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The Story in Paintings: Gustave Moreau and the dissolution of history
During the 1800s, history, and other forms of narrative, painting underwent a crisis from which they have never really recovered. This article looks at the narrative paintings of Gustave Moreau, who...
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The Italian Impressionist: Giuseppe De Nittis – 2
By 1880, De Nittis was well-established and commercially successful, as I have explained in the previous article in this series. Artistically he had extensive contacts in London, Paris, Naples, and...
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The Story in Paintings: JW Waterhouse and mediaeval romance
There were history and other narrative painters in the late 1800s who did not see the need to re-invent history painting in the way that Gustave Moreau did. One of the best and most enduring – if still...
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The Italian Impressionist: Giuseppe De Nittis – 3
In the previous two articles – here and here – I have only included images of those paintings which I can reasonably confidently attribute to Giuseppe De Nittis. To do that, I have matched images which...
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The Story in Paintings: Pre-Raphaelite tableaux
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) was formed as a close-knit and often co-habiting artistic group in 1848, in England. Its early doctrines were expressed in four declarations: to have genuine ideas...
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The Story in Paintings: Jean-Léon Gérôme and the spectacular
Largely forgotten until revived recently, Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) was the most popular painter of the Salon and the art market during the period that the Impressionists were active, and rejecting...
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The Italian Impressionist: Giuseppe De Nittis – 4
Having established a reasonable range of works painted by De Nittis during his short career, I will now use those to consider whether he painted Impressions, and whether he was a member of the group we...
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The Story in Paintings: Impressionist issues
Even without a manifesto or coherent philosophy, one of the few consistent features of the Impressionists was their total abstinence from narrative genres such as history, mythological, and religious...
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The Story in Paintings: Moving panoramas for the masses
During the 1800s, most western cities increased greatly in size, and the scope for exploiting paintings for commercial gain increased concomitantly. The population of Paris grew from just over half a...
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The Story in Paintings: War and puzzles
I have already shown some examples of battle panoramas. Long before the advent of the panorama, painters have been trying to tell the stories of battles and wars. This article looks in more detail at a...
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How copyright disserves almost everyone
Over the last year, I have become increasingly convinced that, much of the time, current copyright law works against the best interests of most artists. In apparently protecting their intellectual...
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The Story in Paintings: New narratives
Much of the twentieth century was a difficult period for narrative painting – well, for painting as a whole. Although there were still many fine artists who painted superb works, they were viewed as...
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The Story in Paintings: Changing fortunes
I have already mentioned Poussin’s ‘péripéties’, which he used to condense the causes of an event, its consequences and moral implications, into his narrative paintings. You may have been as blurry in...
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Making paintings popular again
It is hard to appreciate that, around 150 years ago, painting was so popular that the Paris Salon was able to attract over a million visitors, although the whole population of Paris was less than two...
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The Story in Paintings: Enlightened by science
Most of the narratives used by the paintings which I have shown so far are fairly conventional. Drawn from classical myth, epic poetry, fairy and folk tales, religion, plays, and most recently movies,...
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One hundred thousand views, and some you might have missed
Yesterday, this blog reached another milestone: it has now had over 100,000 ‘visits’, ‘hits’, or page views. This takes it from infancy to childhood, which is not bad in just thirteen months, 1297...
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Making First Impressions: 4 Ready for early test
As well as adding more content to my hypertext exploring the First Impressionist Exhibition of 1874, and those who exhibited in it, I have been working out how best to place web links in its writing...
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The Story in Paintings: Problem pictures
The great majority of narrative paintings refer to well-known oral or text narratives, but a few do not. British painters of the late Victorian period not only made a speciality of painting narratives...
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Carlo Crivelli and his cryptic cucumbers
Other than in still life painting, fruit and vegetables don’t get much coverage in art. Grapes, apples, pears and peaches pop up now and again, and there are always the extraordinary portraits of...
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The online catalogue raisonné: a fundamental tool in art
The catalogue raisonné (CR), a comprehensive and detailed listing of all the known artworks made by an artist, is to the study of art what a dictionary and grammar are to the study of a language....
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