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A weekend on the Isle of Wight in paintings 1
This weekend, come over to our house on the Isle of Wight. It’s usually lovely at this time of year, before the season’s rush of tourists. To save you the high cost of the ferry crossing, claimed by...
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A weekend on the Isle of Wight in paintings 2
Welcome to the second day of our weekend here on the Isle of Wight, which we start in the watercolours of the Pre-Raphaelite Marie Spartali Stillman, whose family owned properties in the south of the...
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Trojan Epics: 13 The Sack of Troy
The ultimate purpose of the Trojan War as far as Zeus was concerned was to reduce the number of mortal humans, something that had worked well over the ten years of the war. In its final stages the god...
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Ukrainian Painters: Fedir Krychevskyi
Two brothers, Vasyl and Fedir Krychevskyi (1879–1947), were important influences in the development of modern Ukrainian art. Vasyl, the elder, was a major graphic designer, and Fedir a prolific painter...
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Hard reality: 6 Reflections in the landscape
For the advanced landscape painter, reflections are one of the most popular components in a showpiece painting, and one that many viewers value highly. While they can be painted successfully by...
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Reading visual art: 57 Tridents and bidents
Tridents are an ancient form of spear giving you three chances of striking home instead of just one. Long used for fishing, they and their relative the bident are unusual but significant symbols in...
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Paintings of Eugène Delacroix: 2 First success
Eugène Delacroix was born in 1798, the youngest of the four children of a major French statesman, who at one time was the Minister of Foreign Affairs. His siblings were much older, and the senior of...
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Folk Tales in Paintings: Robin Hood and other merry men
Folk tales are often oral stories that have some foundation in history, but embellish their heroes to make them champions of the ordinary people, more legend than fact. This weekend I show paintings of...
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Folk Tales in Paintings: Lady Godiva and Wanda
After yesterday’s stories of Robin Hood and other men, today I look at paintings of two women from legend. The first is Lady Godiva, who stars in one of the most unusual of British folk tales. There’s...
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Trojan Epics: 14 Odysseus and Polyphemus
Odysseus had played a major role in the Trojan War, having conceived the plan for the wooden horse that brought victory and the destruction of the city of Troy after ten years of bitter fighting. When...
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Ukrainian Painters: Viktor Zarubin
Between 1892 and 1897, Arkhyp Kuindzhi was a professor at the Imperial Academy in Saint Petersburg, and taught this week’s Ukrainian painter, Viktor Zarubin (1866–1928). Zarubin was born in Kharkiv, in...
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Reading visual art: 58 Sickles
The sickle is an example of a symbol whose meaning has been repurposed since the early twentieth century. Before 1917, when Lenin selected a design dominated by a hammer and sickle as the Soviet...
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Hard reality: 7 Strange landscapes
Reflections in landscapes are sufficiently difficult that even the most proficient of painters has made the occasional optical error in their depiction. Unlike reflections in mirrors, or shadows, few...
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Paintings of Eugène Delacroix: 3 Massacre at Chios
The French proverb une hirondelle ne fait pas le printemps, or its English equivalent one swallow doesn’t make a summer, applied only too well to success at the Salon. Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) knew...
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Paintings of the most famous piazza in the world: to 1840
The location in Europe with the longest and richest history as a subject for painting is Venice, and of all the sites in Venice, Piazza San Marco (Saint Mark’s Square) must be the most frequently...
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Paintings of the most famous piazza in the world: 1880-1908
Today we’re back in Piazza San Marco in Venice, to see it in paintings from high Impressionism in 1881 to those of the years before the First World War. To remind you of its geography, here’s the plan...
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Trojan Epics: 15 Escape from Circe
After escaping from Polyphemus, Odysseus’ crew released the bag of winds while he was asleep, and all apart from Odysseus’ ship were destroyed by cannibals. His remaining ship sailed on to the island...
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Ukrainian Painters: Mykhailo Boichuk
During the first decades of the twentieth century, Mykhailo Boichuk (1882-1937) was the leader of a school of art unique to Ukraine, identified by Guillaume Apollinaire as the School of Byzantine...
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Reading visual art: 59 Aegis
The ancient Greek language used in Homer’s accounts of the war against Troy must have been as obscure to later classical authors as it is to modern scholars, leaving some of its terms ill-defined....
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Hard reality: 8 The illusion of depth
The last task in making a painting look real is giving its two-dimensional image the illusion of depth. Long practical experience, supported more recently by formal investigations, demonstrates that...
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