Having seen the souls caught in Limbo (the First Circle of Hell), Dante and his guide Virgil descend to the Second Circle, where those who were guilty of the sin of lust are to be found. They pass the figure of Minos, who extracts a confession from every sinner as they begin their descent, and directs them to the appropriate circle.

Here the light is dim, and there is an eternal storm blowing the souls of those in this circle, ensuring that they never obtain any comfort or relief from its incessant blast. The first of the souls who is described to Dante by Virgil is that of Semiramis, who married her father and made such incestuous relationships legal. (This is now known to be a false legend recorded by Orosius, popular in Dante’s time.)

Then they see Cleopatra, Achilles, Paris and Tristan. It is the story of Francesca, though, which Dante tells in most detail, and possibly for the first time in literature. She appears, blown in the wind, with her lover Paolo, but it is Francesca who speaks to Dante.

Francesca da Rimini was the aunt of Dante’s host when he lived his later years in Ravenna. In about 1275, she married Gianciotto of the ruling family in Rimini, for political reasons. There is strong suspicion that she was tricked into this: her husband turned out to be disfigured and uncouth, but pre-nuptial negotiations were conducted by his handsome and eloquent brother Paolo, suggesting that she may have been duped.

Soon after the marriage, Paolo and Francesca became lovers, apparently inspired by the story of Lancelot and Guinevere.

Gianciotto suspected the couple, and one day caught them together in his wife’s bedroom.

Paolo had become stuck when trying to escape through a trapdoor. Francesca was unaware of that, and let her husband in, who then attacked his brother with his sword. But Francesca stepped in between them to save her lover and was killed; Gianciotto then killed his brother, and after his own death had descended further into Hell for the double murder.

The story is told in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s watercolour triptych: at the left, the lovers are reading the legend of Lancelot and Guinevere. In the centre are Dante and Virgil, and at the right Paolo and Francesca being blown in the storms of the Second Circle of Hell.

Dante faints at the tragic story that Francesca has told him, and collapses as if dead.

The artists

William Blake (1757–1827) was a British visionary painter and illustrator whose last and incomplete work was an illustrated edition of the Divine Comedy for the painter John Linnell. Most of his works shown in this series were created for that, although he did draw and paint scenes during his earlier career. I have a major series on his work here.

Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) was an Italian painter and sculptor whose tragically short career was a major influence over the development of Futurism. Drafted into the Italian Army during the First World War, he was thrown from his horse and trampled to death when he was only thirty-three.

Alexandre Cabanel (1823–1889) was a major French painter of history in an academic style, and a precocious artist. He won the Prix de Rome in 1845, and was appointed a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1864, teaching many successful pupils including Jules Bastien-Lepage. This article summarises his career and work.

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Early in his career, he produced a complete set of seventy illustrations for translations of the Inferno, which were first published in 1857 and continue to be used. These were followed in 1867 by more illustrations for Purgatorio and Paradiso, and this painting was highly praised when shown at the Paris Salon in 1863. This article looks at his paintings.

Giuseppe Frascheri (1809–1886) was an Italian painter in fresco and oils who has been almost completely forgotten.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) was a major French painter in Neoclassical style, best known for his history and other narrative paintings. He was a pupil of Jacques-Louis David, and continued much in his tradition, and in opposition to the more Romantic painting of Eugène Delacroix. His work extended from portraits to Orientalism.

Gaetano Previati (1852–1920) was an Italian painter who worked mainly in Divisionist style, but is now known for his Symbolism. He was most famous in the period 1880-1920, during which he was involved in the Venice Biennale and exhibitions in Italy and Paris.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) was of Italian descent but born in London. In 1848, he co-founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and was a major figure in British painting until his early death in 1882. A published poet and author himself, many of his paintings were in response to literature, particularly the poems of John Keats. He had a succession of relationships with his models and muses, including Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth, and William Morris’s wife Jane. The triptych shown here is the earliest of at least three paintings of his which show Paolo and Francesca, another similar triptych being from 1862.

Ary Scheffer (1795–1858) was a major narrative painter of the first half of the nineteenth century, born in the Netherlands but trained and working in Paris. Among his favourite literary themes were Goethe’s Faust, and the story of Paolo and Francesca. This article looks at his narrative work.

George Frederic Watts (1817–1904) was a major British painter and sculptor in the middle and late nineteenth century who was associated with several artistic circles and movements including the Pre-Raphaelites, but who worked independently in more Symbolist style. This article looks at his career and paintings.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

Robin Kirkpatrick (trans) (2012) Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, Penguin Classics. ISBN 978 0 141 19749 4.
Richard Lansing (ed) (2000) The Dante Encyclopedia, Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 87611 7.
Guy P Raffa (2009) The Complete Danteworlds, A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy, Chicago UP. ISBN 978 0 2267 0270 4.
Prue Shaw (2014) Reading Dante, From Here to Eternity, Liveright. ISBN 978 1 63149 006 4.

Over the last couple of months, I have been exploring the life and paintings of Diego Velázquez beyond the many portraits for which he is usually most famous. In this concluding article to that series, I pick seven of his paintings which I think were revolutionary.

1, early bodegone

2, to court

3, the challenge of narrative

4 From Mars to Venus

5 Sibyl and Spinners

Then in 1948, Diego Angula proposed that it depicted the legend of Arachne, as told in book 6 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

6 Spinners

This detail also shows another revolutionary feature of Velázquez’s painting, the looseness of his brushwork, which wasn’t to be equalled for the next two centuries.

7 Late Portraits and Myths

8 Las Meninas

With so much looking and the figures, the reflected images of King and Queen, and Velázquez at work painting, there is much to be read about the acts of looking and painting. It also records the artist’s unique achievement in becoming a high-ranking member of one of the great royal courts of Europe.

I hope that you have enjoyed this look at Velázquez’s paintings, and like me are itching to visit the Prado in Madrid, where you can see so many of them in the flesh.

References

Jonathan Brown and Carmen Garrido (1998) Velázquez, the Technique of Genius, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 10124 9.
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.

On 2 May, five hundred years will have elapsed since the death of the most revered artist and polymath, Leonardo da Vinci. This series of articles leading up to that anniversary look at his career as a painter, and the few of his paintings which have survived that half millenium.

Lionardo di ser Piero da Vinci, as he would have been known, was born on 15 April 1452 in or near the small town of Vinci in the Tuscan hills, then part of the Republic of Florence. He was the illegitimate son of a legal notary in the city of Florence and a local countrywoman, often referred to presumptively as a ‘peasant’. He was raised in his mother’s home, then in the town of Vinci itself, where he received an informal education in the classical disciplines of the Latin language, geometry, and mathematics.

His life changed when, at the usual age of fourteen, he was apprenticed to Verrocchio in the city of Florence. I have already written about his master, the output of his workshop, and some of his other pupils. By the time that Leonardo was twenty, in June 1472, he was admitted as a master in his own right to the Guild of Saint Luke in Florence. But Leonardo seemed to be in no rush to break from Verrocchio, and in the late 1470s is believed to have finished his master’s Baptism of Christ, for example.

This Annunciation, painted in oil and tempera on a poplar panel, is generally agreed to be one of the earliest of Leonardo’s own surviving paintings. When it was painted is in greater doubt, but a suggestion of around 1473-75 seems most appropriate. It shows Verrocchio’s marked influence, coupled with the less confident hand of a new master.

There are numerous pentimenti, particularly in the head of the Virgin. Its perspective projection is marked in scores in its ground. Nevertheless, Leonardo used his spontaneous and characteristic technique of fingerpainting in some of its passages. Its composition and execution are conventional and conform to those seen in the output of Verrocchio’s workshop, complete with quite finicky detail throughout.

The Virgin Mary is sat reading, as is conventional, her book shown in detail down to lines of its text. The lectern is draped in a diaphanous fabric similar to the wraps in Verrocchio’s Madonnas.

The Archangel Gabriel is seen in profile, holding the usual white lily, and the details of his clothing, the flowers, and surrounds are all meticulous.

Another of Verrocchio’s former pupils, Lorenzo di Credi (1459–1537), is thought to have painted this superficially similar Annunciation some time around 1478 or 1485, here using egg tempera alone. At this time di Credi was either Verrocchio’s senior assistant or was in charge of his workshop in Florence. The contrast between this painting and that above is marked.

In 1478, Leonardo left Verocchio’s studio and seems to have established himself independently, perhaps in a neo-Platonic academy which had been established in Florence by its ruling Medici family.

Another of Leonardo’s earliest works is this magnificant portrait of the legendarily beautiful Florentine Ginevra de’ Benci, which was probably painted around 1478-80, again in oil and tempera on a poplar panel. Her beauty is well-captured, but in conventional terms, with a uniform and idealistic complexion and shallow modelling of features.

Detail in the foliage behind her is meticulous, and the glimpse of the distant landscape promising, down to the optically accurate reflection. During the 1470s, Leonardo was developing a deep interest in optics, extending beyond that often found in great painters.

Ginevra de’ Benci (1457-c 1520) was apparently greatly admired in a courtly manner by the Venetian diplomat and humanist Bernardo Bembo, who is thought to have commissioned this portrait, most probably when he lived in Florence between 1478-80, perhaps as a gift to Ginevra. Bembo’s personal device is painted on the back of the panel; he was father to the scholar and poet Pietro Bembo, best known today for the typeface named in his honour.

Madonna of the Carnation from about 1477-78 is perhaps the most complex and ambitious of Leonardo’s early works to have survived. There is doubt as to whether he used egg tempera at all, and it is thought to have been painted almost exclusively in oils. In addition to its conventional figures, there is a floral display at the right edge, and a detailed landscape beyond the symmetry of the windows, with strong aerial perspective.

There are signs of inexperience in the use of oils here: wrinkling of the paint layer has occurred, particularly over the Virgin’s face, which resulted from excessive use of oil in an attempt to delay its drying. Nothing is known about this painting’s origin, production, or early history, and it first surfaced in an apothecary’s shop in Günzburg, in Bavaria, Germany.

In early 1478, Leonardo obtained his first public commission, to paint an altarpiece for the Chapel of San Bernardo, in the seat of the Florentine government. This also appears to have been his first unfinished work, and hasn’t even been seen in his drawings of the time. Later that year, though, he wrote that he had started work on two paintings of the Madonna, one of which does seem to have survived, and will open the next article in this series.

References

Wikipedia.

Luke Syson, Larry Keith et al. (2011) Leonardo da Vinci, Painter at the Court of Milan, National Gallery (London). ISBN 978 1 85709 491 6.
Frank Zöllner (2017) Leonardo da Vinci, the Complete Paintings, Taschen. ISBN 978 3 8365 6297 3.

The overwhelming majority of paintings shown in articles here are made using oil paints on canvas, although some use wooden panels or copper plates instead. In this series of articles, I’m going to survey the different media used in painting, not just from a technical sense, but how choice of media influences the painting that we see.

Over the millenia that humans have been painting as art (in its broadest sense), we have used a very wide range of methods for putting colour on different surfaces.

Earliest surviving paintings, such as these from around thirty-six millenia ago, in the Chauvet-Pont d’Arc Cave in the Ardèche, were simple applications of pigment to a stone surface.

A modern painting made using acrylics on canvas has come a very long way, but the underlying principles remain unchanged. As an introduction to the terminology used, let me explain how painting media work so as to make clear the terms I use throughout this series.

Although there’s no reason that you can’t paint three-dimensional surfaces and call that a painting (and many artists have done so), I will make an artificial distinction here that such 3D objects are sculpture. There’s a very long history of polychrome sculpture which precedes radical works of the twentieth century. So what I define here as a painting is the application of colour to an essentially flat surface.

By convention, the surface on which paint is applied is assigned two named roles: as the physical support for the painting, a purely mechanical task, and to provide the ground on which the colour is applied. Those roles are distinct, even when a single surface such as a wall or sheet or paper fulfils both. In this series, we will look at a range of supports from the walls of buildings, which are rigid, massive and immobile, to fragile sheets of paper.

Most traditional paintings by professional painters made in the last few centuries have been on supports of stretched canvas, which have been sized to protect their fibres, then had a white or tinted ground such as chalk bound to them.

Support and ground form the receiver, on which colour in the form of pigments have to be bound. Although it’s possible to get pigment to adhere to a suitably rough ground – which is part of the principle behind painting in pastels – the result isn’t very durable, and clients and patrons are likely to be wary about paying for a painting which literally crumbles into dust in front of their eyes.

Not all paints contain pigments: some prefer soluble dyes instead. Generally dyes, which have often been derived from plants, aren’t as durable. Pigments consist of large insoluble particles, as seen in the cross-section above, which protects them from physical damage, chemical reactions, and most importantly the adverse effects of exposure to light, which can cause their intensity to fade.

The goal of many paint systems is to trap these pigment particles in a solid layer formed by a chemical binder which is liquid when applied but hardens by the chemical process of polymerisation into a solid. In the case of oil paints, the binder is an oil which undergoes slow oxidation to form the polymer – a drying oil, such as linseed oil, obtained from the common flax plant.

The final component involved in a painting is one which should vanish during the process of applying the paint: a diluent or solvent which is used to thin the paint, and clean wet paint from brushes and the other tools used in the process. Diluents are often confused with binders, but usually they are opposites: an ideal diluent should evaporate quickly, leaving no residues and a robust if thin paint layer behind for the binder to turn it into a strong, enduring and faithful record of what the artist intended.

In traditional oil painting, typical diluents are organic solvents such as turpentine and white spirit, which are used to spread thinly the layer of drying oil binder and pigment particles. Remove most of the drying oil and use largely diluent, though, as in peinture à l’essence, used by Degas, and you can end up without any proper paint layer at all, with powdery pigment trying not to fall off.

In this respect, watercolours are strangely named. Oil paints rely on drying oils as their binder, but in watercolours the water is the diluent, not the binder, which is actually gum arabic; many other painting methods also rely on water as diluent, but aren’t called watercolour because of that.

Support, ground, pigment, binder and diluent: those are the key components in most painting systems, which I will discuss in the articles in this series.

Even before humans started building substantial shelters from stone, our ancestors applied pigment from plants and ashes to the walls of caves. These were the first paintings to use what is now known as secco wall or mural painting.

These paintings in the Chauvet-Pont d’Arc Cave in the Ardèche, France, have fortuitously survived for around thirty-six millenia, but they are an exception. Their support is the limestone of the cave wall, which isn’t in the least bit absorbent, so forms a very poor ground. It’s likely that the only binder which might have been used was human saliva, which is hardly going to provide much of a paint layer either.

Secco technique has been widely used outside Europe, and can still be seen in some very old European wall paintings, such as those in Braunschweig Cathedral, which are thought to date from the early thirteenth century.

There are many vernacular paintings in places of worship across Europe which use secco on (dry) plaster, such as this Lily Crucifix in the parish church of Godshill on the Isle of Wight, England. Generally, though, the lack of adhesion between paint layer and ground is too limiting: only thin layers of pigment can be used, resulting in weak colours, little detail, and the need for periodic re-painting as pigment is gradually lost over time.

Various artists have experimented with using different binders and secco techniques. Although dry plaster is more absorbent and a better ground than bare stone, success has been limited, and failure – most tragically and notably in Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, in which he used oil paint and egg tempera on dry plaster – a constant danger.

At some time before about 1700 BCE, one of the Mediterranean cultures discovered that it was possible to apply paint onto a layer of wet plaster, and the technique of fresco (strictly, buon fresco) was born.

The Romans loved frescos which made their rooms look as if they were in a spacious outdoors, like these from the House of the Golden Bracelet in Pompeii.

In fresco, the support remains the wall or ceiling of the building, but the ground is absorbent wet plaster applied to that surface. Pigment is diluted in water and applied directly to the ground when the latter is still wet; this allows the paint to be absorbed into the ground, providing good and durable bonding of the pigment to the wall. Plaster is made using lime, derived from crushed limestone, which sets by reaction with carbon dioxide in the air to form calcium carbonate (from which both chalk and limestone are composed) and water, which evaporates during drying.

Techniques became even more refined, with the use of additional layers of plaster which are prepared in specific ways, to which red pigment named sinopia might be added, allowing the artist to draw in construction and other lines to assist in final painting. Because these frescos are on a grand scale, transferring the design of a painting from final sketch to the wall or ceiling is also challenging to say the least.

The biggest problem for the painter is that successful fresco has to be painted onto the plaster when it is still wet. This means that only a limited area can be plastered and painted each day, known as giornate (singular giornata), a day’s work. For all but the smallest of ground-level fresco painting, work has to be undertaken at height, from a scaffold, posing the very real risk that the artist would fall, or the scaffolding fail. Many fresco painters have fallen at work, resulting in serious injuries and death.

Despite all these practical difficulties, some of the most important European works of art are frescos painted during the Renaissance in places of worship with their high ceilings.

Masaccio’s magnificent fresco of The Holy Trinity in the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella in Florence was painted in 1426-28. Although we think of frescos as being fixed, this one has now been moved twice within the same church, which hasn’t helped its appearance. Study of its giornate reveals that they weren’t simple, ordered rectangles, but follow the structure of the painting.

For the Brancacci Chapel of the church of Santa Maria del Carmine, Masaccio (1401–1428), Masolino (c 1383-1447) and Filippino Lippi (c 1459–1504) each painted sections in their turn. Because frescos cover such large areas, and are seen from a distance, their subjects are often broken into smaller scenes which can be painted side by side. Others attempt highly populated world-views, rather than the more limited contents of most easel paintings.

Perhaps the most famous fresco is Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement (1536-41) in the Sistine Chapel of the Vatican.

Ceiling paintings are even more specialist, and strong cadidates as trompes l’oeuil, as with Andrea Pozzo’s Allegory of the Jesuits’ Missionary Work (1691-94) in Sant’Ignazio, Rome.

Preparatory studies made for a fresco can readily become recognised as works of art in their own right. This study by Anton Raphael Mengs (above) was enlarged over five times to become the fresco of Apollo, Mnemosyne, and the Nine Muses below.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, fresco became relatively neglected.

Some new frescos were commissioned for places of worship, and other public buildings, and in the early nineteenth century Johann Friedrich Overbeck painted a series of frescos telling the story of Torquato Tasso’s epic Jerusalem Delivered, in the Casa Massimo, Rome. There are similar series showing Dante’s Divine Comedy and other long narratives, which are particularly suited to fresco.

Frescos have continued in religious painting, with artists such as Sergei Fyodorov painting them in churches and cathedrals, and for the occasional trompe l’oeuil. John Dixon Batten’s The Creation of Pandora was painted anachronistically in egg tempera on a fresco ground by 1913. Batten was one of the late adherents of the Pre-Raphaelite movement; this painting was deemed unfashionable in 1949, and was put into storage and quietly forgotten until its rediscovery in 1990.

New frescos are still painted in some public buildings too. This work by Finnish painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela is one of a series which he painted in the National Museum of Finland in Helsinki in 1928, and there are spectacular wall paintings by John Singer Sargent in the Boston Public Library in Copley Square, the Widener Library of Harvard University, and in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, for instance.

Frescos aren’t the only way of making very large and monumental paintings for places like churches, though. The walls of Venetian buildings are particularly unsuitable for secco or fresco, because they remain so damp all year round. Hence the painters of Venice were innovators in constructing very large canvases, and you will find few frescos there as a result.

After hearing Francesca’s story in the Second Circle of Hell, Dante weeps for her and faints. When he comes to, he realises that he is now in the Third Circle, where it is pouring with rain, snow and huge hailstones, which fall down in sheets. This soaks the ground, which is stinking mud as a result.

He sees Cerberus, the fearsome three-headed canine monster which guards this circle, it too soaked by the unceasing rain.

Its heads bare their fangs at Dante, but his guide Virgil scoops up three handfuls of mud and throws them into the mouths of Cerberus to assuage its hunger.

Dante and Virgil walk on the flat plain among the prostrate forms of its gluttons. One of them sits up and accosts Dante, reminding him that they knew one another. He is Ciacco (a nickname, literally ‘Hoggio’), who tells Dante of his suffering there, and the names of five other Florentines of noble rank who are in the lower circles of Hell.

Ciacco then falls flat on his face in the stinking mud to await the Final Judgement.

As Virgil leads Dante down to the next circle, they talk of what will happen when the Apocalypse comes, until they reach the dreaded figure of Plutus.

Cerberus

Cerberus is a good example of the redeployment of pre-Christian mythology into Christian beliefs: it was originally the guardian of the Underworld, and prevented those within from escaping back to the earthly world. It even features in the twelve labours of Heracles (Hercules), in which he captured Cerberus. Dante – with Virgil’s explicit involvement – incorporates it into his Christian concepts of the afterlife.

The artists

Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527–1593) was a highly original and individualistic Italian painter now best known for his portraits consisting of assemblies of fruit, vegetables and other objects to form human images. He also painted more conventional works which are largely forgotten today, and was court painter to the Habsburgs in Vienna and Prague. You can see some of his portraits in this article.

William Blake (1757–1827) was a British visionary painter and illustrator whose last and incomplete work was an illustrated edition of the Divine Comedy for the painter John Linnell. Most of his works shown in this series were created for that, although he did draw and paint scenes during his earlier career. I have a major series on his work here.

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Early in his career, he produced a complete set of seventy illustrations for translations of the Inferno, which were first published in 1857 and continue to be used. These were followed in 1867 by more illustrations for Purgatorio and Paradiso. This article looks at his paintings.

John Flaxman (1755–1826) was a British sculptor and draughtsman who occasionally painted too. When he was in Rome between 1787-91, he produced drawings for book illustrations, including a set of 111 for an edition of The Divine Comedy. In 1810, he was appointed the Professor of Sculpture to the Royal Academy in London, and in 1817 made drawings to illustrate Hesiod, which were engraved by William Blake.

Joseph Anton Koch (1768-1839) was an Austrian landscape painter, who worked mainly in Neoclassical style. During his second stay in Rome, he was commissioned to paint frescos in the Villa Massimi on the walls of the Dante Room there, which remain one of the most florid visual accounts of Dante’s Inferno. He completed those between 1824-29.

Philippe Semeria is a young contemporary artist who is an enthusiast for comics and an aspiring illustrator.

Jan van der Straet, also commonly known by his Italianised name of Giovanni Stradano (1523-1605), was a painter who started his career in Bruges and Antwerp in Belgium, but moved to Florence in 1550, where he worked for the remainder of his life. Mannerist in style, he worked with printmakers in Antwerp to produce collections of prints, including an extensive set for The Divine Comedy.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

Robin Kirkpatrick (trans) (2012) Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, Penguin Classics. ISBN 978 0 141 19749 4.
Richard Lansing (ed) (2000) The Dante Encyclopedia, Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 87611 7.
Guy P Raffa (2009) The Complete Danteworlds, A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy, Chicago UP. ISBN 978 0 2267 0270 4.
Prue Shaw (2014) Reading Dante, From Here to Eternity, Liveright. ISBN 978 1 63149 006 4.

Painters have to pay the bills too, and in the nineteenth century, with the traditional system of patronage on its way out, many of the best turned to portraiture. Those who succeeded in getting the rich and famous to queue at the door to their studio often made small fortunes. For a few artists, this enabled them to paint their own choice of themes. Today and tomorrow, I look at the contrasting work of François Flameng (1856–1923), who painted portraits for the royal families of Europe, and was one of the greatest war artists of the twentieth century.

His two most famous portraits are of Queen Victoria of Britain, and Queen Alexandra, wife of Victoria’s successor King Edward VII. She sat for this portrait in the White Drawing Room of Buckingham Palace in London.

In 1902-03, Flameng painted the walls of the Masséna family’s palatial villa in Nice. They were descendants of André Masséna, the son of a shopkeeper in Nice who rose to become one of Napoleon’s Marshalls and the first Duc de Rivoli and Prince d’Essling. This painting shows The Masséna Family Entertaining Princess d’Essling, in a wonderful trompe l’oeuil. Their names are carefully inscribed at its foot.

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Flameng was also a history painter of renown. Some of his works, such as this scene of Bathing of Court Ladies in the 18th Century painted in 1888, were clearly intended to appeal to the husbands who paid him so lavishly for painting their wives.

Other paintings explored the world of the rich and cultured. Jean Grolier in the House of Aldus Manutius from 1894 shows Jean Grolier de Servières, Treasurer-General of France and one of the most famous bibliophiles in history, with Aldus Manutius the Venetian printer and publisher, in about 1511.

Sadly, although the two men did meet, it’s now thought that took place in Milan, where Manutius didn’t have his press, nor was there such a picturesque background. Nevertheless it makes a fine painting.

Flameng also celebrated The Carnival, Venice in this highly detailed and undated view.

His undated Chess Game would surely have appealed to a similar audience.

Life at the royal palaces of France was also fair game, here a Concert at Versailles.

Remaining at the same palace, he painted events at court, such as that of Parisians Arriving at Versailles.

Among his paintings showing the Napoleonic period, one of the most striking is this scene of Napoleon Hunting in the Forest of Fontainebleau, in which the pack is closing in on a cornered stag as the sun sets.

I’ve been unable to locate the scene shown in Flameng’s undated painting of Île Pointeaux, but this appears to be set on the bank of a river, perhaps in Paris. The ladies descending the steps to board a boat look as if they might sit for a portrait too.

In this view of a Picnic, Flameng returns to an earlier era, probably the eighteenth century, when the biggest question is whether the servants brought the right wine.

But among Flameng’s succession of depictions of the rich at play, there is an odd man out, a work both visually striking and profoundly controversial.

Flameng painted Massacre of Machecoul in 1884. At the right is a group of fashionably-dressed gun-toting (and sword-bearing) gentry out for a walk. At the left are the raped and mutilated bodies of women and men.

This scene shows the opening horror of one of the darkest episodes in recent French history: the slaughter of French civilians in the Vendée region of France which took place from 1793. Some now claim that this amounted to an act of genocide, although that is hotly disputed. Flameng’s gruesome image is almost a pendant to a painting by one of his friends, Georges Clairin.

Clairin’s undated painting of The Living Defend Their Dead. War in the Vendée shows a slightly earlier scene from the same royalist uprising, in which a small group of French rebels is taking shelter in the graveyard of a country church, on the lookout for the enemy.

Just a few years earlier, a different episode had been painted by Jean-Joseph Weerts in The Death of Barra (1880). This shows a romanticised story which had started with a young boy who was killed by a gang of horse thieves during the same uprising in the Vendée in 1793. During the French Revolution, this was turned into propaganda by false claims that the boy had been killed because he had stood up for the French Republican movement against the Royalists.

This wasn’t the last time that François Flameng was to paint the victims of war, for in 1914, he became one of the leading war artists to cover the Great War in France, alongside his friend John Singer Sargent. I will look at a few of his paintings from 1914-1919 tomorrow.

Before the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, François Flameng (1856–1923) had been a highly successful portraitist, a painter of history, friend and travel companion to Jean-Léon Gérôme, Georges Clairin, Paul Helleu and John Singer Sargent. And he had painted one gruesome work showing a highly controversial episode in French history.

Information about Flameng’s second career as a war artist is scant. He seems to have been granted official status early in the war, and painted watercolours of what he saw from the earliest months of the battles in northern France.

In early 1915, Flameng was painting in the Soissons area during the first battle of Champagne, which took place around Soissons, to the north-east of Paris. Many of his views show the destruction and military works which had taken place, here in his Barricade in the Distillery of Vauxrot, Soissons from 1915.

Trenches in the Distillery of Vauxrot, Soissons (1915) is another view of the same site.

Soissons Barracks (1915) shows the damage in the town itself, with the occasional civilian walking around.

Coucy-le-Château after the German Destruction from 1917 shows the scant remains of a castle near Soissons which had been built in the 1220s. It was occupied by the Germans in September 1914, and when they were withdrawing from this area in 1917, its keep and four towers were blown up on the orders of General Ludendorff, which caused public outrage.

Flameng’s paintings of the destruction of the landscape are particularly moving. The ghostly remains of trees look like the ribcage of a vast skeleton in The Offensive of Yser, The French Front Line near Het-Sas from 1918.

He also painted some of the major nighttime battles, including The Offensive of Yser, Bombardment of the German Lines (1918).

His watercolour of Return of a Night Bombing Flight of Voisin Aircraft from 1918 is perhaps one of the best paintings of the war in the air.

In The Entonnoires of Ham (1917), farm carts are being used to fill in a huge pit which has severed the main road to St Quentin. The soil and buildings appear red with blood.

Some of Flameng’s paintings must have been posed. This undated scene of Germans in traditional plate armour and gas masks may have been constructed using prisoners, perhaps.

This view of an Attack (1918) being made on duckboards over flooded marshland brought home a vivid picture of what actually happened. These paintings, many of which were not published until the end of the war, brought criticism for their reality.

A Park Gate of the Château de Plessis-de-Roye (1918) shows a particularly poignant scene, set in this village in the Oise, again to the north-east of Paris. During the battle of Matz, part of the second battle of the Marne, in June and July of 1918, nearly five thousand French cavalry were killed here, and the village was razed to the ground.

Watercolours like The Message (Neyon, March 1917) (1917) showed the very personal tragedies too. Here three soldiers tell a mother, wife, and children of the death of their man.

This scene of utter destruction at The Cliff of Craonne (1918) shows part of the battlefield of the Aisne in 1917 which gave rise to one of the famous anti-military songs of the Great War, La Chanson de Craonne.

Despite the critics, François Flameng was acclaimed as one of the greatest of the war artists of the time, and made honorary president of the Society of Military Painters. In 1920, most of his war paintings were donated to the Musée de l’Armée in Paris, in the Hôtel National des Invalides, where they are exhibited.

Lest we forget.

From the gluttons, Virgil leads Dante past the great foe of Plutus, a wolf-like creature who is chided by Virgil, and so they descend to see the next densely-populated circle of avaricious misers and prodigal spendthrifts.

Plutus most probably refers to a composite of the god of wealth, thus the root of the evil in these souls in the fourth circle of Hell, and Pluto, one of the gods of the classical Underworld. Either of those roles justifies Dante’s description of him as the great enemy of mankind.

As opposites, the two groups of spirits are locked against one another, each rolling great boulders around in opposition. When their rocks crash together, they turn about and push in the other direction, and so on for eternity. Among those whose sin is avarice are many clerics, including cardinals and popes.

Virgil explains the role of Fortune in all this, that neither group of sinners can ever be satisfied with the riches that she has. Thus both the avaricious and the spendthrifts curse the angelic Fortune for their own sins.

Dante is led by Virgil past a dark spring to the swamp of the River Styx, so entering the fifth circle of Hell, where other souls covered in mud are attacking one another, punching and kicking as hard as they can. These are the sinners who were overcome with anger. Also in the swamp are their complements, the mournful and miserable, whose breath bubbles upwards through the muddy waters.

The two reach the foot of a high tower, on top of which two flames are lit to signal to another tower in the far distance. This brings them a ferry, this time rowed by a man who Virgil calls Phlegyas, who is to carry the pair across the Stygian waters in his boat.

Phlegyas is a character drawn from classical legend and myth. After Apollo raped his daughter, Phlegyas flew into a fit of rage and burned the temple of Apollo. In punishment, the god killed him.

Rather than showing Charon’s more famous ferry, Eugène Delacroix’s The Barque of Dante may show Dante and Virgil being carried across the River Styx by Phlegyas.

As Phlegyas rows Dante and Virgil across rough water, the spirit of Filippo Argenti, an arrogant Florentine who is hated by Dante, rises out of the water and tries to capsize their boat.

Dante tells him to be off, and Virgil assists in pushing him back into the river. They see Argenti’s ghost cast among those fighting on the shore, where he is torn apart by them, to Dante’s delight.

Their boat approaches the moated city of Dis, in the depths of Hell (circles six to nine). Phlegyas lands them at the city’s entrance. Virgil goes forward to secure their admission, but the gate to the city is slammed shut on him.

The artists

William Blake (1757–1827) was a British visionary painter and illustrator whose last and incomplete work was an illustrated edition of the Divine Comedy for the painter John Linnell. Most of his works shown in this series were created for that, although he did draw and paint scenes during his earlier career. I have a major series on his work here.

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) was a major French painter whose Romantic and painterly style laid the groundwork for the Impressionists. In addition to many fine easel works, he painted murals and was an accomplished lithographer too. Many of his paintings are narrative, and among the most famous is Liberty Leading the People from 1830. This article looks at some of his narrative works.

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Early in his career, he produced a complete set of seventy illustrations for translations of the Inferno, which were first published in 1857 and continue to be used. These were followed in 1867 by more illustrations for Purgatorio and Paradiso. This article looks at his paintings.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

Robin Kirkpatrick (trans) (2012) Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, Penguin Classics. ISBN 978 0 141 19749 4.
Richard Lansing (ed) (2000) The Dante Encyclopedia, Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 87611 7.
Guy P Raffa (2009) The Complete Danteworlds, A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy, Chicago UP. ISBN 978 0 2267 0270 4.
Prue Shaw (2014) Reading Dante, From Here to Eternity, Liveright. ISBN 978 1 63149 006 4.

Late in 1478, when still working in Florence, Leonardo wrote that he had started work on two paintings of the Madonna, one of which does seem to have survived, and now hangs in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg.

His Madonna with a Flower, popularly known as the Benois Madonna, is thought to date from 1481-83, and was preceded in the years 1475-80 by numerous sketches and studies of the Madonna, including several which are strongly linked with this composition. Examination of the painting reveals many pentimenti: the infant’s head was originally larger, and the grasses held by the Madonna in her left hand were originally flowers.

The flower of the title, on which the baby’s attention is concentrated, is a crucifer, making reference to Christ’s crucifixion. The work’s modern nickname refers to Louis Benois, who owned it before it was purchased by the Hermitage early in the twentieth century.

At the same time, Leonardo had started work on a painting that he didn’t complete. This early design study for the Adoration of the Magi is thought to have been made around 1478-81, and has many close similarities with the painting that Leonardo abandoned in 1482, although he changed his mind about the ruins in the background and added a prominent tree to the right of the Virgin Mary.

That was probably followed by this perspective study, thought to date from around 1481. The ruins shown in the painting below were thus part of a complete building which Leonardo imagined and projected meticulously before excerpting those fragments which were to be retained in the final work. This may have been intended to represent the palace of King David, which referred to Christ’s lineage.

He most probably started the Adoration of the Magi in or soon after 1480. At nearly 2.5 metres in each dimension, it was one of his largest and most ambitious works to date, but probably had to be abandoned when he left Florence in 1482. This work had been commissioned in March 1481 by the monks of San Donato a Scopeto, just outside the city of Florence, for their high altar, who imposed complex financial obligations which Leonardo may also have been unable to meet.

Another painting attributed to Leonardo which may have been abandoned at the same time is a portrait of Saint Jerome.

In 1482, Leonardo was despatched north to Milan in an effort by the Florentine ruler Lorenzo de’ Medici to secure peace with the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza. He took with him a diplomatic gift of a silver lyre in the shape of a horse’s head which he had made. Leonardo remained in the court of Milan until 1499, busy with a succession of design and other projects, and some of his greatest paintings.

Soon after his arrival in Milan, Leonardo embarked on the first version of one of his most famous paintings: the Virgin of the Rocks now in the Louvre in Paris, which was probably completed between about 1483-85. It is generally agreed to have been commissioned in 1483 for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception of San Francesco Grande in Milan, where it was to form part of a large wooden altarpiece.

Its complex multi-figure composition, set in an elaborately detailed landscape, makes this the most ambitious of Leonardo’s early paintings. The central figure is the Virgin Mary, whose right hand clasps the back of the infant Saint John the Baptist. With her is an angel, whose left hand supports the lower back of the younger baby Jesus.

Looking just at the figures there are many complexities, including the hand positions which direct towards the clasped hands of John, and directions of gaze. As is traditional, the Madonna’s eyes are cast down, but the angel is looking towards the lower right corner of the painting. Christ is distinguished by his right hand held in blessing, and his evident youth compared with the larger John who is praying for him.

The landscape is richly detailed, with an abundance of symbols. Palm leaves behind the infant John are associated with the flight to Egypt, and with the Passion, and it has recently been proposed that they model scallop shells, which lead into another symbolic realm altogether.

It is thought that there were contractual disputes over the value of the completed painting, and this first version was eventually sold to someone else. A replacement, its second version now in the National Gallery in London, was probably started soon after 1490, but wasn’t accepted until 1508, when the artist was finally paid.

This painting has clearly had a hard life, and in 1806 was transferred from its original panel to canvas, which could only have exacerbated its deterioration.

During this period, Leonardo is thought to have painted at least one portrait, that of a Lady with an Ermine, showing Cecilia Gallerani, which he completed in about 1489-90. Cecilia was the mistress of Ludovico Maria Sforza, and Leonardo’s work made such an impression at court that Bernardo Bellincioni, a poet there, wrote a sonnet celebrating this painting.

The ermine is an unusual animal for such a portrait, but has two distinctive links. Its Greek name γαλέη (galée) is a pun on Cecilia’s surname of Gallerani, and King Ferrante of Naples bestowed the Order of the Ermine on Ludovico, who then became dubbed Italico Morel, bianco eremellino, ‘Italian Moor, white ermine’, by Bellincioni.

Cecilia became Ludovico’s mistress in early 1489, when she was fifteen years old. He married Beatrice d’Este in January 1491, when Cecilia was five months pregnant with his son, and the court poet Bellincioni died young the following year. It is therefore most likely that Cecilia was little more than sixteen at the time that Leonardo painted this portrait of her superlative beauty.

As Ludovico’s power stabilised in the 1490s, Leonardo was engaged in the Sforza equestrian monument, struggled on with Virgins of the Rocks, and started on The Last Supper.

References

Wikipedia.

Luke Syson, Larry Keith et al. (2011) Leonardo da Vinci, Painter at the Court of Milan, National Gallery (London). ISBN 978 1 85709 491 6.
Frank Zöllner (2017) Leonardo da Vinci, the Complete Paintings, Taschen. ISBN 978 3 8365 6297 3.

In the distant past, fresco painting was all very good when you wanted to brighten up the walls or ceiling of a substantial building, and could afford to pay an artist handsomely for their labour. But there was also demand for smaller, more portable works of art. Some would have been painted onto animal skins, and ultimately were developed into miniatures in beautiful manuscripts, which used the precursors of watercolours. One alternative medium developed most successfully, though, was wax, in encaustic painting.

The characteristic feature of encaustic painting is its use of a binder which in most ambient temperatures is solid, but becomes liquid paint at higher temperatures, usually no higher than the boiling point of water. This enables the painter to heat mixtures of pigment and binder which are kept typically at around 50˚-90˚C (120˚-200˚F), apply them while still hot, and for them to bind the pigment to its ground once the paint cools.

People started to keep bees by around 7000 BCE, and one of their most important products has been the wax from which they build their hives. Beeswax has a typical melting point of about 63˚C (145˚F), a temperature readily achieved by heating water but well above daytime maximum air temperatures experienced where people live, which very seldom reach 50˚C (120˚F). Beeswax was therefore most probably the first binder used for encaustic painting, and remains the most common substance used in its paints today.

Other resins have also been used to make solidified paint harder and more resistant to damage. The major modern manufacturer of encaustic paints, R&F, now adds small amounts of damar resin, a powdery gum tapped from species of trees which grow naturally in India and South Asia. Dammar resin is also widely used in varnishes.

Encaustic paint is thus unusual as it doesn’t rely on a chemical process to form the dry paint layer, but a physical change of state, which is fully reversible. Common supports include panels of wood, which probably didn’t have any ground applied originally. More recently grounds of gesso have been used successfully, but encaustic paints have been applied to a wide range of supports including dried and fired clay tablets, pots, and sculpture.

This photo by Joe Mabel shows the materials used by the encaustic painter Alicia Tormey in her studio in Seattle a few years ago.

One significant limitation with the process of painting using encaustic media is that heated paint tends to be thin and runny. Most artists therefore apply their paint with the support laid flat, and leave their work horizontal until the paint has solidified. Instead of painting stood up in front of an easel, they tend to work lying down.

Although encaustic paintings are susceptible to physical damage and decay, some from before the Christian era have survived, and it’s thought that the medium was used for several hundred or even thousands of years before the birth of Christ. The best-known early encaustic paintings are those made by colonists from Greece and Rome when living in Egypt between about 80-250 CE – particularly those found in the Fayum (or Faiyum) Basin. These were first discovered in about 1615, with most being removed during the nineteenth century and spread across collections in Europe and America.

These funerary portraits are some of the most haunting images in European art, and demonstrate how skilled encaustic painting can rival other media. It can achieve a remarkable lucency, although this depends on the processing of the beeswax and its ageing.

A tradition of encaustic painting also grew up in early Christian communities, where it was used to create icons for places of worship and the homes of the wealthiest.

This encaustic painting of the Virgin Mary and Child with Saints Theodor of Amasea and George, and Angels was made in about 580 CE for Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, not too far from the Fayum portraits.

A few artists continued to paint in encaustic even after the Renaissance, although this has remained very much a minority pursuit. Giovanni Francesco Romanelli’s painting of Boys Fishing from about 1640 curiously uses cardboard as its support, suggesting that it may have been more of an experiment.

The nineteenth century saw a resurgence in the use of more traditional media such as egg tempera. In addition to painting with that, some like Arnold Böcklin returned to try encaustics, here in one of his major works, the first version of Villa by the Sea from 1864.

More followed suit in the twentieth century, including James Ensor, Diego Rivera and Jasper Johns, and today encaustic methods have a small but very enthusiastic following.

Maurice Denis (1870–1943) was another of the founding members of the Nabis, and the youngest. To put his career into context, he was still an infant of three when the Impressionists held their first exhibition in Paris, and a member of the next and post-Impressionist generation.

A Norman by birth, he had hunble origins in the town of Granville, near the famous inshore island of Mont-Saint-Michel, on the north coast of France, but his family soon moved to Saint-Germain-en-Laye in the Paris suburbs. At the age of fifteen he decided that he wanted to combine his two interests and become a Christian painter. His major early influence came from the paintings of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.

Denis started on the road to realise his hopes when he gained entry to the Lycée Condorcet in Paris, presumably on a scholarship, and there he became friends with Édouard Vuillard and Ker-Xavier Roussel. He then moved to the Académie Julian in 1888, to prepare himself for entrance exams to the École des Beaux-Arts. He was successful in those later that year, and studied under Jules Joseph Lefebvre.

In 1889, Denis came under the influence of Gauguin, and painted this Ascent to Calvary with the resulting simplicity and emphasis on design and form.

Henry Lerolle, the industrialist and artist, was Denis’ first patron, and purchased Le mystère catholique (1889) for his collection. Later, Denis admitted that it was Lerolle who enabled him to pursue his career in art.

By about 1890, Denis, Vuillard, Roussel, Bonnard and others had formed Les Nabis. With his baccalaurate in philosophy, Denis was involved in developing the group’s philosophy. He later summarised it as moving away from the idea that art is a visual sensation like a photograph, but that it is a creation of the spirit “for which nature is only the occasion”.

Denis’ style, as seen in his Motif Romanesque from 1890, was evolving to that of a Nabi, with muted colour, and his distinctive impression of softness in focus, even where he has painted the outlines of tree trunks in contrasting colour.

In October 1890, Denis met Marthe Meurier for the first time; they became romantically involved the following year, eventually marrying in the summer of 1893.

Marthe was a pianist and musician, and she influenced Denis to look at the relationship between visual art and music. She was also the model for many of his paintings, starting with this, of Marthe Playing the Piano, in 1891. Although the music declares itself to be a minuet, her hands are posed over the keys rather than playing in earnest.

One of his first mature Nabi paintings is September Evening or Women Sitting on the Terrace from 1891. The forms of the figures are flattened, and each wears a patterned dress. There is obvious influence of Japonisme, and muted colours throughout.

The following year, Denis painted four women climbing The Ladder in the Foliage (1892). The motif was popular at the time, typically showing young women picking fruit in fine weather. Gone are the patterned dresses, replaced by flowing curves more typical of art nouveau illustrations. There are no fruit either, and the poses of these women suggest a more spiritual purpose in their ascent.

Green Trees, The Beeches of Kerduel from 1893 returns to his initial simplicity, as a small group of nuns in white habits queue to kneel and pray in front of an angel with wings. This is near a twelth century château in Brittany, which is one of many sites claimed to have been used by King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

Denis was one of the artists who transcribed events described in the Bible into modern settings. One of the most impressive of these is his thoroughly modern Nativity from 1894, in which the birth of Jesus takes place in a French town.

During the early 1890s, Les Nabis slowly dissolved, but Denis maintained his close friendships with Bonnard, Vuillard and Roussel, with whom he later shared some major commissions.

From 1895-97, Denis was occupied painting a narrative series telling The Legend of Saint Hubert, for the office of Baron Cochin. Sadly, images of these aren’t of suitable quality to include here. During this time, he started a long relationship with Paul Cézanne, visiting the older painter in Aix, and writing articles about his art.

In 1897, presumably commissioned by Henry Lerolle, Denis painted Lerolle’s daughter in this Portrait of Yvonne Lerolle in Three Views. Although relatively unusual, including multiple views of the same figure in a portrait has a track record going back to the Renaissance. Yvonne was also painted by Renoir, and was a close friend of Julie Manet, daughter of the late Berthe Morisot.

During the late 1890s, Denis seems to have visited Brittany, perhaps during the summer. In 1897, when on the Channel coast of Brittany, he painted The Regatta in Perros-Guirec, View of the West Pier. His style here is strongly influenced by Gauguin, and his colours are starting to become higher in chroma.

In 1898, Denis visited Rome for the first time, and studied the works of Raphael and Michelangelo in the Vatican in particular.

Denis became more interested in decorative arts, and in 1898 made this design model for a tapestry showing a Cavalry Legend, or Three Young Princesses.

It’s sometimes claimed that Denis’ major group portrait Homage to Cézanne, painted in 1900, was intended as a mark of respect on Cézanne’s death. As the latter artist didn’t die until 1906, Denis would have required a great deal of prescience for that to be the case.

As if a manifesto for his generation of artists, Denis brought his friends together in his dealer Ambroise Vollard’s shop, around Cézanne’s painting Fruit Bowl, Glass and Apples. From the left, those shown are: Odilon Redon, Édouard Vuillard, André Mellerio (a critic), Ambroise Vollard (dealer), Maurice Denis, Paul Sérusier, Paul Ranson, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Pierre Bonnard and the artist’s wife, Marthe Denis.

In the background are works by Gauguin (who owned the Cézanne) and Renoir. This is a homage in the form of those painted by Henri Fantin-Latour, who died in 1904. Denis exhibited this work in Paris and Brussels in 1901, although response to it was unfortunately mixed. Although Denis was asked to sell it, he refused, and finally gave it to the Musée du Luxembourg in 1928.

As the chroma continued to rise in Denis’ paintings, he experimented with Nabi-like dense patterning in Breakfast from 1901.

By the start of the twentieth century, the former Nabi artist Maurice Denis (1870–1943) was firmly in the avant garde, his paintings evolving away from his earlier Nabi style, and making series of prints. He had started serious print-making around 1890, and had made woodblocks for music by Debussy. His prints became even more important in the early twentieth century, when he illustrated writings by an eclectic range of authors including Dante, Verlaine and Saint Francis of Assisi.

Many of Denis’ themes remained religious, such as his Boat to Saint Breton, or Portrait of Albert Clouard as a Saint painted between 1903-06. This may refer to a legend of the life of the first Breton saint, canonised in 1247, or to one of its seven founding saints. Albert Clouard (1866-1952) was a contemporary painter, and presumably a friend of Denis at the time.

In the twentieth century, Denis started painting a series of works telling stories from classical myths, mainly set on the coast of Brittany and in modern times. Polyphemus from 1907 is one of the earliest of these.

Like Polyphemus, Bacchus and Ariadne from the same year is a radically modern treatment of the story of Ariadne’s abandonment on the island of Naxos, which could be mistaken for a recreational beach scene at a coastal resort. Buried in there, though, are some more traditional references.

Just to the right of centre, Dionysus stands behind Ariadne, helping to hold a red and white striped cloak or sheet on her left shoulder. Ariadne’s three attendant nymphs appear to be resting on the rocks at the left. Various bacchantes and other figures are riding black horses down in the water at the right, one of them clutching the thyrsus (staff). There is no sign of Silenius, a chariot, or big cats, and a yacht at the right edge may not have anything to do with the narrative.

Denis also visited the popular story of Joan of Arc, in this ornately-framed painting At the Edge of a Battlefield, Joan of Arc, Kneeling, Prepares to Receive the Sacrament of Communion from 1909.

That same year, Denis started to teach at the Académie Ranson in Paris, and wrote a book on his theories of art. With the rise of the next generation of artists, particularly Henri Matisse who was just emerging from his early Fauvism, Denis’ work started to fall from grace and appear dated.

His 1912 painting of Paradise puts angels with wings into a very earthly and floral imagining of Heaven, not too far removed from Bonnard’s paintings of the same period.

Unlike the paintings of Pierre Bonnard, Denis had painted very few nudes, and his domestic scenes were thoroughly respectable, in accordance with his beliefs. He relented a little and included some classical nudes, both in his mythological paintings and other coastal scenes such as Female Bathers at Perros-Guirec from about 1912. This has almost become Fauvist in its use of colour.

Just on the outbreak of the First World War, Denis bought the former hospital in Saint-Germaine-en-Laye, which he decorated and called The Priory, and now houses the largest collection of his works.

Wave from 1916 is another of Denis’ few paintings featuring nudes, with their forced classical poses.

I suspect that this painting of Daphnis and Chloë from 1918 was the result of Maurice Ravel’s ballet of that name, which was premiered at the Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris in 1912, coupled with his mythological series.

After the First World War, Denis co-founded an atelier dedicated to sacred art, and his late works became increasingly devotional.

The best-known image of Denis himself is his Self-Portrait in Front of the Priory from 1921, when he had just entered his fifties, and is stood in front of the large mansion.

Some time between buying The Priory in 1914 and 1930, Denis painted this roundel illustrating the cardinal virtue of Justice, on the private chapel in its grounds.

Denis appears to have continued spending the summer on the north coast of Brittany, near Ploumanach. Like other painters before him, including Jules Breton, he painted religious festivals there, including The Pardon of Notre-Dame de la Clarté in 1926.

Maurice Denis continued to paint through the Second World War, remaining in Paris during its occupation. He was involved in a car accident in the city in November 1943, and died of the injuries he had sustained.

In early December 1793, when civil war was raging in parts of France, a fourteen year-old boy, Joseph Bara, attached himself to the revolutionary Republican forces fighting a Royalist uprising in the west of the country, to the south of the River Loire. When he was leading a pair of horses he was attacked by a group of thieves who demanded that he hand the horses over. He refused, and the brigands killed him.

That was the report sent by General Desmarres back to the governing National Convention in Paris. But it was seized on by Maximilien Robespierre, who praised the boy as a hero of the nation. Word went out that Bara had been cornered by Royalist forces, and ordered to shout “Long live the King!” When he responded by asserting his allegiance to the Republic instead, the Royalists murdered him in cold blood.

This caught the attention of the great painter and pro-revolutionary Jacques-Louis David, who had recently painted his famous work Marat Assassinated. Seeing the opportunity to portray an even more emotionally-charged episode of revolutionary valour, David set to work to paint the young Bara.

I don’t know why David never completed this painting of The Death of Young Bara (1794). One of his pupils made a copy which has also survived. Nor do I understand why Bara is shown naked, as if the victim of a horrific assault.

Perhaps this painting was overtaken by events: Robespierre and perhaps David too had arranged for Bara’s body to be interred in the Panthéon in Paris during a grand revolutionary festival, but this never happened as Robespierre was overthrown the day before the planned ceremony, and swiftly guillotined in public. David’s unfinished painting then passed to the artist Horace Vernet, and has been largely forgotten.

Bara’s death was but one small episode in a war which has remained controversial ever since, the bloody Royalist uprisings of the Vendée and Chouannerie. Most recently these have been claimed to amount to genocide. You can read detailed accounts on Wikipedia for the full story of the Vendée, which took place to the south of the River Loire between 1793-96, and Chouannerie to the north of that river from 1794-1800.

The Royalists included most of the clergy, and this led to the slaughter of many innocent Catholics. In Nantes, Catholic civilians were rounded up and drowned in large numbers. At the end of 1793, Republican forces killed many other non-combatants across much of the region, and General Westerman reported back to Paris that his Republican forces had trampled their children beneath their horses’ feet, and “exterminated them all”. However, this remains very controversial today, with some claiming that half the population were slaughtered by systematic killings, others considering that deaths were little more than a hundred thousand.

Either way, these horrific events were commemorated in Honoré de Balzac’s first novel, Les Chouans, published in 1829, and and a steady trickle of paintings.

In 1850, the military and battlefield artist Jean Sorieul painted one of the stranger moments in the civil war in the north, in his Fighting at Quiberon in 1795. This shows a failed attempt by Royalist forces to invade the Brittany coast in Quiberon Bay in July 1795, with the assistance of the British Navy. A handful of Royalists at the left are trying to beat back Republican attacks, and allow the flight of civilians to take refuge aboard British ships, at the right.

In 1853, the Parisian landscape and genre painter Charles Fortin painted Royalist forces in the north in his Chouans. A Catholic priest is seen at the far right. At the time that Fortin painted this, the Second Empire had just been established under Napoleon III, and this was probably read as being anti-Republican.

In 1864, in the final years of the Second Empire, the history painter Louis Duveau painted another unusual scene in A Mass at Sea in 1793. Persecution of Catholics became so severe that some took to practising their religion away from the view of Republicans, for their personal safety.

Then, with the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Napoleon III was overthrown and the Third Republic began.

Victor Henri Juglar painted at least a couple of scenes from the French Revolution, of which one shows The Spy, Scene of Chouannerie, which he completed in 1880, when the Third Republic was a decade old. Curiously, its reading appears pro-Royalist, with some Republican soldiers arraigning an alleged Royalist spy before one of their officers, presumably prior to the firing squad.

More overtly anti-Republican was Jean-Joseph Weerts’ return to The Death of Barra, also from 1880, which embroiders Robespierre’s propaganda still further. Weerts was Belgian by birth, but had studied and worked in Paris since 1867, painting history and religious works, including a celebrated view of the assassination of Marat. This painting was shown at the Salon in 1883, by which time events in the Vendée and to the north had become both common and highly popular.

In the next and concluding article, I will show how, in the 1880s, this theme became so frequent at the Salon that critics had to ask artists not to paint them any more.

In the previous article, I showed some of the paintings which had been made of the horrific civil wars in the west of France, up to 1880, when they suddenly became both frequent and very popular.

Their greatest exponent was the Belgian artist Évariste Carpentier, who had trained in Antwerp before going to the south of France in 1879 to recover from an old knee injury which threatened the amputation of his leg. Although he didn’t arrive in Paris until the following year, 1880, in 1878 he painted The Flight of Royalists.

This overtly anti-Republican work shows a Royalist family fleeing during the massacres in the Vendée.

In about 1881, with this theme gaining popularity, Carpentier painted Refugees, which recasts that earlier work into an urban scene and augments the numbers. If there’s any doubt left in the viewer’s mind, at the lower left is a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. This painting proved so popular that it was reproduced as a chromolithograph, which is what I show here, as I have been unable to trace a suitable image of the original painting.

In 1883, Carpentier added this painting showing a couple of ill-equipped Royalists in retreat during the winter to the north of the River Loire: Routed Chouans.

He celebrated the guerilla tactics of the Royalists in Chouans in Ambush (c 1883), which shows a scene from a small battle near La Gravelle, more probably in 1794.

The last of Carpentier’s pro-Royalist paintings which I show here is a tense indoor scene of The Alert, which he completed in 1884. That was the year that he ‘discovered’ the paintings of Jules Bastien-Lepage and started making landscapes en plein air. He abandoned history painting, and returned to Belgium in 1886.

In the early 1880s, the anti-Republican artist Charles-Alexandre Coëssin de la Fosse painted several scenes from the civil war north of the River Loire, among which is this Episode of Chouannerie from 1883. Clues that these are Royalists are plentiful: the rosary and crucifix in the hands of the man in the foreground, their improvised arms, dress, and the fact that three are barefoot.

François Flameng’s account of the Massacre of Machecoul from 1884 is harder to read. The victims at the left include civilians, and are some of the nearly five hundred inhabitants of this small village in the Vendée, who were massacred on 10 March 1793 by Royalist forces. Those at the right who have come to promenade past the corpses would logically also be Royalists, making this a pro-Republican statement to counterbalance claims that it was the Republicans who had killed many civilians.

Flameng’s huge painting had been commissioned by the state, and was exhibited amid great debate at the Salon in 1884, following which it was deemed too grisly for a major collection, and was despatched to the city of Agen in the south-west of France.

Georges Clairin, a friend of Flameng and with a similar place in society, was a little more subtle perhaps in The Living Defend Their Dead. War in the Vendée (undated), where a small group of ramshackle Royalists is taking shelter in the graveyard of a country church, on the lookout for the enemy.

Jules Girardet had established himself a reputation with paintings of the 1871 Paris Commune, and one of its heroines, Louise Michel. In about 1886, he painted at least two works showing anti-Republican action. Mutineers of Fouesnant Arrested by the National Guard of Quimper in 1792 shows a small group of men, wearing large wooden clogs, being marched in after leading a local insurrection.

Girardet’s brilliant painting of Rout at Cholet, October 1793 also from 1886 shows the tragic end to the war in the Vendée, when Republican forces inflicted their first serious defeat at the town in the centre of the region on 17 October 1793. Given the slaughter of Catholics and Royalists which had already started, they were really fleeing for their lives.

From the defeat at Cholet, remaining Royalist forces converged on Granville. On their way, they encountered Republican troops at Château-Gontier. In the course of brief action there, the Republican leader was killed, as shown in Alexandre Bloch’s painting of the Death of General Beaupuy at Château-Gontier, October 1793 from 1888. The troops in uniform on the left are Republicans, with the dying General in the lower centre, and Royalists to the right.

The Royalists found Granville heavily defended, and failed to capture the town. They were finally defeated at the Battle of Savenay on 23 December, leaving General Turreau to kill a further twenty to fifty thousand civilians in his scorched earth policy in the first half of 1794.

The last painting showing this civil war was also one of the last painted by the French history painter Pierre Outin, of an Episode in the Defeat at Quiberon (1899). This returns to the curious British-supported invasion of Quiberon Bay in July 1795, with Royalists trying to keep Republican forces at bay while their civilians are taken out to vessels of the Royal Navy to be rescued.

During the 1880s, history paintings showing scenes in the Vendée and to the north of the Loire were shown at a rate of about three or four a year in the Salon in Paris, and a total of nine were included in the Exposition Universelle in 1889. The critics began to weary of them, and asked that they cease. By the dawn of the twentieth century, they had all but vanished.

Dante and Virgil are ferried across the River Styx to land at the gate to the city of Dis, the lower depths of Hell (circles six to nine), but the gate is slammed shut on Virgil when he goes forward to secure their admission. Virgil reassures Dante that he has been here once before, but Dante’s eyes are fixed at the top of the gate, where the three Furies appear, wreathed in snakes.

Virgil names them to Dante: Megaera on the left, Alecto to the right, and Tisiphone between. Megaera represents evil deeds, Tisiphone evil words, and Alecto evil thought. Drawn from rich classical mythology, they are another crossover into Dante’s Christian Hell.

The Furies call on Medusa to turn Dante to stone, with the sight of her face, and Virgil makes Dante turn to look away from them, and close his eyes tightly.

A strong wind then blows across the marsh of the Styx towards them, as a mass of ghosts there part to make way for an angel who walks across the water towards the walls of Dis. Virgil gets Dante to bow in deference to the angel as he passes them by and opens the gate of Dis for them with his rod. The angel chides those inside Dis for their resistance and immediately returns the way that he came.

Virgil then leads Dante through the open gate onto a plain, its ground made uneven by many tombs set within its surface. The stones on top of those tombs are open, revealing flames within, and letting out cries of pain. Virgil explains that these contain heretics and their followers, and that their lids will be closed with the Final Judgement. By heresy, Dante here means that these sinners denied the immortality of the soul.

Virgil points out the tomb of the Epicureans, then Dante is startled by the appearance of the upper body and head of Farinata degli Uberto in another.

Farinata was the leader of the Ghibellines of Florence, a family grouping which had been fighting against the Guelphs, including Dante himself. The Florentine then asks Dante who his ancestors were, and reveals that he and Dante’s family had opposed one another. With Farinata are the last Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II and Cardinal Octavian – Ottaviano degli Ubaldini, who had been a powerful supporter of the Ghibellines prior to his death in 1273.

With Dante thinking on what he had heard, Virgil leads him on into a gorge, in which they descend further into the depths of Hell.

The artists

William Blake (1757–1827) was a British visionary painter and illustrator whose last and incomplete work was an illustrated edition of the Divine Comedy for the painter John Linnell. Most of his works shown in this series were created for that, although he did draw and paint scenes during his earlier career. I have a major series on his work here.

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Early in his career, he produced a complete set of seventy illustrations for translations of the Inferno, which were first published in 1857 and continue to be used. These were followed in 1867 by more illustrations for Purgatorio and Paradiso. This article looks at his paintings.

John Flaxman (1755–1826) was a British sculptor and draughtsman who occasionally painted too. When he was in Rome between 1787-91, he produced drawings for book illustrations, including a set of 111 for an edition of The Divine Comedy. In 1810, he was appointed the Professor of Sculpture to the Royal Academy in London, and in 1817 made drawings to illustrate Hesiod, which were engraved by William Blake.

Joseph Anton Koch (1768-1839) was an Austrian landscape painter, who worked mainly in Neoclassical style. During his second stay in Rome, he was commissioned to paint frescos in the Villa Massimi on the walls of the Dante Room there, which remain one of the most florid visual accounts of Dante’s Inferno. He completed those between 1824-29.

Bernardino Poccetti (1548-1612) was an Italian Mannerist painter and print-maker who was born in Florence and painted some magnificent frescoes in the palaces of the richest families there.

John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) was an American painter who worked much of his career in Europe. Trained in Paris, he was a highly successful portraitist in Paris then London. One of the most gifted and prolific painters of the nineteenth century, his work is rich in bravura brushstrokes and highly individualistic. In his later career, he painted large murals on the East Coast of America, including Orestes Pursued by the Furies in Boston, MA, which he started in 1922, and completed in 1925, just prior to his death. Over its 100 square feet of canvas, it shows a young and naked Orestes cowering under the attacks of the Furies, as he tries to run from them.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

Robin Kirkpatrick (trans) (2012) Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, Penguin Classics. ISBN 978 0 141 19749 4.
Richard Lansing (ed) (2000) The Dante Encyclopedia, Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 87611 7.
Guy P Raffa (2009) The Complete Danteworlds, A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy, Chicago UP. ISBN 978 0 2267 0270 4.
Prue Shaw (2014) Reading Dante, From Here to Eternity, Liveright. ISBN 978 1 63149 006 4.

Through the 1490s Leonardo was an integral part of the court in Milan, as its ruler Ludovico il Moro consolidated his power there. In 1489, Leonardo was engaged to design and cast the Sforza equestrian monument, a project which was terminated in 1494 when the bronze for the casting was sequestered to make cannons, and never reprovided. He was also still struggling on with his unfinished commission for The Virgin of the Rocks, and drew prolifically.

One of his best-known drawings from this period is this Vitruvian Man, from around 1492. This is based on the correlations of ideal body proportions with the geometry detailed by the Roman architect and geometer Vitruvius, hence its name. This is the most prominent of a long series of geometric studies of the ideal proportions of human bodies through the history of art, and represents the confluence of art and mathematics, so appropriate for Leonardo’s wide-ranging interests.

By the mid 1490s, he was deeply involved in his next major project, a wall painting for one end of the refectory of the reformed Dominican Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. This may seem an obscure location for what was very quickly to become one of the world’s greatest works of art, but Ludovico il Moro dined there twice a week, and it had recently been remodelled as a mausoleum for the Sforza family. Leonardo’s Last Supper was therefore a court painting first and foremost.

Leonardo’s innovation was tragically almost the undoing of The Last Supper (c 1495-97). What we see on the refectory wall now is a pale and changed reflection of the magnificent work which he painted, because of his choice of media and seemingly endless attempts to repaint sections over the centuries since. These are most apparent when you look at a detail such as that below.

Instead of painting this using established fresco technique into wet plaster, Leonardo first applied a chalk ground with glue binder, on top of which he painted relatively thickly in egg tempera, possibly with oil paint too. This has been obscured by a long succession of attempts to make good its deteriorating paint layer, often by applying oil paint on top of its unstable base.

Fortunately, a full size copy was made just over twenty years after Leonardo completed The Last Supper, by Giampietrino, who is thought to have worked closely with Leonardo when they were both in Milan.

Giampietrino’s copy of the The Last Supper from about 1520 gives the closest impression today of what the original must have looked like. Even this copy has been horribly mutilated: the upper third was cut off, and its width reduced, but at least what remains gives a better idea of the original’s appearance.

Leonardo’s composition wasn’t entirely revolutionary for the time. Previous paintings of The Last Supper had spread the apostles along the length of a table, with Christ at its centre. However, Judas Iscariot was usually placed alone on the near side, his back to the viewer, and sometimes with his bag of silver visible behind his back.

Leonardo shows the moment of surprise and denial when Christ announces that one of those sat around the table would betray him. In this, Leonardo was perhaps the first artist to assemble the apostles into small groups, a feature which has been repeated in innumerable images which have followed this painting. For not only must this be one of the greatest works of art, it must have spawned more copies and parodies than any other too.

After completing The Last Supper, Leonardo made this Portrait of Isabella d’Este (c 1499-1500) in chalk. Isabella (1474-1539) was the Marchioness of Mantua, a major patron of the arts, and sister to Beatrice d’Este, the wife of Ludovico. There is no evidence that Leonardo ever used this cartoon for a painting of her.

Another of Leonardo’s famous cartoons is that of The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the Infant Saint John the Baptist, popularly known as The Burlington House Cartoon, from about 1499-1500. Again, there is no evidence that this was ever turned into a painting by Leonardo, but it appears to have evolved through other studies into his Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (c 1503-19), now in the Louvre.

His other major painting from this period was the culmination of the commission for the altarpiece of the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception of San Francesco Grande in Milan: the second version of The Virgin with the Infant Saint John the Baptist adoring the Christ Child accompanied by an Angel, or The Virgin of the Rocks, now one of the diamonds in the crown of London’s National Gallery.

This second version has been far more fortunate in its care over the last half millenium, and small improvements in composition and details bring significant enhancements. These include addition of the crucifix held by the infant John the Baptist, and removal of the palm leaves from the background, whatever they might have signified.

There is dispute, though, over the origin of this painting. Some authorities have argued that this wasn’t painted by Leonardo, but was a copy, either of the first version or of a second version which has since been lost. There is also the mystery that it appears unfinished, for instance in the right hand of the angel. It is thought by some that Leonardo painted most of this version between about 1495-99, following which the commission remained incomplete. Then between 1506-08 he returned to make some late changes, after which it was delivered and accepted.

It is also of technical interest that the prominent light brown lining of the Virgin’s blue cloak, shown so well in the detail below and distinct from the first version, contains lead-tin yellow type I.

By this time, Leonardo’s fortunes had changed. In 1498, King Louis XII of France invaded the Duchy of Milan, and Ludovico ended up a prisoner in France. Leonardo fled first to Venice, where he worked primarily as a military engineer. It was perhaps there that he made The Burlington House Cartoon, before going on to Cesena in 1502, where he served Cesare Borgia as military architect and engineer.

In 1503, Leonardo returned to his home city of Florence, where he was to create the most famous easel painting in Europe.

References

Wikipedia.

Luke Syson, Larry Keith et al. (2011) Leonardo da Vinci, Painter at the Court of Milan, National Gallery (London). ISBN 978 1 85709 491 6.
Frank Zöllner (2017) Leonardo da Vinci, the Complete Paintings, Taschen. ISBN 978 3 8365 6297 3.

At some stage in the dim and distant past, our ancestors discovered that processing some natural products created glues. The raw materials either came from boiling animal bones, hide, and other offal, or from natural exudates of plants. In turn, these came to be used as the binder for paints.

Being ancient in origin, different combinations of binder, pigment, and other substances developed, and these have left a confusion of terms, including glue tempera, and distemper. These represent a spectrum of paints, ranging from those in which only glue and pigment are used, to others which also incorporate substantial amounts of powdered chalk or lime, and are related to whitewash. I will here use the term glue tempera to include them all, as in fine art painting glue is the essential binder, and the addition of chalk or lime primarily makes them opaque, and contributes relatively little to the mechanical properties of the paint layer.

Glue tempera was used in antiquity, and outside Europe remains in widespread use. It has several limitations, including:

• ‘Drying light’, a marked colour change which occurs as the paint dries, reducing the intensity of chroma.
• Mechanical fragility of the paint layer, which is particularly susceptible to abrasion and/or cracking.
• Solution on re-wetting, so that glue tempera can easily be reworked (like watercolour), but is unsuitable for exposure to water or damp. Hardening of the glue binder is not the result of a stable polymerisation, and can readily be reversed.
• Relatively poor protection of light-sensitive pigments, leading to fading of colour over time.

In the early Renaissance, some artists used glue tempera extensively, and with great success, although surviving works have not aged as well as those painted using egg tempera or oils.

Dieric Bouts’ The Entombment from about 1450 was painted using glue tempera on linen. Although it is well over half a millenium old, its colours have sadly faded, but it is well worth seeking out when you next visit The National Gallery in London.

In the south of Europe, Andrea Mantegna was one of its great exponents, as shown in his marvellous glue tempera and gold painting of A Sibyl and a Prophet from about 1495.

Some artists, such as Joris Hoefnagel, continued to use these ancient techniques, as shown in this painting of Diana and Actaeon from 1597. This is finely executed in glue tempera and gold on vellum.

With the widespread adoption of oil paint, glue tempera almost disappeared until it was revived at the end of the eighteenth century by William Blake.

Blake painted a series of major works in what he termed tempera, which use glue as their binder. This Adoration of the Kings from 1799 shows the dulling of colour and fine cracking from his use of stretched canvas as the support.

Some of Blake’s glue tempera paintings have survived in much better condition: The Christ Child Asleep on the Cross, or Our Lady Adoring the Infant Jesus Asleep on the Cross from 1799-1800 has fared better, retaining more of his original colour.

Paintings such as Blake’s Virgin and Child in Egypt from 1810 show the fine modelling he was able to achieve in the figures. Overall, though, the condition of his glue tempera paintings is not good. It has been suggested that some of the variation is attributable to different sources of glue, which is clearly of major importance. For a long time, glues provided for this and similar purposes in painting have been referred to as ‘rabbit skin glue’, but in reality the great majority are derived from a wide range of animal products, often in uncontrolled conditions.

After Blake, the medium fell into obscurity again until later in the nineteenth century, when it was revived by movements which attempted to return to techniques of the past, most prominently the Nabis in France.

Pierre Bonnard used glue tempera very early in his career, when painting this exquisite three-panelled Japoniste screen of The Stork and Four Frogs in about 1889, as the Nabis were forming. Using more modern pigments, Bonnard has achieved very high chroma, comparable to anything in oils, and quite unlike more traditional glue tempera.

Odilon Redon experimented with glue tempera in this painting of Buddha from 1904.

Édouard Vuillard used glue tempera in a significant number of his paintings both during his Nabi period and later, for example in this view Under the Trees of the Red House from about 1905.

My final example is another of my favourite paintings in glue tempera, again by Vuillard: At The Pavillons in Cricqueboeuf. In Front of the House, from 1911, which shows how effective the medium can be.

Glue tempera remains in use today by a very few artists.

Continuing my series looking at Les Nabis, I turn next to Félix Vallotton (1865–1925), a painter and print-maker whose work I thought I knew until I started to research what was going to be just one or two articles.

I then realised that to do him any justice at all would require a series of four or more – and that’s without considering his prints. I hope that you’ll agree by the end of this series that Vallotton was a key figure in the development of modern figurative painting in the twentieth century. And that his paintings are wonderful.

Félix Édouard Vallotton was born in Lausanne, in Switzerland, and moved to Paris in 1882 to study under Jules Joseph Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger at the Académie Julian. His early influences included the paintings of Ingres, and he started painting portraits which followed the academic tradition.

Among those early works is this Self-portrait at 20 from 1885.

In the late 1880s he learned to make prints, apparently through his friendship with the Polish artist in his painting of Félix Jasinski in his Printmaking Studio from 1887. Although Jasinski was successful at the time, his work now seems to have been largely forgotten. Vallotton soon became fascinated by Japanese woodcuts, including ukiyo-e which had become so popular in the late nineteenth century. He collected them, and in 1891 started making his own woodcuts.

At this time, his painting was decidedly Naturalist in subject and style. The Sick Girl from 1892 uses a theme which was popular with Naturalist painters throughout the 1880s and into the 1890s. His model was his muse and lover Hélène Chatenay, whom he had met in 1889. They remained a couple until the late 1890s, and in 1907 she was tragically killed by a car.

Vallotton’s highly detailed realism here extends to showpiece surface reflections from the glassware and polished wood, but he curiously obscures the face of the young woman in her sickbed by reversing the bed’s normal orientation. Many of his apparently humdrum interiors have unusual twists such as this, which add strangeness which was later to be formally exploited in Surrealism. Another odd feature in this painting is that the maid who has just entered the room appears to be heading towards the viewer, and isn’t even looking towards her patient.

La Cuisinière au fourneau, or The Cook at the Stove from 1892 is another domestic genre scene drawn from Naturalism, and features Hélène Chatenay as Vallotton’s model. She stands at the solid-top range in a kitchen strangely almost devoid of the one thing that kitchens are for: food. The only edible item visible is a bunch of onions suspended in mid-air. Everything – the chairs, pots and pans, and the range itself – is spotless as if they have never been used, and appear unnatural.

In 1892, Vallotton made lifelong friendships with key members of the Nabis, including Pierre Bonnard, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Maurice Denis, and Édouard Vuillard. Because of his Swiss origins, he was dubbed the Foreign Nabi.

His most overtly Nabi painting is Bathing on a Summer Evening from 1892-93. These flattened and stylised figures representing women of all ages have been applied like collage to a background reminiscent of some of Ferdinand Hodler’s alpine meadows.

In 1893, Vallotton painted his remarkable Waltz, on which he appears to have sprinkled thousands of multi-coloured dots which give its surface a fine sparkle. Couples sweep across an unseen dance floor, embraced in a lover’s waltz, with just one of their faces clearly visible.

Unlike Pierre Bonnard, Vallotton doesn’t appear to have painted many views of the city itself, but this Street Scene in Paris from 1895 shows more Nabi style and some overlap with Bonnard’s contemporary motifs, even down to the dog wandering in the middle of the road.

Like the other Nabis, Vallotton became involved with the Natanson brothers, and their magazine Revue Blanche published a series of ten of his prints of interiors in 1898. He provides us with a glimpse into the private life of Misia Natanson (as she was at the time) in his Misia at Her Dressing Table (1898), which again shows Nabi style.

As Vallotton moved on from his brief affair with the Nabis, and the group itself disintegrated, he experimented with unusual points of view, as in The Ball from 1899. A young girl is chasing her red ball, as two women talk in the distance. This is seen from mid-air above the girl, forming a simple but compelling motif with an air of mystery.

On Dieppe Beach from 1899 reduces a scene on the north coast of France as only a printmaker could, to discrete forms filled with colour: the textured sand, sea, sky, and the simplified shapes of the three figures with a parasol.

In 1899, Vallotton married Gabrielle Rodrigues-Henriques, a rich young widow who already had three children. The following year, he was granted French citizenship. In the early years of the new century, he was to concentrate on painting more strange motifs.

In 1900, the Swiss painter and print-maker Félix Vallotton (1865–1925) was granted French citizenship. He had cut back on his prints to paint more, and the paintings that he made were no longer Nabi, but explored themes and ideas which were to be influential later in the twentieth century. He also broadened his interests: in the early years of the new century, he wrote eight plays and three novels, although none achieved much success.

Vallotton’s view of the oldest of the great bridges of central Paris, in Le Pont Neuf from 1901, is strange. Like some of the unconventional views of bridges painted in the late nineteenth century, its emphasis is on unusual perspective form, but it manages to avoid showing Pissarro’s dense throng of people, or its place among prominent buildings, and is almost unrecognisable.

It was Vallotton’s continuing series of interiors, though, which I find most fascinating. Woman Searching in a Closet from 1901 shuts out half its image with black screens and the doors to the closet, which give a strongly geometric tone. The woman, in spite of a lamp by her side, is little more than a black silhouette too, who appears to absorb the light falling on her.

The lamp itself is strange, with a shade showing some sailing ships at sea, its stand being a vertical statuette of Truth, perhaps?

A couple of years later, he painted his wife from the back as she stood searching in a cupboard of books, a work now in the Musée d’Orsay.

Maybe we should read Vallotton’s lamps more carefully. For the following year (1902), he painted this quartet of gamblers in a Poker session. Tucked away in a plush back room behind a club or bar, these four are in full evening dress, playing for stakes which could be breathtaking and bankrupting. In the centre foreground is another lamp with a patterned shade, showing sailing boats, I think.

Then in 1902-03, Vallotton painted one of the seminal records of the Nabis: Five Painters, which shows Pierre Bonnard (seated, left), Félix Vallotton (standing, left), Édouard Vuillard (seated), Charles Cottet and Ker-Xavier Roussel (standing, right).

His next views of interiors I find quite cinematic, as if stills from a movie, which perhaps reflects his very modern approach to composition and lighting, more akin to those developed by cinematographers of the future rather than painters of the past. They also appear to have been influences over the New Objectivity that developed in central Europe in the 1920s, and later American artists like Edward Hopper.

Interior with the Back of a Woman in Red from 1903 develops the framing effect of multiple sets of doors, which draw the eye deeper towards the distant bedroom. The woman wearing a red dress looks away, her skirts swept back as if she has been moving towards the three steps which divide the space into foreground and background. There are tantalising glimpses of detail on the way: discarded fabric on a settee, clothing on a chair in the next room, and half of a double bed with a bedside lamp in the distance.

There’s dispute as to whether this painting shows a Woman Reading in an Interior, as given by its French title, or a woman writing, which appears to be its translation. Vallotton painted this in 1904, and charged it with rather less mystery. But I wonder if the lower of the paintings on the wall might be one of Degas’ works showing horseriding. As usual, the single figure doesn’t show her face as she sits at the small bureau, backlit by the window and its stained glass.

Interior, Bedroom with Two Figures from 1904 is one of the last of his series of mysterious cinematic interiors, and worthy of the sub-genre of the ‘problem picture’. This is another bedroom, in which the lady of the house is standing over her maid as the latter is sewing up an evening gown for her.

The mistress stands with her back to the viewer, but her face is revealed in her reflection in the large mirror on the wardrobe at the back of the room. In that, the maid is all but invisible. These three figures appear in a perspective recession, and to the right of the wardrobe is a doorway, presumably leading through to the master’s bedroom.

In this period before the Great War, Vallotton also painted portraits, and several nudes. But the figurative painting from 1905 which I find most fascinating is this, of The Models’ Smoke Break. In an era when most adults smoked, rest periods for models, like those for other workers, were usually termed ‘smoke breaks’ even though neither woman is smoking.

Instead, one model is reclined in a pose (not a pose, as it’s a break) reminiscent of Manet’s Olympia (1863). Instead of her maid bringing her a bouquet, though, she holds a single blue flower which seems to have wilted, and chats idly to another model who sits by her feet. I wish that I could identify the paintings reflected in the mirror behind them, although I think the upper double portrait is that of Vallotton’s parents which he painted in 1886. That below looks like a coastal landscape, perhaps of Honfleur.

To follow these, Vallotton turned to paint classical myths.