Force) and the British Royal Air Force fought a succession of intense air battles over the UK, mainly the south and east coastal areas. The startling distant view in Nash’s Battle of Britain (1941) incorporates many elements of air warfare, including vapour trails (contrails), smoke marking the spin and crash of a downed aircraft, formation flight, and defensive airships. Below this action are the low hills, estuary, and a winding river typical of much of the English south coast.

By emphasising the forms and patterns made in the sky, as seen from high above the ground, Nash increases the distance from this air war, detaching the story of the battle from the people involved.

By the end of 1940, the RAF had become sufficiently displeased with Nash’s paintings for them that his contract was terminated. Early the following year, a compromise was reached in which his paintings would be purchased as he made them. But the artist’s health was deteriorating, and he suffered a period of creative block. He submitted several collages which he thought might be used in propaganda, but they did not do so.

Nash appears to have started work on his Pillar and Moon in 1932, but did not complete it until well into the war, probably in 1942. Using an idealised landscape, he draws comparison between two spheres, perhaps using them again as symbolic references to the soul. That on top of the stone column is solid, close, and tangible, while its counterpart the moon is far distant and intangible.

The artist wrote that this was a “mystical association of two objects which inhabit different elements and have no apparent relation in life”. His use of the geometrical projection of the long row of trees gives the painting great depth, which combines with its nocturnal hues and lifelessness to produce an effect of sombre eeriness.

Using another aerial location, Nash’s Defence of Albion (1942) shows a Sunderland ‘flying boat’ operating in rough seas off the Portland, Dorset, coast; cues for the location are given by the large blocks of limestone from the quarries in the distance. Among the duties of these aircraft were anti-submarine patrols, and part of a German U-boat is shown in the right foreground to emphasise this (in an unreal composite).

Once again Nash distances the viewer from any human elements by concentrating on the machinery of war. He experienced great difficulties in completing this painting due to his worsening asthma. He had originally hoped to travel to the coast to take photographs and make sketches, but was unable to do so. From 1942, Nash spent periods convalescing with the artist Hilda Harrison in Boar’s Hill, overlooking Oxford from the south west.

Oxford During the War (1942) is a quietly apocalyptic vision from the fields at Boar’s Hill, looking towards the dreaming spires of the university city of Oxford. In the foreground, tanks are being driven up the hill, one bearing a pennant which may refer to the local golf course. On the other side of the meadows surrounding the city are two large clouds of white smoke which indicate the impact of aerial bombing.

In the sky above the spires, to the left, marked out clearly against the white cumulus cloud, are some bomber aircraft. The foliage is autumnal, and the sky a military grey, and light pink.

From Hilda Harrison’s house on Boar’s Hill, Nash could also see a landscape which he had first painted when he was young: this inspired his last series of paintings, some of which are his most brilliant.

References

Wikipedia – an excellent and detailed account.

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

By 1920, Nikolai Astrup had met with considerable critical success and acclaim, but it had not brought him financial security, better health, or stability. The huge changes in art taking place outside Norway did not help. Responding to the growing popularity of Cubism and modernism, he wrote in 1920:
At the moment I am only interested in beautifying my surroundings to the best of my modest abilities.

The Parsonage Garden is undated and may be from before 1920, as it shows his earlier style. In the 1920s he broke free of that, modulating his later strident colour and looseness to a magical realism – just as he had moved out from the parsonage into his own world at Sandalstrand. He continued to produce prints, and in early 1920 exhibited some with the Bergen Art Assocation.

March Morning (c 1920) is a good example of how he used those prints to inform and develop his painting. This motif originated from woodcuts which he made based on his painting A Bird on a Stone (1913), in which he progressively focussed on bare willow twigs. By 1916, those were showing a human form emerging from the willow trunk, from which came this strikingly supernatural painting of an old willow pollard.

By local tradition, cut corn was not left to dry in low stooks, as in most of Europe and America, but built onto poles. In a series of paintings and prints, Astrup developed these Corn Stooks (1920) into ghostly armies standing on parade in the fields, the rugged hills behind only enhancing the feeling of strangeness.

In 1920, Astrup also revisited his earlier painting of foxglove flowers, which he had been developing in a series of prints. This second version of Foxgloves lacks the sophisticated composition of the first, but deepens its magical atmosphere. A stream emerges from the dark and vague forests behind, to drop in a series of small waterfalls to the lower right.

Two almost identical women are bent in strained arcs as they forage among the dense birch trees in the middle distance. In the centre the far waterfalls glint like the eyes of unseen trolls. In the foreground Astrup repeats his evocative combination of delicate foxglove flowers and lichen-encrusted rocks. The scene seems rich in Nordic legend and enchantment.

Astrup also gives us the occasional peek into his domestic life. Interior Still Life: Living Room at Sandalstrand (c 1921) shows how well the family’s accommodation had developed, with a tapestry hanging in the corner, an unidentified painting on the wall, potted plants, a bowl of fruit, and an articulated wooden figure leaning against a pitcher of milk. Astrup’s former teacher Harriet Backer would, I am sure, have been proud.

This painting also demonstrates how Astrup had recovered from his gloom and fears, and developed a new optimism. His health still gave cause for concern, and he didn’t yet have good studio facilities at Sandalstrand, but his life there now seemed less spartan, better settled, and more comfortable.

Astrup continued to paint his lifelong favourite views when the brilliant yellow marsh marigolds and fruit trees were both in flower. Apple Trees in Bloom (after 1920) adds a couple of young girls picking flowers beside the stream. In the distance the hills still have plentiful runnels of snow from the previous winter, and the tops are wreathed in patchy cloud.

In the early Spring of 1922, Astrup exhibited his paintings in Bergen, at the Bergen Art Association. Late that year, mainly for health reasons, Astrup and his wife travelled to North Africa, going overland through Germany, Austria, and Italy. The couple stayed in Tunis and Algiers, where Engel gave birth to their sixth child.

It isn’t clear how many sketches and paintings Astrup made during their trip overseas, but this pastel painting of Algiers (1923) suggests they are worth locating. This shows Engel, his wife, staring out into the night from the verandah of their hotel in the city, presumably after her delivery. Exotic palms are silhouetted against the lit buildings, and a row of hackney carriages awaits their customers.

Following their return to Norway, Astrup concentrated on painting the lyrical landscapes around the family smallholding at Sandalstrand, which was to be the focus of his work during the remainder of his life.

Growing Season Weather (c 1923) is a rather looser depiction of the same part of Sandalstrand, now above the Astrups’ home. The artist’s wife and two of their children look intently at a steeply-sloping vegetable patch which will soon be harvested to feed the growing family.

Waterfall and Mill House (1923) shows half a dozen small huts for watermills dotted among the waterfalls high above Jølster Lake. Although the snows have gone from the hilltops, there is still plenty of water to drive those small mills.

The Cold Frame Mound (c 1921-28) reveals more of the Astrup family vegetable garden at Sandalstrand, including the ‘cold frame’ of the title. Despite their name, cold frames actually protect plants from the cold, and are used to enable earlier starting of vegetable crops. Sinking the cold frame into the ground (and siting it on a high point) protects its contents from ground frosts, while covering it with glazed windows ensures that daylight can raise the air and soil temperatures within it.

Landscape with Houses and Blossom Trees (c 1921-28) is another, looser view over Astrup’s smallholding at Sandalstrand, as the blossom is emerging in the Spring.

By the mid 1920s, Astrup and his young family seemed settled on the shore of Jølster Lake. His paintings were providing a richly detailed account of their life there. They may have been out of step with the dramatic changes taking place in the cities of Europe, but he was certainly “beautifying [his] surroundings”.

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.

Ovid concluded Book 2 of his Metamorphoses with the story of the abduction of Europa, up to the point where Jupiter, then a white bull, shot off over the sea with Europa on his back. Book 3 opens where that left off, but with something of a surprise.

The Story

If the reader has been expecting a detailed account of the arrival of Jupiter and Europa on Crete and her rape, they are disappointed. This is all Ovid has to tell us for now:
Now Jupiter had not revealed himself,
nor laid aside the semblance of a bull,
until they stood upon the plains of Crete.

He then uses Europa as a link to her brother Cadmus, who is sent on an unsuccessful mission to find her. Presumably unable to return home to report his failure, he consults the oracle at Delphi as to where he should settle. He is told to follow a cow which he meets in a lonely land, and where it settles, to found a city in Boeotia, in central Greece.

He does this, and kisses the ground in thanks for guidance to the site of his new city. Intending to make a ritual sacrifice to Jupiter, he sends his men off to find a spring to provide water for the purpose. Entering ancient forest, they find a cave with a spring, but it is occupied by a huge and fearsome draconian serpent, which starts killing the men.

Cadmus is puzzled by the delay in their return, so enters the forest to find them. He walks into their bodies, with the serpent towering proudly over them. Cadmus swears to avenge their deaths, and throws a huge rock at the serpent, which is not even grazed by the blow. Cadmus then throws his javelin at the monster, which impales it against the trunk of an old oak. Driving the javelin deeper into its throat, Cadmus kills the serpent.

As Cadmus stares at the dead serpent, a voice utters the prophecy that, one day, he too will be a serpent and will be stared at. Next, Minerva appears:
But lo, the hero’s watchful Deity,
Minerva, from the upper realms of air
appeared before him. She commanded him
to sow the dragon’s teeth in mellowed soil,
from which might spring another race of men.
And he obeyed: and as he plowed the land,
took care to scatter in the furrowed soil
the dragon’s teeth; a seed to raise up man.
‘Tis marvelous but true, when this was done
the clods began to move. A spear-point first
appeared above the furrows, followed next
by helmet-covered heads, nodding their cones;
their shoulders, breasts and arms weighted with spears;
and largely grew the shielded crop of men.—
so is it in the joyful theaters
when the gay curtains, rolling from the floor,
are upward drawn until the scene is shown,—
it seems as if the figures rise to view:
first we behold their faces, then we see
their bodies, and their forms by slow degrees
appear before us on the painted cloth.

The warriors transformed from the serpent’s teeth then fight one another in a miniature civil war, until just five are left, among them Echion. They and Cadmus then proceed to build that city in Boeotia, which became Thebes.

This forms the introduction to Ovid’s account of the Theban cycle.

The Paintings

Ovid’s vivid telling of this action-packed story has inspired several wonderful paintings, which together cover most of the events.

Cornelis van Haarlem’s Two Followers of Cadmus Devoured by a Dragon from 1588 shows a very dragon-like monster killing and eating two of Cadmus’s men. Look carefully into the distance, though, and you will see the same beast being impaled by Cadmus with his javelin: it thus uses multiplex narrative to show two distinct moments of time in the same image. This technique was quite common before and during the Renaissance.

Francesco Zuccarelli’s A Landscape with the Story of Cadmus Killing the Dragon (1765) is a faithful depiction of the ancient woodland with its source of water, and Cadmus piercing the serpent’s throat against the trunk of the old oak. The artist spares us any mutilation of the bodies on the ground, and the otherwise glorious landscape is perhaps a little too dominant. When first exhibited, James Barry at least praised it as a landscape, not a narrative painting at all.

That cannot be said of Hendrik Goltzius’ Cadmus Slays the Dragon (1573-1617), which is one of the best paintings I have seen of spirited dragon-slaying. While one of its three heads (a slight exaggeration from the text) gets on with eating one of Cadmus’s men, the hero is thrusting his spear deep into the throat of another head. There are some apocryphal arrows embedded in the monster’s body, but the overall account conveys Ovid’s text very effectively.

The last two paintings, showing Minerva and the little civil war between the warriors sprung from the “dragon’s teeth”, are clearly different versions of an identical motif. Given the uncertainty over their dates and painters, I suspect that the first may have been used as a sketch for the second.

Rubens’ workshop is credited with the excellent oil sketch of Cadmus Sowing Dragon’s Teeth between 1610-90. Cadmus stands at the left, Minerva directing him from the air. The warriors are shown in different states, some still emerging from the teeth, others killing one another. Behind Cadmus is the serpent, dead and visibly edentulous.

Jacob Jordaens’ finished painting of Cadmus and Minerva shows an identical scene, ready for patron or public to see.

For once, we’re spoiled for choice. I think I’d like to see all five hung together in that order, as they do justice to Ovid’s eloquent account.

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.

When Paul Nash was staying with Hilda Harrison in her house on Boar’s Hill, near Oxford, he could see a landscape which had come to obsess him from childhood: two hills (technically the Sinodun Hills) with clumps of trees at the top, the Wittenham Clumps. As he completed his final paintings of the Second World War, he turned to the Wittenham Clumps in series of paintings which accompanied his steadily declining health.

Not far from Boar’s Hill is an ancient wood, owned by St John’s College, Oxford, which Nash depicts in his Landscape of the Bagley Woods (1943). Using his oil paint with the subtlety of watercolour, the rolling fields of the foreground are quickly replaced by dense woodland. At the leading edge of the wood, some trees assume the form of their foliage, and to the right is a large sphere.

In the background, silhouetted against the distant downs, is one of the Wittenham Clumps. Above is a sky of broken cumulus, the sunlight forming shafts which cast right back to Nash’s paintings of the First World War.

The next three paintings are from Nash’s Landscapes of the Moon series, which is dispersed across different collections and cannot be seen together.

Landscape of the Moon’s First Quarter (1943) is set in the autumn, near Bagley Wood or one of the other woods near the Wittenham Clumps. It incorporates several of Nash’s favourite symbols: in the foreground, two spherical bushes echo the half moon above. A short avenue of poplars at the left is reminiscent of several of his earlier works, going right back to the First World War.

In the distance at the right is the unmistakable form of a Wittenham Clump, behind which a bank of pale earth clouds towers like far mountains.

Landscape of the Moon’s Last Phase (1944) moves much closer to the Wittenham Clumps, which dominate the painting, the hillside glistening under the light of the moon. That moon is a puzzle, as at first sight it appears to be full, but Nash seems to have intended us to see only its brighter left crescent as being fully lit.

In the foreground is more ancient woodland, here with a tunnel formed by the boughs, leading us through the dense trees and on to the Clumps beyond. The trees remain in autumn colours.

Similar themes recur in Nash’s Landscape of the Vernal Equinox (III) (1944), which appears to show the impossible view of a full moon and the sun visible close together and just above the horizon. The more distant of the Wittenham Clumps is now a pale shadow of the closer one. The entrance to the tunnel of boughs is near the centre of the painting and looks more compelling.

Although there is no moon visible in his March Landscape (1944), Nash recomposes similar elements to those in his Landscapes of the Moon series. The Wittenham Clump has receded into the distance, where it is lit by a shaft of sunlight. Two avenues of trees now compete for our gaze and perspective projection: at the left, poplars quickly peter out into dead skeletons and a high screening fence. At the right shorter trees close in to form a tunnel as their boughs overlap. In the centre foreground there is another pale spherical bush.

Another visionary series of late paintings is Nash’s Aerial Flowers, which appear to have developed from his more recent wartime paintings of the Battle of Britain.

In Flight of the Magnolia (1944), a magnolia flower unfurls into the sky high above a low coastal landscape. Those vast, soft petals are set against a background of equally huge leaves, and beyond them a field of cumulus clouds so typical of an English summer. Those below the flower have heaped up to generate a shower in the far distance.

One of the petals has a form which resembles the human pinna, and appears to contains a human shape, in which a head, trunk, and hand can be distinguished. Nash uses soft colours which are again more typical of watercolours than oils, although his paint layer is quite thick and textured in places.

Nash made two watercolour studies for this in the summer of 1944, which were also inspired by a quick study of a magnolia flower which he had painted in September 1943, when on a trip to Dorset.

In an essay in 1945, Nash explained that the Second World War had changed his perception of the sky:
When the war came, suddenly the sky was upon us all like a huge hawk, hovering, threatening. Everyone was searching the sky, expecting the terror to fall: I among them scanned the low clouds … hunting the sky for what I most dreaded in my imagining. It was a white flower. Ever since the Spanish Civil War the idea of the Rose of Death, the name the Spaniards gave to the parachute, had haunted my mind, so that when the war overtook us I strained my eyes always to see that dreadful miracle of the sky blossoming with these floating flowers.

He had also – in common with many other artists before – shown the sky as the domain of souls, thus important to the event of death, a subject which was clearly occupying his mind more and more.

These visionary images are more typical of William Blake, who was a major influence over Nash’s last works.

Eclipse of the Sunflower (1945) was inspired by William Blake’s poem Ah! Sunflower, from his Songs of Experience (1794):

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun:
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the travellers journey is done.

Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow:
Arise from their graves and aspire,
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.

Nash shows a sunflower undergoing an eclipse, as if a celestial body. Below is a windswept sea and the coast of Dorset, as he had painted below the ‘flying boat’ in his Defence of Albion (1942). Just above that coast are more peculiar botanical structures relating to the sunflower, and behind is the threatening sky of an imminent storm.

In July 1946, Nash returned to the Dorset coast. On 11 July, he died in his sleep from heart failure caused by his lifelong asthma. His travellers journey was done.

References

Wikipedia – an excellent and detailed account.

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

By 1925, Nikolai Astrup had recovered from his depression and frustrations of five years earlier, and was painting and making prints avidly in the family’s smallholding at Sandalstrand, on the southern shore of Jølster Lake in western Norway. Although spending the winter in North Africa in 1922-23 had helped his health for a while, he still suffered frequent chest problems and was far from being well.

For much of his career, Astrup’s prints and paintings had informed and influenced one another; The Befring Mountain Farms (c 1924-28) is an example of his mixing the media in a single work, coupling woodblock printing with oil painting. It shows an extended series of farm buildings not far from Jølster Lake.

Astrup uses the natural environment to generate one of his most magical works. Two people are engaged in milking a goat by the entrance to a building in the left foreground. The farm buildings have turf roofs with luxuriant growth, in one case sporting a small tree. Spindly birches stand next to them, their leaves shimmering in the light of the crescent moon.

That moon is reflected in a small pond which is surrounded by marsh marigolds in full flower. You can hear the silence among the massive rock bluffs which tower over the lake, and that in the centre looks like the head of an owl, watching over the stillness of the night.

Another time, at Two O’Clock on a June Night (c 1926), Astrup shows a lake high in the hills, the same crescent moon shining in the sky. The surface of the water has fine ripples from the breeze which is blowing down from the snowfields above. These give that lake a fascinating texture, which contrasts with the surrounding craggy hills.

In 1926, Astrup exhibited again at the Bergen Art Association, and the last of the family’s eight children was born. Nikolai was delighted that his wife Engel still found time to become increasingly involved in the national arts and crafts movement, her speciality being textiles.

Early Snow (1926-27) is a loose oil sketch of the beds at Sandalstrand after the first snowfall of the autumn. It has caught the Astrup family’s vegetables by surprise, with two large red cabbage plants looking the worse for the cold. The door to the house is open, revealing a traditional wood-burner blazing away to keep the occupants warm.

The Astrups had clearly worked hard to develop their smallholding to support their family. Sandalstrand (1927) shows Engel and two of their children enjoying the summer sunshine, in partly-backlit conditions which surrounds their figures, trees, and fences with a magical aura.

This too was created using mixed media, starting with a linocut and woodcut on board, over which Astrup painted in oils. It also underwent his characteristic evolution, starting as Growing Season Weather (c 1923), which was reversed and recomposed to a print of Growing Season at Sandalstrand (1925), and finally reworked as here, and dedicated to Trygve Bydal and his wife.

Apple Tree in Bloom (c 1927) shows a much more substantial if not industrial building, with the trees in full blossom and the marsh marigolds in flower.

The Parsonage (c 1928) presumably shows the replacement for the original building which was demolished in 1907, which Astrup had painted using a less extreme perspective projection in his The Shady Side of the Jølster Parsonage (before 1908). It continues to develop his theme of radical perspective in buildings, to which he had returned from time to time.

Through the winter of 1927-28, Astrup’s pulmonary tuberculosis worsened. After Christmas, he developed pneumonia, and died of that on 21 January 1928, aged just forty-seven. His widow Engel went on to become a very successful textile designer, raised her eight children, and maintained their smallholding. She died thirty-eight years later, in 1966.

In 1986, their home at Astruptunet was opened as a museum, and between February 2016 and January 2017 a major exhibition of Nikolai Astrup’s paintings and prints was held in London, Norway, and Germany. Work is progressing on his catalogue raisonné, and many of his works are on show in Bergen and Oslo.

Prints

The dating of Astrup’s paintings is often uncertain; that of his prints can be little more than intelligent guesswork. Here are a few which are believed to be from the period in which his colour woodcuts underwent their most dramatic development.

Little Corn Stooks (c 1904) is an early exploration of this motif, when the cut corn was still becoming anthropomorphic, before his later paintings and prints of them.

Night Ploughing (c 1905) shows a simpler motif in which he seems to have taken advantage of the texture of the paper for the soil.

Waterfall and Glacier (c 1907) contrasts the white water cascading down with its source in the ice-covered mountains above.

May Moon (c 1908), above, is one of many different versions of Astrup’s motif of the full moon reflected on Jølster Lake, seen from his early home on the north shore. Below is the winter version of the motif, in Winter Night (date not known).

Astrup’s early paintings of Old Jølster Farm and blooming marsh marigolds, for example in A June Night and Old Jølster Farm (before 1911), became prints such as this Marsh Marigold Night (c 1915). By this time his technique had come a long way, and many of his later prints were extremely painterly – to the point where it can be difficult to distinguish woodcuts made between 1920-25 of his Foxgloves painting from 1920 from that original, for example.

There is more extensive coverage of his print-making and prints in the book cited below, which is a unique account of Astrup’s life and work, with many high-quality illustrations. I acknowledge its importance in my compiling this series of articles.

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.

We can associate visual images with predominantly non-visual experiences. One of my most memorable associations of this kind occurs in Antonioni’s 1966 movie Blow-Up, in which I hear the soft roar of wind when David Hemmings’ character is studying his enlarged monochrome photographs. When someone regularly experiences crossed sensations like this, it is known as synaesthesia – in which a musical chord might evoke a specific colour, for example.

Painting non-visual experiences may seem like attempting the impossible, but many great artists have either been commissioned or felt compelled to do so. There are many well-known themes which are primarily non-visual; this article looks and sniffs at one of the toughest – smell.

The best-known and still-startling example of the classical approach to painting smell is Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens’ magnificent Allegory of the Sense of Smell (c 1617-18). Although Rubens’ figures are a delight, it is Brueghel’s wealth of detail which makes this, and the whole series of five allegories of the senses, so compelling.

This set the benchmark for the symbolic objects which could be included to allude to the sense of smell: flowers, of course, with at least a couple of dozen different fragrant species shown, vanilla pods in the foreground being eaten by guinea pigs, a squirrel, the ill-scented civet with its distinctive black and white markings, and a hound (presumably an antecedent of the bloodhound) for its famed sense of smell.

Brueghel also includes vials of scent, and the apparatus for distilling essential oils and perfumes in the left middle distance.

At the same time that he was working with Rubens on that series, Brueghel was busy with Hendrick van Balen the Elder and Gerard Seghers on two paintings for presentation to Albert VII and Isabella, governors of the Spanish Netherlands. These show combinations of senses, here Allegory of Sight and Smell (c 1617-18).

This works as a précis of the full series, with the lower left devoted to smell, where there is an abundance of flowers, and a civet.

Brueghel was not the first, and José de Ribera’s slightly earlier series of five paintings on the senses are too readily forgotten. Allegory of Smell (1615-16) is much simpler, focussing on the more commonplace and less pictorial onion and garlic, and perhaps the equally pungent odour of the rough and tattered man flourishing the cut onion.

This painting of The Unconscious Patient (Allegory of Smell) from about 1624 is believed to be Rembrandt’s earliest signed work, completed when he was only eighteen. It shows a barber-surgeon’s assistant trying to revive a patient from unconsciousness using smelling salts – a particularly pungent aroma.

Three of the other paintings in this series were well-known, but two had apparently gone missing. This was re-discovered in 2015, but that of taste remains lost.

Several painters incorporated all five senses into a single allegorical image. Allegory of the Five Senses (c 1630), attributed to Pietro Paolini, is among the more successful. The figure on the right is sniffing a large melon, which is perhaps more nuanced than the more popular use of scented flowers.

Jan Miense Molenaer introduced a touch of humour in his Smell (1637), in which neither of the competing smells of the smoker or the baby’s bum are attractive, but both are only too familiar. He is also an early user of gesture to make the subject clear.

By the middle of the seventeenth century, northern European painters, particularly those in what are now The Netherlands and Belgium, had made ‘sensory portraits’ quite popular. This is Michiel Sweerts’ A Boy with an Extinguished Candle (Smell) (1656-61), invoking another quite pungent everyday smell.

Gonzales Coques seems to have painted several sets of sensory portraits. That above is the National Gallery’s Smell (Portrait of Lucas Faydherbe) (before 1661), and that below, of Smell (before 1661), is currently in Sibiu, in Romania. They both refer to the consumption of tobacco: that above to pipe smoking, and that below to the taking of snuff.

Towards the end of this fashion for sensory allegories, some became quite convoluted. Jan Weenix’s Landscape with a Huntsmen and Dead Game (Allegory of the Sense of Smell) (1697) is at once a painting of a framed painting, a landscape, and an allegory, with a bit of classical myth thrown in for good measure.

Rather than repeat the now hackneyed objects which Brueghel had laid out, Weenix prompts us with a very few flowers, a couple of hunting dogs, and an extensive array of game which is presumably smelling rank as it is ‘hung’.

With allegories out of fashion by now, Philip Mercier still shows us an allegory in The Sense of Smell (1744-47). Two fashionable young couples are exploring the senses, sniffing melons and flowers. The pair of dead game birds has, I think, only just been shot, so should not be contributing to the olfactory experience, but the gun dog is another visual cue.

So it was that in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the rise of the Aesthetic Movement and its influence on British painting brought more works which refer to smell.

Flowers were frequent in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s early aesthetic paintings, but their role was probably not to refer to the sense of smell. That was more significant in George Frederic Watts’ Choosing, A Portrait of Ellen Terry (1864). His new wife 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.

Beautiful and largely undressed women also graced the Salons of the day, while sniffing flowers. Hans Makart’s The Five Senses: Smell, probably from around 1870, is unusual in that it is one of a series depicting the five senses.

John William Waterhouse’s The Soul of the Rose (1908), above, returns to the Aesthetic track also followed by the overtly classical At the Garden Shrine, Pompeii (below) by John William Godward in about 1910.

These are all wonderful paintings, which succeed as allegories in which the images make clear reference to the sense of smell. But for me, none actually evokes any particular smell as such. Perhaps they – or another painting – work for you?

The Pre-Raphaelites were nothing if not intense and passionate. Although at times their paintings may today seem far from radical, their art often courted controversy, and their courting was all too controversial. Their lives and loves seem to have been a succession of tempestuous affairs, sometimes tragically ending in suicide.

Looking at photos of Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, First Baronet of Rottingdean and of the Grange, it seems hard to believe that in 1870 he was at the centre of a major scandal and was asked to remove one of his paintings from the exhibition of the Old Water-Colour Society.

The painting in question was Phyllis and Demophoon (1870), a watercolour showing Phyllis embracing her estranged husband from within the structure of an almond tree. Burne-Jones’ exposure of Demophoon’s genitals in the exact centre of the painting was the more obvious reason for the painting’s removal, but behind it was a problem more compelling: both figures were modelled by Maria Zambaco, who had recently been Burne-Jones’ mistress.

Maria Zambaco was one of three cousins from the leading expatriate (if not refugee) Greek families of London; the other two were Aglaia Coronio and Marie Spartali, who later married to become known as the last Pre-Raphaelite painter, Marie Spartali Stillman (1844–1927).

All three appear in Burne-Jones’ The Mill (1882). Shown from left to right are Maria Zambaco, Marie Spartali Stillman, and Aglaia Coronio.

Burne-Jones had married Georgiana MacDonald in 1860, and the couple had a son born the following year, and a daughter born in 1866. Maria Cassavetti was ten years younger than Burne-Jones, had married a Dr Zambaco in 1860, and went to live in France, having her own son and daughter by him. When her marriage collapsed, she moved back to London in 1866, and met Burne-Jones when he was commissioned to paint Maria by her mother.

Burne-Jones and Maria Zambaco soon became lovers, a relationship which intensified during 1868, and reached a crisis the following year. Burne-Jones tried to leave his wife and family to live with Zambaco. Maria tried to convince Burne-Jones to join her in a suicide pact, taking an overdose of laudanum by the canal in London’s Little Venice. The police had to be called, and what was already quite a public scandal become the talk of London.

Although Burne-Jones and Zambaco broke up, he continued to use her as a model in his paintings through the 1870s, and in the group often known as the Three Graces in The Mill.

After the Old Water-Colour Society had ‘invited’ him to remove his Phyllis and Demophoon, Burne-Jones exhibited little for almost a decade. By 1880, though, he was ready to have another go at the same motif, with the same model.

The Tree of Forgiveness (1881-82) was painted in oils, rather than watercolours, and its ambiguous title may refer either to the subject, or act as an invitation for the public to forgive the artist for his earlier behaviour.

You could also be forgiven for thinking that its story, that of Phyllis and Demophoon (or Demophon), was one of the hundreds of transformations described by Ovid in his epic Metamorphoses. Although Ovid did narrate this old Greek myth, and it does involve the transformation of Phyllis into and from an almond tree, he did not refer to it in that poem, but in his Heroides.

Ovid’s Heroides (meaning Heroines) are now little-known, but were if anything more popular than his Metamorphoses during and after the Renaissance. They are the first known work of literature consisting entirely of a collection of fictional letters, mostly written by abandoned women to their former husbands or lovers. The story of Phyllis and Demophoon is the basis of the second letter in Ovid’s series, and was illustrated by Robinet Testard in a French translation of about 1520.

Demophoon was one of the Greeks who took part in the Trojan War, and was the son of the great hero Theseus. Following the sack of Troy, he left the scene and sailed back towards Greece. Possibly as the result of a problem with his ship, he landed in Thrace, at the northern end of the Aegean Sea and to the north of Troy. There, he met Phyllis, the daughter of the local king, who fell in love with him.

Phyllis and Demophoon married (or perhaps their marriage was only agreed), but Demophoon had to travel back home before he could rejoin her later. He swore repeatedly that he would return, and Phyllis accompanied him as far as a place called The Nine Roads, where she gave him a casket, with strict instructions not to open it until he had abandoned all hope of returning to her.

Demophoon travelled on to Cyprus, where he may have settled, or he may have returned to Athens. When the time came for his return to Phyllis, there was no sign of him. Phyllis wrote to him, in Ovid’s fiction the letter which he included in his Heroides. It records her determination to commit suicide, and the process of despair after abandonment.

She apparently died by hanging herself in a grove of almond trees. This miniature shows her body becoming part of the tree, but those trees then became barren.

There are two recorded endings to the story. In one, Demophoon returned and was distraught to hear of her fate. When he visited the tree, he embraced it and sought her forgiveness. Then, as in Burne-Jones’ paintings, she transformed from the tree back to human form, and embraced Demophoon.

The other version tells that, realising that he would never return to Phyllis, Demophoon opened the casket she had given him. Its contents then either drove him mad, or resulted in him falling from his bolting horse, and dying by his own sword.

The story of Phyllis and Demophoon was retold by Boccaccio in about 1343, by Chaucer in The Legende of Goode Women (1385), and in many operas from 1699 to 1811. As far as I can establish, there have only been three significant paintings made of the story, and the third now appears lost.

This monochrome image is all that may remain of John William Waterhouse’s Phyllis and Demophoon, painted in 1897. A copy made about ten years later was sold by Christie’s in London in 1926, but has also disappeared.

We may forgive Edward Burne-Jones, but hopefully we’ll never forget him, his model, or Phyllis and Demophoon.

Over the last three weeks, I have posted series of articles outlining the careers and work of two landscape painters of the early twentieth century: the Norwegian Nikolai Astrup (1880-1928), and the Briton Paul Nash (1892-1946). Although I had never intended the two series to overlap in the way that they have, this article seizes the opportunity to compare and contrast their lives and work, as roads to their painting magical landscapes.

Both suffered from asthma, and both died early as a consequence of chronic chest disease. In Astrup’s case, as well as being asthmatic from his childhood, this was the result of pulmonary tuberculosis, which was still a common cause of early death in rural parts of Norway. Paul Nash died of the chronic effects of his asthma on his heart and circulation. For both, particularly during the later years of their life, their art was constrained by their health.

It is worth remembering that Thomas Girtin, who promised to be the equal of JMW Turner, if not a better painter than him, died very young as a result of asthma.

Astrup’s early influences were Henri ‘le Douanier’ Rousseau and Harriet Backer. With his love of Rousseau, in particular, he painted landscapes which try to be true to nature, but with an assumed naïvety. He often understates or omits aerial perspective, and incorporates multiple perspective projections into the same image.

Paul Nash was twelve years younger than Astrup, and from the outset appears most influenced by Samuel Palmer and William Blake. Instead of the naïve, he sought to express his vision through the landscape, rather than trying to depict it faithfully. That is frequently realised by quite rigorous geometric constructions, and the dominance of linear and planar forms.

Astrup uses high chroma colours and relatively fine detail in landscapes which are often quite painterly. His motifs are drawn from the dramatic hills and mountains very close to where he lived, and include more intimate rustic scenes and rites. Although his landscapes are sometimes devoid of people, they seldom appear deserted or abandoned.

Nash uses lower chroma colours and in many landscapes employs patterned brushstrokes which may have been influenced by Cézanne’s ‘constructive’ brushstroke. His motifs are drawn from typical English Home Counties areas, usually near to where he was living at the time, but he moved quite frequently during his career. Except in some of his war paintings, he includes very few figures in his landscapes, which are normally unnaturally deserted.

In the first half of his career, Astrup started to paint motifs which are associated with more ritual occasions, such as the festival of Midsummer’s Eve, often in unusual light. In these, inanimate objects such as the flames from this bonfire assume a life of their own.

In the middle of his career, Nash became overtly surrealist, composing paintings by juxtaposing incongruous objects which are often symbols of the intangible and unpaintable. Some are inspired by ancient landscapes, including the megaliths in central southern England, but the strangeness of his images more often results from seeing familiar objects in very unfamiliar combinations.

For Astrup, the objects within the image start to take on their own lives. Cut corn drying on poles becomes an army standing stock still. He does not have to import objects which were not there in the first place, but to re-interpret their form and appearance to make them appear praeternatural.

Nash’s eery, empty landscapes draw parallels between disparate objects which are similar in form, such as the full moon and the stone sphere on top of a column. Other elements, such as the avenue of trees, assume a military or mathematical regularity which transforms the natural into the unnatural.

Astrup’s rugged rock peaks become the head of a giant owl, peering down at his moonlit unreality. The everyday act of milking a goat becomes strange when it takes place in the dead of night. Marsh marigold flowers, which we typically see in the summer sunshine, still glow yellow under the bright yellow moon.

Nash’s landscapes quote mystical places, such as the Wittenham Clumps, against which he poses the physical impossibility of the deep red sun next to a full moon.

A heaped bank of cloud becomes a vast plant, the form of one of its petals reminiscent of a human ear, with the invited misinterpretation of an included human figure.

Astrup’s magic is primarily generated by leading the viewer to imagine that what was there was actually something quite different: flames from a bonfire detach and take on a life of their own; corn stooks become a standing army; rugged rock faces change into owls. His choice of motif – in particular, the time (often the ‘magical’ period of night), light, and content which can readily be misinterpreted – is key, but there is no evidence that he recomposed his motifs to any significant degree.

Paul Nash’s magic is primarily compositional: it is not so much the way that he depicts individual elements within a landscape, but his choice of elements to create that landscape. Like Samuel Palmer and William Blake before him, he paints a vision which exists in his mind rather than in any momentary physical reality.

They were both wonderful artists, who painted some of the best landscapes of the twentieth century. But the magic which they breathed into those landscapes came from quite different sources.

I hope that you have enjoyed their paintings as much as I have.

Cadmus founded the city of Thebes, and in his series of stories about that city, Ovid moves on to consider the fate of its founder’s grandson, Actaeon.

Unusually, Ovid prefaces this story with a short summary lamenting the fate of both Actaeon and Ovid:
Thy grandson, Cadmus, was the first to cast
thy dear felicity in sorrow’s gloom.
Oh, it was pitiful to witness him,
his horns outbranching from his forehead, chased
by dogs that panted for their master’s blood!
If thou shouldst well inquire it will be shown
his sorrow was the crime of Fortune—not
his guilt—for who maintains mistakes are crimes?

This appears to refer to Ovid’s ‘mistake’ which led to Augustus banishing him to a far corner of the Empire, on the coast of the Black Sea, in 8 CE.

The Story

Thebes is now a city, and Actaeon, the founder’s grandson, was out hunting. Having enjoyed considerable success earlier in the day, he calls on his companions to stop now that it has grown hot. Unknown to Actaeon, Diana, the virgin goddess of the hunt, had a sacred wood nearby, in which she too had grown tired after the morning’s hunting. She had just reached a cave with her favourite pool where her companion nymphs could help her bathe.

Actaeon inadvertently entered the wood and, guided by the Fates, stumbled across Diana, naked, in the pool. The nymphs took fright:
soon as he entered where the clear springs welled
or trickled from the grotto’s walls, the nymphs,
now ready for the bath, beheld the man,
smote on their breasts, and made the woods resound,
suddenly shrieking. Quickly gathered they
to shield Diana with their naked forms, but she
stood head and shoulders taller than her guards.—
as clouds bright-tinted by the slanting sun,
or purple-dyed Aurora, so appeared
Diana’s countenance when she was seen.
Oh, how she wished her arrows were at hand!
But only having water, this she took
and dashed it on his manly countenance,
and sprinkled with the avenging stream his hair,
and said these words, presage of future woe;
“Go tell it, if your tongue can tell the tale,
your bold eyes saw me stripped of all my robes.”
No more she threatened, but she fixed the horns
of a great stag firm on his sprinkled brows;
she lengthened out his neck; she made his ears
sharp at the top; she changed his hands and feet;
made long legs of his arms, and covered him
with dappled hair—his courage turned to fear.

Transformed into a stag by the water that Diana splashed onto him, Actaeon flees. As he stands wondering what to do, his own hunting dogs catch up with him. Ovid lists them to paint the scene in its fullest detail, as the dogs attack Actaeon and inflict wound after wound. Actaeon’s companions see the dogs’ success in attacking their quarry, and call in vain to him as he lies dying.

Ovid closes this tragic story with opinions of Diana’s vicious action, telling us that some felt it unjust, but others viewed it as proper defence of her virginity – an interesting contrast with his earlier accounts of Jupiter’s serial rapes.

The Paintings

This is another of Ovid’s myths which has been very influential on artists, but this time it has remained popular after the ‘official death’ of history painting in the late nineteenth century. Once again, I am going to be pernickety, and look mainly at those paintings which identify Diana, and give us clues as to Actaeon’s transformation and grisly fate. The many paintings of naked nymphs cavorting in a pool are delightful, but their figurative strength is matched by their narrative weakness.

Of my shortlist, Corot’s Diana and Actaeon (1836) captures the earliest moment, and is, in a subtle way, by far the bravest. For a couple of centuries after multiplex narrative fell into disfavour, Corot uses it to good effect. He also achieves a perfect balance between his marvellous woodland landscape, of which Ovid would have been proud, and the figures.

Most prominent are those of Diana and her attendant nymphs, who are behaving like real people for once, climbing a branch bent over the water, and soaking up the sunshine. At the right, Actaeon with one of his hunting dogs is just about to run straight into them. Diana, appropriately crowned, stands pointing to the distant figure at the left – which is again Actaeon, antlers growing from his head as she transforms him into a stag.

At the end of his career, Eugène Delacroix was commissioned by the Alsacian industrialist Frederick Hartmann to paint him four allegorical paintings of the seasons in which they are personified in characters from classical mythology. The Summer – Diana Surprised by Actaeon (1856-63) is another faithful depiction of Ovid’s story.

Actaeon has just arrived from the right, accompanied by the dogs who would shortly turn on him. He faces Diana, who is marked out by the crescent moon on her diadem, as the attendant nymphs make haste to cover her body. Already antlers are growing from his head.

In common with his other late paintings, this is wonderfully loose and prescient of Impressionism.

Darting back almost three hundred years, Joris Hoefnagel’s Diana and Actaeon (1597), finely executed in distemper and gold on vellum, uses a different composition of the same basic elements. However, he has been able to incorporate an additional and significant detail from the textual account, in that Diana is crouching low over the water and splashing the approaching Actaeon with water, scooped up by her left hand.

That is also true of Giuseppe Cesari’s Diana and Actaeon (1602-03), which was almost contemporary with Hoefnagel’s. Cesari’s Diana and her nymphs don’t look as shocked and alarmed as they should, but Actaeon’s hounds are getting ready to pick a fight with him, as if they can tell what those growing antlers mean.

Martin Johann Schmidt captures the splashed water in mid-flight in his Diana and Actaeon of 1785, and is one of the few artists to have heeded Ovid’s description of Diana’s great stature in comparison with the nymphs. Another detail which he depicts well is the nymph who is standing in front of Diana to shield her body from Actaeon’s sight.

The most modern painting which I can show here is Zygmunt Waliszewski’s Diana and Actaeon, made in 1935, only shortly before his sudden and premature death. He shows a slightly later moment in time, as Actaeon’s hounds have started to attack the stag. Diana bears her crescent moon, and appears to be about to take aim with her bow and an arrow she is drawing from the quiver on her back.

My last choice has to be one of Titian’s two superb paintings of this story. These were both intended for King Philip II of Spain, who commissioned him to paint a series of six works based on classical mythology. The paintings that Titian delivered include those of Danae (1549-50), Venus and Adonis (1552-54), Perseus and Andromeda (1554-56), Diana and Actaeon (1556-59), and the Rape of Europa (1559-62) (shown here a couple of articles ago). Although a fine work, that of Diana and Actaeon (1556-59) was more about Diana and her companions, and less about the story.

But Titian also painted The Death of Actaeon (c 1559-75), which he completed shortly before his death, and was never delivered. It is a great painting, much more narrative than his earlier Diana and Actaeon, and something of a puzzle: it is the odd painting out.

Here, Actaeon’s transformation is incomplete, and he is shown as a man with a stag’s head. Nevertheless, his dogs are attacking him, and his death is inevitable. For some unaccountable reason, Diana is shown largely (if rather loosely) dressed, having just loosed an arrow at Actaeon, as if she had second thoughts and wished to hasten his death.

Perhaps Titian took pity on Actaeon, and tried to finish him off more humanely than Diana or Ovid.

I am delighted, once again, to be spoilt for choice. If you don’t mind me taking two, I’ll go for the Corot with its wonderful trees and multiplex narrative, and Delacroix’s pre-Impressionist painterliness.

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.

There were two major French artists who specialised in painting ordinary people in the countryside in the middle of the nineteenth century: Jean-François Millet (1814-1875) and Jules Breton (1827–1906). Recognised as one of the founders of the Barbizon School, I will return to look at Millet’s life and work another time; Breton remained an independent who today might be considered as a ‘social realist’ more akin to Jules Bastien-Lepage. This short series of articles looks at the life and work of Jules Breton.

If you have ever visited the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, you will no doubt have seen at least one of Breton’s most famous paintings, Calling in the Gleaners (1859), which is one of its great treasures. Thankfully, others are in many of the major galleries around the world, so you should not have far to travel to see them in the flesh.

Born Jules Adolphe Aimé Louis Breton on May Day 1827, Breton was brought up in the village of Courrières, a coal mining and farming community in the far north-east of France near the border with Belgium, which was later to be in the thick of some of the major battlefields of the First World War.

Breton’s father was the land agent, bailiff and tax collector for the local landowner and mayor of Courrières, so he got to know the land and its people very well. His artistic talents were recognised when he was in his early teens, and his family were persuaded to let him study art. In 1843, he went to live in his teacher’s house in Ghent, where he attended the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts. In 1847, he moved to Paris, where he studied in the studio of Martin-Michel Drölling, and attended classes given by Ingres and Horace Vernet at the École des Beaux-Arts.

Unsurprisingly, with those artists as teachers, his early paintings were mostly of history, and in 1849 his first painting, titled Misery and Despair, was shown at the Salon in Paris. Sadly it has since disappeared, and is presumed to have been destroyed, together with Hunger, which was exhibited at the Salon of 1851.

Breton’s earliest surviving painting dates back to 1847, shortly before his father died and the family’s finances collapsed, which may have inspired the paintings accepted for the Salon. By 1852, Breton seems to have been devoting his time more to landscape painting.

The Storm (c 1852-53) shows his work at this time was detailed, realist, and – in this case, at least – had a wide tonal range. Although very competent, it was not particularly distinctive or original.

The date of his Summer Landscape with Peasant Women and Cows is unknown, but this was surely from the earlier years in his career, and appears to have been inspired by the works of Constable, whose landscapes were still popular in Paris at that time.

In 1854, Breton returned to live in Courrières, and started to paint agricultural workers in the local landscape. His style changed dramatically, and the following year he enjoyed success at the Salon in Paris.

The Gleaners (1854) won a third-class medal at the 1855 Paris Salon, and was Breton’s first masterpiece. It shows the poor women and children of Courrières out scrounging what they could from the fields after the harvest had been cut – an age-old activity recorded in the Old Testament and before which enabled the poorest in rural communities to put bread on their table.

Overseeing the gleaning is the garde champêtre (village policeman), an older man distinguished by his official hat and armband, who was probably an army veteran. In the background, behind the grainstacks which were later to be such popular motifs for the Impressionists, is the church tower of the village of Courrières, surrounded by its houses.

Breton had started to plan this painting soon after he returned to live in the village. He made a series of studies, several of which survive, for its figures, but the view appears to be very faithful to reality. The figure of the young woman walking across the view from the right (in front of the garde champêtre) seems to have been modelled by the daughter of Breton’s first art teacher, whom he married in 1858. He sold this painting for the astonishing price of two thousand francs, which must have been strong endorsement of his change of genre and style.

Love Token (1854-55) was shown at the same Salon, and is a more intimate glimpse into a moment in the lives of the three young women who seem dwarfed by the high stand of wheat behind them. Although few in number, the poppies are particularly brilliant and anticipatory.

Breton did not show The Burning Haystack (1856) at the Salon, but in London, after it had already beem sold. It shows the frenetic but co-ordinated efforts being made by the people of Courrières to extinguish a fire which has broken out in one of the grainstacks. Each of its multitude of figures is playing their role as part of the whole, working from an unseen script.

Its figures remind me of Frith’s paintings of London stations or Derby Day, but it is the unity of purpose which is so strikingly different here.

No sooner than that painting was sold, Breton was working on the plans for his next masterpiece. By early 1856, he already had a good idea of its composition, and may have painted this Study for The Blessing of the Wheat in Artois (c 1857). Lacouture (2002, p 98) offers an extract of a letter from Breton to his then fiancée Élodie:
Against a dazzling background of light in which the gold of the wheat combines with the emerald green of the clover, losing itself finally in the sky in a warm, transparent vapour, a solemn and silent procession of country folk moves slowly and piously along, with the sun at their backs and their shadows in front.

Although this image of Breton’s finished The Blessing of the Wheat in Artois (1857) is far from good, for which I apologise, I hope that it gives some idea of the brilliance of the painting, now in the museum in Arras. The church tower in the background helps orientate ourselves with respect to the village, and just to its left is the distinctive hat of the garde champêtre.

This was shown at the Salon in 1857, where it was admired by Corot, Troyon, and the older generation of artists, awarded a second-class medal, and was purchased for the Musée du Luxembourg – for the sum of five thousand francs.

In the Spring of 1858, Breton married his fiancée Élodie De Vigne.

In addition to his more major works, Breton painted a steady stream of portraits of those living in the countryside, here The Little Dressmaker (1858), a young woman busy making and mending. Unlike many landscape painters of the century, Breton was skilful and sensitive in his figurative painting.

Major works followed ever more frequently. The Dedication of a Calvary (1858) is a very personal record of an event which occurred in September 1836, when Breton was only nine years old. The procession has just come out of church, for the dedication to take place on a plot of land, reserved for the Breton family graves, which had just been exchanged with the Church of Courrières, whose tower dominates the right third of the canvas.

The artist’s family and friends were models for many of the figures shown, his wife appearing at least three times, for instance.

Although well-received when it was shown at the Salon in 1859, it was Breton’s most famous work, Calling in the Gleaners, which earned him a first-class medal there. As usual, he worked up a series of studies for its figures, among them The Gleaner (1859), painted on cardboard.

Calling in the Gleaners (also known as The Recall of the Gleaners, Artois) (1859) is one of the treasures of the Musée d’Orsay, and on its own almost justifies a visit to Paris. With the light now fading, and the first thin crescent of the waxing moon in the sky, the loose flock of weary women and children make their way back home with their hard-won wheat. At the far left, the garde champêtre calls the last in, so that he can go home for the night.

The contrast between the rich glow of the setting sun at the right and the figures is unfortunately too great for this image to capture. You really do have to see the original.

That year, the Bretons’ only daughter was born: Virginie went on to paint too, and one of her paintings inspired Vincent van Gogh.

References

Wikipedia.

Lacouture, Annette Bourrut (2002) Jules Breton, Painter of Peasant Life, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 09575 3.

Along with Lovis Corinth and others, Franz von Stuck (1863–1928) was one of the co-founders of the Munich Secession, and a career-long painter of myth and narrative. If Corinth is little-known outside Germany, von Stuck is essentially unknown. Usually labelled as a Symbolist, his style changed as much as Corinth’s, and his best paintings are as good, in my opinion.

This short series of articles looks predominantly at his works in those genres, in the context of his life and career.

Born Franz Stuck near Munich in Bavaria, his official title became Franz Ritter von Stuck when he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Bavarian Crown in 1906: it was the Bavarian equivalent of ‘Sir Franz Stuck’. Throughout these articles I will refer to him by the usual abbreviation of Franz von Stuck.

As a young boy, he sketched caricatures of locals, and from the age of only eight was taught art in nearby Munich. When he was eighteen, he proceeded to study at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, which he completed in 1885. He then worked on illustrations, cartoons, and designs for newspapers, magazines, and book publishers. He worked in-house for Die Jugend (Youth) magazine and the Fliegenden Blätter (Flying Pages) until 1892.

When not working on illustrations, von Stuck developed his painting skills in portraiture, and figurative works showing classical myth in a more contemporary context. The latter were inspired in part by his love of Arnold Böcklin‘s paintings; the Swiss artist had worked in Munich during the early 1870s.

His early Amor Imperator (1887-88) is a wonderful realist take on the traditional Cupid. He still holds his bow and quiver of arrows, and sports a crown to match the large orb in his left hand. The quiver, crown, and orb are all decorated with hearts. This emperor of love looks much more modern, though, than is normal in art.

In these early paintings, von Stuck started to develop some themes which were to last through the rest of his career. Teasing (1889), a wonderfully loose and Post-Impressionist view in the dappled light of a wood, brings one of the most enduring: the faun, human from the waist up, and goat below.

Von Stuck’s new twist on the lovers’ game of hide and seek around the massive trunk of an ancient tree casts at least one of them as a faun; he leaves us guessing whether the laughing face behind that trunk is that of a nymph, or a female faun, perhaps.

An appropriately topical precursor to the depiction of more complex mythical motifs, von Stuck’s Homage to Painting (1889) shows a winged angel, bearing a laurel crown and palm frond in tribute to a personification of painting. She sits in a throne on a dais, a large palette in her left hand, looking intently at the angel.

Although a not uncommon personification, none of the traditional nine Muses is designated as being inspirational to painting, and more classical references have tended to cite semi-historical figures such as Apelles.

Von Stuck’s first great success was with The Guardian of Paradise (1889), which was exhibited that year in the Munich Glaspalast, won him a gold medal, and sixty thousand Gold Marks in prize money – quite a coup for a painter who was only twenty-six.

This angel stands firm, looking the viewer in the eye, his great aquiline wings outstretched beyond the realms of the canvas. Behind him is the brilliant light of Paradise, illuminating walls of flowers and foliage. He holds a unique staff-cum-sword, thrust away from his body, which has a wavy shaft or blade of flame.

The following year, von Stuck added centaurs to his repertoire of mythical beasts in his Fantastic Hunt (1890). Here an archer centaur has buried his arrow into the right axilla of a deer-like variant, perhaps resembling Actaeon after Diana’s vicious metamorphosis. The deer-centaur’s legs have already buckled under him, and his hands claw at the air in his agony.

For a while, von Stuck took to the ancient Greek tradition of naming his figures. Although he is readily recognisable by the prominence of his musical instrument, in Orpheus Charming the Savage Beasts with his Lyre (1891) his name is inscribed behind his back. The eclectic mixture of predators and prey includes several with long symbolic traditions: the flamingo painted so elegantly was believed by the ancient Egyptians to be a living representation of the god Ra.

Von Stuck also used less familiar and more complex narratives for his paintings. Samson (1891) shows an episode from the life of the Old Testament Judge, which played a central part in Samson’s wedding. Meticulously labelled, it shows the immensely strong Israelite warrior fighting with a huge lion, prising its jaws apart.

When Samson was young, he fell in love with a Philistine woman. Despite the objections of his parents, he decided to marry her, and travelled to propose to her. On that journey, he was attacked by a lion, which he wrestled with, and tore apart, thanks to the strength given to him by God. He told no one about that episode, and when he was on his way to his wedding, came across the carcass of that lion. In its body was a bees’ nest, which contained honey. This inspired the line ‘out of strength came forth sweetness’, which was long used as a motto on tins of golden syrup.

During Samson’s wedding feast, he posed his thirty Philistine groomsmen a riddle based on his encounters with that lion:
Out of the eater came something to eat.
Out of the strong came something sweet.

The groomsmen did not guess the answer, which Samson only revealed after they had threatened him, and his bride had begged him to do so.

The following year saw von Stuck at the heart of a revolution in art in Munich.

Reference

Wikipedia.

After telling the tragic fate of Actaeon, the grandson of Cadmus, founder of Thebes, Ovid describes the next disaster to strike the house of Thebes, in the bizarre myth of Semele, Cadmus’ daughter.

The Story

In his Metamorphoses, Ovid does not detail how their relationship came about, but simply states that Semele became pregnant by Jupiter, with the implication that, for once, their relationship is consensual.

Juno decides that she is going to ‘deal with’ Semele in retribution, so disguises herself as Semele’s old nurse and sows doubt in her mind about her lover’s true identity. Juno advises Semele to ask Jupiter to reveal himself in his full divine glory, knowing that this will bring about Semele’s destruction:
She rose up quickly from her shining throne,
and hidden in a cloud of fiery hue
descended to the home of Semele;
and while encompassed by the cloud, transformed
her whole appearance as to counterfeit
old Beroe, an Epidaurian nurse,
who tended Semele.
Her tresses changed
to grey, her smooth skin wrinkled and her step
grown feeble as she moved with trembling limbs; —
her voice was quavering as an ancient dame’s,
as Juno, thus disguised, began to talk
to Semele. When presently the name
of Jove was mentioned — artful Juno thus;
(doubtful that Jupiter could be her love) —
“When Jove appears to pledge his love to you,
implore him to assume his majesty
and all his glory, even as he does
in presence of his stately Juno — Yea,
implore him to caress you as a God.”

When Semele puts this to Jupiter, he realises that this would put Semele at grave risk: being the god of the sky and thunderstorms, she would almost certainly be killed by his thunderbolts. But she insists, so he gathers his weakest thunderbolts and smallest storms, and reveals himself to her. Unfortunately Semele is immediately consumed in flames from Jupiter’s lighting, and dies:
her mortal form could not endure the shock
and she was burned to ashes in his sight.
An unformed babe was rescued from her side,
and, nurtured in the thigh of Jupiter,
completed Nature’s time until his birth.

Jupiter then seizes her unborn baby, and continues the pregnancy by sewing that foetus into his thigh. When the baby is eventually born, he becomes Bacchus, who later rescues Semele from the underworld, and has her installed as a goddess on Mount Olympus.

The Paintings

I have recently looked in detail at paintings of this story, and shown how many artists have deviated considerably from Ovid’s account. I suspect that this resulted from the combination of the unreality of events in the myth, and the visual challenge posed by its climax.

Bon Boullogne’s Semele, painted at the end of the seventeenth century, is one of the few paintings to give a close account of the climax. Semele lies on a bed beside a Roman herm (statue). Her left hand has been struck by a small thunderbolt and is already starting to burn. Above her, Jupiter is making off with a large infant – not just full-term but far older, it would appear – while Juno, identified clearly by her accompanying peacock, is in the distance, at the top right.

The young Bacchus is shown as being more than half the height of Semele, which suggests that this may be multiplex narrative, where the upper scene with the gods takes place considerably later than the lower scene with Semele.

The next artist to make an attempt at a painting which follows Ovid’s narrative was Gustave Moreau, about two centuries later.

Moreau worked out the composition of the central section of his second and more ambitious painting in his earlier Jupiter and Semele, made during 1889-95. Semele has not yet been harmed by thunderbolts, but the foetal Bacchus appears to be resting against her, and Jupiter has assumed his divine form. At the foot of the painting is Jupiter’s eagle.

That composition then formed the centrepiece of his large finished painting, also titled Jupiter and Semele (1895). Jupiter now sits on a massive throne, with Semele draped over his right thigh. Surrounding the couple is one of the most iconographically-rich canvases in the history of art, a dense confluence from many cultures across Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, even into India.

At its heart, Jupiter rests his left forearm on Apollo’s lyre. His right hand holds a lotus flower, and he looks straight ahead with his eyes wide open. Behind his left shoulder is the image of a female deity, perhaps Juno’s watchful and avenging eye.

Semele is statuesque, her arms cast back in shock. Her left side is covered in blood, presumably from where the foetus has been extracted, although in this painting no foetus is visible. Her hair flows off in a long, thick tress, decorated like a peacock’s feathers, reflecting her transient displacement of Juno from being Jupiter’s consort. She shows no signs of catching fire yet. Below her is a winged Cupid, its face buried in its forearms, grieving at Semele’s imminent doom.

This is a very difficult story to paint true to Ovid’s words, and trying to show them literally could only result in incredulity. As Moreau’s last great mythical challenge, he has surely succeeded better than anyone before.

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.

One not uncommon English phrase to express futility and difficulty is to say that it’s like painting the wind. As we are now at that time of year when the wind tends to blow strongest, I thought it might be interesting to examine the evidence for that figure of speech. Is it like painting the wind?

Although Renaissance and later painters largely accepted that it was preferable to depict wind in figurative form, as Jan van Kessel the Elder did in his spectacular Allegory of Air (1661), as landscape painting became established as a genre, its exponents tried to do better.

The great early landscape masters such as Poussin seem to have felt constrained by the sensitivity of their patrons not to overdo the forces of nature – although they did paint some cracking thunderstorms on occasion. But for wind, distant trees swayed a bit, the occasional branch broke off, and lakes became ruffled. There was nothing to make you hold onto your hat as you stood gazing at their beautiful, idealised landscapes.

It seems to have been the following generations of landscape painters who really started to show wind at its most obvious. Thomas Gainsborough’s quite sketchy Landscape with Cottage and Church (1771-72) is one of the first works to use angled highlights over the foliage of trees to make them look as if they are moving in the wind, and its style was far ahead of its time.

Although trees are a help when depicting wind, Daubigny’s undated October manages very well with the tell-tale smoke rising from burning stubble.

Gustave Courbet shows how a ‘leaning’ sky can amplify the windswept branches, in The Gust of Wind (c 1865).

Jean-François Millet seems to have perfected the formula for severe storm conditions on land in The Gust of Wind (1871-73). The single tree has been torn limb from limb, with some of its branches being blown to the right, and is now being uprooted. A man is silhouetted in a streamlined position, trying to shield himself from debris. Even the sky echoes the horizontally-drawn branches.

Antônio Parreiras’ wonderful Ventania (The Windstorm) (1888) is not as extreme, but just as eloquent – again using a leaning sky to accentuate the arcs formed by the trees.

With the Impressionist emphasis on transient effects of light, rather than weather, their paintings tend to be more subtle again. Renoir’s treatment of wind (in his Gust of Wind from about 1872) is understated, and Claude Monet’s Poplars (Wind Effect) (1891), shown above, is also gentle.

Some of the most effective aids for the depiction of wind are flags and drying washing. While Sisley used the former, Gustave Caillebotte painted two views in which a washing line gives the strongest clue as to the wind. This is his Laundry Drying, Petit Gennevilliers (1892), the windier of the two scenes.

Following his time at Cullercoats in England painting fisherfolk there (which I will consider in the next article), Winslow Homer’s simple and effective watercolour of Hurricane, Bahamas (1898) should come as no surprise.

Although not famous as a landscape painter, Franz von Stuck’s Storm Landscape (c 1920) leaves the viewer in no doubt.

None of those paintings gives much of a clue as to how cold the wind felt. The British painter John Everett Millais’ Blow Blow Thou Winter Wind (1892) is one of the bleakest images that I know, which is clearly not only windy, but icy cold too. The trees contribute little to the effect, indeed its profound bleakness is made the stronger by their absence. The effects of the wind are also shown quite sparingly: as with Poussin, they are subtle signs such as the distant man holding his hat, and the blown clothing of the woman in the foreground.

Gales and high winds have most commonly been shown on the coast, and at sea, for which there is a great wealth of fine examples. I will show here a small selection, noting that almost every painting of a sailing boat or ship under way inevitably depicts the wind as it fills sails. Paintings of shipwrecks are also quite common, and almost invariably show a storm with high winds.

Claude Joseph Vernet’s A Storm on a Mediterranean Coast (1767) is quite a good earlier example of shipwreck and storm on the coast, and uses the small clump of trees at the upper left to good effect, as well as clouds of spume and spray.

JMW Turner was one of the great masters of the shipwreck/storm maritime scene. My favourite example is this Snow Storm, Steam Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842). This was the work for which it was claimed that Turner had himself lashed to the mast so that he could observe the storm properly – almost certainly false and quite unnecessary anyway. As a seasoned Channel traveller, Turner would have had ample previous experience.

This painting also shows one of Turner’s most distinctive features in painting storms: unlike Millet’s horizontal streamlines, Turner shows a vortex, with his subject seen in its central eye. Although not exactly natural, it has proved very atmospheric.

The undoubted master of dramatic maritime painting in the latter half of the eighteenth century was Ivan or Hovhannes Aivazovsky (1817–1900). His lifelong fascination with the sea concentrated more on waves than the movement of air. However, this view of a Sea Coast from 1886 is superbly realistic.

His paintings of shipwrecks, such as his Loss of the Ship “Ingermanland” in the Skagerrak on the Night of 30 August, 1842 (1876) are also masterly studies in depicting the wind.

Looking at landscapes and seascapes, it seems to me that painting the wind – although not easy – can be very effective. The next and final article looks at how this is helped by the introduction of figures.

Skilled artists, with the aid of trees, smoke, waves, clouds, skies, and some other features of nature, can paint the wind very effectively. Add some people, and this is what happens.

One of the simplest and most effective images of people in the wind is Hokusai’s (葛飾北斎) brilliant woodblock print from about 1830 of『駿州江尻』(Sunshū Ejiri), Ejiri in Suruga Province, also known as Travellers Caught in a Sudden breeze at Ejiri or A Sudden Gust of Wind. On their own, the trees and grass couldn’t have the same visual impact as blown hats, clothing, and most of all the papertrail reaching high up into the sky.

Eastman Johnson’s The Girl I Left Behind Me (1870-75) uses the most common devices of hair and clothing to place its single figure in a strong breeze, but this works best if they look into the wind.

Jean Béraud, in his A Windy Day on the Pont des Arts (1880-1) above, and Milliner on the Pont des Arts (1879-82) below, accomplishes the effect using clothing, particularly hats, and objects being carried. These are two of a series of at least four paintings which Béraud made of this bridge in similar conditions. He also leans several of his figures into the wind to enhance the effect.

In the painting below, the other foreground figure is carrying a canvas and paint box, who could be a self-portrait, or perhaps the character Elixir, from Proust’s popular Remembrance of Things Past, a composite of Whistler, Vuillard, Helleu, Béraud himself, and others.

Working at the same time in the coastal village of Cullercoats in the north-east of England was the great American painter Winslow Homer. Many of his fisherfolk were seen standing looking out to sea, or busy working, in the wind, and its effects on them are an almost constant feature of his paintings made there.

He had the advantage that the signs read from the sea were often more prominent than the more subtle effects on hair and clothing.

In the most severe conditions, the storm seas broke so violently that the air became filled with its spray. This was a great influence on his later work, after he returned to the USA, in masterpieces such as The Life Line (1884), below.

This was ostensibly inspired by the rescue of a young woman from shipwreck off Atlantic City, New Jersey, in the summer of 1883, but his victim here still resembles the fishlasses from Cullercoats, complete with her billowing red shawl.

More painterly style is often an advantage when depicting figures in the wind: John Singer Sargent’s virtuoso oil sketch A Gust of Wind (c 1886-7) shows how well that can work with the minimal clues of a hand held to the hat, and a few wisps of clothing blown back.

Loose and billowing props such as washing are also useful; here Charles Courtney Curran makes it look A Breezy Day (1887) with their aid.

I showed in the previous article how the combination of wind and snow can be made to look bleak with only the most subtle hints from figures. Trying to convince the viewer of searing hot wind without the involvement of figures is far harder. Charles Conder, the Australian Impressionist, succeeds in his Hot Wind (1889), using only simple if unusual objects. He also borrows from the Renaissance device of making visible the thin stream of breath blowing from the woman’s mouth – something which was standard in conjunction with the rounded cheeks of a zephyr or similar.

Jules Victor Clairin’s undated Elegant Couple at the Coast comes not from the Rococco, but as indicated by the very painterly style of the slippery rocks, was most probably painted in the early years of the twentieth century. The very pink young ‘galante’ woman is a textbook example of how to make a figure look windswept, although her partner seems mysteriously to be unaffected by the breeze.

My final example is another carefully-crafted full-length portrait of a woman in long, loose dress: John William Waterhouse’s Windflowers (Windswept) (1903). She may lack a hat, but with the wind behind her needs to hold her long tresses to prevent them from blowing into her eyes and face. Although the landscape around her does not look particularly moved by the wind, she leans back into it, her knees flexed, and ample loose folds of fabric are billowing downstream.

Painting the wind is neither futile, nor really that difficult. In the hands and brushwork of a good or even great artist, it’s actually a bit of a breeze.

The Paris Salon of 1880 was the largest ever, with nearly 7,300 works on display. Despite the impression that we now have, they were quite an eclectic selection, including paintings by Manet, Monet, and Renoir, even though there had already been an Impressionist exhibition (the fifth) during the whole of April that year.

It also turned out to be the last Salon to enjoy official government sponsorship. Significant works included Jules Bastien-Lepage‘s magnificent Joan of Arc, and two paintings by Gustave Moreau: Helen, which has since vanished, and Galatea.

As usual, the critics had spent much of the past year recharging their stocks of vitriol for the occasion, and one painter who became their target was Alexandre Cabanel (1823-1889), a winner of the Prix de Rome who, at the age of fifty-six, surely deserved better. Only two years previously, he had won his third Grande Médaille d’Honneur of the Salon, was a highly respected professor at the École des Beaux-Arts, and had taught the young Bastien-Lepage among many others who were exhibiting at that Salon. Maybe there was an element of revenge for the period in the 1860s when he and Bouguereau had driven the Impressionists out of the Salon into the Salon des Refusés.

Cabanel exhibited his large canvas of Phaedra (1880), showing a lugubrious young woman spread languidly across a couch. To accompany it, the programme offered the following lines from Euripides’ play Hippolytus:
Consumed with love’s sorrow, Phaedra has locked herself in her palace. A delicate veil covers her head. This is the third day she has gone without food as she is intent on ending her wretched existence.

The critics found Cabanel’s painting lacklustre and confusing, considered that showing Phaedra in this weak state was unbefitting, and that the work’s composition was boring.

Looking at this painting now, I think it was the critics who were short of lustre, and had thought only superficially about the subject and Cabanel’s depiction.

Phaedra’s story is told by Euripides in that play, from which Racine had written a well-known French play, and which was partially retold by Ovid in the fourth letter in his Heroides. It centres on incest, suicide, and violent death, which might have been controversial themes for the Salon and its critics.

At this time, Phaedra was married to Theseus. He was the son of Aegeus, a primordial king of Athens, and had earlier killed the Minotaur on Crete. He did that with the help of the king of Crete’s daughter Ariadne, who had fallen in love with him; when the couple eloped to the island of Naxos, Theseus had abandoned her there to return to Athens.

Theseus had raped the queen of the Amazons, Hippolyta, and they had a son named Hippolytus. Later, after Hippolyta’s death, Theseus married Ariadne’s younger sister Phaedra, and had two sons by her. When he grew up, Hippolytus became devoted to Artemis (and had sworn chastity in her honour) instead of following Aphrodite, as a result of which Aphrodite made Phaedra, his stepmother, fall in love with her stepson.

The marriage of Theseus and Phaedra brought together two houses which seemed blighted. Theseus’ father had committed suicide when he mistakenly thought that his son’s mission to kill the Minotaur had failed, throwing himself into the sea which now bears his name (the Aegean). Theseus was an inveterate adulterer whose life strayed from one sexual adventure to the next. Phaedra’s mother Pasiphaë had been impregnated by a bull and then gave birth to the Minotaur, and her father the king of Crete was murdered by being scalded in a bath.

At the time of these events, Theseus, Phaedra and Hippolytus were in voluntary exile at Troezen, a town to the southwest of Athens, on the opposite side of the Saronic Gulf, where Aethra, Theseus’ mother, had conceived him after having sex with both her husband Aegeus and Poseidon on the same night. Theseus had exiled himself after murdering a local king and his sons.

As a result of Aphrodite’s wrath with Hippolytus, Phaedra had fallen in love with her stepson, and at first intended to die with her honour intact. It is this scene which Cabanel chose to paint, and this point at which Ovid’s fictional letter in his Heroides would have been written.

Euripides’ play then tells of a plan by Phaedra’s nurse to save her mistress’s life by telling Hippolytus in secret of his stepmother’s love, and suggesting that they consummate the relationship, which is the proposal argued in Phaedra’s letter in Heroides. This puts to Hippolytus the suggestion that society was becoming more tolerant of such relationships, and that incest wasn’t so immoral after all.

Hippolytus rejects the proposal in a fury, and threatens to tell Theseus of the situation. Phaedra realises that she has no other option, and hangs herself. But when her body is discovered, no one can explain to Theseus the reason, as all are sworn to secrecy. Theseus then discovers a letter on Phaedra’s body which claims that Hippolytus raped her.

Theseus calls upon his father Poseidon to avenge Phaedra’s death on Hippolytus; because Hippolytus is still bound by his oath of secrecy, he cannot defend himself to his father, and is sent into exile. He then travels off in his chariot, but his horses are spooked by a bull roaring out from the sea – Poseidon’s response to Theseus. Hippolytus falls from his chariot and is dragged behind it, and lies dying from his wounds.

With Theseus glad that Phaedra has been avenged, Artemis appears to him and tells him the bitter truth, which devastates Theseus. In the last moments of the play, Hippolytus forgives his father, they are reconciled, and Hippolytus dies.

There were alternative accounts, including one version in which Phaedra and Hippolytus survive to the point where they put their cases to Theseus, as shown in this painting by an unknown artist.

Cabanel’s painting cannot tell the whole story, but captures Phaedra’s situation brilliantly. She is and should be lugubrious, staring into space wondering how she can possibly resolve her love for her stepson. Interestingly, Cabanel’s model for Phaedra was the wife of a well-known banker, who was perhaps well-placed to imagine the emotional turmoil taking place in such opulent surroundings.

He also leaves some cryptic clues to details. At the opposite side of the painting from Phaedra’s unblinking stare is her tearful nurse, soon to play her role in the tragedy. Behind the nurse, and lit by an oil lamp keeping vigil on the wall, are a helmet, sword and shield. Do they belong to her husband or to her stepson? Do they signify her previous relationship with Theseus, or could they be relics from the future event of the death of Hippolytus?

Cabanel painted his eloquent and faithful account of a story which had been told in words or music by Euripides, Virgil, Ovid, Apollodorus, Seneca, Chaucer (The Legende of Goode Women, 1385-86), Spenser (The Faerie Queene, 1590), Ben Jonson (1623), Racine (1676), Jean de la Fontaine (1683), Rameau (1733), Gluck (1745), Voltaire (1775), Schiller (1805), Schubert (1826), Robert Browning (1843), Swinburne (1866), and Massenet (1873). Although several paintings have been made of the death of Hippolytus, Cabanel’s is almost the only one to tell Phaedra’s story.

If only Phaedra had heeded the advice given by the great conductor, Sir Thomas Beecham (1879-1961), who said:
Try everything once except incest and folk dancing.

The Salon of 1859 brought Jules Breton a first-class medal for his Calling in the Gleaners, and in the same year the couple’s only daughter was born. Over the following decade, he concentrated on less monumental and complex works. He never again matched his ferocious output of intricate paintings during the 1850s, but developed a distinctive style which was more about light than crowds of figures.

Young Girl Knitting (1860) is the second painting which Breton made of a young woman from Courrières knitting indoors. Many of these intimate works were sold to private collectors and have never been seen at exhibition.

Landscape at Courrières (1860) is an unusual view of a small avenue of poplars lining a watercourse just at the back of the town. The distinctive tower of the church is distant to the right. Breton’s facture is decidedly loose and pre-Impressionist, although this appears more finished than a sketch would be, and does not seem to match a more finished substantial work.

Over this period, Breton made several quite rapid and painterly sketches of various country scenes and events, such as the sudden arrival of a severe thunderstorm. Comparisons of the style of those works have been made with the sketchiness of Daumier, for example, and some of the late works of Delacroix.

The Rape Seed Harvest (1860) was one of the four paintings exhibited by Breton at the Salon in 1861. It is richer in figures and details, and more akin to his earlier major works. It shows locals from Courrières engaged in the harvest of a crop which has since become extremely popular: rapeseed or canola. With its distinctive brilliant yellow flowers before the growth and ripening of its seed, few associate those golden fields in the early summer with the black seeds shown in the foreground here: those are the canola seeds, which are so rich in oil.

At the time, rapeseed was probably grown in small quantities as a modern cash crop, and relied heavily on manual labour. Its oil has to be processed, as it is toxic to most animals and to humans until that has been performed.

In 1861, following his successes at the Salon, Breton was appointed to the order of the Legion of Honour. The following year took two of his paintings to the International Exposition in London. His reputation was now consolidated.

In 1862, Breton started work on a new commission, for the Comte Duchâtel, of a major work showing the grape harvest on his vineyards in Médoc, Bordeaux. Breton made a series of studies and photographs in preparation, including this Two Young Women Picking Grapes (1862). Unfortunately I have been unable to locate a usable image of the finished painting, The Vintage at Château Lagrange, which Breton completed in 1864 and exhibited at the Salon that year.

At the time, Château Lagrange was classified as one of the fourteen great Troisièmes Crus of Bordeaux, and the Comte Duchâtel – whose château appears in the distance here – was considered the master of a great wine. However, the purpose of Breton’s painting was clearly not to promote the wine or even the Comte: it was to accompany the original painting of The Weeders (1860), which the Comte had bought from Breton.

After his two long visits to work on this, Breton took time to travel around the south and south-west of France, before returning to Courrières.

Mother Feeding her Baby (1863) is one of the most gentle and touching of Breton’s portraits of country people, showing a mother, wearing clogs and clothing which has seen better days, feeding a very young baby in front of a frugal fire.

Not all families were struggling in such abject poverty, though. Grandfather’s Birthday (1864) shows three generations of a Courrières family living in slightly greater comfort, although their floors are still made of bare and worn tiles, and furniture is sparse but includes a spinning wheel. One of the grandchildren is just about to present their grandpa with a simple birthday cake, no icing, as another of the women works preparing a celebratory meal in the kitchen.

In the summer and autumn of 1865, Breton visited Brittany, which was a revelation to him. He started painting a succession of works showing the country people of Brittany, including this Washerwoman in Brittany (1865), and both coastal and rural views.

Breton, perhaps inevitably bearing that name, was convinced that his family were of Breton origin, and seems to have quickly developed a very deep relationship with the people and countryside of Brittany. Unfortunately, few of his paintings of Brittany are currently accessible in the form of usable images, and most seem to have gone into private collections.

Another of his fine figurative paintings of farmworkers at dusk, The Close of Day (1865), was exhibited at the Salon that year. Its composition is strongly based on triangles, which add to its simplicity and the strength of the figures.

The following year brought an outbreak of cholera to Breton’s home town of Courrières, which killed many of his lifelong friends. It was also the first year that the artist served on the jury of the Salon. He made contact for the first time with an American dealer, Samuel P Avery, who was largely responsible for developing Breton’s reputation and market in the US over the coming decades.

In 1867, ten of Breton’s paintings were exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, where he was awarded a first-class medal.

The Weeders (1868) is a smaller variant of a painting of the same name which Breton made in 1860, and which was acclaimed when exhibited in the Salon of 1861, and the Exposition Universelle in 1867. Set in the fields just outside Courrières, the labourers are pulling up thistles and other weeds until the last moment that there is insufficient light for them to work any longer. Breton wrote of their faces encircled by the pink transparency of their violet bonnets, as if worshipping the life-giving star.

These two versions of the same painting mark Breton’s transition from concentrating on large outdoor religious ceremonies and their crowds, to these profoundly moving panoramas of the sky at dusk, under which smaller groups of farmworkers are toiling in wide open fields.

Though only peasants, the light transforms these women into classical beauties, an observation made by the critics at the time. This gives rise to a phenomenon repeated across Breton’s panoramas of country work, in which these classical figures appear in thoroughly socially-realist landscapes – showing their sanctity in labour.

In the summer and autumn, Breton stayed again in Brittany, as he did in each of the following six years. During these prolonged visits, he lived in the town of Douarnenez, on the coast to the north-west of Quimper, in the far west of the Armorican Peninsula (including the major port of Brest).

In 1869, he exhibited another of his major paintings featured populous country religious ceremonies, A Great Pilgrimage in Brittany (1869), which he had worked on when staying in Douarnenez. The finished painting was, as before, the culmination of many studies which Breton made in and around that town.

References

Wikipedia.

Lacouture, Annette Bourrut (2002) Jules Breton, Painter of Peasant Life, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 09575 3.

For some, the only new feature in macOS Sierra 10.12.4 is the arrival of Apple’s Night Shift on Macs. Although it is not the only new feature by any means, if you aren’t interested in cricket and don’t use Shanghainese, it might seem that way. So what good is Night Shift: is it worth using on your Mac?

Night Shift, which has been available for some time on iOS devices, changes the display output to make it appear ‘warmer’ (less blue, more red) during specified hours. Used conventionally, you’d set it to change to that warmer spectrum during the night, from local sunset to sunrise. It is easy to try out: once you have the 10.12.4 update installed, open the Displays pane, select the Night Shift tab, and tick the Manual box to turn it on until sunrise.

The theory behind Night Shift is based on our still very limited understanding of sleep and our daily body (‘circadian’) rhythms. Over the last couple of years, there has been some evidence that wakefulness is encouraged by bluer light, such as that from natural daylight, and that sleep is encouraged by redder light and darkness, as we might ‘naturally’ experience during the night.

Performing research on this area is difficult, because there are so many confounding variables. Most of us tend to be more physically active and more likely to go outdoors during daylight, and much of the populations of North America and Europe experience marked seasonal differences in daylight – both its duration and intensity. Over the last century, most of us have lived with quite bright artificial lighting, which in winter can be lit for much or all of the daytime.

Simplified (and sometimes quite inaccurate) accounts of this research often refer to different light spectra ‘setting’ our ‘body clocks’, which is not what the research actually shows. Furthermore, in real life many people sit in front of the quite bright light emitted by TVs, and there is great variation in the intensity and spectra of artificial lighting to which we are exposed during the evening.

Apple words the Night Shift blurb very carefully, with the emphasis on the word may. You may find that Night Shift helps your body adjust better to the time of day, allowing you to sleep more easily, and to find that sleep more refreshing. There is – as yet – no published scientific study which suggests that Night Shift, or the third-party tool f.lux which claims to do the same thing, provide any benefit whatsoever.

Equally, there are no grounds for thinking that Night Shift, or f.lux, would do any harm.

Unless, of course, your Mac work is colour-critical. If you are working with images, particularly if you are adjusting or correcting their colour, then you should ensure that Night Shift is turned off, or you could produce some very odd-looking work.

Night Shift, if it makes sense anywhere, is probably most useful on displays which you use late in the evening, in the hour or two before going to bed, and any which you might use in bed at night. It is therefore probably less useful to anyone on a Mac, than on an iPhone or iPad. But it is now available, and free.

There is one little irony here, though: one issue which current research has identified as being fraught when it comes to sleep is night-work. If you have ever worked shifts through the night, you will already have experienced some of the problems which that brings. If there’s one term which is associated with short, fretful, and poor-quality sleep, it is night shift – probably not the best name for the feature.