In the first of these two articles about the Nabi painter Paul Sérusier (1864–1927), I looked at a selection of his works up to 1895, including his famous Talisman, viewed by many to be a pioneering abstract painting. This article completes my account by considering his mature style as the Nabi group was dissolving at the end of the nineteenth century.

Before the twentieth century, buckwheat was a major crop throughout Europe. Sérusier’s finely detailed painting of the Buckwheat Harvest from 1899 shows an elderly couple engaged in cutting their crop and setting it into stooks. Despite its name, buckwheat isn’t a relative of wheat, but closer to sorrel and rhubarb, as might be apparent from its red stalks. This could be almost anywhere in Europe, but I suspect is in Brittany, where the crop is still grown because of its tolerance of short summers.

His Wheatfield from about 1900 could almost be a pendant, although quite different in composition. The lower half shows rich detail in the tares at the edge of the field, with the wheat itself forming a golden band above. This is similar to some of the banded compositions of Félix Vallotton, and others, which were created during the same period.

Sérusier’s later landscapes contained more detail too, as shown in this View of a Village from 1906, with its extraordinary sky. Two men are walking to work, pushing their barrow and carrying a pick. Behind them is a woman, probably on her way to spend the day washing for others.

His landscape painting of Plane Tree Hill from 1907 is more modern in its appearance, with flattening of its perspective and simplification of detail, although its brushstrokes never become constructive. It’s still a world away from The Talisman of nearly twenty years earlier.

Sérusier continued to explore cultic ceremonies in the woods in his later figurative paintings, including Women with White Veils Bathing from 1908. This mixes classical figures, some very blonde, wearing white robes in an unearthly forest, and a distant clearing lit in brilliant gold.

In 1908, Sérusier’s longstanding friend and colleague Paul Ranson and his wife Marie-France set up the Académie Ranson in Paris. Sérusier gave up his time to teach there from 1908-12, and continued to help later too.

Throughout his career, Sérusier appears to have painted from what he saw in life, and this example of a Still Life with Bottle and Fruit from 1909 shows how in those works he remained realist, even down to modelling surface effects such as the reflections on the bottle.

Important exceptions to this are three paintings which he made in about 1910, of which Golden Cylinder is one; the Musée d’Orsay last year acquired a second, titled Tetrahedrons, and the third, Origins, remains in a private collection. This coarsely-textured work shows a golden cylinder glowing over a nighttime view of the sea and heaped cliffs to the right.

Sérusier’s later writing suggests that these three paintings were an attempt to use Symbolism to reformulate the close connections between humans and the cosmos around them. It can be no coincidence that he was actively involved in teaching at the time.

The artist’s wife, Marguérite Sérusier, was an accomplished decorative artist, and is shown in his Madame Sérusier with a Parasol from 1912. This is unusual for being an experiment in painting with distemper on paper, which may account for its dull colours.

In 1913, Sérusier painted a series of related works in his Synchronies in colours. Synchrony in Green (1913) is a still life with that colour as its theme, contrast being provided by three lemons.

The Corydon Shepherd, from the same year, is one of Sérusier’s few classical narrative paintings. Corydon, whose name probably derives from the Greek name for the lark (bird), was a stock name for shepherds in classical literature. The most prominent of several Corydons, to which Sérusier refers here, is a shepherd in Virgil’s Eclogues, who falls in love with a boy named Alexis – the two figures shown in the right of this painting.

As a result of his experience teaching in the Académie Ranson, Sérusier published a book ABC of Painting in 1921.

In his later years, Sérusier’s paintings returned to styles more akin to those of the late Middle Ages. Tapestry (Five Weavers) from 1924 shows five women working on various stages of a tapestry, from winding the wool to hand-weaving. As none of the figures is holding the all-important scissors, there is no evidence that the artist intended to allude to the Fates here.

Music, or Saint Cecilia on the Harpsichord, painted in 1926, is one of Sérusier’s last works, and shows the patron saint of music playing a harpsichord, an instrument which was probably invented in the late Middle Ages.

Paul Sérusier died in Morlaix, France, in 1927.

Did he make abstract paintings? I’m not convinced that The Talisman is either abstract or even Sérusier’s work, but a landscape painting made by the close collaboration of Gauguin and Sérusier, in which its forms are strongly motivated by objects in the physical world, including trees, other vegetation, and a house, together with reflections on the surface of a river. It is so unlike any of Sérusier’s other paintings that Gauguin’s role as his mentor must have been significant if not dominant.

Sérusier came much closer to truly abstract paintings in his series in 1910, Golden Cylinder, Origins and most of all Tetrahedrons. But these appear to have been Symbolist explorations of geometric form, and in any case by that time Picasso had already painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), and he and Georges Braque were in the throes of analytic cubism. Pure abstract paintings by František Kupka, Robert Delaunay and others were exhibited from 1912 onwards.

Of all the Nabis I have looked at so far, Paul Sérusier was by far the most experimental, but remained firmly rooted in reality.

I put quite a lot of effort into researching, composing, and publishing articles here, but sometimes that effort comes back to bite me. Last week, I published two articles about quarantine flags in macOS. I don’t normally use emojis in my posts here, and very seldom in their titles. But in this case, I wanted to include the international Quarantine flag, known as Flag Lima, with black and yellow chequers. That is the flag still flown from ships in harbour when they remain under quarantine, before being allowed free entry into a port. It would have been very appropriate to my two articles.

So I reached up for the Emoji & Symbols viewer at the right of my Mac’s menubar, and browsed through the large display of flags among the emoji listed. There was no Flag Lima to be found.

Fortunately, that window supports search, so I put in the word yellow. There is no plain yellow square in any of the Unicode code points which would have sufficed.

I did, though, see the Reminder Ribbon, which seemed quite appropriate given the behaviour of quarantine flags in macOS. It’s also – and here you may need to suspend your disbelief for a few lines – bright yellow, in reference to the song Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree from the early 1970s, which was the cue for the first modern use of a folded ribbon as an awareness symbol.

If anything, that was even better: yellow for quarantine (think Yellow Fever, one of the old reasons for quarantine of ships), a ribbon for awareness and memory – just perfect for quarantine flags in macOS.

The first of my pair of articles published here just as I was about to leave the house on Thursday morning. The ribbon had mysteriously changed colour to blue, which was the colour of my language when I noticed what had happened.

So just what is the colour of Unicode code point U+1F397? How could WordPress possibly have found me a blue ribbon when everywhere else it’s yellow?

The answer is that the Unicode standard fails to define that emoji’s colour. It could be anything from black to green. Seriously. The official Unicode character properties for code point U+1F397 don’t even mention colour. Blue is just fine as far as the standard (a significant word in this context) is concerned.

I appealed to Emojipedia, a wonderful resource on all things emoji, where it showed me that some implementations are actually pink. Microsoft, Facebook and LG think that’s fine.

The infuriating thing is that wherever I look, even on Wikipedia, this ribbon is yellow, except on my own blog articles. And, unlike with some Unicode emoji, there’s no character modifier which allows me to set the colour, I just get whatever I’m given.

I’ve long had my doubts about the ability of emoji, particularly those included in Unicode, to support even the vaguest emotional communication. This only goes to show how flawed they are. So I’m sorry if you were somewhat mystified by the appearance of unrelated emoji in the titles of those two articles. It wasn’t me, it was a standard which in this case doesn’t appear to define anything meaningful.

However pastoral the landscape looks, life for the shepherd (and shepherdess) is seldom as peaceful as it’s made out to be. This weekend’s two articles look at the depiction of shepherds and shepherdesses in paintings. I start with their role in stories.

Ever since the domestication of the sheep well over ten millenia ago, people have been caring for flocks, moving them between grazing, helping care for and protect young lambs, and selecting those to go for meat. With sheep often inhabiting more rugged and remote terrain, the shepherd’s life is often isolated and challenging.

Shepherds feature in ancient myth and legend in many different roles. Two of the more unusual are those of the young Aesculapius, and the love of the goddess Diana for Endymion.

Richard Dadd’s unusual watercolour of The Infant Aesculapius Discovered by Shepherds on a Mountain (1851) shows a rare motif in visual art: the god of medicine Aesculapius as an infant being raised by a goat, with the help of a couple of shepherds. Dadd omits a snake which was an essential part of the story, as it accounts for the serpent which winds it way around the Aesculapian staff.

Endymion was an Aeolian shepherd according to classical Greek myth. Although accounts differ, there are threads which run that Selene, the Titan goddess of the moon (in Roman terminology, Diana), fell in love with Endymion, when she found him asleep one day. Selene/Diana asked Zeus to grant him eternal youth, which resulted in him remaining in eternal sleep. In spite of his somnolence, Selene/Diana still managed to have fifty daughters by him.

In this beautiful pastoral watercolour by Walter Crane, Endymion is seen, fast asleep, in a meadow. Diana is in her other role, as hunter, with her dogs, bow and arrows. Endymion’s flock of sheep is in the distance.

Corydon, whose name probably derives from the Greek name for the lark (bird), became a stock name for shepherds in classical literature. The most prominent of several Corydons is a shepherd in Virgil’s bucolic poems the Eclogues, written around 40 BCE, who falls in love with a boy named Alexis, as shown in the right of Paul Sérusier’s painting of The Corydon Shepherd from 1913.

Shepherds have several important roles in Judaeo-Christian religious writings too, appearing in both the Old and New Testaments.

Their first appearance is in the story of the brothers Abel and Cain in the Old Testament book of Genesis. They were the first two sons of Adam and Eve, and when young adults came into conflict. Cain was the older, and became a ’tiller of the soil’, while his younger brother Abel was a shepherd. Cain became jealous of Abel, whose offerings to the Lord were better received than Cain’s. So Cain took Abel out into one of his fields, where he killed him and buried his body.

Hans Andersen Brendekilde’s Cain gets on with his Work in the Field after Killing his Brother Abel, from 1896, shows Abel’s flock in the distance, with an eagle flying over them, and the shepherd’s dog pining for his master at the left. Abel’s lifeless face still looks up from his grave, as Cain stares down at him.

Christian teaching and literature is particularly rich with references to shepherds, particularly in metaphor and parable. These start with the birth of Christ, and continue throughout his ministry.

In the account of the nativity of Christ in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 2, verses 8-15, an angel appeared to the shepherds around Bethlehem and announced the nearby birth, as shown in Jules Bastien-Lepage’s The Annunciation to the Shepherds of 1875.

This might serve as the artist’s painted manifesto, showing how he built on tradition rather than discarded it. It strikes compromise between the gilding and Renaissance appearance of the angel, the rural realism of the shepherds who have come from Millet (see the next article) rather than Bethlehem, and the wonderfully controlled looseness and gesture of the darkened landscape. He wastes not a brushstroke in telling its simple story, in the almost averted facial expressions, the arms frozen in surprise, hands which have just been tending sheep, even their bare and filthy feet.

Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Angels Appearing before the Shepherds from about 1910 adopts a more radical approach in his mixture of loose brushstrokes, rubbings, and scumbled passages close to Symbolism. Its colours are closely limited, with a single small patch of orange at the lower right, indicating a small open fire, amid an abundance of blues and a few greens. The angels at the left are so ethereal that they could at any moment dissipate like a puff of smoke, and the three shepherds are almost insignificant by comparison.

After the annunciation to them, the shepherds go to pay homage to the infant Christ in adoration, as shown in Jacopo Tintoretto’s The Adoration of the Shepherds from about 1578-81. This starts his magnificent series depicting the life of Christ in the Sala superiore of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice.

Tintoretto takes the conventional (even a little hackneyed) scene of the nativity and adds a second story. Within this, his references stay with tradition: downstairs is an ox and an ass, a cockerel, even a peacock. The Holy family are naturally upstairs, where the infant Christ really does look like a tiny, newborn infant. At the very top, peering through the tumbledown roof, are angels. There are visual links to the crucifixion in the ladder at the foot and cruciforms in beams of the roof.

One of Charles Le Brun’s last paintings is another remarkable depiction of The Adoration of the Shepherds from 1689, the year before his death. Here he achieves a marvellous luminosity not seen in his earlier work.

Murillo’s The Good Shepherd from about 1660 refers to a metaphor used pervasively in Christian teaching, that of Christ as the good shepherd of his flock of Christians. Unusually, though, the artist depicts Jesus not as an adult but a child, holding the crook of a shepherd in one hand, his other hand stroking the back of a sheep, with the rest of the flock in the distance. The crook transfers symbolically to the bishop’s crosier.

Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s The Good Shepherd from 1616 is even more worldly. A contemporarily-dressed shepherd is being attacked by a wolf, as he tries to save his flock, which are running in panic into the nearby wood.

It’s more unusual to see the Virgin Mary as a shepherdess, but this was a theme which Miguel Cabrera painted in several of his works, including this delightful Divine Shepherdess painted in oil on copper in about 1760. A rather amusing twist is the head of a monster at the extreme right, apparently scaring one of the sheep. There is a knight flying down to slay it using a fiery sword.

The best-known saintly shepherdess, at least in France, is Joan of Arc, who is depicted in several paintings seeing her calling vision when tending a flock of sheep.

Léon-François Bénouville’s Joan of Arc Hearing Voices, probably painted between 1845 and his early death in 1859, shows her wide-eyed surprise on being called in that mystical experience. This shows her accompanying visions in the sky: Saints Margaret, Catherine, and Michael are here worked into the cumulus forms heaped up over a town ablaze in the distance, itself a visual link to the wars between the English and French, and perhaps to Joan’s own later martyrdom. Instead of her crook, Joan holds a distaff for spinning wool, linking her to a product of the sheep in the flock behind her.

Shepherds also play important supporting roles in epic poetry, such as Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered. Eugène Delacroix’s wonderful painting of Erminia and the Shepherds from 1859 shows an episode in which the ‘pagan’ heroine Erminia, dressed as the warrior Clorinda, becomes lost, and chances on a family of shepherds tending their flock. The family are taken aback, and their dog has rushed out to bark at the intruder.

Henry Fuseli’s The Shepherd’s Dream from 1793 tells a story of fairy elves bewitching a peasant, from John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost (1667), to which Fuseli had been introduced when a student. This shows a scene in the poem when the fallen angels in the Hall of Pandemonium (in Hell) are compared to the fairies who bewitch a peasant with their music and dancing:
… fairy elves,
Whose midnight revels by a forest side
Or fountain some belated peasant sees,
Or dreams he sees, while over head the moon
Sits arbitress, and nearer to the earth
Wheels her pale course, they on their mirth and dance
Intent, with jocund music charm his ear;
At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds.

Fuseli transforms the convention of these fairies dancing on the ground, and instead they swirl through the air above the sleeping shepherd. One of the fairies is touching the shepherd with his wand, to maintain his sleep. At the lower left, a fairy has pulled a mandrake root, which has transformed into a tiny homunculus, which is now standing. At the far right, sat on the steps, is the small figure of Queen Mabs (or Mab), who is responsible for bringing nightmares.

Tomorrow I will leave narratives behind, and concentrate on shepherds in the landscape, and as subjects in their own right.

The first part of this account of shepherds and shepherdesses in paintings looked at their role in stories, from the earliest classical myths to epic English poetry. This second and concluding article looks at paintings of shepherds in landscapes, and in their own right as the motif.

Nicolas Poussin’s elaborately-composed ideal landscapes often feature shepherds and their flocks. His sublime Landscape with a Calm from about 1651 – arguably one of the greatest landscape paintings in the European canon – does so twice, once in its foreground, although technically the figure is a goatherd, and again on the other side of the lake, where disproportionately large sheep mix with a herd of cattle at the water’s edge.

After Poussin’s lead, many landscape painters included shepherds and their flocks in their staffage.

Painting shepherds as an important part of the motif, or even as the theme of a painting, was more unusual until the nineteenth century. When Heinrich Bürkel and other artists left the towns and cities of northern Europe to go and paint in the countryside around Rome, some started to pay more attention to the shepherds as people.

Bürkel’s Shepherds in the Roman Campagna from 1837 has an almost documentary quality, in the rough and dusty peasants slumped on their horses and donkeys. In the foreground a couple of ewes are looking up at their lambs being carried in a pannier, and a dog is challenging a snake on the roadside.

Their cause was taken up by Jean-François Millet, in pioneering social realist paintings such as his Seated Shepherdess from about 1852. His figures lack fine detail and are formed in a more painterly manner, as precursors to the ‘impression’ which was to come to the fore during the 1860s and 1870s. The flock of sheep are formed quite gesturally into a few vague masses, the head of one resting on the low bank on which the shepherdess is seated, just to the left of her right knee. The trees behind merge quickly into a dense texture, losing their individual forms.

Millet even painted shepherds and their flocks at night, here in The Sheepfold, Moonlight from 1856-60. This beautiful work shows a shepherd working his dogs to bring his flock into a pen on the plain near Barbizon. He is doing this under a waning gibbous moon, which lights the backs of the sheep.

His Shepherd Tending His Flock from about 1862 was most probably painted during showery weather, under a marvellously luminous sky. This older shepherd is fortunate enough to be wearing an old sou’wester-style hat and weatherproof cloak. His sheep look quite thin and scrawny, and are feeding on the stubble left after harvest, implying the painting was set in the early autumn.

For some artists, shepherds were still part of a romantic fantasy, though.

The great animal painter Rosa Bonheur visited Scotland in 1855, during the final phases of the Highland Clearances, which drove much of the inhabitants away, usually to graft and poverty in the lowland cities, or to emigrate. She avoided getting embroiled in such controversies, and met Queen Victoria, who was already an admirer of her work. Bonheur later developed her sketches and studies into finished paintings, including The Highland Shepherd (1859).

Constant Troyon’s On the Way to Market from the same year does at least have greater veracity as well as its outstanding backlighting. Once again, young lambs are looking out from the panniers on a donkey.

This thirst for the harsh truth of life as a shepherd even affected the short-lived but brilliant narrative painter Henri Regnault. When he won the Prix de Rome, he successfully sought dispensation from study in Italy, instead travelling to Spain and North Africa, where he painted this social realist portrait of a Castilian Mountain Shepherd in 1868.

Although Jules Breton’s paintings of shepherds aren’t perhaps as grittily realist, this portrait of The Shepherdess from 1870 delves deeper into the personality of his model, and her working life, in anticipation of Naturalism. Her blouse may be clean and white, but the rough coat or cloak which she carries must have been handed down through several previous owners.

It was Jules Bastien-Lepage who struck the most delicate balance between Millet’s social realism and sickly romanticism, in this enchanting painting of Roadside Flowers or The Little Shepherdess in 1882. Like the weeds behind her, this little girl has a wide-eyed and slightly sad beauty. Although her clothing is visibly tatty, her face and hair are idealistically clean, in keeping with a sentimentalism rather than the objectivity characteristic of true Naturalism.

By the time that Pissarro came to paint his flocks of sheep – some of the few Impressionist paintings which reflected on the social problems of rural France – the shepherds were walking away into the distance.

Now most have gone, replaced by twenty-first century cowboys riding quadbikes on the hillsides.

When a group of devils armed with long hooks threatens Dante, Virgil hurries him on towards the next rottenpocket in Hell. They work their way around some of the damage wrought by Christ’s harrowing of Hell following his crucifixion. With those devils keeping company, they then reach a pit of boiling tar, in which the spirits of barrators are trapped.

The devils pull out one of the souls for Dante and Virgil to talk to, but quickly return to hacking with their hooks.

Unlike others, he springs free and escapes their lunges as he plunges back into the pitch.

Dante and Virgil leave the devils attacking other barrators, and walk on in silence. Dante reflects on one of Aesop’s fables about the frog, the rat and the hawk. He blames himself for the tormenting of the devils behind them, but as he looks back he sees them on the wing again and apparently heading towards Dante and Virgil. As the latter cross into the next rottenpocket, they realise that the pack of devils can’t pursue them beyond that point.

In the next rottenpocket are hypocrites, who are are dressed up in hooded habits like monks. Those habits, though coloured bright gold, are weighted with lead, forcing them into eternal labour against the mass of their clothes.

Dante meets two Bolognese friars, Catalano de’ Malavolti and Loderingo degli Andalò, who formed a hypocritical religious order. They point out a figure staked out naked on the ground, who is Caiaphas, the High Priest of Jerusalem who advised scribes and pharisees that Christ’s death would be a good solution.

Virgil moves Dante on towards the damaged crossing to the next rottenpocket for thieves. After negotiating the descent into it, Dante sees its pit full of snakes, which bind the hands of the souls there and cover their naked bodies.

A snake strikes one of the sinners at the back of the neck, causing the ghost to burst into flames, turn into ash, which falls onto the ground and reconstitutes itself.

There they talk with one of the thieves by the name of Vanni Fucci, a black Guelph from Pistoia near Florence who had stolen holy objects from a chapel and given an accomplice up for execution in his place. The snakes then take charge of him, winding their coils around his neck and body, and putting him into a reptile straightjacket.

Dante and Virgil move on, and meet a centaur.

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.

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.

Artists have long used chalks and similar solid media for drawing, but lacking any form of binding medium their only adherence to a ground is mechanical. They were thus only used for ephemeral work such as studies and cartoons used in the production of more permanent works.

Unfortunately there has been considerable confusion even among those who should know better. For example, Leonardo da Vinci’s wonderful drawing of Isabella d’Este from 1500, is usually described as using “black and red chalk, yellow pastel chalk on paper”. But there is no such thing as “pastel chalk”, any more than there is “oil watercolour”.

Pastels are much more than just a stick of pigmented chalk or coloured earth. They are made by mixing pigment, a bulking powder, and water containing a gum such as Gum Arabic or glue, into a thick dough-like paste, which gives pastels their name. The paste is then formed into sticks, which are dried slowly to produce a stick which is sufficiently firm as to be capable of being sharpened and applied to paper or other ground.

Painting in pastels requires a substantial number of sticks of different colours; although those of different colour can be blended on the paper or ground, pastels don’t mix like oil paints to produce good intermediate colours. You cannot paint properly in pastels with just half a dozen different colours, but need dozens or hundreds to support a broad spectrum of colour.

This shows one of my sets of pastels, now sadly unavailable, a Windsor & Newton boxed set of 200. A serious pastel painter is likely to have hundreds of different colours and shades stored in a chest of shallow drawers, perhaps.

Of all the different media, pastels are the richest in pigment, and are often considered to be ‘pure colour’, although in fact they invariably contain a bulking powder too. They adhere best to grounds with rough surfaces, including roughened papers and abrasive coatings of fine pumice or marble dust. Following application, they are often worked using rolled paper stumps and other tools, to blend them and produce a smooth and dense layer.

Thea Burns has studied a large number of old works of art claimed to be made using pastels, and established that the earliest painter in pastels was probably Robert Nanteuil.

Nanteuil’s Portrait of Monseigneur Louis Doni d’Attichy, Bishop of Riez from 1663 is one of the first real pastel paintings, in creating a good likeness of his sitter. It is relatively small, but expertly worked.

It wasn’t until the eighteenth century that pastel portraits became popular, and quickly became all the rage. Because pastels don’t require any drying time, a good pastellist could produce a fine portrait in a very few sittings, making pastel portraits far less demanding on both parties, much quicker, and of course much cheaper.

The ‘look’ of pastel paintings also came into vogue. Flesh looked amazingly lifelike, and in the absence of drying oils and varnish, had a soft, matte finish. The snag at that time was that there were no fixatives to help to adhere pastel particles to the ground, all had to be glazed, and even then they didn’t prove as long-lasting as a well-made oil painting. But at that price, only the rich would care.

Joseph Vivien was one of the first successful pastel portraitists of the eighteenth century, producing superb portraits such as this in about 1725. He introduced new techniques, laying his pastels down on blue paper, and working in larger formats.

Mainstream artists started to use pastels in preparatory work and sketches, here Charles Antoine Coypel’s dramatic portrait of Medea (c 1715).

One of the most brilliant of this first wave of pastellists was Rosalba Carriera, whose work demonstrated that a good pastel painter could match the accomplishments of the best oil painters of the day.

In the fingers of a skilled pastellist, materials which had long been tricky to render in oils, like hair and fur, became strengths. Carriera’s superb Self-Portrait as ‘Winter’ from 1730-31 is a fine example.

In this detail you can see individual grains of pastel which form each mark Carriera made. She didn’t just apply her pastels dry and from the stick, but in places made them into a paste using water, and applied that to the paper using a brush.

Carriera’s supreme skill with pastels brought even royalty round to have their portraits painted in the new medium: here Crown Prince Friedrich Christian of Saxony (1722-1763), whom she painted in 1739-40.

Pastels were quickly deemed an acceptable medium for women painters too, so that they didn’t then have to contend with the mess and fuss of oil paints, solvents, and cleaning. Most important of all, their hands and clothes weren’t stained by their paints. Pastels are dusty, and these days there are sufficient concerns about the inhalation of toxic pigments in pastel dust as to bring some artists to work in protective masks.

Maurice Quentin de La Tour not only excelled at modelling the softer surfaces and materials which pastels were so suited to, but tackled the harder and glittery materials used in jewellery and the like. His magnificent portrait of La Marquise de Pompadour from about 1749-55 shows how far he had advanced technique. The detail below reveals how gestural his marks became, and his famously soft-focus flesh.

Applying his pastels to a parchment ground and support rather than paper, Jean-Etienne Liotard was able to paint painstakingly detailed realist works like The Chocolate Girl (c 1744-45). This shows how the medium was starting to move on from regular portraits, here to what is perhaps best termed genre.

The use of fixatives to improve particle adherence to the ground became popular among some pastel painters. However, fixatives usually result in some colour shift, alter the surface appearance, and still don’t result in a robust paint layer, although they usually minimise surface loss.

Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s simple portrait of a baby from about 1790 takes up from where Carriera and de La Tour had made their marks: this infant’s face is softly rendered, but their clothes are sketched in a loose style which was far in advance of paintings of the day.

Her portrait of the wonderfully-named Corisande Armandine Léonie Sophie de Gramont has a natural look to it which was rarely achieved in oils. This ideally suited the sitter, given her youth. The detail below shows how painterly are the sitter’s clothes.

Vigée Le Brun was an early landscape painter in pastels, too: her View of the Lake of Challes and Mont Blanc (1807-08) spread across two sheets of green wove paper, shows how well-suited pastels are in landscape art. Carrying back delicate pastel paintings from this sort of location is far easier to handle than a couple of wet canvases.

Edgar Degas was another innovator in the medium. He applied pastel wet, combined it with other media such as gouache, as seen in his painting of the ballet above, and left his marks in plain sight.

Degas’ early pastel of Woman in a Tub from about 1883 shows the vertical (or steep diagonal) strokes which give many of his pastel paintings a rough texture, even over skin.

Later pastel painters have continued to push the boundaries of the medium. Odilon Redon, for example, combined pastels with chalks (above), and with charcoal (below), long considered a medium for sketching.

Pastel paintings can be an artist’s purest expression, in which there is no need for the alchemical techniques of oils. But they do little to protect pigments from air and light, and even when displayed behind glass are by far the most fragile of media.

There had been societies of painters earlier in Britain, but it wasn’t until 1768 that British artists formed themselves into the Royal Academy of Arts. At a time when women were excluded from so many organisations, one surprising feature of the new Royal Academy was two founding women members: Angelica Kauffmann (or Kauffman) and Mary Moser.

Angelica Kauffmann, who was originally Swiss, enjoyed meteoric rise to fame, and remains quite well known, yet Mary Moser has been all but forgotten today, and her paintings have almost vanished. Moser had an eminent career, and died on 2 May 1819, the three hundredth anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death.

Mary Moser was the daughter of another Swiss-born artist, and was born in London on 27 October 1744. She benefitted from precocious talent and the early training of her father, resulting in winning her first medal from the Society of Arts when she was only fourteen. She is recorded to have exhibited floral paintings and a few history paintings at the Society of Artists of Great Britain in the following years.

In 1768, together with her father and Angelica Kauffmann, she was one of the thirty-four artists who founded the Royal Academy of Arts in London. She took an active role in the Royal Academy’s proceedings in subsequent years. Moser, then only twenty-four, was also the youngest of the founding members.

For most of her career, Moser painted portraits, such as this of Joseph Nollekens from 1770-71, who was the finest British sculptor of the time, and floral still lifes.

This arrangement of Flowers, Still Life dates from about 1780.

The collection of the Royal Academy in London holds two paintings of hers, both donated by the artist. This is Spring from about 1780.

This is Summer from about the same date.

At some time in the 1780s, Moser was appointed drawing mistress to Princess Elizabeth, and in the 1790s she completed a series of royal commissions, including one for the floral decorative design of a room in Frogmore House, Windsor, for Queen Charlotte, wife of King George III. The latter work included a combination of large canvas paintings by Moser and painted walls, to create the illusion of “an arbour open to the skies”, and is the most substantial memorial to her work remaining.

In 1793, when she was forty-nine, Moser married for the first time. She continued to paint and exhibit at the Royal Academy until her eyesight failed in 1802, then became more involved in the running of the Royal Academy, until her death in London on 2 May 1819, at the age of 74.

The only portrait that I have been able to find of her is this, by George Romney, painted in about 1770-71.

After Mary Moser and Angelica Kauffmann (who died in 1807), the next woman to be elected a full member of the Royal Academy was Dame Laura Knight, in 1936. For well over a century, not a single academician was a woman.

Today we remember the death five hundred years ago of one of the most brilliant of all the figures in the Renaissance: the polymath Leonardo da Vinci.

Over the last few weeks, I have looked at his few surviving paintings. In this concluding article, I will cast my net a bit wider and consider some of his many other accomplishments, but only after looking at what are six of the great masterpieces of the Renaissance, and among the very greatest paintings in the whole Western canon.

The first is his superb portrait of the Florentine beauty, Ginevra de’ Benci, from about 1478-80, which he painted in his early career when in Florence. If you can get to the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. go for no other reason.

Next another portrait of a lady, this time the mistress of Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan, in whose court Leonardo rose to fame. Anyone passing through central or eastern Europe should make a beeline for Kraków, where it is in the National Museum.

Then comes one of the greatest religious works of all time, now in a tragic state despite sustained and expert conservation work: The Last Supper, seen here in a full-size copy by Giampietrino. For many years, this was on loan to Magdalen College in Oxford, but two years ago returned to the Royal Academy in London, where you should go to experience its grandeur. The original remains in the refectory of the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, Italy.

When you’re in London to view that copy of the Last Supper, go the the National Gallery there and look at one of Leonardo’s two Virgins of the Rocks. The London version is the later, probably from as late as 1506, and is in better condition than the earlier version in the Louvre.

For the last two masterpieces, though, you must go to the Louvre in Paris, and fight your way through the crowds for the Mona Lisa, the world’s most famous painting, and the third of Leonardo’s magnificent portraits of women.

Don’t miss Leonardo’s ultimate demonstration of sfumato, though, in his late painting of St. John the Baptist, made when he was living in the Belvedere of the Vatican, between 1513-16. This is also in the Louvre.

Leonardo was not only interested in so much else, but his genius took him to the forefront and beyond of subjects as diverse as human anatomy, optics, engineering, and cartography. His notebooks are packed with these explorations which still inspire the modern mind.

Leonardo’s Studies of a Foetus made in about 1510-13 transcend mere anatomy and look at the structure of the uterine wall a century before the first microscope.

His famous design for a helicopter, in this drawing of an Air Screw from about 1486-90, was never a feasible invention, but given a suitable source of power it’s fascinating to speculate how far he might have got had he lived over three hundred years later.

Leonardo’s finely detailed Plan of Imola from 1502 reflects his advisory role to a succession of the great courts of Italy. It’s the first map to adopt this imaginary bird’s eye view, and was made when Leonardo was military engineer to Cesare Borgia. We now take for granted similar images made from satellites; this appears to have been the first, and constructed by survey and projection.

You can read more about his artistic career and paintings in this series of articles:
Leonardo the Apprentice: Verrocchio and his Studio
Leonardo the Apprentice: Verrocchio’s pupils
1452-1478, Annunciation, Ginevra de’ Benci, Madonna of the Carnation
1478-1490, Madonna with a Flower, Adoration of the Magi, Virgin of the Rocks (Paris), Lady with an Ermine
1490-1503, Last Supper, Burlington House Cartoon, Virgin of the Rocks (London)
1503-1505, Madonna of the Yarnwinder, Mona Lisa
1505-1513, Battle of Anghiari, Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, (Leda?)
1513-1519, St. John the Baptist, Salvator Mundi

I hope that they do justice to one of the greatest artists, a polymath and genius, the true Renaissance man, Leonardo da Vinci.

Known primarily as one of the Nabis sculptors, Georges Lacombe (1868–1916) was also an accomplished painter, and it is his painted works that this short article concentrates on.

Born into an artistic family in Versailles, he underwent a religious education which succeeded in making him strongly anti-clerical. Although it has been claimed that he trained at the Académie Julian in Paris under Alfred Roll and Henri Gervex, two notable Naturalist painters, other sources claim that he didn’t come into contact with painters until he spent the summer in Brittany in 1892, when he met Paul Sérusier there. He then joined the Nabis in 1893, when he exhibited carved wood sculptures with them. The same year he was influenced by a large exhibition of Paul Gauguin’s paintings from Tahiti.

Lacombe’s early paintings all relate to Brittany, particularly to the school of Paul Gauguin centred on Pont-Aven. Boatwomen in Brittany, painted in egg tempera on canvas at any time between 1888-99, is typical among them. It shows two Breton women rowing a boat piled high with cut wood, in a style clearly influenced by Gauguin, and not dissimilar to the work of Sérusier.

Cave in Camaret from the period 1890-97 shows a sea cave at the end of the Crozon peninsula in the far west of Brittany, not far from Cape Finistère.

Like Paul Sérusier, Lacombe was fascinated by goings-on in the woods in Brittany. This painting of Chestnut Gatherers from 1893-94 combines the Nabi flattened decorative look with a rich red more typical of the early twentieth century.

Lacombe’s Three Breton Women in the Forest from 1894 further identifies the women as being Bigoudènes, who wear their distinctive headdress in the Bigouden country in Brittany. For this painting he returned to egg tempera.

Another egg tempera painting from the same period is Lacombe’s fine portrait of Paul Sérusier, The Nabi with the Shiny Beard (c 1894). Sérusier not only looks like a wizard, but there are waves of ‘force’ emanating from the first two fingers of his right hand.

Lacombe also came under the influence of the Divisionist artist Théo Van Rysselberghe, as shown in this painting of Red Pines from about 1894.

The Ages of Life from about 1894, also painted in egg tempera on canvas, sets this classical theme in the ancient and mystical woods of Brittany.

Some of Lacombe’s sculptures are stunning: this wood carving in mahogany with added colour shows the goddess Isis, and was made in about 1895. It’s now in the Musée d’Orsay.

Isis was one of the major goddesses of ancient Egypt, whose name spread into other Mediterranean cultures, including that of the Romans. She is central to the Osiris myth, in which she resurrects her divine husband Osiris, and became associated with the entry of the dead into the afterlife. Lacombe’s symbolism here may refer to her role in producing and protecting the heir to Osiris, Horus. Interestingly, he doesn’t invoke the ankh commonly associated with her.

In the last few years of the nineteenth century, Lacombe moved on from his early style influenced by Gauguin and the Nabis, and came under the influence of Japonisme. His egg tempera painting of Vorhor, The Green Wave from 1896 shows an Atlantic swell coming into the seacliffs of Vorhor near Camaret-sur-Mer in Brittany. There are shades of Hokusai in his waves.

The Violet Wave from 1896-97 is another painting drawing on the same sources.

In 1899, Lacombe became particularly friendly with Paul Ranson, whose health was deteriorating at the time. Ranson stayed in Lacombe’s house in Alençon, Normandy, well to the west of Paris, until 1905.

Lacombe’s final style emerged after these years with Paul Ranson, and is influenced primarily by the post-Impressionism of Théo Van Rysselberghe. Oaks and Blueberry Bushes from 1905 is high in chroma and Divisionist in its facture, and quite different from any of his earlier work.

The Briante River (Forest Interior in Autumn) from about 1907 contrasts autumnal reds, greens, and mid blues.

Lacombe’s portrait of Paul Ranson on the Grounds from 1905-08 is one of his last paintings, it would appear, and is a riot of colour.

Lacombe fell ill with tuberculosis during the First World War, and died as a result of that illness in 1916, at the age of only 48. For such a cruelly short working life, he got through Gauguin post-Impressionism, Nabism, Japonism, and finally Divisionist post-Impressionism. That’s not bad for a sculptor!

Even those whose knowledge of classical myths is sketchy know the terrifying power of Medusa. Formerly a beautiful young woman, she was transformed into a monster with live snakes instead of hair, and but a glance at her face and you became a stone statue.

Ovid’s rather late account of her tragic story maintains that she had been ravishingly beautiful, and through no fault of her own, had been raped by Poseidon the sea god in Minerva’s temple. For her enforced role in that crime, while Poseidon – as gods always do – went scot free, Minerva transformed Medusa into that hideous and dangerous monster.

In this and the next article, I look at paintings of Medusa. Tomorrow I will tell the story of her death and the power of her severed head; today I look at paintings of what she had become as a result of Minerva’s vindictiveness. To add (fatal) injury to insult, these most commonly show her head after Perseus had cleaved it from her body. I hope that none of them turns you to stone.

Quite rightly, the most famous image of her head is probably Caravaggio’s Medusa from about 1597, which was actually his second version, now in the Uffizi in Florence; the first is slightly smaller and in a private collection. Unusually for Caravaggio, this was painted on a tondo. He follows traditional lines, with ample blood and abundant snakes, and captures the open-mouthed horror in her face.

In using a tondo like this, Caravaggio refers also to the image of the head of Medusa which appears on Minerva’s Aegis, the round shield which is one of her attributes. The artist’s vivid realism gives depth, making this appear to be a painted relief not a flat canvas.

Shortly afterwards, in about 1617, the young and flourishing Rubens painted his remarkable The Head of Medusa. This shows her head when Perseus had placed it on a bed of seaweed, after he had rescued Andromeda (as told in the next article). Rubens shows an exuberant mass of snakes, even a lizard and a scorpion, more of which appear to be forming in the blood exuding from her neck.

At one time, it was thought that Leonardo da Vinci had painted this version of Medusa, now attributed to an unknown artist in the period 1600-50, also in the Uffizi. This too shows the head resting on the beach after the rescue of Andromeda, and I wonder whether this was painted after sight of Rubens’ version, or the other way around.

Medusa’s head then went into hiding for a couple of centuries, it seems, until nineteenth century artists started to explore the concept of the femme very fatale.

Arnold Böcklin’s Medusa from about 1878 gives us a glimpse into the abyss of her inner grief.

Also noteworthy is Carlos Schwabe’s watercolour Medusa from 1895, with its feline eyes and that characteristic wide-mouthed look of utter horror. This is one of the first close portraits in which she is very much still alive, too.

Fernand Khnopff had read more widely and was faithful to other sources of classical myth, in his wonderful pastel painting of Sleeping Medusa from 1896. Described as winged, the artist shows Medusa as a huge aquiline creature with a human head.

By the turn of the century, Medusa had become quite a popular figure in paintings, including Franz von Stuck’s very busy narrative work of the Wild Hunt from 1899. Among its many figures is Medusa with her scalpful of snakes. The Wild Hunt is, of course, part of northern European mythology, an interesting place in which to find Medusa.

The great Polish artist Jacek Malczewski made Medusa a recurrent theme in his work. Above is his Medusa from 1900, in which the snakes adorning her hair curl and sweep in symmetry, amid more natural locks. In the portrait below, from two years later, he pairs his sculptor friend Tadeusz Błotnicki with a dangerously seductive Medusa.

The other richer source of images of Medusa are the many portraits of Minerva bearing her Aegis.

One of Fra Bartolomeo’s few secular works to have survived is this full-length portrait of Minerva from the 1510s. She has her standard attributes of spear, armour, and unusual helmet, and the artist has shown her Aegis in a unique form. This shield bearing the image of Medusa’s head is here made from a semi-transparent material which today we might relate to holography.

Among other examples, my favourite is Gustav Klimt’s Pallas Athena from 1898, one of the first of his paintings in which he incorporated gold. The goddess may appear very modern, but Klimt keeps to tradition by showing her attributes, including a spear, helmet, and the Aegis here emblazoned over her upper chest.

Medusa also makes a guest appearance in Dante’s Divine Comedy. When Dante and Virgil arrive at the gates of Dis, the Furies call on Medusa to turn Dante to stone by the sight of her face. Virgil makes Dante turn to look away from them, and close his eyes tightly, as shown in this section of Joseph Anton Koch’s huge fresco in the Casa Massimo in Rome.

In tomorrow’s concluding article, I will show paintings of Perseus and Medusa.

In yesterday’s first of this pair of articles, I looked at paintings of the terrifying Medusa. This concluding article follows the story of her life, or rather the end of her life at the hands of Perseus.

Perseus was the heroic son of Jupiter and Danaë, conceived when the god, in the form of a rain of gold, entered her prison cell in the royal palace at Argos. When Polydectes fell in love with his mother, he wanted Perseus out of his way, so held a large banquet at which each guest was expected to bring a gift of horses. Knowing that Perseus was unable to do that, Polydectes accepted a substitute offer in which he, the host, would name his gift – and Polydectes promptly chose the head of Medusa, anticipating that Perseus would die when attempting to obtain it.

With the help of Minerva, Perseus went to the Hesperides, who supplied him with the weaponry that he needed for his mission: a bag (kibisis) into which he would put Medusa’s head, Jupiter’s adamantine sword, Hades’ helmet of darkness to conceal him, Mercury’s winged sandals with which to fly, and Minerva’s polished shield.

Perseus found the three Gorgon sisters Medusa, Stheno and Euryale, when Medusa was asleep in her cave. Because direct vision of her face would have turned him into stone, he did this by looking at her reflection in Minerva’s shield. He then cut Medusa’s head off. He fled, with the other two Gorgons in hot pursuit, cloaked by the helmet of darkness. As he left with Medusa’s head in his kibisis, from her severed neck sprang the winged horse Pegasus and Chrysaor, a sword of gold.

Although Baldassare Peruzzi must have been very familiar with the story, his fresco in the Sala delle Prospettive of the Villa Farnesina in Rome takes a very liberal approach. Perhaps to simplify his composition and make the action more direct in Perseus and Pegasus from 1510-11, Perseus looks straight at his victim. The white head of Pegasus, at the right, refers to events later in time than those at the left, an example of multiplex narrative, which was popular at the time.

Eugène Romain Thirion’s Perseus Victorious Over Medusa from 1867 keeps to convention, with the hero holding Medusa’s head aloft, facing away from him, in triumph. He shows Pegasus behind, but not Chrysaor, who is in general omitted from these paintings, and indeed from some verbal accounts.

The most detailed telling of this story is in the magnificent paintings in Edward Burne-Jones’ Perseus series. Here I show three of the studies for that which he completed in gouache in 1881-82, now among the treasures of Southampton City Art Gallery in England.

The fourth and unfinished study for the series, The Finding of Medusa (1882), shows Perseus, wearing the helmet of Hades for invisibility, brandishing his adamantine sword, and viewing the scene in his mirror, in the Gorgons’ cave. Medusa, her hair yet to be detailed into snakes, is stood with a fearsome expression, while her two immortal sisters are scrunched together under their wings.

In the fifth in the series, The Death of Medusa I (1882), Perseus has just cut Medusa’s head off, and holds it aloft with his left hand, at the far right edge of the painting. The adamantine sword is still in his right hand, and the kibisis is slung around his neck. Emerging from the severed neck, as if in collage, are Pegasus and Chrysaor, the latter shown as the associated person and without his characteristic curved golden sword. Three of the serpents from Medusa’s head have detached and fallen to the ground.

The sixth in the series, The Death of Medusa II (1881-2), completes the story of Medusa, as Perseus flees from the remaining two Gorgons. The headless body of Medusa is left on the ground, and her sisters fly around searching for her assailant. Perseus wears the helmet of Hades to maintain his invisibility, and is flying away with his winged sandals, while inserting Medusa’s head in the kibisis.

Sadly, none of these three paintings ever made it into a finished work in oils.

Perseus then flew off to North Africa, where he used the head of Medusa to turn Atlas into stone for his lack of hospitality. On his way back from there, he called into the kingdom of Aethiopia, where the royal princess Andromeda had just been chained to a rock to assuage a ravaging sea monster, Cetus. Like a true hero, Perseus saved the girl and killed the monster.

Andromeda’s parents were so delighted that Andromeda, who had been promised in marriage to Phineus, was quickly married instead to Perseus. At the wedding feast, Phineus and his friends were understandably rather miffed, and a violent quarrel broke out between them and Perseus. As happens at the most memorable of weddings, this turned seriously nasty when weapons came out and bodies started to fall. The solution for Perseus was to brandish the head of Medusa and turn Phineus and his friends into statuary.

Annibale Carracci and Domenichino combined their talents in painting this fresco of Perseus and Phineas (1604-06) in the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. As Perseus stands in the centre brandishing the Gorgon’s face towards his attackers, Andromeda and her parents shelter behind, shielding their eyes for safety.

In Giordano’s Perseus Turning Phineus and his Followers to Stone from about 1683, the process of petrification is made less obvious, but the carnage and mayhem better-developed.

Ricci’s Perseus Confronting Phineus with the Head of Medusa from about 1705-10 also shows the final moments of the battle, as Phineus cowers next to two of his henchmen who have almost completed the process of changing into stone.

Suprisingly, none of those paintings made any reference to Minerva’s protection of Perseus, which is clearly expressed in Jean-Marc Nattier’s undated painting of Perseus, Under the Protection of Minerva, Turns Phineus to Stone by Brandishing the Head of Medusa. The goddess, Perseus’ half-sister, is sat on a cloud to the right of and behind the hero. She wears her distinctive helmet, grips her spear, and her left hand holds the Aegis, providing narrative closure.

Perseus points his weapons away from himself and Minerva, and is looking up towards the goddess. In the foreground, one of Phineus’ party seems to be sorting through the silverware, perhaps intending to make off with it.

The happy couple picked themselves up from the bodies, statues and debris, and moved on. Perseus gave thanks to Minerva for her support and the loan of her shield, by the votive offering of Medusa’s head, which Minerva had set into her shield, turning it into the Aegis which I showed in the previous article.

And that was the fate of the terrifyingly beautifully tragic Medusa.

After talking with the notorious thief Vanni Fucci, who becomes pinned down by snakes, Dante and Virgil move on and meet a centaur, identified by Virgil as Cacus, who had been killed by Hercules. Dante’s classical reference here is a little odd in that he gives an account of the killing of Cacus according to that of Livy, rather than Virgil’s version in his Aeneid.

The centaur flees, and they meet three more tormented souls. A lizard-like creature then attaches itself to one of them named Agnello, a member of a prominent Florentine Ghibelline family, and the two bodies become one. Another is pierced by a serpent through his navel, and Dante witnesses other horrific transformations of the sinners here with reptiles.

Having found five citizens of Florence in this rottenpocket of Hell, Virgil leads Dante through shattered rock to the next, the eighth, where each of the souls is burning with fire in the pit in return for their fraudulent lives.

Virgil explains that among them are Ulysses and Diomedes, who are united in a single flame, which tells an invented story of their final and fateful voyage. Dante didn’t have direct access to Homeric accounts of the adventures of Odysseus, and based this on Virgil’s contrasting retelling of the deception of the Trojan horse.

After that, another flame identifies itself as Guido da Montefeltro, and relates some of its life as a sly Ghibelline military leader who later repented and became a Franciscan friar.

Virgil takes Dante on to the ninth rottenpocket, where those who used fraud to incite division are suffering for their crimes. The gruesome sight that awaits them here is of gross mutilations, bodies chopped up and torn apart so that their organs spill out. They meet aa succession of dismembered and dissected spirits, including Mosca de’ Lamberti, both of whose hands have been cut off. Mosca was responsible for creating the rift between Guelphs and Ghibellines which scarred Florentine history for so long. Another body passes by without a head, which it is carrying like a lantern from one of its hands. The head tells them that he is Bertran de Born, a Provençal troubadour who sowed discord between King Henry II of England and his son Prince Henry.

Dante is so astonished by this display of butchery that he stands and stares at the bodies. For this Virgil reminds him that they have limited time and must move on.

The pair then reach a viewpoint over the last of the rottenpockets, from which arises a foul smell. The souls there are all covered with festering sores and scabs, and can only crawl over one another.

There they hear the story of Capocchio, an alchemist who falsely claimed to be able to transform base metals into gold.

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.

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.

Professional painters have long used brushes to apply paint for their finished work, but many used hand-held sticks of pigment only when sketching in preparation. Charcoal was widely used at first, with metal wire in silverpoint an alternative. In the sixteenth century, large deposits of graphite were discovered in Cumbria, England, following which graphite sticks and sheathed pencils became enormously popular among both amateurs and professionals.

Although it’s impossible to make any clear distinction between drawing and painting, those stick-based media are simple compared with oil paints, for instance, and seldom used in works comparable in their aims or sophistication to professional oil or watercolour painting.

The first changes in practice occurred as a result of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars at the turn of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries. Graphite was a strategic product, as it was used as a refractory in the manufacture of cannonballs, and supplies to France all but dried up. In 1795, Nicolas-Jacques Conté used a mixture of clay, graphite and other pigments to form sticks similar to pastels but significantly harder, referred to as hard pastels or Conté crayons.

As with charcoal and graphite sticks and pencils, Conté crayons were first used for sketching in preparation for formal painting. By the middle of the nineteenth century, artists such as Jean-François Millet extended their use into pastel paintings such as his enchanting and mysterious The Cat at the Window from about 1857-58. Because of their hardness, Conté crayons were more amenable to sharpening, so could make finer lines and richer marks.

Millet’s most famous painting in pastel and Conté crayon is this 1865-66 version of The Sower, a motif which was to recur in the hands of other artists for the rest of the century, and works perfectly in what were still relatively unconventional media.

Conté crayons, like pencil, charcoal and pastels, rely on mechanical adhesion rather than any polymerising binder. Specialised papers with roughened surfaces were marketed to improve their adhesion, but they share similar problems of longevity. However, at a time when mark-making was becoming popular, the wide range of effects available from sticks of pigment was an attraction: not only could the artist place bold strokes of colour over stumped-smooth areas, but they could also paint on textured grounds to great effect.

One of the masters of the Conté crayon is the Divisionist Georges Seurat, who used textured papers to give his paintings or drawings a highly granular appearance, as if they were photographs, perhaps.

The rise of industrial chemistry and manufacturing industries in the nineteenth century brought new painting stick media too. Wax crayons effectively functioned as a low-temperature encaustic, and became popular in schools. They were adopted for resist techniques in watercolours, and some artists started using them in combination with other media too.

Félicien Rops’ painting of a Hamadryad from about 1885 uses a wide range of media, drawn from those those already popular among the illustrators of the day.

Another enthusiast for mixed stick media was Odilon Redon, for instance in this painting of Sîta from about 1893.

Although the mainstream Impressionists kept to oil on canvas in the main, those on the periphery such as Jean-François Raffaëlli were more experimental in their choice of media: his Parisian Rag Pickers from about 1890 was made using mixed media of oil paints and oil crayons.

The new generation of painters who started their careers in the early twentieth century came to use stick media increasingly. Egon Schiele was a prolific draftsman who used drawing techniques extensively in his painting. This work showing Krumau Town Crescent (Small Town V) (1915) is based on a drawing which he had made the previous year, and uses the unusual combination of black crayon, gouache and oil.

For this Portrait of the Artist’s Wife Seated, Holding Her Right Leg, Schiele used just black crayon and gouache.

Some of the older generation joined in with unusual combinations of media. Late in his life, the former Divisionist Paul Signac painted many brilliantly-coloured views of the south of France using various combinations of watercolour and crayons, such as Antibes (1917) above, and The Old Port of Marseilles (1931) below.

On the other side of the Atlantic, also late in his career, Joseph Stella developed a novel drawing technique combining traditional metalpoint with modern crayons, which he used in his intimate portrait of Kathleen Millay from about 1923-24, above, and Eggplant, one of his last works, completed in 1944, below.

Metalpoint uses fine metal wire, most commonly silver, mounted in a holder. a slow and meticulous method of drawing or painting; its marks on paper are only faint to begin with, but as the fine tracks of silver tarnish they slowly darken.

Late in his career, Pierre Bonnard incorporated stick media in some of his paintings. The richly-textured marks in this painting of his wife Marthe in The Bath from 1942 are strokes of coloured crayon, worked over gouache and pastels.

Paul Nash added both graphite and crayon marks to his watercolour of Three Rooms in 1937, a painting with strong graphic elements.

In the nineteen-twenties and -thirties, several art suppliers developed new types of crayon, using proper binders intended to allow more extensive effects and working, greater versatility, and improved longevity. These mixed conventional pigments with a bewildering array of waxes, oils and other substances, including:

• waxes and gums, to make crayons (sheathed only in paper) and pencils (sheathed in wood);
• waxes, to make grease pencils;
• waxes and oils, to make lithographic crayons;
• mineral wax (paraffin), to make wax crayons;
• synthetic wax (polyethylene), to make water-dispersible wax crayons, such as Caran d’Ache Neocolor crayons;
• waxes and non-drying oils, to make oil pastels;
• waxes and drying oils, to make oil sticks and oil bars, which can form polymerised paint layers similar to conventional oil paints.

Their physical properties, determined by the binders used, in turn determine how they can be applied, appropriate grounds, fragility of the stick and its suitability for sharpening, whether diluents are organic solvents or water, and the depth and robustness of the resulting paint layer.

Unfortunately, even reputable manufacturers seem reluctant to provide detailed information on the lightfastness of pigments used, and to achieve high chroma level in attractive colours they often resort to pigments which are known to be fugitive on exposure to light. During the twentieth century in particular, this resulted in many fine paintings being made using media which rapidly became a conservation nightmare, either because the paint film has proved unstable, or their initially brilliant colours have rapidly faded.

Some types of media, in particular coloured pencils, have been vulnerable to irresponsible suppliers and artists who have put blind faith in products which have proved to be ephemeral. Sadly, few artists have obeyed the exhortation for the buyer to beware, and assessed the permanence of the media they have used in paintings which have been sold for large sums.

Among the most recent, and still unproven, media are oil pastels, which work into creamy layers, which undergo only limited hardening because they don’t incorporate drying oils like linseed or walnut. Their origins are controversial: first developed in Japan, and slightly later in Europe, it’s claimed that Pablo Picasso preferred them.

Oil pastels have certainly shown themselves capable of use in some circumstances, such as Robert Clark Templeton’s court paintings, including his Sketch of an Overview of the Courtroom from 1971. Few courts would have even considered him using watercolours, for example, and for this case he chose modern and unobtrusive oil pastels. This sketch has been executed briskly, with very effective use of gestures and marks.

Once a sketch has been laid down in oil pastels, it’s quite quick to work that up into a more detailed portrait like Templeton’s Drawing for CBS Evening News of Bobby G. Seale and others (1971).

Copyright restrictions prevent me from showing examples of stick media in the hands of modern artists, but I conclude by showing a couple of my own amateur efforts.

This Alpine landscape was painted in the studio using Sennelier oil pastels on Daler Rowney Ingres pastel paper.

This dawn view of the Pont Royal in the centre of Paris was painted with Caran d’Ache water-dispersible Neocolor crayons on paper. This uses base washes brought out from an initial dry crayon sketch, with superimposed texturing using dry crayon – something very difficult to achieve in watercolour, for example.

Modern stick-based media look alluring, and are persuasively marketed by their vendors. However, those are seldom the traditional art materials suppliers that they might seem: most have been bought up by large companies which are primarily driven by increasing sale revenues, and may have little understanding of the requirements and problems of painting media.

Modern vendors are often secretive over the composition of their products, and although good standards exist for lightfastness, few publish data for their product ranges. Finally, their advantages in the making of art are often marred by the need to protect these paintings under glass.

Among the immediate precursors to the great art movements of the late nineteenth century, Naturalism and Impressionism, were Eugène Delacroix, Camille Corot, and Gustave Courbet (1819–1877). In a month’s time, we’ll be celebrating the bicentenary of Courbet’s birth, and I hope that you’ll join me in this short series of articles looking at his career and work.

Courbet is one of the most exciting and enigmatic painters of the nineteenth century. Bridging the dark, academic old and the bright, painterly new, he painted everything from transcendent landscapes and marines to erotic fantasies for old men with too much money. His most popularly-viewed painting, the Origin of the World, attracts great crowds in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, while just around the corner his real masterpiece A Burial at Ornans is overlooked by too many. He may currently be well known, but it’s for all the wrong reasons.

Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet was born to a prosperous but thoroughly provincial farming family, in the small rural town of Ornans, in the far east of France not too far from its border with Switzerland. He drew and painted during his youth, using his sisters Zoé, Zélie and Juliette as models. When the time came for him to pursue his artistic education in Paris, in 1839, he retained strong roots with his birthplace, the land and its people.

In Paris he started work in the studios of Steuben and Hesse, but quickly became disenchanted with the traditional system, and spent much of his time making copies of masters in the Louvre, so was essentially self-taught.

Dated to about 1841, this portrait of his younger sister Juliette Courbet at the Age of Ten was presumably made when the artist had returned home to Ornans after he had moved to Paris. Although obviously an early work, this unusual part-profile already demonstrates Courbet’s desire to be different.

Other early paintings were literary in theme, but Courbet abandoned those in favour of self-portraits, of which several have survived. The most radical and impressive of these is The Desperate Man from about 1843, in which he grimaces wildly at his own canvas. Augmented by his signature in bright red, it might have been his manifesto. A more conservative Self-portrait with Black Dog from the same period was accepted for exhibition at the Salon in 1844.

Related to that self-portrait is The Man Made Mad with Fear, again from 1843-45, which he left incomplete. This shows him dressed in gaudy clothes, out in the landscape near Ornans, with its rolling hills and white cliffs.

By 1844, when he painted The Dream or The Hammock, Courbet had set his sights on figurative painting. This young woman is not quite respectably dressed, and reclines in what looks to be an unstable position as she dozes on a hammock slung between trees.

The following year, Courbet planted another gaudily-dressed figure at the foot of some cliffs near Ornans, put a small mallet in his right hand and a chisel in the other, and painted The Sculptor (1845). The subject of this sculptor’s inattention is the emerging form of a woman in the rock just above his left knee, which is over a small pipe from which water is pouring into the stream.

Courbet chose another unusual angle and pose for his charcoal study of a Young Man Sitting, Study, also known as At the Easel, from about 1847.

He visited the Netherlands and Belgium in 1846-47, where he became committed to a realist approach, and was influenced by Rembrandt and Frans Hals. This inspired him to create his first two successful paintings.

After Dinner in Ornans from 1849 was exhibited that year at the Salon in Paris, and earned him a gold medal as well as being purchased by the French State. It marks the start of Courbet’s series of ‘realist’ paintings of everyday life in his home town. The four middle-class men here have just finished dining together, probably one summer’s evening. As one lights a tobacco pipe, the man at the right plays his violin to entertain them.

A large hunting dog is curled asleep under a chair, and the man lighting his pipe is still wearing his hat and a long coat. Many fine details give the impression of real veracity, although Courbet almost certainly painted it in his studio using local models.

Sadly, Courbet’s most successful and important painting of his early career was destroyed during the Allied bombing of the German city of Dresden in 1945: The Stone Breakers (1849).

One of the surviving images of this painting is of sufficient quality to give an idea of what it must have looked like. It was exhibited at the Salon in 1850, and marks the dawn of Naturalism. The artist later explained that he encountered this group of men on the roadside one day, apparently when he was in Ornans. He felt they were so complete an expression of poverty that he was immediately inspired to paint them, and invited them to attend his studio the following morning.

Two men are working beside a rural road near Ornans, breaking rocks into smaller stones used to provide a surface for the road. Both their faces are obscured, giving them anonymity, and their clothing is badly worn, torn, and frequently patched. The man on the right kneels on one knee as he brings a long-handled hammer down to break a rock, while the other carries a large wicker basket of broken rocks. One wears wooden working clogs, the other a pair of worn-out leather shoes.

Like the many thousands of other such teams who would have been scattered around the roads of France at the time, they are living on the job, at the roadside, their pot and a large cooking spoon on a sheet at the far right. Later paintings of other stonebreakers were made by John Brett in 1857-58, and by Hans Andersen Brendekilde in his People by a Road (1893), which I show below.

Before he had even completed The Stone Breakers, Courbet had already started work on an even greater masterpiece, A Burial at Ornans, one of the canonical paintings of the century.

My quest to look at the paintings of the Nabis this week takes me to one who will be unknown to you, unless you are Hungarian: József Rippl-Rónai (1861–1927), dubbed by the group as le nabi hongrois, the Hungarian Nabi. I confess that I had never heard of him before researching this and the following article, in which I reveal the little that I now know of his career, and show some rather surprising paintings of his.

Rippl-Rónai was born in the Hungarian town of Kaposvár, in the south-west of the country, well south of Lake Balaton. He seems originally to have studied pharmacy at university in Budapest, but following an accident at work sustained severe acid burns to his left hand. He took drawing lessons, and in 1884 studied at the Academy in Munich, Germany.

In 1886-87, he was awarded funds to support his study in Paris, so moved there as a pupil of the Hungarian realist painter Munkácsy Mihály.

I regret that this image of Interior Room in Paris Suburbs, one of his early paintings completed in Paris in 1887, is not up to my usual high quality, but it shows the realist or even Naturalist style which he adopted initially.

The following year, possibly through the Académie Julian, Rippl-Rónai made friends with the young artists who were forming the Nabis. He spent some summers with other Nabis and the school of Paul Gauguin in Pont-Aven, Brittany.

By 1890, he still maintained his realist style, as shown in this sensitive portrait of a Mother with Child.

Throughout his career, Rippl-Rónai was an accomplished and prolific painter in pastels. In these early years, he experimented with hatched textures which appear to have been inspired by the pastels of Edgar Degas, and are seen in his Nude with Yellow Narcissus from 1891.

As the other Nabis were painting without depth, in muted colours, and extensive decorative patterning, Rippl-Rónai was visibly distinct. His Woman with a Birdcage from 1892 is rich in colour, retains depth, and has no patterning visible at all.

Other paintings did show more evidence of Nabi influence, though, including Skittle-players from the same year, although it has distinct foreground and background. His paint has been applied very thinly, perhaps with a minimum of binder.

This study for a full-length portrait of a Woman with a Rose, also from 1892, has been sketched in with diluted paint.

Rippl-Rónai’s portrait of My Grandmother from 1894 is perhaps more reminiscent of Whistler’s painting of his mother, than the typical Nabi paintings of this time. Once again there is no flattening of depth, nor patterning. All the textiles shown are devoid of patterns.

His Self-Portrait in a Brown Hat from 1897 continues to pursue his individual style, with careful 3D modelling of his face. Sadly the paintings behind him contain insufficient detail to make them readily recognisable.

The closest Rippl-Rónai seems to have come to the Nabi style is in a couple of watercolours which he painted around 1898, including his Four Women in the Garden from that year. Its almost colourless appearance may not be intentional, as he used indigo dye here, which is notoriously sensitive to light, and may have faded almost completely in the century since this was painted.

By the end of the nineteenth century, in paintings such as this marvellous still life of Fish from about 1898, Rippl-Rónai remained at heart a realist who if anything was still pre-Impressionist.

This wasn’t to last long into the next century.

Before the end of the nineteenth century, the Hungarian Nabi József Rippl-Rónai (1861–1927) returned to his native country, settling in his home town of Kaposvár by 1902.

Nice Landscape in the Pyrenees from 1899 may have been one of his last works before leaving France, and shows the appearance of rich if not brash colour.

In 1900, he had his first major exhibition in Budapest, where the reception was lukewarm at best. That same year, he painted this unusual and chroma-rich nocturne of The Tőketerebes Castle at Night in pastels. This Baroque building dates from 1786, and is in what is now known as Trebišov in Slovakia.

Rippl-Rónai appears to have returned to France on several occasions, and in about 1901 painted this pair of Gendarmes, most probably in Paris.

In 1903 or 1904, Rippl-Rónai visited the Adriatic Port of Fiume and painted this view in pastel. This is now Rijeka, the principal seaport and third largest city in Croatia.

In the middle of that first decade of the twentieth century, Rippl-Rónai’s facture underwent major change to what has been called his “corn” style (in Hungarian, kukoricásnak). This can be seen in the unusual patch structure of the paint on the walls and some furniture of his domestic view of Uncle Piacsek with Dolls from 1905. The uncle sits smoking his very long tobacco pipe, as two young girls in matching striped dresses play with their dolls around him.

In 1906, he exhibited over 300 works at another solo exhibition, which seems to have been more successful.

His already rich chroma increased further, and the corn style now includes clothing in his double-portrait of My Father and Piacsek, with Red Wine from 1907. Although it is tempting to see this style as related to Divisionism, it is quite distinct in the blobs or patches of paint merging with one another without free space between them, and being used with single rather than multi-colour patches.

In Rippl-Rónai’s 1909 painting of a Sour Cherry Tree in Blossom, the corn appears to have popped into an exuberant spray of white flowers.

That same year, he grew more confident with his corn style, as seen in the dazzling colours and tiled facture of Interior. Combined, these can make the painting shimmer.

Rippl-Rónai’s Park with Nudes from 1910 has more subdued colour, but his corn style is quite overt, with frequent glimpses of underpainting where the patches don’t exactly adjoin. This style also causes the outlines of the figures to appear rough and irregular in an unusual manner.

By the second decade of the new century, Rippl-Rónai was being commissioned to paint more decorative works, such as a series including this Panel-Picture for the Schiffer Villa, painted in 1911.

He also painted some classical landscapes, including Three Tall Poplars and two Stacks from 1912, which is in a long tradition going back to the early plein air landscapes of Valenciennes.

When the First World War broke out in 1914, Rippl-Rónai was visiting France. He was immediately interned as an alien, and doesn’t appear to have returned to Hungary until the following year.

As he grew older, Rippl-Rónai spent more time at his villa in his home town of Kaposvár, and painted mainly portraits, including this of Elza Bányai in a Black Dress from 1919. He died there in late 1927.

Like most of the Nabis, Rippl-Rónai’s mature painting was very different from that of his early career when the Nabis were together. In the twentieth century, he was a founder member of the Hungarian Impressionist and Naturalist Circle (MIÉNK), and is today considered by many to have initiated modern painting in Hungary. His later ‘corn style’ paintings are highly distinctive, and I don’t recall seeing any artist of the time using this style. He is also thought to have been highly prolific, with more than ten thousand works to his name, although most have now vanished into private collections.

Described in a masterful understatement as being “among the most aggressive of all poultry”, geese can be fearsome birds. They were first domesticated in Europe several millenia ago, and since then have provided meat, eggs, fat and their downy feathers to keep people fed, greased and warm.

This weekend I’m looking at paintings of geese: today my subjects are the birds themselves, then tomorrow I go in search of the Goose Girl, which I promise won’t be a wild goose chase.

Geese feature in some of the oldest surviving paintings of birds, in this wall painting from the tomb of Itet, Meidum, which is estimated to be from about 2600-2550 BCE. That makes these paintings about four and a half millenia old, which is hard to grasp.

They also have good roots in the northern Mediterranean civilisations of Ancient Greece and Rome. David Rijckaert’s undated painting of Philemon and Baucis Giving Hospitality to Jupiter and Mercury tells the mythical story of this elderly and poor couple, who gave hospitality to the gods Mercury (left) and Jupiter (left of centre) seated at the table. In order to entertain them, the couple decide to slaughter the goose they kept, probably for a feast or special occasion. But first, they have to catch the bird, as shown here.

Geese were, and still are, common in the countryside, so started to appear as staffage in landscape paintings.

There’s a small flock of them at the lower right in Rubens’ wonderful celebration of harvest, Landscape with a Rainbow from about 1638, in the last couple of years of his retirement to his country estate. He really seems to be celebrating the sights of life here.

One of their more evocative appearances in painting is in Jean-Léon Gérôme’s early work Recreation in a Russian Camp, Remembering Moldavia from 1855. The artist claimed to have witnessed this scene when travelling down the River Danube: a group of Russian soldiers in low spirits is being uplifted by making music, under the direction of their superior. In that marvellous sky, a skein of (wild) geese are on the wing. You can almost hear their honking as the soldiers break into song.

Gustave Doré captured a very different moment, a little after dusk, in his Evening in Alsace from 1869. Four young men are squeezed into an open window as they try to charm the four young women standing below. But along comes a flock of geese to join in and ruin their chances.

In Marie Spartali Stillman’s charming (and undated) Farm Scene, painted when she was on the Isle of Wight one summer early in her career, a small flock of domestic geese have walked out from a farmyard to amuse the small girl. The birds tells us we’re in the country.

Another undated painting from the late nineteenth century, this time by Gaetano Chierici, calls on our experience of goose behaviour, and their size. An infant has been left with a bowl on their lap, and that room is invaded first by chickens, then by those large and aggressive geese. The child’s eyes are wide open, their mouth at full stretch in a scream, their arms raised, and their legs are trying to fend the geese away.

Domestic geese aren’t particularly seasonal, apart of course from their traditional unfortunate end at Christmas, but Adolf Lins has used them to capture warm sunshine in his A Summer Day, Geese by a Pond from 1905.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the rise of interest in wildlife painting brought different species and habitats to the canvas.

I’m still amazed that one of Elizabeth Nourse’s earliest surviving paintings is this very challenging Flock of Geese, from about 1883. Even with the aid of photographs this must have been extremely tough for a relative novice to paint so convincingly.

Winslow Homer’s Wild Geese in Flight from 1897 is, as you might expect, a masterful depiction of wild birds as they fly low over sand dunes, two apparently falling prey to a nearby hunter.

Then came specialist wildlife artists, including the father of the sub-genre, the brilliant Bruno Liljefors. After the First World War, he concentrated on the wildlife of Sweden’s coastal wetlands, including Bean Geese Landing above, and Geese in Wetlands below, both from 1921.

I haven’t looked here at the goose’s role in legend, lore and fable, but end this part with a true story of a goose in art, from Paul Gauguin’s time in Brittany.

When Gauguin stayed at Le Pouldu from 1889, he and others were accommodated by Marie Henry in her inn. Gauguin and his colleagues decorated the interior for her with their paintings. In 1893, when Marie Henry rented the building out, she removed as much as possible of the paintings which had been made there by Gauguin and others. But some were left behind. Over the years, they were covered with wallpaper and vanished, until they were rediscovered in 1924.

Among them is this wonderful painting of a goose, intended as a complement to Marie Henry.

In the first of this pair of articles looking at geese in painting, I concentrated on the birds themselves. Here I look at a motif which, for a couple of decades, became popular in paintings: the Goose Girl.

Geese are sufficiently aggressive to function as both intruder alarms and armed guards, so don’t need the protection of human shepherds. They do need to be watched and controlled, and periodically moved on to fresh grazing – an ideal task for the children.

Some geese are so special that they were made sacred, as in those of Juno which were kept on the Capitol hill in ancient Rome. Henri-Paul Motte’s Naturalist painting of Sacred Geese of the Capitol from 1889 shows them being kept in ornate cages, although this loose goose seems to be arguing with one of the priestesses responsible for their care.

They are claimed to have saved the city of Rome from invasion by the Gauls in about 390 BCE, by raising the alarm and waking sleeping Roman soldiers with their watch dogs. But this priestess is no Goose Girl.

I am sure there are earlier examples of this motif, but the first that really comes to attention is one of the most puzzling.

During the late 1850s, Jean-François Millet developed a series of studies which culminated in his painting of The Goose Girl in about 1863. She is here a quite incongruous contemporary nude set in a backdrop of the artist’s evolving social realism. This young woman, who is supposed to be tending the large flock of geese further along the river, has stripped off her working clothes and stepped out of her coarse wooden clogs to bathe herself in the river. She still wears a kerchief over her hair as an obvious mark of her ‘peasant’ status.

The result is certainly original, but I think it makes the viewer feel a voyeur, something that classical nudes in a rustic setting generally avoid, and not, I’m sure, the artist’s intention. The cattle seen at the top right also seem out of place.

Less than a decade later, the next in what was becoming a steady stream of paintings of the Goose Girl appeared: Ludwig Knaus’s Cake at Teatime (1872). She has thankfully recovered her clothes, and stands against a gate with a harvest-time landscape behind. A gaggle of geese are feeding avidly from what clearly isn’t cake, but scraps of greens from the kitchen waste.

In this very loose painting by Teodor Axentowicz in 1883, his Goose Girl walks with a large flock of geese on flat and marshy land beside a river.

Over the period between Knaus’s painting and the end of the century, there was a succession of paintings from other artists exploring this motif.

Wilhelm Friedenberg’s undated The Goose Girl’s Lunch shows a younger girl, plainly dressed as a ‘peasant’ and barefoot, sat as she enjoys a short break with her lunch. A younger brother, who presumably brought the wicker basket out to her, is asleep by her side.

Luigi Chialiva is one of very few artists to have painted not a Goose Girl but a Young Boy Tending Geese, in this painterly watercolour.

Attention then turned away from the pastoral setting and the birds to the young girls themselves. In Jendrassik Jenö’s The Little Goose Girl, his young subject is full of ennui, her back to the geese, staring into the distance.

Julien Dupré’s Naturalist painting In the Meadow, which was completed before 1891, shows a young mother holding her son’s hand as she steers a protesting goose with her stick.

It was perhaps William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s Goose Girl from 1891 which became the best-known example. She stands barefoot, her stick tucked under her left arm like a sergeant-major’s swagger stick, her head turned to look directly at the viewer. Instead of Jenö’s ennui, she smiles with deep confidence in her natural beauty. We could almost forgive the artist for his obvious studio composition.

Nikolai Bodarevsky’s goose girl is far less content. Seen in Little Russia. A Girl with Geese from 1892, this is set in what is now the Ukraine. Barefoot and dressed as a ‘peasant’, her gaze and mind have drifted far away from the geese with their young goslings in front of her.

For me, the consummate of these paintings is Léon Lhermitte’sThe Goose Girl of Mézy from 1892. Following the model set by Jules Bastien-Lepage’s waifs and strays, she stands sullen and sultry, defending her small flock of geese as she gleans for wheat left after the harvest. Her pinafore seems to have been handed down through the generations, and with its gaping holes is a shadow of its former self. But the last thing that she seeks is your pity or charitable handouts.

By the start of the twentieth century, the Goose Girl had moved on with her noisome birds. A few more paintings appear, such as the Canadian Clarence Gagnon’s Brittany Goose Girl from 1908. She walks along in her wooden clogs quietly knitting in the golden sunlight of autumn.

The American Japoniste print-maker Helen Hyde, who died a century ago tomorrow, shows a young Japanese girl arguing with her birds in Complaints from 1914.

The stereotype Goose Girl seems young, poor, barefoot, and thoroughly bored. Little does she know that later in life, she will be seeing to those geese in a different way, as shown in Max Liebermann’s Women Plucking Geese from 1871-72. Perhaps it’s as well that neither she nor her geese know their ultimate fate.

I only occasionally feature prints here, largely because I have never made any myself and don’t have the same practical feel for them as I do for painting. But here I’d like to remember a pioneering print-maker, the American Helen Hyde (1868-1919), who died a century ago today on 13 May 1919.

She was born in Lima, a small town in New York State, but spent much of her youth in California, where she studied art at the California School of Design. After a short period in New York City, she went to study in Europe, in both Berlin and Paris; in the latter city, she studied under Raphaël Collin and met Félix Régamey, who were noted Japonistes. She also saw and was influenced by the paintings and prints of the American Impressionist Mary Cassatt, who had herself been studying under Edgar Degas.

When Hyde returned to California after nearly six years in Europe, in 1894, she frequented San Fancisco’s Chinatown where she sketched mainly women and children. The following year she bought herself a printing press, and started to experiment with etching.

In 1897, Hyde made this delightful colour etching of The Cat and the Cherub, most probably from the sketches that she had been making in Chinatown.

She also made prints of local views, including this of Fort Point in 1898. I presume that this is the fort in San Francisco, in which case it is completely unrecognisable today as it forms the southern end of the Golden Gate bridge, built 1933-37.

She made friends with an unrelated namesake, Josephine Hyde, and in 1899 the two travelled to Japan to learn from Japanese print and painting techniques. Helen Hyde was soon working with woodblock prints, which she learned from the Austrian Emil Orlik who was living in Tokyo at the time.

Interior Decoration from 1900 shows how quickly she learned the technique, and her fascination for Japanese art in everyday settings.

Until 1912, Helen Hyde lived mainly in Japan, but travelled from there to visit China, India, and Mexico, where she sketched for additional series of prints. I show here three examples of those she made from her visit to Mexico in about 1912.

This unusual nocturne, a colour woodcut, showing Moonlight on the Viga Canal (1912) is based on her sketches of this canal, which runs from Mexico City to the suburb of Santa Anita. Although obviously Mexican, her Japonisme has even extended here.

Despite the sombreros and mantilla in A Mexican Coquette from the same year, the plants in this garden are very south-east Asian in appearance.

Oaxaca Market, also from 1912, is one of the most Mexican of her prints from this visit, and appears to have been made from a plein air sketch made on the first of February that year.

Hyde’s views of Japan are numerous and wide-ranging. Like Mary Cassatt, she specialised in depicting women and children, often caught in humorous or intimate moments. She loved pre-industrial Japan, where the kimono was everyday wear, and she saw so much beauty in the landscape and its people.

New Year´s Day in Tokyo, from 1912, is much grander in conception, and a carefully composed print of key elements in the Japanese New Year celebrations. The patterns on each of the different kimonos are marvellous.

I showed yesterday this print of hers of a young Japanese girl arguing with her geese in Complaints from 1914.

Blossom Time in Tokyo, from 1914, is another complex and quite spectacular colour woodcut print showing the tea ceremony taking place during the viewing of blossom in Spring.

Many of Hyde’s simpler motifs show individual figures battling with hostile weather, as in The Blue Umbrella from 1914, which shows a girl sheltering from heavy rain and wind during the winter.

Japan had been changing since its defeat of Russia in 1905, and Hyde was falling out of love with its new, Westernising industrial society. In 1914, after highly productive years during which she had signed around sixteen thousand of her prints, Hyde returned to the USA, where she continued to make prints. She won a bronze medal at the Panama-Pacific International Exhibition in 1915, then moved to Chicago where she had her first solo show, at the Chicago Art Institute in 1916.

Among her late works is this etching and aquatint of Little Miss Muffet, a strange account of this well-known nursery rhyme. There’s no sign of any spider, but there’s a rather large white chicken where I would have expected the spider to have been.

Helen Hyde had first been diagnosed with cancer in 1914, and in 1919 went to visit her sister in Pasadena, California, where she died on 13 May, at the age of only 51. Although not in the best of health, Mary Cassatt died in 1926.

Her prints continue to be sought-after, and were influential throughout the early twentieth century and beyond.

After Dante and Virgil hear the story of an alchemist who claimed to be able to transform base metals into gold, Dante mentions examples of those who have fallen victim to sudden changes of fate, in Thebes and Troy. But none compares to two of the spirits who sink their teeth into the flesh of others in this tenth rottenpocket. One is named as Gianni Schicchi, a Florentine fraudster who once impersonated a dead man to draw up a false will.

The other is Myrrha, who had incestuous desires for her father so passed herself off as another woman in order to sleep with him. Myrrha was transformed into the tree of that name, and her son was Adonis, the much-admired lover of Venus.

They also see Adam a notorious counterfeiter, Sinon the Greek who persuaded the Trojans to bring the wooden horse into their city, and Potiphar’s wife, who repeatedly tried to seduce Joseph before accusing him of trying to seduce her.

Virgil leads Dante on from the eighth circle of Hell towards the next, for the treacherous. As they approach in fog, they hear a deafening horn, and Dante then sees what he thinks are the towers of a distant town; Virgil tells him that they are giants who stand circling the rim, among them the Titans who waged war against the classical gods.

One of them, Antaeus, takes first Virgil then Dante in his hand to carry them onto Cocytus, the frozen lake which forms the ninth circle of Hell.

Here, Dante finds contemporaries who betrayed their kin. Among them are two frozen together almost as one, the Tuscan Sassolo Mascheroni who murdered his cousin for an inheritance, and Camiscion de’ Pazzi who murdered his cousin for property.

Next they meet political traitors, including Bocca degli Abati, a Guelph who aided the Ghibellines. They eventually come across Count Ugolino, who is gnawing the back of the head of Archbishop Ruggieri as a dog chews a bone. Their story will open the next article in this series.

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.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905) was a precocious and highly-acclaimed academic painter who dominated the Salon in the late nineteenth century with his figurative works, often drawn from mythology. Classically-trained at the École des Beaux-Arts, he grew infamous for his nudes painted against false settings, and his vehement opposition to Impressionism. However, he taught at the Académie Julian, and worked tirelessly even when his paintings fell from favour.

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.

Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) was a Swiss artist (originally Johann Heinrich Füssli) who first came to Britain in 1765, where he worked for much of his life. A successful portraitist and figurative painter, many of his works show the supernatural usually in melodramatic chiaroscuro and were unusual for the time. A professor of painting at the Royal Academy in London, his pupils included John Constable and William Etty, and he was an influence on William Blake.

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.