The paintings of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898) had made their mark in the years following the Franco-Prussian War, when they achieved broad appeal despite the bitter divisions in French society. Their unreal and classical motifs painted in a plain style using pale colours must have been refreshingly different from social realism, the Academy, and the increasingly sketchy landscapes of the Impressionists. Puvis responded by painting increasingly symbolic themes in the same style.

Death and the Maiden from 1872 is most probably based on Schubert’s song of the same title, which expresses the inevitability of death, almost in terms of vanitas, which had last been popular during the Dutch Golden Age. This linked with the recent war, in which so many young French and Prussian people had died, and with contemporary scourges such as tuberculosis, which killed many young adults.

The maidens are seen dancing together, and picking wild flowers, as the personification of death is apparently asleep on the grass at the lower left, his black cloak wrapped around him and his hand resting on the shaft of his scythe.

Completed for and exhibited at the Salon of 1879, Young Women at the Seaside must be one of the palest and plainest paintings of any visit to the beach. Only one of the three young women faces the viewer, and she looks as if she’s about to die of ennui. Even the sea looks cold and distant.

Two years later, in 1881, he exhibited The Poor Fisherman (1881), which proved to be one of his most successful works. Significantly more colourful, Puvis provides rather more detail, although keeping well away from anything which might be mistaken for social realism or the increasingly popular Naturalism.

A thin if not quite emaciated fisherman stands, Christ-like, in his boat waiting for his catch to fill his net. Behind him on the marshy land is his wife picking flowers, and their infant, another possible reference to Jesus Christ.

Puvis painted at least four versions of this work, it was reproduced as a lithograph, and numerous contemporaries copied and admired it, declaring its importance in the development of painting at the time. It is thus one of the formative works which led to the Symbolist movement, whose manifesto was published five years later.

In 1882, Puvis painted the much paler Pleasant Land, which returns to the south coast of France and a small group of young women and their children who are engaged in dolce far niente just above the beach.

For the Salon of 1883, Puvis intensified the unreality with his nocturne The Dream. In a similarly placid and contemplative Mediterranean coastal setting, a traveller (vagrant), with their meagre possessions tied up in a cloth, is asleep under a crescent moon. Three angelic but wingless figures from a dream are shown in mid-air, two scattering stars and one bearing a laurel wreath.

Puvis had painted a succession of murals in France from the 1860s onwards. During the 1880s, these turned increasingly to the recurrent motif of classical figures in a ‘sacred grove’.

This panoramic easel painting of The Sacred Grove, Beloved of the Arts and the Muses made in the period 1884-89 is a good example of this series. Puvis alludes to the Muses, but doesn’t identify them as such with their customary attributes. Instead, two women (wingless again) are flying, one apparently playing the lyre.

The figures below are engaged in contemplation, discussion, and the central group are listening to a recital of poetry or song. Most of them wear golden laurel wreaths in their hair, and all are dressed in classical robes.

Charity (1887) is a personification of one of the seven Christian virtues, again set in timeless classical terms. She is the mother of twins, one of whom she holds by her breast. She is clasping the back of the neck of a dark wolf, lying beside her, adding a more unusual touch. This was quite a favourite motif, and only nine years previously had been painted by William-Adolphe Bouguereau in contrasting Academic style.

Of his surviving murals, I think The Sacred Wood is perhaps the most impressive. Completed in 1889, it graces Le Grand Amphithéâtre of La Sorbonne in Paris, and is his ultimate expression of this theme. It includes many classical and artistic references: near the centre, bent over the surface of a pond, is Narcissus, and towards the right, dressed in red, what appears to be the figure of Dante.

In 1890, Puvis was co-founder and first president of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, which became the dominant Salon in Paris.

Puvis continued his low-chroma paintings of coastal scenes with The Shepherd’s Song in 1891. Oddly, the shepherd referred to in the title is the smallest of its figures, perched part-way up an ill-defined rocky slope at the left, above two black goats, as three women are fetching water in the foreground.

During the early 1890s, Puvis developed the theme of the sacred grove and relocated it to a hillside above the city of Rouen, in his Inter artes et naturam (meaning Between Art and Nature), from about 1890-95. His viewpoint is Bonsecours, to the south-east of the city, looking north-west over its bridges and distinctive skyline. Clothing worn suggests a curious mixture of periods, from the classical at the left edge, to the contemporary at the mid-right.

The last of Puvis’ paintings I have to show is The Poet from 1896, which returns to the Mediterranean coast, where a poet, who has just dropped his lyre behind him, is swooning, as a winged angel comforts and supports him. At the upper right is a white dove representing the Holy Spirit. Perhaps this was his prescience of death.

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes died in Paris, where he had worked most of his life, on 24 October 1898, at the age of 73. Only three months before, he had finally married his partner of more than forty years, a Romanian princess who died just a month after their wedding.

Every night – sometimes during the day if we’re allowed – the great majority of us dream in our sleep. Those dreams have become part of many stories, and a rich theme for visual artists. This weekend, in this article and tomorrow’s sequel, I’m going to look at how paintings from the Renaissance onwards have shown those dreams.

I’m going to try to be rigorous in including only what are intended to be dreams, rather than visions or similar revelatory experiences. In these, the person experiencing the dream is asleep at the time. This excludes many of the most popular religious visions, such as the temptation of Saint Anthony, and the visions experienced by Joan of Arc.

Unless you have unusually good dream recall, most people can remember a few events they have experienced in dreams, but seldom much detail about exactly what they saw. As far as most are concerned, vivid dreams are no different from the real world we experience when awake. Dreams that turn sour to become nightmares are thoroughly convincing, and can be terrifying sensory combinations of sight, hearing, smell, touch, somatic sensation such as pain, and strong emotional responses.

For most paintings of dreams, the fundamental problem which the artist has to solve is how to represent and distinguish visually between the real world of the dreamer asleep, and the content of their dream. For this, compositional conventions developed during the Renaissance which have largely been followed ever since.

Tintoretto’s marvellous painting of the Dream of Saint Mark, or Pax Tibi Marce, probably from the early 1590s, shows this well.

According to the Golden Legend, Saint Peter sent Mark to preach in Aquileia, in northern Italy. When he was returning to Rome, Venetian legend claims that Mark fell asleep in a boat which was driven ashore at Venice during a storm. Mark dreamed that an angel appeared to him and said “Peace be with you Mark,” (Pax tibi Marce in Latin) “my evangelist. Here your body will find final rest, and the city which will rise here will name you its protector.” And that is the delightful but palpably false story of how Saint Mark came to be patron of the city of Venice.

Mark is shown asleep in the boat, his head lit with a halo emanating from the angel above, who is flying in a pool of light in the night sky. What Tintoretto shows us is what Mark might have seen in his dream had he seen it from the viewer’s eye, combining the ‘real’ view of the legend with the ‘dream’ view of the dreamer. It is, of course, a composite view concocted for the benefit of the viewer, as it existed neither in the minds of others there at the time, nor in that of the dreamer.

Murillo’s painting of the more widely known Jacob’s Dream, from 1660-65, shows this story from the book of Genesis, chapter 28, verses 10-19, using the same compositional approach.

Jacob went to sleep one night when he was travelling, and dreamed that a ladder had been set up, stretching from earth to heaven. Angels were ascending and descending the ladder. God spoke to him in the dream, telling him that the land on which Jacob was sleeping would be given by God to him and his descendants. Jacob then named the place Bethel, and in the future it did become part of the land of the Israelites.

Jacob is asleep at the foot of the ladder, as angels ascend and descend its rungs, making their way through a bright gap in the clouds. Again, this isn’t the view seen by Jacob in his dream, nor what might have been seen by someone standing where the viewer is, but an imaginary composite of the dream set within reality.

In those two paintings, the dream content is relatively circumscribed. Luca Giordano takes it to extreme in his painting of the Dream of Solomon from about 1694-95. This is based on the story told in the first book of Kings, chapter 3, verses 5-12. IThere, God appeared to the young King Solomon in a dream, inviting the king to ask for whatever he wanted. Instead of asking for long life or riches, Solomon asked for the wisdom to tell good from evil, for which he then became famous.

Giordano’s depiction of the dream almost fills the canvas, with the mighty figure of God, attendant angels, rolling clouds, and sundry classical figures. The composition, though, still follows convention, in showing the viewer the imaginary composite of Solomon’s dream as if seen by the viewer, with the sleeping figure of the king.

Sebastiano Ricci’s painting of The Dream of Aesculapius from about 1718 is at the other extreme, in telling a more obscure story in which an envoy despatched from Rome in quest of the god Aesculapius had a dream in which he saw the god beside his bed, holding a staff around which a snake was entwined (his attribute). The god told the envoy that he would change into a larger snake for the Romans to find and take back with them.

The envoy is asleep in a rather grand bed at the right, as Aesculapius floats in mid-air swathed in a column of cloud, as if he was an accomplished magician.

It was a Swiss artist who worked for much of his career in Britain who first came to specialise in painting dreams.

Henry Fuseli’s breakthrough painting of his career, The Nightmare (1781) was exhibited the following year at the Royal Academy, and remains the work by which he is best known.

It shows a daemonic incubus squatting on the torso of a young woman, who is laid out as if in a deep sleep in bed, her head thrown back, and her arms above her head. Lurking in the darkness to the left is the head of a black horse, whose eyes appear unseeing. The incubus stares directly at the viewer in a manner which arouses discomfort. Fuseli also painted a second version with a slightly different composition, which is as well-known.

A radical departure from previous paintings of dreams, it follows the same principles in providing the viewer with a composite. The two worlds are well differentiated by Fuseli’s use of colour.

Fuseli then turned to literary sources, in The Dream of Queen Katherine, (1781), taken from Shakespeare’s play Henry VIII, Act IV, Scene 2. This is a remarkable fragment of a larger painting intended to show this Shakespearean scene, commissioned by Thomas Macklin in 1779 for his Poets’ Gallery. Insufficient survives to cast light on his compositional strategy, but the swirl of nudes is a distinctive feature which almost became a cliché in paintings of dreams, as I will show.

Fuseli’s next notable dream painting is based on Milton’s Paradise Lost, and we’re fortunate in having both a chalk study and the finished oil painting.

The Shepherd’s Dream (1786) (above) is an elaborate drawing made in preparation for the finished oil painting below. As it shows many of the elements within Fuseli’s composition more clearly than the painting, it is probably more useful for understanding their narrative.

John Milton’s (1608-1674) Paradise Lost held a special appeal for Fuseli since he had been introduced to it when a student. These works show a scene in the poem when the fallen angels in the Hall of Pandemonium (in Hell) are compared to the fairies who bewitch a peasant with their music and dancing:
… fairy elves,
Whose midnight revels by a forest side
Or fountain some belated peasant sees,
Or dreams he sees, while over head the moon
Sits arbitress, and nearer to the earth
Wheels her pale course, they on their mirth and dance
Intent, with jocund music charm his ear;
At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds.

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

Exuberant though Fuseli’s depictions are, they adhere to the composite approach seen since the Renaissance, and the swirling bodies in the dream are placed where you’d expect to see angels and other heavenly figures.

The last painting I have to show from this classical phase in the painting of dreams comes from the great narrative painter JAD Ingres.

Ingres had been inspired by the (probably faux) Gaelic epic of Ossian from his time as a student in Rome. Shortly after his return to Paris, he was commissioned to paint two works for the bedroom to be used by Napoleon when he visited Rome. His Ossian’s Dream completed in 1813 is probably the best-known painting based on Ossianic stories. It shows an episode from Ossian’s epic, with the aged Ossian asleep on his harp, dreaming of past wars and loves.

This is true to tradition, but introduces one new device. To distinguish even more clearly what is being dreamed, Ingres has painted it in monochrome, which contrasts with the full-colour image of the sleeping Ossian below.

At the same time that Ingres was painting that, the great William Blake was moving the depiction of dreams even further beyond Fuseli’s work, as I will show tomorrow.

In the first article of this pair, I looked at some paintings of dreams – as opposed to visions and similar revelatory experiences – from the Renaissance to the early nineteenth century. In these, the convention is to show a composite image including what the dreamer might have seen of their dream had they looked from the position of the viewer, together with the ‘reality’ of the dreamer asleep in the physical world.

William Blake was influenced by Henry Fuseli, and followed his lead with Biblical and literary stories. Jacob’s Ladder, or Jacob’s Dream from 1799-1806 is one of the simplest and most beautiful of Blake’s large output of watercolours, and was painted for his principal patron, Thomas Butts. Blake was sufficiently proud of it that it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1808, and the following year in the artist’s private solo exhibition at his brother’s house.

The painting shows Jacob, asleep, at its foot. Right by his head is a spiral staircase which ascends to the top of the paper, thence we presume to heaven. Figures are ascending and descending the staircase: although some bear angel’s wings, many do not. The whole scene appears to be taking place inside some sort of ‘big top’ tent, with the starry sky of a moonlit night behind, but there is no trace of any ladder in sight.

Blake also developed Fuseli’s swirl of dream figures into a distinctive divine whirlwind in several of his later works. This watercolour of Milton’s Mysterious Dream from about 1816-20 combines sweeping curves of figures with abundant eyes. This is based on Il Penseroso, lines 139-140 and 145-154, rather than Paradise Lost.

In about 1825, Blake painted his version of Queen Katherine’s Dream, clearly inspired by Fuseli’s. The exuberant stream of figures dominates the painting, breaking up into formations of individual figures, and coalescing in other places to form local ‘tubes’. Blake’s ultimate development of the divine whirlwind was in his famous painting of Dante’s Inferno, The Circle of the Lustful: Francesca da Rimini (The Whirlwind of Lovers) in about 1824.

Although not well known outside his native Russia, shortly after Blake died Karl Bryullov painted a series of works showing dreams, among them this marvellous watercolour of a wishful Dream of a Girl Before a Sunrise from 1830-33. It adheres to pictorial convention, with the dreamed content being shown partially transparent to help its distinction.

Another literary account of a dream which has become quite a popular theme in painting is Dante’s dream of Leah and Rachel, the third of three dreams described in Dante’s Purgatory.

This takes place just before Dante enters Earthly Paradise at the top of Purgatory, and involves the two Biblical sisters Leah and Rachel. Leah, who is conventionally seen as representing the active way of life by ‘doing’, gathers flowers and weaves them into a garland. In contrast, she refers to her younger sister Rachel, representing the contemplative way of life by ‘seeing’, who is constantly looking at her own reflection in a mirror.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Dante’s Vision of Rachel and Leah (1855) is unusual for breaking with tradition. The figures of the two sisters dominate the watercolour, and Dante the dreamer is seen walking in the distance. This neither matches Dante’s account of the dream, where he and Leah conversed, nor does it show the traditional composite of dream content and reality.

Marie Spartali Stillman’s Dante’s Vision of Leah and Rachel, painted over thirty years later in 1887, is more true to Dante’s verse and traditional composition. The poet is sat at the left, wearing his customary red chaperon, Leah (in red) stands fashioning a garland of flowers for her head, and Rachel is staring at her reflection. The whole is set in a northern Italian landscape, rising to the southern edge of the Alps in the far distance.

Luis Ricardo Falero’s Faust’s Vision from 1880 refers to an episode early in Goethe’s play, of the developing relationship between Faust and Mephistopheles. Here the latter promises Faust great sensory delight in his dreams, as he cunningly contrives to own Faust’s soul. A torrent of very naked young women flow through the air past the sleeping Faust, as Mephistopheles conjures them up for him.

This is reminiscent of both Fuseli and Blake’s whirlwinds of figures, and employs a traditional composite approach.

For all his rebellious style, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’ The Dream is surprisingly traditional. In a placid and contemplative Mediterranean coastal setting, a traveller (vagrant), with their meagre possessions tied up in a cloth, is asleep under a crescent moon. Three angelic but wingless figures from a dream are shown in mid-air, two scattering stars and one bearing a laurel wreath.

Contrasting with Puvis de Chavannes’ reflective art following the Franco-Prussian War, other artists including Édouard Detaille were stuck in revanchism, playing on the same feelings of patriotism which had mistakenly drawn France into the war. Detaille depicts these in The Dream from 1888.

Rather than showing military action from the war, Detaille here makes a direct political statement. Showing a group of young conscripts just before reveille, when on exercise probably in Champaign, he paints their collective dream of previous battles, spread across the coloured clouds of the dawn sky.

This ‘flashback’ technique sided with the rising militarism and thirst for righting the wrongs which the Franco-Prussian War had done France, and the following year conscription was introduced. The painting was awarded a medal, was bought by the French state, and presented at the 1889 World Fair. Its huge canvas is now one of the less popular works on display in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

This is one of the few paintings showing a collective dream, and employs conventional composition to do so. The soldiers of the dream merge into the dawn clouds, making clear their unreal nature.

Ferdinand Hodler’s symbolist painting of Night from 1889-90 appears to refer back to Fuseli’s Nightmare, although the artist’s later account doesn’t mention that. Four young men and three young women are sleeping outdoors, under black blankets. In the middle of the group, the black-cloaked figure of death is crouching between the legs of one of the men, who is understandably alarmed. This painting can therefore be read as telling the all too common story of early death among adults at the time, notably from tuberculosis and other infectious diseases, something that Hodler knew well.

This painting was submitted for exhibition in Geneva in 1891, but was rejected as being obscene, so Hodler exhibited it in a separate building nearby, causing quite a scandal. The artist also submitted it to the Salon in Paris, where it received praise from Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and the sculptor Auguste Rodin. It was exhibited again at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900, again to acclaim.

For all its modernity, seen as a painting of a dream it follows convention.

Henri Rousseau’s The Dream from 1910 is, at first sight, another challenge to read. A nude reclines on a couch which is surrounded by lush jungle, complete with lions, an elephant, a local playing a wind instrument, and huge flowers. I suspect that the nude woman is intended to be the dreamer, surrounded by her vivid dream of a jungle, in accordance with convention.

My final painting, though, does defy convention, in one of Paul Nash’s most complex and elaborate surrealist paintings.

Landscape from a Dream (1936-38) was apparently inspired by Freud’s theories of the significance of dreams as reflections of the unconscious. Nash locates this collection of incongruous objects on the Dorset coast, a landscape which he associated with the praeternatural. Dominating the scene is a large framed planar mirror, almost parallel with the picture plane.

Stood at the right end of the mirror is a hawk, which is staring at its own reflection, which Nash explained is a symbol of the material world. To the left, the mirror reflects several floating spheres, which refer to the soul. The reflection shows that behind the viewer, a red sun is setting in a red sky, with another hawk flying high, and away from the scene.

To the right of the hawk is a five-panelled screen which is made of glass, through which the coastal landscape can be seen: it is a screen which does not screen.

Much as I love Nash’s paintings, they can be a nightmare to read.

No one painted trees, particularly cypresses, like Vincent van Gogh. These didn’t come out of the blue, but had evolved over a period of a couple of years, as his brushstrokes became more organised into co-ordinated waves and swirls in their foliage.

Early signs appear in his painting of a Blossoming Chestnut Tree from 1887. Although there are a couple of glimpses of the underlying anatomical trunk and branch structure, this chestnut, in full leaf and flower, has a more solid canopy built from visible and organised brushstrokes. These marks are starting to form whorls and swirls in places, including the background vegetation. The tree is only demarcated from that background – the grass below, and trees behind – by discontinuity in the structure and orientation of his marks.

When van Gogh was in the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole mental asylum at Saint-Rémy near Arles, he could see through a window a view of wheatfields and dark Provençal cypress trees, with the Alpilles Mountains in the distance. During a period of intense creativity in June and July of 1889, he first drew parts of this view, then turned those drawings into paintings.

Perhaps this pen-and-ink drawing (above) was his first take, showing these two cypresses almost superimposed. From this, he made a painting in oils (below), which follows it closely.

He then broadened the view to extend to a Wheatfield with Cypresses (1889), which he drew using black chalk and his reed pen (above), probably in late June. To achieve this view, he may well have left the immediate surrounds of the asylum and worked en plein air, out in the heat.

Satisfied that this would make a good painting, he took a prepared canvas of about 73 by 93 cm (29 x 37 inches) and started to paint, again in front of the motif. He may have made a preparatory drawing in charcoal on the canvas, then laid down thin layers of paint, probably including lead white at this stage.

It’s possible that he completed the painting in a single sitting, as this initial version seems to have been intended as an oil sketch for a more finished version which he painted later that summer.

The detail above shows the tops of the wheat towards the lower left of the field, in the foreground. Over his initial thin layers of paint, van Gogh laid thick gestural strokes of highly chromatic paint, orientating those strokes according to the object they show. In the golden yellow of the wheat there are blues and greens, mostly showing through from his underpainting, with superimposed impasto of pale straw, ochre, and pale greens.

This detail, taken from the edge of the wheatfield at the lower right corner of the painting, shows three distinct areas of brushwork: the diagonal strokes forming the standing wheat, swirling loops to form the grasses and weeds below, and shorter marks forming a more random pattern for the heads of the wheat in the upper section.

At the centre of the canvas, from where this detail is taken, impasto blue and white have mixed with the green and yellow of the fields below. This shows that much of the painting, at least, was painted wet on wet, either in the same session or on consecutive days. Some of the darker green at the right may have been painted later, onto paint which had by then become touch dry.

An X-ray image of the whole painting shows in white those passages which are likely to contain the most lead white, and some other pigments which are most radio-opaque. This also reveals the pattern of brushstrokes well.

Van Gogh’s choice of pigments is unusual too. At this time, he was using both lead white, which he tended to apply in underpainting, and Chinese white (zinc oxide), which was more likely applied in upper layers. Some of the greens are here made by mixing synthetic ultramarine blue with yellow, as well as with viridian and other pigments. In addition to ultramarine, van Gogh used cobalt blue, most commonly in the sky.

This first oil sketch was finished by early July, when van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, his art dealer, “I have a canvas of cypresses with some ears of wheat, some poppies, a blue sky like a piece of Scotch plaid; the former painted with a thick impasto like the Monticelli’s, and the wheat field in the sun, which represents the extreme heat, very thick too.” This masterpiece is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, purchased in 1993 for $57 million thanks to donations.

In late July and early August, van Gogh had something of a psychiatric crisis, and he didn’t return to paint his ‘finished’ version until late August, apparently.

He then made this second version, in the studio; this is now in London’s National Gallery. He finally painted a third and smaller version in the studio, which he sent to his mother and sister as a gift; that is now in a private collection.

Vincent van Gogh continued to paint his wonderful cypress trees almost up to the day of his death. Painted just two months before then, his Road with Cypress and Star from 1890 is perhaps his ultimate expression of the form, texture, and colours of cypress trees in Provence, its swirling brushstrokes rising to form halos around the crescent moon and solitary star.

No one else has ever painted like Vincent van Gogh, before or since.

At the end of the sixth canto of Orlando Furioso, the knight Ruggiero had been transported by the hippogriff to Alcina’s island. Despite his determination to avoid her, he was lured into her city by two fine ladies riding unicorns. They have asked him to deal with a woman monster named Erifilla, who guards the bridge on the nearby marsh.

Ariosto warns us that the events in the seventh canto are going to seem unbelievable, in the way that travellers’ tales often are, even when they’re true. Erifilla’s armour shines and sparkles with gems, and she rides a huge wolf. Her crest consists of the image of a poisonous toad, though. As Ruggiero approaches her, she challenges him to stop, but he continues. She prepares to fight, as he throws his spear prematurely and misses her. He’s quick to brandish his sword, but Erifilla is already lying inert on the ground in the midst of flowers and grass.

The two fine ladies call on Ruggiero not to harm her, so he sheathes his sword and accompanies the ladies through a dark wood, up a rough mountain track, and into a park, where he sees a palace. As they approach its gate, Alcina comes out to greet him. She is ravishingly beautiful, and without blemish, and instantly beguiles Ruggiero.

Alcina entertains the knight to a lavish dinner, following which they play a whispering game to pair themselves off as lovers.

They eventually go to their rooms, Ruggiero alone and eagerly anticipating the arrival of Alcina. She keeps him waiting, and when she appears, she is wearing a transparent silk négligé. After their first night of lovemaking, they continue their affair in secret for many nights. They spend all the day together, going fishing out in the park.

While Alcina and Ruggiero are fully occupied with one another’s pleasure, Agramante is laying siege to Charlemagne, and Ruggiero’s love Bradamante pines for him. She had searched hard for him, and continues to ask everyone she meets in case they might know where he has gone, refusing to accept that he is dead. She then resolves to return to Merlin’s tomb in the hope that she might learn of Ruggiero’s fate.

There Bradamante meets Melissa, the good sorceress, again, and learns that Ruggiero was last seen flying off on a hippogriff. Melissa sees that Ruggiero is now wasting his life in the pursuit of pleasure on Alcina’s island, where he is enslaved. Melissa promises to rescue Ruggiero, departing for India first thing in the morning, provided that Bradamante gives her the magic ring which counteracts all spells.

Atlante, the old wizard who flew the hippogriff and imprisoned Ruggiero; Melissa, good sorceress and follower of Merlin; Alcina, who beguiled Ruggiero with her faux beauty.

Within a day, Melissa, the magic ring safely in her purse, reaches Alcina’s island. Once there, she transforms herself to look like Atlante, the evil sorceror who had first imprisoned Ruggiero in his steel castle. She then hides in the gardens around Alcina’s palace, waiting for Ruggiero to be alone. When he walks out to take the air, Melissa challenges him, questioning his un-knightly appearance and reminding him of his destiny. She compares Alcina to a whore, and puts the knight to shame. At this point, Melissa slips the magic ring onto Ruggiero’s little finger, and breaks Alcina’s enchantments.

Melissa explains the situation with Bradamante, and how she has come to rescue him from the clutches of Alcina. Ruggiero quickly develops a deep hatred for Alcina, and thanks to the magic ring he sees her in her true light, not as a bewitching beauty but as the hideous and wizened old crone that she really is. Ruggiero doesn’t let Alcina know that he can see who she is, but goes to the palace armoury to retrieve his sword and shield. He avoids taking either the horse that Alcina had assigned him, or the hippogriff, riding away instead on Astolfo’s horse Rabicano, for the gate through which he can leave Alcina’s land and enter that of the good Logistilla.

Ruggiero has to fight his way through the gate before he can break through it to safety, and head for a wood. He meets one of Logistilla’s servants with his falcon. The servant demands to know where the knight is heading, and when Ruggiero refuses to tell him, threatens to loose his falcon at him. The knight ends up being pursued by the falcon, the servant’s horse, the servant, and his dog – all running like the wind after him. Ruggiero is forced to uncover Atlante’s magic shield and blind his pursuers, who promptly collapse and fall asleep behind him.

Meanwhile Alcina learns of Ruggiero’s escape, and commands her army to stop him. Half are sent after the fleeing knight, and the others to embark on ships to prevent him from leaving by sea. This leaves the palace unmanned, giving Melissa the opportunity to free all the prisoners who Alcina kept spellbound as plants and other objects. Once turned back into people, they hurry away.

When Melissa frees Astolfo from being a myrtle bush, she searches for his lance, which is renowned for its unerring accuracy in striking its target. With that, she rides off with Astolfo to Logistilla’s land. Ruggiero has now entered a hot and arid section of desert.

Back in Scotland, Rinaldo, now held in high esteem by the King of Scotland and his court, after he had saved the king’s daughter from execution, decides that it’s time to put Charlemagne’s request for support to them. His case convinces the king, who puts all his troops at Rinaldo’s disposal, regretting that he is himself too old to join them.

As Scotland mobilises its men, Rinaldo rides to Berwick, where he boards a ship to London to plead with the English court to show the same support. There the Prince of Wales not only honours the King of England’s pledge of support, but adds those from neighbouring islands and appoints a day when they will depart.

Rinaldo also thinks of his love for Angelica. She was last asking an old hermit the way to the coast, so that she could flee not just from France, but from Europe. Much to his surprise, the hermit found himself lusting after the beautiful Angelica, and he tried to keep her with him. When she speeds off on her horse, he tries unsuccessfully to get his donkey to keep up with her. He returns to his cave, where he summons daemons and commands them to put him in possession of her horse.

The hermit then waits until Angelica has been making progress along the coast of Gascony, where he drives the horse out to sea with Angelica still in its saddle. As the horse swims further out, she is unable to turn it round and head back to the land, and weeps in despair. Eventually, towards dusk, the horse heads for a lonely and forbidding section of coast, where, amid rocks and caves, the horse abandons her to the night.

Angelica then laments. As she is speaking of her chastity, the old hermit descends from the cliff top, where he has been brought by his daemons, and stands on the lonely beach beside her. He first consoles her, then produces a bottle of elixir which leaves the damsel deeply asleep on the beach.

The hermit fondles and kisses her limp body, and tries to rape her while she is unconscious. But after all these years of disuse, he remains impotent, and is forced to sleep beside her instead. Fortune hasn’t finished with the old hermit yet, and will play more tricks with him.

Principal Characters

Agramante, King of Africa, who is leading the war against Charlemagne in revenge for the killing of his father, Troiano. Non-Christian.

Alcina, sister of Morgana and King Arthur, a treacherous and evil sorceress.

Angelica, beautiful daughter of the ruler of Cathay, who is loved and pursued by innumerable knights both Christian and not.

Astolfo, son of the King of England who is abducted by Alcina then turned into a myrtle bush.

Atlante, an evil magician who is in fact an old man, but abducts people to keep in his magic steel castle, where he tries to protect Ruggiero from his future.

Bradamante, Rinaldo’s sister, “the celebrated Maid”, a brave Christian knight who is the equal of her brother. She is loved by Ruggiero.

Charlemagne, Charles the Great, Christian King of France.

Erifilla, a huge woman monster who guards a bridge in the marsh of Alcina’s island.

Logistilla, a good sorceress whose lands have been stolen by Alcina and Morgana.

Melissa, a pupil and follower of Merlin, and a good sorceress.

Merlin, the good sorceror from Arthurian legend, long dead but still active in spirit.

Morgana, sister of Alcina and King Arthur, a treacherous and evil sorceress, ‘Morgan Le Fey’.

Rinaldo, cousin of Orlando, one of Charlemagne’s paladins and bravest knights.

Ruggiero, son of the King of Reggio, a non-Christian knight who is in love with Bradamante.

The artists

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Having produced large sets of illustrations for classics such as Dante’s Divine Comedy earlier in his career, he started work on a set for Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso in the late 1870s, for publication in 1879. These are the last major illustrations which he made. This article looks at his paintings.

Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) was one of the greatest narrative painters of Europe. Flemish by adoption as a child, he trained in Antwerp, becoming a Master by 1598. After eight years in Italy, where he painted for the Mantuan court, he travelled extensively in Europe on both diplomatic missions and to paint for royal courts. From 1621-30, he was engaged by Marie de’ Medici to paint a cycle of works celebrating her and her late husband Henry IV, and it was during that period that Rubens painted the work shown above. He retired outside Antwerp in 1630, and continued to paint masterpieces until his death ten years later.

Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1794-1872) was a German painter who trained at the Vienna Academy, from where he went to Rome in 1815 to join the Nazarene movement there, with Johann Friedrich Overbeck and others. He was involved in the campaign to re-introduce traditional fresco painting, and in 1822 was commissioned to paint frescoes depicting Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso in the entrance hall to the Villa Massimo in Rome. He completed these by 1827, when he returned to Munich to paint frescoes for the new palace there showing scenes from the Nibelungenlied. He later turned to Biblical illustrations and designs for stained glass windows.

References

Wikipedia on Ariosto
Wikipedia on Orlando Furioso

Barbara Reynolds (translator) (1975, 1977) Orlando Furioso, parts 1 and 2, Penguin. ISBNs 978 0 140 44311 0, 978 0 140 44310 3. Verse translation with extensive introduction and notes.
Guido Waldman (translator) (1974) Orlando Furioso, Oxford World’s Classics. ISBN 978 0 19 954038 9. Prose translation.

By the start of 1876, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) had, with Monet, Sisley and others, laid down the fundamentals of Impressionist style, and his paintings were starting to attract collectors. But most important of all, his portraiture commissions were beginning to pay the bills.

In the Spring of 1876, Renoir again exhibited with his colleagues at the Second Impressionist Exhibition, with seventeen oil paintings and a pastel. These were predominantly figures and portraits.

Renoir had been close to Alfred Sisley, seen in his portrait of 1876, and the two had often painted en plein air side by side. This painting was exhibited at the Third Impressionist Exhibition.

During the late Spring of 1876, Renoir made various studies and sketches near his new rented house and studio in Montmartre. He then worked them up during May into one of his – and Impressionism’s – masterpieces, Bal du moulin de la Galette (Dance at the Moulin de la Galette) (1876). This was exhibited at the Third Impressionist Exhibition too, and has become one of the canonical European paintings of the late nineteenth century.

There are two versions of this painting: this larger canvas is thought to have been painted in Renoir’s studio from a smaller sketch which he made in front of the motif. The latter painting is now sadly in a private collection.

In September, Renoir went to paint the portrait of the wife of Alphonse Daudet, an author, at his house in Champrosay, to the south-east of Paris. While he was there, he painted Banks of the Seine at Champrosay (1876) en plein air. This shows the artist’s methodical brushwork at the height of his Impressionist landscape style, and was exhibited at the Third Impressionist Exhibition.

Considerable speculation surrounds the use of black paint by the Impressionists. Although often quoted as banning the colour from their palettes, Renoir wasn’t afraid to use it even during the height of the movement. Sure enough, ivory/bone black has been identified in At the Theatre (La Première Sortie) of 1876-7, in passages such as the rail at the lower left.

The Spring of 1877 brought the Third Impressionist Exhibition, at which Renoir exhibited twenty-one paintings.

In the Café from about 1877 appears to be an oil sketch of a café scene in the Montmartre district. Surprisingly, it was accepted for the Salon of 1878, his first work to be exhibited there for eight years.

Another oil sketch, Chez la modiste (1878) shows a couple of young and fashionable women at the milliner’s, a theme which Degas also found particularly paintable.

In the autumn of 1876, Renoir was commissioned by Georges Charpentier to decorate his Paris apartment, and to paint his wife and children in portraits which were exhibited at the Third Impressionist Exhibition. Following those, Renoir made one of his finest family portraits, of Mme. Charpentier and Her Children (1878). This shows mother, Marguérite-Louise Lemonnier (1848–1904), daughter, Georgette-Berthe (1872–1945), and son, Paul-Émile-Charles (1875–1895), and was exhibited at the Salon in 1879, where it was praised highly.

In the summer of 1879, Renoir campaigned in the country for a change, along the River Seine near Bougival and Chatou.

Renoir’s The Boating Party at Chatou (1879, or possibly 1880-81) captures both social rowing in the foreground, and two sports rowers further out in the River Seine. The latter are most probably in single sculls, just as shown by the American Thomas Eakins in 1871. Although Renoir is likely to have seen at least one of Caillebotte’s paintings of boating on the Yerres, neither are likely to have been aware of Eakins’ paintings.

Later in that summer, Renoir visited the Normandy coast, where he painted on his host’s estate at Wargemont, and on the Channel coast at Berneval, where he painted this small family group of Mussel-Fishers at Berneval, Normandy Coast (1879). This was exhibited at the Salon the following year, and later purchased from the artist by Durand-Ruel.

Both Edgar Degas and Renoir painted the Cirque Fernando in Paris, the latter in his Acrobats at the Cirque Fernando, from 1879, which shows the sisters Francisca and Angelina Wartenberg in the ring during a performance.

By the Water from about 1880 is believed to have been painted on the terrace of the Restaurant Fournaise on the Île de Chatou, which he was soon to use for his major work Luncheon of the Boating Party (see below). If that’s the case, then what appears to be a lake in the background is actually the River Seine.

Although it may have been painted up to three years earlier, Renoir’s In the Woods from about 1880 is one of the most radical landscapes prior to Neo-Impressionism, which it closely resembles. Here all is light and colour, and form has dissolved into a myriad of small touches of paint.

View of the Coast near Wargemont in Normandy was painted while Renoir was staying at his patron’s villa in Normandy again during the summer of 1880. He took time out from portraiture and decorative painting for his employer to sneak off and paint local landscapes in front of the motif, including this clifftop farmhouse.

During the summer of 1880, Renoir started work on another of his masterpieces, which he didn’t complete until the following year: Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880-81), another complex group of figures.

This was set on the Île de Chatou at the Restaurant Fournaise, and funded by commissioned portraits over the period. Among his models are his partner and later wife Aline Charigot (left foreground, with affenpinscher dog), the actress Jeanne Samary (upper right), and fellow artist Gustave Caillebotte (seated, lower right). This work was exhibited at the Seventh Impressionist Exhibition in 1882, where it was praised by several critics.

References

Wikipedia.
Wikipedia on Luncheon of the Boating Party.

It’s not very often that you come across an artist active in the twentieth century who not only develops from the style and optics of Vermeer, but painted several ‘problem pictures’. Not only that, but he was American: William McGregor Paxton (1869–1941).

He was born in Baltimore, MD, and moved to Newton Corner, MA, when still a child. He started his art training at Cowles Art School in Boston at the age of 18, then studied with Dennis Miller Bunker, a friend of John Singer Sargent. He was one of the American artists who won himself a place at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he became a pupil of Jean-Léon Gérôme.

Paxton married in 1899, his wife both modelling for him and managing his career successfully. He taught at the Museum of Fine Arts School in Boston, but lost many of his paintings in a studio fire in 1904. He was a successful and sought-after portraitist, with two US Presidents among his subjects.

In addition to portraits, Paxton painted domestic interiors with two distinctive features: he adopted what he considered to be the optical system developed by Vermeer, and some aspects of his lighting and style, and he favoured genteel unresolved narratives in the manner of ‘problem pictures’ which were popular between about 1890 and 1910. These are best seen in this small selection of his works.

In the Studio from 1905 is a good demonstration of what he termed Vermeer’s “binocular vision”. His model is in crisp focus, and as the eye wonders further away from her as the optical centre of the painting, edges and details become progressively more blurred. When you look at the folding screen at the left, it’s really quite soft focus, much as had been used in Vermeer’s paintings.

This painting of a woman marvelling at The String of Pearls from 1908 shows this clearly when you study his rendering of the different strings of pearls across its image. Sharpest focus is in the woman’s face and the pearls she is staring at wide-eyed. Those adorning her dress are a bit fuzzier, and those in the reflection and on her lap resemble the defocussed jewellery in some of Vermeer’s paintings.

The following year, Paxton’s Tea Leaves (1909) not only uses this ‘binocular vision’ but lures us to speculate what is going on. Two well-dressed young women are taking tea together. The woman in the blue-trimmed hat seems to be staring into the leaves at the bottom of her cup – a traditional means of fortune-telling – but neither seems to be talking to the other.

Notice the zone of relative sharpness extending from the right shoulder of the woman at the left, across the silver teapot to the hands of the woman in the hat. This contrasts markedly with the much softer blue edge of the screen above them, for instance.

Paxton not only had the advantage of being able to study Vermeer’s paintings – he and his wife travelled in Europe – and understanding of modern optics, but experienced the widespread use of cameras with lenses that had limited depth of field (sometimes erroneously referred to as depth of focus). Objects beyond the depth of field first appear slightly softer, then more blurred, until they can finally lose all form. This has been exploited to produce optical effects in the out-of-focus zone, known most recently as bokeh. And like Vermeer, Paxton was not only exploring depth of field effects, but bokeh in objects such as jewellery. Yet the term bokeh wasn’t used, in Western photography at least, until around 1997.

Paxton’s domestic interiors included not just the posh people, but their servants, here The House Maid also from 1910. She should be dusting with the feather mop tucked under her arm. Instead she’s completely absorbed in reading. The sharpest focus here is in the maid’s left arm and shoulder, rather than the objets d’art on the chess table in the foreground.

The New Necklace (1910) is one of Paxton’s best-known paintings, and perhaps his most intriguing open narrative. A younger woman is sat at a narrow ‘bureau’ writing. She has turned her chair so that she can reach behind and hold out her left hand to receive the new necklace of the title. This is being lowered into her hand by a slightly older woman, in a dark blue-green dress, whose face and eyes are cast down, and her left hand rests against her chin.

Unlike the ‘problem pictures’ which had become so popular at the Royal Academy in London, this story is light and whimsical, not a matter of life and death. But the viewer is still invited to imagine what transaction is taking place in front of that glittery folding screen, and under the watchful eye of the small figurine at the upper left. What hold does the seated woman have over the other?

Most of Paxton’s paintings are of his time, and quite unlike those of Vermeer in their motifs or even composition. Woman with Book from about 1910 is one notable exception, with sunlight cast through the window at the left, a woman (who even looks like one of Vermeer’s models) standing reading a large book, and a painting on the wall behind her. Its optical focus seems to be in the purse which she holds high against her left shoulder. And look at those blurry bright reflections below the arm of the chair in the left foreground.

The Breakfast from 1911 could so easily have been hung alongside some of the great European ‘problem pictures’ of the day. Should it perhaps have been titled Marriage of Convenience?

There appears to be a long gap in Paxton’s domestic interiors from 1911 to The Figurine in 1921. Their narratives seem to have faded away, but his ‘binocular vision’ is just as marked, putting the painted figurine into sharp focus, but making the woman’s face far softer. It’s also intriguing that, late in his career, Paxton turned to paintings of sculpted figures, in just the way that his former teacher Gérôme had done a quarter of a century earlier.

There is one undated open narrative, The Escape, which shows a woman who appears to be trying to let herself out of the house and escape, maybe from the confines of Paxton’s painting too?

Paxton also painted at least one mythological work, Nausicaä, from before 1937. Here he picks the moment of Odysseus’ first appearance before Nausicaä, just before her handmaids scatter in fright. Although the text of the Odyssey doesn’t state that they were nude at this stage, when they were playing ball after lunch, the artist startles us with eight females and one male nude packed into a single canvas. Perhaps it’s just as well this is a small image, for which I apologise.

Paxton was an important figure in the development of painting in North America, co-founder of the Guild of Boston Artists, and a leader of the Boston School of painting. He is also one of relatively few artists to have died when painting his wife: he suffered a heart attack and died in his living room studio in 1941, at the age of seventy-two.

Looking at his paintings now, I think they explain not how Vermeer achieved his optical effects, but more importantly why.

Reference

Wikipedia.

I’m extremely grateful to Mark Bernstein of Eastgate Systems for drawing my attention to this artist and his wonderful paintings.

Some of the major literary works of the nineteenth century had very unusual origins. Take Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbô, published in 1862, which is based on a contemporary Greek account of the history of Rome between 264-146 BCE, even in those days a subject unlikely to have wide appeal. Yet it was read, discussed, turned into several operas, and even appears as an extra in Orson Welles’ movie Citizen Kane.

The story of Salammbô is drawn, reasonably faithfully, from the first book of Polybius’ Histories, one of the most obscure sources used in a major novel of the time, and a strange choice for an author who had reached fame with Madame Bovary (1856). Flaubert may have renewed interest in Carthaginian history, but its horrific brutality sickened many readers, and it remains controversial even today.

Salammbô is set in the period following the First Punic War, which after twenty-three years of fighting between the empires of Rome and Carthage, led to Roman victory. The defeated Carthaginians faced problems with the many mercenaries who they had employed in the war, and were unable to pay or placate them, so the mercenaries attacked the city of Carthage in revenge.

Salammbô is the fictional daughter of the leading Carthaginian general Hamilcar Barca, and is a priestess. The leader of the mercenaries Matho falls in love/lust with her when she tries to quell the rioting mercenaries at the opening feast in the book. The mercenaries lay siege to the city, and Matho enters it through an aqueduct. This gives him the opportunity to steal the Zaïmph, a sacred veil, and to try to break into Salammbô’s bedchamber.

There follows a series of battles between regular Carthaginian forces and the mercenaries, leading to the latter trapping the Carthaginians. Salammbô is then sent in disguise to recover the Zaïmph from Matho. When they meet in his tent, they believe one another to be apparitions, so make love. The Carthaginians then counter-attack, Salammbô returns with the Zaïmph, and the Carthaginians retreat to their city.

When the mercenaries cut the water supply off to the city, the children of its citizens are sacrificed in the hope of relieving their plight. Relief arrives, driving the mercenaries away and trapping thousands of them to die of starvation. Matho is captured, tortured, and executed by the Carthaginians, causing Salammbô to die of shock. With both Matho and Salammbô dead, the curse of the Zaïmph has been realised, in bringing death to all those who touch it.

It doesn’t appear to have been painted by a well-known artist until the last decade of the century, thirty years after the publication of Flaubert’s novel.

It was Georges Rochegrosse, with his fondness for gruesome narratives and beautiful women, who first tackled a scene from the story, in his Salammbô and the Doves from 1893. Despite ample opportunities to revel in violent death and/or nudity, Rochegrosse seems to have become almost Pre-Raphaelite here, with the beautiful Salammbô reclining fully dressed on a chaise longue among a flock of white doves. I’m at a loss to explain the doves in symbolic terms, though.

The end of the nineteenth century was clearly the right time for paintings of Salammbô, for just three years after Rochegrosse, Léon Bonnat painted a portrait of the great operatic soprano Rose Caron in the role of Salammbô (1896). Bonnat seems to have been a bit slow off the mark, as Caron had first sung the title role in its premiere in Brussels in early 1890. Ernest Reyer’s opera didn’t make its way to Paris for two years, and is now very rarely performed.

Salammbô also caught the eye of the great Czech illustrator and painter Alphonse Mucha, who was working in Paris for the actress Sarah Bernhardt when he made this colour lithograph of Incantation (1897). The print above was a free gift for subscribers to a journal of prints, and that below, with its more restrained colours, is a copy signed by the artist. Either way, Mucha cast her in her role as priestess, looking up to heaven, with the city of Carthage in the background, and marvellously Art Nouveau, of course.

For a while, the Carthaginian priestess seems to have vanished again, until she was revived by Gaston Bussière, a Symbolist who exhibited at Joséphin Péladan’s Salon de la Rose-Croix. Bussière had been a pupil of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and a close friend of Gustave Moreau, and worked as an illustrator on Oscar Wilde’s Salomé and several works by Flaubert.

Bussière’s first painting of Salammbô in 1907 also shows her as priestess, and suggests that it too may have originally been intended as a portrait of someone playing the role. She looks with piercing eyes straight at the viewer, but somehow doesn’t say much of her story.

When Bussière revisited Salammbô in 1920, she had undergone Salomean conversion. Now standing naked and flirtatious beside an extraordinarily erect snake, she’s still in a temple, but is now a glowing pagan goddess of seduction. This painting is in the Musée des Ursulines in Mâcon, France, which occupies the site of a former convent!

Towards the end of his life, a former pupil of Léon Bonnat at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Henri Adrien Tanoux, made the last painting I have to show of Salammbô, in 1921. Tanoux was no Symbolist, but a realist who, like Rochegrosse, was famous for his beautiful nudes. She’s another seductive Salome, a large red rose held to her breast, with one possible link to Flaubert’s story: the diaphanous veil which is wound from her left arm to her legs, with its unusual eye-like motifs in gold. Could that be the cursed Zaïmph?

Reference

Wikipedia on Flaubert’s novel.

Of all the animals exotic to Europe, the elephant must have the longest and most distinguished history, including its depiction in paintings. This pair of articles looks at a selection of those, today covering the period up to the middle of the eighteenth century, and tomorrow following through to the twentieth.

Although the African elephant is now only found in sub-Saharan Africa, there was a North African species which became extinct in Roman times. The famous military elephants used by Hannibal in battle are believed to have been North African by species. Asian elephants were formerly found much further west and north than their current limited distribution, and ranged through coastal Iran, up through the Fertile Crescent into eastern Turkey. Europeans of the past thus had opportunities for contact with elephants from ancient times onwards.

One of the earliest ‘modern’ European paintings of an elephant is this sadly worn Elephant Fresco from 1473, in the Castello Sforzesco in Milan, Italy. Its anonymous artist was clearly familiar with the species and its characteristic prehensile trunk.

Images of elephants used in combat are quite widespread. This anonymous and undated fresco of a War Elephant in Bressanone Cathedral, in the South Tyrol of Italy, also suggests the origin of the placename the Elephant and Castle, which remains not uncommon among British pubs. The most famous of these, near Waterloo in south London, may have been established before 1600.

Hieronymus Bosch was and remains famous for his extraordinary images of composite creatures which evolve across his paintings. Seen here in the left panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights (c 1495-1505) is a curious mixture of the real and the imaginary. There’s an elephant and a giraffe, both early depictions of the species, together with monkeys, brown bears, rabbits, and more. But there are also some oddities, including a unicorn.

It was the exploits of the Carthaginian general Hannibal and the eventual destruction of the empire and city of Carthage which have provided some of the best opportunities to see elephants in European paintings.

Jacopo Ripanda devoted an entire room of frescoes in the Palazzo del Campidoglio in Rome to the Carthaginians and the Punic Wars. Among them is this detail of Hannibal Crossing the Alps from about 1510.

Being an exotic and spectacularly large mammal, elephants were also included in depictions of triumphs and tributes, as in Giulio Romano’s fresco of a Tribute to Apollo from 1526-28, in the Palazzo del Tè, in Mantua, Italy. Some rather stranger and more mythical beasts are at the left in the far distance, but this artist appears to have been familiar with the characteristics of the elephant.

Between about 1570 and 1600, Cornelis Cort painted this magnificent work showing The Battle of Zama, which marked the last stage in the Second Punic War, in 202 BCE, in modern Tunisia. Contemporary accounts record that Hannibal here deployed no less than eighty of his war elephants, shown here with their wooden castles mounted. Despite opening the battle with a charge of these formidable animals, the Romans under Scipio Africanus dodged them, and went on to defeat the Carthaginians on their home ground.

This canvas of Hannibal Crossing the Alps on Elephants has been attributed to Poussin, and dated to 1625-26, but is no longer considered to be by Poussin’s hand.

Hannibal’s moment of enduring fame came much earlier in the Second Punic War. During the late autumn of 218 BCE, he led his army of more than 20,000 infantry, 6,000 cavalry, and 37 elephants across the Alps. He caught the Romans near modern Turin where they were in winter quarters, and defeated them. It was the first step in a campaign which took him dangerously close to Rome itself.

Among the many superb animal paintings of Paulus Potter, Orpheus and Animals from 1650 is one of the most unusual, showing a wide range of different animal species, some of which were not well-known then, and one of which (the unicorn) did not even exist. Those seen include a Bactrian camel (two humps), donkey, cattle, ox, wild pig, sheep, dog, goat, rabbit, lions, dromedary (one hump), horse, elephant, snake, deer, unicorn, lizard, wolf, and monkey.

The Carthaginians under Hannibal were not the only army to use elephants in battle. Pyrrhus, the Greek King of Epirus, was loaned twenty elephants by Ptolemy II of Egypt for his invasion of Italy in 280 BCE, and they proved key to his defeat of the Romans at the Battle of Heraclea that year.

Pyrrhus also used his elephants on a more personal level. Before he was due to meet with the Roman Fabricius, the Greek general had one of them concealed behind a large drape near where he was to meet to speak with the Roman. When Pyrrhus gave the signal, the drape was removed, unveiling the huge elephant, which raised its trunk and emitted a fearful cry.

Ferdinand Bol painted a pair of works telling this story, the second of which is The Fearlessness of Fabricius in the Camp of Pyrrhus (1655-56). This shows the Roman turning calmly to Pyrrhus and telling him that neither gold nor the elephant made any impression on him.

As I mentioned at the start of this article, Asian elephants were found in the Fertile Crescent in the past. This is exemplified in Charles Le Brun’s painting of Alexander Entering Babylon from 1665. This shows the young Macedonian king riding in a large golden chariot hauled by a small elephant, as the great spoils of his early successes are being shown around them.

My last painting for today is this small but wonderfully gestural oil sketch of a baby elephant, which has been attributed to Giovanni Antonio Guardi, brother of the even more sketchy Francesco Guardi, who was an innovative Venetian painter with a very painterly style.

In yesterday’s article, I looked at some European paintings of elephants made before the middle of the eighteenth century. I continue here through to the early twentieth century.

After the Punic Wars and the destruction of Carthage, elephants continued to be used in war. Gabriel de Saint-Aubin’s spectacular watercolour of the first Triumph of Pompey from 1765 shows this unique event from 79 BCE. Pompey had tried to enter Rome with his chariot drawn by four elephants, as shown here, but the gate was actually too narrow and he was forced to switch to horses. These weren’t Roman elephants, but had been captured by Pompey as a result of his defeat of the army of Domitius at the Battle of Utica, and may therefore have been among the last of the North African species before it became extinct.

One of JMW Turner’s most radical early works, showing Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (1812), must have been influenced by the artist’s own firsthand experience of crossing Alpine passes. This is also radical in that the famous elephants are downplayed almost to the point of being invisible under Turner’s extraordinary storm sky. In fact, in the centre foreground, under a scarlet sheet, is what appears to be the black form of an elephant lying on the ground.

The nineteenth century also brought paintings with really obscure historical references. Adrien Guignet’s Meeting Between Cambyses II and Psammetichus III, painted between 1835 and 1854, refers to the Battle of Pelusium, fought between these leaders of the Achaemenid (Persian) Empire and the Kingdom of Egypt, respectively, in 525 BCE. Guignet envisaged some elephants being involved in the fight.

Alberto Pasini’s painting of The Caravan of the Shah of Persia from 1867 is another reference to Persian elephants: this superbly wide view of an extensive royal caravan crossing a desert plain includes a couple of elephants at the right.

The nineteenth century saw circuses in Europe become increasingly popular. As they were able to travel further and more quickly with heavy gear and animals, elephants came to many European towns and cities to perform in the circus ring.

One of Émile Friant’s earliest works is his 1881 painting of The Entrance of the Clowns, which shows the interior of the Big Top at the moment that the clowns, acrobats, and captive elephants arrive. The artist has carefully put the foreground into relatively sharp focus and detail, and left the background blurred and sketchy, as may have been influenced by photographic depth of focus.

My favourite painting of an elephant, though, comes from the India of Gustave Moreau’s imagination.

The Sacred Elephant (Péri) (1885-6) is a magnificent watercolour showing Moreau’s best-developed painting of a thoroughly Indian motif. The Indian elephant has a long history as a sacred animal, at the heart of Hindu cosmology in supporting and guarding the earth (echoed by Terry Pratchett’s cosmic model of his Discworld).

Traditionally, the elephant is the mount (vāhana) for Lakshmi, Indra, Indrani (Shachi), and Brihaspati – goddesses, apart from the last who is a sage. Indra’s mount is a white elephant named Airavata, and Indrani is the goddess of wrath and jealousy, so I suspect that Moreau intends the figure mounted on the elephant to represent Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth, fortune, and prosperity, and wife of Vishnu.

The elephant itself represents wisdom, divine knowledge, and royal power. It is walking in a shallow lake which is rich in exotic vegetation, including lotus and lilies, as the sun is setting. Surrounding the mounted figure are four winged angelic creatures.

The mounted goddess holds a stringed instrument, probably a sitar or near-relative, and is elaborately decorated. Although at first sight the angels might appear European, they too are drawn from the Indian sub-continent, and are richly embellished, apparently paying tribute to the goddess with flowers and a musical instrument.

Colonial powers also used elephants when hunting big game in countries like India, as seen in this painting which has been attributed to Briton Rivière, Tiger Hunt. Although of Huguenot descent, Rivière was British, and specialised in animals.

Probably at about the same time, the German animal artist Wilhelm Kuhnert painted Elephants on the Move, one of the first paintings of African elephants that I can find made in their natural environment, when the artist visited German East Africa.

Lovis Corinth’s painting of The Temptation of St Anthony after Gustave Flaubert in 1908 is his second of this motif, the previous work dating from 1897.

This is based on Gustave Flaubert’s account La Tentation de Saint-Antoine, and focusses on a scene in which the Queen of Sheba appears in the saint’s visions. With her – and shown here – is a train consisting of elephant, camels, and naked women riding piebald horses. Corinth’s new Saint Anthony is a young man, and is surrounded by this outlandish circus of people and animals. In his left hand, he holds a heavy chain, and there is a skull in his right hand.

According to later recollections of the artist’s son Thomas, Corinth painted this from professional models in his studio on Berlin’s Handelstraße. What isn’t clear is whether he painted the elephant from life, probably in the Berlin Zoo, or from printed images.

My last painting brings us well into the twentieth century, with Franz Marc’s Elephant, Horse, Ox, Winter from 1913-14. Marc was a founding member of Der Blaue Reiter (the Blue Rider) journal, and central member of the circle of artists formed around it. He was tragically killed in action at the Battle of Verdun just a couple of years later.

Perhaps the most surprising feature of so many of these paintings of elephants is how many show them in danger or conflict – purely as a result of what humans have made them do.

Of all the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, it is surely Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) who is the most enigmatic. During the twentieth century, his paintings were claimed by almost every new modernist style, from Cubism to abstract art, as its precursor. Whole books have been devoted to trying to explain how he ‘projected’ views onto his canvases, their complexity and frequent exceptions only serving to cast doubt on that approach altogether.

In this article, I’m going to look at some of the evidence in his oil paintings as to how he made landscapes during the later part of his career when he was working in the countryside around his home in Aix-en-Provence.

Cézanne learned to paint landscapes in the north, when he worked alongside other Impressionists when they were painting in front of the motif. Among the most important influences on his Impressionist style was Camille Pissarro, who even then was known for his ability to paint en plein air very briskly.

For Cézanne, painting outdoors was protracted rather than sketchy. At first, this caused him problems when he completed different passages in a view with their shadows. This view of The House of Père Lacroix, Auvers-sur-Oise, painted in 1873, shows this well, as his shadows indicate that different sections of the roof were painted several hours apart.

As shown in the marked-up image below, the angles subtended by the shadows are not consistent. In some, the sun is high in the sky, close to its zenith, but in others rather lower. These indicate a wide range of solar elevations, and the passage of a considerable period of time. This matches contemporary accounts of his plein air painting technique.

Towards the end of his Impressionist period, he started to organise the way in which he applied paint with his brush. What is unique about this, dubbed his constructive stroke, is that those brushstrokes appear independent of the underlying form. This is quite unlike Vincent van Gogh’s brushstrokes which swirled with the form of his cypresses, for example.

One of his earliest paintings to show his constructive stroke is The Bridge at Maincy, which he painted in 1879-80. Much of the foliage of the trees has here been formed using diagonal strokes of the brush, which assemble into irregular patches. Within each of those, the range of colours is relatively limited.

These Poplars, also from 1879-80, show extensive use of this technique, with most of the strokes used for the foliage of the poplars being diagonal, at approximately 45˚, irrespective of the underlying form. This gives these canopies a very solid appearance, which is only loosely reflective of the underlying anatomy of the tree. He has also reduced the range of tones and colours used in the trees, and there is no aerial perspective.

In his later paintings in the south of France, Cézanne used a richer range of brushstrokes. Here, much of the foliage and other greenery is built using a modification of the constructive stroke, which seems to follow the underlying form more closely. Fields and the rocks in the foreground are formed more conventionally. With its thinly applied paint, this work affords a valuable glimpse or two of his underlying drawing, for example in the skyline.

Pigment analysis has shown that the greens here are a mixture of emerald green and viridian, which is known to have been one of Cézanne’s favourite colours. But in the foreground, at the edge of the path, he has built the colour in layers, with lead white mixed with viridian, over which Cézanne applied a yellow lake glaze. The use of such glaze layers is unusual in what is normally assumed to be direct painting, and shows that the artist left the foreground paint to dry for a week or more before applying that layer, almost certainly in the studio.

In many of Cézanne’s paintings after 1890, his constructive strokes became more prominent and start to dominate the structure of whole work. In Large Pine and Red Earth (1890–5) they are used throughout the foreground foliage and vegetation, and even start to appear in some patches on the trunk. Note that their prevailing orientation has also changed, from roughly 45˚ to near-vertical, particularly in the patches of colour in the foreground.

Cézanne’s Le Lac d’Annecy is generally taken as the inception of his most radical style and approach to painting, although it is one work from this period in which constructive strokes are least prominent.

In the searing light of Provence, Cézanne’s paintings have a lighter tone, and start to develop areas which are left unpainted altogether. These resemble watercolours rather than oils, with outlines drawn in using a dark ultramarine blue and small patches of less prominent constructive strokes.

Cézanne’s most unusual paintings are his late watercolour landscapes, such as his Almond Trees in Provence (1900). These have no parallel among his works in oils, and typically have very large areas of reserved space, with selected forms such as the almond trees here painted using flares of concentrated colour.

Below is his House at the Edge of the Water, showing a similar approach from 1900-04.

More typical of his late oil paintings is Forest Scene (Path from Mas Jolie to Château Noir) from 1900-02, below, which is built almost entirely of constructive strokes, with a few sketchy outlines to indicate the form of the trees and some of the steps.

In the twentieth century, it was claimed that Cézanne’s constructive strokes were a direct precedent to Cubism and abstract art. This painting, at least, appears to be thoroughly representational, and was almost certainly painted mostly in front of the motif.

Looking more closely at this detail, it’s clear that there’s no underdrawing, abundant areas which haven’t been painted, and that paint has been applied wet on dry.

Instead of his earlier pencil or charcoal drawing, Cézanne has drawn in outlines of the trees and the top of the steps using a fine brush with dark blue and black paint. As these have been painted over in parts, some of those lines at least have dried before the last paint was applied. Where his original line has been overpainted, Cézanne has in places added further lines later.

Many of the patches of colour built using constructive strokes are uniform in colour throughout that block of strokes. In places, they too have been superimposed on a dry lower layer of paint, although in some places fresh paint has been applied on wet paint, and the colours have mixed.

This work appears to have been the product of a series of sessions of painting, spread over a period of a week or more, during which Cézanne has methodically worked on different passages to create a complex paint layer.

It’s often claimed that Cézanne’s late landscapes lack conventional visual cues to depth, and that he didn’t use 3D perspective projection.

His Banks of a River from 1904 could easily be interpreted as verging on the abstract. Looking more carefully, he shows depth recession in the patches of colour formed by his constructive strokes, and there is more than a touch of aerial perspective too. Even the sky is here built up of patches of stroked colours.

Overlapping patches here also show his use of wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry, confirming that this painting was completed over a period of at least a week or two, and not in a single plein air session.

Careful examination of Cézanne’s paintings shows that even a few months before his death, at least some of his paintings largely adhere to the conventions of modern perspective projection, as seen in his Le Cabanon de Jourdan (1906), above and below.

Cézanne’s paintings remain enigmatic. The artist himself gave us few clues as to what his intentions were, the paintings themselves can’t readily be compared with anything else, and most twentieth century accounts conflict with what Cézanne actually did. Perhaps it’s better to take them for what they are.

Overcome by his lust for the beautiful Angelica, an old hermit has driven her to be dumped on a remote and hostile beach. He then gave her a sleeping potion, with the intention of raping her while whe was unconscious. When he proves to be impotent, he’s forced to sleep beside her instead.

Ariosto then breaks his account of Angelica’s plight to consider what happened on an island beyond the north-west of Ireland and the Hebrides, named Ebuda, where Proteus keeps the orc and other sea monsters. In the past, the King of Ebuda had a beautiful daughter, with whom Proteus fell in love. When she was on the beach there one day, she escaped from her attendant maids, and Proteus raped her.

She fell pregnant as a result, and her father put her and her unborn child to death. Proteus was so angry that he loosed his sea monsters on the livestock of the island. Its inhabitants were advised to offer their most beautiful damsel to Proteus in compensation. If he was not content with the first, they should continue to offer him more until his anger was assuaged.

This they did, only for Proteus to pass each damsel to his orc, who ate them immediately. So the people of Ebuda are cursed to continue feeding their fairest maidens to Proteus’ orc, and their menfolk travel the world kidnapping women to take back to satisfy its vile appetite.

So it is that a ship from Ebuda calls at the beach on which Angelica is asleep in the old hermit’s arms. Before she can wake up, she is bound in chains and adbucted to the castle on the island of Ebuda where she will be fed to the orc. When her turn comes, she is taken down to the water’s edge and chained there, sobbing in tears for her imminent fate.

Meaanwhile, Agramante is laying siege to the city of Paris, and its occupants seem ready to fall to their enemy, when it rains heavily and extinguishes the flames which are about to engulf them. Orlando is pining for Angelica, and regretting that he had handed her over to Namo for safe-keeping, knowing that she’d escape from him. His fears for her fate trouble his sleep, and he dreams of her calling for his help.

So convinced is Orlando by this dream that he immediately dresses in his armour covered in a black coat, mounts his horse Brigliadoro, and rides out of Paris alone, in quest of Angelica.

The following morning King Charlemagne is dismayed and displeasured at the absence of his paladin. Orlando’s close ally Brandimarte follows his friend, without saying a word to his wife Fiordiligi. She will wait a month for his return, then set off herself in pursuit of Brandimarte.

Canto Nine opens with Orlando riding through the enemy forces outside Paris, searching for Angelica among them. He then travels on to scour much of France as autumn gradually turns to winter. He reaches a river on the north coast of France which is in full spate, and has washed its bridge away. He looks for a boat to cross its swollen waters, and sees a damsel who is waving to him from a small ship.

The woman offers to help Orlando cross on the condition that he goes to assist the King of Ireland in preparing for war against Ebuda, to end its kidnapping of women to feed to the orc. When she explains this to Orlando, he is immediately enthused with this mission, in the prospect that Angelica might be captive on Ebuda. He boards a ship near St Malo, and heads for England.

As they are making good progress for the English coast, a storm hits them with severe north-westerly gales, and drives them to shelter in Antwerp. As soon as they dock, a distinguished and elderly figure comes on board to enlist Orlando’s help on another mission, on behalf of a fair maid. The knight goes ashore to meet the woman, Olimpia, daughter of the Count of Holland.

She tells Orlando how she had fallen in love with the Duke of Zealand, Bireno, who was on his way to fight the Moors in Spain. They had vowed to marry on his return from his campaign, and with that betrothal she had refused another offer of marriage from the son of the King of Friesland. That had in turn sparked the invasion of Holland by the Frisians, and all Olimpia’s relatives had been killed as a result.

She also tells Orlando of a new weapon – a primitive form of muzzle-loading gun – which the King of Friesland possesses, and which had killed her father. The King of Friesland threatened Olimpia that, unless she broke her vows with Bireno and married his son, he would invade her island. She therefore played along with the proposed wedding to the king’s son.

Bireno was returning to marry Olimpia, so she sent one of her brothers to his fleet in the Bay of Biscay to warn them of her predicament. The King of Friesland raised his own fleet, which took on Bireno’s in battle, defeated them, and (unknown to Olimpia at the time) took Bireno prisoner.

Olimpia was then married to the son of the King of Friesland, and as the groom was about to consummate the marriage that evening, Olimpia and a helper killed him. Knowing her fate at the hands of the king, Olimpia fled. When the king discovered this, he took revenge on some of the locals, and threatened Olimpia that, unless she was delivered to him within a year, he would execute Bireno.

As Olimpia has sold all her lands and possessions, all her relatives were dead, and she has been unable to find a knight to act as her champion, she has no way of securing Bireno’s release. Orlando agrees to travel to Holland and tackle the king. They sail there immediately, and the knight goes ashore, leaving Olimpia to wait for news just off the nearby coast.

Orlando gallops straight to Dordrecht, where he issues his challenge to the king, but the latter lays a trap in response. The king’s troops surround Orlando, who promptly impales six of them on his lance, leaving a seventh dying on the ground. The knight then takes his sword to the Frisians, driving them away in panic.

The king also tries to run away, with Orlando in hot pursuit. The king then prepares to shoot the knight with his gun. When he fires his weapon, his shaking hands cause him to miss Orlando and kill his horse under him. The knight gets up and rushes so fast at the king that Orlando catches him up as the king turns and gallops away on his horse. With a mighty blow of his sword, Orlando cleaves the king’s head in two.

Back in the city of Dordrecht, Bireno’s cousin has arrived with his troops, and Bireno is at last freed. Olimpia is duly restored to her throne, and gives herself and all her possessions to Bireno. His business with the Frisians isn’t over, though. Some days before, the daughter of the King of Friesland was captured, so Bireno sends word to Friesland that he wants to marry the daughter to his own brother.

Orlando takes possession of the Frisian gun, and throws it into the sea, as a cowardly weapon which breaks the code of chivalry, and heads off in quest of Angelica again, leaving Olimpia and Bireno to marry at last.

But Olimpia’s marital bliss isn’t to last long, as I’ll tell in the next episode.

Principal Characters

Agramante, King of Africa, who is leading the war against Charlemagne in revenge for the killing of his father, Troiano. Non-Christian.

Angelica, beautiful daughter of the ruler of Cathay, who is loved and pursued by innumerable knights both Christian and not.

Bireno, Duke of Zealand, who marries Olimpia.

Brandimarte, knight and close friend of Orlando, husband of Fiordiligi.

Charlemagne, Charles the Great, Christian King of France.

Fiordiligi, daughter of the King of Lizza and wife of Brandimarte.

Olimpia, daughter of the Count of Holland, who marries Bireno.

Rinaldo, cousin of Orlando, one of Charlemagne’s paladins and bravest knights.

Ruggiero, son of the King of Reggio, a non-Christian knight who is in love with Bradamante.

The artists

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Having produced large sets of illustrations for classics such as Dante’s Divine Comedy earlier in his career, he started work on a set for Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso in the late 1870s, for publication in 1879. These are the last major illustrations which he made. This article looks at his paintings.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806) was probably the greatest French painter of the Rococo period, who was a pupil first of François Boucher, then of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, the celebrated still-life painter. He won the Prix de Rome at the age of only 20. Although prolific, his works have since become ignored or reviled. This drawing is one of a series which he made to illustrate Orlando Furioso.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) was a major French painter in Neoclassical style, best known for his history and other narrative paintings. He was a pupil of Jacques-Louis David, and continued much in his tradition, and in opposition to the more Romantic painting of Eugène Delacroix. His work extended from portraits to Orientalism. He painted a group of works centred on this section of Orlando Furioso, at least two showing Angelica chained naked to a rock, and another two or more showing her rescue. The painting shown above was exhibited at the Salon of 1819.

References

Wikipedia on Ariosto
Wikipedia on Orlando Furioso

Barbara Reynolds (translator) (1975, 1977) Orlando Furioso, parts 1 and 2, Penguin. ISBNs 978 0 140 44311 0, 978 0 140 44310 3. Verse translation with extensive introduction and notes.
Guido Waldman (translator) (1974) Orlando Furioso, Oxford World’s Classics. ISBN 978 0 19 954038 9. Prose translation.

With his portraiture work bringing in a steady income, in 1881 Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) could at last afford to travel. Instead of going to London, in March and April he visited Algeria with Paul-Auguste Lhote.

The Mosque, also known as Arab Festival, from 1881, shows some sort of public performance taking place on the ruins of the old ramparts of the city of Algiers. There are musicians, dancers, and a large group of spectators. It has clear influence from the Orientalist paintings of Delacroix, but is perhaps best seen as one of the rare examples of Impressionist Orientalism. Renoir’s small strokes of bright colour and energetic work with the palette knife give it a strong feeling of movement – and it so impressed Claude Monet that he bought it from Durand-Ruel in 1900.

Field of Banana Trees is another unusual work which Renoir painted during his visit to Algeria in 1881. He may not have realised it at the time, but this grove of banana palms is extremely atypical of North Africa, although it gave him a wonderful opportunity to assemble brushstrokes to form its vegetation. When exhibited later in Paris, Manet himself praised the painting.

Shortly after Renoir’s return from Algeria, Durand-Ruel purchased five of the views that he had painted there. He also had two of his portraits (painted in France) accepted for the Salon.

Renoir spent the summer of 1881 on the Wargement estate, for the third year in succession. Then at the end of October, he (probably in company with his partner Aline Charigot) travelled to Italy, staying first in Venice before touring more widely and viewing the Old Masters in Rome, and frescoes from Pompeii in Naples. He was particularly interested in the paintings of Raphael, which seems surprising. At the end of the year, he visited Calabria and the island of Capri.

The first of several Impressionists to visit Venice, Renoir chose this view of the Piazzetta, beside the main Piazza San Marco, from over the water in San Giorgio in his Doge’s Palace, Venice (1881). The tops of the roofs follow the (horizontal) centreline, with the Campanile reaching well above that, and various boats below the band of buildings.

Renoir’s canvas has an aspect ratio of 1.24:1, considerably more square than the golden ratio, and far from the panoramic proportions that might be expected for such a shallow view. This left him with substantial bands of largely blue sky and vacant water, above and below the buildings and boats. The reason for this choice is unclear, and the vague areas of colour shown in the bottom band of uninterrupted water cannot represent reflections.

Although this painting appears very loose in its facture, Renoir has included a lot of quite fine detail, such as the individual arches and columns for the whole of the front of the Doge’s Palace, even some of the tracery in the windows above. This would have required multiple sessions in front of the motif, or more probably several days spent in a studio.

Its colours are bright, and broad areas such as the sky and water made up from strokes of unmixed colours, to give them a coarse chromatic texture which is typical of Renoir’s style at the time. All these effects contribute to the overall impression of spontaneity and speed of execution.

Bay of Naples, Evening (1881) was painted during Renoir’s stay of several weeks in Naples. He had been unable to paint when in Rome, but once he arrived in this city was able to complete figurative works and two matching landscapes of the bay. Although it was recognised that these two views represent morning and evening, for some years they were confused, and this painting was thought (incorrectly) to show the bay in the morning.

When he was in Palermo, on the island of Sicily, in January 1882, Renoir took the opportunity to arrange to paint Richard Wagner’s portrait. At the end of the month, he returned to France, to paint the famous cliffs at l’Estaque.

Renoir followed a succession of artists, many inspired by the ukiyo-e print of Hokusai’s Great Wave, in painting The Wave on the Normandy coast in the summer of 1882. This wasn’t the first time that Renoir had painted this motif: that was in 1879, with another version in 1881. But this is his most vivaceous and unconstrained.

Renoir painted the occasional still life through most of his career. Chrysanthemums, painted in 1881-82, is of particular interest for his use of pigments. Although the new cadmium yellow was affordable at this time, he preferred real Naples yellow still. His greens include both viridian and malachite. This is probably one of the last paintings by a major artist to use malachite green, which was replaced by more modern synthetic pigments.

In the Spring of 1882, Renoir visited the south of France, where he became ill with pneumonia. He therefore travelled on with Aline Charigot for a short spell in Algeria, but while there on this occasion he concentrated on figurative work rather than landscapes.

During the summer of 1882, Renoir visited the home of his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel at Dieppe. The latter had commissioned Renoir to paint portraits of each of his five children: this is Marie-Thérèse Durand-Ruel Sewing (1882), the eldest of them. She is wholly absorbed in her needlework, holding it close, suggesting she may be myopic. She is finely dressed, a little heavily maybe for the fine summer’s day in the garden.

Later that year, Renoir painted The Bridge at Argenteuil in Autumn (1882), close to another bridge over the river which Monet had a particular affection for.

The opening months of 1883 were Renoir’s most productive period, although largely in portraits and other figurative work. During April, he had a solo exhibition at Durand-Ruel’s gallery in Paris featuring seventy of his paintings, and in the early summer nine of his paintings were exhibited in a collection of Impressionist works in London.

After a period in Normandy during August, Renoir stayed on the Channel Isles of Jersey and Guernsey in the late summer, where he painted the south-east coast of Guernsey in particular.

For his portrait of his partner Aline Charigot in By the Seashore (1883), Renoir most probably painted her in the studio, and took its background from the Normandy coast near Dieppe. This shows the growing divergence in his paintings during the 1880s, with landscapes becoming increasingly soft and high in chroma, whilst his figures remained strongly realist in style, emphasised by his “dry” manner.

His figures are looser as they become more distant in Children on the Seashore, Guernsey, one of several beach scenes which he sketched in oils during his visit to Guernsey in 1883.

Sunset at Douarnenez, from around 1883, is a classical Impressionist view looking into the setting sun. Renoir also painted this on the Channel coast.

At the end of 1883, Renoir and Monet travelled along the French and Italian Mediterranean coast. On their way back in the late winter (early 1884), they both visited Paul Cézanne in Aix-en-Provence.

Renoir’s mother, who lived in Louveciennes, was ill during 1884, and he travelled frequently to be with her, while continuing to work in his studio in the centre of Paris. He also took time to study the landscape paintings of Camille Corot, whose role in the development of Impressionism he clearly recognised.

Another example of Renoir’s “dry” manner in figures is this delightful group portrait in Children’s Afternoon at Wargemont from 1884. Look through the window, though, and the world outside is still thoroughly Impressionist.

Renoir started work on The Large Bathers in 1884, but didn’t complete it until 1887. It was intended to be the first of a new style of figurative paintings which he had devised from his studies of Old Masters, including those of Ingres, Raphael, Rubens and Titian. Its figures appear to be sculpted, and it is thought that at least one sculpture, a lead relief by Girardon, was an influence on them. It features two of his favourite models: his partner Aline Charigot, who is the seated blonde, and the painter Suzanne Valadon.

Sadly, this painting was savaged by the critics, and Renoir was forced to abandon his new style.

Renoir and Aline Charigot had been a couple since 1879, and in the Spring of 1885 they had their first child, a boy they named Pierre. They spent a longer holiday together at La Roche-Guyon, and visited Aline’s family in Essoyes in the autumn/fall. He worked more intensively on The Large Bathers, and started to suffer bouts of depression.

Renoir’s Maternity (1885) is the complete opposite of The Large Bathers: informal and intimate, a touching record of his family life.

Despite this setback in his figurative painting, Renoir continued to paint magnificent landscapes, such as his Sea and Cliffs from about 1885, with its very visible and organised brushstrokes and high chroma.

References

Wikipedia.

In my survey of nineteenth century artists who were major influences on the development of Symbolism after 1886, I have now reached Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901), a major Swiss painter who, at the time, was extremely well known, and some the works that I’ll show in this article and its conclusion tomorrow were among the best-known paintings of their day.

Böcklin painted many portraits, narrative works particularly of mythology, and landscapes. I have already looked in detail at his narrative paintings.

Böcklin was born in Basel, Switzerland, and studied at the Düsseldorf Academy, where he became a friend of Anselm Feuerbach. During his training, he visited Antwerp and Brussels, then in 1848 went to Paris to copy in the Louvre.

His early landscapes were technically accomplished, mainly upland views such as Mountain Lake from 1846, which are typical of Swiss landscape painting at the time.

Böcklin, though, soon showed interest in motifs which derived more from German artists of earlier in the century, including Caspar David Friedrich and his friend and pupil Carl Gustav Carus. Landscape with Castle Ruins from 1847 is an example of this ‘Gothic’ Romantic style, its serene halflight full of foreboding.

Megalithic Tomb (1847) introduces anonymous figures who appear to be engaged in a mystical ceremony at this isolated location just below the snowline in the mountains. In the foreground is a boggy lake with a heron-like bird stepping out from cover.

Even relatively plain landscapes start to acquire a feeling of something else. In his Mountain Landscape with Waterfall from about 1849, the foreground is in shadow, and the distant peaks are well-lit. Visible at the right of the waterfall is a wild animal, and there’s a shadowy figure perhaps in the lower right corner. Or maybe it’s just the light playing tricks.

In 1850, Böcklin moved to Rome, where he started to paint in the Campagna.

In the Alban Hills from 1851 is a fine depiction of the landscape in these hills, which are about 20 km (12 miles) south-east of the city of Rome. Unlike many artists working in the Campagna at the time, Böcklin must have painted this work in the studio from extensive sketches and studies made in front of the motif. Look closely, though, and there’s a dark figure standing beside a small smoking fire, to the left of the central mass of trees, and further to the left is what appears to be the entrance to a dark cavern.

Böcklin uses more dramatic lighting in his Roman Landscape from 1852. Its dark wood is very dark indeed, not the sort of place to enter alone. At the foot of the prominent tree at the right is a figure which appears to be a woman undressing, as if she is going to bathe in the stygian gloom.

When he was in Rome, in 1853, Böcklin married, and started to raise his family there. Six years later, though, he nearly died of typhoid. By that time, his mythological paintings were achieving critical recognition, and he was appointed professor at the Weimar Academy in Germany. He stayed there for two years before moving back to Rome in 1862, where started work on his first major landscape painting: Villa by the Sea.

Böcklin painted his first version of Villa by the Sea in 1864, using a mixture of encaustic (wax) paints and resins. Those have sadly not aged well, but it shows a romanesque villa at the water’s edge. Beside it is a small bay, where a woman stands looking at the sea in front of her.

Böcklin painted a second version the following year, using more conventional oil paints, which is more readable. The villa now appears overgrown and partly in ruins, its cypress and other trees leaning away from the prevailing wind. The woman, dressed in black, is now cradling her head with one hand as she looks at the sea.

In another version painted between 1871-74, now in the Städel in Frankfurt, it is last light, with a band of cloud on fire with the last rays of the setting sun. Although the garden of the villa is well-grown, it appears in much better condition, and the woman still stands staring at the sea.

Modern reading of these paintings has been greatly influenced by an account of them published by William Ritter in 1895, which states that they tell the story of Iphigenia in Tauris. Although Ritter appears to have consulted with the artist, Böcklin himself isn’t known to have confirmed this, and there are no specific clues in any of the versions of his paintings.

Iphigenia was the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, who was to be sacrificed to give the Greek fleet favourable winds so that they could attack Troy. There is no coherent account of her fate, but in one version her life was spared, and she was rescued to become priestess of Artemis on Tauris. There, she watched for the arrival of sailors, who would be captured to be offered in sacrifice to Artemis.

The painting would thus be centred on waiting, death, and the passage of time, which are at least consistent with what Böcklin depicted. We can only speculate whether that was the artist’s intention.

Böcklin continued to move between Germany, Switzerland and Italy. In 1866, he went back to Basel, then on to Munich in 1871, where he painted the last work in this article.

In his Mountain Castle with a Train of Warriors from 1871, a small band of warriors clad in scarlet are making their way up a track towards an ancient castle overlooking a valley. Down below them, amid a stand of cypress trees, is a villa. There are no other clues as to the underlying narrative.

In my first article about the Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901) and his landscape paintings, I featured his masterpiece Villa by the Sea. This sequel looks at the landscapes of his later career, and his greatest work, Island of the Dead.

In the early 1870s, he worked in Munich again, then spent almost a decade more settled in Florence, until 1885.

Spring in a Narrow Gorge (1881) seems to be a straightforward landscape painting, of a few birch trees in fresh Spring foliage (although the reference in the title is not to the season), in a narrow gorge. The water source given in the title quite probably runs among the rocks at the base of the gorge, but isn’t readily visible.

Summer Day (1881) shows a small river meandering through meadows, with summer flowers out on the grass, and white blossom on the strange-looking trees. In the background is a town, and half a dozen children are playing in or near the water, in the foreground. It has an air of calm and timelessness, otherwise it doesn’t seem to beg any deeper reading.

Ruin by the Sea (1881) makes its intent clear. The ruins of an old building are just above the waves. Growing within the broken walls are three cypress trees which lean away from the prevailing wind. Above them the sun’s rays break through banks of cloud in a dramatic light, and a large flock of crows are arriving to perch on the top of the walls.

The ruin represents decay, perhaps that of later life, and the crows are harbingers of death. Cypress trees also have a strong association with cemeteries.

Many artists associated with ‘Gothic’ Romantic and Symbolist movements painted groups of worshippers within ancient trees, often under the same title as Böcklin’s Sacred Grove, from 1882. The nine figures here are shrouded in white habits indicating their religious association. On top of a stone altar is a bright flame, at which three of them are bent low and kneeling in obeisance. Behind the grove, in the distance, is what appears to be a large stone building like a temple or monastery. In the foreground is a large pond in which white flowers are starting to open. However, the foliage of the trees indicates that it is autumn/fall.

Between 1880 and 1886, Böcklin painted a total of five different versions of his most famous work, Island (or Isle) of the Dead. Each shows a similar island, probably based in part on the English Cemetery in Florence, where his own baby daughter had been buried. Each shows the deceased being rowed across to the island, which calls on the classical myth of Charon, who rows the dead over the rivers Styx and Acheron to the underworld.

Böcklin painted the first version in 1880 for his patron Alexander Günther. This shows the boat just outside the harbour of a small rocky island which appears to be lined with mausoleums. The light is remarkable, seemingly a bright twilight, against dark water and sky. However the direction of travel of the boat is ambiguous, as it may actually be moving away from the island and towards the viewer.

While Böcklin was working on that version, the widow of a financier, Marie Berna, visited his studio in Florence, and commissioned a smaller version in memory of her first husband, who had died of diphtheria in 1865. For this, the artist added the standing figure and coffin, which he also added to the first version. At that time, Böcklin had titled the painting Tomb Island.

The third version of Island of the Dead was painted in 1883 for Böcklin’s dealer. The first two versions had encountered criticism. Böcklin accordingly changed the lighting and closed in on his motif, making this version much clearer that the boat was entering the island’s tiny harbour. Although less dramatically lit, this adds clarity to the most important part of the painting, as shown in the detail below.

He painted a fourth version in 1884, which was sadly destroyed during the Second World War.

The fifth version was commissioned by the Museum of Fine Arts in Leipzig, and was painted in 1886.

In 1888, Böcklin painted a complement, with the title Island of Life, and in the year of his death, a sixth version was in progress, which was completed by his son Carlo.

A great deal has been written and speculated about this remarkable series of paintings. Böcklin evokes mood, of a poignant calm, of death and loss. During the 1880s, its reputation grew. It was reproduced as a print by Max Klinger which sold strongly. Reproductions were bought by the Swedish artist Prince Eugen, and Georges Clemenceau, Prime Minister of France. By the early twentieth century, several artists had painted their own interpretations of the image. It has influenced countless painters, poets, writers, and other artists since.

Böcklin’s Attack by Pirates (1886) is perhaps a more direct ‘Gothic’ Romantic work, showing a group of pirates attacking some Italianate buildings atop the sheer cliffs of a tiny island, which is connected by a viaduct. The attackers have already set light to the buildings, which casts an eerie red light against the black clouds. Perhaps the artist felt that he was coming under similar attack by his critics.

That year, Böcklin moved from Florence to Zürich in Switzerland, where he turned more to narrative and mythological works. Then in 1892, he moved for the last time, to San Domenico near Florence, where he remained until he died in early 1901.

The final landscape painting of Böcklin’s which I show here is The Chapel, from 1898. It returns to similar sea-swept ruins as those in Ruin by the Sea above, but with some important changes. Here there is no doubt that the waves are destroying the remains of this chapel, as they crash against its walls. The cypresses are still curved with the wind, but instead of black crows there are white doves, associated with peace. On the remains of the steps at the right are red flowers, which could have several associations, including love.

Although this still refers to decay and death, it is perhaps more optimistic with love and peace.

Which birds do you most strongly associate with death?

For some, now that travel to areas where vultures live is relatively easy, they might be a first choice. But for most Europeans alive prior to the Second World War, the answer would have been crows, ravens, rooks, and other large black birds. As they feed on carrion, they’re not infrequently seen in large groups tearing at the corpse of some unfortunate wild or domesticated animal. With their distinctive blood-curdling calls, and black plumage, they could almost have evolved for the role.

In today’s and tomorrow’s articles, I’m going to look at paintings of these harbingers of death, and consider how art has developed their image. Today’s paintings cover the period from the sixteenth century up to about 1870, and tomorrow I’ll look at more recent work.

One longstanding association is that crows or ravens are often seen perching on gallows and at scenes of execution, as in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Procession to Calvary from 1564. As the whole of Jerusalem seems to be flocking towards the distant site of execution, a large black bird rests on the gibbet at the right edge of the painting, and there are others in flight.

Although crows and ravens had cameo appearances on many landscape paintings in the intervening period, it took Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘Gothic’ Romantic paintings to give them star roles. In his Tree of Crows from about 1822, the birds are only doing what they’d normally do around dusk. But Friedrich’s wonderfully wizened trees and the eerie light play tricks with us, and they appear sinister. The artist was apparently inspired in this by an ancient tumulus near the Baltic coast at Rügen, one of his favourite locations.

Friedrich’s followers had similar interests in large black birds, although in Carl Friedrich Lessing’s Landscape with Crows, from about 1830, this doesn’t appear in the least bit sinister. This is a small and painterly plein air landscape sketch, with visible brushstrokes in the vegetation, and gestural construction of its trees and the birds.

When the story of Mazeppa, as told in one of Lord Byron’s poems, became a popular theme for paintings towards the middle of the nineteenth century, birds of carrion were quickly implicated as signs of impending death.

In Eugène Delacroix’s Mazeppa on the Dying Horse (1824), the first of the ravens is already on scene ready for the horse to crumble under Mazeppa, and a line of its friends is arriving just in case there’s room at the table for them too.

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.

When the unfortunate Richard Dadd was committed to mental hospital in London, he must have experienced a lot of disturbed and disturbing behaviour, but made little reference to it in his paintings. Crazy Jane, dated by him 6 September 1855, is a watercolour which is an exception to this, and perhaps gives a little more insight into those around him.

With his lack of female models, his Jane is clearly a John, and he draws on peacock feathers and other objects from his faerie paintings. The recession of large crows flying from the distant ruined tower is particularly effective.

By a strange coincidence, at around the same time, Jean-François Millet made his first image of a sower in the fields, with a flock of crows streaming from a similar distant tower.

Millet revisited that successful painting in two later pastel works with the same title, The Sower, in around 1865. This shows the crows more clearly than his original, as well as the distant tower of Chailly. Whether the artist envisaged those birds having their symbolic meaning is an unresolved question: away from the coast, where seagulls are less common, crows are often the birds seen in company of those working the land.

Ravens have specific associations in Nordic and Germanic mythologies, which were made clear in the paintings of Peter Nicolai Arbo.

In his second version of Valkyrie from 1869, Arbo follows normal conventions in showing a warrior-like woman, with chain mail armour, shield, helmet, and spear, in flight with her escorting ravens.

Arbo’s magnificent Åsgårdsreien (Åsgård’s Ride, The Wild Hunt) from 1872 is drawn from a more general European folk myth, which is specifically included in the Norse canon. This group of ghostly huntsmen, complete with Valkyries and their ravens, passes in their wild pursuit. According to the story, seeing the Wild Hunt was the harbinger of major catastrophe, usually a battle with many deaths. The riders could also snatch humans up and abduct them, perhaps to Valhalla, as Arbo shows in this powerful painting.

Tomorrow my paintings start further east, in the vastness of Russia.

In yesterday’s article, I looked at paintings showing large black birds, including crows, rooks, ravens and their ilk, usually as symbols of death. Here I complete my survey with works from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These start with two contrasting paintings from Russia, both made in 1871.

In Alexei Kondratievich Savrasov’s Rooks have Returned (1871), these birds are heralds of the Spring, returning to their nests before the winter’s snow has thawed fully, or the buds have appeared on the barren birches. Across most of Europe, rooks are resident throughout the year, but towards the northern edge of their range, they abandon the snowbound areas and overwinter where food remains more abundant, returning in the early Spring.

In Vasily Vereshchagin’s Apotheosis of War (1871), ravens/crows perch on a huge pile of human skulls in a barren landscape outside the ruins of a town. This is a powerful statement, in which the birds play an important role.

Exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1878, August Friedrich Schenk’s Anguish, painted in 1876-78, shows a ewe lamenting the death of her lamb in the snow, as a thoroughly menacing murder of crows assembles around the defiant mother. This is the type of image which could have helped inspire Daphne du Maurier’s 1952 novella which became Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), perhaps.

In Arnold Böcklin’s Ruin by the Sea from 1881, the arrival of a large flock of crows to the broken walls of this old and ruined building is an unmistakable sign of death added to its gradual decay.

For John William Waterhouse, large black birds were associated with the arcane world of The Magic Circle, from 1886. His barefoot sorceress is drawing a blazing circle in the dust around her, as a potion bubbles away over the fire. In her left hand she holds a golden sickle. Outside her magic circle are half a dozen ravens or crows, quite possibly former humans.

Possibly Marie Spartali Stillman’s only oil painting, of Antigone Giving Burial Rites to the Body of Her Brother Polynices, probably made around 1883-84, casts crows in their classical role.

Polynices and Eteocles, the sons of Oedipus, quarrelled over which should rule Thebes, leading to their deaths. King Creon, who succeeded them, decreed that Polynices was neither to be mourned nor buried, on pain of death by stoning. Polynices’ sister, Antigone, defied the order and was caught. Here Stillman shows Antigone (centre) attending to the burial of her brother, her companion fearfully trying to draw her away. They are greeted by carrion crows, and at the far right is the headstone of a grave.

Of all the paintings of crows, though, by far the best known is what was one of the last paintings by Vincent van Gogh, completed around 10 July 1890.

In van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows, there is controversy over the reading of the birds. They could simply have been present, as is so common in real life, as part of the landscape. It’s very tempting to suggest that they represent his imminent death, but there’s no indication that at the time that he painted this work he was contemplating that, or suicide. They could well be a more personal symbol associated with his life, or with sadness and loneliness.

In the 1890s, Lovis Corinth started to take landscape painting more seriously, including this Landscape with a Large Raven (1893), which was painted in late autumn. The ravens here are assumed to be harbingers of death. In this otherwise deserted countryside, with the winter drawing close, this painting could be read as indicating Corinth’s bleak melancholy. Although he certainly suffered feelings of mortality and had times of depression, those are not part of the received image of his social life, nor of many of his paintings.

There’s also something distinctly sinister about the birds in Stanislaw Siestrzencewicz’s Crows Before the Sleigh from about 1900, where they’re spooking the horses. Could death be just around the next corner?

Like many artists around the turn of the century, Jakub Schikaneder displayed a somewhat irreverent attitude to death, as shown in his undated The Last Journey. The Grim Reaper (death) clad in red here accompanies a new recruit to the underworld or afterlife, as they walk together surrounded by large black crows. One of the birds appears to have met its own bloody end just in front of them.

Landscape with Ravens from 1911 is perhaps one of Egon Schiele’s more challenging landscapes. It shows a fence with irregular black palings receding into the distance over a hillock. On this side of the fence is a small hut with a framework of poles outside it. Several poles with small crosstrees have been planted into the ground. To the right is a black band to establish repoussoir and break any symmetry, and at the foot is a straggly tree with a few brown leaves still remaining. Wheeling over them all are flocks of ravens, in his decaying world of autumn, a world which is darkening and disquieting.

The Pilgrim Folk (1914) may well have been Marie Spartali Stillman’s last major painting, and is her valediction to Italy, which had influenced her so much. It refers to one of her favourite literary works, Dante’s Vita Nuova, via Rossetti, a quotation from which was shown with the painting. This passage contains Dante’s account of Beatrice’s death to a group of newly-arrived pilgrims.

Dante leans out from a window at the left, addressing three pilgrims below. At the lower left corner, the winged figure of Love crouches in grief, poppies scattered in front of him. Pilgrims around the well are taking refreshment after their travels, and more are arriving through the alley beyond. Black crows fly in flocks above, symbolising death. The landscape behind is very Italian, and the whole has a fairy-tale unreality about its mediaeval details. Even more appropriately, this painting was completed just prior to the outbreak of the First World War, and wasn’t exhibited until 1919.

My final painting appears to be another straightforward landscape with crows, in Margret Hofheinz-Döring’s Boßler, Swabian Alps from 1981. There’s still something faintly worrying about those birds, though.

I have a particular fondness for old landscape paintings, particularly those of the ‘Low Countries’ (The Netherlands and Belgium). Their flat countryside forces the artist to look to the sky, and details with which to relieve seemingly endless fields and woods. But they’re an acquired taste, with subtlety. There are no breathtaking peaks, or sheer-walled gorges. Viewed in a hurry, they may appear monotonously flat. Take your time, though, and they’re richly rewarding for the glimpses they give of everyday life centuries before our era.

I’m therefore delighted to offer a small selection of the panoramic landscape paintings of Philip de Koninck (1619–1688), who was born four centuries ago tomorrow. In this article and tomorrow’s, I will drink in their wide expanses, and look at their timeless tranquillity.

Philip de Koninck, also known as Philips Koninck, was born in the Netherlands on 5 November 1619, when Rubens was a young and thrusting painter, and Rembrandt was still a teenager. He started his training with his brother Jacob in Rotterdam, but later moved to Amsterdam, where he is reported to have trained under Rembrandt. However, there are grounds for doubt, as he isn’t supposed to have moved to Amsterdam until after his second marriage in 1657, by which time he would have been 38; it therefore seems more likely that he worked in Rembrandt’s workshop until he was able to set up his own studio in the city.

De Koninck’s paintings are associated with Rembrandt’s, so much so that many now believed to have been painted by de Koninck were previously attributed to Rembrandt. Several of his relatives were also painters, and there has been confusion between his work, and that of his nephew Salomon de Koninck.

Almost all of de Koninck’s surviving paintings are panoramic landscapes, but there’s evidence that he was considerably more versatile, as a portraitist and with other figurative work including genre scenes, and some narrative and religious paintings too. He also appears to have been very successful, making enough money to buy a small shipping line which operated barges in the inland waterways between Amsterdam and Rotterdam, his favourite area for painting.

Landscape With a Distant Town is one of his earliest surviving paintings, made in 1645-46, over a decade before he moved to Amsterdam. There’s a wonderful use of light to bring out the bridge in the middle distance, and a town on the river to the right. A traveller walks along the road in the foreground, his load carried across his shoulders, as a coach drawn by four horses heads towards the bridge.

De Koninck’s Wide River Landscape from about 1648-49 refers to a wide landscape rather than river, I believe. All seems at peace in the countryside, with livestock in the field in the foreground, and a small boat making its way under sail along the river. He uses similar spotlighting effects.

Although not painted on a panoramic canvas, De Koninck’s Panoramic Landscape With a Country Estate from about 1649 looks much broader and more open than it is. Sadly, his foreground spotlight is less revealing here, but his clouds are magnificent.

Dutch Panorama Landscape With a Distant View of Haarlem from 1654 includes a crumbling cliff in the right foreground, overgrown with small trees and shrubs. Below it and towards the centre are boulders which presumably fell from its face several millenia ago. In the distance is the city of Haarlem, much of it in shadow from the clouds. At this time, the city was still a major trading port, and can be seen connected by a waterway to the North Sea.

De Koninck’s Distant View With Cottages Along a Road (1655) appears to have had its old varnish removed making it more readable. A lone man sits by the pond at the lower right. Behind him a rutted road runs past cottages, down towards a bridge over a river and two towns beyond. The more distant one may be Haarlem again.

Panoramic Landscape With a City in the Background from 1655 features farmworkers at the lower right corner, who are tending to their livestock as they feed on rough grazing. There are more people back towards the trees, and a substantial farm on the other side. Then a rhythmic series of treed hedges and a town, rather than a city, perhaps. In the far distance are dunes, whose white sand makes them look like snow-covered mountains against the flatlands around them.

De Koninck made at least two compositional sketches for a painting of the Last Supper around 1657, perhaps when he had moved to Amsterdam. Sadly I can find no trace of any finished painting which resulted from these.

At some time around 1657, the Dutch landscape painter Philip de Koninck (1619–1688) moved, on his second marriage, to the city of Amsterdam, where he is reputed to have worked in Rembrandt’s workshop, either as a pupil or an assistant.

Few of his portraits or genre paintings seem accessible now, but I was intrigued by this Young Woman Leaning Out of a Window; Holding a Necklace from 1664. I don’t think it is just the old varnish, but that cheeky smile looks fairly grubby. We can only imagine who she might have been, and why she’s grinning out of this window.

De Koninck’s Panoramic Landscape from 1665 appears to be set once again in the countryside not far from the city of Haarlem, judging by the white dunes in the distance. Haarlem isn’t far from Amsterdam, of course. At the right is a rather grander property, with woodland and walls and a small tower. At the lower left are a couple of travellers on the road, and behind them a more workaday farm, with a shepherd out tending their small flock.

By about 1675, de Koninck’s foregrounds become even more fascinating. In An Extensive Wooded Landscape, a horseman has stopped to speak to a couple at the roadside at the left, a couple are walking further down the road, and there’s a posh pleasureboat making its way along the river at the right, its large blue flag hanging limp in the still air.

River Landscape (1676) from the following year rearranges the same staffage. The boat can here be seen more clearly, as its single oarsman takes a small group of people along the river.

A couple of hunters are rushing along in the foreground of Bleaching Fields Near Haarlem from about 1675, one with dogs and the other with a gun. There’s a white animal lying low in the rough land to the right, which could be their quarry, perhaps. The bleaching fields were used to process linen, which was laid out there in the sunshine until it became white enough to use. Behind the bank of trees is a tantalising glimpse of the skyline of the city of Haarlem, its characteristic Grote Kerk (or Sint-Bavokerk) being the most prominent feature.

That’s the last painting that I have of de Koninck’s with a date, but here are four which remain undated.

The Entrance to the Woods is more typical of the better-known landscape masters of the Dutch Golden Age. Towering rows of ancient oaks almost obliterate the sky. From between their twisted trunks comes a herd of cows.

View of Saxenburg Estate With Bleaching Fields Near Haarlem shows one of the estates just outside the city of Haarlem, whose massive Grote Kerk is again visible at the far right of the skyline. This demonstrates the relationship with Rembrandt: the latter’s etching The Goldweigher’s Field from 1651 shows a very similar view of the same estate. At that time, it was owned by Christoffel Thijs, who sold Rembrandt his house in the city of Amsterdam. The city house is now Rembrandt House Museum, but this estate has long since disappeared.

Many of de Koninck’s panoramas are painted on panels or canvases of normal proportions, they just look wide. Flat Landscape With a Broad River is more unusual for his use of a proper panoramic, or marine, format. It also appears more sketchy, and has little staffage, as if it may even have been painted in front of the motif.

His Landscape With a Man Standing by a Boathouse is probably more representative of his working methods: a careful sketch made en plein air, transferred to the studio, where he then worked more slowly at turning this view into a finished oil painting. If he did that using this sketch, then the finished painting doesn’t appear to have survived.

Philip de Koninck died on 4 October 1688, just a month short of his sixty-ninth birthday. I love his landscapes, and could spend all day in them: today, let’s remember his birth, career, and paintings.

The early 1880s had been a time of great change for Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919). He and his partner and favourite model Aline Charigot had their first child in 1885, and he was working on what he intended to be a masterwork, The Large Bathers, in which he introduced a new style derived from his studies of Old Masters in Italy. Sadly, that flopped when he completed it in 1887, by which time he had started to suffer bouts of depression.

In 1886, he exhibited eight paintings in the Salon des XX in Brussels, following which thirty-two were shown in New York, and brought good sales.

The Umbrellas from about 1881-86 is packed not only with people, but their umbrellas too. In parts they are so crushed together that the taller pedestrians are raising them high, to avoid bumping into others. Together they form a dark blue-grey band between the people below and the grey sky above. Analysis of the paint layer has revealed how methodical Renoir was: in the first stage here, he used cobalt blue, then switched to extensive use of synthetic ultramarine for its second stage.

Renoir and his family spent the summer of 1886 in La Roche-Guyon, and then went to Dinard in Brittany, where he painted In Brittany (1886). However, he was clearly unhappy with his paintings from the late summer and early autumn, as he destroyed most of them in October.

If this painting is anything to go by, this exploratory landscape style comes as a bit of a shock. It reminds me of Helen Allingham’s twee country postcards: a far cry from his previously innovative paintings, and from his Impressionist roots.

The following year, Renoir appears to have concentrated on figurative works, with few accessible landscapes surviving.

Washerwoman and Child is a quick informal oil sketch painted in about 1887 which escapes the more sculptured figures which had appeared in his studio work at the time.

Renoir’s portrait of Julie Manet, also known as The Child with a Cat, from 1887, shows the daughter of Berthe Morisot and Eugène Manet (brother of Édouard Manet), born in 1878, which makes her about ten years old at the time. Julie became a painter herself, and wrote a revelatory account of artists of that era in Growing Up With The Impressionists.

Young Girls Playing Badminton from about 1887 is another figurative painting in Renoir’s new classically-inspired style, in which the figures are so sharp against its landscape that they appear cut-out. This didn’t go down well with critics, or his dealer Durand-Ruel. Battledore and Shuttlecock, in French jeu de volant, was the precursor of modern badminton, and had recently become very popular.

In the Luxembourg Gardens from about 1887 developed Renoir’s composition from The Umbrellas above, with a child standing holding a hoop at the right. His figures are growing softer and better integrated with the background again.

In 1888, Renoir visited Paul Cézanne im Aix-en-Provence, where they almost certainly painted landscapes alongside one another. He then spent the summer painting at Argenteuil and Bougival, where he rediscovered his landscape form.

The Seine at Argenteuil (1888) is another view of leisure boating, here painted in a style more similar to the high Impressionist landscapes of Alfred Sisley, with higher chroma coarse brushstrokes laid to form the surface of the water.

At the end of 1888, Renoir’s health gave cause for concern: he suffered his first severe attack of rheumatoid arthritis, which was to trouble him for the rest of his life, and an episode of facial paralysis, which was particularly worrying as he was only 47. Because of these, he spent much of the winter into 1889 with his wife’s family at Essoyes, near the town of Troyes, on a tributary of the River Seine.

The following year, Renoir visited Cézanne at Aix again, and appears to have painted alongside him on several days. Unfortunately it’s not clear which paintings Renoir completed in which year.

Renoir painted at least two versions of this view of Montagne Sainte-Victoire in about 1888-89. That above is now in New Haven, while that below is in Philadelphia. This is the view that became an obsession with Cézanne, here depicted in Renoir’s more conservative style. There are cotton-wool trees in the foreground, with a small group of figures under them in the Philadelphia version. Renoir uses marked aerial perspective and doesn’t flatten the view at all. His brushstrokes show signs of some experimentation, in which they become more ‘organised’, but they remain a far cry from Cézanne’s more radical style.

Renoir’s Dovecote at Bellevue (c 1888-89) shows much greater influence from Cézanne, with a stronger constructive stroke, use of deep ultramarine to give outlines to the trees, and flattening of perspective. Cézanne painted the same motif, from a different angle, in an oil painting which is dated to 1889-90.

Despite these wonderful landscapes, Renoir’s bouts of depression caused him to have great doubts about his own work.

In 1890, though, he had greater success, after the stinging criticism of The Large Bathers. He exhibited at the Salon des XX again, and on 14 April finally married his partner of the last eleven years Aline Charigot. The Renoir family moved to Montmartre, and in the summer they stayed with her family at Essoyes.

Landscape at Vetheuil (c 1890) is a plein air oil sketch with a different approach to brushstrokes. Its water surface is smoother rather than broken, with little attention paid to its to reflections, as would be expected in such a hurried work.

Renoir’s figurative work had settled more too. In his Apple Seller from 1890, above, and In the Meadow (1888-92) below, the figures are softer and not sculpted, and set against a blurry landscape resembling the effect of limited photographic depth of focus, or in modern term bokeh.

References

Wikipedia.