You’re no doubt familiar with the best-known sibyl, the Oracle of Delphi – a woman with the ability to foretell the future, usually in some sort of mystic trance. This article looks at how this very pagan priestess and her kindred became popular figures in European Christian art.

Late classical literature lists ten main sibyls: Persian, Libyan, Delphic, Cimmerian, Erythraean, Samian, Cumaean, Hellespontine, Phrygian, and Tiburtine. To those post-classical writing adds a Hebrew sibyl, to whom were attributed various Jewish prophecies. Around 500 CE, early Christian writings adopted the idea, and the classical sibyls were claimed to have prophesied the coming of Christ. Needless to say, there are no references in the Biblical corpus or even New Testament apocryphal writings.

Sibyls appear in late mediaeval miniatures, but they started to flourish with the Renaissance, in its sometimes bewildering fusion of classical pagan myth and Christian narratives. The first printed editions containing accounts of Christian sibylline prophecies originated in Augsburg in 1545, and quickly became sensational. Further collections were published in 1546 and 1596, providing abundant source material for painters and their patrons: these are the Sibylline Books.

Among the first major paintings of a Christian sibyl is the left wing of the Bladelin Triptych, painted by Rogier van der Weyden in 1445-50, and showing the Sibyl of Tibur. She stands at the left, looking up at her vision of Christ’s future, shown in the image of the Madonna and Child beyond the window. She wears a headdress which characterises her as ‘eastern’.

The artist’s reference must have been an early manuscript version of material which was later incorporated to form the Sibylline Books.

Working in Florence, Domenico Ghirlandaio painted this fresco Sibyl Agrippa in the Sassetti Chapel in 1480. This is one of the first depictions in which the sibyl holds a scroll with prophetic words inscribed. She wears an ‘oriental’ headdress, and around her are mystical symbols.

Soon afterwards, Andrea Mantegna’s marvellous distemper and gold painting of A Sibyl and a Prophet (c 1495) made the association between these prophetic women and the well-established tradition of Jewish prophets. His sibyl wears a crown, and is sharing written prophecies with her male counterpart.

By the time of the major fresco paintings at the start of the sixteenth century, sibyls and prophets were strongly associated. This is Pietro Perugino’s fresco in the Collegio del Cambio, showing The Almighty with Prophets and Sybils, painted between 1497-1500. At the left are the traditional prophets of the Old Testament, and at the right are six sibyls, each clearly captioned.

On the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, painted between 1508-12, Michelangelo included the Delphic Sibyl. She has a characteristic headdress, a scroll, and that same slightly crazed faraway look expected of a seer.

Raphael wasn’t to be outdone in his fresco in Santa Maria della Pace. Arched over a door, he painted The Sibyls in about 1514. The left side is shown above, and right side below. He shows four sibyls in their uniform headdress and robes, aided by winged angels, reading from and writing to tablets, a scroll and a book.

As easel paintings on panels and canvas became more prevalent in the Southern Renaissance, sibyls appeared there too. Dosso Dossi’s Sibyl from 1524-25 is the first of a long line of easel paintings showing a single sibyl with her headdress, exotic robes, tablet, and prophetic gaze.

Some of these early easel paintings showed highly inventive forms of headdress, as in Francesco Bacchiacca’s Sibyl painted in about 1525-50.

When Maarten van Heemskerck painted The Erythraean Sibyl in 1564, he may have had the benefit of access to the Sibylline Books. He kept with the formula for attributes, though: headdress, exotic robes, open book inscribed to tell us who she is, and her distant gaze.

This anonymous British painting of the Egyptian Sibyl is one of a set which was completed before 1626.

Simone Cantarini’s Reading Sibyl from about 1630-35 is more modern in appearance, with a proper printed book, and the fabric of her clothing beautifully executed.

By the middle of the seventeenth century, when Guercino painted this portrait of The Persian Sibyl (1647-48), the craze for sibyls was rapidly dying.

In the next article, I will show some more recent paintings of sibyls, and a special sibylline theme.

References

Wikipedia.
Christian Sibyls.

In the first of these two articles, I showed paintings of Christian sibyls which were made before 1650, when they fell from favour.

In 1775, Angelica Kauffman painted this faithful copy of Guercino’s The Persian Sibyl from 1647-48. I don’t know whether this was commissioned or for her own benefit.

Shortly after that, in 1792, another of the great pioneer women painters, Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, painted a Life Study of Lady Hamilton as the Cumaean Sybil. She follows the traditional rules with an ‘eastern’ headdress, distinctive robes, a scroll, and a heavenly gaze which serves to emphasise the subject’s great beauty.

The idea of a ‘Christian sibyl’ was lost, but sibylline characters appeared on stage in plays and operas. Orest Kiprensky’s Portrait of Russian Opera Singer and Actress Nimfodora Semenova (1788-1876) in ‘La Vestale’ painted in 1828 restates the traditional attributes, although the Renaissance artists wouldn’t have dared to expose as much of the sibyl’s chest.

Then, in late nineteenth century reinventions of painting style, sibyls started to appear again, now without any religious association. Theobald von Oer’s Tiburtine Sibyl from 1865 adds a Tivoli backdrop to the standard combination of headdress, robes, book and gaze.

You might expect the Pre-Raphaelites to have returned to painting sibyls too. Dante Gabriel Rossetti did, in his Sibylla Palmifera (Venus Palmifera) from 1866-70, one of his sultry portraits. Instead of a book, she is holding a palm frond, as suggested by the title. But there is ambiguity too, with a blindfolded cupid in the molding at the left, and another sculpted head staring from above her right thigh.

At about the same time, Edward Burne-Jones painted this Sibylla Delphica (1868), who is dressed for her role but she too holds aloft leaves rather than records of prophecy. Behind her is a tripod altar aflame. Paintings had returned full circle to the pagan sibyl, their strange Christian connotations quietly forgotten.

There is one other theme in which paintings show sibyls.

This is shown well in Giuseppe Crespi’s dramatic painting of Aeneas, the Sibyl and Charon from about 1695-1705. In Virgil’s Aeneid, its hero Aeneas visits the Underworld with a sibyl as his guide, shown here with Charon, the boatman who conveys them across the River Styx.

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

Around them are the ruins of classical buildings and a stand of tall trees, as the land drops away to an idealised view of the coast of Italy. I suspect that the island on the horizon is based on Capri.

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

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

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

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

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

Then in 1823, Turner painted another scene from the same story, in The Bay of Baiae, with Apollo and the Sibyl. His view appears to have been loosely based on Claude’s, with common elements, but has been recast at Baiae, in the Bay of Naples. Apollo is again on the left, with his lyre, but the dark-haired sibyl has adopted an odd kneeling position. She is holding some sand in the palm of her right hand, asking Apollo to grant her as many years of life as there are grains.

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

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

Finally, in 1876 Elihu Vedder painted a contrasting version of The Cumean Sibyl, showing her in her other main role, going to sell the Sibylline books of prophecies to the last king of Rome. She strides out clutching these scrolls under her arm.

I hope these paintings have provided better context for reading Velázquez’s paintings of sibyls.

References

Wikipedia.
Christian Sibyls.

I have another eclectic painter for you: Friedrich Hermann Carl Uhde, generally known as Fritz von Uhde (1848–1911). He has been called “Germany’s outstanding Impressionist”, and claimed to have been a major influence in plein air painting in Germany. He painted military, religious and genre works, and I suspect that he was also one of Germany’s precious few Naturalist painters. I’ll try to convince you in this article and its conclusion next week.

Uhde was born in Saxony, and attended high school in Dresden, from where he was admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts in the city. Most unusually, he left after his first year of studies there to join the army, in which he became a professor of horsemanship!

Uhde seems to have kept up his painting when he was serving in the army. In the Monastery Garden from 1875 shows an unusual motif of a monk serenading a couple on his violin. This is odd, because it could easily be mistaken as a reference to the very popular piece of ‘light classical’ music of that name by Albert Ketelby, which wasn’t published until 1915, and whose origins are thought to have been no earlier than 1910.

The following year (1876), Uhde’s interest in painting was rekindled by a meeting with Hans Makart in Vienna. He then left the army to attend the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. However, he was unable to get into any of the major studios in Munich, so in 1879 he moved to Paris, where he became a pupil of Mihály Munkácsy for a year.

When in Paris, he retained his dark and traditional style, as shown in his Family Concert from 1881. His paintings were generally well-received, and he exhibited at the Salon from 1880.

In 1882, at the recommendation of Max Liebermann, Uhde moved to the Netherlands, where his style changed dramatically. Working largely en plein air, paintings such as Fishermen’s Children in Zandvoort (1882) are much lighter and higher in chroma. Although this is claimed to have been the influence of Impressionism, his paintings more closely resemble those of the ‘school of Bastien-Lepage’ at the time: Naturalism.

Another of his paintings from this period and location is Organ Grinder in Zandvoort (1883), which bears little resemblance to any sort of ‘Impression’.

Organ Grinders were a common sight throughout the town streets of Europe well into the latter half of the twentieth century, but have since been replaced by other types of street musician. They commonly entertained children with their popular music and a captive animal such as a small monkey. Pierre Bonnard painted one in Paris in The Barrel Organ (The Organ Grinder) in 1895.

Although he painted en plein air from 1882 on, Uhde continued to create more formal works, which also became much lighter and typical of the Naturalists working in Paris at the time. Dutch Seamstresses (Sisters in the Sewing Room) from 1883 is a good example.

In 1883, Uhde returned to Munich, where he established his reputation for what he termed ‘unacademic painting’ with works like Bavarian Drummers (1883).

At the height of Naturalism in Paris, he painted this portrait of a small girl stood On the Threshold (At the Door), in 1885.

He also turned to religious motifs, which he continued to paint until the end of his life.

In The Mealtime Prayer from 1885, he interprets a grace said with meals literally: “Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest”. This large poor family is just about to sit down to share the big bowl of soup being placed in the middle of the table. The words are depicted coming true, with Christ appearing as their guest.

Suffer the Little Children to Come Unto Me, also from 1885, is a modern interpretation of the well-known quotation from the teaching of Jesus, with a queue of ordinary parents bringing their children to be blessed by Christ in a modern setting. There are at least two slightly different versions known of this painting.

Although the quality of this image isn’t good, Uhde’s Last Supper from 1886 demonstrates again how he takes popular episodes from the Gospels and recasts them in modern settings, something which divided public opinion at the time.

By this time, Uhde was teaching too. In the next and final article about him I will show a selection of his later works, including some which are even more Naturalist in their style.

Reference

Wikipedia.

After Gretchen has attended a mass for the dead at the cathedral, and fainted there, Faust and Mephistopheles head off to celebrate Walpurgis Night in the Hartz Mountains.

Saint Walpurga, an abbess in France in the eighth century, is reputed to have fought many of the people’s problems such as rabies, and stood against the practice of witchcraft. According to legend, the night before her feast day became a celebration by witches, particularly at an event claimed to take place on the highest peak, the Brocken or Blocksberg, of the Harz mountains in central Germany. Among non-witches this is also an occasion for lighting bonfires to ward off evil spirits.

At Faust’s insistence, he and Mephistopheles walk up the Brocken rather than flying on broomsticks or riding goats.

Goethe’s friend the polymath Carl Gustav Carus painted Faust in the Mountains in about 1821, but curiously shows Faust alone, avoiding direct allusion to Goethe’s story in the form of Mephistopheles.

Eugène Delacroix’s illustration in ink on vellum of Faust and Mephistopheles on the Blocksberg shows the pair ascending the slopes.

Mephistopheles summons a will-o’-the-wisp to light their way, and the three sing a song as they reach the middle peak, from where they get a good view of the main summit being lit like one huge bonfire. A strong gale almost blows them from the mountain.

In 1923, the German Expressionist Ernst Barlach published a book containing forty of his woodcuts showing scenes from Walpurgis Night. Here he shows Faust and Mephistopheles II (1922-23) as they stand together watching the witches assembling.

They then hear the chatter of the witches as they converge for their gathering. Mephistopheles declares himself to them, so that he and Faust can make their way through the seething crowds. Faust says that he’d rather be experiencing this on the summit itself.

Mephistopheles talks with a group of men: a general, a minister, a parvenu and an author. A pedlar-witch tries to sell them her goods, then Mephistopheles spots Lilith, an ancient wanton spirit whom he describes as “Adam’s first wife”. Faust sees two of them, and dances with the younger, exchanging quips about apples with her. Mephistopheles cavorts with the older, making ribald anatomical jokes. Others join in, notably a ‘Mr Arsey-Phantarsey’.

Richard Westall’s painting of Faust and Lilith from 1831 was shown at the Royal Academy that year. A beautiful and very naked young Lilith is cavorting with Faust, as a thoroughly malevolent Mephistopheles looks on from the left. Behind are orgiastic scenes set on the mountain. Westall marks the evil of the occasion with a snake, snail and lizards in the left foreground.

Although Westall is now little-known, at the time that he painted this he was Queen Victoria’s painting teacher, and had an established reputation as both painter and illustrator. He also painted several portraits of Byron.

Faust then spots a young girl standing alone, who he recognises as Gretchen. But Mephistopheles warns him that she is but an apparition. Faust expresses regret at what he has done to Gretchen.

Barlach’s woodcut of Gretchen II from 1922-23 shows her walking past a large boar, with Faust and Mephistopheles in the background.

Several artists have produced composite fantasy views of Walpurgis Night which centre on the figure of Gretchen. Theodor von Holst’s Fantasy Based on Goethe’s ‘Faust’ (1834) puts Mephistopheles beside her as she stirs a witches’ cauldron. Holst was a Latvian who settled in London in 1807. He became a pupil of Henry Fuseli, and followed his teacher’s themes and style.

Fritz Roeber’s Walpurgis Night Scene from ‘Faust’ from about 1910 shows Gretchen standing in white, with her eyes shut tight. To the left of her are Mephistopheles, in red, and Faust. They are surrounded by flying witches holding pitchforks, and in the background are the rocky slopes of the Brocken.

Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret’s Marguerite at the Sabbath from 1911 shows a composite in which Gretchen is lit by the bonfires, and clutches the limp body of her baby. This anticipates the conclusion of part one of Faust.

The scene ends, and there is an intermezzo sub-titled The Golden Wedding of Oberon and Titania, in which many different characters speak in turn as if in a play being peformed to the Walpurgis Night gathering. This ends, and Faust and Mephistopheles return to find Gretchen in prison.

Following the return of Velázquez from his first visit to Italy, by early 1631, it was time to get on with his court duties. Over the next fifteen years, he and his workshop produced a great many portraits, of Philip IV, his relatives and aides, of court jesters and royal children, standing and mounted on horseback. He also painted some other subjects, which I will focus on here.

Over the first part of this period in Velázquez’s career, he was greatly involved in the completion of the new royal palace in Madrid, the Buen Retiro, whose decoration was being finished in 1635. This was a project which had first been proposed by Count-Duke Olivares, and involved selecting paintings from other palaces and deciding where best to display them – a delicate task to meet royal satisfaction.

Temptation of Saint Thomas Aquinas from 1631-32 shows a popular legendary episode in the saint’s life. According to contemporary accounts, the saint’s family wanted him to withdraw from the Dominican Order, so he was abducted and brought home, where his brothers sent a woman to his room in a bid to tempt him to break his vow of chastity. Thomas responded by taking a burning log from the fire, drawing the sign of the cross with it, and chasing the woman away. He then fell into a deep sleep, during which two angels visited him and secured a belt around his waist as a sign of his chastity.

Velázquez’s painting is a skilfully-composed composite of the story. Outside on the balcony (at the left), the woman is still in flight. The fire is burning, and at the right edge is the sign of the cross in charcoal, with the smouldering log in the foreground. The saint is unconscious, supported by one angel as the other (standing) is preparing to tie the belt around him.

One feature attributed to his recent visit to Italy is his precisely drawn and projected fireplace and chimney, which is unique among his surviving works. As visual narrative, it is one of his finest paintings, and a match for those of Rubens.

The Surrender of Breda, or The Lances from about 1634-35 was one of the history paintings destined for the Buen Retiro, and shows Ambrosio Spinola, the Spanish general, receiving the keys to the fortress of Breda from the defeated Justinus of Nassau. This marked the conclusion of the siege which had started in August 1624, this moment of surrender not occurring until 5 June the following year. None of the contemporary historical records refer to this ceremonial event, though, which was almost certainly a convenient fiction for the purpose of this painting.

Velázquez’s painting of this scene may appear conventional, and similar to other historical paintings of the time. The generals form the centre foreground, their senior staff behind, and the battlefield drops away into the distance. Apart from the unfortunate attention given to a horse’s hindquarters, Velázquez has painted a fine group portrait of Spinola’s senior staff, and a superb landscape and sky.

The lances are reminiscent of Paolo Uccello’s famous Battle of San Romano (c 1435-60), which he may have seen when in Italy.

Velázquez’s The Needlewoman from about 1635-43 is one of his few surviving unfinished paintings, and one of a small group of his works which portray apparently ordinary people engaged in everyday activities.

There were several small chapels in the grounds of the Buen Retiro, among them one dedicated to Saint Paul the Hermit. In about 1635-38, Velázquez painted for its altarpiece Saint Anthony Abbot and Saint Paul the Hermit. This relies on the account given in the Golden Legend of Saint Anthony seeking the advice of Saint Paul.

Unusually, Velázquez depicts this using multiplex narrative: in the distance, Saint Anthony is seen asking a centaur for directions. Nearer, he is seen again asking a satyr. The saint is shown a third time in the foreground, sat with Saint Paul as a crow brings them bread from heaven. Saint Anthony then leaves Saint Paul’s cave (seen deep under the rock to the right), but later sees Saint Paul’s spirit being carried up to heaven. He returns, where he finds two lions preparing to bury the saint’s body (lower left).

Although the central figures in the foreground are painted quite tightly, much of the rest of this work is amazingly loose and painterly.

In 1636, the king decided to enlarge his hunting lodge at El Pardo, near Madrid, known as the Torre de la Parada. Once again, Velázquez was heavily involved in choosing and making paintings for it. Those painted for this purpose include three life-size full-length portraits, and three matching portraits ‘from antiquity’, of Aesop (fables), Menippus (philosopher), and Mars, the god of war.

Velázquez’s portrait of Mars from about 1639-41 is highly inventive. Sometimes known as Mars Resting, the god is shown off-guard in a moment of relaxation, his armour and shield dumped on the floor, and wearing just a loincloth and helmet. He looks like he just got out of bed after a long siesta.

Although they may seem almost opposites, my last two paintings are actually closely related, and may even share a common model.

The Coronation of the Virgin from about 1645 is in amazingly good condition for its age, and has neither been relined nor retouched, allowing us to see the artist’s original work throughout. It is the sole survivor of a series of ten paintings of the feasts of the Virgin Mary which were in the Queen’s Chapel of the Alcázar of Madrid when it was destroyed by fire on Christmas Eve, 1734, and is generally believed to have been the last religious painting by Velázquez.

The other nine paintings in the series were by Vaccaro, and Velázquez was commissioned to paint this tenth to complete the set. He was therefore constrained to make it fit in with the rest, and used this traditional composition and style. Being a royal commission, he used finest ultramarine for the conventional blue cloak of the Virgin Mary.

Venus at Her Mirror, also known as The Toilet of Venus or the Rokeby Venus, is probably Velázquez’s most famous and controversial painting. Often claimed to have been painted when he was in Italy during a second visit, documentary evidence that it was in Madrid in 1651 makes it most probable that it was painted in the period prior to that visit, 1644-48.

In the mid 1960s, it was the subject of extensive conservation work which has been heavily criticised by some for its effects on the painting.

It is an unusual work for its time, one of very few nudes painted by a Spanish artist. Its early history is something of a puzzle: it was thought to have been acquired by a relative of the Count-Duke of Olivares who was a notorious libertine, but most recently it seems that he had bought it from an art dealer in Madrid in 1652.

It shows the goddess Venus, whose face is blurred in a false reflection in a mirror being held by her son Cupid. The theme was common, seen in paintings by Titian and Rubens, with Venus sat upright. Giorgione and others had posed her reclining and facing the viewer, making her pose here unusual. Most other paintings of Venus set her in a landscape: here she rests on luxurious even sensuous fabrics.

Venus is one of Velázquez’s relatively few paintings now outside Spain. It was first brought to Britain in 1813, when it was bought by John Morritt, who hung it in his house at Rokeby Park, from which it gained its popular name. It was bought for the National Gallery in London in 1906, and in 1914 was damaged severely by a cleaver wielded by the Suffragette Mary Richardson.

Perhaps it is as well that it is the only one of Velázquez’s three documented nudes to have survived.

At about the same time that he is thought to have been working on Venus, Velázquez was also busy with one of his most enigmatic paintings, which I will examine in the next article in this series.

References

Wikipedia
Wikipedia on the Rokeby Venus.

Jonathan Brown and Carmen Garrido (1998) Velázquez, the Technique of Genius, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 10124 9.
José López-Rey and Odile Delenda (2014) Velázquez The Complete Works, Taschen and the Wildenstein Institute. ISBN 978 3 8365 5016 1.

Two hundred years ago this weekend, the founding father of modern European landscape painting, Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, died. In this and a subsequent article, I will try to trace the origins of this new form of landscape art, starting here with a brief look at the work of Claude-Joseph Vernet (1714–1789).

Prior to the eighteenth century, French and Italian landscape painting by the likes of Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, and their successors, had depicted idealised landscapes. These were composites built from sketches made in water-based media, graphite, and the like. Although there were some early exceptions, including Velázquez’s remarkable oil sketches of the Villa Medici in Rome, plein air painting in oils was unusual.

Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes not only made a great many landscape oil sketches, but embodied them as good practice in his influential textbooks. His teaching was passed through his pupil Achille Etna Michallon, to Camille Corot, and so into Impressionism. Indeed, several of the Impressionists were still using Valenciennes’ textbooks.

The question remains where did Valenciennes get the idea to sketch outdoors in oils? One most likely answer is from Claude-Joseph Vernet. Several art historians consider that Vernet and Valenciennes met in Paris in 1781-82, and it was then that Vernet introduced Valenciennes to the practice. Direct evidence is sadly lacking: Vernet had a contemporary reputation as a plein air painter, but not one of those oil sketches has survived. Instead, we only have Vernet’s finished works from the studio as evidence that he must, at some stage in his workflow, have painted directly from nature.

Claude-Joseph Vernet was the senior of a whole family of artists, of whom his son Horace Vernet is probably the best-known today. He was born in Avignon in France, and set off for Rome to study painting in 1734. There he quickly learned to paint maritime subjects to a high standard, establishing himself a reputation which extended back to Paris. In 1753, he was given the royal command to paint a series of works showing the seaports of France, which he continued well into the 1760s. I will show an example later.

The first paintings of his that I show here form a series showing The Four Times of Day which he completed in 1757. William Hogarth had made a similar series of four paintings in 1736, but I don’t know whether Vernet even knew of those. Thankfully, Vernet’s series hasn’t been dispersed, and is now in Australia.

Morning shows three people busy fishing at the edge of a substantial river, as the sun rises behind a watermill and trees on the left. Making its way slowly towards the viewer is a barge, its sail lofted out by the gentle breeze. Gulls are on the wing, and the day promises to be fine and sunny.

By Midday, the clouds of early morning have built into squally showers. While two people are fishing with nets, a couple with an infant and a dog, in the left foreground, are hurrying for shelter before heavy rain starts. Behind them a shepherd has brought their flock under a grove of trees. The gulls are now wheeling and soaring in the strengthening wind.

The storms past, by Evening the weather is again fine. It is warm enough for a small group of women to bathe in the river, in a pool below a waterfall. This scene is reminiscent of the falls of the Aniene River at Tivoli, not far from the city of Rome, with the ruins of the Temple of Vesta at the top right – a very popular motif for landscape painters.

At Night, Vernet takes us down to the coast, where a group who are apparently living rough on the beach are heating a large pot on an open fire. Behind them is a lighthouse, with a full moon low in the sky, implying that this view is looking to the east (moonrise). A fully-rigged ship is heading into the shore, under full sail to catch what it can of the light breeze.

In 1765, Vernet was painting some of the late works in his series of French seaports, including this finely-detailed view of Dieppe Harbour, complete with its many highly-detailed ships and people. At this time, Dieppe was a very long way from Paris, as there was no railway of course, and there was no scheduled boat service to England either.

Later in that decade, he painted a series of coastal views of the Mediterranean in various weather conditions and at different times of the day, another idea which was to inspire Impressionists a century later.

His dramatic depiction of A Storm on a Mediterranean Coast (1767) captures the scene forcefully. In the distance, to the right of the prominent lighthouse, is a second, set atop a round tower. Sadly, they are both too late for the survivors being dragged out of the sea in the foreground.

Vernet must have painted this after close observation of a real storm on the coast, as he shows the high ‘clapotic’ waves resulting from the combination of incoming and reflected waves, just behind and to the right of the group of survivors on the rocky shore.

Vernet’s later A Calm at a Mediterranean Port (1770) shows a similar stretch of Italianate coastline bathed in the golden light of dusk on a calm evening, a gentle breeze blowing the pendants of the fully-rigged ship.

Vernet painted this nocturne of a Seaport by Moonlight in about 1771, with similar elements to his Night shown above. It was exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1773.

Vernet’s work was by no means confined to the coast. In 1775, for instance, he painted this view of A Mountain Landscape with an Approaching Storm, which combines narrative elements from Midday above in a setting reminiscent of Tivoli.

Unlike the earlier idealised landscapes of Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain, Vernet’s landscapes have a close semblance to real geographical locations, such as Tivoli. They are consistent with the claim that he sketched in oil in front of the motif, and that it was he who advised Valenciennes to adopt the practice. If he did, then he is one of the founders of modern landscape painting.

Claude-Joseph Vernet worked in lodgings in the Louvre, where he died on 3 December 1789, just as Valenciennes’ career was reaching its peak. Tomorrow, I will look at the work of Valenciennes.

Tomorrow will be the two hundredth anniversary of the death of the major French landscape painter, Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750–1819). In this article, I will summarise his career with the aid of a small selection of his finished paintings. But his importance in the history of art centres on his practice of painting landscapes in oils in front of the motif – en plein air – and tomorrow’s article will look at his surviving oil sketches.

Valenciennes was born in the large city of Toulouse, in the south-west of France towards the foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains. He trained locally before being sponsored financially to make his first trip to Rome in 1769. By the early 1770s, he was back in France, probably in Paris, where he trained further in the studio of Gabriel François Doyen, a history painter.

In 1777, Valenciennes returned to Italy, where he probably remained until 1781. He was then in Paris again, where he is recorded as having met Claude Joseph Vernet, one of the most innovative landscape painters of the day. As I described yesterday, it is thought that Vernet recommended the practice of painting oil sketches en plein air, which Valenciennes then adopted.

Valenciennes returned to paint in the Roman Campagna between about 1782-85, during which he started to amass a personal image library of oil sketches. He then used those to compose finished landscape paintings in his studio.

In 1787, Valenciennes was elected to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris. He was later appointed Professor of Perspective at the Académie, and promoted the cause of landscape painting to the point where, in 1816, it was incorporated in the Prix de Rome.

Valenciennes’s finished works develop from the idealised landscape of Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain. Classical Landscape with Figures and Sculpture from 1788 shows a Mediterranean coastal view with an unusual echo in the posture of the sculpture at the right and a woman standing at the left. However the human figure is stripped to the waist and talking to a man (probably) who is seated. There seems to be some narrative here, although it is hard to discern the story.

A Capriccio of Rome with the Finish of a Marathon from 1788 is visibly much closer to the landscapes of Poussin. Groups of figures at the left and right are watching athletes run in to the finish of their race. Behind them is a town which uses some passages of Roman architecture, but isn’t recognisably a depiction of the city itself. It is an intermediate between the completely idealised landscapes of Poussin, and later topographically accurate views.

His Classical Landscape – Ulysses Imploring the Assistance of Nausicaä (1790) is not only a glorious landscape, but also comes very close to being a complete account of the story of Ulysses and Nausicaä, from Homer’s Odyssey.

Odysseus, wearing only a nappy/diaper of leafy branches, has just stepped out from the trees at the right, and is pleading his case with Nausicaä, who stands in sunlight slightly to the left of centre. Behind her are two mules by a chariot-like carriage. One handmaid is still down by the estuary washing clothes, but the others are huddled in hiding below a small cliff above the beach. Only the ball play in Homer’s account appears to be missing.

Further along the coast, shown at the left edge of the canvas, is a city which has a prominent pharos-like tower, a reference to the Phaeacians’ sea-going skills and Odysseus’ future travels. Although subtle, this is a good link to the future, and completes a peripeteia worthy of Poussin himself.

In 1796, Valenciennes painted a historical landscape of Alexander at the Tomb of Cyrus the Great, in which Alexander the Great discovers the neglected and damaged tomb of the great Persian emperor at Pasargadae in what is now Iran. This occurred after Alexander had sacked Persepolis. This tomb survives as a World Heritage Site.

In 1800, Valenciennes published his book Elements of Practical Perspective, in which he not only taught perspective but extolled the practice of making oil sketches of the landscape as studies for finished paintings. He considered that this was a better way to understand the myriad appearances of nature, and learn how to depict them in paint. Nearly a century later, Camille Pissarro still recommended this textbook for aspiring landscape painters.

Thanks to his extensive library of oil sketches, Valenciennes was able to bring a new impression of realism to views, such as his Classical Landscape with Figures Drinking by a Fountain from 1806.

Late in his career, Valenciennes painted this vivid reconstruction of the destruction of Pompeii in the Eruption of Vesuvius Starting on 24 August 79 AD (1813), which relied very little on his sketches.

Valenciennes taught a great deal too. His best-known student was the landscape painter Achille Etna Michallon.

Tomorrow, I will show examples of Valenciennes’ landscape oil sketches made during his stay in Rome between 1782-85.

References

Valenciennes on Wikipedia.
Biography at the National Gallery of Art.

Marlais M, Varriano J, and Watson WM (2004) Valenciennes, Daubigny, and the Origins of French Landscape Painting, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum. ISBN 0 972 1222 0 6.

Two hundred years ago today, Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, one of the major landscape painters of the Western tradition, died in Paris. Yesterday I showed some of his finished works, which led the evolution from the idealised landscapes of Micolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain to modern views of nature.

Valenciennes’ most enduring and important achievement, though, was in the practice of plein air painting, which was the foundation of nineteenth century landscape art and the basis of Impressionism. Following the advice of Claude-Joseph Vernet, Valenciennes devoted a lot of effort to building himself a large image library of oil sketches of real landscapes, which he then used as the basis for his finished paintings.

This library was never intended for public eyes, and much of it has been lost. But a precious few examples survive, believed to date from his work in the Roman Campagna between 1782-85. The richest collection of these fragile works on paper is that in the Louvre, where they are one of its great treasures. There are also a few examples which have found their way into major collections in Europe and America. In this article, I show images of all that I have been able to locate.

The Louvre, Paris

One of the finest, and the best-known, of all Valenciennes’ oil sketches is this showing Farm-buildings at the Villa Farnese: the Two Poplar Trees reputedly from 1780. This shows a Renaissance villa now in the centre of the city of Rome, although here its park setting makes it look as if it is out in the country. It was built in 1506-10 for a banker, and appropriately contains superb frescoes by Raphael and others. It is now owned by the state and most is open to visitors.

View of the Convent of Ara Coeli with Pines is a superb view of what is known as the Basilica di Santa Maria in Aracoeli, again in central Rome. This is on the top of the Campidoglio, and affords the view over the city which appears behind the pine on the right. It is situated close to the Forum.

This untitled sketch shows a different view over the city of Rome.

Several of these surviving oil sketches are brilliant studies in the effects of light, such as Rome: Houses and a Domed Church shown here.

I’m not sure if anyone has identified the buildings shown in Rooftops in the Shadows, but suspect that this too is close to the centre of Rome, perhaps on one of its hills. Is this the first plein air painting of washing on the line?

Around forty years later, John Constable sketched clouds and weather in what he called ‘skying’. Here’s one of Valenciennes’ groundbreaking sketches from the early 1780s, in Rome: Study of Clouds. He wasn’t the first plein air painter by any means, nor the first to make sky studies, but it was he who established the practice among landscape artists, both in his direct teaching and in his book published in 1800.

Elsewhere

The Louvre has most of Valenciennes’ surviving oil sketches, but by no means all of them. This superb Italian Landscape is now in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, has another of his sky sketches, in Study of Clouds over the Roman Campagna.

The Cleveland Museum of Art, in Ohio, has this magnificent View of Rome, which I think compares with the Villa Farnese above in its quality. Notable here is the depiction of the clouds of dust and smoke rising from the streets of the city, which surely qualify it as an ‘impression’.

Valenciennes himself may now be little-known, but his influence extends to almost every landscape painting made since – Barbizon, Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and beyond. Tomorrow I will show how that influence is manifest in some great plein air paintings.

References

Valenciennes on Wikipedia.
Biography at the National Gallery of Art.

Marlais M, Varriano J, and Watson WM (2004) Valenciennes, Daubigny, and the Origins of French Landscape Painting, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum. ISBN 0 972 1222 0 6.

Yesterday, I commemorated here the anniversary of the death of the landscape painter who made plein air oil sketching a part of standard practice, so paving the way for the transformations which occurred in the nineteenth century and after – Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750–1819). This article looks at his remarkable achievement across time.

Although there are claims that later in that decade others followed suit, the next surviving plein air oil sketches are those of Alexandre-François Desportes (1661-1743). He was a professional painter of hunting scenes and animals, but is reported to have made some oil sketches in front of landscape motifs. Usable images of these aren’t available, and in any case he doesn’t appear to have handed his techniques on to any pupil or successor.

Plein air oil sketching was described, and recommended, by Roger de Piles in his book Cours de Peinture, which was published in 1708, contemporary with the work of Desportes. Other books on painting and art in the eighteenth century also cover the topic, and Claude-Joseph Vernet was recorded as having painted oil sketches en plein air, but again none has survived.

At Vernet’s suggestion, Valenciennes made copious oil sketches such as this of Farm-buildings at the Villa Farnese: the Two Poplar Trees when he was painting in the Roman Campagna in 1782-85. He not only built himself a large visual library of sketches from nature, but published a widely-used book on landscape painting in which he recommended the practice.

At roughly the same time, the father of Welsh landscape painting, Thomas Jones, was doing exactly the same – also in Rome. This tiny work of his in London’s National Gallery is a gem worth seeking out.

I can’t find any evidence that John Constable was influenced by either Valenciennes or Jones, but he too used oil sketches made in front of the motif to develop his large finished works. From about 1810 onwards, these included many cloud studies in what he called ‘skying’.

The first major landscape painter to adopt Valenciennes’ practice and to show his sketches was Camille Corot. During his first stay in Italy, between 1825-28, he developed his skills painting outdoors in the Campagna, producing classics such as those above and below.

By this time, Valenciennes’ teaching had spread across Europe, and all good landscape painters in training aimed to spend at least a couple of years learning to paint en plein air in the countryside around Rome. Shown is a fine example of the island of Capri, off the coast of Naples, painted by the German Carl Blechen (1798-1840).

Plein air painting in northern Europe was slower to get off the ground, because of its more fickle and inclement weather. Corot continued to paint outdoors when he was back in France, and in the middle of the nineteenth century Eugène Boudin popularised oil sketches on the northern French coast.

On the last weekend in August, 1857, Boudin visited the Finistère region’s largest religious celebration, and made sketches in oils, including The Pardon of Sainte-Anne-La-Palud (study) (1858). These he used to paint a more traditionally finished oil painting, exactly as taught by Valenciennes, which was shown in the Paris Salon the following year, where it was praised by Baudelaire.

Another important plein air landscape painter of the time was Johan Barthold Jongkind, whose work has sadly been more neglected.

Boudin was a major influence on Claude Monet, and Corot on Camille Pissarro, two of the most important of the Impressionist landscape artists.

Pissarro was taught by Camille Corot, and became one of the most skilful and adept plein air artists ever. However, in order to capture as much of the ‘truth of nature’, he frequently achieved great detail in his paintings by working on them over periods of several days. This enabled him to depict complex and densely-populated views, such as those which he painted during his period of Divisionist style, and the human panoramas of his late career.

Paul Cézanne learned to paint en plein air alongside Pissarro’s easel in 1873. Among Cézanne’s early plein air works is this view of the House of Père Lacroix, Auvers-sur-Oise. As with all beginners, he took a long time getting the painting to look right, so different sections of the roof were painted several hours apart, as shown by their cast shadows.

Claude Monet also took plein air painting in new directions, although in many ways his works confuse the whole practice. John Singer Sargent first met Monet in 1876, and in about 1885 they painted together en plein air in the grounds of Monet’s house in Giverny – a good opportunity for one superb exponent of plein air painting to paint another.

Unlike most plein air artists, Monet often worked outdoors on large canvases, which would necessarily take several long sessions to complete.

Monet’s secret is that many of his apparently plein air paintings were in fact taken back to the studio, where he worked on them over several months. Flowering Plum Trees is a good example of this: as shown in the detail below, its paint layer has a very complex structure. Some marks have been added wet-in-wet, but many wet-on-dry, demonstrating that it must have been worked on over a period of weeks or months.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, and into the next, oil sketches became even more painterly, and often highly gestural, as shown in Boudin’s late painting of Laundresses on the Beach (above), and Francisco Pradilla Ortiz’s Laundry Day, below.

Valenciennes’ influence was great, and enduring. It has transformed landscape painting.

References

Callen A (2015) The Work of Art. Plein Air Painting and Artistic Identity in Nineteenth-Century France, Reaktion Books. ISBN 978 1 78023 3555 0.
Clarke M (2015) Precursors of Plein Air Painting, pp 59-80 in Greub S (ed) Monet. Lost in Translation, Hirmer. ISBN 978 3 7774 2428 6.
Conisbee P, Faunce S and Strick J (1996) In the Light of Italy. Corot and Early Open-Air Painting, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 067941.
Galassi P (1991) Corot in Italy. Open-Air Painting and the Classical-Landscape Tradition, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 049572.
Riopelle C and Bray X (1999/2003) A Brush with Nature. The Gere Collection of Landscape Oil Sketches, Yale UP. ISBN 1 85709 998 2.

By the late 1880s, the German painter Fritz von Uhde (1848–1911) had become overtly Naturalist in his themes and style, additionally painting several major religious works.

His triptych of The Sacred Night painted in 1888-89 shows three scenes from a contemporary recasting of the story of the Nativity. In the centre is a very modern interpretation of the classic Virgin Mary and Child, with the adoration of the magi on the left, and a delightful angelic choir singing amidst the rafters of the barn on the right.

This time also saw his early family paintings. In The Nursery of 1889, he shows his three young daughters playing in the nursery of their apartment in the city of Munich, as his wife knits in the light pouring through the open window.

One of Uhde’s most typically Naturalist works is this portrait of a Little Heathland Princess from 1889, just five years after the death of Jules Bastien-Lepage. It follows the latter’s successful formula which had won him acclaim at the Salon: a high horizon, great foreground detail fading into a more painterly background, and a visibly poor waif. Her rather large feet are bare and filthy, and her blonde hair tousled, as she sucks on long hay stalk and looks defiantly straight at the viewer.

Uhde’s painting of field workers In the Morning from 1889 is quite different, though. Its horizon is lower, and its facture is thoroughly painterly even in the foreground, making it Impressionist in style. Few other artists appear to have painted in such contrasting styles within the same year.

In about 1890, Uhde was appointed Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.

That year, he painted one of his finest modernised religious works, A Difficult Journey (1890). This imagines Joseph and the pregnant Mary walking on rough muddy tracks to Bethlehem, in a wintry European village. Joseph has a carpenter’s saw on his back as the tired couple move on through the dank mist.

Uhde must surely have seen the paintings of Christian Krohg and other Nordic artists of the day, including Harriet Backer, prompting him to make At the Window in 1890-91. A seamstress has been working at her sewing machine, and is now leaning out of an open window to get a breath of fresh air.

Uhde was one of the founding members of the Munich Secession in 1893, and later joined the Berlin Secession too. He played an active role in both, and with his academic responsibilities seems to have painted less through the mid 1890s.

By now his girls had grown up. In the summer of 1897, he painted them again in The Artist’s Daughters in the Garden.

The Artist’s Daughters on the Verandah from 1901 reminds me of Pierre Bonnard’s glorious views through French windows, although here the distant view is of the flowering trees in his garden.

Uhde’s beautiful pastel painting of Tobias and the Angel from 1902 is another religious work. Tobias meets an angel when he is fishing, but doesn’t recognise him as such. When he catches a giant fish, the angel advises him to preserve its guts, which he later uses to conquer a demon after he had married his cousin’s daughter.

I suspect that Uhde painted this quick sketch of The Model takes a Break, above, in the early years of the twentieth century, when he was painting Angel (c 1908-10), below.

The last painting I have by Uhde is his undated Christmas Night, showing his modern interpretation of the Holy Family of Joseph, the infant Christ, and the Virgin Mary in their improvised accommodation in Bethlehem.

Fritz von Uhde’s output fell after 1900, but he continued to paint until his death in Munich in 1911, at the age of 62. I think that he was one of the Naturalist painters in Germany, as well as painting some of the best religious works of the late nineteenth century, a time when social reform was starting to sweep through Europe.

Reference

Wikipedia.

After Faust and Mephistopheles have attended the Walpurgis Night gathering in the Harz Mountains, and following a brief intermezzo, they are seen talking together on a gloomy day, in open country.

Faust laments that his love Gretchen is now imprisoned, and blames Mephistopheles for that, and for concealing the fact from him. Faust wishes that Mephistopheles was turned back into the black dog, as he was when they first met, and calls on the devil to free Gretchen, which he refuses to do. Faust says that he will free the girl himself, but Mephistopheles warns him that, following his killing of Gretchen’s brother, that would be very dangerous.

Mephistopheles offers to take Faust to the prison, where he will disable the guard and steal the keys, for Faust to rescue Gretchen and all three to fly away on the devil’s horses.

In the subsequent brief scene, the pair of them pass the gallows at night on their horses, where witches are engaged in ritual, perhaps in preparation for Gretchen’s execution.

The final and climactic scene in the first part of Faust is set in Gretchen’s cell in the jail. Mephistopheles has stolen the keys as promised, and Faust uses them to unlock and enter the girl’s cell, where she is heard singing a grisly rhyme. At first, Gretchen mistakes Faust for her executioner, and asks to be allowed to feed her baby first, then reveals that she murdered the infant.

Faust calls out her name, and her chains fall off, but she still doesn’t recognise her lover. Then it dawns on her, and she throws her arms around him. Faust tries to take her away with him, but she only wants to embrace and kiss him. He has turned cold, though. He tries to persuade her to go with him, but she is full of remorse for her actions.

Gretchen tells him that she poisoned her mother, and drowned her baby when it was born. She then talks of their graves, and tells him that she can’t leave, can’t escape, and is still haunted by the terrible deaths. Faust tries to carry her out, but she is resigned to her imminent execution.

Mephistopheles appears at the door, warning Faust and Gretchen that dawn is approaching and his night-horses must be on their way before sunrise.

This is the instant shown in Eugène Delacroix’s illustration of Faust with Margarete in Prison from 1828.

Gretchen says that she awaits God’s righteous judgement, and calls on angels to receive and protect her. Mephistopheles says that she is condemned, but the voice of God declares that she is redeemed.

Wilhelm Hensel’s lithograph She is Judged! She is Saved! from 1835 shows Gretchen throwing her arms up at an angel in her moment of redemption, as the two men are falling over one another to get away before the sun rises and seals their fate too.

Joseph Fay’s superb illustration from 1846 is also a fine colour lithograph for its time. Gretchen surrenders herself to the divine light pouring in from the upper left. The unmistakable figure of Mephistopheles is pulling Faust away, in flight. Gretchen’s chains, and the jailer’s keys lie scattered on the flagstone floor.

Mephistopheles and Faust exit hurriedly, leaving Gretchen calling for her lover, “Heinrich! Heinrich!”

That is the end of the first part of Goethe’s Faust, his novel story of Faust and his lover Gretchen. It is surprising how few of those who had painted earlier episodes of this story saw it through to this dramatic conclusion in which God intervenes with the girl’s redemption, which finally thwarts the actions of Mephistopheles.

In the next article in this series, I will look at some of the paintings and other graphic art covering the second part of Faust.

Late in Velázquez’s career, when his position at court was very close to King Philip IV, he painted two of his finest, most important, and most enigmatic works: Las Hilanderas (The Spinners), and Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour). Before considering these, I will look at an earlier enigma which has been discussed at length by Giles Knox and others, who consider it key to understanding these later paintings.

Variously known as Female Figure, Sibyl with Tabula Rasa, or Allegory of Painting, this was probably completed in the period 1644-48.

It shows a young woman holding a tablet or board with her left hand, pressing her right index finger against it. Her face is shown in partial profile, as she is looking away into the picture plane, and slightly downwards, but isn’t looking at either of her hands. Her head is bare, her black hair tied back behind it. She wears light clothing, which is rendered in very painterly style, and reveals part of her right breast.

The light source is on the left, casting a dark shadow for her right hand and pointing finger on the tablet she is holding. The background lacks form or detail, but the left half is well-lit, and the right half black. She appears to be seated, with the lower edge of the tablet resting on her thighs, which are below the lower edge of the canvas.

Knox, and others, argue somewhat tortuously that this woman is an allegory of painting. At this stage, it is worth considering a contemporary example of that subject.

Bernardo Strozzi’s Allegory of Painting from 1635 is unusual for the appearance of the woman, but is the closest that I could find in features to Velázquez’s work. She holds in her right hand the top of a canvas, and her left hand bears a palette, on which there are oil paints, and half a dozen brushes.

Universal in all the examples of Allegory of Painting that I can find are brushes, the most obvious reference to painting. Almost as common are the palette and oil paints on its surface. Yet in Velázquez’s painting, the only common ground is the tablet, board or canvas which the woman is holding. Brushes, palette and paint are all absent, and even if the painting had been cut down from the original, they could not have been in the woman’s hands.

Knox argues his case from, among other evidence, the story of Dibutades, who legendarily ‘invented’ painting. She has been depicted by a few artists, of whom Joseph Wright of Derby is perhaps the most complete and best-known.

Dibutades, a maid of Corinth in Greece, was about to see her boyfriend sent away from the city on military service. As the daughter of a potter, she devised an ingenious way of making a portrait to remember him by: when he was asleep, she positioned a light to cast his shadow against a wall behind him, then she traced the outline of that shadow in the plaster. Once he had gone, her father then transformed his painted silhouette into the first relief sculpture by daubing clay within the silhouette.

In 1778, William Hayley told this story succinctly in his poem An Essay on Painting:
The line she trac’d with fond precision true,
And, drawing, doated on the form she drew …
Thus from the power, inspiring LOVE, we trace
The modell’d image, and the pencil’d face!

Hayley’s friend, the painter Joseph Wright of Derby, turned that into this painting of The Corinthian Maid in about 1782-85, as a commission for Josiah Wedgewood, the affluent founder of the local Wedgewood pottery.

Could the woman in Velázquez’s painting be alluding to the story of the maid of Corinth, tracing the shadow of her boyfriend on a canvas or other board?

Here is an immediate problem: the light source in the painting. Coming from the left, the shadows cast are of the woman’s hand and forearm. Unless her boyfriend was between the source of the light and the surface on which her finger is pressed, he could not possibly have cast his shadow on that surface, and none is seen.

Instead, the woman is looking at something (or someone) to the right. If the panel she is holding is a stretched canvas, as she is exerting significant pressure with her index finger, the canvas will give, and she is unlikely to be tracing an outline (even if it were visible on the surface) with that finger.

Could she be, as was originally thought, a sibyl? Following my recent survey of paintings of sibyls, that cannot be ruled out, but she would certainly be a very idiosyncratic depiction of one if she were.

I don’t have any good explanation of this relatively minor painting by Velázquez. Whatever she is intended to represent, to read this image as an indication that Velázquez had started to create meta-paintings about painterly performance is dangerous. His many paintings prior to Las Hilanderas were without exception firmly grounded in the real, not the theoretical. Our starting point for reading Las Hilanderas should therefore be in the real and not the metaphysical.

That said, I strongly recommend Knox’s excellent book, even though I don’t agree with him. And that is the cue to introduce the painting to which I will devote my attention in the next article in this series: Las Hilanderas, or The Spinners, or possibly The Fable of Arachne – you can make your own mind up after reading all about it.

The early history of Las Hilanderas is as dubious as its reading. It first appears in the inventory of paintings owned by one Pedro de Arce, in 1664, when it was recorded as depicting the story of Arachne. However, it seems most unlikely that de Arce was its original owner, as he didn’t own any paintings by Velázquez in 1657, and seems to have traded in luxury goods rather than being a connoisseur of them. Knox suggests that it was probably painted for the king, or another member of the royal court, who sold it on to de Arce between 1657-1664.

It then came back into the Royal Collection, where it is supposed to have been damaged by fire in 1734, although recent investigation denies this. At some time in the past, new sections were added to the left, right, and upper edges. From the eighteenth century until 1948, it was believed to depict the tapestry workshop of Santa Isabel, with spinners working in the foreground, and tapestries hanging in the background.

Then in 1948, Diego Angula proposed that it depicted the legend of Arachne, as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, book 6, lines 1-145. I will examine the painting in detail in the next article in this series, and suggest some possible readings.

References

Wikipedia on this painting.

An English translation of the story of Arachne is in Tufts’ superb Perseus digital library. The translation is taken from: Ovid, Metamorphoses, by Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922.

Barolsky P (2014) Ovid and the Metamorphoses of Modern Art from Botticelli to Picasso, Yale UP. Pages 147-8. ISBN 978 0 300 19669 6.
Bird W (2007) The bobbin & the distaff: erotic imagery and the meaning of Velazquez’s ‘Las Hilanderas’, Apollo Magazine.
Jonathan Brown and Carmen Garrido (1998) Velázquez, the Technique of Genius, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 10124 9.
Kilinski K II (2013) Greek Myth and Western Art, The Presence of the Past, Cambridge UP. Page 138. ISBN 978 1 107 01332 2.
Giles Knox (2009) The Late Paintings of Velázquez, Theorizing Painterly Performance, Ashgate/Routledge. ISBN 978 1 138 27464 8.
José López-Rey and Odile Delenda (2014) Velázquez The Complete Works, Taschen and the Wildenstein Institute. ISBN 978 3 8365 5016 1.

Most painters paint women, but I can think of only one artist whose whole career consisted of painting almost exclusively women: Jules LeFebvre (1834–1912). He was also one of the great teachers of the late nineteenth century, perhaps inevitably counting at least two significant women artists among his many pupils.

LeFebvre, as he styled his surname, was born on the outskirts of Paris, in Tournan-en-Brie, in 1834, the son of a baker who moved two years later to Amiens. His talent for drawing was soon identified, and he seems to have progressed precociously. At the age of only sixteen, he entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he was taught by the brilliant narrative painter Léon Cogniet (1794–1880).

Cogniet had himself won the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1817, and encouraged his outstanding pupil to try too. Among Cogniet’s other students were Rosa Bonheur, Jean-Paul Laurens and Meissonier.

LeFebvre won the Prix de Rome with The Death of Priam in 1861. Set among the ruins of Troy as it fell to the Greeks, it shows a thoroughly conventional, and very Spartan, Neoptolemus just about to swing his sword at the prostrate figure of King Priam, who is lying on the floor by the altar to Zeus. Priam looks up at his killer, knowing that he has only seconds to live.

Behind Neoptolemus is another body, presumably that of Priam’s son Polites. To the right, in the darkness behind, Queen Hecuba tries to comfort other Trojans. At the left, a young Trojan is trying to sneak away, back into the burning city, with smoke twisting its way into the dark sky.

LeFebvre had first exhibited at the Salon in 1855, when he was only twenty-one. In 1866, he exhibited this Nymph and Bacchus, which is dark and antique in its style. The nymph has just killed a blackbird with her arrow, and is teasing a very young Bacchus with it. The herm at the right looks on and laughs.

Two years later, in 1868, he exhibited his first brazen nude at the Salon amid great consternation.

It was LeFebvre’s Truth from 1870 which established his reputation for painting nude women, a work he completed at the start of the Franco-Prussian War. Truth is conventionally naked and bearing her mirror, but her well seems to have been lost in the gloom behind her. The crucial clue is given in the rope which she holds in her left hand.

This painting is thought to have been a major influence on Frédéric Bartholdi, who that year made the first small model of his sculpture which was to be presented to the US as the Statue of Liberty – Truth fully clothed.

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

That same year, he exhibited this painting of a sultry young woman titled The Grasshopper, or Cicada (1872). The title also applies to a woman street singer, which is almost certainly his allusion here, although it provides no explanation for her state of undress.

LeFebvre even found a religious motif which could feature a nude woman: Mary Magdalene In The Cave, which he painted in 1876. This refers to a French legend which held that Mary Magdalene, her brother Lazarus and some companions fled across the Mediterranean to land at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer near Arles. From there, Mary went to live in isolation in a cave on a hill near Marseille, now known as La Saint-Baume, and the setting for this painting.

In his Graziella from 1878, LeFebvre refers to the popular novel of the same name by Alphonse de Lamartine, which had first been serialised in 1849, and was published entire in 1852. The heroine of the title is a fisherman’s granddaughter who lives in the Bay of Naples, which explains why Mount Vesuvius is quietly smoking in the distance, just by Graziella’s knees. This was commissioned by the American collector Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, an important supporter of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The following year, 1879, saw LeFebvre engaged in a large mythical work. For this, he painted this small panel of Diana, in which she is seen alone with her attributes of hunting bow and arrows, and the crescent moon on her head. LeFebvre appears to have been experimenting with a pre-Christian glow effect to indicate her divine nature.

His large work, Diana Surprised (1879), tells the Ovidean myth of Actaeon, who stumbled into Diana and her party bathing deep in the woods when he was out hunting. For the offence of seeing the goddess naked, he was turned into a deer, which was promptly torn apart by his own hunting dogs.

LeFebvre ingeniously shows only the naked goddess and her attendants, who are taken aback by something beyond the left edge of the canvas. At the far right is a dead deer on the ground, which gives a fairly explicit clue to its narrative.

In the same year, he painted another sultry young woman, her hair decked with Morning Glory flowers, in Morning Glory (1879).

By 1880, Jules LeFebvre (1834–1912) was one of the leading ‘academic’ painters in France, alongside Bouguereau, and with his rival was teaching at the Académie Julian, which that year became the first Paris academy to admit women. It was also very welcoming to non-Francophone artists, particularly those from the USA.

With Naturalism starting to become all the rage at the Salon, and the renegade Impressionists exhibiting their work outside, LeFebvre showed no signs of change, and continued to paint beautiful young women almost exclusively, although he did paint a few portraits of men too.

LeFebvre tried his hand at a few ‘Orientalist’ works, of which Servant from 1880 is perhaps his most successful. Although the woman and her clothing is painted to his usual high standard, I think he is here less successful with the fruit and porcelain on the tray. He also painted at least one Japoniste woman.

Although LeFebvre’s Ondine of 1882 refers to the water nymph featured in Aloysius Bertrand’s prose poems Gaspard de la Nuit of 1842, she here proves no more than another excuse for an academic nude.

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

The tragic figure of Ophelia (1890), from Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, had become a popular motif for artists during this period. Notable in LeFebvre’s version is his attention to the detail of her hair, as well as the Morning Glory flowers adorning it.

In 1891, LeFebvre found another theme which he was to paint on at least two occasions: Lady Godiva, the legendary noblewoman of Coventry in England who rode through its streets naked on horseback in protest at her husband’s swingeing taxes. She is shown here passing over deserted narrow cobbled streets, covering her breasts and appearing in some distress. Her horse is being led by a maid, and flying alongside are three white doves. She appears almost saintly in her mission, as if undergoing some sort of psychological martyrdom.

Renowned or vilified for his nudes, LeFebvre’s paintings included many in which his subjects were clothed, and his Judith from 1892 is one of the most interesting. This is the Judith who, according to the Old Testament story, decapitated Holofernes – understandably a popular motif for women painters.

LeFebvre shows a proud and powerful figure holding a huge sword. From her helmet-like headdress to her heavy bronze belt she is every bit a warrior. In his portraits, LeFebvre favoured two poses: looking straight at the viewer, or head in profile looking to the right; here he uses the latter to reinforce Judith’s strength. His brushwork has also loosened significantly, at the edge of her black hair and in her clothing in particular.

LeFebvre exhibited this painting of Lady Godiva at Prayer at the Salon in 1905, and I presume that this is a monochrome reproduction of a full colour original. His second painting of this heroine is now clearly approaching a religious transition, standing in front of a psalter, her eyes looking up to heaven. However, the artist doesn’t give any visual clues as to what she is about to do.

The final painting I have to show by LeFebvre is unfortunately undated, and shows Grisélidis, the heroine of Massenet’s opera which was first performed in Paris in November 1901. I therefore suspect that LeFebvre painted this between 1902-12. A variant of the folk story of Griselda, included in Boccaccio’s Decameron, Grisélidis is a shepherdess who is repeatedly tempted by the devil to be unfaithful to her husband, but remains loyal to him.

Two features are of relevance here: the sketchiness of the background, and the painterliness of Grisélidis’s hair, shown in the detail below.

By the time of LeFebvre’s death in Paris in 1912, art had changed. The critics quickly turned against him, describing him as a very bad painter, and his works were almost forgotten.

Even if you ignore his career-long fascination for painting beautiful women, he was an important teacher, both at the École des Beaux-Arts and in the Académie Julian. Among his pupils were:

• Georges Rochegrosse (1859–1938), from 1871, who retained academic style.
• Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921), from about 1876, the Belgian Symbolist painter.
• Colin Campbell Cooper (1856–1937), from 1886-90, the American painter of skyscrapers.
• Frederick Childe Hassam (1859-1935), from 1886, a major American Impressionist.
• Elizabeth Nourse (1859–1938), from 1887, a major American realist painter.
• Henrietta Rae (1859–1928), from 1890, who retained academic style and returned to Britain to shock the Royal Academy with her nudes.
• Charles Conder (1868-1909), from about 1891, one of the Australian Impressionists.

That’s a fairly eclectic range of styles.

The great French landscape and narrative painter Nicolas Poussin worked for most of his career in Rome. Between 1642-46, Poussin taught one of his few pupils in his studio in Rome, the brilliant young Charles Le Brun (1619–1690), who was born four hundred years ago tomorrow. Le Brun was dubbed the greatest French artist of all time, by none other than Louis XIV. Yet today, he isn’t known well, and is surely obscure compared to his master.

In this article and tomorrow’s, I will celebrate Le Brun’s life and work, in honour of this great anniversary.

Charles Le Brun was born in Paris, and as a child his drawing skills were noticed by Chancellor Séguier, who had him apprenticed to the painter Simon Vouet at the age of eleven. Four years later he was commissioned by the notorious Cardinal Richelieu. Nicolas Poussin was in Paris at the time, and was so impressed with Le Brun’s early work that he took him back to Rome as a pupil.

Soon after Le Brun had arrived in Rome, he started work on this painting of Horatius Cocles Defending the Bridge (c 1642-43). This tells the story of the fearless Roman who, according to legend, single-handedly fought off the attack of Lars Porsena’s troops as they tried to capture Rome.

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

Continuing his Roman theme, he then painted The Deification of Aeneas in about 1642-44. This shows a much earlier stage in the history of Rome, when Aeneas, hero of Virgil’s epic Aeneid, was turned into a god. Le Brun’s account is a faithful depiction from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, with the river god Numicus sat in the front, and Venus anointing Aeneas with ambrosia and nectar to make him immortal as the god Jupiter Indiges. At the right is Venus’ mischievous son Cupid, trying on Aeneas’s armour, and the chariot towed by white doves is ready to take the hero up to join the gods.

Le Brun also painted several major religious works, of which this Pietà from 1643-45 is probably one of the earliest. The Virgin Mary’s cloak is painted, as is traditional, using ultramarine, suggesting that this was a valuable commission, given the pigment’s high cost.

Towards the end of his time in Rome, Le Brun painted this work showing Daedalus and Icarus (1645-46). This shows the master artificer Daedalus fastening wings made of feathers and wax on his son Icarus’ back, prior to their ill-fated flight of escape from Crete.

Given Poussin’s emphasis on capturing the moment of peripeteia, the change in fortune, and his own carefully-composed narrative paintings, I have to wonder whether this work had a pendant which completed the story with the downfall and drowning of Icarus, after he flew too close to the sun and his wings fell apart.

After four years in Poussin’s studio in Rome, Le Brun returned to Paris, where his work was in great demand by highly-placed patrons.

Shortly before or after his departure from Rome, Le Brun painted this account of the Suicide of Cato the Younger. Although it departs from Plutarch’s description in his Lives, given Cato’s great integrity and the intrigues of the French court into which Le Brun entered, it is an interesting work for this time in his life.

The following year, Le Brun painted The Sacrifice of Polyxena, the youngest daughter of King Priam of Troy. According to the plays of Euripides, she was sacrificed at the foot of Achilles’ grave to appease the winds so that the Greek fleet could set sail to return after the destruction of Troy. Polyxena is here being led to the altar as Hecuba, her mother, tries to hold her back. Behind Polyxena is the same Neoptolemus who threw Astyanax to his death, threatening to kill her where she is.

At about the same time, Le Brun tackled one of the great and most difficult motifs of the Christian Passion, the Descent from the Cross (c 1647). Although a fine painting, there is considerable distance between this and Rubens’ quite early but masterly version painted for the Cathedral of Our Lady in Antwerp in 1612-14.

Le Brun was involved in several major changes in art in France. Together with Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Minister of Finance, he took control of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1648, and reformed it.

In about 1655, he painted this more lighthearted tondo showing Venus Clipping Cupid’s Wings. At the back is the personification of Truth, who has emerged from her well at the left, and holds her eternal flame, just as in the Statue of Liberty.

In the next article, tomorrow, I will explain Le Brun’s most enduring work of art.

Four hundred years ago today, the French painter and art theorist Charles Le Brun (1619–1690) was born in Paris. In the first article of this pair, yesterday, I traced his history and work up to the 1650s.

Le Brun painted many portraits of leading figures in the French court of the day, among them Everhard Jabach (1618–1695) and His Family (c 1660). Jabach had been born in Cologne in Germany, but settled in France when he was twenty, and became naturalised as a French subject. He was an opulent banker who became a director of the French East India Company, and a leading collector of artworks – including paintings by Rubens, Raphael, Poussin and Le Brun. Here he is surrounded by his family, and some of his works of art.

That year, Colbert, the Minister of Finance, and Le Brun established Les Gobelins, which rapidly became the leading maker of tapestries in Europe. Le Brun remained a director, and through its manufacture of furniture for the court, became the originator of Louis XIV Style. Tapestry manufacture and his style long outlasted him, and had influence over the whole of Europe.

On 26 August 1660, Louis XIV made his triumphal entry into the city of Paris, following his marriage to Marie-Thérèse on 9 June. In recognition of the support Le Brun had received from Pierre Séguier in his youth, he painted his patron and protector Chancellor Séguier at the Entry of Louis XIV into Paris in 1660 in about 1661. I find this notable for the use of honorific parasols: as Chancellor, Séguier was dignified with two of them.

Le Brun painted at least two major series, the first showing the life of Hercules, and the second – for the royal palaces – the Battles of Alexander the Great, hero to Louis XIV.

Le Brun’s account of The Queens of Persia at the Feet of Alexander, also called The Tent of Darius, is quite faithful to the story told by Plutarch in his Lives, in placing this event in Dareius’ abandoned tent. The women look fearful of the fate that awaits them, not knowing how Alexander would treat them. At the time, the most likely outcome would have been death or slavery as ‘courtesans’, but Alexander instead accorded them all the honour and dignity of a royal family.

His Alexander Entering Babylon from 1665 shows the Macedonian king riding in a large golden chariot hauled by a small elephant, as the great spoils of war were being shown around them.

Le Brun’s vast painting of the battle between Alexander and Porus (1665) shows Alexander, to the right of centre with the exuberant plumes on his helmet, conversing with the captive Porus, who is being carried by Macedonian soldiers. Around and beyond is the aftermath of the great battle, with corpses of dead elephants, and the remains of Porus’ camp.

In 1667, the Académie Royale de Peinture at de Sculpture (with Le Brun at its helm) organised a series of lectures and debates about the paintings of Nicolas Poussin. One complete session, led personally by Le Brun, examined Poussin’s masterpiece The Israelites Gathering the Manna in the Desert from 1637-39. Le Brun’s keynote lecture for this was published in a collection from that meeting, and in Poussin’s biography. It has been the basis for research, comment, and debate ever since.

In his later years, Le Brun and his assistants were occupied in painting the Halls of War and Peace and the Great Hall of Mirrors in the palace at Versailles, and painting the Gallery of Apollo in the Louvre.

The Capture of the City and Citadel of Gand in Six Days, 1678 painted between 1681-84 is one of his works in the Hall of War, and shows the brief attack on the Belgian city of Ghent, I believe.

In 1683, Le Brun’s close friend in government, Colbert, died. His successor the Marquis de Louvois showed him no favour, and Le Brun’s health went into decline. As so often seems the case, Le Brun turned increasingly to religious works in these final years.

He is believe to have painted The Fall of the Rebel Angels before 1685. This shows the outcome of the apocalyptic war fought in heaven which led to Satan being cast out, and with him those angels who had chosen to follow him rather than God. Le Brun adopts an antique tiered composition, at the top of which is the archangel Michael, with the devil as a great dragon in descent from there, and rebel angels writing with serpents at the foot.

One of his last paintings, The Adoration of the Shepherds from 1689 achieves a marvellous luminosity not seen in Le Brun’s earlier work, and perhaps pointed towards what he saw as the future of painting.

After several years of deteriorating health, Le Brun died in Paris on 22 February 1690, just two days before what would have been his seventy-first birthday.

In the previous articles in this series, I have looked at many of the paintings made of Part One of Goethe’s play Faust. That told the tragic story of Gretchen, caught up in the pact between Faust and the devil, which was largely an invention by Goethe.

Much less well-known is the second part of Faust, which draws more on the legend of Johann Faust, the semi-historical figure. Goethe struggled to write his final version of this, which wasn’t published until just after his death in 1832. It has been relatively seldom painted. This article takes a whirlwind tour through this second part, to the accompaniment of visual art – mainly illustrations – which tell its story.

Faust wakes up in a flowery meadow, from where the scene changes to the emperor’s court just prior to a meeting of the Council of State. This is implied to be the Holy Roman Empire, whose finances Mephistopheles and Faust save by the introduction of paper money instead of gold; this encourages spending, so boosting the economy.

This is followed by a lengthy account of the Florentine Carnival ‘masque’, based on a 1559 account by Grazzini. Among the notable figures who appear there are the Fates, the Furies, and Dante.

The following morning, the emperor appears in a ‘pleasure garden’, and blesses the new paper money. The emperor and his court start to squander this money, in a satire based on the French Revolution. At the end of this act, Faust enters the ‘realm of the mothers’ where he summons the spirits of Helen of Troy and Paris. Faust falls in love with Helen, then destroys his illusion.

Faust is taken unconscious into his old study, as Mephistopheles poses as Faust and interviews his young student, who has now graduated. Wagner uses alchemical processes to create a homunculus.

Wagner’s creation of the homunculus is the one scene from Faust Part Two which has proved popular with artists.

Alfred van Muyden’s illustration of Scene: Laboratory, Wagner Creates the Homunculus from about 1840 is an early example which refers to popular imaginings of such alchemical processes.

This anonymous version of Homunculus, Faust part 2 is rather simpler in conception.

Franz Xaver Simm’s Homunculus in the Vial from 1899 uses light very effectively.

Moritz Retzsch’s line drawing for an illustration from 1836 is also more detailed and better-developed. Wagner holds the large glass vial in which the homunculus has been created, as Mephistopheles points towards the collapsed figure of Faust in his study, at the left.

The homunculus leads Faust and Mephistopheles to a Walpurgis Night in Classical Greece, populated by gods and mortals. Faust tries to search for Helen, as a result of which the sibyl Manto leads him into the underworld. Mephistopheles meets the Phorcyads or Graeae, and disguises himself as one of them. The homunculus starts to become human.

Margret Hofheinz-Döring is one of the few artists who covered this second part of Goethe’s play. With the Sirens from 1962 is a pastel painting which shows the Sirens among rocky inlets of the Aegean Sea, a sub-scene which concludes the second act.

Another of her pastels bears the enigmatic title of The Cap Brought, and is from 1972.

Helen arrives at the palace of Menelaus, her estranged husband, where Phorcyas (one of the Graeae) warns her that Menelaus intends to sacrifice her and her attendants. When Helen asks Phorcyas to save her, she and her attendants are transported to Faust’s fortress. Faust and Helen declare their love for one another before he defeats the army of Menelaus.

Faust and Helen then have a spirit son Euphorion, who falls prey to the same fate as Icarus, in flying too high and falling to his death at his parents’ feet. As with Eurydice, Helen’s shade then returns to the underworld, leaving Faust holding just her dress and veil. Phorcyas turns out to be Mephistopheles in disguise. His daemons then serve the emperor, enabling his victory over a rival.

By the final act, Faust is an old man who is favoured by the king, and pushes back the waters of the sea using dykes.

Alfred Roller’s Before a Palace from 1911 shows what is now numbered as Act 5 scene 18, in which Lynceus the watchman is addressing the aged Faust above him.

Seeing the hut of Philemon and Baucis, Faust orders Mephistopheles to remove the hut and its adjacent chapel. But the devil goes too far and kills the elderly couple. Faust is then blinded by the breath of the personification of care.

Faust then reveals his plans to improve the lives of the king’s subjects. This brings him a moment of bliss which he wants to prolong, to stop the clock – the agreed condition for his death. Faust then dies, and Mephistopheles tries to claim his soul under the agreement which they had made previously.

Angels appear and scatter rose petals to scare the daemons away; Mephistopheles stands firm, and the petals act on him as an aphrodisiac, making him burn with lust for the angels, who seize the opportunity to take Faust’s soul with them.

Émile Bayard’s Death of Faust from about 1870 shows him falling into a mountain gorge in the final scene, as Mephistopheles flies above.

There, Pater Profundus explains the parable of nature. Faust’s soul reaches heaven, then is pleaded by Eternal Womanhood – Mater Gloriosa (the Virgin Mary), Magna Peccatrix (the Great Sinner), Mulier Samaritana (the Samaritan Woman), and Maria Aegyptiaca. Una Poenitentium (formerly known as Gretchen) offers to lead the reborn Faust into the heights of heaven, a wish which is granted by Mater Gloriosa.

So ends Goethe’s play Faust.

Having set the scene with Velázquez’s unusual painting of a young woman who could be a sibyl, or an allegory of painting, I come to look in detail at his Las Hilanderas, which he painted for an unknown patron before he travelled to Italy for his second visit. Before looking at the work, let me refresh your memory with the myth of Arachne and the weaving contest.

Arachne, in Roman legend, was described in three different accounts, of which Ovid’s, in his Metamorphoses, is probably the most popular and appropriate here: we know, for example, that Velázquez had three versions of this retold in Spanish, although any differences between those versions and Ovid’s original are not clear. Unusually, this myth was Roman in origin, and there is no trace of it in the surviving Greek literature, nor has it been found in Greek vase paintings.

Arachne was the daughter of a humble family, whose mother had died, but her father had started as a shepherd and become a dyer of wool in purple. Arachne became the greatest weaver in the world, and boasted that her skill was greater than that of the goddess (Pallas) Athena. The latter set up a contest between them, posing as an old woman who then challenged Arachne before revealing herself.

Unfortunately for Arachne, she not only produced work more beautiful than Athena’s, but it showed the many lapses of the gods and their unfairness to mankind. Athena was enraged by this, ripped Arachne’s work to shreds, and sprinkled her with Hecate’s potion, which turned her into a spider. She and her kin were thus condemned to weave for all time.

This was painted slightly earlier by Rubens, in his Pallas and Arachne (1636-37), which clearly shows the weaving contest, with Pallas Athena striking Arachne with her boxwood shuttle in front of the looms. Behind is a clear visual reference to the Rape of Europa in the tapestry to the right.

The snag with that reading is that it does not fit what the painting actually shows: the older woman at the left is not weaving but spinning, using a spinning wheel which would also have been a gross anachronism at the time of Arachne’s contest.

Ovid’s account is also clear in stating that, before the contest started, Athena revealed herself in her full glory, and did not retain the appearance of an old woman. Furthermore, the woman on the right is not weaving either, but is winding spun yarn into skeins. Neither is there any evidence in the foreground of the presence of any dyed yarn which might be suitable for weaving.

Barolsky (2014) recognises that the women in the foreground are not weaving, but still maintains that the tapestry of The Rape of Europa in the background “conjures up the story of the competition between Arachne and Minerva”. He too considers the woman at the spinning wheel must be Athena/Minerva, as well as the woman in the background wearing a helmet, which makes the painting have multiplex or continuous narrative (a composite of two temporally distinct scenes). That would, of course, be unusual for Velázquez, and for a painting of this time.

However, Velázquez had used multiplex narrative at least once before, in his Saint Anthony Abbot and Saint Paul the Hermit from about 1635-38.

The difficulties in these readings have been recognised by Giles Knox (2009), who maintains that the foreground and background tell different but related stories with the common theme of the craft of painting.

The most remarkable reading is that of Wendy Bird (2007), who accepts that the foreground figures have nothing to do with weaving, but are “engaged in carding, spinning and winding yarn”. She then proceeds to argue that the painting contains earthy erotic imagery referring to lust and prostitution.

1. a young woman, bending down from a position against a pile of fabrics and materials;
2. an older, but by no means old, woman holding a distaff and operating a spinning wheel to spin wool. She is dressed very modestly, with her hair covered, but her left leg is bare from the knee down to her bare foot;
3. a woman sat low, carding wool. Her face is dark and lacks features;
4. a younger woman with her back to the viewer, who is winding wool with her left hand, and holds a ball of undyed wool in her right. She appears to have removed some of the clothing from her upper body, which is clad in (very modest) undergarments;
5. at the right edge, a girl who appears to be observing or assisting the fourth woman, and rests on a wicker basket.

There is also a cat, at the second woman’s feet, and fleeces hanging at the top right.

The second woman, although apparently older than the others, does not meet Ovid’s description of having “long grey hair, and with a staff to steady her weak limbs. She seemed a feeble woman, very old, and quavered as she” spoke.

1. a well-dressed woman facing away from the viewer, her right hand resting near a viola da gamba (the size of a modern cello);
2. a person (of indeterminate gender) wearing a helmet and upper body armour, facing away from the viewer, and probably holding a spear in her right hand, although this is now marked only by a vertical white line;
3. a woman whose right forearm is outstretched, engaged apparently with the second woman, and facing towards her;
4. a well-dressed woman, standing with her back to the viewer, apparently looking towards the fifth woman;
5. another well-dressed woman, seen side-on but looking directly at the viewer.

None of these people are engaged in any form of weaving or wool-working, and the musical instrument is not being played.

Behind them, and close by the third woman, is an ornately-edged tapestry showing the same image as Titian’s painting The Rape of Europa (1560-62), above, or its near-identical copy made by Rubens in 1628-29 (below). At the time that Rubens made that copy, he and Velázquez were together at the royal court in Madrid, but Rubens is believed to have taken his copy back to Antwerp with him in 1629. Velázquez therefore most probably only had access to Titian’s original when he was painting Las Hilanderas.

These paintings are so similar that it is immaterial as to which Velázquez may have used as the basis for this painting.

The second person may be intended to represent Pallas Athena, as her helmet and armour are possibly characteristic. I write “possibly”, because the strongest tradition shows her helmet with exuberant decoration along its midline.

There are no other references to the story of Arachne – such as a spider, spider’s web, etc. – nor to the Fates. The figures shown are not in any form of altercation, nor is the second person wielding a boxwood shuttle, tearing down or up any tapestry, nor showing any of the behaviours described by Ovid.

Putting it together

Velázquez was not a prolific painter of classical myths, but he has a well-deserved reputation for constructing complex paintings which can be read at several different levels, and are quite intensely cerebral – his most famous Las Meninas (1656) is a good example which continues to generate much speculation.

Attempts to suggest a simple reading, in terms of wool-working or Ovid’s story, simply don’t correspond with what is actually shown in the painting. Instead we need to look at each of the references made by Velázquez, their meanings, and how they might assemble into a coherent whole. Although this approach was mentioned by Wendy Bird (2007), she considered that the “interpretations of the fable of Arachne” “seem unrelated to” the painting.

Arachne’s crimes, in the eyes of Pallas Athena, were to criticise the gods in her art, and to be conceited enough (perhaps justly) to claim that she was better than the gods in that art. The image of the rape of Europa is particularly appropriate to the former reason, and particularly relevant to any artist late in their career, when they are looking back at what they created, and passing on advice to future generations.

I don’t believe that Velázquez uses the spinning workshop in the foreground as a reference to Arachne (although Ovid did briefly mention Arachne’s spinning in his laudatory introduction to her weaving skills), nor to time (the Fates are not being cited), nor to sexual promiscuity (which appears out of kilter with the whole painting).

Rather the spinners represent the craft foundation for the tapestry art, both in material terms, and in providing the content through which the art is expressed. This is almost a meta-narrative in defence of narrative painting, and the fundamental craft basis for the art. It also isn’t too distant from Giles Knox’s reading.

I think that this was Velázquez looking back at his career, passing on its lessons to artists of the future, and posing us a visual riddle.

Wikipedia on this painting.

An English translation of the story of Arachne, quoted from above, is in Tufts’ superb Perseus digital library. The translation is taken from: Ovid, Metamorphoses, by Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922.

Barolsky P (2014) Ovid and the Metamorphoses of Modern Art from Botticelli to Picasso, Yale UP. Pages 147-8. ISBN 978 0 300 19669 6.
Bird W (2007) The bobbin & the distaff: erotic imagery and the meaning of Velazquez’s ‘Las Hilanderas’, Apollo Magazine.
Jonathan Brown and Carmen Garrido (1998) Velázquez, the Technique of Genius, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 10124 9.
Kilinski K II (2013) Greek Myth and Western Art, The Presence of the Past, Cambridge UP. Page 138. ISBN 978 1 107 01332 2.
Giles Knox (2009) The Late Paintings of Velázquez, Theorizing Painterly Performance, Ashgate/Routledge. ISBN 978 1 138 27464 8.
José López-Rey and Odile Delenda (2014) Velázquez The Complete Works, Taschen and the Wildenstein Institute. ISBN 978 3 8365 5016 1.

I’m reaching the end of my coverage of paintings of Goethe’s Faust, so it’s time to open another book which has been a major inspiration to and influence on visual art. This time it’s Dante Alighieri’s narrative poem, The Divine Comedy, which is divided into three parts: Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Paradise).

After the Bible and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, The Divine Comedy has probably been the motivation for more paintings than any other literary work. Those span the period from the fourteenth century, when it was completed, to the present day, from Botticelli to Degas and beyond. This article is a general introduction, which will hopefully whet your appetite.

Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri, known as Dante Alighieri or simply Dante, was born in Florence in about 1265. The city-state was growing very rapidly at the time, and was a hotbed of the Renaissance. Its politics were dominated by two family-based factions, the Guelphs, to whom Dante was loyal, and the Ghibellines.

When Dante was only nine, he met and apparently fell in love with Beatrice Portinari, but at the age of twelve he was betrothed to Gemma di Manetto Donati, a member of the powerful Donati family. Beatrice, or Bice, remained a flame in his emotions, even after she died in 1290, and she inspired his Vita Nuova as well as much of The Divine Comedy.

The appropriately-named Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting of Dante’s Dream on the Day of the Death of Beatrice from 1880 is a good example of the attention devoted by the Pre-Raphaelites to Dante’s relationship with Beatrice, although much of this may have been imaginary, and based on courtly love.

In the late thirteenth century, the Guelphs were on the ascendant, and in 1289, Dante fought for them in the Battle of Campaldino, at which Ghibelline exiles from Florence were soundly defeated. But following this, the Guelphs divided into White and Black factions, in part over the role of the Pope in Florentine affairs.

Dante was deeply involved in Florentine politics, and rose to its highest position as a city prior. He was caught when in Rome on a mission to Pope Boniface VIII, and in 1302 was sentenced to perpetual exile for alleged crimes against the rival faction. If he were to return to Florence without accepting his ‘crime’ and paying a heavy fine, he faced being burned at the stake.

The poet spent the rest of his life in exile, completing The Divine Comedy in 1320, just a year before his death.

Marie Spartali Stillman’s superb watercolour of Dante at Verona from 1888 was one of three related works which she submitted for the inaugural exhibition of the New Gallery, and refers both to Dante’s exile and the poem of the same title by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. That poem is set in the public garden in Verona, where “wearied damsels” request the poet to recite his early poem Vita Nuova.

The Divine Comedy circulated after its completion, but it was Boccaccio who first promoted it and set it on the road to becoming one of the major European literary works of all time. The first printed edition appeared in 1472, and it has since been printed in a great many editions and translations.

The framing story of The Divine Comedy describes Dante himself visiting these three realms of the afterlife in the company of the shade of the Classical Roman poet Virgil (in Hell and Purgatory), and Beatrice (in Paradise). Each visit travels through a series of circles or levels in that realm, and each of those circles contains figures drawn from classical literature, legend, and Dante’s own life, who have committed various sins and are now suffering its consequences.

Domenico di Michelino’s fresco of Dante and the Divine Comedy from 1465 is the poet’s memorial in Florence cathedral (Duomo). It shows Dante holding a copy of The Divine Comedy as he points out sinners descending to Hell. Behind him is the mountain of Purgatory, at the top of which is Paradise. To the right is the city of Florence, complete with Brunelleschi’s famous dome – a sight which Dante was deprived of throughout the period in which he wrote the poem.

The poem is rich with references to stories of human weaknesses and failings. Jean-Jacques Feuchère’s Dante Meditating on the “Divine Comedy” from 1843 captures this particularly well, with Dante sitting at work in the midst of the many spectres he invoked in its lines.

From the start, when Dante and Virgil set off on their journey, every moment has been painted or drawn, often by major artists. Corot’s Dante and Virgil from 1859 was exhibited that year at the Salon, but then lay forgotten in his studio. When he rediscovered it in the early 1870s, he was so impressed with his work that he offered it to the French state. It wasn’t until after Corot’s death that it was finally sold, to the Boston collector Quincy Adams Shaw.

Dante and Virgil at the Entrance to Hell is one of Degas’ early narrative paintings, made in about 1857-58 when he was still in Italy. At about the same time, the great French illustrator Gustave Doré started the first of his long series of paintings and engravings of Dante’s poem.

The sinners in Hell are divided according to the type of sin; here, Doré shows Virgil (left) and Dante at the last of these circles, the ninth, for those who committed sins of malice, such as treachery. These sinners are shown partially frozen into an icy lake, with additional blocks of ice scattered around, just as described by Dante.

In 1822, the young Eugène Delacroix painted one of his finest narrative works, The Barque of Dante, showing Dante and Virgil crossing a stormy river Acheron in Charon’s small boat.

Ever since Dante completed The Divine Comedy, enthusiasts have been drawing charts and maps of its realms. Botticelli’s Map of Hell from 1480-90 is perhaps one of the most famous, with its detailed depiction of each of the circles described in the poem.

Another major artist who had a longstanding obsession with Dante’s poem is William Blake. At the end of his career, he was commissioned by the artist John Linnell to produce a set of illustrations, which remained incomplete at the time of his death in 1827. The Punishment of the Thieves (1824–7), anticipates figurative painting of a century or more later, and the darker psychological recesses of sex and snakes. Dante refers to the thieves being bitten by snakes, but Blake uses the creatures in other ways.

Blake’s most famous and wondrously imaginative of these illustrations shows The Circle of the Lustful: Francesca da Rimini, which he completed in about 1824, and had already been etched when the artist died.

This shows one of Dante’s best-known and probably largely original stories, of the adulterous couple of Francesca da Rimini and her lover Paolo, her husband’s brother, who were both murdered when caught in bed together by Francesca’s husband.

Ary Scheffer’s vision of Dante and Virgil Encountering the Shades of Francesca de Rimini and Paolo in the Underworld from 1855 is more conventional. This is one of Scheffer’s most brilliant narrative paintings.

In this series, I will concentrate on paintings and other works of visual art which are directly related to Dante’s words. The latter were also of immense influence in other works of art from the fourteenth century onwards.

Tintoretto’s last vast painting, seven metres (almost twenty-three feet) high and twenty-two metres (over seventy feet) across, showing Paradise (1588-92), focusses on the Coronation of the Virgin, but was inspired largely by Dante’s description of Paradise.

I hope that you will join me in looking at this thoroughly eclectic collection of some of the finest works in Western art.

It’s commonly thought that the last time that Britain was invaded was by the Normans in 1066. In fact it was by an American Colonel in 1797 on behalf of Napoleon. He landed at Fishguard in Wales, and survived three days before surrendering his forces.

That same year, when Napoleon’s forces were more successful in continental Europe and captured Venice, ending eleven hundred years of its independence, the French painter Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury was born in Cologne. Showing precocious artistic talent, he was sent to Paris, where he became a pupil of Girodet and Baron Gros at the Institut de France.

Girodet was another brilliant artist, who when Robert-Fleury was still an infant, got his revenge on a courtesan whose nude portrait he had painted, but he had been left unpaid and she had insulted him further by describing his work as unflattering. He quickly painted another showing her in her true light, in the role of Danaë, which he substituted for the original at the Salon of 1799.

Among Robert-Fleury’s fellow students in the workshop of Baron Gros were Paul Delaroche and Richard Parkes Bonington.

Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury flourished as a history painter following his first major success at the Salon in 1827.

Robert-Fleury’s Scene of Saint Bartholomew from 1833 shows one small scene from the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572. This was a targeted wave of murders of French Protestants by Catholics, largely instigated by the mother of King Charles IX, Catherine de’ Medici. This may show the most notorious of the killings, of the respected Admiral Coligny, who was dragged from his bed, and his body thrown out of the window.

His 1840 painting of Baldwin of Boulogne Entering Edessa in February 1098 refers to one of the early successes of the First Crusade, in which Baldwin became the ruler of a new crusader state of Edessa, established in the land to the south of modern Turkey.

Robert-Fleury’s Looting of a House in the Giudecca in Venice During the Middle Ages fromm 1855 shows opression of Jewish inhabitants of Venice. They were eventually forced to live in the original ghetto in Cannaregio in the city, to which they were confined in 1516, making it the first such ghetto in the world. Note that the island in the Venetian archipelago which is known as Giudecca is quite different.

That year Robert-Fleury became director of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and the following year was appointed director of the French Academy in Rome, perhaps the supreme honour for a history painter of that time.

In 1837, Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury’s son was born. Tony Robert-Fleury (1837–1911) also showed early talent, and was taught by his father before going on to study under Paul Delaroche and Léon Cogniet at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Like his father, Tony Robert-Fleury painted densely-populated scenes of disaster. His first great success was at the Salon of 1866, where he exhibited a scene of the Polish uprising of 1861 in Warsaw, which was crushed by Russian troops. I regret that I have been unable to locate a suitable image of that work, which might even have been lost.

His spectacular painting of The Last Day of Corinth from about 1870 imagines Livy’s account of the day prior to Roman soldiers looting and sacking this Greek city in 146 BCE. This wasn’t a simple historical reference, though: the ancient city of Corinth was rebuilt, and flourished under Roman rule. Then in 1858, that was completely destroyed in an earthquake, following which the modern city was built closer to the coast. Since then, Corinth has been razed to the ground by another earthquake in 1928, and by a great fire in 1933.

His portrait of Charlotte Corday at Caen in 1793 probably from 1875 is of great relevance to French history. Corday was the woman who, in 1793, murdered the revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat, for which she was guillotined on 17 July of that year. She is shown reading Plutarch’s Lives, which she is claimed to have used to inspire her singularly brave act.

Marat was a close friend of the artist Jacques-Louis David, whose most famous painting is of The Death of Marat (1793). David was in turn teacher of Girodet, who taught Tony Robert-Fleury’s father Joseph-Nicolas.

Robert-Fleury’s Pinel, Chief Physician of la Salpêtrière Hospital in 1795, probably from 1876, shows the newly-appointed Philippe Pinel enforcing more humane treatment of the patients at the huge psychiatric hospital in Paris, by having their chains removed and caring rather than restraining them. I’m afraid that the image of the whole painting above is not of good quality; that below shows its central section rather better.

Pinel (1745-1826) was a pioneer of modern psychiatry whose career benefitted from the French Revolution. He was appointed chief physician at the Hospice de la Salpêtrière in 1795, when it was home to seven thousand women, most of whom were old and ailing. Although considered today as practising in psychiatry, he was actually a professor of medical pathology at the time. He was largely responsible for the first formal classifications of mental illness, which he published in 1798.

Tony Robert-Fleury started to teach at the Académie Julian in Paris, where he ran one of its teaching studios, alongside that of Jules LeFebvre. In tomorrow’s article I will name some of his most famous former pupils, and show examples of their paintings.