Clik here to view.
Changing Paintings: 16 Adultery and Unrequited love
After the first of the daughters of Minyas has finished telling the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe, the second daughter starts telling her story. As is so often the case in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, we get...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading visual art: 129 Heron
Among the birds that appear not infrequently in paintings is the European grey heron, a large wader common throughout Europe, Asia and Africa. Its appearance and size are sufficient to make it...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Sea of Mists: Carl Friedrich Lessing 1828-36
Among the successors to Caspar David Friedrich was the influential Carl Friedrich Lessing (1808–1880), a prominent member of the Düsseldorf School (you’ll also see his first name spelled as Karl). That...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A to Z of Landscapes: Kayaks and canoes
In this landscape painter’s alphabet, the letter K stands for kayaks and canoes that open access to areas that are hard to reach overland. In the nineteenth century, with the increasing popularity of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Truthful Vision of Jean-Léon Gérôme 4
As German forces closed on Paris in 1870, at the height of the Franco-Prussian War, Jean-Léon Gérôme fled to London, returned to Paris briefly in the autumn/fall, then went back to London. He finally...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Paintings of the fallen woman: 1 Downward slope
In the nineteenth century several narratives became popular themes in literature and painting, among them that of the ‘fallen woman’. This weekend, as part of my occasional series examining narratives...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Paintings of the fallen woman: 2 Salvation or decline?
During the nineteenth century paintings telling the story of the fallen woman had become popular, following an innovative moralising series painted early in the previous century by William Hogarth, and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Changing Paintings: 17 Hermaphroditus
Once the second daughter of Minyas has completed her story of Leucothoe and Clytie’s love for the Sun, the third daughter takes her turn. Just as the first daughter did, she starts by tantalising us by...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A to Z of Landscapes: Lakes
This week, our alphabet of landscape painting has reached the letter L, which stands for lakes that feature in so many of the finest views. With thousands to choose from, I’ve picked a small selection...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Sea of Mists: Carl Friedrich Lessing 1837-78
By the late 1830s, Carl Friedrich Lessing (1808–1880) was well-established as a German Romantic painter, whose views of isolated castles in mountainous surroundings complemented increasingly popular...
View ArticleClik here to view.
In memoriam Anna Palm de Rosa: painting the card game
In the summer of 1885, the young Swedish painter Anna Palm visited the artist’s colony at Skagen in Denmark. One night she sketched two of the couples staying in the local hotel as they played cards by...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Truthful Vision of Jean-Léon Gérôme 5
The first decade of the Third Republic had been a stormy period in France, and by the 1880s the old guard royalists were in decline, and the civic powers of the Republic were expanding to include the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Celebrating the 200th birthday of London’s National Gallery 1
Two hundred years ago, there were relatively few major collections of paintings that were open to the public. In Britain, John Julius Angerstein had assembled an art collection, and on 2 April 1824,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Celebrating the 200th birthday of London’s National Gallery 2
In the first of these two articles celebrating the two-hundredth birthday of London’s National Gallery, I showed some of its more famous works and personal favourites up to the end of the eighteenth...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Changing Paintings: 18 Ino and the fall of the house of Cadmus
With the tales of the daughters of Minyas completed, and the three of them transformed into bats, Ovid returns to complete his chronicle of the fall of the house of Cadmus. At this stage, Cadmus, the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading visual art: 130 Wand
As every reader of Harry Potter novels knows, those who work magic normally do so with the aid of their wand, a short stick similar to the baton used to control an orchestra by its conductor....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Sea of Mists: Rückenfigur
Following my accounts of individual artists associated with the German Romantic movement, it’s time to consider common features in their paintings that define their Romanticism. The first, which is...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A to Z of Landscapes: le Midi
In this alphabet of landscape painting, M stands for le Midi, the south of France including its Mediterranean coast, which came to the fore at the end of the nineteenth century. European landscape...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Truthful Vision of Jean-Léon Gérôme 6
In the same year that Jean-Léon Gérôme painted himself at work on his marble figure of Tanagra in The Artist’s Model, 1895, he revisited two classical myths, telling them in unusual if not unique ways....
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Quest for Visual Truth: the bicentary of Jean-Léon Gérôme
Two centuries ago today, on 11 May 1824, the great narrative and realist painter, sculptor and teacher Jean-Léon Gérôme was born in Vesoul, in eastern France. Over a series of six articles (links at...
View Article