Clik here to view.
Reading visual art: 3 The Grim Reaper
The English phrase the Grim Reaper refers to the personification of death, and is one of relatively few instances of an image description coining a new phrase. There’s considerable doubt over its...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading visual art: 4 Danse Macabre
Humankind was nearly wiped out in Europe in the fourteenth century, not just once by the Black Death, but previously by the Great Famine. The latter was a succession of crop failures starting in 1315...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Let there be light: 1 Painting by gaslight
Now we’re well past the equinox, in the northern hemisphere dark nights are significantly longer than the daylight. It’s a time when we come to rely ever more on artificial light, and when our streets...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Let there be light: 2 Painting by electric light
In the first of these two articles looking at the lighting of our streets and cities, I showed paintings made during the introduction of gas lighting. At the end of the nineteenth century, electric...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Paintings of William Shakespeare’s Plays 21: Two Gentlemen of Verona
William Shakespeare’s play The Two Gentlemen of Verona may well have been the first that he wrote for professional players, and probably dates from around 1590. Its plot will be familiar to those who...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Sunrise on Impressionism: 13 Eugène Boudin
Although some of those who had contributed most to the birth of Impressionism, including Jongkind, Corot and Manet, didn’t show their work in the First Impressionist Exhibition, one who did was Eugène...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Painted Stories in Britain 8: Shakespeare
For Benjamin West, the greatest success of his painting of The Death of General Wolfe (1770) wasn’t his work, but that of Joseph Boydell six years later. Benjamin West (1738–1820), The Death of General...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading visual art: 5 Evil serpents
Snakes or serpents appear so often in both verbal and visual narrative that it seems likely that in the Fertile Crescent and Mediterranean coast they were not uncommon in the past. Their major...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading visual art: 6 Virgin of the Snake
For around half the Christian population of Europe, the Virgin Mary was more than the Mother of God, Queen of Heaven, Star of the Sea, and so on. She was the focus of their devotion, a role model, the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Weekend Reflections: 1 Landscapes
There are several themes in painting that are used to display technical brilliance, including collections of polished metalware and glass, but for the landscape painter there are few challenges greater...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Weekend Reflections: 2 Nocturnes and mirrors
In the first of these two articles examining the depiction of reflections, I showed a series of landscapes from Dürer to the Neo-Impressionists. Here I move through nocturnes to more enigmatic...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Paintings of William Shakespeare’s Plays 22: Cymbeline
One of William Shakespeare’s most original and intricate plays, Cymbeline, King of Britain is a tragicomedy about a semi-legendary king at the time of the Roman occupation, written in about 1610. Its...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Sunrise on Impressionism: 14 Alfred Sisley
By the end of their careers, most of the French Impressionists had succeeded both in their art and commercially, with one significant exception: Alfred Sisley (1839–1899), who died in worse financial...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Painted Stories in Britain 9: William Blake
One of the factors I previously identified as causes of the failure of British narrative painting was lack of formal academic training, which was rectified with the formation of the Royal Academy...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading visual art: 7 One arm raised
Figures contribute to narrative and the reading of a painting in several ways, most commonly including facial expressions and their gestures or body language. In this week’s two articles about reading...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading visual art: 8 Both arms raised
While raising one arm can have a range of subtle meanings in paintings, since the Middle Ages raising them both has had more natural interpretations. Ancient sculpture in particular uses outstretched...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A moment in time: clocks and time in paintings 1
Have you noticed how unusual it is to see a clock or similar timepiece in a painting? Since the middle of the twentieth century we’ve been surrounded by them. Not content with the versatile Apple...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A moment in time: clocks and time in paintings 2
In the first of these two articles showing some of the few paintings containing clocks, I had just reached the Pre-Raphaelites in the middle of the nineteenth century. Perhaps as a result of growth in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Paintings of William Shakespeare’s Plays 23: Coriolanus
Another of William Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays, Coriolanus is essentially a dramatisation of Plutarch’s biography of Caius Martius, and was probably written in 1608. As a political tragedy it had...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Sunrise on Impressionism: 15 Berthe Morisot
At the time of the First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874, there was only one woman artist who was part of the new movement: Berthe Morisot (1841–1895). Three more were to join later: Eva Gonzalès...
View Article