The story of Angelica and Medoro is one of the most painted sections of ‘Orlando Furioso’. To allow for a reasonable selection of its paintings, I have therefore divided this account into two articles. I hope you enjoy this wealth of fine paintings.

Medoro and his friend Cloridano were fighting for the Saracens at the siege of Paris. When their leader, Prince Dardinello, was killed in combat, they resolved to cross into no-man’s land, search for his body, and give it a proper burial. After dark, they set out, silently murdering sleeping Christians on the way.

When they prayed to the moon, its light revealed the prince’s corpse, which they collected and started to carry back between them. As they did so, the first light of dawn appeared, and some of the Christian forces started to wake for the day. Cloridano panicked and ran, leaving Medoro to take the full weight and hurry on faster.

Medoro and Cloridano now enter a wood. Weighed down by the body, Medoro falls behind and becomes lost in the undergrowth. Cloridano runs like the wind, until he looks back and can’t see his companion, so turns and re-enters the wood. There he hears the hooves of horses in pursuit: a hundred horsemen now stop Medoro, and their commander Prince Zerbino orders them to capture him. Medoro is forced to abandon his prince’s body, as he is tiring.

Cloridano looses an arrow from his bow and shoots through the temple of one of the Scottish horsemen pursuing Medoro. A second arrow strikes another in the throat. Zerbino is angered by this, and pulls Medoro along by his long golden hair. The young Saracen begs the Scottish prince that he be permitted to bury his leader. As Zerbino is about to agree to this, a brutal knight strikes Medoro in the chest with his lance, and leaves him for dead. At that, Cloridano rushes out of the bushes, swinging his sword at the Christians, and is quickly killed before the Scots horsemen ride away.

Medoro lies near-dead in the wood, by the corpse of his friend Cloridano. Later that day, Angelica, dressed as a shepherdess, passes by. She has recovered the magic ring which had been stolen from her by Brunello, and is now riding alone, unmoved by Orlando’s love for her. She comes across the two soldiers, and recognises that Medoro is only just alive.

Angelica remembers seeing a herb to stop bleeding a litle way back on the path, so gathers its leaves to take back to treat Medoro. She bumps into a shepherd on horseback, who is looking for one of his heifers, and enlists his help in trying to resuscitate the young soldier.

She applies the herb to his wound to stop it from bleeding, and he starts to improve quite rapidly.

Once he is strong enough, Medoro is ready to ride the shepherd’s horse, but he insists that both Prince Dardinello and his friend Cloridano are buried first.

Angelica and her patient then stay in the shepherd’s home until Medoro is fully recovered. Over this time, Angelica’s initial pity for the young man turns into a burning passion for him.

Her desire for Medoro reaches the point where she gives up her virginity, and they marry, the shepherd’s wife acting as Angelica’s bridesmaid.

Principal Characters

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

Cloridano, one of Prince Dardinello’s Moorish soldiers, a ‘pagan’.

Dardinello, son of King Almonte and cousin of King Agramante, a ‘pagan’ prince.

Medoro, one of Prince Dardinello’s Moorish soldiers, a ‘pagan’.

Zerbino, son of the King of Scotland and the leader of the Scottish forces.

The artists

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) was a major French painter whose Romantic and painterly style laid the groundwork for the Impressionists. In addition to many fine easel works, he painted murals and was an accomplished lithographer too. Many of his paintings are narrative, and among the most famous is Liberty Leading the People from 1830. This article looks at some of his narrative works.

Giovanni Lanfranco (1582–1647) was an Italian painter of the Baroque period who was born in Parma and trained in the Carracci workshops. He moved to Rome, where he worked for most of his career. He painted a wide range of narrative and religious works, in fresco and oil on canvas. His style reflected that of the Carraccis and of Correggio, although he also painted some ‘tenebrist’ works.

Simone Peterzano (1540–1596) was a Venetian painter who trained under Titian, and is now best known for his frescoes, and for being Caravaggio’s master. His own paintings are in Mannerist style.

Mihael Stroj (1803–1871) was a Slovenian painter, who was born in Ljubno but soon moved to Ljubljana with his family. He trained locally before moving to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He specialised in portraits and religious works, working almost entirely in oils. He spent periods in Zagreb, and is now considered one of the most important Slovenian artists of the nineteenth century.

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770) was a major and prolific painter who was born and worked mostly in Venice. He trained in Venice, where he became painter to the Doge. His works are generally luminously chromatic, quite painterly and decorative in approach. He completed several major semi-decorative commissions, including some in Würzburg and Madrid, as well as in the palazzos of Venice. His son Giovanni Domenico was also a well-known painter.

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.

Angelica came across the moribund body of Medoro, a young Saracen soldier, in a wood outside the besieged city of Paris. With the help of a passing shepherd, she stopped the bleeding and took the wounded soldier back to stay with the shepherd and his wife in their humble cottage. As Medoro recovered, Angelica developed a burning passion for him; they made love and got married.

They honeymoon for a month in the shepherd’s humble cottage, Angelica’s love proving insatiable. Whenever they come across a suitable tree, they engrave their names in its bark, the two joined with love’s knots.

Angelica intends that they move to India, where she will give her kingdom there to Medoro.

She wears on her arm a golden bracelet with jewels, which Orlando had given her as a token of his love. Although she is strongly attached to it, she gives that bracelet to the shepherd and his wife to express her gratitude. The couple then make their farewells, and leave for the Pyrenees Mountains, between France and Spain.

Principal Characters

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

Medoro, one of Prince Dardinello’s Moorish soldiers, a ‘pagan’.

The artists

Jacques Blanchard (1600–1638) was an important French painter of the Baroque period who was born and trained in Paris and Rome. His major influences were Titian and Tintoretto. He painted many portraits, as well as religious and narrative works. Sadly he died in Paris at the age of only 38.

Andrea Casali (1705–1784) was an Italian painter who was born in Civitavecchia, a port near Rome. He trained under Sebastiano Conca and Francesco Trevisani, and spent twenty-five years painting in Britain, where he was also an art dealer.

Sebastiano Ricci (1659–1734) was an Italian painter, who was a contemporary of Tiepolo in Venice, and trained in Venice before moving to Bologna. He painted many well known frescoes in Venice, and in Florence where he decorated rooms in the Pitti Palace. He painted commissions in Britain for several years, afterwards working in Paris for two years, which he became rich. He was particularly successful in painting mythological and other narratives.

Michele Rocca (1671–1752) was an Italian painter who was born in Parma, and worked mainly in Rome. He is sometimes confusingly known as Parmigiano the Younger.

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.

Bartholomeus Spranger (1546–1611) was a major artist who was born in Antwerp, where he trained initially. He is now known for his paintings, sculpture, and prints. He travelled to Paris and Italy, and later became court painter to the Holy Roman Emperor in Prague, where he enjoyed a personal relationship with Rudolf II. He was a prolific painter of mythological stories, and other narratives.

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770) was a major and prolific painter who was born and worked mostly in Venice. He trained in Venice, where he became painter to the Doge. His works are generally luminously chromatic, quite painterly and decorative in approach. He completed several major semi-decorative commissions, including some in Würzburg and Madrid, as well as in the palazzos of Venice. His son Giovanni Domenico was also a well-known painter.

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.

In many ways, the Surrealist movement of the early twentieth century can be seen as a development of Symbolism. Both were primarily driven by the literary world – the first Symbolist Manifesto didn’t even consider visual art, which remained controversial – and both were strongly opposed to mimesis, faithful depiction of the physical world.

Surrealism as a revolutionary movement started at the end of the First World War, and gathered both momentum and pace during the 1920s. Because most of its major works are still covered by copyright (as the artists died less than seventy years ago), it’s not an easy subject to cover without negotiating rights to use images. However, there are a few Surrealists whose copyrights have now expired: by far the most important of these is the British artist Paul Nash (1892–1946). Nash was one of the key figures in British Surrealism, and in this article and the next, I’m going to look at his work during the decade starting in 1929, before his work was engulfed by the influence of the Second World War.

From his earliest works, Paul Nash had particular interest in geometric forms in the landscape, as shown in his painting of Rye Marshes (before 1932) featured in this 1932 advertising poster for the petroleum producer Shell.

This developed into this innovative view from his studio in Sussex, England, Landscape at Iden from 1929. The barren fruit trees are a reminder of his Cherry Orchard from twelve years earlier. They are set in the middle of an odd, faintly surrealist, collection of objects.

A pile of logs for firewood looks as if it has reversed perspective and great foreshortening of the logs. The grass forms a flat plane, uniform in colour and devoid of texture. Two purposeless panels frame the view and exaggerate the perspective, while in the distance is a bank of hills which look almost flat. In the middle of the foreground, a smooth woodbasket containing logs looks completely out of place.

This has been read as a statement of mourning, in which the symbolism of the pile of logs as an altar, and those logs as the remains of fallen trees, could be central.

Nash’s Lares (1929-30) takes geometric abstraction even further. Its title refers to the Roman protective deities most characteristically associated with roads and crossroads, but often confounded with household deities associated with the hearth. The painting is based on Nash’s fireplace, within which flames have been represented as thin upward zig-zags. Upward-pointing triangles of the fire are associated with drawing instruments (a T-square and set-square) in the foreground, which would otherwise be completely out of place.

Nash had seen the work of Giorgio de Chirico at the first exhibition of his work in London in 1928, and this probably motivated him towards this type of surreal composition.

In his Nest of the Siren (1930), Nash again brings the incongruous together in one of his early overtly Surrealist works. The painting is framed by brightly-painted walls with pillared decorations, perhaps ornate wainscot panelling. In the middle of these is what might be a painting, but also seems to be a three-dimensional plant trough containing sinuous shrubs. In the middle of those is a small nest, like an acorn cup.

Standing in front of this is a structure resembling a weather-vane, mounted on a turned wooden shaft. At the weather end of the vane is the faceless figure of a Siren; the leeward end appears purely decorative. Three red rods appear to have detached themselves from the walling, two protruding from the plant trough, the third resting on the floor.

Blue House on the Shore (c 1930-31) is set on the French Mediterranean coast, which Nash had visited around 1927 and again in 1930. It explores the surrealist principle of incongruity, in placing a simple blue building, with contradictory perspective, on a sandy Riviera beach, among fishing boats.

Whiteleaf Cross (1931) may appear unreal, but is quite an accurate depiction of a cruciform hill-carving in Whiteleaf Hill near Princes Risborough in Buckinghamshire, not far from Nash’s old family home. On a down set between small woods, a chalk escarpment has been cut with a trench, which extends to the symbol of a cross above. It is late autumn, with trees devoid of leaves, or their foliage a deep brown.

Nash’s watercolour Mansions of the Dead from 1932 is an illustration for an obscure and mystical essay titled Urne Buriall (1658), by Sir Thomas Browne, which concerns itself with death and immortality. Nash also made a second version which was shown at the International Surrealist Exhibition four years later.

Nash described this painting as showing “aerial habitations where the soul like a bird or some such aerial creature roamed at will”. In addition to those ‘souls’, there are regular geometric constructions which resemble bookshelves with a spacious and airy hangar above.

In 1933, Nash co-founded the Unit One art movement, which started to breathe life back into art in Britain before the Second World War. He also exhibited at the inaugural exhibition of the Mayor Gallery, in London’s Cork Street, alongside the works of Jean Arp, Joan Miró, Georges Braque, Max Ernst, Paul Klee, and Pablo Picasso.

Although it lasted little more than a year, from January 1933 to late 1934, the formation of Unit One was a defining moment both in Surrealism in Britain and more generally in modern British art. Nash and the sculptor Henry Moore were its movers, and other early members included John Armstrong, Edward Burra, Ben Nicholson, John Selby Bigge, and Henry Wadsworth. Also involved were the architect Wells Coates, sculptor Barbara Hepworth, and the New Zealand painter Frances Hodgkins. The last of these resigned shortly after joining, and she was replaced by Tristram Hillier.

The exhibition at the Mayor Gallery was savaged by the critics, who suggested that the works exhibited were practical jokes. The only other gallery in London which was bold enough to show such radical works was the Zwemmer Gallery, which in 1934 exhibited some work by Salvador Dalí.

In the summer of 1933, Nash visited the neolithic landscapes of Silbury Hill and Avebury, in Wiltshire, England, whose magic and sinister beauty were to influence several of his works.

Equivalents for the Megaliths (1935) was inspired by the neolithic landscapes of Wiltshire, here the massive standing stones of Avebury in particular. Nash provides rolling downs and ripe grainfields as the basis for this painting. In the distance is a geometric representation of Silbury Hill, and in the foreground are clean and precise modern solids, the more recent equivalents, perhaps, of the standing stones which they appear to have replaced.

In the late autumn, the Nashes went to London, then on a long trip through France to Gibraltar and North Africa. They returned to England the following summer, living in a cottage on the coast of Dorset near Swanage. Paul Nash was promptly invited by John Betjeman to write a guide to Dorset for the popular Shell Guide series. That was published just over a year later, in 1936, the year that he took part in the first International Surrealist Exhibition in London, which marks the start of the next article about him.

References

Wikipedia – an excellent and detailed account.

Chambers, Emma (ed) (2016) Paul Nash, Tate Publishing. ISBN 978 1 84976 491 9.
Remy, Michel (1999) Surrealism in Britain, Ashgate. ISBN 978 1 859 28282 3.

In the first of these two articles about the Surrealist paintings of Paul Nash, and his role in the movement in Britain, I looked at his work prior to 1936, and at his role in the formation of Unit One. In 1936, Nash took part in the first International Surrealist Exhibition in London, showing photocollages and an objet trouvé of a piece of wood retrieved from a stream, as well as several of his paintings.

The previous year, several of those involved with Surrealism in Britain had been in Paris, engaging with key figures in the Surrealist movement there. These included Roland Penrose, David Gascoyne, Julian Trevelyan, Eileen Agar, John Banting and Henry Moore. It was Gascoyne who published the First Manifesto of English Surrealism that year, ironically in French and in the French journal Cahiers d’Art.

In early 1936, André Breton and Paul Eluard, two of the leading French Surrealists, proposed visiting London to discuss an international exhibition there. From the beginning of April, an organising committee started to meet; among its members were Paul Nash, Henry Moore, and the Cambridge don and writer Hugh Sykes Davies. Hanging was agreed for 8 and 9 June that year, and the opening by André Breton was set for 11 June.

When Nash had visited Toulon on the French Mediterranean coast in 1931 (or perhaps the year before), his hotel room overlooked the busy harbour there. One day he saw the image of a large sailing ship in a big mirror in his hotel room, which gave the appearance of the ship sailing into his room. From that visual memory came Harbour and Room (1932-36), another geometric composition which merges Nash’s hotel room, complete with its mirror over the mantlepiece, with parts of a ship, including a carpet of small waves.

While he was living on the Dorset coast, Nash took to collecting objects which engendered personal associations. One of these was exhibited as an objet trouvé at the Internation Surrealist Exhibition, but in Swanage (c 1936) he went further. This is a collage composed of Nash’s own photos of some of his objets trouvés, which he has extended and elaborated using graphite and watercolour. These combine elements of chance, personal association, and their assembly into something beyond the sum of the original objects.

The First International Surrealist Exhibition opened in the New Burlington Galleries in London on 11 June 1936. Thanks largely to Nash, it had been well publicised, and was suitably criticised by the press. Sheila Legge was dressed as a ‘surrealist phantom’, her face completely covered with roses, holding a pork chop in one hand and a prosthetic leg in the other.

Several lectures were given. Salvador Dalí started his wearing his famed diver’s dress, a jewelled sword at his side, two borzoi dogs on a leash, and holding a billiard cue. Unfortunately, after a few minutes of starting his talk, he began to suffocate within his helmet, and his wife Gala had to unscrew the helmet.

A total of 23,000 visited its collection of 360 collages, paintings and sculptures. A total of 69 artists from fourteen nations exhibited, of whom 27 were British. The biggest problem was a special publication showing Nordic Surrealist art was siezed by British customs on entry into the UK, on grounds of indecency. The exhibition launched Surrealist art in Britain, and was a major milestone in its development in Europe.

The following year, Nash had a large solo exhibition at the Redfern Gallery in London, and visited the White Horse hill-figure cut into the chalk down at Uffington in Berkshire.

Voyages of the Moon (1934-37) develops ideas which Nash first expressed in a drawing of light bulbs reflected repeatedly in the mirrored walls of a restaurant in Toulon. He combines multiple spheres with a forest of vertical rods, which is reminiscent of a lunarium, a form of orrery showing the movements of the moon. This is set inside a spacious hangar or warehouse with high skylights.

Landscape from a Dream (1936-38) is one of Nash’s most complex and elaborate surrealist paintings, 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 or falcon, which is staring at its own reflection, which Nash explained is a symbol of the material world, and may also be associated with the Egyptian sun god Horus. To the left, the mirror reflects several floating spheres, which Nash associated with tumbleweed, and refer to the soul. The reflection shows that behind the viewer, a red sun is setting in a red sky, with another hawk/falcon flying high, and away from the scene.

To the right of the hawk/falcon 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.

Nash’s watercolour Three Rooms of 1937 was a response to the International Surrealist Exhibition of the previous year. The three rooms have become taken over by the sky (top), a forest (middle), and the sea (bottom). The work’s graphic elements are reminiscent of the paintings of William Blake.

Circle of Monoliths (1937-38) is one of a pair of complementary paintings of the same title, which Nash made over the same period. The other (below) shows a similar arrangement of rock-like objects on a coast with cliffs.

What might at first appear to be a collection of completely abstract images turns out to have strong roots in the physical world. The landscape is of chalk cliffs (upper left) and sea, with a large chalk pinnacle just to the right of centre; these are inspired by the coast of Dorset, but made to appear unnatural by their unusual colours.

Two broken ridges run from the foreground into the sea. These are composites of old hedges, stone walls, and the rock spines which are embedded in beaches along the Dorset coast, with occasional trees, in strange colours in the upper version. The forms of the larger objects scattered across the pale blue beach are those of rocks and other found objects, which Nash collected. Their surfaces appear to be ‘silvered’ to act as mirrors, and reflect spheres which symbolise the soul.

Nocturnal Landscape (1938) was another response to the International Surrealist Exhibition. Nash populates a sparse desert-like landscape with another collection of incongruous objects. These have their inspiration in forms he saw in nature, and in found objects, At the upper left is a grille, which echoes his earlier geometric forms. The moon’s crescent shape has been distorted, as if bites have been taken from it.

The following year, the world was at war again, and its images quickly came to dominate Nash’s paintings. At the end of that, shortly before his untimely death, he painted some of his most remarkable works, of which I show just one in conclusion.

Eclipse of the Sunflower (1945) was inspired by William Blake’s poem Ah! Sunflower, from his Songs of Experience (1794):

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun:
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the travellers journey is done.

Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow:
Arise from their graves and aspire,
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.

Nash shows a sunflower undergoing an eclipse, as if a celestial body. Below is a windswept sea and the coast of Dorset, as he had painted in his wartime work Defence of Albion (1942). Just above that coast are more peculiar botanical structures relating to the sunflower, and behind is the threatening sky of an imminent storm.

In an essay in 1945, Nash explained how the Second World War had changed his perception of the sky:
When the war came, suddenly the sky was upon us all like a huge hawk, hovering, threatening. Everyone was searching the sky, expecting the terror to fall: I among them scanned the low clouds … hunting the sky for what I most dreaded in my imagining. It was a white flower. Ever since the Spanish Civil War the idea of the Rose of Death, the name the Spaniards gave to the parachute, had haunted my mind, so that when the war overtook us I strained my eyes always to see that dreadful miracle of the sky blossoming with these floating flowers.

He had also – in common with many other artists before – shown the sky as the domain of souls, thus important to the event of death, a subject which was clearly occupying his mind more and more. In July 1946, Nash returned to the Dorset coast. On 11 July, he died in his sleep from heart failure caused by his lifelong asthma. He was 57.

References

Wikipedia – an excellent and detailed account.

Chambers, Emma (ed) (2016) Paul Nash, Tate Publishing. ISBN 978 1 84976 491 9.
Remy, Michel (1999) Surrealism in Britain, Ashgate. ISBN 978 1 859 28282 3.

One of the more opaque traditions of Christmas is the presentation of gifts by three eastern monarchs, supposedly the basis for all that is so commercial about the modern secular ‘feast’. Those three kings brought with them gold, frankincense and myrrh. The first we all wish we could be more familiar with, the second already declares itself to be used in incense and perfumes, but what is myrrh, and how did it become associated with the Christian nativity? In this article and the next, I’ll show you some paintings which help explain myrrh and its curious associations.

Like frankincense, myrrh is a natural resin obtained from trees, which has been used since ancient times as incense, in perfumes, and as a medicine. Myrrh trees are small, tough and quite thorny, and grow in the dry and barren areas from Ethiopia and Somalia up into the Arabian Peninsula. In traditional medicine, myrrh is primarily used for its antiseptic properties, and has been widely applied to wounds as well as used in oral care.

In classical Mediterranean mythology, the myrrh tree was generated by the transformation of a woman named Myrrha, the great granddaughter of Pygmalion. She was cursed by the Fates and blighted in love; despite having many suitors, she fell in love with her father, King Cinyras. When her father asked her what to do about her suitors, she first stayed silent, then burst into tears, eventually telling him that she wanted a husband like her father.

That night she lay awake in bed, her mind in turmoil, until resolving that her only solution was suicide. She tied a noose around a beam in her bedroom, and was just about to hang herself from it when her old nurse came in. Myrrha confessed her shameful desire, and her nurse promised to arrange the matter for her.

When the festival of Ceres came, Cenchreis, Myrrha’s mother, was busy with her duties, allowing the old nurse to arranged Myrrha’s liaison with her father. The nurse ensured that Cinyras had plenty to drink, and promised him a night making love to a girl as young as his daughter.

Later that night, the old nurse took Myrrha to her father, and put her to bed with him, from which Myrrha became pregnant. Myrrha and her father continued to sleep together, night after night, Cinyras remaining oblivious of the true identity of his partner. Eventually, he brought in a lamp so that he could see her, and was shocked to discover his own daughter.

He drew his sword to kill her, but she fled and wandered in the desert until it was time for her child to be born. Myrrha called on the gods to help her, but wanted to neither live nor die. She was therefore transformed into the myrrh tree, to provide the precious resin from her sap. But she had another very important role to play, as she was pregnant. When the time came for her to be delivered, even as a tree, her baby was the beautiful Adonis, and was promptly anointed with myrrh from his mother.

Surprisingly, the story of Myrrha, her incestuous pregnancy, and the birth of Adonis was popular both in words and images. There are several different accounts in classical sources, but it has been seldom re-told in more modern times.

This classical fresco from the Golden House of Nero in Rome shows one version of the story of the birth of Adonis, with Lucina, goddess of childbirth, presenting Venus (Aphrodite), who stands clutching the top of a myrrh tree, with the newborn infant.

Although an apparently difficult story to present to pious Christians, it was also quite a popular subject for paintings between 1500-1700. Thereafter it has been shunned.

Possibly one of Titian’s earliest works, although this is disputed and even Giorgione has been credited, this cassone panel of The Birth of Adonis probably dates from 1505-10. At the left, Myrrha and her father Cinyras lie together, although this would make certain his knowledge of her identity, of course. In the centre, a baby is delivered from the woody womb of Myrrha, as a tree. This multiplex narrative is set in an idyllic rustic landscape.

At about the same time, Bernardino Luini painted his fresco account of The Birth of Adonis (1509-10), which also looks to adopt multiplex narrative to explain the shameful origin of Myrrha’s pregnancy. In the foreground, the couple are shown together (although this could instead be a reference to Adonis in later life), and at the top left the miraculous birth has just taken place.

Over a century later, this wonderful panel was painted, possibly after Luigi Garzi, although again its maker is disputed. In The Birth of Adonis and Transformation of Myrrha reference to Myrrha’s dark past has been concealed, and she is here shown as a chimera between woman and tree, with the infant Adonis just delivered by a large team of midwives and maids.

The helper at the right wears a coronet with the crescent moon on it, signifying the goddess Diana. On the left side of the tree, one of the other helpers is holding up a tray with a small container of myrrh, with which to anoint Adonis. In the foreground, a wingless putto is laying out a napkin for the infant.

One artist painted this story repeatedly: Marcantonio Franceschini, a Baroque painter in the Italian city of Bologna.

This version of Franceschini’s The Birth of Adonis probably dates from around 1685-90, and is now in Dresden. Myrrha is a distinctive cross between tree and woman, and a couple of satyrs are laughing in the bushes behind her. Two young women are rather pointedly looking in amazement at the origin of Myrrha’s baby. In the centre, Adonis is being given by Diana, with her crescent moon, to Venus, who stars in his later life, and is already admiring his beauty.

Franceschini’s later version from around 1692-1709 is now in Vienna, and re-arranges a similar composition in a vertical format. Here Diana is handing Adonis over to another goddess, possibly Venus, who is preparing to take the role of wet-nurse. Behind them, the two women looking in amazement appear to be less anatomically engaged, and Pan and a satyr are providing some celebratory music. The napkin-bearing putto is here a winged Cupid.

Apart from a slightly later painting by Boucher, which I have been unable to illustrate here, those seem to have been the last paintings of this disturbing story of the origins of myrrh, and of Adonis, until recently.

Contemporary artist Rafael Metz’s The Transformation of Myrrh and the Birth of Adonis (2008) shows only the last part of the story, as the infant is being cradled by another woman, under the chimeric tree of Myrrha with its ornate and decorative branches. Already exuding from the bark is myrrh resin.

Myrrha is one of many figures from classical mythology who makes an appearance in Dante’s Inferno. When Dante is guided by the ghost of Virgil into the tenth rottenpocket of the eighth circle of Hell, who should they encounter but the grieving Myrrha, who is afflicted with madness not for her sin of incest, but for her deceit.

Mad Myrrha is shown in this engraving made from Gustave Doré’s drawings for his illustrated edition of the Inferno from about 1857.

Tomorrow I will look at how Christian traditions have incorporated myrrh into their own narratives, and abandoned its associations with incest and metamorphosis.

In my first article about the curious painted history of myrrh, I concentrated on accounts of the classical myth in which the incestuous Myrrha was transformed into a myrrh tree before giving birth to Adonis.

In later classical times, Myrrah started to recover her reputation, and is one of a group of women identified as heroines. She appears in one of the more mysterious paintings in the Vatican Museums, in a series of full-length portraits in a fresco which was found in a classical Roman villa at Tor Marancia – now famous for its much more contemporary wall-paintings. Their artist has kindly identified the women depicted as Pasiphae, Scylla, Myrrha, Phaedra, and Canace. Although these differ from the women featured in Ovid’s Heroides, the series shares the idea of gathering together women with singular stories to tell.

For a long time, these frescoes were on display in the same room containing the slightly better-known Aldobrandini Wedding, a superb and equally puzzling frieze from a house on the Esquiline Hill in Rome. I regret that I have been unable to locate a suitable image of Myrrha from that fresco.

The greatest change in association occurred not with the mythical origin of the myrrh tree, but in the role of the resin, which was one of the three precious presents given by the eastern monarchs who appeared from nowhere to welcome the nativity of Jesus Christ.

There are many hundreds of well-known paintings of The Adoration of the Magi, of which a few show the gifts most clearly. Two of those were painted by Hieronymus Bosch before 1500.

In the earlier of these, now in the Met in New York, the Magi are shown in front of Mary and Jesus, in the lower right of the panel. The first to pay homage kneels to present a golden ewer and basin. He has removed his hat, which incorporates a gold coronet. Deeper into the view are his colleagues: the nearer, apparently from Africa, bearing a spherical ciborium of frankincense which is decorated with a phoenix, and the third holding his Gothic ciborium containing myrrh.

In the foreground of Bosch’s later painting, now in the Prado, is what appears to be a fairly conventional and detailed depiction of the adoration of the Magi. The Virgin Mary is sat under the tumbledown eaves beside a small cattleshed or stable known in the artist’s home town as hoekboerderij. The infant Christ is seated on her lap, steadied by her left hand.

The senior of the Magi, an elderly man, has removed his crown, which is to the right on the ground, and prays to the mother and child on his knees. His gift is an elaborate gold table decoration showing Abraham about to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Behind him a second has also removed his headgear and holds his gift of myrrh on a silver platter. To the left is the third, a bare-headed African king wearing immaculate white robes, and bearing his gift of frankincense inside a sphere, on top of which is a phoenix bird; he has a child attendant behind him.

More unusually, they are joined by a fourth king, an anti-Christ, who wears an ornate crown, and clutches a helmet with his left hand. His appearance is bizarre because his face and neck are sunburnt, but the rest of his skin is deathly pale. He is partly undressed, and has an old wound on his right lower leg. Several other figures are seen behind this fourth king, and an ass is visible through an opening in the wall of the shed.

Gerard David’s more conventional Adoration of the Magi from about 1515 is another clear depiction of the three kings bearing their gifts.

Skipping ahead another 250 years and countless other paintings, we come to this exquisite tapestry designed in 1888 by Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris and the less well-known John Henry Dearle. This version was woven in 1894 for the Corporation of Manchester, and is one of ten known examples. The composition was taken from Burne-Jones’ watercolour from 1887 which was photographically enlarged into cartoons, then coloured and decorated with flowers by Morris and Dearle.

The other major involvement of myrrh in the writings of the New Testament is with a woman who has subsequently been identified (not uncontroversially) as Mary Magdalene. In western European traditions, apocryphal writings have portrayed her has having a colourful past, probably as a prostitute, who repented and developed a close relationship with Christ. She appears to have been conflated with an unidentified woman who anointed Christ’s feet with myrrh taken from an alabaster box.

Other accounts have claimed that she returned to Christ’s tomb after the crucifixion in order to start embalming his body with myrrh, only to find its boulder door open. Arguments about these have raged for well over a millenium, but whatever their evidential basis, Mary Magdalene became associated with a container of myrrh in a great many paintings.

Piero della Francesca’s full figure portrait of Mary Magdalene (1460) in Arezzo Cathedral shows her holding a container of myrrh in her left hand.

In Fra Bartolomeo’s God the Father with Saints Catherine of Siena and Mary Magdalen from 1509, Mary is shown at the left, holding her container of myrrh, as the myrrhbearer. Saint Catherine wears her Dominican tertiaries’ habit, and in front of her are a white lily, book, and a sprig from the crown of thorns.

God the Father is shown bearing the Greek capitals alpha and omega, and the winged cherubs hold open a scroll with the words divinus amor extasim facit, a quotation from Dionysius the Areopagite meaning divine love produces ecstasy, a reference to the ‘mystical marriage’ of Catherine, and Bartolomeo’s own mystical beliefs.

Bartolomeo’s later Incarnation with Six Saints (1515) shows the Virgin Mary enthroned and surrounded by six saints, two of whom are women. The most clearly-identifiable of the saints is Mary Madgalene, kneeling at the right and holding her container of myrrh. The saint immediately to the left of the Virgin Mary is John the Baptist, and the others are likely to include Jerome and possibly Saint Francis of Assisi. Above Mary is the Holy Spirit, in the form of a white dove, and at the upper part of the left pillar is the angel Gabriel, bearing the white lily of the Annunciation.

Perhaps the most detailed account of Mary as Myrrhbearer is Mary Magdalene from about 1524, in the manner of Leonardo da Vinci and attributed to Andrea Solari. She is here transferring myrrh from a maiolica pharmacy jar to a smaller vessel, as if preparing to take it to embalm the body of Christ. This cannot, of course, be pure myrrh resin which is a solid, but a tincture in alcohol.

Another popular theme has been that of the Penitent Mary Magdalene, seen here in one of Murillo’s earliest surviving paintings, completed in 1640 when he was about twenty-two. In this first of his many paintings of her, she is shown as a ‘scarlet woman’ in penitence, accompanied by a large Bible, a skull, and – more unusually – with a jar of myrrh.

The eastern tradition for Mary Magdalene has been quite different from that of the Catholic Church, teaching that she was virtuous and had no dark past. Instead, she is honoured as an equal to the Apostles, as Myrrhbearer, and is shown holding a container of myrrh in countless icons.

One more modern example of those is Viktor Mikhailovich Vasnetsov’s striking Mary Magdalene from 1899. Maybe the trees in its background are intended to be myrrh-producing too.

Myrrh has undergone quite a transformation of its own, from the sap of a tree formed from the incestuous mother of Adonis, through a Christmas gift and the foundation of the commercial ‘feast’, to the embalming fluid held by one of Jesus Christ’s closest friends.

In 1919, the Great War continued to dominate much of art, with those painters who had been war artists completing major works for visual memorials to the millions who had died, and others recording the labours of those who had supported the war effort and reconstruction afterwards. In this selection of paintings completed in the year after the war, I look at some of the best of those memorials.

Paul Nash’s The Menin Road (1919) was commissioned by the British War Memorials Committee in April 1918 for its Hall of Remembrance, for which John Singer Sargent’s Gassed (below) was also intended. It shows a section of the Ypres Salient known as Tower Hamlets, after what is now a part of eastern London. This area was destroyed, reduced to barren mud, during the Battle of the Menin Road Ridge.

Sargent, as an American who had worked much of his career in London, was commissioned by the same War Memorials Committee to paint a large work showing Anglo-American co-operation in the war. This was originally destined for a Hall of Remembrance as its very large if not monumental painting; the hall was, in the end, never built. In July 1918, Sargent set off for the Western Front with Henry Tonks, a distinguished British artist, and they visited units near Arras and Ypres, close to the area painted by Nash.

According to Tonks’ recollections recorded in a letter two years later, they both witnessed the result of a mustard gas attack during the opening of the Second Battle of the Somme on 21 August 1918 (although records suggest that may have been on 26 August). In the late afternoon, they heard that many casualties were arriving at a Corps dressing station at le Bac-du-Sud, so went there. Lines of gassed casualties were being led in, in parties of about half a dozen, with a medical orderly in front. Apparently, Sargent was “struck by the scene and immediately made a lot of notes.”

When Sargent came to work on this epic painting for the commission, he apparently had the idea of a work involving “masses of men”, along the lines of Signorelli’s fresco The Damned (1499-1505), but he feared that trying to combine separate images of British and American troops in such an epic would look “like going to the Derby.” His solution was to borrow from Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s The Blind Leading the Blind (1568), taking the lines of casualties that he had seen, and making them the central theme of the painting. This change to his commission required the approval of the War Memorials Committee, which he obtained before he started work on the painting in his studio in Fulham, London, in late 1918.

There are several fascinating details in the finished painting, including the game of soccer taking place in the distance, seen in the detail above. Sargent probably added that as a reference to the activities of normal life, contrasting with the horror that is taking place throughout the rest of the painting.

Most remarkably, there is only one pair of eyes visible in all the soldiers present, in the medical orderly near the head of the second line at the right. He even turned the orderly who is tending to the nearer line of casualties so that he faces away from the viewer. This emphasises the blinding effects of the mustard gas, and develops the painting’s theme of vision and art.

Sargent’s monumental painting was completed in March 1919 and the Royal Academy of Arts voted it the picture of the year. It remains one of the most important paintings of 1919.

Henry Ossawa Tanner’s The Arch (1919) is a record of events in the evening of 13 July 1919, when a cenotaph in memory of French soldiers, built under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, was dramatically lit for a large public gathering. His slight readjustment to that reality may have been the symbolic addition of a widow and orphan in the foreground at the left, and a couple of uniformed veterans to the right.

Robert Sterl’s oil sketch of Ironworkers shows workers at one of the Krupp plants in Germany who had been so important during the war, and whose labours were so essential to the peace afterwards too.

In Spain, Joaquín Sorolla was very busy working on a commission for Archer Milton Huntington, an American philanthropist who had founded the Hispanic Society of America in New York, to paint fourteen huge canvases to cover the walls of the society’s library. This became his epic cycle Visions of Spain, which drove the artist to exhaustion during the later part of his career.

Ayamonte, Tuna Fishing (1919) is a section from one painting in this series, showing the tuna market in the town of Ayamonte, Spain, which must have reminded Sorolla of his own summers in Valencia, with the local fishermen there.

Angelica had come across the moribund body of Medoro, stopped the bleeding from his wound, nursed him back to health, and fallen deeply in love with him. They married whilst they were still living together in a shepherd’s cottage, and when they left she gave their hosts her favourite bejewelled bracelet in gratitude.

Angelica and Medoro then head for the Pyrenees Mountains, and on to Spain, where she intends that they take a ship for the east. As they are heading towards Barcelona they find a madman caked with mud, lying on the beach. He roars at them and threatens to attack.

Meanwhile, Marfisa, Aquilante and Grifone are suffering a third day of hurricane-force winds at sea. The crew have no idea where they are, and have been doing everything they can to save the ship in the storm, ditching all their cargo in a bid to survive. On the fourth day, they see Saint Elmo’s fire on what is left of the rigging. Then the storm at last starts to ease, and they head towards the Gulf of Laiazzo, near Syria.

As they draw near the coast, the captain realises their predicament: the vessel is no longer safe to remain at sea, but slavery and death await them here on the land. He explains to the passengers that this section of the coast is ruled by women who make men slaves, or kill them. Astolfo laughs at this, but the captain warns that he’d rather drown at sea than fall victim to those women.

The knights rise to this challenge, and make the captain head into the port, where a galley powered by slaves greets them and tows them in. They arrive in a bay, with a fort at each end and a city in the middle. As the ship nears the quayside, six thousand women archers are there to prevent the men from escaping. An old woman warrior informs the captain of the fate which he had foreseen: they are to be sold into slavery, or put to death.

The only exception is for a man who can defeat ten of their best warriors in combat, and then satisfy ten of their women in bed in the same night. The man capable of that will be made the women’s prince, and his companions will be spared slavery. The old woman expects the men on the ship to be scared of this, but instead they decide to accept her challenge. She lets the knights ride into town to prove themselves.

After drawing lots, the knights consider whether the brave woman knight Marfisa should be their champion. Although she clearly would have the prowess in combat, she wouldn’t be able to take on the second part of the challenge, which they agree to accept. With that, Marfisa dons her armour and proceeds to the field used for tournaments and jousting in the town.

Marfisa rides into the arena, where she is surrounded by women. Her ten opponents then enter, led by a knight clad in black riding a charger of the darkest black. When the signal to start is given, the other nine knights prepare to fight the lone Marfisa together. She impales the first with her lance, then breaks the back of the second and third. She rides off, and turns her charger to tackle the next six, who she quickly despatches with her hefty sword.

Her sole surviving opponent, the black knight, offers her overnight rest before they engage in combat, which Marfisa refuses. When they charge at one another, both their lances are shattered by the impact, throwing them both to the ground. They quickly rise and attack one another with their swords, but are too evenly matched for either to gain the advantage. They fight on until it grows dark, when they stop until the morning. The black knight offers Marfisa and her colleagues his hospitality, which excuses her from being attacked during the night by women.

That night, Marfisa is amazed to discover how young her opponent is, and he is equally surprised to see that she is a woman. When she tells him her name, he identifies himself as Guidone, who knows well of her fierce reputation, and has been a captive of the women for nearly a year. He explains to the knights from the ship the origin of these vicious women.

They were descended from the wives of Greek warriors who went to Troy. Those wives took lovers during the twenty years their husbands were away, and their bastard children were ejected when the warriors returned. A son of Clytemnestra named Phalanthus led a group of a hundred of those young men. They were hired by the people of Crete to protect them, but instead seduced their women, who they then abducted and abandoned. One of those women, Orontea, a descendant of Minos, urged them to stay where they were and wreak vengeance on men. When ships were shipwrecked nearby, the women killed all the survivors.

After living independently like this for four years, the women captured ten knights who could cope with satisfying ten women apiece. Most of their male children were killed, so propagating a population almost entirely of women, keeping the ratio of ten women for every man who was allowed to survive.

One time, a descendant of Hercules named Elbanio landed on their stretch of the coast. He was a valiant knight, fair of face, and charming in manner. Alessandra, daughter of Queen Orontea, was told about him, fell in love, and pleaded with her mother for him to be spared for her. The queen brought this before their council, proposing that Elbanio should be put to the test of combat with ten of their own warriors. It was agreed that he would have to defeat ten opponents in combat, then satisfy ten women in a single night.

He succeeded so well in these tasks that Orontea adopted him as her son, married him to her daughter, and left the couple as heirs to her throne. So this test had become their standard practice over the last two thousand years. Guidone reveals that he had been through the same process when he took over from his predecessor, and that he is now trapped in their gilded cage, with nothing better than death to look forward to.

Realising how they are related, Astolfo introduces himself to Guidone as his cousin, which only serves to make the latter more unhappy, as he knows that one of them must die: either Guidone in combat with Marfisa, or Astolfo and the other knights should Guidone get the better of Marfisa.

Marfisa proposes to Guidone that they should together break free from the women, and escape, but he fears that is impossible. She says that they must try, or die in the process. He then reveals that he knows of one woman who also wants to escape, and will help them leave the citadel, outside which men are not allowed. That night, arms and armour are brought up to the men from the ship in readiness for the morning.

At first light, Guidone escorts the knights, dressed in full armour, down to the tournament field, on their way to the harbour. The knights push on and try to force the gate to let them out of the citadel, doing so under a hail of arrows from women archers. As these start killing their horses, Astolfo decides to blow his magic horn. Its note is so terrifying that it strikes panic into the entire population, who run away as fast as they can. The town is filled with a mob in abject panic, and bodies are crushed in the mass of women try to escape.

Astolfo rides up and down the town blowing his horn, driving the population out until the whole area is empty. The other knights and the crew of their ship hurry down to the harbour and set sail at once, leaving Astolfo behind wondering where they have gone.

The ship carrying Marfisa and the knights, except for Astolfo, makes good speed across the Mediterranean until it reaches the French port of Marseilles, where that other valiant woman knight Bradamante is governor.

Principal Characters

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

Aquilante, son of Oliver, a Christian knight, and brother of Grifone.

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

Grifone, son of Oliver, a Christian knight, and brother of Aquilante.

Guidone Selvaggio, illegitimate son of Count Aymon, a Christian knight.

Marfisa, Ruggiero’s sister, a valiant and fearsome ‘pagan’ warrior.

Medoro, one of Prince Dardinello’s Moorish soldiers, a ‘pagan’.

Orontea, Queen of Alessandretta, a land controlled by women, who put men into slavery, but allow a small minority to serve them.

Sansonetto, envoy to Jerusalem, son of the King of Persia, who was baptised by Orlando.

The artists

Daniel Berger (1744-1825) was a German engraver who was sufficiently eminent to be appointed professor of the Prussian Academy of Arts.

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.

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.

It wouldn’t be Christmas without a Nativity, or my selection of eleven for this year. Probably the most popular motif in European painting, you could look at eleven every day of the year and still not see them all.

By Nativity, I mean a scene at which the centre is the newborn Jesus Christ, surrounded by the Holy Family. Among those adoring the infant can be various shepherds, but not the three Magi (normally considered to be a different motif), and most usually the event takes place in a simple stable, with certain traditional animals such as an ox and an ass.

Although this appears in various icons, miniatures and other paintings of the Middle Ages, it wasn’t until the transition from Byzantine art to the pre-Renaissance that it first became established in its modern form.

Duccio’s Nativity with the Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel (1308-11) forms a prototype for centuries of subsequent paintings, with its humble shed set into rock, the Holy Family, and the attendant animals (ox, ass, sheep) and humans (shepherds, angels). This was installed at the high altar in the Duomo (cathedral) in Siena on 30 June 1311, and remained there for nearly two centuries, only being removed in 1506, a tribute to its innovation.

Just over a century later, Robert Campin’s Nativity from about 1415-30 follows the trend popular in the northern Renaissance of depicting the stable as a dilapidated thatched structure of the type seen widely across the countryside of northern Europe. This was an important step in transforming depictions from the iconic to the representational.

In the middle of the fifteenth century, Petrus Christus elaborated his careful perspective projection into a gentle trompe l’oeil, in which its facade acts as a three-dimensional frame. The contrast in size between the tiny angels and the parents of Christ is strikingly archaic, though.

By the end of the fifteenth century, the short-lived early Netherlandish painter Geertgen tot Sint Jans transformed the scene with his innovative use of chiaroscuro in his Nativity at Night, thought to be from about 1490. Chiaroscuro makes narrative sense here, and results in a scene of great tenderness and reverence, thanks to its soft transitions of tones.

Although there are many fine Nativities from the following four centuries, they tended to evolution rather than revolution until the late nineteenth century, when artists started to experiment in giving more contemporary accounts.

Fritz von Uhde’s triptych of The Sacred Night painted in 1888-89 shows three scenes from a contemporary recasting of the story of the Nativity. In the centre is a very modern interpretation of the classic Virgin Mary and Child, with the adoration of the Magi on the left, and a delightful angelic choir singing amidst the rafters of the barn on the right.

Von Uhde’s undated Christmas Night, shows another modern interpretation of the Holy Family of Joseph, the infant Christ, and the Virgin Mary in their improvised accommodation in Bethlehem. Joseph is preparing Mary a frugal meal on a small spirit stove which is placed on an upturned wheelbarrow.

My favourite Nativity from this period of reinterpretation is Virginie Demont-Breton’s almost forgotten Alma Mater. Although her style may appear quite conventional, her departures from convention have resulted in a painting which is fresh and has lasting relevance. The Virgin Mary, our ‘nourishing mother’ of the title, is dressed in white as a bride. The traditional blue has transferred from her clothing to the flaked paint of the ruins behind her.

She looks very young, and there is no sign of Joseph, just her obviously holy infant lying swaddled on her lap. Around her are the weeds of waste and derelict sites. Is she yet another homeless single mother? This might make a poster appropriate for many Western nations today.

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale’s undated watercolour of The Nativity shows a distinctly contemporary cowshed, whose links with the Biblical account are mainly in the dress of the mother attending to her infant.

The Nabi artist Maurice Denis was another who transcribed events described in the Bible into modern settings. One of the most impressive of these is his thoroughly modern Nativity from 1894, in which the birth of Jesus takes place in a French town. Living above the ‘stable’ are a dodgy-looking couple who are leaning out of their window. Joseph himself looks very French, but behind him are traditional ox and ass, and a small flock of sheep are watching from outside.

Albin Egger-Lienz’s Christmas Eve from 1903 appears to be a re-interpretation of the traditional adoration of the shepherds, apparently set in a Tyrolean cowshed, with skilful use of light. I wonder whether its title has been mistranslated, and should instead refer to Christmas night.

My final novel Nativity is the most radical of all: Joseph Stella’s Crèche from 1929-33. At its centre is the Nativity ‘crib’ so typical of modern Christmas in the West, with an audience who appear to have been drawn from Stella’s home city in Italy, playing traditional bagpipes in homage. In front of the table on which the crib stands are a ewe and her lamb bridging between two major threads of Mary and infant Jesus in the crib, and Christ as the lamb of God.

I wish you a very Happy Christmas!

Normally the last event in the European Nativity cycle is the flight to Egypt, as described in the Gospel of Matthew Chapter 2 verses 13-23. Once the three Magi had left Bethlehem to return to their eastern kingdoms, Joseph had a dream in which an angel appeared, warning him to flee to Egypt immediately, with Mary and their newborn infant Jesus. This was because King Herod would try to seek the child out in order to kill him, in what became the Massacre of the Innocents, which in the Catholic tradition is normally commemorated on 28 December. So here on Boxing Day is a selection of paintings of the flight to Egypt.

Fra Bartolomeo’s The Rest on The Flight into Egypt from about 1500 is a traditional composition showing Mary and Joseph during their journey to Egypt. The more distant landscape is less detailed, but his donkey and palm trees are delightful. This was one of the last paintings which Baccio della Porta, as he still was at the time, made before he became a Dominican friar; he entered the monastery of San Marco the following year. He destroyed many of his earlier secular works, then stopped painting completely for several years.

When Fra Bartolomeo started painting again after 1504, it was only appropriate that he should return to the same motif. In this version from about 1509, he became one of the first artists to use an asymmetric variant of multiplex narrative which is more subtle, and may have been seen at the time as progressive. Joseph and Mary are shown in the dominant scene with the two infants. In the distance at the right is a couple, dressed identically, undertaking the same journey. They too are Mary and Joseph, and remind the viewer of the underlying story.

Maerten van Heemskerck’s The Rest on the Flight into Egypt from about 1530 is more of a conventional portrait of the Virgin and Child, with no strong visual clues such as palm trees that they are in the midst of a journey intended to take then away from Herod’s clutches and into Egypt.

Tintoretto’s Flight into Egypt from about 1582 shows the Holy Family hiking their way through a lush valley, with tougher terrain in the distant hills. In the background, local peasants are fishing on the river, and there’s a small town behind their humble farm. In the far right foreground, a rough wooden cross is a poignant reminder of what was to come in Christ’s adult life. The rope by which Joseph is leading their donkey forms a pictorial link with Tintoretto’s Passion scenes up in the albergo of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice.

Then at some time around 1600, Adam Elsheimer painted, in oil on copper, one of his most brilliant nocturnes, The Flight into Egypt. Under the soft light of a full moon, the Holy Family are about to enter a small camp of other refugees, set around a fire. Look closely and you’ll see a little echo of the Nativity itself, with ox, ass and sheep at the far left. (This could be multiplex narrative, of course, but Elsheimer provides no visual clues to confirm that.) Above them is the vast sky, with recognisable constellations and the wonder of the Milky Way, whose mythical origin is in the breast-feeding of the infant Hercules.

Philipp Otto Runge’s Rest on the Flight to Egypt (1805-06) is another unusual depiction of this story. The Holy Family are resting at dusk around a small fire tended by a dreamy-looking Joseph. The infant Christ – who looks like a real baby for once, if slightly older than newborn – is staring up at a strange tree which is covered with large white flowers and a couple of winged angelic children, one of whom is playing a harp.

William Blake’s Virgin and Child in Egypt from 1810 is one of his unusual glue tempera paintings in which he achieves fine modelling of flesh. Like van Heemskerck’s painting above, this is in essence a Virgin and Child against Blake’s imagined view of the pyramids, and a tiny sphinx, together with the River Nile and the city of Cairo.

Luc-Olivier Merson was skilled at taking traditional if not hackneyed stories and reinventing them in haunting images. His version of the Rest on the Flight into Egypt (1880) shows the Virgin Mary cradling the infant Jesus at the foot of a sphinx, whose head is turned up to stare at its vast nighttime sky. I suspect that he had seen Elsheimer’s nocturne, but arrived at a completely different view.

Like Fra Bartolomeo before, my last artist painted at least two different versions of this motif.

In about 1907, Henry Ossawa Tanner painted The Flight into Egypt in which he strived for geographical authenticity in its sketchy composition.

Tanner’s second version of the Flight into Egypt from 1923 is another nocturne following Elsheimer’s example, but sets a totally different scene in the narrow street of a town. He uses light skilfully, with the cast shadow creating the effect of a halo around Mary’s head, as she cradles the infant Jesus on her donkey.

My final selection of paintings from 1919 is an eclectic mixture of figurative works, including a couple of self-portraits, and floral still lifes. As with the previous articles in this series, they show well the wide range of styles which were current at the time.

Self-portraits

Nikolai Astrup was a wonderful Norwegian painter who provides us with a vivid account of traditional life in the countryside. His Self-Portrait at Sandalstrand with Engel and Her Sister (1919) gives a glimpse into his personal life. Here he sits, puffing on his pipe and staring into the distance. Deeper into the painting, Engel, his young wife, is nursing a baby at her breast. At the right, dressed in blue and clearly at a great distance from the world around her, is Engel’s sister.

However, that image of tranquillity in the landscape was idealised. Astrup’s health had not been good, and he was clearly unhappy. In 1919, he had to postpone indefinitely plans to travel abroad using a travel grant, and for a while, he seriously considered emigrating to the USA. Thankfully, he didn’t.

Lovis Corinth had been one of the leading painters in Germany (and Europe more widely) until he suffered a severe stroke in December 1911. Thanks to the support of his artist wife, Charlotte, he returned to painting within a year, and became as prolific in later years as he had been before. However, his initial nationalist support for the Great War was dashed with Germany’s defeat, and by the time that he painted tHis Self-Portrait at the Easel (1919) he had aged rather more than his years. He was about 61 at the time.

Figurative paintings

József Rippl-Rónai, the founder of modern painting in Hungary, was slightly younger that Corinth, but was spending more time at his villa in his home town of Kaposvár, where he painted mainly portraits, including this of Elza Bányai in a Black Dress.

Pierre Bonnard’s painting The Bowl of Milk (1919) is perhaps one of his best-known domestic interiors now, thanks to London’s Tate Gallery, which has acquired many of the artist’s preparatory sketches, making it one of his best-documented works.

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

Although it may appear to have been painted impromptu, Bonnard planned his composition very carefully over several sketches, in classical methods underlying its modern look.

Standing Woman and Seated Woman in a Landscape is among Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s last and most radical paintings, and was probably made in the summer prior to his death. The woman who is standing holds a basket in her right hand; the other figure is seated on the grass, with her legs merging into its leaves.

Alphonse Mucha’s contrasting Christmas in America has a complex story behind it. In 1919, Mucha had realised his great ambition, to exhibit his series of twenty paintings depicting the history of the Slav peoples, his Slavic Epic, in Prague, which had only the previous year become the capital of newly-independent Czechoslovakia.

Mucha’s decade of work on this series had been supported by the American Charles Crane, celebrated by this painting. Tragically, when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Mucha was badly persecuted, and died on 14 July 1939 in Prague, just before the start of the Second World War.

Floral still lifes

For many artists, painting flowers has been their therapy, a safe retreat when their life has got tough. For Henri Fantin-Latour, it paid the bills and financed his large group portraits; for Charles Demuth, they were a mainstay of his episodes when he was recovering from acute complications of his diabetes.

Édouard Vuillard painted occasional examples, such as his Roses in a Glass Vase, a relief from a steady succession of portraits and other commissions.

Toward the end of the 1910s, the Polish Post-Impressionist Olga Boznańska painted a series of quite radical still lifes featuring Japanese objects, such as this Still Life with White Flowers and a Japanese Doll (1919).

Finally, Lovis Corinth had used floral paintings during his recovery from his stroke, including Roses (1919).

Such an eclectic year in painting.

There are a few themes which even the boldest of narrative painters has avoided committing to canvas. One which is particularly topical is the abandonment of babies, something mothers have felt pressured to do since ancient times and probably long before. It’s topical because every Christmas it’s a stock story for the press: alongside photos of Christmas and New Year babies born to adoring couples who’ll undoubtedly live happily ever after, there’s the tragic account of a newborn left on a doorstep. The awful truth is that this happens year-round, but at other times doesn’t seem to merit coverage. An abandoned baby is not just for Christmas.

Some societies have had policies which selected only the most promising infants for support and nurture. The Spartans were notorious among Greek city-states for doing this, leaving those babies deemed weak or unlikely to make good warriors/mothers in Apothetae, a chasm at the foot of Mount Taygetus. In the growing cities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, abandoned babies were so common that institutions were established to care for these ‘foundlings’, and these live on in the ‘baby boxes’ still found in countries throughout Europe, and in North America.

Several major figures in mythology and religion were reputedly abandoned by their mothers, and this weekend they are my theme. This first article looks at paintings of one of the most famous, Moses, and tomorrow’s sequel starts with some paintings of the twins Romulus and Remus before looking at more modern times.

At the time of Moses’ birth, according to the account in the Old Testament book of Exodus chapter 2 verses 3–10, his parents were in Egypt as part of Jacob’s household and their relatives. When he was born, the Pharaoh had decreed that all male children born to the Hebrews would be drowned in the river Nile, so his mother Jochebed placed him in a small ‘ark’ and concealed it among the bulrushess by the bank of the Nile.

The ark and its occupant were discovered by the daughter of Pharaoh and her handmaids when the princess went to bathe in the Nile. Moses’ older sister Miriam saw this, and offered to find a nurse for the infant. Pharaoh’s daughter then adopted and raised him as an Egyptian of royal caste. This enabled him to survive the Pharaoh’s oppression, and to become the great prophet and leader of the Hebrew people, who delivered them from slavery, handed down the Ten Commandments, and led the Israelites to their Promised Land.

This anonymous fresco of Moses Found in the River was painted in about 244-255 CE on the wall of what must be the earliest surviving synagogue at Dura-Europos in Syria. Using multiplex narrative – the infant Moses appears twice – it tells the story as clearly as any more modern painting. Although the synagogue is believed to have been destroyed during recent fighting in Syria, these unique frescoes are thought to have been removed to the National Museum of Damascus, where they may be marginally safer.

Paolo Veronese and his workshop made several copies of this painting of The Finding of Moses in about 1581-82. This image is of the fine example in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. As was conventional at the time, the artist recasts the story in an Italianate city, its figures dressed according to contemporary fashion. The ark is being held by an African maidservant, as another of the princess’s retinue offers the baby to her mistress, for an older nurse to wrap in cloth. To the right of Pharaoh’s daughter, Miriam is making her offer to have the infant cared for.

Later paintings continued this composition of figures with the princess and baby at its centre. Orazio Gentileschi, father of the now more famous Artemisia, painted this version of Moses Saved from the Waters in 1633. Moses is being presented here while still in his ark, and none of the figures appears ready to bathe in the Nile.

Nicolas Poussin has been attributed several quite different paintings of this theme. My favourite among them is Moses Saved from the River (1638), which is novel for its use of a man as the rescuer of the baby from the river. The idealised landscape behind the figures has an imposing multi-arched bridge, and a pyramid giving the clue as to its intended location, and a conventional rivergod with his back to the viewer.

The tragically short-lived Elisabetta Sirani’s undated Finding of Moses is most closely cropped on the figures, and dispenses with the ark. The handmaid, perhaps Miriam herself, who holds the baby shows emotion in her face, and there is much to be read from the different gazes and hands.

This painting, which appears intended more as an illustration, is credited to Paul Delaroche, and was therefore probably painted between about 1820-50. Titled Moses Abandoned on the Nile, it’s one of the earliest works which show the moment of Moses’ abandonment, rather than his discovery. It was turned into a popular engraving.

Unusually for what is not just a religious work, but one taken from an Old Testament story, the latter half of the nineteenth century brought a great rise in its popularity as a theme in painting, most probably because of its links with the Pharaohs of Egypt.

In José María Avrial y Flores’s Pharaoh’s Daughter Rescuing Moses from the Nile from 1862, the story is told in the tiny group of figures overwhelmed by its massive buildings. The artist provides a literal account too, with Moses’ sister Miriam watching from the lower left corner as her baby brother is presented to Pharaoh’s daughter.

Then Gustave Moreau selected this story as one of a cycle of three paintings, on the ages of mankind and times of the day, which he exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in 1878. Its companions were Jacob and the Angel and King David.

Infancy and dawn were represented by Moïse Exposé sur le Nil (The Infant Moses) (c 1876-78), a radiantly beautiful depiction of the infant Moses asleep, prior to his discovery in the bulrushes. Moses is new life, new Judaeo-Christian beliefs, new law, and the new regime. Set against a background – derived from photographs of Egyptian ruins – symbolising the ancient, pre-Jewish, and decaying – it laid out Moreau’s hope for the French nation.

The baby Moses is marked out as being holy by the rays emanating from his temples, and surrounded by exotic flowers and birds. Unusually, Moreau does not show the traditional and popular moment of discovery of the infant in the bulrushes, but this static scene before.

In the Salon that year, Elizabeth Jane Gardner exhibited her far more conventional account of Moses in the Bulrushes (c 1878). The two women shown must be Moses’ mother, and his older sister Miriam.

Around the turn of the century, the story is told in three separate gouaches by James Tissot, as part of his huge project to produce an illustrated Old Testament, as a sequel to his New Testament. I show here the first two of his series, covering the story retold above.

Tissot’s Moses Laid Amid the Flags (above) and Pharaoh’s Daughter Has Moses Brought to Her (below) cover both the scenes which had been used in previous visual narratives, using Tissot’s modern illustrative style rather than the archaeological fantasies of the day.

It took Lawrence Alma-Tadema to transform the story into The Finding of Moses (1904-05), which looks like a still from a widescreen epic with a cast of thousands.

What I find most strange is that, in a century which saw the rise of social realism and Naturalism, not one of these paintings seems interested in tackling the more contemporary issues raised by a mother abandoning her baby because of the oppression she was suffering. Perhaps those were too close for comfort.

In the first article of this pair about abandoned babies, I looked at the most popular story of a ‘foundling’, that of Moses. Although extensively painted from late classical times, none of those images considered the social issues of the abandonment of babies, despite it being longstanding practice and a growing problem in the cities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This article looks at one of the best-known classical myths of abandonment, that of the twins Romulus and Remus. In this case, the babies weren’t abandoned by their mother, but taken from her with the intention of infanticide, to prevent them from challenging for power when they grew up.

The early history of the city of Rome is shrouded in myth. Although there is consensus that twin brothers Romulus and Remus played a key part, Plutarch admits that some ancient authorities didn’t even believe that the city was named after Romulus, let alone acknowledge his existence. He opens his famous biography of Romulus with a short review of different accounts of the origin of the name Rome, before telling the story with the widest credence, about the twin brothers.

Although Romulus doesn’t seem to have engendered the same cult following as Theseus, mythical founder of Athens, he was revered by the Romans, and well into more modern times. The three Carraccis, Ludovico (cousin), Annibale and Agostino (brothers), told his story in a magnificent series of frescoes which they painted on the walls of the Palazzo Magnani in Bologna, Italy, between 1589 and 1592, one section of which I show below.

Aeneas, survivor of the fall of Troy, became king of the Latins and went on to found the city of Alba; his descendants ruled in their turn, until it came to the brothers Numitor and Amulius. They divided their inheritance, with Amulius taking the treasure which had been brought by Aeneas from Troy, and Numitor ruling Alba. Amulius then used his wealth to wrest the throne from his brother; to ensure that Numitor’s daughter couldn’t produce any male heirs, Amulius made her a priestess of Vesta, so she was sworn to remain a virgin.

Soon after that, Numitor’s daughter was discovered to be pregnant. Although this traditionally would have led to the death of any Vestal Virgin, Amulius’ daughter interceded, and she was merely kept in solitary confinement. She gave birth to twin boys, who were superhuman in their size and beauty. Amulius ordered one of his servants to take the twins away and drown them in the river, but they were put first into a trough which functioned as a boat. As a result they were washed ashore downstream still alive.

A she-wolf then fed the babies, and a woodpecker watched over them; both were later considered to be sacred to the god Mars.

One of the frescoes in the Palazzo Magnani, probably painted by Ludovico Carracci and/or Annibale Carracci, shows the She-Wolf Suckling Romulus and Remus (1589-92). The twins are still inside the trough in which they had survived their trip down the river, and on the opposite bank a woodpecker is keeping a close watch.

At the far right, a now rather diaphanous figure may be Faustulus, one of Amulius’ swineherds who discovered the twins, and took them to his wife.

Peter Paul Rubens shows Romulus and Remus being discovered by Faustulus, in his painting of 1615-16. Not only is the she-wolf taking care of the twins, but a family of woodpeckers are bringing worms and grubs to feed them, and there are empty shells and a little crab on the small beach as additional tasty tidbits. Rubens also provides a river god and water nymph as guardians.

Carlo Maratta advances the story slightly, and elaborates it with a large group of figures in The Finding of Romulus and Remus from 1680-92. Faustulus, his shepherd’s crook at his feet, is now presenting his wife with the first of the twins. This foreground group is still on the riverbank, in the company of the river god, and under the direction of another figure who is holding his horse (possibly the servant of Amulius).

This is multiplex narrative, though: in the distance is Faustulus’ quite substantial farmhouse, outside which the family is shown a second time, to indicate their destination. Maratta also retains the she-wolf from the earlier part of the story, as she leaves the scene to the right, although I can’t see any woodpeckers.

Pietro da Cortona depicts the closing scene of this story in his Romulus and Remus Sheltered by Faustulus from about 1643. Faustulus has brought the first of the twins up from the riverbank, where the flock is now grazing, and is about to present the infant to his wife at their cottage. In the distance at the right the other baby is still suckling from the she-wolf, beside which are two additional figures apparently in dispute.

Nicolas Mignard shows a very similar scene in The Shepherd Faustulus Bringing Romulus and Remus to His Wife from 1654, in which Faustulus has brought both of the twins up from the river, and his extended family appears most welcoming.

Romulus and Remus, as they were now named, were brought up without Amulius’ knowledge. Although both remained large and fine specimens of humans, Plutarch tells us that it was Romulus who appeared to have the better judgement, and behaved in a more commanding way. As they grew older, the brothers became renowned for their hard work and good deeds.

Whilst the great city of Rome may have been founded by two foundling children, as later cities in Europe grew, their foundlings became an increasing problem. In the Middle Ages, religious houses such as monasteries and convents had become places of refuge for unwanted infants, and at times they were heavily used for that purpose. These steadily became more formalised, with the development of dedicated institutions as ‘foundling homes’.

The eighteenth century saw the foundation of foundling homes by secular organisations too. They increased in number as demand rose: in the early nineteenth century, it’s estimated that as many as one in twenty of all live births in France were abandoned. The problem grew in the USA during the latter half of that century and into the twentieth: foundlings were often put together with other orphans and shipped west by railway train to work as farmhands and servants in the households which agreed to foster them. That seens little better than the lot of the foundling in imperial Rome.

William Hogarth’s painting of Moses Before Pharaoh’s Daughter from 1746 is unusual for depicting not his discovery as an abandoned baby, but his later presentation to the princess. This is one of the paintings in the Foundling Museum in London, formed from the collection of one of the foremost charitable institutions which cared for abandoned infants and children.

London’s Foundling Hospital was founded in 1739 by Thomas Coram, a successful master mariner from Dorset, England, who lived for a decade in Massachusetts, where he established a shipyard. His philanthropy started there, in giving a large plot of land for a school. When he returned to England, he grew prosperous by importing tar, and continued in charitable works. He was distressed by the sight of abandoned infants in the streets of London, and started to campaign for the foundation of an institution to care for these ‘foundlings’. After years of fundraising and hard work, the new Foundling Hospital opened in temporary premises in 1741, and four years later the first wing of its new purpose-built premises started to admit the foundlings of London. William Hogarth and Thomas Coram were good friends.

Coram and the Foundling Hospital attracted the support of artists of all disciplines: the composer Handel gave performances there in 1749 and 1750, for example. Sophie Gengembre Anderson’s undated painting of Foundling Girls in the Chapel shows these girls at prayers in the Hospital’s chapel in the late nineteenth century.

More than a century after it opening, Emma Brownlow, the daughter of one of the Hospital’s foundlings, painted a series of works depicting its work, including The Foundling Restored To Its Mother from 1858. John Brownlow, her father, is shown in his role as the Director of the Hospital, and is here engaged in the unusual task of reuniting one of the foundling children with their natural mother. In the background is Hogarth’s painting The March to Finchley, which he painted in 1750 to depict the Guards Division of the army setting out five years earlier to protect the city of London from the threat of the Jacobite Rebellion.

I find it surprising that, of all the social ills shown in paintings, particularly by Naturalists during the nineteenth century, the problem of the abandonment of babies never seems to have had significant presence. Perhaps we’re still too ashamed to admit it.

During the last year, I have researched, written and published here over 350 articles about art and paintings. In today’s and tomorrow’s articles, I’m going to take a look back at those and show some of my favourite paintings from among them. This will hopefully give you the chance to catch up with some that you may have missed, and others which you’d like to view again before we hurtle into the New Year.

Few websites now feature much in the way of narrative painting, yet it has always been one of the major genres. I try to run at least one series at any time which works through a summary of the story or stories in major literary works, which have been extensively featured in paintings. At the start of the year, I began working through Goethe’s Faust, shown with the diabolic Mephistopheles lurking behind him in Ary Scheffer’s Faust in his Study (c 1840) above.

Goethe’s ‘Faust’: Introduction

Last year, I decided that I needed to get a better insight into the genius of the Spanish master Diego Velázquez.

Sometimes, I stumble across painters who I thought I knew a little about, but turn into something of a revelation. This was the case with the American Joseph Stella (1877–1946).

Perhaps known best for his Cubist-inspired paintings of Brooklyn Bridge, he also painted this large almost Surrealist fantasy, Tree of My Life, which appears to have been influenced by the extraordinary paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. It’s filled with exotic plants and birds, and passages are densely patterned, as shown in the detail below. This was sold at auction late last year for nearly $6 million.

This truly eclectic range of styles and themes is covered here in three articles:
A Weekend with Joseph Stella 1, to 1918
A Weekend with Joseph Stella 2, 1919-25
A Weekend with Joseph Stella 3, 1926 on

Each year I try to cover anniversaries of major painters. For anyone interested in landscape painting, this included the bicentenary of the death of the founding father of plein air painting, Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750–1819).

One of the finest, and the best-known, of all Valenciennes’ oil sketches is this showing Farm-buildings at the Villa Farnese: the Two Poplar Trees reputedly from 1780. This shows a Renaissance villa now in the centre of the city of Rome, although here its park setting makes it look as if it is out in the country. It was built in 1506-10 for a banker, and appropriately contains superb frescoes by Raphael and others. It is now owned by the state and most is open to visitors, whilst Valenciennes’ stroke-perfect oil sketch is one of the Louvre’s treasures.

In Memoriam Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes 1 Finished paintings
In Memoriam Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes 2 Oil sketches

I also realised how little I knew of the Nabis. In a bid to become better acquainted with their art, I have looked at each of those associated with the movement in turn. What surprised me most was what each went on to paint next. In the case of Félix Vallotton (1865–1925), these include some unusual domestic interiors.

Interior with the Back of a Woman in Red from 1903 develops the framing effect of multiple sets of doors, which draw the eye deeper towards the distant bedroom. The woman wearing a red dress looks away, her skirts swept back as if she has been moving towards the three steps which divide the space into foreground and background. There are tantalising glimpses of detail on the way: discarded fabric on a settee, clothing on a chair in the next room, and half of a double bed with a bedside lamp in the distance.

Paintings of Félix Vallotton: 2 Mysterious Interiors

Last year saw two major anniversaries, five hundred years since the death of Leonardo da Vinci, and two centuries since the exhibition of one of the most important paintings in art history, Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1818-19).

The Raft of the Medusa is a vast canvas, its figures shown life-sized, which has had huge impact on everyone who has seen it since 1819. Its account of extreme human survival appears completely authentic, and given the work that Géricault put into making it so, that’s perhaps not surprising. If you only see one painting when you visit the Louvre in Paris, make it this.

Why Géricault’s shipwreck changed the course of art 1
Why Géricault’s shipwreck changed the course of art 2

The other painting that everyone views in the Louvre is, of course, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Although I wouldn’t wish to discourage you, my series looking at his few surviving paintings hopefully conveyed the importance of his other works too.

This portrait of the mistress of Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan, in whose court Leonardo rose to fame, is surely good reason to head for Kraków in Poland, where it is in the National Museum.

Another of Leonardo’s paintings is more of a problem for the modern viewer. His original mural of The Last Supper from about 1520 is in a tragic state despite sustained and expert conservation work, but remains one of the greatest religious paintings of all time. This full-size copy of the original was painted by Giampietrino, and is now in the Royal Academy in London. The original remains in the refectory of the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, Italy.

In Memoriam Leonardo da Vinci: Pure Genius

In my series Medium Well Done, I looked at examples of paintings using different media and techniques. Two works which illustrate the versatility of relatively unusual media are shown below.

In 1903, over four centuries after the zenith in the use of egg tempera, Adrian Stokes used it to great effect in this landscape of Autumn in the Mountains.

By applying his pastels to a parchment ground and support rather than paper, Jean-Etienne Liotard was able to paint painstakingly detailed realist works like The Chocolate Girl (c 1744-45).

Medium Well Done starts with an introduction and terminology.

This article concludes my look back at some of my favourite paintings featured in articles published here over the last year.

Having worked through Goethe’s powerful play Faust, I moved on to the enormously influential and popular Divine Comedy by Dante, which extended over much of the middle and later months of 2019.

One of the most famous and wondrously imaginative of the illustrations painted by William Blake for an uncompleted edition of Dante’s work shows The Circle of the Lustful: Francesca da Rimini (above), which he completed in about 1824, and had already been etched when the artist died. This shows one of Dante’s best-known and probably largely original stories, of the adulterous couple of Francesca da Rimini and her lover Paolo, her husband’s brother, who were both murdered when caught in bed together by Francesca’s husband.

Below is a slightly later rendition in oils by the great narrative artist Ary Scheffer (1795–1858).

The Divine Comedy: Overview and list of articles

Most weekends, I take a relatively limited theme and look at a selection of paintings within that. Back in May, my weekend theme was the balcony, which has featured in some particularly interesting works, including this superb canvas by Richard Bergh (1858–1919).

Bergh’s Nordic Summer’s Evening (1899-1900) features two distinguished models, Prince Eugen, Duke of Närke, and the singer Karin Pyk, who were both close friends of the artist. It turns out to have been a wonderful composite: the pillars shown were borrowed from the floor below, where they supported this balcony, and Pyk was actually painted when she was in Assisi in Italy. Its figures look not at one another, but their gazes cross paths as they stare at the still parkland beyond, lit by the low sun.

The Balcony: Outside In
The Balcony: Inside Out

Occasionally, I have looked at the making of great paintings, which includes everything from the materials and techniques used, through to the development of the composition. This series has included several of my favourite paintings, of which I show here just two.

The Wilton Diptych was a luxury object intended from the outset for the personal devotions of a monarch, or someone of close rank and stature. Its interior shows on the left, King Richard II (its most probable owner) kneeling as he is presented by the three saints, Saint John the Baptist (carrying the Lamb of God), Saint Edward the Confessor (holding the ring he gave to Saint John the Evangelist), and Saint Edmund (holding an arrow from his martyrdom). On the right is the Virgin Mary holding the Christ Child with a throng of eleven angels, one of whom bears the standard of the Cross of Saint John. It was most probably painted in northern France in about 1395-99 by an unknown artist, who used egg tempera and gilding with consummate skill.

The Wilton Diptych

Vincent van Gogh’s Wheat Field with Cypresses (1889) was painted when he 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.

This, his first oil sketch, was finished by early July, when he wrote to his brother Theo, “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.”

Vincent van Gogh’s Wheat Field with Cypresses

Last summer, I looked at what is now an almost unknown phenomenon in art, the problem picture. Enormously popular around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, the reading of these works was hotly debated in newspapers. Their greatest exponent was John Collier (1850–1934).

At first, The Sentence of Death (1908) disappointed the critics, but it quickly became very popular. A young middle-aged, and presumably family, man stares blankly at the viewer, having just been told by his doctor – visual clues given include a brass microscope and sphygmomanometer – that he is dying. The doctor appears disengaged, and is reading from a book, looking only generally in the direction of his doomed patient.

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

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

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

Visual Riddles: Summary and contents

During the autumn, I turned more to Impressionist painting, first comparing the art and careers of its two greatest landscape painters, Alfred Sisley (1839–1899) and Camille Pissarro (1830–1903).

Rest along the Stream, Edge of the Wood (1878) must be one of Sisley’s finest paintings, and one of the great landscapes of the century. It features multiple stands of trees, each of a different species, and each depicted with remarkable skill. The lines of its trees, stream, and the gash of sky all lead the eye to the distant bridge, and the figure of a woman, her back against the foot of one of the birches in the foreground.

Pissarro took to painting series late in his career, but these weren’t rural. Because of chronic problems with his eyes, he mainly painted from behind windows, in cities like Rouen, and most of all Paris. Boulevard Montmartre, Spring Morning (1897) is composed primarily of buildings and streets, a plethora of figures, and countless carriages to move those people around – the ingredients for so many of his late paintings.

Pissarro and Sisley

The major Impressionist anniversary of 2019 was the centenary of the death of Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919). Rather than give an account of his better-known figurative art, I preferred to look more at his landscapes.

During the late 1870s, Renoir moved on from his earlier pure Impressionist style, to which Sisley was to remain wedded for the rest of his career. 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.

Later, Renoir set up the family home in the small town of Essoyes, where his wife’s family lived. Essoyes Landscape, Early Morning from 1901 gives a good idea of the rural tranquillity of this small town. Renoir’s trees now have canopies with a soft and sublime quality, as if melting away into the air around them.

Auguste Renoir as landscape painter

Having grokked the Nabis, my next challenge is to improve my knowledge and understanding of Symbolism, which is proving both more difficult and even more enjoyable. Its problems begin at arriving at any workable definition of what Symbolism is, so I have decided to look at a wide range of painters who are often considered to be Symbolists. This in turn has brought some rich rewards.

Giovanni Segantini (1858–1899) was trapped as a stateless person in the European Alps, between Italy and Switzerland, where he painted some extraordinary views. This is the centre panel of a triptych, this showing Nature (1898-99). The sun has just set behind the distant peaks, as a farmer and his wife take their livestock back to the barn for the night. The woman draws a young calf along, its mother following. The low horizon follows the Golden Ratio, and emphasises light as the primordial force in nature.

The Symbolist Landscape: Giovanni Segantini 1
The Symbolist Landscape: Giovanni Segantini 2

Eugène Jansson (1862–1915) lived in Stockholm, Sweden, and specialised in painting views of the city in low light. One of his finest nocturnes is this seemingly infinite view from his studio on Mariaberget over Riddarfjärden, Stockholm, painted in 1898. As the last (or first) light of the day fades to pale red above the horizon, the waterfront of the old city is lit in white. In the foreground, the gaslights of the quay below form into small whirlpools of light.

Eugène Jansson’s low light landscapes 1
Eugène Jansson’s low light landscapes 2

Finally, towards the end of last year, I started giving an account of another major Italian epic poem, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. Today it’s almost forgotten outside Italy, but in its day has provided the stories for a great many paintings. Unless you know the underlying narrative – and Orlando is complex and richly threaded – those paintings are almost unreadable. This series not only celebrates many glorious paintings by artists including Rubens and Delacroix, but hopefully helps you to read and understand them.

Introduction to Ariosto’s ‘Orlando Furioso’.

I look forward to researching, writing and publishing more articles for you in the New Year.

Happy New Year!

This year has relatively few significant anniversaries of the births or deaths of major painters, but some of them should be major events. Here’s a preview of those whom I intend covering in articles or series over the coming year.

24 January 1920, death of Amedeo Modigliani, born 1884

Modigliani was born in Livorno, in Italy, and contracted tuberculosis when he was only sixteen. He studied locally, then moved to Paris in 1906, where he settled in Montmartre and painted in poverty and without recognition. As he became addicted to alcohol and drugs, he developed a distinctive style, and is best known today for his many nudes, such as this Nude on a Blue Cushion from 1917.

He also painted portraits, and a few landscapes such as Cypresses and Houses at Cagnes, which he completed in 1919, the year of Renoir’s death. Tragically, his addictions and lifestyle allowed his tuberculosis to worsen, and he died from that in early 1920. His partner, the young French artist Jeanne Hébuterne, was so devastated by his death that two days later, on 26 January 1920, she threw herself to her death from a fifth-floor apartment window.

11 March 1820, death of Benjamin West, born 1738

West was born in Springfield, PA, where he taught himself to paint, and adopted the ambition to become a history painter. He travelled to Europe in 1760, where he first tried to study in Rome. Three years later, he arrived in London, intending to stay briefly on his way back to America, but never made that return. He was introduced to Joshua Reynolds, then still a student, and settled in London, intending to modernise history painting.

West’s most famous painting shows The Death of General Wolfe (1770), but like most of his work turned out to be a static tableau. The greatest action in any of his paintings is that in Alexander III of Scotland Rescued from the Fury of a Stag by the Intrepidity of Colin Fitzgerald, painted in 1786. Although this incident, in which the King of the Scots was almost gored by a stag, was far from contemporary – Alexander III lived from 1249-1286 – it is at least post-classical.

West draws the viewer’s gaze to the figure of Colin Fitzgerald, with his spear raised and ready to kill the stag, rather than the prostrate king he is saving. There are parallels with the compositional problems of the Calydonian Boar Hunt, perhaps best solved by Rubens in his Hunt of Meleager and Atalanta of about 1616-20, a painting with which West appears to have been unfamiliar.

6 April 1520, death of Raphael (Rafael Sanzio de Urbino), born 1483

Raphael was born in Urbino, Italy, and was orphaned when he was only eleven. His training is uncertain, but almost certainly started locally before he was apprenticed to Pietro Perugino, where he became a master by 1500. From then he travelled between commissions, spending much of his career in Florence. He is thought to have been a friend of Fra Bartolomeo, but was a rival to Leonardo da Vinci and later Michelangelo.

During the early years of the sixteenth century, Raphael’s figures became progressively more lifelike, and his background landscapes wondrous, as seen in The Alba Madonna from about 1510.

In his Madonna della seggiola (Madonna of the Chair) (1513-14), the faces of the Virgin and Child are superb, and all the fabrics are natural in appearance, texture and ‘feel’. Tragically, he died at the age of only thirty-seven, but by then had changed the course of painting in Italy – so much so that the Pre-Raphaelites in Britain tried to return to what they considered to be an older and ‘purer’ style.

20 April 1920, death of Briton Rivière, born 1840

Rivière came from a British artistic family, and was trained almost exclusively by his father. From about 1865, he specialised in the painting of animals.

Typically, Requiescat from 1888 is less about the death of the knight clad in armour than the loyalty and devotion of his dog, who sits pining for his master.

22 August 1920, death of Anders Zorn, born 1860

Zorn was born in the deep countryside of Mora in Sweden. He trained at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in Stockholm, where he was recognised as a high-flyer. His career started with portraits, for which he was as sought-after as John Singer Sargent. He travelled worldwide to paint commissions, which included no less than three Presidents of the USA.

Zorn also painted rural scenes from the region close to his home, and many very ‘natural’ nudes, often in rustic settings. His skill in watercolours equalled that in oils: this painting of a Summer Vacation from 1886 is executed in watercolour.

Several of his oil paintings tackled the problems of living in the countryside, here alcoholic stupor at Mora Fair (1892).

4 October 1720, birth of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, died 1778

Piranesi was a prolific Italian print-maker who made several famous sets of prints of Rome and its classical remains.

His series of sixteen etchings showing Carceri, or Prisons, from 1745, are possibly among the most influential over Romanticism and Surrealism, and entirely of his own invention.

20 October 1620, birth of Aelbert Cuyp, died 1691

Cuyp was one of the leading landscape painters of the Dutch Golden Age, whose biography is almost unknown.

At their best, Cuyp’s coastal landscapes such as The Maas at Dordrecht from about 1650 are full of rich light. As a result, he has sometimes been referred to as the Dutch Claude Lorrain.

13 November 1920, death of Luc-Olivier Merson, born 1846

Merson came from an artistic family in Paris, and trained at the École des Beaux-Arts there. He won the Prix de Rome, and studied in Italy for five years. On his return to Paris, he was a prominent Naturalist who painted a succession of brilliant narrative works.

One of his finest paintings is The Wolf of Agubbio (1877), in which he tells one of the legends associated with Saint Francis of Assisi. As with other Naturalists and academic artists of the day, his work has now largely been forgotten.

December 1820, birth of Eugène Fromentin, died 1876

Fromentin was a prominent writer, art historian and painter, who was born in La Rochelle, in France.

He was one of the first French artists to travel and paint in Algeria. Windstorm on the Esparto Plains of the Sahara from 1864 is one of the later examples of his work from North Africa, which helped establish the vogue for Orientalism.

1620, birth of Juan de Zurbarán, died 1649

The son of the more famous Spanish artist Francisco de Zurbarán, he painted unusual still lifes in chiaroscuro, such as this Still Life with Fruit and Goldfinch from 1639-40. He died during an outbreak of the plague which ravaged Seville in 1649, at the age of only twenty-nine.

1520/1524, birth of Giovanni Battista Moroni, died 1579

Moroni was born near Bergamo in Italy, during the late Renaissance. After training in Brescia, he went on to be one of the most prolific and famous portrait painters of the period.

London’s National Gallery now has one of the finest collections of his paintings, including this Portrait of a Gentleman with his Helmet on a Column Shaft from about 1555-6. It’s an excellent example of the use of highlights and shadows to form 3D objects.

I hope that you’ll join me to look at their paintings, together with those of other artists, over the coming year.

Travelling by sailing ship from New Zealand to Britain in the late nineteenth century typically took over three months, much of which was spent close to the ice of the Antarctic and rounding the infamous Cape Horn. Heaven help those artists who tried to flourish in the British colony of New Zealand at the time, particularly a young woman such as Frances Hodgkins (1869–1947). One answer, as I’ll show in this and tomorrow’s sequel, was to move to Europe to paint.

Hodgkins was born in the city of Dunedin on South Island, New Zealand, in 1869 (coincidentally the year that the Suez Canal was opened), into a prosperous and artistic family. She started exhibiting in 1890, and three years later became a pupil of the influential Italian teacher Girolamo Nerli. In 1895-97, she attended the Dunedin School of Art and Design, then becoming a teacher herself. When her father died in 1898, she started to save money to finance a trip to Europe to extend her training.

In 1901, she sailed to London, stopping at Sydney, Colombo in Sri Lanka where she became seriously ill, and Marseille, France, by which time she had recovered sufficiently to spend a day ashore. She took several classes in drawing and sketching soon after her arrival, then later in the year visited Paris, Les Andelys and Arles in France, and Rapallo in Italy. She became a close friend of another New Zealand painter, Dorothy Kate Richmond, who became her travelling companion.

The following year, she continued her travels, visiting the Italian Riviera, London, Penzance in Cornwall, Dinan in Brittany, and Tangier in Morocco at the end of the year. Several of her paintings were exhibited in London, and a large watercolour developed from her sketches of Morocco was exhibited at the Royal Academy in London – the first by any New Zealander.

In 1903, after visiting Belgium and the Netherlands, she returned to Wellington, New Zealand, where she established a teaching studio and was engaged briefly. In late 1904, another large watercolour was her first work purchased for a public collection in New Zealand. Two more of her paintings, this time of Dinan, were exhibited at the Royal Academy.

She returned to Europe in 1906, holding her first solo exhibition in London the following year, before moving on to Paris in 1908. She kept up her whirlwind series of visits to Italy, the Netherlands and France. One year later (late 1909) she became the first woman to be appointed as an instructor at the Académie Colarossi in Paris, where she taught watercolour. Among her pupils in France in 1911 was the Canadian painter Emily Carr.

In 1912, she sailed back to Melbourne in Australia, and for the next year toured and exhibited in Australia and New Zealand, returning to Italy at the end of the year, to spend the winter on the island of Capri. Hodgkins’ frenetic travel came to a halt with the outbreak of the First World War: she was caught in France at the time, so returned to England and settled in Saint Ives in Cornwall.

Hodgkins found herself out of place in Saint Ives, where the prevailing style was far more traditional – of the kind she had outgrown over the previous decade. Loveday and Ann: Two Women with a Basket of Flowers (1915) gives a good idea of how ‘modern’ she had become, in its combination of double portrait and floral still life.

The war years saw her complete quite a few portraits in oils, including this of Mrs Hellyer from about 1916. Although she had learned to paint in oils before first setting off for Europe, until about 1915 most of her work had been in watercolour.

At the end of the war, she started to rent a studio in Kensington, and made friends with Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines, two progressive British painters who were to prove influential to her work, and the success of her career in Britain.

The Edwardians from about 1918 is another good example of her early figurative work.

In the period after the war, many basic items were in short supply in Britain. Even fuel was hard to come by, and Hodgkins found her studio in London was too cold for herself, let alone her models. By this time, she was also running short of money, so she returned to Cornwall and sub-let her studio for a higher rent that she was paying.

The nineteen-twenties were hard years for Hodgkins, during which she had to teach intermittently to make ends meet. She managed to resume her travel, but now was more confined to England and France. In 1924, she tried to obtain support from her family in New Zealand, and started planning to return, but in 1925 worked for a major calico printer in Manchester, so decided to remain in Europe. Her fortunes changed in 1928, when she started at last to achieve critical acclaim, receiving praise from the art critic of The Times newspaper, for instance. Next year, following her introduction by Cedric Morris, she was elected to the leading group of British avant garde artists, Seven & Five.

Both of her paintings which I have been able to locate from about 1929 are still lifes: above, Still Life Eggs, Tomatoes and Mushrooms, and below Vase of Flowers. The latter is a good example of one of her favourite compositional devices, a still life in the foreground of a window, which in turn frames a distant landscape.

Hodgkins spent the winter of 1929-30 at La Gaude, near Vence, on the Mediterranean coast of France between Nice and Antibes. When she returned to London in the Spring, she signed a contract with a London gallery to supply paintings. Although the terms were inevitably more beneficial to the dealer than the artist, this enabled her to spend the summer painting at East Bergholt, Suffolk: Constable country.

The two paintings that I have to show from that summer have near-identical titles: above is Flatford Mill (1930), now in the Tate Gallery, London, and below is Flatford Mill, Suffolk (1930), now in a provincial gallery in Eastbourne. Both show countryside which will be familiar to anyone who has seen John Constable’s landscapes of more than a century before, but Hodgkins wasn’t tempted to revisit his compositions, not in the slightest. Both are from elevated viewpoints, looking down on the mirror-like surface of the water from the treetops. Everything about them is original and innovative.

Hodgkins spent the first half of 1931 in the south of France, then returned to London before spending the following winter in the village of Bodinnick-by-Fowey in Cornwall.

Hodgkins painted Wings over Water during the winter of 1931-32. It shows a view from her rooms in Bodinnick. Carefully placed in the foreground is a still life consisting of three large seashells with floral and plant arrangements. Sitting on the fence in the middle of the view is her landlady’s parrot, beyond which is the expanse of the River Fowey. She probably painted this after making an elaborate drawing of the same motif, but there are numerous pentimenti suggesting that she was still resolving its geometry and composition as she was applying paint.

Later in 1932, with the closure of the London gallery to which she had been contracted, she signed a new contract with the Lefevre Gallery, which brought her a steady annual income of £200. She could afford to overwinter in Ibiza.

References

The Complete Frances Hodgkins – online catalogue and resources from Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.

Catherine Hammond and Mary Kisler (eds) (2019) Frances Hodgkins European Journeys, Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978 0 500 09418 1.

In the first of these two articles about the life and work of the New Zealand painter Frances Hodgkins (1869–1947), I showed examples of her paintings up to 1932, a period in which she struggled and finally succeeded in establishing herself among the foremost painters in Britain. After her return from Ibiza in 1933, she was invited by Paul Nash to join his new avant garde group Unit One, which was the origin of the Surrealist Movement in Britain. She agreed, but quickly realised their differences, and left after just a few months.

The following year, she was in Cornwall again, and stayed at Corfe Castle in Dorset. She exhibited once more (as she had done annually since 1929) with the Seven & Five group, but it then decided to become more abstract. Throughout her career, Hodgkins steadfastly refused to move towards abstract painting, so resigned from the group.

Sabrina’s Garden was most probably painted in the studio in 1934, developed from a detailed pencil drawing which Hodgkins had made in Bridgnorth during August 1932. She had originally intended painting in Norfolk with her friend Hannah Ritchie, but they were so disappointed with its flat landscape and “lifeless outlook” that they went to Bridgnorth after the first two days of their trip together.

She has arranged a still life on the table, and added two ghostly figures at the left; otherwise, much of the composition is rooted in the drawing, which is now in Christchurch Art Gallery.

Spanish Peasants is a tiny oil sketch which Hodgkins made in 1934, of two Spanish women carrying large loads.

In 1935, she continued to travel, particularly with Cedric Morris. He noted that her eyesight had deteriorated badly; she was now in her late sixties, but continued to paint avidly. The Weir (c 1935) may have been painted during one of those excursions, and appears to be a plein air sketch showing fish leaping upriver over a weir.

Most of Hodgkins’ best-known works from later in her career are oils, but she continued to paint in watercolour and gouache. The Lake, from about 1930-35, is thought to be a recollection of the River Severn seen at Bridgnorth, a town in which she taught and painted on several occasions between 1926-32. She probably made drawings in front of the motif in about 1932, which she worked up later in the studio, much as she had done with Sabrina’s Garden above. The resulting painting wasn’t exhibited until 1940, though.

Its foreground still life is laid out on a wrought iron table with a blue top. The objects are hard to distinguish, though. Behind is the lake, in which there are two canoes and several other objects. At the lower right is a large stone goblet in which flowers are growing.

In 1937, Hodgkins had her most successful exhibition to date, at the Lefevre Gallery, which elicited highly favourable reviews.

Tanks, Barrels and Drums from 1937 is an unusual outdoor still life composed from various containers commonly encountered on farms, including traditional wooden barrels, riveted tanks, and moulded tanks formed like large pots.

Hodgkins’ eyesight may have been poor, and she was certainly growing old, but nothing could stop her from painting, nor from travelling incessantly. In February 1938, she left Worth Matravers in Dorset for a motoring holiday with Rée Gorer, which took the pair as far as Saint Tropez, on the French Mediterranean coast. Later that year, she had another motoring holiday, this time to Wales.

The Painted Chest from 1938 is another composite of still life and outdoor view. Standing on top of the painted chest are two jugs and a vase, the latter containing flowers. In the distance is what appears to be a laid-out vegetable and flower garden.

Houses and Outhouses, Purbeck (1938) shows a jumble of old outbuildings in a field by the more distant houses on its skyline. Gathered by the outbuildings is a seemingly random collection of household junk, forming an outdoor still life, with different forms and material textures.

Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Hodgkins was recognised in two signal invitations: the first, from Sir Kenneth Clark, the director of London’s National Gallery, was to exhibit in the British pavilion at the World’s Fair in New York; the second was to exhibit in the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale, alongside five other major artists. Sadly, her paintings were never shipped because of the war, but the following year were exhibited in London instead.

Portrait of Kitty West, painted in watercolour and gouache in 1939, shows the artist and wife of author Anthony West. Hodgkins became good friends of the Wests in 1937, and painted their double portrait after staying with them in August of that year. She returned to holiday in Wiltshire, where the Wests lived, in 1939, when she is presumed to have painted this portrait of Kitty (1910-99). Her style shows the influence of Matisse, whose work she greatly admired.

Cheviot Farm (1938-1940) shows an interesting collection of objects of different forms in a farmyard, apparently in the Cheviot Hills, spanning Northumbria and the southernmost part of Scotland.

By 1940, Hodgkins had largely settled in Corfe Castle. The following year her health took a knock: she had to undergo surgery for stomach ulcers. In 1942, she was granted a civil list pension, and agreed to be the subject of one of the books in the Penguin Modern Painters series, which had been commissioned of Myfanwy Evans, wife of John Piper and a friend.

Broken Tractor is a gouache from 1942, believed to have been painted when Hodgkins was living at Corfe Castle. This is another farmyard, and another lexicon of form and texture.

Although known as the Isle of Purbeck, this part of the English Channel coast of Dorset is actually a peninsula. In Purbeck Courtyard, Morning from 1944, Hodgkins shows the small yard behind tight-packed buildings, glowing red in the morning sunlight. In the centre foreground is a large cat basking in the sun.

At the end of the war, Hodgkins was seventy-six and her eyesight was failing. She remained at Corfe Castle, escaping only to Wales for a holiday. Her work was exhibited in London, with that of Francis Bacon, Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland. In 1946 she travelled to London for a major retrospective exhibition of her work at the Lefevre Gallery, which was an outstanding success. She grew increasingly frail, and died in Dorchester, Dorset, on 13 May 1947, aged seventy-eight.

References

The Complete Frances Hodgkins – online catalogue and resources from Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.

Catherine Hammond and Mary Kisler (eds) (2019) Frances Hodgkins European Journeys, Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978 0 500 09418 1.

Themes and titles of paintings are often opaque, leaving the viewer wondering how to read an image. This weekend I’m going to help you decode two potentially puzzling groups of paintings: today I tackle the Ship of Fools, and tomorrow Death and the Maiden.

Probably the most famous painting with the current title The Ship of Fools is a fragment in the Louvre painted by Hieronymus Bosch (c 1450–1516) as part of what is now believed to have been a Wayfarer Triptych from the period 1500-10. This theme is drawn from a section in Plato’s Republic, in which the ancient Greek philosopher uses an allegory to criticise systems of government based not on experts but on (a flawed) democracy.

Plato’s allegory is that government by democracy (or similar means) is like a ship full not of specialists with training and experience, but a group of ignorant fools:
“Imagine then a fleet or a ship in which there is a captain who is taller and stronger than any of the crew, but he is a little deaf and has a similar infirmity in sight, and his knowledge of navigation is not much better. The sailors are quarrelling with one another about the steering – every one is of opinion that he has a right to steer, though he has never learned the art of navigation and cannot tell who taught him or when he learned, and will further assert that it cannot be taught, and they are ready to cut in pieces any one who says the contrary. They throng about the captain, begging and praying him to commit the helm to them; and if at any time they do not prevail, but others are preferred to them, they kill the others or throw them overboard, and having first chained up the noble captain’s senses with drink or some narcotic drug, they mutiny and take possession of the ship and make free with the stores; thus, eating and drinking, they proceed on their voyage in such a manner as might be expected of them. Him who is their partisan and cleverly aids them in their plot for getting the ship out of the captain’s hands into their own whether by force or persuasion, they compliment with the name of sailor, pilot, able seaman, and abuse the other sort of man, whom they call a good-for-nothing; but that the true pilot must pay attention to the year and seasons and sky and stars and winds, and whatever else belongs to his art, if he intends to be really qualified for the command of a ship, and that he must and will be the steerer, whether other people like or not – the possibility of this union of authority with the steerer’s art has never seriously entered into their thoughts or been made part of their calling. Now in vessels which are in a state of mutiny and by sailors who are mutineers, how will the true pilot be regarded? Will he not be called by them a prater, a star-gazer, a good-for-nothing?”
Plato, ‘The Republic’ book 6, translated by Benjamin Jowett, Wikisource.

In 1494, Sebastian Brant (1458–1521) developed this allegory into a complete book, in which he detailed many human mistakes and shortcomings. Its title is Das Narrenschiff, the Ship of Fools, and it was illustrated with a series of woodcuts made by an unknown artist. I show here the same prints, taken from an English translation, Shyp Of Foles Of The Worlde published slightly later by Alexander Barclay.

The woodcut above is featured on the title page, and that below is a more detailed view of the ship included later in the text. The fools are drinking, arguing, and one is hanging over the side, about to be thrown overboard.

Until late in the twentieth century, it was assumed that Bosch’s panel The Ship of Fools was a standalone painting, a response to Sebastian Brant’s book published just a few years earlier.

The Ship of Fools is actually a small boat, into which six men and two women are packed tight. Its mast is unrealistically high, bears no sail, and has a large branch lashed to the top of it, in which is an owl. The occupants are engaged in drinking, eating what appear to be cherries from a small rectangular tabletop, and singing to the accompaniment of a lute being played by one of the women.

One man at the bow is vomiting overboard, near a large fish which is strung from the branch of a small tree. Another of the passengers holds a large spoon-like paddle, which would be of little or no use either for propulsion or steering.

There are four additional characters (all men): two are swimming by the side of the boat, one, dressed as a fool, is perched high up forward in among the rigging, and the fourth has climbed a tree on the bank to try to cut down the carcass of a chicken from high up the mast. The vessel flies a long red pendant from high on its mast, with a gold crescent moon on it. The distance shows relatively flat countryside.

The boating party are seen engaged in lustful and drunken activities, once again showing Bosch’s association between music and sin, and the symbolism of fruit. The man and woman seated opposite one another by the tabletop, providing the musical entertainment, appear to be a monk and a nun.

Research in the late twentieth century showed that this panel was but one fragment from a triptych. Below the Ship of Fools is another fragment showing scenes of gluttony and lust, on the water and the bank. This makes up the left wing, with Death and the Miser forming the right wing. The centre panel is still missing, making it impossible to make any firm conclusions about the theme of the whole triptych, but it has now been matched with Bosch’s The Wayfarer (or Pedlar) forming its exterior.

This is a modern reconstruction of the outer panels, as remain.

As far as I can tell, that was the last painting of the Ship of Fools until the twentieth century. William Etty’s Youth on the Prow, and Pleasure at the Helm (1830-2) has some similarities, but uses Thomas Gray’s poem The Bard from 1757 as its literary reference, not Plato.

Then, on the cover of the German art magazine Jugend (‘Youth’) in 1930, Franz Sedlacek’s painting Das Narrenschiff (Ship of Fools) may have come as a surprise. I don’t know how political this was intended to be: the magazine had earlier been at the heart of Art Nouveau, and was the origin of Jugendstil. But a few years after this was published, it aligned itself with National Socialism. I rather hope that with its clear reference to Plato’s allegory this was a last cry for help, seeing what was about to happen in Germany at the time.

Coming right up to the very recent past, Plato’s allegory is made explicit in Thomas Bühler’s Das Narrenschiff (Ship of Fools). Its Surrealist gathering of symbolic figures spares no one from shame. At its centre is the tree from the Garden of Eden, with the celebrated apple displayed on a placard, below which is the serpent.

Now, as we enter the 2020s, aren’t many of us just passengers in Ships of Fools?

References

Wikipedia has a list of other artistic references.

Matthijs Ilsink, Jos Koldeweij et al. (2016) pp 316-335 in Hieronymus Bosch, Painter and Draughtsman: Catalogue Raisonné, Yale UP and Mercatorfonds. ISBN 978 0 300 22014 8.

In yesterday’s article, I looked at the origin of an unusual motif in painting, the Ship of Fools. As a theme in visual art, Death and the Maiden is considerably more common, but concerns a peculiar association, that of death with the erotic. This was first expressed clearly in paintings around five hundred years ago, and was revived during the late nineteenth century.

In European art, personifications of Death have generally been derived from those of Time: a man bearing a scythe and sometimes an hourglass or sandglass (a timer consisting of grains of sand inside two glass bulbs joined by a narrow neck, resembling the figure of 8). From this evolved the Grim Reaper, often depicted as a skeleton or rotting corpse wearing long monastic robes with a deep hood, and holding his scythe.

Among the first well-known painters to show the everyday tragedy of an early death coming to a young woman is Hans Baldung, a contemporary of Hieronymus Bosch. He made several paintings of this scene of Death and the Maiden. This version is thought to have been painted in 1509-11, and is now in Vienna. The woman is young, beautiful, and nude, arranging her long tresses in front of a hand-mirror. Behind her is a decomposing corpse holding an hourglass high above her: he is Death.

This painting is also a good example of a long tradition which can be seen going back to ancient Egyptian wall paintings, that of colour-coding the genders. Men traditionally have yellow or pale brown skin, but women are as white as porcelain.

Baldung’s later Death and the Maiden, also more appropriately titled Death and Lust, from 1517 shows a similar scene. This time Death has taken a firm grasp on the woman’s tresses, and she locks her hands together in prayer, knowing well the fate that awaits her.

When this theme was revisited in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the figures had changed. Death was no longer that grim pre-Christian reaper, but the Angel of Death with feathered wings.

In Horace Vernet’s The Angel of Death from 1851, a young man is praying over the side of a bed, kneeling, his hands clasped together. Opposite him, an illuminated Bible is open, above that an icon hangs on the wall, there is a sprig of flowers, and a flame burns in prayer. But the occupant of the bed, a beautiful young woman, is being lifted out of it. Her right hand is raised, its index finger pointing upwards to heaven.

Behind her, the Angel of Death, the outer surface of its wings black, and clad in long black robes, its face concealed beneath a hood, is lifting her out, to raise her body up towards the beam of light which shines down from the heavens. This epitomises the nineteenth century European attitude to death, and its common narrative as an ascent to Heaven, without any of Baldung’s earthy eroticism.

One major influence was the lied (sung poem) composed by Franz Schubert in 1817, Der Tod und das Mädchen, ‘Death and the Maiden’. Its translated verse reads:

The Maiden:
“Pass me by! Oh, pass me by!
Go, fierce man of bones!
I am still young! Go, dear,
And do not touch me.
And do not touch me.”

Death:
“Give me your hand, you beautiful and tender form!
I am a friend, and come not to punish.
Be of good cheer! I am not fierce,
Softly shall you sleep in my arms!”
(Wikipedia).

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’ Death and the Maiden from 1872 probably linked Schubert’s song with the recent war, in which so many young French and Prussian people had died, together 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.

Evelyn De Morgan’s androgynous Angel of Death from 1880 is one of three similar paintings which she made of this motif. Here Death holds in their right hand the scythe so feared by us all, while comforting a seated young woman. The landscape at the left of the painting appears dry and barren, with just three daisy flowers visible. That to the right of the angel is better watered, more fertile, and has richer flowers. This has been interpreted as indicating that the woman’s past was tough, but that her imminent death will offer her a better future, another popular aspiration of the day.

It wasn’t long, though, before this simplified interpretation became more complicated, when the erotic returned.

Edvard Munch’s Death and the Maiden, Death and Life or The Loving Woman, from 1893-94, shows the souring of love, as a naked and wanton woman kisses a skeleton of a man. Framing them in repoussoir are long-tailed sperm cells, at the left, and two foetuses, at the right.

This is one of Munch’s most complex images, and invokes the cycle of life, from gametes through intra-uterine development, to love, then death. The artist here symbolically links Eros, procreation, and Thanatos (death).

Domenico Morelli’s The Angel of Death (1897) returns to the simpler emotions of a winged female angel tenderly drawing a white sheet over the body of a young woman who has just died.

Henry Lévy’s style may be more academic and conventional than Munch’s, but his Young Woman and Death from 1900 mixes almost as many emotions. The Angel of Death, depicted as a saintly young man with large white wings, is embracing a dying young woman in an overtly erotic way, with his hand cupped over a breast, and his mouth close to her ear. She is starkly naked, and a clothed young man kneels by her, his arms outstretched and pleading for the angel to leave her with him. Behind is a ‘Gothic’ landscape.

Marianne Stokes’ Death and the Maiden from 1908 returns to the purity of Vernet, though. Her Angel of Death could even be female, and holds a lantern in her right hand, as she comforts her young victim.

My last painting of this small selection is by Egon Schiele, who was going through a somewhat complex phase in his personal life at the time. He had just forsaken his partner Wally (Walburga Neuzil), with whom he had been living for the last four years, and married Edith Harms. It appears that Schiele expected to maintain his relationship with Wally after his marriage. When he tried to explain this to Wally, she – not unsurprisingly – abandoned him immediately, and they apparently never met again.

Schiele expressed this in his major painting of Death and the Maiden (1915), which was exhibited the following year in Berlin. The young woman is based on his earlier paintings of Wally, and the man is a self-portrait. They embrace in unnatural kneeling positions on crumpled sheets which are laid out on rocks in the countryside.

The challenge is to work out what Schiele’s painting has to do with any of the preceding images, the personification of Death, or the Angel of Death.