Next month, I will be commemorating here the centenary of the death of the great Swiss artist Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918). He is not a painter that I have known well, and I can’t recall seeing any of his paintings in the flesh. Researching his life and work has been revelatory, though, and in the coming weeks I’d like to share with you what I have found out. I hope that you too will come to appreciate the work of one of the period’s most versatile and innovative painters.

Hodler was born the first child of a poor, working family in Bern, Switzerland. His father, a carpenter, died when Hodler was seven, but the following year his mother married a second time, to a decorative painter who painted stage scenery, etc. Tuberculosis was rife in the poor quarter of the city where they lived, and Hodler saw his brothers and sisters die one after the other, then his mother died of TB too when he was only fourteen.

By that time, Hodler had been helping his stepfather in his work, and clearly showed artistic promise. In about 1868, at the age of fifteen, Hodler was apprenticed to a local (fine art) painter, Ferdinand Sommer, who painted souvenir landscapes for tourists in the manner of Alexandre Calame (1810-1864). That apprenticeship was cut short because of an accident, following which Hodler went to live with an uncle in Langenthal. There, he set up his first studio, and started to sign and sell his paintings.

That year, Hodler walked to Geneva, where he set up studio and tried to make his living from his art.

Among his earliest surviving works are impressive views of two of the most famous Alpine waterfalls: The Upper Reichenbach Falls (c 1871), above, and The Staubbach Falls (1871), below. Both are painted in oils on cardboard, and the sort of landscape which must have been very popular with tourists.

Castle Schadau with Scherzlingen Church and Blümlisalp is another tourist landscape he painted in 1871.

In 1872, Hodler was granted permission to remain in Geneva, and to copy paintings by Calame and François Diday at the Musée Rath. His talent was spotted by Barthélemy Menn, former student of Ingres and professor of painting and director of the École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva, and Hodler was offered a place there at no cost. In 1874, he won the Concours Calame with one of his landscapes.

In 1877, Hodler visited Paris, then later that year travelled to Madrid, where he stayed for several months, painting, and studying the works of the great masters in the Prado.

While he was still in Geneva, Hodler painted this rustic view of Sheep at the Sentier des Saules (1878), on the bank of the River Rhône just before it merges with the River Arve at La Jonction. This remains one of the parks in the city.

In Madrid, Hodler’s landscapes became brighter, higher in chroma, and increasingly artistic rather than just representational, as shown in this Landscape Near Madrid (1878).

Apparently after his return from Madrid, Hodler painted this view of a Watchmakers’ Workshop in Madrid (1879), one of his first figurative works.

At this time, Hodler continued his studies working as an assistant to Edouard Castres, a successful painter of panoramas.

Hodler’s early Self-portrait with Wing Collar from 1879 shows his very traditional style.

The Little Fisherman (c 1879) is a tiny oil sketch of a young boy apparently fishing on Lake Geneva.

Towards 1880, Hodler devoted much of his time to painting landscapes en plein air. At La Jonction (c 1880) is a small canvas showing the junction between the Rivers Rhône and Arve in Geneva.

In 1881, Hodler had his first paintings exhibited overseas, two being shown in London at an exhibition of Swiss art.

In the early 1880s, Hodler started painting figures in earnest, including Devotion (1882). The artist provides us with scant clues as to its reading. It appears to be set inside a church or similar communal area. The large man at the left, who is probably a priest, is leading ten family members together in prayer.

One figure, an older man dressed in a simple blue smock, looks at the priest out of the corner of his eyes. He has a wry smile on his face, as if disbelieving what the priest is praying for.

In the summer of 1883, Hodler travelled to Munich, where he studied the work of Dürer in the Pinakothek, in particular The Four Apostles which was to influence him.

By the mid 1880s, Hodler’s painting style had loosened up considerably, and his skills at depicting people had grown greatly. They are displayed in this fine portrait of an older, bearded man studying the pages of a newspaper: The Reader (c 1885)

Hodler was showing increasing interest in Symbolism, and had been developing his personal art theory since he had been a student. His work was about to change from realism.

Reference

Hans-Peter Wipplinger (ed) (2017) Ferdinand Hodler, Elective Affinities from Klimt to Schiele, Leopold Museum / Walther König. ISBN 978 3 96098 220 3.

Like Madder, Indigo is a vegetable dye which has been used to colour fabrics since ancient times. According to classical authorities, its European variant Woad was used by ancient Britons to colour their skin blue and make them look ferocious in battle. The term Indigo was then restricted to an almost identical dye produced in India and imported into Europe, but is now used for all blue dyes and pigments derived from Indigofera species of plant, shrubby members of the pea family.

When used as a dye, Indigo is highly colour-fast on wool, but fades noticeably on cotton. As a result, manufacturers, colour merchants and artists were very secretive about the processes they used to make Indigo pigment, some of which involved adulteration with wool fibres, starch, and other substances. The effect of those adulterants and manufacturing processes on the lightfastness of Indigo in oil media is not known, but in practice there is wide variation seen in paintings.

Friedrich Herlin’s altarpiece in the church of St. Jakob in Rothenburg is a relatively early example of the use of Indigo in conjunction with other blues for its most popular application, modelling drapery. The panel showing The Presentation of Christ in the Temple has some strange discolouration in the robes of the Virgin Mary in the foreground, which could be accounted for by fading of Indigo overpainting.

Rubens relied on Indigo for the dark blues in his triptych of the Descent from the Cross from 1612-14. He appears to have used it mainly in underlayers, where it is better protected against fading from light or atmospheric exposure.

Prior to about 1625, the use of Indigo in oil painting was relatively limited, and principally in underlayers to model the folds of fabrics. Then, in about 1627, Frans Hals and other Netherlandish artists started to use it more generally, and in the upper parts of the paint layer, where it was more exposed to light and atmospheric pollutants. Demand for Indigo from India rose, and it is probable that pigment manufacture became less diligent, and supplies may have been mixed with local Woad.

In Abraham Bloemaert’s The Adoration of the Magi from 1624, the cloak of the Virgin Mary appears to use two different blues, with its lower passages painted in the duller hue that is Indigo, which has faded slightly. Examination of the paint layer has shown that the artist used a beige ground, onto which he painted a thin layer of Indigo Blue mixed with Lead White.

Bloemaert then modelled the folds using a red pigment for shadows, and Lead White for brights. Over that, he painted a finer-modelled layer of Ultramarine, with Lead White for highlights. There were then several thin glazing layers of Ultramarine applied to generate the rich blue, following traditional technique.

The dullest areas are those which had the thinnest Ultramarine glazes applied, much of which have now abraded away during subsequent cleaning of the painting. The unprotected Indigo has therefore suffered sufficient exposure to fade slightly, as well as losing its rich glazes.

In Judith Leyster’s A Game of Tric-Trac (1630), the blue of the nearest player’s jacket consists of a thin medium-rich layer of Indigo over a dark brown underpainting, which is now starting to show through in the darker patches.

Hendrik Gerritsz Pot used the novel technique of putting Indigo layers over underpainting, without the protection of glazes, in his Portrait of the St Adrian Civic Guard, Haarlem from 1630. As a result of fading of the Indigo, what were originally bright blue sashes have become almost white (shown in the detail below).

Frans Hals’ Officers and Sergeants of the St Adrian Civic Guard (1633) not only shows the same group of men, but has suffered exactly the same fate with their formerly blue sashes.

In Jan Miense Molenaer’s humorous depiction of the sense of Smell (1637), Indigo with Lead White were used for the skirt of the mother cleaning her baby. This has suffered quite severe fading, the extent of which can be judged by the much darker blue seen at the edge of the panel, where the frame has shielded the pigment from light.

Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck’s Portrait of a Girl Dressed in Blue (1641) now shows the dress as a very pale and anaemic blue; judging by the thin rim of unfaded paint at the lower edge (unfortunately cropped from this image), its blue was originally quite intense. The artist did not apply any protective glazes over the Indigo Blue of the dress.

The oddly-coloured tablecloth in Verspronck’s Regentesses of the St. Elisabeth’s Hospital (1641) was originally a rich green. Unprotected Indigo Blue has faded from much of its surface, leaving most of it an odd yellow ochre hue.

Some of Vermeer’s paintings have also been affected, although thankfully much less visibly. In Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (c 1654-56), the blues, which include Indigo, appear to be well-preserved.

The background of Cornelius Jonson the Younger’s portrait of A Dutch Gentleman (1657) was once quite a dark blue, according to the evidence of the blue rim around the canvas where the frame shielded the Indigo.

Vermeer did use Indigo in his masterpiece Girl with a Pearl Earring (c 1665), in the upper of three layers which he used in the near-black background. Not that any of us would notice if it were to have faded there.

Indigo has remained in use in water-based media such as watercolours, its potential for fading being accepted by those who use it. By the late seventeenth century, it was falling out of favour for oil paints, and when Prussian Blue – an almost exact colour match – became available in the early eighteenth century, Indigo was quickly displaced by the new synthetic and more reliable pigment.

Reference

Helmut Schweppe (1997) Artists’ Pigments, vol 3, ed Elisabeth West Fitzhugh, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 76 0.
Margriet van Eikeina Hommes (2004) Changing Pictures, Discoloration in 15th-17th Century Oil Paintings, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 873 13239 5.

In the summer of 1878, John Singer Sargent had just completed his studies with Carolus-Duran, and had already started to have success at the Salon in Paris. He went off on a working holiday to Capri, staying in the village of Anacapri, as was popular with other artists at the time.

Capri was still quite a select holiday destination then, and unspoilt. But getting a local model was tricky, because of the warnings that women were given by priests. History has proved those priests only too right in their advice.

One young local woman, Rosina Ferrara, seemed happy to pose for him, though. She was only 17, and Sargent a mere 22 and just developing his skills in portraiture, following the advice of Carolus-Duran. Over the course of that summer, Sargent painted at least a dozen works featuring young Rosina, who seems to have become almost an obsession with him.

One, Dans les Oliviers, à Capri, above, he exhibited at the Salon the following year. A near-identical copy A Capriote, below, he sent back for the annual exhibition of the Society of American Artists in New York, in March 1879. The latter is now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

He also painted a pair of views of what was probably the roof of his hotel. In View of Capri, above, made on cardboard, Rosina stands looking away, her hands at her hips. In the other, Capri Girl on a Rooftop, below, she dances a tarantella to the beat of a friend with a tambourine. The latter painting Sargent dedicated “to my friend Fanny”, who is presumably Fanny Watts, who modelled for the first portrait which Sargent exhibited at the Salon in 1877.

Rosina appears to have danced for Sargent again, for him to paint her in Portrait of Rosina Ferrara, above, a precursor to his paintings of Spanish dancers, perhaps.

But of all Sargent’s paintings of Rosina, the finest portrait, possibly one of the finest of all his ‘quick’ portraits from early in his career, is another painted in oils on cardboard: Rosina Ferrara, Head of a Capri Girl.

This he dedicated to “Hyde” (the artist Frank Hyde), and signed in 1878, while he was still on Capri.

There are another couple of portraits which he painted of a young woman during that summer on Capri. Although she is in more serious mood, possibly even a little surly with ennui, I can’t help but wonder if they also show Rosina Ferrara.

Sargent left Capri, eventually returning to Paris and his inexorable rise to greatness, fortune, and success. But that wasn’t the end of Rosina’s modelling career, not by a long way. Frank Hyde, to whom Sargent had dedicated his portrait of her, painted his own in about 1880.

Here she reclines in a classical pose, the coast of Capri behind her, as she is serenaded by two young maids.

At this time, Rosina seems to have modelled for other artists too, including Adrian Stokes, who visited Capri on honeymoon, Alfred Stevens, and Charles Sprague Pearce. I have only been able to locate one work derived from what must have been several dozen paintings of her, an engraving based on a portrait by Charles Sprague Pearce, below. This was probably the work that Pearce exhibited at the Salon in 1882.

By 1891, Rosina had met the American artist George Randolph Barse, and that year they married in Rome. The couple later returned to live in the US, eventually settling in Katonah, Westchester County, NY, where Barse pursued quite a successful career.

Although very little of Barse’s work is now accessible over the internet, the large wall paintings which he made in the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress are. These were commissioned in 1895, and probably painted in the following year. The two that I show here are Romance, and Erotica (meaning love poetry rather than the modern sense of soft porn).

I don’t know whether Rosina ever modelled for her husband, or whether she may have modelled for those two particular paintings. I like to see a resemblance in them to the young woman who had John Singer Sargent so smitten that summer on Capri.

Barse and his wife were clearly very devoted. She died from pneumonia in 1934 at the age of 73. Barse struggled on for four years without her, but finally killed himself with carbon monoxide in 1938, to rejoin his muse.

Georgia – the nation, rather than the US state – is a bridge between Asia Minor, the Black Sea coast with its ancient ports, central Asia, and the Middle East. In its markets you’ll meet traders from Eastern Europe, Turkey, Russia, Iran, and deep along the old Silk Road into Asia. Its history stretches back to some of the oldest remains of our ancestors, dating from around 1.7 million years ago. It is the most probable source of domesticated grape plants, and the origin of wine-making, from around 6000 BCE.

The legendary Colchis, Jason’s destination in his quest for the Golden Fleece, was most probably on Georgia’s section of the Black Sea coast, and the Fleece itself may have been rendered golden by its use to sift gold dust from the rivers running down from the mountains. Georgia adopted Christianity as its State religion as early as 337 CE, and has long and strong links with the early Christian church in the Holy Lands.

Oddly, its best-known native is Joseph Stalin, who was born Ioseb Jughashvili in the town of Gori, to the west of the capital Tbilisi. He was a trainee priest at the Spiritual Seminary in Tbilisi, and later a meteorologist there until he was exiled to Siberia in 1903. But if you have heard of any other Georgian, they are most likely to be the country’s most famous artist, Nikoloz Aslanis Dze Pirosmanshvili, known as Niko Pirosmani (ნიკო ფიროსმანი), who was born about 5 May 1862, and died on a day between 7 and 10 (probably 9) April 1918 – a century ago.

Pirosmani is not just remarkable for being one of very few Georgians known outside his home country, but he is one of the best-known ‘primitives’ (a term I dislike because of its connotations), and was not ‘discovered’ until after his death. In this article and the next, I present a short account of his life, and a selection of his paintings, to commemorate the centenary of his death.

Pirosmani was born to a farming family in the village of Mirzaani in the eastern region of Georgia, but they soon moved to the village of Shulaveri, near to Tbilisi. When both his parents died in 1870, he was cared for by his father’s former employer, an Armenian merchant. Living within an extended family with many children, he learned to read and write both Georgian and the Russian language, Georgia then being a part of the Russian Empire.

During his youth, Pirosmani taught himself to paint, and in the 1880s turned professional, when he established a studio in Tbilisi with another self-taught artist, painting signboards. In 1890 he abandoned that, and worked on the railway, until he opened a dairy store in Tbilisi in 1894. This provided him with his most secure income, and allowed him to paint more too.

Pirosmani painted in oils on two different supports: the great majority of his works are on oilcloth, a cotton or linen base which has been coated with boiled linseed oil to make it waterproof. As that oil was boiled, most oilcloth was very dark or black in colour. Being flexible and not stretched on a wooden frame, it is far from ideal, and most of his works on oilcloth have been subsequently mounted on stretched canvas to reduce the mechanical stress on their paint layer.

The other support which he used was cardboard, which has often deteriorated since, and is also likely to have been mounted on a more recent support such as stretched canvas. His painted signs were often made on metal, although I don’t think that he could ever afford the luxury of copper. He did date a few of his works; as most remain undated, I group them by motif rather than in chronological order.

Many of his surviving paintings are of animals, which he appears to have painted entirely from memory, in his own idiosyncratic ways.

Curiously, Pirosmani’s undated White Cow on a Black Background was painted not on the naturally black oilcloth, but cardboard. Note the cast shadows, which are a feature of many of his paintings.

Farmer with a Bull from 1916 shows his characteristic stylisation of very familiar subjects.

White Sow with Piglets is another undated work on cardboard, this time with only vestigial cast shadows.

Pirosmani’s undated Lamb comes with symbolic associations of Easter, both the season for lambing and the Christian festival centred on the symbolism of the lamb. Shown are Easter eggs and a symbol of Easter, together with the meadow flowers of Spring. Around the lamb’s neck is a red and white ribbon, symbolising the death of Jesus Christ.

Some of Pirosmani’s nocturnes are surprisingly sophisticated in their depiction of light. A good example is his undated A Fox in Moonlight, with its backlighting (contrenuit, I suppose!) and careful composition.

His undated painting of a Black Bear most probably shows a Eurasian Brown Bear, which can be quite black in colour. Still quite numerous in Georgia, he had probably seen such bears both in the wild and in captivity.

A Sitting Yellow Lion (c 1900-1918) is an animal – the Asiatic Lion – that Pirosmani is only likely to have seen in captivity. During his lifetime, a few were still alive in the upper reaches of the River Euphrates and the Zagros Mountains, but none in Georgia.

Tatar Camel Driver (c 1900-1918) would still have been quite a common sight in parts of Tbilisi visited by traders from the south, and Pirosmani was clearly very familiar with the animal.

A Deer, from about 1905, shows another species with which Pirosmani would have been very familiar.

Pirosmani’s A Family of Deer from 1917 shows a family group drinking at a pool in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, which mark the northern borders of Georgia.

Exhibition

From 26 October 2018 until 27 January 2019, the Albertina in Vienna, Austria, is showing a “comprehensive” exhibition of Pirosmani’s paintings. Full details are here.

In the first of these two articles commemorating the centenary of the death of the great Georgian artist Niko Pirosmani (1862–1918), I looked at his paintings of animals. This article considers his other paintings.

Pirosmani’s Company Visit from 1917 was, like his sign paintings, made on metal, and I wonder if it wasn’t intended to be the sign of one of the taverns which he stayed at during the final years of his life. It shows a waiter taking a tray of Georgian wine and bread to a customer, with a background of grapes.

A Tatar Fruiterer from about 1910-12 is one of his more complex paintings, and shows a fruit shop in the capital, Tbilisi, where a mother, accompanied by her young child, is just paying for a bag full of fruit. Included are three domestic animals: a small bird in a cage, a large dog, and a smaller animal which is most probably a cat.

Vintage, from 1906, is another more complex work, showing the grape harvest at the end of the summer, and the processing of grapes to make wine. It is quite black because it was painted on oilcloth, whose heated oil makes it very dark in colour.

Accompanying the scenes of grape harvest and processing is the start of an al fresco feast, with one animal being slaughtered, another roasting on a spit, and a group already sat down ready to eat and drink.

Pirosmani was particularly fond of painting feasts, which must have been the highlight of his social calendar.

Feast of the Malakans or Molokani Carousing from about 1905 shows a group eating, drinking and singing together around a table. Most of Pirosmani’s paintings of feasts adhere to the same formal composition, like this.

The Feast shows another group, using drinking horns for their wine.

Feast of Merchants from Tbilisi with a Gramophone is a fascinating but sadly undated painting showing the introduction of new technolgical advances in the form of a wind-up gramophone, phonograph or record-player with its early loudspeaker horn. This would have been used to provide the group with musical entertainment through their meal. Note, though, that there are still traditional Georgian musical instruments hanging on the wall behind.

The gramophone was the successor to the original wax cylinder phonograph, and was introduced during the 1890s. It was the first popular device to be able to play commercial pre-recorded music, and almost certainly dates the painting to after 1900.

A Robber with a Stolen Horse is another atmospheric nocturne with backlighting from a full moon. Pirosmani depicts the moon as being quite close to its natural size, rather than enlarged as in many other ‘naïve’ paintings, and shows the cast shadows of the horses.

Georgia has had railways since 1871, when its first route opened near the Black Sea in the west of the country. This was extended east through Kakhetia by 1883, to link with Baku in Azerbaijan, allowing the export of Caspian oil through the Georgian port of Batumi. Pirosmani’s nocturne of Train in Kakhetia from about 1895-1918 undoubtedly relied on his own experience working on the railway in the early 1890s.

It shows the loading or unloading of animal carcases and wine, in casks and amphora, on the plain below the foothills of the eastern Caucasus Mountains.

Six-Scene Panel is one of Pirosmani’s largest and most ambitious works painted entirely on oilcloth. The panels don’t appear to show a single continuous narrative, but six scenes which the artist linked together to describe the land of his birth. From the top left, they show feasting on the bank of a river; cattle and wagons in more mountainous terrain, probably in the north of the country; feasting during the grape harvest; (bottom row) feasting in the country; the funicular railway in Tbilisi, which was built by a Belgian and opened in 1905; another view of Tbilisi.

Self-portrait (1900) is one of several which he made during his lifetime. In 1900, Pirosmani went missing for some months, following which he adopted a vagrant lifestyle, living sporadically in taverns where he paid for his keep with paintings.

In about 1905, a French singer came to Tbilisi, and Pirosmani tried to court her. Although he doesn’t appear to have been successful, and the relationship never went any further, in 1909 he painted a portrait of her in The Actress Margarita, which is one of his few surviving paintings on canvas.

In 1913, Pirosmani’s paintings were noticed by a Russian poet and artists who had come to Georgia in search of “naïve” art. They promoted Pirosmani’s paintings in Moscow, where four examples of his work were exhibited alongside those of other self-taught artists.

Pirosmani’s Portrait of Ilya Zdanevich was commissioned by one of the Russian artists, its subject, who was a Futurist.

The Wounded Soldier is one of Pirosmani’s oil paintings on cardboard, which was only discovered in 2011.

Pirosmani’s first solo exhibition was held in Tbilisi in 1916, but by that time he was in decline due to his vagrancy and alcoholism. He died in poverty on a date between 7 and 10 April 1918, probably on 9 April.

Although he was not forgotten in Georgia, his international reputation was initiated by an exhibition in Kiev in 1931, and his popularity rose during the 1950s.

Ilya Zdanevich fled Russia in the 1930s, and settled in Paris, where he seems to have introduced Pablo Picasso to Pirosmani’s art. Picasso, in turn, is believed to have painted two posthumous portraits of Pirosmani, of which one dated 1972 is currently known. Inevitably, Picasso’s Portrait of Pirosmani (1972) is painted using thick black straight lines, and neither resembles Pirosmani nor any of his work, but it reinforced the Georgian’s reputation, and inflated the prices paid for his paintings at auction.

Exhibition

From 26 October 2018 until 27 January 2019, the Albertina in Vienna, Austria, is showing a “comprehensive” exhibition of Pirosmani’s paintings. Full details are here.

As Ovid nears the end of the last book of his Metamorphoses, he has just told of the transformation of King Numa’s inconsolable widow Egeria into a spring. He still has some key moments in Roman history to cover before reaching Julius Caesar.

The Story

We next are taken through a short series of strange events which occurred during the early history of the city of Rome. First, an Etruscan was ploughing his fields when one of the clods was transformed into a prophet named Tages. Ovid then mentions the spear of Romulus, which was transformed into a tree on the top of the Palatine hill in Rome.

He moves on to the great early Roman general Cipus, who one day discovered that he had grown horns on his head. He was invited to become the King of Rome, but used a ploy to have himself banned from even entering the city. The Senate then gave him a plot of land outside the walls, commemorating his actions in a carving on the city’s nearby gate.

Ovid then gives his account of the bringing of the god Aesculapius (Asclepius) to the city, which at the time was suffering an epidemic of a fatal disease:
A dire contagion had infested long
the Latin air, and men’s pale bodies were
deformed by a consumption that dried up
the blood. When, frightened by so many deaths,
they found all mortal efforts could avail
them nothing, and physicians’ skill had no
effect, they sought the aid of heaven. They sent
envoys to Delphi center of the world,
and they entreated Phoebus to give aid
in their distress, and by response renew
their wasting lives and end a city’s woe.
While ground, and laurels and the quivers which
the god hung there all shook, the tripod gave
this answer from the deep recesses hid
within the shrine, and stirred with trembling their
astonished hearts —
“What you are seeking here,
O Romans, you should seek for nearer you.
Then seek it nearer, for you do not need
Apollo to relieve your wasting plague,
you need Apollo’s son. Go then to him
with a good omen and invite his aid.”

The Senate despatched a party to the port of Epidaurus in quest of Aesculapius, a son of Apollo. The envoy leading that mission had a dream one night, in which he saw Aesculapius beside his bed, holding a staff around which a snake was entwined. The god told the envoy that he would change into a larger snake, for the Romans to find and take back with them.

The following morning, the Romans gathered at the god’s temple, where they saw a large golden snake, which the priest told them was the god Aesculapius. The snake promptly slithered down to the port, where the Roman ships were berthed. It boarded one of them, so the Roman party set sail to take it back to Rome with them.

Ovid provides a long illustrated list of the places that they sailed past in their return journey, including a stop at Antium during bad weather. The ships finally sailed up the River Tiber to the city of Rome, where they were greeted by great crowds:
The serpent-deity has entered Rome,
the world’s new capital and, lifting up
his head above the summit of the mast,
looked far and near for a congenial home.
The river there, dividing, flows about
a place known as the Island, on both sides
an equal stream glides past dry middle ground.
And here the serpent child of Phoebus left
the Roman ship, took his own heavenly form,
and brought the mourning city health once more.

So Aesculapius the god ended the epidemic which had been killing so many of the citizens of Rome.

The Paintings

The short stories of strange happenings, including the transformation of Tages from a clod of earth, the turning of Romulus’ staff into a tree, and the horns of Cipus, seem to have escaped the attention of major painters, but the bringing of Aesculapius to Rome has been part of several intriguing paintings.

I have previously looked at depictions of Aesculapius more generally, from which I bring these, showing Ovid’s story.

When I first looked at Sebastiano Ricci’s The Dream of Aesculapius (c 1718), I couldn’t identify its literary reference. In the light of Ovid’s account here, it clearly shows Aesculapius, clutching his staff with snake in his right hand, appearing in the dream of the Roman envoy at Epidaurus.

Although Jules-Élie Delaunay’s The Plague of Rome (1869) is based on the account in Jacques de Voragine’s The Golden Legend, that refers in turn to the story told by Ovid here. A pair of angels were claimed to have appeared, one good, the other bad. The good angel then gave the commands for people to die of the plague, and the bad angel carried the commands out. At the upper right edge of the canvas, the anachronistic white statue shows Aesculapius, who was to be the city’s salvation.

A drawing attributed to Jacques-Charles Bordier du Bignon, Aesculapius Routing Death (1822), also appears to have its roots in Rome’s plight. Aesculapius has two staffs, with which he is despatching the ‘grim reaper’ of Death. The woman to the right of Aesculapius has been thought to be Ceres, as she is pouring out her breast milk to feed the starving, something not mentioned in Ovid’s account.

There are also general representations of the god with his trademark serpentine staff, such as Giovanni Battista Cipriani’s drawing of Aesculapius Holding a Staff Encircled by a Snake, completed before the artist’s death in 1785.

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 first article in my series to commemorate the centenary of the death of the Swiss artist Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918) showed some of his realist paintings from the early years of his career. During the late 1880s, he started to develop his mature style, a form of Symbolism which he referred to as Parallelism.

It was also a period of great change in his personal life. In 1887, Hodler and his partner Augustine Dupin (1852-1909) had a son. Two years later, Hodler married Bertha Stucki, but they divorced in 1891. He met his future second wife, Berthe Jacques (1868-1957), in 1894. All three of his partners modelled for his paintings, although not, as far as I can tell, simultaneously.

Hodler’s Portrait of Hélène Weiglé (1888) remains firmly rooted in his early style, but signs of his transition are starting to become apparent in the unconventional pose, and the separation of the figure from its surroundings.

The Miller, his Son and the Donkey (c 1888) is a delightful depiction of this classical fable or folk story of a miller and his son who are repeatedly corrected by others for their treatment of the donkey, in particular which of the pair should ride the animal. At this point in the story, it is the miller who is being borne by the donkey, and his son who is driving the animal. Three women passing by are telling the miller what he should be doing, which is apparently quite different.

The landscape background is very similar to others which he painted at this time, and remains thoroughly realist.

Hodler’s painting The Boxer’s Procession was awarded a distinction at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889, his first major international recognition.

Night (1889-90) marks Hodler’s turn towards more Symbolist motifs. Four young men and three young women are sleeping outdoors, under black blankets. In the middle of the group, a black-cloaked figure is crouching between the legs of one of the men, who is alarmed; the figure represents death. This painting can therefore be read as telling the all too common story of early death among adults at the time, notably from tuberculosis and other infectious diseases, something that Hodler knew well.

This painting was submitted for exhibition in Geneva in 1891, but was rejected as being obscene, so Hodler exhibited it in a separate building nearby, causing quite a scandal. The artist also submitted it to the Salon in Paris, where it received praise from Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and the sculptor Auguste Rodin. It was exhibited again at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900, again to acclaim.

Hodler wrote later that he considered this his first work to have been entirely his own in terms of conception and staging.

Hodler’s landscape motifs had shifted from the influence of Calame, and were exploring symmetry and rhythms in nature, as in The Road to Evordes (c 1890), above, and Bank of the Rhone (1891), below.

Hodler often painted the same landscapes repeatedly, although not in the same way as Claude Monet’s formal series. These can afford valuable insights into his changing style. Two particularly informative examples are identical views At the Foot of Petit Salève. That above was painted in about 1890, and that below in about 1893.

From 1891, Hodler worked on a series of paintings showing tired-out men. The World-Weary (1891-92) was another important early work on his road to Parallelism, with its emphasis on the symmetry and rhythms seen in society. He painted this from models who sat for him in a local cemetery during the autumn of 1891, and the finished work was exhibited in Geneva in 1892.

The Disappointed Souls (1892), another in this series, also shows five older men, this time dressed in black robes and sat on a bench in barren fields similar to those seen in Night. It too was exhibited in Geneva in 1892.

The Disillusioned One (1892) singles out one of the men, at the left end of The Disappointed Souls, and appears to have been one of his studies for the group.

Hodler continued to paint portraits over this period. His Portrait of Madame de R (1893) shows how far his changing style had come from that of Hélène Weiglé just five years earlier.

This Portrait of Berthe Jacques, the Artist’s Wife was painted in 1894, the year that they met, and is most unusual in her pose, facing away from the viewer, with her head turned in profile.

Hodler also started to develop lasting motifs based on standing children, as seen in Childhood (1893), or women, who formed into rhythmic and symmetric groups which are characteristic of his mature Parallelism. These evolved through several stages, and were often set in rolling meadows, which I will show in the coming articles in this series.

Reference

Hans-Peter Wipplinger (ed) (2017) Ferdinand Hodler, Elective Affinities from Klimt to Schiele, Leopold Museum / Walther König. ISBN 978 3 96098 220 3.

By the nineteenth century, ‘genteel’ people (such as patrons of the arts) were starting to discover the challenges and rewards of Europe’s mountainous and wild regions, including the Alps and Switzerland. Just as artists like JMW Turner sold paintings in their home markets showing the savage beauty of the distant Alps, so Swiss painters came to sell local paintings to intrepid and awe-struck tourists.

Among them was Alexandre Calame (1810–1864), who was an important influence on the early work of Ferdinand Hodler, and remains one of Switzerland’s major artists. This article and its sequel look briefly at the career and work of Calame, whose paintings have since travelled out to collections all over Europe and North America.

Calame was born in a small village, which has since grown to the town housing the worldwide HQ of Nestlé, on the shore of Lake Geneva. He lost one eye in a childhood accident, and the family moved to Geneva when he was fourteen. Two years later, his father was killed in an accident, and the young Calame had to start bringing money into the family by colouring black and white engravings to sell to tourists, as well as working in a bank.

In 1829, Calame’s artistic talents were spotted by the banker who was to be his early patron, and he started to learn to paint with another great Swiss landscape artist, François Diday (1802-77).

Although dated to about 1830, Calame’s superb Swiss Landscape seems too mature for someone so early in their training. It shows the shore of one of the country’s large lakes, probably Lake Geneva, and is a textbook example of aerial perspective.

Calame’s View of Bouveret from 1833 also attests to his very rapid development. At this time, the mountains remain distant and almost lost from view, and a grey heron stalks at the water’s edge in the foreground. Bouveret is at the southern end of Lake Geneva, close to the border with France.

By 1834, Calame had set up his own studio, and was already teaching drawing.

In 1835, Calame started travelling, first to the Bernese Oberland in central Switzerland, where he painted its spectacular scenery and rural scenes. In his highly detailed view of a Farm with Peasant and Animals (1833-36), a woman sits on a wooden drinking trough as her goats, sheep and chickens wander in the yard between the tumbledown buildings. That year, he exhibited his first work(s) at the Salon in Paris.

Calame’s paintings were now selling healthily, and he was becoming well-known in Germany and France. In 1838, he visited the Netherlands, where he studied the landscape masters including Jacob van Ruisdael and Meindert Hobbema, who were to influence his later work. The following year, his third exhibiting at the Salon in Paris, secured his international reputation, and ensured a steady stream of lucrative work.

Workshop in Valais (1840) shows the remains of an old workshop in the south-west of Switzerland, in a painting which is unusually sketchy for Calame, suggesting that he may have painted it largely in front of the motif.

The influence of van Ruisdael and Hobbema on Calame’s paintings is seen most strongly in the latter’s Landscape (1830-45), which surely must have been painted after he had returned from the Netherlands in 1838.

Fallen Tree (1839-45) is a marvellous study which also bears the hallmarks of being painted largely en plein air, despite its great detail.

In 1844, Calame travelled to Italy with some of his students, but suffered from dysentery which limited his ability to paint during the trip. He did, though, advance his skills in painting in oils en plein air, and demonstrated that he was able to paint the motifs of the Roman Campagna as well as the Alps.

This was shortly after Camille Corot’s formative visits to the Roman Campagna, when such experience was considered an essential part of the training of all good landscape artists. With that and his knowledge of the great Dutch landscape masters, Calame was at last fully qualified in the eyes of his peers.

Stormy Mountain Torrent (1848) is typical of many of Calame’s commissions – and by this time he worked almost entirely to commission – for what he termed his “Swiss horrors”. These brought together the forbidding mountainous terrain of the Alps, stormy weather, and a raging torrent, although in nature those sights would have been unlikely to have been synchronous.

Lake Lucerne is a huge lake of complex form carved into the heart of Switzerland and is known by many names. Among those are Vierwaldstättersee and the Lake of the Four Cantons; its four arms and other segments are often known by names such as Urnersee, Küssnachtersee, and Luzernersee. It became a favourite motif for Calame.

View of the Urnersee is an oil sketch of part of Lake Lucerne which Calame painted in 1848, in which he brings together the rugged cliffs, twisted trees, and just a hint of its mountainous backdrop.

Painted in the studio the following year, his finished View of Lake Geneva (showing Lac Léman, Genfersee or Lake Geneva, not Lake Lucerne) (1849) includes some people and the distinctive sailing boats of the Swiss lakes, and one small bird in the shallows.

Vierwaldstättersee (1849) is an elevated view of Lake Lucerne again with the mountains beyond.

Reference

Alberto de Andrés (2006) Alpine Views, Alexandre Calame and the Swiss Landscape, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 12138 4.

For something which many say is not a colour in its own right, merely the absence of colour and light, black has attracted a lot of attention among painters. For centuries they argued over which was the blackest of blacks, then along came the Impressionists who tried to tell us that we should never paint a true black anywhere.

Yet, from all the evidence of prehistoric cave paintings, black was the first colour in the palette, and the first pigment used by humans.

Traditionally, single-pigment blacks have relied on elemental carbon – the Carbon Blacks. The first and, until relatively recently, most popular source has been charcoal made by the controlled charring of plant matter, particularly thinner branches and twigs of trees and shrubs. There have been many alternative sources, including the mineral graphite (a layered carbon crystal), and carbon from the combustion of almost anything else, including ivory, animal bone, seeds, and organic fuels such as oils.

Charcoal is readily made, and its manufacture is still a traditional woodland industry. Careful selection or trained growth produces sticks of varying density and properties which have been widely used for drawing, and are commonly found in the underdrawings of oil paintings.

Some works in charcoal have attained cult status, including Leonardo da Vinci’s The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the Infant Saint John the Baptist, popularly known as The Burlington House Cartoon (c 1499-1500). But in general such drawings are not intended to be finished works in their own right, and are all too often ephemeral.

Giovanni Bellini used Charcoal Black pigment in his The Feast of the Gods (1514-1529), his last painting which was completed after his death by Titian. Although they were probably sparing in their use of black, the large black bird seen in the middle of the gods, in the detail below, appears to have been painted almost entirely using Charcoal Black.

There are more sustained passages of black in Maerten van Heemskerck’s The Rest on the Flight into Egypt (c 1530). These appear low on the Virgin Mary’s robe at the right, and in the shadows of the trees at the upper left. Microscopy of samples taken from the paint layer forming the robe shows it contains particles of wood char, confirming his use of Charcoal Black.

El Greco’s The Disrobing of Christ (1583-84) is a good example of the extensive use throughout the work of Charcoal Black pigment.

Carbon-based pigments make near-ideal black paints regardless of the binding medium being used. Mineral carbons, in the form of coal and graphite, have proved the least suitable. Whether mined or synthetic, graphite produces a dark grey paint with a distinct sheen, although it has been an ideal ‘lead’ for drawing.

Most carbon pigments do have a slight colour tint to them, though, commonly blue or brown. When used with drying oil as a binder, carbon takes up more binder than any other pigment, and is notoriously slow to dry. As a result, drying accelerators, such as copper salts in the form of Verdigris, have often been added to improve drying performance.

In their quest for the ‘blackest black’, painters have been prepared to try carbon blacks derived from some unusual, and invariably expensive, sources. This has resulted in pigments such as Vine Black (from charred marc, the residue from winemaking), Swedish Black (charred birch bark), Peach Black (charred peach pits), and Cherrystone Black (charred cherry stones).

One longstanding source has been the charring of animal bones and related waste – Bone Black. This has been used since before the Middle Ages, but became the dominant source during the eighteenth century, particularly in its highest quality Ivory Black, a curiously attractive oxymoron. As long as painters have been sold Ivory Black it has been disputed that the pigment has ever been made from significant quantities of ivory. There is no doubt, though, that horn and antlers have been charred for it.

Peter Paul Rubens’ Samson and Delilah (c 1609-10) is one of relatively few paintings which has been shown to contain both Charcoal Black and Bone/Ivory Black pigments, and was made at the time that the latter was starting to become more popular than vegetable blacks.

Dirk Bouts’ The Virgin and Child (c 1465) shows the relatively early use of Bone/Ivory Black pigment.

The blacks used in William Hogarth’s Marriage A-la-Mode series are of animal origin, as seen in The Tête à Tête (c 1743).

When Impressionism developed in the latter half of the nineteenth century, one of its tenets was to banish dark colours, including black, from the palette. Monet’s stated opposition against black was so strong that, after his death, Georges Clemenceau is alleged to have had the black drapes removed from Monet’s coffin, exclaiming: “No! No black for Monet!”

In truth, there are plenty of blacks seen in Impressionist paintings. Monet may at times have mixed his own from three different colours, but he also knew of the danger that they would produce a dark muddy grey, not a true black. Other Impressionists and leading artists of the time were less convinced of the need to remove black from their palettes.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir has certainly been sparing in his use of Ivory/Bone Black in his painting At the Theatre (La Première Sortie) of 1876-7, but it has been found in the passages which look, well, black, such as the rail at the lower left.

The same pigment is seen in many of the details in Renoir’s By the Water (c 1880) too.

Édouard Manet seems to have had no such concerns in his use of Bone/Ivory Black in Corner of a Café-Concert from 1878-80.

Finally, there are innumerable dots of Ivory/Bone Black in Georges Seurat’s huge divisionist masterwork Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-6), and in its darkest areas they become confluent, just like a normal painting.

Most recently, some modern synthetic organic pigments have been offered in black paint. The best-known, perhaps, is also known as Perylene Green, which in concentration becomes Perylene Black. It’s particularly useful for the darkest shadows in foliage. But for general use, Ivory/Bone Black has stayed on most palettes.

For there are always times when an artist needs that blackest black.

Reference

John Winter and Elisabeth West FitzHugh (2007) Artists’ Pigments, vol 4, ed Barbara H Berrie, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 23 4.

My interest in the paintings of Louisa Anne Beresford (née Stuart), Marchioness of Waterford (1818-1891) arose as the result of today being the bicentenary of her birth, on 14 April 1818, and the repeated statement that she was a Pre-Raphaelite. What I have found is fascinating, and her paintings worth looking at, but quite different.

Beresford was born in Paris into British nobility, the daughter of a Baronet whose family home was a castle overlooking the English Channel, who happened to be the British Ambassador in Paris at the time. In 1842, she married the Marquess of Waterford, so acquiring her title.

She was apparently taught drawing by John Ruskin, although as he was a year younger than her, I suspect that was not until her adult life. She was also allegedly taught to paint by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, although as he was ten years younger than her, I suspect that did not start until after 1850.

But she was different. One of the family estates included the small village of Ford, close to the eastern end of the Scottish border in Northumberland. When Beresford’s husband died in a riding accident in 1859, she determined that she would improve the welfare of her tenants, so rebuilt their houses and the village church, and had a new school constructed for them in 1860.

She painted extensive murals for the school, now known as Lady Waterford Hall, although sadly I have been unable to locate good images of them. These were painted on large sheets of paper, which were then mounted on canvas and affixed to the walls, and were not completed until 1882. From 1880, she was also occupied in work to prevent the family castle in Dorset from collapsing as a result of coastal erosion.

As a friend of Rossetti and Ruskin, Beresford was a member of the Pre-Raphaelite inner circle. It is thought that she modelled for John Everett Millais, although I don’t know of any identifications of her in his paintings.

Apart from her wall paintings, very little of her work is now accessible. The only works that I have been able to trace in public collections are one book of watercolour sketches spanning the years 1887-88, which is in the National Portrait Gallery, and a couple of larger watercolours in the Tate.

The book in the National Portrait Gallery contains a series of pencil and watercolour sketches made by Beresford over a period of about a year, from the middle of 1887. Most, like this sketch of an Unknown Child from 19 June 1887, are brisk and painterly, and have no further identification.

Several show scenes such as a Group of Five Men Working with a Net (1887) which were painted on the coast, most probably near the artist’s family home in Dorset. Her estate in Northumberland was well inland.

Two Unknown Men, Possibly Fishermen, from 26 July 1887, shows a fish of impressive size.

Beresford’s portrait of Marianne Margaret Egerton (née Compton), Viscountess Alford (‘Lady Marian Alford’) (30 August 1887) shows this elderly amateur artist, patron of the arts, and a particular champion of needlework, both as a fine art and for the employment of women. Although Alford was only a year older than Beresford, she died the following year.

Beresford’s small paintings of children, as in Three Unknown Children and a Cat, painted on 25 October 1887, are particularly good.

Her portrait of an Old Navvy (26 October 1887) demonstrates her use of Chinese White rather than reserved space.

This painting of an Unknown Boy drinking at a fountain on 3 February 1888 is one of the finest in the book.

These Two Unknown Girls were painted on 17 April 1888.

Her more substantial paintings include this undated scene of Two Children Picking Flowers, which remains in a private collection.

Her two undated paintings in the Tate’s collection are both of religious motifs, which may have coincided with her work on related themes for the murals in the village school in Northumberland. That above shows Christ Raising the Dead and does have a distinct Pre-Raphaelite feel to it. Sleeping Disciples below features a timeless composition and skilful use of colour.

Beresford died in 1891, and is buried in Ford churchyard; her gravestone was designed by George Frederic Watts, and its slab by his wife.

It is tragic that so few of her paintings are now accessible. As she had little incentive to sell her work, and doesn’t appear to have exhibited much until the 1870s, most must have gone into private collections. What remains suggests that there may be hidden treasures; for someone with the time and energy to track her paintings down, the reward could be well worth their effort. They might then discover whether she really was a Pre-Raphaelite artist.

Accustomed as we are to viewing bloody casualty simulations and surgical procedures on TV, Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp still strikes many modern viewers as a strange painting. In what at first appears to be another of his wonderful group portraits, said Dr Tulp is in the midst of dissecting a human forearm, still attached to its former user.

Another gruesome work, Enrique Simonet’s The Autopsy made that artist’s reputation at the Salon in 1895, and Thomas Eakins’ painting of surgery in The Agnew Clinic (1889) is recognised as one of his major works, although at the time controversial for its depiction of a nude woman.

There may seem little difference between depictions of anatomising, autopsies, and surgery, and reading around there appears to be a great deal of confusion between them, even among those who painted them. This article looks at some important works in this strange sub-genre, and how they might be read.

Anatomising

Rembrandt painted his Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp in 1632, a decade before his Night Watch. An early commission soon after his arrival in Amsterdam, it is unmistakeably a group portrait of distinguished members of the Surgeons’ Guild in their working environment. Most remarkable is the fact that its principal, Dr Tulp, and most of his colleagues are not looking at the dissected forearm.

Rembrandt was by no means the first Dutch artist to paint such a group portrait. Back in 1617, Michiel van Mierevelt and his son Pieter, specialists in portraiture, had painted The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Willem van der Meer. Here the company is larger, and all ignoring the cadaver in front of them, preferring to look at the painter.

At that time, surgery was quite separate from medicine, and more of a craft. In the absence of any form of anaesthesia, surgical procedures were almost invariably as brief as possible, and usually (mercifully for the patient) far too swift for an artist to paint them. Besides, the dangers of haemorrhage and infection were so great that surgery was generally dreaded as a likely precursor to death.

Surgeons are, of course, highly reliant on their anatomical knowledge, something learned and reinforced repeatedly by the dissection of cadavers. Although those bodies were sometimes obtained through a trade based on grave-robbing, the most reliable supply came from the execution of criminals – the source of the unfortunate Aris Kindt whose body fills the middle of the Rembrandt.

Dissection, often in public, was part of the punishment of those who were executed for crimes. They may have been dead for a few hours by then, but no effort would be spared to deprive them of the last dignity. This is shown very clearly in William Hogarth’s fourth and final stage of cruelty, from 1751.

By The Reward of Cruelty, the protagonist of the series has been tried, convicted, and hanged, and his body handed over for dissection. This was not yet routine, but the following year the Murder Act made it standard that the bodies of murderers would be handed over for dissection, and would not be buried, as a further penalty for the crime.

The noose remains around his neck, and the mutilation which his body is subjected to reflects the cruelties previously inflicted on animals: his eye is removed, his intestines coiled out into a pail, a dog is about to make off with his heart (shown in popular not anatomical form), and incisions are being made in the chest and left foot. In the left foreground, previous skulls and bones are being boiled to prepare them for anatomical specimens.

The room is the round anatomical demonstration theatre of the Surgeon’s Hall. Presiding over the scene is John Freke, then President of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, who had been an admirer of Hogarth’s work until the pair quarrelled over Handel’s music.

The skeleton on the left is that of James Field, a boxer who was hanged just before the first prints of this series were issued. That on the right is of Macleane, a notorious highwayman who had been hanged the previous year.

Human dissections for anatomy teaching continue, although during the twentieth century they came to rely on those who generously ‘gave their body to science’, and growing respect was paid to the deceased. Their depiction in visual art has all but ceased, which may seem the more puzzling as many painters who underwent formal training studied anatomy, often with the aid of dissections.

Autopsies

By the nineteenth century, advances in medicine and surgery had reached the point where the subjects were transitioning from superstition to science. Disciplines such as pathology were established, and doctors became deeply interested in causes of death – particularly as they could help the quest to prolong healthy life. One of the advances in pathology was the autopsy, in which a small number of doctors (often only one) would dissect the cadaver and perform gross examinations – not elaborate anatomical displays – to try to determine the cause and mechanism of death.

This was all part of the rise of objectivity in science during the middle of the nineteenth century, and led to microscopic examination of samples of various organs, and developing understanding of disease processes – a prerequisite for the development of effective treatment.

In 1876, Henri Gervex painted an Autopsy at the Hôtel-Dieu. Although that exhibited work is currently inaccessible, above is a study which he made for it earlier that year. This was the main Paris morgue of the day, and the corpse being examined is so thin as to have died as a result of starvation – in Paris, in 1876.

This scene contrasts with earlier anatomy demonstrations. Autopsies have often taken place in the basements of hospitals, in dark and dingy surroundings. Gervex appears to have been one of the first artists to have used an autopsy for a stark social message, one which was common among Naturalists.

Almost twenty years later, in the Salon of 1895, Enrique Simonet Lombardo enjoyed great success with another painting of a similar theme: The Autopsy also known as Anatomy of the Heart; She had a Heart! (1890), in which the victim is a young woman who has drowned herself. Here is another social message: was she an Ophelia, or one of the many ‘fallen women’ who decided to end her life with one final fall?

Surgery

For surgeons, one of the watersheds was the discovery of general anaesthesia during the 1840s. Prior to that, all they could attempt were brief life-saving procedures; with general anaesthetics all those centuries of studying anatomy suddenly enabled surgeons to perform lengthy procedures with patients who were relaxed and unconscious. I have looked more generally at paintings of hospital medicine and surgery here.

Surgery was transformed from rushed mutilations to theatrical performance. Its empires grew, and their leaders wanted their portraits painted. In The Agnew Clinic (1889), Thomas Eakins shows a retiring professor of surgery, Dr. David Hayes Agnew, at work in the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. His patient is a woman, who is partially naked (to the consternation of many who saw this), 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. These lead figures are paying attention to the patient rather than their teacher; although the teaching is professorial and theatrical, its goal is here the cure of the patient.

Puzzles

In the anatomy class, we have group portraits of successful surgeons in their workplace. In the autopsy, we have a hidden corner of the hospital, where the tragedy of death is used to comment about contemporary society. In the operating theatre, we finally have advancing medical science being applied to change people’s lives. But there are still a couple of paintings which don’t fit those moulds.

Gabriel von Max’s Der Anatom, which can surely only be translated as The Anatomist, of 1869 doesn’t appear to be anatomising to me. A young woman – every bit as beautiful as Simonet’s drowning victim – lies naked under a diaphanous sheet. Peeling back that sheet is a significantly older well-dressed man, his eyes downcast, and his chin resting on his left hand.

The cavader rests on a mortuary slab in a darkened office, with a couple of human skulls and piles of papers on the desk in the background. There are no signs of dissection instruments or the trappings of a hospital mortuary, nor had any internal examination of the body commenced.

My impression is that this depicts the moments before the start of an autopsy, in which the pathologist is contemplating the tragic premature death of the woman. Anything else would only become deeply sinister.

Early in his career, during his ‘dark period’ in 1869, Paul Cézanne painted Preparation for the Funeral or Autopsy (1869), possibly intended for the hospital in his home town of Aix. This seems to have been the culmination in a sequence of works including The Rape and The Murder.

A corpse is propped up in a semi-recumbent position, its arms by its sides. A man, dressed as a workman rather than a doctor, is working with both hands obscured at the far side of the cadaver, to the outside of its thigh. Standing to the right, with her back towards the viewer, is a woman wearing a bright red blouse.

I don’t believe for a moment that this was intended to represent faithfully a scene at an autopsy. Its most obvious reading is that the man is an undertaker who is preparing the corpse for a funeral. That is an unusual event to depict in art, and very different from the autopsies above.

Having had the privilege in the past of dissecting a cadaver to learn anatomy, of attending many autopsies, and of performing surgery, rest assured that their sigificance and reading is profoundly different, even though, to the unaided eye, they might appear superficially quite similar. Saying that a painting like Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp is similar or related to a Naturalist painting of surgery is like saying a landscape with grazing horses is similar to a cavalry charge.

Once the god Aesculapius is ensconced in Rome, Ovid is ready to round off his Metamorphoses with salient points from the life of Julius Caesar, and links to the contemporary emperor, Augustus. These are politically charged topics, though, and require very careful coverage and language.

The Story

Ovid provides a whirlwind summary of some of Julius Caesar’s achievements, but writes that it was Augustus who was the greatest of them:
Of all the achievements of great Julius Caesar
not one is more ennobling to his fame
than being father of his glorious son.
In fact, Augustus was not Julius Caesar’s biological son, but his designated heir. Moreover, it was the undoubted divinity of Augustus which makes Julius Caesar similarly divine, hence elevated to the gods on his death.

Having flattered his emperor, Ovid tackles the thorny issue of the assassination of Julius Caesar:
But portents of the gods could not avert
the plots of men and stay approaching fate.
Into a temple naked swords were brought —
into the Senate House. No other place
in all our city was considered fit
for perpetrating such a dreadful crime!

Venus pleads Caesar’s case, and elicits Jupiter’s response:
“Venus, the man on whose behalf you are
so anxious, already has completed his
alloted time. The years are ended which
he owed to life on earth. You with his son,
who now as heir to his estate must bear
the burden of that government, will cause
him, as a deity, to reach the heavens,
and to be worshipped in the temples here.”

Jupiter hardly had pronounced these words,
when kindly Venus, although seen by none,
stood in the middle of the Senate-house,
and caught from the dying limbs and trunk
of her own Caesar his departing soul.
She did not give it time so that it could
dissolve in air, but bore it quickly up,
toward all the stars of heaven; and on the way,
she saw it gleam and blaze and set it free.
Above the moon it mounted into heaven,
leaving behind a long and fiery trail,
and as a star it glittered in the sky.

Julius Caesar therefore underwent transformation into a star (catasterisation) as his apotheosis, on his assassination. This is perhaps the best compromise, likely to offend least, and leaves Ovid the task of saying a few words about Augustus before concluding in his epilogue.

The Paintings

Visual artists have been surprisingly reticent over the depiction of any of the well-known events in the life of Julius Caesar, given their familiarity. A high proportion of visual art about him is also derived not from classical accounts, but through William Shakespeare’s play The Tragedy of Julius Caesar (c 1599).

The most popular single event in the dictator’s life was inevitably the end of it, with his assassination on the Ides (15th) of March, 44 BCE. Apart from a few rather clumsy depictions of the assassination itself, the better paintings don’t agree on the most appropriate moment which should be shown. I will here show them in sequence to cover much of the story.

Caesar’s assassins were senators of Rome, a group of more than thirty led by three conspirators including Caesar’s former friend and ally, Marcus Junius Brutus. Several of Caesar’s closest aides had warned him not to attend the Senate on the Ides of March, and he had to be fetched by one of the conspirators. As he arrived at the Senate, Caesar was presented with a petition, and the conspirators crowded around him.

Karl von Piloty’s The Murder of Caesar from 1865 shows this moment, with Julius Caesar sat on a throne in the portico of the Senate. Immediately behind him, one of the conspirators has raised his dagger above his head, ready to strike the first blow.

Casca, one of the conspirators, produced his dagger and struck the dictator a glancing wound in his neck. The whole group closed in and stabbed Caesar repeatedly.

This is the stage shown by Vincenzo Camuccini in The Assassination of Julius Caesar from 1804-05, although this is not taking place on the steps in the portico, and Caesar has already moved forward from his seat.

Blinded by his blood, Caesar then tripped over and fell, and was stabbed further on the lower steps of the portico of the Senate. The conspirators made off, leaving Caesar dead where he lay, with around 23 stab wounds.

In Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Death of Caesar from 1859-67, Caesar’s corpse lies abandoned on the floor, as his assassins make their way out of the Senate, brandishing their daggers above their heads.

None of those paintings shows Venus or Caesar’s apotheosis, though.

It is Virgil Solis’s engraving of The Deification of Julius Caesar (before 1562) which shows simultaneously the assassination of the dictator at the left, and Venus taking him up to the gods, above, where Jupiter is addressing the other gods (upper right).

Shakespeare’s play develops subsequent events in more detail, and contains the two most memorable lines: Et tu Brutus? (“you too, Brutus?”), said when Brutus stabs Caesar, and Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears as the opening words of Brutus’ oration over Caesar’s corpse.

Later, as Brutus and Cassius prepare to wage war against a triumvirate of Mark Antony, Octavius and Lepidus, Caesar’s ghost appears to Brutus to warn of his imminent defeat. This scene from the play has also inspired visual artists, including the great William Blake.

This engraving of Richard Westall’s painting Brutus and the Ghost of Caesar, from about 1802, shows Brutus in his role of general, sat at a writing desk, as Caesar’s ghost fills the upper left of the painting, warning Brutus of his imminent death with the words Thou shalt see me at Philippi.

William Blake painted a very similar scene in his Brutus and Caesar’s Ghost from 1806, for an extra-illustrated folio edition of Shakespeare from 1632. This series of illustrations for this play are not well-known among Blake’s work, and were made quite early in his career.

In the next and final installment, I will look at paintings covering the reign of Augustus, in the context of the closing lines of the Metamorphoses.

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

Many, perhaps most, artists have come from the working classes, and painted largely for the wealthy. In times of social unrest, they were faced with difficult choices. Had they taken up the social cause in their art, they would have risked the patronage which had enabled them to break free of their humble origins.

This changed with the French Revolution, when David, for example, became involved with the same revolutionaries who executed his former patrons, whose portraits David had painted a few years earlier. Artists also felt more able to depict some of the horrific attacks on the public, for example during the Paris Commune in 1871.

The nineteenth century was a period of great social unrest throughout Europe. With the rise of cities and industrialisation, the urban poor were in even greater distress than those in the country, while those who owned factories and businesses became obscenely rich at their expense. Social inequality drove movements aimed at ending such injustice, including those to improve the rights of workers. Strikes broke out in many of the poorest areas, such as the coalfields in the north-east of France and nearby Belgium.

One of the first prominent paintings of a strike appears to be Alfred Philippe Roll’s Miners’ Strike, which was exhibited in the Salon of 1880 (or perhaps the following year). It is most probably based on a strike at Denain in the Nord-Pas de Calais coalfield of that year.

It shows the desperate and increasingly worrying gathering of striking miners and their families. A woman is restraining one man from throwing a rock at the pithead buildings. Most of those present are barefoot. Mounted soldiers or police are present, handcuffing one of the strikers.

Roll agreed to sell his painting to the state at cost price, on the understanding that it would hang in the Ministry of Commerce, but he was tricked and it was sent instead to the local museum in Valenciennes, where it would bring less embarrassment. It has since become badly damaged, and is now only known from this reproduction, printed in Le Petit Journal of 1 October 1892.

I have argued that this painting may well have influenced Émile Zola when he was preparing to write his novel Germinal, about a miners’ strike in the Nord-Pas de Calais coalfield similar to that painted by Roll. This painting and Zola’s novel also appear to have inspired a series of Naturalist works showing other strikes across Europe.

Robert Koehler’s masterpiece of The Strike in the Region of Charleroi was made in 1886, the year of a succession of strikes across Belgium. These started in Liège as a commemoration of the fifteen anniversary of the Paris Commune, but spread through industrialised zones to the region around Charleroi and Hainault.

Koehler shows a group of workers standing outside the smart entrance to offices (detail below). The top-hatted owner stands on the top step, one of his managers looking anxious beside him. The leader of the workers is at the foot of the steps telling the industrialist of the workers’ demands.

Wives in the crowd are remonstrating with their husbands, one demonstrator is picking up a rock to use as a projectile, and at the far left is a young wife with her two children, looking anxiously at the proceedings. The situation is looking increasingly nasty, although there are no signs yet of police or troops, or of violent confrontation.

The strikes of 1886 led to the formation of a parliamentary socialist party in Belgium, and increasing industrial strife. This came to a head in 1893, when there was a general strike called by the Belgian Labour Party in a demand for universal male suffrage. It has been claimed that this was the first such general strike in Europe.

The general strike was called to start on the evening of 11 April, and is depicted in Eugène Laermans’ An Evening’s Strike, or The Red Flag (1893). Instead of Koehler’s small group of workers, the whole population, men, women and children, are on the march, and the distant factories have fallen silent.

The Belgian government tried to quell growing clashes between strikers and troops, which by the 17 April led to The Riots of Mons shown here in an anonymous illustration published in Le Petit Journal the following month. The artist here concentrates attention on the civilian casualties. Between 13 and 20 civilians were apparently killed, here by the Civil Guard shown in the right background. The following day the government acceded to the demands, and the strike ended.

Strikes were prominent in other European countries at the time, including regions of Spain. In the Spring of 1892, workers in Valladolid, in north-western Spain, came out on strike.

José Uría y Uría’s painting After a Strike from 1895 is quite different from those above, in showing the inside of one of the factories. In the foreground, a worker lies apparently dead, his wife and young daughter grieving beside his body. Next to him is a large forge hammer, which was presumably the cause of his death.

In the distance on the left are two policemen or civil guards, one of whom is comforting an older daughter. An opening in the factory wall at the right edge shows mounted forces outside.

The likely reading is that the worker shown was killed during the violence of the strike, which has now been suppressed by troops. This is a far more personal and intimate impact than depictions of large groups and crowds.

Ramon Casas i Carbó’s The Charge, or Barcelona 1902 was dated by him in 1903, but is thought to have been started in 1899. It refers, though, to a strike which took place in Barcelona in 1902, so remains something of a mystery. It shows a rider of the Civil Guard trying to avoid running over a member of the crowd, during a violent confrontation.

Another fine anonymous illustration from Le Petit Journal of 1 April 1906 shows continuing unrest in the French coalfields, here in The Miners’ Strike in Pas-de-Calais. Attention is drawn to the increasing strength and politicisation of strikers and their families, as they stride forward under numerous red banners – and the growing socialist movement across Europe.

One of the most sinister paintings of strikes during this period is Stanisław Lentz’s Strike (1910). He shows three workers, who are presumably all involved in a strike at the time. At the left is an older man who is singing or chanting his commitment to the workers’ movements; in the centre is a younger worker, his arms folded in his determination not to be moved; at the right is an angry man who looks ready to fight for his rights, his right hand already clenched into a fist and ready to punch.

During the late nineteenth century, painters increasingly engaged in social comment. First in ‘social realist’ and Naturalist art ‘for the people’, artists took up the cause of the urban and rural poor, and their struggle to change society. Perhaps populism wasn’t such a bad thing in art after all.

By 1895, Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918) was turning to more Symbolist paintings and developing his mature ‘Parallelism’ from there.

In 1897, Hodler won the commission to paint a large fresco in the Weapons Room of the Swiss National Museum (Schweizerisches Landesmuseum) in the centre of Zurich. Oddly, Hodler proposed depicting the Battle of Marignano, fought between France and the Old Swiss Confederacy near Milan in 1515. The French had been the victors there, leaving the defeated Swiss with around 50% casualties.

This compositional study for Retreat from Marignano was made in about 1897, using pencil and gouache on fabric. From its inception, the painting is composed as a frieze in two planes, with most of its figures in the nearer plane.

This more advanced study for the Retreat from Marignano followed soon afterwards, but Hodler’s theme, style and imagery were controversial, and the whole affair became the subject of intense public debate known at the time as the ‘fresco dispute’.

In 1897, Hodler was invited by Gustav Klimt, president of the Vienna Secession, to exhibit in its first exhibition the following year, but declined, probably because of his commitments to commissions for the National Museum, which kept him occupied for much of 1898.

I am unsure whether Hodler painted his marvellous The Mower in about 1898, or if it was significantly earlier: the dates given are inconsistent. A farmworker is seen sharpening the blade on his heavy scythe using a whetstone, as the sun rises behind and to the left.

Hodler still found time to paint some of his superb landscapes when he was working his commissions. Among them is Kastanienallee near Biberist (1898), which shows leaffall in the autumn, in an avenue which runs parallel to the picture plane. Biberist is in northern Switzerland.

At about this time, Hodler started to paint a series of landscape views from the northern shore of Lake Geneva (Lake Léman) looking south, across to the major peaks of the Chablais Alps. He was to continue this series until his death about twenty years later. Lake Geneva from Chexbres from about 1898 shows one of the first of these, painted near the village of Chexbres in early winter.

Hodler had started making sketches for The Day (1900) as far back as 1890. With its rhythmic figures and informal symmetry, it is one of the best examples of his Parallelism. He appears to have used three different models, with the woman in the centre looking much like his second wife, Berthe Jacques, whom he married in 1898.

This was one of Hodler’s three award-winning paintings exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900. He was invited to join both the Berlin and Vienna Secessions.

Hodler’s Parallelism also found expression in single figures and smaller groups, which he often painted in multiple versions over several years. In his Spring (1901), he sets two figures in their biological Spring in one of his idealised meadow landscapes, rich with the flowers of the season.

Lake Geneva from Saint-Prex (1901) is another view across the lake, from a town further west of Chexbres, looking south with a closer view of the peaks of the Chablais Alps. This appears to have been painted in the summer, with the trees in full leaf and a rich range of flowers. The clouds over the mountains are starting to become more organised in a regular rhythm, a trend which resulted in some of his most distinctive later landscapes.

Hodler’s tempera painting of Empfindung, best translated perhaps as Sensation, from about 1901, is one of his series of singleton women seen walking through floral meadows.

In July of 1902, Hodler stayed in Reichenbach im Kandertal in southern Switzerland, from where he went out to the hamlet of Isenfluh to paint The Jungfrau from Isenfluh, one of his most spectacular paintings of valleys and mountains.

The distant peak of the Jungfrau (4,158 m or 13,642 ft) is one of the main summits of the Bernese Alps, to the east of the Chablais Alps shown in his views over Lake Geneva. Here the rock and ice of the Jungfrau floats in a world of its own above a belt of cloud and the deep, richly vegetated valleys below.

This painting was exhibited at the nineteenth exhibition of the Vienna Secession.

Another landscape painted when he was staying in Reichenbach, Kiental and Blümlisalp (1902) shows a colourful valley leading to the Blüemlisalp massif in the Bernese Alps, seen in the distance. Its main peak, Blüemlisalphorn, is not as well-known as the Jungfrau, and is rather lower, at 3,661 m or 12,011 ft.

The final landscape of Hodler’s which I have for 1902 could also have been painted when he was at Reichenbach: Forest with Mountain Stream, which could equally have been painted at many other locations in Switzerland.

It is thought that most of Hodler’s landscapes were either started in front of the motif and completed in the studio, or painted entirely indoors from studies and drawings accompanied by extensive colour notes. He appears to have completed few, if any, entirely en plein air.

Reference

Hans-Peter Wipplinger (ed) (2017) Ferdinand Hodler, Elective Affinities from Klimt to Schiele, Leopold Museum / Walther König. ISBN 978 3 96098 220 3.

By the end of the 1840s, Alexandre Calame (1810–1864) had established himself as a major painter of dramatic, sometimes even melodramatic, views of the Swiss landscape, and had a steady stream of commissions to keep him busy, and comfortably off. He then focussed more closely on views of Lake Lucerne, often composed with quite formal elements, including a group of closer trees near the centre, with rugged cliffs and the lake in the middle distance, and high peaks beyond.

The Lake of the Four Cantons from about 1850 is one of the finest of these formal compositions. The foreground trees and boulders add an air of gloom, and contrast with the warm sunlit patches of cliff and crag surrounding the vaguer, almost ethereal surface of the lake. The distance is then dominated by awe-inspiring rock pinnacles, as vertiginous as the imaginary spires seen in many fanciful Renaissance landscapes.

Vierwaldstättersee (1851) shows the same stretch of Lake Lucerne, here from a greater elevation and with the sun higher in the sky, augmenting the distant passages in the haze. There are also some tiny figures, perhaps those of Calame’s customer, on the small grassy platform beneath the trees.

Souvenir of Handeck (1851) is a pure studio composition based on sketches and memory of a scene near Handeck (Handegg), near what is now the Grimsel Pass south of Guttannen, in southern Switzerland. As in some of his earlier commissions, it combines high peaks, storms, and swollen rivers crashing down waterfalls – Calame’s ‘Swiss horror’.

Calame also painted some of the well-known peaks, including The Jungfrau, Switzerland (1853-55). This 4,158 metre (13,642 feet) mountain in the Bernese Alps had only received its first ascent in 1811, and was still well off the beaten track. Calame views it from the bottom of the Lauterbrunnen Valley, another mountain torrent in full spate, with broken trees nearby to demonstrate the wildness of nature.

The Sycamores (1854) is one of several finished paintings which Calame made of stands of ancient trees that he came across during his travels in the Alps.

Meanwhile back at Lake Lucerne, Calame went right down to the water’s edge for Vierwaldstättersee (Symphony in Blue) in 1855. Four sailing boats appear to be floating slightly above its water surface, and a team of boatmen are disembarking onto the massive boulders in the foreground. Gone are the trees too.

Late in his career – now almost at the dawn of Impressionism – Calame developed some quite different motifs. Landscape with Oaks from 1859 shows a group of farmworkers during the harvest, perhaps returning to work after a short lunchbreak. Its sky with broken clouds is almost photographic in appearance, and adds great depth.

Chalets at Rigi (1861) is even more modern in its stark and bold motif. The Rigi is a massif in central Switzerland which is surrounded by lakes – Lucerne, Zug, and Lauerz. Views across one of the lakes with the Rigi in the distance are prominent among the Alpine paintings of JMW Turner from twenty years earlier, but Turner seems not to have ascended the Rigi to paint from there.

The last four paintings I show by Calame are undated, and two are more vague in their locations.

Mountain Landscape is a variation on the tree-cliffs-lake-mountain combination from an unknown location in Switzerland.

In the Bernese Oberland remixes the same elements with a view of one of the higher peaks of the Bernese Alps. A lone figure is seen to the left of the broken pinetree in the foreground.

Vierwaldstättersee is another variation of his views of Lake Lucerne, including the same essential elements. Here a larger group of people are sitting on and around the same grassy platform as seen in Vierwaldstättersee (1851). Comparison with that earlier painting shows the consistency in Calame’s landscapes.

Finally, Waterfall from Handeck toward Grimsel is a ‘Swiss horror’ painted near the Grimsel pass, as shown in his 1851 Souvenir of Handeck.

Calame had often suffered bouts of poor health, and in 1853 and 1860, he stayed in the south of France to try to recuperate. In 1864, he went there when suffering from a bad bout of pleurisy. He never recovered, and died there on 19 March 1864, at the young age of 53.

Ferdinand Hodler’s early paintings were strongly inspired by Calame and Diday, as have many others who have aspired to paint the mountainous parts of the world. His influence lives on.

Reference

Alberto de Andrés (2006) Alpine Views, Alexandre Calame and the Swiss Landscape, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 12138 4.

Until relatively recently, many pigments were closely guarded secrets. Their precise manner of preparation, even the source of their ingredients, were considered part of the craft of paint-making, whether performed by a supplier or in the artist’s workshop. On at least one occasion, this led to the loss of a pigment from the palette: Lead-Tin Yellow, widely used in many of the greatest works of art prior to 1750, vanished until its rediscovery in 1940.

Lead-Tin Yellow seems to have originated in glassmaking, and there is some evidence of its use as a pigment in glass made as early as about 400 CE. Its earliest use in paintings seems to date back to Giotto in about 1300, following which it became extremely popular.

My earliest example is this painting in egg tempera which is attributed to Jacopo di Cione: Noli me tangere from around 1368-70. Examination of the brilliant yellow lining to Christ’s robe has shown that its pigment is Lead-Tin Yellow of type II. That is a variant which consists of a lead-tin oxide with free tin and silicon which is more strongly associated with glass-making, and prepared slightly differently from the ‘purer’ type I.

Both types of Lead-Tin Yellow have proved robust and stable pigments in a range of different binders, including egg tempera and oils.

The centre panel of Rogier van der Weyden’s St Columba Altarpiece, showing the Adoration of the Magi, from about 1455, has been found to contain Lead-Tin Yellow in the rich yellow sleeve of the king in the centre. This is shown better in the detail below.

By about 1450, Lead-Tin Yellow type I was used increasingly. For example, the infant Christ’s lemon yellow dress in Ambrogio Bergognone’s The Virgin and Child with Saint Catherine of Alexandria and Saint Catherine of Siena (c 1490) has been found to contain this ‘purer’ type.

Another very similar painting by Bergognone, his The Virgin and Child from 1488-90, has not, as far as I can tell, be examined to test for the use of Lead-Tin Yellow, but I strongly suspect that the infant Christ’s dress here contains the pigment too. This is shown particularly well in the detail below.

Although believed to be a stable colour, one of the more surprising examples of the use of Lead-Tin Yellow is in one version of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Virgin with the Infant Saint John the Baptist adoring the Christ Child accompanied by an Angel, better-known as The Virgin of the Rocks. The panel from the S. Francesco Altarpiece of Milan, painted between 1491-1508 and now in the National Gallery in London, is shown here.

The light brown lining of the Virgin’s blue cloak, shown so well in the detail below, contains Lead-Tin Yellow type I. The version in the Louvre, in which that lining is a bright yellow, doesn’t appear to have been reported on.

Yellow is a prominent colour in the paintings in Paolo Veronese’s series The Allegory of Love. In this, the third, Respect from about 1575, Lead-Tin Yellow type II has been found in the primrose yellow impasto on the man’s tunic.

Veronese used type I in the first of the series, and type II in the third and fourth, suggesting that he used different sources of supply for his pigments over this period. The two types appear visually indistinguishable, and don’t seem to handle differently in oil paint.

Several of Peter Paul Rubens’ paintings, including his Hippopotamus and Crocodile Hunt from about 1615, have been found to contain Lead-Tin Yellow, although I don’t know which type he used.

Another fine example of the extensive use of Lead-Tin Yellow, here of type I, is in Rembrandt’s Belshazzar’s Feast (c 1635-38). Many of Rembrandt’s paintings have been found to contain the pigment, but here it has been applied in quite thick impasto to model the highlights on Belshazzar’s cloak.

Rembrandt here used a double ground, over which he applied earth pigments before applying the uppermost layers of lighter colours, including Lead-Tin Yellow, to model the detail. These are shown in the detail below.

Jan Vermeer is another of the Old Masters whose paintings often contain Lead-Tin Yellow. In The Milkmaid (c 1660), for example, it accounts for much of the pale yellow of the woman’s bodice.

What happened next is rather strange. During the first half of the eighteenth century, Lead-Tin Yellow declined markedly in popularity, and by 1750 it appears to have been replaced by other, sometimes less stable, pigments, including Naples Yellow (highly toxic lead antimonate). Once replaced, the recipes for its manufacture appear to have been lost, and its use forgotten.

During the eighteenth century, there were also changes in the supply of pigments and paints to artists, and by the nineteenth century most were sourced from specialist colourmen, who appear not to have known about Lead-Tin Yellow as a pigment. When commercial manufacture of oil and other paints became widespread in the late nineteenth century, the pigment was long forgotten. This was aided by uncertainty over its traditional name, which led to confusion with the pigment Massicot (lead oxide or Lead Yellow).

It was Richard Jacobi, working at the Doerner Institute in Munich in 1940, who stumbled across the pigment when trying to analyse yellow paints in Old Master paintings. He reported his radical findings in 1941, and from the late 1940s and 1950s onwards paint analyses looking for it have been performed quite widely – and have found its extensive use in works between 1300 and 1750. It has even been re-introduced in some commercial paint ranges.

Reference

Hermann Kühn (1993) Artists’ Pigments, vol 2, ed Ashok Roy, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 75 3.

Men in paintings get all the best roles: armoured champions over dragons and sea-monsters, explorers and adventurers going where no man has been before, and so on. Outside of genre paintings, roles permitted of ‘genteel’ ladies were strictly limited. One of them which recurs throughout painting, even back to classical times, is sewing and needlework.

In three articles I am going to explore a small selection of paintings which show women not (dangerously!) reading books, but sewing. The first two cover the long history of sewing by hand, and the third the more recent history of sewing machines. My aim is to trace the role and significance of sewing in paintings, and how we might read this activity.

In the oldest classical and post-classical paintings, sewing was one of a group of fibrecrafts which were acceptable for women of all ranks. Others include spinning, weaving, knitting, and crochet. Indeed, compilations of art resources such as Wikimedia Commons confound them, including knitting, crochet, embroidery, tapestry, and other fibrecraft within the category of sewing. Although I show a few paintings of embroidery and tapestry, and one of knitting, I largely constrain my view to fibrecraft performed using a sewing needle.

Diego Velázquez’s The Needlewoman from about 1640-49 is a good example: it shows one woman engaged in the act of sewing. As she is looking down at her work, its role as a portrait is limited. Much of what it has to say is about what she is doing with her hands, her skill, and peaceful concentration.

Many portraits are different: a woman poses with her needlework beside her, a common variation which was socially acceptable even for royalty. Such portraits were popular and numerous, and I consider them no further here.

It may not have been until well into the nineteenth century that needlework came to assume an important role in another major painting. Certainly it was in that century that sewing and needlework became the main thread of so many.

In Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s early pre-Raphaelite painting of The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1848–9), the young Mary is embroidering with her mother, Saint Anne, while her father, Saint Joachim, prunes a vine – by that time, another thoroughly socially-acceptable activity for a gentleman. Rosetti uses Mary’s embroidery to introduce the symbolic colour red, signifying the Passion to come, and this slow, painstaking activity as a symbol of the demands of motherhood.

A few years later, the contrasting style of Jozef Israëls shows The Seamstress (1850-88) as if a product of the Golden Age. A young Dutchwoman works with her needle and thread in the light of an unseen window at the left. In the background to the right, there are some Delft tiles on the wall, and there’s a single tulip in a glass vase at the left. The scene is timeless, the woman solitary.

One of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s earliest significant paintings, Lise Sewing from 1866, shows his partner Lise Tréhot, then just eighteen. They had only met the previous year, and a ‘wedding’ ring is prominent on the ring finger of her left hand. This adds to her domestication, making her appear a married woman undertaking her wifely tasks, in spite of her obvious youth.

Giovanni Boldini had only been in Paris for three years when he painted Peaceful Days (The Music Lesson) (1875) in his early ‘pre-swish’ style. A young woman reclines on a settee and sews, as a younger boy sits on a vividly-decorated carpet studying an epée, with a cello behind him. She is wrapped in a flame-red kimono-like gown, and appears engrossed in her work, which might actually be lace-making rather than sewing. Both figures appear to be whiling away idle time, rather than engaging in any form of lesson.

The women of wealthy families appear to have spent much of their time engaged in activities intended to pass the time. Gustave Caillebotte’s Portraits in the Countryside (1876) shows, from left to right, the artist’s cousin Marie, his aunt, a family friend Madame Hue, and the artist’s mother.

Three of the four are engaged in needlework, although it is not clear precisely what. Caillebotte’s mother is the exception: sitting in the distance, she is reading a book. Not only are these women sewing their lives away, waiting for the next event on their social calendar, but they sit apart, and concentrate on their work, without talking to one another. Their sewing provides them with a small world of their own, whose only hurt could be the infrequent prick of a needle.

Thomas Eakins painted just a couple of dozen watercolours during his career. Seventy Years Ago, from 1877, which explores the early Federal period in Philadelphia is one of those few. This must have coincided with increased interest in that era resulting from the national centennial in 1876. I have broken my rule about not including works showing knitting, as Eakins’ subject is actually knitting in the round on three needles. A spinning wheel at the left edge shows her to an accomplished fibrecrafter.

Emma Ekwall was the first Swedish woman painter to be awarded a royal medal, and painted many outstanding portraits of young children. Her undated portrait of a Girl Working by Hand captures the concentration of a young girl as she works with fibres by hand. Ekwall’s style here is loose and brings life to what would otherwise have been quite a static image.

Possibly unique among paintings of women sewing, Paul Gauguin’s Study of a Nude (Suzanne Sewing) from 1880 shows his model undressed for the occasion. It begs several questions: she is undeniably sewing, with a thimble on the middle finger of her right hand, so why is she not clothed? Why is there a mandolin hanging from the inside of the window behind her?

Apparently painted in Paris, the scene is more plausibly that of a more southern location. These oddities appear to have been too much for the public at the time, leaving this work unsold. Perhaps understandably, Gauguin’s wife refused to allow it to be hung it on the wall of their home.

Young Scheveningen Woman Seated: Facing Left is one of the earliest surviving paintings by Vincent van Gogh, dating from 1881-82, and one of his few watercolours. It was probably painted when he was at Etten, or perhaps early in his time in The Hague.

By 1882, Renoir had established himself as one of the more successful of the French Impressionists. When in Sicily that year, he painted a portrait of Richard Wagner. As with several other Impressionists, his dealer was Paul Durand-Ruel, who commissioned Renoir to paint each of his five children. Marie-Thérèse Durand-Ruel Sewing (1882) shows the eldest of them.

She is wholly absorbed in her needlework, holding it close, suggesting she may be myopic. She is finely dressed, a little heavily maybe for the fine summer’s day in the garden of the Durand-Ruel’s family home in Normandy.

In the first of these three articles, I looked at paintings of women sewing by hand from Velázquez in the 1640s to Renoir in 1882. This article concludes coverage of hand sewing from then into the early twentieth century.

I suspect that Nicolae Grigorescu’s undated Old Woman Darning was painted in or near Vitré in Brittany, where he painted en plein air during the 1880s. She is sat in the sunshine on the grass of her wild garden, against a backdrop of washing, her clothing plain and intended for such chores. She has brought out a small pile of clothing which needs her sewing skills, and rests on the grass next to her. Her sewing is an opportunity to escape from her cottage and enjoy the fine weather.

My second painting by Vincent van Gogh dates from 1885, when he was painting the rural poor in Nuenen, and shows a Woman Sewing. Sewing relies greatly on vision, and that vision on light. With their small windows, the cottages here were generally dark and gloomy, forcing this woman to position herself diagonally to the incoming light.

This lighting effect transforms the painting, with her hands represented by simple brushstrokes for the thumbs and forefingers alone; she has also become faceless with full shadow.

Ferdinand Hodler’s Seamstress from 1885-87 enjoys the brighter and more even lighting in a living room, where she bends her head over her work, withdrawn in her concentration.

Eva Bonnier was a fine Swedish portraitist, whose Dressmakers (1887) explores very different effects of backlighting. Two women are collaborating on the making of a dress for a special occasion, although here they are working quite independently, each almost oblivious of the other.

The woman to the right wears a thimble, and sews with orange thread, her scissors left open on the table in front of her.

Mary Cassatt’s undated Woman Sewing may have been painted in the 1880s, and is another plain view of a woman at her needlework, with a vase of lilac-coloured flowers behind her shoulder. It is reminiscent of the far earlier painting by Velázquez, expressed using Impressionist colour and brushwork.

Harriet Backer’s Kone som syr (Woman Sewing) (1890) looks contre-jour into the bright light flooding in through the window, as a woman (designated a wife in the Norwegian title) sits at her sewing, retaining complete anonymity as she faces into the light. A quick oil sketch, its highly gestural depictions of potted plants, table, and chair go beyond Impressionism.

In Christine Lerolle Embroidering from about 1895, Renoir shows the older daughter of the artist, patron and collector Henry Lerolle. She is working with an embroidery frame made of bamboo. Christine would have been eighteen at the time that this was painted, and was already a favourite of Renoir’s. In the background, her father and a friend are studying one of the paintings in the family collection.

For the German painter Emil Rau working in Munich, wifely sewing was part of the domestic bliss of this Young Couple in Front of a Farmhouse in Upper Bavaria (date not known). The pink-cheeked young wife sits looking lovingly at her husband, not paying attention to her needlework. Rau’s work was frequently used as illustrations in the popular family newspaper Die Gartenlaube.

Eugene de Blaas was an Austrian artist who painted mainly in and around Venice. His painting of The Friendly Gossips from 1901 shows the social side of sewing, as three young women chat and joke together while they work through their sewing and repair baskets. They are most probably unmarried daughter(s) and friend(s) within a middle class home, and the young man peering cautiously round the door looks as if he has turned to up woo one of them.

Following her earlier marvellous explorations of light and its effects, Anna Ancher, the Danish Impressionist and Skagen artist, painted Two Little Girls Being Taught How to Sew in 1910. The girls’ mother/teacher stands sewing in the rich light from a window to the right. Cast shadows on the plain pale lemon wall behind are complex: the sun is low in the sky, and those shadows fall from a large houseplant at the right, and external branches too.

Edmund Blair Leighton was one of the last British academic painters, who specialised in legend from the age of chivalry. In Stitching the Standard from 1911, a young princess sits in a cutout at the top of the castle wall, sewing the black and gold flag to be flown from the castle. She comes straight from Arthurian legend, or a fairy tale, and emphasises how needlework was deemed an acceptable activity for women of all classes.

My final painting of sewing by hand takes us well into the twentieth century, in Édouard Vuillard’s late painting of his wife Madame Vuillard Sewing from 1920. Its colours and style show the remains of his time as one of the Nabis, but by this time he was largely painting portraits.

Madame Vuillard doesn’t even look up, but continues to work on what looks like the darning of a pair of grey socks or gloves.

Sewing by hand has, in general, remained thoroughly respectable, and an activity which can safely be shown of a woman. The artist can show one or more women concentrating on the close-held task at hand, or engaging in conversation with sewing as a thread of cohesion between them. They can emphasise the timeless nature of hand-sewing, its tranquillity, and intense concentration.

Because sewing is demanding of vision, it is important that the act of sewing takes place in good lighting. The artist can use that to develop an image around backlighting (into the light, contre jour), with its high contrast, or across the image with resulting shadow play.

But above all else, at least the act of sewing provided the opportunity for women to appear in their own right in paintings which were not simple portraits of them. My third and concluding article tomorrow looks at the impact of the sewing machine.

The first functional sewing machines started to appear in the middle of the nineteenth century, and by 1870, several factories were making them for sale to anyone with sufficient money. Sales rose, costs fell, and by the 1880s they were within the reach of many households and individuals.

They did not completely replace sewing by hand, though. Their best use is for making whole new garments and sewn items: an early comparison claimed that a fully hand-sewn shirt took over 14 hours to make, something a skilled machinist could complete within an hour.

Otto Piltz’s undated Sewing Hour, or A Sewing Lesson shows a group of young girls (not one boy in sight) learning a range of fibrecrafts under the supervision of a teacher or nanny, who sits reading beside an early sewing machine. It is interesting that neither the children nor their supervisor appears in the slightest interested in the sewing machine.

Piltz had originally been a decorative painter, and made many illustrations for the German family newspaper Die Gartenlaube, although here his style is thoroughly painterly and not conventionally illustrative.

Given the dramatic reduction in time to make garments, among the most enthusiastic early adopters were professional seamstresses, who could reduce cost and increase throughput once they had become adept with their machines. Wenzel Tornøe, a Danish genre painter, shows the effects of this in his Seamstress, Whit Sunday Morning of 1882, his best-known work.

This seamstress had been engaged in making costumes to be worn for the Danish festivities of Pentecost (Whitsun), when many Danes rise early to go out and see the sun dance at dawn. By the time that the festival morning has arrived, she has fallen asleep over her work, exhausted.

The Norwegian Naturalist Christian Krohg may have been inspired by that painting for his Tired in 1885. This was part of his longer-term exploration of the theme of fatigue and sleep, particularly among mothers. The young woman seen here is no mother, but a seamstress, one of the many thousands who worked at home at that time, toiling for long hours by lamplight for a pittance. At the left is an empty cup, which had probably contained the coffee she drank to try to stay awake at her work.

Home work as a seamstress was seen at this time as the beginning of the descent into prostitution – a major theme in Krohg’s work. The paltry income generated by sewing quickly proved insufficient, and women sought alternatives, which all too often led to prostitution. During the 1880s, therefore, in some countries in Europe, the sewing machine was seen as a precursor to a woman’s moral downfall, the top of the slippery slope.

Other depictions were quite the opposite. The Austrian genre painter Moritz Stifter’s The New Dress from 1889 places the sewing machine in the safe almost wholly-female setting of the dressmaker’s. Every face is smiling here, some perhaps a little vacuously, as an affluent young woman tries on a new dress, with its incredibly small waist. Although this room is full of fabric and the trappings of dressmaking, including the mandatory sewing machine, no one is actually making anything.

Fisherman’s Wife Sewing (1890) is another of Anna Ancher’s beautifully sidelit paintings, showing a further safe and moral environment for the sewing machine: for the fisherman’s wife, it could greatly reduce the time that she had to spend making, repairing, and maintaining her husband’s clothing.

The belief that there were many women left exhausted at their sewing machines persisted and pervaded. Adolphe Willette developed it further in this advertisement for Fer Bravais medicine against anaemia from about 1890. In a twist of irony, her cat appears very wakeful. The brand new Eiffel Tower in the background ensures that we recognise the location of this woman’s flat.

There were other problems with sewing machines too: being mechanical, they could go wrong and need repair. Robert Koehler’s undated The Old Sewing Machine shows a woman and her young daughter with a mechanic and repairman, looking at the woman’s old and very primitive sewing machine.

Koehler is now little-known, but had a fascinating career. Born in Germany, he arrived in the USA in 1871, and decided to stay. He returned to Europe twice to train, and became a good friend of the American painters William Merritt Chase and Frank Duveneck, whom he met when they too were training in Munich.

Women were not the only ones at risk of becoming slaves to their sewing machines. Many men worked as tailors and dressmakers, a trade prominent in the Jewish ghettos of Europe. Ephraim Moses Lilien’s Art Nouveau illustration for Lieder des Ghetto (Songs of the Ghetto) makes its point clearly. Lilien was a prolific illustrator who became the first Zionist artist.

After his earlier illustration warning of the dangers of the sewing machine, Adolphe Willette struck a different balance in Alone at Last in about 1915. This illustration was used in Journey of a French infantryman, published at Christmas 1915, when many troops would have just returned home for seasonal leave from the First World War.

While her husband has been away at the front, the young wife has been making good use of her time with her sewing machine. She looks a picture of health for all that work, too, but may well attribute that to the Fer Bravais, of course.

Judging by the sheer volume of garments in Hans Best’s undated Sewing Women in the Room, these two women are not just maintaining the clothes of their family, but are seamstresses working at home, sharing the single sewing machine. This effect is exaggerated by the multiple curtains at each of the windows.

Izsák Perlmutter’s Rákospalota Seamstress (date not known) shows a Hungarian version of the same, a homeworking seamstress.

Anna Ancher again makes the most of the light in her Sewing a Dress for a Costume Party of 1920. These three women look rather older than the average seamstress, and they are working with the materials for a single dress, destined perhaps for a daughter or granddaughter. One of them performs the larger-scale sewing at the machine, and the others progress the manual work.

Christian Krohg returned late in his life to his earlier concerns over sewing machines and moral decline, in his Seamstress’s Christmas Eve (1921). A young woman is in her garret bed-sit, where she has been toiling long hours at her sewing machine. An affluent couple – a relative or employer perhaps – has just arrived to give the young woman a Christmas tree, a large wicker basket of presents, and more. Maybe that young woman can still be saved from the fate brought on by the sewing machine.

Sewing machines also had dramatic impact on the making of clothing on a more industrial scale. When sewing by hand, homeworking is the order of the day, and there is no value in pooling those workers into a factory. Once those seamstresses are working with sewing machines, the situation is reversed, and many were employed in factories, the sewing mills.

Karl Armbrust’s Interior of a Sewing Mill with Seamstresses at Work from 1927 shows what was commonplace in garment manufacture. These women didn’t need the skills of those sewing by hand, consequently were paid a pittance.

Paintings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries explore many of the concerns and benefits of the sewing machine. One area which they left for the next generation of artists was the changing roles of women over this period – something which was directly influenced by the sewing machine.

Sparing many women the time required to make and maintain the clothing for members of their household didn’t give many of them more free time. Instead, it enabled them to go and work in factories, to earn the money to pay for factory-made clothing and its repair. What at first had seemed to be an increase in independence ended up as increasing dependence.

The bad news last week for anyone interested in art history is the acquisition by Bridgeman Images of rights to images for all the 439 state-owned museums and galleries in Italy. Those include the Uffizi, most notably, and many of the major collections in Rome.

This doesn’t mean that every existing image of a work of art in one of those museums and galleries is suddenly going to require licensing from Bridgeman. But it does make it likely that anyone wanting an image of a particular painting or sculpture in one of those collections will have to pay Bridgeman for the privilege.

This hits academics worst of all. Those reproducing images in specialist publications will increasingly find that they will have to pay to do so. It also hits non-commercial websites such as this blog: a typical article on paintings here might contain ten images; at Bridgeman’s current rates, if all ten images had to be licensed, that article would cost me £700 to publish. Not only that, but Bridgeman’s licensing terms include the following:
2.7. Licensee shall not make the Licensed Material available to be downloaded, extracted, redistributed or accessed as a standalone file by third-parties.

That would mean that my current article format would be unacceptable if it were to use any licensed image; instead, I would have to use a locked image browser which denied you direct access to the image files.

It is a matter of dispute as to whether Bridgeman or any other organisation or individual can claim copyright over images of works of art which are themselves out of their period of copyright, such as Botticelli’s Primavera shown above. At the time that it was created, there was no copyright law. Under most current laws, Botticelli and his heirs would have been fully protected by copyright for a period including both the artist’s lifetime, and seventy years following his death (terms and periods vary according to jurisdiction).

Copyright, as an intellectual property right, exists to protect the rights of those who create paintings, sculpture, music, movies, and many other parts of our culture. It ensures that creators, the people who put their ideas, perceptions, and skills into producing works, are adequately rewarded for their contribution to culture.

There has been a long-running dispute over copyright and photographic reproductions of artistic originals. If I take a photo of Primavera, does copyright apply to my photographic image? Many claim that such a faithful reproduction is by definition not itself an original or artistic work, and has none of the properties required to be eligible for copyright.

Others – overwhelmingly those who make income from the sale of such spuriously ‘copyrighted’ reproductions – claim that making a good photograph is sufficiently demanding as to make it a creative act.

There is actually a very simple test which should be applied: if a photographer does have a legitimate claim to copyright, then those who photograph paintings and other works of art should receive royalty payments from the sale of rights for the use of their images. What the image agencies fail to mention is that those photographers don’t. If you pay a licence fee to use an image provided by an image agency, that fee is split between the agency, which has done nothing creative or original, and the current owner of the painting. Not a penny or cent makes its way to anyone related to the original artist, nor to the photographer who made the image.

Photographers are paid fixed fees for each image taken, at the time that they make the photographs. Irrespective of what the agencies and others might claim, they are not treated as creators or originators in any way, but are paid per reproduction.

The truth is that image agencies and owners of works of art are subverting copyright to generate income for themselves which has nothing to do with the intellectual property invested by the artist in creating a work of art, and everything to do with physical ownership and profit for those who have had nothing to do with the creative act.

Image agencies have shown themselves to ignore copyright law by charging licensing fees for the use of images which the creator has placed in the public domain. Far from helping preserve our cultural heritage, image agencies are parasites upon it.