In many cases, you get a misleading view of an artist’s work if you remove it from the context of their development over their career. This is most apparent in the late nineteenth century, where so many painters worked in academic style as students, and progressed through several other styles by the time that they finished painting.

One excellent example is the Belgian artist Évariste Carpentier (1845–1922), whose paintings of the war in the Vendée I featured last weekend. This weekend I’d like to set those into the context of his career, which took him from history painting, through Naturalism, to Impressionism (and/or Luminism if you wish).

Carpentier was born into a farming family in the country town of Kuurne in Belgium, in 1845. At the age of only sixteen, he started studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in the regional capital, Kortrijk or Courtrai, where he excelled, earning himself a place at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp three years later. He completed his studies there and established his studio in Antwerp in 1872, where he painted commissioned religious and history works, exhibiting from that year onwards.

Among his friends in the 1870s was Emile Claus, who for three years shared Carpentier’s studio. However, Carpentier had been suffering from an old knee injury, which worsened to the point where amputation became a threat. He shut his studio in Antwerp and returned to Kuurne, where his sister nursed him.

In 1878, Carpentier painted The Flight of Royalists, an overtly anti-Republican work showing a Royalist family fleeing from massacres in the Vendée in 1793.

The following year, on medical advice, he went to stay in the south of France to help his leg recover. In 1880, he travelled back to Paris, where a friend from Antwerp persuaded him to share his studio. At the time, the theme of the war in the Vendée was becoming popular, and in 1881 he painted further works depicting them, in particular his Refugees, which proved so popular that it was reproduced as a chromolithograph.

Carpentier had long painted country scenes and farm animals, but now seems to have started painting populated landscapes, including this view of the beach at Le Tréport, Bathing Time in 1882. Le Tréport is a small resort on the Channel coast of France near Dieppe, which had become a popular place to ‘take the waters’. At this stage, the artist seems to have been more interested in those who went to bathe than the coastal scenery around them.

Carpentier continued his successful run of paintings of fighting in the west of France during the Revolution with Routed Chouans in 1883, showing a couple of ill-equipped Royalists in retreat during the winter, to the north of the River Loire.

He also celebrated the guerilla tactics of the Royalists in Chouans in Ambush (c 1883), showing a scene from a small battle near La Gravelle, which most probably occurred in 1794. The last of those history painting which I can find is a tense indoor scene in his The Alert of 1884.

That was a momentous year in painting in France, when Jules Bastien-Lepage dominated the Salon before his health suddenly collapsed and he died in December at the age of just 36. Carpentier abandoned history painting, preferring Naturalist genre scenes, and returned to Belgium in 1886.

Although Carpentier is said to have devoted himself to plein air landscape painting once he was back in Belgium, the paintings of his which remain accessible are overwhelmingly genre narratives which are very Naturalist in style. The Foreigners shows a timeless situation: the arrival of outsiders in a close-knit community.

At the right, sat at a table under the window, a mother and daughter dressed in the black of recent bereavement are the foreigners looking for some hospitality. Instead, everyone in the room, and many of those in the crowded bar behind, stares at them as if they have just arrived from Mars. Even the dog has come up to see whether they smell right.

This was painted by Carpentier at Kuurne in 1887, exhibited in Brussels that year, and purchased from that exhibition for the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Belgium.

Visiting the Convalescent was probably painted in that same year, and shows a large group of friends and relatives visiting a woman who is convalescing from an illness – a popular motif and optimistic relative of the sick child theme. Carpentier includes many closely-observed details, including a crucifix, candles and other items on the mantelpiece, and pot plants on the window-sill.

I suspect that Carpentier painted Pigeons at around this time too. This is a more modest living room, in which a mother and two children appear to be luring pigeons in with grain thrown on the floor, so that they can presumably be killed, plucked, and cooked in the large pot seen on the traditional stove at the left.

The Reprimand is also undated but appears to be from the same period in Carpentier’s stylistic progression. This family is visibly poorer, their son sat on the corner of a simple table with one of his wooden clogs dropped onto the floor. Dressed in multiply-patched clothing, he is being reprimanded by a figure out of the image, beyond its left edge. His mother stands preparing food to the right, and his grandmother sits at the table. Even the family’s black and white dog faces towards the wall, as if in disgrace.

The one landscape from 1888 which I have found, Walk at the Seaside (Menton, 1888), is sufficiently detailed as to make it an improbable candidate for being painted en plein air, although Carpentier’s brushwork is becoming looser here. Menton is a resort on the Cote d’Azur, possibly where the artist had stayed back in 1879-80, although this view is clearly dated 1888.

Carpentier’s undated Eating in the Farmyard is even more Naturalist, its two children and goat almost photographic in appearance. This is the rural deprivation which originally inspired Naturalism.

By the end of the 1880s, the Belgian painter Évariste Carpentier (1845–1922) was painting Naturalist works inspired by Jules Bastien-Lepage, showing rural deprivation.

During the 1890s, with Naturalism more generally on the wane, Carpentier’s themes and style started to become more Impressionist and idyllic. The country people shown in After Work from about 1890 are sat around as the sun sinks slowly to the horizon.

The Turnip Washer from 1890 is among the last of his thoroughly Naturalist paintings. Alongside the farmyard birds, two figures are busy washing piles of turnips in a small and dirty pond. This won Carpentier a medal when it was exhibited in Paris.

Intimate Conversation from about 1892 is another stock Naturalist theme, of a young couple talking idly outdoors in the sun. Carpentier avoids the controversial issues which marred Bastien-Lepage’s earlier painting, and puts a prominent tear in the young woman’s apron to emphasise their poverty. This also marked the start of increasing sentimentality in his paintings.

Carpentier’s Impressionist Wild Friend from about 1893-95 is more painterly, higher in chroma, and has lost the objectivity of his earlier Naturalist paintings. Given the dense marks across the meadow, this seems unlikely to have been painted in a single session in front of the motif.

On Holiday is thought to have been painted between about 1890-95, when Carpentier himself had a young family, and may be a portrait of his wife and children dressed up for an outing to one of the beaches on the Channel or North Sea coasts.

I similarly suspect that his model for Siesta from about 1897 may be his wife Jeanne. This is a composition which was popular with Impressionists and other painters in the late nineteenth century: a woman seated in the sunshine overlooking a backdrop of a town, which may be Liège, perhaps, to which he and his family moved that year.

His undated view of an old woman Feeding the Chickens in her yard appears to have been painted at around this time.

Child Playing is claimed to have been completed before 1900, and shows a young girl, possibly one of his own daughters, playing with an improvised sailing boat made from a wooden clog.

In 1897, Carpentier was appointed professor of painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Liège. There, he introduced many students to Impressionism and Luminism.

In about 1900, Carpentier painted a series of works showing churches and related buildings in Liège, including this view of the Place Saint-Jacques in Liège. Six of these are now in the Prince-Bishops’ Palace of Liège, which was itself one of his subjects.

First Beautiful Days from about 1900-03 is probably another Impressionist view of his wife seated with the city of Liège as the backdrop.

In 1904, Carpentier became director of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Liège, a post from which he retired fifteen years later.

These last four paintings are all undated, but were most probably completed in the early years of the twentieth century, judging by their loose facture and Impressionist style.

Sunset at Ostende shows the seafront of this Belgian resort at the southern end of the North Sea, looking towards the setting sun to the west.

Carpentier painted several works showing girls and young women in gardens, including this one of a Girl and her Greyhound in the Garden.

Ladies Taking Tea shows a group of young women, possibly his daughters, taking tea on a small terrace in a town.

Children Asleep is more sentimental again, with two young children asleep by a hedge as their parents are cutting hay in the field.

Finally, De Kempen in August was painted in a heathland and wetland area on the border betweem the Netherlands and Belgium, to the east of Antwerp. It’s known as Campine in French, or De Kempen in Dutch, and lies to the east of Antwerp. Among the cattle and people is a woman artist, who has set up her easel to paint under a small white parasol.

Carpentier’s painting productivity declined after his retirement in 1919, and he died in 1922 after a long illness. He had been prolific, successful, and had been a dedicated teacher. However, with the changing tides of art in the early twentieth century, his work was quickly forgotten until interest in it revived in the later years of the century.

Virgil leads Dante into a gorge which takes them from the heretics further into the depths of Hell. As they descend, Virgil advises that they take their time so they can become accustomed to the stench emanating from those depths. This affords him time to explain to Dante the layout of the parts into which they are about to enter.

Within the next pit are three sub-divisions, catering for the sins of malice in their different forms. The first ring is for those of violent will, and is divided again into three, for homicides and bandits, for suicides, and blasphemers. Dante’s verbal description of these sub-divisions can readily become confusing, and has been turned into diagrammatic maps by several artists.

One of the most famous is Botticelli’s Map of Hell from 1480-90, in which these lower zones are shown as a funnel at the bottom, leading to the Devil himself.

Jan van der Straet’s diagram from 1587 is similar in form, and packs these zones into the narrow section at the foot.

Dante opens Canto 12 as the pair are scrambling down boulders as if in the Alps, dislodged during the earthquake which resulted from Christ’s harrowing of Hell, to meet the Minotaur from Crete.

Like so many of Dante’s beasts, the Minotaur is drawn from classical mythology. This monstrous cross between a bull and man was kept in the labyrinth on Crete, where it was periodically fed with young Greek men and virgin women. For George Frederic Watts, in his painting of The Minotaur from 1885, it represented the worst of Victorian society and its moral values: the industry of child prostitution which flourished in London at the time.

Dante and Virgil hurry past the Minotaur when they can, and continue their descent through fallen boulders and scree, to enter the seventh circle, for sins of violence. They are then hailed by one of a group of centaurs, who are armed with bows and arrows. Virgil responds that they will discuss their mission with Chiron, rather than the hot-headed Nessus.

Chiron directs Nessus to aid Virgil and Dante in their passage.

They pass along the rocks beside the damned souls, who are immersed in boiling blood to a depth appropriate for their sins. Dante recognises some as they go: Alexander the Great, Dionysius the Elder and tyrant of Syracuse, one of the d’Este family who was suffocated by his own son. Further on is Attila the Hun, Pyrrhus, Sextus the son of Pompey, and a couple of infamous contemporary highwaymen.

Virgil then leads Dante into a strange wood, whose thorn trees form the nests of Harpies. These composite creatures have the heads of humans, but the bodies and talons of birds, and live in sub-ring number two. In classical legend, the Harpies inhabited the Strophades, islands where they attacked Aeneas and his companions during Virgil’s Aeneid.

Virgil tells Dante to break a small branch from one of the trees. When he does, the tree screams out in pain, and the wound oozes blood. The tree explains that they were once people, but had taken their own lives. In this case, Dante is talking to the poet Pier della Vigna, who was ruined by envious rivals.

Dante is filled with pity for the spirit, who can only look forward to the Day of Judgement, while they are tortured by the Harpies feeding on their leaves. After learning of another two suicides from Siena and Florence, Dante moves on in profound sorrow.

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.

Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510) was one of the leading painters of the early Southern Renaissance, working in his native city of Florence. In addition to his huge egg tempera masterpieces of i (c 1482) and The Birth of Venus (c 1485), he was a lifelong fan of Dante’s writings. He produced drawings which were engraved for the first printed edition of the Divine Comedy in 1481, but these weren’t successful, most copies only having two or three of the 19 which were engraved. He later began a manuscript illustrated edition on parchment, but few pages were ever fully illuminated.

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. He also appears to have drawn a set of illustrations for Dante’s Inferno in about 1808.

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.

Prior to 1498, Leonardo da Vinci had enjoyed a settled period working in Ludovico Sforza’s court in Milan. With the invasion of the Duchy of Milan, he fled first to Venice, then to Cesena, before returning to his home city of Florence in 1503.

During this unsettled period, he seems to have been working on two main paintings: the second version of the The Virgin of the Rocks, and a new painting of the Madonna with the Yarnwinder. Although his original of the latter work doesn’t appear to have survived, there are two copies which were probably made in his workshop in the period between about 1501-07.

The first, in the private ownership of the Duke of Buccleuch in Scotland, has evidence of technical shortcomings that make it most unlikely ever to have felt the brush of the master himself, but gives some clue as to what Leonardo’s original – if it ever existed – might have shown.

The version below, in a private collection in the USA, may have been painted by Leonardo’s assistant Giacomo Salai over the same period.

Leonardo is believed to have produced the design for these paintings, as a commission for the secretary to the King of France in 1501, and a preparatory drawing by Leonardo in the British Royal Collection provides further evidence of his involvement.

Leonardo’s next surviving work is the most famous European painting, the single exhibit of the Louvre in Paris which is responsible for drawing millions of its visitors each year: the Mona Lisa.

This quite modest portrait of Lisa Gherardini (1479- after 1551?) was painted for her husband, Francesco del Giocondo (1460-1539), a Florentine merchant in silk. It was apparently made to celebrate the birth of their second son in December 1502, and their moving into their own home the following Spring.

Although small in size and almost retiring in reality, it is one of the most technically advanced oil paintings of its time. Leonardo used multiple thin glaze layers consisting largely of binder with just a little pigment to develop the subtle shadows of the flesh. This was so admired by other masters of the day that it was named sfumato, Leonardo’s smoke, for its subtlety.

But there is more to this painting that those multiple glazes of sfumato on the woman’s face: the hands, the delicate patterning and folds in the clothing, and the landscape background. Many artists have a few paintings in which everything just works right: in the Mona Lisa, Leonardo achieved perfection.

The oil paint on the Mona Lisa was still drying when the young Raphael used it as inspiration for his first female portraits in around 1505. However, Leonardo is reputed to have still been working on it as late as 1506, and some now claim that he may have continued to make final adjustments, perhaps just another fine glaze here and there, to 1513-16.

As with his Last Supper, the Mona Lisa has been copied, revisited, and parodied endlessly. After Leonardo’s death, it returned to Milan, before being sold to the King of France. It went on display in the palace at Fontainebleau, where it remained for two centuries, then it moved to Versailles and the Tuileries in Paris. After four years hanging in Napoleon’s bedchamber, it was taken to the Louvre in 1804.

In 1911, Louis Béroud, an artist who painted many works showing copyists at work in front of famous paintings in the Louvre, started painting a view of the Mona Lisa being copied, in The Mona Lisa in the Louvre. The copyist is missing, though, as if to symbolise the disappearance of the painting. It was probably this painting that Béroud was working on when the Mona Lisa disappeared on the 21st August 1911.

More sinister still is this copy of the Mona Lisa, which has been attributed to Béroud. It is undated, but was it painted before or after the disappearance of the original? Might it have been intended as a replacement for the original, or could Béroud just have used it as a substitute while he completed the painting above?

At the time, the police arrested first the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, then questioned Pablo Picasso. The painting appeared lost, until two years later, when Vincenzo Peruggia tried to sell it to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. Being something of an Italian patriot, Peruggia had decided that it was time for the painting to return to its homeland, and had smuggled it out of the Louvre under his coat. He served six months in prison, and Leonardo’s finest painting headed back to Paris.

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.

If you’ve ever left plates coated with egg around for a while, you’ll know how difficult egg residue can be to remove. No one knows when people first took advantage of this in paints, but earliest surviving examples are from late classical times. By the Renaissance, egg yolk was popular as a binder in artists’ paints, and the technique of egg tempera was used to create many of the masterpieces of the day.

Pure egg tempera technique uses the proteins, fats and other consituents of the yolk of fresh hens’ eggs as its binder; being water-based, water is its diluent. Applied thinly to an absorbent ground such as powdered chalk in a gesso, this quickly sets to form a hard if not brittle paint layer which – unlike glue tempera – can’t readily be removed by water.

Because egg tempera forms such a hard paint layer but is applied thinly, it is prone to cracking unless the support is rigid and doesn’t change dimensions over time. Early egg tempera paintings were almost exclusively made on wood, but more recently stretched canvas has been used instead. That can lead to cracks and eventual mechanical failure of the paint layer. Egg tempera on wood panel was the favoured combination for easel paintings (as opposed to fresco for walls) during the early Renaissance, particularly in Italy.

The finest paintings in egg tempera use only fresh eggs; as eggs age, particularly when they’re not refrigerated, separating the yolk becomes more difficult, and the resulting paint layer doesn’t appear as strong.

Since the nineteenth century, some paint manufacturers such as Sennelier have offered tubed paints with egg as its main binder, but with the addition of some drying oil forming an egg-oil emulsion. These have some of the properties of pure egg tempera, but are more versatile in their handling, and can be used like gouache and even, with care, like oil paints to a degree. These appear to have been derived from recipes recorded during the Renaissance.

Earliest European examples of egg tempera, such as Margarito d’Arezzo’s The Virgin and Child Enthroned, with Scenes of the Nativity and the Lives of the Saints from the middle of the thirteenth century, often incorporate extensive gilding and appear ‘primitive’. As I will show later, there is nothing inherently ‘primitive’ in the medium.

Even early paintings in egg tempera can be remarkably well preserved, such as Duccio’s Healing of the Man born Blind from the early fourteenth century. Although only a thin paint layer, the egg yolk is sufficient to preserve high levels of chroma in the pigments.

As the modelling of flesh and clothing became more realistic, egg tempera proved more than sufficient for the task.

One of the finest early works painted entirely in egg tempera is the anonymous Wilton Diptych in London’s National Gallery. Thought to have been made in France at the end of the fourteenth century, its exquisite detail would have been painted in multiple thin layers using fine brushes, much like the miniatures painted in egg tempera on vellum in the previous centuries.

But it was in Italy that painting in egg tempera reached its apogee, with masters like Masaccio, in his Santa Maria Maggiore Altarpiece from about 1428-29 (above) and Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ (below) of a decade later.

During the fifteenth century, egg tempera was progressively replaced by oils in Italy, as it had been earlier in the Northern Renaissance.

Uccello’s large panel of the Battle of San Romano incorporated some drying oils, including walnut and linseed, although still fundamentally painted in egg tempera.

By the end of the fifteenth century, many studios had changed to oils. Among the last large egg tempera paintings are Botticelli’s Primavera (above) and The Birth of Venus (below), from the 1480s. The craft labour involved in producing these large works must have been great. Although Primavera was painted on panel, Venus was on canvas, which must have made it far more manageable given its size of nearly 2 x 3 metres.

In the closing years of the fifteenth century, Michelangelo kept to the hallowed tradition of egg tempera on wood in this incomplete painting of the Virgin and Child known now as The Manchester Madonna. This shows how he painstakingly completed each of the figures before moving onto the next, and the characteristic green earth ground.

By this time, the only common use for egg tempera was in the underpainting before applying oils on top. This remains a controversial practice: performed on top of gesso ground it can be successful, but increasingly studios transferred to oils. Egg tempera didn’t completely disappear, though. With so many fine examples of how good its paintings both look and age, there were always some artists who chose it over oils.

Some nineteenth century movements which aimed to return to the more wonderful art of the past experimented with egg tempera again. In the late 1870s, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope started to paint in egg tempera, and made one of his finest works, Love and the Maiden (1877), using the ancient medium.

A later exponent who was rigorous in his technique was Adrian Stokes, who used it to great effect in this landscape of Autumn in the Mountains in 1903.

But for my taste, the greatest painter in egg tempera since the Renaissance has to be one of the major artists of the twentieth century: Andrew Wyeth. As his works remain in copyright, I recommend that you browse his official site, where you can see just how effective egg tempera can be in the hands of a great master. It may not be as popular as in the past, but egg tempera still has a great deal to offer.

In the first few years of the twentieth century, the former Nabi painter and print-maker Félix Vallotton (1865–1925) had concentrated on painting mysterious interiors, as well as portraits and other figurative works. Although those interiors often seemed to be ‘problem pictures’ hinting at narrative, I’ve been unable to find any earlier works in which he told stories from classical myths.

By 1907, when Vallotton painted his Orientalist Le Bain turc (The Turkish Bath), his figures had become very modern in appearance. With their tied-up hair, it would be easy to mistake this as a painting from fifty years later.

That same year, he started painting scenes from classical myth, here Andromeda Standing with Perseus (1907). This shows the sea monster Cetus heading for a defenceless Andromeda, as hero Perseus charges to her aid through a cleft in the black sky. He has lost his classical attribute of the head of Medusa, and here rides the winged horse Pegasus and holds a knight’s lance. The horse’s wings form an edge to the black sky as it carves through the air. Each figure is colour coded: green for the sea monster, pink for the near-victim, and blue for the hero, against a straw-coloured sea.

The following year, Vallotton broke with convention again in his painting of The Rape of Europa (1908). In his clean and simplified account, we look out to sea as the naked Europa clambers onto the back of Jupiter disguised as a brown bull. Given the long-established literary and artistic tradition of the bull being white, this can only have been a deliberate choice on the part of the artist.

In addition to mythological narratives, Vallotton started to paint more landscapes, some of which are unusual and innovative, like La Mare, Honfleur (1909), which shows a pond at night near the north coastal town of Honfleur. The black plane of the water has ripples travelling from a point at the right edge. In the left foreground is a stand of long grass and weeds bowed over in an arc, and behind the blossom on a tree glows in the dark.

Vallotton returned to the story of Perseus and Andromeda in 1910, in his Perseus Killing the Dragon, which is no sequel to his earlier work. Here he catches the height of peripateia and action, as Perseus is slaying Cetus.

Andromeda, long freed from her chains, squats, her back towards the action, at the far left. Her face shows a grimace of slightly anxious disgust towards the monster. Perseus is also completely naked, with no sign of winged sandals, helmet of Hades, or any bag containing Medusa’s head. He is braced in a diagonal, his arms reaching up to exert maximum thrust through the shaft of a spear which impales Cetus through the head. The monster is shown as an alligator, its fangs bared from an open mouth.

Honfleur in Fog from 1911 isn’t a conventional view of this small port on the north French coast, as it looks down from Mont-Joli to the west of the town centre. It captures exactly the sort of transient effects that had been the concern of Impressionism, but in Vallotton’s distinctive style.

In Coquèterie (Sauciness) from 1911, we see a young woman still undressed in her white chemise, her unmade bed behind. She looks at herself in the mirror of a small dressing table, wondering how she should dress.

In 1913, Vallotton returned to transient atmospheric effects in Night With Light Fog. Influenced by his print-making, he distils this scene into simple geometry, with almost two-thirds of his canvas the vague purple forms of the town and sky, and three simple bands below it. The lone lamppost and figure at the extreme left restore context.

He painting this Self-portrait in a Dressing Gown at a turning point, in 1914, just as the world was about to enter the Great War, and he was to enter his fifties. That is where I will start from in the next and final article in this series.

At the outbreak of war in 1914, the former Nabi painter and print-maker Félix Vallotton (1865–1925) had turned to painting unusual landscapes showing transient atmospheric effects like fog, with the simplification of a print. He volunteered for the army, although at this time he was almost fifty and was rejected because of that.

Vallotton’s The Sheaves from 1915 is one of his moving and symbolic images of the Great War. It’s late summer, harvest time, and the ripe corn is being cut and stacked in sheaves. But where are those farmworkers, whose rakes rest against the sheaves, and whose lunch-basket sits on the ground ready to be eaten? Where is the wagon collecting the harvest, and why is the white gate in the distance closed?

Then followed images of war itself. Landscape of Ruins and Fires from 1915 captures the utter destruction on the ground and surrealist displays in the sky. Vallotton returned to making woodcut prints, which he assembled into his last print series titled This is War.

In 1917, Vallotton was commissioned as a War Artist to tour and paint the front line in Champagne, in the north-east of France. One of the paintings which he made as a result of that is Verdun (1917). This shows the land burning under beams of coloured smoke, which reverses their more usual appearance as beams of light. The Battle of Verdun, fought on the banks of the River Meuse, was the longest battle of the war, ending just before Christmas in 1916 with over 300,000 dead.

Perhaps Vallotton’s most moving painting of the First World War is his view of Châlons War Cemetery from 1917, with its countless rows of crosses receding into the town of Châlons-en-Champagne. There are a total of more than 4500 French war graves from the First World War here, with other nationalities, and many more were added from the Second World War.

Like Pierre Bonnard, Vallotton visited the town of Grasse, in the hills north of Cannes on the Mediterranean coast of France. In 1918, as one of a series of sunset views, he painted Sunset at Grasse with its saturated colours.

Vallotton continued to make some figurative paintings after the war. His Blonde Nude from 1921 develops the modern look from that of Le Bain turc in 1907.

He still painted some narrative works too. When I first saw his Chaste Suzanne from 1922, I was puzzled as to what its story could be, but I think that this is a modern retelling of the Old Testament tale of Susanna and the Elders, in which the two men are trying to blackmail Susanna into being unfaithful.

In the last few years of Vallotton’s life, like some other artists, he turned to landscapes. Unlike Ferdinand Hodler, he couldn’t paint these from his balcony, but seems to have gone back to his notebooks and sketches and painted composite views, similar to the ‘reminiscences’ of earlier landscape artists.

The Old Olive Tree from 1922 could be almost anywhere in southern Europe, although the stack of cut reeds resting against the tree adds a slightly surreal effect. In the distance, the terraced fields on the hillsides are brown and parched from the summer heat.

Broom in Bloom, Avallon from 1923 shows an idyllic scene of fishing beside the river near the appropriately-named Avallon, which is south-east of Paris, towards Dijon and the Alps.

Vallotton’s view of Château Gaillard at Les Andelys was painted in 1924. The ruins of this mediaeval castle tower above this village in northern France. Les Andelys was popular with landscape painters during the nineteenth century, and had been the birthplace of Nicolas Poussin.

The last of these wonderful print-inspired landscapes shows The Dordogne at Carennac, and dates from 1925. The town of Carennac is on the banks of the River Dordogne in the south-west of France.

By 1925, Vallotton had completed over 1700 paintings and some 200 prints. He then fell ill with cancer, and died that year, the day after his sixtieth birthday. His last novel, which he had started to write in 1907, was published posthumously.

Félix Vallotton’s work is less well-known today than it merits. Like Pierre Bonnard, he emerged from the Nabi period as a distinctive and innovative artist, whose influence continues even now, and can be seen in the paintings of Edward Hopper and others.

For many, Spring is the start of the year. In the countryside around the city of Florence, as in much of Europe, it was the time when livestock could return to life outdoors, rather than being cramped in with families, when the often undernourished people could start eating again, and would give thanks for surviving another winter. Even for rich patrons of the arts like Lorenzo de’ Medici, it was a time of great relief.

What better way to celebrate Spring than with a painting by the great master Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi – that’s Sandro Botticelli to you and me? But what resulted looks, to modern eyes at least, something of a puzzle.

Botticelli’s magnificent masterwork, still known reverentially by its Italian title Primavera, is an intricate allegory based on Roman myth recorded by Ovid, not in his popular Metamorphoses, but his less well-known Fasti, a book of days.

Let me introduce the characters first, starting at the right:

• Zephyrus, the warm and moist west wind, who is borne on wings and grasps the body of
• Chloris, who looks back in fright at Zephyrus, and from whose mouth a chain of plants emerges;
• Flora, who is dressed in a robe bearing images of many different flowering plants, wears a garland of flowers in her hair, and appears to be casting flowers from within her robe;
• Venus, the mother of Cupid and (often) of the three Graces, who appears pregnant, and holds her right hand up in greeting or blessing;
• Cupid (above Venus), who is about to loose a flaming arrow from his bow, and is borne on wings;
• the Three Graces, Aglaea (splendor), Euphrosyne (mirth), and Thalia (good cheer), linked by their hands, the nearest (with her back to the viewer) being the target of Cupid’s arrow, and looks at
• Mercury, the son of Maia (as in the month of May) and messenger of the gods, who holds his caduceus up to quell a small group of dark clouds, but faces away to the left, looking up at those clouds.

As you might expect, the story behind this beautiful pastoral painting is thoroughly pagan, and all about sex and violence.

Chloris was a nymph, who was wandering in the Spring when she was seen by Zephyrus, who followed her. In her modesty, the nymph fled, but couldn’t escape the god, who of course flew like the wind after her. Boreas his brother had told Zephyrus that he could rape Chloris as a reward for stealing from Erechtheus’ house, which Zephyrus did once he had caught her.

To make amends (!) for his violence to her, Zephyrus then made Chloris his bride, and she became Flora, who enjoys perpetual Spring. Her husband stocked her garden with flowers, and made her the mistress of them. When the dew has dried in the morning, the Hours gather in their colourful clothes, collecting flowers from Flora’s garden. Then the Graces join her and bind their hair with her flowers.

Ovid also told the completely spurious story that the origin of Flora’s new name was a result of the Romans’ inability to pronounce her original name Chloris: in fact, Chloris is derived from the Greek for the colour green (as in chlorophyll), which is appropriate for Spring, and Flora comes from the Latin for flower, as in floral.

Botticelli’s masterpiece has proved influential to generations of artists since.

Bartolomeo Veneto is alleged to have painted Lucrezia Borgia in his Idealised Portrait of a Courtesan as Flora from about 1520, one of many portraits of women ‘as Flora’. Whether it is plausible that the Duchess of Ferrara would have exposed her left breast in that way is another matter, but Flora is often depicted as baring one or both breasts probably as a reference to her fecundity.

Nicolas Poussin painted Flora too, most notably in his masterpiece The Empire of Flora in 1631, which is even more complex than Primavera, and set itself as another precedent for painters. Its figures include:

• a herm representing Priapus, his phallus wreathed in the greenery of gardens and fertility;
• Ajax, falling on his sword and his spilled blood turning not into the purple hyacinth but a white carnation;
• Narcissus and Echo, the former enraptured by his own reflection, with Echo gazing longingly at him, and the narcissus flower;
• Clytie, who fell in love with Apollo and pined away into the sunflower (heliotrope);
• Apollo in his sun chariot, with a band containing the signs of the zodiac;
• Flora herself, presiding over her floral empire (detail below);
• Hyacinthus, killed by his own discus for falling in love with Apollo then turned into the flower, and Adonis, fatally wounded when hunting and turned into the anemone;
• Smilax and Crocus, unrequited homosexual lovers, who were turned into saffron and rough bindweed flowers;
• Cupid, with his quiver.

Poussin’s Empire of Flora is thus a sequel to Botticelli’s Primavera, and a wonderful collation of floral transformations from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

In about 1685, Jerzy Siemiginowski-Eleuter painted this Allegory of Spring, which refers mainly to Poussin’s painting. Flora is now aloft, with Zephyrus behind her, and signs of the Spring zodiac emblazoned in the sky. Below them is a selection of the cast of Poussin’s Empire of Flora, including Ajax falling on a spear in the centre. Birds and ‘May’ blossom set the seasonal reference.

Later, in 1712-16, came Sebastiano Ricci’s simpler Flora. Zephyrus stands behind Flora, and there are sundry winged cupids and accessory winds, as well as a display of flowers, but the intricate references to Roman myth have faded.

In the next and concluding article, I will follow the theme of Flora and Spring through into the early twentieth century.

In the previous article, I looked at how Botticelli’s Primavera influenced artists in the first couple of centuries after its creation, and how Poussin told a set of stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in his sequel Empire of Flora.

In the mid 1740s, Tiepolo painted two accounts of Flora, the first probably being The Empire of Flora from about 1743. She is here seated in a chariot being drawn by winged cupids or winds, brazenly showing off her naked body like a down-market version of Venus. There seem to be precious few references to classical accounts, or those of Botticelli and Poussin.

Tiepolo’s second painting, of The Triumph of Zephyr and Flora from 1734-35 refers to Ovid’s account, thus Botticelli’s Primavera, with Zephyrus in flight with his arm round Flora, just about to crown her with a garland. Splendid though these two paintings are, the rich mythical narrative has fallen by the wayside in preference for fleshly romance.

Fifty years later, Antoine-François Callet painted this allegory of Spring (c 1781). There’s no shortage of figures, with Flora at its centre, her breasts bared, and a rather effeminate Zephyrus under her left arm. At the lower right are the three Graces, dancing with their hands held high, but at the lower left is the goddess of the harvest Ceres, in her chariot drawn by lions. With her daughter Proserpina, Ceres was often allied with Flora in their common association with plant growth and fertility.

In the late nineteenth century, Flora and her Spring became more popular again in paintings, particularly with artists associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement. John Everett Millais’ Spring, also known as Apple Blossoms, from 1856-59 may contain subtle allusions to Primavera and classical myth.

At the far right, beside this group of elegant young women, is the scythe of Father Time. Two of the group have baskets full of Spring flowers, and three have flowers in their hair. Tempting though it may be to try to see three Graces and Flora herself, I fear that is as far as Millais went.

Others, like Arnold Böcklin, painted simpler non-narrative figures of Flora (1875), scattering Spring flowers.

Henrietta Rae at least brought the couple together in herZephyrus Wooing Flora from 1888, but in a delicate ‘faerie’ painting quite unlike either Ovid’s or Botticelli’s account.

Evelyn De Morgan’s Flora from 1894 is again a single figure removed from the narrative, although she establishes clearer visual links with Primavera.

Hans Thoma’s Spring Fairytale, An Allegory from 1898 shows a woman who must surely refer to the figure of Flora in Botticelli’s painting. She is surrounded by meadow flowers, two small fawns, and sundry winged putti.

But it’s my last two paintings, both late works by John William Waterhouse, which refer more strongly to Primavera.

In Flora and the Zephyrs, from 1898, Flora sits, arms raised, to the right of centre as Zephyrus kisses her right arm from above. With her are the three Graces (not the Hours with their colourful clothes), who rather than dancing together are gathering the flowers to braid into their hair. Other winds are seen over the treetops. I apologise for the poor quality of this image.

When Waterhouse revisited this theme more than a decade later, in his A Song of Springtime (1913), he sadly stripped away several of its narrative references, but showed Flora with breasts bared, and a skirtful of daffodils or narcissi – perhaps a cross-reference to Poussin and his figure of Narcissus in The Empire of Flora. The Graces have here been replaced by young children.

Although the strength of narrative in subsequent paintings of Flora and Spring has fluctuated, it’s a tribute to both Botticelli’s and Poussin’s paintings that 400 and 250 years later, they are still being referenced. And they remain major attractions in the Uffizi and the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden. Who says that narrative paintings are no longer popular?

From their tragic encounter with tormented souls in the Suicide Wood, Virgil leads Dante onto a barren and sandy plain, where groups of spirits are in different postures, naked under steady showers of flakes of fire. These fall on their flesh, and set the sand afire underneath them.

These groups are being punished for their differing acts of violence against God: blasphemers lie flat on their backs, sodomites are moving at all times, and usurers crouch with purses strung from their necks.

The two talk with Capaneus, a huge man who was once a powerful king and waged war against the city of Thebes, who is a blasphemer who was struck by a thunderbolt for his arrogance towards the (classical and pagan) gods.

Among the sodomites is the prominent Guelph encyclopaedist Brunetto Latini (c 1220-94), who may well have been Dante’s mentor at one time. Also identified are Priscian, a Latin grammarian, Francesco d’Accorso, a legal scholar, and Andrea de’ Mozzi, a bishop of Florence, together with three other Florentines.

Virgil explains some more of the topography of Hell, how waters originating from a statue on Mount Idaeus (Ida) on the island of Crete flow down to form the three principal rivers of Hell, the Acheron, Styx and Phlegethon. The statue of the Old Man of Crete has a gold head, silver arms, brass torso, and iron below, apart from a terracotta foot. This follows the mythical ‘ages of mankind’ in descent, and its tears feed the waters of Hell.

Dante is led down towards a vile monster with the face of an honest man but the body of a serpent, its body seemingly tatooed with knots and whorls, and a sting at the end of its great tail: this is Geryon, in classical myth a cruel king who was killed by Hercules, and here forming an image of fraud.

Before reaching that monster, the pair see some usurers on the ground. These are identified as contemporary members of prominent Florentine and Paduan families known for their riches and usury.

Virgil then jumps onto Geryon’s back, and encourages Dante to have sufficient courage to join him there. Once they have both boarded, Virgil tells Geryon to fly off, and the monster carries them down through a hundred spiralling turns to the foot of a high cliff.

Virgil and Dante are now in circle eight.

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. He also appears to have drawn a set of illustrations for Dante’s Inferno in about 1808.

Bartolomeo Pinelli (1781-1835) was a Roman illustrator and engraver who provided illustrations for a great many books, and specialised in the city of Rome. He made 145 prints to illustrate Dante’s Divine Comedy, most probably in the early nineteenth century.

Francesco Scaramuzza (1803–1886) was an Italian painter who specialised in mythological and historical narratives. He became quite obsessed with Dante’s Divine Comedy, and for much of his career worked on producing paintings and drawings of its scenes. He worked mainly in Parma, in Italy.

Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770–1844) was the greatest Danish sculptor, and one of the foremost in Europe. He worked most of his life in Italy, although the Thorvaldsens Museum with much of his work is in the city of Copenhagen, in a place of honour by the Christiansborg Palace. From humble origins, he trained at the Royal Danish Academy of Art, where he was extremely successful. He arrived in Rome in 1797, and remained there until 1838, when he was welcomed as a returning hero in Copenhagen.

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.

Watercolour is the most inappropriately-named of the popular painting media. Oil paint uses drying oils as its binder, egg tempera uses the yolk of eggs, and glue tempera various types of glue. Water is, of course, not the binder in watercolour, but the diluent, used to turn blocks of hard pigment and gum binder into liquid paint. Water is also the diluent for several other media which aren’t called watercolour, including fresco, glue and egg tempera.

The binder distinctive to watercolour and gouache is gum derived from trees, in particular gum arabic, made from the hardened sap of acacias. This was probably introduced progressively during the Middle Ages, at least in Europe, when it was produced in Arabia and west Asia. Gum arabic is now almost entirely produced in Sudan and neighbouring areas.

Like the animal glues in glue tempera, gum arabic redissolves when wetted. It doesn’t form a ‘permanently’ bonded paint layer in the way that drying oils or egg tempera do.

Watercolour paints were made by grinding pigment with water containing gum arabic, then forming the paste into small dried cakes. Varying amounts of filler, such as chalk, can also be added to the paint to reduce the intensity of the colour, and to make it opaque when applied. Gouache paints are intended to be fully opaque, but undergo significant colour shift when they dry. ‘Pure’ watercolour paints normally have some degree of transparency, while those which are more opaque are often referred to as bodycolour, gouache, or opaque watercolour.

There is no absolute distinction between watercolour and gouache, nor between paintings which use the white of their paper support as their whitest tone, with transparent paints, and those in which chinese white paint is the whitest tone, with opaque paints.

The former transparent technique has become associated with an ‘English School’ which is neither English nor a coherent school. The latter opaque technique has also been used extensively in illustration and design, which has only added to its patronising treatment by those who consider that they are practitioners of ‘pure watercolour’ technique.

In reality, many of the greatest watercolour artists use both transparent and opaque watercolour paints, and form highlights using ‘reserved’ white from the paper support and with opaque white paint.

Small works incorporated into manuscripts and books – miniatures – were probably the first true watercolour paintings, although they are not usually included in the history of the medium. Further to the east in Asia, inks based on dyes and water were long predominant, and ‘true’ watercolour painting wasn’t introduced until much later.

Watercolour first became established as a major painting medium in the Renaissance, most particularly in the paintings of Albrecht Dürer, one of the first major and most innovative watercolour artists.

Dürer travelled extensively through Europe, making views such as this fine landscape of the town of Trento, which is the more remarkable for its extensive use of reserved white space and transparent paints. Works such as this were therefore effectively the foundation of the ‘English school’ by a German.

These topographic views were the precursors to a whole industry which was to create similar views of towns and countryside throughout Europe over the following centuries. Dürer uses a range of sophisticated techniques, including the use of layers, and there are passages which appear to have been painted over when the underlying paint was still wet – wet on wet or wet in wet technique.

Dürer also initiated the use of watercolour in specialist genres – here the recording of wildlife, which he extended to include birds and botanical painting.

At about the same time, artists in the southern Renaissance were turning to watercolour to lay out works to be implemented in other media, such as fresco and tapestry. Some of the most remarkable early examples are Raphael’s ‘cartoons’, although some were probably painted in distemper (glue tempera) rather than gum-based watercolour.

Raphael’s The Miraculous Draft of Fishes (c 1515-16) is among the earlest large and complete paintings using opaque watercolour. Because of limitations in the manufacture of paper at the time, it was made on many sheets which have been mounted on canvas.

The Old Masters also used the medium when painting in front of the motif, to create studies for use when painting finished works in oils, for example, as shown in this landscape sketch in mainly opaque watercolour by Rubens.

Gainsborough was another oil painter who made many fine watercolour studies. Today, some appear to have been painted in a limited range of colours, although that may be the result of fading of the fugitive pigments which were used. Because watercolour produces a very thin and essentially unprotected layer of paint, it leaves pigments vulnerable to discoloration from atmospheric pollutants and fading from exposure to light. As a result, framed watercolours are often protected behind glass.

By the end of the eighteenth century, there were some artists – particularly those like Giovanni Battista Lusieri who made landscape views – who worked almost entirely in watercolour. His large panorama of the Bay of Naples had to be painted on six sheets of paper, and uses a combination of transparent technique and opaque paints in extreme photorealism.

As people started travelling more, and upland and coastal areas were visited by those in search of the ‘sublime’, increasing numbers of artists turned to watercolour for making topographic views. Although most were formulaic if not illustrative, artists like Alexander Cozens used watercolour in more sophisticated paintings.

Cozens developed specialist techniques, such as keeping ‘reserved space’ to let his white paper ground show through, wet on wet as well as wet on dry application of paint, and scratching out. He also employed both transparent and opaque paints.

Throughout Europe, watercolour became a rival to oil paint for landscape painting. Those making oil sketches en plein air tended to gravitate around Rome and in southern Europe, where the weather was more consistent, and its warmth allowed oil paint to become touch-dry far more quickly. In northern Europe, particularly the British Isles, cooler temperatures and shorter breaks of good weather made watercolour sketches more practical, and this helped the development of the medium as the choice of most landscape painters there.

The main innovators were a trio of major artists: Thomas Girtin, John Sell Cotman, and JMW Turner. Between them, they transformed not only watercolour painting, but painting as whole.

Of the three, it was probably Thomas Girtin who was the most brilliant, but he died very young in 1802, having progressed rapidly from traditional views to more lyrical works, such as The White House at Chelsea (1800), in just a few years.

In the brief lull between the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, JMW Turner started to travel beyond the British Isles, and was already using a range of specialist techniques when he returned to paint his dramatic views of the Alps.

Turner’s later watercolours (and oils) dispense with the rigorous form which had been the mainstay of the painter of views, and influenced subsequent painting in all media throughout Europe.

Despite the snobbish attitudes of some purists in Britain, judicious use of opaque watercolour with transparent technique brought some breathtaking results, such as John Brett’s highly detailed view Near Sorrento (1863).

Meanwhile in France, Eugène Delacroix not only made studies for finished oil paintings using more opaque paints, but he used a range of advanced techniques with them, as shown in his spirited Horse Frightened by Lightning (1825-29).

During the nineteenth century, watercolour became the preferred medium for most women painters, who had previously often used pastels. Considered to be much less messy than oils, and less dusty than pastels, watercolour paint is easier to remove from skin and clothing, and its use of water as the diluent and cleaning solvent was seen as more socially acceptable.

Gustave Moreau was one of the greatest French exponents of watercolour during late nineteenth century. He seemed able to switch between oils and watercolours with ease, such that this watercolour version of The Apparition (c 1876) was shown at the Salon, following which he painted a version in oils.

Moreau’s The Fall of Phaeton (1878) shows rather better his almost comprehensive variety of techniques.

North America also saw a rise in the use of watercolours by both professional and amateur painters. In addition to their specialist use by the bird painter John James Audubon, and by some of the Hudson River School for landscapes, Winslow Homer was among the foremost practitioners. He developed his techniques and style during his stay in the English fishing community of Cullercoats in 1881-82, when he painted almost exclusively in watercolour.

Many of his paintings from that period are fine examples of the use of advanced techniques, here including both transparent and opaque paints, rewetting and blotting to remove paint for highlights, scraping, application of wax to resist the adherence of paint, and the use of pure gum solution as a glaze.

By the end of the nineteenth century, watercolour had become established as the medium of choice for many important artists, as well as the most popular among amateurs. It was widely available in cakes which were most suitable in small portable kits for painting en plein air, in pots, and tubes. Brush suppliers offered a wide range of specialist brushes designed to hold water and facilitate watercolour techniques. Most importantly, it had displaced the use of oils in most educational establishments, ensuring that future generations of painters would see watercolour as a first class medium, not just an elaborate means of drawing.

Marie Spartali Stillman, one of the last survivors of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, developed elaborate layered techniques which are still not fully understood. In this particular painting, Love’s Messenger from 1885, she has also incorporated tempera and gold paint, together with more opaque technique. Apparently her use of layers was painstaking, and prone to failure, which sometimes forced her to abandon paintings.

Paul Cézanne turned to watercolour for some of his most remarkable paintings late in his career.

Cézanne’s most unusual watercolours are late landscapes, such as his Almond Trees in Provence (1900). These have no parallel among his works in oils, and typically have very large areas of reserved space, with selected forms such as the almond trees here painted using flares of concentrated colour.

John Singer Sargent was one of the most prolific and accomplished watercolour painters after JMW Turner, and used a full range of specialist techniques in his extremely painterly works.

Sargent’s watercolours of Venice, here Scuola di San Rocco from about 1903, appear to have been painted with masterly ease.

Many of his best watercolours are rich in marks, which only make sense when assembled into the whole.

Paul Signac painted many brilliantly-coloured views of the south of France using various combinations of watercolour and crayons. Some of these, such as Antibes (1917), also have substantial amounts of reserved space, although still far less than Cézanne’s late watercolour landscapes.

Since then, watercolour has shown its flexibility in supporting new styles and techniques. A glance through the work exhibited at any of the major watercolour societies’ exhibitions will reveal a huge range, from realist pure transparent methods to abstract mixed media.

The most recent technical development has been the adoption by one paint manufacturer of a replacement binder for traditional vegetable gum: QoR paints are based on a synthetic polymer Aquazol® which has been used extensively as an adhesive and consolidant in the conservation of fine art. Coupled with synthetic varnishes and more lightfast pigments, it is likely to result in watercolour paintings which are far more robust than those of the past.

From 1503 to 1506, Leonardo da Vinci lived and worked in Florence, where his major project and one of the most substantial of his artistic career was a mural of the Battle of Anghiari for the Palazzo Vecchio there. This was to be accompanied by a painting of the Battle of Cascina which was painted by Michelangelo.

Leonardo received this commission soon after he arrived back in Florence, in the autumn of 1503, and worked on the cartoon during 1504. He seems to have been painting it from scaffolding in 1505, but took leave of absence from his work there in 1506, and never returned to complete it.

For a long time, it was claimed that this oil painting, known as the Tavola Doria, was a trial panel made by Leonardo immediately before starting work on the wall. It is, though, more likely to have been a copy made by another artist at the time. It gives an idea, though, of the tightly-composed small group which Leonardo chose to paint.

As Peter Paul Rubens couldn’t have seen Leonardo’s original, this undated version of The Battle of Anghiari attributed to him was probably made from the latter’s preliminary drawings, and is almost certainly more extensive that the mural itself, if the evidence of the Tavola Doria is to be believed.

Tragically, Leonardo’s wall painting was destroyed in the middle of the sixteenth century. There have been many subsequent attempts to reconstruct what it might have looked like, but the Tavola Doria and Rubens’ fuller treatment are probably the best that we will get.

In 1506, Leonardo returned to Milan, which was still under control of the French. He went back to Florence temporarily in 1507, trying to sort out his late father’s estate.

The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne does appear to be an original painted by Leonardo, although it is unfinished in several places, and hasn’t survived the years well. There is also great controversy over when it was painted, and for whom. It can be seen as a late culmination of a series of earlier studies and possibly paintings, dating back to the Burlington House Cartoon from around the turn of the century, and is therefore dated to anywhere from 1503 to Leonardo’s death. It has at some time been widened by the addition of a strip of oak at each side.

Most striking about this painting is its strongly pyramidal composition, which was to influence several of Raphael’s paintings, and to become one of the defining features of composition during the High Renaissance in Italy. Numerous artists also made copies, attesting to its wide recognition as a masterpiece at the time.

There is greater mystery over whether Leonardo ever painted Leda, but there is good evidence that he arrived at at least one and probably two compositions which were then turned into finished paintings by others.

Leda and Her Children, probably painted between about 1508-13, and now attributed to Giampietrino, may be a realisation of one design. In this, Leda kneels among her children conceived in part from her union with Jupiter in the form of a swan. The children are Castor and Pollux, and Helen and Clytemnestra. This work is likely to have been painted in Leonardo’s workshop in Milan, possibly under the direct supervision of Leonardo.

Investigations have shown that under this painting are traces for a copy of The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne shown above, which implies its panel has had an unusual history.

There are several different versions of what appears to have been Leonardo’s other composition with Leda, including this, now attributed to Cesare da Sesto, known as Leda and the Swan, and dated to about 1505-15. Here she is standing as her four babies hatch from eggs to the left, her arms cradling the neck of the divine swan.

In the autumn of 1513, Leonardo moved to live much of his time in the Belvedere in the Vatican, in Rome.

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.

This week’s Nabi painter is less well-known, but curiously appears to have been one of the ‘purest’ of the group: he is Paul-Elie Ranson (1861–1909). Although there are now plenty of images of his paintings and other art available, remarkably little biographical information is online. This is in part due to his early death: unlike most of the other Nabis who lived until well after the First World War, Ranson died when he was only 44.

He was born in Limoges, close to the very centre of France and far from the popular artistic haunts of the nineteenth century. He started his training in decorative arts, in his home city.

One of Ranson’s earliest paintings, made in 1885 before he had even left Limoges, I think, is his curious The Vanity of Mice. Influenced by Vanitas paintings and his interest in ‘witchcraft’, three black mice scurry over some books of arcane knowledge.

By 1886, Ranson had moved to Paris, where he became a student at the Académie Julian, alongside others who were about to become Nabis. His first contact with those who were to form the group was with Paul Sérusier, in 1888.

In about 1890, Ranson found himself the creative leader of the Nabis, and was responsible for introducing many of their quirks, including their private argot, and for assigning each of the members a name. He dubbed himself le nabi plus japonard que le nabi japonard – the Nabi who was more Japanese than the Japanese Nabi (who was Pierre Bonnard). Each Saturday afternoon, the members gathered in his apartment in Paris.

Although Ranson doesn’t appear to have painted many overtly religious images, he was certainly interested in religions and their philosophies. Christ and Buddha from about 1890 is one of his first paintings to use its iconography, with Christ on the cross and an interpreted image of a Buddha.

Witches around the Fire from 1891 is an example of a more recurrent theme in his paintings, in which he showed visions of witches’ ‘sabbaths’ with erotic undertones.

One motif which appears in several of Ranson’s earlier works is a nude bent forward to grasp her feet, as shown in his very Nabi Lustal from 1891.

An early preference for blue turned that into his Blue Bather, also from 1891.

Ranson’s Hippogriff from the same year shows a legendary chimeral creature which traditionally consisted of the upper parts of an eagle on a horse’s hind parts. It had been popularised in engravings by Gustave Doré, based on Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, which may have been Ranson’s point of reference.

In 1892, Ranson, with the help of Sérusier, Bonnard and Vuillard, designed sets for a theatrical production of Rimbaud’s Bateau Ivre.

Witch with a Black Cat from 1893 returns to his theme of witchcraft, this time without any hint of eroticism, and in a style becoming increasingly decorative.

Two Girls Next to the Head of Orpheus from about 1894 appears to refer to Gustave Moreau’s well-known painting Thracian Girl Carrying the Head of Orpheus on His Lyre (1865) which had been exhibited in the Salon of 1866.

Around 1895, Ranson painted series showing groups of women in various circumstances, including Four Women at a Fountain.

With his training in decorative arts, Ranson made designs for needlecraft and tapestry. Spring or Women Under Trees in Bloom is reminiscent of Maurice Denis’ earlier The Ladder in the Foliage (1892), but was made in 1895 in needlepoint. Its delicate textures reinforce its Nabi patterning.

Ranson, like the other Nabis, also made several vertical canvases to resemble Japanese screen paintings, as in his Woman Standing Beside Railing with Poodle from about 1895. This shows increasing influence of Art Nouveau.

This article concludes my short account of the career and paintings of the Nabi painter and artist Paul Ranson (1861–1909), which I started in my previous article about him.

Diana the Huntress near a Lake from the period 1894-96 is one of Ranson’s relatively few mythological works. True to tradition, Diana is distinguished by the “hunter’s” moon in her hair, and her collection of dead game. But Ranson stops short of depicting the Ovidian myth of the death of Actaeon.

During the final years of the Nabis, his paintings became increasingly pastoral and realist, as in his Three Bathers among the Irises from 1896, one of several variations on this theme.

He still held to Nabi style in some works, such as this Sitting Woman from about 1898. She sits in a barren garret, a stocking dangling from the window, attending to her nails. Ranson has imposed fluid patterning on the bare floorboards and beams.

Saint Anthony and His Pig from about 1898 reveals Ranson’s steady departure from Nabi style, is another narrative painting, and a religious work. It shows the association between Saint Anthony/Antony (the Great) and a pig, peculiarly combining visual reference to his more famous temptation in the nude lying on the grass near him.

Legend claims that, during his early period as a hermit, Saint Anthony was a swineherd. Another legend claims that he healed a pig, as a result of which he is the patron saint of domesticated animals. Yet another legend claims that a pig was responsible for him keeping to the appointed hours for prayer, and that led in turn to the contracted term tantony pig, which has come to mean the smallest pig of the litter.

By the turn of the century, Ranson was in a confluence of decorative design, Art Nouveau, and the remains of his Nabi style. This is most apparent in this extraordinary design for upholstery based on Water Lilies from about 1898.

He experimented with the traditional medium of distemper (glue tempera) in this Japoniste painting of Digitales in 1899.

Ranson was a skilful painter in pastels, as shown in his Fallen Stars from 1900, in which he also used gouache. This refers back to his earlier paintings of witchcraft, and is one of his few nocturnes.

Apple Tree with Red Fruit from 1902 is perhaps one of Ranson’s better-known works from late in his career, and shows the high chroma which he used.

Some of his landscapes from this time are surprisingly realist, even conventional, such as his Three Beeches from about 1905.

At about the same time, he took similar trees to tell the folk tale of Little Red Riding Hood (c 1905). The black wolf here is lying in wait for the girl wearing a bright red hat in the distance, who is on her way to visit her granny in the forest.

Two Nymphs Surprised by a Rider from about 1905 is a pastel painting which revisits the theme of nude bathers by a pond, here with references to classical mythology.

Ranson’s Bathers from about 1906 is another late variation on the same theme, which adds a Sphinx at the left and strong colour contrasts in red and green.

In 1908, with his experience of the Académie Julian, Ranson and his wife Marie-France set up their own school, the Académie Ranson. It enjoyed the support of other Nabis as teachers, including Maurice Denis and Paul Sérusier. It developed a good reputation, and eventually closed in 1955. Among its many alumni are the sculptor Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) and the painter Tamara de Lempicka (1898-1980).

Paul Ranson died in Paris on 20 February 1909, at the very young age of 44.

Each Spring, travelling circuses around the world break out of their winter quarters and migrate to cities to bring entertainment to their masses. Much-changed now from their form in their heyday in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were among the earliest forms of mass entertainment, long before movies.

It was the Romans who not only coined the name, but transformed older and purer athletic events into spectacle soaked with sweat and blood, as recreated by Jean-Léon Gérôme in his Circus Maximus of 1876. This shows four-horse chariot racing taking place in the largest of all the stadiums in Rome, capable of holding a crowd of over 150,000.

These lived on in fairs throughout the Middle Ages and later, but it wasn’t until the late eighteenth century that the modern circus started to take shape. Itinerant street performers, riders and others who visited fairs were organised by pioneers like Philip Astley and Andrew Ducrow into coherent performances. These events took place in buildings like the London Hippodrome, and the Amphithéâtre Anglais in Paris. In the early nineteenth century, some took to travelling from city to city, performing under canvas tents centred on the ‘Big Top’.

Among the early painted accounts of this form of entertainment is Honoré Daumier’s caricature of The Parade, or Street Circus from about 1860. This shows a group of mountebanks, theatrical performers, musicians, and clowns who drew large crowds. Their facial expressions and gestures are theatrically exaggerated, but the narrative less apparent. The crocodile suggests it may be one of the Pulcinello or Punch and Judy shows which were popular among street performers in several European countries, including France and North America.

Painting the action from inside the Big Top is a great challenge, particularly at a time when it wasn’t possible to photograph moving bodies in such low light.

One of Émile Friant’s earliest works is this 1881 painting of The Entrance of the Clowns, which shows the interior of the Big Top at the moment that the clowns, acrobats, and other entertainers parade. The artist has carefully put the foreground into relatively sharp focus and detail, and left the background blurred and sketchy, as may have been influenced by photography.

Following James Tissot’s return to Paris, he included in his successful series of large paintings about the modern woman this view of Women of Sport (The Amateur Circus) from 1883-5. This derivative of the circus seems to have used notable members of the public as its performers, and Tissot places even greater emphasis on the audience reaction.

In 1872, Ferdinand Beert (1835-1902), popularly known as Fernando, started a circus in Vierzon, France, which he moved to Paris the following year, and into purpose-built premises on the edge of Montmartre in 1875. Cirque Fernando became popular among artistic and literary circles, including the French Impressionists. Fernando’s wife encouraged this by allowing artists free access to both rehearsals and performances, so that they could sketch freely.

I’m not sure whether Jean-Louis Forain’s atmospheric painting of The Tight-Rope Walker from about 1885 is set in Cirque Fernando, but it’s skilfully composed with the dramatically-lit performer in the upper half, with a packed house below her.

One of the artists who frequented the Cirque Fernando was Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. In his The Rider at the Cirque Fernando of 1888, Fernando’s son Louis is the ringmaster looking at one of his equestrian performers, who is riding side-saddle in a typically skimpy costume.

Georges Seurat’s The Circus from 1891 is one of the large masterpieces of Divisionism, and may also depict a scene in Cirque Fernando. Its deep internal contradiction is the artist’s choice of a painstakingly slow and mechanical method of painting, for a motif which is full of spontaneous movement and action.

Many circus performances were aimed at adult audiences, with mixed action, danger and more than a pinch of the erotic. This is captured well in Boris Dmitrievich Grigoriev’s 1918 painting In the Circus. Curiously, the following year Lenin expressed his desire that in post-revolutionary Russia, circuses should become the people’s art-form, and they were soon nationalised there.

Isaac Israëls’ undated watercolour At the Circus dispenses with the action in the ring, and looks at the reaction to that among the audience.

By the early years of the twentieth century, circuses were an established if itinerant part of society. Children in neighbourhoods engaged in circus games, as shown so delightfully in Heinrich Zille’s lithograph Circus Games from 1924.

They also influenced art. To conclude this first of two articles, I show one such example by Lovis Corinth.

Corinth’s second painting of The Temptation of St Anthony after Gustave Flaubert (1908) is based on Flaubert’s account of the temptation of Saint Anthony, and focusses on a scene in which the Queen of Sheba appears in the saint’s visions. With her – and shown here – is a train consisting of elephant, camels, and naked women riding piebald horses. This new Saint Anthony is a much younger man, and is surrounded by this outlandish circus of people and animals.

Having looked at the spectacle of the circus, in tomorrow’s second and concluding article I look at the performers themselves.

In the previous article, I looked at the spectacle of the circus, as seen mainly during the late nineteenth century. Even in circuses which worked year-round in their own permanent buildings, performers were notoriously itinerant. And in those circuses which travelled around and operated under tentage, the life of performers was often little different from that of a vagrant. This inspired a few artists to look beyond the glitter and gasps of amazement, at individual performers, and those who worked in circuses.

In 1879, Degas embarked on one of his major works, concerned entirely with one woman, the Cirque Fernando performer Miss La La (or Lala), who startled audiences by her aerial act, suspended only by her teeth. Even given free access to her rehearsals, this was a formidable challenge, and for once we have good insight into how he tackled this. He started with a series of drawings, looking at different views and compositional possibilities.

He then refined those into what I believe was his first pastel sketch of Miss Lala at the Fernando Circus (1879), now in the Getty. He has squared it up with a pencil to make the image easier to transfer to his next study.

This later version of Miss Lala at the Cirque Fernando (1879), now in the Tate, makes small adjustments, such as bringing her right leg round more, as if her hips had been rotated, and adds some background.

In the final version, Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando (1879), painted in oils and now in London’s National Gallery, Degas has changed his mind about her legs, rotated her hips the other way, and drawn her feet higher up behind her.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was another of the French Impressionists who painted the Cirque Fernando, and in the same year he completed Acrobats at the Cirque Fernando, which shows the sisters Francisca and Angelina Wartenberg in the ring during a performance.

Ludwig Knaus shows the scene Behind the Curtain of a smaller itinerant show in 1880. Performers were often colourful in both their costume and character, with many incongruities – such as the clown seen in the centre feeding a baby, and looking straight at the viewer.

What happened In the Wings at the Circus, the subject of this painting from about 1887 by Toulouse-Lautrec, often wasn’t intended for the public. Animal and human cruelty were common, and circus owners were often only interested in making money, and cared not for their human or animal performers.

Georges Seurat’s earlier, and less well-known, painting of a circus showed not the action in the ring, but a sideshow of ill-paid musicians, in Parade de cirque (Circus Sideshow) from 1887-88.

Then in 1888, Fernand Pelez exhibited at the Salon his most ambitious work: a vast five-section canvas over six metres (twenty feet) in length, showing the reality of life as an acrobat. This currently exists in two versions: one roughly half that size and less finished in parts, and the work exhibited, which is in the Petit Palais in Paris.

Above is the smaller version, and below the full-sized one.

Grimaces et misères: les Saltimbanques (Grimaces and Miseries: the Acrobats) follows the pattern of a traditional ‘ages of man’ image, in which the figures increase in stature from the start at the left edge, to the centre, then diminish again with advancing years, to the right. Les Saltimbanques had been a successful show in the theatre fifty years earlier, and had lived on in entertainments staged in fairs and circuses around France. Contemporary performers attested to the faithfulness and accuracy of Pelez’s painting.

Rosenblum summarises the painting as presenting “a glum view of the contrast between the goals of rousing entertainment in a popular Parisian circus troupe and the actual melancholy and isolation of the performers.”

Les Saltimbanques was featured and illustrated in the French weekly magazine l’Illustration, which also identified many of Pelez’s models, who were performers in fairs and circuses.

Toulouse-Lautrec captured similar distress in his lithograph of La Clownesse assise, a seated Clown, from 1896. Making people laugh doesn’t necessarily make your lifestyle happy at all. By this time, Cirque Fernando was in financial distress, and shortly went bankrupt.

Some of Charles Demuth’s early Precisionist works were drawn from entertainment, here The Circus from 1917.

Vilmos Aba-Novák, the first major modern painter in Hungary, made a series of works looking at the lives of Circus Performers, from about 1930. Here they are clustered around the caravans in which they lived.

Aba-Novák’s later Before the Show from 1934 shows another eclectic mixture of horsewomen, ringmaster, and ‘midgets’ waiting to enter the ring.

My final painting of the backstage of a circus is Lorenzo Aguirre’s Clowns from 1934, with three performers sharing a cramped dressing-room, their costumes draped over the suitcases with which they travelled. It was a strange and unsettling life.

In their descent into the depths of Hell, Virgil and Dante have just entered circle eight, which is for those who committed fraud in its broadest sense. This consists of what Dante refers to as malebolge, best translated as rottenpockets, a series of ten deep trenches each of which caters for a different type of fraud. Dante compares these to the defensive earthworks which surrounded the outer walls of castles of the day.

Virgil leads Dante into the first of these rottenpockets, where souls are being lashed by demons to keep them moving constantly. These are pimps and seducers, among whom is a Bolognese man, a Guelph, who pimped his sister, the beautiful Ghisolabella, for political gain.

The pair move on past other sinners being scourged, where they see Jason, who seduced then abandoned the young Hypsipyle, queen of Lemnos, and later did likewise with Medea. They then enter the second rottenpocket, for flatterers, who are wallowing in excrement.

They find a contemporary figure from Lucca, and see Thaïs, a Greek courtesan who notoriously flattered her partners. She is now covered in filth and utterly crabby.

In the third rottenpocket, Dante and Virgil come across Simonists, corrupt religious leaders, who are trapped headfirst in rock holes, their protruding feet being toasted with flames. The key figure here is Pope Nicholas III, who initially confuses Dante with Pope Boniface VIII, who happens to be in the same rottenpocket. Pope Nicholas was known for his nepotism, which included appointing three of his family as cardinals.

Virgil carries Dante on to the fourth rottenpocket, reserved for soothsayers. Their heads are turned to face backwards, so that the tears streaming from their eyes wet their buttocks.

Virgil identifies several of them from classical times, including the Theban Tiresias; Dante recounts how he became a soothsayer after he had twice changed gender, as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The list concludes with three near-contemporaries: Michael Scot, a scholar and astrologer to Emperor Frederick II, and two well-known Italians.

The fifth rottenpocket they find to be filled with corrupt public officials, or barrators, who are immersed in a sea of boiling pitch, and further tormented by a pack of vicious devils known as malebranche, ‘evil-claws’.

The latter are armed with long hooks, which they use to push the souls down into the pitch, much as you might push down lumps of meat which rise to the surface of a stew. Those devils are so evil as to threaten Dante, so Virgil whisks him on to the next rottenpocket, for hypocrites.

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.

Giotto di Bondone (c 1267–1337) was one of the great masters who bridged between the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. He was born near Florence, and is reputed from about 1296 to have painted a cycle of frescoes in the Basilica di San Francesco d’Assisi, in Assisi. This is hotly disputed though, and these may have been painted by Cimabue instead. The scene of The Devotion of the Devils from Arezzo shows what may, directly or indirectly, have been an inspiration to Dante, although I don’t know whether there is any evidence that the poet ever visited Assisi.

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.

Since the decline of egg tempera as the preferred medium for easel paintings in the Renaissance, oil paints have dominated those used by professional painters. This is due to their longevity and versatility. When appropriate techniques are used, oil paintings readily survive over five hundred years, and are the closest we have come yet to a permanent medium.

At the heart of every oil painting is a robust paint layer consisting of pigment particles bound in polymerised and oxidised drying oil, traditionally derived from a vegetable oil. The most common binder is linseed oil, extracted from the seed of the common flax plant, and there are alternatives obtained from safflower, poppyseed and walnut, and beyond Europe in perilla, soya bean and tung.

It has been claimed that poppyseed oil was used as a binder in Afghanistan in about 650 CE, but its subsequent use is doubtful. The use of other drying oils became established in northern European art by about 1250; although those were known in and around the Mediterranean since ancient times, their ability to oxidise and form a paint layer wasn’t exploited there until much later.

The other key ingredients for these drying oils to be used widely in painting are suitable diluents and solvents: this required the distillation of ‘spirits’, which didn’t start until the twelfth century, when mineral spirits, turpentine and lavender oil started to become available.

The earliest examples of substantial oil paintings are altar frontals and other church decorations in Tingelstad and other locations in Norway, and date from around 1275. The frontal shown above is a modern reconstruction which demonstrates their sophistication. Over the following century, purification and treatment of drying oils improved, and various treatments were discovered to accelerate the process of drying, which could otherwise may take weeks to reach the stage at which a layer could be overpainted.

There is evidence of the early use of pre-polymerisation by sunlight and heat to initiate the drying process, and the admixture of siccatives to catalyse the chemical reactions involved in drying. Pre-polymerisation also has the advantage that it thickens the oil, and when pigment is ground in, results in more viscous paints which are easier to apply with brushes.

The first great masterpieces painted in oils started to appear in the early fifteenth century across the ‘low countries’ from northern France through Belgium and the Netherlands. Workshop assistants prepared the paints for each day’s work, by grinding pigment with the oil until the paint consisted of fine pigment particles dispersed evenly in the oil binder, using a type of pestle conventionally known as a muller, normally on a flat, smooth block. The muller and block were later made of glass, but in early workshops are likely to have been fashioned from polished hard stone.

Some started to add resin thickeners to alter the viscosity of the oil paint. Although there was some trade in more exotic resins from southern Europe and elsewhere, the main resin found in early oil painting in northern Europe is pine resin, which was melted into the oil before mulling in pigment. Resins also have the advantage that they adjust the optical properties of the paint layer, and were discovered to enhance the ‘look’ of paintings as a result.

Oil paintings were generally constructed in layers, on a wooden support with a ground of chalk. Some layers used opaque paint made by adding lead white pigment or filler, others were more transparent colour. Four or more layers were not uncommon, and gave the painter the ability to build up colour and texture in a highly controlled way.

By the middle of the 1400s, oil painting had been used in northern European art for over 200 years, and in the workshops of the van Eycks and their contemporaries it had flourished in ways simply not possible with other media such as egg tempera and fresco. But in Italy, with the southern Renaissance well under way, drying oils were still not used as a primary painting medium. Over the next half century, Italian painters didn’t just catch up with developments in the north, but – in some respects at least – took the lead in technical development.

The introduction of oils to Italy was largely the result of the paintings of Antonello da Messina (actually Antonello d’Antonio), who was probably a pupil of Niccolò Colantonio (c 1420-1460) in Naples, and was in contact again with northern European techniques when he was in Venice in the 1470s. Colantonio seems to have learned oil painting from Flemish artists who were brought to the court of Alfonso V of Aragon, who was King of Naples from 1442-1458, and an enthusiast for northern European paintings.

Surprisingly, with Venice the trade centre that it was, early Italian painters in oils appear to have used predominantly linseed oil as their binder, and pine rather than more exotic resins, in accordance with practice in the north. As you can see, Antonello’s paint layers are very smooth in finish, do not show any brushstrokes or impasto, and generally have a minimum of only fine cracks.

As early as 1501, Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione started to use impasto, initially in fine details of fabrics, metalwork, and jewellery, where those details were applied in the upper layer of paint.

Over the next decades, such impasto passages were used by many Italian artists, and found their way to northern Europe by way of Martin van Heemskerck, who visited Rome between 1532-36.

Two Northern artists advanced the repertoire of techniques significantly. Those of Peter Paul Rubens are best seen in his oil sketches and studies, which he produced in preparation for finished works, and occasionally as paintings in their own right. He achieved great economy of effort by making as few virtuoso marks as was necessary to form each object within the painting, and often left an uneven paint surface where there was shallow impasto, brushstrokes, and occasional incised sgraffito.

For this he relied on careful control of the viscosity of his paints, and on his great and masterly skills in applying that paint.

In the five hundred or so years since drying oils had first been used to make artistic paintings, virtually no use had been made of the surface texture of the paint layer. The expected standard for oil paintings was a smooth surface finish, although some painters had (controversially) left brushmarks and other evidence of the painting’s making. It was Rembrandt who changed this, particularly in the later part of his career.

His surface textures are usually richest in passages depicting fabrics, decorated metals, and the like, but in his David and Jonathan (1642) even plain textiles bear fine brushmarks. This was well before the date usually accepted for his radical late style.

The artists’ colourman may have first appeared as a skilled assistant in a big workshop, then realised that they could make a living from supplying stretched and primed canvases, prepared oil paints, and other materials to several smaller workshops, individuals (who might be wealthy amateurs, perhaps), and eventually even to larger workshops.

It had long been known that excluding air from drying oils prevented them from drying, and someone discovered that oil paint would remain fresh when it filled a small bag, such as a pig’s bladder. By the late 1700s, artists’ colourmen throughout Europe were selling their oil paints in these bladders.

In Quadrone’s witty Every Opportunity is Good (1878), we’re given a detailed look at the painter’s paraphernalia, including several paint bladders on the low table behind the easel, and one on the floor. Although painted well after the introduction of paint tubes, bladders remained relatively cheap and popular quite late in the 1800s.

Paint bladders transformed oil painting, most of all because they made oil paint portable. No longer was the painter constrained to using oil paints in the studio, but they could take a lightweight easel, small panels or canvases, and some bladders of paint outdoors, and paint en plein air, with the landscape in front of them.

Experimentation with new techniques has sometimes caused problems in the paint layer. When innovative artists like JMW Turner broke from the traditional and empirical rules of oil painting, the results often suffered in longevity. This is shown well in one of Turner’s most famous paintings on canvas, The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up (1839).

Turner applied high chroma paint quite thickly on top of already thick and layered paint. Although this produces breathtaking effects, as shown in this detail, it will result in problems with cracking unless those superficial layers dry more slowly than layers underneath, a phenomenon embodied in the well-known ‘fat over lean’ rule. Here they have clearly not done so, and patchy areas of cracking are the result.

Some areas are worse affected, with apparent wrinkling probably resulting from the slumping of impasto, and undried paint exuding. This is most probably the result of Turner’s use here of bitumen or asphalt, which inhibits the oxidative ‘drying’ of linseed oil, and commonly leads to problems in the paint layer. Sadly bitumen was a popular pigment in the 1800s, although its adverse effects were well known.

JMW Turner was also one of the first painters to make use of the latest pigments, including chrome yellow, which he purchased in tubes rather than bladders. It was John Goffe Rand who patented what he termed “metal rolls for paint” in 1841. At first, these were seen not so much as a means of increasing the portability of oil paints, but for their cleanliness and lack of odour.

Adoption among professional painters at the time was patchy: these new tubes were expensive, and required filling equipment which many of the existing colourmen did not see was necessary. Oil paint continued to be sold in bladders for several decades afterwards, although newer pigments offered by the larger and more innovative colourmen often only came in tubes.

Coupled with a lightweight portable easel and canvas-carrier, tubed paints made oil painting truly portable, and outdoor landscape painting became enormously popular in Europe and North America.

By the start of the twentieth century, artists like the virtuoso John Singer Sargent were able to paint quite substantial works in the confines of a small bedroom, something impossible in the past. I doubt that his work was as well-appreciated by the housekeeper.

Advances in industrial chemistry in the twentieth century have opened up new potential in oil painting. Alkyds have been added to traditional drying oils to accelerate drying even further. Rising concerns with the toxicity of solvents such as turpentine used in traditional oil painting have brought water-miscible oils, a supension of fine particles of oil paint, still with their drying oil included. Carefully packaged with a series of additives such as surfactants – detergents, as they are more commonly known – these are extremely convenient in use.

These give the illusion that, thanks to modern chemistry, oil and water do mix. Deepening understanding of oil paints among conservation experts and the array of scientists who now support them has raised a new issue in oil painting technique: the threat of soap formation in the paint layer.

The triglycerides which make up drying oils will only polymerise into a robust paint layer in the right conditions – they require oxygen, for example – and very slowly. Given different conditions, they can turn into soap, which has none of the physical properties required for a paint layer to last many centuries.

Some apparently well-constructed paint layers in oil paintings have been seen to saponify to such an extent that they drop off the ground in large sheets, resulting in total loss of the painting. In other cases, deeper saponified layers can remain liquid, and ooze from holes and cracks which open in dry surface layers.

We clearly still have much to learn about oil paint, painting with oils, and how to make paintings which will last as long as those of Rembrandt and van Eyck.

In 1512, Leonardo da Vinci turned sixty. In the autumn of the following year, he moved to live in the recently-constructed Villa Belvedere in the Vatican, in Rome. This had been designed by Pollaiuolo as a summer retreat from the heat of the main palace, and had just been linked by a long court, the Cortile del Belvedere, with the Vatican Palace.

This must have been an exciting period with both Raphael and Michelangelo active at the time. Raphael was still working on his Stanze there, the “Raphael Rooms”, whose frescoes are generally considered to be his greatest works. Michelangelo had just completed his masterpiece fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and was promptly commissioned by the new Medici Pope Leo X to reconstruct the façade of the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence, and was busy with drawings and designs for that work before it was abruptly cancelled in 1520.

One painting of Leonardo’s which is thought to date from this stay in the Vatican is his striking portrait of Saint John the Baptist, from about 1513-16. Investigations have demonstrated that it was painted in a very similar way to the Mona Lisa, and visually it takes the delicate sfumato of the earlier portrait to its ultimate conclusion.

Paul Barolsky has argued that it is based on the opening verses of the Gospel of Saint John (the apostle this time, of course) in which John the Baptist’s role as a witness to God’s light is expounded. The raised hand and serene smile, surely another reminder of the Mona Lisa, have become popularly quoted, although less known are the details obscured by its darkened varnish: the crucifix which parallels the raised index finger, and camel-skin robe cradled in his left arm.

Just before Christmas in 1515, Leonardo attended the meeting of Pope Leo X with King Francis I of France, who had just recaptured the city of Milan. The following year, the artist entered the service of King Francis, and retired with his friend and apprentice Count Francesco Melzi to a manor house, Clos Lucé, close to the royal residence at Château d’Amboise, on the bank of the River Loire. He died there on 2 May 1519.

There are no paintings which have been safely attributed to Leonardo from those final years, but there is a controversial candidate in the world’s most expensive painting, Salvator Mundi. If painted by Leonardo himself, it is thought that was after 1507, and may have been during those years of retirement in France.

Of all the works which have been claimed to be painted by Leonardo, this presents the greatest problems. Associated with a work from which engravings were made in the seventeenth century, its provenence proper doesn’t start until 1900, when it was thought to be a copy after a work by one of Leonardo’s assistants, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, who died in 1516. When auctioned in 1958, it wasn’t seriously considered to be an original by Leonardo, but was bought again in 2005 by a New York art historian, who had it restored in 2007.

It was only following that restoration that this was presented as a painting by Leonardo’s own hand, and exhibited as such in London’s National Gallery in a temporary exhibition in 2011. On the strength of that, Christie’s in New York sold it at auction on 15 November 2017 for $450.3 million to the Abu Dhabi Tourism & Culture Authority.

The painting that remains is, whoever its creator, a shadow of its former self, particularly in the head, which appears to have lost much of its original paint layer and been overpainted poorly. One plausible suggestion is that Leonardo produced a cartoon which was then used by his studio assistants as the basis for their paintings. At best, then, the hands might have been painted by Leonardo’s own hand. This controversy is unlikely to be settled for a long time to come.

By the time of his death, Leonardo had been a great influence over his studio assistants, close associates, and other leading artists of the day.

Many of those who had worked in Leonardo’s studio proved very competent painters, but hardly compare to the Master himself. For example, Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, generally known as Il Sodoma, painted The Three Fates in about 1525.

More significant are the changes which took place in the paintings of Raphael. Here, for example, is his magnificent Madonna della seggiola (Madonna of the Chair), painted in 1513-14 when both he and Leonardo were working in the Vatican.

Leonardo’s paintings were already revered by artists during his life, and continue to influence even today. His Last Supper, for instance, remains the benchmark. In about 1546, Jacopo Bassano took that formal composition and added informality by loosening the groups of apostles and relaxing their postures and activities. But there’s no mistaking its pictorial reference.

More general enthusiasm for the work of Leonardo waned, though. It wasn’t really until the twentieth century that the Mona Lisa became so generally revered, or attracted such crowds. Over the last century, general knowledge about Leonardo’s artistic and many other accomplishments has grown considerably, and he has at last achieved recognition as the genius that he undoubtedly was.

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.

One of the Nabis who seems to be remembered for but a single painting is Paul Sérusier (1864–1927), who is also claimed to be a “pioneer of abstract art”. He was certainly unusual among the Nabis for his style, which was closer to that of Gauguin than the rest of the group. In this and the next article I will try to discover more about his paintings.

Sérusier was born and studied in Paris. In the middle of the 1880s, he attended the Académie Julian, where the Nabis were starting to form as a movement. But unlike the others, in 1888 he left the city and went to live and work in the artists’ colony at Pont-Aven in Brittany. There he met and befriended Paul Gauguin, who had not long returned from his visit to Martinique; later in 1888, Gaugin stayed with Vincent van Gogh in Arles.

Early in 1888, Sérusier painted The Weaver, a fine realist portrait of a weaver at work on his loom, looking into the light.

Shortly after that, Sérusier painted his most famous work, The Talisman (also 1888) at Pont-Aven, under the close supervision of Gauguin. This was explained as being a ‘landscape with Le Bois d’Amour in Pont-Aven’, but it is now widely considered to be a radical move towards abstract art. Sérusier returned to Brittany in the summers of 1889 and 1890, and local motifs dominated his art until the early 1890s.

It was the Nabis who gave this painting its name, adopting it as a sort of religious icon. Despite that, it stands unique among their art for its unusual treatment of a landscape and doesn’t appear to have been used by them as a model for other paintings.

Sérusier’s later paintings in Brittany were far less radical, and show different post-Impressionist influences. His Landscape at Le Pouldu from 1890 experiments with Cézanne’s constructive strokes, which are most prominent in the foliage of the trees.

His Seaweed Gatherer from about 1890 again uses constructive strokes to build the geometric forms of haystacks and fields. A lone man is bent double behind a low stone wall, apparently gathering seaweed, which is strangely concealed from view.

Sérusier apparently started work on Washerwomen while still at the Académie Julian in 1886, but is thought to have completed it as late as 1897. Its style is strongly influenced by Gauguin’s work during his visits to Pont-Aven, and there is little evidence of his early realism or of constructive strokes, suggesting that a date of around 1888-90 is more probable.

From about 1890, Sérusier became more integrated with the Nabis, often meeting and working in the Paris studio shared by Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard and Maurice Denis. He was dubbed le nabi à la barbe rutilante, ‘the Nabi with the shiny beard’.

In 1890, Sérusier painting this humorous Portrait of Paul Ranson in Nabi Costume. Adopting almost mediaeval style, Ranson, known for his religious paintings, is cast in the role of a bishop clutching an ornate crosier and reading from an illuminated book.

I hadn’t realised that wrestling was a local sport in Brittany, where it’s known as gouren, but in 1890-91, Sérusier showed a bout taking place in his painting of Breton Wrestling. This almost died out after the First World War, but was revived in the 1930s and is currently flourishing there.

In 1892, Sérusier joined Maurice Denis and other Nabis in designing sets for a theatrical production of Rimbaud’s Bateau Ivre.

Although still one of the Nabis, Sérusier remained close friends with artists with whom he had worked in Pont-Aven, largely followers of Gauguin. Among them was Émile Bernard (1868-1941), who by 1893 had allied himself with Symbolists such as Odilon Redon, and travelled to Italy and the Middle East. I presume that Sérusier must have accompanied him at least as far as Florence, to paint this Portrait of Emile Bernard in Florence (1893).

This work also marks a period in which Sérusier experimented with painting in tempera on canvas, presumably to return to pre-Renaissance style, something reflected here in his Giotto-like perspective. However, he doesn’t appear to have adopted original tempera technique as well. The bridge shown is the Ponte Vecchio, and the prominent dome is that of the Duomo by Brunelleschi, who was the pioneer of modern linear perspective.

The Snake Eaters from 1894, another work in tempera on canvas, is one of Sérusier’s most puzzling paintings. It seems to show a cultic religious ceremony taking place in the woods of Brittany, but apparently refers to the writings of Gabriela Zapolska, a naturalist Polish author who lived in Paris from 1889, and may have been in the same artistic circles.

The last of Sérusier’s tempera works appear to have been made in the mid 1890s, at about the time that he used that medium to paint The White Cow (c 1895). The cloud-like blossom on the tree and textured grass are quite unlike his earlier use of constructive strokes.

Probably from the same year is this ink and gouache painting of a Breton Woman Sitting on the Seashore (1895), in the style of Gauguin.