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Painting Everyday London: 9 James Bolivar Manson
However small and radical, every group needs an administrator, someone to maintain its correspondence and handle the petty cash. For the Camden Town Group, that role was fulfilled by James Bolivar...
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Altogether Now: 6 William Powell Frith, Derby Day, 1856-8
By the seventeenth century, paintings with a great many small narratives had fallen out of favour. Although there may be some exceptions, my next examples are taken from the nineteenth century, when...
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A short history of animal painting 1
Evidence from surviving cave art shows that humans have been painting animals for well over thirty thousand years. Anonymous, Volcano in Eruption (c 36,000 BP), pigment on limestone mural, 60 x 60 cm,...
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A short history of animal painting 2
In the first of these two articles looking at a selection of paintings of animals by animaliers, I had reached the early nineteenth century, a time when this sub-genre came into its own. In his early...
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Don Quixote 49: Trampled by bulls
In the previous episode, the Duke schooled the proxy who was to fight Don Quixote in a duel, to ensure that he would defeat the knight without injuring him. On the agreed day, a platform was built for...
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Art and Science: 13 Pseudoscience
In previous articles in this series, I have looked at examples of where art and science have brought benefit to one another. Here I consider what we now acknowledge to be two pseudosciences which have...
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How good is Monterey’s Visual Look Up?
Visual Look Up might have come as a surprise in Monterey 12.3, but it’s been brewing for a good while. It’s the next step beyond facial recognition and the extraction of text from images. It was almost...
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Animalière Extraordinaire: the bicentenary of Rosa Bonheur 2
Two hundred years ago today, the most celebrated animal painter and woman artist Rosa Bonheur (1822–1899) was born in Bordeaux, France. In the first of these two articles celebrating her career and...
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Painting Everyday London: 10 Pissarro, Lightfoot, Taylor
Unfortunately, the work of several members of the Camden Town Group is still covered by copyright. Those I am unable to show are: Walter John Bayes (1869–1956) Charles Ginner (1878–1952) Duncan Grant...
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Altogether Now: 7 William Powell Frith, The Railway Station, 1862
In the previous article in this series, I looked at the first human panoramas painted by William Powell Frith (1819–1909), but stopped short of the painting which many think is his greatest. William...
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A cavalcade of colour: 1 yellow to blue
Painting is all about colour and light. Over the centuries, painters have acquired a vocabulary of different colour names based on the pigments they’ve used. This weekend I’m going to take a quick tour...
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A cavalcade of colour: 2 green to white
Having made my way from yellow through red to blue in the first of these two articles, I conclude this tour of the colours of the painter’s palette with three of the most important: green, black and...
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Don Quixote 50: With outlaws into Barcelona
In the previous episode, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza rode away from the Duke’s palace, and first came across farmers carrying wood carvings for their village altarpiece. Next they met two young women...
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Art and Science: 14 Back to alchemy
Sometimes science lags so far behind art that painters are left to fall back on proto-sciences like alchemy. The results are all too often disaster for art. With the advance in science brought by the...
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Painting Everyday London: 11 Walter Sickert before
At the heart of the Camden Town Group was Walter Sickert, the most influential British painter of the period. His career and work are complex: I have already looked at his central role in British...
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Altogether Now: 8 Ford Madox Brown, Work, 1863
At the same time that William Frith was painting his social panoramas, one of the Pre-Raphaelites was painting his own. Although not one of the Brotherhood itself, Ford Madox Brown (1821–1893) was...
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Paintings of the Hutsuls in the Carpathians
If you think Ukraine consists largely of steppe and broad rivers, consider the Carpathian Mountains, whose eastern peaks reach into western Ukraine. Like most mountainous regions, they have smaller...
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The Start of the Year: Paintings of Spring 1
Whoever thought it was a good idea to start the new year in the middle of the winter couldn’t have gone outside much. This year we, most particularly the long-suffering people of Ukraine, deserve a...
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The Start of the Year: Paintings of Spring 2
In the first of these two articles looking at paintings of Spring, I had reached the end of the nineteenth century and Pissarro’s cityscapes of central Paris. Among Renoir’s late landscapes are several...
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Don Quixote 51: The enchanted bust
In the previous episode, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza rode on towards Barcelona. They came to blows when the knight decided he’d help his squire reach his goal of three thousand lashes in order to...
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