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Trojan Epics: 10 The death of Achilles
With the leading Trojan warrior Hector dead, and his body returned to his father King Priam, the Greeks and Trojans observed a truce of twelve days for the funeral and mourning. It’s here that Homer’s...
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Ukrainian Painters: Serhii Svitoslavskyi
Few artists become major sponsors of zoos; this week’s Ukrainian painter, Serhii Svitoslavskyi (1857-1931), was not only instrumental in the founding of Kyiv Zoo in 1909, but the following year went on...
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Reading visual art: 53 Music A
If music can evoke mental images, then can paintings put music in our head, even a little earworm, perhaps? It’s a challenge that many painters have risen to. In today’s and tomorrow’s articles I’ll...
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Reading visual art: 54 Music B
In the first of these two articles showing paintings of musicians playing music, I had reached Degas’ painting of the Orchestra at the Opera from 1870. With the rise of Impressionism in France,...
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Hard reality: 3 Cast shadows in figurative painting
By the Renaissance, the depiction of shade and attached shadow was relatively common and uncontroversial. Although there was good understanding of those and cast shadows falling on other surfaces and...
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Paintings of Forbidden Love: Hero and Leander
On the third of May 1810, the twenty-two year-old British poet and writer Lord Byron entered the waters of the Hellespont (now the Dardanelles), and swam for his life, zigzagging through the strong...
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Paintings of Forbidden Love: Pyramus and Thisbe
Often billed as the greatest love story, William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is but one of many derivatives of an ancient legend first recorded by Ovid as a story within his Metamorphoses. It’s told...
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Trojan Epics: 11 Paris killed and the Trojan Horse
With the lead warriors of both sides dead in the tenth year of the war, the Greeks had yet to make any impression on the city of Troy, whose walls stood as solid as they had been at the start. As was...
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Ukrainian Painters: Arnold Lakhovskyi
One of the pupils of Kyriak Kostandi (1852–1921) in the Odesa Art School, around the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries, was the young Arnold Lakhovskyi (1880–1937), the subject of this...
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Reading visual art: 55 Lions
Lions weren’t uncommon in southern Europe until their local extinction in about 100 CE, and even then they lived on in North Africa and the Middle East. As a result, they appear in literary sources...
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Hard reality: 4 Cast shadows in landscapes
Given the convention established in figurative painting to omit shadows cast on figures, this article looks at the treatment of shade and shadows in landscapes. As with figurative paintings, few...
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Paintings of Eugène Delacroix: Introduction
Each summer I write a series covering an artist whose work we might think we know, but don’t really know well enough. This year my choice is one of the most important visual artists of the nineteenth...
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A weekend with painters in Skagen 1
Skagen is a fishing village on the spit of sand at the northern tip of Jutland (Jylland) in Denmark, where painters started to gather in the 1870s. In the summer of 1874, Karl Madsen and Michael Ancher...
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A weekend with painters in Skagen 2
In the first of these two days spent with painters in Skagen, at the northern tip of Jutland, I looked at the work of Anna Ancher, her husband Michael, and Christian Krohg. Today it’s the turn of PS...
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Trojan Epics: 12 Extinguishing the line
The Trojans had ignored the prophecies, turned their backs on soothsayers and their dire warnings, and towed the wooden horse inside the city, convincing themselves that they had finally beaten the...
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Ukrainian Painters: Abraham Mintchine
Among those who studied at Kyiv Art School in the early twentieth century was Abraham Mintchine (1898-1931), whose only surviving work comes from the last five years of his tragically brief life....
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Hard reality: 5 Mirror play
The privileged and affluent have always loved shiny things, reflective surfaces from tiny gems to large mirrors. For the realist painter, these present challenges that often bring them into displays of...
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Reading visual art: 56 Tortoises
Sometimes we see things in paintings that are strange and appear unexplained. If you’ve come across Gustave Moreau’s painting of Orpheus (1865), you will have noticed that there are a couple of...
View ArticleTwitter auto-posts have stopped: how to keep in touch
Those of you who rely on Twitter to keep you in touch with new articles posted in this and all other WordPress blogs may have noticed a change today: those auto-posts have stopped. Apparently Twitter...
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Paintings of Eugène Delacroix: 1 Beyond Neoclassicism
Eugène Delacroix started painting at a challenging time. Apart from the dramatic political changes that brought first the Napoleonic Wars, Napoleon as Emperor in 1804, his abdication and exile a decade...
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