If you were asked to name the four most important artists of the Italian High Renaissance (1495-1527), the first three would come quite easily to many: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael. For many art historians, the fourth would have to be Fra Bartolomeo, for his innovations in clothing and its depiction, his use of real landscapes sketched in front of the motif, draughtsmanship, simple but effective compositions, and above all for his influence on the young Raphael.

Today is the five hundredth anniversary of Fra Bartolomeo’s death, on 31 October 1517. There have been some small exhibitions, mainly of his drawings, to mark the occasion, but for most it will pass almost unnoticed.

In this final article of my series looking at Fra Bartolomeo and his work, I show some of his finest paintings, including two which survived from the first part of his career, before he became a friar, alongside some of Raphael’s, over a similar period. I will, in the main, let the paintings speak for themselves, but feel that this is the best way to put Fra Bartolomeo’s work in context, with an artist who is without doubt one of the greatest of the Renaissance, and one of the most important painters in the history of European art.

Raphael, born in 1483, was of course just over ten years younger than Fra Bartolomeo. Both their careers were lamentably brief: when Raphael died in 1520, he was only just 37; Fra Bartolomeo was 45 when he died in 1517, but had lost four years when he stopped painting.

The two were close friends from Raphael’s arrival in Florence in 1504, which coincided with Fra Bartolomeo’s return to painting. For the next four years, when they were both in Florence, they appear to have learned much from one another. When Raphael moved on to Rome, Fra Bartolomeo periodically caught up with him still. Both seem to have benefitted from Leonardo da Vinci’s presence in Florence from 1504-06.

Fra Bartolomeo, Madonna and Child with the Young Saint John the Baptist (c 1497). Note its glimpses of landscape, and the superb depiction of the Madonna’s clothing, particularly over her right forearm, and in her veil.

Raphael, Madonna and Child with Book (1504). An early work, probably painted during one of his first visits to Florence.

Fra Bartolomeo, Penitent Saint Jerome (1498). A sophisticated distant landscape, with a delightful crucifix worked into a tree.

Raphael, Madonna in the Meadow (1505-06). Superb modelling of flesh, finely-painted flowers and plants, but still rather amorphous clothing.

Fra Bartolomeo, The Nativity (1504-07). The landscape was developed from a sketch presumably made in front of the motif. Breaking with convention, Joseph has no beard.

Raphael, Madonna with Beardless St Joseph (1506). Joseph has no beard, and appears to have been painted from a real model. The garments have the look of real fabrics.

Raphael, The Holy Family with a Palm Tree (1506). A bearded Joseph again, but he appears to have been painted from a model still. Note the palm tree with its shaggy trunk.

Fra Bartolomeo, The Rest on the Flight into Egypt with St. John the Baptist (c 1509). Another beardless Joseph who must have been painted from a model. The palm tree has a shaggy trunk, and the landscape background is a joy.

Raphael, The Deposition (1507). This composition is apparently based on drawings inspired by reliefs on Roman sarcophagi, and mixes the Deposition, Lamentation, and Entombment.

Fra Bartolomeo, Pietà (Lamentation of Christ) (1511-12). A similar composition in many respects, which leans more towards Lamentation than Deposition. Note the almost identical placement of the crosses on Calvary at the right edge.

Fra Bartolomeo, Minerva (1510s). An unusual secular motif, beautifully painted.

Raphael The Alba Madonna (c 1510). With its superb landscape.

Fra Bartolomeo, Madonna della Misericordia (1515). One of his most populous works, with a rich and fascinating collection of figures, and an unusual composition.

Raphael Madonna della seggiola (Madonna of the Chair) (1513-14). The faces of the Virgin and Child are superb, and all fabrics are natural in appearance, texture and ‘feel’.

Fra Bartolomeo, The Scene of Christ in the Temple (1516). A very natural-looking group.

Which brings me to a final question: what was it that the Pre-Raphaelites objected to?

Articles here about Fra Bartolomeo:

1. to 1500
2. 1504-1512
3. 1513-1517

As an archipelago, Japan has one of the longest coastlines in the world, almost thirty thousand kilometres (over 18,000 miles). One of its most popular stretches of coast is on Sagami Bay, to the south-west of Tokyo, where among the sandy beaches is the tiny island of Enoshima. The whole island is dedicated to the goddess of music and entertainment, Benzaiten (弁才天, 弁財天), and forms the subject for this article.

Painting the coast of Japan has always been popular, both in traditional style and technique, and in the Western styles which were slowly imported when the country was open to Western trade and influence. This grand ‘world view’ of Nagasaki was painted by one of the pioneers of Western technique, Kawahara Keiga (川原慶賀), in 1820. It was the port of Nagasaki which was the point of contact with the West, until the mid-nineteenth century.

Much of the art showing Enoshima has, of course, been in the form of ukiyo-e woodblock prints, rather than the fine art of painting. These became very popular in the first half of the nineteenth century, and went into decline after about 1860 – which was, ironically, when they started to become fashionable in Europe.

Kitagawa Utamaro’s (喜多川 歌麿) (c 1754-1806) Girl Fishers and Bathers, a triptych from 1791, shows seaside activities at Enoshima. Although composed as a triptych with a continuous motif, the same topless woman appears in each of the sheets, making the whole a multiplex narrative. Such narrative forms are common in traditional Japanese art.

Katsushika Hokusai (葛飾北斎) (1760–1849) is the most famous ukiyo-e artist in the West, thanks to a single image The Great Wave off Kanagawa. This print of Springtime in Enoshima from 1797 shows one variation of this famous view, with the small and densely-vegetated island of Enoshima at the end of its sand spit, and the snowy cone of Fuji in the far distance. Even on this beach, his waves look quite menacing.

Hokusai’s Enoshima in Sagami Province (c 1830) offers a more detailed view of the island, with people crossing the spit at low tide, and the ever-present Fuji in the distance.

Hokusai was also an accomplished painter: Shell Gathering is made in colour on silk, and has some quite Western touches in the clouds, for example.

Utagawa Hiroshige (歌川 広重) (1797–1858) was one of the last great Masters of ukiyo-e, and seems to have made many different prints of this section of the coast. The Seven-Ri Beach, from about 1835, views Enoshima and Fuji from the east, above the ‘Seven-Ri’ beach, and as with Hokusai invokes fearful waves.

Seven-Ri Beach, or Shichirigahama, is near Kamakura, which is a beautiful town filled with historical buildings and shrines, from its days as the capital of Japan.

Another of Hiroshige’s views of The Seven-Ri Beach, this from about 1858, gives a more classical account of Fuji.

Hiroshige’s triptych print of Pilgrimage of Female Entertainers to Enoshima to Pay Homage to Benzaiten (c 1835) is a wonderfully-detailed depiction of the pilgrimage to the island’s shrine, their figures crossing the spit to reach a rather grander version of the island.

Enoshima Seen from the Beach (1860), a diptych print, is unusual for cropping Fuji out. An elegantly-dressed man is riding an ox, which is being led by a woman. The waves are again quite threatening.

The Entrance Gate In Enoshima (c 1858), one of Hiroshige’s later prints, frames Fuji with a classical Japanese entrance gate on Enoshima.

My last print by Hiroshige shows the Entrance to the Cave at Enoshima Island in Sagami Province (1853), which remains popular with tourists today.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi (歌川 國芳) (1798–1861) was another of the last of the ukiyo-e Masters, whose style contrasts markedly with those of Hokusai and Hiroshige. The island is here shown in symbolic form, with Fuji in the distance.

With the decline of ukiyo-e in Japan, painting started to undergo change to adopt Western style, in the yōga movement. Among its early exponents is Takahashi Yuichi (高橋 由一) (1828-1894), who painted Enoshima at least twice: the view above is from 1873-76, and that below from 1876-77. Both adopt a low position on the sand spit, looking towards the island, with pilgrims, visitors, and others walking over to it.

Takahashi was largely self-taught; later yōga artists trained in France, but in his day there were very limited opportunities. With the Meiji Restoration, an Italian painter, Antonio Fontanesi, was appointed to advise the government, and Takahashi became professor of art at the Technical School of Fine Art. He was even made painter to the Imperial Court, and was permitted to paint the Emperor himself.

You can read more about the introduction of Western style into Japanese art in this series of articles.

If you’re hoping to attend any of the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, you’ll be pleased to know that Enoshima will be hosting its sailing and surfing events. I’m sure that Benzaiten will approve.

The coast of Brittany was one of Claude Monet’s favourite sources of powerful motifs, where he painted in all weathers, and produced some of his most effective landscape works. It was also what made Henry Moret (1856–1913) successful, and his paintings worth viewing.

Moret wasn’t a Breton by birth, but came from the other large peninsula in the north of France, Cherbourg. His artistic leaning was recognised when he was serving in the military, in the Breton port of Lorient, and he started to learn to paint with a local artist. He began his studies at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1876, where he was taught by Jean-Léon Gérôme, and later by Jean-Paul Laurens, among others.

His early work seems to have vanished, but by all accounts was in Salon style, and nothing particularly innovative. However, he became fond of Brittany, and in 1888 went to the artists’ colony at Pont-Aven, fom where he moved to the Breton coast at Le Pouldu, at the northern end of the Bay of Biscay. From 1890, he increasingly concentrated on painting the countryside and coast of Brittany.

Young Bretons (c 1900) uses a style which would appear more typical of his early work from before 1890, perhaps when he was still at Pont-Aven, although it is claimed to date from much later.

La Côte Sauvage, Groix (1891) shows the Atlantic swell rebounding off the foot of sea cliffs on the ‘savage coast’. There is a mystery over where this is located, as its title appears ambiguous. There are several sections of coast known as La Côte Sauvage, none of which is on the island of Groix, off the Breton coast.

The Island of Raguenez, Brittany (1890/1895) shows a tiny island off the coast not far from Pont-Aven, between Quimper and Lorient. At this early stage of his landscape painting, Moret’s style is reminiscent of the Impressionists during the 1870s, his brushstrokes resembling those of Cézanne during his campaigns around Paris.

Moret is one of the few artists to have painted Groix, an island off the coast of Lorient. The Cliffs at the Île de Groix (1894) shows some of its cliffs, with Moret’s colours starting to intensify, and his brushstrokes becoming more prominent.

In Lorient Harbour (1895), Moret’s style continues to evolve away from older Impressionism, with passages in which his brushstrokes and colour are more typical of Vincent van Gogh, perhaps.

Moret also visited other coastal areas to paint. Port of Volendam (c 1895) shows a fleet of small fishing boats crowded together in the harbour of this small town in North Holland. Its flat landscape could not have been a greater contrast with Brittany.

Waves at Pen-men, Île de Groix (1896) shows the far western tip of the island of Groix, with the mountainous sea for which this part of the Bay of Biscay is notorious. Moret’s colours continue to intensify.

Belle-Île (1898) shows fine summer weather on the island of Belle-Île-en-Mer, to the south-east of Groix. Monet stayed here for ten weeks in 1886, one of his formative periods of painting en plein air.

Moret returned to the flatlands of North Holland around the turn of the century, when he painted The Dunes at Egmond (1900) on the sandy coast near Alkmaar. This was also an artists’ colony at the time. He is now starting to include brushstrokes of complimentary colours, and his colours continue to intensify.

The North Sea (1900) is another view, presumably, of the coast of North Holland near Egmond.

Port Manec’h (c 1900) is at the entrance to the river Aven, which leads up to Pont-Aven. Moret’s colours are now intense under the summer sunshine.

The Port of Audierne (c 1900) is in the far west of the Brittany peninsula, beyond Quimper. Much of this canvas is covered by vigorous marks of concentrated colour.

Moret’s undated Heavy Weather at Doëlan shows the mainland coast near the island of Groix, with another rough sea being driven in by the wind.

This undated view of the cliffs on Île de Groix was probably painted at about this time too.

Ponte de la Sirene, Belle-Île-en-Mer (1904) shows another storm sea, this time on the windward side of Belle-Île.

Heavy Weather at Saint Grenoble, Point de Penmarc’h (1905) shows enormous seas breaking at this point to the south-west of Quimper, almost at the northern terminus of the Bay of Biscay.

Haymaking in Brittany (1906) has a particularly rough facture, and the high chroma typical of Moret’s later work.

Finally, Moret’s view of the Entrance to the Port of Doëlan from 1908 catches the bright sunshine of a more temperate day.

Moret was successful in his lifetime, with Durand-Ruel selling many of his 600 or more oil paintings to clients in Europe and in America. A few have made their way into public collections, but the rise of modernism in the twentieth century pushed his work back to near-oblivion for a long time. His paintings capture the ruggedness and exposure of these wild and beautiful coasts as well as anyone’s, even those of Claude Monet.

Reference

Wikipedia.

Jason, of Golden Fleece fame, comes across as one of the better heroes of classical myth. Compared with multiple murderer, rapist, and utterly untrustworthy partner Theseus, or Hercules/Heracles, or …, perhaps he’s just the best of a bad bunch. Until you look at the way that he treated the women whom he married.

His first bride is almost forgotten now: Hypsipyle, Queen of Lemnos, a rather beautiful Greek island known now for its superb sandy beaches.

According to myth, Lemnos had a troubled history. Its womenfolk had neglected due worship of Venus/Aphrodite, so the goddess made their husbands reject them. In revenge, the women decided to kill the men, leaving the island populated only by women. There had been one exception: Hypsipyle had spared her father, originally the king, by tucking him into a large wooden chest and pushing him out into the sea. King Thoas was recovered, and Hypsipyle secreted him away quietly.

Just when the situation for the women of Lemnos was looking worrying, who should turn up but Jason and his fifty hunky Argonauts. Perhaps word had got around that they might be welcomed there. They certainly seemed to enjoy their visit, and didn’t find much time to send any postcards back to their families explaining what they were doing. Jason, according to his status, was entertained by Queen Hypsipyle to the point where they married and she later gave birth to twins.

But Jason and the Argonauts had a mission in Colchis, and once it became clear how fruitful their stay on Lemnos had been, they set sail in quest of the Golden Fleece. Jean Pichore’s miniature shows Jason parting from Hypsipyle, making their twins look quite advanced in age.

Jason then met the sorceress daughter of King Aëtes, Medea, who helped him accomplish the series of trials, culminating in him putting the monster which guarded the Golden Fleece to sleep, and achieving his mission. King Aëtes welshed on his deal with Jason, so the hero made off with both the Golden Fleece and Medea, marrying her bigamously on their way back to Thessaly.

When Hypsipyle hears of this, she is unimpressed, to say the least. It is at this stage that Ovid imagines, in the sixth letter of his Heroides, Hypsipyle writing to Jason, as shown in the two miniatures below, painted by Robinet Testard.

Medea’s bigamous marriage didn’t last long either.

The writing is not on the wall in Gustave Moreau’s Jason (1865), but in the almost illegible inscriptions on the two phylacteries wound around the column.

Cooke has deciphered their Latin as reading:
nempe tenens quod amo gremioque in Iasonis haerens
per freta longa ferar; nihil illum amplexa timebo
(Nay, holding that which I love, and resting in Jason’s arms, I shall travel over the long reaches of the sea; in his safe embrace I will fear nothing)
et auro heros Aesonius potitur spolioque superbus
muneris auctorem secum spolia altera portans
(And the heroic son of Aeson [i.e. Jason] gained the Golden Fleece. Proud of this spoil and bearing with him the giver of his prize, another spoil)

We should thus read the painting in terms of the conflict between Jason and Medea: Medea expresses her subjugate trust in him, whilst Jason considers her to be just another spoil won alongside the Golden Fleece. And she was a spoil which Jason was quick to dispose of when it suited him: when he met Glauce (or Creusa, but not the wife of Aeneas), he decided to move on and marry her too.

In JMW Turner’s spectacular Vision of Medea (1828), Medea is now in the midst of an incantation to force Jason’s return. In the foreground are the materials which she is using to cast her spell: flowers, snakes, and other supplies of a sorceress. Seated by her are the Fates. In the upper right, Medea is shown again in a flash-forward to her fleeing Corinth in her chariot drawn by dragons, the bodies of her children thrown down after their deaths.

Meanwhile, life for the spurned Hypsipyle wasn’t easy either. The women of Lemnos discovered that she had been sheltering ex-King Thoas, and she ended up as a slave of Lycurgus, the King of Sparta. One of her tasks was to look after his son Opheltes, but one day her attention was distracted from her charge, and he was killed by a snake.

Johann Christian Reinhart’s extraordinary Classic landscape with Hypsipyle and Opheltes tells this almost as Poussin would have done, with an idealised landscape, the boy swathed in the snake’s coils, and Hypsipyle rushing to try to save him. I think this is an extraordinary painting because, despite almost passing as a Poussin painted in about 1650, Reinhart completed it almost two centuries later, in 1816.

For neglecting Lycurgus’ son, Hypsipyle was almost put to death, but for once the Fates were lenient, and she and her two sons were allowed to return to Lemnos, where she retired gracefully from mythology.

Jason seemingly reaped what he had sown. Medea presented his new bride Glauce/Creusa with a magic dress, which burned her and her father to death. Jason’s faithlessness towards Medea brought him disfavour with Juno/Hera, and he spent the end of his life alone and unhappy, sleeping rough under the stern of the rotting hulk of his ship, the Argo. One night the timbers collapsed on him as he slept, killing him.

I am afraid that this blog has once again been under a spam attack all day, in which spammers are trying to post spurious comments at a rate of about one every minute.

I have therefore had to limit comments to those who are already recognised by the blog, or who log in to make their comment. I am very sorry that this will make it more difficult to add a comment for some. Once the attack has gone away, I hope to be able to ease that restriction again.

Please don’t let it inhibit your use of the blog, or making comments.

Update:

The avalanche of spam comments appears to have stopped at last, and these restrictions have now been removed. Please comment freely!

For nearly two centuries, painting and photography have co-existed, not always peacefully, though. We are used to seeing photographs of painters at work, and there are plenty of paintings of painters painting, but paintings of photography are more unusual. Perhaps the photographers were always in such a rush that they couldn’t wait for the painter to transform their canvas into an image.

But painters have long had an interest in optical devices, as shown in Charles-Amédée-Philippe van Loo’s delightful trompe l’oeil The Camera Obscura from 1764. I don’t find this at all surprising, nor that many famous painters have had, and used, cameras obscura. When much of your life is about images, any device which creates images is surely just the sort of technology which would fascinate.

The Polish artist Wojciech Gerson was one of the earliest painters to include a photographer in a painting, in his watercolour In the Tatra Mountains from 1860. This shows a team of surveyors and explorers at work in the Tatra Mountains, during the campaign in many European countries to produce high-quality maps, mainly for military purposes.

In Britain, for example, national mapping is performed by the Ordnance Survey, whose original purpose was to perform military surveys for the use of the artillery.

The camera in Frederick Daniel Hardy’s The Young Photographers (1862) is almost hidden beneath the bright red cloth covering it and the photographer. The message that photography was just child’s play may not have been what he intended, and wasn’t true at that time.

As photographic portraits became popular in the middle of the nineteenth century, and every town had its own photographic studio, painters seemed happy to paint them. Thomas Le Clear’s Interior with Portraits from about 1865 captures the atmosphere and props well. Once again, the photographer and his camera are almost hidden from view and Le Clear’s attention is focussed on the two children who are frozen in front of the lens.

Paintings of photography seem to have peaked around 1870, when the latter was still relatively novel and unusual, and not perceived as much of a threat to the painter.

Philipp Sporrer’s The Photo (1870) is probably the most pointed painted propaganda. The young photographer is not the sort of man you would leave your wife or daughter with: he is down at heel, unkempt, and his straw hat is abominably tatty. His studio is poorly-lit, probably an old shed, its floor littered with rubbish, and its window broken.

His subject is manifestly poor and uncouth, sitting in ill-fitting clothes and picking his nose as he waits for the photographer to fiddle around with his equipment.

Lajos Bruck’s The Photographer (1870) is perhaps fairer to the new medium, with a whole village and their innumerable children being cajoled into smiles ready for the camera. The itinerant photographer’s partner, though, seems disinterested, as she sits resting her head against her hand and looking away.

Then there are more neutral depictions, like Franz Schams’ Curious Guard most probably from around 1870. Once again, the photographer and his camera are largely concealed, as if photographers consisted only of buttocks and legs, and had no head.

Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret’s A Wedding at the Photographer’s (1879) seems more calculated. Hugely successful at the Salon, this artist saw no threat from wedding photography, a market in which there was no competition between painting and photography. But he still takes the opportunity to show the photographer and his studio as being tatty and tawdry.

Nicanor Blanes’ excellent plein air painting of Bella Vista (1889) is a fairer match.

The only painting that I have found which really matches the two media is Hermann Neuber’s The Photograph from about 1890. Here the photographer is taking a photo of the painter, who is painting the photographer … and a strategically-placed watering can looks as if it is poised to soak the photographer.

None of those paintings looks at the other, more technically-demanding side of photography: developing plates and printing. That is the subject of Louis Muraton’s The Photographer, which was painted before 1901. The subject is rocking a glass plate in a bath of developer, in his improvised darkroom.

The last image, though, speaks clearest: Joaquín Sorolla’s portrait of The Photographer Christian Franzen (1903). Franzen (1864-1923) was Danish by birth, trained in Copenhagen, then worked throughout Europe until he established his studio in Madrid in 1896. He was then appointed court photographer to King Alfonso XIII.

By then, photography had became an art in its own right, not the pale imitation depicted by Philipp Sporrer or Dagnan-Bouveret. But the top photographers still liked to have their portraits painted.

The profession of medicine was formed from two quite separate trades: surgeons and physicians. Early versions of the oath of Hippocrates, the (physician) father of medicine, included an explicit undertaking that a doctor (physician) would not attempt surgical procedures such as the removal of stones from the bladder. That was a task best left to the surgeon, armed with his scalpel.

Physicians, whose treatments were largely ineffective and often endangered the patient, acquired royal patronage and high status; surgeons often practised other trades, usually being barber-surgeons, and their status was often relatively low, more of a craftsman than the confidant of kings.

Rembrandt’s very early painting of The Operation from 1624-25 shows a barber-surgeon and his assistant performing surgery on the side of a man’s head. This is most likely to have been the lancing of a boil or removal of a tumour from the scalp or pinna of the ear. In the absence of any form of anaesthesia, this visibly resulted in considerable pain for the long-suffering patient.

Hogarth’s The Inspection (from his series Marriage A-la-Mode of about 1743) takes us to the consulting room of a repulsive (physician) doctor, who appears to be treating his three patients for syphilis.

A crucial detail which may be hard to see in the image is of a link between three small boxes of black pills: the younger woman holds one box, which is closed; a second closed box is on the seat of the chair just in front of the man’s crotch; the third is open in the man’s right hand, outstretched towards the doctor. The pills are black, in common with the poxmarks which appear on the man and the older woman, indicating that they are the mercuric salts then used to treat syphilis.

A skull on the table at the left bears the unmistakeable erosions produced by advanced syphilis, and the doctor himself bears the hallmarks of congenital syphilis. All around the group are various worrying items of medical equipment and specimens. More worrying still, the older woman is caressing a cutthroat surgical blade.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, advances in public health, hygiene, and science generally resulted in dramatic changes in medicine. The two separate trades gradually united, with common training, and by the end of the nineteenth century many treatments, using drugs and/or surgery, were starting to become effective. Physicians ceased being ‘quacks’, and surgeons ‘butchers’, and the unified profession built its reputation on science.

Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret was travelling in the Franche-Comté region in the east of France, near the Swiss border, in company with a medical friend, when his friend was called to help someone who had been injured in an accident. The artist turned that into An Accident (1879), in which a country doctor is bandaging a boy’s hand following a similar event.

Although this doctor is clearly better-clothed than the patient’s family who surround him, he is working in their deprived environment, with a small bowl full of bloody water, and a filthy rag.

Emmery Rondahl’s The Doctor’s Orders (1882) shows another country doctor who is writing a prescription, perhaps, for an older patient who is tucked up in a magnificent fitted bed in their own home. On the chair between them, in the centre of the painting, is a candle in a holder, a bottle of medicine, and a spoon.

In 1877, the painter Luke Fildes’ own infant son died, a tragedy which affected him deeply. He was later moved to paint The Doctor (1891) as a commission for Sir Henry Tate (who founded what is now the Tate Gallery), which shows a family physician staring in great concern at a sick child. In the background, the child’s fisherman father rests his left hand on the shoulder of the mother, as she sobs in despair on the table.

At the end of the nineteenth century, John Collier and others established a sub-genre of the ‘problem picture’, which contained a set of unresolved clues as to an underlying narrative. Designed to puzzle and encourage speculation, the newspapers of the day carried comment and correspondence arguing for particular readings of the latest problem picture.

Collier’s The Sentence of Death (1908) at first disappointed his critics, but quickly became very popular with the public; the original painting has not lasted well, and I show here a contemporary reproduction.

At a time when disease and death were prominent in everyday life, this painting might seem quite banal. A middle-aged man stares blankly at the viewer, having just been told by his doctor that he is dying. The doctor appears disengaged, and is reading from a book, looking only generally in the direction of his doomed patient.

Unusually for Collier’s problem pictures, and for paintings showing medical matters in general, the patient is male. This led to speculation as to the expected male response to such news, and questions as to what condition might be bringing about his death. There was even debate about interpretations of the doctor-patient relationship – an issue which I will examine in more detail in the second and concluding article tomorrow.

As the medical profession developed in the nineteenth century, the centres of growing medical power were the hospitals and their clinics. They developed the foundations of medical science, on which the new profession depended, and taught future generations of doctors.

Typical of these re-invented institutions was the Salpêtrière (now Pitié-Salpêtrière) Hospital in Paris. Initially a gunpowder factory, it was turned into a hospice for poor women in 1656, and by the end of the eighteenth century was the largest hospital in the world, capable of containing over ten thousand patients, although few received any real medical care.

During the nineteenth century, this huge hospital specialised in nervous disorders and psychiatric conditions. In André Brouillet’s A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière Hospital (1887), its eminent neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot is demonstrating how he could hypnotise Marie “Blanche” Wittman, the ‘Queen of Hysterics’, into suffering hysterical collapse. Charcot and Wittman were a renowned partnership in this ‘act’, who performed in front of Sigmund Freud when he visited the hospital.

The composition is radically different from those of doctors visiting patients in their own home. There are 28 men and three women present. Dominating the work is the figure of Charcot, who looks not at his ‘patient’, but at his audience. Care of his patient is left to Dr Joseph Babinski and the two nurses at the extreme right.

The patient is a woman, the least dressed of all those present, passive, and unconscious. The distinguished members of Charcot’s audience are looking not at Wittman and her collapse, but at Charcot, the star performer.

Over at the Hôpital Saint-Louis, also in Paris and founded in 1607 during an outbreak of plague, another eminent doctor is teaching in Henri Gervex’s Before the Operation.

Dr Péan is one of the eight men and three women present, and dominates the composition as he looks somewhat distantly to the right of the painting. His patient is a woman, who lies there naked and unconscious. Only one person is looking at her, as the others are all looking at one another.

Ilya Repin’s painting of The Surgeon Evgueni Vasilievich Pavlov in the Operating Theatre (1888) shows an eminent Russian surgeon at work in the operating theatre, wielding a hammer and chisel on an anaesthetised patient’s leg. The painting is dominated by the dazzling white operating gowns of those at work, and the slightly less intense pale blue of the surrounding walls.

The patient can hardly be seen, only their lower legs which are held by assistants, and part of their face. In addition to the patient, who is unconscious and of indeterminate gender, there are six men and five women present.

Thomas Eakins has the distinction of having painted two major works showing surgical procedures which, for someone who was not a war artist, appears unique.

His first, the Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (The Gross Clinic) from 1875, has remarkable compositional similarities with those of Gervex and Brouillet above. Gross stands in dominance in the middle of the painting, a scalpel held in his bloodied right fingers. He not only looks away from his patient, but appears completely detached. Behind and to the left is the only woman in the painting: not a nurse, but apparently the patient’s distressed mother.

The patient, lying with their feet towards the viewer and their head under the anaethetist’s mask, is of indeterminate gender, and is unconscious thanks to the effects of either ether or chloroform. Gross looks like an actor on a stage, surrounded by his audience, who appear similarly disinterested in the patient. It is left to Gross’s four assistants to get on with the operation.

Over ten years later, Eakins painted the retiring professor of surgery, Dr. David Hayes Agnew, at work in the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Superficially it may appear similar to his earlier painting, but it has a very different composition.

The patient is a woman, who is partially naked and unconscious thanks to a volatile liquid general anaesthetic administered via a mask. Bright surgical lighting puts six figures literally in the limelight: Agnew, holding a scalpel at the left but appearing detached from the operation; three assistants who are attending to the patient and her surgery, and the only woman present (other than the patient), nurse Mary Clymer, who is dressed not for the operating theatre but for ward work.

This group is shown in the spotlight on stage, but the audience is here paying particular attention to the patient, rather than the teacher.

Prior to the introduction of general anaesthesia, surgical procedures were severely limited in what they could tackle. Robert C. Hinckley’s Ether Day, or The First Operation with Ether, painted some time between 1882-93, recreates the scene on 16 October 1846 in what is now known as the Ether Dome in the Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA. Here John Collins Warren is removing a tumour from the neck of a local printer, Edward G Abbott, who was anaesthetised using ether – its first recorded use for a general surgical procedure.

Although the quality of this image is not good, its composition is still clear. The patient is a man seated upright in a chair, but anaesthetised and unconscious. He, and the surgery taking place on his neck, is the centre of the painting, and of attention of almost all those present. Only one person stands to the right of centre, apparently looking at the viewer rather than the patient.

Now mainly remembered for his paintings of the First World War and his teaching, Henry Tonks trained and practised as a surgeon until he was appointed Slade Professor of Fine Art in London in 1892. As far as I am aware, he is the only significant painter to have changed professions in this way, although many artists have started training as doctors before switching to art.

When war broke out in 1914, Tonks returned to medicine, first in England, then the following year he served as a medical orderly on the Marne, in France, where he used his pastels to paint Saline Infusion: An incident in the British Red Cross Hospital, Arc-en-Barrois, 1915.

Saline intravenous infusions were still relatively novel at that time, and war surgery was busy re-learning many of the lessons of the past. Tonks preserved the anonymity of his models although his drawing is otherwise anatomically precise – as would be expected of a former teacher of anatomy.

Tonks shows the patient at the centre of his three carers, of whom one is a nurse. The two male carers, probably doctors, are both in physical contact with the patient. The man on the left is holding the patient’s hand, while the other is inserting the cannula for the intra-venous infusion, a delicate task which would have been unfamiliar at the time. Oddly, it is the nurse who is most detached.

The medicalisation of life was incomplete without the medicalisation of death. Enrique Simonet’s unique painting of The Autopsy, also known as Anatomy of the Heart; She had a Heart! (1890), shows the largely exposed body of a young woman who had drowned herself. A well-dressed male pathologist stands by her head, holding in his left hand her heart, which he has apparently just removed. There are no spectators other than the viewer.

From so few paintings, it is perhaps dangerous to draw any conclusions, but there may be a trend away from the practice and teaching of medicine as an exhibition or performance, to more patient-oriented care. At the same time, its treatment in painting has moved away from the clinic as spectacle, and looked more at the effects of illness on the patient.

In Book 14 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Aeneas is at last making his way up the coast of Italy towards his destiny, leading to the foundation of the city and empire of Rome.

The Story

Having cleared the dangers of Scylla and Charybdis, and seen the Cercopes who had been transformed into apes, Aeneas and his crew pass the city of Naples, and land at Cumae to visit the Sibyl there in her cave. Aeneas needs to do this in order to go to the underworld to speak to the ghost of his father Anchises.

The Sibyl reassures Aeneas that he will achieve his goals, and to that end she takes him to Proserpine’s sacred glade. Finding a golden bough there, she tells Aeneas to break that from the tree. Bearing that bough, the two of them travel to the underworld, make contact with the ghost of Anchises, and return safely.

During their walk back, Aeneas thanks the Sibyl for her help and guidance, and offers to build a temple to her, assuming that she is a goddess. The Sibyl points out that she is no goddess, and explains how she had once been offered immortality if she were to let the god Apollo take her virginity:
And, while he hoped for this and in desire
offered to bribe me for my virtue, first
with gifts, he said, ‘Maiden of Cumae choose
whatever you may wish, and you shall gain
all that you wish.’ I pointed to a heap
of dust collected there, and foolishly
replied, ‘As many birthdays must be given
to me as there are particles of sand.’
“For I forgot to wish them days of changeless youth.
He gave long life and offered youth besides,
if I would grant his wish. This I refused,
I live unwedded still. My happier time
has fled away, now comes with tottering step
infirm old age, which I shall long endure.
You find me ending seven long centuries,
and there remain for me, before my years
equal the number of those grains of sand,
three hundred harvests, three hundred vintages!
The time will come, when long increase of days
will so contract me from my present size
and so far waste away my limbs with age
that I shall dwindle to a trifling weight,
so trifling, it will never be believed
I once was loved and even pleased a god.
Perhaps, even Phoebus will not recognize me,
or will deny he ever bore me love.
But, though I change till eye would never know me,
my voice shall live, the fates will leave my voice.”

Aeneas and the Sibyl then reach Cumae, and he moves on to his next adventure.

The Paintings

The two interlinked stories of Apollo and the Sibyl of Cumae, and Aeneas and the Sibyl, have both attracted the attention of several Masters. Indeed one, JMW Turner, cut his mythological teeth on them, and during the rest of his career painted at least three more works showing the Sibyl.

I start with one of Claude Lorrain’s most wonderful coastal landscapes, his Coast View with Apollo and the Cumaean Sibyl from about 1645-49. Although their figures are small, Apollo on the left is holding his lyre in his left arm, trying to persuade the seated Sibyl, to the right, to let him take her virginity.

Around them are the ruins of classical buildings and a stand of tall trees, as the land drops away to an idealised view of the coast of Italy. I suspect that the island on the horizon is based on Capri. In the small bay immediately below them are some ships, which may be a reference to Aeneas’ future visit to the Sibyl, although that would have been centuries later according to the Sibyl’s account of her age.

JMW Turner didn’t tackle this first part of the story until 1823, when he painted The Bay of Baiae, with Apollo and the Sibyl. His view appears to have been loosely based on Claude’s, with common elements, but has been recast at Baiae, in the Bay of Naples. Apollo is again on the left, with his lyre, but the dark-haired Sibyl has adopted an odd kneeling position. She is holding some sand in the palm of her right hand, asking Apollo to grant her as many years of life as there are grains.

Opposite the couple, on the other side of the path, under the trees, is a white rabbit.

When Claude was painting his coastal view, François Perrier was painting a more conventional figurative account of Aeneas and the Cumaean Sibyl (c 1646). Aeneas, stood to the left of the incense burner, appears to be offering to burn incense in honour of the Sibyl, who stands at the right in front of her cave, and is just about to tell him her life-story.

Behind Aeneas is a queue of people, including a king, bearing gifts and waiting to consult with the Sibyl. At the top left corner is a temple, and in the clouds above it the god Apollo, I believe.

JMW Turner’s first version of this scene is thought to have been his first mythological painting, back in his early career, in about 1798. This second version, Lake Avernus: Aeneas and the Cumaean Sybil, dates from 1814 or 1815, and is both an improvement on the original and in better condition.

True to the spirit of Claude’s landscape, this too is a mythological landscape showing the beautiful setting of Lake Avernus, near Pozzuoli, to the west of the city of Naples. In the distance is Baiae and the cliffs of Cape Miseno.

The Sibyl, who does not show her years, holds aloft a golden sprig rather than a bough, and Aeneas stands with his back to the viewer, as if he too is enjoying the view.

Turner’s last account is The Golden Bough, which he exhibited in 1834. It shows well how much his style had changed, although it retains compositional features from his earlier paintings.

The Sibyl stands on the left, radiant in white light, and holding aloft a more substantial golden branch than Turner showed previously. Her right hand holds a golden sickle used to cut that branch. Down towards Lake Avernus are the Fates, dancing around another white glow. A couple of female companions of the Sibyl rest under the tree, but Aeneas is nowhere to be seen (he might be in the middle of the Fates, perhaps). In the right foreground is a snake, a symbol of the underworld.

Of the straight paintings of the Sibyl, hardly any show her as the seven hundred year-old woman of Ovid’s (and Virgil’s) accounts.

The painting which comes closest is probably Elihu Vedder’s The Cumean Sibyl of 1876. However, rather than show the Sibyl in the context of Aeneas’ story, he prefers to depict her in her other main role, going to sell the Sibylline books of prophecies to the last king of Rome. She strides out clutching these scrolls under her arm.

There are also many fine paintings of Aeneas and the Sibyl visiting the underworld, which I will examine on another occasion.

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

The leading ‘Naturalist’, or social realist, painter of the late nineteenth century in France was Jules Bastien-Lepage. Following his untimely death in 1884, at the age of only 36, that role passed to Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret (1852–1929).

In truth, the two were inspiration to one another, without which they would both have been the poorer. But contemporary critics were smitten with Bastien-Lepage, and it was he who stole the limelight, even after his death.

Dagnan-Bouveret was the son of a Parisian tailor, who started his studies at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1869. He studied there with Alexandre Cabanel then transferred to Jean-Léon Gérôme, and showed great early talent. He competed for the Prix de Rome in 1876, coming second, but was influenced by Bastien-Lepage to adopt Naturalism rather than becoming a history painter.

Dagnan-Bouveret was also close to Gustave Courtois, with whom he shared a studio for some years. His career at the Salon opened in 1875, following which he became a regular and successful exhibitor there. From the late 1870s he painted frequently in the Franche-Comté region in the east of France, near the Swiss border, where he was able to find the mainly rural Naturalist motifs which he preferred.

His technical skills are shown exercised to the full in A Wedding at the Photographer’s (1879), where he achieves a highly detailed realism throughout the canvas. Dagnan-Bouveret was calculating in his choice of motif. The wedding market was not one which could be catered for by painters, at least not in the way that photographers were starting to capitalise on it. The image has the appearance of veracity, and uses subtle signs to make photography appear cheap and nasty compared with painting.

There is an irony in this painting, in that Dagnan-Bouveret was one of the first painters to incorporate photography into his working methods, later using it in conjunction with more traditional sketches and studies when preparing major works.

An Accident (1879) was Dagnan-Bouveret’s first great success in the Salon of 1880, where it won him a first class medal.

It shows a country doctor cleaning and bandaging the injured hand of a boy, as the rest of the extended family looks on. Conditions are primitive: the small bowl of water is heavily blood-stained, and the cloth by it appears filthy.

Dagnan-Bouveret is supposed to have been recalling an incident which occurred when he was travelling with a medical friend, who was called to help in similar circumstances as shown here.

Bouderie, which means sulking, is a splendid and intimate portrait of Dagnan-Bouveret’s friend and colleague Gustave Courtois, painted in 1880. Courtois is seen at one end of a large sofa, smiling wrily and staring into the distance. He holds his palette and brushes in his left hand, and what may be a long mahlstick in the right.

At the opposite end of the sofa, turned with her back towards Courtois, is a young woman dressed in fashionable clothing, in black throughout, apart from white lace trim at the foot of her skirts. Also shown is a screen decorated with Japanese imagery, and on the floor the skin of a big cat, perhaps a lioness.

Courtois is largely forgotten now, but enjoyed considerable success at the Salon. In 1891, he painted a portrait of Madame Gautreau which was deemed far less scandalous than John Singer Sargent’s earlier Portrait of Madame X (1884) – the same woman.

During this early part of his career, Dagnan-Bouveret experimented with various styles and ideas. In his Blessing of the Young Couple Before Marriage (1880-81), he looks at a very traditional subject lit by the brilliant sunshine from the right, which almost makes the bride’s dress seem to be on fire.

He also visited Venice, where his brushwork was very loose, and his marks painterly, as shown in his sketched View of Venice (1882). This is remarkably similar to the views of Venice painted a few years later by John Singer Sargent.

Dagnan-Bouveret also explored some narrative subjects, including Hamlet and the Gravediggers (1883), which shows what is possibly Shakespeare’s most famous scene from his play Hamlet. The prince is just about to lament the passing of Yoric to the gravediggers, against a rich floral background.

Then, the following year, Dagnan-Bouveret was shocked when Jules Bastien-Lepage died. After that, he started visiting Brittany to paint.

Following the sudden death of the great and very influential Jules Bastien-Lepage, Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret (1852–1929) was the most distinguished and successful painter in ‘Naturalist’ style. After an initial visit to Brittany in 1885, Dagnan-Bouveret turned his attention to that most westerly part of France, a complete change from his earlier works from the Franche-Comté region in the far east of the country.

Like the older Jules Breton, Dagnan-Bouveret was fascinated by the extensive religious pilgrimages known as pardons, but does not seem to have attempted to paint large gatherings of pilgrims in a full-scale pardon, like Breton. His first painting showing those attending a pardon was completed in 1886, as The Pardon in Brittany.

Dagnan-Bouveret shows men and women of all ages walking barefoot, holding lighted candles. The older man with a stick to the left of centre is strongly reminiscent of some in Breton’s earlier paintings of pardons. This painting was awarded a medal of honour at the Exposition Universelle in 1889.

Dagnan-Bouveret prepared for these works conventionally, with studies such as this Portrait of a Breton Girl (1887), and using the radically new technique of photography, and was one of the first painters to employ photography in the production of his paintings.

Bretons at a Pardon (1887) shows a group of Breton women attending the Pardon of Rumengol, which takes place in this village to the east of Faou. At least one of the photographs which he took when developing this work survives, but was unsuitable for inclusion here.

Dagnan-Bouveret painted a series of modern interpretations of traditional religious works. Among them is his profoundly beautiful Madonna of the Trellis (1888), which shows the Virgin Mary embracing the infant Christ under trellis work with dense foliage. It departs from artistic tradition in that the Madonna is dressed in white, rather than classical ultramarine blue, and has a contemporary appearance.

In 1888, Dagnan-Bouveret, Louis-Auguste Girardot and Jules-Alexis Muenier visited Tétouan in Morocco together, although Dagnan-Bouveret doesn’t appear to have left any surviving Orientalist paintings from that trip.

He also painted some modern history works, of which the most famous is Conscripts (1889). This shows a group of young men who have just been conscripted into the army, marching behind a very non-military drummer and a boy bearing the national flag. The conscripts walk with their arms linked to express their solidarity.

Dagnan-Bouveret delayed exhibiting this painting for two years, then in 1891 it stole the show at the re-organised Salon run by the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. It became a runaway success, and a focus for French nationalism.

Dagnan-Bouveret was at the height of his Naturalism by the early 1890s, and painted another well-known example, his In the Forest of 1893. This shows a group of itinerant people sat together, eating to the sound of a violin. Behind them are two oxen, and the forest which is currently their home.

After these two paintings, Dagnan-Bouveret abandoned Naturalism and concentrated his efforts on religious works.

The Last Supper (1896) is probably his most spectacular religious painting, which again follows the artistic tradition in most respects, but with more contemporary figures. Christ is shown blessing the bread and wine, lit from a rich source which doesn’t appear in the painting.

Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus (1896-97) shows an earlier meal during Christ’s ministry, using more contemporary figures and looking into the light. This gives Christ a heavenly radiance, lighting his hair in particular.

Dagnan-Bouveret uses light to further dramatic effect in his Marguerite at the Sabbath (1911), inspired by the fate of Gretchen/Margaret in Goethe’s Faust. After the birth of her illegitimate child, Margaret drowns the infant in despair, and is shown here clutching his limp body. This is set at the witches Sabbath on Walpurgis Night, lit by the flames of a bonfire.

Saint-Trophime in Arles (1914) appears to be a straightforward townscape of the centre of Arles, showing the celebrated ancient Romanesque church of Saint Trophime at the right.

When Dagnan-Bouveret turned seventy in 1922, he painted this wonderful portrait of Old Julie, from Quincey, in the Franche-Comté, where the artist lived; he died there seven years later in 1929.

More recent re-assessment of the works of Bastien-Lepage and Dagnan-Bouveret propose that they should be considered together, on a par, as the leaders of the Naturalist movement. History may not have done Bastien-Lepage many favours, but it has been of even greater disservice to Dagnan-Bouveret.

If pigments were drugs, asphalt would be cocaine – addictive and seriously destructive. Until the Impressionists tried to eliminate black from the palette altogether, numerous painters are claimed to have used asphalt in their oil paintings, and many paintings are claimed to have suffered its destructive consequences.

Except that very, very few paintings have actually been demonstrated to have contained asphalt as a pigment at all.

Together, these make asphalt one of the most mysterious pigments. It was apparently used by many Masters, including Titian, Rembrandt, Tintoretto, Velázquez, Reynolds, JMW Turner, David, Delacroix, Ingres, Courbet, Anton Mengs, Hans Makart, and many more. It was attributed the lustrous, rich brown-black which is so widely seen in their works. But very few of their paintings have been found to contain robust evidence of its use.

Asphalt isn’t even a true pigment (insoluble particles containing substances of intense colour), but an odd colloid cocktail of organic and inorganic materials. Some, such as the viscous binder within asphalt known as bitumen, are organic residues. Other components can include modified vegetable matter, mineral particles, and more. Asphalt and its derivatives also go under a variety of names, including Antwerp Brown, and possibly Mummy.

Mummy is even more mysterious than asphalt. Originally claimed to be extracted from the ground bodies of embalmed Egyptians, it was thought that asphalt formed an important part. Its origin and composition appear to have changed over time, and at some periods the pigment known as Mummy may well have contained significant amounts of asphalt.

Reliable tests for the presence of asphalt in paint are highly specialised, and little-used, and little is known about asphalt’s behaviour in oil paint layers. As a result, it is not clear when it first came into use, although most consider it was used during and after the Renaissance, and gradually phased out during the nineteenth century.

Asphalt has been used as an oil paint, and in varnishes; being strongly hydrophobic it is very poor in watercolour. It is not the ‘blackest black’ as has sometimes been claimed, but a very deep brown-black, which has been prized by many artists.

Notorious for the problems with which it can be associated in the paint layer, asphalt has been blamed for bleeding, discolouration, wrinkling, and cracking. But careful examination of paintings known to contain it suggests that those are not necessarily the consequences of using asphalt: genuine asphalt has been used in some old paintings without any of those ill-effects.

Orazio Gentileschi’s Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife painted in 1626-30 is one of the few paintings which is known to contain asphalt in its paint layer, yet appears in remarkably good condition, considering that it is nearly four hundred years old.

Another painting known to contain asphalt in its paint layer is Gerrit Dou’s The Young Mother from 1658. Most of the darks and blacks in the centre of the painting don’t show the brown tinting which is characteristic of asphalt, but I suspect it may be in the dark browns towards the top.

This detail reveals a different pattern of cracking in the dark brown drapery at the very top, which has open and coarser cracking than most of the rest of the painting. I wonder if that is consistent with some adverse effects of asphalt here.

One major work in which there appears to be extensive written evidence of the use of asphalt is Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19). However, critical examination of sources shows that they depend on a single original document, a note made on an unspecified date by Géricault’s assistant Jamar, who listed the pigments used by the Master as:
“vermillon, blanc, jaune de Naples, ocre jaune, terre d’Italie, ocre de Brie, terre de Sienne naturelle, brun rouge, terre de Sienne brûlée, laque ordinaire, bleu de Prusse, noir de pêche, noir d’ivoire, terre de Cassel, bitume.”

Cassel earth is a derivative of lignin rather than asphalt, but readily confused with asphalt as they have similar colours. Géricault is alleged to have used asphalt glazes or varnishes late in the painting process, but at that stage few witnesses were allowed access to the studio.

The Raft of the Medusa may well have undergone varnishing with asphalt, and is the worse for wear considering that it is only two hundred years old. However, its life has been very stressful: it remained unsold after its was first exhibited at the Salon in 1819, so was rolled up and stored in a friend’s studio, until it was transported (rolled up still) to London for exhibition the following year.

There are also claims made for several of JMW Turner’s paintings that they contain asphalt in the paint layer, which has resulted in their deterioration. I am not aware of any robust analyses which have confirmed its presence, though.

Turner’s Fighting Temeraire has areas in which wrinkling is apparent, probably resulting from the slumping of impasto, and undried paint exuding. This has been attributed to Turner’s assumed use of asphalt, which can inhibit the oxidative ‘drying’ of linseed oil.

The Rape of Proserpine (1839) also has its problems. Here Turner worked freely, mixing layers of low to medium impasto with thinner glazes and scumbles, particularly in the sky. Although cracking has occurred, this has not resulted in significant loss of the paint layer.

It has been proposed that problems in the foreground and middleground of Turner’s Rape of Proserpine are the result of his use of asphalt. Cracks here have widened, and become filled with paint which has risen from deeper layers.

Many of the paintings of the American artist Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847–1917) have suffered severe problems in the paint layer, and some are now almost completely lost as a result. Ryder was known to have incorporated a wide range of unconventional materials and substances in his paintings, which are thought to have included asphalt. Unfortunately, there does not appear to be robust analytical evidence to support his use of asphalt.

The Waste of Waters is Their Field (c 1883) is a small oil painting which is almost completely lost now, with much of the detail merged into a dark brown mess as its superficial layers have faded, and the deeper layers darkened. The detail below shows that its entire paint layer is dissected by cracks, many of them gaping and oozing lighter wet paint from below.

Details can still be made out in his tiny Resurrection (1885), although even this has changed and cracked severely. Many of the cracks are wide and filled with paint which has risen up from lower layers.

The objective evidence shows that it is quite possible for paintings containing asphalt to live long and strong, but its rumoured use has been claimed to result in destruction of the paint layer. Perhaps it is as well that asphalt and its relatives became unfashionable in the nineteenth century, and are almost unobtainable in oil paints today.

There are other deep brown-blacks, but none with the same air of mystery.

References

Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, a detailed analysis of the evidence of its making.

Catarina I Bothe (2007) Artists’ Pigments, vol 4, ed Barbara H Berrie, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 23 4.

Over the last two millenia, it must have been the most famous extra-marital affair, and one of the best-known suicides – that of Dido Queen of Carthage and Aeneas, Trojan refugee and patriarch of the Roman Empire. First told in explicit detail in Virgil’s epic Aeneid, it has inspired at least a dozen operas, is referred to in seven of Shakespeare’s plays, and even pops up in two of the Civilization games.

Its outline is simple, and a prototype for uncountable literary works: girl meets boy on a mission; boy cannot deviate from mission; boy leaves girl; girl heartbroken. Ovid’s summary in his Metamorphoses is little longer than than, but far more eloquent and poetic. Ovid also wrote a second and fuller version in his collection of fictional letters by famous women, Heroides, and it is that which concerns me here.

Dido and her brother Pygmalion (not the better-known Pygmalion who made and fell in love with a statue) were of royal blood, probably being the children and heirs of the King of Tyre. Dido married Sychaeus, but Pygmalion wanted their riches too, so had her husband murdered when he was at the altar in their own home.

Dido took her riches and fled to North Africa, seeking sanctuary on a plot of land which she acquired from the Berber king Iarbas, whom she rejected as a suitor. He gave her as much land as could be encompassed by an oxhide, so Dido ingeniously cut the oxhide up into thin strips, which she fastened end-to-end to enable her to circumscribe an entire hill.

There, Dido built the city of Carthage, into which she drew those who had fled with her, local Berbers and many others. The city grew to be wealthy and powerful, and she remained its queen.

JMW Turner depicts this in one of his works inspired by Claude Lorrain: Dido building Carthage, or The Rise of the Carthaginian Empire (1815). Dido is seen on the left bank, dressed in blue. On the opposite bank is the monumental tomb of her husband Sychaeus.

Although a simple reading of this painting follows its title, it could equally show Aeneas as the man to the left of Dido, in which case the masts behind them would be those of Aeneas’ ship(s), and the painting would show their first meeting.

Aeneas was a refugee from the city of Troy, who fled the city with his father Anchises, wife Creusa, and son Ascanius, as the city was burning and being sacked by the Greeks. Together with other refugees, Aeneas, his father and son had sailed away, then undertook a protracted journey across the Mediterranean in search of his destiny.

Pompeo Batoni’s Aeneas Fleeing from Troy (1753) shows the family as they leave the burning city behind them. Creusa is starting to fall slightly behind, and becoming distressed.

Aeneas’ mother was Venus, making him a brother to Cupid. Also interested in Aeneas was Juno, the senior goddess, who wanted to thwart his reaching Italy, and her husband Jupiter, who wanted Aeneas to reach his destination, where his descendents Romulus and Remus would ultimately found Rome.

When Aeneas and his men left the island of Sicily heading north towards the Italian mainland, Juno intervened by bringing a northerly gale which drove them south to the coast of North Africa, and the city of Carthage.

Once ashore in Carthage, Aeneas met Dido, as shown in Pierre-Narcisse Guérin’s Aeneas tells Dido the misfortunes of the City of Troy, painted in about 1815. He told her the story of his escape from the ruins of Troy, and of his guilty secret: his wife Creusa had become separated from the rest of the family. Aeneas claimed that he had gone back to look for her, and she appeared to him in ghostly form, telling him to leave without her, which he did.

It is Cézanne, in his watercolour sketch of Aeneas Meeting Dido at Carthage, painted in about 1875, who expresses this situation most clearly. Queen Dido is at the left, surrounded by her court. The warrior figure of Aeneas stands to the right of centre, and to the right of him is the shrouded spectre of Creusa.

Dido had sworn to her late husband that she would love no other, but as she and Aeneas got to know one another, both Juno and Venus (through her other son, Cupid) conspired to grow that into love. Venus wanted Dido to provide her son with a safe haven, and Juno wanted to halt his progress. This came to a head when the couple went out with a hunting party, and took shelter from a torrential rainstorm, brought by Juno, in a cave. Both Virgil and Ovid make it quite explicit that they made love in that cave.

As so often happens, Dido and Aeneas made love under different assumptions. For Dido, given her commitment to her husband, she consented on the basis that this was also the act of union in marriage. For Aeneas, who had made no such commitment to his wife, who had disappeared in dubious circumstances anyway, there was no such agreement, and he remained free to pursue his destiny.

The next external influence on the couple’s relationship then came into play: Jupiter, wanting to chivvy Aeneas on his journey to start the founding of Rome and to appease Dido’s rejected suitor, sent Mercury his messenger to tell Aeneas that he must not tarry with Dido, but must prepare to sail, leaving the queen behind. Aeneas instructed his crew to get their ship ready to resume its journey – but in complete secrecy. He then went to Dido to break the news to her, only to find that she already knew of his intention to desert her and abandon her as he had previously abandoned Creusa.

Pompeo Batoni’s painting of Dido and Aeneas (1747) draws on ambiguity in an ingenious way. It could be read as showing the couple after their lovemaking in the cave, with Dido still partly undressed, and Aeneas adjusting his clothes.

However, the presence of Aeneas’ ship in the left background implies that this is the moment that Aeneas has returned to break the news to Dido that he must sail shortly. More puzzling, perhaps, is the figure of a naked woman on board the ship, which indicates Aeneas’ intended lack of faithfulness to Dido in any case.

Behind the couple is Dido’s sister Anna. In Virgil’s account, she goes to Aeneas to plead Dido’s case before the queen’s suicide; in Ovid’s version in his Heroides, Anna takes Aeneas the letter written for her by Ovid.

Dido’s letter, as supposed by Ovid, is a tour de force, and truly elegiac. It expresses her side of the story and her view of their relationship brilliantly. She points out that she could well be pregnant with a brother for Aeneas’ son Ascanius. She appeals to the emotions in a calculating and crafted way. And most of all, she raises questions about Aeneas’ abandonment of Creusa, which should have had greatest impact on his heart. No matter what Mercury might say, how could Aeneas abandon a second wife too?

But Mercury intervened again, and Aeneas was driven to sail forthwith. When Dido saw this, her only option was to fall on her sword, taking her own life.

Here I show two of the most vivid paintings of the climax of this story. In Joseph Stallaert’s The Death of Dido (1872), the queen has fallen on the sword given by Aeneas, and now lies dying on the couch on which the couple had previously made love, pointing at his ship leaving harbour by the light of the early dawn.

Resting her hand on Dido’s chest wound, her sister Anna comforts the queen in her dying moments, as the queen’s nurse and a maidservant are in attendance. There is no sign of a funeral pyre, but suggestive smoke is made by the small altar at the extreme left.

Henry Fuseli’s Dido (1781) has mounted her funeral pyre, and is on the couch on which she and Aeneas made love. She then fell on the sword which Aeneas had given her, and that rests, covered with her blood, beside her, its tip pointing up towards her right breast.

Her sister Anna rushes in to embrace her during her dying moments, and Jupiter sends Iris (shown above, wielding a golden sickle) to release Dido’s spirit from her body. Already smoke seems to be rising up from the pyre, which will confirm visually to Aeneas that she has killed herself, as he heads towards the horizon, and history moves to the founding of Rome.

Was it Dido? Aeneas? Or the pair of them? Ovid implies – but dares not state – that it was all down to the play of the gods. Given the conflicting interests of Venus, Juno, and Jupiter, this relationship was surely doomed from the start.

It was a long time before painters paid much attention to the working man and woman. When the Industrial Revolution swept through Europe during the latter half of the eighteenth century, a few artists were sufficiently moved by its visual effects as to commit them to canvas.

Joseph Wright of Derby was less interested in the people at work in new industries, and more fascinated by their new science and technology. An Iron Forge (1772) is one of his series of paintings which were both commercially successful, and accurate portrayals of the comparatively small-scale technological advances of the early decades of the revolution.

It shows a group of workers forging a white-hot iron casting, using a tilt-hammer powered by a water-wheel. Also present is the wife and children of the iron-founder, stressing the family nature of these small forges at the time.

A decade later, Pehr Hilleström recorded a visit to the Anchor-Forge at Söderfors. The Smiths Hard at Work (1782). As with many of these early glimpses of new industries, his painting shows a well-dressed group of visitors, at the right, who are watching the workmen in the centre. Söderfors is in Uppsala, on the east coast of Sweden, and seems to have been an early industrial site.

The greatest of the painters of the early part of the Industrial Revolution was Philip James de Loutherbourg, a landscape artist who started painting the small-scale industrial sites which sprung up around towns. Typical of these is A View near Matlock, Derbyshire with Figures Working beneath a Wooden Conveyor (1785).

De Loutherbourg also painted one of the most sublime and enduring images of the industrial revolution, in his Coalbrookdale by Night (1801).

Here is the round-the-clock labour of the furnaces sweating out iron for industry and construction. Its clouds are lit by the furnaces, with white-hot spoil and smut rising into the night. A team of horses draws finished castings away from the site, towards the viewer, as boys watch from amid the debris. Here is a new sub-genre, the industrial landscape, and a glimpse into the fires not of some spiritual hell, but the hell of humans, toiling on earth, in a small, previously rural and wooded, valley in Shropshire, England.

With men working in the heavier industries, women were put to work in the fabric mills. Giovanni Migliara’s Mylius Spinning Mill (1828) shows a visit by a well-dressed and obviously affluent woman and her family, as the workers toil at their labour.

Industrial development rapidly swallowed what had previously been agricultural land across Europe and America. George Childs shows the consequences in a series of paintings of South Wales, including this one of Dowlais Ironworks (1840). This site at Methyr Tydfil, South Wales, opened as a single iron furnace in 1760, and by the time that Childs painted this was providing iron for the railway tracks which were spreading throughout Britain and much of Europe. It operated eighteen blast furnaces, employed over seven thousand people, and produced over 80,000 tons of iron each year.

Large-scale iron production also started in North America. In 1857, investors opened a site for the production of iron primarily for the growing railways across Canada, and a few years later William Armstrong painted those Toronto Rolling Mills (1864). By this time, it was the largest iron mill in Canada, and the largest manufacturing industry in the city, but it was soon surpassed by steel mills and shut down in 1873.

John Ferguson Weir took his rather dark realism before an unusual motif for American painting at that time – the hot, harsh, and dangerous world of the West Point Iron and Cannon Factory, in The Gun Foundry (1866). The moment shown is the casting of a Parrott Gun, in the foundry responsible for making most of the large guns used by the Union forces during the Civil War.

Weir’s Forging the Shaft is a replica which he painted in 1874-7, after the original of 1868 was destroyed by fire. It shows the same foundry, this time working the massive propellor shaft for an ocean liner, more a symbol of peace and trade than past conflict.

Adolph von Menzel’s The Iron Rolling Mill from 1875 gives a good impression of the crowded, sweaty, and dangerous environment in which iron and steel workers spent much of their lives.

Production of steel on an industrial scale started after 1857, with the introduction of the Bessemer Process. Constantin Meunier’s undated Steel Foundry must therefore have been painted during the 1860s or later.

Meunier’s undated Women Working in a Glass Factory shows an example of the factory work which employed many women. It is also a good indicator of the trend in painting during the late 1870s, which turned attention from the industry to its workers.

Although there are several well-known Impressionist paintings of factories belching smoke into the French countryside, the French Impressionists showed little interest in either heavy industrial processes or their workers. One of the few examples is Alfred Sisley’s Forge at Marly-le-Roi (1875), which shows a smaller-scale and more traditional sight.

Where the factories and works didn’t completely take over the countryside, lighter industries invaded more traditional agriculture. Max Liebermann’s The Preserve Makers (1879) shows a shed full of country women preparing foodstuffs for bottling and canning; the latter gradually came into use after 1810, but didn’t become popular until the First World War.

The first article in this two-part series looked at paintings of earlier phases of the Industrial Revolution, up to 1880. These had started with awe-inspiring industrial landscapes, concentrated on activities and the environment inside factories and ironworks, then during the 1870s had come to focus on the men and women working there.

Thomas Pollock Anshutz’s The Ironworkers’ Noontime (1880) uses the ironworks as its background, and shows the iron workers during their short lunchtime break. They are taking turns to wash the grime of the morning off their arms and faces, and enjoying the moment out in the sunshine.

John Singer Sargent’s early painting of Venetian Glass Workers was made in 1880-82. These women appear to be preparing bundles of fine glass rods, which would presumably go on to further manufacturing processes.

During the 1880s, painting the portraits of workers became increasingly popular. Ernst Josephson’s Spanish Blacksmiths (1882) is a fine example of a Naturalist, or ‘social realist’, portrait in which its objectivity is enhanced by the white wall behind them. Josephson has painted every rip, tear and fray in the remains of the white shirt worn by the man in the middle, and his muscular forearms are almost hyper-real.

Charles Frederic Ulrich painted in fine Naturalist detail too. In The Glass Blowers (1883) the work is more delicate: blowing and preparing glass domes, perhaps for use as covers of watches and clocks.

Ulrich also painted a young apprentice drinking during a moment’s pause in his work in The Village Printing Shop, Haarlem (1884).

The employment of children, who might otherwise have been in school, was becoming controversial in many societies. With artists now drawing attention to the workers and their conditions, social messages developed in their art.

Joan Planella i Rodríguez’ The Little Weaver (1882-89) is a superb Naturalist painting with strong social content. This version is a replica of the artist’s original, which was completed in 1882. It shows a young girl working at a large and complex loom in Catalonia, as a man lurks in the background, keeping a watch over her.

This work was awarded a medal when it was exhibited at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, and was purchased from there into a Saint Louis public collection. It didn’t return to Catalonia until 2012.

Christian Ludwig Bokelmann’s oil sketch of a Lead Mine in Selbeck (1888) has a more subtle social message for an ancient industry which had long recognised the toxicity of the lead which it worked with, but which continued to employ children.

Another Naturalist artist, Jean-Eugène Buland tackled more complex issues in his Un Patron, or The Apprentice’s Lesson (1888). After France’s ignominious defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, efforts were made to make France more industrial and more modern. Here a young boy is being trained by the foreman to make a cogwheel, when many would have preferred him still to be at school. Buland used photographs quite extensively in the preparatory work for this painting, to capture its wealth of detail.

I have not included paintings of the reconstruction of major cities such as Paris, but this by Édouard Joseph Dantan shows some of the more traditional skills still being used for a Glasshouse Under Construction (1890).

Painting men and women at work was by no means confined to Naturalists, with their attention to fine detail. Alessandro Milesi’s undated The Spinners is a much looser oil sketch which could qualify as being an Impression.

Beda Stjernschantz shows a more usual view of Glassblowers (1894) working on larger-scale products. This was painted from life in a glass factory at Impilahti in Finland, on the shore of Lake Ladoga. In 1944, this area was ceded to Russia.

Maximilien Luce painted many works showing people at work, as his style moved on from Neo-Impressionism to Post-Impressionism during the 1890s. His Charleroi Foundry, Casting (1896) shows this well, and is one of a long series he painted showing those working in heavy industry.

Luce’s The Pile Drivers (1902-3) shows the very active construction work which continued in Paris in the early twentieth century, with blocks of factories on the opposite bank, infiltrating the surrounding residential and commercial districts.

Döme Skuteczky’s painting In the Smithy from 1897 returns to smaller-scale and more traditional industry.

Not all metal working was heavy and large-scale. Jean-Eugène Buland uses strongly Naturalist style to depict The Tinker (1908), who repaired damaged pots, pans, and domestic metal objects in a cottage industry which predated the Industrial Revolution.

With the decline of Naturalism in the early twentieth century, the emphasis on workers weakened, and artists like Hans Baluschek returned to painting heavy plant and processes in his Steel Rolling Mill (1910).

Maximilien Luce’s Construction Site (1911) is another depiction of those at work in Paris at the time, and shows the high chroma influence of the Fauves.

Finally, Robert Sterl’s Ironworkers of 1919 is an oil sketch showing workers at one of the Krupp plants in Germany.

In Ovid’s retelling of Virgil’s Aeneid, in Metamorphoses, Aeneas has just returned from the Underworld with the Sibyl of Cumae as his guide. Ovid then uses two of Ulysses’ men to narrate episodes from Homer’s Odyssey in flashback. The first is Achaemenides, who survived their encounter with Polyphemus.

The Story

Aeneas sailed on from Cumae and reached the coast midway between Naples and Rome, at Caieta (Gaeta). There he went ashore, and Achaemenides, whom Aeneas had rescued from Sicily, happened across Macareus, another survivor of Ulysses’ crew who returned from the Trojan War.

The meeting of these two veterans prompts Achaemenides to give a short account of the encounter between the Cyclops Polyphemus and Ulysses (Odysseus) and his men.

The full story is not given here, but was familiar from the Odyssey.

Polyphemus, a savage one-eyed man-eating giant, spent his days tending his flock of sheep. Polyphemus held Ulysses and his crew captive, then devoured several of them, so Ulysses got the Cyclops drunk in order to engineer their escape. Polyphemus asked Ulysses his name, and the latter replied Οὖτις (Outis, Greek for nobody). Once the giant had fallen into a stupor, Ulysses drove a hardened stake into the Cyclops’ one eye, blinding him.

The following morning, Ulysses and his men tied themselves to the undersides of the sheep in Polyphemus’ flock so that he couldn’t feel them escaping. Recognising that he has lost his captives, Polyphemus called out for help from the other Cyclops, telling them that ‘Nobody’ had hurt him. The other Cyclops therefore didn’t come to his aid.

Achaemenides became separated from the main group, who made their way down to the ship and sailed off into the dawn, deriding the blind Polyphemus as they went. Achaemenides was thus able to see Polyphemus fly into a rage, and hurl huge rocks at Ulysses in his ship:
The shoutings of Ulysses nearly caused
destruction of your ship and there I saw
the Cyclops, when he tore a crag away
and hurled the huge rock in the whirling waves;
I saw him also throw tremendous stones
with his gigantic arms. They flew afar,
as if impelled by catapults of war,
I was struck dumb with terror lest
the waves or stones might overwhelm the ship,
forgetting that I still was on the shore!

The Cyclops then strode the slopes of Mount Etna in his rage, cursing the Greeks in general and Ulysses in particular. Achaemenides felt certain that Polyphemus would discover him, and that he would suffer the same fate as his colleagues who had been eaten alive. He hid:
Most carefully concealed for many days,
trembling at every sound and fearing death,
although desiring death; I fed myself
on grass and acorns, mixed with leaves; alone
and destitute, despondent unto death,
awaiting my destruction I lost hope.
In that condition a long while, at last
I saw a ship not far off, and by signs
prayed for deliverance, as I ran in haste,
down to the shore. My prayers prevailed on them.
A Trojan ship took in and saved a Greek!

This prompted Macareus to tell the story of his survival.

The Paintings

One of the best-known episodes from Homer’s Odyssey, there are some superb paintings telling the story of Ulysses/Odysseus and Polyphemus, but none which makes any reference to Achaemenides, who may just be a narrative device created by Virgil to link his Aeneid with the Odyssey.

Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg’s Ulysses Fleeing the Cave of Polyphemus (1812) shows Ulysses about to make his way out of the Cyclops’ cave, as his captor strokes one of his sheep. With Polyphemus’ face turned away from the viewer, it is difficult to confirm that he has been blinded at this stage, though, making this painting quite hard to read.

Jacob Jordaens pictures the crew fastening themselves to the underside of the sheep as they prepare to escape, in his Odysseus in the Cave of Polyphemus, which was probably painted in about 1650. Again, the Cyclops is facing away from the viewer, and it is hard to be sure that this is taking place after his blinding.

Given the difficulties in depicting the moment of escape from their captivity, most artists have opted to show Polyphemus hurling chunks of mountain at Ulysses and his crew.

Guido Reni’s account in his Polyphemus from 1639-40 is far clearer. The Cyclopean eye socket is now empty, where Ulysses had poked its single eye out. In the distance, Ulysses and his crew are making their way out to their ships in two smaller boats, in their haste to depart. In Reni’s simplicity comes great narrative strength.

Arnold Böcklin’s Odysseus and Polyphemus (1896) shows Ulysses’ crew rowing frantically out to sea, through large waves, as Polyphemus prepares to hurl a huge rock at them from the shore. The detailed realism and tight composition make this one of Böcklin’s most dramatic and active paintings, and a vivid account.

JMW Turner’s magnificent Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus is probably his finest narrative painting, and the product of a long gestation. He seems to have started work on rough sketches for this in a sketchbook which is believed to date to 1807, and this finished painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy over twenty years later, in 1829.

The massive figure of Polyphemus is wreathed in cloud above the wooded coast towards the upper left, as the rays of the rising sun light the whole scene from Apollo’s chariot.

The entire crew is dressing the masts and rigging, and Ulysses brandishes two large flags, to deride the blinded giant. The orange flag on the mainmast bears the Greek letters Οὖτις (Outis), the name that Ulysses told Polyphemus was his. Below it is another flag showing the wooden horse of Troy, a reference to Virgil’s Aeneid. In front of the bows of the ship are ghostly white Nereids and sea creatures, presumably a reference to Neptune, Polyphemus’ father, whose curse results from this incident.

Annibale Carracci’s fresco of The Cyclops Polyphemus (1595-1605) in Rome’s Palazzo Farnese has sometimes been mistaken for showing this episode from the Odyssey. It actually shows, quite unambiguously, the earlier story in Metamorphoses, in which Polyphemus kills Galatea’s lover Acis. There is no evidence that the Cyclopean eye has been blinded, and closer examination of the fleeing figures shows that the more distant is a woman, Galatea.

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.

Among the many wonderful paintings in the Musée d’Orsay, in Paris, is a large canvas showing a sprawling group of farmworkers being paid for their labour during the harvest. For many, this is the only work by Léon Augustin Lhermitte (1844–1925) which they will ever see. There are also several fine rustic scenes of his in American collections.

Very few get to see either of his most radical paintings: one is tucked away in the Sorbonne, and the other is now only known from copies and prints. Those two paintings are so important that they should change the way that we think about painting in the late nineteenth century.

Lhermitte was a precocious artist. His talents were recognised when he was still a child, and he was educated at a special school which went on to become the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs. After that, he studied at the École des beaux-arts in Paris. He established his reputation at the Salon in 1864, although I have been unable to locate any suitable images of his work from the 1860s.

The persistent thread through most of Lhermitte’s work is the plight of the rural poor. In his charcoal drawing of The Cider Jug from 1874, an older woman stares at a jug of cider. Her bowl and glass are empty, and she has fallen back on drinking home-made cider to relieve her hunger and misery.

Lhermitte’s detailed realist style brought scenes such as this Apple Market, Landerneau, Brittany (c 1878) to life. With a cart on the move in the background, and sellers ready with their scales, it shows the small-scale bustle of an otherwise quiet country town.

Also painted in Brittany, Lhermitte’s sketchy Procession near Ploumanac’h (1879) shows a religious festival, with a small stream of locals making their way along a track on the open hillside towards the church. Behind its leader are women and children dressed in white, the priest in front of the Host under its canopy, then mothers carrying infants, and the elderly.

The Musée d’Orsay’s best-known painting by Lhermitte, The Harvesters’ Pay (1882), is an unusual take on the harvest. Although there are a couple of cut sheaves of wheat at the lower right, it looks at the economic and social aspects. Four of the harvesters, bearing their heavy-duty scythes, await payment by the farmer’s factor, who holds a bag of coins for the purpose.

In the centre of the painting, one of the workers is counting out his pay in front of his wife, who is feeding a young infant at her breast. To their left, another worker just sits and stares blankly into the distance, dead-beat tired and wondering whether his pittance was worth all that effort. Life was hard.

Lhermitte’s countryside wasn’t all bad, though. In The Grape Harvest (1884) there’s the lifting smile of a mother as she watches her young boy eating the grapes. Behind and to the left, though, the work of the harvest goes on, and looks particularly back-breaking. The painstakingly realist rendering of the vine leaves here lends this painting a unique texture.

The Haymakers (1887) continues a more relaxed rustic theme, perhaps picking up the traces following Jule Bastien-Lapage’s untimely death at the end of 1884. A team of haymakers are taking a short break, as the scythe undergoes repair. This is the opportunity for a little girl to grab the other tools, as her parents enjoy some time together.

As with Breton and Millet before him, Lhermitte’s most enduring expression of rural poverty was in showing those too poor to afford their own grain purchases, and forced to salvage remains left in the fields after the harvest: the Gleaners, here his version of 1887.

Lhermitte was a close friend of Émile Zola, the Naturalist novelist, and was an enthusiastic supporter of his concept of ‘experimental’ art. Unlike Impressionism, which lacked any coherent theoretical basis, Naturalism was rooted in the Positivist philosophy of the day, expounded by the likes of Hippolyte Taine and Zola, and linked to more general changes occurring in science and technology.

One of the leading scientists and thinkers of the time was the French physiologist Claude Bernard (1813-1878), whose books were read avidly by Zola and many Naturalist artists. It may seem strange that non-scientists should read a book like Bernard’s Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865), but in it Bernard expressed his views on much more than just physiology.

Following Bernard’s death, the Sorbonne (where he had taught) commissioned Lhermitte to paint his portrait in 1886. Sadly I have been unable to trace an image of the original, but Claude Bernard and His Pupils is quite a faithful copy of that original which Lhermitte exhibited at the Salon in 1889.

Bernard stressed the importance of not just observational science, but the experimental too, which inspired the Naturalists to pursue in the arts what they saw as the experimental approach. Zola observed people in life, filling notebooks with his observations of them. He then set characters up in the scenario for a novel, and they behaved according to his observations. He then documented this imaginary experiment, which became his next novel.

Lhermitte’s painting shows Bernard in the midst of performing an experiment on a rabbit, his students discussing its results, and one writing the experimental observations in the laboratory daybook.

This carefully-chosen composition is the single most explicit link between Bernard’s science and Naturalism in art. As such, it explains how much of the Naturalist painting, between about 1880 (some earlier) and the early twentieth century, came about.

Lhermitte’s explanations for Naturalism go beyond even that. His painting of The Chemist Henri-Étienne Sainte-Claire Deville, Lesson on Aluminium from the following year, also commissioned by the Sorbonne in Paris, links the movement with science and technology more generally. I apologise for the poor size and quality of this image, which is the only one that I have been able to locate.

Henri-Étienne Sainte-Claire Deville (1818-1881) was responsible for many significant discoveries in chemistry, the most important of which was a method for the industrial manufacture of aluminium. He is shown here surrounded by objects made from this new material, which quickly came to transform manufacturing, and to invade every home.

In 1889 and 1890, the Naturalist painter Léon Augustin Lhermitte (1844–1925) had stated on canvas the links between this art movement and contemporary scientific thought. In the later years of his career, he returned to painting more rural themes, but still came up with more original work.

The Goose Girl of Mézy (1892) follows the paintings of waifs and strays by Jules Bastien-Lepage. Sullen and sultry, a young girl stands defending her small flock of geese as she gleans for wheat left after the harvest. Her pinafore seems to have been handed down through the generations, and with its gaping holes is a shadow of its former self.

Lhermitte painted in pastels too through his career, and published reproductions of them were greatly appreciated by Vincent van Gogh, among others. This pastel of the Vegetable Market in St-Malo (1893) is a good example of his balance between detail, as seen in the distant crowd and shop fronts, and painterly style.

In 1889, Lhermitte was commissioned to paint Les Halles, the main and most central market in the city of Paris. He completed this, perhaps his last major work, in 1895, when it was exhibited at the Salon. The market’s origins were mediaeval, then during the nineteenth century it grew even busier, and was re-housed in iron and glass buildings erected during the 1850s. Lhermitte’s friend Émile Zola set his novel Le Ventre de Paris (1873) in this market.

Lhermitte has succeeded here in capturing the crush, rush, and human interaction of the market. His painting is an interconnected web of negotiation, carrying, and conversation, set amidst its relentless human throng.

Les Halles was dismantled and replaced with a concrete shopping mall in 1971.

In Sundown: Return of the Cattle (1897), a young woman takes a moment away from bringing her cattle back to the farm at dusk, to chat to a couple who have been working on the harvest. The man holds the broad blade of his scythe on his lap.

Peasant Woman Resting (1903) is a wonderful and quite loose portrait of a young woman resting from the work of the harvest. A sickle by her feet shows that she is a labourer rather than a gleaner.

Lhermitte often pictured family groups out in the fields, as in The Family (1908).

Gleaners Near Haystacks (1912) is another group of women gleaning, after the main harvest has been brought in.

He also captured the austere interiors of farms. His pastel of The Farmworkers’ Supper (1913) shows those who have been working outdoors during the long day enjoying a simple and small meal at its end.

Lhermitte had painted a few religious works earlier in his career, but his late pastel of The Prayer, the Church of Saint-Bonnet (before 1920) is probably the most moving. Odilon Redon and other contemporary pastellists had also depicted stained glass windows to great effect.

There was always time, though, for just another painting of gleaners, as in his Gleaning Women of 1920.

Europe had changed greatly as a result of the First World War. The high toll among the men of the countryside, swollen by those who died during the 1918-19 influenza pandemic, and advancing mechanisation, left few to swing their scythes in the grainfields. Naturalism had also passed, as the art world embraced modernist movements and styles. Lhermitte’s once-popular paintings hung briefly as a memory of the previous century, then were replaced by those of the new generation.

Impressionism was still revered, seen as the early stages in the evolution of the new. Naturalism was confused with academicism, and reviled. People forgot how, in its day, it had been the avant garde.

As another of the primary colours, yellow is a vital paint for artists. For centuries, there weren’t any particularly good greens which were also enduring, so most oil and watercolour paintings have relied on the mixture of blue and yellow to generate most of their greens.

Many yellow pigments in use, even into the twentieth century, have also shown a pronounced tendency to fade. So when someone comes along offering you a ball of compressed powder which is an intense yellow, and appears more lightfast than most that you already have, you’ll believe anything that they say. It comes from the urine of cows? No worries – how much, and when can you deliver?

This seems to have been the story behind the introduction of Indian Yellow into European painting. It had a long track-record of use in and around the Indian sub-continent, where it had featured in watercolours and gouache, and buyers in Europe were only too happy to pay quite high prices for it when it became available.

This exquisite watercolour miniature showing a Mongol Chieftain and Attendants from the Gulshan Album now in the Freer and Sackler Galleries is a good example, from around 1600. Its yellows and greens have lasted those four centuries very well, and careful testing by Elisabeth FitzHugh has shown the unmistakable presence of the chemicals known to be diagnostic of real Indian Yellow.

The snag with European paintings is that so few works have been tested, and records are so scant, that we don’t even known when Indian Yellow was first used to the west of the Middle East.

Ernst Willers’ Grove Near Ariccia in the Evening Light (1873) is one of the few European paintings known fairly unequivocally to contain Indian Yellow, used perhaps in forming its rich greens.

We know with rather greater certainty when Indian Yellow came off the market, as by the end of the nineteenth century supplies had essentially dried up. The claim is that, between the late 1500s and then, some Indian herdsmen fed their cows with mango leaves, collected the cows’ urine, and dried it to generate the pigment as balls of compressed powder, some of which still exist. In the nineteenth century, this was increasingly viewed as being cruel to the cows, and the practice was progressively eliminated.

Whether this story is accurate, or indeed the pigment ever saw much use, remains open to doubt. Certain claims, for example of a ban on the production of the pigment from 1908, have not been verified and appear legendary. But there is evidence that some artists in both India and Europe used the pigment in their paintings.

Chrome Yellow, a family of pigments ranging from pale lemon to deep orange-red, is based on lead chromate, which had been ‘discovered’ as a mineral in the middle of the eighteenth century. Its use as a pigment wasn’t recognised until the early nineteenth century, when it became increasingly popular and versatile.

Initially, its supply was quite limited, and it was expensive as a pigment as a result. As general commercial demand for the mineral increased, new sources of supply were found, and its price fell accordingly. During the latter half of the nineteenth century it was probably the mainstay yellow and orange in the palette of most painters.

The first evidence of the use of chrome yellow as a pigment in painting dates from just before 1810. Johann Friedrich Overbeck’s painting of Italia and Germania (or possibly Sulamith and Maria) was made in 1828, and is thus from the early adoption phase, when the pigment was expensive and encountered fairly infrequently. Although Overbeck was restrained in his use of colours from orange through to yellow and green, he has achieved a subtle chromatic effect in the green fabric.

Carl Blechen seems to have used Chrome Yellow more extensively in his imposing View of Assisi, painted a few years later in 1832-35. By this time, the mixture of Chrome Yellow with Prussian Blue had become known as Green Cinnabar or Chrome Green, although the chromium salt used was not itself green, of course. Prussian Blue was one of the first major ‘modern’ synthetic pigments, and had been introduced a century earlier.

By the time that Arnold Böcklin painted this, his first version of Villa by the Sea in 1864, Chrome Yellow had established itself as standard. However, this is one of a relatively small number of works which use the pigment in an almost encaustic mixture of resin and wax.

Chrome Yellow was widely used by the Impressionists and shown at the Salon, and is demonstrated well in Paul Cézanne’s famous painting of The Railway Cutting (c 1870). I believe that most if not all of the greens seen here rely on Chrome Yellow mixed with blue.

As some of the Impressionists, like Claude Monet, generated more income, they could afford to start using the newer, and far more expensive, cadmium-based pigments which were coming onto the market. Cadmium Yellow is considerably more lightfast and durable than Chrome Yellow, so during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many painters switched away from Chrome Yellow.

Walter Crane’s Neptune’s Horses (1892) is one of the later works which apparently still relied on Chrome Yellow.

During the twentieth century, Cadmium continued to displace Chrome in pigments for paints ranging from lemon to orange-red. However, both are potentially environmentally damaging, and in this century more modern, less toxic synthetic organic pigments have been introduced as substitutes. Thankfully, as both Cadmium and Chrome pigments trap their toxic salts in insoluble particles, neither presents any danger to the careful painter when used in paint. For the pastellist, though, inhalation of pigment in dust is a more significant risk.

We shouldn’t forget that Chrome Yellow was one of the key colours of Impressionism, and a great deal of nineteenth century landscape painting.

References

NS Baer, A Joel, RL Feller & N Indictor (1986) Artists’ Pigments, vol 1, ed Robert L Feller, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 74 6. (Indian Yellow)
Hermann Kühn, Mary Curran (1986) Artists’ Pigments, vol 1, ed Robert L Feller, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 74 6. (Chrome Yellow)

In Ovid’s Heroides, Ariadne is in a class of her own. She’s the only one of his heroines who not only survives, but comes out of her crisis rather well, in the end.

The daughter of King Minos of Crete, her half-brother (from her mother’s extraordinary bestial relationship) was the Minotaur. Her father blamed the Greeks for the death of her full brother, so demanded that they provided the Minotaur’s annual diet of seven young men and seven young women. The Minotaur was kept concealed inside the Labyrinth, an ingenious maze designed and built by the master artificer, Daedalus.

Theseus was the son of King Aegeus of Athens, and decided to put an end to this attrition of young Greeks by killing the Minotaur. The only way that he could gain access to it was by including himself in that year’s batch of sacrificial victims. When Theseus arrived on Crete, Ariadne fell desparately in love with him.

Ariadne came up with an ingenious plan to enable Theseus to make his way back out of the Labyrinth once he had killed the Minotaur: she provided him with a ball of thread, which he used to mark his route of entry. He could then retrace his steps along the line of thread and escape. In return for this assistance, Theseus agreed that, once he had killed the Minotaur and escaped, he would marry Ariadne.

When it was Theseus’ turn to enter the Labyrinth, Ariadne held the end of the thread, he went in, killed the Minotaur, and found his way back to her. They wasted no time, and sailed immediately from Crete for Athens. On the way back, they stopped off overnight on the island of Dia (Naxos), where they appear to have consummated their marriage. The following morning, Theseus and his crew set sail before Ariadne had awoken, abandoning her on the island, as she watched Theseus’ ship heading towards the horizon.

John William Waterhouse paints the moment that Ariadne (1898) starts to wake, as Theseus’ ship has just sailed. As she hasn’t yet realised that she has been abandoned, she lies back at ease.

On and under the couch are a couple of leopards, a clear reference to the imminent arrival of Bacchus, although his chariot is more usually drawn by lions or tigers.

By the moment shown in Angelica Kauffman’s Ariadne Abandoned by Theseus (1774), she has seen Theseus’ ship heading back to Athens, and is now swooning in the realisation that she has been jilted.

The painting which perhaps captures best Ariadne ready to write her letter to Theseus, is Paulus Bor’s Ariadne (1630-35). She looks desolated, is still undressed from bed, and clutches the thread with which she had saved his life, the thread which she thought held them together as a couple. Only now there is no one at the other end.

Evelyn De Morgan envisages her alone on the beach, in her painting of Ariadne in Naxos (1877). It’s possible that Ariadne had slept there, in the large brown blanket still wrapped around her legs, but there’s now no trace of her former husband – not even a sail on the horizon.

The other painting which I think is truly Ovidian is Herbert James Draper’s Ariadne (c 1905). Still half-naked, kneeling on a rock by the sea, she beats her breast in the grief of Theseus’ betrayal. This is a direct reference to Ovid’s lines in Ariadne’s hypothetical letter.

Ovid’s letter also contains some subtle allusions as to what happened next, but is written in ignorance of that. In a remarkable turn of fortune, who should turn up on the island of Dia/Naxos but the god Bacchus, who promptly marries Ariadne, and carries her off to Olympus with him. Maybe Bacchus’ lifestyle didn’t make him an ideal husband, but this was far better than the fate of Ovid’s other heroines.

Eugène Delacroix’s Autumn – Bacchus and Ariadne (1856-63) shows the moment of his arrival, as he helps the despondent Ariadne back up from her gloom. Behind is his chariot, here drawn by lionesses.

Jean François de Troy’s Ariadne on Naxos (1725) is the ideal romantic ending, the couple staring longingly at one another as putti cavort with fruit. But look carefully at what’s going on down at the beach, in the background.

My favourite painting of this scene has to be Lovis Corinth’s vivacious and complex Ariadne on Naxos (1913). He uses multiplex narrative to tell the whole story, from Theseus’ betrayal at the left, to the arrival of Bacchus at the right.

None, though, shows Ariadne’s revenge on Theseus.

Theseus had made an elaborate arrangement with his father, the king of Athens, to signal to him the outcome of his mission. When Theseus had sailed from Greece, his ship had black sails. The agreement was that he would change those sails to normal white (or, more likely, tan) ones in the event that he had successfully killed the Minotaur.

In his rush to abandon Ariadne, Theseus forgot to change the black sails. As the ship approached the Greek mainland, his father noticed this. Knowing that meant that they would have to continue sending young Greeks to their death on Crete, King Aegeus threw himself to his death from a cliff. Theseus was broken by grief when he realised that his carelessness had caused the suicide of his father.

I wonder if Bacchus and Ariadne ever visited Theseus, to remind him how his treachery backfired.