Best-known if not infamous for his erotic nudes during the 1860s, Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) in fact painted far more interesting works over the decade, although reading and explaining them may be more difficult. While our attention may be focussed on those popular displays of desirable flesh, Courbet’s certainly wasn’t. In 1862, he painted together with Camille Corot, at the time the leading landscape painter in France, from whom he learned how to limit his tonal ranges.

One salient and mysterious if not mystical theme in his landscape painting from this period is his quest for the “sources” of rivers. His views ascend to the headwaters, eventually ending in the “source”, a cave from which stygian waters emerge into the world, as in The Grotto of Sarrazine near Nans-sous-Sainte-Anne (c 1864). Even then, this was a noted place for tourists to visit near to his home town of Ornans.

These paintings of caverns also offer him the opportunity of making them as rough as their rocks, and exploring mark-making, often using a palette knife.

The Grotto of the Loue (1864) had very personal meaning for Courbet, as it is from here that the river runs down through his native town of Ornans. These paintings, coupled with two that I showed in the previous article, both titled in English The Source, from 1862 and 1868, lend themselves to Freudian interpretation, in which the artist might be seeking to return to his mother’s womb.

Slightly later, Courbet showed how he could make a ‘leaning’ sky amplify the impression given by windswept branches, to form The Gust of Wind (c 1865).

The other major theme which he developed during this period was the sea and its coast. The Fishing Boat from 1865 shows a small boat hauled up amid rocks as a windswept sea behind rushes in but stops short. There’s a marvellous light in his contrasting sky too, as the heavy clouds blow away into its distance.

His preference developed for desolate views, as in his Cliffs on the Sea Coast: Small Beach, Sunrise from the same year.

During the later years of this decade, his quest for the source seems to have subsided. The Weir at the Mill from 1866 appears to be another river view in the countryside near Ornans, in which Courbet has studied the different forms of water surfaces, rock, and trees.

His coastal paintings came to concentrate more on the waves breaking on the beach, as in his Autumn Sea from 1867, where two sailing boats are the only forms to punctuate its horizon.

The Sea, painted after 1865, is another of these views which are full of the serried ranks of waves and the immense power of the clouds.

Among the other themes which he painted during this decade is the Effect of Snow (1866-8), one of a series. Others show wild animals and hunting in the snow, and continue from his earlier paintings of hunting scenes. Here his very loose brushwork captures the texture of the snow on a country road near Ornans.

By 1869, Gustave Courbet was a thoroughly experimental painter, moving forward at the same time, but quite separately from, the Impressionists. Then came the Franco-Prussian War, the Paris Commune, and disaster.

Before Dante takes us on from Hell to Purgatory, I’d like to take a brief overview of the last fifteen articles in which he has taken us to Hell and back, looking at some of its finest paintings.

It was Botticelli who provided the clearest pictorial map of Dante’s journey, as he descended through a succession of circles, each with its own class of sinner. Highest are the woods through which Dante was wandering when he encountered the three wild beasts. At the left, Virgil led Dante down to the area in which the cowards are trapped, neither being allowed admittance to Heaven, nor to Hell. Charon’s boat them crosses the River Acheron, shown in blue, taking Dante and his guide Virgil to the First Circle of Limbo.

This journey starts just before dawn on Good Friday in 1300, when the poet is wandering, lost in a dark wood. His way is blocked first by a leopard, then by a lion, and finally by a wolf.

Forced to retreat back into the wood, Dante comes across a man who introduces himself by way of a riddle, leading Dante to recognise him as the ghost of the classical Roman poet Virgil. He tells Dante that the only way out is to pass through the eternity of Hell. When the pair reach the gate of Hell, they read its warnings, which culminate in the bleak exhortation: leave behind all hope, you who enter.

They first encounter those stuck forever on the periphery, those whose lives were too cowardly to enter Heaven or Hell, who are stung repeatedly by flies and wasps.

They then cross the River Acheron in Charon’s ferryboat, and enter the First Circle of Limbo, a place of tranquil and calm. Here are the souls of those who led honourable lives before the Christian era, and others who never had the opportunity to follow Christ. These include the great classical writers: Homer, Horace the satirist, Ovid and Lucan. Together with Virgil, these five invite Dante himself to join them as the sixth among the ranks of great writers (an ambitious piece of self-promotion).

Virgil leads Dante down to the Second Circle, for those guilty of the sin of lust.

Here the lustful are thrown around by vicious winds, and Dante hears the tragic story of Paolo and Francesca da Rimini, which inspired many fine paintings.

Passing the three-headed dog-monster Cerberus, Virgil takes Dante on to the Third Circle, full of gluttons wallowing in stinking mud, under a constant deluge of rain, sleet and snow. In the Fourth Circle, they see a mixture of the avaricious and prodigals pushing great boulders in opposite directions.

The Fifth Circle holds the swamp of the River Styx, in which sullen spirits are submerged, and the wrathful fight one another. Dante and Virgil cross this in a boat piloted by Phlegyas, who deposits them at the gate to the city of Dis, entrance to the lower parts of Hell. The gate is slammed shut on them, and requires a messenger from Heaven to let them through.

Here, Dante encounters the Sixth Circle, for heretics who denied the soul’s immortality, among them the Florentine Farinata degli Uberti, who is imprisoned in a tomb. With Virgil the guide, the pair are carried by Nessus the Centaur on to the Seventh Circle, for the violent.

These not only include tyrannical warriors like Attila the Hun, murderers and bandits, but those whose violence was directed at their own lives in suicide, who are trees in a wood which is kept in perpetual pain by harpies feeding on them. The pair then cross a desert on which fire rains to torment the souls of blasphemers, sodomites, and usurers.

Here Dante learns of a statue of an old man on Mount Ida, on the island of Crete, whose tears form the rivers of Hell.

Virgil guides Dante onto the back of Geryon, who had been a king slain by Hercules, condemned to suffer in Hell for his fraud, who flies the pair on to the Eighth Circle, for the fraudulent. This is divided into a series of ‘rottenpockets’, depressions in which different types of fraudster are confined. They pass through the areas for pimps, flatterers, corrupt religious leaders, sorcerors, corrupt officials, and hypocrites.

Among the corrupt religious leaders, or ‘simonists’, is Pope Nicholas III, who had been shamelessly nepotistic.

The later rottenpockets contain thieves, those who gave fraudulent counsel, those who sowed discord, and falsifiers and imposters of various kinds. Thieves are attacked repeatedly by snakes to undergo their own reptilian transformation.

Among these many cheats and frauds are those who fight one another, and sink their teeth into flesh.

Dante and Virgil are lowered into the Ninth Circle by Antaeus, one of the giants who stand guard around its periphery.

There is the lake of Cocytus, in which those guilty of treachery are frozen and suffering for eternity. These include souls of those who were treacherous against their relatives, against their homeland, against guests, and against their benefactors.

Among them is Count Ugolino, who sinks his teeth into the neck of Archbishop Ruggieri, who left him to starve to death in a cell.

Finally, Dante and Virgil see Lucifer himself, before leaving Hell.

The next article in this series joins Dante as he journeys through Purgatory, and shows paintings and illustrations of that second book of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

The artists

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

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

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.

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (1796–1875) was French, and one of the most prolific and greatest European landscape artists of the nineteenth century, who was key to the development of Impressionism. Following in the classical tradition, he also painted several narrative works set in those landscapes. This article looks briefly at his work and career.

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.

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.

Alexander Dmitrievich Litovchenko (1835-1890) was born in the Ukraine, but spent most of his career painting historical events in Russia. His painting of Charon shown above won him a gold medal.

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.

Linen and silk have been used as a support for paintings since ancient times, particularly in Egypt and China, where fabrics have been in greatest supply. Their first use in modern European painting seems to have been in the late Middle Ages, when painted banners became popular in churches, and during the fourteenth century artists were painting on fabrics stretched on wooden frames.

The first major proponent of stretched fabrics, which I will refer to generically as ‘canvas’, was Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506), who in the latter half of the fifteenth century painted many works using glue tempera on thin gesso ground applied over fine linen stretched across wooden frames.

Mantegna’s A Sibyl and a Prophet from about 1495 is a good example. In both Northern and Southern centres of the Renaissance, stretched fabrics quickly became popular supports for egg as well as glue tempera. Fabrics have included linen made from flax (also the source of linseed oil, of course), a wide range of grades of cotton, hemp, jute, silk, and most recently synthetic fabrics developed primarily for sailmaking and other purposes.

Just a few years after he had painted Primavera on a large panel, Botticelli switched to stretched canvas for The Birth of Venus (c 1486). As the use of oil paints swept through Italy, canvas became even more popular.

By the early sixteenth century, techniques for painting on canvas were well understood. Fabrics are woven on looms which limit the width of the roll manufactured. Where necessary, because of the size of the work, strips of fabric are stitched together. The resulting sheet is then stretched over a wooden frame, suitably braced to ensure its stability.

This is shown in this view of the back of a canvas in Paul Cézanne’s The Stove in the Studio from about 1865.

Various devices, including jointed ‘stretcher’ frames which could be tensioned by hammering in small wedges, were developed to maintain the fabric in tension, and its edges are tacked (today, stapled) to the wood on the reverse.

The woven fabric then needs to be protected using an isolating layer, originally ‘size’ or ‘rabbit-skin glue’, in reality a glue made from animal products more generally. Over that, chalk-based gesso is applied to form the ground for the oil paint, just as with wood panels.

Canvas proved versatile, and could readily be stretched over circular frames to produce the tondi seen in Louis Béroud’s Copyists in the Louvre (1909), where their cross-braces are apparent. The large painting shown here is Watteau’s Embarkation for Cythera (1717); to the left is Greuze’s The Milkmaid (1780), and to the right his Broken Pitcher (1785).

The technology and technique of painting on stretched canvas developed most actively in Venice. With its many churches and affluent families, there was great demand for substantial paintings. But its maritime environment – cold and wet in winter, hot and humid in summer – made fresco painting far from ideal. Large canvases proved the best solution, and Venetian workshops geared up for their production.

The sixteenth century saw canvases provide the supports for Titian’s greatest paintings, and later for the increasing sizes demanded by Tintoretto – above in an elliptical tondo, and below over sixty square metres (nearly 650 square feet) of paint, in his Crucifixion of 1565. This is about the same size as a squash court.

Veronese’s largest canvas paintings also exceeded 5 x 12 metres (16 x 40 feet) in size, in The Feast in the House of Levi (1573).

One of the largest oil paintings of its time was Tintoretto’s final Paradise, which is a remarkable 7 x 22 metres (23 x 72 feet), only slightly smaller than a tennis court.

Over time, the fabric used in many paintings on canvas deteriorates, and new fabric is attached to the reverse to improve their mechanical stability – a process known as lining or relining. Remarkably, there are still many very old paintings which have never been lined, and continue to look in excellent condition.

Stretched fabrics form a support which is not as rigid and dimensionally stable as wood panels, which makes fine cracking common in the paint layer; ageing fabric is also liable to tear unless of high quality, and is prone to deliberate acts of vandalism. As a result, many valuable oil paintings on canvas are now sadly secured behind protective glass.

Canvas can be detached from its wooden stretchers, sometimes undertaken to prepare a painting for transport or storage in a roll. Although this saved many precious paintings from destruction during the Second World War, rolling painted canvases too tight causes severe cracking in their paint layer, and can require extensive conservation work to minimise the damage. When Théodore Géricault’s massive canvas of The Raft of the Medusa was taken to exhibit in London, it was dismounted, rolled, and shipped in rolled-up form, and some of Rubens’ canvases were transported on the roll between the Netherlands and Spain.

During the heyday of the artist’s workshop, the fabrication of canvas supports and their preparation for use with the application of the ground was largely performed in house. By the nineteenth century, many painters bought in first unprepared canvases made by specialist craftspeople, then prepared canvases with their grounds already laid, ready to paint.

Although Frederic Church’s Heart of the Andes was seen as spectacularly large when he completed it in 1859, by Venetian standards it was small.

Changing painting style allowed some to apply the thinnest of grounds – usually ‘oil grounds’ consisting largely of lead white oil paint – to allow the texture of the underlying fabric to show through in the surface of their finished painting.

Canvases remain popular in plein air and mobile work, but lightweight and more mechanically robust boards began to replace them.

Industrially-manufactured canvases can be of uneven quality, and sometimes have flaws which lead to damage to the paint layer. Many of the paintings of the modern abstract artist Pierre Soulages made during the 1950s have suffered partial or complete delamination of their paint layer, as a result of their manufactured canvases containing water in the ground. This is thought to have occurred as the result of a labour dispute in the factory where they were made.

With the introduction of acrylic paints in the late twentieth century, stretched canvas has remained a popular choice of support. However, acrylic grounds have now largely replaced traditional gesso and oil grounds, even for those painting in oils.

By the end of the 1860s, Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) had matured from being an enfant terrible, becoming a darling of the liberals. As an act of appeasement, the Emperor Napoleon III nominated Courbet to the Legion of Honour, but the artist stood fast and refused. His popularity grew.

As tensions rose, Courbet returned to the coast to paint the sea, its waves, the sky, and distant horizon.

Among the earliest in this extraordinary series of paintings is The Wave from 1869, which concentrates on the familiar and distinctive form of a wave breaking on a rocky beach.

Some views were from further up the beach, such as The Calm Sea from the same year. His horizon is very low, as was traditional among the landscape painters of the Netherlands, giving him free rein in its sky.

As the French nation slid inexorably into crisis, the weather in Courbet’s marine paintings deteriorated. In The Wave from 1869-70, the clouds look threatening and there are white caps on the waves as evidence of the strengthening wind.

Then, in 1870, the year that he refused the Emperor’s nomination and in which France declared war on Prussia, Courbet’s storm arrived in The Waterspout.

He also continued to develop the motif of a single breaking wave, here in Waves from about 1870, which is now in Tokyo. This coming weekend I will explore this with its links to Hokusai’s famous woodcut and other marine artists.

Courbet revisited the famous cliffs at Étretat in 1870, where he painted this more tranquil view of The Cliff at Étretat after a Storm, a location and motif which was to be strongly associated with Claude Monet and Impressionism.

That summer, the Franco-Prussian War broke out. As a prominent artist and citizen, Courbet directed correspondence at those involved. Among his missives was an open letter to the Prussian army and artists of Prussia proposing that the French and Prussian cannons be melted down. He put a more serious proposal to the government, that it authorise him to disassemble the Vendôme Column in Paris, which had been erected by Napoleon I to honour his victories, so that it might be moved to a more appropriate place. Inevitably, nothing was done about this at the time.

After the ignominious French defeat in 1871, Courbet played a prominent part in the Paris Commune, organising a federation of artists which drew hundreds to a meeting which he chaired. He was first invited by the Commune to re-open the Louvre and Luxembourg Palace museums, and to organise an independent Salon for that year. That same meeting of the Executive Committee of the Commune also directed that the Vendôme Column should be demolished (not moved). A few days later, Courbet was elected the Delegate of Fine Arts to the Commune, with which he soon fell out.

The Vendôme Column was demolished amid great celebration on 16 May, a few days before “Bloody Week” saw widespread destruction of central Paris, and the final suppression of the Commune on 28 May 1871. Courbet then went into hiding until he was arrested on 7 June. Two months later, at his trial before a military tribunal, he was sentenced to six months in prison and a fine of 500 Francs. In prison he was allowed to paint, but wasn’t allowed to use models, so painted a series of still lifes.

Soon after release from prison, Courbet travelled to the mountains not far from his home town of Ornans, where he painted a Stream in the Jura Mountains, or The Torrent, in March 1872.

In the summer of that year, he returned to allegory in The Trout, “hooked and bleeding from the gills”, a powerful expression of his personal feelings, I suspect.

He also completed one of the last of his marines, Squall on the Horizon (1872-73), which almost seems prophetic. For the Vendôme Column continued to dog Courbet after his release from prison. The new Republican president decided to rebuild it, with Courbet footing the bill – a cost which would have bankrupted the artist, who fled France for the safety of Switzerland. Courbet took to heavy drinking and stayed in exile for the rest of his life.

Courbet painted some of the finest landscapes of his career during his exile in Switzerland, like this Sunset over Lac Leman from 1874, the year of the First Impressionist Exhibition in Paris.

He became particularly obsessed with the island château at the eastern end of Lake Geneva, Chillon Castle, here in 1875.

Chillon Castle from 1874-77 is another of several views which he painted of the castle on the lake.

Sunset on Lake Geneva from about 1876 is reminiscent of his earlier seascapes, but now the water is calm once more.

In May 1877, the French government informed Courbet that the cost of rebuilding the Vendôme Column would be over 300,000 Francs, which he could pay in installments of 10,000 Francs each year, starting on 1 January 1878. Courbet died in Switzerland on 31 December 1877, the day before, at the age of only 58.

Nature has many wonderful forms, of which the near-breaking or “surfer’s” wave is one of the most fascinating. Unless you were an artist in central Europe who didn’t get out much, chances are that you would have witnessed these forms, even if their scale wasn’t so impressive.

This article and its sequel tomorrow look briefly at the depiction of the near-breaking ‘regular’ wave in painting. Unlike almost every motif in art, this divides neatly into two around a single work: Katsushika Hokusai’s woodblock print of The Great Wave of Kanagawa first made in about 1830-31, but not seen in Europe until the latter half of that century.

Water waves were among the earliest physical phenomena to be painted, in the ancient and classical civilisations around the Mediterranean, which provided an endless source of models. Although those artists must have seen ‘regular’ near-breaking waves, they don’t really appear in paintings until they became more strictly realist in the middle of the eighteenth century. Prior to that, waves generally appear confused: impressive, atmospheric, but lacking that characteristically beautiful form.

As far as I can see, it was the marine painter Claude Joseph Vernet who first made a serious attempt at capturing the form, here in A Storm on a Mediterranean Coast from 1767. He has grasped all their essential features, such as their increasing transparency towards the crest, and their breaking, and I think these look thoroughly convincing.

Painstakingly careful realism, even if cast romantically, was also Géricault’s hallmark in his monumental painting of The Raft of the Medusa completed in 1818-19 and exhibited exactly two centuries ago. Right behind the makeshift raft with its desperate survivors is a superb depiction of one of these waves, which must have come from personal observation on the part of the artist.

For an artist who throughout his career painted some marvellous marine works, JMW Turner is a bit of a surprise, and seems to have had a career-long aversion to painting such regular waves. In his early watercolour of the Bell Rock Lighthouse from 1819, the waves are furiously irregular. In most if not all of his marine paintings, Turner opts for effect over form, and the water is often vague – a word which coincidentally is the French for wave.

Perhaps the closest that Turner comes to painting the form of a regular wave is in his Wreckers from 1833-4, where a breaker runs diagonally from the lower right up to the centre.

Contrast Turner’s rich effect with John Martin’s emphasis on the form of waves, in his Destruction of Tyre (1840), seen unusually along rather than facing into the breakers.

Another artist who placed great emphasis on accurate form is the prolific marine painter of the nineteenth century Ivan or Hovhannes Aivazovsky. His best-known painting The Ninth Wave from 1850 contains a visual reference collection of wave forms, lightly influenced by Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa. The detail below shows how carefully-rendered these waves are.

Its title derives from the belief that waves occur in trains of nine, progressively increasing in size to the ninth wave. Some nautical traditions claim that the number is seven rather than nine, and although there is some underlying evidence to support wave trains, inevitably real life is not as regular.

Japan’s eastern seaboard is exposed to the Pacific Ocean, which despite its name is often far from being pacific, with large waves generated by frequent storms. They had been depicted in Japanese art since the sixteenth century, forming their own sub-genre of painted screens known as ariso byōbu, or ‘rough seas screens’.

In about 1797, the woodblock print-maker Katsushika Hokusai (葛飾北斎) (1760–1849) started to develop motifs from this theme, with his print of Springtime in Enoshima. Here the small and densely-vegetated island of Enoshima is seen at the end of its sand spit, with the snowy cone of Fuji in the far distance. Just about to crash on the beach is a ‘regular’ wave, and a precursor to the most famous Japanese work of art in the West.

By about 1803, Hokusai’s attention had moved further south and east along the coast to another island, Kanagawa, from which he made this print of a View of Honmoku off Kanagawa. The wave has grown into a monster, its talons reaching out from the crest at a cargo vessel sailing along its trough. Two years later came the parent of his most famous print, then in around 1830 he struck gold.

Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa (Edo, 1830-32) was included in the collection Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, and proved popular not only in its home market, but also in Europe, when it arrived there more than twenty years later.

That wasn’t the last of Hokusai’s versions of this motif either: a few years later it appeared as The Big Wave in his 100 Views of Mount Fuji.

Other masters of ukiyo-e took up this theme too: Utagawa Hiroshige (歌川 広重) (1797–1858) was one of the last. In this view of The Seven-Ri Beach, from about 1835, looking towards Enoshima and Fuji from the east, he includes a similar ‘regular’ wave just about to break on a small group of people.

In the next and concluding article, I will show how Hokusai’s Great Wave influenced European and American art.

In the previous of these two articles, I looked at European paintings of near-breaking ‘regular’ or “surfer’s” waves prior to 1850, and the appearance of Katsushika Hokusai’s woodblock print of The Great Wave off Kanagawa, which became so popular in Japan.

No one knows when Hokusai’s Great Wave first appeared in Europe. Although it’s sometimes claimed that this didn’t happen until the re-opening of Japan to the West with the Meiji Restoration in 1868, there are records of the first ukiyo-e prints reaching the hands of artists in France more than a decade earlier.

They appear to have first arrived as protective wrapping for porcelain, and in about 1856 the French artist Félix Bracquemond, also an accomplished print-maker, first came across Hokusai’s prints at the workshop of his printer. Japonism(e) spread rapidly through artistic circles in Paris and other European cities. Among those who collected these prints were Bracquemond, Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Gustav Klimt, Édouard Manet, and Paul Gauguin.

In the late 1860s, Gustave Courbet’s coastal paintings came to concentrate more on the waves breaking on the beach, as in his Autumn Sea from 1867.

Then in 1869 Courbet painted a breaking ‘regular’ wave which must surely have at least been influenced by Hokusai’s popular print.

Appropriately, this development of the motif, in Courbet’s Waves from about 1870, is now in Tokyo, where it should perhaps be exhibited alongside Hokusai’s Great Wave.

Although I don’t have a date for this fine painting of Shipping off the Eddystone Lighthouse, and it has only been attributed to Anton Melbye’s younger brother Vilhelm, this too is likely to be post-Hokusai. At the right is a fine breaking wave.

It’s hard to judge the scale in Elihu Vedder’s Memory from 1870, but its waves appear much smaller, though beautifully regular. This remarkable painting is one of the earliest symbolist images made by an American artist, and is part a response to Tennyson’s poem Break, Break, Break (1842), in which he ponders the memory of loved ones when contemplating the sea. I feel sure that Vedder had at least glimpsed a Hokusai print too.

The great American landscape artist Albert Bierstadt only painted about thirty coastal views out of a total of around five hundred catalogued paintings, but at least three of them show breaking regular waves. In May 1872, he visited the Farallon Islands, a group of uninhabited rocks thirty miles to the west of San Francisco, responding with his dramatic Seals on the Rocks, Farallon Islands (c 1872-73).

Bierstadt’s wife was diagnosed with ‘consumption’ in 1876, and the following year the couple visited Nassau in the Bahamas, where they hoped the warmer climate would help her condition. During that visit, Bierstadt was inspired to paint The Shore of the Turquoise Sea (1878), showing a wave breaking on the coast there: surely a direct reference to Courbet and Hokusai. Bierstadt also painted a second, larger development from this work after 1878, now exhibited in the Haggin Museum in Stockton, CA, as After a Norther.

In France, the mainstream Impressionists and their successors seemed less impressed with Hokusai, preferring other Japonist themes such as tree blossom. The Great Wave found greater enthusiasm with Paul Gauguin and his circle who gathered first in Pont-Aven then Le Pouldu in Brittany. Gauguin’s gouache Seaweed Gatherers I (1888-90) shows two Breton women gathering seaweed on the beach. Behind them is a huge wave, its spume formed into a claw, which could only have come from Hokusai.

In 1889, Gauguin painted two works showing Ondine in the sea among waves. The first, known now as In the Waves, or Ondine (I), also refers to Hokusai.

Like JMW Turner before, Winslow Homer’s many paintings of the sea tend to depict waves for effect rather than their form. One of the few paintings in which he has formed a breaking wave regularly is this showing Cannon Rock, which he made in his nearby studio on the Maine coast.

In 1896, Great Waves swept across Europe on many canvases. Arnold Böcklin’s retelling of the story of Odysseus and Polyphemus shows Odysseus’ crew rowing frantically out to sea, through large waves, as Polyphemus prepares to hurl a huge rock at them from the shore.

Henry Moret, one of the Pont-Aven school, found his Waves at Pen-men, Île de Groix, on the far western tip of the island of Groix, with the mountainous sea for which this part of the Bay of Biscay is notorious.

The Nabi sculptor, and painter from Gauguin’s school, Georges Lacombe took Hokusai’s motif forward in several of his paintings. This is his treatment of Vorhor, The Green Wave in egg tempera, which shows an Atlantic swell coming into the seacliffs of Vorhor near Camaret-sur-Mer in Brittany.

Lacombe’s slightly later The Violet Wave also makes its influence abundantly clear.

In that same year, even the notorious academic artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau joined Hokusai’s crowd of admirers, in The Wave.

My last example of a post-Hokusai Great Wave is one of the late marine paintings of William Trost Richards: Off the Coast of Cornwall from 1904. In its impeccably-painted breakers are the spirits of Bierstadt, Courbet, and Hokusai.

A very Great Wave indeed.

Two hundred years ago today, Gustave Courbet was born in the country town of Ornans in Doubs, in the north-east of France. His paintings were of great influence in the development of art throughout Europe and North America. In my recent series of six articles examining his career and paintings (listed at the end), I have shown most of his major works. In this article, I look at his dozen most important paintings and their lasting influence.

Young painters are apt to produce exaggerated self-portraits, and Courbet’s The Desperate Man, from about 1843, is no exception. Here he grimaces wildly at his own canvas, and signs off in bright red, bringing it close to being his early manifesto.

Although tragically destroyed during the Allied bombing of the German city of Dresden during the Second World War, Courbet’s The Stone Breakers from 1849 marks the dawn of social realism and Naturalism. Courbet later explained that he encountered this group of men on the roadside one day, apparently when he was at home 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.

Before he had even completed that, Courbet was at work on his monumental A Burial at Ornans (1849-50), which was shown at the Salon of 1850 (as was The Stone Breakers), established his reputation, and became one of the canonical works of European art. This huge painting depicts in remarkably unemotional and objective terms the funeral of the artist’s great uncle in the small provincial town of Ornans. Such a large canvas showing what would previously have been considered a minor genre motif demanded revision of what was accepted as history painting.

Courbet continued to paint founding works of his new realism in The Wheat Sifters (1854). This prepared the way for Jean-François Millet, later Léon-Augustin Lhermitte, and culminated in dominance at the Salon of Naturalism, led by Jules Bastien-Lepage in the early 1880s.

In the mid-1850s, he turned his attention more to landscapes, including that of Château d’Ornans from 1855. The town seen in the valley in the middle distance is Ornans, straddling the River Loue, and the Château is the hamlet at the left, poised above the valley.

Then followed another huge and enigmatic canvas which remains the subject of speculation: his Painter’s Studio from 1855. The figures in this allegory show individuals who had influence over Courbet’s life and artistic career. At the right are the artist’s friends and admirers, including his first patron Alfred Bruyas, critics Champfleury and Baudelaire who had been so positive in their reactions to his work, and others. At the left a man with dogs has been interpreted as an allegory of the Emperor Napoleon III. Behind him are figures who were long assumed to be allegorical, but have been identified as contemporary people, most of whom had been supporters of the Emperor’s regime.

For the Exposition Universelle to be held in Paris in 1855, he submitted a total of fourteen works, including A Burial at Ornans and The Painter’s Studio. The latter two, being very large, were rejected (along with another), so Courbet withdrew from the exhibition and set up his own gallery of paintings next door to the Exposition – in anticipation of the Salon des Refusés to be held in 1863.

For the Salon of 1857, Courbet prepared six paintings, of which the most notorious is his Young Ladies Beside the Seine (1856), which shows a pair of prostitutes relaxing under a tree, a theme to be revisited by Édouard Manet in Le déjeuner sur l’herbe in 1863, and subsequently by the Impressionists. Like Manet’s successor, Courbet’s painting was rejected by the Salon jury.

Later in the 1860s, and largely to satisfy commissions from wealthy collectors of erotica, Courbet broke taboos in his paintings of nudes, such as The Sleepers from 1866, for which Joanna Hiffernan modelled. When exhibited by a picture dealer in 1872, its explicit lesbian motif resulted in a police report and the painting being removed from public view for more than a century.

While satisfying those carnal desires, Courbet turned to more mysterious landscape paintings in a quest for the “sources” of rivers. His views ascended to the headwaters, eventually ending in the “source”, caves from which stygian waters emerge into the world, as in The Grotto of Sarrazine near Nans-sous-Sainte-Anne (c 1864). Here he explores the making of marks, often using a palette knife, an avant garde technique.

Another of Courbet’s favourite themes which was to become strong among the Impressionists was the snowscape, using very loose brushstrokes, as in his Effect of Snow from 1866-8. This should perhaps be seen alongside some of the wintry views of roads painted by Camille Pissarro during the following decade.

Just before the Franco-Prussian War, Courbet developed the motif of the breaking wave in a coastal landscape consisting almost entirely of sky and sea. This coincided with the popularity of Hokusai’s woodblock print, and was taken up by Albert Bierstadt and even the academic artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau.

Tragedy struck Courbet in 1871, as a result of his involvement in the Paris Commune, and its demolition of the Vendôme Column. Not content with him serving a prison sentence and paying a hefty fine, he was later driven into exile by a government demand for over 300,000 Francs in restitution.

During his exile in Switzerland, Courbet painted some of the finest landscapes of his career, such as Sunset over Lac Leman from 1874, the year of the First Impressionist Exhibition in Paris. But instead of his art continuing to drive the revolution that was taking place in painting there, the Republican French government hounded him into exile, alcoholism, and an early death from liver disease on 31 December 1877. I wonder what could have happened had Gustave Courbet become involved with Impressionism during the 1870s.

Some governments have neither regard for art or culture nor for the achievements of their own citizens.

Detailed articles here about Gustave Courbet

1: The Desperate Man
2: The group
3: Allegory
4: The erotic
5: Waves and caves
6: Into exile

Although Heaven and Hell have clear biblical roots, the concept of Purgatory as part of the Christian life after death is more recent. It originated in the early Christian Church, flourished in the Middle Ages, and ripened only in the Catholic Church after the schism of Protestants in the Reformation during the sixteenth century. It can be seen as a route to Heaven for those who had sinned on earth, so long as they had confessed and repented – the ultimate let-out clause, perhaps.

Dante had much greater freedom in imagining what Purgatory might be, and adopted a physical structure which is the exact inverse of his vision of Hell: a mountain rising through seven terraces to culminate in a terrestrial paradise at the summit. Each terrace then accommodates a class of sin, rising from pride at the foot to lust just below paradise.

Dante and his guide, the spirit of Virgil the great Roman poet, emerge from Hell to arrive at Purgatory by sea just before sunrise on Easter Sunday in 1300. They are met on the shore by Cato the Younger (of Utica), who as a virtuous pre-Christian statesman is the guardian of this island-mountain in the southern hemisphere. Cato is in some ways a strange choice for this role as, when defeated by Julius Caesar, he committed suicide rather than submit to Caesar’s tyranny, but seems to have been liberated during Christ’s Harrowing of Hell.

Virgil explains to Cato a little of Dante’s story, and Cato instructs him as guide to make a belt for him using a single rush, and to wash him thoroughly. Cato then leaves them to make their way across a plain towards the foot of the mountain.

As they do so, a ship approaches the nearby shore at high speed. As a parallel to Charon’s ferry on the periphery of Hell, Purgatory is also reached by boat, this time piloted by an angel, who is ferrying souls from the mouth of the River Tiber, downstream from the city of Rome.

The hundred souls on board disembark and ask Virgil the way to the start of the ascent. Among them is Casella, a friend of Dante and a fine singer. The new arrivals race off towards the mountain, as Dante and Virgil progress more slowly. When the two finally reach the foot of the mountain, their way up is barred by a sheer cliff. They ask a group of spirits where they should start their climb, but they notice that Dante’s body throws a shadow, demonstrating that he is still alive.

One of them introduces himself as Manfred, grandson of the Holy Empress Constance and illegitimate son of Emperor Frederick II, who was betrayed and died at the Battle of Benevento in 1266, but sought God’s forgiveness for his terrible sins just before his death. He explains how the prayer of those still alive on earth can shorten his period in Purgatory, which would otherwise be thirty times the period of their excommunication (in Manfred’s case). Virgil then finds a steep route up for them, and they scramble up shattered rock until they’re above the cliff.

Virgil assures Dante that the way will get easier as they rise up the slopes. They then come across a group of souls huddling under a large rock.

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. Sadly, Blake’s illustrations of Purgatory were only at an early stage when he died, most still being rough pencil sketches.

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.

Philip Firsov (b 1985) is a British painter and sculptor who was born in Russia and trained in London, at the Slade School of Fine Art and Prince’s Drawing School. Further details of him and his works are here.

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.

The first paper-like sheets were made by the ancient Egyptians from papyrus, but it was the Chinese who discovered how to break plant fibres down to form sheets of what is recognisably paper. This knowledge came to Europe in the Middle Ages, by the eleventh century, and by the start of the Renaissance paper was being manufactured in water-powered mills.

Because even thick papers are so flexible, they don’t appear to have been used to any significant extent for paints such as egg tempera or oils which need rigid supports. However, the absorptive properties of paper are ideal for water-based media which form a relatively thin paint layer, most notably watercolour. Since the Renaissance, watercolours have almost invariably been applied to paper, serving as both its absorbent ground and support.

In the southern Renaissance, artists started to use watercolour to lay out works to be implemented in other media, such as fresco and tapestry. Some of the most remarkable early examples are Raphael’s ‘cartoons’, although some were probably painted in distemper rather than using gum-based watercolour paint.

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

At the end of the eighteenth century, some artists like Giovanni Battista Lusieri worked almost entirely in watercolour. His large panorama of the Bay of Naples measures around 1 x 2.7 metres (3 x 9 feet), and still had to be painted on six sheets of paper. During the nineteenth century, the paper industry started using wood pulp to give their products additional strength, and manufacturing methods improved further to result in paper, like woven fabric, being available on long rolls as well as in large sheets.

By the time that John Singer Sargent painted this wonderful watercolour Simplon Pass. The Tease in 1911, high-quality watercolour papers were widely available in a range of sheet sizes, on the roll, and in various weights and finishes. These enhanced the use of advanced techniques such as wet-in-wet and wax resist.

Papers were also developed with more abrasive surfaces suitable for retaining the powdery pigment particles of soft pastels, for which paper has long been the preferred ground and support for many artists.

This wonderful portrait of A Baby, painted in pastels by Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun in about 1790, shows how the experienced artist can use the texture of the paper for unique effects.

If finished oil paintings couldn’t be made on paper because of its flexibility, it was surely good enough for plein air and other sketches.

One of the most prolific of the early oil sketchers on paper is Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes. His sketch of Farm-buildings at the Villa Farnese: the Two Poplar Trees is an example made when he was painting in the Roman Campagna in 1782-85. This helped to form a large visual library of sketches from nature, and he recommended this practice in his influential book on landscape painting, which was still in widespread use a century after his death.

At roughly the same time, the father of Welsh landscape painting, Thomas Jones, was also in Rome, using the same practices, as seen in his tiny sketch of A Wall in Naples (c 1782).

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

Some oil sketchers apply their paint directly to unprepared paper, but impregnation of the ground and support by oil media can lead to its rapid deterioration. Those who intended their oil sketches to last longer sometimes primed the paper using pure linseed oil, and others applied size and a thin layer of more traditional ground such as gesso. When carefully prepared, such oil paintings on paper can last very well over time.

Painting with oils on paper or cardboard thus became the mark of the young, those still pupils, and artists too poor to purchase ready-made canvases. Alexandre Calame’s Swiss Landscape from about 1830 probably meets all three criteria.

Like Calame, Hans Gude started his career by applying oil paint to paper. His By the Mill Pond from 1850 seems to have been a plein air study which is so detailed that it would be hard to class it as a sketch.

In the coming years, some experienced older painters were to choose to paint on paper for its very different properties in contrast with stretched canvas.

In his quest for different techniques and effects, Edgar Degas painted occasionally with oils onto paper, as in his Women Combing Their Hair from about 1875-76.

Charles Conder and the Australian Impressionists were much more adventurous in their use of different supports, which included wood panels from cigar boxes and large sheets of cardboard, used here in Conder’s Herrick’s Blossoms from about 1888.

Elihu Vedder was another enthusiastic sketcher in oil on paper, as shown in his The Advent of Man from about 1913. This was probably intended to be worked up into a finished painting using a more traditional support.

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, specialist paper manufacturers developed products which are intended for use with oils, and don’t need any protective coating before oil paint can be applied. Although these work excellently as a novel ground, they still need to be mounted on a more rigid support, an issue which I will discuss in a future article in this series.

My final example of an oil painting on paper is perhaps its most appropriate. Aōdō Denzen was a Japanese artist who in the early nineteenth century was among those who brought European painting techniques to south-east Asia.

His Mount Asama Screen (Edo, 1804-1818) was made using perilla-based oil paints on paper. Perilla is a drying oil seldom used outside the tropics, and paper was of course first made in south-east Asia, which is where this story started.

Over the last few months, I have systematically worked through the careers and work of those painters who have been associated with the Nabis. Viewed individually, it’s hard to assemble a picture of where they came from, what the Nabis were, and where they went. In this and the following articles in this series, I’m going to draw on what I have discovered so far, trying to derive a better and thoroughly visual account of the Nabis.

The Nabis formed in around 1889 from a group of friends in Paris. Their first outward expression as a group was an exhibition at the Café des Arts or Café Volponi outside the Exposition Universelle in 1889, after the Eiffel Tower had been opened there. The following year Maurice Denis published their manifesto in the journal Art et Critique. At this stage they declared themselves to be Impressionist and Synthesist, the latter linking them to the school of Gauguin, including Émile Bernard, both of whom showed paintings at that first exhibition.

Gauguin and Bernard had met at Pont-Aven in Brittany in 1886, when Bernard had been suspended from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Breton Girls Dancing, Pont-Aven (1888) is one of Gauguin’s most famous paintings from Pont-Aven, and is typical of his style in the late 1880s, which was such a strong influence on the young artists who gathered there around him.

Émile Bernard’s House among trees: Pont-Aven from the same year shows his close adherence to Gauguin’s style.

Another member of the school was a Dutch formerly realist painter Meijer De Haan, who quickly converted to the new style shown in his Breton Women Scutching Flax: Labour from 1889.

Charles Laval had been painting with Gauguin rather longer, since they met in 1886, and travelled with him to Panama and Martinique in 1887. Laval’s The Aven Stream (1889) shows his affinities. Little seems to be known about his career. Following his early death in 1894, many of his paintings were attributed to Gauguin. Whether Laval was ever a member of the group who became the Nabis isn’t clear.

Paul Sérusier didn’t join the school until the summer of 1888, and prior to that had been quite a realist or even an ally of Naturalism, as shown in The Weaver above, from earlier that year. Under the close supervision of Gauguin, he painted the work which became the touchstone and religious icon of the Nabis, The Talisman, below.

Paul Ranson was a realist with an interest in the supernatural, and still a student at the Académie Julian in Paris when he met Paul Sérusier in 1888. He then changed style quite dramatically, and became a member of the group as it formed into the Nabis.

József Rippl-Rónai had travelled to Paris to study under the Hungarian realist painter Munkácsy Mihály in 1886-87. In 1888, he met and befriended that same group who were forming the Nabis, and changed from his earlier realist or Naturalist style as a result. He then spent some summers with the school of Gauguin in Pont-Aven.

Maurice Denis first came into contact with Gauguin’s paintings when he visited the exhibition outside the Exposition Universelle in 1889, and Le mystère catholique from later that year was an early indication of him following this new style.

Édouard Vuillard had painted in the sketchy post-Impressionist style shown in his still life of a Cup and Mandarin from his student days in 1887-88. He didn’t come into contact with the school of Gauguin until 1889, when he was introduced to it by Maurice Denis, an old schoolfriend.

Félix Vallotton didn’t join the Nabis until after the group had formed. Previously a realist, in 1889 he became fascinated by Japanese ukiyo-e prints by Hokusai when he was exhibiting some of his paintings at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. It wasn’t until 1893 that he became a Nabi.

The central figure for the Nabis before the launch of their manifesto in 1889 was undoubtedly Paul Gauguin. But by the time that they were developing their movement and working together, Gauguin had another project in mind, his trip to Tahiti. In early 1891, he was busy raising funds, and sailed from France on 1 April that year. He didn’t return until August 1893, when he was thoroughly involved in promoting the paintings that he had returned with. Having inspired and launched the Nabis in the late 1880s, he then abandoned them in pursuit of his own art and career.

Painters of note in France during the latter half of the nineteenth century are generally quite easy to classify. There were Impressionists, some of whom became Divisionists and/or Post-Impressionists, Realists and Naturalists (whose work I have covered quite extensively here), the Nabis at the end of the century, and those who adhered to academic styles. Then there are a few artists who don’t really fit any of those, like Edgar Degas, who was a member of the Impressionists but didn’t paint in Impressionist style.

The misfit whose career and work I have chosen for this series of articles is even stranger than Degas: close to the Impressionists and major figures like Manet and Whistler, he spent much of his career painting exquisite and lucrative floral still lifes. His best-known paintings now are a handful of group portraits, and only late in his career did he show any signs of ‘loosening up’ from his rigorous academic style. He’s Henri Fantin-Latour.

Ignace Henri Jean Théodore Fantin-Latour, to give him his full name, was born in the city of Grenoble, in the far east of France adjacent to some of the most spectacular scenery at the edge of the Alps, in 1836. As his father was an artist, he was taught to draw and paint at an early age, and progressed to enter the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1854.

As his skills developed there, and like many other students, Fantin copied paintings in the Louvre. The early paintings of his which have survived are a series of portraits, and he made commissioned copies of old masters from 1856 onwards. Among his best-sellers was the huge Veronese Wedding Feast at Cana (1562-63), of which he made no less than five large-scale copies over a period of eleven years. That seems to have been a successful trade for other painters too: Delacroix had painted at least two slightly modified versions.

In the summer of 1858, when he was copying in the Louvre, Fantin met Whistler, and the two became great friends. By this time, Fantin moved in circles which included Carolus-Duran, who was later to teach John Singer Sargent, Alphonse Legros, Édouard Manet, and the writers and critics Charles Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier.

Although Fantin later had a preference for the paintings of Delacroix, early in his career he also seems to have been influenced by Gustave Courbet. His early self-portraits may reflect that, as in this Self-portrait Aged 23 from 1859. Fantin also apparently painted his two sisters at this time, when he was back home in Grenoble.

This Self-portrait from the following year is surprisingly rough in its facture.

As with many other painters, he made some simple still lifes, such as his Still Life with Mustard Pot from 1860, which is also painterly.

His Self-Portrait made in black chalk in 1861 was, like most of the others, given to a friend, in this case someone called Myiounet, an unusual name perhaps associated with Monaco.

This Self-Portrait from 1861 is more reminiscent of Courbet’s Desperate Man.

Then in the early 1860s, Fantin started painting floral still lifes, such as this Still Life with Chrysanthemums from 1862. These were the first of his original works to attract attention from prospective purchasers, and his friend Whistler promoted them when he was visiting London, resulting in early sales to Britain.

In 1863, Eugène Delacroix died, and Fantin was inspired to gather his friends for a painting with which to commemorate him. He didn’t undertake this lightly, but researched Delacroix’s writings and engaged in a long series of sketches in his quest for the right composition. This fairly early oil study for Homage to Delacroix was made in 1863-64, and shows one possibility which he rejected: an irregular group around a statuary bust of Delacroix.

As Bridget Alsdorf has written, Fantin was primarily trying to solve the problem of how to represent the artist’s relationship to the group of friends.

His eventual solution, in the finished Homage to Delacroix from 1864, includes the following figures:

• Louis Cordier (standing, left),
• Alphonse Legros,
• James Abbott McNeill Whistler,
• Édouard Manet,
• Félix Bracquemond,
• Albert de Balleroy (standing, right),
• Louis Edmond Duranty (seated, left),
• Henri Fantin-Latour,
• Jules Champfleury,
• Charles Baudelaire (seated, right).

Like Fantin’s later group portraits, this is a historical record of considerable importance. As a work of art, it is ambitious, and demonstrates the difficulties of such group portraits. Duranty looks so detached that he isn’t there at all, and the relatively inexperienced Fantin struggles to make all the figures appear part of an integral and instantaneous image.

Its colours are low-key, reaching a peak in the flowers below Delacroix’s portrait, where they conveniently link to his new theme of floral paintings. It’s also unfortunate that the image he used for Delacroix’s painting is one which its subject was quite unhappy with. That said, this is one of the most important paintings of Fantin’s career and demonstrated how quickly his skills had developed.

Around that time, Fantin painted Peonies in a Vase (c 1864), as another step in his more commercial career.

In 1865, Fantin was fully engaged painting more still lifes. His Flowers and Fruits shows his progress here.

Another from that same year is Still Life with a Carafe, Flowers and Fruit, where he explores the optical properties of different surfaces more.

In the next article, I will look at how his figurative paintings developed through into the 1870s, against a background of flowers.

Reference

Bridget Alsdorf (2013) Fellow Men, Fantin-Latour and the problem of the Group in Nineteenth Century French Painting, Princeton UP. ISBN 978 0 691 15367 4.

I am very grateful to @SuperNormaled for prompting me to look at Fantin in more detail.

Repoussoir is a term you’ll see bandied about in writing about art, particularly landscape painting. It’s French for pushing back, and refers to compositional techniques used to make the distant parts of an image look further away and deeper into the picture. In this article and its sequel tomorrow, I look at repoussoir to get a clearer idea of what is meant by the term, how it works, and how it has been used and developed by the masters old and newer.

The ancient painters in classical Greece and Rome were very keen on realism. Although they never quite discovered linear perspective projection, they valued the ability to make a two-dimensional image appear to have physical depth, its third dimension.

When there are buildings and people around, as in Pissarro’s Boulevard Montmartre, Spring from 1897, there are rich visual cues which give depth to a painting. Among them are occlusion of distant objects by nearer ones, relative size, height in the picture plane, texture and detail gradients, aerial perspective, and formal projection in linear perspective – all of which are seen here.

But away from buildings, particularly in the flat North Sea coast seen in Willem Roelofs’ Seascape at Heijst from about 1868, many of those cues are lost. Without further visual information, our brains can struggle to gauge the depth – an effect Roelofs was presumably exploiting here.

Anton Mauve followed traditional teaching in his Morning Ride Along the Beach from 1876 by adding foreground objects, and augmenting cues for depth. But most of those rely on the details which are lost as you look further into the distance.

One compositional solution to the problem, repoussoir, is shown clearly in Richard Parkes Bonington’s sketchy watercolour of Les Salinières near Trouville (1826). At the left side of the painting – the most conventional location for it – he plants a tree, straggly enough not to obscure the landscape, but high enough to rise much of the height of his paper.

This repoussoir tree adds a remarkably rich set of cues which make the painting have palpable depth.

In the paintings of these two articles, you’ll see a variety of objects used in this role. Some may never have existed at all, and been put there purely to provide repoussoir. Others have been slightly ‘adjusted’ from nature, perhaps, to gain their full effect.

Trees are the most common among landscape artists, and they are normally seen on either or both sides of the painting. Sometimes they arch over towards the centre of the view, but they’re subordinate additions to the view, and generally the approach taken is to keep them in their place, rather than letting them vie for the viewer’s attention.

After the Romans, there was a long period during which paintings seldom tried to imitate reality. It was in the Renaissance that artists resumed painting what they saw in the world around them – and with it came the importance of depth again.

At the dawn of modern landscape painting, Giorgione’s The Tempest from about 1504-8 uses trees on both left and right to frame the buildings and lightning in repoussoir, an extremely early and innovative use.

At around the same time, Fra Bartolomeo used a ruined building for repoussoir in The Holy Family with St John the Baptist (1506-07). Some refer to the framing object leading the gaze of the viewer, and here that is easy to imagine, with the pillar taking the eye to the distant ox and ass, and on to the far Italianate town.

The greatest of the early landscape painters in the south of Europe, Poussin and Claude, were fine exponents in the use of repoussoir. My favourite example is Poussin’s magnificent and pure Landscape with a Calm from about 1651. Here the forms of the trees fit so well with the landscape beyond, because this is but an idealised composite landscape.

There’s no shortage of repoussoir among the landscapes of Claude either. Above is his Coast Scene with the Rape of Europa from 1667, in which the dark and heavy tree at the left is his frame. Below is a chalk and sepia sketch made slightly later for Perseus and the Origin of Coral (c 1671), with its repoussoir tree again on that side.

Repoussoir had already been widely adopted by the great landscape painters in northern Europe too. By the time that Jacob van Ruisdael painted this view of a Landscape with a Church in about 1645, his repoussoir trees were threatening to take over the whole view.

Thomas Gainsborough took a lighter touch in his Wooded Landscape with a Cottage and Shepherd from 1748-50: on the left is a thin sliver which hints gently that there’s a tree just beyond the edge of the canvas. Its twin on the right is further into the motif, but makes up for that in its engaging character.

In the next article, I’ll consider how repoussoir fared in the nineteenth century, when so much of painting was questioned and re-examined.

In the first article of this pair yesterday, I explained and showed how trees to one side of the foreground of a painting strengthen the cues for depth, a compositional technique known as repoussoir, pushing back. This had become quite widely used by the end of the eighteenth century, and an accepted part of the artist’s repertoire.

Caspar David Friedrich used it from an unconventional angle of view in his Chalk Cliffs on Rügen (after 1818). Here the viewer’s gaze is directed down towards the sea below and beyond the white pinnacles. To make this appear even more vertiginous, Friedrich adds classical repoussoir from a couple of trees perched on the clifftop, then leans two of his figures against their feet.

Inspired by Claude Lorraine, JMW Turner’s early view of Pope’s Villa, at Twickenham from 1808 is a good example of the left-sided repoussoir convention in all its glory.

A few years later, Turner used even stronger repoussoir to make the city of Plymouth seem even more distant as we look down on it in his Crossing the Brook (1815). He draws our gaze deep into that distance by continuing the trees diagonally downwards from the right, leading us to the river which then meanders into the haze.

Franz von Stuck included two young birch trees as repoussoir either side of six young women dancing in a ring, in his Circle Dancing of 1910. This demonstrates again how the foreground figures alone don’t have as much effect on depth as they do in conjunction with the repoussoir: try covering the trees with your hands.

I showed in the first article an example of Richard Parkes Bonington’s use of traditional repoussoir in a watercolour landscape sketch. In The Piazzetta, Venice painted in oils the year before he died tragically young, he uses a column placed close to the centreline of the picture, in a radical departure from convention which works very well.

Richard Berg tried another variation using figures and pillars moved out from the edges, in his Nordic Summer’s Evening (1899-1900), then adds to the recession with trees behind them in the middle distance.

In the early nineteenth century, taking a lead from Caspar David Friedrich’s painting of a woman standing by a window, windows, balconies and other structures were used to frame distant landscapes, recalling the windows used in many Renaissance and earlier paintings to afford far landscape views. As the century passed, painters steadily closed in on these frames, until Pierre Bonnard returned again and again to views through the window.

Samuel Palmer’s The Shearers from about 1833-35 uses the massive beams of a sheepshed to frame the dazzling external landscape.

Bonnard was no stranger to the conventional use of trees for repoussoir, as shown in his spectacular view of Earthly Paradise from 1916-20. In some of his paintings, he moved the trees into the centre instead.

Bonnard’s The Breakfast Room from 1930-31 uses thin slivers of figures at its edges for its first plane of repoussoir, beyond which are one of the artist’s favourite repoussoir structures, French windows. Although others have used figures for repoussoir, this reverses convention.

The Impressionists, particularly landscape specialists such as Pissarro, used repoussoir occasionally. But some took their lead from Corot, who so often extended what you might have thought were perfectly good repoussoir trees to cover much or all of the view, isolating foreground and background altogether.

My last artist, though, leaves me more puzzled than when I started: Paul Cézanne, who apparently wanted to control the viewer’s perception of the geometry of the painting, in particular with the aim of losing depth.

I therefore find it puzzling that Cézanne used repoussoir quite traditionally. In his painting of Mont Sainte-Victoire with a large Pine from 1886-87, he frames the view with two straggly pines which reach out to one another at the top of the canvas.

Cézanne’s Le Lac d’Annecy is generally taken as the inception of his most radical style and approach to painting, during his late career. When compared to modern satellite images, the distance between the artist’s point of view and the Château de Duingt on the opposite side of the lake is 800 metres (just under half a mile), but it appears to be far closer than that despite the very traditional repoussoir of a tree trunk on the left.

Cézanne was perhaps the first painter to use repoussoir to make a distant object look closer.

Dante is being led by the ghost of Virgil up the steep crags at the foot of the island mountain of Purgatory. After negotiating their way around sheer cliffs, they come across a group of souls huddling under a large rock: these are the spirits of those who delayed their repentance until their very last minutes on earth.

One them, Belacqua, tells Dante that they must spend another complete lifetime in Ante-purgatory on the lower parts of the mountain before they can pass out at the top. He had been a famously lazy friend of the poet in Florence, and shows no sign of changing his ways.

They pass onward and upward, to meet another large group who made their peace with God shortly before dying violent deaths. Among them is Buonconte, a fearsome Ghibelline leader who disappeared in a battle in which Dante took part. He tells Dante that, dying of his wounds, he shed a tear of contrition and succumbed with the name of the Virgin Mary on his lips.

There followed a battle between a good angel and the Devil for his soul, which fortunately resulted in triumph for the former, and his admission to the slopes of Ante-purgatory.

The other victim of violence is La Pia, more fully Pia de’ Tolomei, the wife of a Tuscan leader of the Guelphs known as Nello, or Paganello de’ Pannocchieschi. She was by all accounts a wife of great virtue, but Nello wanted to marry a widowed countess, so had her murdered in great secrecy in 1295 when she was at her husband’s castle in Maremma.

This gives rise to her summary statement Siena mi fé, disfecemi Maremma (‘Siena made me, Maremma unmade me’). Her tragic story has inspired many paintings, particularly during the nineteenth century.

The artists

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.

Enrico Pollastrini (1817–1876) was an Italian painter who was born in Livorno in the Dolomites, but became the first professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. He appears to have painted mainly figurative and historical works.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) was of Italian descent but born in London. In 1848, he co-founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and was a major figure in British painting until his early death in 1882. A published poet and author himself, many of his paintings were in response to literature, particularly the poems of John Keats. He had a succession of relationships with his models and muses, including Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth, and William Morris’s wife Jane, and it was Jane Morris who was his model for the paintings shown above. His finished painting wasn’t exhibited at the Royal Academy until the year after Rossetti’s death, and was bought by FR Leyland.

Eliseo Sala (1813–1879) was an Italian painter who was born in Milan and studied in Brera. He was a renowned portraitist, and made history and genre paintings.

Stefano Ussi (1822–1901) was an Italian painter who studied under Enrico Pollastrini in his native Florence. In the 1850s he was a successful history painter, then around 1860 joined the Macchiaioli, a group of Italian pre-Impressionists. In 1869 he visited Egypt and became a noted Orientalist during the 1870s and 1880s.

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.

The vast majority of oil paintings have been made on supports of wood or stretched fabric. But over the centuries a wider variety of materials have been used, including sheets of metal, slate and other stone, glass, and most recently elaborately-structured composite materials. They all meet the primary requirement, that of rigidity, but vary in their dimensional stability, weight, and suitability to retain paint or an appropriate ground.

The most commonly-used of these alternative supports has been copper sheet, which has long been used as the support and ground for enamelling, and forms plates for various methods of making prints. Although a relatively expensive metal, it is highly malleable and was worked into uniformly thin sheets even in quite ancient times.

Earliest surviving paintings on copper date from the first half of the sixteenth century. Lavinia Fontana’s striking oil painting of The Annunciation from about 1575 is a good example from the time that copper came into vogue in both the north and south of Europe.

By the end of that century, many painters were using copper supports. For landscape artists like Paul Bril, they were an ideal means of making relatively small but intricately detailed works which were suitable for a customer’s ‘cabinet’.

Jan Brueghel the Elder was among many others who painted on copper at this time. By the early seventeenth century, there were twenty-five master coppersmiths in Antwerp alone who provided plates for painting.

The challenge to painters who chose to paint on copper was ensuring good adhesion to the metal surface. Traditional recipes stress the importance of thorough cleaning and de-greasing, and some recommend treatment of the copper using cloves of garlic or their juice. Like many metals, copper does slowly corrode when exposed to the atmosphere, and ensuring complete coverage of bare metal by ground or paint was important to prevent that. In practice, surviving oil on copper paintings have generally remained in fine condition, and they don’t appear to suffer delamination.

In return, the painter gets a very smooth surface on which they can develop fine detail. The dark natural colour of the metal was widely used for chiaroscuro effects, and the surface of the paint layer is usually so smooth that varnishing was unnecessary.

Adam Elsheimer specialised in painting on copper, and I can’t recall seeing any painting which he made on a different support. He painted Saint Elizabeth of Hungary Bringing Food for the Inmates of a Hospital in about 1598, when he was just twenty.

Elsheimer excelled at nocturnes and other scenes in very dark settings, such as The Burning of Troy above, and Ceres at Hecuba’s Home below.

Copper remained quite a popular support during the seventeenth century in the Netherlands. Some artists, such as Hendrick de Clerck, pushed their technique up to larger sizes too.

David Teniers the Younger was another career-long enthusiast for painting in oil on copper, in more varied lighting than Elsheimer. Around 1628-30, he painted a complete narrative series of Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered on copper.

The fine detail in Teniers’ Temptation of Saint Anthony demonstrates what can be achieved on a smooth copper surface.

During the latter half of the seventeenth century, enthusiasm for copper supports started to tail off. Gerard ter Borch still used quite a large plate for his historical record of The Ratification of the Treaty of Münster, 15 May 1648, but most other painters were transferring to canvas.

The use of copper has never ceased altogether since the late sixteenth century, and has been continued by a succession of artists with whom it has found favour, such as Nicolas Lancret above, and Johann Georg Platzer below. The latter appears to have painted many works on rather larger sheets of copper than those used earlier.

Here there’s a delicate balance to be struck: thinner sheets are less rigid, and warp more readily, but are substantially lighter and cheaper too.

One of the founding members of the Royal Academy of Arts in London in the late eighteenth century, Angelica Kauffmann painted smaller history works on copper which she could then sell at more affordable prices than her larger works on canvas.

The first widely-known painter to run into trouble when painting on metal sheet was William Blake. Early in his career he devised techniques for painting in glue tempera, and applied this to printing plates, some of which he seems to have cut down to size himself. One of these has been painted on tinned steel, thought to have been cut from the lid of a box, and the others are on copper. Unfortunately, adhesion between the glue and gum binder used in his paint and the surface of the metal has proved poor, and these paintings have flaked and aged badly.

Copper and other metals made something of a comeback during the twentieth century. Joseph Stella painted several works on copper, including his very large and detailed Apotheosis of the Rose shown below, in 1926.

Large copper and other metal sheets become heavy; the advent of aluminium in the late nineteenth century has led some modern artists to use it as a support. With the development of lightweight rigid sheet materials for aircraft and other industrial applications, and most recently composites in which plastics and metals are bonded together, modern painters now have a much wider choice.

Most rocks are neither light nor readily made into flat surfaces suitable for painting. The one exception which has been used since the Renaissance is slate, which is widely available in thin sheets. I show here just three examples, the first two of which are on quite large slate supports.

Several masters of the southern Renaissance painted on slate, including Sebastiano del Piombo, whose magificently dark portrait of Pope Clement VII above shows how the natural slate grey can be used to effect, and Vasari’s large painting of Perseus and Andromeda below.

The most surprising painting here is the last: a preparatory study made for a large portrait of Benjamin Franklin, which was never completed, by the Anglo-American history painter Benjamin West in about 1816 – on a sheet of slate. I have no idea why he chose this support in the final few years of his life.

Between 1886 and 1889, Paul Gauguin had assembled a school of artists around him in Pont-Aven then Le Pouldu in Brittany, where they developed a distinctive style together. Under his direction, Paul Sérusier had painted The Talisman in the summer of 1888, which formed the touchstone and religious icon for the new group as it formed.

But Gauguin was working on a different project, which in early 1891 took him to Tahiti. By this time, the Nabis, as they had named themselves, had exhibited together in 1889, and the following year Maurice Denis published their manifesto as an Impressionist and Synthesist movement which he termed enigmatically neo-traditionalism. This article looks at their paintings between that manifesto and 1893: the infancy of the Nabis.

Sérusier’s Portrait of Paul Ranson in Nabi Costume adopts almost mediaeval style, and casts his subject in the role of a bishop clutching an ornate crosier and reading from an illuminated book – a humorous indication of the religious feelings the Nabis had for their art and aesthetics.

Sérusier’s painting of Breton Wrestling remains in the school of Gauguin.

Pierre Bonnard was at the height of his Japonism(e), painting vertical panels such as The Dressing Gown, in which decorative patterns rather than colour or outline are used to distinguish figure from ground.

In 1891, Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard and Maurice Denis started sharing a studio, which formed a focal point for the members of the new group, including Ker-Xavier Roussel and Paul Sérusier. But it was Paul Ranson’s studio which was the ‘temple’ at which The Talisman was on display like an icon.

Vuillard’s Child Wearing a Red Scarf also shows flattened perspective and emphasis on patterning, particularly in clothing, although his colours weren’t as muted as those of some of the others.

In Maurice Denis’ overtly Japoniste September Evening, the forms of the figures are flattened, each wears a patterned dress, and colours are muted.

Paul Ranson’s paintings started to feature the figure of a nude bent forward to grasp her feet, as in his Lustal, which became a recurrent motif in his Nabi works.

Working in oil with pen and black ink, in his Afternoon in the Garden Pierre Bonnard combined colour and patterning in an image which has lost all depth, but retains clear pictorial structure.

Jan Verkade’s two Decorative Landscapes, above and below, have muted colours and flattening of depth, but are still firmly rooted in Gauguin’s Pont-Aven style.

This image of Ker-Xavier Roussel’s Conversation is unusual for revealing its rich surface texture. Under that, it too has muted colours, flattened perspective, and patterned textiles.

In 1892, several of the central Nabis – Ranson, Sérusier, Bonnard and Vuillard – worked together on theatrical sets for a production of Rimbaud’s Bateau Ivre in Paris.

Maurice Denis interpreted a popular contemporary motif of women picking fruit in high Nabi style in The Ladder in the Foliage (1892). Gone are the patterned dresses, replaced by flowing curves more typical of art nouveau illustrations. There are no fruit either, and the poses of these women suggest a more spiritual purpose in their ascent.

The Croquet Game, also from 1892, continues to show Pierre Bonnard’s fascination for Japonism(e) and occasionally gratuitous use of patterning.

The Stages of Life is one of two versions of this motif painted by Ker-Xavier Roussel in the early 1890s, both of which have several Nabi characteristics.

By 1892-93, Félix Vallotton’s flattened and stylised figures in his Bathing on a Summer Evening looked as if they had been applied like collage to a background reminiscent of some of Ferdinand Hodler’s alpine meadows.

In the mid-1890s, the Nabis were at their height, and exhibited in Toulouse in June 1894, and again the following year at Siegfried Bing’s gallery on the Rue de Provence in Paris, which specialised in modern and Japoniste art, as I will examine next week.

By the middle of the 1860s, Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904) was paying the bills by copying works in the Louvre and selling his beautifully detailed floral still lifes, and struggling to find acceptance of his group portraits. His first, Homage to Delacroix, has proved an excellent historical record, but wasn’t appreciated when shown at the Salon.

Fantin was driven by Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio and his subsequent lost Source of Hippocrene, which was to have been submitted for the Salon of 1864 until it was irreparably damaged in the studio. He started work on his next group portrait in 1864. Titled The Toast! Homage to Truth, he completed and exhibited it at the Salon in 1865, but it had such a disastrous reception there that he cut it up shortly afterwards.

Many of Fantin’s preparatory sketches and studies for The Toast! have survived, though. They feature the conventionally nude figure of Truth standing in the midst of a gathering of his friends, all clad in their uniformly drab dark jackets. Earlier studies put Truth with her back to the viewer, but in the finished version she had turned round, just as Fantin’s theme had changed from allegory to that of another group portrait.

Fantin returned to his still lifes, bringing Flowers and Fruit together in two paintings in 1866: that above is now in Toledo, and that below in Australia.

The following year, Fantin painted this superb three-quarter-length portrait of his friend Édouard Manet (1867), who was then aged 35 and the leading avant-garde artist in France. Fantin carefully inscribed its dedication as, at that time, portraits exhibited at the Salon couldn’t identify their subject in the title, and Fantin wanted to demonstrate their friendship in public.

In what the critics agreed was a dull Salon, it at last attracted their praise. It was also a visible sign that Fantin was at work on his next group portrait, in which Manet was to be the centre figure.

Meanwhile the steady stream of floral still lifes continued, with Still Life (1869) above, and Still Life of White Roses (1870) below.

In the aftermath of The Toast!, Fantin’s sketches turned to mixed groups and a painter working at their easel. These were initially in response to his patron Edwin Edwards, and by 1865 had already become an interior scene in a studio.

Somewhere during that work, Fantin painted this double portrait ofThe Reading (1870), one of what turned out to be a series of similar works. What strikes me as being so odd about this is that the woman sat bolt upright and looking at the viewer is wearing only one glove, so as to expose the ring of the fourth finger of her left hand.

During 1869, Fantin finalised the aim and composition of his next major great portrait, in this Conté crayon study for Manet’s Studio in the Batignolles.

This oil sketch for the central section of Manet in his Studio was made that year.

Fantin’s next group portrait was A Studio at Les Batignolles (1870), showing his friend Manet painting with a small group of friends peering over his shoulders. Its debt to Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio is palpable. The figures were identified by the artist as:

• Otto Schölderer (standing, left),
• Pierre-Auguste Renoir,
• Émile Zola,
• Edmond Maître,
• Frédéric Bazille,
• Claude Monet (standing, right),
• Édouard Manet (seated, left)
• Zacharie Astruc (seated, right).

As a window into history, this is unique, showing Manet, Renoir, Zola, Bazille – who was to die that November in the Franco-Prussian War – and Monet in a fictional snapshot; it also inspired Bazille to paint his Studio in Rue de la Condamine, and seems to have struck a chord with both artistic circles and the critics of the day.

Technically Fantin managed to integrate his figures much better, but it begs many questions such as what are they all doing together, and whether the painting is about homage to Manet (who was still very much alive), or the meeting of a gentleman’s club. Bridget Alsdorf writes that it “evokes an atmosphere of anxious enclosure”, which is relieved slightly by the inclusion of a little Japoniste pottery, and the statue of wise Minerva pointing down approvingly at Manet’s canvas.

But substitute anonymous models for its well-known figures and all meaning vanishes.

Within a few months, the group gathered in Fantin’s imagination had scattered with the onset of war. Manet enlisted and served in Paris, Bazille joined the infantry and went with them to his death, while Monet refused and fled with his family to Britain. Fantin made it clear that he too had left the country, and hid in his father’s Paris apartment until the Commune ended ten months later.

Reference

Bridget Alsdorf (2013) Fellow Men, Fantin-Latour and the problem of the Group in Nineteenth Century French Painting, Princeton UP. ISBN 978 0 691 15367 4.

I am very grateful to @SuperNormaled for prompting me to look at Fantin in more detail.

In a week’s time, we will celebrate the bicentenary of the birth of another important landscape painter from the nineteenth century: Henri-Joseph Harpignies (1819–1916). A close friend of Camille Corot, his career spanned all the major landscape movements and styles of the nineteenth century: he started out as a plain realist, became a member of the Barbizon School, then saw the rise of Impressionism and the development of post-Impressionist art, and was still painting when Picasso and Cubism took the world by storm before the First World War.

Harpignies was born on 28 June (although some say 24 July) 1819, in Valenciennes, in north-east France close to the border with Belgium, where his father was an entrepreneur and businessman. He showed little interest in academic subjects at school, but excelled at drawing. When he completed his schooling, he toured France for two months, then set about persuading his father to allow him to study art in Paris. This he started in 1846, when he became a pupil of Jean-Alexis Achard at the unusually late age of twenty-seven.

With the Revolution of 1848, Harpignies left Paris and travelled to Brussels and Baden-Baden in Germany. From there he went to Rome at the end of 1850, where he painted in the campagna just as Camille Corot had done twenty-five years earlier, before he moved on to Naples and visited the island of Capri. He eventually returned to France, and exhibited his first three landscape paintings in the Salon of 1852, by which time he was thirty-two. He continued to travel, and started to spend periods in and around the Forest of Fontainebleau, to the south-east of Paris, with the Barbizon artists.

When Harpignies was on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, he painted largely en plein air, including this fine view of Fir Trees in Les Trembleaux, near Marlotte from 1854.

Harpignies had initially learned to paint in oils, but from 1851 also took to watercolour. He painted this dawn View of Moulins in watercolours between about 1850-60, close to the dead centre of France. This looks over the Allier River, past the line of washerwomen on its far bank, towards the spires and towers of the town.

Harpignies returned to Italy to paint between 1863-65, during which he made this unusually stark watercolour View of the Colosseum from the Basilica of Domitian and the Flavian Palace, Rome (1864). You’d hardly believe that this is in the centre of the city of Rome.

He still had a fondness for the gentle rolling meadows of the French countryside, as shown in this view of Saulce Estate, Drôme Department, painted in front of the motif in central southern France on a fine summer’s day in 1869.

Harpignies also travelled to some of the more rugged regions, where he painted The Rocky Path in the Morvan in 1869. This is to the west of the the Alps and to the north of Lyon, in what is now a large National Park. He includes three small figures as staffage.

This unusual view of the River Seine in Paris shows the predecessor of the current Pont du Carrousel, known originally as the Bridge of Saint-Pères, Paris (1870). The trees which provide repoussoir for this view of the river are almost overbearing but not quite. This first bridge was constructed from iron and wood in 1831-34, and replaced by the modern concrete version after 1935.

This must have been painted just a couple of months before the start of the Franco-Prussian War; a year later the Tuileries Palace near the Arc de Triomphe had been burned down during the Commune, and the city was badly scarred by that and other damage.

In the years after the war, Harpignies sought solace in the countryside, carefully mirroring this Farmhouse (1875) in its reflection. That year, his friend Camille Corot died in the February, but Harpignies was appointed to the Legion of Honour in recognition of his sustained success at the annual Salon.

In 1877, he returned to the Morvan, where he painted this more painterly view of Morning in the Nièvre. The following year, he bought a property at Saint-Privé, near the Loire Valley to the west of Morvan. He still maintained his studio in Paris, though.

This Landscape from 1880 shows a farmer walking across the bridge over a small weir deep in the French countryside.

Harpignies’ View of a Village from 1882 is another escape into the lush greens of well-watered meadows, although there are small glimpses of what might be a distant town through the gaps in the trees. A lone fisherman is peacefully working this stretch of the river.

His Angler from the following year is a rearrangement of those same essential elements, this time with added reflections.

Now into his sixties, Harpignies continued to paint well into the twentieth century, as I’ll show in the next and concluding article to celebrate his bicentenary, next week.

Many religions have both god(s) and goddess(es), the most prominent exceptions being those which originated in the Middle East: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In the male-dominated societies in which they developed, this is perhaps only to be expected, but ancient Mediterranean cultures were noted for their rich and often powerful female deities.

Graeco-Roman religions featured several prominent goddesses, who have been popular subjects for more modern paintings.

Diana the Huntress, here painted by Arturo Michelena in 1896, was strong, fleet of foot and a ruthless huntress who was quite happy to kill the children of Niobe with her arrows, and to see Actaeon transformed into a stag and torn to shreds by his own hunting dogs.

Minerva is easily recognised in this painting of her and the Muses by Jacques Stella in about 1640-45. She’s the warrior with a battle helmet, spear and her famous shield bearing the image of Medusa, a woman whose mere look turns people to stone.

Rubens’ elaborate painting of Juno and Argus from about 1611 shows Jupiter/Zeus’s half-sister and wife picking the eyes from Argus’ severed head to put on the plumage of her favourite peacocks. She was ruthless towards the many mortal women raped or seduced by her errant husband.

Instead, the Judaeo-Christian tradition starts with the Fall of Man as a result of the temptation of the first woman, Eve, who is perhaps the antithesis of a goddess.

The cherubic head in Rubens’ painting of The Fall of Man, based loosely on Titian’s original, is that of the Devil in the guise of an anthropomorphic serpent, who hands Eve the apple which brought about expulsion from God’s Garden of Eden.

William Blake’s exuberant and draconian serpent has caught Eve in its calligraphic coils, in his glue tempera painting on copper of Eve Tempted by the Serpent (1799-1800). This relies not only of the biblical narrative from Genesis chapter 3, but also Milton’s elaboration in his epic Paradise Lost. Eve is to blame for what happened both to her and to Adam.

But Blake’s earlier Satan Exulting over Eve from about 1795 depicts Satan separately from the serpent and makes the important point that it was the masculine Devil who tempted Eve in the first place, so attributing Original Sin not to the first woman but the fallen male angel.

Thereafter, the Judaeo-Christian beliefs underlying most European painting associated snakes with the Fall of Man, Eve, and the Devil himself. They also became associated with the woman who you do and don’t want to know, the femme fatale.

Piero di Cosimo’s well-known portrait of a woman claimed to be Simonetta Vespucci from 1490, that’s more than half a millenium ago, is one of the earliest to explore the theme of the femme fatale. Simonetta was reputed to have been the most beautiful woman in the whole of northern Italy, and was a favourite at the court of the de’ Medicis. In 1475, Giuliano de’ Medici entered a jousting tournament bearing a banner on which Botticelli had painted an image of Simonetta as Pallas Athene. But she died the following year of tuberculosis, at the age of only twenty-two.

The melanistic adder wrapped around her necklace may be a reference to the suicide of Cleopatra, and marks her out as a femme fatale.

it wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that visual artists really developed the theme of the femme fatale, though.

Along with other artists such as Gustave Moreau and Lovis Corinth, Franz von Stuck returned repeatedly to the theme of the femme fatale. Here she is, in a painting from about 1893, as Sin. Coiled between her legs with its head resting on her right shoulder is the largest serpent you could ever imagine.

John Collier’s painting of Lilith from 1892 invokes an even older piece of mythology which probably dates back to the Epic of Gilgamesh and the early civilisations of Mesopotamia. A sexually wanton daemon of the night, she has been claimed to be Adam’s original wife, and created from the same clay as he was. Although not involved in the Original Sin, she is associated with a serpent which appears to be related to that shown by von Stuck.

If the Christian faith lacks any goddess, and has rules which forbid their addition to its Holy Trinity, might its woman saints substitute?

Some, like Joan of Arc, shown here in a section from Jules Eugène Lenepveu’s spectacular murals in the Panthéon in Paris, appear to parallel classical goddesses like Minerva. But a great many paintings of Joan, and other women saints, undermine this warrior image; for Joan, she was really a young shepherdess who was driven to lead the French against the English by her visions.

Perhaps the strongest contender is the mother of Christ, the Virgin Mary, who has a very special role in the Catholic Church in particular. Although many of the paintings of her follow popular conventions, as with Miguel Cabrera’s The Divine Shepherdess from about 1760, there are some more unusual images. Despite the teaching that the Lord’s my shepherd, for some the Virgin Mary was their shepherdess.

In the next and concluding article, I’ll look at some images of the Virgin Mary which may surprise, as they show her vanquishing Original Sin, which might appear quite heretical.

For around half the Christian population of Europe, the Virgin Mary was more than the Mother of God, Queen of Heaven, Star of the Sea, and so on. She was the focus of their devotion, a role model, the woman that they wanted to be. Dogma dictated that Mary couldn’t be a goddess, but she seems to have assumed some fairly divine properties.

One clue as to what may have happened here is given in Ferdinand Max Bredt’s unusual and undated painting of Sensual Pleasure and Peace of Mind, in which Eve stands on the left, holding the forbidden fruit and with the serpent’s long coils visible. On the right is Mary, dressed modestly in her traditional blue, her eyes cast up to heaven in prayer.

Beyond its obvious moralising message, with the femme fatale looking directly at the viewer trying to reassure us to ignore the snake, this brings together the two most prominent women in the Bible, one from the dawn of time, the other from the birth of Christ. Ignore that anachronism, and see how close Mary is to the snake.

As is fitting for a super-saint, the Virgin Mary is remembered on three Marian solemnities each year: Mary, Mother of God on New Year’s Day, her Assumption in August, and the Feast of the Immaculate Conception on 8 December. The last of those marks her conception free from Original Sin, which connects that feast to Eve and the serpent. It also happens to be an event which has been painted frequently.

Murillo’s Immaculate Conception (of Soult) from about 1678 is a fine example of about two dozen which he painted during his career.

The Virgin Mary, who normally looks up to God in heaven, is shown alone, usually wearing white robes with her signature blue cloak. She stands in the heavens, her arms crossed over her chest with the moon at her feet, surrounded by clouds, a golden light, and putti who are often winged. In some examples, there are twelve stars around Mary’s head, although not on this occasion.

This has also been shown in many statues of the Virgin Mary. But look more carefully at Mary’s feet and you may see something surprising.

This example of Our Lady of the Angels from Sineu on Mallorca features a bronze-coloured serpent with an apple stuck in its mouth, and one of Mary’s feet resting on it in her triumph over Original Sin.

This rather humbler statue of The Immaculate Conception in Augsburg-Kriegshaber, Germany, is very similar, with Mary’s feet pinning the brown snake to the ground.

This rather lovely Holy Family in Bamberg, Germany, shows Mary standing on a globe, around which is coiled a snake, again with an apple in its mouth.

Polychrome statues of the Virgin Mary remain common across the churches of Europe, and many of them show Mary standing on a snake. A frequent if even more puzzling alternative is for her feet to be resting on the heads of putti or infants, which resemble the human head sometimes attached to the snake’s body in depictions of the Fall of Man.

Paintings of the Virgin Mary standing on a snake are rather more unusual, but by no means rare among those showing the Immaculate Conception.

The first really good example that I have come across is Rubens’ Immaculate Conception from 1628-29, although I suspect that lesser painters had already been including the serpent under her feet. In addition to the standard symbols expected of this motif, the Virgin Mary’s right foot is pinning down a very obvious snake, which is holding a sprig of an apple tree in its mouth, with the fruit already bitten.

Almost a century later, the image of Mary walking on the snake seems to have enjoyed something of a comeback. Martino Altomonte’s Immaculate Conception from 1719 shows it quite clearly, within the more conventional iconography, although he hasn’t gone to such lengths to show the bite mark in the apple. You can also see how others came to depict Mary walking on the heads of putti, however strange that might appear.

From around the same time in the first half of the eighteenth century, this tondo attributed to Leonardo Antonio Olivieri adds a couple of attendant saints to form Immaculate Conception with Saint Anthony and Saint Camillo of Lellis. I’m not sure whether its body is coiled around the apple to the left, but this is yet another snake.

The latest in this series of paintings of The Immaculate Conception featuring the serpent of Original Sin is its most florid, made by Tiepolo in 1767-68. His Virgin Mary isn’t looking up to heaven, but appears to be relishing her role of vanquishing the snake of Eden. More curiously, tucked away at the foot, behind a palm tree, is a framed mirror, whose symbolism is open to speculation.

I have one last painting which, viewed apart from this series of Immaculate Conceptions, would have seemed the most enigmatic of all. It is also the precedent against which we should read them.

In 1605-06, Caravaggio painted what was expected to have been a fairly conventional depiction of the Virgin Mary, her mother Saint Anne, and the young Jesus Christ, for the altar of the confraternity of the Papal Grooms, in Saint Peter’s Basilica. What they got instead was his Madonna and Child with Saint Anne, which so shocked that it was only briefly shown in the parish church of Saint Anne in the Vatican, before being sold to Cardinal Scipione Borghese, in whose palace it still hangs.

At a time when even showing the Virgin’s feet was considered quite tacky, her low-cut dress was definitely beyond the pale, and Saint Anne is hardly flattered in her appearance. But look at what Mary’s left foot is doing, with support from Christ’s foot: treading on the head of a snake. Caravaggio too shows the Virgin Mary, here with the assistance of God the Son, vanquishing Original Sin.

Mainstream Christianity may have permanently excluded the goddess as a matter of dogma, but the triumph of the Virgin Mary over Original Sin is a significant reversal of the trap laid for Eve, the first woman, by Satan, the fallen (male) angel. But the woman won in the end.