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Next Year in Paintings: Joaquín Sorolla, Alexandre Cabanel, Sir Joshua...
Each year I celebrate the lives and work of artists with anniversaries. This coming year there are three major anniversaries: it’s the tercentenary of the birth of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the bicentenary...
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Paintings of William Shakespeare’s Plays 29: King John
For the leading British English writer, many of William Shakespeare’s plays are set outside the British Isles. His most British works are his histories, including King John, although in more recent...
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Sunrise on Impressionism: 22 Claude Monet
The last of my list of individual artists who showed or should have shown their paintings at the First Impressionist Exhibition of 1874 is Claude Monet (1840-1926), who in the twentieth century became...
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Painted Stories in Britain 18: Towards a history
Over the last few months, I have been looking at the development of narrative painting in Britain. This final article in the series tries to summarise its history, and provide a table of contents to...
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Reading visual art: 23 Transformation 1
There’s one book you’re likely to have found in every artist’s studio from the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century, a well-used copy of a translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. His stories have...
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Reading visual art: 24 Transformation 2
In the first of this pair of articles showing paintings of transformation, I concentrated on the more popular myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This article completes those and shows a couple of...
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Pioneers painting New Zealand 1
It may be midwinter here in the northern latitudes, but if you’ve got any sense you’ll have fled the long nights, cold weather and high energy prices to spend these months in New Zealand’s summer. As...
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Pioneers painting New Zealand 2
In the first of these two articles showing some of the pioneering paintings of New Zealand, I covered the first century, from James Cook’s first voyage of 1769 to Nicholas Chevalier’s landscapes of...
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Paintings of William Shakespeare’s Plays 30: King Richard II
William Shakespeare’s Life and Death of King Richard the Second had great contemporary relevance. Telling the story of the forced abdication of a childless English king may have been a bit near the...
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Sunrise on Impressionism: 23 Paintings of the First Impressionist Exhibition
Over the last few months, I have surveyed the contemporary paintings of those artists who showed their work at the First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874, and some who perhaps should have. In this...
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Ukrainian painters: Marie Bashkirtseff
Art knows no borders, but painters and paintings have locations and locale, which sometimes prove misleading. If I were to tell you that Rubens was a Spanish artist, you’d be quick to correct me, but...
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Reading visual art: 25 Dreams classical
Dreams are a common everynight experience that have come to feature in many stories. Although they’re easily contained in verbal narrative, painting a dream is a challenge for the visual artist. At the...
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Reading visual art: 26 Dreams modern
In the previous article, I looked at the depiction of dreams following the Renaissance convention for showing a composite image including what the dreamer might have seen of their dream had they looked...
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Paintings of the Bay of Biscay 1
The Bay of Biscay, known to the French as the Gulf of Gascony, must be one of the largest in Europe, as it sweeps down from the headland of Penmarc’h in Brittany, drops past the winemaking area of...
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Paintings of the Bay of Biscay 2
In the first of these two articles looking at paintings of the Bay of Biscay, we weathered storms along its rugged north coast and islands. Today we start with the tragic history of the Vendée, the...
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Paintings of William Shakespeare’s Plays 31: King Richard III
Normally considered to be one of William Shakespeare’s history plays, King Richard III may have been intended as a tragedy, and is second only to Hamlet in its length. It’s likely to have been written...
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Sunrise on Impressionism: 0 Contents
This is a table of contents for the series Sunrise on Impressionism, which centres on the early years of French Impressionism up to the First Impressionist Exhibition in Paris, in 1874, and the artists...
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Reading visual art: 27 Eagle and owl
Birds can appear in narrative paintings as mere staffage, decoration of the sky, or to lend a natural atmosphere, but when the artist has gone to the lengths of making the type of bird distinguishable,...
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Reading visual art: 28 Peacock and dove
In yesterday’s article I showed examples of eagles and owls with specific readings. Today it’s the turn of peacocks and doves. Peacock The bird of Zeus or Jupiter is the eagle; that of his consort Hera...
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Ukrainian painters: Mykola Kuznetsov
The latter half of the nineteenth century brought Ukraine many significant painters and other artists, most of whom are now referred to as Russian. Mykola Kuznetsov (1850-1929) is today better known by...
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