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Reject: Contents
This short series looks as some of the more famous masterpieces which have been rejected by those who commissioned them, or the juries for major exhibitions. Articles are listed in chronological order,...
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Impressionist painting in Britain: 8 Algernon Talmage
Far too many accomplished and famous British artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have all but vanished. One of the difficulties with trying to build a history of British...
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The 700th anniversary of Dante’s death: 1 His life
On 14 September 1321, seven hundred years ago this Tuesday, Dante Alighieri died in exile in Ravenna, Italy. After the Bible and classical myths recorded by Ovid, Dante’s Divine Comedy must be the...
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The 700th anniversary of Dante’s death: 2 His writing
In the first article of these two remembering the seven-hundredth anniversary of the death of Dante, on 14 September 1321, I showed paintings of his life. Here I offer a very small selection of those...
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Don Quixote 25: Preparing for the third sally
In the previous episode, Cervantes resumed the story with Don Quixote back at home after his second sally. The priest and the barber left him alone to recover for a month, but when they revisited him...
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Landscape Composition: 2 Beginnings
Although it was Leon Battista Alberti, in the southern Renaissance, who first developed the subject of composition in paintings, in his 1436 book Della pittura (On Painting), landscape painting first...
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Francisco Goya: Repaying debts
Despite Goya’s paintings of resistance against French troops in 1808, he was among the many who were purged from court for ‘purification’ in May 1814 following the restoration, and didn’t return to...
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Characters in Painted Stories: 1 Introduction
Story-telling is a central theme in literature, but an embarrassing secret in painting. For the last century, critics and commentators have insisted that it no longer existed, and was unworthy of a...
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Impressionist painting in Britain: 9 Edward Stott
The first British Impressionists were, in the main, painters who returned from training in Paris in the 1880s, several of whom were early members of the New English Art Club. Among them was Edward...
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By the Azure Sea: Paintings of the Côte d’Azur 1
As summer steadily slips away from us in Northern Europe and America, I felt one last glimpse of the sun would cheer us before leaf-fall. This weekend we’re off to the Midi, the south of France, the...
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By the Azure Sea: Paintings of the Côte d’Azur 2
In the first of these two articles looking at paintings of the section of the Mediterranean coast between Marseille and Nice, I showed examples from the late 1890s to 1908, by which time there was a...
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Don Quixote 26: Off to El Toboso
In the previous episode, Sancho Panza told the young graduate a rather different story of how his donkey had been stolen from under him as he slept, and how he recovered it from the thief. He also...
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Landscape Composition: 3 Poussin’s modes
While Leon Battista Alberti’s book Della pittura (On Painting) made its way to the Northern Renaissance after its publication in 1436, its earliest equivalent in the north didn’t appear until 1604,...
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Francisco Goya: Black Paintings 1
For Francisco Goya (1746–1828) the year 1819 brought great change. At the end of February, he bought himself a villa with twenty-five acres of land on the right bank of the River Manzanares, just...
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Francisco Goya: Black Paintings 2
The first article on the Black Paintings of Francisco Goya (1746–1828) showed seven of the images which he painted in oils on the plaster walls of his villa Quinta del Sordo, just outside the city of...
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Impressionist painting in Britain: 10 Paul Maitland
Whistler and Sickert seem to have influenced many British artists during the last couple of decades of the nineteenth century. Among them was Paul Fordyce Maitland (1863–1909), many of whose paintings...
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A life of Perseus in paintings 1
So many of the heroes of the classical world were deeply flawed: Theseus, founder of Athens, treated women appallingly, and Jason of the Argonauts no better. But the greatest slayer of monsters,...
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A life of Perseus in paintings 2
In the first of this pair of articles looking at paintings of the life of the classical hero Perseus, I traced his mythical life from conception to his arrival at the rock to which Andromeda was...
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Don Quixote 27: Sancho’s deception
In the previous episode, Don Quixote’s niece and housekeeper thought they could enlist the help of the young graduate to stop the knight from leaving on his third sally, but instead he egged him on....
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Landscape Composition: 4 Dutch Horizons
Well before the publication of Karel van Mander’s Foundation of the Noble Free Art of Painting (Den Grondt der edel vry Schilder-Const) in 1604, there was a landscape tradition building in the Low...
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