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High: Hot and cold in Spain’s Sierra Nevada
Mountains are most commonly associated with cold, particularly in the more northerly or southerly latitudes, but there are locations and times of the year when the hot plains have a contrasting...
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Painting on the edge: Overview and contents
This short series of articles has looked at an oddity in visual art, where artists have intentionally introduced optical effects into their paintings by blurring edges and other passages. Human vision...
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Gérôme’s Vision: Paintings about vision, truth and photography 1
Visual artists, by definition, have an interest in vision and seeing, but few made it as recurrent a theme as Jean-Léon Gérôme. This weekend I look at a few of his paintings about vision, visual...
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Gérôme’s Vision: Paintings about vision, truth and photography 2
In the first of these two articles looking at Jean-Léon Gérôme’s paintings about vision, visual fidelity, and the new art of photography, I showed paintings from early in his career, in 1849, to the...
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Arthur: 11 The Lady of Shalott
Tennyson’s poem about the Lady of Shalott was derived from a thirteenth century Italian novella Donna do Scalotta, rather than Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. This isn’t associated with events...
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Reading visual art: 89 Oil lamps A
The coming of first gas then electric light transformed the night, and replaced one of the most common household items after candles, the oil lamp. In this article and the next I look at various...
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Reading visual art: 90 Oil lamps B
Oil lamps were essential aids to painters, as they enabled them to work after dark before the advent of gas and electric lighting. They also enabled the use of chiaroscuro. Adam Elsheimer (1578–1610),...
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High: Haute Route in the Alps
The Haute Route was originally an epic summer mountaineering route from Chamonix, below Mont Blanc, to Zermatt and the Matterhorn, travelling eastwards across the European Alps. From its inception in...
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Celebrating 300 years since the birth of Gavin Hamilton, Scottish painter in...
When Benjamin West, the American artist who later became president of the Royal Academy, arrived in Rome in 1760 to learn how to paint history, he was mentored by Gavin Hamilton (1723–1798), a Scottish...
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Paintings of Honfleur: Corot to Monet
Most Europeans are drawn to the sea, and for those living in Paris and the cities of the north of France in the nineteenth century, that meant the chain of coastal towns on the southern shore of the...
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Paintings of Honfleur: Seurat to Vallotton
In the first of these two articles showing nineteenth century paintings of the small coastal town of Honfleur, I had reached the 1860s, just before the birth of Impressionism. I start today’s paintings...
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Arthur: 12 Division and treachery
Returning to Malory’s account of Arthur, after the tragic death of Elaine the Fair Maid of Astolat, Queen Guenevere had asked Sir Lancelot for mercy over her previous anger towards him. After...
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Reading visual art: 91 Markets A
Trading produce and goods has been central to urbanisation. At the heart of many towns and cities are marketplaces, where those who farm and catch bring their produce to sell to those whose urban...
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Reading visual art: 92 Markets B
In the first of these two articles on markets in paintings, I concentrated on those trading farm crops and livestock. This article concludes by looking at fish markets, and some outside Europe. Most...
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High: Castles
One of the clichés of Romantic and Gothic literature is the castle high in the mountains. They’re usually traced back to Salvator Rosa and his travellers’ horrors, in which those crossing the mountains...
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Commemorating the 500th anniversary of the death of Pietro Perugino
Five hundred years ago, on an unknown date in 1523, one of the masters of the Italian Renaissance Pietro Perugino died. Not only was he a major painter in his own right, but he was a contemporary of...
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Rescued from the sea-monster: Paintings of Andromeda
This weekend, in my occasional series looking at women in major narrative paintings, I cover two almost identical stories of women who are rescued from the jaws of a sea-monster: Andromeda, who was...
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Rescued from the sea-monster: Paintings of Angelica
In the first of these two articles, I looked at paintings of the story of Andromeda, who in classical myth was rescued from a sea-monster by the hero Perseus, who then married her as his prize. A...
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Arthur: 13 The death of Arthur
Most puzzling of all about Malory’s book is that, despite its title of The Death of Arthur, after hundreds of pages of tales about the king and his knights, Arthur’s death is covered in just two pages....
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Reading visual art: 93 Dawn or dusk?
The great majority of paintings show a single moment in time. One of the fundamental questions when reading them is when that moment occurred: the time of year, and time of day. Today and tomorrow I...
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