In yesterday’s article, I showed some spectacular paintings of glassware from the Renaissance to the middle of the eighteenth century. Then for a century or so, the detailed realist depiction of glassware in works other than still lifes became less popular. Perhaps their value in advertising the artist’s technical skills became devalued. This seems to have changed again in the middle of the nineteenth century, across Europe and America.

William Holman Hunt’s Isabella and the Pot of Basil from 1867 is intricately detailed, with several references to elements of the story retold by John Keats from Boccaccio’s Decameron, such as the relief of a skull on the side of the pot, a red rose on a tray by Lisabetta’s left foot, and a silver watering can at the bottom right. It also features an elaborate glass lamp, hanging in splendid isolation at the top left.

When William Merritt Chase was only nineteen, he declared his aspirations in this Still Life With Watermelon (1869), painted before he had even enrolled at the National Academy of Design in New York. Alongside the cut watermelon is a wine glass, at the centre of the canvas, and a bottle.

Henri Fantin-Latour’s still lifes sometimes featured glassware, but the most elaborate of his paintings in this respect is this response to the fraught experience he had with his group portrait of the literary avant garde in 1872, Still Life: Corner of a Table (1873). Here he extended his previous composition to show the same table and objects which had featured in that group portrait, stripping out its figures. He includes detailed depictions of a cut glass jug, a wine glass, and a small decanter.

Glassware was one of the least popular objects to be included in Impressionist paintings, perhaps because its successful depiction depends on fine detail.

Where glassware does appear in the works of the French Impressionists, it is perhaps the least convincing of their subjects, as in Edgar Degas’ famous painting In a Café or L’Absinthe from 1873.

Those who were less centrally associated with the core French Impressionists had more latitude in their approach to glassware, though.

Just a year before his untimely death in 1884, the Italian peri-Impressionist Giuseppe De Nittis painted this startling Breakfast in the Garden, with its contrast between the detail of the glass soda syphon, covered bowl, glasses, and other reflective materials on the table, and its sketchy garden background. De Nittis’ wife and son may be distracted by the ducks and geese, but I’m gazing at what’s on that table.

I don’t know if the Swedish painter Hanna Hirsch (Pauli) saw that painting, but a few years later she used an outdoor table for her virtuoso painting of Breakfast-Time (1887). This strikes a wonderful balance between the painterliness of the ground and wooden furniture, and sufficient detail (below) to bring the silverware, porcelain and abundant glassware to life. She was only 23 when she completed this.

Félix Vallotton, known best for his membership of the Nabis, was another accomplished painter of glassware.

Before his involvement with the Nabis, Vallotton’s paintings were decidedly Naturalist in both subject and style. The Sick Girl from 1892 explores a theme which was popular with Naturalist painters throughout the 1880s and into the 1890s. His highly detailed realism extends to showpiece surface reflections from the glassware and polished wood, but like some of his later paintings its narrative is far less transparent than the glass.

For those still making history paintings in academic style, fine glassware was too obviously anachronistic, and something which doesn’t appear to have featured in accessible works by the likes of Lawrence Alma-Tadema or Jean-Léon Gérôme.

But Alma-Tadema’s wife Laura Theresa placed two wine glasses at the centre of The Pledge, probably from 1904, one of her Dutch period scenes which may have been intended as a ‘problem picture’, those being all the rage in Britain at the time.

Jean Béraud’s more academic take on The Absinthe Drinkers from 1908 reworks Degas’ painting in virtuoso style, with its two glasses of cloudy absinthe, soda syphon, and jug of water. And for bonus points, right at the top edge he lines up a parade of coloured glass bottles.

There it came to a rather abrupt end, until the later revival of realist painting. Artists sometimes did paint glassware, but even in still lifes, such as Édouard Vuillard’s Roses in a Glass Vase (below) from about 1919, they just weren’t the same as they used to be.

Then came artists like Janet Fish – and how I wish I could show you some of her amazing paintings here.

Dante and Beatrice ascend the golden ladder – previously Jacob’s Ladder – taking them up from the realms of the planets to the shell of fixed stars, where they arrive in Gemini, under whose sign Dante had been born. From here, Dante looks down on the poor little earth far below, then upwards to see the shining light of Christ himself, above his triumphant armies.

Dazzled, he looks down at Beatrice to recover his sight, then up again to see the Virgin Mary surrounded by the Archangel Gabriel. Dante is joined by the apostles Peter, James and John, who examine him in sequence on the Christian virtues of faith, hope and love, respectively.

Dante’s sight fails again from looking at the radiance of Saint John, but recovers once he looks back at Beatrice. They are joined by Adam, who answers Dante’s questions about when he was admitted to Paradise. Saint Peter then angrily condemns Pope Boniface VIII and his successors for their betrayal of the martyrs before them, and promises God’s vengeance.

The apostles rise up into the Empyrean, leaving Dante to gaze down at the earth, where he sees the route of Ulysses’ last voyage, before he is elevated upwards again to the first moving sphere (Primum Mobile), responsible for transmitting the motion generated by God’s love down to the lower spheres; it is thus the origin of time. After Beatrice condemns the contemporary lack of moral leadership, Dante turns to look at what is reflected in her eyes: a brilliant point of light surrounded by nine whirling concentric rings of fire, each being an order of angels.

Beatrice explains their elaborate relationship to the celestial spheres. In this, the innermost ring of angels, the most powerful seraphim, equates to the outermost sphere, in which they are already; the outermost angels are the ‘ordinary’ ones, and equate to the innermost sphere of the moon.

Beatrice tells Dante more about angels, before informing him that there are more angels than the total of human words or thoughts. They then move up to the final zone, the Empyrean, the mind of God which exists beyond time and space – the real home of the angels, and of all the spirits in celestial heaven. Here Dante sees a river of light which transforms into a circle, in which angels leap out like sparks from the light into the flowers of blessed spirits on its banks.

This circle then changes into a celestial white rose, in which are thousands of tiers of spirits.

Beatrice reveals that one place in the flower is being held ready for the soul of Henry VII. Saying that, she rejoins her place in the flower, her task of guiding Dante now handed over to Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), a persuasive orthodox Cistercian monk who became abbot of the monastery at Clairvaux. Bernard prays to the Virgin Mary for the completion of Dante’s journey.

Dante then sees past the light to understand how the universe is held together by God’s love. His closing visions are of the Holy Trinity as three circles and the mystery of the Incarnation.

He has now completed his journey, and this book and the whole Divine Comedy are concluded.

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.

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.

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.

Considering how long watercolours have been used by the masters, it’s still disappointing that they aren’t taken as seriously as oils. There have been many factors at play in keeping watercolours in the second rank. One which is seldom considered is the very limited role of a traditional workshop in producing watercolour paintings, which are almost entirely a solo performance for the master alone.

The techniques used in watercolour painting have also seemed simple in comparison with oils: there’s water, pigment, a little binder, and paper, and none of the media, glazes and alchemy of oils. In practice, though, as anyone who has taken watercolour painting seriously knows, there’s a great deal more to it.

At a time when most watercolour painting was still disparagingly considered to be ‘drawing’ for routine topographic views, Alexander Cozens developed specialist techniques, such as keeping ‘reserved space’ to let his white paper ground show through, wet on wet as well as wet on dry application of paint, and scratching out. He also employed both transparent and opaque paints for different effects.

JMW Turner did a great deal to advance both technique and the critical reception of large watercolour works painted in the studio, although even today his oils are much better known, with a few exceptions such as his sublime paintings of the Rigi.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Winslow Homer earned his place as one of the greatest watercolour painters of America during a period spent in a fishing community in north-east England. The advanced techniques which he used are shown well in The Watcher, Tynemouth (1882), and include both transparent and opaque paints, rewetting and blotting to remove paint for highlights, scraping, application of wax to resist the adherence of paint, and the use of pure gum solution as a glaze.

John Singer Sargent is one of a very few masters who consistently painted superbly in both oils and watercolours, although during much of his career he seems to have considered those watercolours as personal, between him and his social circle, rather than for exhibition to the public. His commercial success was such that he was able to use the latest and most expensive pigments, tubed paints, Whatman paper, and finest brushes. But no matter how good the materials might be, watercolours are most demanding on skill, technique, and art, which Sargent had in abundance.

Sargent was an early adopter of cadmium yellow pigmemt in watercolours such as Olive Trees, Corfu from 1909 (above), and An Artist at His Easel from 1914 (below), where it enabled his greens to be lightfast.

His watercolours of Venice show well how he assembled a series of marks, gestural strokes of the brush, into amazingly real images of the city, its canals and buildings.

At times, these brushstrokes appear so casual that it’s almost as if he was just doodling with pigment, as in the blue shadows of In a Levantine Port (1905-6). But they coalesce into the image which Sargent clearly had in his mind all the way along, and pop out at the viewer.

Sargent wasn’t dependent on sophisticated techniques, though: Rio dei Mendicanti, Venice from about 1909 works its magic almost entirely using a mixture of wet on dry and wet on wet passages. There isn’t even much in the way of a graphite drawing under its thin washes.

In the summers of 1909-11, Sargent stayed with various friends in the Bellevue Hotel, at the top of the Simplon Pass, enjoying the cool mountain air at a time when much of the rest of Europe would have been stiflingly hot. While his family and friends whiled away their days in leisure, Sargent got them to pose for a unique series of informal portraits.

They may have been reclining at leisure, but Sargent took those watercolours very seriously, and deployed an amazing array of techniques. Among the finest is his Simplon Pass: The Tease from the summer of 1911. For any watercolour artist, it is a lexicon of advanced techniques.

One of the most unusual, and extensively used here, is wax resist. Before applying paint, Sargent scribbled over areas which were intended to be vegetation, using a soft wax crayon, probably made from beeswax. On a fairly rough paper, the wax is deposited quite unevenly, and when painted over using the watercolour it shows the white paper through. This creates disruptive patterns of near-white in the midst of the greens, and a superb effect.

Most of the paint used is transparent watercolour, applied as a wash in small areas, and in highly gestural marks elsewhere. In the upper third of this detail, he has applied white gouache (opaque watercolour) sufficiently thickly for it to now have fine cracks. The large pale blue area crossing the middle appears to have been rewetted and some of its colour lifted to reduce its intensity, although most applications of paint over existing paint have been made wet on dry.

Complex details such as the faces and hands of the figures have clearly undergone multiple repainting, starting with the palest flesh of the face, and progressively darkening to near-black. In most cases, the clean edges of the marks demonstrate that these were applied wet on dry, with as many as six different layers in the hair.

In the midst of this complex assembly of layers, Sargent still keeps to the lines of his original graphite sketch, which he uses to give the parasol form, and maintains small reserved areas, here forming the spectacle frames in the white of the paper. He could have used wax resist here, but if using pure beeswax it is hard to keep the soft wax to fine lines, as he would have needed.

John Singer Sargent is the Chess Grand Master, the strategist whose moves at times might almost seem random or abstract, but in the end they all come together to bring this masterly watercolour to life.

Reference

Erica E Hirschler and Teresa A Carbone (2012) John Singer Sargent, Watercolors, MFA Boston and Brooklyn Museum. ISBN 978 0 8784 6791 4.

In the late 1890s, ‘problem pictures’ had started to generate public controversy in the press, with critical analyses, correspondence, even competitions to choose the most appropriate resolution of their narrative. But the great master of this sub-genre, John Collier, had only recently entered the field, and his first couple of paintings hadn’t been particularly successful.

Collier next exhibited A Confession in 1902, for which I have been unable to locate a suitable image. This stepped back to some of the precursors from the early 1890s in showing a couple engaged in an emotional conversation. Despite its lack of innovation and limited visual clues, it was sufficient to generate controversy over its reading, even some fan letters to the artist begging him to disclose its meaning and resolution.

The following year, Collier realised his ambition with The Prodigal Daughter (1903), which proved far more successful, and remains one of Collier’s best-known works. An elderly middle-class couple are seen in their parlour in the evening in their sober black clothes and sombre surroundings. They are surprised when their prodigal daughter turns up out of the blue, in her low-cut gown with floral motifs and scarlet accessories.

Father is still sitting, backlit by a table lamp to heighten the drama. Mother has risen from her chair and is visibly taken aback. Daughter stands, her back against the door and her hand still holding its handle, as if ready to run away again should the need arise. Collier also uses ingenious shadow play, a device which became popular in the nineteenth century perhaps with the advent of optical projectors: here the mother’s cast shadow makes her appear much larger than the daughter’s, like an ogre bearing down on a child.

This immediately sparked debate over the role of women in the modern world, the nature and scope of their family responsibilities, and changing class boundaries. Collier went to great lengths to capture the expressed emotions, in terms of the daughter’s facial expression, and the contrasting body language. The daughter is seen as a ‘fallen woman’, thus part of a popular mythology of the time. But far from appearing fallen and repentant, she stands tall, proud, and wears a rich dress.

The resulting discussion spilled over from art gossip columns into more general editorial and comment sections of the press. Collier had arrived.

At the same time in France, Félix Vallotton had moved back from his brief Nabi phase to painting mysterious if not sinister narrative interiors. His Interior with the Back of a Woman in Red from 1903 develops the framing effect of multiple sets of doors, which draw the eye deeper towards the distant bedroom.

The woman wearing a red dress looks away, her skirts swept back as if she has been moving towards the three steps which divide the space into foreground and background. There are tantalising glimpses of detail on the way: discarded fabric on a settee, clothing on a chair in the next room, and half of a double bed with a bedside lamp in the distance.

Collier’s The Sinner from 1904 shows a woman, possibly dressed in widow’s weeds, making an emotionally-charged confession. Although opening the viewer’s mind to speculation, it doesn’t appear to have enjoyed the same success as The Prodigal Daughter from the previous year.

Even the wife of Lawrence Alma-Tadema felt it worth entering the sub-genre: Laura Theresa Alma-Tadema’s Pledge, probably from 1904, is one of her Dutch period scenes with an obviously unresolved narrative. A young man and woman are clearly making some sort of pledge to one another over glasses of white wine. But who is the second man, at the right? Is this a matter of the heart, or perhaps something more sinister?

Félix Vallotton continued his series with Interior, Bedroom with Two Figures from 1904, set in a bedroom, in which the lady of the house is standing over her maid as the latter is sewing up an evening gown for her.

The mistress stands with her back to the viewer, but her face is revealed in her reflection in the large mirror on the wardrobe at the back of the room. In that, the maid is all but invisible. These three figures appear in a perspective recession, and to the right of the wardrobe is a doorway, presumably leading through to the master’s bedroom.

Although Vallotton’s disquietening interiors may appear a separate and blind alley here, they may actually have had greater lasting influence in twentieth century painting, particularly among later artists associated with Surrealism.

Collier regained form with his Mariage de Convenance in 1907, another of his ‘problem pictures’ which received extensive media coverage. In contrast with Orchardson’s early more obvious treatment of the problem of marriages of convenience (which were often also arranged marriages), Collier poses a real problem.

The mother, dressed in the black implicit of widowhood, stands haughty, her right arm resting on the mantlepiece. Her daughter cowers on the floor, her arms and head resting on her bed, in obvious distress. Laid out on the bed is the daughter’s wedding dress. Perhaps the daughter is to be married into money to bring financial security to the family, now that the father is dead?

Collier himself offered a slightly simpler version of that, when finally tackled by the press, which omitted reference to any father’s death. But this then raised debate in the press over how and why the young woman’s mother should appear so haughty and unfeeling, particularly when wearing such a low-cut dress. This led to her condemnation as a ‘bad mother’, and comparisons with other contemporary paintings showing ‘good’ mothers embracing and comforting their daughters.

John Collier’s ‘problem pictures’ had become an annual event within the yearly exhibition of the Royal Academy, and press and public were looking forward eagerly to his painting in 1908.

Reference

Fletcher PM (2003) Narrating Modernity, the British Problem Picture 1895-1914, Ashgate. ISBN 978 0 754 63568 0.

In January 1885, the Pissarros were living in the peaceful village of Éragny, unaware of the turmoil which was to come in the remaining years of that decade. Camille Pissarro dined fairly regularly in Paris with other leading Impressionists including Monet, Renoir, Sisley and their dealer Durand-Ruel.

He took the opportunity to visit Guillaumin in his studio, where he met the young painter Paul Signac for the first time, then in October, he met Georges Seurat, who explained their research and theories of Divisionism. As a result of these meetings and his own research, Pissarro concluded that Divisionism was the next phase in the logical progress of Impressionism.

Pissarro’s high Impressionist painting of Meadow at Bazincourt was completed in 1885, and adheres to the style expected of his landscapes at the time. It was sold to Durand-Ruel in June of that year.

A few steps away from the Pissarros’ house, at the entrance to the village of Éragny, was a small brickworks, which Pissarro painted in this view of the Delafolie Brickyard, Éragny from 1885. Claude Monet thought that they made cider there too, and asked Pissarro to obtain some for him.

Pissarro’s brushwork here – when there are no leaves on the trees – forms patterns of cross-hatching in places, and longer arcs in parts of the foreground.

Delafolie House, Éragny, presumably from later in the same year, judging by its rich green foliage, is a view of the brickmaker’s house from an upstairs window in Pissarro’s house. His brushwork has become finer again, but remains well within his Impressionist style.

Pissarro also painted at least one more fan, showing a ‘turkey-herd’, Girl in Field with Turkeys in about 1885. As with his others, this was painted in gouache on silk, then mounted on paper.

The following year (1886), the eighth and final Impressionist Exhibition was held in Durand-Ruel’s gallery in Paris, in May-June. This revealed to the public for the first time a large collection of Divisionist paintings by Pissarro, his son Lucien, Signac and Seurat. These included Seurat’s huge masterpiece A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.

This sealed the fate of the French Impressionists as a cohesive group, as Monet, Renoir, Sisley and Caillebotte rejected Divisionism and refused to take part. Pissarro exhibited a total of twenty works there, including nine in oils, which confirmed him as a Divisionist, or Neo-Impressionist. Confrontation between the two schools resulted in open conflict at times.

Pissarro had started to paint this large studio work Apple-Picking in 1881, but ran into problems with its size and composition, and didn’t complete it until early in 1886. Meanwhile, he completed a similar composition in distemper as early as 1882. This later oil version was one of his works shown at the eighth Impressionist Exhibition, where its unusual square canvas and more Divisionist style proved popular with the critics. However, this didn’t translate into a sale.

In July, Pissarro passed it to Durand-Ruel for sale at 3,000 Francs, but it remained unsold. The artist then arranged for Georges Petit, who was more sympathetic to Divisionism, to take it on but he too was unsuccessful. After that, Pissarro became curiously uncertain as to what should become of it: in 1889, when Théo van Gogh was interested in trying to sell it, Pissarro refused, and it remained unsold at the time of the artist’s death.

That year, 1886, marked Pissarro’s most extended experiments in Divisionist painting, in which he painted landscapes using patches of colour of different sizes. However, his plans suffered a setback when Durand-Ruel decicded that he wouldn’t buy any Divisionist paintings from Pissarro.

In 1887, Pissarro became a fully-fledged Divisionist, a member of the Neo-Impressionists alongside Seurat, Signac, Luce, and colleagues. Paintings such as this of Farm Houses, Éragny (1887) leave no doubt. With Durand-Ruel not interested in such works, the artist sought other outlets. He found Vincent’s brother Théo van Gogh particularly helpful, and sold this through him for 300 Francs in March 1888. This wasn’t as much as his family needed, but at least it kept them from starving.

In the summer of 1887, Pissarro worked on another strongly Divisionist painting of Haymaking, Éragny. Although not a large canvas by any means, he found the work slow and tedious, something to occupy rainy days when he remained indoors. His labour was rewarded when this was taken on by Théo van Gogh, who sold it to a customer on the same day that he’d received it from Pissarro.

This later version of Apple Picking, Éragny had been largely completed in the autumn of 1887, but may have required further work early the following year. One of the canonical works of Neo-Impressionism, it was exhibited to favourable reviews at the Cercle de XX in Brussels in 1889. It too was bought by Théo van Gogh, in March 1888.

The Seine at Rouen, the Île Lacroix, Effect of Fog from 1888 is another of Pissarro’s best-known Divisionist paintings, and one of several to use fog to great effect. This was based on studies which Pissarro had made during his visit to the city back in 1883, five years before he started work on this finished painting. Once again, Théo van Gogh took this painting for sale, in November 1888.

Pissarro was unusual among the French Impressionists for his strong political views: he was an anarchist. Although he did draw gently on social realism, and had at times been accused of being a successor to Millet, most of Pissarro’s paintings of the rural poor are pastoral and idyllic, which I find hard to reconcile with his ardent anarchism, as if he wasn’t depicting social reality, but his political dreams.

The closest that he came to social realism was in this Flock of Sheep, Éragny from 1888, another of his finest Divisionist paintings. This was developed from a series of three drawings and a pastel study, following which Pissarro must have spent long hours in the studio applying the thousands of small marks from which the image is composed. It was then bought by Paul Signac in November 1888.

The following year, Pissarro’s intensely sensory and idyllic painting The Gleaners proved a lesson in the practicality of Divisionism. He had started work on this in early 1888, using a squared-up study in gouache to finalise his composition. He found the painting hard, and wrote that he needed models so that he could complete its detail. It was finished a year later in 1889, when he set his price at a mere 800 Francs. Although it achieved that, by the time that framing and commission charges had been deducted, Pissarro received just 620 Francs from Théo van Gogh’s firm.

Woman and Goat, Éragny from 1889 is a more modest Divisionist painting, similar to another from the same year, showing the woman pushing a wheelbarrow.

By the end of 1889, after three years of painting the most gloriously Neo-Impressionist works, Pissarro was worn out, and little better off for all those painstakingly slow canvases. He considered his future.

Tomorrow I’ll show a selection of Alfred Sisley’s landscapes from the same period.

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.

In the late 1880s, while Alfred Sisley lived near to and in the small town of Moret-sur-Loing, he painted a succession of the most sublime Impressionist landscapes which stand as a whole as one of the great achievements of the movement, comparable to Monet’s Grainstacks series.

One of the groups of motifs is the Canal du Loing, here seen in 1885. These paintings typically have a low horizon, and reiterate his emphasis on the sky setting the mood and tone of his paintings. Below that, the water shimmers with the reflected buildings and relatively coarse brushstrokes rather than the more staccato style seen developing in Pissarro’s landscapes.

Another group is exemplified by Moret – The Banks of the River Loing, probably painted in the autumn/fall of 1885, with its slightly coarser marks and strong colour contrasts. These bring the foreground even closer, and push the background very deep.

Sisley continued to paint in locations such as the small port of Saint Mammès, and in the middle of the 1880s completed a large and loose series of works there, although not apparently intended as a formal series such as Monet’s later Grainstacks.

Although few of these paintings are available in usable images, this assembly of thirteen gives an idea of their consistency and variations. Sisley was later to paint more formal series, of which his best-known is of the town and bridge of Moret itself.

The Bend on the Loing at Moret from 1886 has all the elements of these paintings brought together: the all-important sky, a huge stand of poplars on the far bank, a barge with the town behind, and that marvellously broken water.

Sisley also recognised the potential of Moret and its bridge, a motif which was to dominate his work later. The Bridge at Moret, Storm Effect from 1887 is an early plein air sketch capturing the approach of a storm, with the sky remaining bright for the moment, but the gathering wind already driving up small waves on the River Loing.

Sisley seems to have started this series, showing the avenue of poplars at Moret-sur-Loing, in 1888, with the first two, shown above and below. They show views from and of almost identical locations, and are painted in very similar style, their differences being attributable to the transient effects of light. However there are more subtle differences in the trees, particularly in the depiction of their bark.

l’Etang de Chevreuil from about 1888 was presumably painted at one of the many local ponds, at dusk during the autumn/fall, with the warm light of the sun accentuating the autumn colours.

Moret at Sunset, October (1888) combines a rather longer view of Moret bridge and town with the avenue of poplars on the bank. The lighting in this image brings out the differences in facture between different passages, particularly over the water surface and sky.

Another of Sisley’s favourite groups of motifs in this period were the grand farmhouses along the riverbanks, such as this view of Houses on the Banks of the Loing from 1889.

Over these five years, Sisley had remained largely in isolation, painting outdoors around Moret. Although he did travel into Paris and meet other Impressionists there, he remained apart for much of the time. He sided with Monet against Pissarro’s Neo-Impressionism, and didn’t exhibit at the eighth and final Impressionist Exhibition of 1886. But while Monet and Renoir started making a living from their paintings, Sisley remained living in poverty, few of his paintings selling.

But he alone kept the faith, still working outdoors in front of the motif, and still in true Impressionist style.

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.

Last weekend, I looked at one of the great technical challenges in realist painting, glassware. This weekend I turn to an even tougher problem: painting jewels, jewellery, and precious stones.

From the dawn of humanity, people have valued and hoarded treasures, precious stones and metals which are turned into movable property with which they can decorate their palaces and their bodies as jewellery. Nothing shouts out – often uncouthly – your riches louder than wearing them on yourself, and on your partner.

When painted, though, there’s a delicate balance to be struck. Those symbols of status must look really special, sparkling and glinting, but mustn’t outdo the person wearing them. The diamonds, sparklers in slang, have to show their value, but that mustn’t exceed that of the owner.

In some of the oldest surviving portraits in European art, jewellery was more than just a sign of earthly riches and status.

This haunting funerary portrait, of a woman of noble status among Greek and Roman colonists in Egypt in around 100 CE, adorns her with the riches she couldn’t take with her on that last journey. There’s a glint in the deep red stone hung from her necklace, but it doesn’t really sparkle as it would.

One of the earliest and most brilliant depictions of jewellery comes in the details of an anonymous work, The Wilton Diptych from the end of the fourteenth century.

Probably painted as a personal devotional work for King Richard II of England (1367-1400), its left panel features three crowns and abundant jewellery which, in the right light, looks every bit as impressive in miniature as they would have in real life. Considering that this was painted using egg tempera, that is an astonishing achievement.

These details of jewels and the white hart brooches were raised from the paint surface using thicker areas of lead white, to give the impression of enamelling. Coupled with mordant gilding, they mimic the three-dimensional form of jewels and act as point reflectors of light, sparkling as if they really were gems in the paint layer. Although it has been suggested that these details may have been added using oil paint, no evidence of that has yet been found.

That approach doesn’t appear to have been known more widely among artists of the northern Renaissance, though.

Around fifty years later, when Jan van Eyck and his workshop painted the Virgin and Child, with Saints and Donor (c 1441-43), jewellery and precious stones, including those of the crown held at the right, and on the hem of the Virgin’s gown, were painted in detail but lacked any real sparkle. Given the keen interest in optics and optical effects at the time, this is surprising.

Two reasons for this are apparent: the flat lighting, which deprives the gems and gold of contrast, and insistence on a smooth paint surface and tight brushwork, as shown in the detail below.

It was late in the Renaissance before painters seemed to rediscover how to give jewellery that extra something which made it stand out and look real.

Although the gems and metals in Veronese’s fourth painting in his Allegory of Love series are only modest, they look far more real than the greater riches of van Eyck. As revealed in the detail below, this is because Veronese has applied thicker and more painterly highlights to them.

It was Rembrandt who took this further and really brought cut gems and metals to life.

In his stunning painting of Belshazzar’s Feast from about 1635-38, Rembrandt combines the right high-contrast lighting and innovative rendering of highlights to bring its many jewel and worked metal surfaces to life.

The detail below shows how he has achieved this, using thick, even impasto, and highly gestural marks to form the reflective highlights on the faces of cut gemstones and on their metal settings. Instead of painting fine and precise lines and areas, these more irregular marks result in a more realistic effect. It took the genius of Rembrandt to recognise that striving for precision had made earlier paintings look less realistic.

Another superb example of Rembrandt’s technique, this time without the glitter of cut gemstones, is in this slightly later painting of David and Jonathan (1642). Seen in the flesh, these paintings look even more real than in these images.

The detail below of David’s elaborately decorated sword shows how thickly Rembrandt has applied light paint over the highlights in irregular and broken marks.

Tomorrow, I’ll look at some portraits, still life, and the depiction of jewellery in nineteenth and early twentieth century painting. Could anyone match Rembrandt?

In yesterday’s article about the problem of depicting gems, precious metals and jewellery in paintings, I looked at some exceptional examples, particularly in the Wilton Diptych, and those of Rembrandt.

During the Dutch Golden Age, still lifes became extremely popular for the ‘cabinets’ of collectors. Among those were vanitas paintings, which paradoxically expressed the futility of worldly possessions and matters temporal. Jewellery became favourite objects in these vanitas still lifes.

Evert Collier’s A Vanitas from 1669 includes a small collection of jewellery with gemstones. These are painted thoroughly proficiently, but lack the innovative techniques used only a few years earlier by Rembrandt. They sparkle quietly, but don’t glitter, which may only be appropriate in the circumstances.

Portraits were even more of a problem.

Girodet’s magnificent Portrait of Hortense de Beauharnais, Queen of Holland from 1805-09 shows the queen wearing jewellery which has been carefully chosen so as not to distract the viewer from her majesty.

Franz Xaver Winterhalter’s authoritative portrait of Queen Victoria in her coronation robes in 1859 features a lavish selection from the British crown jewels. But had he wanted to, the artist couldn’t have lit this scene to get the best from the many ‘sparklers’, and the finely detailed academic style makes impasto gestures inconceivable. As a result, the queen isn’t upstaged by her jewellery (detail below).

If there’s one theme which became popular during the late nineteenth century which cried out for the dazzling depiction of jewellery, it’s the femme fatale.

Gustave Moreau’s first watercolour painting of The Apparition has sadly faded now, but watercolour is an even more challenging medium in which to capture lifelike gems and precious metals. When he came to paint this slightly later oil version, also in 1876-77, Salome’s exuberant and alluring jewellery doesn’t compete with its vision of the severed head of John the Baptist, complete with oozing blood and dazzling aura.

When Gaston Bussière dressed Helen of Troy (1895) in abundant jewellery, he seems to have wanted her to be a flashy femme fatale, more typical of a courtesan rather than the head of court. He was also constrained by his adherence to academic style, with a smooth paint surface which forbad any painterly impasto.

Gustav Klimt’s approach was influenced by his decorative experience. He returned to using gold leaf, in what therefore became known as his Golden Phase. This rather earlier painting of Judith I from 1901 shows the beautiful widow who seduced the Israelites’ enemy general Holofernes and proved very femme fatale when she lopped off his head. As if to emphasise her own neck, Klimt puts a broad gold choker around her neck and studs it with gems. These are echoed in a golden belt at the foot of the painting.

Of all these more modern depictions of gems and jewellery, I think the most effective has been accomplished in the last medium which I’d choose to attempt this task. The boat in Odilon Redon’s pastel painting La Voile jaune (The Yellow Sail) from about 1905 is filled with a cargo of gemstones which really do shine out at the world brilliantly. Redon was able to use his pastels to similar effect in paintings of sunlight pouring through the stained glass windows of churches.

I’m more puzzled by Franz von Stuck’s painting of Salome from 1906, one of many made during the wave of Salomania which followed the rewriting of the original post-Biblical story initiated by Moreau and Oscar Wilde’s play. Here her jewellery, although profuse, appears dull and not reflective, and it’s the background which sparkles.

My small selection ends with another of Klimt’s lavish and sensual paintings of beautiful women, this time his first Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer from the height of his Golden Phase in 1907.

In this his most extreme and startling work, most of the canvas is encrusted with gold and silver. Its decorative patterns include symbols of eyes, flowers, whorls, ellipses divided into halves, and rich textures worked into the gold leaf. In the midst of this glittering metal, only the head, upper chest, forearms and hands are painted in oils. Around her neck she wears a silver choker reminiscent of Judith’s, and bangles adorn her left arm. Each is studded with gemstones.

Marvellous though these are, I can’t see a painting in these four centuries which comes close to those of Rembrandt. To try, you need to get the right lighting, contrast, gestural highlights in impasto – and, perhaps most of all, to be Rembrandt.

The least known of the three books which make up Dante’s Divine Comedy, at the time it was arguably its most important. In Inferno, he details the eternal sufferings of the damned; in Purgatory, there are the acts of penance required of those who would ultimately make it to earthly paradise. Only in (heavenly) Paradise does Dante reveal the carrot, the incentive for not sinning. Without that, there would seem little point.

His heavenly Paradise has its own distinctive structure. Inferno is a series of circular terraces forming an inverted cone, descending to Satan’s pit at the bottom. Purgatory is a series of terraces spiralling up an island mountain, culminating at the top in earthly paradise. Heavenly paradise is a series of spherical shells rising from the top of the earth’s atmosphere, each with a heavenly body in orbit, rising to the realm of fixed stars, beyond which is the Empyrean, the mind of God.

With Beatrice as his guide, Dante first ascends through the layer of fire above the earth’s atmosphere to the shell containing the moon.

Here, Dante meets spirits of those who broke their religious vows, including Piccardia Donati, who was forced to leave her convent in order to enter into a political marriage. He then meets the Empress Constance, who underwent similar removal from holy orders for an arranged marriage.

The next shell up contains the planet Mercury, where Dante and Beatrice meet the spirits of those whose love of God was reduced in their high ambitions for fame. Among these are the Roman emperor Justinian.

Beyond that, Dante enters the shell containing the planet Venus, where they meet the spirits of those whose lives were dominated by carnal love and desire – which many Christians would consider strange if not heretical. Among these are Charles Martel, Cunizza da Romano, and the troubador Folco of Marseille, each of whom had lives driven largely by their libido.

Ascending above Venus, Dante and Beatrice reach the shell of the Sun, where they meet the spirits of the wise. Notable among them are Saint Thomas Aquinas with eleven companions including King Solomon, who was a Dominican and outlines the life of Saint Francis of Assisi. Then they meet Bonaventure with his eleven companions, who balances matters with an account of the life of Saint Dominic.

When Dante and Beatrice move up to the shell of Mars, they are greeted by a cross formed by the spirits of holy warriors.

At the foot of that cross, Dante meets his great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida, a pious and righteous man who died ‘fighting for God’ in the Second Crusade, and identifies other spirits present including Joshua, Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Bouillon (from the First Crusade).

They next enter the shell of the planet Jupiter, where spirits form the letters of an exhortation to rulers to cherish justice, the last of which forms itself into a huge eagle.

The eye of the eagle is formed from Kings David and Hezekiah, with other just rulers such as the Emperor Constantine around it.

The next shell up contains the planet Saturn, where Dante and Beatrice see Jacob’s ladder of contemplation. Descending this ladder is the spirit of Peter Damian, a former Benedictine monk who rose to become a Cardinal. He condemns contemporary clergy for their licentious lives. Dante then meets Saint Benedict, founder of the order and author of the rules of monastic life.

As they approach heavenly Paradise itself, Dante and Beatrice reach the realm of fixed stars, as they were thought to be at that time. They arrive under Dante’s birthsign of Gemini, the twins. Here Dante sees Christ himself above his triumphant armies, and far below the pitiful little earth. He is joined by the apostles Peter, James and John who successively examine him on the Christian virtues of faith, hope and love.

Dante moves up to the first moving sphere, which is the origin of time. He is surrounded by concentric rings of angels, arranged in order of their power from the seraphim out to ordinary angels. This gives Beatrice the opportunity to explain the vast numbers of angels before they ascend further.

Finally, Dante and Beatrice reach the Empyrean, the realm of the mind of God, beyond time and space. Spirits form themselves into a celestial white rose, in which Beatrice assumes her place. Dante is now guided by the Cistercian monk Bernard of Clairvaux, for his closing visions of the Holy Trinity and the mystery of the Incarnation, with the love of God holding together the whole universe.

So the Divine Comedy comes to a close.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) had just completed three years of painting in Neo-Impressionist style, as a ‘Pointillist’. Although this resulted in fine paintings, some of which remain among his best, he found it slow and laborious work. Even more significantly for his family’s finances, his dealer Durand-Ruel refused to buy any of those works, and their slow rate of completion limited the number which he could offer to more enthusiastic dealers like Théo van Gogh.

One painting which was caught up in his reversion to more Impressionist style was this Landscape with a Flock of Sheep, which he had started back in 1889, when he signed it for the first time. This was based on a pastel which he had painted that year. In 1902, he undertook extensive overpainting, probably in response to a commission from the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery, then signed and dated it a second time.

In February and March 1890, the Boussod & Valadon gallery in Paris – for which Théo van Gogh worked – exhibited sixteen of Pissarro’s oils, seven paintings in distemper, and four in watercolour. Critical reception was excellent, although resulting sales were less encouraging. Then in late May and June of 1890, Pissarro went to London to visit his son Georges there.

Among the six paintings which he started work on in England was this view of Charing Cross Bridge, London (1890) from Waterloo Bridge. For this he made a sketch in front of the motif, then following his return to his studio in Éragny he painted this in oils. It was complete by October, when he sold it to Théo van Gogh.

This shows the River Thames in central London, looking south-west, with the skyline broken by the Palace of Westminster and the tower of Big Ben. The powered watercraft shown are paddle steamers, popular with locals and tourists at the time.

The following year (1891), as Pissarro’s style was still making the journey back from Neo-Impressionism, he painted this bank of locally dense fog at the edge of a wood near Éragny, in Meadow at Éragny with Cows, Fog, Sunset. In early 1892, this was exhibited in Paris, where it was still considered to be ‘Pointillist’, but it was bought by Durand-Ruel in February 1892 and sold on to a customer on the same day.

This Landscape at Saint-Charles, Sunset from 1891 was also painted near Éragny, and is an instructive example of Pissarro’s use of colour in shadows. Areas of grass which lie in the shadow of the trees are intensely green, whilst those in full light are gold. This painting was initiailly turned down by Durand-Ruel, but he finally bought it in September 1891.

Pissarro’s brushstrokes were growing less staccato when he painted The Steeple and Manor-House at Éragny, Sunset in 1891.

Unfortunately, the artist’s eye problems became more severe during the middle of that year, and he had to undergo several treatment sessions and surgery in Paris, with financial help from Claude Monet. Pissarro was then advised to paint indoors, behind glass, rather than en plein air.

In January 1892, Durand-Ruel held a retrospective of Pissarro’s paintings at his gallery in Paris. From May to August 1892 the artist was in London again, this time to sort out his son Lucien’s wedding which took place that summer. After a brief stay in the city, he moved out to Kew (in the south-western suburbs, and home to the famous botanical garden), where he painted a total of eleven canvases.

Pissarro painted Bank Holiday, Kew (1892) from the balcony of his rented flat in Kew, on the summer public holiday in early August. This is the precursor of his later densely-populated urban landscapes.

On Pissarro’s return to Éragny, he continued to paint local views. These grew the series of paintings which he had started there in the late 1880s, eventually including at least 43 paintings of views of Bazincourt, which generally include the church spire and poplar trees, such as View of Bazincourt, Sunset from 1892.

That large Bazincourt series requires more careful study and analysis, but it is notable that it was started well before Claude Monet’s first tight series, of La Vallée de la Creuse in 1889. It couldn’t therefore have been a response to Monet’s first commercially successful series from then onwards.

In early 1893, Pissarro had to stay in Paris again for treatment to an abscess on one eye. His doctor gave him strict instructions to avoid exposing that eye to dust in the street, so the artist took a room at the Hôtel-Restaurant de Rome, which afforded good views of the busy junction below. From there, he started to paint the cityscapes which came to dominate this late phase in his painting.

Place du Havre and Rue Amsterdam, Morning, Sunlight (1893) is one of Pissarro’s first populous cityscapes, and a clean break from his Neo-Impressionism. He had completed this painting by March, when he sold it to Durand-Ruel.

Pissarro painted several figurative works over this period too. A Washerwoman at Éragny from 1893 must have seemed an almost timeless motif: it shows a woman labouring at a similar wooden tub to those seen in Dutch genre paintings by Gabriël Metsu and others from nearly 250 years earlier.

When in Éragny, Pissarro continued to add to his huge series of works showing its countryside. He painted The Big Walnut Tree in Spring, Éragny (above) in 1894 – a tree which had visibly flourished since he first painted it nine years earlier. Below is his view of poplars there as the autumn colours were developing, in Autumn, Poplars, Éragny from the same year.

In the summer of 1894, Pissarro visited Belgium. This coincided with the assassination of the President of France by an anarchist, which made it impossible for the artist to return to his home, because of his known political affiliation. He was eventually able to return to Éragny in October.

As Pissarro moved steadily away from ‘Pointillism’, he was able to increase both his output and sales. Although he wasn’t growing rich, and his family demands were increasing, by 1895 they were clear of poverty, and his work was becoming better valued.

Tomorrow I’ll show a selection of Alfred Sisley’s landscapes from the same period.

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.

Of all the inner circle of French Impressionists, by 1890 only Alfred Sisley was still painting in the manner which had originally defined Impressionism, outdoors in front of the motif, rather than over a period of weeks in the studio. Despite (or perhaps because of) that, his paintings continued to attract low prices, when they did sell, and the Sisley family remained living in poverty in Moret-sur-Loing. He had at least received formal recognition in his election to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1890, but that still didn’t pay the bills.

During the late 1880s, Sisley had started to develop informal series of paintings of similar motifs in different seasons and lighting conditions. In the early 1890s, these became steadily more formal and deliberate. The first theme he used in these series is of avenues of poplars at Moret, which he started to paint in 1888. He returned to them in 1890, from a different view, as shown by the bridge and trees on the left. Several of the poplars now appear much younger.

After another gap of two years, he painted a near-identical pair of paintings from a third location, shown above and below. These show a higher bridge further in the distance, and a bend in the avenue leading to some buildings. His marks on the trunks and in the foliage are more gestural.

These make up a small series of Poplars at Moret-sur-Loing, over the period 1888-92, of which I show just five below, but suspect that there are more to add to that.

In the same year he painted this barren winter landscape, with its pale stand of poplars beating their rhythm across the canvas before curving into the distance.

Even more formal and deliberate than the avenues of poplars is Sisley’s series of views of the bridge and town of Moret, which he had first examined in 1887, in the light of an imminent storm.

The Bridge at Moret, Morning Effect from 1891 looks at most of the span of the bridge from the bank of the river, adjacent to another stand of poplars. He maintains his long-standing emphasis on the sky, which occupies most of the canvas and sets the time and mood.

In Moret Bridge in the Sunlight from the following year, Sisley settles on an angle of view which proved his favourite, capturing the main spans of the bridge, the Porte de Bourgogne and the town’s Gothic church beyond.

A couple of years later, in The Bridge at Moret (1893), he returned to the east bank of the River Loing to show some of the traffic crossing the bridge.

This loose series of views of Moret-sur-Loing Bridge and Town happened to coincide with the period during which Claude Monet was working on his highly successful series of Rouen Cathedral, something which historians are agreed that Sisley couldn’t have known about at the time.

There is no doubt though that Sisley’s most formal and conscious attempt at series painting is that of the Church at Moret-sur-Loing, a tight series with two branches consisting of fourteen paintings, completed in 1893-4, when Monet was reworking his Rouen series in the studio.

Sisley’s emphasis in this series is shown well in The Church at Moret, Evening, from 1894, and is quite different from Monet’s. As MaryAnne Stevens puts it so well “Monet painted the air that lay between his eye and the façade”, while “Sisley focused on the physical mass of the structure, using different light conditions to accentuate his subject’s architectonic quality.”

Looking back at the early 1890s, Sisley considered that he had painted many of his finest works in and around Moret. Not only that, but he continued to do so as an Impressionist, working largely in front of the motif, which gives these paintings veracity.

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.

Tomorrow (20 September), we celebrate the bicentenary of the birth of the artist described by Ingres as the Napoleon of painting: Théodore Chassériau (1819–1856). In case you haven’t seen many of his works, or haven’t even heard of him, he has a whole room in the Louvre dedicated to his work, although he died when he had only just reached thirty-seven. His greatest legacy was his influence on Gustave Moreau and other major artists of the late nineteenth century.

This article, and its sequel tomorrow, I show a small selection of his paintings, in celebration of his brief but brilliant life.

Chassériau was born to a French adventurer in what is now the Dominican Republic, when it was first a French then a Spanish colony. His family moved to Paris when he was a young infant, and his precocious skill at drawing was recognised in his childhood. He started as a pupil in the studio of JAD Ingres in 1830, when he was only eleven years old. Ingres was struck by his talent, and at that time rated him as his most faithful follower.

But in 1834, Ingres was appointed as the Director of the French Academy in Rome, leaving Chassériau in Paris, to fall under the influence of Ingres’ rival Eugène Delacroix. Within two years, in 1836, Chassériau had his first work exhibited at the Salon, where he was promptly awarded a third-class medal. Chassériau travelled to Rome in 1840 to try to heal the rift with Ingres, to no avail.

Susanna at her Bath, or Susanna and the Elders, from 1839, is among Chassériau’s most important early paintings. It shows a scene from the Old Testament story of this pious woman who was watched when bathing in her garden, by two voyeuristic elders. They tried to blackmail her into committing adultery with them, threatening to report that she had met a young man with whom she was having an adulterous relationship. Susanna stood fast, and was tried and sentenced to death. The young Daniel intervened, showed that it was the elders who had lied, as result of which it was they who were executed, and virtue triumphed.

Chassériau shows the scene most popular with narrative painters, combining a delicate figure study of Susannah with a condemnatory interpretation of the voyeurs behind.

His watercolour of Sappho Leaping into the Sea from the Leucadian Promontory (c 1840) seems to have been his first painting of the motif which was to become an obsession later in the paintings of Gustave Moreau. Here the Greek poet clutches her lyre, with her arms braced across her chest, as she steps off the edge of the Leucadian Cliff.

Andromeda Chained to the Rock by the Nereids (1840) is an unusual depiction of the popular myth of Perseus and Andromeda. When Cetus, a sea monster, is devastating his kingdom, Andromeda’s father is advised to sacrifice her to appease Cetus. She is then chained to a rock by the Nereids to await her fate, as shown.

Cetus is just arriving at the left edge (which appears to have been cropped badly, I am afraid). Also cropped from the left edge is Andromeda’s saviour, Perseus, who has recently killed Medusa the Gorgon. Andromeda’s face shows her abject terror, as the Nereids make haste to secure her to the rock before Cetus reaches them.

When he was in Italy in 1840, trying to reconcile with Ingres, Chassériau visited the ruins of Pompeii, which had been extensively excavated since its rediscovery a century earlier.

Taken from another well known and often painted Old Testament story, The Toilet of Esther (1841) is less strongly narrative. It shows Esther, an orphan daughter of a Benjamite who had been living in exile in Persia. After becoming a member of King Ahasuerus’ harem, Esther dressed in her finest in order to successfully persuade the king to spare the life of her former guardian Mordecai, and to execute his anti-Semitic grand vizier Haman.

In addition to these superb narrative paintings, Chassériau proved a successful portraitist. His portrait of Comtesse de La Tour-Maubourg (Marie-Louise-Charlotte-Gabrielle Thomas de Pange, 1816–1850) in 1841 shows the wife of the French Ambassador to the Holy See in Rome. Chassériau started painting this when he was in Rome in 1840, posing his sitter in the garden of the French Embassy there. At the right edge are the domes of the churches in Trajan’s Forum and the Colosseum. Although they are bathed in the warm light of sunset, the sitter appears pale and cold by comparison.

Chassériau stylised his sitter’s appearance, elongating her head, and this was the subject of criticism when this painting was exhibited at the Salon in Paris in 1841.

In 1844, Chassériau was commissioned to paint murals for the grand staircase of the Cour Des Comptes, the court of audit in Paris, which he completed in 1848. A monumental work, it was badly damaged when the building was set ablaze during the Paris Commune in May 1871 – an act of destruction which distressed Moreau. Recovered fragments of this are now preserved in the Louvre.

In 1846, Chassériau travelled to Algeria, where he spent much of his time in and around the city of Constantine, in the north-east of the country, making copious sketches and drawings. On his return, he then worked those up into finished oil paintings which are among some of the finest of the ‘orientalist’ works of the day.

This imposing equestrian portrait of The Caliph of Constantine Ali Ben Hamet, Chief of the Haractas, Followed by His Escort is stated as having been exhibited at the Salon in 1845, although it wasn’t until the following year that the artist arrived in Algeria.

He appears to have been particularly productive and successful in 1849, when he painted this quite sketchy portrait of two Moorish Dancers, much in the style of Delacroix.

That same year, his Woman and Little Girl of Constantine with a Gazelle is in similar style, and an unusual subject for Orientalism, with its customary fixation on partially clad subjugate young women.

He also painted another version of Sappho about to throw herself from the Leucadian cliff. I apologise for its poor image quality.

As with other narrative painters of the nineteenth century, Chassériau made several works showing scenes from popular plays, and in his case many of these were drawn from Shakespeare. His painting of Desdemona Retiring to her Bed from 1849 shows the female lead from Othello lost in thought as a maid prepares her for bed. He developed this from one of a series of eighteen engravings of scenes from that play which he had made in 1844.

All these paintings – and more – were completed before he turned thirty.

Reference

Wikipedia.

This is the second of two articles looking at the paintings of Théodore Chassériau (1819–1856), who was born two hundred years ago, on 20 September. In the first, I looked at a selection of his youthful works up to 1849.

The part of Algeria which he visited had been seized by France in 1837, so at that time it was an integral part of France. Scene in the Jewish Quarter of Constantine (1851) shows a mother and, presumably, her mother with an infant in an ingenious rocking cradle. Constantine is now the third largest city in Algeria, and has long had a substantial Jewish population.

Chassériau was one of many painters to be inspired by Lord Byron’s poem Mazeppa, published in 1819; I have looked at its depiction in paintings in this article.

Byron’s poem ends when Mazeppa wakes up in bed, having been rescued from unconsciousness by a “Cossack Maid”, who then tends his wounds. Chassériau’s A Young Cossack Woman Finds Mazeppa Unconscious on a Wild Horse is one of the few faithful accounts of the end of the poem, down to the ravens flying overhead waiting to feed on Mazeppa’s corpse.

In the mid-1850s, Chassériau’s Orientalism took the inevitable turn towards the erotic. This started with his Orientalist Interior: Nude in a Harem from 1850-52, which refers strongly to Delacroix’s earlier Women of Algiers in their Apartment, from 1834, a second version of which Delacroix painted in 1847-49.

The logical successor to that wasn’t derived from sketches made during a visit to Algeria, but went back much earlier, to the visit which he’d made to Pompeii in 1840: The Tepidarium (1853). This shows a carefully composed group of women in the warm room prior to their proceeding to a hot or cold bath, and is traditionally understood to have been the most richly-decorated of spaces in classical Roman baths. This painting was acclaimed when it was shown at the Salon.

In 1854, Chassériau revisited his north African theme with this vivacious painting of a Battle of Arab Horsemen Around a Standard. This too shows the influence of Delacroix, and despite its wonderful painterly style, it contains numerous details, such as the brandishing of a severed head, by one of the horsemen at the rear, mid-right.

The following year, he returned to one of the most popular Shakespearean scenes in visual art, taken from the tragedy of Macbeth: Macbeth and Banquo Meeting the Witches on the Heath (1855), painted in the style of Delacroix.

In the early 1850s, Chassériau was commissioned to paint murals in the Paris churches of Saint-Roch and Saint-Philippe-du-Roule, which he completed by 1855. Descent from the Cross (1855) is his vast mural for the latter, showing one of the most popular of the scenes from the Crucifixion, also known as the Deposition. Chassériau tackled this in a very conventional and traditional manner, using a composition which dated back to Rogier van der Weyden in about 1435.

These huge works and his already deteriorating health combined to weaken him markedly during the winter of 1855-56.

Earlier in 1856, Chassériau painted another account of the story of Susanna and the Elders, which is more powerful and more intimate that his first from 1839. In a more traditional composition, he shows the elders propositioning Susanna as she tries to cover her nakedness and shrink back from their advances in defiance. The elders are not quite touching her yet, but edging far too close.

Later that year Chassériau’s health finally collapsed, and he died that October, just a month after his thirty-seventh birthday. For the last five years, he had been a close friend and mentor to the young Gustave Moreau, who was devastated by Chassériau’s untimely death. Delacroix survived him by seven years, while Ingres himself died over a decade later, having apparently called his former pupil ‘the Napoleon of painting’.

Reference

Wikipedia.

Towns and cities seem to have been one of the first signs of civilisation, or maybe they’re the first warning of its end. As people were drawn from the surrounding countryside by the lure of a better life, towns grew into cities and became more densely populous.

Paintings of crowded cities seem a more recent phenomenon, though. They fall inconveniently between different genres: to a pure landscape painter, crowded streets in a city are unattractive and technically demanding; to the figurative painter, there are just too many bodies to do them any justice in the painting.

In this and tomorrow’s article, I’m going to show a selection of paintings which show crowds in cities, particularly those going about everyday life.

This is motivated by my series of articles comparing changes in the landscape painting of Pissarro and Sisley: in his later work, Pissarro took to painting crowded and bustling urban views, which are a remarkable contrast to his earlier pure landscapes. These two articles are an attempt to set that in its historical context.

In the early Renaissance, landscapes of any kind were normally constrained to limited background vignettes, as seen through the arches of Jan van Eyck’s The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin from about 1435. When you do look at that distant detail (below), although not crowded by later standards, the bridge and its streets are certainly busy.

Curiously, the best season for painters to show crowds out in urban areas seems to have been winter, particularly in fairs and at other times when most of the population seem to have taken to the ice.

This view of the Frost Fair on the Thames, with Old London Bridge in the Distance painted by an unknown artist in about 1685, shows a winter when the ice here reached a thickness of nearly thirty centimetres (12 inches). Most of the people of London have taken to the frozen surface of the River Thames to visit the fair.

Similar scenes are shown in Hendrick Avercamp’s Winter Landscape with Skaters from 1608. The whole population has spilled out from the warmth of buildings to take to the ice. The fashionable parade in their best clothes and company, children play, and the occasional less able skater ends up sat on the ice.

The citizens of Venice timed their outdoor social gatherings in rather better weather, and there are numerous paintings by Canaletto and others showing water-based festivals there.

My example of more terrestrial crowds, though, comes from the more obscure artist Michele Marieschi and this view of The Procession in St. Mark`s Square in Venice from about 1740.

As the industrial revolution swept across Europe, it brought a new wave of growth in the cities which was documented by painters during the nineteenth century, particularly in Victorian Britain. William Powell Frith started painting human panoramas in 1854, when he showed the crowded beach of Ramsgate Sands. He followed that with The Derby Day in 1856-58, and entered one of London’s major railway stations in 1862, with a painting which remains a classic example of urban crowds.

The Railway Station (1862) is set in a crowded and busy Paddington railway station in London. It’s rich with little social vignettes, and among its many faces are associates and friends of the artist, including the dealer who paid handsomely for it.

Take, for example, the incident happening at the extreme right, where a man dressed in brown clothes is apparently in the process of being arrested whilst trying to board a train. We do not know what event has preceded or precipitated his arrest, nor do we have any inkling as to whether he will try to run off, or be taken into custody. Much as in later ‘problem pictures’, the viewer is left to endless speculation and absorption.

Frith was also one of the first painters to use photographs to aid him in the details.

Also in 1862, Édouard Manet painted a very different scene in Paris, in his famous Music in the Tuileries. Its setting is hardly urban though, and the Impressionist paintings which it inspired, such as Renoir’s Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette (1876), were situated in equally atypical environs.

Shortly before Renoir painted his crowd in Montmartre, Giuseppe Sciuti completed this impressive crowd scene The Funeral of Timoleon (1874). Timoleon was a great Greek general, who was formative in the history of the Greek colonies in Sicily, particularly the city of Syracuse. His funeral pyre burns in the right foreground, ready to cremate his body when it has been carried from the other side of the forum.

As urban crowd scenes go, this is complex. Clearly Sciuti had little idea of what the original scene, in 337 BCE, might have looked like, and could only express this painting in terms of his own experience. So what he shows is probably an anachronistic composite of what he thought Syracuse looked like at the time, and more contemporary ideas of such urban crowds.

But it was another Italian, Alberto Pasini, who seems to have pioneered painting the outdoor urban crowd, in this stunningly detailed view of Constantinople from 1877.

Market Day in Constantinople is a ‘big’ if not cinematic view as the quay sweeps gently away into the distance. The detail below shows how meticulous Pasini is in his closer figures and produce, including his signature group of melon sellers with their great green globes glistening in the sunshine.

In the second and final article in this series, I’ll start with views of Paris before travelling to New York.

In the first of these two articles looking at paintings of urban crowds, I ended with a brilliantly detailed realist painting of the waterfront market in Constantinople, now Istanbul, completed in 1877.

Meanwhile back in Paris, although the core French Impressionists seemed relatively disinterested in urban bustle, Naturalists such as Alfred Philippe Roll were more ambitious.

This is a sketchy oil study for Roll’s enormous depiction of celebrations on the 14th of July – the Fête Nationale or Bastille Day – in 1880. The finished work is 6.5 metres high, and nearly ten metres across, and was shown in the Salon of 1882.

It wasn’t that which inspired Camille Pissarro, though. He’d long had an artistic interest in markets and similar gatherings in towns. Then from May to August 1892 he was in London, where he stayed in a rented apartment in Kew, in the south-western suburbs, where he painted a total of eleven canvases.

Pissarro’s visit coincided with the summer public holiday in early August. On that day, he painted Bank Holiday, Kew (1892) from the balcony of that apartment, the precursor of his later densely-populated urban landscapes.

Léon Augustin Lhermitte was another Naturalist with an eye for fine detail, who had painted almost exclusively in the countryside. Late in his career, in 1895, he moved his easel into central Paris to paint one of the most vivid images of the city at the time, in Les Halles. This shows the central market in Paris, described so well by Émile Zola in his novel Le Ventre de Paris (1873).

When Pissarro suffered eye disease, including abscesses on one eye, his doctors instructed him to paint indoors behind windows to shield his eyes from dust. It was this which drove the artist to start painting his late urban series.

Pissarro’s Boulevard Montmartre, Spring from 1897 shows a landscape composed primarily of buildings and streets, a plethora of figures, and countless carriages to move those people around.

As Pissarro was painting these innovative cityscapes, on the other side of the Atlantic the American painter Colin Campbell Cooper was making similar views of the crowds in New York City as they poured into their places of work in the midst of skyscrapers.

In Cooper’s The Rush Hour, New York City from about 1900, the canvas is literally teeming with people, who are pouring along the street, packing the stairways and walkways to a station, and seething around booths and tramcars.

Cooper’s cityscapes came to focus primarily on the enormity of the buildings, as seen in this painting of the Flatiron Building, Manhattan from about 1908.

Others among the new generation of Post-Impressionist painters increasingly depicted the crowds in their cities.

Pierre Bonnard’s Place Clichy (The Green Tram) from about 1906 shows this very busy intersection at the edge of the Montmartre district of Paris, more properly known as Place de Clichy. The streets are crowded with a tram (which had only recently been electrified), several horse-drawn vehicles, and a market barrow in the foreground. There are also pedestrians almost everywhere, even some small dogs.

The crowded streets of New York City became one of the central themes of the new Ashcan school of art, notably in the paintings of George Bellows.

In Bellows’ New York from 1911, the landscape is densely human. Its horizon, formed of figures walking past a white background, divides the canvas into two. Above is a vague blur of buildings, below a cacophony of vehicles, stalls, and people. As shown in the detail below, Bellows’ much larger figures in the foreground are little more detailed than the tiny figures in Cooper’s work.

In 1913, Bellows painted what must be the most human landscape of them all, in his famous Cliff Dwellers. This reverses Cooper’s hierarchy by overwhelming its buildings with people.

European painters in other cities followed suit. This example is Paul Hoeniger’s Spittelmarkt from 1912, showing the eastern end of Leipziger Straße in central Berlin.

My final painting, by Maximilien Luce, marks the end of the old order, and the real start of the twentieth century, as it shows The Gare de l’Est in Snow in 1917. It is a sequel to Frith’s painting of Paddington station in 1862. Hadn’t the world changed in those fifty-five years?

Over the last seven months, I have travelled with Dante in his Divine Comedy, showing paintings and prints to accompany his imaginary journey to the depths of Hell in Inferno, ascending the island-mountain of Purgatory, and finally up through the realms of the planets and stars to Paradise.

This final – and initial – article in the series summarises The Divine Comedy and provides links to the individual articles in the series.

Domenico di Michelino’s fresco of Dante and the Divine Comedy from 1465 forms Dante’s memorial in Florence cathedral (Duomo). It shows Dante holding a copy of The Divine Comedy as he points out sinners descending to Hell at the left. Behind him is the mountain of Purgatory, at the top of which is earthly paradise, the Garden of Eden. Above are the concentric spheres of planets which rise to heavenly Paradise. To the right is the city of Florence, complete with Brunelleschi’s famous dome – a sight which Dante was deprived of throughout the period of exile in which he wrote the poem.

Introduction to Dante’s Divine Comedy
An overview of Hell
An overview of Purgatory
An overview of Paradise

Corot’s Dante and Virgil from 1859 shows the poet at the start of his journey, when he meets the spirit of the great Roman poet Virgil, who is to be his guide until Dante is reunited with his beloved Beatrice in the Garden of Eden on top of Purgatory.

Inferno

Botticelli’s Map of Hell from 1480-90 is perhaps the most famous of its kind, with its detailed depiction of each of the circles through which Virgil guides Dante. These circles are arranged in a hierarchical taxonomy of sin, with the punishments imposed on the spirits appropriate to their crimes.

1 Into Hell
2 Crossing with Charon
3 In Limbo, and the Harrowing of Hell
4 Lust

Blake’s most famous and wondrously imaginative of illustrations to The Divine Comedy shows The Circle of the Lustful: Francesca da Rimini, which he completed in about 1824. This shows one of Dante’s best-known embedded stories, of the adulterous couple of Francesca da Rimini and her lover Paolo, her husband’s brother, who were both murdered when caught in bed together by Francesca’s husband. Ary Scheffer’s more conventional and slightly later account is below.

5 Gluttony
6 Avarice, Wrath, and more
7 The Furies and Heresy
8 Murderers, bandits, suicides
9 Blasphemy, sodomy, usury
10 Pimps, soothsayers, the corrupt
11 Barrators, hypocrites and thieves
12 The fraudulent
13 Treachery

Spirits of sinners in Hell are divided according to the type of sin; here, Gustave Doré shows Virgil (left) and Dante at the last of these circles, the ninth, for those who committed sins of malice, such as treachery. These sinners are shown partially frozen into an icy lake, with additional blocks of ice scattered around, as described by Dante.

14 From treachery to cannibalism
15 Lucifer

Another excellent visual summary of the horrors of Hell is shown in this watercolour by Joseph Anton Koch, a study for the frescoes which he painted in the Casa Massimo in Rome.

Purgatory

After emerging from the depths of Hell, Dante and Virgil travel by boat to the island-mountain of Purgatory, which is summarised brilliantly in this ink drawing by Philip Firsov, tracing each step and canto from their arrival to Dante’s reunion with his beloved Beatrice in the earthly paradise at the top.

Admission to Purgatory is only open to those who confess their sins before death, and make their peace with God. Each spirit has to ascend its terraces, undergoing prolonged periods of purgatory during which they atone for their sins. When finally cleansed, they emerge at the top and are admitted to earthly paradise.

1 Starting the ascent
2 The murder of Pia de’ Tolomei
3 The valley of kings
4 Pride and Envy
5 Wrath, Sloth and Avarice
6 Gluttony and Lust
7 Dante’s dream of Leah and Rachel

During his ascent, Dante has three dreams. In this the last, he meets Leah, who gathers flowers and weaves them into a garland and represents the active way of life. Her younger sister Rachel spends her time looking at her own reflection in a mirror, and in contrast represents the contemplative way of life. The following morning, Dante enters the Garden of Eden on top of the mountain.

8 Matelda, Beatrice in her chariot

Once in this earthly Paradise, Dante is reunited with his love Beatrice, who becomes his guide in lieu of Virgil; being pre-Christian he has to return to his place in Limbo in Hell. She appears in a chariot within a procession. When she steps out, she first admonishes Dante for his recent straying from the path of righteousness, as shown in Blake’s painting, causing him to weep then faint.

9 Final preparations for Paradise

Paradise

With Beatrice as his guide, Dante starts to ascend through the concentric spheres containing the moon, sun, planets and fixed stars, eventually leading to heavenly Paradise, the Empyrean. The spirits they meet during this journey aren’t trapped in these lower levels, but go there to demonstrate to Dante the different virtues through which the faithful attain Heaven.

1 The moon and broken vows
2 Fame and love
3 The wise and warriors
4 The just and the contemplative
5 Into the Empyrean

Inspired by Dante’s description of Paradise, Tintoretto’s last vast painting is seven metres (almost twenty-three feet) high and twenty-two metres (over seventy feet) across. It is perhaps the closest any work of visual art has come to Dante’s achievement in The Divine Comedy.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

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

We don’t know the year or place of birth of Jan Weenix, who was probably born not far from Amsterdam between 1640-49. Although we know that he died in September 1719, three hundred years ago, we don’t know the exact day.

His father seems to have been a successful painter too, and there has been considerable confusion over the authorship of many paintings which were originally attributed to the father. Although Jan started off living in a castle outside Utrecht, his father got into financial difficulties and died soon afterwards. Weenix was admitted to the guild of painters in Utrecht by 1664.

His early painting of a Landscape with Shepherd Boy from 1664 reveals his true forte in the realistic depiction of the sheep and dog. Although he did paint several other landscapes, in at least one painting he enlisted the help of a landscape specialist, so didn’t consider himself particularly strong in the genre. That said, this landscape has a wonderful lightness.

More typical of his work during the early years of his career is The Prodigal Son from 1668. Against a background of classical ruins, an extended family is dining at the left. In the central spotlight is a young man dressed flamboyantly, presumably the prodigal of the title, bidding farewell to his aged father. At the right his horse is ready for him to depart.

Weenix then specialised in painting still lifes with dead game, which today appear horrific in their depiction of the slaughter of so many wild animals and birds.

His Still Life of a Dead Hare, Partridges, and Other Birds in a Niche from about 1675 is one of a large number of finely detailed and realistic paintings which he made in maturity.

In 1679, Weenix married, and the couple subsequently had thirteen children, although as was common at the time, several didn’t survive infancy.

These piles of animal corpses spilled out into a strangely dark countryside, in paintings such as his Still Life of Game including a Hare, Black Grouse and Partridge, a Spaniel looking on with a Pigeon in Flight from about 1680. These became popular at the time, and Weenix was commissioned to decorate the houses of the rich with large murals on canvas, and to paint series for European royal courts.

This Allegory of the Sense of Smell is one of those large murals on canvas, which is now in the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh. It is at once a painting of a framed painting, a landscape, and an allegory, with a bit of classical myth thrown in for good measure.

In his Hunting Still Life from about 1708, the dead game are piled together with a strange mixture of objects related to hunting. At the lower left is a ‘duck’ whistle, for example, used as a decoy when hunting wildfowl.

At some stage in his career, he also produced a series of fine watercolours showing bird specimens. This example of Merops apiaster, the European bee-eater, was painted from a stuffed example obtained from Ceylon.

Although Jan Weenix’s paintings may be distressing to the modern eye, he was one of the most accomplished and prolific painters of wildlife at a time when wild animals and birds were preferred dead, ready for the table. Goethe was so impressed with the paintings by Weenix that he saw in Munich that he dedicated a poem to his skill as an artist.

Reference

Wikipedia.

During the first decade of the twentieth century, John Collier was the painter the whole of Britain was talking about. His unresolved narratives, or ‘problem pictures’, had captured the public imagination, and debating their stories was popular in the press.

For the Royal Academy exhibition in 1908, Collier had come up with an unconventional theme. Rather than revisit previously popular stories of the ‘fallen woman’, extra-marital affairs or failed marriage, he chose life and death.

At first, The Sentence of Death (1908) disappointed the critics, but it quickly became very popular. Sadly the original work has not lasted well, and I rely here on a contemporary reproduction which may do it better justice.

A young middle-aged, and presumably family, man stares blankly at the viewer, having just been told by his doctor – visual clues given include a brass microscope and sphygmomanometer – that he is dying. The doctor appears disengaged, and is reading from a book, looking only generally in the direction of his doomed patient.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a time of great advances in medicine, but the big killers in Europe and North America like tuberculosis remained common and barely affected by improvements in surgery and hospitals. In some ways, this painting may at the time have seemed quite everyday, but Collier’s genius was in confronting the viewer with the reality.

Not only did this problem picture tackle the great Victorian obsession with death and mortality, but it did so with an adult male patient, assumed by society to keep a ‘stiff upper lip’ and not to be emotional. This led to speculation as to the expected male response to such news, and questions as to what condition might be bringing about his death. There was even public debate about interpretations of the doctor-patient relationship.

For me, this is the pinnacle of Collier’s achievement, a painting which should challenge every generation of viewers, whose unresolved narrative is one of the eternal stories of our species.

Collier continued to paint ‘problem pictures’ for some years, but the sub-genre steadily faded from the public eye. I show here two undated paintings which may date from this period.

Fire shows a young woman, sat up in bed, afraid by the bright warm light of a fire, presumably one which is in the same building and putting her into danger. It is not clear why she is not doing anything to try to escape, though.

The Minx shows a femme fatale holding what might be a mirror in front of her. Unfortunately the condition of the painting is not good, and its narrative now more obscured that it was.

Then, in 1914, the world changed with the start of the First World War. Painters continued to make problem pictures, but they no longer had much public appeal.

In 1914, the American society portraitist Cecilia Beaux made what was for her an unusual type of painting: After the Meeting has all the makings of a problem picture.

The woman in the foreground is in discussion with an unseen companion to the left and beside the viewer. Another woman in the distance appears to be in the company of a young girl, and is talking at a counter. We are invited to speculate what might be happening, what interactions there have been, and who the meeting might have been with.

The Danish artist Hans Andersen Brendekilde tried one last and more whimsical unresolved narrative in his Afternoon Work from 1918. A dedicated gardener has joined battle against a mole, which has been steadily burrowing under his prized vegetable patch. The gardener’s small daughter is standing back at a safe distance from attack with the spade, and his wife is hiding indoors.

John Collier tried to revive problem pictures after the war, with works such as Sacred and Profane Love (1919), which returned to women’s problems. On the left, sacred love is shown as a modestly if not dowdily dressed plain young woman, and on the right, profane love as a ‘flapper’ with bright, low-cut dress revealing her ankles, flourishing a feather in her left hand. The suitor is shown reflected in the mirror above, a smart young army officer.

Although not as enigmatic as his earlier works, Collier remained very topical, achieving his narrative using dress and composition, rather than facial expression or body language.

One of the last paintings which I have come across, before the later revival of strange and unresolved narratives later in the twentieth century, is this late work by Félix Vallotton.

When I first saw Vallotton’s Chaste Suzanne from 1922, I was puzzled as to what its story could be, but I think that this is a modern retelling of the Old Testament tale of Susanna and the Elders, in which the two men are trying to blackmail Susanna into being unfaithful. This appears to be the consensus of others who are more knowledgeable than I am.

Vallotton has not simply painted a modern theme, but recast a very old story into contemporary terms.

Reference

Fletcher PM (2003) Narrating Modernity, the British Problem Picture 1895-1914, Ashgate. ISBN 978 0 754 63568 0.

By 1895, Pissarro’s paintings were selling and reaching better prices than the derisory sums they had in the past. The rift over his period of Neo-Impressionist had largely healed, although the Impressionists as a group had long since dissolved. What was coming to trouble him more was his chronic eye disease, and the limits which it imposed on his outdoor painting.

He still managed to paint some views of the snowy conditions at Éragny in early 1895 including Poplar Trees, Effect of Sunlight, Winter, Éragny. This features a poorly-dressed country woman carrying a couple of pails in the snow. It was bought by Durand-Ruel in early April, and not sold on until 1910, when it was bought by an American collector.

Poplars, Éragny, Sunlight is from later in the Spring of 1895, another of his long and varied series of the poplars around his home. He didn’t sell this to Durand-Ruel until the autumn of that year, and it took even longer to find an interested American purchaser for it.

In January 1896, Pissarro returned to the city of Rouen for a second period painting there, with the aim of completing eight to ten views of the city, with which he was already familiar. These were intended for a Spring show at the Durand-Ruel gallery in Paris later that year. As it turned out, painting in the Hôtel de Paris that winter was little better for his eyes than being outdoors: his accommodation proved bitterly cold and drafty, but at least he was able to remain behind glass. When he returned to Éragny at the end of March, he had fifteen canvases with which to establish the urban theme for the late years of his career.

Pont Boieldieu in Rouen, Rainy Weather (1896) is one of the finest examples of the view from Pissarro’s icy hotel room, looking out over the intense activity on and around this iron bridge which had only been completed in 1888. The artist became fascinated with the appearance of this bridge in different weather conditions, and the critics agreed both with his choice of motif and his impressions of it. When Pissarro returned to Rouen in the autumn of that year, and again in 1898, it remained one of his favourite motifs there.

This composite shows some of the accessible paintings from his loose series of urban and industrial views painted from his hotel room during his two visits to Rouen in 1896.

In 1897, Pissarro transferred his attentions back to Paris. In January, he painted from a hotel room overlooking the Rue Saint-Lazare, then in February transferred to a room with a view over the Boulevard Montmartre, where he painted some of his finest cityscapes.

Boulevard Montmartre, Spring Morning (1897) is composed primarily of buildings and streets, a plethora of figures, and countless carriages to move those people around – the ingredients for so many of his late paintings.

In the foreground, Pissarro may have formed each quite roughly, but he has painted in sufficient detail. Three white horses range in tone and colour, with highlights on the front of each head. You can see which people are wearing hats, and spot ladies in their fashionable clothing.

Deeper into the distance, detail is lost, and the carriages and crowds merge into one another. Still they have a rhythm, highlights and shadows, and form.

Pissarro must have spent day after day at his hotel window populating these busy streets.

During the period 1893 to 1903, I consider that Pissarro painted 10 series of urban landscapes, including:

• Gare Saint-Lazaire, Paris, a total of 5 from 1893 and 1897;
• Rouen, a branched series of 45 paintings from 1896 and 1898;
• Boulevard Montmartre, Paris, a tight series of 14 paintings from 1897;
• Avenue de l’Opera, Paris, a branched series of 15 paintings from 1897;
• Tuileries Gardens, Paris, a branched series of 31 paintings from 1899-1900;
• Coin du jardin à Éragny, a series of 5 paintings from 1899;
• Louvre, Pont Neuf, Pont Royal, Quai Malaquais, Paris, a branched series of 71 paintings from 1900 to 1903;
• Church of Saint-Jacques, Dieppe, a series of 6 paintings from 1901;
• The Harbours, Dieppe, a branched series of 16 paintings from 1902;
• Le Havre, a branched series of 23 paintings completed shortly before his final illness in 1903.

These differ slightly from previous estimates of Brettell and Pissarro, which were made before the publication of the latest catalogue raisoné.

These series were broken suddenly when Pissarro had to rush to his son Lucien in London, who fell seriously ill in May 1897. It was to be Pissarro’s last visit overseas: when his third son Félix died of tuberculosis in London in November of that year, the artist’s eye condition was too bad for him to travel.

At the end of that dreadful year in his family life, Durand-Ruel encouraged Pissarro to return to Paris. So he did, staying from the end of the year until April 1898, painting views of the Place du Théâtre-Français and its environs.

In his Rue Saint-Honoré, Sun Effect, Afternoon (1898), the human throng is more scattered, and the carriages and figures in the foreground rather larger.

Pissarro accordingly forms his blots and strokes to deliver more detail. A few carefully-shaped brushstrokes of a mid-browny-grey, and there’s a woman wearing an elegant hat, with a waist in her long coat, carrying a bag. The carriages have wheels, and there is a charabanc, with a group sat in the open on top.

Every stroke, dot, splodge gives the visual cortex of our brains just enough information to see in our mind the detail of an object, for it to be recognisable, even though much of what we see is hardly there on the canvas at all. This is miraculously perceptive painting: knowing exactly what, and how much, to hint at, so that our minds will fill in the rest.

From July to October 1898, Pissarro returned to Rouen, where he completed twenty canvases during his last working visit to the city.

A new motif, given the more favourable weather during the late summer, is Rue de l’Épicerie, Rouen, Effect of Sunlight, one of a series of just three paintings showing one of the oldest streets in the city as it runs between sixteenth century houses near the cathedral.

At the end of 1898, Pissarro rented a flat for his family in Paris, from where he enjoyed a superb view over the Tuileries Gardens, which, unlike Monet and Renoir, he hadn’t painted until late in his career. His first series of eleven paintings was sold to Durand-Ruel in May for the sum of 27,000 Francs. The artist then returned to the same flat to paint a second series at the end of 1899.

These two versions of The Garden of the Tuileries on a Winter Afternoon (1899) are composed almost identically to Monet’s view from nearly 25 years earlier, with the dome of Les Invalides and the spires of the Church of Saint-Clotilde in the background. Pissarro was perhaps the first to capture the appearance of the gardens when busy, as they are during fine weather even in winter. His crowds of people are as varied and minimalist as those populating his other series paintings of Paris.

The Garden of the Tuileries on a Spring Morning (1899) is a very similar aerial view, this time well into springtime, with the trees in full leaf, in their brilliant fresh green foliage. Although there are fewer people now, Pissarro affords us some delicate detail, for instance in the pram just above the middle of the lower edge of the canvas.

There are subtle differences between these three canvases which demonstrate that Pissarro’s painting was far from mechanical, and involved significant interpretation. The spring view has a lower skyline which cannot be accounted for by its being angled more to the left than the winter views, for example. However details of trees and even quite small features in the distance match very well, supporting the view that he did try to remain faithful to the real world.

Tomorrow I’ll show a selection of Alfred Sisley’s landscapes from the same period.

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.

In stark contrast to Camille Pissarro and his family, the Sisleys continued to live in poverty in Moret-sur-Loing, earning just enough from Alfred Sisley’s paintings to feed themselves and pay for painting materials. His work was exhibited at St Louis and Pittsburgh in the USA, the Ghent Triennial in Belgium, in Hamburg, and at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. However, in the summer he fell ill.

His Haystacks seems to have been painted at the end of the harvest in 1895, and is unusually rich in colour.

During 1896, Sisley was preoccupied preparing for a solo exhibition which was held in February 1897 at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris, with 146 paintings and five pastels on display.

In the summer of 1897, when Alfred was fast approaching sixty, still unmarried to his lifetime partner Eugénie Lescouezec, and their children officially illegitimate, the Sisleys had a stroke of good fortune: his patron François Depeaux funded the couple to visit Britain.

They arrived first at the Cornish port of Falmouth, and moved on to Penarth, the seaside town to the south of Cardiff, Wales. After painting there, they moved west to Langland Bay, just on the Gower Peninsula and not far from the Mumbles, to the south-west of Swansea, then a popular series of picturesque cliffed bays. In all, Sisley returned to France with seventeen oil and about eight pastel paintings, each made in front of the motifs at Penarth and Langland Bay.

Although it was summer, Sisley’s visit seems to have coincided with poor weather. Penarth Cliff, Evening, Stormy (1897) shows the low cliff overlooking the Bristol Channel. Lavernock Point is in the centre distance, and the two low islands on the horizon are Flat Holm and Steep Holm.

Lady’s Cove, West Side, Wales (1897) shows a small stretch of sandy beach at the eastern end of Langland Bay also known as Rotherslade. The large rock on the beach is Storr Rock, then probably known as Donkey Rock.

Langland Bay (1897) shows the plentiful shipping just off the coast, with vessels bound for and from the industrial port of Swansea.

Windstorm (1897) shows the coast, presumably in Langland Bay, during a gale.

Storr Rock (1897) is another view of this rock in Langland Bay.

In August, Sisley legitimised their children, and married Eugénie at long last in Cardiff Town Hall. They arrived back in Moret-sur-Loing on 1 October 1897. Later that winter, Sisley developed chronic pain. In early 1898, he once again tried to progress his application for French citizenship, but ultimately proved unsuccessful.

On 8 October 1898, Eugénie Sisley died at Moret. By then, Alfred had already developed his terminal illness, cancer of the throat, and by the end of that year was gravely ill himself. He died at Moret on 29 January 1899, still the only British national among the French Impressionists. Their two children were left almost penniless, but later that year an auction of Sisley’s work – with contributions from others including Monet, Degas, Pissarro and Renoir – raised over 150,000 Francs, probably more than the lifetime total of Sisley’s sales.

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.