Dante and Virgil are steadily making their way up the island mountain of Purgatory, and have just met Pia de’ Tolomei, who was murdered by her husband, but still has to wait here because of her late repentance. In seeking advice as to how best to make their way up the mountain, they meet the mediaeval poet Sordello, who like Virgil was born in Mantua.

After lamenting for the state that Italy is in, the spirit informs them that they cannot proceed any further upwards once the sun has set, a basic rule of Purgatory. He leads them to a valley inset into the mountain where they can spend the night among the select company of former rulers there.

Amid lush vegetation and sweet-smelling flowers, the rulers sing hymns and pray. Among the rulers are various more virtuous European monarchs, including Philip II of France and Henry III of England. In the evening, two green angels come down and assume guard in the valley. An evil snake then enters, only to be chased away by the angels with their flaming but blunted swords – a performance which seems to take place each evening.

One interesting contact here is between Dante and a member of the Malaspina family, who were later to shelter Dante during his exile from Florence.

When Dante finally falls asleep just before dawn, he dreams that, like the young Ganymede, he is abducted by a huge eagle and taken to Olympus.

When he wakes, he discovers that he was carried in his sleep by Saint Lucy or Lucia, and deposited at the entrance gate to Purgatory itself.

The gatekeeper angel there tells Dante to ascend three steps of marble, rock and porphyry which symbolise penance, then traces seven letters P (for peccatum, sin) on his forehead with his sword. The angel opens the entrance to Purgatory using one golden and one silver key given to him by Saint Peter. As Virgil and Dante enter Purgatory, the angel warns them not to look back or they will be returned to outside its wall.

The artists

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

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

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

Joseph Anton Koch (1768-1839) was an Austrian landscape painter, who worked mainly in Neoclassical style. During his second stay in Rome, he was commissioned to paint frescos in the Villa Massimi on the walls of the Dante Room there, which remain one of the most florid visual accounts of Dante’s Inferno. He completed those between 1824-29. He also appears to have drawn a set of illustrations for Dante’s Inferno in about 1808.

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

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.

Many of the best supports don’t provide a surface which is suitable for the direct application of paint. This is particularly true of egg tempera and oil paints on wood panels or stretched fabrics, some of the most important combinations for professional artists over the centuries. So, from ancient times on, it has been common to apply a ground to the support, which will ensure good adherence of the paint.

The traditional ground for both egg tempera and oils consists of an initial sealing layer of size, such as ‘rabbit skin’ glue, then a series of layers of semi-absorbent chalk or gypsum known as gesso. Formulae for the gesso mixture vary, but usually include more glue and may include pigment, which can be coloured rather than white. For use on stretched canvas, some drying oil such as linseed is often added as it is thought to increase mechanical flexibility.

This paint section cut by Elizabeth Steele from a painting by Honoré Daumier made on wood panel shows the relatively thick white layer of ground underneath layers of pigment-rich oil paint.

In traditional painting practice, the ground is never seen, and is always covered by paint: leaving ground exposed in a finished painting would have been as shocking as exposing your underwear in public. Other than during conservation work, the only time that you should see the ground in such a painting is during its early stages. We are fortunate enough to have a few works by old masters which have been abandoned while their ground was still visible.

Michelangelo’s abandoned ‘Manchester Madonna’ was being painted in egg tempera on wood on which a traditional gesso had been laid as the ground. Those are the off-white areas at the left, over which he had painted a characteristic green earth underpaint where there was to be flesh. Applied with care and in many thin layers, the gesso provided a perfect semi-absorbent smooth surface on which egg tempera or oils adhered well and could take fine detail.

A few years earlier, Leonardo da Vinci had abandoned his Adoration of the Magi at a slightly earlier stage, when he left Florence. Although he has applied relatively little paint yet, there is already fine detail appearing in his underdrawings and tonal modelling.

At other times, carbon black was added to generate black grounds, for example when the finished painting was going to use chiaroscuro. However, studies in the choice of colour for grounds have found many examples where there seems little or no correlation between the colour used and the subject, style or nature of the finished painting.

By the sixteenth century, some painters were reducing the number of layers of gesso and applying oil primings on top of them, often using lead white as a pigment in linseed oil binder, sometimes bulked out with an inferior white powder such as chalk. By the seventeenth century, many of those painting in oil on canvas had abandoned traditional gesso grounds in favour of thinner and simpler ‘oil grounds’ based on lead white and linseed oil. These could also incorporate other pigments to form different coloured grounds according to the painter’s preferences.

One of the characteristic techniques of the Pre-Raphaelites was the use of ‘wet white grounds’, in which oil paints were applied to lead white paint which had not yet dried. This was used by Millais in his painting of Ophelia (1851-2). To ensure that the white ground didn’t dry before coloured glazes were applied into it, it is believed that the Pre-Raphaelites painted small sections at a time. Some who tried this technique abandoned it because it proved too difficult, and all acknowledged that it made later corrections almost impossible.

The Pre-Raphaelites claimed that this technique was responsible for the bright and lustrous colours of their work, although others achieved similar effects without ever using wet white grounds.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, changing painting style allowed some to apply the thinnest of grounds – usually oil grounds of lead white – to allow the texture of the underlying fabric to show through in the surface of their finished painting. Böcklin’s Sirens is unusual as he applied this same principle but for painting in egg tempera, which historically had almost exclusively been applied to the smooth absorbent surface of chalk and glue gesso.

Some artists used the thinnest of preparatory layers, or even applied diluted oil paint directly to canvas, as in József Rippl-Rónai’s study for a full-length portrait, which shows the fine texture of the canvas support.

Degas and some of his contemporaries developed an unusual if not paradoxical practice which they termed peinture à l’essence. Tubed oil paints can be a bit oily, and these artists experimented with reducing the amount of oil in their paints. Squeezing paint out of the tube onto blotting paper or rag and removing excess oil should not cause any problems, but peinture à l’essence took that to an extreme, in blotting out as much oil as possible, and restoring viscosity and flow by adding turpentine.

This was also used on very thin oil grounds, and in some cases it appears was applied to unprimed canvas.

Degas’ Danseuse dans sa loge (Dancer in her Dressing Room) (c 1879) is one of his experimental paintings which uses both pastel and peinture à l’essence applied to canvas. The detail view below shows how thinly he applied his paint to the ground, although it is impossible to judge how well it is adhering.

In the last couple of decades of the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth, avant-garde painters broke the last taboo in letting their ground show through. In Tom Thomson’s oil sketch of Tea Lake Dam, this was because of the speed at which the work had been painted over his ochre-tinted ground, here on a wood panel. Others, though, revealed their grounds in works painted more slowly and deliberately, even in the studio. What had once been a well-concealed secret was now on display to the world.

Other changes include the substitution of zinc white for lead white in oil grounds, now controversial in view of the tendency for zinc salts to saponify in the presence of water, and the introduction of acrylic grounds, often referred to incorrectly as gesso. The latter became common in commercially-manufactured canvases during the late twentieth century. Finally, oil grounds now sometimes use titanium and zinc white pigments in alkyd resins, which dry quickly and may prove even more durable than those using linseed oil binder.

After the Nabis coalesced as a group in the early 1890s, they reached their peak in the middle of that decade, and exhibited together in June 1894 in Toulouse.

It had never occurred to me when looking at the works of the Nabis individually, but a striking feature when their paintings are pooled together as a group is how many of their figures are women, and how many of these ‘high Nabi’ paintings explore the theme of womanhood.

Pierre Bonnard’s Three Ages (Maternity) (1893) is a thoroughly Nabi treatment of a classical theme, with a newborn infant sat on its mother’s knee, and grandmother behind. Bonnard’s decorative effect on the mother’s dress is applied flat, rather than being projected over her 3D form, giving the painting the look of collage.

Ker-Xavier Roussel’s Meeting of Women from about 1893 continues the theme of womanhood in Nabi style, and is decidedly autumnal.

Georges Lacombe’s Chestnut Gatherers from 1893-94 combines the Nabi flattened decorative look with a rich red more typical of the early twentieth century. He and Paul Sérusier (see below) had a particular fascination for mysterious scenes in the woods of Brittany.

In 1894, Édouard Vuillard painted one of the great Nabi masterpieces, one of many now at the Musée d’Orsay: his large triptych Public Gardens. Its Japoniste panels show daily life for the nannies, nurses and their children in fine weather in one of the larger public parks, probably in Paris.

Like Georges Lacombe, in 1894 Paul Sérusier was deep in the woods of Brittany, with his more puzzling Snake Eaters. It seems to show a cultic religious ceremony taking place among the ancient trees, but apparently refers to the writings of Gabriela Zapolska, a naturalist Polish author who lived in Paris from 1889, and may have moved in common artistic circles.

Georges Lacombe’s The Ages of Life from about 1894 sets this classical theme in those same ancient and mystical woods.

In 1895, the Nabis exhibited together in the ‘first salon’ of the Maison de l’Art Nouveau, Siegfried Bing’s gallery on the Rue de Provence in Paris, which specialised in modern and Japoniste art and gave its name to the Art Nouveau movement. The dealer Ambroise Vollard commissioned Pierre Bonnard and other Nabis to make lithographs for albums.

Maurice Denis was more actively involved with religious works, and that year was commissioned to paint seven large paintings on the vision and comversion of Saint Hubert for the home of Baron Cochin in Paris. The Baron, who lived between 1851-1922, was a writer and Catholic right-wing politician, who also collected Impressionist paintings.

By 1894-95, Pierre Bonnard’s paintings were starting to diverge from his Nabi style. One of his few larger studio works from this period, The Large Garden has an independent look more typical of his later works. It shows the large grassy orchard garden of a house in the country, possibly in the Dauphiné. As well as three children and the mother/housekeeper, there is a rich collection of domestic creatures. The woman has gathered in and folded white sheets, which have been drying on the fence which crosses the canvas. The third child has been cropped as if at the edge of a photograph. This enhances the impression of her running briskly to the right.

In contrast, in 1895 Édouard Vuillard’s Woman in a Striped Dress remains more conformant with the flattened, decorated painting style.

Unlike Pierre Bonnard, Félix Vallotton doesn’t appear to have painted many views of the city of Paris, but this Street Scene in Paris from 1895 is in Nabi style and shares much with Bonnard’s views of the Paris streets, even down to the errant dog in the middle of the road.

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

The Nabis became involved with La Revue Blanche, an avant garde art magazine published by the Natanson brothers. Ker-Xavier Roussel married Édouard Vuillard’s sister Marie, and Roussel, Bonnard, Vuillard and Paul Sérusier together decorated the Théâtre de l’Œuvre in Paris.

Next, members of the group started to diverge and develop more individual styles.

As the destruction and slaughter of the Paris Commune subsided in 1871, Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904) emerged from his father’s Paris apartment, where he had been hiding since the start of the Franco-Prussian War the previous summer. He then made a start on his next major group painting, which he completed the following year.

Another large canvas, By the Table was only just finished in time for the 1872 Salon because one of its figures refused to appear alongside those who he termed “pimps and thieves”. Although outside the Francophone world today you might wonder who these drably-dressed figures are, this was Fantin’s most famous painting, as it shows all the major avant-garde poets of the time.

The figures are:

• Pierre-Elzéar Bonnier (standing, left)
• Emile Blémont
• Jean Aicard (standing, right)
• Paul Verlaine (sitting, left)
• Arthur Rimbaud
• Léon Valade
• Ernest d’Hervilly
• Camille Pelletan (sitting, right).

For those unaware of the scandals of Paris in 1872, Verlaine and Rimbaud were lovers. This had come to a head only a couple of weeks before the submission deadline for the Salon, when Rimbaud had wounded another member of their literary circle with a sword during an altercation after dinner. The couple were then shunned by most of their peers, and Fantin had to paint in the large floral arrangement at the right of the canvas. The still-absent figure was Albert Mérat, who had founded a poetry journal, and was hardly going to improve this painting’s fate at the hands of the critics of the day.

Fantin resumed his steady stream of floral still lifes with paintings such as this Vase with Apples and Foliage from 1872.

In 1873, a year after his last group portrait, Fantin painted a rejoinder in which he envisioned that corner of the room when the poets had gone, or perhaps had successively withdrawn from appearing in it, in Still Life: Corner of a Table (1873). Although he doesn’t try to create a perfect match with the objects on the table in the original group portrait, there can be no mistaking his references. Perhaps the artist has now sat down with his head in his hands, wondering why he had bothered in the first place.

Earlier, Fantin had been an avid copyist in the Louvre. I don’t know how long he continued this, or returned to copy Eugène Delacroix’s Women of Algiers as a one-off in 1875, but this gives a good idea of the quality of that work. He also started painting sketches and studies for some narrative works.

In 1874, the long-awaited publication of Gustave Flaubert’s book The Temptation of Saint Anthony, written as a script for a play, brought renewed interest in this very visual story. Fantin’s compositional study doesn’t appear to have progressed any further, but at about the same time Paul Cézanne completed his painted account, Gustave Moreau painted it in watercolour, and Fernand Khnopff followed in 1883.

During the 1860s, Fantin had become smitten by music, and a particular fan of Louis-Hector Berlioz, it seems, who died in 1869. His memorial painting The Anniversary. Homage to Berlioz was started after hearing Romeo and Juliet in December 1875, and completed the following year. It includes the following:

• The Allegory of Music (sitting, left)
• The Muse Clio, History (standing, centre)
• Marguerite, from The Damnation of Faust (standing, behind and to right of Clio)
• Juliet and Romeo, from Romeo and Juliet (seated in front, at right)
• Didon, from The Trojans (standing behind Romeo)
• The Angel, from the oratorio The Childhood of Christ (standing at back, right)
• the artist (standing, foreground, right).

Clio holds a scroll identifying the works of Berlioz which are referenced by the figures.

This eclectic work is usually omitted when considering Fantin’s group portraits, but seems to have had deep emotional meaning for him.

And still the floral still lifes kept coming, here with his Vase of Flowers from 1877, which is considerably looser and more painterly than those which had preceded it.

In 1875 (or 1876?), Fantin married another accomplished floral painter Victoria Dubourg (1840-1926), and in 1877 she appears as the woman at the left of The Reading. This is reminiscent of his 1870 painting of the same title, in which both women are sat in silence and not even looking as if they are together.

The following year, he painted his in-laws in The Dubourg Family, which was exhibited at the Salon that year. His wife Victoria is standing at the left, her hands pointing down to her father (I presume) who is gazing distantly as if he was somewhere else. Even the flowers at the right edge aren’t allowed to relieve its drab colours.

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.

By the late 1880s, the French landscape painter Henri Harpignies (1819–1916) was well into his sixties, and still painting very actively. He’d started with realism, been on the periphery of the Barbizon School, had been a close friend of Camille Corot until the latter’s death in 1875, and was now seeing Impressionism giving way to the latest Neo- and Post-Impressionist styles. He just kept painting away, en plein air and in the studio, in his own way and style.

From about 1885, Harpignies migrated south for each winter, spending his time in the more comfortable climate on the Côte d’Azur.

This marvellous photo taken between about 1885-90 shows Henri Harpignies in his Paris studio, playing his cello rather than working on one of the many landscapes seen there. He was to continue painting for more than twenty-five years after this photo was taken!

The Railway Bridge at Briare (1888) had been a favourite theme among the Impressionists, but not at one of their popular sites along the River Seine near Paris. Harpignies found this rather non-descript bridge in the quiet country town of Briare, well to the south of Paris and near his retreat at Saint-Privé, far beyond the stamping ground of other artists.

Harpignies had a reputation as the finest painter of trees of his time, and looking at this studio painting of Evening at Saint-Privé from 1890 I can see why. One reason that his trees appear so real and alive is his deep understanding of their anatomy, and of the subtle differences between species.

His paintings of ancient trees, like The Old Oak from 1895, convey their character.

In 1900, Harpignies was awarded the Grand Prix at the Exposition Universelle in Paris for his collection of oil and watercolour landscapes exhibited there.

The trees in his Landscape at Dusk from 1902 show his affinity with Corot’s distinctive style.

As late as 1913, when he turned 94, he produced this brilliant chalk and wash sketch Study of Trees, complete with its plein air artists at work under the boughs.

But that was the last year in which Harpignies submitted work to the Salon. His failing eyesight then prevented him from painting much, although he is said to have continued painting until his death on 28 August 1916, by which time he was almost blind and had reached the grand age of 97.

I have some remaining undated paintings of his which I hope you will also enjoy.

Wash Day is a fine plein air oil sketch of a small group of women washing clothes by a small waterside village.

If you’ve visited Rome, The Roman Forum is a view with which you should be familiar, and is one of his more detailed oil sketches, made during one of his several visits to the city.

Throughout his career, Harpignies did a steady trade in watercolour views, such as this of Le Pont du Carrousel on the Seine, which he had painted previously in his more unusual view of 1870.

Priest in a Park is a pen and wash sketch which reminds me of the original plein air sketches made by the early landscape masters like Poussin and Claude.

Finally, what I think is his finest painting, this breathtaking watercolour View of the Seine at Rouen, which I believe shows the view from Bonsecours, to the south-east of the city, looking north-west into the summer sunset.

Henri Harpignies may not have been much of an experimental landscape painter, but so many of his paintings capture the essence of their locations, from peaceful pastures to that most memorable view over the mediaeval city of Rouen. What better to celebrate his bicentenary.

We’ve come to associate different forms of transport with art movements: railways are decidedly Impressionist, and aircraft contrastingly modernist, for instance. But long before the railways cut their way across meadows and bridges, much of Europe moved its goods by water; inland that often meant by canal. This weekend I look at paintings of canals to see how their history is reflected in art.

Canals were first dug for irrigation of crops in the Fertile Crescent, but soon came to be used for transporting produce, goods, and anything which was too heavy or bulky to draw by cart. Chinese, Egyptian and Greek engineers put huge teams of labourers to work digging canals large enough to support trade, including the Ancient Suez Canal which linked the Nile (hence the Mediterranean) with the Red Sea.

The first modern canals were dug in Bavaria, the ‘Low Countries’ around Belgium and the Netherlands, and in England during the Middle Ages. They also came to form the main thoroughfares in the watery city of Venice as it grew. Venice is something of a special case which I’ll consider in the next article. Early Dutch landscape artists quite frequently included local canals in their paintings.

Meindert Hobbema’s view of The Haarlem Lock, Amsterdam from 1663-65 is a good example, showing a working lock with a raising bridge, and the masts of many ships in the harbour beyond.

The building of canals became common major civil engineering projects as the Industrial Revolution swept across much of Europe during the latter half of the eighteenth century. But they seem to have escaped the attention of artists, even those like Philip James de Loutherbourg and Joseph Wright of Derby who painted superb scenes of its fire, smoke and industrial sites. It seems to have been the topographic artists at the very end of the century who first started to paint canals in earnest.

JMW Turner’s magnificently atmospheric painting of Chichester Canal from about 1828 is one of the earliest major works to make a canal its motif. This shows a merchant ship under way from the distant city of Chichester, just inland of the south coast of England, along the five miles or so to take it to Chichester Harbour and the English Channel beyond. This short canal had only opened six years earlier, and operated for just over a century.

In about 1832, Turner painted a view of Dudley Castle and the Dudley Canal, one of the busy industrial waterways which had been dug around Birmingham in the English Midlands during the late eighteenth century. I regret that I can’t locate a usable image of that painting, but in 1835 it was turned into this fine engraving and published. This is one of the best visual records of a heavily-industrialised canal during this period before the advent of the railways.

In case you’re wondering why I haven’t included John Constable’s superb landscapes of the River Stour from the turn of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, that river isn’t actually a canal, although it was ‘improved’ during the early eighteenth century to enable its use for commercial traffic.

Away from the ironworks, fire and smoke of industrial England, urban canals were bustling with activity. Charles Leickert is better known for his winter landscapes of frozen waterways in the Netherlands, but his Urban Landscape from 1856 shows active trading taking place beside a canal in a large Dutch town.

Unlike the later railways, many canals passed through tranquil countryside without disrupting their calm. Johan Hendrik Weissenbruch painted this View near the Geest Bridge in 1868, when this canal was still in active use. The Trekvliet Shipping Canal shown here links The Hague with neighbouring villages of Rijswijk and Voorburg; both have now been swallowed up into The Hague conurbation.

When the Suez Canal was finally completed after ten years of construction, in 1869, many artists went out to visit this spectacular sight, but I have only been able to find one painting of it during those early years.

Painted by the great marine artist Ivan Aivazovsky shortly after its official opening on 17 November 1869, Suez Canal shows a convoy of ships passing through in a quite unearthly light.

The city of Paris isn’t known for its canals, but apparently has three: St-Martin, St-Denis and Canal de l’Ourcq, which connect to the River Seine.

Alfred Sisley’s view of The Canal Saint-Martin, Paris from 1872 shows a placid and nearly-disused stretch of canal in the centre of Paris. This network of canals had originally been intended to supply the city with healthy drinking water from the River Ourcq to the north-east, and was ordered by Napoleon I. It brought supplies of grain and building materials into the heart of the city, but is now only used to entertain tourists on boat trips.

As the railways expanded rapidly during the middle of the nineteenth century, they took over the task of moving most produce and goods around those parts of Europe which they served. Many canals ceased carrying commercial traffic, and they steadily became neglected, with locks in disrepair and the waterways filling with silt.

Adolf Kaufmann’s undated painting of Boats in a Canal shows a typical canal in many towns and cities across Europe, with a couple of old flat-bottomed sailing barges lying idle.

When Claude Monet moved to the Netherlands in 1871 after sheltering in England for the Franco-Prussian War, there were still boats active in the Canal at Zaandam, to the north-west of Amsterdam.

During the winter, though, many of the smaller canals froze over, providing skaters with first class highways, as shown in Johan Jongkind’s painting of a Canal in Holland in Winter from 1873.

Alfred Sisley painted some wonderful landscapes in the country to the south of the Forest of Fontainebleau, near Saint-Mammès. Among them is this view of The Loing Canal from 1884. This connects the Briare Canal to the River Seine, and is one of the series of waterways which join Paris to Lyon, known as the Bourbonnais Route. These were constructed in the early eighteenth century, and still carry barges of grain from the farms in central France.

In the next article, I’ll look at paintings of the decline of canals from the end of the nineteenth century, and briefly at those of Venice.

During the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century, and until the spread of the railways a hundred years later, canals across Europe had been major routes for the transport of grain and other farm produce, raw materials for and products from new industrial sites. By the end of the nineteenth century, their commercial use was in decline or had already ceased, and many canals lay derelict.

The Italian city of Milan also had a thriving network of five canals, until they were covered over from the 1930s onwards. When Emilio Gola painted this view Along the Milan Canal in about 1890-92, they already seem to be in relative disuse, more of a place to hang your washing out on a bright winter’s day, with snow still on the rooves of the tenement blocks.

Late in his career, Sisley was still painting his way along The Canal du Loing at Moret (1892), in a thoroughly wintry scene this time.

For Théo van Rysselberghe, the eycatching geometry of a Canal in Flanders (1894) was too good an opportunity for this combination of radical perspective projection, rhythmic trees, and meticulous reflections, which together make this one of the great Divisionist paintings.

Karl Friedrich H Schuster is now an obscure artist, but his view of Fishermen’s Houses on the City Canal painted in 1896 shows another urban canal in steady decay, then only used by fishermen to keep their punts.

In North America, canals had enjoyed a similar period of growth, followed by steady decline with the advent of railroads. Some major ship canals, including those used to link the Great Lakes, remain in heavy use, though.

In about 1900, Edward Lamson Henry painted this watercolour of Nearing the Bend, which shows only too well the eventual fate of many canals, providing trips out for locals and tourists. Like many ‘narrow boats’ built for smaller canals, this is being hauled at a sedate pace by the team of horses at the right edge of the painting.

The final work, before moving on to look at Venice, is Helen Hyde’s unusual nocturne, a colour woodcut, showing Moonlight on the Viga Canal (1912). This canal runs from Mexico City to the suburb of Santa Anita.

One city has become so strongly associated with canals that I can’t complete this pair of articles without looking briefly at them: Venice, traditionally founded by refugees on a group of 118 islands in a lagoon at the northern end of the Adriatic Sea, in around 421 CE. Rather than being dug in dry land, its canals are the remains of the watery gaps between islands.

Venice came to prominence as an artistic centre in the Renaissance, and since then its unique features have been recorded in paint by a rich stream of painters.

Many of the most famous views of the canals of Venice were painted, appropriately, by Canaletto, who built his reputation on them. Although they appear to be faithful depictions, and it has been claimed that he used a camera obscura for the purpose, careful analysis has shown that he exercised ample creative licence. Some feature crowds attending major festivities, such as The Bucintoro at the Molo on Ascension Day (1759-61).

His successor Francesco Guardi is less well-known, but maintained the tradition, with his Regatta at the Rialto Bridge from 1770-9 (above) and an undated view of The Bucintoro Festival of Venice (below).

A century later, a new generation of views of the canals was painted not by a Venetian, but by the Spaniard Martín Rico. Many of these show lesser-known canals and less-frequented areas, like A Canal in Venice from about 1875. Although populated by the occasional gondola and a small clutch of children, they have a wonderful air of peace and serenity. His broken reflections are painted quite tightly although he is reputed to have painted mainly en plein air.

For many of us, though, the canals of Venice will always be associated with the brilliant bravura brushstrokes of John Singer Sargent.

Once Dante and Virgil pass through the entrance to Purgatory, the gatekeeper angel warns them not to look back, or they will be ejected and remain outside its wall. They climb along a trough of moving rock up through a gap to emerge on the first terrace of Purgatory, for the spirits of those who suffered from pride, the first of the Seven Deadly Sins.

There is a large marble frieze depicting the antithesis of pride, humility. This starts with the Anunciation to the Virgin Mary, and progresses through history.

The souls of those purging themselves of pride are bent double under the weight of huge boulders on their backs as they chant a modification of the Lord’s Prayer.

Among these is Oderisi da Gubbio, a painter of miniatures who illuminated manuscripts for Pope Boniface VIII and was a colleague of Giotto.

As Dante moves round the terrace, he sees further sculptures showing the famously proud, figures such as Lucifer himself, Niobe whose fourteen children were slain for her pride, and Arachne. She was so proud of her weaving that she challenged Pallas Athena (Minerva) herself to a contest. Although by her achievements Arachne should have won, her tapestries were scathingly critical of the gods, and Athena flew into a rage. Although Arachne’s life was spared, she was transformed into a spider and condemned to spin webs forever.

An angel then ushers them to move up to the next terrace. As he does so, Dante’s forehead is brushed by his wing, and he feels much lighter when that removes one of the Ps which were inscribed on his brow by the gatekeeper angel.

The second terrace of Purgatory contains those souls who have to cleanse themselves of envy, the second of the Seven Deadly Sins. Here, disembodied voices keep flying past to remind the penitents of the value of the opposite of envy, selfless love. The spirits here are like hunting birds under training in that their eyelids are sewn together with iron wire to make them blind.

Sapia, born into the Sienese Salvani family, explains to Dante that she had taken pleasure in the defeat of her fellow Ghibellines and the death of her nephew alongside them.

Various spirits them lament the situation in Italy at the time, before Dante and Virgil are taken on by another angel to the third terrace of Purgatory.

The artists

Walter Crane (1845–1915) was an English artist known best for his many illustrations which graced the pages of books in late Victorian Britain. Although a student of John Ruskin and influenced by William Morris, he remained on the periphery of the Pre-Raphaelites. He also painted successfully, inevitably specialising in narrative works. His illustration of Arachne is one of few which explicitly refers to her future life as a spider.

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.

Hippolyte Flandrin (1809–1864) was born into an artistic family in Lyon, France, and trained along with his younger brother in the studios of Louis Hersent and JAD Ingres, who remained a close friend for life. He won the Prix de Rome in 1832, which helped establish his career as a history painter and a sought-after portraitist. He doesn’t appear to have had any particular interest in Dante’s Divine Comedy, though. and this painting appears to be a one-off. He died of smallpox when in Rome in 1864.

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.

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.

Long before paintings became movable objects of great value used by the rich as investments, artists and the owners of their paintings wanted to protect the paint layer which had been so carefully applied to the ground and its support. From the early Middle Ages onwards, one popular means of doing this has been to apply some form of protective layer, a varnish.

Varnishes have been widely used not only for protection. Careful choice of their composition can enhance the appearance of a painting, through the optical properties of the varnish medium and its smooth, glossy surface. Until the late nineteenth century, the great majority of painters either applied a final layer (or more) of varnish themselves, or advised their patrons and clients to do so.

Three main types of varnish have come into common use:

• Drying oil and resin, which is in effect a resin-rich transparent and unpigmented paint layer, and usually becomes an integral part of it. Some artists have added pigment, perhaps to attempt to make a general colour correction. There isn’t really any clear distinction between that and a final paint glaze.
• Solvent and resin, in which the solvent will evaporate, leaving a thin surface coat of resin.
• Water-based washes such as egg white, known as glair, vegetable gums like gum arabic, and animal glues.

The resins used in varnishes have rich and sometimes strange histories. Most are exudates from trees obtained from exotic locations, and have evocative names like mastic, sandarac, colophony and dammar. They’re usually very insoluble, either in drying medium which has to be heated to make oil-based varnishes, or in turpentine or similar organic solvents. There have been a great many recipes proposed, and there’s always the lure of the perfect, and inevitably top secret, formula.

The biggest problems with varnishes are their propensity to yellow or grey with age, and their tendency to take up dirt and atmospheric contaminants. Rembrandt’s first painting of Bathsheba at her Toilet from 1643 has sadly lost much of its detail into the gloom of old varnish, which can be almost impossible to clean off when composed of drying oil and resin, without damaging the paint layer underneath.

Another problem for the conservation specialist is a painting like Edward Poynter’s A Visit to Aesculapius from 1880. Although this is little more than a century old, the evidence from contemporary prints made from this painting is that it was originally far from being so dark. Sadly it now seems almost impossible to read as a result of its near-black shadows.

A good varnish should be both colourless and transparent, but painters haven’t always respected that principle.

When finishing his monumental Raft of the Medusa in 1819, Théodore Géricault is thought to have applied glazes or varnish containing asphalt, to give the painting a deep brown tone. Asphalt is not only completely unprotective and almost attracts dirt, but it never fully dries, and can have adverse effects on underlying paint too. It hasn’t helped that this (exactly) two hundred year-old painting was rolled up and stored in a friend’s studio when it remained unsold, and was then transported to London still rolled up the following year.

Conventional wisdom says that it’s best to leave an oil painting to dry for at least six months before varnishing it. JMW Turner sometimes varnished over paint layers which were far from dry. In the case of The Opening of the Wallhalla, 1842 (1843), which was painted on mahogany, Ruskin reported that it had “cracked before it had been eight days in the Academy Rooms”, although this overall view shows little evidence of that damage.

Hellen and Townsend attribute this to Turner’s extensive use of Megilp, here a product sold by his colourman containing leaded drying oil and mastic varnish. Used sparingly and with great caution, such medium modifiers do not necessarily cause serious ill-effects. But Turner has used Megilp to excess, to produce a soft impasto used in the foreground figures, in particular. These have resulted in wide and shallow drying cracks, as the surface has dried quickly and shrunk over trapped layers of liquid paint.

Varnishes do provide mechanical protection to the paint layer, but at the cost of locking out atmospheric oxygen, which is required for drying oils to polymerize properly in their drying process. Applied too early, varnishes can therefore greatly slow drying of underlying paint layers; the danger is that they may saponify instead of drying normally.

Despite these dangers, varnishes can, when used with care by those who understand them properly, be valuable beyond simply providing a protective coat. Kirsty Whiten’s The Quing of the Now People (2015) achieves its superbly realistic effect by the skilful combination of conventional oil paint with varnish.

In the late nineteenth century, attitudes to varnishing oil paintings changed markedly, as Impressionists like Camille Pissarro started to prescribe that their works should on no account be varnished. This was to preserve the soft matte surface of the paint as applied by the artist, and became increasingly popular in the twentieth century.

For such paintings, protection can be provided by glass, when necessary. That isn’t of course an option for many extremely large oil paintings on canvas, which will probably need to be varnished and periodically cleaned well in the future, as they have in the past.

Varnishes, usually of the third type containing vegetable gums or animal glues, have also been used extensively on paint layers other than oils.

These are reported in Samuel Palmer’s Tintern Abbey at Sunset, above, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Lucrezia Borgia, below. Gum or glue varnishes can have impressive optical effects when used carefully on watercolours.

Unfortunately, their tendency to yellow can cause colour shifts in paintings too. William Blake liked to apply glue varnish to his watercolours and perhaps to his glue tempera paintings as well. In the case of his Penance of Jane Shore in St Paul’s Church from about 1793, this has resulted in a generalised yellow shift and loss of chroma.

Other artists appear to have been more successful: Henry Ossawa Tanner apparently applied varnish to this tempera painting of The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah almost a century ago, and it doesn’t appear to have suffered any adverse consequences, yet.

Varnishing has become such an accepted process that major exhibitions have incorporated ‘varnishing days’, although what happens on those occasions can be quite different. In Turner’s day at the Royal Academy in London, Varnishing Day was an occasion for artists to make any last-minute changes, and Turner himself seems to have turned up armed with paint and brushes and continued to work on his paintings then.

Varnishing Day in the Paris Salon was very different, attended normally by the artists’ colourmen, who applied a coat of varnish to the paintings for which they were responsible. The artists themselves don’t seem to have been involved, unless performing the varnishing themselves.

By 1895, the Nabis were at their peak as an art movement. Involved with the Natanson’s La Revue Blanche, and decorating the Théâtre de l’Œuvre in Paris, the group consisted of the following painters:

• Pierre Bonnard, dubbed ‘very Japanese’,
• Maurice Denis, with ‘beautiful icons’,
• Meyer de Haan, ‘Dutch’,
• Georges Lacombe, ‘sculptor’,
• Paul Ranson, ‘more Japanese than the Japanese Nabi’,
• József Rippl-Rónai, ‘Hungarian’,
• Ker-Xavier Roussel,
• Paul Sérusier, ‘with the shiny beard’,
• Félix Vallotton, ‘foreign’,
• Jan Verkade, ‘obeliscal’,
• Édouard Vuillard, ‘Zouave’ (North African infantry),

and a handful of others, including writers and journalists. But, as with other movements in art, no sooner had the group come together than its members were starting to drift apart and move on.

Édouard Vuillard’s pastel Evening Effect from about 1895 appears to have been influenced by photography, in the way that the figure in the foreground is blurred and ghostly, as they would be when photographed at night with a long exposure.

Vuillard must also have been influenced by Pierre Bonnard’s contemporary Views of Paris. Here, Bonnard has turned his board into a Japanese screen, dividing it up into three vertical panels, to accommodate his aerial views of the bustling streets.

Paul Ranson’s paintings were becoming increasingly pastoral and realist, as in his Three Bathers among the Irises from 1896, one of his several variations on this theme. The previously flattened perspective was regaining depth, and the need for decorative patterns had receded.

When not making sculpture, Georges Lacombe also came under the influence of Japonisme. His egg tempera painting of Vorhor, The Green Wave from 1896 shows an Atlantic swell coming into the seacliffs of Vorhor near Camaret-sur-Mer in Brittany, with more than a touch of Hokusai’s Great Wave.

A few of the group’s paintings recorded their social life. In Vuillard’s Vallotton at the Natansons, he shows Thadée Natanson’s wife Misia – a muse to Bonnard in particular – watching Félix Vallotton painting in 1897, at the Natanson’s home.

Maurice Denis visited the Channel coast of Brittany in 1897, where he painted The Regatta in Perros-Guirec, View of the West Pier, returning to the school of Gauguin but forsaking mute colours for those of higher chroma.

József Rippl-Rónai maintained a more individual style in any case, as shown in his Self-Portrait in a Brown Hat from 1897.

Not only are their styles divergent, but their motifs are now very different too. Whereas at their peak many of their figures were women, and their themes often centred on womanhood, they have now gone out onto the streets of Paris, and to the coast of Brittany, with their more diverse populations, or just the unceasing roar of the waves.

Despite their growing differentiation, they kept together, and in 1897 chose not to exhibit at the Salon des Independants in Paris, but to hang as a group at the Galerie Vollard instead.

The following year, as a precursor to their imminent separation, several of them travelled independently. Édouard Vuillard visited Venice and Florence, and in 1899 he went to London. Maurice Denis also travelled to Italy, but spent much of his time in Rome, where he studied the works of Raphael and Michelangelo in the Vatican in particular.

Their final exhibition as a group took place at the Galeries Bernheim in 1900, where works by Bonnard, Denis, Ibels (a print-maker and illustrator), Roussel, Sérusier, Vallotton and Vuillard went on display together.

In the next article, I will look at where each went in the early twentieth century.

By 1880, Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904) was making his living from selling beautiful floral still lifes, but hadn’t made the mark that he had aspired to with his group portraits of the avant garde. He had married Victoria Dubourg, also a floral painter, with whom he lived a close life which was shared with their small circle of friends.

Around that year, when Fantin painted this Still Life with Grapes and a Carnation, his brushwork had loosened up significantly. The white tablecloth is surprisingly rough now, with obvious brushstrokes, and even the grapes are more painterly.

His portrait of the industrialist Henry Lerolle’s wife Madeleine in 1882 poses her next to one of his floral arrangements. Lerolle was a Naturalist painter himself and a patron of the arts including both painting and music. An enthusiastic collector of works by Claude Monet, Pierre Bonnard, Gustave Moreau and Édouard Vuillard, he was also an important patron to Degas, Renoir, and Maurice Denis.

Fantin had painted occasional figurative works earlier, but as he grew older these became more numerous, and frequently of motifs taken from opera. This painting of Dawn from about 1883 (above) may have been paired with Dusk (below), for which I don’t have a date. These nudes are curiously coy, almost as if he didn’t intend painting them that way. The critics weren’t impressed, claiming that they added nothing beyond the old master paintings which they referenced.

In 1885, he painted his last group portrait, this time with a musical theme. The figures Around the Piano are some of the members of Le Petit Bayreuth, a Parisian fan-club for Wagner and his music, of which Fantin was a member. Depicted are:

• Emmanuel Chabrier (seated, at piano)
• Edmond Maître
• Amédée Pigeon
• Adolphe Jullien (standing, left)
• Arthur Boisseau
• Camille Benoît
• Antoine Lascoux
• Vincent d’Indy (standing, right).

Apart from the piano and a couple of white doors in the background, the room around them is barren.

Chabrier was a composer himself, and a devout fan of Wagner at a time (after the Franco-Prussian War) when anything German was hardly popular in France. Strangely, though, the score on the piano has been identified not as Wagner but Brahms. The eight figures again are dressed in drab colours, and the directions of gaze give the impression of fragmentation. Chabrier looks at neither the keyboard nor score, but at something to the right of the viewer. Lascoux is the only person who appears to be looking at one of the other figures in the painting. They don’t look to be a group at all, but eight strangers who just happened around the piano.

This painting was exhibited at the Salon that year, just two years after Wagner’s death, and became known as Les Wagnéristes. Fantin had been planning the portrait for at least two years, recognising that it was going to be his last large work of this type. However, at no time during its development did he ever see himself within that group.

Although not unknown at the time, the figures gathered Around the Piano meant more to Fantin and his circle than to others. Compare with a photograph taken at the home of Henry Lerolle’s sister-in-law just a few years later.

This hand-coloured photographic print from 1893 shows a musical gathering in the home of Lerolle’s brother-in-law, the composer Ernest Chausson. From the left are Yvonne Lerolle (daughter), Mme Madeleine Lerolle (wife), Raymond Bonheur, Henry Lerolle, Ernest Chausson (brother-in-law), Claude Debussy, Christine Lerolle (daughter), Mme Chausson (sister-in-law), Etiennette Chausson (the Chaussons’ daughter). Fantin just didn’t appear to move in such circles.

Tannhäuser, exhibited at the Salon in 1886, is one of the better examples of Fantin’s musical paintings. Based on the first act of Wagner’s opera of that name from 1845, it shows the profoundly religious minstrel Tannhäuser wrestling with his morals among the pleasures of the court of Venus, after his seduction by the goddess.

This opera has won over many fans to Wagner through its sensuous music, which is reflected in Fantin’s painterly brushwork, particularly in the loose and revealing robes (partly) worn by the women. The landscape behind is surprisngly vague and almost Impressionist, though dark and low in chroma, as if he was still trying to graduate from the Barbizon school.

During the 1870s, Fantin’s output of lithographs had outnumbered his paintings, and he continued to produce many prints, mostly based on musical themes. Here is what I think is an exception.

Fantin’s undated oil painting of Embroiderers Before a Window is tiny and extremely sketchy.

I suspect that was the basis for his developing a much lighter lithograph, also undated, ofThe Embroiderers. These are quite different from his floral works and his group portraits, and perhaps more closely related to his other figurative paintings and their musical backgrounds. Just when you think you understand his paintings, they seem to have changed.

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.

Three of my favourite painters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are John Singer Sargent, Anders Zorn, and Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863–1923). Although I had never thought of any of them as being particularly ‘Naturalist’, Véronique Gerard Powell has recently made a strong case for Sorolla’s paintings, particularly those of the 1890s, to have been thoroughly Naturalist. In this article and next week’s sequel, I will consider those works which support her case.

Sorolla had been born and brought up in Valencia, on the eastern and Mediterranean coast of Spain. After training in Madrid and Rome, in the mid-1880s he was in Paris during the peak of Naturalism and the success of Jules Bastien-Lepage, who died in 1884. When Sorolla moved to Madrid in 1890 with his wife and young family, he strove for success at Salons and exhibitions throughout Europe, often with large paintings that were both realist and carried obvious social messages.

Although working primarily in Madrid, Sorolla started to use the fishermen of Valencia to supply motifs. Early among those is this man Peeling Potatoes (1891) in one of the fishing boats hauled up just above the sea on the beach there. Relatively small and quite sketchy, this may have been a study which he intended to develop into a larger more finished work.

The following year, Sorolla had his first great success with a gold medal at the National Exhibition in Madrid, for Another Marguerite! (1892). This went on to win first prize at a Chicago International exhibition.

A young woman sits, hunched up and dejected, with chains around her wrists and her possessions tied up in a small bundle next to her. Sat behind her in the cattle-class compartment of the railway train are two armed National Guards, near-identical figures who are escorting her in custody to face trial. She appears already to be sitting in the cell which awaits at her destination.

Sorolla’s title explains, with its reference to Gounod’s opera Faust (1859), itself based on Goethe’s Faust. There, Marguerite was seduced by Faust, made pregnant, and then killed her baby. The artist was apparently inspired to paint this in the summer of 1892 in Valencia by a real-life episode in which he had seen a woman being transported in custody to face a tribunal for an identical charge.

He next painted a couple of works usually associated with costumbrism, a Spanish art movement which revelled in everyday observations of tradition, and in painting is marked by its fine and attentive detail.

The second of those shows Kissing the Relic (1893), an occasion at the end of Mass in the church of Saint Paul in Valencia, very close to Sorolla’s childhood home. The congregation, composed largely of poor and elderly women, have been invited to kiss a reliquary containing an alleged relic of a revered saint, drawn from the cupboard behind the priest. In their midst is an altar-boy who is selling images to the pious.

In 1894, Sorolla focussed again on the lives of the fishermen of Valencia, in two major Naturalist paintings.

And They Still Say Fish is Expensive! (1894) is set in the hold of one of the larger fishing vessels, amid spare tackle, a large barrel, and some of its catch. Two older men are attending to a youth, who appears to have been wounded, presumably as the result of an accident at sea. Around the boy’s neck is a pendant good-luck charm; he is stripped to the waist and pale, and one of the men is pressing a dressing against his abdomen. Lit from an open hatch at the top left, the painting has the immediacy of a photographic ‘snap’ and looks documentary.

Sorolla’s title is incisive social comment about the values of a society which is happy to see young boys go to sea to fish, putting their lives at risk so that those ashore can enjoy cheap seafood. This was painted during the summer of 1894, again in Valencia, and went on to great acclaim in the Paris Salon the following year, where it was bought for the Museo del Prado in Madrid.

It is sometimes held that this painting was inspired by a novel by Blasco Ibáñez, but Powell suggests that the chronology makes it more likely that Ibáñez was inspired by this wonderful painting.

At the same time that he was painting that work, Sorolla was busy on his even larger Return from Fishing (1894), which is now one of the most visually impressive exhibits in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, following its purchase for the French state from the Salon of 1895, where it won a gold medal.

Romantic though this may appear today, it is a precisely detailed account of the complex, strenous, dangerous and above all primitive working conditions of the local fishermen of Valencia, who still used teams of oxen to haul their boats up the beach. While you’re relishing the warm sunlight filling the huge sail, consider how difficult this task is, and how dangerous it must have been to work with those powerful animals, and several tons of wooden boat hull, in wind and waves.

Valencian Fishermen (1895) is perhaps a little more relaxed, and a far smaller essay in the work of the fishermen as they maintain their gear at the water’s edge.

Another painting which Sorolla exhibited successfully at the Salon in 1895 was White Slave Trade (1895), an epitome of the contemporary trade in prostitutes in Spain.

Set in a similarly bleak railway compartment to Another Marguerite, four young women are asleep while being transported in the care of a much older woman. In contrast to their guardian, who wears black, the young women are dressed in bright-coloured Valencian regional costumes, and wear fashionable shoes. Their few possessions are stacked on the bench at the right, and include a guitar. The ‘slave trade’ to which Sorolla’s title refers is, of course, the movement of prostitutes between brothels. This could have been from Valencia to the port of Cartagena, then over to Orán and Algeria, as suggested by Powell for example.

The theme of prostitution had been brought to the fore in Naturalism by the Norwegian painter and writer Christian Krohg, whose first novel published in 1886 had documented its problems in Oslo, and which he had depicted in Albertine in the Police Doctor’s Waiting Room (1885-87), a work which Sorolla is unlikely to have seen, but may well have heard about.

In the next and concluding article, next week, I will look at a couple of fascinating paintings of contemporary science, and more of the fishing industry.

Reference

Véronique Gerard Powell (2019) Sorolla and ‘social painting’, in Sorolla, Spanish Master of Light, National Gallery and Yale UP, ISBN 978 1 85709 642 2.

The great majority of paintings show what we can see: people, landscapes, vases of flowers, and everything else in the world around us. Sometimes the artist wants to express non-visual concepts such as the senses, virtues, even the struggle between good and evil. One long-established method of delivering a non-visual message using visible objects is to cast the painting in an allegory. Within that allegory, intangibles are often represented by human figures, personifications of that concept or idea.

This weekend I’m going to look at some great allegorical paintings to illustrate this technique. This article looks at grand allegory, while tomorrow’s looks more narrowly at personification. These paintings can be some of the most difficult to read: if you don’t understand the visual language being used, you may come away utterly confused. I’ll do my best to be your guide.

Allegorical paintings were very popular during the Renaissance, particularly in Italy, but by the end of the seventeenth century became less frequent.

Bellini’s Allegory of Winged Fortune (1490) looks weird today because of its use of contemporary symbolic associations, most of which have been forgotten in the centuries since. The following symbolic devices can be read here:

• the blindfold represents Fortune’s salient characteristic, her blindness in dispensing good fortune and misfortune;
• ill fate is normally associated with a peacock tail, wings, and lion’s paws;
• the two pitchers represent the dispensation of good and bad fortune;
• abundant and long hair at the front of the head, and little at the back, symbolises Kairos, the moment of opportunity, which can be seized by the hair when approaching, but once passed cannot.

Painters had collections of images with established symbolic associations which they used to compose such allegories. Fortunately some were published in sufficient quantities as to have survived, to assist in modern interpretation.

Even armed with an extensive reference to the symbols used, some paintings seem to defy rational interpretation. I’m sure that Lotto’s Allegory of Prudence and Wisdom from 1505 meant something to his contemporaries, but few can interpret it today.

One of the most famous allegories was the Calumny of Apelles, here reconstructed from Lucian’s description of a long-lost painting by the ancient Greek artist Apelles, here painted by Botticelli in about 1496-7. This shows an innocent young man about to be badly misjudged by King Midas.

The youth who is the victim of the calumny is being dragged by his hair, clad only in a loincloth, with his hands pressed in prayer. On the throne at the right, perched on a dais, sits Midas, with ass’s ears, extending his right hand towards the distant figure of Slander. On either side of Midas are Ignorance and Suspicion, speaking simultaneously into those ears.

Slander is shown as a beautiful woman, holding a blazing torch in her left hand, and the accused’s hair in her right. At her left, between Slander and Midas, is Envy, who reaches his left hand out towards Midas’ eyes. The two women attending Slander are Fraud and Conspiracy. To the left is Repentance, dressed in deep mourning, her clothing in tatters. She glances back at the naked Truth, who looks up to the gods.

Botticelli recreated this painting by assembling the personifications of the vices and virtues involved in the case.

Late in the sixteenth century, these rather strained compositions were replaced by allegories which showed more mature and integral composition.

Tintoretto’s marvellous painting of Minerva and Mars from 1578 is an early example in which the goddess is pushing the god of war away from her, as her right hand rests on the shoulder of Peace, with Prosperity at the left edge of the canvas.

Some allegorical subjects became particularly favoured, including various arrangements of truth and time, as seen in Annibale Carracci’s Allegory of Truth and Time from 1584. The winged Father Time lacks his usual scythe but is putting his shoulder to Truth to raise her from a well, and she clutches a mirror in her right hand.

Trampled under the feet of Truth is the strangely chimeral two-faced figure of Deceit. The two figures framing the image are more controversial: the official identification gives them as Good Luck or Happiness on the left, and Happy Ending on the right. That on the left bears a winged caduceus and a cornucopia (horn of plenty), which is an unusual combination which may allude to good health as well as abundant food. That on the right is scattering Spring flowers, which might relate her to Flora.

It was Peter Paul Rubens who painted some of the grandest of these mythical allegories, which form the basis of much of his Marie de’ Medici Cycle.

The Felicity of the Regency shows Marie on her throne, in the role of the personification of Justice. At her left are Minerva (in her armour with her Aegis) and Prudence, around whose right arm a snake indicates serpentine wisdom. At the far right is Abundance carrying her cornucopia.

At the left is Saturn, who holds his scythe signifying the march of time. Above them are two figures of Fama (Fame or Pheme) blowing fanfares on their trumpets. Below are Envy, Ignorance, and Vice, together with four attendant putti.

Rubens wrote optimistically that this shows the flowering of the Kingdom of France, under Marie’s rule of prudence and equity. Sadly, history just didn’t work out that way.

With Europe nearing the end of the Thirty Years’ War, Rubens was only too delighted to be commissioned to paint one of his final narrative masterpieces for Ferdinand de’ Medici, then the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Tuscany had been largely uninvolved in the war, and at this time Rubens had no diplomatic mission to accomplish. He could afford to be frank in his story, and we are fortunate in having the artist’s own description of the painting as a reference.

The central figures in The Consequences of War (1637-38) are Venus and Mars. The god of war is advancing forcefully having just rushed from the temple of Janus, moving from left to right, with his sword bloodied and held low. His head is turned back to look at Venus, whose left arm is caught around his right, and who is clearly trying unsuccessfully to restrain him. Standing against the right thigh of Venus is a winged Cupid, the child of Mars and Venus.

Drawing Mars forward is Alecto, her hair here looking more like that of a Fury but with few snakes visible, who bears a torch in her right hand. Monsters near her personify Pestilence and Famine, the inseparable partners of war at that time. On the ground below Alecto is a woman with her back towards the viewer: she is Harmony, whose lute has been broken in the discord brought by war.

Nearby, also on the ground, is a mother with her child in her arms, symbolising the effect of war on families and their rearing. At the lower right corner is an architect clutching his instruments, indicating how fine buildings are thrown into ruin by war. Under the right foot of Mars is a book, showing how war tramples over the arts. On the ground to the left of Cupid is a bundle of arrows or darts: these are not Cupid’s arrows of desire, but when bundled up would form the symbol of Concord; thus war breaks Concord. To their left is the caduceus and an olive branch, attributes of Peace, also cast aside.

The woman at the left in a black gown is the personification of Europe, whose globe (symbolising the Christian world) is carried by a putto behind her. Having endured the ravages of war for so long, her clothing is torn and she has been robbed of her jewels. Venus and Mars are, in myth, well-known lovers. Venus is failing to restrain Mars from charging off to war, and in doing so, he is breaking their bond of love.

Earlier in Rubens’ career, he had collaborated with his friend Jan Brueghel the Elder to paint a magnificent series of five allegories of the senses, among them Sight from 1617. Amid the cornucopia of visual and optical artefacts shown here is a sophisticated telescope, various drawing and navigational instruments which relied on sight (for making sightings), an early magnifying glass, a globe and an orrery (showing the orbits of the planets), and a vast collection of visual art, including paintings and sculpture.

There are some obvious figurative items, such as the peacocks shown in the distance, just above the woman’s head: their feathers have eye-like markings, and refer to the well-known myth of Argus.

Painting itself became another popular theme for allegory. Bernardo Strozzi’s Allegory of Painting from 1635 is unusual for the appearance of a woman, who holds in her right hand the top of a canvas, and her left hand bears a palette, on which there are oil paints, and half a dozen brushes. One symbol common to all examples of this allegory are brushes, an obvious reference to painting. Almost as common are the palette and oil paints on its surface.

During the seventeenth century, Vanitas paintings became another sub-genre which attracted an allegorical approach. Carstian Luyckx’s undated Allegory of Charles I of England and Henrietta of France in a Vanitas Still Life is an unusually florid combination of allegory, Vanitas and a still life – the latter an unusual association for allegory.

The symbols here include a globe, the physical world itself, the gall from a tree, a snuffed-out candle, seashells, and coral. Luyckx uses another common device found in Vanitas painting: an open book, here showing King Charles I, who was executed in 1649, and his wife Henrietta Maria of France, who was deposed as queen of England by the civil wars, which forced her to flee to France in 1644.

Some later Vanitas paintings developed the allegory of young boys blowing bubbles, as in Karel Dujardin’s Boy Blowing Soap Bubbles, an Allegory on the Transitoriness and Brevity of Life (1663).

By the end of that century, allegories had become unusual in painting, replaced to a degree by personifications, as I will show in the next article. But I have come across one superb example of a complex allegory painted in the early twentieth century, of which I am sure even Rubens would have been proud.

Osman Hamdi Bey’s magnificent The Tortoise Trainer from 1906 set the record for the highest price paid for a Turkish painting when it was sold in 2004 for $3.5 million.

Its ingenious allegory can be read in at least two ways. The artist may have been self-critical of his painstakingly slow work; tortoises are not only inherently slow, but in the early eighteenth century had been used in Istanbul to bear lit candles for evening outings. This painting also had a greater political meaning, as the tortoise trainer wears traditional Ottoman religious costume from before the middle of the nineteenth century, and is training the tortoises with a traditional Turkish ney flute.

In that sense, it is a satire on the slow, faltering, and often ineffective reforms made to the Ottoman Empire during the late nineteenth century, an issue with which Hamdi Bey had much personal experience. This resulted in a time of increasing social and political upheaval, preceding the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 which changed the basis of rule in the empire, followed by the breakup of the empire after the First World War.

In the previous article, I looked at examples of allegory in paintings which have been used to express non-visual concepts in visual terms. Because these were usually both elaborate and dependent on the viewer understanding their symbolic language, they can all too readily become unreadable, and just look bizarre.

They fell out of favour – with a few exceptions – by the end of the seventeenth century, and in the nineteenth century were replaced by paintings which were simpler in concept and composition, and relied on the personification of a non-visual concept. The artist normally used a single figure rather than a whole group, which enabled more direct and obvious symbolism, and ultimately led to symbolist style.

This first seemed to manifest itself in the rising tide of nationalism which took place across Europe early in the nineteenth century.

Known better for his personification of France (below), Eugène Delacroix painted the personification of Greece in 1826, in his Greece in the Ruins of Missolonghi (above), where she walks on the rubble remaining from the third siege of Missolonghi from 1825-6. This was a desperate attempt by the Greeks to withstand the attacks of the Ottomans. After a year of siege, the Greeks had little option but to try to release their women and children from the city, leaving the men to defend the empty city to the last. Only a thousand made it to safety, the remainder being slaughtered or sold into slavery.

However, the appalling butchery practised by the Turkish forces, who displayed three thousand severed heads on the city walls, brought widespread support for the Greek cause. Britain, France, and Russia intervened, and the Greeks eventually regained their independence. Delacroix’s painting played a significant role in that cause.

Just a few years later, Delacroix painted Marianne, as the personification of the French nation, as the liberty achieved by the July Revolution of 1830, in his famous Liberty Leading the People (1830).

Nationalist personifications became steadily more elaborate. Ary Scheffer referred to his as an Allegory of the November Uprising (Polonia, 1831). Polonia, the personification of the Polish nation, is being brutally trampled on in the suppression which followed that uprising. The Russians suppressed that rebellion, integrated Poland into the Empire, and even closed the university in Warsaw.

In his 1847 fresco for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s luxurious holiday palace of Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight, William Dyce went far beyond mere personification in the form of Britannia. Neptune stands astride his three white seahorses, holding their reins in his right hand, and passing his crown with the left. The crown is just about to be transferred by Mercury (with wings on his cap) to the gold-covered figure of Britannia, who holds a ceremonial silver trident in her right hand.

Neptune is supported by his entourage in the sea, including the statutory brace of nudes and conch-blowers. At the right, Britannia’s entourage is more serious in intent, and includes the lion of England, and figures representing industry, trade, and navigation.

Personification, rather than full-blown allegory, became popular with those painters associated with the later phases of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement. These often involved romantically morbid intangibles, such as sleep and death.

John William Waterhouse’s first successful painting, shown at the Royal Academy in 1874, was Sleep and His Half Brother Death. This shows the Greek personification of sleep, Hypnos, and Thanatos, the personification of death. Although a painting with a mythical theme, it appears to have been influenced by the Aesthetic Movement, which was becoming popular with the decline of Pre-Raphaelite principles.

George Frederic Watts was at the other end of his career when, in 1886 and with the aid of assistants, he painted Hope. One of a series intended for a grand ‘House of Life’, Watts broke with tradition and shows this personification blind, her ear bent to listen intently to the one remaining string of a lyre. She sits on the globe, one tiny star twinkling faintly above, her efforts seemingly in vain, but always in hope.

Popular subjects for personification were day and night, because of their strongly visual associations. My first pair of examples were painted by Peter Nicolai Arbo.

Arbo’s Dagr (1874) shows the Norse deity of the day (as opposed to night), the son of the god Dellingr, and the rider of the bright-maned horse Skinfaxi. Together they bring day and its light to mankind, much in the way that Apollo’s sun chariot crossed the sky for the Mediterranean civilisations, only here it is a burning brand which makes the light.

Nótt riding Hrímfaxi (1887) shows the dark side, the night. Nótt is given as the daughter of Nörvi, whose third marriage was to Dellingr, their son being Dagr.

Truth was featured in some of the great allegories, but in the late nineteenth century rose to fame in her own right. Jean-Léon Gérôme painted a series of works showing her, first as a nude at the bottom of a well, either lying on the ground, or standing with a mirror in her hand. The version which has survived is probably his last, a painting which was so dear to Gérôme that he kept it close by in his studio up to the moment of his death.

Truth Coming out of her Well to Shame Mankind (1896) is based on a quotation from Democritus, “Of a truth we know nothing, for truth is in a well” (or, more literally, ‘in an abyss’), but knowing that reference is of little help in understanding these paintings.

Gérôme had given one of the earlier paintings the title of Mendacibus et histrionibus occisa in puteo jacet alma Veritas, which translates as ‘The nurturer Truth lies in a well, having been killed by liars and actors’. In this last version, she has climbed out of the well, and instead of bearing her customary mirror, she brandishes a whip with which to scourge us.

It is often suggested that this series of works relate to the Dreyfus affair in France, but as they predate Zola’s famous article J’accuse! of 1898, that is unlikely. I agree with more recent proposals that this Truth is the culmination of his themes of what is seen, visual revelation, and truth, particularly to nature. It is, perhaps, his last word on Impressionism, and his final defence of his life-long painting style.

Gérôme used the same allusion in his preface to Émile Bayard’s posthumous collection of collotype plates of photographs of nudes, Le Nu esthétique. L’Homme, la Femme, L’Enfant. Album de documents artistiques inédits d’après Nature, which was published in 1902:
Photography is an art. It forces artists to discard their old routine and forget their old formulas. It has opened our eyes and forced us to see that which previously we have not seen; a great and inexpressible service for Art. It is thanks to photography that Truth has finally come out of her well. She will never go back.

Jacek Malczewski was adept at personification, particularly when it came to painting death. In Thanatos (1898-9), above, the Greek word and personification for death, he has revised Greek myth completely from its traditional male guise, casting the figure of death as a young woman, still bearing her symbolic scythe, but allied here with Eros. Naked under her scant scarlet robes, she sizes up an old man who is cowering at his window.

Then in Death (1902), below, her skin assumes the ghastly green of the putrefying corpse, as she closes the eyelids of the artist himself, adding the element of self-portraiture.

My last two examples of personification are among its most intense and extensive, in two substantial watercolours by Edward Robert Hughes.

Wings of the Morning (1905) is his personification of the dawn. Its winged nude woman is bringing the early day, with coloured doves receding into what Hughes termed “a mass of cirrus clouds”, rose-tinted by the dawn light. These dispel the bats and owl of darkness below her.

Although not a pendant to Wings of the Morning, and painted seven years later, Night with her Train of Stars (1912) shows its complementary scene, the arrival of night. Portrayed as another winged woman, this time she wears a blue gown and swaddles an infant, her right index finger at her lips as if to bring the silence of the night. Her blue clothing, crown, and infant are likely to be an allusion to the Virgin Mary.

In her tow is a train of putti-like winged infants, the nearest clutching at her gown. Stars twinkle between them, and there are poppy flowers (classically hypnotic), blackbirds, and other dark birds in flight.

And then there is Symbolism – perhaps another time.

Dante, guided by the spirit of Virgil, is making his way steadily up the island-mountain of Purgatory. The pair are taken up to the third terrace by one of the guardian angels, as Virgil explains to Dante how spiritual love can only grow as more share it.

On this terrace, the souls of the dead rid themselves of wrath, a process involving visions. Most prominent among the examples used is the last prayer of Saint Stephen (in French, Saint Étienne) for the forgiveness of those who cast him out of their city for preaching in the name of Jesus, and stoned him to death.

As the sun sets, its light is blocked by a rising cloud of dense smoke, forcing Dante to close his eyes. As he follows Virgil, Dante’s hand resting on the Roman’s shoulder, he converses with the worldly-wise Marco the Lombard, who blames humans for lack of virtue, most of all their leaders for their misrule.

Marco singles out Pope Boniface VIII for criticism, over his claim to both spiritual and temporal authority, which he refers to as having ‘two suns in the sky’. Dante and Virgil meet another guardian angel, who draws them up the next section of ascent just before sunset to reach the fourth terrace. Once again, the wing of that angel brushes against Dante’s brow, and removes the third P which had been inscribed there.

Through the course of the evening, Virgil explains to Dante the moral structure of Purgatory, and how the Seven Deadly Sins relate to love. Towards midnight, as Dante is dozing off, a crowd of spirits approaches them at speed, urging one another to move more quickly. They quote examples of the consequences of sloth before hurrying off.

Dante has another vivid dream that night, in which he sees a malformed woman, who transforms into a beautiful siren, one of those who had tried to lure Odysseus, before she is revealed to have foul-smelling guts. At that point he awakes, and quickly moves up the mountain with the help of another guardian angel, whose wing removes the fourth P from his forehead.

Dante and Virgil have now reached the fifth terrace, where souls rid themselves of avarice and prodigality. This is achieved by their lying face down on the hard rock while remaining immobile, and weeping. Among them is Pope Adrian V, who tells Dante how he repented of his avarice only when he had been elected to office in 1276. He then died before his investiture, just thirty-eight days later.

Dante and Virgil hear of other examples of avarice and poverty as they move around the terrace.

As they move on, the whole mountain trembles under their feet and they hear a shout of praise to God: Virgil assures Dante that he needn’t be afraid, as that is the what happens when another soul has been cleansed and moves up from Purgatory to reach its peak.

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.

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606–1669) was one of the greatest Old Masters of all time, active first in the Dutch city of Leiden from around 1624-25, and best known for his acclaimed paintings and prints made in Amsterdam from 1631 onwards. The painting shown is one of his earliest independent works, made several years before his discovery by Constantijn Huygens. It’s believed to have been commissioned, and is one of his few showing a martyrdom.

Charles Thévenin (1764–1838) was a French neoclassical painter who won the Prix de Rome in 1791. He painted mainly contemporary history, depicting major events from the French Revolution and the days of the First Empire. Painted relatively late in his career, following his return to Paris after seven years as the Director of the French Academy in Rome, his work showing the martyrdom of Saint Stephen is unusual for its time, as such scenes had ceased being popular by the end of the seventeenth century.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

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

Over the last few months, I have looked at most of the media used by painters to form their work, from the support of massive stone walls to the last layer of varnish. This article summarises the series, and provides links to each of its articles.

At their very simplest, paintings need only consist of three components: pigment, some binder, and a combined ground and support. The precise meaning of these terms is explained in this introduction to the series.

Simpler painting systems include fresco (and secco), encaustic, watercolours, pastels, and more ‘modern’ media such as oil pastels. Their paints or sticks are generally applied directly to a surface which functions as both ground and support.

In fresco wall painting, water-based paint is applied to wet lime plaster, and dries into that plaster layer, providing a bonding which often lasts for a millenium or more. The disadvantage is lack of mobility: the painting is one with the building, and moving them separately is very difficult and risky. In secco technique, the paint is applied to dry plaster, which results in weaker colours, less detail, and needs to be repainted periodically.

Painting in hot wax or encaustic, usually on wooden panels, has never been common, but remains very effective. The binder changes phase, from a liquid when heated for painting, to a solid at ambient temperature, which is reversible. Beeswax, with various additives, is the binder most widely used.

The binder in watercolour and gouache is gum from trees, in particular gum arabic, and the water functions as its diluent or solvent. Although long considered inferior to oil paintings, a succession of masters from Dürer onwards have made it one of the most expressive of the media, capable of a range of unique effects. Emphasis has rested on technique rather than alchemical processes.

Pastels developed quite late, and are by far the most direct form of painting: the artist applies pigment with a little gum arabic or glue binder from sticks direct to an abrasive surface, almost painting in pure pigment. Sadly, the result remains delicate and susceptible to mechanical loss. Dust from pastels is a particular danger too, and modern pastel painters often wear respiratory protection when in the studio, or have to be very careful in their choice of pigments.

More recently, crayons, oil pastels, and other stick-based media have found favour among some artists, and brought impressive results.

Three types of water-based tempera have been used: glue tempera or distemper, egg tempera, and casein derived from milk.

Glue tempera enjoyed quite a following until it became largely displaced by egg tempera. It uses a binder of animal glue, so can be rewetted and reworked when necessary. Intense colour is difficult to achieve, and over time most glue tempera paintings have faded and/or changed colour.

In contrast, egg tempera has proved highly durable. It relies on egg yolk as its binder, which dries rapidly and sets to form a hard and brittle paint layer which doesn’t rewet or rework at all. Normally applied in multiple thin layers, it was the choice of some of the great masters of the early Renaissance before being displaced by oils.

It was revived by Pre-Raphaelites and others during the nineteenth century, and again in the twentieth century by Andrew Wyeth in particular. It also resulted in the development of gesso grounds made from chalk and glue, which were initially standard for oil paintings too.

Ink and casein have been relatively unusual in finished paintings. Ink doesn’t have a binder as such, but its carbon and other pigment particles are absorbed into the surface of its paper ground. Adding shellac as a binder makes it waterproof. Casein is a protein binder not unlike egg yolk, which is made from milk with the aid of rennet, then prepared in an alkaline solution. It first became popular among illustrators, and has been little-used in fine art paintings.

Since the Renaissance, the majority of paintings by professional artists have used drying vegetable oils as their binder. The most popular of these has been linseed oil, extracted from the seed of the common flax plant, but other suitable oils are made from safflower, poppy seeds, walnuts, even soya beans. These oils slowly polymerise as they incorporate oxygen, taking months or years to ‘dry’ in depth; the presence of water and some other substances can instead result in the formation of soap, and a very weak paint layer prone to delaminate from its ground.

Because of its longstanding popularity among painters, a great deal of development has taken place in materials and techniques. Originally paints were freshly ground by assistants in the workshop, and far from portable. They first became available in ‘bladders’, then during the nineteenth century in metal tubes. These make it practical to paint in oils almost anywhere, so long as you can bring your wet canvas back.

In the late twentieth century, acrylic emulsions started to replace oils. While oil paints, even today, have firm roots in alchemical practices, acrylics are very much a product of industrial chemistry, with carefully-formulated thickeners and other media, surfactants and all manner of polymer trickery. Early paints were rather crude and limited in their pigments, but during the 1960s and 70s became much more sophisticated. However, they still have the fundamental limitation that they dry relatively quickly in comparison with oil paints, and can’t be reworked, which limits techniques.

Oils and acrylics last best when applied to relatively rigid surfaces. The most popular supports for them have been wood panels and stretched fabrics, although some artists have preferred sheets of copper and other materials.

Painters like Adam Elsheimer specialised in applying their oils to copper plates, which give his small but exquisitely-detailed paintings a distinctive look. Copper provides a smooth surface compared to the texture of woven fabrics stretched in ‘canvases’. Early gesso grounds have progressively been replaced by thinner ‘oil grounds’, which have allowed some artists to let the weave show through. Arnold Böcklin’s Sirens below is of particular interest here as it was painted with (presumably egg) tempera.

Although paper has generally been frowned upon as a support and ground for oils, it has a long and very respectable history, including playing a key role in the development of painting in front of the motif, en plein air, by landscape masters such as Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750–1819) and Camille Corot (1796-1875). Aōdō Denzen’s painting above is notable as his paints use perilla rather than linseed oil as their binder, and are applied to paper, which was first made in south-east Asia.

At the end of all these media, the painting may be protected by glass, or varnish applied onto the paint layer. Like so many processes in painting, varnishing is both friend and enemy. Many varnishes contain hard resins derived from the sap of trees, which protect the surface of the paint from physical damage. But old varnish turns grey or brown and becomes dirty, requiring periodic removal and re-varnishing. In the late nineteenth century, some artists instructed owners of their works never to varnish them, so that their soft matte surface wouldn’t be obscured.

One fact you can always be certain of in painting media is that, if one artist has decided how to do something, another will have done the exact opposite – which helps ensure that every painting remains unique.

Having peaked as an art movement by 1895, the Nabis steadily moved apart, and by about 1906 there was little to show, it seems, for their work together apart from friendships which lasted unto death. In this article and next week’s, I’m going to show carefully selected paintings from each of the Nabis whose careers extended into the twentieth century, to see what remained of their Nabism in the years just before the First World War, and even later.

By far the best-known, most successful, and longest-lived of the Nabis was Pierre Bonnard, whose paintings in the early 1890s were often not in particularly Nabi style. The Croquet Game from 1892 is one of those which is unmistakably Nabi, though.

Although much of his work from the end of the nineteenth century onwards showed precious little Nabism, as it grew more intense in chroma and he adopted themes such as Marthe in the bath and French windows, every so often he did paint works, like The Bowl of Milk, which referred back to his earlier style – in this case, over twenty years after the group had dissolved.

Like many of Bonnard’s paintings this looks informal if not spontaneous, but it is actually the result of quite deliberate compositional work, and attention to details such as the form of the pillars on the balcony outside. In its informality is formality, in the model’s pose, the layout of the table settings, and the echoing verticals in the window and wallpaper.

Over forty years after Nabism, some of Bonnard’s paintings, like Nude in Bathtub from about 1938-41, still hark back to some of its traits. His colours are now brilliant and visionary. The form of the bath adopts itself to that of Marthe within, curving around her legs in its asymmetry. The shimmering patterns of the floor and the curtain are quite independent of their orientation, a feature of Nabi decorative patterning.

Édouard Vuillard maintained Nabi traits in his work long after his masterpiece of Public Gardens from 1894.

Here is a Japoniste vertical panel with common roots, At The Pavillons in Cricqueboeuf. In Front of the House, from 1911. He painted this using glue distemper, one of the traditional media from the late Middle Ages which was revived by the Nabis. Although this view has depth, it also retains the patterning of clothing and objects such as the deckchair and the foliage, no longer as prominent as it had been twenty years before.

As late as 1920, when Vuillard painted his mother Madame Vuillard Sewing, he still occasionally returned to a more Nabi style. By this time, Madame Vuillard must have been in her early seventies.

Maurice Denis’ mature Nabi paintings like September Evening or Women Sitting on the Terrace (1891) are good examples of the collective style. The forms of the figures are flattened, and each wears a patterned dress. There is obvious influence of Japonisme, and muted colours throughout.

Although he became almost Fauvist in his use of high chroma, when Denis turned to paint some classical nudes in mythological and coastal scenes, such as Female Bathers at Perros-Guirec (c 1912), his work retain some of the Nabi look.

His Self-Portrait in Front of the Priory from 1921 is even more strongly reminiscent of his Nabi work, with more muted colours and some continued flattening of perspective.

The last of these four artists, Paul Sérusier, is perhaps even more interesting in his development in the twentieth century, given that he had painted The Talisman in 1888, which is today generally held to have been a bold step in the direction of abstract painting.

During the height of Nabism, Sérusier remained most strongly influenced by Paul Gauguin, as shown in his Washerwomen, started in 1886 but not completed until as late as 1897.

Sérusier’s View of a Village from 1906 is quite a marked contrast with its extraordinary sky and greater detail, but still shows its Nabi origins. Sérusier was, at the time at least, probably the most influential of the Nabis; following his experience teaching in the Académie Ranson, he published a book in 1921 ABC of Painting which is still cited.

Late in his career, Sérusier drew more heavily again on early modern painting, such as that of the late Middle Ages in paintings such as Tapestry (Five Weavers) from 1924. Unlike Vuillard, though, he remained happy to work in oil on canvas.

Where, then, are Sérusier’s abstract paintings, given that he painted through revolutionary phases such as Cubism? Oddly, he seems never to have pressed on in that direction from The Talisman, although in about 1910, he painted three works in which he used geometrical forms. He wrote later the these were an attempt to use Symbolism – rather than abstraction – to examine the relationships between man and the cosmos.

Next week I will look at five of the Nabis whose later work was very different from their Nabi style.

By the late 1880s, the French painter Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904) was in his fifties, commercially successful, and living a relatively withdrawn family life. He had avoided becoming embroiled in the controversy of the new Impressionist movement, but not really gained much traction in the Salon with his large group portraits either.

He had recently devoted a lot of his time to print-making, particularly of scenes from operas and similar musical productions. His floral still lifes remained popular, particularly with customers in Britain, but Fantin’s motifs started to turn to the more fantastic.

Another interesting example of his lithographs is The Trojans at Carthage, Act III from 1888, in which he shows a scene from Berlioz’s opera The Trojans, or rather the much-reduced version known as The Trojans at Carthage which was premiered in Paris in 1863. Berlioz had completed the original five-act opera just a few years before that performance, but the first staged performance of the whole work didn’t take place until 1890, long after the composer’s death. This print must therefore be based on the reduced version which Fantin would have seen and heard.

The opera tells some of the story of Virgil’s Aeneid, particularly Book IV, and the scene shown here is of Aeneas with Dido, I believe.

Perhaps influenced by some of the paintings of personifications becoming popular on the other side of the Channel, in Britain, in 1889 Fantin painted Immortality, one of the finest of his late romantic works.

The title given to this floral still life from 1891 is Poppies, although the blooms shown don’t appear to be poppies at all. We also have to be very careful in not interpreting them in any modern way: poppies weren’t, as far as I can tell, associated with deaths in combat prior to the First World War, neither were white poppies a mark of pacifism until well into the twentieth century. The flowers here could be carnations, which are well-known in white, but the leaves don’t appear so; neither do they appear to be peonies, sometimes suggested as an alternative.

These flowers do appear to conform to what is expected of their title of Zinnias, from about 1897. These had been introduced from the Americas, and had already become popular in gardens.

Around 1900, at the age of fifty-four, Fantin effectively retired from professional painting and print-making. The following year, he wrote that he would never paint portraits or flowers again, but would “amuse myself painting whatever comes to mind”.

What came to Fantin’s mind were soft-focus romantic visions of coyly semi-undressed maidens, as in his Dancers from 1900. Most appear to have musical or literary allusions, but lack anything specific to connect to classical myths or more recent narrative. Fantin wrote that his dealer was still able to sell them, so why not?

The Palace of Aurora from 1902 is another ethereal painting of a motif which might have come from the older artists of the Royal Academy in London. Aurora, the personification of the dawn, is here being disrobed by the personification of night, those diaphanous robes being lit by the red of the sunrise.

The last painting I have found by Fantin is his Awakening (of Venus) from about 1903, which shares a similar theme. A major influence on his paintings of women in these later years was photography: Fantin gathered a collection of more than 4500 prints, two-thirds of which show major paintings, the remainder being of nude women posed for painting. Could Fantin have been unable to paint these late works from live models, and had to rely on photographs?

In his later years, Fantin and his wife spent their summers on her family’s country estate in Normandy, in northern France. He died there on 25 August 1904, at the age of 68. His widow, Victoria, survived him until 1926. Within a year or two, his work had almost been forgotten, and it was only later in the twentieth century that his group portraits were rediscovered.

Next week, I will look at Fantin’s group portraits in the context of similar works of the nineteenth century.

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.

At the Salon in Paris is 1895, Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863–1923) had enjoyed continuing success with his Naturalist paintings, including Return from Fishing (1894), which won him a gold medal, was bought by the French state, and now graces the Musée d’Orsay.

Sorolla continued to paint scenes from the working lives of fishermen in Valencia, including their shore maintenance tasks in Fishermen Taking up Nets (1896).

That year he also painted the better-known Sewing the Sail. This shows a scene on a patio at El Cabañal beach, Valencia, during the Sorolla family holiday in the summer of 1896. Although it may look a spontaneous study of the effects of dappled light, Sorolla composed this carefully with the aid of at least two drawings and a sketch, which survive. It shows the whole family engaged in one of the more technically-challenging supporting tasks ashore.

This was exhibited the following year at the Salon in Paris, where it was praised, and went on to win first prizes in Munich and Vienna. Reaction was more mixed when shown in Madrid in 1899, but at the 1905 Venice Biennale it was bought by the city of Venice in recognition of its popularity there.

Sorolla’s Portrait of Dr. Simarro at the Microscope from 1897 shows Doctor Luis Simarro Lacabra (1851-1921), who was an eminent psychiatrist in Madrid. He also undertook pioneering research looking at the fine structure of the brain. Among his many achievements was a modification of an established technique for staining microscopic sections of brain, which proved a major advance and an inspiration to the great Spanish neurohistologist Ramon y Cajal. This portrait was exhibited at the National Exhibition in Madrid in the same year.

Research, or under its original Spanish title of Una investigación o El Dr. Simarro en el Laboratorio, from the same year, goes on to look at Dr. Simarro at work in the laboratory among colleagues and students. He is here preparing specimens for microscopy, presumably using his staining technique. The table is covered with bottles of chemicals used in that process, and the chunky metal object in the centre foreground is a microtome, used for cutting very thin sections of tissue embedded in paraffin wax, prior to their staining, for study under the microscope.

These two paintings are probably his most floridly Naturalist works, celebrating contemporary advances in science, technology and medicine, in a documentary style.

Sorolla’s best-known painting from his Naturalist period is his large Sad Inheritance (1899), which won him the Grand Prix and medal of honour at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, and a medal in Madrid the following year. As ever, its spontaneity is deceptive: this is one of his most carefully-prepared paintings for which at least oil sketches survive.

This shows a group of young boys from a local charitable hospital enjoying a visit to the sea in the care of a ‘lone priest’, and celebrates the mission of the Hospitaller Order of St John of God, who had built the hospital in 1892 at the end of Malvarrosa Beach. Sorolla later said that he had witnessed this scene one evening in a remote corner of the beach, and once he had been given permission to paint the boys, he made an initial oil sketch from memory.

There is considerable dispute over the cause of the boys’ disabilities. Sorolla’s title implies that they result from the ills of society, implying conditions such as congenital syphilis, and the consequences of parental alcoholism. More consistent with the period and their appearance, though, would be a mixture of preventable conditions including polio, which wouldn’t have fitted as well with the artist’s social message. Whichever was true, the implicit criticism made of the state left this remarkable Naturalist painting unsold, despite its medals and awards.

Although Sad Inheritance was Sorolla’s last large Naturalist painting, he continued to create works in similar style. Lunch on the Boat, painted in the previous year, shows a group of Valencian men and boys eating an improvised lunch under the awning on their fishing boat.

His later large Afternoon Sun, Beaching the Boat (1903) is another scene of fishermen working hard with three teams of oxen to bring a fishing boat ashore, in the spirit of Return from Fishing.

Beach of Valencia by Morning Light from 1908 shows mothers taking their children into the water on El Cabañal beach, Valencia.

In May 1908, Sorolla had a spectacular solo exhibition of 278 works in the Grafton Galleries in London, sponsored by his friend John Singer Sargent. Although not a commercial success, it was visited by Archer Milton Huntington, an American philanthropist who had founded the Hispanic Society of America in New York just six years earlier. In 1911, Huntington commissioned Sorolla to paint fourteen huge canvases to cover the walls of the society’s library, which became the cycle Visions of Spain. For these, Sorolla returned to Naturalism.

Castilla, The Bread Festival (1913) shows the pageantry of a local festival in the province of Castilla. The section here is just over half of the full width of this part, which is just under 14 metres across.

Ayamonte, Tuna Fishing (1919) is a section from another painting in this series, showing the tuna market in the town of Ayamonte, Spain, which must have reminded Sorolla of his Valencian summers.

Véronique Gerard Powell has made an excellent point. It should (with the wisdom of hindsight) have been obvious that Sorolla painted Naturalist works for a period of more than a decade. And several of them remain among his very best.

Reference

Véronique Gerard Powell (2019) Sorolla and ‘social painting’, in Sorolla, Spanish Master of Light, National Gallery and Yale UP, ISBN 978 1 85709 642 2.

For several millenia, the largest human civil engineering projects have been palaces, temples and other places of worship, fortifications, harbours, and bridges. The Romans were inveterate builders of bridges, either carrying roads or water, and many still stand across the far-flung reaches of their former empire.

Whilst artists have long found well-designed buildings worth painting, and the depiction of places of worship has been deemed particularly appropriate, more prosaic constructions like harbours and bridges were only rarely the true subject of paintings until the Age of Enlightenment started to celebrate science and technology. In this article and the next two parts, I’m going to take a very quick look at some of my favourite paintings of bridges to see what they tell us about the history of painting, and more.

Bridges have had huge impact on man. A great many towns and cities only really exist because of the bridge(s) at their centre. This was most commonly at the lowest bridging of a major river, where that bridge saved traders and travellers additional journeys of hours or even days to reach a crossing point further upstream. Suddenly, two communities which had previously only communicated by boat were only a short walk away from one another. The bridge brought trade, commerce, travellers, industry, inevitably crime. But – unless you’re a civil engineer – most bridges aren’t normally considered to be aesthetically attractive.

In Jan van Eyck’s The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin from about 1435, you have to look way past its figures, deep into the painting to see crowds crossing an elegant bridge (detail below).

Bridges were painted for their part in legendary history. Charles Le Brun’s Horatius Cocles Defending the Bridge (c 1642-43) tells the story of the fearless Roman who single-handedly fought off the attack of Lars Porsena’s troops as they tried to capture Rome.

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

A few very old paintings are more topographic: Frost Fair on the Thames, with Old London Bridge in the Distance painted by an unknown artist in about 1685 shows the first London Bridge in 1683-4, during a winter when the ice here reached a thickness of nearly thirty centimetres (12 inches). This was built as a penance by King Henry II for his murder of Thomas Becket, between 1176-1209, and soon became crowded with shops. It repeatedly caught fire, and its southern gatehouse was used to display the severed heads of traitors following their execution. It was finally replaced and demolished in 1831.

Another world-famous bridge which has found its place in paintings is the Rialto in Venice, shown here in Francesco Guardi’s view of a Regatta at the Rialto Bridge from 1770-9. This stone bridge replaced a wooden version in 1591, and like the old London Bridge bears rows of shops. It’s considered one of the top tourist attractions in modern Venice, despite the prediction at the time of its construction that it would collapse under its own weight.

One of Caspar Wolf’s most popular paintings is this view of the Devil’s Bridge in the Saint Gothard Pass, from 1777. This pass connects northern and southern Switzerland, and this section has been of great strategic importance. This bridge across the Schöllenen Gorge was first built in wood in around 1220, and was a key section of the route. It probably wasn’t replaced by a stone bridge until the seventeenth century, and by 1775 it had developed into that shown here, which was wide enough to allow passage of the first carriage, and to carry the increasing flow of tourists crossing the Alps.

In the late eighteenth century, as interest in topographic painting increased, it attracted some of the brightest and best, including the young JMW Turner and his tragically short-lived rival Thomas Girtin.

Girtin’s wonderful view of Durham Cathedral and Castle (c 1800) strikes an interesting balance between the fine bridge over the River Wear in the foreground and the castle and cathedral behind. This is Framwellgate Bridge, built after 1400 as a replacement for an original which had been built in around 1110. It served as the main traffic route from the west of Durham into the centre of the city until that burden was taken over by Milburngate Bridge in 1969, and now only carries pedestrians.

Girtin used a similar compositional approach in his watercolour of Ripon Minster, Yorkshire from 1800, putting the features of the river including its fine bridge in front, to steal the gaze from the bulk of the minster behind.

When Girtin campaigned in Yorkshire, he concentrated not on cathedrals and other prominent buildings, but made the River Wharfe the centre of his attention, including the Ouse Bridge, York (1800).

In the early nineteenth century, another young landscape painter was out painting en plein air, this time Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot in the countryside around Rome. During his first stay in Italy, between 1825-28, he painted one of his finest oil sketches showing The Bridge at Narni (1826).

This shows the Ponte d’Augusto, constructed under the Roman emperor Augustus in about 27 BCE using large blocks of marble. It carries the Flaminian Way over the river Nera near what is now the city of Narni in Umbria, Italy. At the time of its construction, it was one of the largest bridges in Europe, crossing 160 metres (520 feet) in four spans at a height of up to 30 metres (100 feet).

On the other side of the Atlantic, adventurous artists like Frederic Edwin Church found rather more tenuous bridges to paint. His Pichincha from 1867 shows a suspended bridge in Ecuador, one end glowing in the early morning light. Just over half way across (detail below), a woman wearing a brilliant red blouse is riding side-saddle on a mule, which is picking its way slowly across the thin logs which form the walkway of the bridge. At the left end is another mounted figure, who has just completed that frightening crossing.

By this time, in northern France, the move towards Impressionism was well under way. The landscape painter Johan Jongkind returned to Paris in 1859, where he painted this view of Le Pont de la Tournelle, Paris (1859), with a small group of washerwomen at work by the water’s edge.

The bridge shown here had been built in 1654, to replace a series of predecessors from the first in 1620. It connects the city to the south with the Île Saint-Louis, which had originally been two smaller islands close to the Île Notre Dame, on which the cathedral stands. Jongkind isn’t interested in the market for topographic paintings, though, and his attention is on the washerwomen and the old bridge.

In the next article, I’ll look at how the Impressionists progressed the painting of bridges in Paris and beyond.