The Munich Secession, in 1892, was a watershed in von Stuck’s life and his art. Together with Lovis Corinth and almost a hundred other artists, von Stuck resigned from the official Artists’ Association, which was opposed to Impressionism, Expressionism, and Symbolism. They established their own association, and held their first exhibition the following year in Berlin.

The Munich Secession was the first in a series of art movements which swept the German-speaking countries at the end of the nineteenth century. It was followed in 1897 by the Vienna Secession, in which Gustav Klimt was a major force, and in 1898 by the Berlin Secession, which included Lovis Corinth (again) and his wife Charlotte, Ferdinand Hodler, Walter Leistikow, Max Liebermann, Edvard Munch, Emil Nolde, and Max Slevogt. By the start of the new century, painting and the other fine arts in central Europe had undergone revolutionary change.

This was also the year in which von Stuck made his first sculpture. Although even less well-known for his plastic art, he was also an architect and interior designer.

In 1893, von Stuck’s paintings became dominated by images of a dark and sensual femme fatale, based largely on the figure of Eve. The roots of this go back at least a few years, and are manifest in this etching of Sensuality from about 1889. The serpent has become an erotic object, its long body insinuating itself up between Eve’s legs, embracing her shoulders, and its head rests next to her face. I suspect that Sigmund Freud had a field day analysing this print.

His most famous development of the image of Eve as femme fatale is this more restrained painting of Sin from 1893, now in the Neue Pinakothek in Munich. This won him a gold medal at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago that year. Eve now gives us a knowing look, much – but not too much – of her naked body peering out from the dark. The serpent’s coils are less obvious, but there’s no mistaking its head perched on her right shoulder.

There are other more overt versions elsewhere, including Sin from about the same time, now in a private collection. This appears to be a reversed image of von Stuck’s Sensuality, with the serpent’s body passing between Eve’s legs and its head on her shoulder, the tongue flickering out in menace.

These femmes fatales continued to appear in later paintings too. The Kiss of the Sphinx (1895) may well have been influenced by Gustave Moreau’s paintings of the sphinx, not just in his highly successful Oedipus and the Sphinx of 1864, but more particularly his later Triumphant Sphinx of 1886.

These works show the Greek sphinx, a chimera of a woman’s head and chest with a body based on that of a lion, which effectively put the city of Thebes under siege. It sat outside and refused to let anyone pass unless they answered its riddle correctly. The succession of those who failed in that task were killed by strangulation, their corpses littering the scene. It was not until Oedipus arrived and solved the riddle that its siege was ended – and his fate was hardly a reward, as he entered the city to fall in love with Queen Jocasta, who was actually his mother.

Von Stuck’s depiction of this popular story was probably influential on Fernand Khnopff‘s even more extraordinary painting of the Sphinx in the following year, 1896.

In 1895, von Stuck accepted the position of professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, where he had studied. He also started work on the design of his house, Villa Stuck, in Munich, which enabled him to exercise his wide range of skills, in its architecture, interior design and decoration, and to decorate the house with his own sculpture and paintings. His furniture designs were recognised in the award of a gold medal at the World’s Fair in Paris, in 1900.

Von Stuck’s femmes were not just fatales, though. His remarkable Dancers (1896) is one of his earlier paintings exploring images of dancing women. This seems to have been inspired by some of the more flamboyant dresses of the day, and as an experiment in the portrayal of motion, in turn influenced by photography. Neither is it great distance from this painting to those of the twentieth century which superimposed multiple images to achieve the effect of movement, such as Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912).

In 1897, von Stuck married an American widow who was well-known in Munich arts circles, Mary Lindpaintner (née Hoose, 1865-1929), who was already the guardian of von Stuck’s first daughter. He painted her portrait as Pallas Athena in 1898.

Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, craft, and war, was a flattering choice for his wife. She is dressed in the armour, complete with its distinctive helmet, which was characteristic of the goddess, and her breastplate bears the image of the head of a Gorgon, making it a form of Aegis. She also holds the shaft of what must be a long spear in her left hand. I’m less clear as to why von Stuck specified that his wife should be qualified with the epithet Pallas, except perhaps by familiar association.

Von Stuck’s matching Self-Portrait of the following year appears in an Art Nouveau frame designed by the artist, as did many of his paintings.

Wild Hunt (1899) is a very busy narrative painting which appears to have been influenced by Lovis Corinth, and is rich in figures, expressions, and action. In the foreground is a Gorgon, perhaps Medusa who was later beheaded by Perseus, with her scalpful of snakes. Behind is a bearded man riding a white charger. Further into the background are others on horseback, including a nude woman who is screaming with her mouth wide open.

Another nude woman appears immediately behind the red rider, although she looks less substantial and more ghostly. In the background are pale skulls.

This appears to be a mixture of classical Greek, Nordic and Germanic mythologies – a wild hunt indeed.

Reference

Wikipedia.

After the remarkable birth of Bacchus, Ovid breaks from his Theban cycle to introduce Tiresias, who at first seems an irrelevant distraction, but leads us into one of the best stories in the whole of the Metamorphoses told with the greatest skill: that of Echo and Narcissus.

For this, Ovid uses ingenious wordplay as part of the narrative, and to introduce a little saucy humour. In his unique full-length account of the story of Narcissus, the poet also shows insight into human psychology far in advance of his time.

The Story

From the infant Bacchus, we are taken to Jupiter and Juno, who in an idle moment are arguing over whether the man or woman gets more pleasure from sex. This incongruous topic causes them to refer the matter to Tiresias, who has apparently changed gender twice, and therefore is presumed to know both sides of the bed. When a young man, he disturbed a pair of snakes copulating, which caused him to become female. Over seven years later, he chanced upon the same event, and by striking the snakes again reverted to being male.

Tiresias sides with Jupiter’s claim that the woman derives greater pleasure than the man, and incurs Juno’s wrath. She blinds him as punishment, to which Jupiter (unable to reverse his wife’s vindictive act) compensates by giving Tiresias prophetic powers. Those are the link to the story of Echo and Narcissus, as the water nymph Liriope – who had been raped by Cephisus – brought her young son Narcissus to Tiresias for him to pronounce on his future. True to form, the prophecy is cryptic:
If he but fail to recognize himself,
a long life he may have, beneath the sun

When Narcissus was approaching manhood at the age of fifteen, Echo fell in love with him. She was a nymph who had originally been too loquacious for Juno, who transformed her power of speech so that she could only repeat the words of others:
“Your tongue, so freely wagged at my expense,
shall be of little use; your endless voice,
much shorter than your tongue.” At once the Nymph
was stricken as the goddess had decreed;—
and, ever since, she only mocks the sounds
of others’ voices, or, perchance, returns
their final words.

Ovid illustrates this wonderfully in the following passage, describing Echo in pursuit of Narcissus (I have lightly edited the translation to try to preserve the original play on words):
Presently the youth,
by chance divided from his trusted friends,
cries loudly, “Is anyone there?” and Echo, “One there!”
Replies. Amazed, he casts his eyes around,
and calls with louder voice, “Come here!” “Come here!”
She calls the youth who calls.—He turns to see
who calls him and, beholding naught exclaims,
“Avoid me not!” “Avoid me not!” returns.
He tries again, again, and is deceived
by this alternate voice, and calls aloud;
“This way! We must come together!” Echo cries,
“We must come together!” Never sound
seemed sweeter to the Nymph, and from the woods
she hastens in accordance with her words,
and strives to wind her arms around his neck.
He flies from her and as he leaves her says,
“Hands off! May I die before you enjoy my body!” Naught she answers save,
“Enjoy my body!”

Ovid then reveals the curse which afflicts young Narcissus: one youth, whom he had scorned earlier, prayed that Narcissus should never be able to win his love, which Nemesis implemented for them. This became manifest when Narcissus, slaking his thirst in a lonely pool, first saw himself: that was the moment that the young man fell in love with his own reflection.

Being unable to embrace his reflection, Narcissus pines for himself, and cannot eat or rest for his burning love for himself. Echo follows him around, watching him being consumed by this passion for himself, until he lies down on the grass and says “Farewell!” Echo repeats his valediction, and Narcissus dies.

Finally comes the transformation of the dead Narcissus into living flowers:
His Naiad sisters mourned, and having clipped
their shining tresses laid them on his corpse:
and all the Dryads mourned: and Echo made
lament anew. And these would have upraised
his funeral pyre, and waved the flaming torch,
and made his bier; but as they turned their eyes
where he had been, alas he was not there!
And in his body’s place a sweet flower grew,
golden and white, the white around the gold.

The Paintings

For a visual artist, Ovid’s tale of a gender-changing seer, a nymph who has become no more than an acoustic effect, and a young man who dies of self-love, are a nightmare. Despite those challenges, the story of Echo and Narcissus has inspired many of the greatest Masters, and resulted in some of the finest narrative paintings – and continues to do so even today.

That said, Tiresias has been almost completely overlooked in this role. Sadly no one has risen to the challenge of depicting his gender changes, and only Giulio Carpioni has painted Liriope Bringing Narcissus before Tiresias (c 1665).

By far the most famous painting of Narcissus with just his beloved reflection is Caravaggio’s Narcissus of 1594-96. If there is one painting that displays the virtues of masterly chiaroscuro, this is it. I also consider it one of Caravaggio’s greatest works, and perhaps one of the characters into whom the artist had deepest personal insight.

Jules-Cyrille Cavé’s Narcissus (1890) is unusual for being one of the only paintings which places the young man almost in a kiss with his reflection. Although almost unknown today, I think it is another enduring and insightful image.

There are fine depictions of Narcissus alone, but to tell Ovid’s interwoven story fully, the presence of Echo is all but essential. Such combined works seem to have reached their peak at the end of the nineteenth century.

Ludwig von Hofmann’s Narcissus from about 1900 captures Ovid’s echoing wordplay. Narcissus stoops, as if listening for the repetition of the end of his words from the near-mute Echo beside him. It is incredibly difficult for a painting to convey any sound, but I think von Hofmann has just about managed to accomplish that.

Von Hofmann was a contemporary of Lovis Corinth, painted with a not dissimilar style, and like him was a co-founder of the Berlin Secession.

Talbot Hughes’ Echo (1900) reverses the more popular scene, with the nymph splayed across most of its foreground, surrounded by narcissus flowers, and the ghostly image of a man perhaps appearing in the waterfall at the top left, with its poignant reflection. Echo is in a rocky gorge, where we would expect to hear echoes, and holding her right hand cupped against her ear. She even wears narcissus flowers in her hair.

A couple of narcissus flowers are also to be seen at the far right edge of John William Waterhouse’s Echo and Narcissus (1903), which combines the young man staring longingly at his reflection, with the forlorn and near-silent figure of Echo stood at the left.

I suspect that Waterhouse was well aware of Poussin’s justly famous Echo and Narcissus of about 1630, which shows the final moments of the story: Narcissus is asleep, nearing death, his flowers already coming into bloom beside his head. In the background, Echo looks mutely on, knowing that her love will remain unrequited. Cupid stands still, holding his torch, but his arrow points to the heavens.

These and other artists have shown how the visual arts can tell a story which revolves around sound, and the depths of human nature. They have matched Ovid’s brilliant words with equally brilliant images.

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.

By 1870, Jules Breton’s art was flourishing. He had fallen in love with Brittany, and his paintings of rural scenes and people around his home town of Courrières were being augmented by the contrasting scenery and people of Douarnenez. In the Spring, he travelled to Italy in company with his brother, and toured major sites including Florence, Rome, and Venice. Soon after his return to France, the Breton family went to stay in Douarnenez until well into the autumn. For the first time, he rented a former dance hall to use as a studio there to improve his working conditions.

A Peasant Girl Knitting (c 1870) was probably started, if not completed, en plein air in an old orchard near Douarnenez. Although a sensitive portrait, it lacks the intimacy and personal feelings which many of his other portraits of country people have.

In The Shepherdess (1870), Breton delves deeper into the personality of his model, and her working life, in a manner typical of Jules Bastien-Lepage‘s depictions of young waifs and strays. Although her blouse is clean and white, the rough coat or cloak which she carries must have been handed down through several previous owners.

Probably dating from the late summer of 1871, Returning from the Fields appears to have been painted at Courrières, with its flatter wheatfields. Three young women, barefoot and wearing working clothing, have finished for the day and are talking as they walk back to their homes. One carries a hoe, suggesting that they were not working on these crops but further afield.

Breton’s facture displays a broad range of painterliness, from the Salon precision of the figures and the ripe wheat in the foreground, to the very loose tree in the right background.

In 1871, the Breton family again spent much of the summer and autumn in their now-customary haunts in Brittany. It was probably in the previous year that he started making a series of studies which evolved into Élodie with a Sunshade, Baie de Douarnenez (1871). This shows Breton’s wife Élodie reading, with the magnificent view over the Bay of Douarnenez to the low hill of Ménez-Hom in the far distance. Ménez-Hom is reputed to have been a sacred place in neolithic times, and is the subject of many local legends.

Breton’s composition is strikingly reminiscent of the recently-dead Frédéric Bazille‘s View of the Village (1868), which was so well received in the Salon of 1869. I wonder whether Breton’s painting may have been paying homage to Bazille.

In November, Breton made a short visit to London. By that time, Pissarro and Monet had left England; it is likely that Breton would have visited dealers there, perhaps including Durand-Ruel’s recently-established branch.

The following year saw two fine portraits of a young Breton woman spinning on the coast of the Bay of Douarnenez. The Flax Spinner (1872, above) and Young Woman Spinning (1872, below) probably show the same model, provisionally identified as Soisik Jouinou, who was a favourite with Breton at this time.

Of the two, the lower painting has surely caught her in the midst of a spinning daydream, gazing far into the distance while her hands watch the distaff (at her left hand) and drop spindle (below her right hand). This method of hand-spinning originated thousands of years ago, and gives the painting a timeless quality: it could have been painted at almost any time over the preceding several centuries.

In 1872, Breton was awarded the Salon’s Médaille d’Honneur.

The Fig Picker (1873) was also painted in Brittany, where figs were a traditional fruit crop. The climate there is mild and moist, and since their probable introduction by the Romans, several suitable varieties have been developed. The picker wears a capacious apron to contain the crop, and her sickle rests on the ground near her feet.

Breton continued to work on studies for his larger and more complex works: in Brittany, even more than at Courrières, these came to record outdoor religious ceremonies such as pardons. Woman with a Taper (1873) is one of his finest studies of this kind, showing a woman in formal traditional dress bearing a lighted taper in one hand, and silently praying the Rosary with the other.

Four of Breton’s major works, including The Blessing of the Wheat and The Recall of the Gleaners, were exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Vienna, in 1873.

Peasant Woman Resting (1873) is another of Breton’s intimate portraits of poor women, probably painted earlier in the year when he was back in Courrières.

One of Breton’s major works from this period is The Festival of Saint-Jean, which was shown in the Salon of 1875; sadly I have been unable to locate a suitable image of that finished painting, but this study for it, The Feast of Saint John (1875) (even with its poor image quality) may give you an idea of its magnificence. If Breton painted this, or any of his other studies, from nature, those are most likely to date from 1874 or earlier, for the finished work to be ready for submission to the Salon early in 1875.

Like the Midsummer’s Eve paintings of Nikolai Astrup, it shows the bonfires and dancing which took place on the eve of the feast of Saint John. I believe that this was painted at Courrières and not in Brittany, judging by the distinctive church tower visible in the finished version. That work was purchased from the artist by Goupil in March, before the Salon in May, and was then sold on to a British dealer in June for 45,000 Francs.

Following encouragement from friends he made in Brittany, Breton published a volume of his poetry in 1875. If anything, that proved even more popular than his paintings.

References

Wikipedia.

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

Today, the First of April, is traditionally a day of practical jokes and pranks: what more appropriate day to consider how painters, working on flat surfaces, can deceive the eye? In the trompe l’oeil, the artist goes far beyond the normal trickery of painting, to make the viewer think that they are looking at something quite different, and usually intensely three-dimensional.

The Romans loved wall-paintings which made their rooms look as if they were in a spacious outdoors. Unfortunately their multiple perspective projections make their architectural trompes l’oeil look ungainly today, but murals which set a room in the midst of a garden, like these from the House of the Golden Bracelet in Pompeii, are still exquisitely real.

With the invention of accurate 3D perspective projection, the strict optical realism necessary for successful deception was at last achievable. Indeed, one of the first paintings to employ modern perspective, Masaccio’s magnificent The Holy Trinity (1426-8) in the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, is also one of the greatest trompes l’oeil.

The Renaissance then brought a succession of masterly religious paintings which aimed to be so realistic that they deceived the eye, including Petrus Christus’ The Nativity (c 1445-50).

Bellini painted several works which used perspective projection for a trompe l’oeil effect: this is his San Giobbe Altarpiece from about 1487.

And this is Bellini’s next work, from 1488, the Frari Triptych.

Many frescoes couple powerful projection with enormous size to extend the building that they are in, and this is almost universal for painted ceilings. Andrea Mantegna’s oculus on the ceiling of the Spouse’s Chamber in the Palazzo Ducale, Mantua, is a splendid example from 1473.

Andrea Pozzo made the fresco trompe l’oeil his speciality, creating extraordinary ceilings such as his Allegory of the Jesuits’ Missionary Work (1691-94) in Sant’Ignazio, Rome.

Easel paintings are amenable to deceptive devices at a smaller scale. Vermeer’s Girl reading a Letter at an Open Window (c 1658) interposes a railed curtain to give an air of intimacy, suggesting that the viewer is peeping past the curtain and gazing in at real and private life.

This was exploited by the American artist Raphaelle Peale in his Venus Rising From the Sea – A Deception (c 1822). This was a visual criticism of the smallminded attitude to the display of paintings of nudes at the time. Peale’s extra twist is that, rather than using a curtain, his nude is concealed by a handkerchief.

From early in the Renaissance, painters realised that they could mimic three-dimensional artworks too. Jan van Eyck’s The Annunciation Diptych (c 1433-35) probably started from the concept of a monochrome grisaille, and ended up as vividly 3D as any sculpture.

If a painter could feign a sculpture, other small wall-mounted objects were within reach. Carel Fabritius put The Goldfinch (1654) on someone’s wall; with a light frame on an off-white wall, it must have looked very realistic.

At about this time, painters such as Cornelis Norbertus Gysbrechts made their speciality the production of trompe l’oeil still lifes. A popular theme was the wall-mounted letter-rack, shown in his Board Partition with Letter Rack and Music Book (1668).

Some of Gysbrechts’ trompes l’oeil became quite elaborate too, such as his A Cabinet in the Artist’s Studio (1670-71), which also uses a hanging curtain device.

Two centuries later, William Harnett and some other American painters made very similar works; this is his Mr. Hulings’ Rack Picture (1888).

Harnett’s The Last Summer Rose (1886) is more of a conventional still life, but also aims to deceive.

This sub-genre lives on today. Here is Jeylina Ever’s topical Vanitas Symbolizing Childhood Disease, Culture, Time Passing and Death from 2009.

The other line which has been pursued in easel paintings is the use of false frames to accomplish visual tricks. There are countless paintings which have included false frames of various types, sometimes with their figures ‘breaking’ the false frame by sitting or leaning on it.

Gustave Moreau’s Nyx (1880) is an example of many paintings which come with an inbuilt and painted frame. It is unusual for Moreau, and something of a puzzle in that this type of realism was never a big feature of his art.

One of the most brilliant of these, Pere Borrell del Caso’s Escaping Criticism (1874), shows its single figure climbing through the false frame as if it were a hatch, allowing them to move from the flat constraints of the canvas back out into the 3D world of the viewer. It is an excellent demonstration of how sophisticated illusion can be generated by a skilled painter.

Paintings only too easily become separated from their original titles. Devoid of that crucial clue, Evelyn De Morgan‘s full-length portrait of an overtly troubled woman, above, becomes an insoluble mystery.

We see a classically-dressed woman, walking slowly in a non-descript landscape. Both her hands rest on the top of her bowed head, as if she is wrestling with inner turmoil. She stares down at the ground just in front of her feet. The wind has blown loose robe high over the top of her.

Even when we know the title, which is just her name, Deianira, we are little the wiser. The only well-known story involving her is of her attempted abduction by the Centaur Nessus, which I have told in another article. With neither Nessus nor her husband, Hercules/Heracles, shown, the painting is no less cryptic.

Evelyn Pickering, as she was then, studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in University College, London, between 1873-76; the Slade’s first professor was Sir Edward Poynter, who taught there from 1871-75, and painted several unusual if not obscure classical motifs.

Looking at a short and incomplete list of Evelyn De Morgan’s paintings, I can see five which show Ovid’s ‘heroines’, characters for whom he wrote fictional letters in his Heroides:

• Ariadne in Naxos (1877) – letter 10,
• Deianira (1878) – letter 9,
• Hero Holding the Beacon for Leander (1885) – letters 18, 19,
• Medea (1886 or 1889) – letter 12,
• Helen of Troy (1898) – letters 16, 17.

With Poynter her inspiration, Evelyn De Morgan seems to have dipped into Ovid’s unique collection of stories about women.

So why should Deianira appear so troubled?

Considering how frequently Hercules is reported to have had relationships with women and men, his marriage to Deianira seems to have been one of his most enduring. For some artists, it was very physical: Jan Gossaert’s Hercules and Deianira (1517) spares little to the imagination.

Some of Hercules’ relationships were unusual, to say the least. One episode which Ovid’s letter alludes to is a period spent as a slave to Queen Omphale.

As Lucas Cranach the Elder’s bizarre Hercules and Omphale (1537) shows, this paragon of manly attainment – in his twelve labours most notably – was dressed as a woman, and performed womanly tasks such as spinning. I will consider that in detail in the next article.

The attempted abduction by Nessus set a trap which was later to bring about the deaths of both Hercules and Deianira. As he lay dying, Nessus gave Deianira a vial of his blood, advising her that it ‘would ensure that Hercules was true to her forever’. Well-versed readers at the time of Ovid would have recognised this immediately, knowing how toxic the blood of a Centaur is, but Deianira was too naïve to know that, and took the Centaur’s words at face value.

Years later, when she heard that Hercules was having an affair with Iole, Deianira decided to try Nessus’ parting gift on her errant husband. When he called for a tunic (or shirt, or similar), she impregnated the garment with some of the blood, and sent it to Hercules. This is shown in this beautiful miniature accompanying Octavien de Saint-Gelais’ translation of Ovid’s Heroides from about 1510. It is at this stage that Ovid’s fictional letter from her to Hercules starts.

As soon as Hercules donned the impregnated tunic, he suffered intense pain from the poison, and he was unable to remove the garment from his skin. The pain was not so severe as to stop him from murdering Lichas, the herald who brought him the tunic, by throwing him into the sea. But Hercules was unable to find any relief, and resolved to burn himself on his own funeral pyre in desperation.

This is illustrated in another miniature, The Death of Hercules (c 1470), this time for Raoul Le Fèvre’s Histoires de Troyes.

Its most famous depiction, though, is in Francisco de Zurbarán’s powerful The Death of Hercules (1634). Using chiaroscuro as stark as any of Caravaggio’s, Zurbarán shows what can only be a Christian martyrdom, with its victim staring up to heaven, commending his soul to God.

Apart from portraits, Zurbarán painted almost exclusively religious motifs, until King Philip IV of Spain commissioned him to produce a series of paintings showing the life of Hercules. The king was a major patron of the arts, the work of Velázquez in particular, and this series was most probably part of his attempt to impress his royal grandeur with the construction of the Buen Retiro Palace in Madrid from 1631 onwards.

Later Philip became actively involved with religious mystics, and it is possible that his unconventional beliefs may have included Christianisation of some heroic figures like Hercules, but in the way that Botticelli had interwoven classical myth and Christian beliefs.

What happened to Hercules on his pyre has resulted in even more confused imagery, such as Tiepolo’s wonderful The Apotheosis of Hercules (c 1765). Because Hercules was the son of Jupiter/Zeus, as his body was burning, Jupiter decreed that only his mortal ‘half’ would be consumed by fire. His divine part was then conveyed in a chariot in an apotheosis to the gods on Olympus, which has often been portrayed as a saintly ascension. Once there, Hercules reconciled previous quarrels with Juno/Hera, and, as a god in his own right, married Hebe (the Roman Juventas), his half-sister.

The Deianira of Ovid’s Heroides and Evelyn De Morgan’s painting was then left in deep trouble. Hearing the news of Hercules’ death in the midst of writing her letter, she had but one option: suicide. With Hercules a god, and even Iole being cared for by Hercules’ son, Deianira was left alone, to die by her own hand.

But there is more to Ovid’s account, matters which I will take up in the next article.

In yesterday’s article about Deianira, I promised to return to the odd story of Hercules and Omphale, for which I showed a fine painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder, in which Hercules is dressed up in women’s clothing, and trying to spin.

Hercules or Heracles (even Herakles) is one of the great heros of classical mythology. Stories of his accomplishments pervade the literature of Greece and Rome from Homer’s early Iliad and Odyssey, right up to the last writings as Europe moved into the Middle Ages. He is most famous for his twelve labours, in which he proved his endurance, strength, fearlessness, and cunning by overcoming legendary monstrous challenges.

From the first, his killing of the Nemean lion, he wore its skin as a badge of honour and witness to those accomplishments.

He was also more than a little wayward, as might be expected from the son of Zeus/Jupiter and a Theban woman, Alkmene. He had as many ‘adventures’ as he had relationships – both forced and consensual – with women and men, and is an archetype of the swashbuckling testosterone-rich superhero.

Hercules also had some close calls, visits to Hades from which his return was uncertain, and often displeased the gods. At some stage, when he violated the laws of guest-friendship in the murder of Iphitos, his conduct reached a new low, and he was forced to seek the advice of the Oracle at Delphi. He ended up being sent into slavery to Omphale, the queen of Lydia, for a year or more.

It is in Omphale’s court that the once-mighty demi-god experiences his greatest humiliation. He is subjugated, stripped of the hide of the Nemean lion, his trademark club taken away, and the women of the court dress him in their (or possibly Omphale’s) clothes, and give him a distaff so that he can join them in spinning. The queen asserts her authority by donning the lionskin, and wielding the club.

From quite early in the telling of this story, it has also developed a certain sexual frisson, amplified in a dubious appendix in which Hercules is in Omphale’s bed, only for Pan to get in, assuming that he is the queen. Hercules promptly kicks Pan out of the bed, to welcome Omphale instead.

These stories were shown on vases and elsewhere from quite early on. One of the most unusual summaries of Hercules’ career is this mosaic from Llíria, Valencia, which summarises the twelve labours around its central panel.

There, in the midst of the swashbuckling, Hercules is seen holding his distaff and spindle, dressed as a woman, while Omphale sits on the Nemean lionskin on her throne, clutching his club.

Lucas Cranach the Elder made several slightly different paintings on the same basic theme of Hercules and Omphale (1537), which shows Hercules being humiliated in a respectable and amicable way by the women of Omphale’s court.

Bartholomeus Spranger’s Hercules and Omphale (c 1585) uses the same exchange of attributes, but plays openly with the eroticism of Omphale’s position.

Hercules and Omphale (c 1620) has been attributed to Rubens, and explores the humiliation of the hero in a more conventional way, as Omphale tugs at his ear as if he were an errant schoolboy.

Bernardo Cavallino puts the enslaved and degraded Hercules on display in the court, in his Hercules and Omphale (c 1640).

Antonio Bellucci cedes Hercules’ club to the queen, but not (yet) the lionskin, in his Hercules in the Palace of Omphale (c 1698). But look carefully at the directions of gaze of Omphale and her attendant women: they are not looking Hercules in the eye, although he appears to be remonstrating with the queen as a floral crown is put on his head, and a distaff in his left hand.

Luigi Garzi’s Hercules and Omphale (c 1700-10) lets Hercules put his spinning gear behind him, as he entertains the court with a song and the tambourine. Omphale seems to be enjoying her new position on the lionskin, and holding his club in her left hand.

Only Goya is more straight-laced, in his Hercules and Omphale (c 1810); there is no exchange of clothing, but Hercules sits attempting some fine task – threading a needle perhaps? – with his sword under the control of a courtier.

As the nineteenth century wrestled with the future of history painting and mythology, the story of Hercules’ humiliation did not die, by any means. This is Charles Gleyre’s Hercules and Omphale from 1862, showing the hero learning to spin. It was at Gleyre’s Academy that Jean-Léon Gérôme, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Whistler all started to learn to paint.

Into the twentieth century, this story held out when most others were falling into disfavour. Otto Greiner’s Hercules and Omphale (1905) shows an older and exhausted Hercules who has fallen asleep because of his exertions, amidst the taunting court.

As the First World War loomed close, Gustave-Claude-Etienne Courtois cast Hercules as a circus strong-man, a ‘toy-boy’ kneeling in front of an opulent Omphale, in his Hercules at the Feet of Omphale (1912).

Finally, Byam Shaw ignores the figure of Hercules alogether, showing a triumphant and erotically-charged Omphale (1914), against a background of the twelve labours, in a remarkable reconfiguration of the ancient Roman mosaic.

What of Ovid’s account in his Heroides, though?

This seems to me to be the most remarkable twist to the whole story. For a Roman poet who was sent into exile because of the content of some of his erotic works, Ovid’s fictional letter from Deianira to Hercules is a model for feminism. Having given a brief account of Hercules’ serial adultery and promiscuity, Deianira mercilessly attacks his relationship with Omphale, accusing him of being effeminate. Worse, Deianira claims that Omphale was a better man than Hercules ever was.

Shortly after that, the letter records that Deianira has been told that her stray husband is dying because of the Centaur’s poison with which she impregnated his tunic. Her world has ended, and she bids farewell to it before she kills herself.

As beautiful and unusual as these paintings are, none covers a fraction of the ground laid out by Ovid’s heroine.

By 1900, Franz von Stuck had built upon his already substantial reputation, and remained active in the Munich Secession.

Von Stuck’s Spring (in German, Frühling) (1902) was a departure from his previous femmes fatales, which had based on an erotic interpretation of Eve. This beautiful young woman decked with purple flowers looks the viewer straight in the eye – a look which seems more knowing than innocent. Behind her the trees have also just come into bloom, and the sky promises that its thin white clouds are dispersing.

Wounded Amazon (1903) is a development of an earlier painting from 1897 in which von Stuck first explored the theme of Amazons, and unfortunately much later became a favourite of Hermann Göring. Here they are at war with Centaurs, and the young Amazon who almost fills the canvas has been wounded under her right breast. At the right is the corpse of another, pale blue in death.

According to Greek myth, there were series of major wars involving the Amazons and Greeks, known as the Amazonomachy, and the Centaurs and Lapiths, known as the Centauromachy. These resulted in the defeat of the Amazons and the Centaurs, who were driven from Greece. Depictions also show battles between Amazons and Centaurs, although accounts of that are more dubious.

Von Stuck also revisited the Greek Sphinx (1904), perhaps in response to Fernand Khnopff‘s painting of 1896. This version is completely human, but still in the pose of the half-woman, half-lion seen more commonly. It is night, and the sphinx lies in the heraldic couchant position characteristic of the beast. Significantly, there is no sign of its previous victims.

Susanna Bathing (1904) has been an enduringly popular motif for many centuries, and her story was painted by Lovis Corinth and other contemporary painters in Europe. Von Stuck shows the most frequently-painted scene, in which two voyeuristic elders watch the beautiful Susanna bathing in her garden, then try to blackmail her into committing adultery with them.

Von Stuck also progressed his recurrent theme of fauns and nymphs in his very loosely-painted The Game (Faun and Nymph) (c 1904). A pale-skinned nymph is escaping the clutches of a darker-coloured faun; she pushes his head away from her, as she breaks free, presumably to don the clothing which she is carrying.

The marked contrast in skin tones has a very long history, dating back at least to the ancient Egyptians, who used the same gender-based colour-coding.

Orestes and the Erinyes (1905) shows the haunted figure of Orestes trying to escape from three snake-wielding Furies, who swirl around him with menace. They are avenging Orestes’ murder of his own mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover Aegisthus, a story told in a trilogy of plays by Aeschylus, the Oresteia.

This story became particularly popular around the end of the nineteenth century, when it was painted by Gustave Moreau and John Singer Sargent. I consider their paintings here. Von Stuck’s painting is particularly innovative in its use of space, within which the Furies swirl and tumble.

Von Stuck’s Salome (1906) follows those of Gustave Moreau, which appear to have changed the original post-Biblical story with The Apparition (c 1876), and Lovis Corinth, whose paintings of 1899 and 1900 were very influential in the story’s further evolution. Von Stuck was one of the first painters to ride on the wave of ‘Salomania’ which swept Europe from about 1905.

Richard Strauss saw Oscar Wilde’s play performed in Berlin in 1902, and his opera premiered in Dresden, at the end of 1905. The following year, and perhaps as an even more immediate inspiration for this painting, the dancer and choreographer Maud Allan produced the show Vision of Salomé in Vienna, which featured a notorious version of the Dance of the Seven Veils.

Von Stuck painted several similar versions of this work, of which this is perhaps the most famous. His Salome is the erotic dancer of Wilde, Strauss, and Allan, decked with flamboyant ‘oriental’ jewellery and naked to the waist. Behind her, in the dark shadows, an ape-like creature grins, and holds out a platter on which is the head of John the Baptist. Von Stuck had added his interpretation to the growing and controversial canon of art depicting Salome as the author of John’s execution, and Salome as femme fatale.

In 1906, von Stuck was awarded the Order of Merit of the Bavarian Crown. Among his students and visitors to his classes were members of the Blue Rider group, including Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, and he later taught Josef Albers.

Reference

Wikipedia.

Having introduced Tiresias to us as a seer, and after taking a short break from the Theban cycle, Ovid’s last story in Book 3 of his Metamorphoses involves a prophecy from Tiresias about Theban events, which lead to a grizzly murder.

The Story

This story opens with a two-line summary, in which we’re told that one man scorned the gods and Tiresias: Pentheus, son of Echion, who was one of the founding Thebans born from the dragon’s teeth sown by Cadmus earlier in this book. Pentheus mocks Tiresias for his blindness, in return for which Tiresias warns him that he would be better off blind. The seer then foretells that a new god, Bacchus, son of Semele, will soon arrive. If Pentheus does not worship him, then he will be torn apart, limb from limb, by his own mother and aunts.

In the next lines, Bacchus and his cult arrive. Although everyone else is immediately engaged in his celebration and worship, Pentheus pours scorn on the new god and those rites. Pentheus is highly critical, warning that the city of Thebes could fall to an unarmed boy while its citizens engage in Bacchic festivities.

Pentheus orders his men to bring him Bacchus, but they return only with one of his followers. The captive is invited to tell his story before being put to death. Acoetes, as he names himself, describes his upbringing, and career as a ship’s captain. On one journey, he put his ship in to Chios, where his crew found a young boy who seemed to be partly drunk and dazed. Against his better judgement, his crew brought the boy aboard his ship.

When the boy woke up properly, he asked to be taken to Naxos (the island on which Ariadne was abandoned by Theseus). Acoetes set course for the island, but the crew steered away from it. The ship then came to a grinding halt, in the middle of the Mediterranean, and ivy grew rapidly over the oars, sails, and rigging. The crew, apart from the captain, then leapt overboard, and were transformed into dolphins:
“Then the mariners leaped out,
possessed by fear or madness. Medon first
began to turn a swarthy hue, and fins
grew outward from his flattened trunk,
and with a curving spine his body bent.—
then Lycabas to him, ‘What prodigy
is this that I behold?’ Even as he spoke,
his jaws were broadened and his nose was bent;
his hardened skin was covered with bright scales.
And Libys, as he tried to pull the oars,
could see his own hands shrivel into fins;
another of the crew began to grasp
the twisted ropes, but even as he strove
to lift his arms they fastened to his sides;—
with bending body and a crooked back
he plunged into the waves, and as he swam
displayed a tail, as crescent as the moon.
“Now here, now there, they flounce about the ship;
they spray her decks with brine; they rise and sink;
they rise again, and dive beneath the waves;
they seem in sportive dance upon the main;
out from their nostrils they spout sprays of brine;
they toss their supple sides. And I alone,
of twenty mariners that manned that ship,
remained.”

Bacchus told Acoetes to sail on to Naxos, where the captain joined Bacchus’ cult.

Pentheus then orders Acoetes to be tortured until he dies. But while he awaits his death in a cell, the doors suddenly fly open, his shackles fall away, and he escapes unharmed.

Pentheus decides to deal with this himself, and heads for Mount Cithaeron, where the Bacchic revels are taking place. He finds the worshippers in a clearing on the wooded slopes. As he gazes at the forbidden sight of the ‘mysteries’, he is seen. His own mother, and her sisters, mistake him for a boar, and immediately attack.

Pentheus invokes the name of Actaeon in a desperate bid to stop the throng of bacchantes who attack him, and tries to run away, but it is futile. His arms are torn off, and then his head. Ovid ends the story with the lesson that the women of Thebes will honour Bacchus in those rites, and cannot be stopped.

There is an interesting historical link, as during the history of Rome, the cult of Bacchus and its ‘mysteries’ were a source of concern to its government. Around 186 BCE (almost two centuries before Ovid’s prime), attempts were made to control or stop those practices. They do not seem to have eliminated Bacchic cults or revels, but absorbed them better into society, which is perhaps the solution which Pentheus should have sought.

The story of Pentheus is also unusual in Metamorphoses in that its only transformation occurs in the embedded story of the ship carrying Bacchus to Naxos, in which the crew are turned into dolphins. Its theme or moral, of not looking at what shouldn’t be seen, does though fit in well with Ovid’s stories in this book.

The Paintings

This story is shown in at least two surviving works of art from ancient times, but since the spread of Christianity, has all but vanished from art.

This Attic red-figure lid for a cosmetics bowl, from about 450-425 BCE, shows Pentheus about to be torn apart, limb from limb, by Agave and Ino, his mother and aunt.

This fresco found in the ruins of one of the houses in Pompeii shows a similar scene, here with his mother and an aunt preparing to rip his arms off, another woman behind him about to throw a large rock, and two others wielding their thyrsi like clubs.

As far as I can discover, the only painting of Pentheus and his death which has been made since, up to 1950, was a mid-nineteenth century history painting by Charles Gleyre (who taught several of the Impressionists to paint). Sadly I have been unable to locate that, or any usable image of it.

There are hundreds of paintings from the Renaissance onwards which show Bacchic revels and bacchantes. Among the most famous are several by Poussin, for instance. Almost universally, they show feasting, drinking, and free sexual activity. One of my favourite paintings of this type is Lovis Corinth’s Bacchanale (1896).

I have only found one painting which shows the sinister side of the cult as applied to Pentheus: Émile Lévy’s Death of Orpheus (1866)

Shown at the Salon in Paris in 1866, Lévy catches the moment before the first wound is inflicted: Orpheus has just been knocked to the ground, and looks stunned. Two bacchantes kneel by his side, one clasping his neck (almost as if feeling for a carotid pulse), the other about to bring the vicious blade of her ceremonial sickle down to cleave his neck open.

Orpheus was the great legendary musician, who shunned the worship of gods other than that of the sun. Early one morning, when he went to the oracle of Dionysus/Bacchus at Mount Pangaion to salute the rising sun, a group of bacchantes were enraged by his refusal to honour their god, and tore him to pieces.

So why has no one painted the dramatic story of the death of Pentheus?

I’d hazard a guess that its underlying lesson was too anti-Christian for any patron or painter to try to tell it in a painting. Lévy succeded in doing so for Orpheus because of the latter’s musical accomplishments; Pentheus had no saving graces, and any depiction could only have appeared an endorsement of extremely heathen revels – which were only acceptable when they resembled the activities of contemporary Christian courts, perhaps.

But as an encouragement to tolerate or even encourage the worship of a profoundly heathen god, they would have been wholly unacceptable to European society.

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.

After the success of The Festival of Saint-Jean, which was sold before it went on display at the Salon, and shortly afterwards sold on to another dealer for 45,000 Francs, Jules Breton came under increasing pressure from the dealers. Coupled with his new career as a poet, following publication of the first volume of his poetry in 1875, he found it hard to justify the time and preparatory studies required for larger ‘crowd’ paintings.

During the 1880s, in particular, he therefore concentrated on works showing one or only a few figures in rustic settings, which lack the gravitas of his more complex motifs. They did, though, provide the opportunity to explore the transient effects of light, which were becoming more significant with the rising popularity of Impressionism.

In 1877, Breton visited the south of France again, and his painting The Gleaner (1877) was bought for the state from exhibition at the Salon.

A Fisherman’s Daughter (1878) was painted at Port-Rhu near Douarnenez, in Brittany. It shows a young woman mending or making fishing net for her father, a very traditional task for the women who supported seagoing men. She wears local working dress, with a white cornette over a red headband, fawn bodice, and purple kerchief on her chest.

A couple of fishing boats are visible in the background. It is coincidental that Breton’s paintings of fisherfolk in Brittany were made at about the same time that Winslow Homer was documenting similar activities at Cullercoats in north-east England (1881 onwards).

Another painting from the Breton coast is The Wounded Sea Gull (1878), in which a different young woman cradles an injured gull in her arms. Oddly, she is not looking at the gull, but staring into the distance. This was perhaps a device to suggest to the viewer that she is reflecting on some greater meaning, but appears rather strange.

Innocent (c 1879) may have been intended as a study for a more substantial painting, but is a delightful work in its own right, and was probably also made near Douarnenez.

Breton maintained the family home back in Courrières, where he increasingly painted full-figure views against the flat fields. In the case of The Tired Gleaner (1880), this was into the setting sun, giving the sky the qualities of light which were characteristic of many of these paintings.

By this stage, most of Breton’s paintings had become far looser than they had been in the past. He decided in about 1867 that adhering to the Salon tradition was not good for his art, and had steadily become more painterly in his facture.

In 1880, his poem Jeanne was published, and his poetry was awarded the a Montyon Prize by the Académie Française, a great honour. However, the demands of art dealers were only increasing, and he was now attracting considerable interest from the large and rich market in the USA. Despite that, in 1881 he managed to visit The Hague and Brittany, although the latter was shorter than in many previous years.

Among the transient effects of light which had always interested Breton were rainbows, which appear in a few of his paintings. The Rainbow (1883) is his most dramatic, and was shown at the 1883 triennal exposition of the Salon, where its rough facture must have appeared quite progressive.

In 1884, Breton found time for some more complex paintings, including this Departure for the Fields and a much more substantial work, The Communicants, which now seems to have gone missing. Departure for the Fields is set in his favourite wheat fields just outside Courrières, but The Communicants may have been painted further afield, possibly even in Brittany.

Song of the Lark (1884) is one of his best single-figure works from this period, and was one of his most successful. It shows a barefoot young woman agricultural worker singing as she walks out to her work in the fields near Courrières, her sickle in her hand. Shown at the Salon in 1885, it sold to the USA, where it soon went on to Chicago.

Breton’s model was a local woman, Marie Bidoul, who stood for him outdoors in the field at dawn and dusk until the artist was happy that he had captured her form. At the time that he was working from the model, Breton had not committed himself as to whether the painting would show her at dawn or dusk. Thankfully for both, it was at least summer.

This painting was given to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1917, and since then it has been one of the most popular and loved paintings in its entire collection. In 1934, The Chicago Daily News ran a survey to decide the most popular painting in the Institute’s collection, which was won by Song of the Lark. Unfortunately the then director had decided to remove the painting from display, only to be forced to return it very quickly.

Study for The Snack (1885) is a wonderfully loose sketch which Breton made, again near Courrières, in preparation for The Snack, or The Tea-break as it is sometimes known, which was shown at the Salon in 1886.

That year, Vincent van Gogh, who was a great admirer of Breton’s paintings, walked 85 miles to visit the artist at his home in Courrières; at the last minute van Gogh was deterred by the high wall surrounding the property, and returned without trying to see him.

The following year, Breton showed The End of the Working Day (or Across the Fields) (1886-87) at the Salon. Apart from the precision of the three figures in the foreground, its looseness, rich colours, and use of light would surely qualify it as being Impressionist. This too sold to a US collector, and in 1921 was given to the Brooklyn Museum in New York City, where it has proved very popular.

Not intended as a pendant to Song of the Lark, Breton’s The Shepherd’s Star (1887) would surely be an appropriate companion, as it shows a tired woman returning from the fields as the light of sunset fades to reveal the brightest of the stars above. On her head she balances a sack of potatoes. For this work, Breton used a ‘Catherine Bibi’ as the model.

This painting was shown at the Salon in 1888, and at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889, from where it was sold to the USA. It first went on display in the Art Institute of Chicago in 1889, but was then sold into a private collection. It went back on public display in 1922, when it was given to the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio.

In 1887, Breton’s collected poetic works were published. However, his health was starting to trouble him: from 1886 he made annual visits to La Bourboule, a spa in the Auvergne, for treatment of various symptoms. In 1889, he was created a Commander in the Legion of Honour.

References

Wikipedia.

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

Although it is fairly widely known that Jules Breton had a daughter, Virginie Demont-Breton (1859–1935), who went on to paint, I had not realised just how successful she was, and how distinctive and delightful her paintings are. As is usual for women artists, lamentably few of her paintings are available as usable images, and little is reported of her career. This article is as much as I know.

She was born and named Virginie Élodie Marie Thérèse to Jules and Élodie Breton, in Courrières, inland from Calais on the north-east coast of France, on 26 July 1859. She was a precocious artist, and had her first work accepted by the Paris Salon in 1879 when she was still nineteen. She married the painter Adrien Demont the following year, after which she signed her paintings as Virginie Demont-Breton.

In her early career, she specialised in painting mothers with their young children. Her First Steps (1881-2) was exhibited at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles in 1881, although it is dated 1882, and was shown in the Salon in 1882. From there it was sold to Goupil, who sold it to the USA, a market in which, like her father, she did well.

She was awarded a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle in Amsterdam in 1883, although I have been unable to identify which work(s) brought her that distiction.

The Beach (1883), which was painted on the Channel coast, was exhibited at the Salon in 1883, where it earned her ‘hors-concours’ (because of exemplary record, her works didn’t need to be submitted to the jury in future), and was purchased by the state.

That year, she joined the French Union of Women Painters and Sculptors, and was its president from 1895-1901. Among her achievements for the Union was the full admission of women to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and their eligibility for the competition for the prestigious Prix de Rome.

L’homme est en mer (The Man is at Sea) (1889) is probably her best-known painting, and shows a fisherman’s wife warming herself and her sleeping infant by the fire, while her husband is away fishing at sea. It was exhibited at the Salon in 1889, where it was rapidly engraved for prints.

The reason for the fame of that painting above is in part because of Vincent van Gogh’s copy, L’homme est en mer (The Man is at Sea, after Demont-Breton) (1889), which he painted when he was undergoing treatment in the Saint Paul asylum at Saint-Rémy. Van Gogh based his copy on a printed reproduction.

In 1890, she and her husband moved to the small fishing village of Wissant, on the Côte d’Opale between the capes of Blanc-Nez and Gris-Nez, between Calais and Boulogne. The following year they started construction on a villa in neo-Egyptian style which they named Typhonium, and is now a preserved historical site.

Their house became the focus of a group of artists known as the Wissant School, which was active until the early twentieth century. Members included Félix Planquette, Fernand Stievenard, Valentine Pépe, Henri and Marie Duhem, and Virginie and her husband Adrien.

This detail of Virginie’s Portrait of Marie Duhem (1889) shows one of their close friends and colleagues in the Wissant School, at work en plein air on the coast near their house.

In 1893, Virginie was among the French women artists who took part in the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, forming its Woman’s Building.

This monochrome reproduction of Stella Maris (1894) is one of Virginie’s many paintings using maritime motifs, which she developed after they moved to Wissant. Stella Maris is a popular name for Polaris, the Pole Star, which has been used since ancient times for celestial navigation, but the artist’s principal reference here is to its use as a traditional synonym for the Virgin Mary.

The wrecked mariners clinging on to the rigging have been joined by a vision of the Virgin Mary, who bears the infant Jesus in her arms. This painting was exhibited at the Salon in 1895, and the print comes from a 1905 book on Women Painters of the World.

In 1894, Virginie was admitted to the Legion of Honour, and in 1896 was recognised by the Rosati Society for her achievements.

She continued to paint intimate family scenes around the Channel coast. Into the water! (c 1898) shows a fisherman’s wife taking her young children for what may well have been their only opportunity to bathe properly.

Men of the Sea (1898) is another monochrome reproduction of a full-colour original painting, showing the fishermen of Wissant landing their catch on the beach. This compares with her father’s earlier (1879ish) paintings of fisherfolk in Brittany, and Winslow Homer’s famous paintings from 1881 of those at Cullercoats, north-east England.

Première audace premier frisson (First dare, first thrill) (1900) is a monochrome reproduction, again, showing two young children entering the water at Wissant. This painting was exhibited at the Salon in 1900.

Like her father, later in Virginie’s career she turned to writing poetry and prose, in which she was also successful. Her collected poems were published in 1920, and four volumes of memoires between 1926-1930. She died in Paris on 10 January 1935.

Among her undated works are the following.

Mother and Child in an Orange Grove (above) was probably painted in the south of France, as was Under the Orange Tree (below).

—

Alma Mater is an unusual version of the Nativity, in which the Virgin Mary’s traditional blue has been transferred to the painted plaster behind her, so that she can be dressed in white.

Le Divin Apprenti (The Divine Apprentice) is a monochrome reproduction of a full-colour original. This shows the Holy Family in Joseph’s carpenter’s shop. The elderly Joseph guides Jesus in sharpening a knife on a whetstone, which is turned by his mother Mary. Sunlight cast through the window illuminates the boy’s head.

This compares with John Millais’ famous Christ in the House of His Parents (1849-50).

Young Fisherman Watches the Sea is a thoughtful portrait of a young man whose future depends on his abilities to survive at sea. Note how painterly are the waves and other details in the background, which are also deliberately defocussed.

Although there are no books devoted to her work, as far as I can discover, a catalog raisonné is being prepared, which will be a major step forward in documenting her paintings properly. Not as great a modern Master as her father, perhaps, like the work of the women Impressionists, she broadened the appeal of painting, and was important in opening up art as a career for women. She deserves much greater recognition.

Reference

Wikipedia (brief).

Sensory associations with music since the end of the nineteenth century have undoubtedly been greatly influenced by the progressive dissociation between music and live performance. Although ‘phonographs’ and the records which succeeded them had limited effect, once a substantial proportion of our populations were able to listen to concerts on the radio from about 1930, music was no longer associated with the sight of musicians playing instruments.

No matter how often you might attend live music now, I expect that most of the music that you hear is a purely auditory sensation, emitted from loudspeakers or headphones, long after it was originally performed. The only exceptions to this are likely to be professional musicians. The repertory of known music for any individual will also have grown steadily through the nineteenth century, before increasing enormously after 1930.

This has odd effects. Personally, although I often associate specific music with images, it seldom works the other way around, in ‘hearing’ in my mind music which I associate with a specific image. Strangely, the only music which I tend to imagine in this way is Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries – far from being a favourite! – with paintings and images of valkyries, such as Arbo’s evocative second version of Valkyrie (1869).

Even splendid paintings of single instrumental performance, such as Renoir’s soft-focus Young Girls at the Piano (1892), leave me without so much as a note in my auditory imagination.

Not only that, but few paintings about music and musicians actually show an instrument being played. Jan Brueghel the Elder’s magnificent allegory of Hearing (1617-18), with figures painted by Rubens, is also remarkable for the presence of so many unplayed instruments. There is a small performance going on in the back room at the left, but the great majority of the instruments, creatures, and noise-making devices appear silent.

In the past, it was much more likely that middle- and upper-class people – those more likely to see a painting – would play at least one musical instrument. Jan Miense Molenaer’s delightful portrait of his own family in about 1635 makes that point clearly, and unusually many of them are actually playing their instrument in the painting, rather than just posing with it.

Of the huge number of paintings which are associated with music, only a small number can be associated with a specific type of music, closely enough that we could identify a piece for our auditory imagination.

Adolph Menzel’s Concert for Flute with Frederick the Great in Sanssouci (1850-52) is one of the best examples, in that the musicians and audience can also be identified. The solo flautist is Friedrich II of Prussia (Frederick the Great), at the harpsichord is CPE Bach, and Johann Joachim Quantz, the king’s flute teacher, is at the far right. The concert shown would have taken place about a century earlier.

A little later in the century, Edgar Degas painted a much less formal work showing The Orchestra at the Opera (c 1870), in which the bassoonist closest to the viewer is visibly playing. But do you hear any of his notes? Do you even know which piece of music they are playing? You might be able to guess, say, given the ballet taking place on the stage behind, that it might have been one of the more famous bassoon passages from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. But does the painting really tell us that?

If imagining a specific piece of music is difficult, it may be easier to invoke the less musical sound resulting from a group of enthusiastic young musicians. Georgios Jakobides’ Παιδική Συναυλία (Children’s Concert) (1894) is one of the few paintings which evokes my auditory imagination, as well as being an excellent depiction of the event. Jakobides painted at least one other version of a similar motif, which I find as effective, although the image available of that painting is not as good.

Another more readily imaged sound is the disorganised cacophany which sometimes ensues in practice, or preparation for a concert. Pompeo Massani’s The Orchestra Rehearsal from around 1900 captures this well, but I don’t find this as strong an evocation as Jakobides’ children.

Undoubtedly the greatest challenge to anyone trying to paint music is to introduce the viewer to instruments, and music, with which we are unfamiliar or even ignorant. Kamal-ol-molk’s فارسی: عمله طرب، نوازندگان و رقصندگان عصر ناصری shows a Music Group in Naser al-din Shah Ara in Iran, in 1886. Although I recognise a dulcimer – in fact a santur – at the right, I have no idea what this group might have sounded like. It is worrying, though, that the large red-haired man at the back, on the left, appears to be brandishing a knife.

When the Aesthetic Movement came to painting, after the initial blush of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, its emphasis on depicting a range of different sensory modalities seems to have been a daunting prospect.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Blue Bower (1865) is a musical conundrum: in his bid to involve the sense of hearing, Fanny Cornforth (Rossetti’s lover at the time, and model for this painting) is idly caressing the strings of an exotic and excitingly ‘oriental’ musical instrument. It is likely that neither Cornforth nor Rossetti knew that this is a Korean relative of the Japanese koto, known as a gayageum or kayagum – which also happens to be related to the Persian santur.

Rossetti’s later Veronica Veronese (1872) returns to altogether safer ground with its inclusion of a violin. By this time, the artist had become obsessed with Alexa Wilding, who was the model for this painting, who was clearly no violinist. Instead of holding the instrument, it is hung on the wall and she plays idly with its strings and bow. Only the yellow canary at the left is emitting any song.

Albert Joseph Moore at least assembled The Quartet, a Painter’s Tribute to Music (1868), and had them play as he painted them, with a silent double bass on the shelf above. But this is a decidedly strange painting too: all seven figures are dressed for classical times, yet the instruments which they are playing did not exist until the sixteenth century, and the double bass developed from the violone rather later than that.

I’d also be most interested to learn of the music which might have been played by an Augustinian string quartet: the modern string quartet didn’t really exist before Haydn in the mid-1760s.

My final example of paintings of the Aesthetic Movement depicting music is altogether more credible: Marie Spartali Stillman’s Fiammetta Singing (1879). This was based on Boccaccio’s sonnet Of Fiammetta Singing, probably using Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s verse translation. Fiammetta, in red at the left, is singing to the accompaniment of a lute. Despite its multi-modal and multi-sensory devices, I’m afraid that I can’t hear her singing.

This has been a tiny selection of the innumerable paintings which have taken music as their theme, and I fear a demonstration of how difficult it is for a painter to evoke a musical response in the viewer. This does not detract from any of these wonderful paintings, but illustrates the limitations in human sensory association. Or at least it does for someone who has lived entirely in the era since music was separated from the instruments of its creation. Maybe it was different before the twentieth century.

(This article is dedicated to the composer David Ward: I hope that you enjoy it.)

If you want a quick summary of this story before you skip ahead to the paintings, here’s the TL;DR:
Helen, daughter of Zeus and Leda, who was the wife of King Tyndareus of Sparta, married Menelaus, successor to Tyndareus. Paris (Alexander) wanted Helen, so eloped with, or abducted, her back to Troy, where they lived together. Menelaus went to fight the Trojans, leaving his daughter Hermione in the care of Tyndareus, who agreed her marriage to Orestes, son of Agamemnon. Menelaus agreed that Hermione should marry Pyrrhus (Neoptolemos), so took Hermione from Orestes and gave her to Pyrrhus. However, Pyrrhus had taken Andromache, widow of Hector, as a concubine. Hermione plotted Andromache’s murder, but Orestes and Hermione then eloped. Orestes plotted the murder of Pyrrhus, but he was killed at Delphi. Orestes later married Erigone, the daughter of his mother, Clytemnestra, by her lover Aegisthus after they had murdered Orestes’ father, Agamemnon. Orestes murdered his mother and her lover, and later Alete, Erigone’s brother.

Perhaps I had better explain a little more slowly.

Helen, ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’, was conceived by Leda, who was the wife of the King of Sparta, Tyndareus, when Jupiter seduced her in the form of a swan. When she grew up, Helen married Menelaus, who succeeded her father as the King of Sparta, and the couple had a daughter named Hermione. Following the Judgment of Paris, Paris made off with Helen from Sparta, and took her back to Troy: an action which precipitated the war between Greece and its allies, and Troy. Paris was also known as Alexander.

With Helen already in Troy, Hermione’s father Menelaus left Sparta for the war against Troy, leaving their daughter in the care of Helen’s father, Tyndareus. He agreed for Hermione to marry Orestes, who was her cousin, being the son of Agamemnon, Menelaus’ brother. It seems likely that by the end of the Trojan War, Hermione and Orestes were living together as a couple.

While Menelaus was away fighting against Troy, he agreed that his daughter Hermione should marry Pyrrhus, who was also known as Neoptolemos, and was the son of the great Greek warrior Achilles (who was killed by Paris towards the end of the war). When Menelaus and Pyrrhus returned from the war, Menelaus implemented that marriage by taking Hermione away from Orestes, and giving her to Pyrrhus.

However, Pyrrhus had not returned alone from Troy; he had brought with him a concubine, Andromache, who had been the wife of Hector and mother of Astyanax. Achilles had killed Hector in the war, and Pyrrhus had (probably) thrown young Astyanax to his death from the walls of Troy during its sacking.

The arrival of Andromache and the enforced marriage to Pyrrhus were understandably very distressing to Hermione, who quickly developed a dislike of Andromache, which was mutual. Hermione accused Andromache of using sorcery to prevent her from conceiving a child by Pyrrhus, which might have strengthened her position, in return for which Andromache taunted Hermione for remaining childless. As a result, Hermione started to plot the murder of Andromache, her bitter rival.

Orestes visited Hermione, and the couple seized the opportunity to elope. Orestes then started to plot the murder of Pyrrhus, which would release Hermione from her enforced marriage. Although some accounts claim that it was Orestes who killed Pyrrhus, others claim that he was killed when he visited the oracle at Delphi, because he desecrated the temple there; either way, Pyrrhus was dead and Hermione was free to marry Orestes.

Orestes’ father, Agamemnon, the brother of Menelaus, had commanded the Greek forces during the Trojan War. When he returned to his kingdom of Mycenae, he found that his wife, Clytemnestra, who was Helen’s (half-)sister, had made Aegisthus (who was Agamemnon’s cousin) her lover. Clytemnestra and Aegisthus then plotted the murder of Agamemnon, and although there is disagreement about which of them actually did the deed, the hero Agamemnon was then killed, and Aegisthus and Clytemnestra ruled Mycenae.

Back in Sparta, Orestes and Hermione had a son, Tisamenos. Eventually, after Aegisthus and Clytemnestra had had children of their own, Orestes returned to Mycenae, where he murdered Clytemnestra (his mother), Aegisthus, and their daughter (confusingly named Helen), in vengeance for the death of his father. Orestes returned to Sparta, and Hermione disappeared, probably dying. When Aletes, the surviving son of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, came of age, Orestes returned to Mycenae, killed Aletes (his half-brother), married Erigone, his half-sister, and assumed the throne.

For his matricide – an unusual crime even for the murderous mythical Greeks – Orestes was pursued by the Furies, and driven mad.

Hermione’s part in all this may seem minor, but she suffered a raw deal when she was forcibly taken from Orestes and given to Pyrrhus, who already had a concubine. Real history has also done her a disservice: Sophocles’ play Hermione has been lost, but Euripides’ play Andromache survived, and has spawned operas and plays, including Racine’s tragedy Andromaque (1667), which has remained quite popular.

The one account which is sympathetic to Hermione’s plight is letter 8 of Ovid’s Heroides. This fictional letter in Latin verse is a plea by Hermione to Orestes, written when Hermione is in her enforced marriage to Pyrrhus, while Andromache is his concubine. Of Ovid’s fictional letters, it is one of the few whose pleading is satisfied, and Hermione is thus one of the few such heroines who achieves the happiness she craves.

This fresco from Pompeii shows a scene from Euripides’ play Andromache, in which Pyrrhus is about to be murdered by Orestes, with Hermione in attendance. Pyrrhus part-kneels on the altar of Apollo at Delphi, in the centre, as Orestes, on the right, is about to kill him with the sword held in his right hand.

There do not appear to have been any further paintings of Hermione until about 1800, when two great French history painters tackled the story.

In Girodet’s ink and chalk drawing of The Meeting of Orestes and Hermione (c 1800), Hermione is seen at the right, her arms folded, looking coy as Orestes approaches her. The second woman, with Orestes, is presumably Hermione’s maid.

This drawing is one of a series of illustrations made by Girodet to accompany Racine’s play, and has subtleties which you might expect from a great narrative artist. Visible in the gap between the figures is a table-leg in the form not of a Fury (which might have foretold Orestes’ fate), but of a siren, implying that Hermione is luring Orestes to her.

Hermione, for all her apparent coyness, has let the right shoulder-strap of her robe slip, in her enticement of Orestes. She has assumed the role of femme fatale, as portrayed by Euripides and Racine.

Just a decade later, Pierre-Narcisse Guérin made two paintings exploring this story. In Andromache and Pyrrhus (1810), the central figures of Pyrrhus, seated on the throne, and Andromache, kneeling at his side and clutching her young son, are in conflict with two other women. It is most likely that the figure at the right is Hermione, who is being displaced from her enforced role as Pyrrhus’ wife by Andromache.

The child is almost certainly Astyanax. Although some accounts tell that Pyrrhus threw the boy to his death from the walls of Troy, others, including Euripides, claim that Astyanax survived the sack of Troy, and accompanied his mother when she was taken as Pyrrhus’ concubine. When Hermione plotted the murder of Andromache, she included the killing of Astyanax.

Guérin’s Orestes Announces the Death of Pyrrhus to Hermione (c 1810) shows a scene described later in Euripides’ and Racine’s plays, in which Orestes has just murdered Pyrrhus at Delphi, and here tells Hermione of that death, by flourishing the sword which he used. Hermione is shocked, as is her maid standing behind her.

Guérin painted at least three other stories which are the basis of letters in Heroides: Phaedra and Hippolytus (1802), Dido and Aeneas (c 1815), and Sappho (date not known). In this case he chose not to follow Ovid’s heroine, but Euripides.

What’s the link with Harry Potter? Hermione has appeared as a character in a long succession of plays and operas, among them William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, where she is the virtuous and beautiful Queen of Sicily. The latter was the inspiration for the name of the character Hermione Granger in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter novels. Played by Emma Watson in the movies made from those books, Hermione has returned to fame.

It seems to have taken more than three millenia, and a modern novellist, to have got a fairer deal for poor Hermione.

The first decade of the twentieth century had been highly successful for Franz von Stuck, with paintings such as Salome (1906), and his ennoblement in the Order of Merit of the Bavarian Crown.

Over the next few years, using his now loose and high-chroma style, von Stuck revisited several of the themes which he had been developing since his early works.

The Dance (c 1910) progresses from the two women he had painted earlier, to a human chain, rich in its variety of dress, including a pale white nude, and ethnicity. The classical pillar in repoussoir at the right suggests a formal setting, perhaps, but the dancers are definitely partying, with two other small groups of people apparently looking into the distance. Above them is a fair-weather sky, and a few birds soaring in the thermals.

Although it is suspected that von Stuck painted The Dance using a combination of oils and tempera, Circle Dancing (1910) has been painted entirely in tempera. Half a dozen young women, wearing evening dresses, are linked by their hands into a ring, and are dancing round in apparent joy. The repoussoir is now formed by young birch trees, and a rolling country landscape is in the distance.

The clouds are here more organised, heaped into towering cumulus, and there’s the suggestion of a shower some miles away. Slightly fewer birds are soaring above.

Fauns, some of von Stuck’s earliest mythical creatures, returned in some brilliantly humorous paintings. In Dissonance (1910), a young faun is struggling to make musical sounds from the reed pipes he holds so intently. The resulting noise is making the older faun next to him suffer badly.

The Old Faun (c 1910-13) reverses the roles: here a much older faun is playing his reed pipes, eliciting admiration from two younger fauns who stand in their amazement at his musical skill.

Von Stuck had not abandoned the femme fatale, but was now exploring different manifestations, including that of Bathsheba (1912).

The story of Bathsheba, which comes from the Old Testament (second) book of Samuel, had long been a favourite of artists, and has inspired some of Rembrandt’s finest works, for example. It is unusual in combining the opportunity to paint a female nude (or partially nude) with intense psychological drama.

When King David was walking on the roof of his palace, he saw the wife of Uriah, then one of his generals, bathing, and lusted after her. David then seduced Bathsheba, and made her pregnant. In a bid to conceal his adultery, he recalled her husband, in the hope that he would sleep with Bathsheba and enable her pregnancy to be ascribed to him. That failed when he did not go to his own bed. David therefore despatched Uriah to the front line, in the hope that he would be killed, which he was. With Bathsheba now widowed, David was able to marry her.

Rembrandt’s famous Bathsheba at Her Bath (1654) is a brilliant depiction of the inner conflict into which David’s invitation to seduction must have placed her. More popular depictions of her taking her bath, with David in the role of peeping Tom, generally assume her innocence, at least until David’s successful seduction. She was no femme fatale, but victim of a king’s lust.

Von Stuck tells us that it took two to tango: King David the voyeur is shown in silhouette on his palace roof, holding a trident. But Bathsheba looks and smiles at us knowingly as she emerges from her luxuriant pool: she performed for the spectator behind her. Von Stuck’s departure from the Biblical story is here as radical as Moreau’s re-writing of the story of Salome.

It was only appropriate that von Stuck should revisit the other Old Testament story of a bathing beauty and voyeurs, that of Susanna and the Elders, also labelled Susanna I (c 1913) to distinguish it from his other works. Here Susanna’s face is turned away from the viewer, as she looks at the two elders who are watching her. Without her facial expression to tell us of her anguish and embarrassment, this too becomes ambiguous.

This further version, Susanna and the Two Elders also from 1913, seems to follow the traditional account more faithfully, but uses a joke to make the elders look even more ridiculous: the small stream of water emerging from the orifice set in the wall of the pool could be misinterpreted as the urine of the elder dressed in red.

Although only a small sample of von Stuck’s paintings from this period, I am fascinated by the lack of military, nationalist, or jingoist influence in them. This contrasts with his contemporaries such as Lovis Corinth.

For von Stuck, there was now only one thing which he lacked: a studio by his villa. In 1913, construction on one started, and it was completed the following year. It had a separate floor for his sculpture. But in 1914, the First World War broke out, and the whole world changed.

Reference

Wikipedia.

The fourth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses starts with the introduction of a team of narrators, the daughters of Minyas, who take it in turns to tell us stories within their story. These women provide a narrative link with the end of the previous book, in that they live close to the city of Thebes, and like the unfortunate Pentheus, they refuse to worship Bacchus.

Their first story is novel to the Metamorphoses, and is not a Greek myth; although Ovid cites it as a Babylonian legend, it is now thought to have originated in southern Anatolia, modern Turkey. It is also one of the first stories to end with the suicide of frustrated lovers, and in the Western canon is seen as the ultimate ancestor of major narrative works including Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and appears in the play within Act 5 of his play A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The Story

Ovid introduces the daughters of Minyas by establishing their lack of respect for the new cult of Bacchus, and gives a short hymn of praise to the god. Although the women of Thebes are out honouring the god, the daughters of Minyas ignore the festival, and carry on working at their spinning. To pass the time when they are at work, they each in turn tell a story.

The first of the daughters teases the reader with the outlines of three stories which she decides not to tell, all of which involve transformations:

• Dercetis of Babylon, who developed scaly limbs and lived in a lake,
• the daughter of Dercetis, who grew wings and lived on a tower, and
• an unnamed Naiad, who tranformed men into fish, and was eventually turned into a fish herself.

She then tells the story of how the white fruit of a tree was turned red: that of Pyramus (the man) and Thisbe (the woman).

The coupled lived in the city of Babylon, in houses which shared a common wall. They fell in love with one another, but their fathers refused to let them marry. They communicated through a crack in the party wall between the two houses, talking together until nightfall. They resolved to meet outside the city, at the tomb of Nisus, after dusk, under a mulberry tree with its white fruit.

Thisbe arrived first, but while she was sitting under the mulberry tree, a lioness came to drink at the nearby spring, her face still covered in blood from her recent kill. Thisbe fled to hide in a cave, leaving her shawl on the ground, which was then torn by the lioness as she walked away from the spring, leaving blood on the material.

Pyramus arrived after the lioness had gone, but saw her footprints, and discovered the bloody and torn shawl by the mulberry tree. He immediately presumed that Thisbe had been killed by the creature, and blamed himself for putting her at risk. Draping the shawl over the tree, he kissed it, then killed himself by thrusting his sword into his side. This caused his blood to spurt high in jets, which coloured the mulberry fruit hanging there.

Thisbe then tentatively left the cave, and made her way back to the mulberry tree, which she found hard to recognise because she could not see its white fruit. She there discovered her dying lover, lifted him up, and kissed him. As he died, she blamed herself for his death, and decided to join him in that death. She took his sword, placed its point below her chest, and fell onto it.

In her last words, Thisbe asked that the couple should share the same tomb, so that they could finally rest together, and that the fruit of the mulberry tree should forever bear the mark of their deaths:
“And, O thou tree of many-branching boughs,
spreading dark shadows on the corpse of one,
destined to cover twain, take thou our fate
upon thy head; mourn our untimely deaths;
let thy fruit darken for a memory,
an emblem of our blood.” No more she said;
and having fixed the point below her breast,
she fell on the keen sword, still warm with his red blood.

Both of these wishes were respected: their parents put their ashes together in the same urn, and the gods transformed the mulberry fruit from white to red.

The Paintings

Ovid tells this tragic love story between humans – the gods are barely mentioned for once – in very visual terms, but sets its climax at night. That coupled with its gruesome conclusion may have deterred the patrons of the great Masters from commissioning it in paint. Several of those masters seem to have been working on paintings of the story – Rembrandt, for example, left some drawings – but few finished paintings remain. This compares with the long list of poems, plays, books, and operas which tell the tale.

Most of the surviving paintings were made before 1750, and very few after 1850.

The exceptions to this are artists of the Pre-Raphaelite movement: John William Waterhouse’s Thisbe, inevitably also known as The Listener, (1909) shows her listening at the party wall, and alludes to the daughters of Minyas in showing Thisbe’s spinning gear. Its only reference to the tragic outcome is a red and white shawl, screwed up in the far corner of the room. Edward Burne-Jones also made some illustrative drawings for the story.

Among those depictions from an earlier era, Abraham Hondius’ Pyramus and Thisbe (1660-75) stands out in coming closest to Ovid’s account. Set at night, the artist shows us the spilt blood, and more spurting from Thisbe as she impales herself on Pyramus’s sword. Behind and to the right of her the lioness is shown making away, with red and reddened garments strewn in the foreground.

Hondius even manages to include some mulberries, hanging at the top right, their berries still white.

This combined landscape attributed to Jasper van der Laanen, Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe probably from around 1615, is another faithful account. Pyramus has not quite expired, and still clutches the blood-stained shawl, as Thisbe is about to fall on his sword, wiping the tears from her eyes. The lioness is more distant, and the mulberry fruit has already changed colour to red, above Thisbe’s head.

My favourite painting of this story, and surely its most famous, is Poussin’s Landscape during a Thunderstorm with Pyramus and Thisbe (1651), which succeeds in telling the story and being one of his finest landscapes.

Before looking at his narrative, it is worth appreciating its setting. The city of Babylon is in the distance, along a picturesque and pastoral valley. But the peacefulness of this landscape has been transformed by the sudden arrival of a thunderstorm: the gusty wind is already bending the trees, and near the centre of the view has broken a large branch with its force. Two bolts of lightning make their way to the hills below.

In the foreground, there is frantic activity in response not only to the storm, but to the lioness which is attacking a horse, whose rider has fallen. An adjacent horseman is about to thrust his spear into the back of the lioness, while another, slightly further ahead, is driving cattle away from the scene. Others on foot, and a fourth horseman, are scurrying away, driven by the combination of the lioness and the imminent storm.

In the foreground, Pyramus lies dying, his sword at his side, and his blood flowing freely on the ground, down to a small pond. Thisbe has just emerged from sheltering in the cave, has run past the bloodied shawl at the right, and is about to reach the body of her lover. She is clearly distraught. The only element from Ovid’s story which this painting apparently lacks is the mulberry tree with its fruit.

Although there isn’t a brilliant Rubens, or an insightful Rembrandt, nor a work by any of the great narrative painters of the nineteenth century, I think that Ovid’s story has been well told in these paintings.

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

The 1880s had been a period of continuing success for Jules Breton. Although concentrating on compositionally simpler paintings, his work was sought-after in Europe and North America, and his poetry was well-received and published. From 1886, though, his health had started to trouble him, necessitating annual visits to the spa at La Bourboule in the Auvergne for ‘the cure’ that never came.

In early 1890, he enjoyed a spell at Cannes to help him through the worst of the winter.

Breton’s last working period in Douarnenez in Brittany was in 1890, when he most probably painted his visionary Young Women Going to a Procession (c 1890) there. A long trail of young women, dressed in virginal white, are making their way through the rolling coastal countryside. Clutching golden fronds (probably of ripe wheat), they are led along the path by a young girl. Further back is a woman bearing a church banner.

The distant hills and cliffs are wreathed in mist, and the whole scene is backlit, casting halos around the veiled heads of the young women. This probably shows a ceremonial procession in association with the rite of First Communion. It was exhibited at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893.

Last Flowers (1890) is unusual in being an early winter snow scene; Breton seems not to have painted outdoor winter scenes during the earlier part of his career, but in the last couple of decades made a few, perhaps when he was more confined to urban environments. This follows on from his full-length portraits of young women in the 1880s, showing a woman using a pair of household scissors to cut the last of the autumn flowers from under their fresh cover of snow. This was bought by Cincinnati Art Museum.

Although Summer is dated 1891, and was shown at the Salon that year, Breton’s original charcoal and chalk study for this was completed in 1887, and is now in a private collection. It is typical of his paintings from the 1880s, showing a lone woman lost in thought at the edge of a ripe wheatfield. His style is here very loose and painterly, with the thistles in the right foreground depicted using gestural marks.

Breton’s last great painting of the crowds at a religious rite was The Pardon of Kergoat in Quéménéven in 1891 (1891). He had accumulated numerous studies, sketches, and probably photographs too showing the masses who attended this small inland village near Quimper in Brittany, on the third Sunday in August, 1891. They came to ask the ‘Virgin of Pity’ and ‘Christ in Agony’ to cure their ailments.

This was exhibited at the Salon of 1891, then at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893.

Breton had made many studies of the gnarled features of older men of the country.

The men’s features are in marked contrast to those of the women: some dressed in red and blue who are carrying the statue of the Virgin Mary, and the more numerous in white who follow on behind, bearing other statues, banners, and more. The huge crowd curves in an arc through the surrounding woods, on into the far distance.

At the Spring (1892) is another full-length portrait, this time of a Breton woman carrying a pitcher of water on her head, after she had filled it at a communal spring. This is set on the Brittany coast near Douarnenez, by the cliffs of Plomarch, and was presumably based on studies made over the previous years.

Breton’s use of a load being carried on the head as a means of producing a fine deportment is reminiscent of The Shepherd’s Star (1887), in which the burden was a sack of potatoes.

Breton seems not to have painted a proper self-portrait until almost the final decade of his life, when he made his Self-portrait of 1895. The painting which he is apparently working on is one of his last showing harvest scenes at Courrières. This was exhibited at the Salon that year under the title of My Portrait.

In 1896, Breton painted another more modestly multi-person harvest scene, Harvesting the Oil Poppies, which was shown in the Salon of the following year.

By 1897, the medical treatment that he was receiving and his many official duties dictated that he had accommodation in Paris, so he bought a house there. At first he and his wife visited it as infrequently as possible, but in 1900 they moved there permanently, giving up the family home in Courrières. He travelled to Amsterdam and Germany in 1897, and in 1899 was made an honorary foreign academician by the Royal Academy in London.

With his steady decline in health and the increasing hostility towards realist art, Breton became depressed in 1903. However, he continued to paint, albeit at a slower pace, and later that year visited Barbizon to paint there too. He also continued to exhibit right up to 1905, the Salon in the year before his death.

On 5 July 1906 he died at his house in Paris.

With the huge changes taking place in painting in the early years of the twentieth century, Breton’s paintings became quite unfashionable. Thankfully during the later half of the twentieth century, his social realism became more respectable. Together with the likes of Millet and Bastien-Lapage, his paintings showed a rural life which was lost after the First World War, a world which was never to return, an eternally golden harvest time.

References

Wikipedia.

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

By the start of the First World War, Franz von Stuck was successful, ennobled, and had just had a new studio built at his Villa Stuck in Munich. One of its features, a dedicated floor for sculture, was never used for that purpose, because on the outbreak of war he ceased making sculpture. Thankfully, he continued to paint innovative and exciting narrative paintings.

Von Stuck continued to delight in exploring the mythical life of fauns, and in particular their playing reed pipes, in A Faun Blowing Reed-Pipes (1914). Munich may be almost as far from the sea as you can get in Europe, but the artist painted several of these mythical scenes at the seaside. Unfortunately the limited biographical information that I have doesn’t reveal whether he may have holidayed on the Mediterranean, perhaps, which would seem the most likely setting here.

Hercules and the Lernean Hydra (1915) is von Stuck’s account of the encounter between Hercules (Heracles) and the monstrous Hydra during the second of his labours. This had been depicted by Gustave Moreau in his painting of the same name in 1876, which von Stuck may well have seen.

The Hydra was a poisonous monster with multiple serpent-like heads on the body of a dog, which could kill with its breath alone. Living on the Lernean marshes near Argos, for the second of his twelve labours Hercules was charged with killing it. He covered his face with a cloth to protect from the Hydra’s deadly fumes, and tried cutting its heads off.

However, for each head that he removed, two grew back. Enlisting the assistance of his friend Iolaus to cauterise the severed heads with fire, Hercules managed to remove the one immortal head using a golden sword provided by the goddess Athena, and that killed it.

Von Stuck took a symbolist approach, simplifying his subject to that of the hero swinging his sword at the multiple heads of the Hydra – a powerful image indeed.

As the war was ending, von Stuck returned to his favourite faun motif, in A Faun and a Mermaid (1918). This has survived in two very similar versions, the other of which is now in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin. His mermaid is a maritime equivalent of a faun, with separate scaly legs rather than the more conventional single fish tail. She grasps the faun’s horns and laughs with joy as the faun gives her a piggy-back out of the sea.

Unfortunately, after the War, interest in von Stuck’s art declined quite quickly, as Europe was swept by the new modernists.

Sisyphus (1920) may have expressed von Stuck’s increasingly difficult task of attracting attention to his art, and perhaps resulting self-criticism. Another simple, bold, and powerful image, it may have been inspired by Titian’s famous painting of the ancient Greek mythical king.

Sisyphus was the founder king of Ephyra, who was greedy, cheated, and violated his moral obligations to guests and travellers by killing them. As punishment for these crimes, he was condemned to roll a huge boulder up a steep hill, as shown in this painting. This is the basis of the English phrase a Sisyphean task, which is endless and futile.

Rather than paint the traditional story of the Judgement of Paris, von Stuck opted to show The Three Goddesses Athena, Hera and Aphrodite (1923). These are the three who were judged in the ‘beauty’ contest by Paris, alias Alexander, which led to the war against Troy.

Conventionally, the three goddesses are shown with Paris as judge, Hermes, and sundry attendants, often as an opportunity to paint three beautiful nudes on a single canvas. Von Stuck does not duck that, but builds his story more with the goddesses themselves than the contest. Athena, at the left, is shown with her helmet and spear in her Pallas mode, and holds a large shield, her Aegis, on which is the image of the head of a Gorgon.

Hera (centre), both sister and wife of Zeus, adds a little decorum by screening her body from full view with a diaphous garment. At the right, Aphrodite holds her veil behind her, to ensure that nothing stands in the way of admiring her entire body.

In traditional versions of this story, the goddesses’ bodies are being exposed to Paris for his judgement. By removing Paris and attendants and putting the viewer in his position, von Stuck transforms this into the judgement of the viewer, making us think not only about the goddesses and their beauty, but also the consequences of our decision.

Von Stuck kept painting through the 1920s, when art had moved on to newer things, and his work was almost ignored. Two of his late paintings are particularly striking: the first, Wind and Wave (c 1927), is I think one of his finest. Another vibrant and uncluttered scene, it shows a winged figure who is probably one of the Winds (Anemoi or Venti), blowing over the body of a sea nymph (Oceanid or Nereid). As in classical painting, von Stuck shows streamlines being blown from the zephyr’s mouth.

This work may be thoroughly mythological, but it also has a meaningful physical interpretation, in showing ‘how’ the wind generates the waves of the sea.

The last of von Stuck’s paintings for which I have a usable image is his depiction of the long-popular story of Judith and Holofernes (1927); I have previously looked at the story in detail, with a wide range of paintings.

Taken from the book of Judith, Holofernes was one of Nebuchadnezzar’s generals, sent to take vengeance on the Hebrew people. Judith was a beautiful widow, who volunteered to help the Hebrew cause by ‘deadling with’ him. She seduced him, got him drunk, then beheaded him. She brought his severed head back to the Hebrews, who were then able to defeat Holofernes’ army.

The great paintings of the past showed various scenes, from the seduction, preparation for the decapitation, the killing itself, or Judith handling the head. Von Stuck chose Judith preparing to swing the heavy sword, with Holofernes lying on the bed in a drunken stupor. The simplicity of the scene results in a powerful image, heightened by the same red patches that he used behind Sisyphus.

Franz von Stuck died in Munich on 30 August, 1928.

By the time of his death, his art had already been largely forgotten. Unfortunately, he was also Hitler’s favourite artist from his childhood on, which did not help his reputation in the years after the Second World War. It was not until the 1960s that interest in his work was rekindled, and the Villa Stuck opened to the public in 1968. He surely deserves recognition as an original and very talented painter, who created some superb narrative and mythological works.

Reference

Wikipedia.

For those wishing to observe Easter, and for anyone who appreciates the wealth of paintings depicting the events of the first Easter, here is a selection of paintings.

Grand overviews

Gaudenzio Ferrari’s Stories of The Life and Passion of Christ (1513) arranges twenty frames covering the life of Christ around a central frame with four times the area of the others, showing the crucifixion. The frames are read from left to right, along the rows from top to bottom, although the crucifixion is part of the bottom row.

Hans Memling’s intricate Scenes from the Passion of Christ (1470-1) shows a (very imaginative) bird’s-eye view of Jerusalem, in which each of the major scenes in Christ’s crucifixion are placed. These start at the top left, with Christ riding into the city on Palm Sunday, weave their way down the left side of the painting, which includes the Last Supper almost half way down the left edge, then cross into the centre, for the flagellation. The narrative chain then runs down, turns to the right, and ascends to the crucifixion at the top. That is shown twice, to accommodate the descent from the cross, and scenes following the resurrection are towards the top right.

Hieronymus Bosch’s Passion Scenes (c 1490-95) are detailed here.

Scenes from the Passion

William Blake’s The Agony in the Garden is an unusual moment from the popular sequence of the Passion. Although much of it is dark (it is set at night, in the Garden of Gethsemene), Blake’s imagery is as radical as that in his watercolours. The story is a composite from the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and shows the instant just before Christ’s betrayal by Judas and his arrest. An angel appeared from heaven, to strengthen Jesus, and “his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.”

Christ’s head is tilted in the extreme to face the angel, who grasps him under the armpits. The angel has descended from a brilliant red burst, at the top of the painting. The disciples are seen asleep among the dark tree-trunks.

James Tissot’s huge series of watercolours shows the Passion in great, and sometimes graphic, detail. Jesus Before Pilate, First Interview shows the episode from Luke 23:1-4 and John 18:33-38 in which Pilate, the Roman governor at the time, questions Jesus and concludes that there is no basis for any charge against him. Technically one of the most brilliant paintings of the series, it is easy to mistake this for being painted in oils.

Hieronymus Bosch’s The Crowning with Thorns (c 1490-1500) is detailed here.

Hieronymus Bosch’s Ecce Homo (c 1475-85) is detailed here.

Lovis Corinth painted Ecce Homo at Easter, 1925, as an act of meditation to mark the festival. It shows the moment that Pilate presents Christ to the hostile crowd, just before the crucifixion. Christ has been scourged, bound, and crowned with thorns, and Pilate’s words are quoted from the Vulgate translation, meaning behold, the man.

Hieronymus Bosch’s Christ Carrying the Cross (1490-1510) is detailed here.

James Tissot’s Jesus Bearing the Cross (1886-1894) is another watercolour from his unique series.

Lovis Corinth’s Christ Carrying the Cross (1909) explores Christ’s Passion in very real terms. Although this contains most of the usual elements seen in traditional depictions, his language is contemporary, almost secular. Two men, one of them apparently African, are helping Christ bear his exhausting load, while a couple of soldiers are whipping him on, and threatening him with their spears. A third soldier is controlling the crowd at the upper left, and behind is a mounted soldier and one of the disciples.

Hieronymus Bosch’s Calvary with Donor (c 1490-1500) is detailed here.

Frans Francken the Younger’s The Crucifixion of Christ, with Scenes from the Life of Jesus (1600s) puts the crucifixion scene at the centre of a rectangle, around which there are twelve scenes from the life painted in either normal or brown grisaille. Unfortunately those peripheral scenes are difficult to differentiate from one another, thus to identify, but they appear to be read in a clockwise direction from the upper right, rather than linearly.

William Blake’s The Crucifixion: ‘Behold Thy Mother’ (c 1805) is a traditional scene from the Passion, and refers to the gospel of John, chapter 19 verses 26-27:
When Jesus therefore saw his mother, and the disciple standing by, whom he loved, he saith unto his mother, “Woman, behold thy son!” Then saith he to the disciple, “Behold thy mother!” And from that hour that disciple took her unto his own home.

James Tissot’s What Our Lord Saw from the Cross is a uniquely innovative and narrative depiction of the crucifixion.

James Tissot’s The Descent from the Cross or The Deposition shows Christ’s body being taken down from the cross after his death, and removed for burial. With so many Masters before him, Tissot was spoilt for choice as to how he depicted this, and seems to have been inspired mainly by Rubens’ version from 1617-18, arguably the most famous of all.

Unlike Rubens, he ensures that most of the faces are not visible, which ingeniously dodges arguments about who actually was present at the time: John 19:38-42, for instance, only identifies Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, and the Gospel accounts mention an undefined number of women, including Mary Salome, the Virgin Mary, and Mary Magdalene.

The Deposition (Descent from the Cross) (1895) was one of Lovis Corinth’s major paintings from his time in Munich, and won a gold medal when it was exhibited in the Glaspalast in Munich, in 1895. It shows the traditional station of the cross commemorating the lowering of the dead body of Christ from the cross, attended by Joseph of Arimathea and Mary Magdalene.

This work is a thoroughly modern approach to this classical theme, in its framing, composition, and the faces. Its close-in cropped view suggests the influence of photography, and the faces shown appear contemporary and not in the least historic. These combine to give it the immediacy of a current event, rather than something that happened almost two millenia ago. Corinth returned to the subject of the Deposition, and the theme of the Crucifixion, in many of his paintings.

Gustave Moreau painted several versions of the Pietà (c 1876), this one on a tiny panel. It incorporates some of the more radical imagery which was appearing in his mythological paintings, with the blue wing in the centre.

William Blake’s The Entombment (c 1805) refers to the gospel of Luke, chapter 23 verses 53 and 55:
And he took it [the body of Jesus] down, and wrapped it in linen, and laid it in a sepulchre that was hewn in stone, wherein never man before was laid.
And the women also, which came with him from Galilee, followed after, and beheld the sepulchre, and how his body was laid.

William Blake’s The Angels hovering over the body of Christ in the Sepulchre; Christ in the sepulchre, guarded by angels (c 1805) elaborates the gospel accounts of Christ’s body in the sepulchre with reference to the description of the tabernacle in Exodus, chapter 25 verse 20:
And the cherubims shall stretch forth their wings on high, covering the mercy seat with their wings, and their faces shall look one to another; toward the mercy seat shall the faces of the cherubims be.
This may have been in the light of Hebrews, chapter 9 verse 5:
And over it the cherubims of glory shadowing the mercyseat; of which we cannot now speak particularly.

William Blake’s Christ Appearing to His Disciples/Apostles After the Resurrection is one of Blake’s large colour print series from 1795, which refers to the gospel of Luke, chapter 24 verses 36-40:
And as they thus spake, Jesus himself stood in the midst of them, and saith unto them, “Peace be unto you.” But they were terrified and affrighted, and supposed that they had seen a spirit. And he said unto them, “Why are ye troubled? and why do thoughts arise in your hearts? Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.” And when he had thus spoken, he shewed them his hands and his feet.

I wish you a peaceful Easter.

Many classical Greek and Roman artists were generous enough to label the figures in their paintings. Where we have lost the context that their original owners might have enjoyed, these labels are often the only good clues as to what the painting is about. In the beautiful mosaic below, the crucial letters identify the figure of Mnemosyne, apparently a fairly undistinguished-looking woman sat with a group who could be Muses, perhaps.

Mnemosyne, you will probably recognise, is the personification of memory, and mother of the Muses. Although we tend to think of nine Muses, the count only stabilised at that number in relatively late classical times, and was always prone to adjustment. The mosaic, from Antioch in Turkey, is one of the few good depictions in art of Mnemosyne, who is a rather indistinct character who never really achieved particular fame in anything, apart from her relationship with Zeus/Jupiter, and her talented daughters.

The best-accepted account of the origins of the classical Greek gods portrays them as descendants of, and replacements for, the Titans. The daughter of the Titans Uranus, proto-god of the sky, and Gaia, proto-goddess of the earth, Mnemosyne acted as the head and controller of her daughters, the Muses, and gave kings and poets their authoritative powers of speech.

Her daughters were conceived with Zeus, who led the overthrow of the Titans and established himself as the king of the gods who succeeded them. To achieve a nine-fold pregnancy, Zeus slept with Mnemosyne on nine consecutive nights. Even in the thousands of lines of poetry which Ovid wrote in his Metamorphoses, Mnemosyne only warrants mention in a single line, as one of the subjects of Arachne’s wonderful weavings, and there for her relationship with Zeus.

Marco Liberi’s Jupiter and Mnemosyne (c 1670) shows Zeus, in his usual guise as a dark brown eagle, forcing himself upon a naked Mnemosyne, who is not given any marks of distinction. Additionally, most accounts (including Ovid’s) make it clear that Zeus disguised himself as a shepherd for his liaison with Mnemosyne.

Jacob de Wit’s Jupiter and Mnemosyne from 1727 shows this more faithfully: the eagle, complete with a small stock of thunderbolts, now keeping station above the couple, who have the (im)moral support of three cupids and a spectating couple in the trees at the right.

The most thorough account of Mnemosyne before the nineteenth century is that of Anton Raphael Mengs. This is his Parnassus, a highly-finished sketch for a fresco shown below, which he painted in about 1760. Standing in the centre is not Zeus, the father of the Muses, but Apollo, complete with his lyre and laurel wreaths, used to crown those who became accomplished thanks to the Muses.

To the left of Apollo is Mnemosyne herself, with a dark blue skirt, who is pointing towards a small spring in front of Apollo’s feet. The other women are Mnemosyne’s daughters, each with symbols to identify them.

The puzzling figure is lurking in the shadows behind Apollo’s legs: possibly a river god, responsible for the origin of the water. There is also an Orphic tradition in which the River Mnemosyne is the source of water to bring inspiration, and this is perhaps an allusion to that rather obscure sub-narrative.

This is the finished fresco, known as Apollo, Mnemosyne, and the Nine Muses which Mengs painted in 1761 in the Villa Albani-Torlonia in Rome.

In more modern times, Mnemosyne has been used as the personification of memory, here with a lyre in a war memorial in New Zealand.

But for me the most interesting of the few paintings of Mnemosyne is that by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

His Mnemosyne, also known as The Lamp of Memory, or Ricordanza (c 1876-1881), took around five years to complete. It is a reworking of an earlier painting, Venus Astarte, for which his model was Jane Morris (née Burden), the wife of the designer, artist and poet William Morris (1834-1896). At the time, Rossetti saw Jane Morris as his muse, and was quite infatuated with her.

Rossetti inscribed two lines of his own poetry (not known from any other source) on the frame:
Thou fill’st from the winged chalice of the soul
Thy lamp, O Memory, fire-winged to its goal.

Whereas Jane Morris elsewhere usually has a sultry beauty, here she stares, her face blank and empty of emotion. In her right hand, she holds what is intended to be a small light, and in her left she holds an ornate oil lantern. By that is a single pansy flower, a symbol of remembrance, and a sprig of yew with a couple of berries – an ancient associate for protection against evil, and for connecting to the past.

Rossetti dated the painting 1881, the year that he sold it. The following April, he was dead, his body destroyed by his addiction to chloral, and the whisky he drank with it.

Reference

Wikipedia.

There isn’t really a single sense of touch. Somatic sensation comes in a range of different modalities, such as fine touch, pressure, heat, cold, and of course pain. Of all the senses, it is perhaps the one which we take most for granted, and which is least used in the arts.

Although most sculptures and many paintings need to be touched to benefit from their whole experience, almost every collection of paintings forbids physical contact with the works. Even getting close enough to see the surface texture usually brings security guards rushing in case you’re about to attack the painting and damage it.

A great many paintings are about touch sensation – from the caresses of lovers to the heat and pain of hell – but few if any seem intended to evoke specific sensations of texture, temperature, etc. So my examples this week are drawn largely from allegories and visual essays on specific touch sensations. Several are spectacular and ingenious, but this is a theme which still welcomes innovative approaches.

The common ancestor of all European paintings about the five senses is the wonderful tapestry cycle of The Lady and the Unicorn from the end of the fifteenth century. In that cycle, The Sense of Touch shows the common figures of the lady and a unicorn, surrounded by animals and objects amid the mille-fleurs. As in the other tapestries in the cycle, its references are symbolic and now quite obscure.

The next common reference is Jan Brueghel the Elder’s brilliant Allegory of the Sense of Touch painted in 1617-18, with figures by Rubens. Each of the five paintings in this series would have been a masterpiece in its own right, and the group of five must be a unique accomplishment.

However, despite its extraordinary detail, this particular painting strikes me as being the least appropriate of the group as regards its content. Brueghel shows some objects which are strongly associated with touch, and recognises several of the modern sensory modalities, such as heat and fine touch, with the brazier and brushes nearby.

But much of the panel is devoted to a collection of armour, weapons, and their manufacture by gunsmiths and armourers. The many suits of armour on display appear to be equipment which isolates the sense of touch, and I cannot see any relationship between crossbows and touch, for example.

Brueghel also quotes several paintings, which show the apocalypse, the flagellation of Christ, and a cavalry battle, which seem mainly directed at the modality of pain. Below them, next to Rubens’ kissing Cupid and nude, is a collection of surgical instruments which, in the days before anaesthesia, would have been strongly associated with pain.

Johann Daniel Glöckler is so obscure an artist that I have only just been able to discover his dates, but a couple of his sensory allegories have come to light in recent years. Allegory of the Sense of Touch, from 1621, shows a woman with a hooded hawk or falcon on her right hand, and holding her left hand up in a gesture of touching.

Rembrandt’s very early painting of The Operation from 1624-25 shows a barber-surgeon, with his assistant, performing surgery on the side of a man’s head. This is most likely to have been the lancing of a boil or removal of a tumour from the scalp or pinna of the ear. In the absence of any anaesthesia, this invokes the modality of pain, as is shown clearly in the patient’s expression and posture.

Even at the start of his career, Rembrandt’s facture is wonderfully painterly: the cloth wrapped around the neck and upper chest of the patient shows very visible brushstrokes.

José de Ribera painted at least two different series showing the five senses, both around 1630. The Sense of Touch, as with its sister in the Prado, uses a blind man feeling a sculpture, which is both novel and a highly appropriate image.

Jan Miense Molenaer’s more ribald and lighthearted series of paintings of The Five Senses includes this work titled Touch (1637). The ragged couple who feature in each of the paintings are possibly engaged in the removal of the husband’s nits (head lice) by beating them, and the man’s head, using his wife’s slipper. Alternatively, the woman is simply striking his head in response to his exploration of touch, as he has his left arm around his wife’s waist, and his right hand is groping up her dress.

Frans Wouters probably painted a series showing the five senses not long after Brueghel’s. So far, only three have come to light, of which his Allegory of Touch (1635-59) is almost as ambitious and detailed as Brueghel’s. He includes many of the objects referenced by Brueghel, suggesting that Wouters had seen the earlier work, but extends them, with a live cavalry battle and extensive fire in the background.

There is also a small collection of what we might now refer to as ‘creepy-crawlies’, animals which give rise to distinctive somatic sensory experiences, including tortoises, a leech, a scorpion (with its intensely painful sting), and an ant. This suggests some medical knowledge: the sensation of ants crawling over the skin is a long-recognised and distinct symptom, which is given the name formication (hence the origin of some esoteric jokes).

Wouters includes a nursing mother, which shows unusual insight (for a man, at least), and two putti who are wrestling, one apparently kneeing the other in the groin. However, the extremely unpleasant sensation resulting from that is not part of the spectrum of touch sensation, and is more visceral in nature.

A Courtesan Pulling the Ear of a Cat, Allegory of the Sense of Touch was painted in Jan van Bijlert’s workshop around 1625-70, and was clearly composed on the theme of touch. A florid courtesan is playing with her cat, pulling its ear, which results in a grimace of pain and anger, and probably its claws being dug into her hand.

In the same period, probably around 1640-50, An Allegory of the Sense of Touch was painted in Juan de Arellano’s workshop, and tries to be more ingenious. Against a background showing Adam and Eve being cast out of Eden, their original sin being the Christian mythical origin of pain and unpleasant sensation, there is a catalogue of distinctive sensory stimuli. These include snails, massively enlarged tics, a tortoise, and a spider’s web. The woman dominating the composition has a bird perched on her left hand, and the sharp point of an arrow in her right.

Over the next century, sensory cycles and allegories became unpopular, and I can find none comparable to those painted during the seventeenth century.

Philip Mercier’s cycle includes The Sense of Touch from 1744-47, which demonstrates a range of somatic sensory modalities rather well. At the left, a man has just been scratched on the left hand by the cat resting on his partner’s lap, as a child is about to stroke the cat. At the right, another couple are embracing, and about to kiss. Behind them is a fire, which is warming their exposed flesh.

Another century later, Hans Makart’s The Five Senses: Touch (1840-84) is not as rich in its sensory allusions, showing the physical relationship between a mother and her young child.

The sense of touch, in any and all its modalities, has proven difficult to depict in paintings, and I am puzzled that no one seems to have shown the rich range of textures which we encounter in everyday life – the smooth coldness of polished marble, and coarse abrasion of rough-cut granite, for example. Although the optical properties of such surfaces have played a major role in paintings since the Northern Renaissance, their tactile properties seem relatively neglected.

There is still plenty of scope for exploration.

Homer’s Iliad centres on events during the war against Troy, but is far from being a comprehensive account of the decade during which combined ancient Greek forces tried to crush the mighty fortress city – allegedly over the abduction of Helen, queen of Sparta, and her ‘face that launched a thousand ships’.

The opening lines of the Iliad refer not to Helen, nor even directly to the war, but to the anger of Achilles, the son of Peleus:
The wrath of Peleus’ son, the direful spring
Of all the Grecian woes, O Goddess, sing!
(Alexander Pope’s translation (1715-20), via Wikisource.)

Achilles had been angry before the ‘thousand ships’ had even left Greece. He had been promised King Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia in marriage, but at the last minute the king decided that his daughter had to be sacrificed to appease the goddess Diana, and give the fleet propitious winds.

David’s The Anger of Achilles (1819) shows Achilles, at the left, reaching for his sword when Agamemnon (right) breaks the news to him, the young Iphigenia looks understandably crestfallen, and the eyes of her mother, Queen Clytemnestra, are red with crying.

Once away at war, Achilles justified his reputation as Agamemnon’s best warrior, and finest leader. During an assault on the city of Lyrnessus in an earlier phase of the war, Achilles demonstrated those powers, killing the local king, queen, their three sons and a son-in-law, and leaving just the king’s daughter, Briseis, to survive. As was usual at the time, Achilles took the widowed princess Briseis as his enslaved concubine.

Agamemnon, in spite of his marriage to Clytemnestra, had also won himself a concubine: Chryseis, the daughter of Chryses, a priest of Apollo. Chryses was left alive, though, and tried to ransom her back from slavery. When Agamemnon refused to bargain with his concubine’s father, Apollo sent the plague to sweep through the massed Greek forces, which had devastating effect. This forced Agamemnon’s hand, and he returned Chryseis to her father.

The Iliad opens with this problem, and Agamemnon’s decision that he should take Briseis from Achilles, making her his own concubine in place of Chryseis. Abhorrent by any modern standards, women captured during war (and in many other circumstances) were treated as prize possessions at the time, and Agamemnon’s action was by no means unusual.

Although Briseis was but a slave and concubine, there is evidence of a deeper relationship developing. Achilles’ great friend Patroclus had comforted her following the loss of her home city, family, and freedom, and promised to have Achilles make Briseis his wife when the war was over. The arrival of Agamemnon’s two envoys, Eurybates and Talthybius, to take Briseis to Agamemnon was therefore a great shock to Achilles, Patroclus, and Briseis.

In 1801, JAD Ingres’s painting of Achilles Receiving the Envoys of Agamemnon made him the victor of that year’s competition for the Prix de Rome, and launched him on his career as one of the great history painters. The two envoys are at the right, explaining Agamemnon’s demand to Achilles at the left, who is clutching his lyre as he rises from his seat in anger. Patroclus stands behind him, wearing his helmet and a look of bemusement.

This detail shows Achilles and Patroclus in the foreground, and behind, in Achilles’ tent, stands Briseis. As a non-Greek, she may have found it difficult to understand the conversation going on with the envoys, which was perhaps just as well.

Tischbein’s painting of Briseis Led from the Tent of Achilles (1773) makes the removal of Briseis from Achilles’ tent look quite amicable. By any account, it was far from that.

John Flaxman’s original drawing of Briseis Taken from Achilles, made between about 1793-1805 to illustrate Pope’s translation of the Iliad perhaps, catches the atmosphere better as Achilles sulks in anger, and Patroclus tries to comfort Briseis again.

Piroli’s final engraving of Flaxman’s illustration, Briseis Taken from Achilles (1793), shows an oddly weaker composition and feeble body language.

Jean-Baptiste-Henri Deshays’ Briseis Led from the Tent of Achilles (c 1761) is a close-cropped view of the grief of Briseis as she is led away by the envoys – an interesting change of focus from Achilles.

George Frederic Watts showed an alternative version in his much later fresco of Achilles and Briseis (c 1858-60). Achilles is once again the centre of attention, and being comforted by another woman, as Patroclus, further to the left, looks resigned to events.

Tiepolo told the story over three sections of fresco in the Villa Valmarana, Vicenza. This is the last of the three, Eurybates and Talthybius Take Briseis, Achilles’ Concubine, to Agamemnon (1757).

The Iliad continues, its focus on Achilles and his anger, which resulted in the warrior withdrawing completely from the action. This is devastating to the Greek campaign, and as Achilles’ anger simmers steadily over the following days, the Trojans start gaining the upper hand.

Agamemnon knows that he must persuade Achilles to re-engage if the Greeks are going to have any chance of success. He tries offering Achilles wealth as compensation for the loss of Briseis, and a deputation of Ulysses, Ajax, and Phoenix is sent to appease Achilles’ wrath – and fails.

It is about this time that, according to Ovid’s fictional account in the third letter of his Heroides, Briseis might have written to Achilles. Whereas much of Homer’s Iliad is devoted to describing Achilles’ side of the story, Ovid takes up the cause of his former concubine, now presumably sharing Agamemnon’s bed.

Robinet Testard’s miniature Briseis Writing to Achilles (c 1510) shows this, in Octavien de Saint-Gelais’ translation of the Heroides into French. Briseis weeps as she struggles to write to her former captor in a foreign language.

Ovid’s fictional letter goes over the horrific murders of both her parents, her three brothers, and her husband. Despite that, Briseis even offers to remain Achilles’ enslaved concubine if he were to marry another woman. She pleads with the warrior to take her back and settle with Agamemnon. She also swears that she has not slept with Agamemnon, although she doubts that Achilles has been faithful to her since their parting.

The anger of Achilles is not assuaged. Eventually, his dear friend Patroclus goes out to fight wearing Achilles’ famous suit of armour, and is mortally wounded.

In one of his earliest and most brilliant paintings, Léon Cogniet brought together the whole story, with Briseis correctly at its centre, in his Briseis Restored to Achilles in his Tent Discovers the Body of Patroculus (1815). With the death of Patroclus, Briseis was restored to Achilles, who returned to battle to avenge the death of his dear friend. Briseis is seen grieving on Patroclus’ corpse, as Achilles (to the left) is being galvanised into action, with a fearsome stare in his eyes.

True to her word, or at least Ovid’s fictional account of her words, Briseis remained faithful to Achilles. When he was killed as a result of his ‘Achilles heel’, she fell into profound grief, and prepared him for the afterlife. Homer’s account of the battles leading to the Greek victory were but one side of the story: if Homer’s Achilles had been a great warrior, so Ovid’s Briseis had been the great heroine behind him.

Sadly, history has not been so kind to Briseis. In the Middle Ages, her name became Briseida, and she became confused with Chryseis, Agamemnon’s former concubine. So William Shakespeare’s tragedy Troilus and Cressida should perhaps have been Troilus and Briseida.