Each year, I look back at the paintings which were made a century earlier. This time, this is rather special, as 1918 was the year in which the Great War, as it was known then, ended, and in which so many who survived its slaughter died in the following influenza pandemic.

This article looks at some of the paintings made in 1918 which depict the war and its effects.

The German artist Lovis Corinth had been an enthusiastic supporter of the German Empire. He became progressively disenchanted during the war, and at its end expressed his feelings symbolically in Armour Parts in the Studio, with its empty suit of armour broken apart, and cast on the floor.

George Bellows had strongly opposed US entry into the war, and was horrified by the many stories of atrocities allegedly committed by German troops when they had entered Belgium. One, in which the Germans had apparently used the local population as a ‘human shield’, he expressed in The Barricade.

Henry Tonks, a former consultant surgeon before he became a full-time painter, was commissioned as a Lieutenant in the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1916. But it wasn’t until 1918 that he became an official war artist. For much of the final phase of the war, John Singer Sargent and Tonks travelled and worked alongside one another.

Here, Tonks shows a cellar being used to receive and assess the wounded in An Underground Casualty Clearing Station, Arras.

Perhaps Tonks’ most important painting is that of An Advanced Dressing Station in France, 1918, a near-documentary depiction of an ad hoc medical facility not far from the front line, and the apocalyptic vision of war.

John Singer Sargent made a series of drawings and studies for his commissioned work Gassed (1919). This Study for Gassed Soldiers show details of different passages for the final painting, and could have been made in Arras or Fulham, London.

More interesting, perhaps, are Sargent’s assemblies of figures, such as Study for ‘Gassed’.

The Two Studies for “Gassed” in the Fogg Museum are more compositional in purpose, and show the shape of the final painting starting to emerge.

Sargent painted several other scenes in military medical facilities, including this watercolour of the Interior of a Hospital Tent.

One of the most famous paintings of aviation during the war is John Singer Sargent’s Crashed Aeroplane. Two farmers get on with the harvest, with a crashed British biplane planted in a hillside behind.

The First World War introduced war at a different level: in the air, high above the soldiers in their mud, barbed wire, and trenches.

Louis Weirter’s An Aerial Fight is one of the first paintings showing the war in the air, as British and German biplanes fight among scruffy clouds.

David M Carlile’s Hun Plane Caught in Searchlights – Arras-Cambrai Road – France – Sept 1918 is an atmospheric watercolour showing a scene from the final months of the war.

François Flameng’s superb watercolour of Return of a Night Bombing Flight of Voisin Aircraft is perhaps one of the best paintings of the war in the air. Flameng was a very successful portraitist, and a close friend of both John Singer Sargent and Paul Helleu.

Paul Nash proved one of the most prolific war artists of 1918, and I find his original approach evocative and deeply moving.

Typical of the paintings made by Paul Nash of the Western Front is this watercolour Wire, which had originally been titled Wire – The Hindenburg Line. It shows a characteristically deserted and devastated landscape, pockmarked with shell-holes, and festooned with wire fencing and barbed wire. Its only landmarks are the shattered stumps of what was once pleasant pastoral land.

A Howitzer Firing is one of Nash’s early oil paintings, and was commissioned by the Ministry of Information. It shows a four-man British guncrew working under a canopy of camouflage netting. In the sky, flying high above the flash of exploding shells, is a biplane. Behind this howitzer is another in the same battery, pounding away during the barrage.

Nash’s lithograph of Men Marching at Night shows a strong design influence, drawn from Blake and amplified by the regularity of military life. The long column of tight-packed soldiers is seen moving along an avenue of poplar trees, lit by an unseen full moon. CRW Nevinson, another notable British war artist, helped Nash learn the process of lithography at this time.

Rain, Lake Zillebeke is a lithograph which Nash made from a drawing of soldiers walking along duckboards zig-zagging over the mud. Again it shows design influence, with the treestumps and flooded shell-holes arrayed in patterns.

Not all of Nash’s paintings from the front line were as bleak and stark. Spring in the Trenches, Ridge Wood, 1917 is based on drawings which he made slightly earlier. Some of the trees in the distance still have branches and foliage on them, and the three soldiers appear idle.

Nash’s pen and ink drawing of Sunrise: Inverness Copse, showing the aftermath of heavy fighting during the Battle of Langemarck, became this finished oil painting of We are Making a New World. Although richer in colour, the slime green furrowed mud dominates the lower half of the canvas. Its intensely ironic title and use of the early morning sun makes the artist’s response to the war very clear, and it has remained one of the strongest images of that war.

But for my eye, the last image should be one of Albin Egger-Lienz’s more provocative paintings: Finale, with its pile of mangled and contorted bodies in a trench.

Next week I will show more paintings which were completed a hundred years ago.

In the middle of the night following the crusaders’ first major assault on the city of Jerusalem, Clorinda burned their siege towers down. Unrecognised by Tancred, he then mortally wounded her in a fight before realising who she was, then baptised her just before she died.

The wounded Tancred feels disgust at his killing of Clorinda, and the two are carried back to his tent. Despite his injuries, he makes his farewell to her corpse. She appears to him in a dream and his emotions are reconciled following her burial.

Canto thirteen returns to the siege, and the crusaders’ need to replace their wooden towers. Ismen visits the ancient wood which is the nearest source of timber, and casts a spell to prevent any more trees from being felled there. He then reassures Aladine that he is safe, particularly as he forecasts that the weather is set to turn very hot and dry, and that Aladine should sit tight in the city rather than try to force an end to the siege as Argante wants.

Godfrey now wants to rebuild his siege towers quickly, before Jerusalem has had time to repair the damage made to its defences. He despatches men to the woods to cut down the timber which the new towers require, but they are now repelled by the bewitching of the trees. Godfrey sends troops in on three successive days, but each time they are driven out by the dire effects of Ismen’s spell.

Finally, Tancred, now recuperated from his wounds, plucks up his courage and enters the enchanted wood. He feels no ill-effects, and makes his way to its centre, where there is a cryptic inscription written on an ancient tree. The trees then speak to him, claiming to be the spirit of Clorinda and others, and warning him not to try cutting any of them down. Tancred reports this to Godfrey, who turns to other plans.

As Ismen had forecast, the weather becomes unrelentingly hot and dry. Even the nights remain hot, and crusaders are dying as a result. The nearby stream of Siloa, which had been a major supply of water, dries up, and there are deaths from dehydration. Morale collapses, with many of the crusaders questioning Godfrey’s inaction. The remaining Greeks desert and start their journey home.

Godfrey then prays for divine assistance. This brings a torrential rainstorm and the return to more comfortable conditions at last.

Canto fourteen opens with nightfall, when at last with the cooler conditions all were able to sleep properly. For Godfrey there is a vision, in which he is told to recall Rinaldo from his self-imposed exile, and to absolve him from his error. No sooner does Godfrey awake the following morning than Guelph asks him for Rinaldo’s pardon, in the hope that the knight will be brave enough to overcome Ismen’s spell, and cut wood to build their siege towers.

Godfrey agrees, leaving Guelph and a team of volunteers to find and recover the missing knight. As the group are discussing where to look, Peter the Hermit interrupts and advises them to travel to Ascalon, and there to ask the man that they meet.

When they reach Ascalon, a wizard with a white beard, beech crown, and wand tells them to follow him as their guide. He takes them into hidden caves beneath a stream, where they see the sources of the great rivers of the world, set in a huge cavern whose walls are speckled with jewels. The wizard says that this is the womb of the earth.

The wizard then tells them what happened to Rinaldo after he had freed the other knights who had been made captive by Armida, and how Rinaldo’s armour came to be made to look as if the knight had been killed.

Armida then waited at the ford on the river Orontes for Rinaldo. When he arrived, he found a column with an inscription which enticed him to go further, leaving his esquires behind him as he boarded a boat. He then came to an island which appeared quite deserted, so he decided to rest there, and put his helmet down beside him.

A little later, he heard a sound from the river, and spied a beautiful woman emerging from the water, naked. She sang a song which lulled Rinaldo to sleep, then came across intending to kill him. But when she saw him, breathing gently in his sleep, her anger melted away and she fell in love with him instead. She then put garlands of flowers around his neck, arms and feet which she had bewitched to act as bonds, had him lifted into her chariot, and abducted him.

This remarkable turn of events has been a great favourite among painters, and a particular challenge to depict in a single image. As a classical example of what Aristotle in his Poetics refers to as peripeteia, it has led to some superb narrative paintings.

In Anthony van Dyck’s Rinaldo and Armida of 1629, the key elements of the couple and attendant symbolic amorino are enriched by a second woman with non-human legs still immersed in the river and clutching a sheet of paper, and several additional amorini. Armida appears unarmed but starting to bind him with garlands, and it is possible that the letter represents her mission to murder him, which the woman in the water, perhaps a nymph, is reminding her about.

Although beautifully executed, its narrative is considerably more elaborate than Tasso’s marvellously concise description.

The most brilliant account to date is Nicolas Poussin’s justly famous Rinaldo and Armida from about 1630.

There are two quite distinctive, almost formulaic, elements within Poussin’s depiction: Armida’s facial expression, and the ‘body language’ of her posture, particularly the conflict between her arms.

Facial expressions have long been associated with different emotions, in paintings and other narrative media such as the theatre. Even late into the nineteenth century, there were collections of prints and books which showed a range of stereotypical expressions intended to help artists and illustrators who were engaged in producing narrative works. Although Poussin appears to have avoided such stereotypes, Armida’s expression is a key graphical element in understanding the narrative: she is perplexed, in a quandary, unsure whether to kill or kiss the young knight.

In the Renaissance, emphasis was also placed on the disposition of all parts of the body, and their role in conveying action and emotion. Leon Battista Alberti’s cardinal work On Painting (1435-6) devotes much of its second book, The Picture, (paragraphs 38 onwards) to instructions about the positioning of body parts in the construction of Historia, narrative painting.

Armida’s right hand represents her original intent, to murder him with her dagger, an action which the amorino is trying to stop. Her left hand, though, reaches down to touch his hand in a loving caress. Poussin manages to tell us what she had intended to do (the past), and what she is going to do next (the future): three moments in time conveyed in a single image.

Poussin’s Rinaldo and Armida (c 1635) is a later and more explicit version of this same narrative episode, in which Armida is falling in love with Rinaldo. There is a multiplicity of amorini who seem less engaged in the action. The river appears more symbolically as being poured from a pitcher. In the background, Armida’s chariot is already prepared for Rinaldo’s abduction.

Sebastiano Conca’s Rinaldo and Armida from about 1725 is a return to simpler composition, based on a central triangle, and content. Armida is drawing her sword, and looking pensive, as the sole amorino reaches from above to intervene.

Tiepolo’s Rinaldo Enchanted by Armida (1742-45) presents another permutation of the elements in Tasso’s story. Armida has already brought her enchanted flying chariot, in which there is another woman, perhaps Venus herself, with an accompanying amorino. Armida is almost undressed and unarmed, and her facial expression is more of unhappy pleading than internal conflict, while her female companion appears cold and unaffected.

Fragonard’s Rinaldo and Armida from 1760-65 is another elaborate painting with an abundance of amorini. Armida’s right hand clutches a dagger, and is restrained by two of the amorini, although it is hard to determine whether she has much facial expression.

With Guelph’s party searching for Rinaldo, Armida now whisks him away in her chariot – still fast asleep, and ignorant of what is in store for him.

References

Wikipedia on Jerusalem Delivered.
Wikipedia on Torquato Tasso.
Wikpedia on the First Crusade.

Project Gutenberg (free) English translation (Fairfax 1600).

Librivox audiobook of the Fairfax (1600) English translation (free).

Thomas Asbridge (2004) The First Crusade, A New History, Free Press, ISBN 978 0 7432 2084 2.
Anthony M Esolen, translator (2000) Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, Gerusalemme Liberata, Johns Hopkins UP. ISBN 978 0 801 863233. A superb modern translation into English verse.
John France (1994) Victory in the East, a Military History of the First Crusade, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 589871.
Joanthan Riley-Smith, ed (1995) The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, Oxford UP. ISBN 978 0 192 854285.
Jonathan Riley-Smith (2014) The Crusades, A History, 3rd edn., Bloomsbury. ISBN 978 1 4725 1351 9.
Johathan Unglaub (2006) Poussin and the Poetics of Painting, Pictorial Narrative and the Legacy of Tasso, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 833677.

We know that the two Danish Naturalist artists Hans Andersen Brendekilde (1857–1942) and L A Ring had painted together in a village near Odense in 1893, and their friendship seems to have extended well beyond that. However, Brendekilde’s accessible paintings and biography then become relatively thin.

He seems to have travelled quite often: in 1894-95 to Germany and Italy, and several later trips to Italy again. But I haven’t been able to find any of his paintings showing scenes outside his native Denmark which correspond with those periods abroad. Those works which are accessible now consist of mostly rural genre scenes and religious narratives.

Melting Snow from 1895 is a wonderful depiction of a harsh winter in the country. An elderly couple are doing the outside jobs in typically grey and murky weather, in the backyard of their thatched smallholding. He has walked down to fetch a pail of water from a hole that he has made in the ice on the river. Walking on that ice in his wooden clogs must be cold and quite dicey.

His wife meanwhile is cutting some leaves from their vegetable patch. With the snow on the ground, their food supplies must have been dangerously meagre until the thaw was complete in the Spring.

The following year, he painted Spring. A Young Couple in a Rowing Boat on Odense Å (1896), which was exhibited at Charlottenborg in 1897. A young couple are out in the fine weather on a sleepy river near Odense. She is standing in the boat and dropping wild posies on the water. A couple of swallows fly past them, as they return from their winter in north Africa. The world is at peace, basking in the warmth of the sun.

Brendkilde’s greatest success of this time was his Cain gets on with his Work in the Field after Killing his Brother Abel, also from 1896, which won him the Eibeschiitz Prize. This tells the story from the Old Testament book of Genesis, in which the first two sons of Adam and Eve, Abel and Cain, came into conflict. Cain was the older, and became a ’tiller of the soil’, while his younger brother Abel was a shepherd.

Cain became jealous of Abel, whose offerings to the Lord were better received than Cain’s. So Cain took Abel out into one of his fields, where he killed him and buried his body.

Brendkilde shows Abel’s flock in the distance, with an eagle flying over them, and the shepherd’s dog pining for his master at the left. Abel’s lifeless face still looks up from his grave, as Cain stares down at him.

At some stage before 1900, Brendkilde painted this small but intense Portrait of Laurits Andersen Ring.

At the end of the century, there is a gap of about five years for which I have been unable to find any accessible paintings by Brendkilde. Then, early in the twentieth century, comes this splendid Wooded Path in Autumn from 1902. As with his earlier Naturalist paintings, there is a story on this canvas, although it is perhaps intentionally open-ended, encouraging the viewer to speculate more.

It is autumn on a walk beside a river. A woman, dressed in black apart from a red ostrich feather on her hat and her white gloves, sits on a rustic bench. Her head is turned to look intently at two men who are now receding into the distance along the path.

The men must have walked past the woman a few minutes ago, and there is evidence in the fallen leaves of their passing. Who were they, and what relationship do they have with the woman?

In the same year, Brendekilde painted this rather sentimental rustic scene of Two Girls with Needlework Sitting in a Farmyard (1902). These girls are a far cry from the subjects of his earlier Naturalist paintings, being clean, well-dressed, and engaged on light domestic tasks typical of the middle class. In the distance is a farmyard cat, and a woman is kneeling on a doorstep giving it a good scrub.

The children in Brendekilde’s 1906 painting of Soap-bubbles are a little more down to earth, although engaged in an activity which had become something of a cliché since John Everett Millais’ famous and sentimental painting of exactly twenty years earlier. Brendekilde’s brushwork has become looser, although each bubble is crafted finely.

Tomorrow, I will look at a small selection of the prolific output of L A Ring over this same period.

When Laurits Andersen Ring (1854–1933) returned from his tour of Italy, he could so easily have fallen into another bout of depression. His desperately unrequited affair with Johanne Wilde had ended in 1892, and Henrik Pontoppidan’s public disclosure of that had shattered their friendship. Instead of slipping into decline, over the next decade Ring painted many of the finest works of his whole career, indeed of any painter of the day outside France.

The catalyst to his success was the twenty year-old daughter of his friend, the ceramics designer and potter Herman H. Kähler: Sigrid (1874-1923), who was more than twenty years younger than him. While developing her own skills as a painter, she modelled for Ring, became his muse, and in 1896 the couple married. Here’s a small selection of Ring’s best paintings from the first decade of their partnership.

Spring. Ebba and Sigrid Kähler from 1895 appears to show a mother and her daughter talking in their garden, but the two are in fact sisters. At the right is Sigrid, the year before her wedding, at the left is her sister Ebba, who was fifteen at the time. Ring uses a very light touch with the blossom and spring flowers to avoid them dominating the figures. This was exhibited at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris.

Ring continued to paint social realist, or Naturalist, works too. Father Coming Home from 1896 shows a mother and two children awaiting the return of their husband and father. He is still quite distant on the muddy track in this poor rural community in Denmark.

At the French Windows. The Artist’s Wife from 1897 is justly thought of as one of Ring’s greatest paintings, and won him a bronze medal at the 1900 Exposition Universelle. Sigrid is noticeably pregnant here with their first child, a daughter. This was probably painted at the family home in Karrebæksminde, close to Sigrid’s father’s factory at Næstved on the island of Fyn (Funen).

Sigrid is again the subject At Breakfast in 1898. She sits reading the ‘leftist’ daily newspaper Politiken in the sunshine. Ring had been an early subscriber to Politiken when it first started to publish in 1884; it played an important role in the formation of the Social Liberal Party in Denmark, and remains one of the country’s leading ‘broadsheet’ papers.

In 1898, Sigrid’s parents celebrated their silver wedding anniversary. For this, Ring painted this remarkable family portrait showing Six Portraits of Potter Herman A. Kähler’s Children. From the left are Sigrid, Herman Hans Christian, Hedevig, Ebba (seen in the first painting above), Elisabeth, and Stella. This may well have been influenced by some of the Renaissance multiple portraits which Ring must have seen when in Italy.

The following year, Ring painted another outstanding work, In the Month of June (1899). Sigrid (I believe) sits blowing dandelion ‘clocks’ idly, her back resting on a patchwork fence, near a farm. This reminds me of some of the rural paintings of Anders Zorn from the same period, and of course the much later work of Andrew Wyeth.

Ring still painted some pure landscapes, and those in which symbols of death are included. After Sunset from 1899 looks at first sight to be an unusual view of a country church just after sunset, but alongside the road at the right is a succession of tombstones, and the rock chamber in the foreground is packed with mummifying corpses, reminiscent of those which Ring had painted in Palermo, Sicily. The twisted old pine then takes on a more sinister appearance, as if influenced by Caspar David Friedrich, perhaps.

A Man Digging Potatoes from 1901 is pure social realism again, as this smallholder uses his spade to lift the potatoes which are his staple diet – as was the case for numerous people throughout Denmark, and many other countries in Europe at the time. I believe that the plants shown here have suffered from potato blight, which swept Europe periodically causing famine and death.

This was followed by The Sick Man in 1902, which was bought the year after for the Hirschsprung Collection. The man stares grimly, wide-eyed and straight ahead, as if he is already looking death in the face. Meanwhile his wife sits knitting, already swathed in black apart from her apron.

As with other countries in Europe, farmland had been progressively enclosed by hedges and fences during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Fenced in Pastures by a Farm with a Stork’s Nest on the Roof from 1903 may therefore be a wonderfully widescreen landscape with social commentary on the continuing issues of enclosure and land reforms.

My selection from Ring’s paintings of 1904 is The Artist’s Wife and Children, which shows Sigrid with their young son and daughter, in front of a really roaring fire. By this time, Ring was well embedded in Danish art circles, and appears to have been comfortably off. In the next room is the same table which appeared in At Breakfast above, and the table in the left foreground has a carefully-polished surface which allows Ring to show subtle reflections.

Ring’s social comment came with wit too: Housewife’s Evening Party from 1905 is a very different sort of party from those being painted by others at the time. This housewife sits knitting, as her husband and a friend discuss a book by the light of the kerosene lantern. They are not poor by any means: there are portrait paintings on the wall, and a clock ticking softly above them, and the man holding the book draws on a large and ornate pipe. They are also clearly literate and educated people. But it’s a far cry from the life of the ‘young things’ in the cities.

The bog at Carlsminde in Søllerød, Zealand from 1906 is one of Ring’s finest landscapes, although perhaps more appropriate of pre-Impressionist painting in the middle of the nineteenth century. It shows a lake in the grounds of a Baroque mansion in Søllerød, to the north of Copenhagen. The estate had been bought by Isak Glückstadt in 1903, who expanded it and had it landscaped, centred on this lake, with its stock of pike and tench. Glückstadt seems to have been eccentric, at one time keeping two Indian elephants there.

Appropriately, in more recent years Carlsminde has been the headquarters of the Danish Liberal Party Venstre, which was Ring’s mature political alignment.

Next week I will look at the careers and art of Ring and Brendekilde further into the start of the twentieth century.

For much of the history of Western Art, one of its underlying principles has been to reveal rather than to hide. Atmospheric and other effects which tend to obscure the image being painted have generally been shunned. The great majority of landscape views, at least until the nineteenth century, have shown fair weather, good visibility, and optical clarity.

This is peculiar to the Western tradition. East Asian art in particular has long favoured views in which significant passages are obscured by cloud or fog.

In this, the final scene in Qiu Ying’s Ode on Shanglin Park, the emperor’s carriage and cortège pass along the edge of a river or estuary. There are ships at anchor, and areas of padi cultivation at the water’s edge. In the distance are more pavilions and houses, all of which are surrounded by a blanket of low fog.

Two great landscape artists were largely responsible for changing attitudes towards the use of fog and cloud as major compositional devices: JMW Turner and Caspar David Friedrich, both painting in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Turner painted Sun rising through Vapour: Fishermen cleaning and selling Fish before 1807. With the sun rising and slowly dispersing banks of fog, larger ships in the distance are emerging and taking form. In the foreground, three fishing boats are discharging their catch. This early in his career, Turner perhaps didn’t dare to bring the fog effect any closer, and was careful to populate the foreground with people and boats.

Many of Turner’s later paintings show effects of reduced visibility, but they peaked in his famous painting of a Great Western Railway train crossing the River Thames at Maidenhead: Rain, Steam, and Speed, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1844. The whole image has now become more fogbound and vague – an important precursor to the approach of the Impressionists after Turner’s death.

One of Caspar David Friedrich’s earliest paintings in which fog was a feature is his Morning Mist in the Mountains from 1808. This shows the Honigstein massif near Rathen, on the River Elbe, and has a distinctly East Asian look about it.

Although set in full daylight, Wanderer above the Sea of Mists (1818) uses extensive mist and cloud both to detach its scenery from ground level, and to maintain a pervasive air of mystery. A bareheaded, blond man stands astride a rocky outcrop in the foreground, a walking stick in his right hand. He looks out over a blanket of lower cloud, pierced by occasional rock pinnacles and peaks. In the distance, more gradual slopes suggest higher mountains to the sides, and vaguer forms of rounded peaks, and a massive rocky butte, fade into mist.

Riesengebirgs Landscape with Rising Fog from 1819-20 shows Friedrich’s further development of the effects of fog in the mountains.

The occasional landscape specialist continued to paint a few views modulated by fog. Peder Balke’s Stetind in Fog from 1864 shows Balke’s favourite mountain looking fearfully from a blanket of fog.

Fog is exactly the sort of transient effect of light and atmosphere which the Impressionists sought out. In 1872, Claude Monet painted the view which gave rise to the style’s name, Impression, Sunrise. This appears to be a brisk oil sketch of fog and the rising sun in Monet’s home port of Le Havre, on the Channel coast. It is one of a series which depicted the port at different times and in varying lights. Monet exhibited this in the First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874, where its name became that of the whole movement and its distinctive style.

The other Impressionists were quick to join Monet in the fog. Alfred Sisley’s Fog, Voisins from 1874 shows a fog-cloaked flowerbed in the foreground, the small patch of colour in this garden. The woman working away is not tending her nasturtiums, but toiling away at what will, in a few months time, be carefully prepared and cooked in her kitchen.

When the Australian Impressionist Tom Roberts was studying at the Royal Academy Schools in London between 1881-5, he took advantage of the frequent fogs which affected the city to paint Fog, Thames Embankment (1884). This was painted from a similar location to that used by Monet when he was sheltering from the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, on the Embankment to the north of Westminster Bridge.

Winslow Homer had painted in London prior to staying in the Engish fishing village of Cullercoats. After he had returned to the US East Coast, he painted in even harsher conditions fishing with the herring fleet off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. The Fog Warning (Halibut Fishing) (1885) shows the ominous sight of a bank of thick fog closing fast on the small boats far out into the North Atlantic Ocean.

Realist painters of the day such as Emil Jakob Schindler also used fog to great effect, here in his urban setting of a Sawmill in the Morning Mist from 1886.

After three centuries in which European art had concentrated on showing full details of landscapes, it was the innovative paintings of JMW Turner and Caspar David Friedrich which had started to popularise fog effects. This was siezed upon by the Impressionists, so that, by the late nineteenth century, fog was quite a common feature of landscape paintings.

Île Lacruix Rouen, Effect of Fog from 1888 is one of Pissarro’s best-known Divisionist (‘pointillist’) paintings, and one of several to use fog to great effect. To that, Pissarro adds black smoke curling idly out of the chimney.

Eugen Dücker’s Morning Fog at a Port at Saint Petersburg from about 1890 is reminiscent of Turner’s early Sun rising through Vapour in that it keeps the fog distant behind abundant foreground detail. It adds the acrid brown smoke rising from a small vessel making its way into harbour, which provides colour contrast against the dawn sky.

Fog effects had become part of Claude Monet’s repertoire when painting series works, here Grainstack, Sun in the Mist (1891) from his famous series showing grainstacks which he painted near his house at Giverny, near Paris.

In the same year (1891), before he returned to mainstream Impressionism, Pissarro painted this bank of dense fog at the edge of a wood, in his Setting Sun and Fog, Éragny. The play of the fog on the cattle here is a good example of how objects viewed through fog can be transformed to look unfamiliar, mysterious, even ghostly.

Pierre-Georges Jeanniot is now almost forgotten. His painting of Night on the Seine of 1892 is unusual, being a nocturne with its distinctive effects on what can be seen, further modulated by fog. It shows the river running through central Paris on a slightly foggy night, and plays skilfully with effects on lights, and their reflections, as well as being thoroughly painterly. Jeanniot also shows the contrasting opacity of smoke.

When Monet returned to London in 1899, and in the following two years, he chose to paint a series of 19 works which examine different atmospheric effects on the same view of the Palace of Westminster. These were all started from the second floor of the Administrative Block at the northern end of the old Saint Thomas’s Hospital on the ‘south’ bank of the River Thames, and completed over the following three or four years.

His The Houses of Parliament, Sunlight Effect (1903) is even more radical than his painting of thirty years before, showing little more than the Palace in silhouette, the sun low in the sky, and its broken reflections in the water.

Monet’s Waterloo Bridge from 1903 is the ultimate conclusion of his paintings of fog, in which only the vaguest of forms resolve in its pale purple and blue vagueness – and his common destination with the paintings of Turner over fifty years before.

Others, like Émile Claus in his Sunset over Waterloo Bridge from 1916, were careful to retain as much form as they can. He uses billowing clouds of steam and smoke to great effect, and his inclusion of the road, trees and terraces in the foreground, on the Embankment, provides useful contrast with the crisp arches of the bridge, and the vaguer silhouettes in the distance.

Ferdinand Hodler chose to develop from Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog in his third version of View into Infinity from 1905. Standing on a rock pinnacle above Hodler’s sea of fog is a naked young man. Behind him long red mountain ridges pierce through the fog, and the pale lemon sky of dawn has parallel strips of red cloud.

Easily mistaken for a watercolour, the optical effect in Hodler’s later Rising Fog Over the Savoy Alps, painted in the summer of 1917, heralds his change to extreme simplification, as the valley mist obliterates detail.

Jakub Schikaneder’s undated Riverbank with Tram shows a tram travelling, most probably in Prague, during a damp and foggy autumn evening.

After the First World War, realist landscape artists such as George Clausen continued to use the optical effects of fog in their paintings. The Road, Winter Morning from 1923 shows Barnard’s Farm at Duton Hill in the flatlands near Dunmow in Essex, England. Its mist and morning sunlight bring more subtle colour, a marked contrast to his earlier Impressionist paintings.

My last example is another view over the River Thames, this time by Lesser Ury. London in Fog from 1926 doesn’t appear to be a nocturne, but looks at the effects of fog on both lights and their reflections in a rather different way than Jeanniot’s painting above.

I think that it’s safe to conclude that Western painting has accepted the many benefits of fog, just a few centuries later than Asian painting.

In my second and final look at the greatest stories and paintings from Plutarch’s Lives, I consider two of his longest and best biographies, of Alexander and Julius Caesar, together with one which became a favourite with Nicolas Poussin.

Alexander the Great

Although never intended to be an accurate historical account, Plutarch’s life of Alexander remains a valuable source and a good read. Much of it relates his long and difficult campaign against the Persian forces of Dareius (Darius), whose army totalled 600,000 at its peak.

Their final confrontation was delayed when Alexander fell ill in Cilicia, and Alexander was warned in a letter that Philip the Arcanian intended to kill him. When Philip came in bearing him a cup of medicine, Alexander took the cup and passed Philip the letter to read. As Alexander drank his medicine, the two men stared at one another wondering who to trust.

Henryk Siemiradzki’s painting of Alexander the Great Putting Trust in his Physician Philip of 1870 tells this episode wonderfully. Philip, with black hair and beard, stands reading the letter which the king had received to warn him of Philip’s intention to kill him. Alexander lies on his sickbed, the cup of medicine in his right hand, deciding whether to drink it, or to believe that warning. The old man behind Alexander leans forward, as if to reinforce the warning in the letter, and advise his monarch not to touch the medicine in the cup.

Eventually, with the Persian forces destroyed, Alexander continued in pursuit of the king. This took him across desert where many of his troops had to turn back because of the shortage of water. When he approached Dareius’ camp, he was left with just sixty of his soldiers. It transpired that the once-great Persian king had been captured by Bessus, who had left him amid great riches, lying in a waggon, pierced by javelins and on the brink of death. Alexander gave him water, and when he died covered his body with his cloak.

This scene is shown in Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini’s painting of Alexander at the Corpse of the Dead Darius from 1708: the conqueror looks tenderly at the conquered. The body of Dareius was then handed over to his mother, and laid in state for his funeral.

One painting which perhaps expresses Alexander’s achievements best is Gustave Moreau’s Triumph of Alexander the Great, which he painted over the period 1873-90. Alexander is shown dressed in white and sitting high on his throne in the foreground. Around him is an extraordinary imagined landscape with imposing buildings forming a gorge, and a stack of grand buildings, towers, and other monumental structures further back. These are set at the foot of a massive rock pinnacle.

Moreau drew on a wide variety of sources for this most elaborate of Indian fantasy cityscapes: miniature paintings of south India, photographs by English travellers, several illustrated books, and Le Magasin Pittoresque, a contemporary illustrated magazine.

Julius Caesar in Gaul

Julius Caesar is Plutarch’s best demonstration of the dangers of absolute power. Although Caesar wrote his own account of his wars in Gaul, which anyone who has learned Latin will recall with faint terror, Plutarch does justice to his military accomplishments there.

After Caesar had heard of the death of his daughter Julia in childbirth at Pompey’s house, and was preparing for winter, there was a major uprising in Gaul. This was led by Vergentorix, who attempted a co-ordinated rebellion against the Romans, aiming to rouse the whole of the country and exploit growing opposition to Caesar back in Rome.

Caesar returned to tackle this rebellion, which culminated in the rebels congregating in the city of Alesia, where Caesar put them under siege. The Romans crushed the rebels outside the city, and forced Vergentorix to surrender. The latter donned his best armour and decorated his horse, then rode out through the gates and made a circuit around Caesar.

Lionel Royer’s painting of Vercingetorix Throwing down His Weapons at the feet of Julius Caesar from 1899 shows the moment of surrender. Vergentorix is about to dismount, strip off his armour, and kneel at Caesar’s feet.

The plot to assassinate Julius Caesar is one of the great climaxes within the Lives. Driven by Caesar’s passion for royal powers, the plot grew from open and deadly hatred even among his former allies. Plutarch describes a series of portents, including lights in the sky and birds of omen being seen in the Forum. One seer advised Caesar to be particularly wary of the Ides of March, when he would be in great peril.

Decimus Brutus, who was so close to Caesar that he was designated his second heir in his will, joined a conspiracy with Marcus Brutus and Cassius to kill Julius Caesar on the Ides of March – 15 March 44 BCE.

The senate had assembled. Antony, a friend of Caesar, was held outside in a long conversation by Brutus Albinus. Caesar entered the meeting, and the senate rose in his honour. Friends of the conspirators took places around the back of Caesar’s chair, and Tullius Cimber presented Caesar with a petition on behalf of his exiled brother.

Caesar pushed the petition away, and started to grow angry. Tullius then gave the sign for the start of the attack, by seizing the tyrant’s toga and pulled it down from his neck. Casca struck the first blow with his dagger in Caesar’s neck. Caesar grasped the knife and asked Casca what he was doing.

Those watching who were not part of the plot dared not run away, nor go to Caesar’s aid. The conspirators then drew their daggers, hemmed Caesar in, and stabbed him repeatedly. Caesar pulled his toga over his head as he sank down against the pedestal of a statue of Pompey, which was covered by his blood. He was stabbed a total of twenty-three times.

The conspirators burst out of the doors and fled, some into hiding, but Brutus and the leaders went out of the senate-house still brandishing their daggers, and marched proudly to the Capitol. Caesar was dead.

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

Phocion, the fate of a good man

Another common theme in Plutarch’s Lives is the way in which the just and the good were so often destroyed or killed by their enemies, regardless of the intended protections of the state. For example, Phocion was denounced as a traitor, and the order given for him to be seized, tortured, and put to death. With his friends, he was taken back to Athens ostensibly to be tried, but his sentence had already been determined.

He was given no opportunity to defend himself when tried in front of a rabble. He asked the crowd whether they wished to put him to death unjustly or justly. They replied “Justly”, to which he asked how they would determine that without hearing him first. He wasn’t allowed to make himself heard again, until he admitted his guilt but denied that of his friends. The crowd insisted that they too would be put to death, merely because they were his friends, and voted to put them to death.

They were then given hemlock to drink by the executioner. However, there was insufficient left for Phocion, who had to arrange for a friend to pay for more poison so that he too could be executed.

Phocion’s enemies even got a decree passed that his body had to be carried beyond the boundary of Athens, and that no Athenian could light a fire for his cremation. A man was hired to carry Phocion’s body beyond Eleusis, where it was cremated. Phocion’s wife was present, and built a small memorial at the spot. She then carried his remains by night to her house, where she buried them in her hearth.

Poussin painted Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion in 1648. Phocion’s widow is here gathering his ashes to take back to her hearth, as her maidservant anxiously keeps watch. The landscape here is particularly wonderful, with the trees echoing the form of the skyline.

Not long after his execution, when the people had returned to their senses, Phocion’s achievements for Athens were marked by a bronze statue, and his remains were given a public burial. Phocion’s fate reminded the Athenians of what the people had previously done to Socrates.

Cato the Younger, the tongue is mightier than the sword

Cato the Younger was another great Roman who came to a premature end, although in his case this was largely the result of the seizure of power by Julius Caesar, and Cato’s incisive powers as an orator. Over the years, his speeches had attacked many influential people, something which caught up with him when his previous allegiances were collapsing around him.

With Caesar’s army approaching, Cato bade the citizens of Utica farewell, as if he was going to leave them. He then took a bath, after which he sat at supper with friends. He retired to his room, where he read Plato’s On the Soul. He looked up for his sword, which had been removed while he had been eating, so summoned a servant to return it.

His son and friends had by this time recognised that Cato intended to end his own life, and Cato had to insist, quite angrily, that he was of sound mind and capable of making his own decisions. His friends finally withdrew, and his sword was brought in to him. Towards dawn, Cato drew his sword and stabbed himself in the abdomen using a hand which was inflamed and weakened. This failed to kill him, but he fell from his couch and overturned a nearby abacus.

His son and friends ran in when they heard the disturbance, and found Cato covered with blood, with most of his bowels protruding, but still alive. A physician went in and tried to repair this, but Cato pushed him away and tore at his wounds until he was overcome by death. The citizens of Utica honoured him, burying his body near the sea. He was only forty-eight.

Cato’s daughter was the wife of Brutus, who two years later was one of those who killed Caesar.

This was not an easy scene to depict in a painting, and it wasn’t until 1863 that the young Jean-Paul Laurens tried a novel approach which I think proved successful. In this earlier moment of the story, Cato is trying to sink his sword into his belly, when quite alone.

In these more recent depictions, the great strength of this story lies in Cato’s refusal to compromise his high values: something of great importance in France at the time of the Directory in 1797, and again under Emperor Napoleon III in 1863. It also seems a timely reminder in 2018.

Plutarch’s Lives remains a collection of biographies which should be read by all, particularly those who aspire to power. It repeatedly demonstrates the corruption of power, the ease with which voters can be swayed to ostracise some of the best statesmen, and how often people have killed or destroyed those who were of greatest benefit to society. And it inspired many truly wonderful paintings.

The end of the Great War in 1918 may have seen the avant garde entering late Cubism or dabbling with Dada, but there were still many significant and wonderful artists with styles that owed more to the previous century. In this second look at some of my favourite paintings from a century ago, I show those which use more traditional means of expression.

In Japan, there were two main schools of painting, the novel, which was derived from Impressionism and other European styles, and the traditional or nihonga. Gyoshu Hayami (速水 御舟) trained in traditional techniques and was a founding member of the Japan Fine Arts Academy, which was restricted to nihonga style. Village in Shugakuin shows his skills working in ink and color on silk. Later in his career he became more realist, and even tended towards Symbolism before his sudden death from typhoid fever at the age of only 40.

Boris Mikhaylovich Kustodiev (Бори́с Миха́йлович Кусто́диев) also adhered to older style. His Merchant’s Wife at Tea is a remarkable achievement for someone who had become paraplegic in 1916, as a result of tuberculosis of his spine. He also survived the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, which if anything enriched his painting.

Colin Campbell Cooper had established his reputation in his paintings of skyscrapers and cityscapes on the East Coast of the USA around the turn of the century. He appears to have been inspired by Japonism on the West Coast in his Summer, which is also influenced by Claude Monet’s paintings from his garden at Giverny in France.

After many years painting brilliant narrative works, Enrique Simonet started to concentrate on painting the landscape of Spain. Otoño en la Dehesa (Autumn in the Dehesa) shows the brilliant colours of foliage in a landscape characteristic of southern and central Spain and Portugal (where it is known as montado). The Dehesa is a mixed, multifunctional area providing grazing for cattle, goats, sheep and pigs, mixed trees centred on oaks, and supports many endangered species such as the Iberian lynx and Spanish imperial eagle.

Louise Upton Brumback had been one of William Merritt Chase’s students at the turn of the century, and was then rated as one of the best women painters of the day, frequently attracting critical acclaim. I love her rich colour contrasts and vigorously-brushed foliage in May Day, Boston.

Best-known for his many gorgeous paintings of Bluebonnets in his native Texas, Julian Onderdonk was at the height of his powers and career. Road to the Hills shows how well he could depict the shimmering light, heat, and textures of the arid countryside, an environment which most painters avoided because of its harshness.

Back in Europe, Jean-François Raffaëlli was painting Paris street scenes in rather looser style, such as his Boulevard Saint Michel, which is in the Latin quarter near the Sorbonne and Luxembourg Gardens. Raffaëlli was a friend of Degas, but his work was rejected by Monet and others at the time, and has since been largely forgotten.

The Czech artist Rudolf Kremlička was influenced by Degas and his favourite motifs. His Dancer is reminiscent of the young girls painted by Degas, and Kremlička painted several works showing women bathing and at their toilet, although in much more modern style, more similar to some of the nudes by Matisse.

I’d like to end this small selection with two Norwegian painters who have relatively recently been ‘rediscovered’. The first is Nikolai Astrup, whose paintings and prints capture so well life amid the pastures between the rugged Norwegian uplands and the huge fjords.

Astrup’s woodcut prints are something really special. In Christmas Eve at Sandalstrand he shows his wife and young son asleep in their home, surrounded by the traditional decorations of the festival.

Not only did Astrup derive his prints from paintings, but he reversed the process and used his prints to develop his paintings. His oil painting of Kari – Motif from Sunde shows an elfin figure of a girl who seems to have come from an illustration, or perhaps one of Carl Larsson’s popular albums of ‘family life’.

Another prolific Norwegian painter of the day was Aksel Waldemar Johannessen, who remains almost unknown outside his native country, not even meriting an English Wikipedia page yet.

Towards the end of the First World War, Johannessen turned more to painting rural scenes, such as this of Ploughing in the Spring. A single farmer with a plough hooked up to a single horse would have been typical of the small scale of many of the farms at the time.

Peasant with Cabbages, also known as Peasant with Cauliflowers shows a farmer with a wheelbarrow full of either cabbages or cauliflowers. His face is closely observed, and magnificent in its detail. Behind and to the right of him, though, is what appears to be a well-dressed young woman, who doesn’t look entirely human.

He was also heavily involved in the design of Norwegian folk dress, and in the Norwegian Theatre (Det Norske Teatret) in Oslo, which had only been founded in 1912. After the Performance shows an actor being congratulated following a production.

The crusaders led by Godfrey of Bouillon desperately need Rinaldo back if they are to resume their assault on Jerusalem. Guelph’s party, notably the knights Charles (Carlo) and Ubaldo, have gone off in his quest. But Rinaldo has been lured into a trap by the sorceress Armida, who intends to kill him. At the last moment, though, she changes her mind and abducts him in her chariot.

Armida’s chariot takes the couple to the distant, deserted and enchanted Fortunate Isles, where she lives in her garden which is perpetually in Spring. The wizard explains this to Charles and Ubaldo, to aid them in their mission to rescue the knight.

David Teniers the Younger’s The Magician Shows Carlos and Ubaldo the Whereabouts of Rinaldo (The search for Rinaldo) from 1628-30 is a small oil on copper painting in his series telling this section of Tasso’s epic. Here the wizard despatches the two knights to the Fortunate Isles.

Charles and Ubaldo set off at the start of canto fifteen, retracing their steps with the wizard as their guide. The river then takes them gently down to the sea, where a ship awaits. They board, and sail at miraculous speed past Ascalon and the mouths of the River Nile, westward through the Mediterranean, and through the Pillars of Hercules into the Atlantic Ocean. They eventually approach the Fortunate Isles, pull into a harbour, and the two knights disembark.

They spend the night at the foot of the mountain which they have to climb to reach Armida’s garden and its captive Rinaldo. They set off again at dawn, only to encounter their first obstacle: a fearsome dragon which blocks their passage up the mountain. Charles draws his sword ready to slay the dragon, but Ubaldo waves a golden wand – a gift of the wizard – which drives it away.

Poussin’s The Companions of Rinaldo (c 1633-4) shows the two knights confronting this dragon. Charles stands in the centre with his sword ready to tackle it, but Ubaldo behind him leaves his weapon in its scabbard and brandishes a golden wand instead. In the background at the left is the magic ship in which they sailed, and standing in its prow is the maiden who steered it.

Johann Friedrich Overbeck’s fresco of Ubaldo and Carlo free Rinaldo from Armida’s Castle from 1819-27, in the Casa Massimo, Rome, shows an interesting composite scene. To the right of centre, Charles and Ubaldo wield their sword and wand, but in the distance are Armida and Rinaldo in the garden at the summit of the island. The amorini are playing with Rinaldo’s weapons, and his empty suit of armour has been cast in the undergrowth.

Next, the two have to face a lion, which is similarly sent away with a wave of the wand. After that comes an army of animals, which disperse readily, and Charles and Ubaldo are on the ascent towards a stretch of snow and ice which they must cross before attaining Armida’s eternal Spring.

Once up at the top, the two knights pause from their strenuous climb, slaking their thirst in a mountain stream. The grassy banks either side of the stream have a fine banquet laid out on them, and there are two naked young women frolicking in the water.

David Teniers the Younger’s Carlos and Ubaldo in The Fortunate Isles (1628-30) shows this moment, the banquet having been placed on a clean white tablecloth rather than the grass. Surrounded by trees and standing proud on the skyline is their destination, Armida’s palace.

I regret that I only have this monochrome image of Charles-Alexandre Coëssin de la Fosse’s painting of Danish Warriors in the Garden of Armida from 1848. The two knights are clearly dallying rather longer than their mission had intended.

Once Charles and Ubaldo could tear themselves away from these nymphs, they pressed on to the circular outer wall of the palace, which opens the sixteenth canto. For it is here that they enter Armida’s garden.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Armida’s garden appeared on all manner of products. This wallpaper designed by Édouard Muller in 1854 is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Other smaller images appeared on coffee cups and much else.

Tasso gives a brief description of the garden, with its figs, apples and grape vines. Birds sing, and the wind murmurs softly. One bird speaks to the two knights, telling of the chaste and modest rose flower which springs virgin from its green leaves.

This passage about the rose was the inspiration for Marie Spartali Stillman’s exquisite watercolour of A Rose in Armida’s Garden from 1894. The artist gave this work to a family friend as a wedding gift.

Charles and Ubaldo then peer through the leaves and spot a loving couple, who they presume to be Rinaldo and Armida. The knight’s head rests in Armida’s lap. He then stands up and takes a crystal glass which hangs at his side. Armida uses this as a mirror to adjust her hair, telling Rinaldo to keep looking into her eyes.

Tiepolo paints this clearly in his Rinaldo and Armida in Her Garden from 1742-45, now in The Art Institute of Chicago. It was originally hung in a special room dedicated to Tasso’s epic in the Palazzo Corner a San Polo in Venice, where it belonged to the noble Serbelloni family.

In Angelica Kauffman’s Rinaldo and Armida from 1771, the crystal glass is ready at Armida’s feet, and she is busy distracting him by sprinkling flowers over his head.

Francesco Hayez shows a slight variation in his Rinaldo and Armida from 1812-13. Anticipating the next part of Tasso’s narrative, instead of Rinaldo wearing a crystal glass at his side, his circular shield rests on the ground next to Armida. Charles and Ubaldo are shown peering from behind a tree trunk, safely in the distance.

Armida then kisses Rinaldo goodbye and leaves. Charles and Ubaldo see their opportunity and step out from the bushes, dressed in their full armour. Ubaldo holds a highly polished shield up so that Rinaldo can see himself for what he has become – a woman’s dandy, not a warrior knight.

References

Wikipedia on Jerusalem Delivered.
Wikipedia on Torquato Tasso.
Wikpedia on the First Crusade.

Project Gutenberg (free) English translation (Fairfax 1600).

Librivox audiobook of the Fairfax (1600) English translation (free).

Thomas Asbridge (2004) The First Crusade, A New History, Free Press, ISBN 978 0 7432 2084 2.
Anthony M Esolen, translator (2000) Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, Gerusalemme Liberata, Johns Hopkins UP. ISBN 978 0 801 863233. A superb modern translation into English verse.
John France (1994) Victory in the East, a Military History of the First Crusade, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 589871.
Joanthan Riley-Smith, ed (1995) The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, Oxford UP. ISBN 978 0 192 854285.
Jonathan Riley-Smith (2014) The Crusades, A History, 3rd edn., Bloomsbury. ISBN 978 1 4725 1351 9.
Johathan Unglaub (2006) Poussin and the Poetics of Painting, Pictorial Narrative and the Legacy of Tasso, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 833677.

In the early twentieth century, Hans Andersen Brendekilde (1857–1942) was painting religious motifs and rather sentimental rural scenes. He was part of the art establishment too: like his long-standing friend LA Ring, he was on the permanent staff of the Charlottenburg Exhibition. In 1908-09, he visited Italy again, but I have been unable to find any of his paintings made outside Denmark over this period.

The sequel to his Cain gets on with his Work in the Field after Killing his Brother Abel from 1896 was over ten years in the making: Abel’s Offering, which he completed in 1908.

His earlier work had shown the outcome, as Cain was burying the body of his murdered brother Abel. Here Brendekilde goes back to look at the cause of jealousy between the two brothers: Abel is making a burnt offering to God, his flock of sheep apparently joining him in worship. Cain was convinced that God responded more favourably to Abel’s offerings, which fired hatred of his brother.

Whereas Brendkilde’s social realist (Naturalist) paintings of the countryside had quite complex embedded narratives, in his later more idyllic rural works, there seems little more than the beauty of the view. Farmhouse with Meadow Flowers from 1909 shows a tumbledown thatched cottage somewhere in the Danish countryside. A young girl is at the open door, and a farm dog stands watching from the path behind her. Brendkilde’s brushwork is looser now, giving a shimmer to the blossom on the tree in bloom. But the opportunity for social comment has been missed.

Peaceful acceptance also prevails in Brendekilde’s Village Scene in the Early Spring from 1911. The rutted mud track is slowly drying from its winter role as main drain. A man is out cleaning the tiny windows of his cottage, and two women have stopped to talk in the distance. Yet piles of wood and household junk sit in front of the cottage at the left. Smoke curls idly up from a chimney, and leafless pollards stand and wait for the season to progress.

While Reading the Newspaper News from 1912 marks the steady passing of time without any real change. Two men are outside a thatched cottage in the summer. One stands reading a newspaper intently, in silence. The other sits drawing on his large and elaborate pipe, staring vacantly into space. It’s then that you notice that, unlike his friend who wears a pair of old wooden clogs, the man who is sitting only has one shoe: his right lower leg has been replaced with a crude wooden prosthesis, a ‘peg leg’.

At the Garden Bank from 1913 shows different people in a different garden, also in summer. A young mother is preparing vegetables, cutting what appears to be a cucumber or courgette. Behind her are some small new potatoes on a wooden bench, a galvanised bucket, and a brown coat which looks oddly out of place. Her daughter stands in front, watching her mother intently and clutching a doll to her. Behind them are sheets hanging out to dry on the washing line, and a small flower garden in full bloom.

In 1910, LA Ring had painted the figure of a sower casting seed on a ploughed field, a motif which had been developed during the nineteenth century by Millet (from his original version of 1850), Vincent van Gogh (1889), and others. Brendekilde responded in 1914 with A Sower on a Sunny Spring Day at Brendekilde Church.

This is thought to show Holme-Olstrup Church, near Næstved on the island of Sjælland (Zealand), close to where Brendekilde was born and from where he had taken his name. The sower, walking over poor soil with abundant stones, has been identified as Ole Frederik Jensen (1870-1953).

Brendekilde doesn’t seem to have had a summer retreat of his own, but at some stage during the early 1900s he painted this fine oil sketch of Summer Day at the Beach with Boys Bathing and a Fisherman at his Boat, which brings this chapter of his life and art to a conclusion.

Tomorrow I will look at this period in the life and work of LA Ring, which is quite a contrast.

Laurits Andersen Ring (1854–1933), like his long-time friend HA Brendekilde, turned more to landscape painting in the middle and later years of his career. With the birth of his son in 1902, Ring moved his family to the old schoolhouse in Baldersbrønde, to the west of Copenhagen, where his wife Sigrid later had their third child.

Ring’s style remained quite tightly realist, although this rendering of an Old Outhouse from 1907 is more sketchy than his exhibition works, and appears to have been painted quite quickly, probably in front of the motif.

Whitewashing the Old House from 1908 is probably his most famous work from the twelve years that he lived in Baldersbrønde. It shows a local man in the midst of applying whitewash – normally made from slaked lime rather than a proper paint with pigment – to the walls of this thatched cottage. He has paused in his work as the woman who lives there talks to him.

The trees in the distance are still leafless, showing that it is early spring. The gate, path, and everything around them are resoundingly rustic.

It was probably in the following winter that Ring painted Short Stay (1909), an enigmatic work. An elderly man and woman face in opposite directions: he looks to the right, she to the left, but their gazes do not meet. They both appear to be standing still, and in silence. He is towing a small sledge on which there is a sack; she is carrying a basket in which there is a large fresh fish wrapped in paper (I think).

Ring had long admired the social realism of Millet, and would undoubtedly have seen his famous painting of The Sower, probably in its original version from 1850, and he may also have seen Vincent van Gogh’s painting from 1889. In 1910, he painted this, The Sower, in such great detail that you can see every seed frozen in mid-air. This suggests that he may have been influenced by photography, which was the first means of producing such images.

Four years later, his friend HA Brendekilde painted his own interpretation of the same theme, which I showed in yesterday’s article.

Interior with a Farmer Reading a Newspaper from 1911 contrasts with the action of the sower and his flying seed, in one of Ring’s most glacially static paintings, which uses extreme asymmetry too. A farmer, better-off than the average peasant for sure, sits reading the newspaper by the light streaming in from its windows. Roses provide a brilliant splash of colour to the far left, and there is a clock ticking on the wall.

The open doors lead through into the far end of the house, which is sparsely furnished by heavy wooden items like a wardrobe and a chest.

By 1911, Ring and his family had bought a caravan, which in those days resembled a railway goods wagon and usually weighed several tons. Most had to be towed by a truck or even a traction engine, which were still used on farms, and were barely mobile. The Artist’s Wife with the Family Caravan (1911) shows Sigrid in a loose-fitting dress, under the shade of a parasol, enjoying a holiday amid sand dunes, perhaps on the coast of Sjælland (Zealand). There is no sign of their children, though.

By the Village Pond at Baldersbrønde from 1911 shows the village in which the Rings lived, with its rutted mud track, once again in early Spring when the pollards are still bare of leaves.

Ring also returned to the country around Sigrid’s family home near Næstved. The Bridge at Karrebæksminde from 1912 must be one of his most intricately detailed works, showing the bridge connecting the large and populous island of Sjælland (Zealand) with the tiny rural island of Enø. This canal was dug in the early nineteenth century to connect Karrebæk Fjord with the Baltic, and has a very strong tidal stream, as demonstrated here.

The Postman Comes with Letters from 1912 is another interior showing everyday life, with a country postman delivering letters to a woman in her cottage. The grandfather clock behind them is full-size, and must have been a family heirloom.

In the summer of 1913 Ring and his family must have holidayed in their caravan again. In his View of a Shore with the Artist’s Wagon and Tent at Enö, they are seen on the south-west coast of the island of Enø, near the bridge at Baldersbrønde. They have here spilled out into a tent, whose heavy guy ropes are being used to dry washing. Now not even Sigrid is to be seen.

The last painting of Ring’s which I have chosen from this period harks back to his first great success, The Lineman of 1884. Over those thirty years, the railways and towns had changed greatly, as shown in his Waiting for the Train. Level Crossing by Roskilde Highway (1914). The single tracks of the past have been replaced with four tracks, complete with this level crossing.

With a train expected at any moment, the barriers have been lowered. Standing waiting to cross the tracks is a cyclist, clearly a working man. It is still winter, and he stands wearing a coat and gloves, looking into the distance for the train. The street at the upper left is in much better condition, broad, and lined with bare pollards.

That year, the Ring family moved west from the old schoolhouse in Baldersbrønde to a property which had been built for them in Roskilde, where they were to remain.

Imagine for a moment what it would be like if half of all the people that you know were to suddenly fall ill and die within a fortnight. For most of us, that’s so far beyond experience that we can only fall back on apocalyptic science fiction and horror movies.

Just as Europe was starting to emerge from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was developing across the continent, in the middle of the fourteenth century, it was struck by catastrophe which almost led to the extinction of humans from the area: the Black Death.

By early 1438, for instance, the city of Florence in central Italy was becoming prosperous and its population had grown to more than a hundred thousand. Then in the Spring of that year, over a period of just a few weeks, the Black Death killed about half of those people. Many of the survivors were scattered over the surrounding countryside, praying that they would be spared, and scared to return to the city.

One of the survivors – who may have sheltered away from Florence itself – was a twenty-five year-old scholar and writer, Giovanni Boccaccio. Years later, he was to describe the coming of the Black Death to Florence in the opening of his famous collection of short stories The Decameron (c 1353). The epidemic forms the frame story which drives its ten young people and their servants to seek refuge outside the city, and to tell one another the hundred tales which make up the bulk of Boccaccio’s book.

In this article and the next, I look at paintings which depict the Black Death, and related plagues, in Europe, and their human impact. This is to set the scene for a new series in which I will look at paintings of the stories in Boccaccio’s Decameron. It also coincides with the centenary of an even greater human catastrophe, the influenza pandemic of 1918.

Epidemics of infectious diseases had been a feature of cities, and concentrations of people in armies, since the dawn of ‘civilisation’. In classical times, both Athens and Rome were struck by epidemics of what is likely to have been bubonic plague.

Michiel Sweerts’ painting of Plague in an Ancient City from about 1652-54 is believed to show Athens during one of these epidemics. The moribund and the dead litter the streets, normal life having collapsed.

The pandemic which started in about 1338 was different, though. Changing climate in the grasslands of Asia led to the movement of rodent populations into cities, and those rodents brought with them fleas which carried diseases which were highly infectious among humans, notably Yersinia pestis, which causes bubonic plague.

In around 1346, outbreaks had reached south-west Asia, and were soon affecting the Ukraine, from where they spread with maritime traders. They brought the plague to ports such as Venice and Genoa, from where it moved inland until striking Florence, Rome and Naples. It then spread north to affect most of the continent and its islands by 1349.

Doubt has been cast that Boccaccio’s description of the Black Death in Florence was based on his personal experience, but few alive at the time could have escaped witnessing its deadly consequences. Much later, in the early nineteenth century, Luigi Sabatelli made this engraving to illustrate an edition of the Decameron, in The Plague of Florence in 1348 (date not known).

Contemporary depictions give some idea of the high death rates, and the problems of disposing of bodies. This miniature of Citizens of Tournai Burying Their Dead During the Black Death shows the scene in Belgium.

Some remarkable frescoes in Nørre Alslev Church, on the island of Falster in Denmark, which date from around the time of the Black Death, show what became known as the Danse Macabre or Dance of Death.

Plague Altarpieces appeared in some churches in an effort to ward off future epidemics. Here two panels from about 1513-14 by Martin Schaffner show victims seeking divine intervention. The cloaked figure of a saint in the right panel is Saint Roch, with his wounded thigh, and to the right of him is Saint Sebastian. Opposite them is the figure of the Virgin Mary, dressed in blue. Above them, angels of death are picking off people at random using their crooked arrows, in punishment for their sins.

This magnificent polychrome limewood sculpture shows The Last Judgement (c 1520) as an outbreak of plague, and may be based on descriptions of the Black Death.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s apocalyptic vision of The Triumph of Death from about 1562 combines scenes of a plague epidemic with the nightmare images first developed by Hieronymous Bosch in the early 1500s. Bosch was born after the Black Death had swept through the Low Countries, but Brueghel may well have witnessed a subsequent outbreak of bubonic plague.

Venice suffered repeatedly, with more than twenty further outbreaks of plague in the city over the two centuries after the Black Death. In those later outbreaks, doctors and others diagnosing and managing victims adopted characteristic dress, shown here in a seventeenth century illustration. The bird-like mask was adopted as a reminder of those dark days, worn in masked balls ever since.

One characteristic of many of the paintings made of the Black Death was the role of saintly figures in giving comfort to the dying, and perhaps even relief from the epidemic, as shown in the paintings in tomorrow’s concluding article.

In the first of these two articles, I looked at the spread of the Black Death across Europe around 1348-50, and some early apocalyptic paintings of its effects.

After a century during which many European cities had continued to suffer outbreaks of the plague on a smaller scale than in the Black Death, it came to feature more in saintly narratives.

Tintoretto’s Saint Roch Heals Plague Victims from 1549 shows those suffering from plague brought to a small chapel, where this Venetian saint is healing them. The dark room is already collecting a disarray of bodies, some seemingly close to death. Without the miraculous work of the saint, this would quickly have become the waiting room for hell. This was painted for Saint Roch’s church, the Chiesa di San Rocco, in Venice.

Jacob van Oost the Younger’s Saint Macarius of Ghent Giving Aid to the Plague Victims from 1673 shows a saint who is supposed to have been the Bishop of Antioch, and was captured by the ‘Saracens’ before escaping to Europe, where he joined the monks of Saint Bavo’s monastery in Belgium. He is thought to have died of the plague there.

He is shown giving communion to those still alive, with the dead bodies of a family in the foreground.

Sebastiano Ricci casts one of the greatest Popes in the role of intercessor, in his Pope Gregory I Invoking the Virgin to End the Plague in Rome from 1700. This may refer to an apocryphal story about this Pope, who was born just before the Plague of Justinian in around 542 CE. He is shown here pleading with the Virgin Mary in heaven to end an outbreak of plague.

Giuseppe Crespi’s Blessed Bernard Tolomei Interceding for the Cessation of the Plague in Siena from 1735 shows a better-attributed episode which occurred during the Black Death in Siena, Italy, in 1348. Tolomei had founded the Olivetans, of the Blessed Virgin of Monte Oliveto, who wore white habits.

When the Black Death reached Siena in 1348, he left that institution to care for the sick in the monastery of San Benedetto in Siena, where he died of plague on 20 August 1348. He was finally canonised in 2009.

Tiepolo invokes another lesser-known saint in his Saint Thecla Praying for the Plague-Stricken from 1758-59. Thecla was born in about 30 CE, and travelled with Saint Paul. She is claimed to have practised as a physician, but doesn’t appear to have had any specific involvement with outbreaks of the plague. Here she is shown praying to God to bring an outbreak to an end, with a small Italian town in the background.

Jules-Élie Delaunay’s painting of The Plague of Rome (1869) is based on an episode reported in The Golden Legend, a mediaeval compilation by Jacques de Voragine, in which plague was raging in Rome. A pair of angels were claimed to have appeared, one good, the other bad. The good angel then gave the commands for people to die of the plague, and the bad angel carried the commands out. At the right edge of the canvas, the white statue appropriately shows Aesculapius or Asclepius, the god of medicine.

It is thought that Delaunay based this painting on a fresco in the basilica of San Pietro in Vincoli, which shows an outbreak of plague in Rome in 1476. It was quickly popularised following exhibition of the painting in the Salon du Palais de l’Industrie in Paris, in the print below, and Delaunay’s painting was bought by Napoleon III for the public collection.

In the late nineteenth century, plague was an uncommon disease in Europe, although it still ravaged populations elsewhere, occurring as recently as the early twentieth century among mainly migrant populations in America and Australia. Theodor Kittelsen painted this nightmare vision of The Plague on the Stair in 1896 for engraving to illustrate a book on the plague.

Arnold Böcklin reminds us that the spectre of death is never far away in The Plague, which he painted in 1898. Although the chances of this happening again should be remote, there are now ‘new’ infectious diseases such as Ebola which would prove even more deadly. Boccaccio’s account in the Decameron could then prove an understatement.

As we’re told everywhere, history and other forms of narrative painting died in the nineteenth century. To examine how true that might be, in this look at some of the great paintings of 1918, I start with narrative works, then look at figurative paintings.

Perhaps the greatest narrative painter still prolific at the end of the First World War was Lovis Corinth, who had painted classical and more modern stories throughout his career. By this stage, he had suffered (in 1911) and recovered from a major stroke, and his brushwork was often very loose and sketchy in appearance. My choice of his narrative art, though, is one of his many fine lithographs.

Odysseus and Nausicaä mixes moments from the story in book six of Homer’s Odyssey: Odysseus has just been shipwrecked and appears at the right, still naked and clearly neither bathed nor oiled. He pleads with Nausicaä, daughter of the local king, in the centre, who has one handmaid with her. Behind them is a mule wagon, mules in harness, with further handmaids on board, representing the group of women from the palace who have come to the shore to do their washing.

I cannot make out any evidence of their washing clothes, nor playing ball, and the handmaids look surprised but have not run away in shock at Odysseus’ appearance. Corinth does, though, show a town in the far background – insufficient to confirm the improvement in Odysseus’ fortunes, but getting closer.

The first version of Henry Ossawa Tanner’s painting of Daniel in the Lions’ Den became lost some time before 1907, so between about 1907 and the end of the First World War, he painted another version which appears to be rather looser in its brushstrokes, and is cropped slightly differently.

Tanner had a fondness for painting lions since his student days in Philadelphia, and had at first considered specialising in the painting of animals. Some have suggested that this might be through a tenuous personal connection with Androcles and the Lion, Androcles being a slave who gained freedom and success.

This version is another example of his very tightly constrained colour, and his skilled use of light, which were probably key in the original’s very successful reception.

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

Helen Hyde is known best for her print-making, which includes this etching and aquatint of Little Miss Muffet. This is a strange account of this well-known nursery rhyme: I can see no sign of any spider, but there’s a rather large white chicken where I would have expected the spider to have been. Hyde tragically died a year later, in 1919, at the age of only 51.

When he died unexpectedly in 1918, Klimt had almost completed this painting of Adam and Eve, one of his few works showing biblical figures. Although he hadn’t painted Eve’s right hand or the passage behind it, there is no sign of the traditional references to the Fall of Man, such as an apple or serpent. Instead, the figures are shown as a happy, loving couple, their heads leaning gently to one side, with flowers at Eve’s feet.

This leads me on to look at a selection of figurative works, starting again with Lovis Corinth.

Throughout Corinth’s career, he painted superb figures, particularly nude women, including his wife and muse Charlotte Berend. She was crucial in the recovery from his stroke, and it must have been encouraging to both of them how he could still paint flesh as well as in his Girl in Front of a Mirror.

Corinth himself was showing his age, grown gaunt with the war and his hard road back to painting. In his Self-Portrait in a White Coat he is seen painting with his left hand, using an open sleeve to stow some brushes for ready use.

As with Corinth earlier, the American artist Charles Demuth enjoyed the night-life in clubs, where he painted In Vaudeville (Dancer with Chorus) in watercolour and pencil.

In Vienna, Gustav Klimt remained one of the most innovative figurative artists, but at this time was embroiled in a very difficult commission, to produce a posthumous portrait of a young woman from an affluent family. Maria Munk, known as Ria, had been engaged to the actor and writer Hanns Heinz Ewers; when he called off their engagement, she committed suicide just after Christmas in 1911, by shooting herself in the chest. Klimt’s commission was for Ria’s grief-stricken family.

Klimt first thought that he had completed Ria Munk on her Deathbed in 1912, but seems to have returned to it in 1917-18. She is manifestly dead, and surrounded by floral tributes. The family rejected the work, which they found too distressing, and asked Klimt to paint her when she was still alive, from photographs.

A second portrait, which Klimt completed in 1916, was also rejected, although there is doubt about the identity of the painting, and the reason for its rejection.

Klimt started his third Posthumous Portrait of Ria Munk in 1917, and was still working on it shortly before his death. It was clearly going to be another richly-decorated painting, with abundant colourful flowers in the background, and brilliant peppers and other vegetables.

Of all the figurative artists in Europe, it was surely the young Egon Schiele who was the most radical and innovative.

In the Spring of 1918, his wife Edith became pregnant, which may have been the stimulus for Schiele to revisit the theme of The Family. His three figures seem full of longing and aspiration: the father, surely a self-portrait, looks straight at the viewer; his wife, who doesn’t resemble Edith in the slightest, stares sadly down to the right; their young child peers out from mother’s legs, as if looking up at an object to the right.

My final choice is, I must admit, my favourite figurative painting of the year, by the Norwegian Edvard Munch.

Munch’s dazzlingly vibrant Bathing Man is set on the coast of Norway. The figure and its landscape are fashioned from bold strokes of pure colour, which he modulates skilfully to show the bather’s lower legs under the water.

Next week, I will complete this survey with a look at some of the landscape paintings from 1918 – and some of the most sublime of the century.

The ‘Saracen’ sorceress Armida had abducted the crusader knight Rinaldo to her enchanted garden far to the west, on the Fortunate Isles.

A rescue team of the knights Charles and Ubaldo sailed out in a magic ship piloted by a fair woman. After they had overcome a series of obstacles, Charles and Ubaldo found Rinaldo dressed and behaving as a woman’s dandy, and then had the task of restoring his senses as a warrior knight, so that they can take him back to rejoin the siege of Jerusalem.

By showing Rinaldo his own image in a highly polished shield, the knight realises what he has become, and is put to shame. Ubaldo bids him rejoin the forces of Godfrey of Bouillon, and the holy war. They hasten away, leaving Armida weeping and choking with grief. She runs after them, calling him back. Rinaldo and his two companions wait for her, and the couple stare at one another in silence.

The scene of Armida and Rinaldo separating has proved another of Tasso’s great images for art. Its greatest exponents were the Tiepolos, father and son, who during the eighteenth century painted a succession of works showing this parting. I show here four examples, each of which uses the compositional device of collapsing Armida’s garden on one side, with the beach and ship on the other, and using that spatial and temporal merging to tell the whole sequence, from Rinaldo’s awakening to their departure by sea.

In this version for the Tasso Room in the palace of the Cormaro Family in Venice, painted in 1742-45, Charles and Ubaldo are stood in full armour, pointing to their ship which is waiting to take Rinaldo away. Armida lies back exposing a great deal of leg, trying to persuade Rinaldo to stay with her.

In Tiepolo’s Rinaldo’s Departure from Armida from 1755-60, Rinaldo is still being woken from his enchantment, and Armida bares her breast as she is trying to lure him back to her.

His son, Giovanni Domenico, squeezed the three knights in tighter, and omitted Armida, in his Rinaldo Leaving the Garden of Armida from about 1770. Rinaldo’s separation from Armida is marked by the hold he has over the blindfolded Cupid in his right arm. This was painted in a fresco in Ca’ Rezzonico in Venice, Italy.

The father Tiepolo had painted Rinaldo Abandoning Armida, another variation of the figures, in 1757, as a fresco in the Villa Valmarana ai Nani, in Vicenza, Italy. In this, the composition is reversed, with the ship at the left, and Armida at the right, pleading with Rinaldo. This is perhaps Tiepolo’s most complete account, as it includes both Armida’s crystal mirror at the right, and the polished shield into which Rinaldo looked, at the feet of Charles and Ubaldo.

Tasso’s narrative, developed in this painting, may have a sub-text about looking and its power: for Armida looking in her crystal was a means of strengthening her allure over Rinaldo, but for him looking into the polished shield was a means of restoring his power by showing what he had become in her clutches.

The Tiepolos were by no means the first to merge Armida’s garden with the sea and ship. Nicolas Colombel’s undated painting from the late 1600s showing Rinaldo Abandoning Armida has done much the same.

Armida then launches into a speech, asking him to let her follow him back, and offering to be his shield. His love has been replaced by compassion for her, and he asks her to remain there in peace. The three knights then sail away on the magic ship, leaving Armida behind on the beach. Her grief now changes to anger at this loss, so she casts evil spells and conjures up her chariot. On that she departs in vengeance for the battlefield.

David Teniers the Younger shows this section of the story in two of his small paintings on copper: in his Armida and Rinaldo Separated of 1628-30, Armida is weeping and being comforted by Charles and Ubaldo, as the woman pilot of their ship waits for them to board by its stern.

Teniers’ sequel, Rinaldo Flees from the Fortunate Isles, shows the group returning to war, with Armida still looking disconsolate in her chariot above them.

Canto seventeen opens in Gaza, between Egypt and Jerusalem, where the King of Egypt is mustering his army ready to advance towards Godfrey’s forces. He sits on his throne to review his forces, which Tasso lists in procession much as he had done when the crusaders were setting out for Jerusalem at the start of the epic.

These start with Egyptians, and progress through those from the coast of Asia, citizens of Cairo, those from the land to the south, men of Barca, those from the coast of Arabia, from the Persian Gulf, and the Indes. At the end, Armida appears riding in her chariot with her own forces who had been mustered in Syria by Hydrotes, together with Circassians and more.

The king then retires to a banquet, where Armida offers her forces in support of the king, and tells of her wish for vengeance against Rinaldo. Adrastus, a ‘Saracen’ leader of Indian troops, offers to rip Rinaldo’s heart out, and make a present of his head to Armida.

References

Wikipedia on Jerusalem Delivered.
Wikipedia on Torquato Tasso.
Wikpedia on the First Crusade.

Project Gutenberg (free) English translation (Fairfax 1600).

Librivox audiobook of the Fairfax (1600) English translation (free).

Thomas Asbridge (2004) The First Crusade, A New History, Free Press, ISBN 978 0 7432 2084 2.
Anthony M Esolen, translator (2000) Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, Gerusalemme Liberata, Johns Hopkins UP. ISBN 978 0 801 863233. A superb modern translation into English verse.
John France (1994) Victory in the East, a Military History of the First Crusade, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 589871.
Joanthan Riley-Smith, ed (1995) The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, Oxford UP. ISBN 978 0 192 854285.
Jonathan Riley-Smith (2014) The Crusades, A History, 3rd edn., Bloomsbury. ISBN 978 1 4725 1351 9.
Johathan Unglaub (2006) Poussin and the Poetics of Painting, Pictorial Narrative and the Legacy of Tasso, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 833677.

At the start of the First World War, Hans Andersen Brendekilde (1857–1942) was in the process of divorcing his first wife, Ida Juliane Antonie Brendekilde (1860–1920), and in the midst of an affair with his favourite model, Maren Kristine Hansen (1872–1956), whom he married in 1918. Hansen had been the family’s nanny, and had modelled in that role in his painting Springtime; The First Anemones (1889).

Other than that, we know that he travelled to Italy, where he painted, in 1922-23, and that he died in Jyllinge, not far from Roskilde on Sjælland (Zealand), on 30 March 1942, when he was nearly 85 years old.

Remarkably few of his paintings remain accessible to account for those twenty-seven years. Most are rural genre paintings, like Home for Dinner from 1917. A young girl stands talking to a man, who could be her father, but with a bushy white beard he would seem rather old for that. He holds a spade, she half a dozen fresh fish and a large parcel wrapped in brown paper.

The source of the fish is not revealed, but the implication from the title is that they will form the family’s main meal that night. On the right side of the painting is a well-worked vegetable plot containing a couple of very large marrows. In the distance is a thatched cottage, where presumably the two live.

The following year, Brendekilde painted a rather simpler gardening story, in Afternoon Work (1918). A younger man is out on his finely-tilled vegetable patch in front of his cottage. Standing just outside the door, behind him, is his young daughter, and through the window is an older woman, presumably his wife. Both are watching him intently, with an air of fear at what he is about to do.

The man looks as if he is about to attack a small crop of molehills which have appeared freshly in the midst of his seedling vegetable plants. He is oblivious to the fact that gardeners seldom, if ever, get the better of a determined mole.

Two Children in a Village Street from 1921 shows two young girls, with a toddler playing behind them, in a backstreet of a village somewhere in the Danish countryside. One of the girls is on an errand, carrying a flask to get some milk; they appear to have stopped simply to talk.

If Brendekilde intended any social comment, it may be subtly hidden in the girls’ feet: one wears old shoes, the other none at all. But the sun is out, a rose in flower against the wall, and the world seems at peace.

For once, a couple of Brendekilde’s paintings from Italy have not only survived, but are accessible still. A Fountain in Rome from 1922 is an accomplished plein air oil sketch of one of the many fountains in Rome, this apparently tucked away in some gardens.

Summer Day in Villa Borghese in Rome (1922) shows this large public park, which was originally landscaped in ‘English style’ from a former vineyard. It was bought by the city and made properly public in 1903, and has since hosted many events, including part of the 1960 Olympic Games.

The nearby Villa Medici is thought to have been the birthplace of plein air oil painting, in Diego Velázquez’ View of the Garden of the Villa Medici of about 1630.

It may be that Brendekilde retired from professional painting after that last trip to Italy. One last painting of his which has survived is this Portrait of the Artist’s Nephew Nils from 1928. The subject’s sailor’s rig may indicate that he was a boy sailor at the time, but such dress was also commonly worn by teenagers of the day.

My last painting of Brendekilde’s is his undated Country Road with Flowering Lilacs and Golden Rains, which is perhaps the most fitting end to his career, as a man walks away along an unmade country road, his dog following behind.

Tomorrow I will look at the last years of LA Ring’s work over the same period.

In 1915, Laurits Andersen Ring (1854–1933) celebrated his sixty-first birthday, and his first year of retirement to the house which had been built for him and his much younger family to the north-west of Roskilde, on the island of Sjælland (Zealand), Denmark. Roskilde is itself to the west of Copenhagen, and has the earliest brick-built Gothic cathedral in the Nordic countries, which has long been the burial place for Danish monarchs.

Ring’s house in what was then the neighbouring village of Sankt Jørgensbjerg was ideally situated. Although generally flat and low country, here, around Roskilde Fjord, the land rises to 40 metres (130 feet) above the water of the fjord. Ring’s house and environs gave him fine views over the city, country, and the fjord itself to the north. It is these which dominate his work over the final eighteen years of his life.

View of Sankt Jørgensbjerg and Roskilde Fjord. Winter is an early oil sketch of the view looking over the fjord, in 1915. Unlike his exhibition works from earlier, it is wonderfully loose and in parts quite gestural.

The following winter, Ring painted one of his finest landscapes, View of Roskilde from Sankt Jørgensbjerg (1916). It’s a dull grey day, with the snow lying on the ground still. Although here quite distant, the great cathedral dominates from its position at the top of the hill. In seemingly painting every single branch and twig on the barren trees, Ring has brought a fine, rhythmic texture to the foreground which extends right to the skyline.

The detail below shows his rich vocabulary of textures in the trees, field, and buildings, which compensate for the muted colours.

Ring seems to have worked on this full-length winter portrait At the Old House over quite a long period, starting it in 1919 and not completing until 1922.

In 1921, he returned to his 1915 view, with another View of Sankt Jørgensbjerg and Roskilde Fjord. This again seems to have been painted in the winter, and the same windmill is seen on the opposite bank of the fjord.

Sigrid Kähler, Ring’s wife, died in 1923 at the age of only 49. Their son Ole, who had been born in 1902, also trained as a painter, and followed his father in style.

When his son was twenty-three, LA Ring painted him in Ole Ring looks over Roskilde (1925). This is reminiscent of Ring’s Young Girl Looking out of a Roof Window which he had painted in Copenhagen back in 1885, forty years earlier at the start of his career. I’m not sure where this was painted: it appears too close to Roskilde Cathedral to be in Ring’s house in Sankt Jørgensbjerg. It is also winter again.

Brøndgade, Sankt Jørgensbjerg from 1927 shows the main street in what was shortly to be absorbed into the growing city of Roskilde. Off to the right the lands drops down to Roskilde Harbour and the fjord, and the cathedral is behind the viewer’s left. This district has now become one of the more sought-after residential suburbs.

In the autumn of 1929, Ring painted The Old Chestnut Tree at the Gate.

Spring Day at Køge from 1931 was painted at this town which is south of Roskilde, on the coast opposite southern Sweden.

The last of Ring’s landscapes which I have found is another View Over the Roofs at Sankt Jørgensbjerg, Denmark, from 1932. By this time, Ring was 78, still a superb artist with great precision in his detail of the leafless trees, and in the texture of the thatch. The church seen behind the trees is that of Sankt Jørgensbjerg, and this view is from the artist’s house.

Ring died in Sankt Jørgensbjerg on 10 September 1933. His biographer, Peter Hertz, wrote that his still waters ran deep – something as true of his life as his art.

As you will have gathered, I love a good story, and most of all I love it painted well, preferably by some masters spanning the period from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. We looked at some wonderful examples for Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and in many of Plutarch’s Lives. I’m still working my way through Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, but there’s another book which was hugely popular as a source for narrative painting over this long period: Boccaccio’s Decameron.

This article introduces a new series, in which I am going to look at some of the best paintings of stories selected from the hundred told there by Boccaccio.

Giovanni Boccaccio’s life has been studied extensively by scholars over the last seven hundred years or so, but much of it remains very vague. He was either born in Florence, or perhaps near the village of Certaldo, to the south-west of the city. His father worked for the Bardi bank, but he is thought to have been illegitimate and his mother has never been identified. There have been rumours that she may have lived in Paris, but those now appear unlikely.

We do know that he was born on 16 June 1313, and while still a child his father married a woman from a rich family, before they moved to Naples. At the time, Naples was a major cultural centre, and as a young man Boccaccio immersed himself in that. His father expected him to become a banker, and Giovanni started work as an apprentice in his father’s bank in the city, which must have brought him into contact with many colourful characters.

Boccaccio had no interest in banking though, and persuaded his father to let him study canon (ecclesiastical) law at the city’s university. When he was in his twenties, his father introduced him to the Neapolitan court and cultural circles around the King of Naples, Robert the Wise. Among Boccaccio’s most important influences at this time was the scholar Paolo da Perugia, who had amassed a great deal of information about classical myths. Boccaccio himself became a scholar, particularly of the classical world, a writer rather than an ecclesiastical lawyer, and his future started to crystallise when he wrote his first poetry.

His early works became the sources of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (Troilus and Cressida), and the Knight’s Tale.

Boccaccio left Naples in 1341, as tensions were growing between its king and the city-state of Florence, and returned to live mainly in Florence, although he also spent time in Ravenna. He developed great admiration for the work of Dante Alighieri, who had died in Ravenna in 1321, and the great poet Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) (1304-1374), whom he regarded as his teacher.

Giorgio Vasari is most famous for writing biographies of many of the important painters of the Renaissance and earlier, but was also a very accomplished artist himself. His tribute to some of the greatest writers of the period is Six Tuscan Poets from 1544. From left to right, I believe these to be Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), Guido Cavalcanti, Giovanni Boccaccio, Cino da Pistoia, and Guittone d’Arezzo.

Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio remain three of the greatest European writers of all time.

William Bell Scott’s undated painting of Boccaccio’s Visit to Dante’s Daughter shows the writer paying indirect homage to his illustrious predecessor. Boccaccio wrote the first biography of Dante, at about the time that he was writing the Decameron.

During the 1340s, Boccaccio seems to have been developing the idea of a book in which seven characters take it in turns to tell stories. When the Black Death struck Florence in 1348, even killing Boccaccio’s stepmother, this provided him with the framing story. He was already building his collection of tales which would form the bulk of the book, and it is thought that he started writing it shortly after the Black Death.

What is more doubtful is whether Boccaccio was living in Florence when the Black Death struck. However, as it raged through the whole of Tuscany in that year, hardly sparing a village, it is most unlikely that he didn’t observe its effects somewhere, possibly in Ravenna.

In 1349, Boccaccio’s father died, leaving Giovanni as the head of the household. In spite of that, he pressed on and had largely completed the first version in 1352. He revised it in 1370-71, and from then on it has been widely read, translated into all major languages, and its stories have inspired many other works of art.

Egide Charles Gustave Wappers painted Boccaccio Reading from the Decameron to Queen Johanna of Naples in 1849. It shows Queen Joanna I of Naples (1328-1382), whose reputation at the time was controversial to say the least. However, Boccaccio was her supporter, and wrote a complementary account in his collection of biographies of famous women, De Mulieribus Claris (On Famous Women). Whether he ever read to her from his Decameron is more speculative.

This miniature by the Master of 1482 and Follower conflates Boccaccio, the Black Death in Florence, and the framing story of the Decameron: Giovanni Boccaccio and Florentines who have Fled from the Plague was painted in about 1485 on vellum, in what must have been one of the first illustrated versions of The Decameron.

The Decameron opens with a description of the horrific conditions and events which overwhelmed Florence when the Black Death struck, then takes us to a group of seven young women who are taking shelter in one of its great churches. They decide to leave the city, rather than waiting amidst its rising pile of corpses, to spend some time in the country nearby. To accompany them, they take a few servants, and three young men.

Once settled in an abandoned mansion, the ten decide that one of the means by which they will pass their self-imposed exile is by telling one another stories. Over the next two weeks, each tells one story on every weekday, providing a total of one hundred in all.

Raffaello Sorbi show the group of ten during one of the story-telling sessions in The Decameron from 1876. The city of Florence is in the distance.

Salvatore Postiglione’s undated, ornate and almost illustrative Scene of the Narration of the Decameron is unusual for omitting one of the seven young women, but links visually to their other musical and craft activities.

Relatively few of the hundred tales in the Decameron have been committed to paint. Some are little more than brief fables, or what used to be known as shaggy dog stories. Others are more lengthy novellas with intricate twisting plots. But many have been painted, from the Renaissance until well into the twentieth century. They were particularly popular sources of motifs among the Pre-Raphaelites and other nineteenth century artists.

The tale of Griselda has cropped up in folk stories across Europe before it was told as the final tale (Day 10, Story 10) of the Decameron. It was then taken up by Chaucer in the Clerk’s Tale, and by Charles Perrault. Francesco Pesellino depicted it in this Scene from the Life of the Griseldis painted around 1450.

One of the most significant series of paintings of the Decameron is Sandro Botticelli’s The Story of Nastagio Degli Onesti, of which this is the first. Boccaccio includes this horrific tale as the eighth story on Day 5, which Botticelli shows in four panels which were commissioned as a wedding gift for a couple whose marriage was partly arranged by Lorenzo the Magnificent (Lorenzo de’ Medici), ruler of the Florentine Republic in the late fifteenth century, and Botticelli’s patron. They were completed during 1482-83.

Some paintings of stories from the Decameron aren’t as clearly associated with Boccaccio’s words: I am going to try to associate George Frederic Watts’ A Story from Boccaccio from 1844–47 with the tale that it tells.

One of the earliest and greatest examples of Pre-Raphaelite painting is John Everett Millais’ Isabella (Lorenzo and Isabella) from 1848-49. When exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1849, it was accompanied by lines from John Keats’ poem Isabella or the Pot of Basil, which refers to the story of the ill-fated love of Lisabetta for Lorenzo, the fifth told on Day 4.

Later in the nineteenth century, Marie Spartali Stillman painted The Enchanted Garden of Messer Ansaldo (1889), showing a scene from the fifth story of Day Ten. This was also painted by John William Waterhouse in 1916-17.

Perhaps the most popular of all the stories in the Decameron with visual artists has been the romance of Cymon and Iphigenia, here shown in Frederic, Lord Leighton’s luscious and languid painting from 1884.

I hope that you will join me in looking at many more wonderful paintings exploring Boccaccio’s stories from the Decameron in the coming weeks.

As secular painting became increasingly popular, and patrons were commissioning works which showed landscapes and scenes from everyday life, so painters turned to the four seasons for their motifs. This article and the next show a very small selection of some of the more interesting paintings showing all four seasons, either in a single image, or in a series.

Their origin, in Europe, is in the calendar miniatures painted by the likes of the Limbourg Brothers in Books of Hours, such as the famous Très Riches Heures of the Duc de Berry, from about 1411-1416.

In each case, I will show the seasons in chronological order, starting with Spring, and ending with winter.

One of the early exponents of painting the seasons was Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who painted several of his marvellous anthropomorphic portraits in sets of four. Less well-known, but more ambitious, is his Four Seasons in One Head from about 1590.

He combines different passages to represent the seasons in turn. Spring is in the flowers on the body, summer in the sheaves of ripe corn, autumn in the fruits decorating the hair, and winter in the leafless face and branches.

Although best known for these anthropomorphic paintings, Arcimboldo was by no means their only exponent. At about the same time, Joos de Momper painted anthropomorphic landscapes, in which figures appear from crafted landforms. These come together in an undated series of four allegories of the seasons.

The most conventional platform for depicting the seasons was, inevitably, in landscape paintings. Here, Joos de Momper painted one of the finest landscape sets between about 1612-15.

Each of these paintings is carefully composed with a checklist of different details: trees and their foliage, domestic animals, birds both species and activity, human dress and activity, weather, sky, and so on. This provides much common ground with traditional East Asian paintings of the seasons, an example of which I show in the sequel to this article.

The Bruegels had also been working on their series showing the seasons for many years. Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c 1525-1569) had been commissioned to produce designs for prints in the mid 1560s, but after his early death the incomplete project was taken over by Hans Bol (1534-1593) and completed as prints in 1570. Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1564–1638) used these as the basis for one of his standard series of paintings, and two complete sets are known to survive. The images below are of those in the National Museum of Art of Romania, in Bucharest.

In Spring, gardeners are planting out a formal Italianate flower-garden, a sight which was probably inspired during Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s visit to Italy. It has been suggested that this composition is even more ingenious, in showing March in the foreground, April behind, and May at the furthest end of the garden.

Summer shows the conventional country sight of the wheat harvest, which has been fully developed in other paintings by the Brueghels, and is one of the most familiar with its golden stooks and bustling activity.

The composition used for Autumn is taken from Bol’s print, although here the number of figures has been reduced to simplify and clarify. The villagers are busy slaughtering and preparing a pig, as stooks of corn are laid up in lofts.

Winter draws on several earlier paintings showing skating on ice, and is influenced by those and Bol’s composition used in his 1570 series of prints.

Then, towards the end of his life, Nicolas Poussin painted a series of narrative landscapes drawing on Biblical stories which are one of the greatest treasures of the Louvre in Paris.

Towards the end of his life, Nicolas Poussin’s hands developed a severe tremor which made painting fine details very hard for him. Despite that, his final years saw some of his greatest landscape paintings, and standing head and shoulders above those is his series of the Seasons, believed to have been painted between 1660-64.

Each of these is not just a fine painting of an idealised landscape, but includes narrative referring to a Biblical story. They not only move through the seasons of the year, but through the times of the day, starting in the early morning of Spring, and ending at night for winter – a device used by later artists such as William Hogarth.

In the Louvre, known for its many great treasures of art, they are among the most sublime and important of all its riches.

Spring starts with the beginning of the Bible, with the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Eve is persuading Adam to join her in an apple, the opening step of the Fall.

For Summer, Poussin chose the story of Boaz discovering Ruth gleaning after the wheat had been cut in his fields, as told in the Book of Ruth. In its contrasting Italian coastal setting, this overlaps with the earlier paintings of the Brueghels and others.

Poussin refers to a story from the Book of Numbers for Autumn, in which Israelite spies visited the Promised Land, and brought back grapes as evidence of what lay ahead.

Winter returns to the Book of Genesis, to show the great flood, with lightning crackling through the sky, and a few survivors trying to escape the rising waters. This also shows Poussin’s lifelong dread of snakes: one is slithering up the rocks on the left, and from memory I think that there is another in the water, although I can’t see it in this image.

Early in William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s career, in 1854, he was commissioned to paint a series showing The Four Seasons (1854-55) for the music pavilion in the garden of the Monlun banking family in La Rochelle. In keeping with their opulent surrounds, these were painted on gold grounds, a layer of gold leaf into which the artist embossed a geometric pattern to result in this unusual appearance.

Bouguereau painted a series of young women with seasonal attributes. These include the flowers of Spring, with their reference to Flora, sheaves of ripened corn (Ceres), a bacchante with her goblet of wine and thyrsus, and wrapped up for winter with snow on her clothing.

But the greatest series of mythological allegories of the seasons is that painted – as with Poussin – in the final few years of Eugène Delacroix’s life. These were commissioned by the Alsacian industrialist Frederick Hartmann, and completed just before the artist’s death in 1863. Although considered to be allegories, in that they don’t directly show each season, they are unconventional in using stories from classical myths which are tied into the seasons.

For Spring, Delacroix chose Eurydice Bitten by a Serpent while Picking Flowers (Eurydice’s Death), in which the bride Eurydice is bitten on the foot (or ankle) by a snake shortly after her wedding, and dies. I’m not aware of any deeper connection between Eurydice or Orpheus and this season.

For summer, the story is another tragic myth of Diana Surprised by Actaeon, which is again set in the season shown. Actaeon stumbled across the goddess bathing when he was out hunting; as a result of his unintentional glimpse of her naked body, he is turned into a stag and killed by his own hunting dogs. Already here he can be seen in transition, with antlers growing from his head.

Delacroix’s choice for autumn draws on the common association between that season and wine, in Bacchus and Ariadne. After being abandoned on the island of Naxos by Theseus, who had promised to marry her, Ariadne is discovered by the young Bacchus. Here, Bacchus has just arrived and is helping the gloomy and despondent Ariadne to her feet. They fall in love and marry.

For the final season of winter, the artist chose Juno Beseeches Aeolus to Destroy Ulysses’ Fleet, which has suffered a slight conflation between the stories of Ulysses and Aeneas. In the Aeneid, Juno offers Aeolus a nymph as a wife if he will let loose his winds on the fleet of Aeneas. That he does, and the fleet is driven onto the coast of North Africa – in what was surely a winter storm.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Alphonse Mucha made several series of prints showing the four seasons. Among these is The Four Seasons, probably from around 1897-1900. These make interesting comparison with the more traditional paintings of Bouguereau above.

The seasons are an important and pervasive feature of much of the art of East Asia. I have chosen one relatively modern example which is straightforward to read.

Araki Jippo 荒木 十畝 painted Birds and Flowers of Four Seasons 四季花鳥 on silk in 1917, a fascinating comparison with the landscapes of de Momper.