Sometimes perfectly good pigments prove just too awkward for general use. Given the shortage of lightfast bright greens, it’s surprising how little-used Malachite Green is in European painting, despite its rich colour. For a while it rejoiced quietly under the traditional names of Chrysocolla, Green Verditer, and even Green Bice, but only ever became popular in Japan and China.

As a natural mineral, Malachite is not uncommon, and a reliable source of pure pigment, which is chemically basic carbonate of copper. Although another copper green like Verdigris, it is quite different in properties and distinct in its use.

Malachite Green was known to the ancient Egyptians, who appear to have used it as eye-paint. Found abundantly in Japanese and Chinese paintings from the seventh century onwards, it wasn’t used much in Europe until the Renaissance. After that, its use in Europe almost died out until the nineteenth century, when it enjoyed a brief return.

Two versions of the painting by Watanabe Kazan 渡辺崋山 of Sato Issai 佐藤一斎（五十歳）像 show Malachite Green at its finest.

This version from 1824, now in the Freer in Washington, is known to use Malachite Green, a slightly blue shade and deep in colour.

This smaller and earlier version from 1821, now in Tokyo, is a lighter, more yellow shade. I’m not aware of its pigment having been analysed, but I’d be surprised if it was straight Malachite Green.

The biggest problem with Malachite Green in Europe was the popularity there of oil paint. The pigment worked well where it could be ground quite coarsely, and used in aqueous media like fresco and egg tempera. But the finer that you grind it, the paler it becomes; oil painters like smooth buttery paints with fine particles of pigment, something which sadly didn’t work for Malachite Green.

The rich, almost emerald green robes of Spinello Aretino’s Virgin Enthroned with Angels from about 1380 contain Malachite Green, here in tempera medium.

Among its earliest appearances in oil paint is the spectacular centre panel of the van Eyck brothers’ Ghent Altarpiece, famed in its own right as the Adoration of the Lamb (c 1425-1432).

Continuing use of egg tempera in the Southern Renaissance helped its survival. Piero della Francesca’s famous The Baptism of Christ (after 1437), made in egg tempera on poplar wood, relies on the pigment for its greens. Microscopic examination of the paint layer here shows coarse mineral particles typical of natural Malachite.

In Francesco del Cossa’s Saint Vincent Ferrer from about 1473-75, Malachite Green has been identified in the dark green grass at the foot of the painting. This too was made using egg tempera.

However, microscopy of the paint layer shows that these pigment particles don’t seem fractured as if they have been ground, but are globular, as occurs when the Malachite Green has been made by a process of precipitation. Such artificial Malachite Green didn’t appear in European paintings until after about 1430.

Although he painted in oils, Tintoretto was an enthusiastic user of Malachite Green. To obtain the range of greens seen in the rich and varied colours of vegetation in his Saint George and the Dragon from about 1555, he used this pigment with Copper Resinate glazes, a technique found in other paintings of the period.

Tintoretto’s vast oil painting of The Last Judgment (1560-62) in the Chiesa della Madonna dell’Orto, Venice, has been found to contain Malachite Green, I suspect in the band of green depicting the Flood just below the centre. The detail below makes this a bit clearer, I hope.

When painting the frescoes formerly in the Villa Aldobrandini between 1616-18, Domenichino and his assistants relied heavily on Malachite Green. It has been formally identified in this section, showing Apollo pursuing Daphne, where it is the mainstay colour remaining, and is suspected in most of the others.

Although only classed as moderately permanent, these and other examples of very old frescoes generally show how well Malachite Green has retained its colour after four centuries or more.

With the rise of oil painting, this pigment then fell from favour across Europe.

One of those who participated in its revival in the nineteenth century was Pierre-Auguste Renoir, whose painting of Chrysanthemums from 1881-82 shows how it could still be used in oil paint. But by then there was a much wider choice of more modern green pigments; the revival was short-lived, and Malachite Green has hardly been used since.

Reference

Rutherford J Gettens and Elisabeth West Fitzhugh (1993) Artists’ Pigments, vol 2, edited by Ashok Roy, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 75 3.

When reading a novel or watching a movie, many of us enjoy a surprise or twist in the plot. There are whole genres, such as detective fiction, in which such surprises are expectations, and the word whodunit was coined around 1930 for such stories.

Vera Tobin’s superb, and very readable, study of surprise in plot, published just a month ago, looks at many examples drawn from literature and film. In this and the next two articles, I’m going to see how this has been tackled in narrative paintings.

Verbal stories and movies have the great advantage that they are serial forms: their plots can twist and turn through time, leading the reader/viewer through the misleading and confusing, before bringing them to recognition, surprise, and plot resolution. The painter has no such luxuries; unless they tell their story in a series of images, they have to accomplish all or any of these in one, which the viewer will see in a single look.

One solution is what I call multiplex narrative, in which two or more scenes from a story are shown in a single image, such as Duccio’s The Healing of the Man born Blind from his Maestà Predella Panels of about 1310. Much of the panel is taken up by the first scene, in which Christ is healing a man we know – from the Gospel story – is blind. The surprise is revealed at the right, where he is sighted, and looks up in wonder and amazement.

This surprise is subtle, and not only dependent on reading the painting, but on knowing the story of this miracle.

Masaccio is more sophisticated and elaborate in The Tribute Money (1425-8), one of his marvellous frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence. He packs in three separate scenes, in non-linear arrangement. In the centre, a tax collector asks Christ for temple tax. At the far left, as directed by Christ and Peter’s arms, Peter (shown a second time) takes a coin from the mouth of a fish: the surprise. At the right, Peter (a third time) pays the tax collector (shown a second time) with that coin.

It took the ingenuity of post-Renaissance artists to incorporate references to multiple scenes in a single, instantaneous narrative image. One of its greatest exponents was Nicolas Poussin, whose Rinaldo and Armida from about 1630 encapsulates a lot of story and more overt surprise.

The narrative is here taken from one of Poussin’s favourite literary works, a then-popular epic poem by Torquato Tasso (1544-1595), a prodigy of the late Italian Renaissance, titled Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered), and published in 1581.

Today, unless you’re a scholar of Italian Renaissance literature, you’ll see the surprising image of a pretty young woman on the one hand about to murder a sleeping knight with a dagger, and on the other hand caressing his brow. It is that conflict which brings surprise, albeit still subtle, implicit recognition, and reveals the twist in the plot.

The sleeping knight is Rinaldo, the greatest of the Christian knights engaged in Tasso’s romanticised and largely fictional account of the First Crusade, who has stopped to rest near the ‘ford of the Orontes’. On hearing a woman singing, he goes to the river, where he catches sight of Armida swimming naked.

Armida, though, had an evil aim. She had been secretly following Rinaldo, intending to murder him with her dagger. As the ‘Saracen’ witch who is trying to destroy the crusaders’ campaign, she had singled out its greatest knight for this fate. Having revealed herself to him, she sings and lulls him into an enchanted sleep so that she can thrust her dagger home.

Just as she is about to do this, she falls in love with him instead – and this is the instant, the twist or peripeteia (to use Aristotle’s term), shown here. A winged amorino, lacking the bow and arrows of a true Cupid, restrains her right arm bearing her weapon. Her facial expression and left hand reveal her new intent, which is to enchant and abduct him in her chariot, so that he can become infatuated with her, and forget the Crusade altogether.

Just a few years later, another of the greatest masters of visual narrative painted perhaps the most surprising work of all.

The first time that you see Rembrandt’s Belshazzar’s Feast (c 1635-1638) in the flesh, it’s a thorough surprise, in its imagery, composition, colours, lighting, and its very painterly facture. And it never ceases to surprise. Showing a relatively minor episode from the Old Testament book of Daniel, Rembrandt creates surprise using every trick in the book.

Belshazzar is a hopeless case: his father Nebuchadnezzar had his arrogance crushed when he learned of God’s sovereignty over mankind. The son is more obdurate, even when his great feast is thrown into disarray by a disembodied hand writing incomprehensible words on the wall. Daniel is summoned, who interprets the message as warning that Belshazzar “has been weighed and found wanting”; the blasphemous king is killed later that night, and his kingdom taken by Darius the Mede.

As Belshazzar watches the hand writing on the wall, his eyes are nearly popping out. His left arm is raised, and the right has to steady himself against a salver on the table, having already knocked over one of the temple vessels.

A couple of the guests sat to his right show astonishment, looking not at the wall but at Belshazzar, directing our gaze at him too.

To Belshazzar’s left, a woman in a bright red robe is also transfixed by the writing on the wall, sufficient that she has tipped the contents of the goblet in her right hand onto the floor.

I now skip forward over a century to an artist much better-known for his portraiture.

Sleep doesn’t come easily when your twin boys are eight months old. For Alcmene and her husband Amphitryon, that sultry night was broken as one of them, Iphicles, started sobbing loudly. When his parents got out of bed to investigate, this is what they saw, as painted by Pompeo Batoni in The Infant Hercules Strangling Serpents in his Cradle (1743). Surprise is something of an understatement, for there is Iphicles’ brother, who had recently been renamed Heracles, quietly strangling a couple of snakes. At eight months.

Batoni uses the cover of darkness to enhance the dramatic effect. A tiny oil lamp is the sole illumination. Mother and father – actually step-father, as Zeus was Heracles’ natural father – are bent over, peering through their sleep and the darkness to see what is plain to us, the most surprising infant portrait in the history of painting. There are no theatrical expressions, no wild gestures, as what you see is a complete surprise.

Hera, the wife of Zeus, had given the infant the snakes in a bid to kill him, in spite for her husband’s repeated infidelity. Heracles, though, was made of sterner stuff.

The night is a time for surprises, with things that go bump, ghoulies and ghosties.

For Henry Fuseli, it is the time of The Nightmare (1781). What could be more surprising for the young woman whose head and arms are falling out of bed, than a daemon sat on her abdomen, and the head of a blind black horse poking through the drapes?

Thomas Rowlandson was an astute observer of people and society, and his undated small watercolour sketch of Reflections, or the Music Lesson is an excellent example of his work, and a good demonstration of surprise, even if its narrative is thin and brief.

An old man sits in front of the fireplace, above which hangs a large mirror. This gives him a view behind of his daughter, who is playing the piano as her music teacher sits close to her. That is what we see: the image seen by the old man is of the couple embracing and about to kiss, which enrages rather than merely surprises him.

James Gillray was another perceptive caricaturist and satirist of the day. In his etching and aquatint of The Hand-Writing Upon the Wall from 1803, he borrows the story of Belshazzar’s feast and recasts it with Napoleon on the throne. Gillray cleverly quotes from Rembrandt, with wineglasses and bottles being knocked over by Napoleon’s outstretched arms, but he also uses different techniques to express this version of surprise. For example, Napoleon’s eyes aren’t about to pop out, but those of the man to the left of him, who is looking at Napoleon rather than the writing on the wall, are.

Reference

Vera Tobin (2018) Elements of Surprise, Our Mental Limits and the Satisfactions of Plot, Harvard UP. ISBN 978 0 674 98020 4.

In the first of these three articles about surprise in narrative paintings, I traced the development of techniques to add a surprising twist to stories told in single paintings, from Duccio in about 1300 to the turn of nineteenth century.

So far, with the exception of the Masaccio, the cause of surprise in each of these images has been visually substantial, and in some cases has dominated the composition. Masaccio’s coin-bearing fish, though, was sufficiently small as to require careful study of the painting. My next example takes this a step further, for very good reason.

Géricault’s monumental painting of The Raft of the Medusa completed in 1818-19 shows a well-known and scandalous story of the day, in which over 130 people on board the French frigate Méduse died when they abandoned onto a makeshift raft. Just fifteen of the 147 people on that raft survived thirteen days before being rescued, and gave harrowing stories of drowning, dehydration, and cannibalism.

After a series of studies, Géricault showed the moment at which the rescuing ship, the Argus, is first seen, as no more than a dot on the horizon. So the cause of surprise is as barely visible to the viewer, as it would have been to those survivors. This puts the viewer in the same raft as the survivors, and some may feel sufficiently drawn into the surprise as to want to wave at that distant ship in the hope of rescue.

The nineteenth century brought many challenges to narrative painting, but in France it was still promoted by the prestigious annual Prix de Rome. The chosen theme for competitors in 1832 was a story about surprise with an unusual twist, Theseus Recognised by his Father.

Theseus, founding father of the city of Athens, was the illegitimate son of the incestuous relationship between his father and Theseus’ half-sister. Left to grow up with his mother, he came to travel to join his father, the King of Athens, bearing the sandals and sword which his father had hidden beneath a large rock. He had to use these to prove his identity to his father.

By the time that Theseus reaches his father’s court, the city and throne are in disarray, and the king is cohabiting with the sorceress Medea, who has promised him a son and heir. She convinces King Aegeus that Theseus is trying to wrest the throne from him, and that his best course is to poison his still-unrecognised son with a cup of deadly aconite.

Just as Theseus is about to put this toxic cup to his lips, Aegeus recognises his sword, thus that his guest is no usurper, but is his son – a major change in fortune indeed. The king knocks the cup away, is re-united with his son at last, and Medea suddenly becomes superfluous and unwanted.

Antoine-Placide Gibert’s entry, which turned out to be the runner-up, shows the moment of recognition, the king’s right hand just about to knock the goblet of poison from Theseus. Two expressive faces are lit brightly: the king, mouth agape and eyes wide with surprise, and Medea, with a face like thunder as she realises that her conspiracy has been foiled.

This plot, although dependent on knowledge of the story, is similar to many detective and crime novels, and is thoroughly well-told in this single painting.

Hippolyte Flandrin’s winning entry that year shows a few moments later, the poison goblet resting on the table on its side, and King Aegeus in a very similar position as in Gibert’s version. Apart from its neoclassical style, its narrative is expressed more weakly, with little facial expression or body language, and its surprise barely cocks an eyebrow.

One story which came back into fashion after she was declared a symbol of the French nation in 1803 is that of Joan of Arc, Jeanne d’Arc.

Léon-François Bénouville’s Joan of Arc Hearing Voices, probably painted between 1845 and his early death in 1859, shows her wide-eyed surprise on being called in a mystical experience. Once again, body language is used to great effect, with Joan’s arms tensed, even down to her hyperextended toes.

Bénouville uses the sky to show Joan’s accompanying visions. Instead of depicting these as distinct from the clouds, as might have been done in earlier religious works, Saints Margaret, Catherine, and Michael are here worked into the cumulus forms heaped up over a town ablaze in the distance, itself a visual link to the wars between the English and French, and perhaps to Joan’s own later martyrdom.

As Joan was being rediscovered, classical narratives were revived too.

Twists and surprise are frequent features of the narrative paintings of Jean-Léon Gérôme, from which I have chosen Phryne before the Areopagus (1861) as perhaps his most visually arresting.

Phryne was a highly successful and very rich courtesan (hetaira) in ancient Greece who, according to legend, was brought to trial for the serious crime of impiety. When it seemed inevitable that she would be found guilty, one of her lovers, the orator Hypereides, took on her defence. A key part of that was to unveil her naked in front of the court, in an attempt to surprise its members, impress them with the beauty of her body, and arouse a sense of pity. The legend claims that this ploy worked perfectly.

Gérôme shows a whole textbook of responses to surprise among the members of the court, although Phryne herself is covering not her body, but her eyes; each of the men in the court, of course, is looking straight at her. The artist also follows an ancient colour coding scheme, in which the flesh of women is pale, almost white, in contrast to the more sallow skin of men.

Henri Regnault, another great history painter of the time, painting the shocking Summary Execution under the Moorish Kings of Grenada (1870), with its careful use of colour contrast reinforcing the red of the blood spilled on the steps.

Although the Prix de Rome continued to promote narrative painting, corruption in its adjudication put some potentially great artists off for the rest of their careers.

In 1875, the young Jules Bastien-Lepage submitted The Annunciation to the Shepherds, was unsuccessful, and for the remaining few years of his career he abandoned history/religious painting. To emphasise surprise, he makes the angel as incongruous as possible: it is painted in almost Renaissance style using gold leaf and distinct colours. The two shepherds have facial expressions and body language which speaks plainly of their surprise.

The following year, Domenico Morelli painted another popular religious motif of surprise in The Conversion of Saint Paul (1876): a fine example of peripeteia, and composed in a way which remained faithful to the story and delivering maximum visual impact.

Myths remained a popular platform for expressing surprise.

Frederic, Lord Leighton’s Perseus and Andromeda from 1891 is traditional in its approach. Andromeda has here been attached to a rock by the sea, to appease the sea monster Cetus which has been destroying coastal cities of her parents’ kingdom. As the monster has returned to kill and eat the young princess, who should arrive on the scene but Perseus, fresh from his trip to kill Medusa the Gorgon.

Although at variance with most accounts, Leighton shows the hero astride the winged horse Pegasus, who grew from the remains of Medusa, loosing his arrows at Cetus. Andromeda has been twice surprised, with Cetus then Perseus, Cetus is certainly surprised to be coming under attack from Perseus, and Perseus is surprised to have discovered the beautiful Andromeda in her predicament.

Reference

Vera Tobin (2018) Elements of Surprise, Our Mental Limits and the Satisfactions of Plot, Harvard UP. ISBN 978 0 674 98020 4.

In the second article of this series, I looked at the depiction of surprise in narrative painting during the nineteenth century, when it seems to have flourished. Even relatively minor narrative artists painted some fine examples.

Félix-Henri Giacomotti, a friend of William Bouguereau, painted this satirical scene of Forbidden Literature in 1886, with two interrelated surprises. Five young women have found their way into a private library containing ‘forbidden literature’, and are showing various signs of surprise and shock at what they have discovered and read there. They have then been surprised by the entry of an older woman, possibly their mother, who clearly wasn’t expecting to find them swooning over explicit content.

Surprise became such a popular theme of paintings at the end of the century that at least one artist, Gaetano Chierici (1838-1920), almost made it his speciality.

In Chierici’s undated The Mask Prank, a young boy is still laughing as his mother scolds him for surprising and upsetting his younger sister, who is now crying at her mother’s skirts. As in Rembrandt’s Belshazzar’s Feast, the young girl has dropped her spoon, and mother may have dropped and broken something too.

Chierici’s undated A Scary State of Affairs shows another childhood surprise, when an infant has been left with a bowl on their lap, and that room is invaded first by chickens, then by large and aggressive geese. The child’s eyes are wide open, their mouth at full stretch in a scream, their arms raised, and their legs are trying to fend the geese off.

In Britain, a new sub-genre appeared, in which surprise was often key: the problem picture. Among its most successful exponents was John Collier (1850–1934).

In Collier’s The Prodigal Daughter (1903), an elderly middle-class couple are seen in their parlour in the evening in their sober black clothes and sombre surroundings. They are surprised when their prodigal daughter turns up out of the blue, in her low-cut gown with floral motifs and scarlet accessories.

Father is still sitting, backlit by a table lamp to heighten the drama. Mother has risen from her chair and is visibly taken aback. Daughter stands, her back against the door and her hand still holding its handle, as if ready to run away again should the need arise. Collier also uses ingenious shadow play, a device which became popular in the nineteenth century perhaps with the advent of optical projectors: here the mother’s cast shadow makes her appear much larger than the daughter’s, like an ogre bearing down on a child.

Facial expression is even more vital in Collier’s The Sentence of Death (1908), where a medical practitioner has just told a man of his fatal condition. The patient stares at the viewer, in complete shock, while the doctor looks instead at a large book on his desk, detached from his damning message. The viewer is left to decide the nature of the man’s illness.

There were light-hearted paintings of surprise too.

In Louis Béroud’s The Joys of the Flood (in the Medici Gallery) (1910), Rubens’ huge painting of The Disembarkation of Marie de’ Medici at Marseilles (1621-25) has burst into life, as its water starts to flood the Louvre and its three nudes step out onto the floor. The painter shown painting this painting is, of course, Béroud himself, adding another wry twist to what must be his finest work.

In spite of all claims and fears, narrative painting did not die in the twentieth century, although there were times when it might have.

Lovis Corinth continued to paint classical myths, including this famous scene of surprise, in Homeric Laughter (1909). It shows a story from Book 8 of Homer’s Odyssey, where the hero is being entertained by King Alcinous of the Phaeacians. The bard Demodocus tells the well-known tale of the illicit affair between Ares/Mars, god of war, and Aphrodite/Venus, god of love and wife of Hephaistos/Vulcan.

When Hephaistos surprises his wife Aphrodite making love with Ares in their marriage bed, instead of being angry, he forges a very fine but unbreakable net, throws it over the couple to prevent their escape, and summons the other gods, who come to laugh at the ensnared couple.

As Ares tries to disentangle his body from that of Aphrodite, in her nudity she only seems to care about covering her eyes (like Gérôme’s Phryne). Other masters had painted this story before, but no other artist quite captures the surprise or the ribald humour.

Corinth was not afraid to return to the use of multiplex narrative either, in his painting of two surprises in Ariadne on Naxos (1913). Theseus (left) had promised Ariadne (naked on his thigh) that he would marry her after she helped him kill the Minotaur on Crete, but surprises her when he abandons her on the island of Naxos. Ariadne is then surprised by the arrival of Bacchus in his chariot, who surprises himself by falling in love with and marrying her.

Surprise in narrative painting has still, today, refused to die. My final example comes from one of our finest modern painters, Stuart Pearson Wright.

Although inspired by the movie An American Werewolf in London, and an episode in the artist’s life, Wright’s Woman Surprised by a Werewolf (2008) is unusual among narrative paintings in not relying on the viewer’s knowledge of extraneous sources. A naked, buxom young woman is running away from a werewolf which is baring its teeth and sexually aroused. She has clearly been caught by surprise, her mouth is wide open as if screaming, but her face shows an odd combination of fear and lust.

For the viewer, perhaps the greatest surprise is of seeing a naked woman and werewolf together in a barren wood in the dead of the night.

There are many more well-known paintings which have been made between 1300 and the present which depict surprise in a narrative context. I have in this short series shown a selection which illustrate some of the techniques which have been developed to show surprise in the figures in a painting, and to surprise the viewer.

Most consistent among these are the traditional elements of facial expression and body language, which were prescribed by Alberti as rules. Innovative artists have extended these to include composition, lighting, the use of colour, actions such as tipping of drinks and dropping objects, incongruities and contradictions, direction of gaze, large or small size of the object of surprise, backward and forward reference in narrative, nudity, skin tone, style, and more.

Depicting such an abstract concept as surprise, and telling stories with surprise, may at first sight appear a tough challenge. It is one to which narrative painters have risen, to the point where some have told new stories successfully, for which the viewer doesn’t already know the story. That really is a mark of success.

Reference

Vera Tobin (2018) Elements of Surprise, Our Mental Limits and the Satisfactions of Plot, Harvard UP. ISBN 978 0 674 98020 4.

Just as Lycurgus was believed to have provided Sparta with its laws and institutions, Numa (or Numa Pompilius) was claimed to have fulfilled that role for early Rome. Hence Plutarch’s match for his account of the Spartan is the largely legendary King of Rome who succeeded Romulus.

It has commonly been claimed that Numa was a close friend of Pythagoras, something repeated by Ovid in Book 15 of his Metamorphoses. Plutarch recognises that this involves a chronological dispute, but passes over it without taking a side, merely affirming that Numa was undoubtedly of Sabine descent. He then gives a summary of the mysterious disappearance of Romulus, thirty-seven years after Rome had been built and Romulus had become its ruler.

During the interregnum, each of the 150 senators acted as the ruler for a period of six hours in rotation. Eventually, the Roman and Sabine factions reached agreement that the Romans would choose a Sabine man to be the next king, and Numa Pompilius was agreed by both parties as the most acceptable candidate.

Numa was a virtuous man who believed that reason should overcome passions. He had eliminated luxury and extravagance from his home, and as a result of his virtue and fame had married the daughter of Tatius, the previous Sabine co-ruler with Romulus.

When Numa was invited to become the King of Rome, he declined, as he felt unable to contend with its repeated wars and strife, which he hated. The Romans appealed to him to reconsider, and he agreed to take the throne. When he went to the city, the people greeted him and voted unanimously for him to be crowned king.

Numa, though, sought divine approval, for which he resorted to augury by birds, as Romulus and Remus had done long before. When the appropriately auspicious birds appeared, Numa donned his royal robes and became the king.

Bernhard Rode’s etching of Augury from 1768-69 shows Numa with an oracle determining whether the birds were propitious; the oracle stands watching the sky, as Numa sits, his head cloaked, waiting for the verdict. Alongside him is a crown and sceptre, symbols of his imminent elevation to the throne.

Numa started his programme of reform by disbanding the three hundred close bodyguards which Romulus had kept. He added a third priest to the existing two of Jupiter and Mars, who was called Flamen Quirinalis. He then set about changing the harsh and warlike nature of the city and its citizens by means of religious rites.

Plutarch attributes much of Numa’s approach to him being a follower of Pythagoras, and the changes which Numa brought to Rome and its citizens as being in keeping with the doctrines of Pythagoras. One example is that the new king forbade the worshipping of graven images – statuary or painted – of the gods, and that animal sacrifice was also banned in view of Pythagoras’ vegetarianism.

A couple of times, Plutarch refers to a legend that Numa was in love with the nymph Egeria, although he does not mention the associated claim that the laws of Rome were dictated to Numa by that nymph. It is a story which has been quite popular with artists, though.

Nicolas Poussin’s Numa Pompilius and the Nymph Egeria from 1631-33 shows the meeting of King Numa, at the right, with Egeria, at the left, as she was being entertained by a young man with a lute, who may signify the Muses who apparently inspired Egeria to provide the laws of Rome. However, Numa hasn’t come equipped with any means of recording them, suggesting that this wasn’t the occasion on which Egeria dictated those laws.

Felice Giani’s much later painting of Numa Pompilius Receiving from the Nymph Egeria the Laws of Rome (1806) shows that process of dictation in full swing, with Numa working through scrolls, which are then transcribed onto the tablets of stone seen at the left. The nymph is the one sat on a throne, and is clearly in command, wagging her index finger at the new King of Rome.

Ulpiano Checa’s The Nymph Egeria Dictating to Numa Pompilius the Laws of Rome (c 1886) offers a similar account, with King Numa sat writing down the laws on scrolls of paper using a reed pen. Egeria is quite different, though, and appears a simple and very naked nymph, in accordance with the linked legend of Numa and Egeria being lovers – which Plutarch denies.

Numa established the order of high priests known as the Pontifices, and their chief, the Pontifex Maximus, terms which influenced the titles of the much later Christian church. Although the Vestal Virgins had already been cited in Plutarch’s biography of Romulus, Numa is attributed the institution of the temple of Vesta, the duties of its priestesses, and the penalties for any breach.

Two other orders of the priesthood were established by Numa, including the Fetiales, whose duty was to guard the peace. If they were unable to settle a quarrel with an enemy, then they, not the king, were responsible for any decision to declare war.

Numa’s solution to the division of Rome into two factions, Sabine and Roman, was to divide it further according to trades and arts, which he actively promoted. He also changed the calendar to keep it in better synchrony with the solar year, and re-ordered the months within it.

It is Merry-Joseph Blondel’s portrait of Numa from 1828 which is most in keeping with Plutarch’s account. Sat in a modest throne beside an altar, he is dressed as a priest, and holds a scroll of his new laws in his left hand.

Plutarch accepts that there was much dispute over Numa’s personal life, including the number of his children, but asserts that he was over eighty years old when he died, and was mourned greatly. He was buried under the Janiculum in a stone coffin, with another coffin containing the sacred books which he is supposed to have written.

Comparing Lycurgus with Numa

Plutarch’s comparison between these two virtuous statesmen starts by pointing out that Numa accepted kingship, albeit reluctantly, but Lycurgus refused it. He draws a good metaphor by stating that Lycurgus tightened the strings at Sparta, but Numa loosened them in Rome. To achieve those changes, Lycurgus had to put his life on the line, and lost an eye in the process, whereas Numa was able to use persuasion.

There were also marked contrasts in handling of their subjects: Numa was popular, favoured the masses and encouraged arts and crafts, but Lycurgus was rigid, dedicated single-mindedly to make Spartans warriors, and left non-military crafts to slaves and Helots. Sparta came to foster bold women who ruled their houses absolutely, but the women of Rome became accustomed to remaining in dignified silence.

Perhaps the most revealing comparison was the later destinies of Sparta and Rome after moving on from these early laws: while the Romans only increased in power, Sparta collapsed, and was in danger of complete destruction. Numa’s change by persuasion brought a more enduring harmony.

Reference

Whole text in English translation at Penelope.

In 1904, Bonnard had started to travel more and further afield, in the summer taking Marthe to the north coast, and later visiting Saint Tropez on the Mediterranean.

The following year, he visited Belgium and Holland in company with the painter Pierre Laprade, the composer Maurice Ravel, and their patrons Misia and Alfred Edwards, on the maiden voyage of the latter’s private yacht l’Aimée. Coupled with visits to London and Spain with Vuillard, this enabled Bonnard to visit art collections across much of Europe in a systematic way.

Bonnard also visited Berlin, where he painted a portrait of the wife of the painter Curt Herrmann.

Judging by the brown foliage in the trees in The Tuileries Garden (1905), Bonnard painted this in the autumn. The rich array of statuary stands out well. This garden in central Paris had been a popular location for the paintings of Manet and the Impressionists.

In Two Elegant Women, Place de Clichy (1905), Bonnard fills his panel with the figures of two women dressed in the latest fashions, that on the left with a hat which dazzles as much as the lit street behind.

No doubt influenced by his cruise on board Alfred Edwards’ yacht, maritime motifs such as Boats in Port at Low Tide (1905) start to appear among Bonnard’s work at this time, although this painting may have its origins in his stay on the north coast the previous year.

Bonnard’s In a Boat (1905) appears to have been painted on a river or a lake in a park, though. He has shaped the striped clothing on his model more than he might have done during the height of his Nabi style, giving her a more conventional 3D appearance.

In the early years of the twentieth century, Bonnard used mirrors and reflections in several paintings, including this Interior from about 1905. It is an unusual composition, with but a little of the woman’s back visible in the mirror; Bonnard instead shows the reflection of a chair placed in front of the mirror, and what appears to be the artist sat at a table.

His purpose in placing the chair in front of the mirror was, I think, to demonstrate that the artist’s eye is in line with the chair and with his own reflection, confirming that it is him who is sat at the table, although he doesn’t have an easel, neither is any canvas or palette visible.

Bonnard’s Model with a White Robe (c 1905) doesn’t appear to be Marthe, but is most probably the same he used in Interior and In a Boat above. She appears to wear a chignon, in which case it is likely to have been Anita Champagne, who was a favourite of his at the time.

At the end of 1905, Bonnard moved studio, ironically taking over part of a building which had been a convent.

In 1906, Bonnard was busy again travelling. At the end of the winter, he visited Marseille and Toulon, then in the summer he toured Belgium and Holland again with Misia and Alfred Edwards on board the yacht l’Aimée. In the Spring, he had a successful solo exhibition at Vollard’s gallery. In November, though, he had another solo exhibition, this time at Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, which became his standard venue until the Second World War.

Place Clichy (The Green Tram) (c 1906) shows this very busy intersection at the edge of the Montmartre district of Paris, more properly known as Place de Clichy. The streets are crowded with a tram (which had only recently been electrified), several horse-drawn vehicles, and a market barrow in the foreground. There are also pedestrians almost everywhere, even some small dogs.

Bonnard’s At the Seaside (Strollers on the Promenade) (1906) revisits a theme which had developed from the paintings of Eugène Boudin, and flourished with Monet and the Impressionists.

Bonnard dedicated his painting of La Casa de Misia Sert (The House of Misia Sert) (1906) to the former Misia Natanson, muse, close friend, and patron. This was made using tempera rather than oils.

Misia Godebska (1872-1950) had first married Thadée Natanson, who published La Revue Blanche. She met Alfred Edwards, who founded and owned the leading Paris newspaper Le Matin, through Natanson’s business dealings, and in 1903 became Edwards’ mistress. Edwards offered Natanson the capital that the latter needed, on condition that Misia was released to marry Edwards.

Misia married Alfred Edwards in 1905, and settled into a lavish apartment overlooking the Tuileries Palace in Paris, and the property shown in Bonnard’s painting. Edwards perhaps inevitably proved unfaithful, and the couple divorced in 1909. She then married the Spanish painter José-Maria Sert in 1920 – which proved to be another tumultuous relationship, ending in divorce in 1927.

Misia’s portrait was painted by Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, Vallotton, Vuillard and Bonnard, and Maurice Ravel dedicated two pieces of music to her. By the time of her death in 1950, Misia had been a muse and patron to countless painters, writers, composers, and ballet dancers, including Sergei Diaghilev, whose funeral she paid for.

Bonnard seems to have had a liking for cats, which appear in several of his paintings, such as The Cats’ Lunch from about 1906. Two women are sat at the table, feeding their four cats. The women don’t look at the cats, nor at one another, but stare blankly into the space in front of them.

The Letter from about 1906 is a more conventional portrait of a well-dressed woman sitting at a table to write a letter. The model may again have been Anita Champagne.

Woman Getting Dressed (1906) is a second example of Bonnard’s optical play with reflections. Dominating the centre of his canvas is a pile of women’s clothing on a low item of furniture, and a heater. A flat mirror at the left reveals the subject, who is sat beyond the right edge of the painting, getting dressed.

Pleasure or Games (1906) is another unusual work, a large painting on cardboard which was one of four panels for Misia and Alfred Edwards’ apartment in Paris; the others were Travel, Play I, and Study. Their style is decorative, reminiscent of fanciful Rococo ornamentation and fantasy, and their colours vibrant.

The central image shows young women cavorting in an idealised landscape, with a fountain and two large gates which are partly open. The decorative edging includes images of birds and monkeys, with strings of beads or pearls.

The four were exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in 1910.

In a Boat (c 1907) is very different from his previous painting of a woman in a small boat. Here, three figures, probably all women, are in a larger vessel, perhaps a punt. At the right is a fisherman, and there are ducks at the left. Beyond the small pond is a weeping willow tree, houses, and a distant hill. The colours suggest this may be in the brighter light of the south of France.

In 1907, Bonnard painted a pair of panels under the overall title of In the Country. Each shows two figures from an idyllic family: Father and Daughter, with a large white dog in the foreground, and Mother and Child, with a smaller black dog which resembles Marthe’s dog Black. These show the continuing influence of Japonisme.

The Milliner, painted in 1907, features Anita Champagne’s distinctive chignon. The hat which she has brought is laid carefully on a chair beside her.

Early in 1908, Bonnard and Marthe were to visit North Africa.

References

Guy Cogeval and Isabelle Cahn (2016) Pierre Bonnard, Painting Arcadia, Prestel. ISBN 978 3 791 35524 5.
Gilles Genty and Pierrette Vernon (2006) Bonnard Inédits, Éditions Cercle d’Art (in French). ISBN 978 2 702 20707 9.

The Arts depend on a complex web of people other than artists themselves. For a painter, it starts with the paint manufacturer and materials suppliers, and extends right through to galleries, dealers and copyright agencies. Somewhere in the middle is the patron, often a close friend, who has the money to make it all happen.

Between about 1895 and the late 1930s, one of the most important patrons in France was a Polish woman, born Maria Zofia Zenajda Godebska in 1872, but subsequently known as Misia Natanson, Edwards, or Sert. Her father was Cyprian Godebski, a major sculptor who was a professor at the Imperial Academy in Saint Petersburg.

Misia’s mother died shortly after the girl’s birth, and Misia was sent to her grandparents in Brussels. This took her from sculpture to music, as those grandparents had musical circles which included Franz Liszt. She was brought up as a pianist, and when her father moved her to Paris, she studied under Gabriel Fauré.

Misia married for the first time at the age of twenty-one, to her cousin Thadée Natanson, who had socialist ideals and lived in artistic circles. The Natansons entertained Marcel Proust, Stéphane Mallarmé, André Gide, and Claude Debussy. But they were closest to their painter friends: Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Odilon Redon, Paul Signac, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

It was probably Toulouse-Lautrec who first started to draw and paint Misia, as in this Portrait of Misia Natanson of 1895.

He turned that into his Poster for “La revue blanche” (1895), the arts magazine co-founded in 1889 by Misia’s husband, which was the platform which promoted the Nabis, including Pierre Bonnard.

Toulouse-Lautrec later painted Misia Natanson (1897) playing the piano.

The Nabis themselves painted Misia’s portraits, not just as their main patron, but in informal settings, as more of a friend and muse.

Édouard Vuillard’s Vallotton at the Natansons shows Misia watching Félix Vallotton painting in 1897, at the Natanson’s home.

Félix Vallotton affords us a glimpse into her private life, in his Misia at Her Dressing Table (1898).

In his turn, Pierre Bonnard painted Misia Natanson at Breakfast in about 1899, with one of the family’s maids at work in the background.

Bonnard’s Misia at the Piano from about 1902 shows Misia doing what she loved most.

At this time, Thadée Natanson needed more capital to support his publishing and other activities. He found a source in Alfred Edwards, a publishing magnate who had founded and published the major newspaper in Paris at the time, Le Matin. Unfortunately, Edwards and Misia fell in love, and Misia became Edwards’ mistress in 1903. As Natanson wanted his capital, so Edwards wanted Misia, and that became a condition of the deal.

Renoir painted this and the next portrait of Misia Sert while this was being settled, in 1904. Of the two, this is the better-known, as it hangs in the National Gallery in London. I can’t help feeling that she is unhappy here.

In this second of Renoir’s portraits of Misia from 1904, now in Tel Aviv, she is as sumptuously dressed, but her head is buried in a book.

Pierre Bonnard sees a completely different figure, though. In Misia Natanson and Her Dog from about 1904, she is out in the country with her dog, wearing an ornate white lace hat – more like a character from a nursery rhyme than the mistress of a newspaper magnate.

The following year, Misia married Edwards, and her circle of artists and composers benefited from new patronage with even deeper pockets. Misia and her husband had a yacht – by which I mean a large, crewed vessel, not a dinky little dinghy. In the summer of 1905, they took Bonnard, Maurice Ravel, and others on the yacht’s maiden cruise to Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany.

Misia, though, looks no happier in Renoir’s third portrait of Misia Sert with a Lap Dog (Young Woman with a Lap-Dog) from after her marriage, in about 1906. And the dog has changed to a toy breed, probably a Brussels Griffon.

Bonnard continued to keep company with Misia and her husband. Maurice Ravel dedicated two of his most beautiful compositions to her: The Swan, from Histoires Naturelles, and The Waltz.

In 1908, Bonnard painted at least three portraits of Misia. Gone is the illusion of the shepherdess: she now sits in a lavishly-decorated room, with what appear to be Gobelin tapestries behind her.

In Misia with a Pink Corsage, Bonnard closes in for a straight head-and-shoulders.

In Misia with Roses, she looks down at an almost unseen pet she is stroking beside her.

As could have been expected, Alfred Edwards proved unfaithful to Misia. She divorced him in 1909, by which time she was already in a relationship with the Spanish painter Josep Maria Sert (1874-1945). He had been on the periphery of the Nabis since he moved to Paris in 1899.

The last portrait that I can find by Bonnard, of Misia Godebska Writing, was painted in about 1910. It’s back to head-and-shoulders, although here the artist has used a little mirror play to reveal her chignon.

Misia didn’t marry Sert until 1920, by which time she was established as the cultural arbiter in Paris, and a close friend of Coco Chanel. Her husband, a friend of Salvador Dalí, specialised in murals, and doesn’t appear to have painted her portrait. Instead, he spent over thirty years painting murals in the Vic Cathedral in Barcelona, and having affairs of his own. In 1927, Sert divorced Misia to marry the sculptor Isabelle Roussadana Mdivani (1906-1938), known for short as Roussy, who for a time had lived with the Serts in a ménage à trois.

The Serts had been strong supporters of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, which was based in Paris from 1909. Josep Maria Sert painted sets and designed costumes from 1914 onwards, among other more famous artists including Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Misia was heavily involved too, and often raised money to save a production from seemingly overwhelming debts.

Misia remained close to Diaghilev, and in August 1929 she comforted him as he died in Venice of diabetes, then paid for his funeral from her own pocket.

Just before the Second World War, Roussy Sert died, and Misia and Josep Maria Sert reconciled and sort of lived together, in separate apartments in Paris. Misia’s reputation remained unblemished during the Nazi occupation of Paris, and she died there on 15 October 1950, at the age of 78.

Without Misia’s influence and support, a great deal of the painting, music, and ballet of the first half of the twentieth century simply wouldn’t have happened.

Reference

Wikipedia.

The element Chromium is so named because of the rich colours seen in many of its salts and compounds. One of them, Chromium Oxide, was discovered in about 1798 by Louis-Nicolas Vauquelin, who immediately recognised its future use as a pigment, because of its “fine emerald colour”.

But painters were still enamoured with more toxic greens, and straight Chromium Oxide doesn’t look particularly brilliant, being a rather dull yellow-green. Its introduction into paintings probably didn’t start until around 1840, when landscape painting outdoors was becoming all the rage.

Some of the earliest paintings known to use Chromium Oxide are those of Moritz von Schwind, of which the first example that I can show is his Mermaids Watering a Stag from about 1846. He seems to have used the pigment quite extensively here for foliage, although probably in combination with other pigments.

Von Schwind’s King Krokus and the Wood Nymph from about 1855 is shown in a clearer image. Again, he probably used Chromium Oxide in combination for his greens generally across this canvas.

As these works were being painted, an improved version of Chromium Oxide was being developed: Hydrated Chromium Oxide, which became known as Viridian during the 1860s. This first became available at a reasonable price after Guignet started to make it in quantity in 1859, and has also been known as Guignet’s Green. It is sometimes termed émeraude or emerald, which only serves to confuse Viridian with Copper Acetoarsenate, which was more widely known as Emerald Green.

Viridian came into use during the 1860s, and has proved far more popular than Chromium Oxide. Both pigments are reliably lightfast, opaque, and have good covering power, but Viridian is the more intense hue, and doesn’t appear dull, as does plain Chromium Oxide.

Anselm Feuerbach’s painting of Paolo and Francesca from 1864 is one of the earlier works found to contain Viridian among its many rich greens.

The best example showing the colour of Viridian is perhaps Édouard Manet’s The Balcony (1868-69), where he appears to have used the pigment throughout the blinds and railings, most probably mixed with Lead White, and unmixed for the woman’s parasol.

Arnold Böcklin’s Triton and Nereid from 1874 is unusual in several respects. It is reported as being painted in tempera rather than oils, but its deep lustrous greens were developed using a base of predominantly Viridian, over which Böcklin applied a Copper Resinate glaze.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s La Yole (The Skiff) of 1875 uses Viridian as the main colour for the reeds in the left foreground.

Analysis of Claude Monet’s series of paintings of the Gare Saint-Lazare in 1877 has found quite extensive use of Viridian in mixtures, including the green shadows in the roof. In Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare (1877), Viridian is apparent (and confirmed) throughout the green foreground of the platform, an optical effect resulting from light passing through the glass roof of the station.

Renoir used Viridian together with Malachite Green and other pigments in mixtures for the greens in his Chrysanthemums (1881-82).

If you care to spend some time examining the myriads of tiny dots in Georges Seurat’s monumental Divisionist painting of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-86), I am assured that you will find many of those forming its vegetation contain Viridian.

Viridian remained popular among the post-Impressionists, from whom I have two well-known paintings as examples.

Vincent van Gogh included Viridian in the pigments used in the range of greens in his A Wheatfield, with Cypresses (1889), which is more unusual for his use of Ultramarine Blue mixed to form green.

Paul Cézanne is known to have had a strong preference for Viridian as one of the key colours in his palette. However, in his Hillside in Provence (1890-92), it is Emerald Green which is the more prominent, and the major part of the painting’s more brilliant greens, even to its pale turquoise sky.

Some green passages, such as the patch of yellow-green grass at the edge of the path in the foreground, at the right edge of the canvas, have been built with a base of Lead White and Viridian, over which he has applied a yellow lake glaze. What might appear to be quite simple and direct turns out to be much more sophisticated.

Chromium Oxide and Viridian remain widely available today; although the former is not popular or widely used, Viridian is still a mainstay green which is widely recommended for its colour and other properties. Being virtually insoluble, Chromium Oxide and Viridian pose minimal risks of toxicity to the artist. However, there is growing concern over their environmental effects, and great care is needed when handling waste paint containing either pigment.

Reference

Richard Newman (1997) Artists’ Pigments, vol 3, ed Elisabeth West FitzHugh, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 76 0.

Most classical myths were told in paintings during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with narrative masters such as Rubens often painting them two or more times. Very few remained almost undiscovered and untold until the nineteenth century.

The story of Pandora and her ‘box’ is one such myth which was almost unknown in painting until 1850, when it suddenly became very popular. This article and the next look at most of the surviving paintings telling this tale.

One reason for Pandora’s late discovery is that her myths appear in less popular sources: Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days. These are among the oldest of the Greek anthologies of myth, dating back to around 750 BCE, even now are not as accessible as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and deal with more ‘difficult’ stories.

The story of Pandora and her ‘box’ is told most fully in Works and Days, where she is the original woman, created by Hephaestus (Roman: Vulcan) for Zeus, as punishment for humans receiving the gift of fire which had been stolen by Prometheus. After she was formed from earth by Hephaestus, other gods gave her properties which determined her nature.

Athena dressed her in a silvery gown, and taught her needlecraft and weaving. Aphrodite shed grace on her head, together with cruel longing and cares. Hermes gave her a shameful mind and deceitful nature, together with the power of speech, including the ability to tell lies. Other gifts were provided by Persuasion, the Charities, and the Horae.

Pandora also carried with her a large earthenware jar (pithos, in Greek) containing toil and sickness that bring death to men, diseases, and a myriad of other pains. Zeus gave her as a gift to Epimetheus, brother of Prometheus. She then opened her jar, and released its evils into the earth and sea. The only thing remaining in the jar was Hope, who stayed under its lip.

This marked the beginning of the second age of mankind, its Silver Age, in which people knew birth and death, as humans had become subject to death, and Pandora brought birth too. In later accounts, Epimetheus married Pandora, and the couple had a daughter Pyrrha, who married Deucalion with whom she survived the flood.

As with other classical myths, at the time that Jean Cousin painted Eva Prima Pandora, in about 1550, it had been mixed with Christian religious narrative, in this case of Eve and the Fall of Mankind. No longer clothed in Athena’s silvery gown, Eve/Pandora lies naked, propped against a human skull. Her left hand clutches the dreaded jar, which she has not yet opened.

Her right hand holds a fruiting sprig of the apple tree, an allusion to the traditional Biblical story of Eve. Coiled around her left arm is a serpent, another reference to the Fall of Mankind.

When William Etty painted her, in Pandora Crowned by the Seasons of 1824, the significance of the crux of the story, Pandora opening the jar, had become lost in the other detail. Besides, it gave Etty the opportunity to paint a statuesque and almost naked young woman.

It was the now-forgotten Henry Howard who first painted The Opening of Pandora’s Vase in 1834. Pandora, more correctly dressed, crouches to duck the torrent of woe, evil and pain which streams from the jar, as Epimetheus tries in vain to reseal its lid. This is the story as told by Hesiod in his Works and Days.

At some time between about 1834 and 1860, the story of Pandora with her jar of evils became confounded with that of Psyche, who had a box which she could not open. The result was the tale still told about Pandora and her box of evils.

This undated painting attributed to Louis Hersent of Pandora Reclining in a Wooded Landscape gives this revised account, with the box firmly shut in Pandora’s right hand, and the motif an uncommitted combination of landscape, nude figure, and weak narrative.

In the 1870s, this suddenly became one of the most popular subjects for mythological paintings. This doesn’t appear to have been the result of it being told in another creative medium, though.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s first painting of Pandora, completed in 1871, shows a moody, brooding Pandora, modelled by Jane Morris. She has just cracked open the lid of the jewelled casket held in her left hand, and it emits a stream of noxious red smoke. As this coils around her head winged figures appear in the fumes.

This was one of Rossetti’s earlier paintings of Jane Morris, the wife of his friend William Morris, and the subject of Rossetti’s late passionate obsession. It was commissioned by John Graham for 750 guineas, who was so pleased with the result that he exhibited it, against Rossetti’s wishes, in Glasgow the following year. Graham had made his money in cotton manufacture and trade with India, and was a keen collector of Pre-Raphaelite art.

Rossetti’s source for the story of Pandora was most probably Lemprière’s dictionary of classical mythology, which erroneously referred to Pandora’s box, not jar. The inscription on the side of the jewel casket reads “Nascitur ignescitur”, meaning born of flames.

Jules Lefebvre was another artist who painted Pandora more than once. This initial version from 1872 shows her walking with the fateful box held in both hands, its lid firmly shut. Ominous smoke rises from a series of fumaroles in the ground around her. She is nude, wears an unusual coronet, and there is a six-pointed star above her head.

Next was Alexandre Cabanel’s portrait of the Swedish soprano Christine Nilsson as Pandora, from 1873. As a portrait rather than a faithful account of the myth, the box is closed, almost concealed, and its significance suppressed.

In 1877, the elderly Paul Césaire Gariot’s Pandora’s Box places her in a primeval world of rock, studying the closed box intently, wrestling internally with the desire to open it.

The following year, Dante Gabriel Rossetti make a chalk study for a second painting of Pandora, again using Jane Morris as his model. Her face shows a faint agony this time, as a decorative golden stream emerges from the crack in the lid. Here the inscription reads “Ultima manet spes” – hope remains last, a candidate perhaps for Rossetti’s own epitaph.

Reference

Wikipedia on the myth of Pandora.

The ancient Greek myth of Pandora had been almost unknown in paintings until the nineteenth century. During the 1870s, it suddenly became a popular theme for paintings in both Britain and France, but its narrative had altered from the original in showing the Greeks’ first human woman with a box containing the ills of the world, rather than a large earthenware storage pot.

Lawrence Alma-Tadema sought a compromise in his Pandora of 1881, in which she held not a box but a small pot, suitably decorated with a Sphinx. In what appears to be a skilfully-painted watercolour, Pandora has not yet given way to the temptation to open the pot.

Jules Lefebvre’s second painting of Pandora made in 1882, a decade after his first, also places her in profile next to the sea. She has a star just above her forehead, but that has become five-pointed rather than six, perhaps to dodge any Jewish connotations. His previous gentle narrative has all but vanished too.

The story of Pandora broke out of Europe by 1883, when Frederick Stuart Church painted his more illustrative Pandora (1883). Dressed more modestly (presumably for a wider audience), she is shown as an innocent young woman kneeling on a large golden chest as she tries to close its lid and stop the stream of red demons emerging. I suspect that this was painted as an illustration for a printed collection of classical myths.

In his later years, William-Adolphe Bouguereau chose an oddly androgynous model for his depiction of Pandora in 1890, but has rather lost the narrative. Her neutral expression, body language, and the closed box tell little of what is about to come.

One of his lesser-known paintings, John William Waterhouse’s Pandora from 1896 is a major depiction of this myth, and one of the most complete.

Set by a small brook in a dark, primeval forest, her box has become a large gold chest encrusted with precious stones and decorated with mythological motifs. Pandora kneels by its side, peeking inside as she carefully raises its lid. But even this tentative glimpse is sufficient to release its stream of ills, of which she appears unaware.

I wonder whether the rush of demons from the box is suddenly going to overwhelm, snatching the lid from her hand, and throwing her into panic to try to close the chest again.

Ernest Normand is one of few painters to show a later moment, in which Pandora (1899) bends low to duck beneath the swirling grey clouds of evils as they spread out into the idyllic world beyond, causing blossom to fall as petals to the ground. Her jar is only hinted at, behind her bilowing white robes, almost depriving the viewer of this vital cue to the original story.

I have been unable to find a date for this presumed illustration by the great Arthur Rackham of Pandora, but suspect it was made around the turn of the twentieth century, and intended to accompany a British English retelling of this myth.

As with Church before, Pandora is young and innocent in her nakedness. She gazes up in awe at the batlike demons as they escape from the open lid of her large wooden chest, seemingly unaware of what she is unleashing in her curiosity.

Thomas Benjamin Kennington shows Pandora (1908) in the final phase of regret and sorrow, after the evils have all been released. Her box, now empty, with no sign of the remaining Hope, rests on her thigh. She hangs her head in shame, resting it on her right hand as she weeps at what she has done. Unfortunately the released demons shown at the left edge are so dark that they are quite hard to see.

Over this period, other artists had also been painting the story of the creation of Pandora, a theme which I have avoided in these two articles. I will, though, show one of the more unusual works depicting this, a painting which was lost for forty years.

John Dixon Batten’s The Creation of Pandora was painted somewhat anachronistically in egg tempera on a fresco ground by 1913. Batten was one of the late adherents of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and now almost forgotten. It had been exhibited in a commercial gallery, and was acquired by the University of Reading, England, shortly before the First World War. Deemed unfashionable in 1949, it was put into storage and quietly forgotten until its rediscovery in 1990.

Pandora is at the centre, having just been fashioned out of earth by Hephaestus, who stands at the left, his foot on his anvil. Behind them, other blacksmiths work metal in his forge. At the right, Athena is about to place her gift of a robe about Pandora’s figure, and other gods queue behind her to offer their contributions.

Just before the start of the war, Odilon Redon made a series of studies leading to a radically different presentation of Pandora’s story.

Redon’s undated pastel study of Pandora shows her clasping her box close in the midst of very large floral images.

Redon’s finished oil painting of Pandora from about 1914 shows her more clearly, surrounded by a garden of exquisite and exotic blooms, referring to Eve’s Paradise before the Fall. She holds her box to her bosom, in the midst of succumbing to temptation to open it, but Redon stops just short of showing its evils pouring out.

My final representation of the myth of Pandora is a photograph from 1919 by the society portrait photographer Yvonne Gregory (who also worked under her married surname of Park): Pandora. The box lies wide open by her knees, as Pandora is bent double in distress over it, her left arm over her head to shelter her from the demons which have been released, and in grief at what she has done.

Given the disasters which had struck the world in the years immediately preceding this photograph – the mass carnage of the war, and the influenza pandemic which followed it – it must have had great impact when it was published in 1919.

The myth of Pandora rose to fame during the late nineteenth century, a time when painters were responding to tragedies such as the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, and increasing awareness of the ills within society.

In some ways, and for its time, it was a curiously misogynist tale, attributing the release of all the ills in the world to its first Eve-like woman. Its continuing popularity through the twentieth century is even more questionable.

As a visual story, it has a moment – when Pandora first opens the jar or box and its demons start to escape – which is pictorially and narratively compelling, but relatively few painters chose to depict that. From this view, Henry Howard (1834), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1871, 1878), Frederick Stuart Church (1883), John William Waterhouse (1896), and Arthur Rackham told the story optimally.

And despite claims that narrative painting was dying during this period, these paintings are splendid evidence to the contrary.

Reference

Wikipedia on the myth of Pandora.

Plutarch’s third pair of biographies are a good example of the influence that they had over art: dealing with Solon and Publicola, unless you are a classical scholar, you are unlikely to have ever come across their subjects. Yet there are significant numbers of surviving paintings which are based on these accounts in Plutarch’s Lives, demonstrating their influence in the history of art.

Solon was a key figure in the development of classical Greek civilisation, most significant for laying down the tables of law for Athens, and most famous for his perhaps legendary involvement with Croesus, the fabulously rich king whose name endures in English and other languages in the phrase as rich as Croesus.

Solon did not set out to be a statesman, but began his career in commerce, which brought him to travel. In the course of this, he started to write poetry and to take a more philosophical view on life. He met and banqueted with other influential figures of the day, including Periander, Thales of Miletus, and Anacharsis.

When the Athenians had become disenchanted with a war they had been fighting against Megaria over the island of Salamis, they made a law prohibiting future claims over the island. But this did not put a stop to younger Athenians wanting to resume the war. Solon wrote an elegiac poem about this, which he sang in the marketplace. This brought about repeal of the law, and Solon was put in command of Athenian forces which resumed the war over Salamis.

Solon then used ingenuity and deception to capture Salamis: he sent an agent who pretended to be an Athenian deserter to the island, to invite the Megarians to sail to Colias immediately to capture the principal women of Athens. He then dressed his soldiers up as women, to await the Megarians. When they arrived, the Athenians drew their weapons and killed all the Megarians, so allowing the Athenians to capture Salamis unopposed.

With this and other acts, Solon grew famous and powerful. He then became the senior statesman of Athens when the city was divided between three factions, which disputed the very form of government, and all the common people were trapped in debt to the rich, driving many into slavery, to sell their own children, or go into exile. Only Solon was sufficiently independent of the factions to be trusted to lead the government, but he refused to become its dictator.

Solon’s first public act was to discharge all existing debts, and to ban all future loans from being made against the person of the borrower. He also reformed the currency by devaluing it, but stopped short of redistributing property in the way that Lycurgus had in Sparta.

This proved successful, and Solon was asked to reform the constitution and the city-state’s laws and institutions.

He next repealed many of the more severe laws which had been made by Draco (‘draconian laws’), which had assigned the penalty of death to almost every crime, including common theft.

Solon established a system of taxation and representation according to wealth. Although this gave the richest access to office as magistrates, he gave the common people the right to be members of the assembly, and most importantly to act as jurors in popular courts. This ensured their access to what they considered justice, and provided the city with two councils, the Areiopagus consisting of those who had held office as archons, and a second council chosen from the four tribes making up the ordinary citizens.

Plutarch provides many insights into the details of Solon’s tables of law. These included an elaborate marriage code, laws on wills and mourning, and much else. They forbade speaking ill of the dead, and prevented women from wearing more than three garments or carrying more than “an obol’s worth” of food or drink.

Some of Solon’s laws were, though, plainly absurd. They allowed an adulterer who was caught in the act to be killed, but the penalty for rape of a free woman was a fine of only a hundred drachmas, reduced to twenty if he used persuasion. While the selling of a daughter or sister was banned, it was still permitted if she was no longer a virgin.

Solon’s reputation may now have vanished, but for many centuries he was known well beyond the shores of Greece. This painting of Solon and Pupils, made in around 1200-1250, appears in the al-Mubashshir Manuscripts, which reflect thought in the Arab-Muslim world in around 1050.

He was also known well in the Renaissance, being ‘modernised’ in this portrait by Justus van Gent and Pedro Berruguete from about 1476.

Solon’s tables of law were inscribed on revolving wooden tablets, and set to last for a period of a hundred years. He then left Athens to travel for ten years, and visited Egypt, Cyprus, and Sardis (in what is now Turkey). When he was in that last city he is claimed to have met King Croesus of Lydia, which Plutarch accepts may be contradicted on chronological grounds, but stories of that meeting are so well-known that he doesn’t deny them.

By this time, Solon himself lived in luxury. But as he met a succession of the king’s court, he mistook each in turn for the king himself, until finally he saw Croesus wearing many precious stones in a spectacularly extravagant manner. At this, Solon made it clear that he despised such a vulgar display of riches. Croesus responded by throwing open his treasure chambers. When Solon had been taken around those, Croesus asked him if he had ever known a happier man than he. Solon replied that a friend of his, Tellus, had been happier, living an honest life and serving his country well.

Croesus thought Solon strange and uncouth, for not considering his riches to be a measure of his happiness, and asked Solon if he knew of any man more fortunate than he. When Solon responded with another example of modesty, Croesus became angry, and asked whether Solon thought that he was happy at all.

Solon did not want to deliberately flatter the king, so replied by extolling the virtues of moderation, and condemning becoming puffed up by one’s possessions. Plutarch’s account ends with the warning: “to pronounce any one happy, however, while he is still living and running the risks of life, is like proclaiming an athlete victorious and crowning him while he is still contending for the prize; the verdict is insecure and without authority.”

This story has proved popular in paintings, mostly during the seventeenth century.

Gerard van Honthorst’s painting of Solon and Croesus from 1624 shows the elderly Greek statesman getting a hostile reception from Croesus, with his court laughing at his responses. Included are two slaves supplicating themselves before the king, in an interesting condemnation of slavery for its time.

Gaspar van den Hoecke’s Croesus Showing his Treasures to Solon is one of several very similar paintings made in about 1635, presumably from a common source; others attributed to Cornelis de Vos and Frans Francken II survive. Here Croesus is showing Solon one of his treasure chambers. Troops in the background may refer to Croesus’ imminent fate at the hands of Cyrus and his Persian forces.

Claude Vignon’s Croesus Showing Solon his Treasures from about 1635 shows a similar scene.

Nikolaus Knüpfer’s Solon Before Croesus of 1650-52 places less emphasis on the riches of the king, instead showing the two men locked in debate.

As a result of their meeting, Croesus lost his respect for Solon. But later, when Croesus had lost his kingdom to Cyrus and his Persians in battle, the tables were turned. As the former king was about to be burned to death, he apparently called out for Solon, finally accepting his wisdom. For this, Cyrus not only spared the life of Croesus, but held him in honour.

While Solon had been away from Athens, the citizens had again become divided into factions. Although they still observed Solon’s tables of law, they wanted revolution and a change of government. With his advancing years, Solon no longer had the strength to lead in public, but tried to bring harmony among the leaders of the factions in private meetings.

The leader of one of the factions, Peisistratus, inflicted a wound on himself and claimed that it had been caused by his enemies. Solon exposed his deception, and opposed granting that leader a personal bodyguard. When that was permitted by decree, it allowed Peisistratus to use those men to seize the Acropolis, bring chaos to the city, and make Peisistratus its dictator.

Solon remained openly critical of Peisistratus, and his friends warned him that his life was in danger. Peisistratus then showed respect to Solon, who gave counsel to the new leader and ensured that his tables of law were maintained. Some years later, Solon died, but his laws lived on.

It is less than a century since the story of Solon was taught extensively in schools across the West. Walter Crane’s admittedly generic illustration of Solon, the Wise Lawgiver of Athens was published in 1914, in a book which was popular for the learning of Classics – a subject which has disappeared from most modern educational systems.

Reference

Whole text in English translation at Penelope.

In February 1908, Pierre Bonnard and Marthe travelled to Tunisia and Algeria, following which he visited London with Vuillard. Then in August, he stayed at Quiberon, which is on a peninsula on the southern coast of Brittany, in the north of the Bay of Biscay.

I am profoundly puzzled, though, over his trip to North Africa. The most exotic and different area that he had ever been to, it has been visited by many painters who have returned with superb sketches and paintings made during their stay. I have searched online and in books, and have been unable to identify a single surviving painting which he made during his visit, or of any local motif painted afterwards. If you know of any, I would be delighted to hear of them.

Following his return to France, Bonnard painted Early Spring (1908), which shows children, possibly from the Terrasse family, enjoying their garden as it comes into bloom in the better weather. Although this image is very high in chroma, I suspect from the appearance of the woman’s face that this may be exaggerated from the original painting.

Thunderstorm at Vernouillet is an atmospheric landscape which he may have painted in 1908, although my bibliographic information suggests that he didn’t visit this area until the following year. Vernouillet is on the southern bank of the river Seine, midway between the centre of Paris and Monet’s property at Giverny.

This was the first painting that Bonnard sold to Arthur Hahnloser and his wife, a sale helped by Vallotton. The Hahnlosers became steadfast friends, supporters, and patrons.

Young Girls and Dogs, also known as The Natanson Girls, (1908) shows four young girls from the Natanson family. Thadée Natanson had two brothers, Alexandre and Louis-Alfred, and the girls shown here may have been their daughters; I can find no record of Thadée and Misia having any children of their own, and by this time Misia had divorced Thadée and married Alfred Edwards, the press magnate. Between them, the girls are petting a smaller dog, while a larger black dog sits watching patiently.

This was also the year in which Bonnard painted several portraits of his muse and patron Misia, including this of Misia with Roses (1908), in which she sits more distantly in the opulent surroundings in which she lived with her second husband.

Bonnard had occasionally painted laid-out tables as a form of still life. In 1908 these became more frequent, as in this Breakfast under the Arbour (1908).

In Bonnard’s The Cherry Tart (c 1908), he has extended the still life to include two participants at the table, and a delightful touch of humour. At the far right is, I believe, Marthe, and at the far left a young boy. In the middle of the painting is Marthe’s dog Black, his eyes peering longingly at an uneaten segment of cherry tart.

I wonder how many slices of cherry tart the dog ate by the time that Bonnard had finished this painting.

Bonnard continued to paint figures from models. Nude Seated on a Red Sofa (1908) engages in mirror-play, but without the sophisticated compositions of previous years.

His intimate visual diary of Marthe’s life was becoming the focus of his development and innovation. In El Tocador, which means The Dressing Table (1908), Marthe’s headless torso is seen only in reflection. The direct view is of the large bowl and pitcher which she used to wash herself.

Mirror in the Dressing Room (1908) shows a similar dressing table and mirror, but in contrasting blue decor. A woman’s nude back and buttocks now appear in the mirror, as another young woman sits at the left drinking a cup of coffee.

In The Toilet, alias The Toilet in Pink, from about 1908, a nude woman stands drying herself in front of a vertical mirror. This painting sets the trend for these intimate domestic scenes to be lighter.

Of all these works which Bonnard painted in 1908, my favourite is The Bathroom, or The Dressing Room with Pink Sofa, which anticipates those from later in his career, painted when Bonnard was living in the south of France. Looking at a brightly-lit window from a slightly elevated position, Marthe’s body is seen against that light, and the bright colours of the room.

There is still some subtle mirror-play, with her headless torso shown in the dressing table mirror, in which the artist is replaced by an empty chair. Its last reflection is that of the window frame in the residual water in the shallow metal bath at the left.

In 1909, Bonnard visited Vernouillet and Médan (which are adjacent). In the early summer, he stayed in Saint Tropez, with the Fauve painter Henri Manguin (1874-1949), where Bonnard was dazzled by the light and colours of the Midi.

He also met and established a close friendship with the critic Georges Besson (1882-1971), who became an enthusiastic collector of Bonnard’s work. At the end of the year, Bonnard and Vuillard made their first visit to Claude Monet in his house and garden at Giverny.

The Small House, Spring Evening is an unusual landscape which Bonnard painted in 1909. It offsets the rich blossom on the trees at the left against the plain wall of a house, seen in the failing light.

Bonnard continued to paint cityscape nocturnes of Paris, such as The Effect of Night, the Moulin Rouge, which is also known as Leaving the Moulin Rouge (1909). The road has the interesting, and transient, combination of horse-drawn cabs and early motor cars, shown at the bottom right.

Among his intimate domestic scenes, Reflection or The Tub (1909) is one of his best pieces of mirror-play. He again opts for the view from an elevated position, looking down and into an angled plane mirror in the bathroom. The reflected view almost fills his canvas, with the nude Marthe (I think) crouching slightly in the upper left corner, as she dries herself after a bath.

The angle of view plays some odd tricks. The washing bowl on the dressing table is brought to overlie the larger shallow bathtub on the floor, for example. Some of the objects on the dressing table are shown directly, others only in the reflected image. And over on the opposite side of the room is a chair, and a coffee tray.

From 1909, Bonnard started to spend more and more of his time in the south of France. Early the following year, he was also to be commissioned to paint a vast triptych, probably his largest work.

References

Guy Cogeval and Isabelle Cahn (2016) Pierre Bonnard, Painting Arcadia, Prestel. ISBN 978 3 791 35524 5.
Gilles Genty and Pierrette Vernon (2006) Bonnard Inédits, Éditions Cercle d’Art (in French). ISBN 978 2 702 20707 9.

At the start of the nineteenth century, seen from Europe, the world didn’t extend much further east than Turkey and the east Mediterranean seaboard (including Palestine). Visitors to, and images of, the countries beyond were scarce indeed.

One of the artists who opened up what was then considered to be ‘the Orient’ was the Italian Alberto Pasini (1826–1899). In this and the next article I show a few of his magnificent paintings of what is now the Middle East.

Pasini’s father died when he was an infant, and he moved with his mother to the city of Parma, in central north Italy, famous now for its prosciutto or Parma ham. He trained at the Academy of Fine Art in the city, where he specialised in landscapes. He was also taught by an uncle, who was a painter and illuminator of manuscripts. His potential was recognised, and he travelled to Paris, where he started to work in studios.

In 1853, one of his lithographs was exhibited at the Salon, and he moved to work in the workshop of the brilliant but short-lived Théodore Chassériau, who had been a pupil of JAD Ingres, had visited Algeria, and was an Orientalist. Pasini was producing impressive work, and as Chassériau’s health failed, the teacher nominated his pupil as the official painter to support a French ministerial tour to Persia.

During the late 1850s into the 1860s, Pasini travelled extensively in Persia, Armenia, Turkey, Egypt, and the Arabian Peninsula, usually as part of an official diplomatic mission.

The earliest of Pasini’s paintings that I have found is this marvellous depiction of Al-Khudayri Street, Cairo from 1861, eight years after he had first exhibited at the Salon. It is typical for the works now accessible, in being thoroughly realist and highly-detailed. Although it has been claimed to show the ancient Ibn Tulun mosque, its famous spiral minaret, and the Saladin fortress in the city, it looks to me to be more of a composite inspired by those buildings, rather than a faithful depiction.

The street below is bustling with those passing through, and the market stalls to the right. Pasini has been careful not to show the face of any of the figures, though.

During his travels in the Middle East, Pasini must have become very familiar with the sight of An Arab Camp (1866), shown here at a small watering place. From the dress and preponderance of horses, this was probably further north into Syria or even Turkey.

Pasini’s work includes many ‘action’ scenes, including battles, although few are now accessible. His painting of an Arab Caravan from 1866 shows a large caravan negotiating difficult terrain, which includes ancient ruins.

More camels feature in this more sketchy painting of Caravan in the Desert from 1867. His sky is remarkably painterly, and I feel sure that the likes of Eugène Boudin would have been proud of it at that time.

The Caravan of the Shah of Persia from 1867 is more finished: a very wide view of an extensive royal caravan crossing a desert plain, with rugged mountains in the distance. There are even a couple of elephants at the right.

Pasini’s great forte, if these surviving paintings are anything to go by, was the marketplace. He lived in Constantinople (also Istanbul, which has been its only name since 1928) for periods of up to nine months, and became very familiar with the often ad hoc markets which set up wherever trading vessels came alongside. Market in Istanbul (Constantinople) from 1868 captures the cosmopolitan nature of these markets, and the whole city, mixing cultures, beliefs, eras, and technologies so gloriously.

Despite their apparent detail, Pasini’s paintings are relatively small, none here exceeding 90 cm (36 inches) in either dimension. The Met’s painting of A Mosque from 1872 is one of his larger works, and appears a more formal composition. A high-ranking person has just arrived in their decorated carriage to attend this mosque (see detail below), where they are greeted by a very casually turned-out guard, at the left.

In the right foreground is one of Pasini’s trademark melon sellers, who appear in so many of his paintings.

Exhibition

There is currently an exhibition of Pasini’s paintings at Fondazione Magnani Rocca in Parma, Italy, the artist’s home town. It closes, though, on 1 July 2018. Further details, and more magnificent paintings, are here.

In the first of these two articles about the Orientalist paintings of Alberto Pasini (1826–1899), I showed some of his earlier surviving works. This article concludes with some which he probably painted in his studio later in his career.

Up to 1876, he had undertaken a series of travels through the Middle East, latterly in Turkey painting commissions for Sultan Abdul Aziz, who was then the 32nd Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. The Sultan died in May 1876, and that seems to have brought an end to his visits to the Middle East, although he visited Spain in 1879 and 1883.

As an Italian living and working in France, he faced growing hostility there after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. In the late 1870s, he bought a farm near Turin, where he spent more of his time.

At The Golden Horn from about 1876 shows a dockside not far from the bustling city of Istanbul. The Golden Horn (in Modern Turkish, Haliç) is a horn-shaped estuary which empties into the Bosphorus Strait at ‘Old Istanbul’. As a stretch of sheltered water so close to the city, it had long been a popular port for smaller traders, such as the mixed steam and sailing ship seen shrouded in coal smoke.

Market Day in Constantinople (1877) is one of Pasini’s finest paintings of the city’s waterfront, and one of several which have made their way to the US. Although its cultural fusion is less overt than his earlier painting of a market there, this is another ‘big’ view as its quay sweeps gently away into the distance.

The detail below shows how meticulous Pasini is in his closer figures and produce, including the inevitable melon sellers with their great green globes glistening in the sunshine.

Pasini caught many fine buildings before their collapse or destruction. This unusual scene in Damascus from 1880 shows horses watering in a large pond in the courtyard of this once beautiful building.

In 1882, Pasini painted this view By the Fountain, Constantinople which combines a small market – with its melon seller, of course – and three horses sheltering as well as they can from the blazing midday sun.

A Market Scene (1884) appears to be set out in the provinces, with an eclectic mixture of produce, ranging from live chickens to pots and the ever-present melons. To the left of centre is a ramshackle old horse-drawn carriage.

A Mosque (1886) is the second of Pasini’s two paintings in the Met, and a marked contrast from the earlier one. There are no smart carriages here, and most of the exterior of the building is in need of decoration if not repair. But there’s a small market running, and you can still get melons too, as shown in the detail below.

Although Pasini often dated his paintings, the dates on the last two works are no longer clear.

I suspect that this view of A Horse Market, Syria was probably painted during his earlier years, perhaps his initial tour of Syria in the late 1850s. The detail below reveals that he was, in his own miniature way, quite painterly in forming the buildings and vegetation behind the small market.

If the melon seller in the foreground is anything to go by, Pasini’s Horsemen in Front of the Entrance to the Bazaar is one of his later works. The detail below shows how he skilfully paints sufficient detail to give the meticulous appearance, but forms that detail from fine marks. This reminds me of the facture of a master such as Sargent, but shrunk down to Pasini’s smaller scale.

Alberto Pasini died on his farm near Turin at the end of 1899, when he was rated as one of Italy’s greatest artists of the nineteenth century, with his self-portrait in the Uffizi’s collection. Now he is almost forgotten outside his home town of Parma.

Exhibition

There is currently an exhibition of Pasini’s paintings at Fondazione Magnani Rocca in Parma, Italy, the artist’s home town. It closes, though, on 1 July 2018. Further details, and more magnificent paintings, are here.

The rise and fall of cadmium salts as pigments is a strange story, driven by misunderstandings and market forces.

Cadmium itself wasn’t discovered until recently – 1817 – and then only by a chance observation of abnormal yellow colouration of a sample of what should have been zinc carbonate. The brilliant yellow colour of its salt cadmium sulphide was noticed the following year, but it wasn’t exploited as a pigment until the 1840s, when it became possible to manufacture it in quantity.

Nevertheless, it has been claimed that it was used as a pigment for oil paints as early as 1829, and by 1851 it was shown by Winsor & Newton at the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace in London. But it remained extremely costly.

Few artists could afford to use Cadmium Yellow until its price fell late in the nineteenth century. Claude Monet was among its early users, in this painting of The Artist’s House at Argenteuil from 1873. Before this, William Holman Hunt and others had reported that its colour was “capricious”, sometimes fading rapidly to “the colour of dirty beeswax”. With the alternative of Chrome Yellow more readily available and much cheaper, most artists steered well clear of the new pigment.

Monet’s love of the pigment continued to grow, and he used it again in Still Life with Apples and Grapes in 1880. He appears to have been fortunate in securing a supply of high quality which has proved thoroughly stable.

Bordighera from 1884 is perhaps the most famous of Monet’s works to use Cadmium Yellow, which attests not only to his sustained use of the pigment, but to his commercial success which enabled him to afford such expensive paint. Even by this time, few other Impressionists could have justified the cost.

Monet must have been very grateful to have been using it when painting dawn or dusk, as in his Stacks of Wheat (Sunset, Snow Effect) from his 1890-91 grainstack series.

It is commonly, and quite incorrectly, claimed that Vincent van Gogh used Cadmium Yellow for his famous paintings of sunflowers, including Still Life, Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers from 1888. Analysis has shown that those rely instead on the better-established, and then much cheaper, Chrome Yellow.

However, van Gogh did use Cadmium Yellow in his still life of Grapes, Lemons, Pears, and Apples in 1887. Whether he was deterred by its high cost or simply preferred Chrome Yellow, I don’t know.

For those who could afford it, Cadmium Yellow also worked excellently in watercolour. Winslow Homer came to use it later in his career, for example in his Hunter in the Adirondacks of 1892.

It appears in several of John Singer Sargent’s later watercolours, including Olive Trees, Corfu from 1909.

It has been found, perhaps mixed in some of the greens, in Sargent’s watercolour An Artist at His Easel from 1914.

Léon Bakst used Cadmium Yellow in his watercolour paintings of costume designs, here for the character Pretres Agni in The Blue God of 1911.

Bakst’s design for a young woman in a red bonnet, for Ballet Boutique Fantasque in 1917, is one of relatively few paintings which have been found to contain Cadmium Orange, obtained by adding small amounts of the more novel selenium to cadmium sulphide.

In the early twenty-first century, many ranges of artists’ paints offered several cadmium-based colours ranging from lemon to full red.

By the end of the First World War, cadmium production had increased greatly, and the cost of Cadmium Yellow had fallen as a result. Another development which helped popularise the colours was the manufacture of lithopones by admixing barium sulphate, during the 1920s. These were half the cost of pure Cadmium Yellow, yet proved almost as lightfast and stable.

Charles Demuth used Cadmium Yellow in at least two of his exquisite floral watercolours, including Fruit and Sunflowers from about 1924-25. He painted these as therapy when recovering from episodic complications of diabetes.

In the twentieth century, cadmium pigments became widely used to make brightly-coloured plastics, particularly those for domestic use, and the consumption of pigment for artists’ paints was relatively tiny. It was then that cadmium fell from favour.

Cadmium salts are notoriously toxic, something discovered soon after their introduction. However, when locked into pigment particles, their insolubility makes them of very low risk, unless they are dispersed in dust which is inhaled, as could be the case when incorporated into soft pastels. This lack of immediate threat lulled users into a false sense of security: it turned out that cadmium (as with other toxic pigments) posed major environmental risks.

In the twenty-first century, evidence has accumulated that cadmium pigments can become concentrated in sewage sludge, which is often applied to fertilise agricultural land, resulting in increased dietary intake of cadmium, which is in turn associated with long-term medical problems such as osteoporosis and bone fracture, and some cancers.

None of this should have been any worry for artists, whose use of cadmium salts is tiny relative to industrial uses, including most notably rechargeable batteries. Except that most artists had almost no awareness of their impact on the environment, and have been happily discharging pigment-rich waste into the sewage system.

Instead of educating artists to minimise their impact on the environment – which applies equally to other pigments – environmental organisations instead proposed a ban on the use of cadmium pigments in artists’ paints. This in turn scared artists and their paint suppliers into a self-imposed ban, in which many paint ranges no longer include cadmium pigments, and art schools won’t use them because they’re “toxic”.

When all that was required was a little care in processing waste water rich in pigment, for example – actions which are still required to handle other pigment hazards which haven’t (yet) become scary. Humans are sometimes so irrational.

Reference

Inge Fiedler and Michael Bayard (1986) Artists’ Pigments, vol 1, ed Robert L Feller, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 74 6.

The Masters have seemingly painted almost every conceivable subject and theme, but I have been unable to discover any well-known paintings showing a classroom in school. This is odd: although we now spend longer in education than did any previous generation, and most famous painters had started apprenticeships before they wore long trousers, maybe most found their schooldays weren’t exactly the happiest days of their life.

In this and the next article, I therefore rely on artists whose names are less familiar, to see the changes that have taken place in the classrooms of schools over the three hundred years up to the early twentieth century – and stumble across some interesting art history in the process.

Isaac van Ostade lived only briefly between 1621–1649, so I suspect this painting of a Village School from his circle was probably made by about 1650, possibly rather earlier. Although it has seen better days, it shows a schoolmaster at the right supervising a group with a wide age range, all in various levels of poverty, and in primitive stages of education. The classroom itself is almost bare of furniture, with most of the children sitting or squatting on the floor.

Later in the seventeenth century, Jan Steen’s The Village School (c 1665) shows one reason for the apparent unpopularity of school as a motif: physical punishment. The child at the right holds out a hand for teacher to strike it with a wooden spoon, presumably in return for the screwed-up piece of paper on the floor. The children here are better-dressed, and the room better-furnished.

One boy at the far right is writing intently, and another, his face almost covered by the brim of his hat, is reading a book.

A few years later, Steen painted a scene in a larger and more chaotic classroom, in The Village School from about 1670. Although there are two staff sat at the teachers’ desk, the man is distracted, perhaps cutting himself a fresh quill. The woman teacher sat next to him is engaged in explaining something to a pupil, though.

Around them, all hell is breaking loose. In the distance, a boy is stood on one of the trestle tables. Older children are teaching younger ones, and a small group at a table at the right are trying to write while others get up to mischief. One younger child in the middle of the foreground has fallen asleep against a hat.

In those early schools, boys and girls were not segregated, but enjoyed equally derelict schooling. By the middle of the eighteenth century, in larger schools at least, it became more common for the genders to be taught in separate classes or even different schools.

Boys’ School is a copy of an original painting by Jan Josef Horemans the Younger from the middle of the eighteenth century. Its schoolmaster looks to be the only figure sat at a desk, and is engaged with a couple of the older boys, while the rest of the class catches up with its social life. A few writing tablets are visible, as are scraps of paper, but the only real books seem to be those well out of reach, above the schoolmaster’s head.

Its sister painting showing a Girls’ School is more peaceful and purposeful, but aimed to trap young women in their narrow social role. Although one girl is reading, others are engaged in fibrecraft or dressmaking, or apparently learning how to make a brush from a bundle of twigs. More academic learning was only really possible in richer homes, under exceptional private tutors.

In towns and cities, there was greater economic drive for children to work throughout the year, and to obtain a better education. These seem to have taken some schools, at least, to operate well into the evening, as George Gillis Haanen shows in his beautifully lit Night School from 1835. The schoolmaster, ensconced at his elevated desk, does at least look more academic, and there are slates for writing and children reading books.

The nineteenth century also brought the concept of self-improvement, and a growing desire among many of the working and middle classes to better themselves by education, to improve their income and family prospects – increasingly among a growing minority of girls too.

Changes were slower in the country still, as seen in this undated painting by one of Eduard Ritter’s circle, of Brave Girls, Bad Boys, School Class in Tyrol, probably from between 1835-1849, the reign of Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria shown in one of its portraits. The children are enjoying a rich range of fruit, and there’s no shortage of paper, even if some of it is being used to make hats rather than for writing. Its elderly schoolmaster looks delightfully benign, and the stem on his smoking pipe is the longest that I have ever seen.

Schools in Europe had arisen to meet the need for clergy and to support the church; those in other cultures were no different, as shown in John Frederick Lewis’s undated watercolour of an Arab School, probably from around 1850. This is what is more properly known as a maktab, which provides general schooling between the ages of 6-14, after which children specialise more in their subjects prior to going on to higher education at a madrasah.

Thomas Faed’s paintings have faded from view since it was claimed that he did for Scottish painting what Robert Burns did for Scottish song. His Visit to the Village School from 1852 shows an elderly couple listening to some very young children reading, as the schoolmaster is trying to impress his visitors. Older children, though, are not being quite so obliging, and stood against the wall at the far left is a pupil wearing a dunce’s hat in shame.

Scotland, for all the difficulties posed by its far-flung rural and island populations, was in the vanguard of introducing free public schooling: in 1561 the Church of Scotland declared that every parish church should have its own teacher, and that education should be provided free to the poor, and an act of the Scottish Parliament raised taxes for that purpose in 1633.

Thomas Brooks didn’t have the benefit of a Scottish education, and his painting of The New Pupil from 1854 clearly shows the more disorderly rabble in an English country school, as a mother introduces her unwilling son to his new class. Brooks’ eye for fine detail and the modern lightness in this work are leading up to what would later be termed Naturalism.

Charles Hunt’s Visit to the Schoolroom from 1859 returns to more traditional style, as a well-dressed mother looks a little taken aback by the antics going on behind the teacher, and extra-curricular activities include a girl who is about to snip a lock from a boy’s head. At the far left another dunce stands on a chair wearing the trademark conical hat.

In the first article of this series of two, I showed paintings which illustrated school life from the early seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth – a period of more than two centuries, in which few artists painted the inside of the classroom. From 1850, this changed, although the subject still failed to attract the best-known painters.

Albert Anker, the father of Swiss painting who is known for his large output of ‘genre scenes’, probably painted more classrooms than any other. He painted The Village School in 1848 nearly half a century later, in 1896, presumably from his own recollection of his final year at school in Neuchâtel. Compared to earlier paintings, this classroom is packed, relatively orderly, and well-equipped with benches and desks, even though the children are shabbily dressed, indicating their poverty.

Anker’s earlier painting of The School Exam from 1862 shows a more contemporary scene. It’s not clear whether the pupils are undergoing examination, or the school is. Three of the children seen standing out at the front are so poor that they cannot afford shoes at all, but a lot of effort is being put into their education, at last.

Winslow Homer is perhaps the most famous painter to have made more than one work showing The Country School, believed to be of a country schoolroom in the Catskills, New England. This painting, dated 1871, is the first of a series of three or more showing the same, largely empty classroom, with its impossibly wide age range. Two of the boys reading to the teacher are too poor for shoes, although the girls on the right look much better-dressed.

Following the collapse of the Second Empire during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, the Third Republic targeted education for special development. Schools in France had earlier been largely run by the Catholic Church, but from 1833 communes had been required to provide schools for boys (not girls!). The anti-clerical Minister for Public Instruction, Jules Ferry, introduced law in 1881 to establish free education throughout the country (even for girls!), and progressively replaced existing Catholic schools with the modern Republican School through the 1880s.

François Bonvin’s The Scholar of 1874 is one of a few paintings which show individual pupils in the classroom. This boy has been granted the privilege of his own desk, at the front of the class, and is working on after the end of the school day. The teacher’s hat and coat are draped over his desk, ready for when this pupil completes his extra work.

Jean-Baptiste Jules Trayer’s wonderful watercolour of A Breton Infants School from 1882 predates any celebration of this Republican policy: the crucifix high on the wall at the right shows that this is one of the older Catholic schools. It shows a teacher helping one of her students with her writing, in a class entirely wearing traditional Breton costume. There is clearly room for improvement, though, as one girl is sleeping on her book, tired out from her early morning work on the family farm, no doubt.

Rising standards of schooling were also reaching out to some of the more remote communities through the Nordic countries. Oscar Björck’s painting of Madam Henriksen’s School for Girls in Skagen from 1884 shows a tiny and very personal class in this small, isolated community at the northern tip of Jylland (Jutland) – which also happened to be home to a major artists’ colony, and the birthplace of Danish Impressionism.

Then, in the mid 1880s, something remarkable happens to paintings of the schoolroom in France: they become strikingly photographic in their reality, with the advent of Naturalism.

Within two years of the early death of Jules Bastien-Lepage, Paul Louis Martin des Amoignes’ In the Classroom (1886) looks as if it may have been painted from photographs. One boy, staringly intently at the teacher in front of the class, is caught crisply, pencil poised in his hand. Beyond him the crowd of heads becomes more blurred.

Jean Geoffroy’s Primary School Class from 1889 doesn’t give us the same depth of field effect, but shows one of the Republic’s new lay teachers working diligently in the classroom with her pupils. They’re still a bit of a shower, with the younger ones at the back working on traditional slates, but this is the public face of the modern Republican School now.

In Geoffroy’s In School from about 1900, another lay teacher in a modern Republican infants class is caring for the French men and women of the future.

Of course France wasn’t the only country to be improving its educational system at this time. Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky’s Mental Arithmetic. In Public School of S. A. Rachinsky from 1895 shows a class of poor students in the village of Tatev in Smolensk province (at the western edge of the Russian Empire in central eastern Europe), who were fortunate enough to have a pioneering educator as their local teacher.

Sergey Rachinsky had been a professor of botany in Moscow until 1867, when he abandoned academic life to run the village school in Tatev. The elderly Rachinsky is seen with his students working on a very challenging mental arithmetic problem. The teacher died in 1902.

My final painting, by the Ukrainian artist Max Silbert, shows a Singing Lesson in a School in Holland (1907), and is the most fascinating chance discovery. Although its realism is not as detailed or photographic in quality as the French paintings from the 1880s above, it shows a similar photographic depth of field effect. The pupils closest to the artist are shown in sharp focus, and those in the further distance are markedly blurred.

It is impossible to tell whether this results from Silbert painting this work from photographs with the same blurring, or it was a deliberate effect introduced by the artist to make the painting look more photographic.

Although few of these artists were even famous in their own time, their paintings tell a fascinating story of how schools have changed over this period, and how education has been increasingly politicised. Perhaps it is just as well after all that this theme hasn’t been dominated by a small number of paintings by more major artists.

From its foundation, the city of Rome was ruled by monarchs with absolute authority, leaders in its all too frequent times of war. Plutarch chooses to compare against the Greek leader Solon one of the Roman statesmen who oversaw the city’s transition from that monarchy to a more democratic state: Publius Valerius, who was dubbed Publicola (or Poplicola), one of the founders of the Roman Republic. Unlike the earlier Roman figures who remain at least partially legendary, Publicola is well-attested historically, and died in 503 BCE.

The last King of Rome, Tarquinius Superbus, had been tyrannical. Matters came to a head when his son, Sextus Tarquinius, raped a noblewoman, Lucretia. Although Plutarch does not tell this story, he refers to it leading into Publicola’s involvement in the subsequent revolution.

Sandro Botticelli’s comprehensive account of The Story of Lucretia, painted in 1500-01, is not one of his well-known works, but tells the story very effectively using multiplex narrative. At the left, Lucretia is raped at knifepoint by Sextus Tarquinius. She then commits suicide in shame, and anger erupts through Rome. Her body is carried from her house (right) and placed in the Forum. There, her husband and his friends swear to overthrow the king (centre), and this brings about the new constitution.

Many masters painted Lucretia’s suicide, most notably Rembrandt, whose later painting of 1666 is one of the most moving images in the canon of Western art. Lucretia has already pierced her chest with her blade. Her fine clothing has been pulled back to reveal her simple white shift, which has a broad streak of fresh, bright red blood running down from the point at which the dagger was inserted.

Her arms are outstretched: her right hand still clutches the dagger, which has dropped to waist level already. Her left hand is dragging a beaded bell-pull, presumably to summon her family to witness her final moments on earth. It is her face, though, which makes this painting. Her eyes, moistened by welling tears, are looking away to the right of the painting, in an absent-minded stare. Her brow is tensed with subtle anxiety. She knows that she is about to die, and is preparing herself for that moment.

Lucius Brutus and Publicola were among the leaders who drove out and overthrew the king, and with popular support instituted a republic under two consuls. However, Publicola’s hopes of being elected to the office were dashed when Lucretia’s husband, Tarquinius Collatinus, was chosen instead.

Publicola then briefly withdrew from public life, while remaining loyal to the new republic. Tarquin sent envoys to announce his abdication from the throne, but demanding return of his riches, and to be allowed to live in exile. This sowed dissension between the consuls and among the senators, and some, the Vitelli and Aquilli families who were relatives of the consuls, conspired to kill the consuls and support the monarchy.

The plot was discovered, and the conspirators beaten and beheaded. Tarquinius Collatinus was implicated too, and forced to flee the city, leaving his post as consul to Publicola.

The former king had been welcomed by the Tuscans, and they marched on Rome with their army in an attempt to restore him to the throne. This led to slaughter, and the soldiers of both sides became disheartened by their heavy losses. After hearing a god pronounce that the Romans had lost one man fewer than the Tuscans, the Romans rallied and finally defeated and captured the remaining enemy.

After this, Publicola celebrated the triumph, and became the first consul to drive into the city of Rome on a four-horse chariot.

However, Publicola was thought by many to be living as if he were a king. When he heard of this, he razed his house to the ground overnight, making himself homeless in the process. He was then provided with a more modest house than before. In a wave of reforms, he restored the senate, provided defendants with a means of appealing to the people from the judgement of the consuls, and lifted taxes from the citizens of Rome.

Meanwhile, Tarquin had become a supporter of Lars Porsena, the most powerful leader in Italy at the time. Porsena sent a message to Rome, telling it to restore Tarquin to his throne; the city inevitably refused, so Porsena declared war against it. When the Etruscan forces attacked Rome, Publicola went out to engage Porsena’s army in battle, but was wounded and carried back into the city. Porsena’s men then reached a wooden bridge which, had they taken it, would have let them into Rome.

It was then that Rome relied on a single fearless citizen to defend it, as shown in Charles Le Brun’s Horatius Cocles Defending the Bridge (c 1642-43).

Horatius is putting up his spirited fight on a stone pier on the side of the bridge opposite the city, as Romans are hastily removing the wooden bridge behind him. Above and behind Horatius, Minerva, goddess of battle, grasping her characteristic staff, holds a laurel wreath over Horatius’ head. In the foreground, the god of the River Tiber lounges on the bank, pouring water from his large flagon (which never becomes empty). It can only be a matter of minutes before the bridge is adequately broken, and Horatius can abandon his defence.

Once the bridge behind him had been demolished, with several significant wounds and still wearing his armour, Horatius Cocles knew it was time to get out. He jumped into the River Tiber and swam to the Roman shore, where he was welcomed as a great hero, and rewarded with the land that he was able to plough around in a day, which became the estate of the Horatius family. The Etruscans still laid siege to Rome, but on this occasion did not occupy and sack it.

This undated painting by an unknown follower of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo also shows Horatius Cocles Defending Rome Against the Etruscans.

During the siege, Rome was struck by famine. Publicola, who was by then in his third term as consul, kept order in the city throughout.

One attempt was made to kill Lars Porsena, by a Roman named Mucius, who posed as a Tuscan/Etruscan and gained entrance to his camp. When he had killed someone who he thought might be Porsena, Mucius was arrested and taken to the king, who had just had burning coals brought to him for a sacrifice. Mucius held his right hand over the flames, unflinching while his flesh burned. This so impressed Porsena that he released Mucius, who then warned the king that there were three hundred other Romans inside his camp waiting to kill him.

For his bravery, Mucius gained the name of Scaevola, meaning left-handed.

Rubens and Anthony van Dyck worked together to paint Mucius Scaevola Before Lars Porsena before 1628. The Roman is seen holding his right hand in the flames, with the body of the dead Tuscan at his feet. Porsena, sat on his throne, is considering how to respond.

Matthias Stom’s painting of Mucius Scaevola in the Presence of Lars Porsena from about 1642 is more dramatic with its skilful use of light, with a similar composition.

Publicola realised that Porsena would be more valuable as an ally, and invited him to arbitrate in the dispute over Tarquin. This forced the former king to refuse, which displeased Porsena, who promptly ended his war against Rome.

In time, Publicola became consul for a fourth term, when war was looming again, this time between the Sabines and Romans. Publicola cunningly won over one of the Sabine leaders, gave him land, and a seat in the senate. Some remaining Sabines launched an attack against Rome, but Publicola counter-attacked and put them to flight. He died shortly after celebrating his triumph and handing over to his successor as consul.

Comparing Solon with Publicola

Plutarch draws together Solon’s meeting with Croesus, and the honourable life of Publicola, to establish that Solon could equally have declared Publicola a truly happy man, for his virtuous life.

However, it is also true that Publicola enhanced the fame of Solon in following his example and making Rome more of a democracy. There were differences in approach: one of Publicola’s more controversial laws allowed a murderer to be killed before trial, whereas Solon established that no-one, not even a murderer caught red-handed, could be punished without trial.

Solon’s early success in reforms didn’t prove enduring, though, and later in his life he was to see its collapse. In contrast, Publicola’s changes lasted until the civil wars much later. One of Publicola’s great skills was in using an adversary, such as Lars Porsena, to put an end to conflict, and to make them an ally.

Reference

Whole text in English translation at Penelope.

Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) first ‘discovered’ the south of France, le Midi, in 1909, and from then on its light and colours progressively took over his painting – and his life. In January 1910, he was commissioned by the Russian industrialist and collector Ivan Morozov, who wanted a huge painting of le Midi to help create a harmonious atmosphere in his home.

In January, Bonnard moved his studio to the Quai Voltaire, on the bank of the River Seine in Paris, opposite the Louvre. In September, he stayed in Saint Tropez, where he spent time with the Polish painter Józef Pankiewicz (1866-1940), who had attempted to introduce Impressionist and post-Impressionist styles to Poland in 1890. Bonnard also bought a drawing by Rodin, which sparked correspondence between the two artists.

In apparent response to his experience in le Midi, Bonnard’s paintings became markedly richer in chroma at this time. In The Garden in the Snow, Sunset from about 1910, not only is the sky scarlet, but the remaining snow on the ground is tinged with a pale purple-blue, giving it a subtle and distinctive glow.

Bonnard’s landscapes painted in le Midi, such as this Marine Scene from about 1910, are vibrant in colour. Although already well-connected by fast rail services to Paris, resorts like Saint Tropez were still in their early development at that time. It wasn’t until the 1920s that it was made highly fashionable by the likes of Coco Chanel.

Many of Bonnard’s paintings have little concern for form or architectural geometry, but this Street Scene (The Auteuil Viaduct) from about 1910 shows a view which clearly caught his eye in this town to the west of Paris. Two arches of a railway viaduct are superimposed to give the effect of an ogive window, beyond which are more rectangular and wedge forms, including the projected lettering GARAGE.

Blue Balcony from 1910 is a view from the garden of a house in which Bonnard and Marthe appear to have stayed, with the distinctive balcony cited in the title. The trees are in blossom, suggesting that it is Spring, and on the balcony is a figure, most probably that of Marthe.

Bonnard seems to have had a particular affection for cats, and a liking for painting them in humorous situations. In The Bouillabaisse (c 1910), a ginger and white cat walks below the kitchen table, on which are the alluring ingredients for this Provençal fish stew. The cat sniffs the air with great interest, if only it could work out how to steal the fish.

Bonnard’s sister and her family remained a favourite motif. In The Claude Terrasse Family from 1908-10, the artist again looks at the play of lamps and their light, although he curiously manages to avoid showing any face. Claude Terrasse the musician and composer is naturally at his piano, his face obscured by a lamp standing on its corner. Bonnard’s sister and her daughter sit sewing at the table, lit by a larger lamp and facing away.

Woman with Parrot (1910) is set in le Midi, with intensely bright and hot colours, against which the large blue parrot, some pots, and foliage make contrast. This was painted in Saint Tropez during Bonnard’s visit in September, and was based on an experience which Bonnard wrote about in a letter to his mother, in which he had passed a young dark-haired girl with an enormous blue parrot.

Bonnard’s surviving paintings from 1910 include relatively few nudes, among which is this Nude in Lamplight (c 1910). With her face deep in shadow, it is hard to know whether this is Marthe who is undressing for bed. Her body is lit only partially by the small bedside lamp, which changes her form with the dark shadows.

In 1911, Bonnard spent even longer in Saint Tropez, visiting there in March, July, and October, where he spent time with Paul Signac. He bought his first car; in some sources, this is claimed to have been a Citroen 2CV, made by a company which didn’t come into existence until 1919, and a model which was first released in 1948. I haven’t seen any better suggestion as to what he might have driven, though.

In May and June, Bonnard worked in Vernonnet, near Monet’s house at Giverny.

Bonnard continued to paint street scenes in Paris. Boulevard de Clichy (1911) is rich with his usual street life, including market barrows, a horse-drawn cab, many pedestrians, and some dogs. Its colours and the leafless trees suggest this was a damp and dull winter’s day, perhaps approaching dusk.

Morning in Paris, also painted in 1911, could not be a greater contrast, although the season is still winter. The rich light of a fine dawn colours the street, buildings, and even the clothes and faces of the people. This work was commissioned by Ivan Morozov, with its pendant Evening in Paris (1911) – for whom the next, much larger painting was made.

Bonnard completed his major commission for Morozov in May 1911, and its three huge canvases were exhibited in Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris, and later at the Salon d’Automne, before being shipped on to their new owner in Moscow. Mediterranean is one of Bonnard’s major works, and one of the great paintings of the century.

Its three panels were mounted slightly separated by engaged columns. When seen with those columns in place, they give the impression of a continuous view of a garden in le Midi, overlooking the Mediterranean, almost as a trompe l’oeil. The middle panel is based on a painting which Bonnard made in Saint Tropez in June 1909, known as View of Saint-Tropez (1910); however that work had been sold, and Bonnard may well have painted that panel from memory.

The right-hand panel revisits his Woman with Parrot, changing the colour of the bird to green to fit his overall colour scheme. The whole painting is full of the bright, rich colours typical of le Midi. It was a great success, and Morozov was so pleased that he commissioned another two outer panels showing First Days of Spring in the Country, and Autumn, Fruit Harvest. Bonnard completed those the following year.

Bonnard’s intimate domestic scenes hadn’t stopped, but just seem to have been fewer in number. In Nude with a Fur Hat (1911), his model has opened the door into a room bright with sunshine.

The following year Bonnard went to Grasse in le Midi in January, where he stayed at the Villa Antoinette until May.

References

Guy Cogeval and Isabelle Cahn (2016) Pierre Bonnard, Painting Arcadia, Prestel. ISBN 978 3 791 35524 5.
Gilles Genty and Pierrette Vernon (2006) Bonnard Inédits, Éditions Cercle d’Art (in French). ISBN 978 2 702 20707 9.

We seem to have forgotten and lost most of a generation of fine painters from the late nineteenth century. This week, I have beem looking for information about, and images of the work of, the once-great Jules-Alexis Muenier (1863–1942), many of whose paintings were bought straight from the Salon to go into the Musée du Luxembourg, then the centre for modern art.

Muenier was also unusual for his use of photography in his painting. Many artists of the late nineteenth century took photographs, and some, like Degas, were innovative in both. But most were quite secretive about their photography, fearful of its threat to their livelihood, and openly secptical about its potential as an art. Those who used their photography in painting usually kept very quiet about that. But not Muenier.

This article presents an overview of his career and work, and in the second article I will look more closely at how he might have used photography in his painting.

Jules-Alexis Muenier was born in the town of Vesoul, near Lyon, in the east of France – which also happens to be the home town of Jean-Léon Gérôme, who was later one of Muenier’s teachers, and Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, his great friend who was about ten years older than him. Muenier’s father was a writer and journalist, and encouraged his son to develop his drawing and painting skills when they became apparent as a child.

In 1880 or 1881, Muenier started his studies at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he worked in Gérôme’s studio, and developed his friendship with Dagnan-Bouveret. When he had completed his training in 1885, he moved out of Paris to live in Coulevon, close to his home town, where he married and settled down to live on an estate which had been bought from Gérôme by Muenier’s in-laws, and to paint in the beautiful countryside of the Haute-Saône.

His first success at the Salon was in 1887, when his painting The Breviary won him a medal there, despite Gérôme’s reservations about the work. I will discuss that painting in the next article.

In 1888, Muenier travelled across Spain, to visit North Africa with Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret and their camera equipment. Following this, and using the photographs together with sketches, Muenier painted several Orientalist works, but I have been unable to locate suitable images of them.

Beautiful Days (1889) was successfully exhibited at the Salon the following year, where critics compared him to the still highly popular Jules Bastien-Lepage, who had died in 1884. It shows three generations of a family together in the garden of their home: an image which was strongly supportive of the ideals of the Third Republic.

At first sight, you might assume that the mother was Muenier’s wife, and the rest were members of his family. Muenier actually experimented with several different models, photographing them and adjusting with his composition likewise. The figures shown are the artist’s wife and son Pierre, the Mayor of Coulevon, and an unidentified older woman, and they are sat in the garden of Madame Muenier’s parents’ estate in Coulevon.

Catechism Class (1890) was exhibited at the Salon of 1891, where it was bought for the Nation, and the first of Muenier’s paintings to be hung in the Musée du Luxembourg. It is now in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. An elderly country priest sits looking intently at the four village children whom he is teaching in preparation for their confirmation, which will be their next major milestone in life.

The children could have come straight from Bastien-Lepage’s paintings of country children. They are poor, their clothing ragged and faded, but Muenier compares them with the wild flowers around them.

In Muenier’s painting of a Young Peasant Taking His Horse to the Water Hole from 1891, a young man has ridden his horse into a shallow pond to allow it to drink. He is riding bareback and barefoot, and talking to a young woman who is doing her washing on the opposite bank. Behind them is the village, either Coulevon or another nearby. The water is calm, with just the gentle ripples made by the horse.

Later in his career, Muenier lived in Corsica for two years, where he painted extensively, and in Switzerland, where his son Pierre was a Professor of French Literature and author.

I suspect that Muenier may have painted Le Calme (Serenity) (1894) when he was in Corsica, and that the trees shown are Corsican pines. This young woman is walking down a clifftop path with her basket of lemons, and pauses to look out to sea. She is above a small bay, in which there is a fishing boat. The horizon is hazy with the Mediterranean heat.

Les Chemineaux (Tramps) from about 1897 was a success when it was exhibited at the Salon that year, from where it was purchased for the Musée du Luxembourg. Muenier used photographs of his models in developing this painting, which shows two tramps or vagrants who have stopped by a slow-flowing river to drink. Their clothing looks surprisingly clean, and they seem well-shod too.

This painting, as with others by Muenier, follows Bastien-Lepage‘s formula of fine detail in the foreground, far less detail in the background, and a high skyline.

Muenier experimented with his style around the turn of the century: The Children’s Round (1902) was exhibited at the Salon that year, although it looks more illustrative.

Elegant Repose from 1932 is one of his later paintings, whose fashionably-dressed young woman is very much dolce far niente – doing sweet nothing. I don’t know whether this represents a more aesthetic approach in his later life, though.

I have a further three paintings by Muenier which are undated.

From the Garden is a wonderful painting of a small girl trying to bring into the house a bunch of freshly-cut flowers which are as large as she is. It reminds me of the paintings of Harriet Backer.

Angler by the Stream is a pastoral view at the edge of a village, showing a fisherman working the river close to a small wooden bridge. A woman, his wife possibly, is crossing the bridge and appears to have stopped to talk to him from there. Behind her are two magnificently pollarded trees.

Judging by its brilliant greens, The Rustic Rendezvous is set in Spring, as a young couple talk together. She is taking a large pitcher probably to a well, and looks down on him, as he stands on the other side of a stone wall, further down the hillside. This was a popular theme among Naturalists.

Muenier painted almost to the day of his death, and between 1887 and 1941 exhibited more than three hundred paintings in the Salons in Paris. He died in Coulevon, where he had lived and worked for most of his life, in 1942, at the age of 79.

In the next article, I will look at the evidence as to how he used photography in his painting.

Reference

Gabriel P Weisberg and others (2010), Illusions of Reality, Naturalist Painting, Photography, Theatre and Cinema, 1875-1918, Van Gogh Museum. ISBN 978 90 6153 941 4.