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All the fashion: 1 Seamstress
Fashion thrived with the growth of cities across Europe during the nineteenth century. This weekend, I look at a selection of paintings showing both sides of the fashion industry as it grew in the last...
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All the fashion: 2 Milliner
In the first of these two articles looking at both sides of the fashion trade in the late nineteenth century, I focussed on the legion of women who earned a pittance making expensive dresses and other...
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Paintings of William Shakespeare’s Plays 32: Troilus and Cressida
There’s still doubt over whether William Shakespeare’s play Troilus and Cressida, set in the Trojan War, was intended to be a history or tragedy. It was most probably written in 1602, since when it has...
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Reading visual art: 29 Motion and billows
The perception of motion is crucial to many images in art. Often, paintings try to tell a story in which movement is central, but a single painting can only show a single frozen image. Depicting motion...
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Reading visual art: 30 Frozen motion and blur
In the first of these two articles looking at the depiction of motion in figures, I had diverted from motion implied by the rules we learn about the world around us, to look at billowing garments....
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Ukrainian painters: Kyriak Kostandi
Last week’s Ukrainian artist, Mykola Kuznetsov, came from an estate to the north of Odesa, on the Black Sea coast. Kyriak Kostandi (1852–1921), the subject of this article, was also born and brought up...
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When history is fiction: painted inventions of Pierre Guérin
In the many centuries before photography, history painting was the only way that people could see the past. And just like modern photography, it became a good way of delivering fictional accounts of...
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Paintings of Swiss Lakes: Geneva
Think of Switzerland and you see mountains and lakes, alpine meadows and snow-capped peaks. This weekend we’ll stay low and look at a small selection of paintings of some of the best-known Swiss lakes....
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Paintings of Swiss Lakes: Lucerne and Thun
In the first of these two articles showing a selection of paintings of major lakes in Switzerland, I left with Ferdinand Hodler’s evolving views of Lake Geneva, also known as Lake Léman. In the final...
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Paintings of William Shakespeare’s Plays 33: Titus Andronicus
The fortunes of William Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy, Titus Andronicus, have changed with the times. As his most violent and bloody play, it was enormously popular at the time, then fell from favour...
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Ukrainian painters: Arkhyp Kuindzhi
Greeks have lived on the Black Sea coast since classical times, and some from north-eastern Anatolia, a region known as Pontus, migrated to southern Ukraine, where they’re referred to as Pontic Greeks...
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Reading visual art: 31 Two or more scenes in one image
Visual culture in the Renaissance was very different from that today. When a modern artist wants to show more than one scene from a story, they now generally split it into frames and show the scenes...
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Reading visual art: 32 Up to 23 scenes in one image
In the first of these two articles demonstrating how to identify and read multiplex narrative, where the artist has incorporated more than one scene from the story into a single integrated image, I...
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Not Like That: Introduction to a new series on paintings that have changed
We tend to assume that the images of paintings we see today show what the artist intended us to see, with the same colours, contrasts, and overall appearance. This new series looks at examples that...
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A Weekend with Maximilien Luce’s ‘muscular’ paintings 1
This weekend I’m celebrating the life and art of one France’s least-known and most prolific Neo-Impressionists, Maximilien-Jules-Constant Luce (1858-1941). His paintings are in galleries and museums...
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A Weekend with Maximilien Luce’s ‘muscular’ paintings 2
In the first of these two articles celebrating the life and art of Maximilien Luce (1858–1941), I had reached the turn of the century, the mid-point of his life, as he was abandoning the slowly sinking...
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Paintings of William Shakespeare’s Plays: Contents
This article lists the contents of this series, containing paintings, and their engravings, showing scenes from the plays of William Shakespeare. Images of the paintings are set in a brief summary of...
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Ukrainian painters: Serhii Vasylkivskyi
This week’s Ukrainian artist was born in Izyum, a city to the south-east of Kharkiv, in the east of Ukraine. His grandfather had been a Chumak, transporting grain and other commodities in oxcarts, and...
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Reading visual art: 33 Picture in a picture, landscapes
The great majority of paintings, even those showing complex narrative, try to persuade your brain that they’re really natural three-dimensional views. A few weeks ago, I looked at some exceptions...
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Reading visual art: 34 Picture in a picture, stories
In yesterday’s look at embedded landscapes, I showed one of the series of the five senses painted by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens, for its distant landscape. This article moves on to...
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