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Still Life History: 10 Modern times
One of the remarkable features of painting in the twentieth century was the persistence of the still life. Through what turned out to be a long and largely self-destructive period, painters didn’t...
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Francisco Goya: 4 Family life
In the late 1770s, Francisco Goya (1746–1828) developed his skills in etching by creating a series of prints of the paintings of Velázquez in the Royal Collection. These were sold in Madrid from 1778...
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Reject: Mary Cassatt’s Little Girl in a Blue Armchair
When the American artist Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) submitted a portrait of a young girl for the American pavilion at the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris, she must have hoped for better luck than...
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Impressionist painting in Britain: Introduction
Impressionism was a strongly international movement in art. From its beginnings in the 1860s in France, it attracted the attention of artists throughout Europe, and as far afield as Australia and...
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Into the Rococo: In Memoriam Antoine Watteau 1
This weekend I mark the tercentenary of the death of Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), who was largely responsible for transforming the dying embers of the Baroque to the charming Rococo. Although I have no...
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Into the Rococo: In Memoriam Antoine Watteau 2
Three centuries ago today, on 18 July 1721, the master of Rococo painting, Antoine Watteau, died. In the first article of these two celebrating his life and work, I showed paintings culminating in his...
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Don Quixote 19: The footman and the judge’s daughter
In the previous episode, the group at the inn heard the conclusion of the account by the former captive in Algiers of his escape with the beautiful young Moorish woman Zoraida. Once he’d explained how...
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Still Life History: A place at the table
Having completed my historical survey of still life paintings, we can draw from those some of the lasting themes within the genre, and trace their development in detail. This article opens this next...
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Francisco Goya: 5 Four seasons
December 1784 brought welcome change to Goya’s household: their newborn son Francisco Javier Pedro survived birth and started to flourish, unlike his deceased siblings. The artist’s altarpiece in San...
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Reject: Gustave Caillebotte’s Parquet Planers
The Paris Salon ran into problems over its many rejected paintings in 1863, but the early years of the Third Republic, after the Franco-Prussian War, were no easier. Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904),...
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Impressionist painting in Britain: 1 Foundations
The history of British Impressionism, such as it is, normally starts in the 1880s, when Whistler, Sickert and others overtly declared their direction. In this series, I start by looking at the...
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River in Flight: paintings of waterfalls 1
Waterfalls are one of nature’s great spectacles, from ribbon falls which drop so far that almost all their water turns to spray before it lands, to vast thundering rivers plunging down a cliff, often...
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River in Flight: paintings of waterfalls 2
In the first article of these two looking at paintings of waterfalls, I ended with Edward Lear’s watercolour of a waterfall on the Kalamas River in Albania, which he painted in 1851. The following...
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Don Quixote 20: Attempted arrest and imprisonment
In the previous episode, those staying at the inn had been awoken by the singing of one of the judge’s footmen Luis, who was in love with the judge’s young daughter Clara. The innkeeper’s daughter and...
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Still Life History: Deceiving the eye
In a sense, all traditional still life paintings are intended to deceive the viewer’s eye, making this a genre of the trompe l’oeil. But the really deceptive go a good bit further than just looking...
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Francisco Goya: 6 The new king and rural humour
I ended my last article about Francisco Goya (1746–1828) with his final cartoons for tapestries commissioned by King Carlos III, who died on 14 December 1788. That year, Goya had also been commissioned...
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Reject: Gustave Courbet, The Painter’s Studio
In the middle of the nineteenth century, Gustave Courbet was something of the enfant terrible of French painting. His startling self-portrait The Desperate Man from about 1843 is more of a manifesto...
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Impressionist painting in Britain: 2 Walter Sickert
Like his mentor James Whistler, Walter Sickert (1860–1942) had been born overseas. The son of a Danish-German artist who was living in Munich, Germany, the Sickert family migrated to London when Walter...
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Landscape embedded 1
Well before landscape painting was recognised as a genre in its own right, the only ways that an artist could paint a view of the countryside were in the background of a figurative motif, or as a view...
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Landscape embedded 2
In the first of these two articles looking at a selection of paintings in which views of landscapes are embedded in paintings with contrasting motifs, I showed examples from the early Northern...
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