The great majority of narrative paintings refer to a well-known story, which the viewer is expected to recognise and recall when they try to read the painting. This is because stories refer to at least two moments in time, and a conventional painting can only show one. Among the best stories to use, at least from the late eighteenth century onwards, are those from the plays of Shakespeare. And painters did with scenes from Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Hamlet, and others.

Shakespeare’s plays show profound insight into people, and the character Ophelia is a fine example. Caught up in a royal family’s internal feuding and murder to gain power, Ophelia grows increasingly deranged by events and her treatment, until she finally drowns herself in a brook.

In one of the earliest well-known paintings of the play, in 1792, Benjamin West picks Hamlet: Act IV, Scene V (Ophelia Before the King and Queen). This was originally intended for inclusion in the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery in London. John Boydell was an engraver and publisher who decided to exploit popular interest in Shakespeare’s works in an ambitious plan for a gallery of paintings of scenes from them, prints for general sale, and an illustrated edition of the plays. But he failed to secure the necessary support, and the paintings which he commissioned, including this one, were sold off in 1805, leaving Boydell’s company in bankruptcy.

Ophelia is seen in white, in a state of madness, with the king and queen becoming concerned for her at the right. Inevitably, given the nature of Boydell’s project, the painting is theatrical rather than a conventional narrative.

It was Eugène Delacroix who first seems to have realised the visual potential in Ophelia’s drowning. His first painting of The Death of Ophelia in 1838 follows Queen Gertrude’s account of events in Act 4 Scene 7. In that, Ophelia climbed into a willow tree whose branch broke, dropping her into the stream below.

Fifteen years later, in 1853, Delacroix returned to the story and painted The Death of Ophelia again, just as loosely but with richer chroma. Although the artist has reversed the image here, she is still holding onto the branch of a tree, and about to be carried away to her death.

Still the most famous painting of this scene, I have recently detailed the story behind John Everett Millais’ painting of Ophelia from 1851-52. It’s the first depiction which ignores Queen Gertrude’s account in favour of a more tragic-romantic self-drowning. Millais uses the intricate symbolism of flowers to add great nuance, and a real landscape setting with lush vegetation.

There is a deeper and more poignant tragedy here too, in that Lizzie Siddal, Millais’ long-suffering model for this work, died just a decade later at the age of only 32, from an opium overdose which may well have been suicidal.

At the same time that Millais was being eaten alive by midges when painting in the deepest Surrey countryside, Arthur Hughes, another Pre-Raphaelite, was hard at work on his first painting of Ophelia, which he completed slightly later.

It shows Ophelia sat under a willow tree, by the stream in which she was shortly to drown herself, having been driven to madness by Hamlet’s murder of her father, and his rejection of her love. To ensure that the viewer is in no doubt as to the moment which he shows us, Hughes inscribed the relevant lines from Hamlet Act 4 Scene 7 around his painting. But it lacks any sense of the imminently tragic outcome, relying on its text and the viewer’s own knowledge of the play.

A decade later, Hughes returned to this story, in his Ophelia (“And will he not come again?”) (c 1863-71). This time he refers to an earlier moment in the play, in Act 4 Scene 5, just after Hamlet’s murder of Polonius, when Ophelia, already “distracted”, sings:
And will he not come again?
And will he not come again?
No, no, he is dead;
Go to thy deathbed;
He never will come again.
His beard was as white as snow,
All flaxen was his poll.
He is gone, he is gone,
And we cast away moan.
God ‘a’mercy on his soul!
And of all Christian souls, I pray God. God b’ wi’ you.

Despite that reference to a scene which takes place inside the castle, Hughes has painted Ophelia minutes before her drowning, when she is picking wild flowers and standing in front of an old willow tree which overhangs a much more substantial body of water. The latter is almost black in the deep shade, and is revealed as water only by the presence of a few bright reflected objects on its surface.

Two years after his wife Lizzie Siddal’s death, Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted this watercolour of The First Madness of Ophelia (1864). This shows Act 4 Scene 5, essentially the same as Benjamin West’s painting above, with Ophelia being comforted as she talks in riddles and rhymes in front of the king and queen.

A couple of years later, Rossetti’s watercolour of Hamlet and Ophelia (1866) moves even earlier in the play, and becomes more remote from her tragic death. I wonder how much this may have been influenced by his own thoughts and emotions about Lizzie Siddal’s death.

When Jules Bastien-Lepage died suddenly in 1884, he left his unfinished painting of Ophelia which he had started in 1881. Her anguish is about to drive her body down into the water, and drown there. At the time of his death, Bastien-Lepage still had to paint all the foreground detail. This would have covered the lower half of the canvas, and given it his usual finely-detailed appearance.

Jules-Élie Delaunay painted this beautiful portrait of Ophelia in 1882, whose only narrative references are the careful choice of flowers. Without knowing its title, most viewers would be hard-put to work out who it represented.

The following year, it was the turn of the academic painter Alexandre Cabanel to try his hand at Ophelia (1883). I suspect that he had the benefit of seeing both Delacroix’s and Millais’ paintings, and opted to return to Queen Gertrude’s account involving the broken willow branch. By a curious twist of fate, Bastien-Lepage had been Cabanel’s former pupil, although at that time, before Bastien-Lepage’s untimely death, it’s likely that Cabanel was unaware of his former pupil’s unfinished painting.

My last image of Ophelia for today isn’t a painting, but an etching made in 1889 by the now almost-forgotten Anna Lea Merritt. Like Delaunay, she opts for a non-narrative portrait, which may have featured one of the popular actresses of the day.

Tomorrow, I’ll resume this story the following year, when painting Ophelia became something of an obsession for some artists at least.

In the first of this pair of articles looking at paintings of Ophelia from Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, I showed works from Benjamin West’s in the late eighteenth century, through the most famous painting of Ophelia by Millais in 1851-52, up to 1889. What happened then is surprising: as narrative painting entered its decline into the twentieth century, depictions of Ophelia became still more frequent.

Even the academic painter of nudes Jules LeFebvre tackled her inner turmoil and grief, in his Ophelia from 1890. Notable here is his attention to the detail of her hair, as well as the Morning Glory flowers adorning it. These flowers were apparently associated with unrequited love and mortality.

Henrietta Rae, by coincidence another established painter of nudes, returns to the same early scene in the play as painted by West and Rossetti, when Ophelia’s madness first became manifest. (I apologise for the poor quality of this image.)

Rae shows Ophelia in Act 4 Scene 5, as she scatters flowers and herbs while reciting their names and symbols in front of King Claudius and Queen Gertrude, saying:
There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. Pray you, love,
remember. And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts.
There’s fennel for you, and columbines. There’s rue for you,
and here’s some for me. We may call it herb of grace o’ Sundays.
O, you must wear your rue with a difference! There’s a daisy. I
would give you some violets, but they wither’d all when my father
died. They say he made a good end.
For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy.

Most surprising of all is Paul Albert Steck’s Ophelia from about 1894 for its unusual sub-aquatic setting. In common with the image of the drowned woman, there is a profound calm, a grace in the streamlines of the weeds, her dress and hair, and a dreadful finality in the last bubbles of air rising to the surface. To accomplish this, Steck transforms Shakespeare’s brook into a deep lake.

Harold Copping’s illustration of Ophelia drowning, Hamlet, Act IV, scene 7 from 1897 appears to have been influenced by Millais’ earlier painting.

Ophelia and her story came to be something of an obsession with John William Waterhouse, who featured her in at least three finished paintings, and who made reference in another.

Waterhouse’s Ophelia from 1889 shows her lying in the midst of wild flowers in a wood, with no water in sight.

A second painting completed in 1894 puts her beside water, although its surface is well covered by water lilies. Rather than climbing a willow tree, she here sits on an ancient pollard overhanging the water, apparently in a state of distraction.

Waterhouse later painted a couple of studies which are thought to show Ophelia indoors at an earlier moment in the play. These he developed not into a third painting of Ophelia, but his Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May (1908), which refers to the opening lines of Robert Herrick’s poem To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time:
“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.”

In his third and last painting of Ophelia in 1910, Waterhouse shows her looking distraught as she steadies herself on an old pollarded willow on the bank of a small river. The artist adds two other women at the upper right, who are crossing a wooden bridge in the distance.

In 1900, the French Naturalist artist Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret painted his version of Ophelia. As with these other paintings of her from the turn of the century, he captures her madness and grief very effectively, but with little in the way of narrative.

Odilon Redon’s pastel of Ophelia from 1900-5 shows her in a lily pond, presumably just after her suicide. The contrast between this and Waterhouse’s paintings could not be more stark. Redon shows her from an unusual point of view looking down from above, and with more than a touch of Japonisme, vibrant colour, and varied forms in the plants.

Ophelia is also referenced in some more unusual paintings, with which I will conclude.

The figures and scenes in Thomas Stothard’s unusual composite of Shakespearean Characters (1813) include (from the left) Twelfth Night (Olivia, Malvolio, Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek), The Merry Wives of Windsor (Falstaff and friends), As You Like It (Celia and Rosalind), The Tempest (Prospero and Miranda), King Lear (Lear and Cordelia), Hamlet (Ophelia and Hamlet), and Macbeth (Macbeth and the witches).

The Polish master Jacek Malczewski includes the figure of Ophelia in his Polish Hamlet – Portrait of Aleksander Wielopolski from 1903, an incisive political commentary on the career of Aleksander Ignacy Jan-Kanty Wielopolski (1803-1877), who was head of Poland’s civil administration under the Russian Empire, from 1862 to 1863. An aristocrat and conservative, he was sent to London to try to obtain the assistance of the British government during the 1831 November Uprising in Poland. He then wrote a controversial letter responding to the Galician massacres in 1845, and tried to stop the growing Polish national movement in 1863. However, in forcing the conscription of young Polish men into the Russian Army, he provoked the January Uprising of 1863, which forced him to flee into exile in Dresden.

I believe that Wielopolski is here shown in the role of Hamlet, with Ophelia at the left and Queen Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, at the right; the two women represent the Polish nation, which must be something of a first for the Danish Ophelia.

My last painting is another reference to Ophelia and her drowning in a most unusual painting by Enrique Simonet Lombardo, which was a great success at the Salon in Paris in 1895.

The Autopsy, also known as Anatomy of the Heart; She had a Heart! (1890), shows a young woman who has drowned herself. The painting asks whether this woman was an Ophelia, trapped in an impossible situation, or one of the many ‘fallen women’ who decided to end her life with one final fall.

Shakespeare’s Ophelia has certainly had a remarkable life in paintings.

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

Dante and Virgil arrive at the mountain-island of Purgatory by boat, just before sunrise on Easter Sunday in 1300. The peak’s structure is the exact inverse of hell, with a series of seven terraces through which the dead have to rise before they reach the ‘earthly paradise’ of the Garden of Eden at the top.

The whole book is summarised brilliantly in this ink drawing by Philip Firsov, in which you can trace each step and canto from arrival to Dante’s reunion with his beloved Beatrice at the top.

Dante and Virgil are greeted by the island’s guardian, Cato, who leaves them to make their way across the plain towards the start of their ascent. As they do so, a boat arrives with a hundred more souls being brought over from the mouth of the River Tiber, near Rome. Among them are Casella, one of Dante’s friends with a fine voice.

When they reach the foot of the mountain, they meet Manfred, who like others gathered there only sought repentance in the moments before his death. The pair then climb above a cliff, where they find others whose repentance was similarly delayed.

Above them are those who only made their peace with God in the moments before they died violent deaths. Among these is La Pia, Pia de’ Tolomei, a virtuous wife who was murdered to enable her husband to marry a widowed countess. After her, they meet the mediaeval poet Sordello, who explains to them that upward progress is only possible when it’s light. As the sun is now setting, he leads them to a lush valley in which there are many former rulers serving their penance.

When Dante finally falls asleep shortly before dawn, he has the first of his dreams, in which he is abducted by a huge eagle and taken to Olympus, just as Ganymede was in myth. When he awakes, he discovers that it was Saint Lucy or Lucia who carried him up to the entrance gate to Purgatory itself.

The gatekeeper angel there tells Dante to ascend three steps symbolising penance, then traces with a sword on his forehead seven letters P, which are subsequently removed when Dante ascends from each terrace in turn. Dante and Virgil are then admitted through the gate with the warning that should Dante look back he will be returned to outside the walls of Purgatory.

The first terrace cleanses souls of their pride, and its occupants are bent double under huge boulders for their penance.

Dante and Virgil then pass up the steps to the next terrace, as a guardian angel removes one of the Ps from Dante’s forehead to mark his progress. Here are souls cleansing themselves of envy, by having their eyelids sewn together with wire.

The pair progress up to the next terrace, where souls pay penance for wrath by means of visions, including that of the stoning of Saint Stephen and his last prayer for the forgiveness of those who martyred him. With the sun setting again, they rest there for the night. Dante experiences a second dream, in which a malformed woman is transformed into a siren, one who had tried to lure Odysseus.

When Dante awakes, he and Virgil move up to the next terrace where the dead rid themselves of avarice and prodigality by lying immobile, face down on the hard rock, and weeping. Among them is Pope Adrian V, who died just thirty-eight days after being elected. The whole mountain shudders as another soul completes their cleansing and moves up to its peak: this is the Latin poet Statius, who joins them.

The trio move together to the next terrace where souls are purged of their gluttony by being deprived of food and water until they adopt abstemious ways. Beside them are trees laden with fruit and well-watered. From there they ascend to the seventh terrace, where souls are cleansed of their lust by becoming chaste and passing through a wall of flames. As the light fades at the end of another day, Dante is told that he too must pass through the flames if he is to ascend any further. When he does, the three settle down for the night, during which Dante has his third dream.

In this dream, he meets Leah, who gathers flowers and weaves them into a garland. She became first wife of Jacob and represents the active way of life. Her younger sister Rachel, who became Jacob’s second wife, spends her time looking at her own reflection in a mirror, and in contrast represents the contemplative way of life.

The following morning, Dante, Virgil and Statius are ready to enter the Garden of Eden at the summit of the mountain. This is a lush forest with rich flora and fauna, where Dante soon meets Matelda, a beautiful young woman who is picking flowers.

Dante follows Matelda on the bank of the combined rivers of Lethe and Eunoë, until they come across a holy procession making its way along the opposite bank. Resembling a classical Roman triumph, in the midst of elders and animals is a richly-decorated chariot drawn by a Gryphon. Within it is Dante’s beloved Beatrice, who wears a white veil, green robe, and a dress the colour of flame. Dante is elated, but then realises that his companion Virgil had quietly departed.

Beatrice steps out of her chariot, and admonishes Dante for his recent straying from the path of righteousness. Dante first weeps, then faints. When he recovers consciousness, he is being immersed in the River Lethe by Matelda. Dante approaches Beatrice, who removes her veil, dazzling him with her beauty.

The procession returns to the forest, where the chariot is attached to the tree of knowledge. Dante falls asleep, waking to find himself in the midst of the seven cardinal virtues. An eagle then crashes through the tree of knowledge into the chariot. A giant appears and takes the chariot with a whore into the forest.

Beatrice then gives the prophecy that God will send someone to destroy the giant and the whore (who represent the movement of the Pope from Rome to Avignon in France). Matelda leads Dante and Statius into the River Eunoë, where Dante is cleansed ready to ascend to Paradise in the heavens. It’s now noon on the Wednesday after Easter.

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

The artists

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

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

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

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.

George Dunlop Leslie (1835–1921) was a British painter who trained at the Royal Academy Schools in London. He specialised in genre painting, and was also a successful illustrator. He became part of the Saint John’s Wood Clique, and was influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites although his own style remained light academic. The painting shown here was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1860, and was well-received by critics. It was bought by a wine merchant known for his collection of works by Rossetti, Alma-Tadema, Leighton, and Arthur Hughes.

Odilon Redon (1840–1916) was born in Bordeaux, and studied briefly under Jean-Léon Gérôme before becoming a sculptor. He then turned to drawing and print-making before painting in oils and pastels, becoming one of the great pastellists of the early twentieth century. He is known now as a Symbolist, and throughout his career was highly experimental, producing unusual images that can appear surrealist.

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

Marie Spartali Stillman (1844–1927) was an outstanding watercolour painter who was born in London, into an affluent family of Greek origin. With her cousins, she became known in Pre-Raphaelite circles as one of the ‘three Graces’, and modelled extensively for Rossetti and others. She was a pupil of Ford Madox Brown, and specialised in highly-worked watercolours, several of Italian literary themes, which are comparable to the better paintings of Rossetti. I have written a series of three articles about her life and work.

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.

By the early fifteenth century, painting in oils was already technically mature in the northern Renaissance. The first truly great masterpiece to use pure oil technique, and still one of the most important European works of art, is the huge altarpiece in Saint Bavo’s Cathedral in the Belgian city of Ghent, which was dedicated there on 6 May 1432.

The Ghent Altarpiece, as it’s now known, is also one of the most studied paintings, with many thousands of pages devoted to theories as to how it was made. With the benefit of more modern methods of analysis and investigation, some of the earlier accounts have been shown to be wrong. For instance, the proposal by Max Doerner that egg tempera was used in its painting has now been rejected.

The panels which make up the altarpiece are generally accepted as being painted by the van Eyck brothers in their workshop in the city of Bruges, to the north-west. Hubert, the older and more experienced, may have obtained the original commission, thought to be from Jodocus Vijd, who died in 1439, and his wife Isabella (or Lysbette) Borluut, who died in 1443. Vijd was a senior councillor of the city, an affluent merchant, and originally intended the altarpiece for the family chapel in the church of Saint John the Baptist, which was reconstructed as Saint Bavo Cathedral in 1559-69.

Work seems to have started, probably under the direction of Hubert van Eyck, in about 1424. As the staff of the workshop worked on preliminary designs and studies, Hubert was working out its dimensions, thus ordering the supports and frames from a specialist joiner. In turn, they sourced suitable Baltic oak which had been imported directly into Bruges, now recognised as a major centre for trade at the time.

The oak panels were cut to size, sized with glue derived from animals, and prepared with traditional chalk grounds, and were probably supplied ready for Hubert to design the principal scenes on them. This he did using either charcoal or graphite and an organic black ink. Unfortunately Hubert then died on 18 September 1426, when work on the altarpiece was in full swing, but far from complete.

By this time, the younger brother Jan had established himself as a master painter too. Paintings such as his Diptych of The Crucifixion and The Last Judgment (c 1420-25), of which this is the left panel, demonstrated that he too was capable of taking on a complex oil painting.

There seems to have been a short hiatus before Jan took over the Ghent Altarpiece project, perhaps for contractual adjustments, and it probably wasn’t until January 1430 that work on it resumed. By its dedication on 6 May 1432, Jan and his workshop had completed all twenty-four painted scenes which not only covered its interior, but also the exterior which was most prominent when the altarpiece was folded.

Examination of the panels shows that the techniques used by the two brothers, Hubert and Jan, appear indistinguishable, as might be expected from the same workshop. They painted in layers, varying their technique according to the nature of the passage. Dark and opaque passages are often made in a single layer, while more elaborate details such as fabrics and foliage are usually made from as many as seven layers. Different pigments and tones were used in layers much as they have been used in similar techniques ever since.

Even the grisaille passages on the outer aspects of the panels are carefully layered. Samples shown by Streeton, for example, may have dark modelling in carbon black or brown ochre over the chalk ground, then a thin layer of resin before a mixture of the same with yellow ochre and lead white, and further carbon black or brown ochre to deepen shadows.

Pigments identified in paint samples include cinnabar, ultramarine, malachite, azurite blue, and copper green including verdigris, which was a mainstay of the foliage passages in particular.

The van Eycks’ workshop bought in raw materials such as pigments, drying oil, diluent such as turpentine, and resins, and ground the oil and pigments to produce fresh supplies of the required paints on demand by its painters. As a centre of trade, Bruges would have had good supplies, with more sought-after pigments such as ultramarine being brought first overland then by sea to Venice, before being shipped round the Atlantic coast of Europe to reach the city of Bruges.

Since its dedication in 1432, the altarpiece has had a lot of history. It was first cleaned and ‘restored’ in 1550, which probably did more harm than good. In the summer of 1566 the cathedral was visited by rioting Calvinists, but the altarpiece was saved from destruction at their hands. This was the first time that it was dismantled, and it was dismantled again later that century, and again in 1794, when four central panels were taken for Napoleon’s new museum in the Louvre in Paris.

Although they were returned in 1816, by that time some of the outer panels had been pawned by the church, and those ended up being sold first to London and then to Berlin. Some of the panels which remained in Ghent were damaged by fire in 1822. During both the World Wars panels were removed to Germany, and in the latter years of the Second World War were stored in Austrian salt mines, which resulted in marked deterioration in their condition.

Extensive conservation programmes have now saved almost all of the remaining panels except one: the Just Judges had been stolen in 1934, and has never been recovered. The current version of that panel was painted by restorer (and sometime forger) Jef Van der Veken after the Second World War.

Reference

Streeton NLW (2013) Perspectives on the Painting Technique of Jan van Eyck, Beyond the Ghent Altarpiece, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 9049 8270 8.

By September 1476, the pioneering Italian oil painter Antonello da Messina (c 1430–1479) had returned from Venice to his home city of Messina on the island of Sicily. Information about his whereabouts after that is limited, although it’s presumed that he worked mainly from his studio there, but may have travelled back to Venice from time to time. Although Messina and Venice are almost as far apart as two cities can be in Italy, there was considerable trade between the two, and travelling by ship wouldn’t have been particularly difficult – but still, by modern standards, slow and hazardous.

Antonello continued to gain commissions for portraits, and painted one of his finest in this Portrait of a Man, popularly known as the Trivulzio Portrait, in 1476. Unfortunately its provenance is not known before it entered the collection of the Marquis Giorgio Teodoro Trivulzio in Milan in 1857. It may show a wealthy Milanese merchant, perhaps.

Around 1477, Antonello painted two striking pietas.

The earlier Dead Christ Supported by Three Angels (1476-77) appeared in Venice, suggesting that it was probably commissioned for a church in that city. At some stage the heads of Christ and the angels were abraded right down to the ground, and the panel was cut down too, but what remains today after extensive conservation work gives a hint as to its original quality. The church at the right (between the angel’s wings) has been identified as that of San Francesco in Messina, implying that this must have been painted in that city not Venice.

Its simpler sibling, Dead Christ Supported by an Angel, was probably painted slightly later, in 1477-78, and despite similarly lacking any provenance until the nineteenth century, was discovered in Spain. It’s also in far better condition, allowing us to see the brilliant realism of its figures and their facial expressions, complete with the angel’s deep anguish and tears. Christ’s face here is very closely related to the next of Antonello’s masterpieces.

Christ at the Column, painted in about 1478, is another of Antonello’s paintings which is one of the masterpieces of European oil painting. The head of Christ here is almost identical to that of the pieta above, to the point where the artist is thought to have used the same cartoon for both, but here showed the eyes open and looking up to the heavens.

Amazingly, this painting didn’t appear until 1863, when it was bought by the chief curator at the South Kensington Museum in London from a dealer in Granada in Spain. It was originally attributed to Andrea Solario, and wasn’t recognised as Antonello’s until the twentieth century. After display in the National Gallery in London, it was bought by the Louvre in 1992.

One of a series of similar works painted by Antonello and his studio, it is surely the finest and most expressive.

Antonello shows his supreme skill in manipulating oil paint, right down to the two small tears on Christ’s cheek, and the congealed droplet of blood just below the hairline.

Antonello’s last surviving secular work is thought to be this Portrait of a Young Man from 1478, which is very Venetian in its style. This has been associated with the the style of Giovanni Bellini, who was in many ways Antonello’s artistic heir.

Probably Antonello’s last (surviving) religious painting is this complex and sophisticated account of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, painted in 1478-79. Distinctively Venetian, with architectural references to that city, it is agreed to have been part of a triptych in the church of San Giuliano in Venice, where it stood on the altar of the confraternity of San Rocco, which was established in 1478.

In 1556, the church roof collapsed, causing considerable damage to this painting. It then passed through various collections on the assumption that it too had been painted by Bellini, and was transferred to canvas, before being recognised as one of Antonello’s when it was exhibited in Vienna in 1873.

The saint is statuesque in his suffering, tied to an isolated tree trunk in a meticulously-projected piazza. His posture, shoulders in particular, proved of great influence in subsequent Venetian paintings.

Antonello died suddenly in early 1479, at the height of his art, aged about 49. His studio continued to work successfully on mainly local commissions, but Antonello’s greatest legacy was in the north, in Venice in particular, where many of his finest paintings continued to be studied by generations of artists, among them no doubt Leonardo da Vinci when he was in Venice in 1499-1500.

If any individual artist brought oil painting to Italy in the late fifteenth century, it was surely Antonello da Messina.

References

Caterina Cardona, Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa (eds.) (2019) Antonello da Messina, Skira. ISBN 978 88 572 3098 2.
Thomas Skorupa (2015) Antonello da Messina and his Workshop, The Master’s Legacy, Logos Verlag. ISBN 978 3 8325 3929 0.

For many centuries if not a couple of millenia, narrative painting relied on depicting stories which the viewer already knew. Because painting a single synchronous image can only show one moment in time, most artists accepted that the viewer would have to set that into a narrative sequence in their mind. If they didn’t recognise the story, then the painting was lost on them.

There were some workarounds, such as ‘multiplex’ narrative, in which two or more moments are incorporated into the same painting. These had been popular during the Renaissance, but fell into disfavour and disuse.

Knowing the underlying story to a narrative painting is required for closure. Even the most skilled narrative painters like Nicolas Poussin were unable to achieve full closure in a painting alone. But without closure, the viewer is left wondering and unsatisfied.

In the nineteenth century, storytelling in literature changed. New genres such as detective and ‘mystery’ novels started to challenge the convention of narrative closure. Readers of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories in the first half of the century, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels towards the end of the century, developed a taste for something rather different.

In this series of articles, I’m going to look at examples of narrative paintings which lack closure and become the closest thing that visual art has to the literary riddle, leaving the viewer speculating rather than completing. In their heyday, between about 1895 and 1914, such unresolved narrative paintings became so popular that they frequently featured in the press – a peak in which they became known as problem pictures.

One of my goals is to demonstrate how these didn’t arise out of the blue, but evolved from 1850 onwards, perhaps even earlier. Neither were they a British phenomenon, and far from vanishing by the end of the First World War, they continue even today.

As far as I can discover, one of the earliest major paintings which lacks narrative closure is William Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience, which he painted during the period 1851-53 to contrast with The Light of the World (1851-53). As with most masterly narrative paintings, its story is assembled from a multitude of clues which are to be found in its image.

It shows a fashionable young man seated at a piano in a small if not cramped house in the leafy suburbs of London, in reality Saint John’s Wood. Half-risen from the man’s lap is a young woman who stares absently into the distance. They’re clearly a couple in an intimate relationship, but conspicuous by its absence is any wedding ring on the fourth finger of the woman’s left hand, which is at the focal point of the painting. This is, therefore, extra-marital.

Around them are signs that she is a kept mistress with time on her hands. Her companion, a cat, is under the table, where it has caught a bird with a broken wing, a symbol of her plight. At the right edge is a tapestry with which to while away the hours, and her wools below form a tangled web in which she is entwined. On top of the gaudy upright piano is a clock. By the hem of her dress is her lover’s discarded glove, symbolising her ultimate fate when he discards her into prostitution. The room itself is decorated as gaudily as the piano, in poor taste.

The couple have been singing together from Thomas Moore’s Oft in the Stilly Night when she appears to have undergone some revelatory experience, causing her to rise. For Hunt this is associated with a verse from the Old Testament book of Proverbs: “As he that taketh away a garment in cold weather, so is he that singeth songs to an heavy heart.” Ironically, his model was his girlfriend at the time, Annie Miller, an uneducated barmaid who was only sixteen herself.

Hunt leads us to imagine that this kept mistress has had a religious moment, seeing the route to her redemption as her conscience is awakened. The image brings hope without any resolution.

As Hunt moved away from the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, he wasn’t the only painter who was asking viewers to puzzle at his images.

The wonderfully-named Philip Hermogenes Calderon followed in 1855 with his “Lord, Thy Will Be Done”. This quotation is derived from the Gospel account of what was turned into the Lord’s Prayer, and has subsequently been used on many Christian religious occasions.

A young mother cradles her baby on her lap, looking up to the left. She is living in difficult circumstances, but isn’t destitute, and unlike Hunt’s young woman she wears a wedding ring on her left hand. The carpet is badly worn, and the coal scuttle empty, but there is a loaf of bread on the table: she has her ‘daily bread’, another reference to the Lord’s Prayer.

A portrait of a fine young man hangs above the mantlepiece, indicating that her husband and the baby’s father is currently absent on military service. Several issues of The Times newspaper are scattered on the floor at the right, as if the woman has been following news of a military campaign overseas. Under the table is a letter, most probably from her husband.

The clues all point to the woman putting her trust in the Lord, but despite that hope there is no resolution.

The following year, Calderon exhibited Broken Vows (1856) at the Royal Academy, where the painting proved a great success, and remains his best-known work. It’s also the earliest true ‘problem picture’ that I have come across.

A beautiful young woman, displaying her wedding ring, stands with her eyes closed, clutching a symbolic ‘heart’ area on her chest to indicate that her love life is in trouble. On the ground near the hem of her dress is a discarded necklace or ‘charm’ bracelet. The ivy-covered wall behind her would normally indicate lasting love, which was her aspiration.

A set of initials are carved on the fence, and on the other side a young man holds a small red flower in front of his forehead, which a young woman is trying to grasp with her right hand. The wooden fence appears tatty, and has holes in it indicating its more transient nature, and affording glimpses of the couple behind.

Whereas clues in the earlier two paintings lead to consistent if unresolved narrative, Calderon has here deliberately introduced considerable ambiguity. The eyes of the shorter person behind the fence are carefully occluded, leaving their gender open to speculation. Most viewers are likely to conclude that the taller figure behind the fence is the unfaithful husband of the woman in front, but that requires making assumptions which aren’t supported by visual clues. Whose vows are being broken? Calderon leaves us to speculate.

Paintings of this type were by no means confined to Britain. Here are two slightly later examples from Germany (or rather Prussia, as it was then).

Throughout Europe, people were migrating to North America in the hope that they could make their fortunes there. This inspired Berthold Woltze to paint A Letter from America in about 1860, in which an elderly mother and father are eagerly reading a letter, presumably from their migrant son, and brother to the young woman, who looks as if she might consider going too.

Woltze is one of several artists who developed the scenario of the received letter, as seen in this undated painting of The Letter, which provides fewer clues to a more substantial story. A young mother has just received, opened, and read a letter. She leans against the massive stone hearth, looking badly crestfallen, as her young daughter holds her arm and looks up at her mother’s face. The mother has been peeling potatoes, which are now scattered on the floor, and in her apron. Her shoes are badly worn, and she is clearly not well off.

The letter’s envelope lies on the floor, at the lower left corner, but gives no further clues. This is clearly bad news, and probably about her husband. Is he wounded, missing, dead, or has he left her?

Did you know that Victor Hugo (1802-1885), the great French writer of the nineteenth century and author of Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, was also an artist? He drew and painted not for public exhibition, but for his own pleasure, and for his family and friends. For an ‘amateur’ he was prolific, with over four thousand drawings and paintings recorded, and Eugène Delacroix himself expressed the view that he could have been a successful artist, even transforming painting perhaps. See what you think of this small selection.

Hugo grew up at a time of great turmoil, spanning Napoleon’s reign as Emperor and the Bourbon restoration of the monarchy. His father was a senior officer in Napoleon’s army, but his mother was a Catholic Royalist! As a result of his father’s military career, Hugo was well-travelled as a child, and saw the Alps and Italy, for instance.

He married a childhood friend, Adèle Foucher (1803-1868) in 1822, the year before the publication of his first novel. During the 1830s he established himself as a major poet, and in 1829 published his first major mature novel, The Last Day of a Condemned Man, which was to be highly influential on authors such as Albert Camus, Charles Dickens, and Dostoyevsky. Notre-Dame de Paris, known in English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, followed in 1831 and brought him popularity across Europe and the Americas.

Most of Hugo’s accessible paintings, like Old Castle in a Storm from 1837, are Gothic-Romantic paintings in ink and wash on paper.

By the late 1830s, Hugo was working on what was to become Les Misérables, although it wasn’t published until 1862. He visited the notorious prison, the Bagne of Toulon, which features in that in 1839, and started writing the book in 1845.

This is his Castle on a Hill from about 1847, again in Indian ink and wash on paper.

Hugo was appointed to the peerage in 1845, then started his political career when he was elected to the French National Assembly in 1848. When Napoleon III seized power in 1851, Hugo left France, first staying in Brussels, then moving to the British island of Jersey, and finally settling on the neighbouring island of Guernsey, where he lived between 1855-1870. He wrote about the island in his novel Toilers of the Sea, which was published in 1866, while he was still in self-imposed exile.

Hugo fought a lifelong battle against the death penalty, which he first committed to print in his early novel The Last Day of a Condemned Man (1829). The Hanged Man “Ecce” from 1854 shows the remains of a hanged criminal swinging from a gibbet.

The Gnome of the Night from 1856 is one of several works which show grotesque figures from folk tales and legend.

John Brown, from 1861, is an engraving after Hugo’s original painting showing the body of the famous American abolitionist, who was tried for treason and murder and was hanged in 1859. Hugo had tried to obtain a pardon for him, while the writer was in exile on Guernsey, and this engraving appeared subsequently on a pamphlet reprinting two of Hugo’s open letters about John Brown.

Hugo’s painting of Château de Walzin was made in 1863. Walzin Castle is in Belgium, where it overlooks the River Lesse.

Octopus from 1866 is a painting which just appears to be fun.

The Steamship ‘Durande’, dated 4 November 1866, was made to accompany his novel Toilers of the Sea, and offered to a critic to thank him for writing a favourable review. It is reminiscent of some of Turner’s marine paintings, perhaps.

My Destiny appears a curious coincidence. Hugo painted this in brown ink, wash and white gouache in 1867, at about the same time that Gustave Courbet painted the same theme of a breaking wave on the shore. Both men had grounds for concern as Napoleon III’s rule came to an end: Hugo was already in exile, and Courbet was soon to leave France.

In some of his paintings, Hugo was extremely experimental in his methods. Evacuation of an Island from 1870 is most unusual, and perhaps more typical of the avant garde in the twentieth century. He is reputed to have practised ‘automatic drawing’ without looking at the paper, and during séances.

Hugo painted this mediaeval tower of Schengen Castle on 13 September 1871.

After the fall of the Paris Commune in 1871, when he failed to be re-elected to the National Assembly, Hugo again left France, returning to the island of Guernsey between 1872-73.

I also have two undated works of Hugo’s.

The House I Lived in at the Corner of the Bridge was published in the artist’s Complete Works in 1913.

This untitled work, made during his many travels, was published in the same collection.

Victor Hugo died on 22 May 1885, at the grand age of 83. He was, perhaps inevitably, given a state funeral, and was buried in a crypt in the Panthéon in Paris.

References

Misha Bittleston’s page
Wikipedia.

Through the summer in the temperate and higher latitudes, butterflies are commonplace in the country, in some places forming swirling clouds of paper-thin wings. Although a great many paintings feature different types of bird, butterflies seem to have been painted less frequently. In this article and tomorrow’s, I look at a selection of paintings which feature butterflies in some form, the bigger the better.

Pisanello’s egg tempera Portrait of a Princess, showing Ginevra d’Este in 1435-49, surrounds her with flowers and four butterflies. The two on the left are Red Admirals, and one of the right is a Swallowtail, two of the larger and more spectacular species which are abundant in southern Europe.

Another early painting of butterflies is a bit more unusual. Dosso Dossi shows the senior of the Classical gods painting butterflies in a pseudo-Christian act of creation in his Jupiter, Mercury and Virtue from 1524. The underlying myth stems from a quarrel between Virtue and Fortune. Virtue has here brought her case to Jupiter, but he is busy painting the wings of butterflies, so Mercury tells her to wait before pleading with him.

Jupiter’s painting is so real, like that of Apelles, that as he completes each butterfly it takes life and flies off. Behind him is a rainbow providing the brilliant colours for his painting. It is thus an allegory of painting too.

The first ‘vanitas’ paintings started to appear in the early sixteenth century. These commonly include butterflies because of their association with the ephemeral. In Jan Sanders van Hemessen’s Vanitas from about 1535-40, an androgynous angel with butterfly wings cradles a human skull with fragmentary Latin inscriptions. Those wings were modelled after the Swallowtail butterfly.

A few years later, an anonymous follower of Hieronymus Bosch painted Christ among the Doctors (c 1545), with a large butterfly settled in the foreground. This might have been a reference to ‘vanitas’ paintings, or the artist’s signature device.

Cornelis van Haarlem’s The Fall of the Titans from 1588-90 is another strange painting in which to find butterflies. This shows the classical myth in which the gods have defeated the Titans, who preceded them. As a result the Titans fell from the heavens and were imprisoned in Tartarus, or Hell, as shown here. It’s claimed that flying insects, even butterflies, were associated with the fire of the underworld, although the two butterflies and one dragonfly appear quite incongruous, at least to the modern eye.

For their familiarity, bright colours, and natural beauty, butterflies were popular in the Dutch Golden Age, particularly in smaller paintings such as still lifes destined for the collector’s cabinet. Nicolaes de Vree’s undated A Forest Floor Still Life with Flowering Plants and Butterflies from the latter half of the seventeenth century is a fine example of a painting which goes beyond the normal still life and depicts a more natural scene.

Jan van Os’s Flowers from about 1780 is a much later example, featuring a Peacock, Swallowtail and Red Admiral. Each would have been painted from a dead specimen in a collection; collections became popular as the Age of Enlightenment encouraged the better-educated to take an active interest in developing sciences such as entomology.

Painted in 1804, Johann Amandus Winck’s magnificent still life of Flowers and Fruits on a Stone Ledge with Butterflies and Mice makes good use of two butterflies, a housefly (perhaps in a ‘vanitas’ reference), a mouse and a snail.

By the early nineteenth century, Europeans were travelling overseas to look for exciting new species of butterfly. Carl Spitzweg’s The Butterfly Catcher from about 1840 shows every hunter’s dream: discovering the largest, most spectacular butterflies ever seen. Compare the size of the hunter’s net with the unrealistically large butterflies in the foreground.

For William Holman Hunt, in his Our English Coasts, 1852, native species of butterfly were a symbol of the British countryside. Composed from several passages from different motifs, it was assembled in a similar way to the Pre-Raphaelites’ figurative works. Hunt went to great lengths to work from nature: the Peacock butterflies at the lower left were one of the last details to be completed, and were painted from a single live specimen which the artist examined indoors after the rest of the painting was all but complete.

Shortly afterwards, Richard Dadd, painting during his confinement in London’s Bethlem hospital for the mentally ill, extended the still life tradition in one of his few oil paintings, of Contradiction: Oberon and Titania (1854-8). This develops his early faerie paintings into a new and unique style, and was painted for the hospital’s first resident Physician-Superintendent, William Charles Hood.

Its theme takes Dadd back to Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, and there’s hardly a square millimetre of canvas into which Dadd hasn’t squeezed yet another curious detail. Like other great imaginative painters (Bosch, for instance) before, Dadd’s dense details dart about in scale: there are tiny figures next to huge leaves and butterflies, and towards the top of the tondo these distortions of scale generate an exaggerated feeling of perspective.

The contradiction of the title refers to the battle of wills between Oberon and Titania, and the conflict here centres on an Indian boy. Titania (inevitably somewhat masculine) stands just to the right of centre, the boy bearing her skirts. To the left of centre is the bearded figure of Oberon, an elfin lad holding him back by his right arm.

At the right are Helena and Demetrius, despite Helena’s efforts, their love remaining unrequited.

Beyond those central figures is an overwhelming mass of detail, miniature scenes and stories involving hundreds of extras, flowers (including the ‘Morning Glory’ convulvulus at the feet of Titania), leaves, an ornate Swallowtail butterfly, a floating jade egg, fungi, and far more. Descriptors like hallucinatory and surreal spring to mind, and have been used in accounts of this remarkable painting.

Tomorrow I’ll look at a second golden age of butterflies in paintings, in the late nineteenth century.

In the first of these two articles looking at paintings of butterflies, I showed some examples spanning around 1435 to almost 1860. This article concludes by looking at paintings of the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth.

One of the few paintings that I have seen which captures my experience of dense clouds of butterflies is Gustave Doré’s Summer from about 1860-70. Set in what appears to be an upland or alpine meadow, its butterflies look like large flowers which have taken to the air.

In Charles Edward Perugini’s undated Ephemeral Joy, a young woman who has been picking flowers in a garden pauses with a Brimstone butterfly on the back of her hand. This species was seen as quintessentially British, although widespread throughout Europe, Asia and North Africa.

Winslow Homer’s Butterflies from 1878 shows a young woman hunting Eastern Tiger Swallowtail butterflies with her net. This is a species of swallowtail which is widespread in the eastern USA, and related to the Old World Swallowtail found across Europe. She is carrying a box in which to place her specimens, in which they’d be killed, ready to mount in a glass cabinet. Collecting butterflies was considered sufficiently ladylike, because of their beauty. Less aesthetically satisfying insects such as beetles were left to male entomologists.

Sophie Anderson entered the faerie painting sub-genre with Take the Fair Face of Woman, and Gently Suspending, With Butterflies, Flowers, and Jewels Attending, Thus Your Fairy is Made of Most Beautiful Things from 1880. The title is taken from some verse allegedly by Charles Ede, but the only literary person of that name who I can identify was born long after this work was painted. Not only are there butterflies adorning this fairy’s hair, but she also appears to have butterfly wings.

Edward Poynter’s painting of Psyche in the Temple of Love from 1882 tells a story from classical mythology which has been painted with butterflies on several occasions. Cupid has fallen in love with Psyche, and takes her to the Temple of Love, where he visits her each night, but never in daylight. Here Psyche is whiling away the daytime, holding a sprig out to attract her attribute, a butterfly, here the rather common and prosaic Small White. However, Psyche’s enemy Venus is not far away, as shown by the doves in the temple behind her.

Although numerous paintings of butterflies had been made from dead specimens, some of the earliest to attempt to show them in realistic environments appeared in the late nineteenth century, thanks to new wildlife artists like the masterly Bruno Liljefors. Redstarts and Butterflies, from 1885, shows what the artist called ‘five studies in one frame’. Here he has combined five separate studies from nature into a single image, including this very dark Small Tortoiseshell butterfly, which is about to become a meal for one of the redstarts, which are insectivorous.

Late in his career, Vincent van Gogh painted the largest European species of moth, the Giant Peacock Moth, in 1889. Its wingspan can reach 20 cm (8 inches).

The following year, van Gogh painted Butterflies and Poppies (1890), which probably shows two Clouded Yellow butterflies, rather than Brimstones. This appears to have been painted on unprimed canvas.

The Japanese Western-style artist Fujishima Takeji 藤島武二 painted Butterflies in 1904, just before he travelled to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts. Like Doré’s painting above, this shows a dense cloud of butterflies gathered around flowers.

In the twentieth century, butterflies provided an opportunity for artistic invention to take flight. Odilon Redon’sButterflies, from around 1910, shows a highly imaginative collection of butterflies, flowers, plants, and rocks, which are often outlined to emphasise their form.

Finally, in Anastasiya Markovich’s recent Effect of Butterfly, its wings are breaking up into shreds of unreality.

Just as the butterfly’s life cycle continues from egg through caterpillar to pupa and then to the winged adult, art started in the unreality of mythology and vanitas, and has now returned in symbolism and the surreal.

The least-known of the three books which make up Dante’s Divine Comedy, to his contemporary readers Paradise was its most important. Having given gruesome detail of what would await them in Inferno, and the penance they would have to pay in Purgatory, Paradise must be everyone’s ultimate aspiration. Here, Dante invokes classical cosmology rather than the simple physical structures of the two previous realms, which for many readers is more nebulous.

This is reflected well in two contrasting pictorial summaries of Paradise: the fresco above, painted by the German Romantic painter Philipp Veit (1793–1877) in the ceiling of the Casa Massimo in Rome between 1817-27, and below the modern account in Indian ink by Philip Firsov, who was born in 1985.

Dante sets off with Beatrice from the Garden of Eden at the summit of Purgatory soon after noon on the Spring Equinox, to ascend to the first of the nine concentric shells which form the Celestial Paradise.

They first pass through the layer of fire above the earth’s atmosphere, and then enter the shell in which lies the moon. As they rise, Beatrice’s beauty intensifies, and she explains to Dante how the dark spots on the moon come about.

At the time, popular belief was that God had covered Cain with thorns after he murdered his brother Abel, then exiled him to the moon, where those thorns formed the dark patches. Beatrice tells Dante that understanding the heavens needs more than just physical observation and reason, and requires deeper spiritual insight. Her metaphysical explanation is that the moon’s luminosity varies over its surface in the same way that the brightness of the stars vary.

In the shell containing the moon are the spirits of those who broke their (religious) vows. This doesn’t mean that there are different levels in Celestial Paradise, but that its souls are presented to Dante according to features and virtues of their earthly lives.

Among these spirits is that of Piccarda Donati, a friend of Dante’s (and related to his wife) whose sister Forese remains in Purgatory for her gluttony, while her brother Corso is condemned to eternal Hell. Piccarda was a member of the order of ‘Poor Clares’, founded by a follower of Saint Francis of Assisi. Her brother Corso forced her to leave her convent near Florence in order to marry one of his colleagues in crime. Piccarda died shortly after that marriage.

In turn, Piccarda introduces Dante to the Empress Constance (1152-1198), who was the wife of King Henry VI, mother of Frederick II, and grandmother of Manfred, whom Dante met in ante-Purgatory. Constance had also been forced to leave a convent for a political marriage.

Beatrice explains that Piccarda and Constance had been forced to break their vows, but their absolute will remained intact, in that they stayed true to their heart.

The artists

Giovanni di Paolo di Grazia (c 1403-1482) was a prolific Italian painter who worked primarily in Siena, and was one of the more important members of the early Sienese School. He started work painting miniatures, later making some important altarpieces as well. He created sixty-one images of Paradise for the “Yates Thompson” Dante commissioned by King Alfonso V, and now in the British Museum in London.

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

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

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.

Raffaello Sorbi (1844–1931) was an Italian narrative painter who was born and trained in Florence. He painted at least two works based on Dante’s Divine Comedy early in his career, both telling stories of the Donati family. From 1870, his paintings were mostly sold by the Goupil Gallery, and were popular in Britain. He retained an academic style throughout his career, and became professor in Florence and Urbino.

William Cave Thomas (1820–1896) was a British painter who was born in London. He started his training at the Royal Academy Schools, then spent two years in Munich. He painted narrative and genre works during the mid-nineteenth century. Among his works is a pair of watercolours, one showing Dante on Earth, the other Dante in Heaven, seen above.

Lorenzo Toncini (1802–1884) was an Italian narrative and portrait painter who was born in Piacenza. He started his training there before moving to Rome. He returned to Piacenza by 1840, where he remained painting for the rest of his career.

Philipp Veit (1793–1877) was a German Romantic painter who was partly responsible for the revival of fresco techniques in the early nineteenth century. He was a pupil of Caspar David Friedrich in Dresden, and later trained in Vienna. A prodigious draftsman, he preferred watercolours to oils. He went to Rome where he joined the Nazarenes, later returning to Frankfurt, where he became professor.

John Riley Wilmer (1883-1941) was a British painter mainly in watercolours who was born in the Cornish port of Falmouth, and remained there much of his life. He seems to have painted mainly figurative and religious works, and has been described as being Impressionist and ‘Modern’, but little is now known about him. His painting shown here is also something of a puzzle, as to how it might relate to the story of Piccarda.

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.

Following popular demand, I have added a system which automatically checks for updates when you open many of my free apps. This apparently works satisfactorily, judging by the lack of complaints about it, but isn’t efficient for some of my apps, like Alifix 1.0 which was officially released earlier this morning.

When this mechanism runs, the app connects to my GitHub server and downloads a list of the current versions of my apps which use this system. It then finds its own name in that list, and compares versions, to see whether a newer one is available. For a more popular app which is likely to be updated every few weeks, this makes good sense, and should help you keep up with those changing versions.

Some of the utilities offered here change only infrequently. The previous version of Alifix, for example, was released back in January. If it had had an auto-update mechanism and you’d been using it twice a week on average, then it would have checked for updates about 60 times before finally downloading today’s new version. That’s not efficient.

One solution is to reduce the frequency of checks for updates, but that just extends the wait you’re likely to experience before being notified of them.

Today I offer what I hope will be better: an Updates category here, which will be low-volume and only contain articles announcing new updates to macOS, including security updates, etc., and updates to my apps. You can then add that category to your news reader, and get immediate notice there of the availability of those updates.

To subscribe (free) to this news feed, point your news reader at
https://eclecticlight.co/category/updates/feed/
or for Atom newsreaders
https://eclecticlight.co/category/updates/feed/atom/
noting that these are by HTTP not HTTPS.

If you’d rather not use a news reader, then you can access the same information by pointing your browser at
https://eclecticlight.co/category/updates/
where all the updates will be listed in chronological order.

If you want to manually check the Updates category, it isn’t listed in the top menus, which are already overcrowded, but down at the bottom of each page with all the other pages and categories.

This should now ensure that you can not only keep copies of my utilities up to date, but you’ll also get early information there about updates to macOS. I hope this addresses everyone’s need. This doesn’t replace the auto-update checks in many of my apps, but provides what I hope will be a better solution for others.

At first sight, twentieth century oil paintings like those of Pierre Bonnard seem lightweight and technically simple compared with the carefully-crafted paintings of the preceding centuries. They look like sketched snapshots, particularly those depicting everyday domestic scenes.

It’s true that most of the technical issues were taken care of by others, notably the art materials industry, which had flourished towards the end of the nineteenth century. Bonnard didn’t have a workshop staffed by artisans preparing his canvases and paint. These were instead bought ready to use, the canvases stretched and primed, his oil paints with modern high-chroma synthetic pigments in convenient tubes. These enabled artists like Bonnard to focus on their art, rather than expend time and effort on the craft of creating their own materials.

When painting landscapes en plein air, the process could be relatively brief and spontaneous, but finished figurative works were often the result of considerable preparation, which is often lost to the modern viewer because the artist’s sketchbooks and other preparatory materials have been dispersed and effectively lost from view. In two cases, Bonnard’s Le Café (Coffee) from 1915, and his Le Bol de lait (The Bowl of Milk) from 1919, the Tate Gallery has been able to reunite several of the artist’s sketches with the resulting finished paintings. Those simple domestic scenes turn out to have been carefully planned and composed.

In 1915, during the early part of the First World War, Bonnard was staying with his partner Marthe in a house which they rented in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, on the western outskirts of the city of Paris. He sketched on sheets which have been torn from a spiral-bound pad roughly 96 by 137 cm in size using graphite, almost certainly pencils.

The simplest of these three sketches shows Marthe at a table with her dog Ubu sat on her right. She’s looking down, although at this stage it’s not apparent what is drawing her attention.

Bonnard seems to have progressed to a more extensive sketch in which Marthe is drinking coffee, with her dog now along the same side of the table, on which the coffee pot stands. There’s a window behind them, through which the exterior is seen.

Here, in the third sketch, Marthe and Ubu are brought closer together, and she is turned towards her dog as she raises the coffee cup higher. The detail of items on the table has increased, and its cloth has a chequered pattern, as Bonnard liked. He has also re-oriented his canvas from portrait to landscape mode, and extended the tabletop details closer into the foreground, to occupy more than half the area.

Bonnard chose a canvas slightly smaller, at 73 by 106.4 cm, than his sketchpad. He applied paint quite loosely and vigorously onto the ground. He almost certainly used oil paint bought in tubes from one of the hundreds of retailers in Paris. Among the pigments listed by the Tate Gallery for this work are vermilion, cadmium and strontium yellows, cadmium orange, cobalt blue, Prussian blue and natural ultramarine. Only the first and last of those are ‘traditional’, the others all being products of industrial chemistry.

Compared with the last of the sketches, Bonnard has made small adjustments in the figures and items on the tabletop, and most significantly added part of a second woman’s figure at the right side. He has also extended the canvas downwards towards the viewer, pushing the figures up towards the upper edge. Some of these changes were made during painting.

Although worked quite quickly, this doesn’t appear to have been completed in a single session. The red and white pattern on the tablecloth almost certainly required some drying time between the application of the white and overpainting in red. However, the colours have bled into one another in parts, so the white wasn’t fully dry when the red was applied over it. Shadows of other objects on the table appear to have been among the last details to have been added.

The Tate Gallery has an even more detailed record of Bonnard’s Le Bol de lait (The Bowl of Milk) from 1919. This was painted when Bonnard spent the winter in Antibes on the Mediterranean coast of France, just to the east of where the artist was to spend much of the later part of his life.

With nine preparatory sketches in the Tate’s collection, it’s harder to work out their order of production. All came from the same pad, which seems to have been ‘perfect’ bound rather than spirally, and approximately 181 by 123 cm, its outermost corners rounded instead of square. Bonnard again used graphite, probably in pencils.

In this study of the room in which the painting was to be set, Bonnard has identified its landmarks and geometry. Set on the table is a bunch of flowers in a vase, and a tray with a jug and bowl. At the right there’s the start of a figure, perhaps, and he has roughed in the details of the balcony beyond the French windows.

Bonnard had earlier undergone something of a crisis over relative emphasis on colour or form, an age-old controversy in visual art. He made a separate study to establish the exact form of the balustrade on the balcony.

This sketch looks in detail at the layout and forms of the tray on the table and its contents, a jug and large breakfast cup on a saucer.

He remained unsure how best to place the figure, and in this sketch has her bending over the table. It’s not known who Bonnard’s model was on this occasion: she certainly wasn’t Marthe, and others have suggested that she might have been Lucienne Dupuy de Frenelle, a doctor’s wife with whom he had an affair, or Renée Monchaty, another of Bonnard’s lovers who almost destroyed his relationship with Marthe and shot herself a month after Bonnard and Marthe married in 1925.

Another alternative which he explored was using two figures, a woman and a girl.

Here he pursued a different arrangement of the pair.

But when he roughed them into the whole room, he clearly wasn’t happy with the result.

Bonnard then concentrated on the single figure of the woman holding the bowl out, which proved his preferred option.

In this late compositional study he arrived at his final motif consisting of a woman holding a bowl of milk at the right edge, the large window with its balcony outside, and a table positioned by the window.

The result is The Bowl of Milk (1919), with its more muted colours reminiscent of his earlier Nabi period. The woman has just poured milk into a small bowl, which she is now about to put down for her cat. Beside her is a table laid out with four places for breakfast, with a large jug of milk on a tray. To the left is another table, on which is a vase of flowers and assorted small objects. The black cat is pacing the floor at the woman’s feet, as cats do, and was only added in the final painting.

I am particularly grateful to the Tate Gallery for purchasing Bonnard’s preparatory drawings, and for making their images available. Without them it’s so easy to think that more modern painting is simple and superficial.

In the first article in this series, I looked at some of the first major narrative paintings to appear in the middle of the nineteenth century which depicted unresolved stories. Although most of those shown were painted in Britain, where at the end of the century they became highly fashionable and known as ‘problem pictures’, two were painted by the German artist Berthold Woltze (1829-1896).

In this article, I look at a selection of later paintings with unresolved narrative, including examples from France and North America, which demonstrate that this change in narrative painting wasn’t confined to Britain by any means.

The first two of these were painted in France by Edgar Degas, who made several narrative works during his early career, such as his Young Spartans Exercising from about 1860.

Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin tales became very popular across Europe when they were published from 1841 onwards, and in 1868 Émile Gaboriau’s serialised detective story Monsieur Lecoq shot to fame throughout France. That same year, Degas started work on his own detective story.

Degas’ Interior (1868-9), also known as The Interior and even The Rape, appears strongly narrative, but has so far defied all attempts to produce a reading consistent with its details.

A man and a woman are in a bedroom together. The woman is at the left, partly kneeling down, and facing away from the man. Her hair is cropped short, she wears a white shift which has dropped off her left shoulder, and her face is obscured in the dark. Her left forearm rests on a small stool or chair, over which is draped a dark brown cloak or coat. Her right hand rests against a wooden cabinet which is in front of her. She appears to be staring down towards the floor, off the left of the canvas.

The man stands at the far right, leaning against the inside of the bedroom door, and staring at the woman. He is quite well-dressed, with a black jacket, black waistcoat and mid-brown trousers. Both his hands are thrust into his trouser pockets, and his feet are apart. His top hat rests, upside down, on top of the cabinet on the other side of the room, just in front of the woman.

Between them, just behind the woman, is a small occasional table, on which there is a table-lamp and a small open suitcase. Some of the contents of the suitcase rest over its edge. In front of it, on the table top, is a pair of scissors and other items which appear to be from a clothes repair kit (‘housewife’).

The single bed is made up, and its cover is not ruffled, but it may possibly bear a bloodstain at the foot. At the foot of the bed, on its large arched frame, another item apparently of the woman’s clothing (perhaps a coat) hangs loosely. On that end of the bed is a woman’s dark hat with ribbons, and her corset has been dropped on the floor by the foot of the bed.

She clearly arrived in the room before the man, removed her outer clothing, and at some stage started to undress further, halting when she was down to her shift or chemise. Alternatively, she may have undressed completely, and at this moment have dressed again as far as her chemise.

The suitcase appears to belong to the woman; when she arrived, she placed it on the table, and opened it. This indicates that she was expecting to stay in the bedroom overnight, and brought a change of clothing and travelling kit including the housewife.

The man is obstructing the door, the only visible exit to the room. Although he looks as if he may have come no further across the room, his top hat says otherwise.

The man and woman appear to be a couple, who have met in that room to engage in a clandestine sexual relationship. However, the bed is a single not a double, and shows no sign of having been used, nor has the bedding been disturbed in any way. There is a mature fire burning in the fireplace behind the woman and the lamp.

There are four paintings or similar objects hanging on the walls, of which only one appears to be decipherable. This is the large rounded rectangular one above the fireplace. Although that appears to be a mirror, the image shown in it doesn’t resemble a reflection of the room’s interior, but looks to be a painting. This might show a bright figure, resembling the woman, in front of some shrubs, behind which are classical buildings. This doesn’t resemble any of Degas’ paintings, nor any well-known work.

Degas provides a lot of small details, just as in a detective story, none of which points clearly to a resolution. You can discuss and debate its narrative endlessly – as has been done for the last 150 years.

Degas’ second painting, Sulking from about 1869, is a far simpler image, but no less enigmatic. This time his story is set in an office, in which a man is sat at a desk, and a young woman stands leaning over the back of a chair, looking directly at the viewer.

The desk in front of the man is strewn with piles of papers, which he is studying intently, his arms folded with elbows resting on the desk. Within the papers is a full cup of coffee. Although his face is largely obscured, he appears sullen and sulking.

The wall behind the figures is wood-panelled, and there is a large painting of an unidentified steeplechase horse race in full view. The woman is well-dressed, as is the man, and her wrists are crossed on the back of the chair on which she is leaning. In her right hand is a light object, which may be a rolled up paper tied with a fine ribbon. Her facial expression is neutral, with the hint of a slight smile, perhaps.

One reading could be that the man is sulking over excessive bills and expenditure; it is feasible that the woman is his wife, and that her dressmaking and millinery accounts are part of the cause of his unhappiness. Once again, though, Degas leads us into a story and leaves us looking at clues which don’t resolve except in our own imaginations.

Meanwhile in Britain, Philip Hermogenes Calderon continued his series of unresolved narratives with Letter from Daddy in 1873. Here he gives us fewer clues, and a theme which he previously considered in his “Lord, Thy Will Be Done” (1855), which I showed in the previous article.

A young mother, who appears to have just been breast-feeding, leans low over her baby, both of them resting on a bed. She wears a full and long gown. Clutched in her left hand are the pages of a letter, which the title tells us has come from the baby’s father. Behind, on a shelf, is a model of a square-rigged ship, implying that the absent father is a sailor (probably an officer) on board. Although centred at a very different social level from “Lord, Thy Will Be Done”, the message appears similar.

At about the same time in New York, the American genre artist Eastman Johnson painted another narrative work which only makes any sense when you know its title of Not at Home (c 1873), which apparently shows the interior of the artist’s home. Without those three words of the title, all you see is a well-lit and empty parlour, and the presumed mistress of the house starting up the stairs, in relative gloom in the foreground. At the right is a child’s push-chair, parked up and empty.

Those three words, of course, are the classic excuse offered in someone’s absence – “I am sorry, but the Mistress is not at home” – even when they are very much at home, but simply don’t want to see the visitor(s). So the title could imply that the woman is ascending the stairs in order not to see visitor(s). Or, if we know that this is the artist’s home, could it be that it’s Johnson himself who is not at home?

Until now, paintings with unresolved narratives had been relatively unusual. Careful searching for examples has returned just nine in a little more than twenty years. That was to change in 1874, when they became more frequent, as I’ll show in the next article in this series.

There were two ‘pure’ landscape painters among the core of the French Impressionists: Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) who seldom painted in other genres, and Alfred Sisley (1839–1899) who almost never strayed beyond landscapes, and remained an Impressionist to the end. In this new series of articles, I’m going to step through their careers and their paintings, looking at similarities and differences. For a start, neither really qualified as a French Impressionist: Pissarro was Danish, and Sisley British, although for much of their careers they lived and painted in France.

Both suffered as a result of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870-71, losing much of their previous work. In Pissarro’s case this amounted to well over a thousand paintings. In today’s article about Pissarro and tomorrow’s on Sisley, I therefore cover the period up to that war, for which we now have fewer works that we should.

(Jacob Abraham) Camille Pissarro was born and brought up on the Caribbean island of Saint Thomas, in a mixed Portuguese Jewish and Creole family, of Danish nationality. When at boarding school in France he showed himself to be an able artist, and at the age of 21 he travelled to Venezuela with friend and painter Fritz Melbye, where he worked as an artist for two years.

Pissarro painted this Landscape with Women Under a Large Tree in 1854-55, either on the island of Saint Thomas or when he was in Venezuela. It appears to have been painted in front of the motif, in sketchy style, but with careful anatomical construction of the tree. The four figures are quite gestural too. The artist sold this work to Anton Melbye, Fritz’s brother, when he was working for him later in Paris.

Two Figures Chatting by a Roadside from 1856 is another landscape from the same period, this time in more finished style.

Soon after completing that, Pissarro moved to Paris, where he worked as assistant to Anton Melbye, then a successful artist in the city.

In Paris, Pissarro tried classes at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Suisse, but settled with instruction from the great plein air landscape artist and grandfather to the Impressionists, Camille Corot.

Pissarro quickly became an almost compulsive painter of trees, and in Forest Path from about 1859 in good Barbizon style. That year he had his first painting accepted for the Salon, and at the Académie Suisse met Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Armand Guillaumin, and others who were to form the Impressionist movement. He started to travel further afield, specialising in landscapes, and painting extensively en plein air.

In 1860, Pissarro’s parents, who were then living in Paris, took on a servant girl by the name of Julie Vellay. To their dismay, their son Camille soon fell in love with her, and his parents dismissed Julie from service. The couple lived together, and in 1863 their first son was born, although they didn’t marry until they had two more children, in 1871.

This rustic view of Donkeys at Pasture painted in 1862 didn’t sell until 1873, though.

Landscape at La Varenne-Saint-Hilaire was painted en plein air in 1863, when Pissarro was among those whose work was included in the Salon des Refusés.

The Marne at Chennevières (1864) is perhaps Pissarro’s finest landscape from this period, and confirms his art follows the tradition from Valenciennes, through Daubigny and Corot.

For several periods from 1864 onwards, the Pissarros shared the large house of friends in the tiny hamlet of Montfoucault, on the border of Normandy and Brittany. Then between 1866-68, they lived for periods in the small town of Pontoise, to the north-west of Paris, on the River Oise, a tributary of the Seine. One distinct advantage of being there was that his friend and champion Charles Daubigny lived not far away, in Auvers-sur-Oise.

Côte de Jalais, Pontoise (1867) shows the hill of Les Jalais at l’Hermitage, where Pissarro lived, viewed from the Chemin des Mathurins in Pontoise. This was exhibited at the Salon in 1868, where it was well received by Zola, Castagnary and several other critics, and went on to show in Le Havre later.

In 1869, the Pissarro family moved to Louveciennes, again to the north-west of Paris, where they intended to settle down in a large rented house. This town is located between the River Seine and the Forest of Marly, an ideal location for a landscape artist. It was here that Pissarro first got to know Alfred Sisley well, when they painted in company, and alongside Monet and Renoir – all four of them starving, and fighting off despair from their lack of sales.

As many artists before him, Pissarro used trees to frame his motifs in repoussouir, but during the late 1860s they started to invade more central areas of the canvas. In about 1869, in his Winter Landscape at Louveciennes for the first time tree trunks and branches spread across his canvas, breaking up the motif behind into small sections.

That same year his winter paintings concentrated on road scenes, with attendant trees, around Louveciennes, a theme which continued for many years, spanning the seasons. The following year his rushed and more sketchy trees resolved into finer and more subtle representations, as he started to use brighter colours too.

Pissarro’s Houses at Bougival, Autumn is clearly dated 1870, although by that time he had moved from Louveciennes. It is also thought to have been exhibited at the Salon that year, suggesting it may have been started in late 1869.

Following the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, in September 1870 the Pissarros’ house in Louveciennes was requisitioned by the invading Prussians. The family fled first to their friends in Montfoucault, then in December travelled on to England, where they settled in Norwood, at thattime an outer suburb of London. When in England, Pissarro met Paul Durand-Ruel, who became his dealer, and Monet (again), who had also fled to London. I will look at his paintings from this period next week.

References

Wikipedia

Brettell RR (1990) Pissarro and Pontoise, Yale UP and Guild. ISBN 978 0 300 04336 5.
Pissarro J (1993) Pissarro, Pavilion Books and Harry N Abrams. ISBN 1 85793 124 6.
Pissarro J and Snollaerts CD-R (2005) Pissarro. Critical Catalogue of Paintings, 3 vols, Wildenstein Institute and Skira. ISBN 88 7624 525 1.
Rothkopf K ed (2006) Pissarro. Creating the Impressionist Landscape, Philip Wilson, London. ISBN 0 85667 630 6.

Yesterday I looked at the start of Camille Pissarro’s career with a selection of his paintings prior to the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Today I turn to look at Alfred Sisley (1839–1899), who was nine years younger than Pissarro.

Sisley was born and brought up in a prosperous Anglo-French family who were merchants in Paris. He was destined to take over the family business, and in pursuit of that was sent to London to study in 1857, where apparently he was so moved by the paintings of JMW Turner and John Constable that he resolved to be an artist instead.

Once he returned to his family in Paris in 1860-1, he had to convince them of his new career, then in the autumn of 1862 he started classes in Charles Gleyre’s studio. Among his fellow students were Pierre-August Renoir, who had already been there a year, Frédéric Bazille, who joined shortly after Sisley, and for a period in the following Spring, Claude Monet.

Sisley had started painting en plein air in the old haunts of the Barbizon School in 1861, and was soon painting outdoors in company with the other budding Impressionists.

This is one of the earliest paintings remaining from the start of Sisley’s career. Although significantly lighter than other works which remained under the influence of the Barbizon School, its trees are constructed anatomically and have canopies which are painted in a manner very similar to the contemporary works of Corot, a major influence on Sisley’s early style.

From 1865, Sisley started sharing studios in Paris, first with Renoir, before setting himself up in Les Batignolles, close to Bazille’s studio.

Sisley painted this Avenue of Chestnut Trees in La Celle-Saint-Cloud on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau in 1865, again in Barbizon style. He didn’t submit it to the Salon until 1867, when it was refused. It then remained unsold for ten years before being bought by Sisley’s patron Jean-Baptiste Faure, a celebrated opera singer.

The following year, Sisley walked through the Forest of Fontainebleau together with Renoir. He then stayed in the village of Marlotte, where Renoir, Monet, Bazille, Pissarro and Cézanne also visited to paint.

Sisley was more successful with Women Going to the Woods, which he completed in 1866. This was one of two of his paintings which were exhibited at the Salon that year, and shows the main street in that Barbizon village of Marlotte with a little rustic staffage.

He also met Eugénie Lescouezec in 1866, and to his parents’ horror, they started living together as a couple. Prior to this, Sisley had been given a fairly generous allowance by his father, and was able to paint without financial worries, but disapproval of the relationship resulted in that being cut. That pushed the couple into dire financial straits, which soon grew even worse when Eugénie became pregnant. They then spent the summer of 1867 together in Honfleur, on the north French coast, another popular location for artists.

(It had been thought that Sisley’s allowance was lost during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, but more recent research by Richard Shone has discovered that this blow fell earlier, as a result of the artist’s relationship with Eugénie Lescouezec.)

Sisley never seems to have found the cityscapes of Paris appropriate motifs, and on the occasions when he did paint in the city, he chose vistas which appeared more rural, like this View of Montmartre from the Cité des Fleurs, which he painted in 1869. At that time, the Sisley family was living in the Cité des Fleurs, close to his viewpoint of the hill of Montmartre.

This famously bohemian part of Paris had been outside the city limits until 1860, and the local mining of gypsum had only recently ceased. The Basilica of the Sacré-Cœur which now dominates this part of Paris wasn’t started until 1876, but the area was famous for its cafés and cabarets, as painted by other artists in the late nineteenth century. Sisley stuck to his landscapes instead.

His View of the Canal Saint-Martin from 1870 is another small break in the buildings near the centre of Paris, joining the Canal de l’Ourcq to the River Seine. This, with another landscape, was exhibited at the Salon of 1870.

Like Pissarro, Sisley started depicting the streets of suburbs, including Early Snow in Louveciennes. This has been dated to 1870, although it appears more likely that it was painted en plein air late the previous year.

Over this period, Sisley had maintained a studio in Bougival, a favourite village with the Impressionists. Soon after the start of the Franco-Prussian War, the village was overrun by Prussian soldiers, who commandeered Sisley’s studio; many of his early works were lost, just as Pissarro’s were in Louveciennes, just over a mile away. The Sisleys were forced into the city of Paris, and despite Alfred’s British nationality, they remained trapped through the siege of the city into the following year.

Worse still, the Sisley family business collapsed. Even if Alfred’s parents had relented, they were then in no position to support the artist. His father apparently spent most of his remaining years in a mental hospital as a result.

References

Wikipedia
Richard Nathanson

Shone R (1992, revisions 2008) Sisley, Phaidon. ISBN 978 0 7148 3892 2.
Stevens MA (1992) Alfred Sisley, Yale UP. ISBN 0 300 05244 8.
Stevens MA (2017) Alfred Sisley, Impressionist Master, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 21557 1.

Everyone looks at faces in paintings, and we seldom look at the feet at the other end of the body. Today and tomorrow I’m going to show a selection of paintings in which reading the feet is valuable for the additional information which they provide, sometimes even for the surprises they bring.

Before the advent of cars and cheap public transport in the twentieth century, most people travelled on foot. People migrating across Europe, Roman legions expanding the empire, tinkers moving from village to village, and painters all tended to walk. In March 1880, Vincent van Gogh walked nearly 50 miles (80 kilometres) to visit Jules Breton, Alfred Sisley earlier walked for several days through the Forest of Fontainebleau, and Paul Cézanne walked daily into the countryside around Aix-en-Provence to paint. Feet and what you wore on them were among them the defining properties of each person.

Go back to the ancient civilisations around the Mediterranean, and most people most of the time remained barefoot.

Notable exceptions to this were the gods, who were sufficiently divine as to use sandals. Notable among those, as seen in this detail from Botticelli’s Primavera (c 1482), was Mercury, the son of Maia (who gave her name to the month of May, hence his association with Spring) and Jupiter. As the Messenger of the Gods, he is distinguished by his staff or caduceus and special sandal-boots, often shown with wings attached.

Lionel Royer’s painting of Vercingetorix Throwing down His Weapons at the feet of Julius Caesar from 1899 shows an interesting array of footwear from the Roman Empire. Caesar wears sandals (without wings), and Vercingetorix some sort of riding boot. But the other barbarians are shown barefoot, compared against Roman soldiers who have combat sandals.

Footwear also played an important part in some classical myths. Theseus’ father King Aegeus of Athens abandoned his mother Aethra, leaving only his sandals and sword hidden under a large rock.

When Theseus came of age, his first major task was to discover his father’s hidden sword and sandals, and set off in search of him. This is shown in Laurent de La Hyre’s Theseus And His Mother Aethra from 1635-36, although the king’s sandals appear more contemporary than classical.

Gustave Moreau’s painting of the encounter between Oedipus and the Sphinx from 1864 engages in footplay too. Despite the Sphinx’s beautifully human head and bust, her hindfeet are thoroughly feline. Below her are some of the remains of her victims, including a solitary foot.

Feet, and their care, play a significant and very visual part in Christian teaching, when Jesus Christ washed the feet of his disciples at the start of the Passion.

This is shown in Tintoretto’s large Christ Washing the Disciples’ Feet which he painted for the Scuola di San Marcuola in Venice in 1548-49.

The disciples are gathered in a palatial room, around a large refectory table which looks appropriate for the Last Supper, an event which appears to be depicted in a painting hanging on the wall. In the right foreground, Jesus Christ is washing the feet of those disciples one by one, with them standing in turn in a shallow wooden tub. Elsewhere, disciples are seen pulling one another’s boots off, and a hound sits alert in the centre foreground. Tintoretto opted for a style of high leather boot which might have been worn when riding during the colder months in northern Italy.

The bathing of feet provided Rembrandt with the scene for his famous painting of Bathsheba with King David’s Letter from 1654. Here Bathsheba considers the king’s invitation to adultery while her maid dries her feet.

Feet can be both surprising and decisive in reading a painting. In Arnold Böcklin’s depiction of Sirens from 1875, their brightly coloured birdlike feet are more of a shock than the three human skulls, and confirm that the two figures may look like women down to the waist, but they’re every inch a siren.

An apocryphal story which grew popular during the late nineteenth century is that of Salome and the death of John the Baptist. Both of Lovis Corinth’s paintings from the turn of the century make dramatic use of feet in their narrative.

Corinth’s second Salome from 1900 is the more finished and detailed. The severed head of John the Baptist is at the centre of the canvas, with four unsevered heads towards the upper edge. There’s stark contrast with the feet, representing the rest of the saint’s body directly below his head.

In my last painting from this first selection, it’s the absence of a foot which is quite startling. The man seated in the middle of Hans Andersen Brendekilde’s While Reading the Newspaper News from 1912 has only one shoe: his right lower leg has been replaced with a crude wooden prosthesis, a ‘peg leg’.

Tomorrow I’ll look at the depiction of feet and footwear as social history.

In the first of this pair of articles looking at feet and footwear in paintings, I showed some historical and mythical works which rely on feet in telling their story. To conclude, this article presents a selection of paintings in which feet and footwear are an important part of social history.

Prior to the nineteenth century, most people lived, walked and worked barefoot, with only the richest likely to wear shoes or boots for much of their waking hours. Those more ordinary people in Europe who did use footwear were likely to wear wooden clogs, although the manufacture of leather shoes and boots expanded greatly during the century. By the twentieth century, barefoot figures in contemporary scenes were normally intended to be poor members of the working class, and a person’s footwear was a strong indicator of class, wealth and more.

Winslow Homer’s fascinating painting of The Country School, from 1871 is believed to show a country schoolroom in the Catskills, New England. In its largely empty classroom is an impossibly wide age range of children; two of the boys on the right who are reading to the teacher are too poor for shoes, although the girls on the right look much better-dressed, each with polished black leather boots.

The contrast is also notable in Geoffroy’s Whoever Breaks the Glass Pays for It in 1881. This shows a group of three young boys who have apparently broken a glass from a street café. The boy at the right is pointing down at the fragments of glass on the ground, and looking daggers at the other two; his clothing and lace-up boots are dirty and tattered. Those on the other boys are clean and more fashionable.

Other Naturalist painters let footwear and feet tell a great deal about the figures they painted.

The cheeky ploughboy in Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Pas Mèche (Nothing Doing) from 1882 is on his way out to work in the fields. His face is grubby, his clothing frayed, patched, and dirty, and his boots caked in mud and laceless.

From the same period, Bastien-Lepage painted this portrait of The Blind Beggar from the street in the artist’s home village of Damvillers. The boy has presumably removed his right boot for comfort, and both appear to have worn out several years ago.

The younger children shown in this family living on the street, in Fernand Pelez’ Homeless from 1883, have no footwear at all, and their feet are filthy; the mother and her older daughter are wearing tatty boots, perhaps to support them in casual work, when it’s available. This painting was exhibited at the Salon in Paris that year, when those viewing it only needed to walk round the corner from the Palais des Champs-Élysées (where it was held) to see scenes like this for real.

Despite their hard labour, the rural poor were no better off. Contrast the resolution and will in the woman’s face in Jules Breton’s Song of the Lark (1884) with her bare feet, their toenails battered, grubby and bruised.

Feet take part in the grand story in Fernand Pelez’s epic Grimaces et misères: les Saltimbanques (Grimaces and Miseries: the Acrobats), which he painted in 1888. This follows the pattern of a traditional ‘ages of man’ image, in which the figures increase in stature from the start at the left edge, to the centre, then diminish again with advancing years, to the right. Look at their feet, though: they progress from ballet shoes to the fancy boots of circus performers, ending up at the right in handed-down worn-out leather boots.

In another of Hans Andersen Brendekilde’s paintings, Worn Out from 1889, footwear tells an important part of the story. An old man has collapsed when working in the fields. A younger woman, perhaps his daughter, is giving him aid and shouting for all she’s worth to summon assistance. He was wearing wooden working clogs, as a poor farm labourer would; one of them has fallen off, an indication that he’s not going to get back up in a hurry. A century later, the English phrase popping your clogs was coincidentally in general use as an idiomatic euphemism for dying.

In much of the Russian Empire, the poor wore not clogs but felted boots to keep their feet as warm as possible in the long and bitter winters. These are shown on pupils in Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky’s painting Mental Arithmetic. In Public School of S. A. Rachinsky from 1895, depicting a class in the village of Tatev in Smolensk province.

Antoni Piotrowski’s Homeless (Country girl at the fence) (1896) shows a young pregnant Polish woman standing barefoot by the side of a country road. Her meagre possessions are laid out around her: a pair of worn boots, a bundle of clothes, and a stick.

For those who could afford to wear fashionable clothing, outrageously impractical footwear was (and still is) a sign of their affluent disdain for working and walking.

Among Georges Clairin’s many paintings of ‘frou-frou’ is this Elegant Couple at the Coast, whose shoes certainly weren’t intended for standing on slippery rocks.

For all Marthe Bonnard’s humble origins, she developed a lasting fondness for white high-heeled shoes, which appear in many of Pierre Bonnard’s domestic scenes, including this of Marthe in the Dining Room from 1933.

Footwear has also become involved in sex and its symbolism, particularly during the twentieth century.

Egon Schiele uses bright colour to draw attention to this woman’s lips, nipples, and navel in his Crouching Woman with Green Headscarf from 1914, and further sexualises her with a pair of high-heeled boots. These are the only items of clothing she is wearing other than the headscarf.

The contrasting footwear worn by the two almost faceless women in Edgar Degas’ Waiting from about 1882 is a crucial part of his enigmatic pastel painting, and a reminder of the importance of the feet to those who dance.

My final painting is one in which dramatic foreshortening reverses the normal emphasis of figurative painting.

Hendrik Goltzius’ foreshortened projection of the Dying Adonis (1609) pushes his face and head into the distance and makes their features almost unreadable, while his feet take pride of place and you can even read their soles.

I hope that by now I have made my point: when you look at paintings, don’t forget the foot.

From their visit to the shell of Paradise in the heavens which contains the moon, Dante and Beatrice ascend rapidly to the next shell containing the planet Mercury, where they meet the spirits of those who achieved great fame. Because of those high ambitions, their love of God was reduced accordingly, but they still reached Paradise.

The first famous figure they meet there is the emperor Justinian, who ruled the Roman Empire between 527-565 CE. Among his many important achievements was the compilation of Roman law still known by his name. Justinian gives an account of the history of Rome from the arrival of Aeneas in Italy, through the establishment of the Republic in 510 BCE, the Punic Wars, and to Julius Caesar.

Dante, through the words of Justinian, celebrates Julius Caesar and the birth of the Roman Empire as being decreed in heaven, for the good of mankind. This history progresses on to the Pax Romana of Augustus in 27 BCE, then skips hastily forward to Charlemagne. The emperor also names another spirit in this shell as being Romeo, who was gifted but persecuted into vagrancy.

From the shell of Mercury, Dante and Beatrice ascend to the next, containing the planet Venus, where there are the spirits of those whose lives were largely influenced by carnal love and desire. On this ascent, Beatrice’s beauty is once again enhanced.

The first spirit who they meet here is that of Charles Martel, who visited Florence in 1294 and may have met Dante then, but died during an epidemic the following year.

They then meet Cunizza da Romano, who married four times and had at least two other lasting affairs, including one with the poet Sordello.

Next is the troubadour poet Folco of Marseille, who turned from his libinous youth to take holy orders and eventually became the Bishop of Toulouse.

Folco in turn praises the spirit of Rahab, a prostitute from the city of Jericho who, according to the Old Testament, helped Joshua, and was thus spared when he destroyed the city.

The artists

Giovanni di Paolo di Grazia (c 1403-1482) was a prolific Italian painter who worked primarily in Siena, and was one of the more important members of the early Sienese School. He started work painting miniatures, later making some important altarpieces as well. He created sixty-one images of Paradise for the “Yates Thompson” Dante commissioned by King Alfonso V, and now in the British Museum in London.

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.

Federico Faruffini (1831–1869) was an Italian realist painter and engraver, who specialised in history and other narrative works. He rose to fame during the 1860s, culminating in an award in the Paris Salon in 1867. However, he was never commercially successful and tragically committed suicide in 1869 at the age of only 38.

Philipp Veit (1793–1877) was a German Romantic painter who was partly responsible for the revival of fresco techniques in the early nineteenth century. He was a pupil of Caspar David Friedrich in Dresden, and later trained in Vienna. A prodigious draftsman, he preferred watercolours to oils. He went to Rome where he joined the Nazarenes, later returning to Frankfurt, where he became professor.

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 superb paintings from both the northern and southern Renaissance were the product of months of planning and preparation, and the collaborative effort of the master and many other highly-skilled assistants and craftsmen. Wonderful though they are, they are usually painstakingly deliberate, rather than more spontaneous creative acts.

That wasn’t always the case. This week’s painting, by Lucas Cranach the Elder, shows evidence of greater spontaneity, as you might associate more with the nineteenth century: it’s his Martyrdom of Saint Catherine, painted when he was just over 30 years old.

Cranach either completed The Martyrdom of Saint Catherine in the year that he was appointed court painter to the Elector of Saxony, Friedrich III the Wise, or shortly after that appointment in Wittenberg, in eastern Germany.

Cranach would have developed a final study, much as this for his later David and Bathsheba (c 1526), using pen, black ink, and grey wash. Comparing his study above for its finished counterpart below, it’s obvious that many changes, some substantial, were made between the two.

Cranach and his workshop made several paintings of this particular motif. This small undated study was probably intended for a different version of The Martyrdom of Saint Catherine, although it has common features, such as the executioner with his large sword and vulgar bulging codpiece.

With the preparatory drawings advancing, the wood support had to be specified and fabricated by a specialist joiner. Later in his career, Cranach developed a system of standard sizes of panels, but he doesn’t appear to have followed that in this early phase. This painting’s wooden support was made from four broad boards of lime (linden) wood of unusual thickness, 1.6 cm (nearly 2/3rds of an inch). The boards are joined and stabilised using dovetail battens, and on the painting surface those joins were carefully covered with canvas strips.

The ground applied to the support consists of white pigment bound with animal glue, together with calcium carbonate prepared from local limestone as a filler, a traditional formula. Over this his assistants laid a thin layer of light reddish imprimatura coloured using a mixture of lead white and red lead pigments in an oil medium. This was applied using very wide bristle brushes.

Once that had dried thoroughly, Cranach himself laid down the underdrawing, using a pointed brush with carbon black ink made from soot. This extended to tonal modelling, and is shown clearly in the infra-red reflectogram below, and should have been very similar to his final drawn study, both in appearance and detail.

Where he needed precise geometric forms, such as in the cartwheel at the right, Cranach scratched the contours in the ground, in this case using dividers.

Cranach had a reputation for being an impulsive and rapid painter, which has been borne out by analysis of his works. His early paintings, in particular, show evidence of repeated adjustments in form and colour – which contrasts with Dürer’s much more determinate workflow, for instance. The reflectogram above shows how detailed are the figures in the foreground, but the pyrotechnic effects at the upper right were left to be extemporised during painting.

In infra-red reflectograms, invisible infra-red radiation illuminates the painting, and a camera sensitive to its wavelengths, here between 900-1700 nm, is used to record the image. This effectively looks through the paint layer at the underdrawing beneath.

Looking in more detail at the figure of the executioner and those around him, in visible light above and the reflectogram below, it’s clear that Cranach made considerable changes during the painting process.

With the underdrawing complete, areas to be gilded were then prepared for the application of gold leaf. Cranach and his workshop varied their techniques even within each painting: most of their gilding used unburnished mordant methods, but these were employed prior to painting, during the application of paint, and in at least one passage in The Martyrdom of Saint Catherine on top of the paint!

Paints were prepared in Cranach’s workshop, using pigments which were usually purchased from a pharmacy; in 1520, Cranach himself was granted permission to establish a pharmacy in Wittenberg, so he could purchase pigments and other specialist materials through the trade. His main binder was linseed oil, which was available plentifully across northern Europe. This was also used after heat treatment to thicken it, a technique which is almost as old as oil painting itself.

Initial painting in much of this work consisted of undermodelling using grey tones of carbon black and lead white. Some of the darker garments were preceded by a local underpainting of black, a technique which was popular at the time for dark red fabrics in particular. Much of this seems to have been completed very quickly, probably within a single day. Some passages were then continued rapidly, on occasion painted wet in wet.

More typically, passages were worked up through modelling in layers of paint, allowing time to dry between applications, with glazes being applied later in the sequence to complete the surface effects of different fabrics and textured materials. Cranach is unusual for repeatedly correcting and refining both forms and detail as the painting progressed, as shown in the changes he made between the underdrawing seen in the reflectogram and the finished painting.

Cranach’s paintings of the martyrdom of saints were much in demand, and the final step with most of these works was the preparation of woodcuts to make prints. I haven’t been able to locate a print made of this particular painting, but this undated woodcut of The Martyrdom of Saint Barbara is well known.

Unlike many more modern paintings, Cranach didn’t dash off The Martyrdom of Saint Catherine in a few hours, but it was the product of considerable extemporisation, even a touch of bravura in its pyrotechnics, which gives it a distinctive and dynamic realism.

References

cranach.net a massive research database with many visible light and other images. Requires registration. (German)
cda the Cranach Digital Archive, another huge research and image resource, in English or German.

Heydenreich G (2007) Lucas Cranach the Elder, Painting Materials, Techniques, and Workshop Practice, Amsterdam UP. ISBN 978 90 5356 745 6.

By 1873, a number of significant artists had painted narrative works which didn’t resolve. They were by no means confined to Britain, but included some in Germany, France, and the USA. These coincided with the rise in popularity of more open-ended literary works, such as mystery and detective stories, which were serialised in newspapers in many countries, translated into the major languages of Europe, and occupied the minds of the middle and upper classes.

In this article I look at the further development of what were to become known as problem pictures twenty years later.

These modern narrative paintings often built on highly contemporary themes. The title of John Everett Millais’ The North-West Passage from 1874 tells you how closely it coincided with the departure of a British expedition in futile quest of the rumoured north-west passage round the north of Canada to the Pacific. Enterprises like that had brought a succession of failures since the famous total loss of Sir John Franklin’s expedition of 1845.

Rather than adopt the symbolic richness of the Pre-Raphaelite, Millais addresses this topical issue in another image which leaves the narrative unresolved and open to speculation by the viewer.

The old man is clearly an experienced mariner, who knows the risks and futility, which are expressed in his body-language. The young woman, probably his daughter, is presumably the wife of one of those on the expedition. The man stares hard and cold, the woman reads anxiously. Behind them a chart shows the limited knowledge of the area of the north-west passage at the time. Flags declare an affinity with the nation, and its Navy. A painting on the wall shows a ship negotiating ice in the far north.

The view through the window shows that this is set on the coast, and there is a sailing vessel in sight. A telescope rests on the table, by a glass presumably containing rum. Below the table are old ships’ logs and other papers.

That same year in what was then Prussia, Berthold Woltze moved away from his earlier letter-based narratives in one of the finest of these ‘problem pictures’.

Woltze’s Der lästige Kavalier (1874), best rendered into English as The Annoying Bloke, is thoroughly contemporary in its setting and theme.

The story takes place in a railway carriage, where there are two men and a young woman. She is dressed completely in black, and stares towards the viewer with tears in her eyes (detail below). Beside her is a carpet-bag, and opposite is a small wooden box and grey drapes.

Leaning over the back of her seat, and leering at her, is a middle-aged dandy with a brash moustache and mutton-chop whiskers, brandishing a lit cigar. He appears to be trying to chat her up, quite inappropriately, and very much against her wishes. Behind him, and almost cropped off the left edge of the canvas, is an older man with a dour, drawn face.

The young woman appears to have suffered a recent bereavement, and may even be travelling back after the funeral. She looks too young to have just buried a husband, so I think it more likely that she has just lost her last parent, and is now living alone, and prey to the likes of this annoying and abusive bloke. Here, Woltze’s painting tackles a modern theme which became very popular in ‘problem pictures’: relationships between men and women at a time when society was changing rapidly, and most particularly the changing roles of women.

Today, Woltze’s painting may appear just a curiosity from an unknown artist. At the time, though, he was well known, and many of his works were engraved for and published in the illustrated weekly newspaper Die Gartenlaube, where they probably reached a readership of two to five million, making it one of the most widely read publications in the world at the time. It was also one of the major periodicals which published serialised novels, including the writing of Goethe and Schiller.

Some of these unresolved narratives were historic rather than contemporary. These run the risk that, as at least part of their story is likely to be known to the viewer, that might provide clues which cut short speculation.

One of the most famous of these historical paintings is the only work for which William Frederick Yeames is now remembered, And when did you last see your Father?, painted in 1878.

For anyone familiar with costume at the time of the English Civil War, and the Puritan dress of conical hats and plain clothes, this immediately places the event shown at that time. Contrasting with those are the opulent silks of the mother and chidren, who are clearly Royalists, the other side. Yeames tells us what the young boy is being questioned about in the painting’s title, without which the narrative would be largely lost.

The only unresolved issue is whether the boy did reveal the whereabouts of his Cavalier father – an act which is clearly bringing great anguish to his sisters and mother.

At about this time, William Quiller Orchardson started to paint the first of his many problem pictures.

Orchardson’s Hard Hit from 1879 is more difficult to solve. The fashionably-dressed young man about to open the door on the left is walking away from a group of older villains, who have stopped at nothing (probably including cheating) to beat him repeatedly at cards, and have relieved him of his wealth. Although this may appear a carefully chosen narrative, it was apparently Orchardson’s model who provided the inspiration, when he arrived dejected at the studio one day and revealed that he had been ‘hard hit’ himself the previous night.

My last example from this period during which ‘problem pictures’ became more widespread and popular is another of my favourites, and one of Degas’ last narrative works.

Two women are sat side-by-side on a wooden bench in a corridor or similar area within the ballet of the Paris Opera. The woman on the left is a ballet dancer, who is in full dancing dress. She leans forward and down, grasping her left ankle with her left hand, although she is not looking at that ankle but ahead at the flagstones on the floor.

Sat immediately to the right of the dancer is a woman wearing black street clothing, holding an unrolled black umbrella, and with black walking or working shoes. She wears a black hat and a full length black coat, her wrists are crossed on her lap, and she looks slightly down from directly ahead.

The dancer’s face is completely obscured; the other woman’s eyes are obscured by the brim of her hat. The two women occupy only the left half of the wooden bench, leaving the other half free. Degas provides no other clues as to what the two women are waiting for, nor whether there is any relationship between them. Instead he invites us to speculate.

In the next article in this series, I reach the heyday of the problem picture, when they come thick and fast and speculation starts spilling over into the press.