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High: Alpine Miscellany
As we reach the end of this series, this article gathers together a small selection of views of the European Alps that never made it to earlier articles. Once the Napoleonic Wars had ended, British...
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Paintings of Pompeii: 1 Before the eruption
Fate is often capricious, being unkind to those around at the time, and generous to future generations. When their local volcano, Mount Vesuvius, erupted on 24 August 79 CE, the inhabitants of the...
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Paintings of Pompeii: 2 The city remembered
It had long been thought that the city of Pompeii and surrounding towns were buried by ash, lava and rock from the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius on 24 August 79 CE, but more recent research...
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Changing Paintings: 5 Fall of Phaëthon
Ovid leads into the myth of Phaëthon, one of the longest in his Metamorphoses, from Epaphus, the son of Io, who is a childhood friend of Phaëthon. This story balances the earlier account of the Flood...
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Reading visual art: 110 Lyre A
Musical instruments appear in many paintings, and during the nineteenth century came into vogue with Aestheticism. Of all the instruments to appear in mythical and narrative paintings, the most...
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Reading visual art: 111 Lyre B
Lyres may be most strongly associated with Apollo, Orpheus and lyric poets, but they’re also seen more widely as symbols of music, the arts more generally, and culture. These can result in some...
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An unsettling eye: Félix Vallotton’s domestic interiors
One of the powers of a great painter is their ability to transform the everyday into the remarkable, and nowhere is this more apparent than in domestic interiors. These are the places we take for...
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High: Contents and locations
This series has included a wide range of paintings showing mountains around the world, their features like glaciers and waterfalls, and some of the people and fauna that live among them. This article...
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Almost an Impressionist: Commemorating the death of Jean-François Raffaëlli 1
The history of painting is often completely arbitrary over who is remembered. Claude Monet is today viewed as the leading French Impressionist, and Edgar Degas as a member of the same movement, even if...
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Almost an Impressionist: Commemorating the death of Jean-François Raffaëlli 2
On this day 11 February one hundred years ago, in 1924, Jean-François Raffaëlli died in Paris. This is the second article of two celebrating his life and art, and picks those up around 1890, when he...
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Changing Paintings: 6 Callisto victimised
After order had returned to the chariot of the sun, Jupiter checked around heaven for any damage caused by the sun’s extreme heat. He then restored rivers and vegetation to Arcadia, where he took a...
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Reading visual art: 112 Constellations A
Before the twentieth century brought widespread use of electric lights at night and our cities came to glow in the dark, people were accustomed to seeing the stars, and learning the constellations....
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Reading visual art: 113 Constellations B
In the first of these two articles considering the reading of constellations in paintings, I showed examples of Ursa Major, the Milky Way, the Pleiades and Sagittarius. In some cases, mythical figures...
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Sea of Mists: Influences on Caspar David Friedrich and Romantics
German Romantic painting has never been particularly popular or well-known outside Germany, although the enigmatic works of its leading exponent, Caspar David Friedrich, have been rediscovered from...
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A to Z of Landscapes: Aerial perspective
In this the first of a new series about landscape painting, I start with the letter A, which must be for aerial perspective. Until the recent advent of digital manipulation of images, only painters...
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Who was the hero: Marat or Corday? 1 Marat
The difference between being a national hero and a vile traitor can be narrow and sometimes seem arbitrary. This weekend, in my occasional series looking at narrative paintings featuring women, I...
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Who was the hero: Marat or Corday? 2 Corday
Following her murder of the revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat in his bath on 13 July 1793, Charlotte Corday was arrested at the scene of her crime, and made no attempt to deny or excuse the murder. While...
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Changing Paintings: 7 Gossip and the death of Coronis
At the end of the appalling story of Callisto’s abuse, Ovid returns to the image of Juno riding high in her chariot with peacocks adorned with the eyes of dead Argus. This leads on to one of the more...
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Reading visual art: 114 Bottle of potion
Bottles are also made of materials other than glass, and these narrow-necked containers have been around since ancient times. The first glass bottles were made in the Fertile Crescent in about 1500...
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Reading visual art: 115 Bottle of trouble
In the first of these two articles looking at bottles in paintings, I showed examples of them being used for medicine, science more generally, and had moved on to look at them bearing alcohol for...
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