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In memoriam Achille Michallon, a bright star over the landscape 1
Landscape painting in Europe advanced by leaps and bounds from the late eighteenth century, thanks largely to the art and teaching of Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750-1819), whose textbook was...
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In memoriam Achille Michallon, a bright star over the landscape 2
Two centuries ago today, the brilliant French landscape painter Achille Etna Michallon (1796–1822) died of pneumonia, at the age of only twenty-five. As I explained in my first article about him...
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Painting landscapes from Corot to Cézanne
In the first of these articles, I explained how landscape painting came to France in a roundabout fashion via Paul Bril, Poussin and Claude, then via Claude-Joseph Vernet to Valenciennes. This was to...
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Paintings of William Shakespeare’s Plays 17: Henry IV part 1
This week I look at paintings of two of William Shakespeare’s most popular history plays, the two parts of Henry IV. These provide a fairly liberal account of events during the reign of this King of...
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Paintings of William Shakespeare’s Plays 18: Henry IV part 2
In the first of these two articles showing paintings of William Shakespeare’s two plays about King Henry IV, I covered the first play. This described events leading to the rebellion against the King...
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Sunrise on Impressionism: 10 Gustave-Henri Colin
Perhaps the most important painter who didn’t show his work at the First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874 was Camille Corot, the most influential artist over Impressionism at the time. Several of the...
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Painted Stories in Britain 5: Joseph Wright, the enlightened artist
William Hogarth’s death in 1764 brought to an end a new tradition of narrative painting in British art, which had started with James Thornhill (1675–1734) in the early years of that century. Although a...
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Reading visual art: 1 Introduction
I’m surrounded by books about painting and visual art, containing a vast number of words written by eminent scholars such as E H Gombrich and Michael Baxandall. Yet when it comes to reading paintings...
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Portrait of the artist’s wife 1
Painting portraits is lucrative if dangerous. Striking the right balance between faithfulness and flattering the sitter can’t be easy, and on more than one occasion has got the painter into deep...
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Portrait of the artist’s wife 2
In the first of these two articles I showed some of my favourite portraits painted of the wife of the artist, from Rubens and Rembrandt to Signac and Hodler in the 1890s. Here I conclude my selection...
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Celebrating the tercentenary of Johann Heinrich Tischbein, painter of Hermann...
Three hundred years ago today, on 3 October 1722, Johann Heinrich Tischbein (1722–1789) was born. He went on to lead a whole family of painters in Germany, spanning three generations. He’s sometimes...
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Paintings of William Shakespeare’s Plays 19: Twelfth Night
Twelfth Night marks the end of the traditional English feast of Christmas, and William Shakespeare’s much-loved comedy Twelfth Night was probably written in late 1601 to be performed after the end of...
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Sunrise on Impressionism: 11 Stanislas Lépine
Some of those who exhibited at the First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874 don’t appear to have been part of the Impressionist movement at all, but showed their art more through friendship with core...
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Painted Stories in Britain 6: Benjamin West and Modern Histories
While Joseph Wright of Derby was painting his unusual chiaroscuro narratives of the Enlightenment, a new American artist stopped off in London, on his way home to Philadelphia. Over the next...
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Reading visual art: 2 Wings of Angels
We all know that angels have wings. It’s the most distinctive of their features, and is pervasive in paintings. In this article, I consider how that might have come about, by going back through visual...
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A Weekend on Capri 1
After our two weekends cruising down the Rivers Seine and Thames, now the weather’s shifting into autumnal gales, it’s time to spend our weekend somewhere warmer and less exposed: the island of Capri....
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A Weekend on Capri 2
In the first of these two articles covering our weekend break on Capri, I showed a selection of paintings of this island off the Bay of Naples, from the period to 1880. This article takes those on...
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Paintings of William Shakespeare’s Plays 20: Antony and Cleopatra
After William Shakespeare’s successful and memorable tragedy Julius Caesar, his other well-known play based on Plutarch’s lives is Antony and Cleopatra, thought to have been written in about 1606. This...
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Sunrise on Impressionism: 12 Johan Barthold Jongkind
One of the more notable absentees from the First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874 was Johan Barthold Jongkind (1819–1891), who was invited but declined, as his life started a descent into drinking and...
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Painted Stories in Britain 7: Benjamin West’s revolution fails
Whether Sir Joshua Reynolds ever claimed that Benjamin West’s 1770 painting of The Death of General Wolfe would bring about a “revolution in the art”, it didn’t. West was next commissioned by William...
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