Mention the name of Edvard Munch (1863–1944) and everyone thinks immediately of his most famous work – indeed, one of the most famous images in Europe and North America – The Scream. There was far more to Munch and his work than that, and my focus in this new series is on what he considered to be his most important artistic achievement: a series of paintings which he called The Frieze of Life, which includes The Scream.

Before looking in detail at the individual paintings which make up Munch’s Frieze of Life, I will give a brief account of his life and career, illustrated by some of his most important paintings. For without understanding his background and seeing some of the rest of his art, his Frieze is profoundly cryptic.

Edvard Munch was born in a very small village not far from Oslo, which was then named Christiania, in 1863. His father was a rural medical practitioner, and his mother much younger than her husband. Edvard had four siblings, including an older sister. The family moved to Oslo the following year, but in 1868 his mother died of tuberculosis, which also killed his older sister in 1877, when Edvard was only 13. The family was then raised by their aunt Karen and father Christian. Edvard was often too ill to attend school during the winter, and his aunt and father did their best to tutor him when he was sick at home.

Christian Munch was the son of a priest, and was very religious, to the point of being oppressive at times. Although being a doctor could have brought the family a very healthy income, Christian was poorly paid in military service, and never managed to develop a private practice to augment his income. The family only just scraped along on his meagre salary.

Edvard Munch drew avidly through his childhood, and when he was 13, he started painting, copying landscapes at first, but soon moving to oils. He studied engineering at a technical college for a year; although he excelled, he left determined to be a painter, which was strongly opposed by his father. In 1881, at the age of 17, he started his studies at the Royal School of Art and Design in Oslo, where he was taught by Christian Krohg, one of Norway’s major artists who had studied under the Norwegian landscape painter Hans Gude in Germany, and in Paris.

Munch adopted a bohemian lifestyle, and in the autumn of 1882 started sharing a studio with some friends and Christian Krohg, who became their tutor and mentor.

Morning (1884), which Munch originally named A Servant Girl, is generally accepted as being his first important work. Inevitably influenced by Krohg, it shows an innovative use of light which may have been inspired by Impressionism, which was a hot topic in artistic circles at the time.

Although Munch’s painting was recognised early, and one of his paintings included in the World Exhibition in 1885, when that work was exhibited in Oslo it was damned by the Norwegian critics, and Munch became branded ‘the painter of ugly things’ by the press. Despite that, Morning (1884) was included in the Norwegian pavilion at the Exposition Universelle in Paris five years later.

After this naturalist and Impressionist start to his career, Munch started to diverge with the first in a series of paintings of the motif of The Sick Child (1885–86). This marks his open expression of personal experience and emotion in his works, and the appearance of a theme which was to reappear in many of his paintings and prints. He also started repainting the same motif – in this case, according to the artist’s own estimate, no less than twenty times.

This first version was originally titled Study, and exhibited in the autumn of 1886, when it was greeted by a critical storm. The art historian Arne Eggum wrote that “no other painting in the history of Norwegian art has provoked such outrage and indignation.” Munch was undeterred, and in the Spring of 1889 organised his own solo exhibition in Oslo, which was received rather better!

In 1889, Munch showed what was then titled Evening, but which is now better known as Inger on the Beach or Summer Night (1889). This shows the lonely figure of his younger sister in the melancholic gloom of a boulder beach, and became the first in another series of developments of the theme.

Late in that year, Munch travelled to Paris on state travel and study grants, where he studied drawing from life in Bonnat’s studio. Lodging in St-Cloud on the outskirts of the city, he adopted a Neo-Impressionist style for a while. However, at the end of 1889, his father died, and Munch had to assume financial responsibility for his family back in Norway.

In Paris, Munch laid down his manifesto, aiming to paint a series of “powerful, sacred” works, which was the foundation of his later Frieze of Life. In preparation for these, he made his dark and melancholic Night in Saint-Cloud during the winter and Spring of 1890. Its only tiny glimpses of light and colour are beyond the window which dominates the upper half of the painting. Silhouetted against that is a man wearing a top-hat, whose figure dissolves into the shadows.

Rue Lafayette (1891) is a complete contrast in its lightness and bright colours, and shows a vigorously Neo-Impressionist use of brushstrokes.

Munch returned to Norway in the early summer of 1891, most influenced by the spirit of Gauguin, and over the following year painted some of his most significant works which were to initiate new themes in his repertoire. The first of these was originally exhibited under the title of Evening (1891), but is now better known as Melancholy; as I have been unable to locate an image of this first painting, I defer its discussion until later.

The Kiss or Kiss by the Window (1892) is one of three variants of this theme which Munch painted during the winter of 1891-2, when he was at Nice, on the French Mediterranean coast, which accounts for its soft evening light.

Munch’s younger sister appears again, in Inger in Black and Violet (1892), as a stern perhaps repressive figure enveloped in her solid dress.

This slightly later painting in Munch’s series of Melancholy from 1892 has most of the same elements as his first composition. The figure is based on a friend, and aspiring author, who had had an intense and ultimately tragic affair with Christian Krohg’s wife. Behind is a boulder-strewn bay, curving undulantly into the horizon, with a bright yellow boat tied to the end of a small jetty. Bands of grey cloud contour across the sky.

This version of Melancholy painted in 1894-96 shows developments of this motif. The figure is now sat up, his chin buried in the heel of his hand, morose. The nearby boulders have become more vividly coloured, and less like rocks.

In the Spring on 1892, Munch visited Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, on the French Mediterranean coast almost into Italy, where the Norwegian painter Christian Skredsvig and his wife had rented a house. Inspired by a blood-red sunset there, Edvard Munch painted his first version of Despair, the precursor to The Scream.

Later that year, Munch was invited to exhibit in Berlin (well before the Secession), where his paintings were considered so shocking that the exhibition closed prematurely.

References

Wikipedia.
Collection at Norway’s National Gallery.
The Munch Museum, Oslo.

Wood, Mara-Helen (ed) (1992) Edvard Munch, The Frieze of Life, National Gallery Publications. ISBN 978 1 857 09015 4.

Having just looked at the life and work of Jules Breton, I come to attempt the same for the other great French ‘social realist’ painter of the mid-nineteenth century, Jean-François Millet (1814–1875).

I don’t see art as competitive, but those who feel it necessary to make comparisons, and claim whose work is ‘better’, often rate Millet more highly than Breton. Looking at their paintings, I think that they are so different that it is like trying to compare da Vinci with Rembrandt – a meaningless exercise.

Millet was also from the north of France, in his case a hamlet near the coast by Cherbourg, at the northern tip of the Cherbourg peninsula. Born in 1814, at the end of the Napoleonic period, he was raised in a farming family, and lacking aptitude at farming was sent to study with a portrait painter in Cherbourg when he was nineteen. He progressed to another local studio, and in January 1837 moved to Paris, where he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts under Paul Delaroche, one of the leading history painters of the day.

Académie masculine (Male Nude) dates from about 1837, and Millet’s studies in Paris. Despite this proficiency in painting from life, the funding provided to support him in Paris was withdrawn in 1839, and the first painting which he submitted to the Salon was rejected. He also made two unsuccessful attempts to win the Prix de Rome, in 1838 and 1839. He was, though, successful with the portrait which he submitted to the Salon the following year, and returned to Cherbourg to work as a portraitist.

Millet seems to have been a successful painter of portraits, and examples such as this pastel Portrait of Louis-Alexandre Marolles from 1841 show him to have been thoroughly competent if not rather good.

That year he married, and the couple moved to Paris to try to establish his career there. However, his submissions to the Salon in 1843 were rejected, and his wife died of tuberculosis, so in 1845, Millet moved to Le Havre, further east along the Channel coast. He did not stay long there, returning to Paris after a few months.

Millet extended his genres in the hope of success at the Salon. Diana Resting (c 1845) is a small and painterly sketch of the virgin goddess of hunting yawning, her bow and quiver of arrows beside her, and her right foot dangling in a pool. Behind her is another figure, sleeping with their back towards the viewer: it is unclear who that might be, and what Millet’s narrative might have been.

The Temptation of St Anthony (1846) is another very painterly sketch of a classical and popular story. Saint Anthony’s head is thrown back, as he looks to heaven for support, as a wanton near-naked woman embraces him. Millet’s composition has an awkwardness in the placement of hands: that visible just below the saint’s chin must be his, and appears to be the left, which doesn’t fit comfortably with the orientation of his body.

Millet also started to paint country scenes involving local people, such as his Retreat from the Storm (c 1846). This may have resulted from his friendships with Constant Troyon, Théodore Rousseau, and others who would later form the Barbizon School, and with Honoré Daumier, who had a notoriously loose style but was a fine draughtsman of figures.

Here, a woman and her daughter are fighting their way through a gale, as they struggle to reach shelter. The woman is clutching a bundle of sticks to use as firewood, both figures are lightly-clad in tattered clothes, and the young girl is barefoot.

Millet’s study for Mercury Leading the Cows of Argus to Water was probably painted between 1846-1848. Its narrative basis appears to be the story of Jupiter and Io from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which I have previously examined in detail. Mercury is leading a white cow, presumably Io herself, away from the sleeping Argus. Ovid’s account has Mercury decapitate Argus, which Millet does not depict.

In the late 1840s, Millet finally started to be more successful at the Salon. He had paintings accepted in 1847 and 1848, and in the latter year one of those was purchased by the state.

The story of Hagar and Ishmael (c 1847) is drawn from the book of Genesis in the Old Testament. Hagar was an Egyptian, who was a maid to Sarah, Abraham’s wife; when her mistress was unable to conceive, Hagar was given to Abraham, and gave birth to his first child Ishmael. When Sarah later conceived, the two women fell out, leading to Hagar and Ishmael being cast out into the wilderness of Beersheba.

Millet’s very painterly sketch shows mother and son fighting for their survival in the wilderness, after they had been cast out. According to the book of Genesis, God heard her cries and provided them with a well to drink from, and Ishmael went on to found the tribe of Ishmaelites.

In the late spring of 1849, Millet and his growing family left Paris, which was in the throes of a cholera epidemic, and moved to the village of Barbizon, where he and his friends were forming the Barbizon School. Millet, Rousseau, and Daubigny became its leaders, and the best-known, and there were a further dozen or more artists who were part of the school during its existence.

The following year he entered into a contract with a patron, Alfred Sensier (1815-1877), which ensured a reliable supply of materials and an income, in return for drawings and paintings; this was not exclusive, and allowed him to sell work to others too. Sensier was later to write Millet’s biography, which was published after they had both died.

Millet’s The Sower was completed in 1850 and shown at the Salon that year; it has since been recognised as his first real masterpiece. It shows an agricultural worker striding across a field, sowing seed for the summer’s crop. In the distance to the right, and caught in the sunlight, is another worker ploughing with a pair of oxen. Behind the sower is the inevitable flurry of birds, trying to eat any seed left on the surface of the ground.

Millet revisited this motif in several later paintings, and in them inspired Vincent van Gogh’s The Sower (1888), one of the major paintings which he made of country people. After this success, Millet started work on his Harvesters Resting (Ruth and Boaz), which he completed in 1853.

Millet was a prolific draughtsman, and around 1851 appears to have been involved in a collaborative project with the Swiss artist Karl Bodmer (1809-1893) to illustrate the gripping yarn of Jemima Boone and the Callaway sisters, probably for a popular edition of James Fenimore Cooper’s fictionalised account in The Last of the Mohicans (1826). Millet’s drawing in charcoal and brown chalk of The Rescue of the Daughters of Daniel Boone and Richard Callaway (1851) shows a scene late in the story, which took place on the Kentucky River in the Spring of 1776.

A raiding party of American Indians, mainly Shawnee and Cherokee, captured the three girls. On the third day after their abduction, a rescue party organised by Daniel Boone caught up with them, killing two of the captors. The others fled, allowing the girls to be taken back to their homes in Boonesborough.

Capture of the Daughters of D. Boone and Callaway by the Indians (1852) is a lithograph produced from one of Millet’s drawings of the earlier part of the story. For his part, Bodmer produced at least one oil painting of the story. Bodmer had painted American Indians in North America, and joined the Barbizon School; his name was commemorated by Claude Monet, who painted a tree in Fontainebleau Forest under the title of The Bodmer Oak (1865).

References

Wikipedia.
L’Atelier de Jean-François Millet, a private museum.

Sensier’s biography of Millet in English, and in French.

Lepoittevin, Lucien, and Lacambre, Geneviève (eds) (2002) Jean-François Millet, Au-delà de l’Angelus, Éditions de Monza. ISBN 978 2 908 07193 1. (In French.)

After the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe has been told by the first of the daughters of Minyas, the second daughter starts telling her story. As is so often the case in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, we get more than we had expected: this narrator opens with a brief summary of the adultery of Venus and Mars, then relates two intertwined stories of the loves of Leucothoë and Clytie for the god of the Sun.

The discovery of the adultery of Venus and Mars has been told widely through the Classic literature, and its most detailed and popular account is probably that in Homer’s Odyssey (book 8, around line 326). Homer also uses another narrator to tell the story there: the bard Demodocus, who gives his account in a bid to cheer Odysseus up when he is being entertained by King Alcinous, after meeting Nausicaä on the island of the Phaeacians.

The Metamorphoses are the earliest surviving account of the myths of Leucothoë – who is not to be confused with Leucothea – and Clytie, and it has been speculated that they may originate from a non-Greek source. There has been confusion over who they loved, with more recent accounts giving the partner as Apollo. In Greek mythology, Helios, the personification of the Sun, is a Titan, but Apollo is an Olympian god with other distinct roles. Roman mythology transferred Helios as Sol, but there was increasing confusion with Apollo. Ovid avoids any such confusion here.

The Story

The second daughter of Minyas, confusingly named by Ovid as Leuconoë, first announces that she will tell of how the Sun fell in love, then embarks on an account of how the Sun was the first to witness the adultery of Venus and Mars, which he reported to the husband of Venus, Vulcan. The latter immediately fabricated a fine net of bronze, which he arranged around the bed in which the couple were about to make love.

Vulcan’s net trapped the couple in the act of lovemaking, at which point Vulcan threw the doors open and invited the gods in to witness the couple’s shame – an episode which was long talked about.

Venus did not forget this, and obtained her revenge on the Sun by making him fall in love with Leucothoë. This led to the Sun becoming erratic in his course and timing, as he paused to cast his light on his sweetheart. Then one night, the Sun took the form of Leucothoë’s mother, gained access to her chamber where she was spinning, and sent her maids away. The Sun then revealed himself, and raped her.

Clytie, another woman who may have been Leucothoë’s sister and who had fallen in love with the Sun, came to hear of this, and spread the story. Leucothoë’s father ignored his daughter’s account of the rape, and buried her alive with a mound of sand on top. Although the Sun melted that sand away in an effort to rescue her, she was already dead, and past any hope of resuscitation. The Sun then laid fragrant nectar around her, and she was transformed into a frankincense tree (now of the Boswellia genus, which exudes the resin):
At once the maiden’s body, steeped in dews
of nectar, sweet and odourate, dissolves
and adds its fragrant juices to the earth:
slowly from this a sprout of Frankincense
takes root in riched soil, and bursting through
the sandy hillock shows its top.

With the Sun no longer dallying after Leucothoë, Clytie pined in vain for his attention. She sat outdoors for nine days and nights without food or drink, weeping, and turning her head to watch the Sun as he passed. She became rooted into the soil, and was transformed into a heliotrope plant (the sunflower):
A pearly white
overspread her countenance, that turned as pale
and bloodless as the dead; but here and there
a blushing tinge resolved in violet tint;
and something like the blossom of that name
a flower concealed her face. Although a root
now holds her fast to earth, the Heliotrope
turns ever to the Sun, as if to prove
that all may change and love through all remain.

Strictly speaking, in English heliotropes are members of the borage family, Boraginaceae, which does not include sunflowers. However it is clear from Ovid’s description that he meant what we now call the sunflower, from the genus Helianthus. Sunflower flowers not only resemble the sun, but the plant tilts during daylight to face the sun, i.e. they are heliotropic.

The Paintings

Of all the non-Christian figures, Venus must be the most popular subject for European patrons and painters alike, and her affair with Mars has been painted by almost every artist until the nineteenth century. Out of those innumerable paintings, a surprisingly small proportion have attempted to depict the story given in the Odyssey and here, involving Vulcan and his fine net of bronze.

The two outstanding depictions which I have chosen come from opposite ends of the period of narrative painting.

Joachim Wtewael is not only known for his ostensibly unpronounceable surname, but for his remarkably explicit figures. In Mars and Venus Surprised by the Gods from about 1606-10, he gives a full visual account of the story, and leaves the viewer in no doubt as to what the couple were doing, even adding a flush to the cheeks of Venus.

He uses multiplex narrative too: Vulcan is seen forging his fine net in the far background, and again at the right, as he is about to throw the finished net over the couple. Mars’ armour is scattered over the floor, and there is a chamber-pot under the bed. Behind Vulcan the other gods are arriving, and laughing with glee at the raunchy scene being unveiled to them.

At the other extreme in time is Lovis Corinth’s splendid Homeric Laughter, painted exactly three centuries later, in 1909. Corinth inscribes a German translation of line 326 in book 8 of the Odyssey, which reads in English:
unquenchable laughter arose among the blessed gods as they saw the craft of wise Hephaestus

Corinth painted two versions, this being his first. It shows Venus recumbent on the bed, shielding her eyes from the crowd around her. Mars struggles with the net which secures the couple, looking frustrated. Vulcan, clad in black with his tools slung around his waist, is talking to Poseidon (who wears a crown) with Bacchus behind clutching a champagne glass. At the right edge is Mercury, with his winged helmet. Sundry putti are playing with Mars’ armour, and an arc of putti adorns the sky.

The few paintings which have been made of Leucothoë have either been lost, or are not accessible as suitable images. However Clytie has proven more popular, and I have selected some of her finer depictions to show here.

Charles de La Fosse tells Ovid’s complete story in Clytie Transformed into a Sunflower (1688). The unrequited lover sits weeping on the shore, as the chariot of the Sun moves on to sunset behind. Growing on the rocks behind Clytie are sunflowers, to which she will shortly be transformed.

Nicolas Colombel’s Clytie, probably from around 1670-80, is simpler: here she holds her right hand up to help her look at the Sun, while grasping the stalk of a sunflower with her left.

I had not come across the paintings of Louis Welden Hawkins before, but his work showing Clytie, from the late nineteenth century, combines the same key elements: a lovelorn nude, and a mass of sunflowers.

Evelyn De Morgan hints more explicitly at the transformation about to overtake her Clytie (1887), which is set against a superb rendering of the western sky at dusk.

The other late Victorian British painter who explored Ovid’s story was Lord Leighton, who painted Clytie at least twice. In his Clytie from about 1890-92, I have been unable to spot the woman’s figure, and suspect that the only image that I have has cropped it out.

The later version, Clytie (1895-96), shows Clytie prostrating herself before the sun, her head thrown back and arms outstretched, but no sign of her signature flowers.

I hope that you find these good depictions of Ovid’s text.

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

In 1892, Edvard Munch had been invited to exhibit his paintings in Berlin, long before the start of the Secession there. When that exhibition opened in November, his work was considered so shocking that it provoked outrage, and the exhibition had to close prematurely after only one week. The artist almost relished the reaction, and the exhibition was shown later in Düsseldorf, Cologne, and Berlin again.

Despite (or perhaps because) of this, Munch fitted in well with the literary and arts circle around the Swedish playwright August Strindberg which met in the ‘Black Piglet’ tavern, and was able to develop the series of psychologically-dramatic paintings which became his Frieze of Life.

Munch’s first versions of Despair from 1892 were inspired by a blood-red sunset which he saw with the Norwegian painter Christian Skredsvig, when they stayed in the south of France in early 1892. This version probably dates from 1893-94, and is higher in chroma, with a different figure in the foreground. The view is from the same location above the city of Oslo, and the same vessels are shown at anchor in the fjord.

From Despair came The Scream, shown here in its first version of 1893, which was painted using a mixture of oils, tempera and pastel on cardboard. He painted several different versions of The Scream, with that of 1910 being as well known as this one. The landscape includes Oslo, its fjord with ships at anchor, and the surrounding hills. Munch strongly associated this series with the notes that he had written to describe the feelings which built the image in his mind:
I was walking along a path with two friends. The sun was setting. I felt a breath of melancholy. Suddenly the sky turned blood-red. I stopped and leant against the railing, deathly tired, looking out across flaming clouds that hung like – blood and a sword over the deep blue fjord and town. My friends walked on – I stood there trembling with anxiety, and I felt a great, infinite scream pass through nature.

Munch returned to Norway in the Spring of 1894, and had a solo exhibition in Oslo in October 1895.

In 1896, Munch moved to Paris, where he developed his techniques as a printmaker using woodcut and lithographic methods. His prints developed the themes which he had already initiated in his paintings, and sold well, enabling him to buy a summer cottage on the west coast of Oslo Fjord, about sixty miles south of the city. The following year he moved back to Oslo, and in 1899 began a relationship with Tulla Larsen.

Munch and Larsen travelled together to Italy, which was a stimulus for a productive period in his work. But the following year, he left her after injuring his left hand with a shot from his own pistol, and he returned to Berlin, where he became involved in the Secession (and the Vienna Secession), and exhibited with it in 1902.

His visits to Paris helped infuse Munch’s paintings with new colour, which may well have influenced the development of the Fauves. An example is his study in adolescence and the charged stillness of a Norwegian summer night: Girls on the Pier (c 1901). He again painted several different versions of this theme, including Girls on the Bridge (c 1902), below, in which the colours have been brightened by the light of day.

This painting is currently – until 28 May 2017 – being exhibited at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, Germany, alongside paintings by Liebermann, Nolde, and Kandinsky.

After his visit to Italy in 1899, Munch decided that he wanted to create works suitable for large walls, which would be more monumental in scale if not intent. After he had exhibited his Frieze of Life at the Berlin Secession in 1902, he started incorporating its themes in these large paintings. In 1903, Munch was commissioned to paint a frieze for his patron Max Linde’s house in Lübeck.

Loving Couple in the Park is one of the panels from Munch’s Linde Frieze, completed in 1904. Being based on his Frieze of Life, these dealt with adult themes, and Dr Linde felt them a little too charged for their intended destination of his children’s rooms.

Munch continued to return to Norway each summer, but during his stay there in 1905, he had a violent altercation with Ludvig Karsten, and left Norway for Copenhagen. From there he travelled to Germany, where he underwent treatment for a ‘nervous disorder’ and alcoholism. In 1906, Munch was commissioned to paint a frieze for the foyer of Max Reinhardt’s theatre in Berlin, which was at the heart of Berlin’s avant garde.

I show here two panels from the Reinhardt Frieze: Desire (above) and Melancholy (below), which were painted between 1906–7. Munch used diluted paint on unprimed canvas to achieve the lightness of these, although the lower work is reported as using tempera. These are set on the undulating coast near his summer home on Oslo Fjord, and further develop his earlier images about mature love.

Munch also planned a monumental polyptych with five panels, which was reduced to three, showing the ages of man. Bathing Men (1907–8) is one of the panels from that set. Arne Eggum draws attention to the contrast between the more extrovert attitude seen in these paintings, and Munch’s deteriorating health at the time.

By the autumn of 1908, Munch was, by his own admission, verging on madness, resulting from anxiety, excessive drinking, and drunken fights. When he started to suffer from hallucinations, he voluntarily entered the Copenhagen clinic of Dr Daniel Jacobson for eight months, during which his condition stabilised then improved.

Munch frequently painted self-portraits, but one which I find most insightful is his Self-Portrait in the Clinic, which he made as he was recovering in early 1909. His use of colour is almost Fauvist: he portrays himself in dark clothing, still anxious and in recovery, but the room around him is formed of bold brushstrokes of raw colour.

When he was able to return to Norway later that year, Munch’s health was much improved and he was less full of pessimism and anxiety. He set up an outdoor studio for the summer, and then competed successfully to provide a series of paintings for the University of Oslo.

References

Wikipedia.
Collection at Norway’s National Gallery.
The Munch Museum, Oslo.

Lampe, Angela, and Chéroux, Clément (2012) Edvard Munch, the Modern Eye, Tate Publishing. ISBN 978 1 84976 023 2.
Wood, Mara-Helen (ed) (1992) Edvard Munch, The Frieze of Life, National Gallery Publications. ISBN 978 1 857 09015 4.

With the success of Millet‘s The Sower at the Salon in 1850, the artist achieved his first real recognition. His next major work, Harvesters Resting (Ruth and Boaz) (1850-53), was successful in the Salon of 1853, and sold from there to Martin Brimmer of Boston, MA. It is now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The following years were a very productive time for Millet, with a series of significant paintings showing the poor working the land, made mostly from the farmland adjoining the Forest of Fontainebleau, where Millet was living in the village of Barbizon.

The young couple seen Going to Work (1851-53) are equipped for their day in the fields. She wears a wicker basket over her head, and carries a sack and a length of rope. He has a pitch-fork on his shoulder, carried as if it were a soldier’s rifle. Both are thin and dishevelled, from their outsize worn-out shoes up to his crumpled hat. The man’s thin ankles are almost a caricature to indicate perpetual hunger, but they still stride out to work in the light of the early morning.

More characteristic of the wooded countryside around the village of Barbizon, Millet’s Seated Shepherdess (c 1852) demonstrates the marked differences from Breton’s full-length portraits of young country women either around Courrières or in Brittany. Millet’s figures lack fine detail and are formed in a more painterly manner, as precursors to the ‘impression’ which was to come to the fore during the 1860s and 1870s.

The flock of sheep are formed quite gesturally into a few vague masses, the head of one resting on the low bank on which the shepherdess is seated, just to the left of her right knee. The trees behind merge quickly into a dense texture, losing their individual forms.

Starry Night (c 1850-65) is an unusual nocturne which may have been painted rather later. As in Nikolai Astrup’s much later paintings of Norwegian summer nights, the forms of trees are ill-defined and indistinct. The stars and a couple of meteor trails above resolve more crisply, giving the simple composition a much grander scale. A couple of the stars are also seen in reflection in puddles along the rutted muddy track, which the dark allows to merge with the surrounding fields.

Millet’s drawings from this period are also a delight, and their simplified forms were later to appear in the work of other master draughtsmen such as Georges Seurat and Odilon Redon. The Potato Harvest (1853) is a good example, worked using black chalk with white chalk highlights.

A man and a woman are seen filling sacks of harvested potatoes, their forks resting on the ground to the left. The heavy sacks are then placed on a simple wheelbarrow, to be moved laboriously back to the farm. This was perhaps the first appearance in his work of a motif which was to reappear most notably in his later l’Angélus.

Sheep Shearing (c 1854) shows the highly skilled task of hand-shearing the fleece from a sheep. A man holds the animal still, resting over the end of a large barrel. A woman is using hand shears to cut the fleece from the sheep, as was universal before the introduction of machine shearing from 1888. Even with highly-skilled hands, this is a difficult process, and it is hard to remove the complete fleece. In some parts of the world, itinerant shearing teams would have performed this task, but for small flocks on poor farms it had to be carried out by those working the farm.

The Shepherdess (1852-62) is less densely-worked drawing in black chalk, showing a woman with her working dog, tending her flock on the rough land at the edge of a dense wood, probably close to the village of Barbizon.

Before the introduction of machine milking and milking parlours in the early twentieth century, scenes such as Millet’s Woman Milking a Cow (1854-60) were common: the milkmaid would take her pail out to the individual cows and milk them on location.

In Millet’s The Hamlet of Cousin near Gréville (1855), the artist has returned to the hamlet of his birth, and shows the rough lane leading to another nearby hamlet, Cousin. A man, possibly a local trader, is attending to the load on his animals (I’m not sure if they are donkeys), and the bottom of the valley is dotted with geese. This rolling countryside with hedgerows enclosing tiny fields contrasts greatly with that around Barbizon.

The Potato Harvest (1855) is another more substantial work developed from drawings such as that shown above. This more complex composition features half a dozen figures, but is still far less busy than Breton’s harvest scenes. In the foreground, a man and woman are working together to fill sacks with the harvested potatoes, which will be loaded onto the wagon behind them. The other four work as a team to lift the potatoes using forks and transfer them into wicker baskets – gruelling and back-breaking work.

Although the fields in the left distance are lit by sunshine, the dark scud-clouds of a heavy shower fill the sky at the right. Being poor, none of the workers has any wet-weather gear. The soil is poor, full of stones, and yields would be low despite the full sacks shown at the right.

Millet had gone from strength to strength during the early 1850s, and established his simple, naturalistic style on rural ‘genre’ subjects. These avoided earlier sentimentality, were far from idyllic, and showed life on the land as it really was. His style and subjects thus reinforced one another as faithful expressions of what country life for the poor was really like.

The late 1850s would see two further masterpieces: The Gleaners and l’Angélus.

References

Wikipedia.
L’Atelier de Jean-François Millet, a private museum.

Sensier’s biography of Millet in English, and in French.

Lepoittevin, Lucien, and Lacambre, Geneviève (eds) (2002) Jean-François Millet, Au-delà de l’Angelus, Éditions de Monza. ISBN 978 2 908 07193 1. (In French.)

Like the sense of smell, taste is one of our more ‘primitive’ senses, and linked to basic biological drives such as hunger and preparations for eating. As Pavlov so memorably demonstrated, mammalian behaviour can be conditioned so that we anticipate the act of eating by making saliva and gastric secretions, although hopefully none of us sits and drools whenever a bell is rung.

Those of us who live very ordered lives, such as monks and nuns who gather in a communal eating area such as a refectory, where they are exposed to specific paintings and other visual stimuli, could perhaps come to associate those paintings with the act of eating. For most of us, though, paintings are likely to struggle to evoke particular tastes, although they could more readily elicit a desire for food, even salivation, perhaps.

José de Ribera’s early painting of Taste from about 1616 shows a man, a decanter in his left hand and a goblet in the right, who has just polished off a large bowl of food. The small skull in the foreground and the abundant cleaned ribs suggest that this might have been a rabbit pie or similar – by modern standards neither particularly tasty nor appetising.

Jan Brueghel the Elder’s Taste (or Allegory of Taste) (1618), with figures painted by Rubens, is an almost exhaustive catalogue of what was then considered to be edible. At its centre, Pan (or a satyr) pours a woman with an ample figure a coupe from his large flagon. Immediately in front of her are a dozen oysters, and the remainder of the table is packed tight with an array of exotic dishes.

The rest of the room – which opens out to a deer park and distant palace – is piled with unprepared foodstuffs, including a boar’s head, peacocks and many game birds, a hare, rabbit, fish, shellfish, fruit, and vegetables. In the left distance is a kitchen in which food is being prepared. In keeping with the theme, paintings on display show the marriage feast at Cana, The Fat Kitchen, and a festoon of fruit.

This demonstrates how our taste and eating habits have changed in the last four centuries. Delicacies which were restricted to nobility, such as Swan Pie, would today make most of us go for the vegetarian option, and much of our food we only see following extensive preparation and processing. Instead of inspiring our hunger, most of us would now see Brueghel’s magnificent painting as a celebration of excess almost to the point of obscenity.

An artist in the circle of Abraham Janssens probably painted this more modest The Sense of Taste at about the same time, around 1620. The fare shown appears to be a simple pie, but alongside it is what looks like the cooked head of a bird. The woman holds aloft an ornate goblet of what seems to be plain water, which together with the bread on the table is the most basic of meals. The man is still wearing his hat, which looks decidedly odd.

Johann Daniel Glöckler’s Allegory of the Sense of Taste (1621) shows a very demure woman, apart from the completely incongruous exposure of her right breast, eating a thin segment of what may be an apple or an older fruit such as a quince. Although a marvellous work, it does little for me in terms of taste or salivation.

Frans Wouters’ Allegory of Taste followed in 1635–59, and was clearly inspired by Brueghel. Instead of the lavish jam-packed collation in the earlier painting, Wouters seems to have had a smaller budget, or perhaps wished to avoid the sin of gluttony. Its emphasis, though, remains on unprepared foods, including a range of game animals and birds, fish, and fruit. There is still the famous Swan Pie on the table, but there is no sign of Pan or his aphrodisiac oysters.

More humorous is David Rijckaert’s Peasant Woman with a Cat (1640-42), showing an elderly woman spoon-feeding porridge to a tight-swaddled kitten.

The last of my allegories is perhaps the closest to modern tastes: Philip Mercier’s The Sense of Taste (1744-47). Its two genteel young couples are enjoying healthier eating, with a bowl of fruit nearest the viewer. Behind that are half a dozen desserts topped with whipped cream, showing that even they can succumb to the temptation of calories.

Although this is getting closer to appealing to my more modern palate, it still doesn’t really entice me to rush off for a quick snack. So I turn to still life paintings in the hope that they might be more successful.

Food is an enormously popular item to include in a still life painting, but has tended to appear in abstruse combinations which are less attractive to the palate, like ‘lobster, drinking horn and glasses’ (an actual painting by Willem Kalf from about 1653).

One of my favourite classical painters of still life, Clara Peeters can be relied upon to come up with brilliant depictions of more appetising combinations, such as her Mesa (Table) from about 1611. Even its birds have now been readied for the table, perhaps with more waiting under the crust of that fine-looking pie.

Clara Peeters’ marvellous Cheesestack with Knife, Shrimp, Crayfish, Glass of Wine and Bread (c 1625) shows not only her exceptional skill in composing and painting foods and the crockery and glassware in which they should be presented, but her taste in assembling them.

Generally considered the lowliest of the genres, still life paintings have been far more than just a painterly warming up exercise. At the start of his long and glorious career, William Merritt Chase rose to a vivid realism in his Still Life With Watermelon (1869) which even shows the subtle bloom on the grapes.

His later virtuoso paintings of fresh fish became legendary among his students: brilliant, but not appetising, I’m afraid.

In search of a more sensory experience from an Impression, Renoir’s Strawberries (c 1905) certainly look the part, and are presented as carefully as are the dishes of Clara Peeters. But there’s still something missing.

Perhaps it is the act of consumption, something formalised in Man With a Wine Glass (c 1630) which is attributed to Velázquez. Here I’m puzzled by that strange cream leather glove, and wonder if it used to be part of a sommelier’s outfit.

Murillo’s delightful painting of The Melon Eaters (c 1645-55) catches a couple of street urchins consuming grapes and melons which do look very appealing. Later this year I’ll be celebrating Murillo’s four hundredth anniversary – it is hard to believe that this work was created almost four centuries ago.

Joining Boris Kustodiev’s Merchant’s Wife at Tea (1918) looks even more real, and those slices of watermelon and cake look so tangible, but not quite tastable.

Tjalf Sparnaay’s ‘mega-realistic’ Sandwich Ham-Egg (2014) takes this to its conclusion, where I think that I am finally convinced. It’s contemporary processed food: no eggshells, no ears of ripe wheat, not the slightest trace of an unsliced tomato, and certainly no adorable pigs. Maybe our real problem is that we no longer recognise food when we see it.

Epics tell the adventures of their heroes as they triumph over the forces of evil. Heroes are almost exclusively male, and their epic is narrated from a strongly male point of view. Of the three greatest epics to emerge from classical Greece and Rome – Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and Virgil’s Aeneid – the latter two describe protracted journeys across the ancient Mediterranean.

The Odyssey details the adventures of its hero Odysseus, as he travels back from the ruins of Troy to his wife and family in Ithaca. Although it both opens and closes in Odysseus’ home on Ithaca, the overwhelming majority of its 12,110 lines of verse detail the travels and travails of Odysseus and, to a much lesser extent, his son Telemachus.

When Odysseus left Ithaca for the Trojan War, he left behind a young wife, Penelope, and their young son, Telemachus. It took a further seven hundred years after Homer’s account was probably created, before anyone wrote any serious consideration of Penelope’s story – a pattern which has been repeated for similar stories until the twentieth century. Even then, we learn much about life in the trenches during the First World War, but precious little about what it was like for the women and families left at home.

Robinet Testard’s miniature showing those left at home – Penelope, Laertes and Telemachus (c 1510) – may seem a little quaint to modern eyes, but is a succinct summary. Penelope, as the husband of the now absent King of Ithaca, had to try to rule in his lieu. Odysseus’ aged father, Laertes, was unlikely to see his son’s return. The young Telemachus needed his father to guide him to adulthood, and to learn how to be a king in contemporary society.

Domenico Beccafumi’s almost contemporary painting of Penelope (c 1514) is a sophisticated masterpiece even by today’s standards. By the start of the Odyssey, Penelope’s husband had been away from home for twenty years, during which Penelope had grown from girl to middle-aged maid. For the first of those decades, her husband had faced daily dangers on the killing fields around Troy. News of what had happened was very slow to reach outposts like Ithaca, a small island in the Ionian Sea off the west coast of mainland Greece.

When she heard that Troy had fallen and the victors were returning home, Penelope must have spent days watching and waiting. As she heard reports of other wives regaining their husbands, her hopes must have run like a roller-coaster.

Beccafumi’s Penelope holds a thread in her right hand, which refers to her daily task of weaving the funeral shroud for Laertes, to spinning as a symbol of time and its passage, and to the Fates, who might be the figures shown at the bottom right.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Penelope (1869) is shown at her loom, the shuttle held in her left hand, as she stares lost in thought of her absent husband, whose ships are seen in her weaving.

For Heva Coomans, Penelope Awaiting Odysseus (c 1900) is weaving an image of her husband as warrior, celebrating the victory at Troy. She pauses to look over her shoulder in the hope that the sails of his ships might appear any minute now.

Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée, painting in the late eighteenth century, showed one event which we know didn’t happen: Penelope Reading a Letter from Odysseus.

Instead, her husband’s protracted absence brought suitors for Penelope’s hand, as shown in John William Waterhouse’s Penelope and the Suitors (1912). They took over her court, living off Penelope’s kingdom, raping a dozen of her maids, and rose to more than a hundred in number by the time that Odysseus returned.

Penelope was forced to resort to devious tactics to keep them at bay. The most celebrated was her promise that she could only consider her suitors once she had completed weaving the shroud for Laertes, which they could observe her working on each day.

As Angelica Kauffman shows in Penelope Awoken by Eurykleia (1772), each night Odysseus’ nurse would wake her up, and she would then resort to a subterfuge.

While the suitors were asleep, the queen undid her day’s weaving, as seen in Joseph Wright of Derby’s Penelope Unravelling her Web by Lamp-light (1785). By her son’s bedside, and under the watchful eye of Odysseus’ statue, Penelope ensured that she would remain faithful to her husband alone.

But as time went by, the suitors wondered why the shroud grew in size only very slowly. One of Penelope’s household revealed the subterfuge, and the queen was forced to use other techniques. Telemachus was sent by Athena to discover what had happened to his father.

It is after the return of Telemachus, when Odysseus himself is back on Ithaca, that Ovid’s fictional letter was written by Penelope. Robinet Testard’s miniature, illustrating an early French translation of the Heroides, shows Penelope (c 1510) writing it.

Often assumed to be the ultimate expression of marital fidelity, Ovid’s letter, which opens his Heroides (meaning ‘heroines’), is far more perceptive and insightful. It addresses the restless fear that comes in true love. It recounts, with some curious inaccuracies, some of the events of the Trojan War which must have had greatest impact on Odysseus’ family. It accepts her husband’s inevitable unfaithfulness over those twenty years, during which Penelope has remained steadfast and chaste. It explains how important a father would have been to Telemachus as he grew up.

Ovid’s fiction is the prototype of every letter which could be written by the partner of any man who goes to war (and more).

There has been long debate as to whether, at that time, Penelope already knew that Odysseus had returned. What followed, and is so often skipped over in readings of the Odyssey, is actually its entire purpose, and the climax of the epic.

Penelope set the suitors the challenge of shooting a single arrow from Odysseus’ bow through the heads of a dozen axes: a task which none can attain. This is shown brilliantly in Lovis Corinth’s wall painting Odysseus in the Battle with the Suitors (1913), for the Villa Katzenbogen.

The only person who could string the bow and achieve this task was Odysseus himself. Having confirmed his identity, Odysseus, Telemachus, and two servants, with Athena herself, proceed to slaughter the suitors.

This scene of carnage was the motif for Gustave Moreau’s unfinished The Suitors (c 1852-1885), in which (Pallas) Athena, or Minerva, dominates. In his repeated reworking, Moreau came to obscure the figure of Odysseus, who is seen holding his bow in the doorway at the back, an owl above his head. Moreau would perhaps have done better to have considered the strength and endurance not of Athena, but of Penelope herself.

In 2005, about 2700 years after Homer’s Odyssey became the epic that we know today, Margaret Atwood’s novel The Penelopiad finally told Penelope’s story.

I’ll admit that, until a couple of weeks ago, I had never even heard of Louis Welden Hawkins (1849–1910), nor can I recall seeing any of his paintings, although some are in the Musée d’Orsay. As even the great Wikipedia knows next to nothing about him, allow me to cast a little light on his life and work.

Louis Hawkins was born in Germany, the son of a British Naval Officer and an Austrian Baroness. He grew up near London, and at the age of fifteen he followed in his father’s footsteps by joining the Royal Navy. He then decided that he wanted to be a painter, so left the Navy and settled in Paris in around 1870, to begin his training. He started at the Académie Julian, where he was taught by Jules Lefèbvre and William Bouguereau, and in 1873 made friends with George Moore, an Irish writer who also attended the Académie.

Hawkins seems to have been quite poor at the time, and had to work painting porcelain in a factory to make ends meet. He persevered, apparently painting in a conventional academic (Salon) manner, as may be expected given his teachers. In 1876, he was admitted to the Académie Nationale des Beaux-Arts, where he was taught by Gustave Boulanger.

By about 1880, when he painted A Peasant Woman, Hawkins had left Paris for Grez-sur-Loing, which is close to Barbizon and was still very rustic at that time. There he painted rural scenes in a style strongly reminiscent of Jules Bastien-Lepage, who was only slightly older than Hawkins, and making a great impression at the Salon.

Hawkins’ first success came with Orphans (1881), which shares Bastien-Lepage’s somewhat muted colours, which are attributed to the light peculiar to Grez. A young brother and sister are in a neglected graveyard, looking together at a pauper’s grave, apparently of one or both of their parents. This painting was awarded a third-class medal at the Salon that year, and marked the start of a run of his paintings exhibited at the following three Salons. This work was purchased by the state in 1887 for 10,000 francs, and was also exhibited at the Paris World Exhibition in 1900.

Hawkins continued this style in The Last Step (c 1882), which shows an elderly woman walking slowly with a stick in what may be the same graveyard. In the distance, a gravedigger is digging a new grave through the stony soil. The two engage in conversation, probably discussing where she will be buried in the not too distant future.

During the late 1880s, Hawkins turned away from the naturalism of Bastien-Lepage (who had died suddenly in 1884), and became more symbolist. In 1887, he asked Pierre Puvis de Chavannes if he could work in his studio, but was turned down. The Priestess (c 1890) shows the dramatic change which had occurred in Hawkins’ themes and style over those years.

In about 1890, Hawkins met Raffaela Zeppa, an Italian woman; the couple lived together, their daughter being born in 1892. They married in 1896, after Hawkins had adopted French nationality (in the previous year).

In 1891, Hawkins broke with the ‘official’ Salon de la Société des Artes Français, and switched to its counterpart, the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, a move which brought him renewed success at last.

Les Auréoles (Haloes) (c 1891-94) was shown at Symbolist exhibitions, where it was interpreted as depicting the duality of woman as both femme fatale and femme fragile.

Although undated, I suspect that Hawkins’ wonderful painting of Clytie dates from around this time, and his distinctive confluence of Impressionist handling of colour with Symbolist motifs.

The Procession of Souls (1893) was dedicated to the successful sculptor Alexandre Charpentier, who was a close friend. It shows a group of figures with haloes walking slowly along a riverbank, as two cloaked boatmen wait in their small boat on the river – suggestive of Charon on the River Styx. On the opposite bank is a chapel, its windows lit up in the gloom of the half light.

Back in 1888, Hawkins had lived for a while with Camille Pelletan, a radical socialist politician, and he continued to move in radical circles. His Portrait of Séverine (1895) shows a popular journalist, who was then at the height of her fame. Séverine’s original name was Caroline Rémy (1855-1929), and she was a famous defender of humanitarian causes. During the First World War, she sided with anarchists and protested against the fighting.

Hawkins made this frame himself. On its left are olive branches and the inscription PAX (peace), and on the right are ears of wheat and the inscription PANIS (bread). This work was shown at the Salon Nationale in 1895, where it was greatly admired.

In the mid-1890s, Hawkins made friends with the Symbolist writers Paul Adam and Jean Lorrain, and with Stéphane Mallarmé, and through his soirées met Puvis de Chavannes, Odilon Redon, and Claude Monet. Hawkins’ work was particularly popular in the Symbolist movement, with its controversial leader Joséphin Péladan, and at its Salon de la Rose + Croix.

Several of Hawkins’ paintings were turned into popular prints, although I have been unable to trace any original for Readers (1897), or evidence that Hawkins himself might have engraved it.

The Eiffel Tower as Seen from The Trocadero (c 1899) is one of a pair of views which Hawkins painted while the pavilion for the 1900 World Exhibition was being constructed, here seen in the distance behind the Eiffel Tower. In the foreground is the sculpture Asia, by Alexandre Falguière (1831-1900), which decorated the old Palais du Trocadero, which had been built for the World Exposition of 1878.

Although the chroma of this image is perhaps slightly exaggerated, this painting is as richly colourful as it appears.

In an effort to improve his family’s income, at the turn of the century, Hawkins turned to making masks and fans. These proved most popular at the World Exhibition of 1900, and are exemplified by Mask (1895-1905) above, which was drawn in black chalk and pencil, and Fan (1905), below, which was painted in gouache. Their art nouveau style was seen as very fashionable at the time.

The Sphinx and the Chimera (1904-06) is an extraordinary painting which draws from Hawkins’ own paintings of women, such as Les Auréoles above, with influences from Moreau and Khnopff. It is hard to distinguish the Sphinx with its radiantly beautiful womanly face, and sculpted wings from the grotesque head and body of the chimera beneath.

A Veil is a chalk drawing which shows Hawkins developing themes which are reminiscent of Odilon Redon and of pastels by Fernand Khnopff, such as his Voile series. Although it has been claimed to date from around 1890, it seems more likely that it was made in Hawkins’ final year or two, perhaps 1909.

In 1905, Hawkins’ arts circles in Paris collapsed, and he and his family retired to Brittany, where he spent his remaining five years painting realist landscapes. He still returned to the city to paint watercolour views, and died there in 1910 after suffering a heart attack. His first solo exhibition took place at the Van Gogh Museum in 1993.

Reference

Lucas Bonekamp (1993) Louis Welden Hawkins, 1849-1910, Van Gogh Museum. ISBN 978 90 6630 442 0.

One of Ovid’s most controversial works, his Heroides (which means ‘heroines’) could have been written early in his career, or quite late, and some have claimed that few of its letters were even written by him. Until the late nineteenth century, they were among his most popular works, at times better-known than his Metamorphoses. Bizarrely, it was after the critical attention that they received during the nineteenth century that they declined in popularity.

The Heroides consist of two series of letters, and Ovid claimed that they established a new genre of epistolary (poetic) fiction. The genre has developed considerably since, although it remains limited in scope and popularity.

The first series, consisting of letters 1 to 15, are fictional letters written by a woman, one of Ovid’s heroines, to her partner during a time of separation. The situations vary considerably, from Penelope’s imminent reunion with her husband after twenty years apart, to several who knew that they could never be reunited and chose suicide.

The second series, letters 16 to 21, consists of three pairs of fictional letters, the first from the man to the woman, and the second from the woman to the man, in relationships in which Ovid considers the woman to have been a heroine. They are accounts of famous couples, whose lives were not necessarily ended because of their relationship. Indeed, the collection ends with the thoroughly positive story of Cydippe and Acontius, who seem to have lived happily thereafter.

The most recent literary critical examinations of Ovid’s letters consider them to have been highly innovative in their approach to gender and its roles. For a male Augustan poet to have even considered writing such a collection seems extraordinary. When you read the individual letters, many have deep insight, and a timelessness which is exceptional among contemporary literature.

The Heroides have inspired many fine paintings and other works of art over the centuries, many of which share Ovid’s radical ideas on women and their roles. I hope that this occasional series of articles reflects those paintings, and does justice to Ovid’s poetic epistles.

References

Wikipedia.
AS Kline’s translation.
James M Hunter‘s translation and commentaries.
The Latin Library‘s text in Latin.
Downloadable PDFs of Loeb Classical Library – L041 includes the Heroides in English and Latin.
Arthur Palmer’s edition and commentary (1898).

Boyd, Barbara W (ed) (2002) Brill’s Companion to Ovid, Brill. ISBN 978 90 04 22676 0.
Hardie, Philip (2002) The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 77528 1.
Knox, Peter E (ed) (2009, 2013) A Companion to Ovid, Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978 1 118 45134 2.
Syme, Sir Ronald (1978) History in Ovid, Oxford UP. ISBN 019 814825 9.

Kenney, EJ (1996) Ovid Heroides, XVI-XXI, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 46623 3.
Knox, Peter E (1995) Ovid Heroides, Select Epistles, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 36834 6.
Palmer, A (ed) (1898, 2005) Ovid Heroides, vol 1, Latin text, Bristol Phoenix Press. ISBN 978 1 904675 05 0.
Palmer, A (ed) (1898, 2005) Ovid Heroides, vol 2, Commentary, Bristol Phoenix Press. ISBN 978 1 904675 06 8.

Gantz, Timothy (1993) Early Greek Myth, A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources, vol 1, Johns Hopkins UP. ISBN 978 0 801 85360 9.
Gantz, Timothy (1993) Early Greek Myth, A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources, vol 2, Johns Hopkins UP. ISBN 978 0 801 85362 3.
Morford, MPO, Lenardon, RJ, & Sham, M (2015) Classical Mythology, 10th ed., Oxford UP. ISBN 978 0 19 999739 8.

1: Penelope to Ulysses – Love’s Restless Fear: Penelope’s story

2: Phyllis to Demophoon – The Over-Exposed Warrior, the Suicide Pact, and the Almond Tree

3: Briseis to Achilles – Pride and Petulance: How one woman almost saved Troy

4: Phaedra to Hippolytus – The Largest Salon, the Wicked Stepmother, and a Fatal Lie

5: Oenone to Paris – President’s Park, the Titanic, and a Name on a Tree

6: Hypsipyle to Jason
7: Dido to Aeneas
8: Hermione to Orestes – Spouse-swapping, matricide, and Harry Potter

9: Deianira to Hercules – A Troubled Woman, Centaur’s Blood, and Hercules as Martyr and Cross-Dressing, Feminism, and the Greek Demi-God

10: Ariadne to Theseus

11: Canace to Macareus
12: Medea to Jason

13: Laodamia to Protesilaus
14: Hypermnestra to Lynceus – Fifty Brides for Fifty Brothers, and their Unexpected Wedding Night – coming soon

15: Sappho to Phaon
16, 17: Paris to Helen, Helen to Paris
18, 19: Leander to Hero, Hero to Leander
20, 21: Acontius to Cydippe, Cydippe to Acontius – A Message on an Apple, and Two Abandoned Lovers

Once the second daughter of Minyas has completed her story of Leucothoe and Clytie’s love for the Sun, the third daughter starts her speech.

As with the first daughter, she tantalises us by mentioning five stories which she will not tell, of:

• Daphnis, who was turned to stone by a rival in love,
• Sithon, whose sex was ambiguous, switching from man to woman and back,
• Celmis, closest friend of the infant Jupiter, and now turned to stone,
• the Curetes, who grew from a shower of rain,
• Crocus and his lover Smilax, who were turned into the crocus flower and bindweed.

She follows that with one of Ovid’s most unusual stories. On the face of it, it is a strange myth which ‘explains’ how hermaphrodites might arise. Delve a bit deeper into its words and ideas, and Ovid shares some remarkably progressive insights about human sexuality.

He rounds off this section of the book by revealing the transformation which the daughters of Minyas underwent in retribution for their failure to worship Bacchus.

The Story

Hermaphroditus was the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, hence his portmanteau name. Raised by Naiads on Mount Ida, when he was fifteen he left that area and roamed distant rivers, until he reached a pool. Living there was a nymph, Salmacis, who was unusual in not following Diana. Instead of hunting, she spent her time bathing and maintaining her beauty.

When Salmacis saw Hermaphroditus, she was filled with desire for him, and immediately proposed marriage. He blushed, and rejected her attempt to kiss him, so she hid in the undergrowth. When he started to bathe in the pool and undressed, her passion was inflamed. She stripped off, and plunged into the water, to kiss, caress, and fondle his body.

Entwining his body with hers, she struggled to embrace him against his will. She cried out to the gods, asking them to join the couple together forever:
Propitious deities accord her prayers:
the mingled bodies of the pair unite
and fashion in a single human form.
So one might see two branches underneath
a single rind uniting grow as one:
so, these two bodies in a firm embrace
no more are twain, but with a two-fold form
nor man nor woman may be called — Though both
in seeming they are neither one of twain.

Thus the two were transformed into a single body, which was both man and woman.

With the last of the daughters’ stories, they work on, scorning the festivities of Bacchus, and dishonouring the god. As the sounds of drums and cymbals grow loud, their weaving becomes overgrown with ivy, and the sisters themselves are transformed into bats:
Full of affright amid the smoking halls
the sisters vainly hide, and wheresoever
they deem security from flaming fires,
fearfully flit. And while they seek to hide,
a membrane stretches over every limb,
and light wings open from their slender arms.
In the weird darkness they are unaware
what measure wrought to change their wonted shape.
No plumous vans avail to lift their flight,
yet fair they balance on membraneous wing.
Whenever they would speak a tiny voice,
diminutive, apportioned to their size,
in squeaking note complains. Adread the light,
their haunts avoid by day the leafy woods,
for sombre attics, where secure they rest
till forth the dun obscure their wings may stretch
at hour of Vesper; — this accords their name.

The Paintings

Although the fate of the daughters of Minyas seems not to have inspired painters or their patrons, the opportunity to show a couple of beautiful young nudes has had lasting appeal.

Bartholomeus Spranger’s Hermaphroditus and the Nymph Salmacis (1580-82) shows Salmacis undressing, ready to jump in after the bathing Hermaphroditus, but closer examination reveals one very important difference from Ovid’s text: in his story, the poet has Salmacis strip off quickly in her haste to make love to the young man.

Spranger’s Salmacis is not making haste in the slightest, but performing a sensuous striptease. Her right hand reaches back to untie the lace on her sandal, and her left hand is drawing back her robe to reveal her body. She is attempting a smouldering seduction, trying to lure him to turn his head towards her, rather than going to grab him.

Two of the Carracci family are thought to have painted this story: this painting of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus from around 1600 has been attributed to Ludovico Carracci, cousin of Annibale, and shows a more static scene which is perhaps more consistent with Ovid’s account.

In Francesco Albani’s Hermaphroditus and Salmacis (1630-40), the nymph has cast back her clothes and is on the point of launching into the water, in her pursuit of Hermaphroditus. The couple are set almost as far apart as his panoramic copper plate permits.

In Louis Finson’s Hermaphroditus and Salmacis (c 1600), Salmacis has almost thrown her body onto the young man. Although their bodies are anatomically conventional, Finson has given them faces which already appear to be converging on a single ungendered form. His splash and ripple effects are particularly realistic too.

Jan Gossaert’s The Metamorphosis of Hermaphrodite and Salmacis (c 1517) shows the couple further into their final battle, Salmacis with a steely, almost angry, look of determination. He also uses multiplex narrative, in showing the union of their bodies taking place on the bank at the far left: at that stage they appear like Siamese twins, with two legs and two heads.

François-Joseph Navez prefers Salmacis in the role of seductress in his The Nymph Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (1829). With both her arms clasped around the body of Hermaphroditus, the nymph is looking straight at his eyes. He is pushing her away with the heel of his right hand, and looking askance, avoiding any eye contact.

Annibale Carracci’s fresco medallion on the ceiling of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome shows Salmacis and Hermaphroditus from about 1595, with the couple seen in a firm mutual embrace, and about to kiss. This deviates from Ovid’s account of the resistance of Hermaphroditus to the end, when their bodies became one.

Giovanni Carnovali remains more true to the text in his Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (1856): the nymph is intertwining her limbs around Hermaphroditus, who is still fighting her advances. Carnovali’s wonderful painterly style gives this a very dynamic feel which is in keeping with Ovid’s account, and like Finson he has already started to transform the face of Hermaphroditus.

These eight superb paintings each show an individual interpretation of this unusual myth. Although only Gossaert attempts an explicit depiction of the outcome of the transformation, on reflection I think that there is narrative strength in leaving the result to the imagination of the viewer.

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 his treatment in the Copenhagen clinic and his return to Norway in 1909, Munch set up an outdoor studio for the summer, and turned to his biggest projects since the Frieze of Life in the 1890s.

In 1909, Munch had competed successfully to provide a series of eleven huge paintings to decorate the new Hall of Ceremonies of the University of Oslo. He showed preliminary studies for these monumental works in Oslo in March 1910, and worked for much of the years to 1916 in properties which he purchased specially to provide sufficient space. His plans for the paintings remained controversial, and the subject of ongoing discussions between Munch and the University, until their acceptance and his victory in the contest in 1914.

There is a consensus that the three most significant paintings from this series are The Sun, History, and Alma Mater.

The Sun (1910–11) is as different from Munch’s paintings during the 1890s as you could imagine. It shows the sun recently-risen over the sea, viewed from a point high above a Norwegian country valley. Its sparse application of paint and geometric arrangement of rays and arcs is reminiscent of the paintings of William Blake (although I have nowhere seen that Munch took any interest in Blake’s work).

History (1909-16) has a similar light and open style. An old man sits with a young boy under an ancient tree, set on a rock pulpit somewhere on the dissected coast of Norway – a zone referred to by those who navigate its waters as the Inner Leads.

Alma Mater (1909-16) plays on the term used worldwide for your former university, which is derived figuratively from its literal meaning of nourishing mother. Again it is set somewhere along the Norwegian coast, which here is less rugged and includes the undulating sweep of a bay which appears in so many of Munch’s earlier works. Sat under the shelter of a younger tree is a mother, dressed in Norwegian costume, who is feeding a young infant at her breast. Three other young children play close to her side.

On the right is a small clump of birch trees, another characteristically Norwegian sight. The sky is formed from a fascinating combination of linear blots of blue, between the clouds, and a contrasting pattern of pale brushstrokes.

Other paintings from this period show how vigorous and dynamic Munch’s facture had become: for example, Galloping Horse (1910–12) shows a horse-drawn sleigh being driven at speed along a packed snow track in the winter.

In 1912, two important overseas exhibitions featured his work. At the Sonderbund Exhibition in Cologne, Germany, he had an entire room devoted to his work; other artists represented there included Vincent van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, and Picasso. Another exhibition of modern Scandinavian art, which included Munch’s, toured New York, Buffalo, Toledo, Chicago, and Boston.

After a series of moves to accommodate his large works, in 1916 he finally settled at Ekely, which was then just beyond the western edge of Oslo, where he was based until his death, a recluse for much of that time. Later that year, his paintings for the University of Oslo were finally accepted and hung.

Munch’s dazzlingly vibrant Bathing Man (1918) is also set on the coast of Norway. The figure and the landscape in which it is set are fashioned from bold strokes of pure colour, which he modulates skilfully to show the bather’s lower legs under the water. Later, Munch developed his outdoor studies of bathing figures with the intention of creating a series of Love motifs for the intended new city hall of Oslo, but the series was never completed.

Munch was not entirely free from anxiety and melancholy, though. In his Sleepless Night. Self-Portrait in Inner Turmoil (1920) he stands, gripping his jacket, presumably in a room at Ekely.

In these later years, he also explored the relationships between the artist and their model. Model by a Wicker Chair (1919–21) features similar high chroma colour in formed strokes and lines to his other paintings from this period, although the artist himself is not shown. Apparently Munch had no difficulty in attracting young models to pose for him at Ekely.

In 1921, Munch was commissioned to paint another series of large works to decorate the canteen of the Freia chocolate factory at Oslo, which he completed the following year. In 1922, he had a major retrospective exhibition in Switzerland.

Recognising the dire financial straits of many German artists following the First World War, he purchased seventy-three of their works, and in 1924 he gave some of his own works to be sold for their benefit.

Munch returned to painting landscapes after the War. Starry Night (1922–24) is one of the most distinctive of these, showing the woods and snow-covered hills which lay outside the distant city of Oslo.

In 1927, major retrospective exhibitions of his work were held at the National Galleries in Berlin and Oslo. Munch also purchased his first movie camera, and started making his own cine films. However, in 1930, he required a period of treatment for eye problems, whose effects he documented in paintings. These visual disturbances recurred in 1938.

Munch continued to paint through the 1930s, although little of his work from those years is well known. Summer on Karl Johan Street, Oslo (1933) shows how much his style continued to evolve, and contrasts with his dark, anxious and melancholic street scenes from before 1900.

In 1933, he was honoured with the Grand Cross of the Royal Norwegian Order of Saint Olav.

In 1937, Nazis in Germany condemned eighty-two of his works as being ‘degenerate’, and confiscated them from public collections. They were brought back to Norway and sold at auction in Oslo in 1939.

After the invasion of Norway in 1940, Munch lived alone at Ekely and avoided all contact with the occupying forces. He died there on 23 January 1944, leaving all his remaining work, including 1100 canvases and 18,000 prints, to the City of Oslo. Those works are now in the Munch Museum in Oslo, which opened in 1963, to commemorate the artist’s centenary.

Having given a brief overview of Munch’s career and work, my next article in this series will start to examine the Frieze of Life, the series of paintings mainly made during the 1890s which Munch considered to be his most important work.

References

Wikipedia.
Collection at Norway’s National Gallery.
The Munch Museum, Oslo.

Lampe, Angela, and Chéroux, Clément (2012) Edvard Munch, the Modern Eye, Tate Publishing. ISBN 978 1 84976 023 2.
Wood, Mara-Helen (ed) (1992) Edvard Munch, The Frieze of Life, National Gallery Publications. ISBN 978 1 857 09015 4.

During the early 1850s, Millet had established his simple, naturalistic style on rural ‘genre’ subjects, faithfully expressing what country life was really like for the poor.

His pastel of The Knitting Shepherdess (1856-57) continued his pastoral theme, showing a young woman engaged in knitting as her flock grazed in broken woodland behind her. She is depicted very simply, almost in illustrative form.

Millet’s hope for the Salon of 1857 was his substantial painting of The Gleaners (1857). His vision was in complete contrast to Breton’s highly successful painting of the same name, which had been so well-received at the Salon in 1855, which I show below. The distant wagon, grainstacks, and village may appear common elements, as are the three women bent over to glean in the foreground, but that is as far as the similarities go.

Millet’s composition is sparse, concentrating on those three figures. There are no distractions, such as a garde champêtre to add any colour or humour: it is about the rural poor, who made ends meet by salvaging scraps after the harvest had been cut. This is unavoidably about poverty, and the sector of the population who just managed to survive each winter. It smacked of socialism, and got the thumbs-down from both the rich and the middle classes.

Although Millet sold The Gleaners after it had been shown at the Salon, and it brought in much-needed money, this painting did not appreciate in value until after his death. It finally entered the Louvre after the death of its owner in 1891.

Millet continued to document the lives and work of the country people around Barbizon. Among these paintings is his delightful First Steps (c 1858), showing an infant about to break free from mother’s arms and walk for the first time towards their father.

But his most famous single work, L’Angélus (The Angelus), was completed around 1857-59 too. This had been commissioned by the American collector Thomas Gold Appleton, as Prayer for the Potato Crop, but underwent modification before Millet gave it its present title. At some stage, it is thought to have included a child’s coffin, but that was overpainted.

It shows a couple, praying the Angelus devotion normally said at six o’clock in the evening, over the potatoes they have been harvesting. It is dusk, and as the last light of the day fades in the sky, the bell in the distant church (whose steeple was a late addition, after Appleton failed to collect the painting from Millet) is ringing to mark the end of work, and the start of the evening.

Next to the man is his fork, which he has been using to lift potatoes from the poor, stony soil; his wife has been collecting them in a wicker basket, which now rests at her feet. Behind them is a basic wheelbarrow, which has a couple of sacks of potatoes on it, ready to be taken home. In the gathering dark, viewers often misread the barrow and think that it contains a small child. Its motif dates back at least to Millet’s chalk drawing of The Potato Harvest in 1853.

With the hostile reception of The Gleaners, Millet did not exhibit this painting until 1865, although he had sold it in 1860 for a meagre 1,000 francs. Since Millet’s death, it has become enormously popular, and in 1890 was sold for 750,000 francs.

The most famous of Millet’s few nocturnes followed: The Sheepfold, Moonlight (1856-60). This beautiful painting shows a shepherd working his dogs to bring his flock into a pen on the plain near Barbizon. He is doing this under a waning gibbous moon, which lights the backs of the sheep.

In Death and the Woodcutter (1858-59), Millet brought together his social realist paintings of the poor and his early narrative paintings. An elderly woodcutter has collected a large bundle of firewood, but is slumping to the ground, his walking stick having fallen in front of him. The figure of death, complete with a scythe on his shoulder and a winged hourglass (sand timer), grasps the woodcutter by his shoulder as the moment of his death approaches.

Millet’s setting for this painting is unusual: the two figures are on a track which has been cut about three metres (ten feet) below the level of the adjacent wheat field, and the thicket at the upper left. The vertical sides make it unlikely to be a dried-up watercourse.

Another delightful and intimate drawing in charcoal and pastel shows The Sewing Lesson (c 1860). A mother, nursing an infant at her breast, is teaching her young daughter to sew. On the floor, beneath the girl’s feet, is a pair of scissors. They are sat in front of an open window; on the outer window sill is a cat, drawn in a more rudimentary way.

Potato Planters (c 1861) shows more agricultural work taking place in the flat fields near Barbizon. The man uses a mattock to cut the hard earth for his wife to drop in seed potatoes. Although potatoes will grow in such conditions, their yield is poor unless the ground has been well-prepared first, normally by ploughing to raise the ridges into which they are usually planted.

Behind them, at the left, a child sleeps in a large wicker basket, and the donkey used to carry the seed potatoes is resting in the shade. The man’s working clogs are padded out with straw to prevent chafing of his feet.

References

Wikipedia.
L’Atelier de Jean-François Millet, a private museum.

Sensier’s biography of Millet in English, and in French.

Lepoittevin, Lucien, and Lacambre, Geneviève (eds) (2002) Jean-François Millet, Au-delà de l’Angelus, Éditions de Monza. ISBN 978 2 908 07193 1. (In French.)

At first sight, as painting is one of the visual arts, it might seem simple to paint on the theme of sight. In some sense, every painting is necessarily about sight, but some are more explicit depictions of the sense, and others merely assume its existence.

As with the other senses that I have considered in this series, I will look first at what are commonly accepted as being allegories of the sense of sight. Strictly speaking, there is no meaning hidden in these works, so they are not true allegories, but the term has stuck.

I am not sure when Frans Floris’s Allegory of Sight was painted, but it was probably around 1550, making it an early and quite sophisticated entry to the subject. The face of its figure is shown reflected in the only appropriate optical instrument of the day: a simple mirror, which is angled carefully so as to project most of the face. Although only a small feature, that reflection looks fiendishly difficult, given the wildly different angle between the mirror and the picture plane.

Floris includes two other symbols related to sight: a window, which shows a heavily-overcast sky but does not provide the main illumination for the scene, which comes from the left, behind the viewer, and, in the foreground, a bird of prey, probably as a small statue of an eagle, known for its exceptionally keen vision.

By the early seventeenth century, José de Ribera had worked out a very different approach for his Allegory of Sight (1615-16). Painted just a few years after the appearance of the first working telescope in 1608, Ribera shows a man surrounded by these wondrous new inventions, as well as a traditional flat mirror. In his hands is an early telescope, possibly made in the Netherlands or Germany. Next to the mirror is a pair of spectacles, which had been developed from the middle of the thirteenth century. Next to them is what may be a small handglass, but the details are obscure in this image.

Shortly after that, Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens collaborated on their magnificent series of five allegories, including Sight (1617). Among the cornucopia of visual and optical artefacts shown here is an even more sophisticated telescope, various drawing and navigational instruments which relied on sight (for making sightings), an early magnifying glass, a globe and an orrery (showing the orbits of the planets), and a vast collection of visual art, including paintings and sculpture.

There are some obvious figurative items, such as the peacocks shown in the distance, just above the woman’s head: their feathers have eye-like markings, and refer to the well-known myth of Argus, although I cannot see that in any of the paintings within this painting.

Frans Wouters provides a brief resumé of Brueghel’s painting in his Allegory of Sight (1635–59), which sadly lacks the optical instruments, but features an unusual convex mirror, being held by the figure.

This painting of Sight has been attributed to Abraham Janssens, and could date to any time between about 1590 and 1632. It appears to have been inspired by Floris’s Allegory of Sight, and its figure is more modest in her dress. The eagle is almost lost in shadow, but is less statuesque at the bottom right. Unfortunately, the reflection of the woman’s face in the mirror does not appear optically correct.

Pietro Paolini’s Allegory of the Five Senses: Sight and Touch was probably painted around 1650, and shows how effective it is to contrast opposites. In the centre is a blind man, who is simultaneously touching the smooth surface of a painting with his left hand, and a sculpted head with his right. Holding the painting is a younger, sighted man.

With the loss of enthusiasm for allegorical paintings of the senses, the next significant work appeared nearly a century later, in Philip Mercier’s The Sense of Sight (1744-47). Most of the other works in this series have involved a cast of two young couples; here he uses a man, his three daughters, and son, who display three optical instruments in use: a flat mirror, a small collapsible telescope, and a magnifying glass. One of the daughters is tracing with her finger on a chart of what appears to be the eastern coastline of North America, and the son is looking intently at another map underneath.

But my favourite depiction of The Sense of Sight wasn’t painted until 1895: it is this, Annie Swynnerton’s masterpiece. Her single figure has no need for optical instruments or paintings: looking up to heaven, her eyes, expression, and body language speak of only one thing.

Our sense of sight is also celebrated in a peculiar, ancient, and very widespread game which is played by children and adults alike: blind man’s buff (or bluff). This involves putting a blindfold on the ‘victim’, who is then required to ‘tag’ one of the sighted players. It was recorded in ancient Greece, and more recently is known from much of Asia, including Japan, throughout Europe, and the Americas. Although it has been introduced to Australasia by European settlers, I do not know whether it has been recorded among indigenous peoples there.

The game also rejoices under many fascinating names: in ancient Greece it was known as copper mosquito, in Bangladesh as blind fly, in Germany as blind cow, and in France as Colin-Maillard, after a tenth century warrior.

Fragonard’s Blind-Man’s Buff (1750-52) shows a red-faced young woman wearing the blindfold, being teased by her young man, and a child using a simple fishing rod. Her torso is tightly constricted by a tubular corset which gives her what appears to be an anatomically-impossible figure, and if she is not very careful, she will fall down the stone steps in front of her.

Goya shows a more usual form of Blind Man’s Buff (1788), in which the sighted players hold hands and form a ring around the blindfolded ‘victim’. Although this should provide them with more safety, this group has chosen to play on the bank of a river.

Konstantin Makovsky’s Игра в жмурки (Blind Man’s Buff) (c 1895) shows another variant, being played indoors.

To those, we should perhaps add the many paintings showing Samson when he had been blinded, and the innumerable works which depend on the direction of gaze. Perhaps another time.

Stories of the abduction of women and their enforced marriage have persisted for an extraordinary length of time. One of the most popular, and still much-loved, musicals is Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, which was a successful movie in 1954, and as late as 1982-83 was remade for television. It tells of seven ‘shotgun’ marriages, and was based on a short story The Sobbin’ Women, which in turn was a parody of the story of the rape of the Sabine women in about 750 BCE.

As popular in classical Greek and Roman times was an equally disturbing myth concerning Hypermnestra and her sisters the Danaïds, which was largely forgotten after the Middle Ages, only to be revived around the start of the twentieth century. It was told by Hyginus, Apollodorus, Aeschylus, and Horace, and referred to by many others.

Danaus and Aegyptus were twin brothers who lived in North Africa. Aegyptus was a mythical king of Egypt who had fifty sons, and his brother had fifty daughters, from polygamous relationships. When Aegyptus decided that his sons would marry his brother’s daughters, Danaus fled with those daughters to Argos, in Greece, where the reigning king handed over his throne to him.

Aegyptus and his sons were not to be put off so easily, joined Danaus and his daughters in Argos, and pressed ahead with the plans for the weddings. The couples were assigned by lot, apart from two matches between Hypermnestra and Lynceus, and Gorgophone and Proteus, which were deemed necessary because of the rank of their mothers, who were princesses.

On the day of their weddings, Danaus equipped his daughters with swords, and told them to murder their husbands in bed that night. Once those drunken grooms had fallen asleep, the daughters each followed their father’s instructions, except for Hypermnestra: by the morning, of the fifty brothers only Lynceus survived.

This story was told in the fourteenth of Giovanni Boccaccio’s De Mulieribus Claris (Concerning Famous Women), published in 1374, and illustrated as Hypermnestra, Lynceus and the Danaïdes (1473) in this hand coloured woodcut from the translation by Heinrich Steinhöwel. Four of the brothers are seen, their throats cut in bed, but the helpfully-labelled figures of Hypermnestra and ‘Linus’ are still in a loving embrace.

Robinet Testard showed a similar scene in The Danaides Kill Their Husbands (c 1510), his miniature for Octavien de Saint-Gelais’ translation of Ovid’s Heroides. Hypermnestra’s sisters have each dutifully cut the throats of their new husbands, and sit holding their swords. At the left, though, Hypermnestra and Lynceus sit together on their marriage bed, unharmed.

Danaus was furious with the disobedience of Hypermnestra, who was dragged to a dungeon by her hair to await her fate. It is at this point that Ovid set his fictional letter from Hypermnestra to Lynceus, which appears as the fourteenth letter in his Heroides.

Ovid’s Hypermnestra makes it clear from the outset that she has been charged with the crime of faithfulness, which should surely be praised, not condemned. She reveals the quandary that she found herself in, as she held her father’s sword at the neck of Lynceus and agonised over whether she should kill him or not. Three times she raised the sword in preparation for his murder, and three times her love for Lynceus overpowered her, and spared his life.

Hypermnestra was not summarily executed by her father, but brought before a court, which acquitted her of any wrongdoing. Lynceus (sometimes erroneously named Linus) then killed Danaus, and succeeded him as the King of Argos with Hypermnestra as his queen.

This maiolica plate painted by Francesco Xanto Avelli in 1537 shows the later scene of Hypermnestra Watching Lynceus Take Her Father’s Crown. Lynceus (labelled here as ‘Lino’) has taken Danaus’ crown, and is about to put him to the sword. Hypermnestra stands at a window, most probably not that of a dungeon. Below its lintel is a Cupid bearing the famous saying omnia vincit amor – love conquers all – which actually comes from Virgil’s last Eclogue and is quite unrelated.

In the end, while Lynceus and Hypermnestra lived happily ever after, the other forty-nine sisters were punished in Hades for the sin of murder. They were given an impossible task, of filling a large container with water; as that container had holes in its bottom, they now spend the rest of eternity carrying water to the container and pouring it in.

Unlike the hapless Sisyphus, who was condemned to push a hefty rock up a steep hill – a Sisyphean task – the Danaïds have not been commemorated in figurative language, but have appeared in a surprising number of paintings.

The murderous sisters don’t seem to have had much of a showing in art until Martin Johann Schmidt painted The Labour of the Danaides (1785) on copper. He makes the allusion to Danaïds also being known as water-nymphs, like Naiads, by placing a river god at the left.

John William Waterhouse revived them for two paintings, of which this, The Danaides, was the first, completed in 1903. He made a second slightly more complex composition in 1906, which now hangs in Aberdeen Art Gallery in Scotland. Rather than a battered and leaky barrel, Waterhouse has the Danaïds filling an ornamental cauldron.

I have been unable to find a date for Walter Crane’s version, The Danaides, which was probably for a triptych painted between 1890-1915 and shows a remarkably similar cauldron.

Towards the end of his life, John Singer Sargent painted this vast canvas to show The Danaïdes (c 1922-25), which decorates the entrance to the Library of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Of all the accounts of this unusual myth, once again only Ovid looks deep into the relationships involved. He explores the situation of a woman who didn’t commit a crime at her father’s behest, but stayed true to her morals and to her love for Lynceus: a real heroine whose virtue was, for once, rewarded.

I have written a lot here about the writings of the Augustan Roman poet Ovid – his Metamorphoses and latterly his Heroides – and how they have inspired so many major and less well-known paintings. But I have said nothing about Ovid himself. This article looks briefly at what we know about him, and shows how that has been reflected in paintings.

The poet known throughout the world now as Ovid bore the full name of Publius Ovidius Naso: Publius was his praenomen, or first name, which was given to him by his parents at a purification ritual nine days after his birth. Unlike in modern societies, there were only around eighteen different first names available to Romans at that time, and many were almost pre-determined by birth order, etc.

Ovidius was his nomen, which corresponds more to a Western surname, as it indicates his family or clan. The Ovidius family were soldier-farmers who owned quite large estates in the valleys around Sulmo (the modern town of Sulmona), in the Apennines to the east of Rome, where Ovid was born. As such, they were not properly Romans, but had aligned themselves with the Roman state and as a result had been assimilated into its social order and institutions.

Naso, meaning ‘nose’, was his cognomen, a nickname which had been acquired by the family at some time in the past. In this case, one of his ancestors had probably had a prominent nose.

Coming from the lesser country aristocracy, he received a good education, and his father expected him to aim for a career in law and probably politics. But these were turbulent times: Ovid was born in 43 BCE, the year after the assassination of Julius Caesar, the end of the Republic, and the start of civil wars which led to the new political order of Augustus, the first Roman Emperor who ruled from 27 BCE until 14 CE.

Ovid was sent to Rome, where he was educated mainly in rhetoric, and started in some public posts at the foot of the ladder which led to his expected career. However, when he was only eighteen, he entered literary and poetic circles, and made his first public recitation. He travelled to Greece, Asia Minor, and Sicily, and soon renounced a legal career to become a poet – against his father’s wishes.

Over the next twenty-five years or so, Ovid wrote some of the most important literary works of the time, following those of Virgil, who died in 19 BCE. These explored love and human relationships (Heroides, Amores, and Ars Amatoria), and myth (Metamorphoses and Fasti), which were all written in verse.

Apart from Metamorphoses, which was written in hexameter, Ovid wrote primarily in elegiac meter. His poetry was thus intended principally for recitation and reading out loud, when its rhythms and poetic language would be most apparent and appreciated. Although this was over a millenium before the invention of printing, Ovid’s works were very popular, and copies were sold to many individuals and to Roman libraries.

Poussin, who painted a large number of works which told stories from Metamorphoses in particular, made his tribute to the poet in The Triumph of Ovid in about 1624-25. Surrounded by Cupids and amorini, Ovid leans against books of his works, and holds high the laurel of achievement. At the right, a woman is asleep, one infant suckling at her breast. I’m unsure whether she is intended to represent one of Ovid’s three wives, or a character from his myths.

Ovid’s poetry was in many respects quite radical. Interpretations of his Metamorphoses remain controversial: superficially it appears laudatory of the emperor Augustus, but there are signs of deeper critical intent; there is more consensus that it is critical of Virgil. Ovid’s love poetry was, though, a more flagrant challenge to the rule of Augustus, who had established adultery as both a private and public crime in 18-17 BCE. Any encouragement of relationships which went beyond the confines of marriage was thus an obvious target.

In 8 BCE, the emperor Augustus suddenly banished Ovid to the far north-east of the Roman empire. The only account of this is Ovid’s, in which he gives two reasons: one was his (love) poetry, the other what Ovid refers to as a ‘mistake’, but does not detail further. Despite extensive and imaginative speculation, no one knows what ‘mistake’ might have offended the emperor so deeply.

JMW Turner’s magnificent painting Ancient Italy – Ovid Banished from Rome exhibited in 1838 is strongly reminiscent of Claude Lorrain’s contre-jour dusk riverscapes, and gives a thoroughly romantic view of departure by boat from the bank of the Tiber. Turner may not be as well known now for his paintings of Ovidian myths, but at the time they had formed a central part of his work.

Ovid travelled by boat and overland until he reached the eastern coast of the Black Sea at what was then Tomis, now the Romanian holiday resort of Constanța. By this time, Tomis was a well-established city which had developed over a period of more than five hundred years. The area had been annexed by the Romans in 29 BCE, and was still at the far frontier of the empire: travelling just a little further north along the coast you would have reached Roman forces defending the territory against hostile tribes.

The local Scythians seemed more content with their place in the empire, though, and Ovid appears to have been among friends, just not those of his choosing. His third wife remained back in Rome, and Ovid had to live in a largely non-Latin-speaking society with no access to libraries.

Ovid’s predicament was a lasting inspiration to Eugène Delacroix, who first started to develop paintings of it around 1835. His first known painting showing Ovid in exile was completed in 1844, for the ceiling of the Library of the Palais Bourbon in Paris.

In 1859, as he neared the end of his career, Delacroix painted Ovid among the Scythians. He shows Tomis as a rural and primitive area on a narrow coastal plain amid rugged, hilly country. The Scythians follow their legendary reputation of living on mare’s milk – as demonstrated by the barebacked local milking a mare in the right foreground.

When exhibited at the Salon that year, Delacroix’s painting drew considerable criticism for its unusual composition and the small scale of its figures.

Just a year before his death in 1863, Delacroix tried again with this variation of Ovid among the Scythians, which alters the composition and enlarges the figures. Although wonderfully painterly and rich in colour, it remains very romantic and embroiders the myth which Ovid had started to create in his writings from exile.

The Romanian artist Ion Theodorescu-Sion’s version of Ovid in Exile (1915) appears much more realistic, showing Tomis with more substantial buildings and a port.

Deprived of a library, Ovid was unable to complete his detailed account of the Roman calendar which he had started in his Fasti, but he did continue writing. His Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto from those years in Tomis provide the only real information which we have about his life. He died there in 17 or 18 CE, his many poetic appeals to the emperor for clemency unheeded.

Johann Heinrich Schönfeld’s Scythians at the Tomb of Ovid (c 1640) shows an imaginary scene of local Scythians paying homage to Ovid’s tomb. Unlike Delacroix’s depictions of them as friendly barbarians, Schönfeld comes closer to the truth, I suspect.

If you wish to read more about Ovid’s life, I recommend Diane Middlebrook’s posthumous and sadly incomplete Young Ovid. Although it stops short of his exile, and relies heavily on supposition rather than evidence, it is rich in detail and compelling reading.

References

Wikipedia.

Boyd, Barbara W (ed) (2002) Brill’s Companion to Ovid, Brill. ISBN 978 90 04 22676 0.
Hardie, Philip (2002) The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 77528 1.
Knox, Peter E (ed) (2009, 2013) A Companion to Ovid, Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978 1 118 45134 2.
Middlebrook, Diane (2014) Young Ovid, an Unfinished Biography, Counterpoint. ISBN 978 1 61902 331 4.

I have long wondered whether some East Asian handscroll paintings have been narrative, rather than just showing wondrous landscapes. When I came across the Japanese Night Attack on the Sanjō Palace I was delighted, and frustrated: here is one handscroll which tells a clear story, but where are the others?

A new book by Cédric Laurent has finally answered my question, by examining in great detail five separate narrative painted handscrolls from China. As his book is in French, is quite expensive, and somewhat obscure, in this and a further two articles (to appear at roughly weekly intervals) I will examine three of these five examples. If you study the book, you will see that I depart from it slightly in the division of scenes in the stories; rather than slavishly copy Laurent’s work, I have used it as a bridge. Any mistakes here are mine alone.

The first handscroll is one of the most remarkable artworks that I have come across. It is an anonymous copy of a handscroll originally painted by Gu Kaizhi 顾恺之 who lived between about 344 and 406 CE, in the Jin Dynasty, and that original (now lost) would have been made before 400 CE – a millenium before the start of the Renaissance in Europe.

This painting tells the story originally created by Cao Zhi 曹植, who lived between 192-232 CE: his Ode to the Nymph of the Luo River, composed in 222 CE, during the Han Dynasty.

The copy that I show here is believed to have been made in the period between 960-1279, and is now preserved in the Palace Museum in Beijing, China. As with all handscrolls, it is read from right to left, and designed to be viewed one section or scene at a time.

There are at least four different copies which appear to have been made of Gu’s original, and others are held in the British Museum, London, the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and the Liaoning Provincial Museum in Shenyang. Although their contents differ, Laurent’s comparative analysis leaves no doubt that they are derived from a common original, which tells the same story drawn from Cao’s poem.

Because of its great length, I now work through each section or scene, from the right end to the left.

The first scene, covering lines 5-16 of Cao’s poem, shows Cao’s arrival at Yanglin, and looking at the Luo River. Two horses are beside a servant, one apparently grazing, the other looking up. Behind, a third horse is rolling on its back on the meadow, with a second servant watching.

In the second scene (lines 17-43), Cao sees the extraordinary vision of the nymph of the Luo River. He asks her who she is, and she confirms her identity. Two figures stand at the front of a group of people. The right figure is Cao, a prince, whose arms are outstretched. The other figures are assistants and servants who are attending him.

Opposite that group is the nymph, with her distinctively-bunched hairstyle, who appears to be hovering in mid-air, ribbons from her robes blowing in the wind. In the air between the nymph and Cao’s group is a dragon, and two flying geese.

In the third scene (lines 44-77), Cao gives an elaborate description of the nymph’s beauty. She returns to the river, where she stays between two banners. The painting depicts her twice, initially as if she is low down and walking on the surface of the river. She is then shown again higher up, between two decorated vertical wands.

This copy omits the next scene, covering lines 78-103 of the poem, in which Cao gives the nymph a pendant, and she gives him a precious stone.

The next scene, from lines 104-121, is covered in two scenes in the scroll. The nymph’s companion appears, and two concubines of Xiang follow them, holding the nymphs’ hands. In this first part of the depiction, two nymphs are seen together twice. At the right they are low down on the river surface, and at the left they are higher above it. In each case the nymph on the left holds a fan, and that on the right a lotus flower.

In this section of the painting, three nymphs are shown. On the right, one stands on the water surface, holding a lotus flower. On the left two appear together: the nymph on the left is holding a fan, that on the right is significantly shorter, and follows slightly behind the taller nymph.

In the sixth scene (lines 122-129), the nymph re-appears to Cao, who is so absorbed by her that he forgets to eat. Cao is shown seated on a small dais, with five servants in attendance. They are surrounded by trees, and two of the servants are fanning him. In front of the dais, and being watched intently by Cao, is a nymph, who is looking back at Cao. Above them, in the sky to the left, is a monster with a dragon head and white pantaloon trousers.

The following scene (lines 130-133) consists of Pingyi calming the wind, the Count of the River calming the waves, Fengyi beating a drum, and Nūwa singing in a clear voice. These are shown as a figure at the right, who is holding a rod, and bows towards Cao in the previous scene. Above the water, the nymph moves towards a large ceremonial drum, which is being struck by a man holding two drumsticks.

In the eighth scene (lines 134-135), the nymph appears to Cao on a jade Phoenix. In the painting, Cao is now accompanied by only three servants, and is looking at the nymph, who is seated on a Phoenix, whose body forms a crescent behind her. The nymph looks back at Cao.

In the ninth scene (lines 136-153), the nymph is in a carriage of the waves, being drawn away by six solemn dragons. This is accompanied by whales and flying fish as it travels through the river. The nymph bids Cao farewell, then vanishes.

The painting shows the nymph with a fan seated inside an elaborate carriage, whose tail streams many ribbons. It is being drawn by six deer-like animals, alternately coloured red and white. Another nymph is travelling in the carriage with her. Huge fish accompany the carriage through the water, and two white deer-like creatures follow. Another white deer-like creature is behind those drawing the carriage.

The tenth scene (lines 154-163) is of Cao searching in vain for the nymph from a boat. This is depicted as a substantial double-decked boat, travelling from right to left, powered by peculiar sails. Cao and two of his servants are shown on the top deck, and its two crew are shown on the outer lower deck.

The penultimate scene (lines 164-165) is of Cao spending a sleepless night, longing for the nymph. In the painting, he is seen on a small dais, a single servant attending him. In front of him is the figure of an officer, who looks back over his left shoulder at Cao.

In the final scene (lines 166-169), Cao returns sadly, in a conventional carriage. This is depicted as an analogue of the nymph’s river carriage, complete with its tail streamers. Here, the carriage has wheels, and is being drawn by five horses. Seated next to Cao is a woman whose hair is not bunched the same as the nymph’s, and who looks straight ahead. Three horsemen accompany Cao’s carriage: two on the far side, and one immediately behind.

This handscroll clearly tells the story using a series of separate frames, each relating to a scene in the original text. At this level, the scroll is very similar to modern ‘comic’ books, although divisions between frames are implicit, cued by space and non-narrative elements such as plants and trees. The order of frames matches the sequence of scenes in the poem.

Within some of the individual frames, there are multiple representations of the same figure – in scenes three and four above – which indicates the use of multiplex narrative.

This handscroll goes beyond the superlatives that I can muster for its description. Although very ancient by any standards for art, it tells a complex narrative in exquisite detail, and demonstrates that such early East Asian painting can be thoroughly narrative in nature.

References

Wikipedia on Gu Kaizhi.

Laurent, Cédric (2017) Voyages Immobiles dans la prose ancienne, la peinture narrative sous la dynastie Ming (1368-1644), Les Belles Lettres. ISBN 978 2 251 44520 5. (In French, with copious original Chinese.)

With the daughters of Minyas transformed into bats and no longer able to tell their tales, Ovid returns to his chronicle of the fall of the house of Cadmus.

At this stage, Cadmus, the founder-king of Thebes, had five children:

• Semele became pregnant by Jupiter and was then destroyed when he appeared in his full divinity to her; their son was the god Bacchus.
• Polydorus, his only son, died young of an unknown cause.
• Autonoë was among those who killed Pentheus; her own son, Actaeon, was killed by his hunting dogs after Diana transformed him into a stag.
• Agave married Echion; their son Pentheus was killed by worshippers of Bacchus, including his mother and her sisters.
• Ino married Athamas, and they are the subjects or victims of this story.

The Story

Ovid leads in with Ino’s family relationship with Bacchus, her own marriage to Athamas, and their two children. However, Juno is not happy with this, feeling that the family had still wronged her. She therefore seeks vengeance on Ino, wanting her to suffer the madness that had led to Pentheus’ death.

Juno therefore enters Hades, passing its monstrous guardian Cerberus, and seeks out the Furies. Juno sees some of those damned to impossible tasks, including Titys, Tantalus, Sisyphus, Ixion, and the Danaids. She wonders why they should suffer so, but Athamas (who has actually done nothing wrong other than marrying into the house of Cadmus) should not.

Juno engages Tisiphone, one of the three Furies, to bring Athamas down by driving him mad. Tisiphone readies her weapons, and visits Athamas in his palace. There she hurls two snakes from her hair at Athamas and Ino, and pours a poisonous concoction on them both.

Athamas is instantly driven mad, convinced that Ino is a lioness, and their sons her cubs. He snatches Learchus from his wife’s arms, and smashes the infant against hard rock. Ino, calling the name of Bacchus, flees to a high clifftop, still carrying their other infant son, Melicerta. Once there she launches herself towards the sea below.

At this moment, Venus intervenes, and gets Neptune to transform them both into gods: Ino into Leucothoë, the infant into Palaemon. They thus vanish from the earth, and Ino’s friends and household, who have been pursuing them, assume that they are dead.

Juno has one final touch of pure spite: as those friends stand mourning the loss of Ino, the goddess turns them to stone, and transforms others to seabirds (probably albatrosses):
But even as she tried to leap, she stood
fast-rooted to the ever-living rock;
another, as she tried to beat her breast
with blows repeated, noticed that her arms
grew stiff and hard; another, as by chance,
was petrified with hands stretched over the waves:
another could be seen, as suddenly
her fingers hardened, clutching at her hair
to tear it from the roots. — And each remained
forever in the posture first assumed. —
But others of those women, sprung from Cadmus,
were changed to birds, that always with wide wings
skim lightly the dark surface of that sea.

The Paintings

Ovid’s story of Athamas and Ino is not unique – it is told in other sources, and Leucothoë later plays an important role in the Odyssey – but in spite of its pictorial potential, it has been very little painted.

The only major work by a Master showing any part of it is, though, a real gem: Jan Brueghel the Elder’s Juno in the Underworld (1596-98). Brueghel’s vision of Hades rivals even Hieronymus Bosch’s apocalytic scenes, and comes dangerously close to losing Juno altogether in its sea of horror and suffering.

Juno’s cool blue robes and a couple of peacocks stand out from the reds and browns, the monsters and the tormented. She waves at the trio of Furies, with their snake-filled hair and screaming faces. A few years later, Wouters painted another version which could only have been based on this original.

Godfried Maes’ Athamas Tearing his Children Apart (1664-1700) is a fine chalk and pen drawing showing Athamas dashing the infant Learchus against the palace walls, and Ino, clutching Melicerta, heading very rapidly towards the door in her bid to escape. To make his account even more explicit, he includes the figure of Tisiphone further up the staircase. I suspect that this was destined to be engraved and used as a print, as a couple of other drawings of this story were.

The only two paintings which appear to have been made of this scene appeared in the same year; had they been French, I might have suspected that it had been the subject for the Prix de Rome that year, but both the painters were Italian, and I cannot find any reason for this strange coincidence.

Gaetano Gandolfi’s Athamas Killing Ino’s Son (1801) shows Athamas wielding his infant son like a sledgehammer, and about to strike him against the ground with great force. Ino is holding Amathas’ hair, and the other son in her right arm. There is no sign of any Fury here.

Arcangelo Migliarini’s Athamas after the Fury (1801) composes the couple and their babies quite differently, although Learchus is about to suffer the same violent death. Behind them Tisiphone is still floating around, apparently bringing distress to others in Athamas’ palace. At the far right is the cliff to which Ino is about to run. In fact, Thebes is not that close to the sea, something which was also overlooked in Ovid’s account.

Ino’s transformation to a goddess is also a little confusing: Ovid has, through the daughters of Minyas, only just told of a Leucothoë who was turned into a frankincense tree, and the daughter of Minyas named Leuconoë. Ino was transformed into a sea goddess who is also known as Leucothea, who appeared in the form of a gannet to Odysseus when he was shipwrecked, during the Odyssey.

That appearance has been painted more often, and Henry Fuseli’s The Shipwreck of Odysseus (1803) is a notably dramatic version of that, perhaps providing final closure to this story.

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.

Edvard Munch seems to have started thinking about assembling his paintings into series during the 1880s, but it was not until the early 1890s that he crystallised this in his personal notebooks. He talked about building them into a ‘symphony’ in early 1893, and by the end of that year exhibited his first self-contained series of images in Berlin, under the title A Human Life.

During 1893 and 1894, Munch painted most of the works which were to form his first Frieze of Life, which was exhibited in March 1895, in Ugo Barroccio’s gallery in Berlin. This article shows the closest approximation that I can get to that original series, using available images.

Munch’s own explanation is that “the paintings are moods, impressions of the life of the soul, and together they represent one aspect of the battle, between man and woman, that is called love” (Heller, in Wood, 1992).

Most of the paintings were included in his later and larger version of the Frieze, and I will consider them in more detail when I cover that series, in the next articles in this series. Those which only appear in this first version of the Frieze I examine more thoroughly below.

The series opens with paintings in which love is almost rejected, according to Munch.

Starry Night (1893), which was originally known as Mysticism, opens Munch’s narrative by setting the scene. It is unique in being the only work in this series in which human figures are apparently absent, although on closer examination there are the backs of two heads at the left lower edge. In subsequent lithographs developed from this painting, the figures became more prominent, e.g. in Attraction I (1896).

The view shown is believed to have been that from the window of the Grand Hotel in Åsgårdstrand, on the west side of Oslo Fjord, where Munch started his love affair with ‘Mrs Heiberg’ (actually Millie Thaulow, a cousin by marriage) in about 1885. This shows the neighbouring garden, its white fence running diagonally into the centre, and providing vital clues on depth and perspective.

The large dome is formed from linden (lime) trees, and the lowest star in the distance is Venus. Munch has written comparisons between the human soul and planets, and he saw the transience of love being reflected in the phasic appearances of the planets in the sky.

The relationship between the couple develops, and is made more visible, in Eye in Eye (1894), which was originally known as Two People. In its early form, this works seems to have been more gloomy in its colours and tones. It is thought that after 1906, Munch overpainted the hair of the woman and the tree to add the bright highlights which are now visible.

Third in the series is the Boston version of Summer Night’s Dream (The Voice) (1893), which was originally known as Two Eyes. A woman, almost certainly Munch’s lover ‘Mrs Heiberg’, is shown at the edge of the Borre Woods, to the north of Åsgårdstrand. The reflection of the moon on the flat surface of Oslo Fjord appears like a column of light. A second version of this painting, in Oslo, is cropped more closely and has additional boats on the fjord.

Munch most probably referred to this work as The Voice because of his great love for his lover’s musical voice, “one moment tender – the next teasing, then provocative.”

The Kiss (1897) is a later version of the painting shown in Berlin, and it isn’t clear whether Munch included one with the close-cropped couple kissing, as shown here, or the first version from 1892 (shown in the previous biography) which includes a street scene to the left of the lovers. Later versions followed this cropped form, in which the lovers dominate the canvas and fuse into a single form.

Munch’s love affair soon starts to develop more worrying tones. Although the couple in Vampire (1893) are embracing, her kiss is now starting to form part of what he saw as the battle between them, the woman in the role of femme fatale. This was a popular theme in arts and literary circles in Berlin at the time, for example in works about Moreau and Wilde’s revision of Salome, and it was only later that Munch gave the painting the lame euphemistic title of A Woman Kissing the Back of a Man’s Neck.

Death and Life (Death and the Maiden) (1893-94), which had originally been known as The Loving Woman, progresses this souring of love, as a naked and wanton woman kisses a skeleton of a man. Framing them in repoussoir are long-tailed sperm cells, at the left, and two foetuses, at the right.

This is one of Munch’s most complex images, and invokes the cycle of life, from gametes through intra-uterine development, to love, then death. The artist intimately links Eros, procreation, and Thanatos (death) in a strongly Symbolist way. It thus is the herald of later paintings in his second version of the Frieze which consider death.

Munch’s Madonna (1894) is another Symbolist combination of conflicting themes, of the saint, whore, and abandoned lover. This is shown in her halo alone: a mark of the saintly, he uses the colour associated with earthy eroticism. In more conventional Christian religious art, these themes were normally reserved for Mary Magdalene, and Munch’s invocation of them for the Madonna must have been shocking at the time.

Woman in Three Stages (1894) was originally known as Sphinx, and was first exhibited with a quotation from a play in which a woman appears as three different personalities to her three lovers. Here Munch shows three women: a young romantic on one of his undulating bays, a naked femme fatale, and a darkly-dressed matron. At the right, a man stands, his face cast down in dejection. It is a series within the outer series, a frieze on its own.

Separation (1896) follows directly from, and echoes in its composition, Woman in Three Stages. Using thin applications of paint briskly applied to unprimed canvas, Munch takes the young romantic woman to walk out towards the fjord, her hair streaming as she goes. Munch suggested that her hair is wrapped around her lover’s heart. The dejected man is now rejected and separated, clutching his heart.

Munch developed this painting into two lithographs, Separation I and II (both 1896), in which he zoomed in more closely on the heads and shoulders of the two figures and added detail to the formless face of the woman.

Hands (1893) uses the same near-naked woman featured in Woman in Three Stages, a drypoint The Woman (1895), and clothed in Ashes (1894). Her hands are clasped behind her head, but the hands of others reach out from around the edge of the canvas, in lust for her body.

This progresses to Jealousy (1895): in the background, Eve, her dress open to reveal her body, is reaching up to pick an apple for Adam. The satanic face at the right looks directly at the viewer, his jealousy made clear.

Beyond the Frieze, this painting was part of an artistic dialogue between Stanislaw Przbyszewski, model for the face at the right, and Munch, who was having an affair with Przbyszewski’s Norwegian wife at the time. The writer Przbyszewski responded by having a jealous painter commit suicide, in his novel Overboard (1896).

Evening on Karl Johan (1892) was originally just known as Evening, and grows the anxiety. Set on the main street in Norway’s capital city, it looks from the Royal Palace towards Storting (the parliament building) with greatly foreshortened perspective to pack the pedestrians together and instill a deep sense of anxiety. This refers to an episode during Munch’s affair with ‘Mrs Heiberg’, in which he was anxiously waiting for her.

Anxiety (1894), which was originally known as Insane Mood, is an intermediate composed of the stream of people in Evening on Karl Johan transposed into the setting of The Scream, and acts a the transition between them.

I have already described The Scream (1893) in detail. In this first version of the Frieze, it forms the culmination of the collapsed love affair, in which a great scream passes through the whole of nature.

This first Frieze ended with a vignette of Metabolism (1898–99). Munch considered this necessary to the whole “as a buckle is to a belt.” A young man and woman meet in a dark wood. Just peeping through some small gaps in the treetrunks are glimpses of the ‘golden city’. In the version of this painting shown at the time, there was an exuberant plant in the foreground between the two figures, in which there was a human foetus. Those were overpainted at some time between 1903-1918.

There is further mystery in that the version shown as the vignette in 1895 predates the date now given for the completion of the original version of this work, 1899. It is therefore even less clear what visitors to the first exhibition of Munch’s Frieze of Life would have seen.

References

Wikipedia.
Collection at Norway’s National Gallery.
The Munch Museum, Oslo.

Wood, Mara-Helen (ed) (1992) Edvard Munch, The Frieze of Life, National Gallery Publications. ISBN 978 1 857 09015 4.

Although Millet’s The Gleaners had not been successful at the Salon, and his l’Angélus was not even submitted to public view, by 1861 his reputation was growing steadily. He had two patrons, one of whom paid him a monthly stipend in return for twenty-five paintings over a three year period, the other who regularly commissioned pastel paintings for his collection.

Millet’s Man with a Hoe (c 1860-62) is a full length portrait of an agricultural labourer, who is leaning on his mattock after breaking up the heavy and stony soil, presumably to ready it for a crop such as potatoes. He has clearly been swinging the short haft of the mattock for much of the day, its weight suspended from his bent back. You can almost feel his back pain as he tries to find some comfort in this momentary break.

In the distance there are bonfires burning on the plain, their smoke rising languidly into the sky.

His Young Girl Watching her Sheep (c 1860-62) revisits the motif of a young woman tending a flock of sheep at the edge of woodland, while busy with her knitting. As she is having to concentrate on that craft work, the flock is under the watchful eye of her black dog.

Shepherd Tending His Flock (c 1862) is its male counterpart, most probably painted during showery weather, with its marvellous luminous sky. This older shepherd is fortunate enough to be wearing an old sou’wester-style hat and weatherproof cloak. These sheep look quite thin and scrawny, and are feeding on the stubble left after harvest, implying the painting was set in the early autumn.

Although he had painted nudes earlier in his career, The Goose Girl (c 1863) is a rather uncomfortable setting of a nude in a backdrop of social realism. This young woman, who is supposed to be tending the large flock of geese further along the river, has stripped off her working clothes and stepped out of her coarse wooden clogs to bathe herself in the river. She still wears a kerchief over her hair as an obvious mark of her peasant status.

Millet had been developing this composition in a series of studies over the previous seven years, and although the result is certainly original, I think that it makes the viewer feel a voyeur, something that classical nudes in a rustic setting generally avoid, and not, I think, the artist’s intention. The cattle seen at the top right also seem out of place. However, its use of light and painterly style provided inspiration for later Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists.

In the mid-1860s, Millet developed some seasonal themes which softened his social message. Ceres (The Summer) (c 1864-65) is a classical mythological portrait of the goddess of agriculture, grain crops (from her name we get the modern cereal), fertility, and maternal relationships.

Ceres stands, her breasts swollen and ready for lactation, her hair adorned with ripe ears of wheat, a sickle in her right hand to cut the harvest, and a traditional winnow (used to separate the grain from chaff) in her left hand. At her feet is a basketful of bread, with ground flour and cut sheaves of wheat behind. The background shows the wheat harvest in full swing, right back to a group of grain- or hay-stacks and an attendant wagon in the distance.

Spring (Daphnis and Chloë) (1865) may come from the same series of seasons, and is also based on a classical story. Daphnis and Chloë were raised separately but became devoted childhood friends. They fell in love naïvely, and after a series of adventures were finally married. Daphnis holds a bird’s nest full of chicks for Chloë to feed. They are surrounded by spring flowers, and behind them a large herm statue has been decorated for a spring festival.

Millet also revisited his successful painting of a sower from fifteen years earlier, here with two pastel paintings with the same title, The Sower, from around 1865. That above is now in the Walters, and that below in the Clark. These feature a different background, which includes the tower of Chailly, harrowing using a pair of horses, and a swirling flock of crows in the sky.

Midday Rest (1866) is another delightfully rustic pastel, showing field workers enjoying a short siesta during the harvest. Although Millet had not dodged any of the realities in these scenes, he was now starting to take the edge off his social message, with brighter paintings which are less about labour and work, and more upbeat in tone.

Many of his works – including The Gleaners, l’Angélus, and Potato Planters – were shown at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867.

My final selection from Millet’s paintings of this period is, I think, one of his finest, and least characteristic of his work: Dandelions (1867-68). His pastels capture the delicate dandelion ‘clocks’, their hairy stalks, and the fragile beauty of the flowers of the roadside. Perhaps he meant us to draw a parallel with the rural poor, and the transience of their lives.

In 1868, he received his most valuable commission to date, of 25,000 francs, for a series of paintings of the four seasons.

References

Wikipedia.
L’Atelier de Jean-François Millet, a private museum.

Sensier’s biography of Millet in English, and in French.

Lepoittevin, Lucien, and Lacambre, Geneviève (eds) (2002) Jean-François Millet, Au-delà de l’Angelus, Éditions de Monza. ISBN 978 2 908 07193 1. (In French.)

Like the Alma-Tademas, the Coomans family was Belgian. Father Pierre Olivier Joseph Coomans (1816–1889) initially studied in Ghent, then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp under Nicaise de Keyser and Gustave Wappers. In 1857, he visited the remains of Pompeii, which was to be a lasting inspiration to his work, and that of his children. Commercially he was very successful, and his paintings sold particularly well to American collectors.

A Family Scene in Pompeii (1858) is one of his first paintings inspired by his visit to the ruins of Pompeii the previous year. It appears to be based on proposed reconstructions of everyday objects and interior decor, and is painted in highly-finished Salon style.

Joseph and his children became most enthused about trying to depict Pompeii in the fateful hour or so before disaster struck. The Last Hour of Pompeii – The House of the Poet (1869) is a very detailed reconstruction showing a crowded interior of a spacious villa. Coomans clearly had a great eye for detail, showing family pets such as a couple of cats and a tortoise. In the distance, plumes of black smoke rise from the growing eruptions of Vesuvius, which was shortly to engulf and kill everyone present.

The Farewell (c 1873) shows a wife waving to her husband as he departs by sea from her and their child, in their classical Roman setting. Floating on the water of their fountain at the bottom right is a child’s model of the ship in which father/husband has gone to sea. Behind the woman are the fibrecraft activities with which she will now occupy her time, perhaps drawing parallels with Penelope during the absence of Odysseus.

Children (date not known) looks more contemporary, and could date from the late 1860s and show his own two daughters, perhaps. One is taking a swing at her sister’s articulated wooden doll, in an apparent bid to continue dismembering it.

Joseph Coomans had two daughters and a son who became successful painters. Oscar-Jean Coomans‘ (1848–1884) work seems to have vanished without trace, and Diana Coomans‘ (1861-1952) work is still in copyright, so I will show here the few paintings by Héva Coomans (1860-1939) for which I have been able to discover reasonable images.

Little is now known about the Coomans sisters: they trained in Europe, probably in Paris, and in 1910 emigrated to live in New York, where they died in 1939 (Héva) and 1952 (Diana).

Two Young Italian Women Meeting at a Window (1887) appears to show these two close friends in classical Roman times, with the ornate painted marble of an opulent villa.

Héva’s Self-portrait from 1888 shows her working at the easel on one of her paintings of classical Roman times. The decor here is similar to that of her father’s Children.

All the remaining works that I have by her have been dated to about 1900, which I would suggest is little more than a guess.

In Penelope Awaiting Odysseus (c 1900), the wife of Odysseus is weaving an image of her husband as warrior, celebrating the victory at Troy. She pauses to look over her shoulder in the hope that the sails of his ships might appear any minute now, although he was making only slow progress during the ten years which elapsed of his Odyssey.

A Melody for a Roman Beauty (c 1900) is set in a Mediterranean location in classical Roman times, judging by the landscape and the city below. The musical instrument being used would have been unusual, as it appears to be a pandura or lute, which was played rarely in comparison with the lyre and cithara (a type of large lyre), which were more characteristic of the period. None of the women appears to be singing, either.

A Young Woman by a Temple (c 1900) appears more painterly in style, and may have been painted rather later. The full-length figure is seen against another backdrop of a classical Roman town or city, on a Mediterranean coast.

Woman in Supplication (c 1900) is a more complex subject. A plainly-dressed woman with long dark hair kneels in supplication as she offers a woman (‘B’) of overtly higher caste a small floral gift. Behind B is another woman of similar standing, looking intently at B’s head, as if gauging her reaction. Deeper still into the painting is a servant, who is fanning B.

At the left, a driver stands in a one-horse chariot, as if waiting for B to conclude her business before taking her away at the rush.

Offerings (c 1900) contains some rich details which resemble those in her father’s paintings. Two women are at a shrine devoted to a Roman goddess. One is about to tie a small articulated doll to the shrine, while the other sits and watches. This may be a depiction of the rite in which a bride surrendered her childhood doll to her family Lares on the night prior to her wedding, as a sign that she had come of age. However, that more typically took place at a family shrine of the Lares, not a public one.

If you know any more, particularly about Héva or Diana Coomans, I would love to hear about it.