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Into the Light: Cecilia Beaux’s perceptive portraits, 1 – to 1898
Thomas Eakins was a very different teacher from William Merritt Chase. Although she was one of his most famous and successful students, Cecilia Beaux (1855–1942) could perhaps foresee the trouble that...
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Into the Light: Cecilia Beaux’s perceptive portraits, 2 – from 1898
Having established herself as the leading portrait painter to the wealthy and influential on the East Coast, Cecilia Beaux (1855–1942) could only continue to rise in status. Cecilia Beaux (1855–1942),...
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Into the Light: Henry Tonks, surgeon, painter, professor
It’s not unusual for artists to have started off studying medicine, and the French Impressionist Frédéric Bazille (1841-1870) came close to qualifying as a doctor. It has been suggested that the great...
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City Life: 1 Eakins and Chase
The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were times of great change throughout Europe and America. Cities grew, became heavily industrialised, bred squalor among the poor, and offered grandeur to...
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Porting from WordPress to Storyspace, 3: alt stories and references
In the last article – before macOS Sierra was upon us – I had been building the spine of a hypertext document ported from a series of WordPress articles. Since then, I have completed building that...
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City Life: 2 Henri, Cooper, and Bellows
The previous article looked at how Eakins showed little pictorial interest in the city, and how Chase found ingenious ways to bring the countryside into the city, and to draw attention away from the...
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The Story in Paintings: Eastman Johnson sugaring off
We have seen examples before of painted narratives which, at the time, were easily read, but which have since become obscure and sometimes even lost. This one is unusually complex, because of the...
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The Story in Paintings: Philip Hermogenes Calderon 1, the Bible and morals
As with the French Impressionists, there were many artists who were associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement who are little-known today. Every so often I stumble across one – Marie Spartali Stillman...
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The Story in Paintings: Philip Hermogenes Calderon 2, Shakespeare and the...
Following the success of his Broken Vows and subsequent work, particularly his mediaeval Home After Victory, Philip Hermogenes Calderon (1833–1898) was elected a full member of the Royal Academy in...
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William Merritt Chase: a life in painting, 1 to 1883
To commemorate the centenary of the death of the American Master painter William Merritt Chase (1849–1916), this is the first in a series of articles which outlines his biography, illustrated by some...
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Into the Light: Val Prinsep, the oriental Aesthetic
Scholars trying to work in the library of the Oxford Union Society in 1856-7 were often disrupted by the antics of a group of young artists, who were active next door in the Union’s new Debating Hall....
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The Story in Paintings: Mariana – Shakespeare or Tennyson?
Artists of all periods since have painted characters and scenes from the plays of William Shakespeare. Some – such as Hamlet, King Lear, the witches from Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet – have been...
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William Merritt Chase: a life in painting, 2 1884-1890
This is the second in the series of biographical articles to commemorate the centenary of the death of the American Master painter William Merritt Chase (1849–1916). This instalment covers the period...
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti: the Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic
There was a lot happening in European painting in the middle and late nineteenth century, from about 1840 onwards. General accounts focus on France, but there were just as major changes happening in...
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Frederic, Lord Leighton: Classic and Aesthetic
Of his contemporaries, there were few artists who contrasted greater with Rossetti than Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830-1896). Trained in Europe for more than twelve years, he studied and worked in...
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William Merritt Chase: a life in painting, 3 1891-1900
This is the third in the series of biographical articles to commemorate the centenary of the death of the American Master painter William Merritt Chase (1849–1916). This instalment covers the period...
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John Roddam Spencer Stanhope: a different Pre-Raphaelite
Another of the team of artists who painted the murals in the new Debating Hall of the Oxford Union Society was John Roddam Spencer Stanhope (1829–1908) – a member of the Pre-Raphaelite movement who,...
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Sir Edward Poynter, a British Gérôme? 1, to 1879
It is hard to believe now that, in his day, Sir Edward Poynter (1836–1919) was one of the most eminent British artists. But like so many in the later years of the nineteenth and early twentieth...
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Sir Edward Poynter, a British Gérôme? 2, 1880 onwards
By 1880, Sir Edward Poynter (1836–1919) was well-established as one of the leading artists of the day. Although he had painted some spectacular panoramas and some scenes from popular classical...
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Porting from WordPress to Storyspace, 4: sidethreads and projections
In the last article, I showed how I incorporated an alternative narrative thread in my Storyspace hypertext account of the history of oil painting, and how to incorporate references using stretchtext....
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