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Woman in Trouble: Paulus Bor’s mythical portraits
The career of Paulus Bor (1601-1669) is fairly typical of that of many artists of the Dutch Golden Age: born in the city of Amersfoort in the centre of the modern Netherlands, he seems to have trained...
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Changing Paintings: 19 Perseus rescues Andromeda
The transformation of Cadmus and Harmonia into snakes completes Ovid’s account of the Theban cycle. His switch to start telling stories about Perseus is abrupt, referring in passing to Perseus’ mother,...
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Reading visual art: 131 Reed pipes
As well as the lyre, wind instruments have been popular in paintings. These are normally a single or double pipe, known in Ancient Greek as the aulos (αὐλός), a reed instrument related to the modern...
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In memoriam Fritz Roeber, an artist lost in history
On 15 May 1924, Fritz Roeber (1851-1924) died in the city of Düsseldorf, where he had developed and expanded its prestigious Art Academy. This was the focus of the Düsseldorf School, including Albert...
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Sea of Mists: Nocturnes
As I’ll show in tomorrow’s entry in the alphabet of landscapes, paintings of landscapes at night have been briefly popular but have never been a dominant theme. Yet among the German Romantic artists,...
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A to Z of Landscapes: Nocturne
We have now reached the letter n in this alphabet of landscapes, and that brings us to nocturnes, showing them after dark. Only yesterday, that was the theme of this week’s look at German Romantic art,...
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Rising fog in paintings 1
For much of the history of European visual art, one of its fundamental principles has been to reveal rather than to hide. Atmospheric and other effects tending to obscure the image being painted have...
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Rising fog in paintings 2
The nineteenth century saw a change in the attitude of landscape painters to fog, thanks to pioneering views by Caspar David Friedrich and JMW Turner in the early years of the century. By its last...
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Changing Paintings: 20 Perseus kills Medusa
When Perseus has rescued Andromeda from the jaws of the sea monster, he makes offerings to the gods and prepares for his wedding to his newly-won bride. It’s then, at his wedding feast, that Ovid has...
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Reading visual art: 132 Aulos, pipe or flute
According to Greek mythology, the goddess Athena invented a musical instrument consisting of a double pipe with reeds, named the aulos (αὐλός), and related to the modern oboe or bagpipes. When the...
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Reading visual art: 133 Bagpipes
No one knows when the aulos was fitted with an airtight bag to become a set of bagpipes, although there are claims of an ancient origin that could date back to 1000 BCE in Anatolia. During the Middle...
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Sea of Mists: Ships
Among their recurrent themes, the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and the German Romantics sometimes featured sailing ships. These are a great technical challenge to painters, with their finely...
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A to Z of Landscapes: Oil sketch
Although landscapes can be and have been painted in almost any medium, perhaps the most important have been sketches made in oil paint in front of the motif. Thus, in this alphabet of landscapes, the...
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Heroines: 1 Penelope in Ithaca
This weekend’s articles about paintings cover the first two stories explored by Ovid in his Heroines, a collection of fictitious letters between famous women and their partners. Today’s letter is...
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Heroines: 2 Abandonment, suicide and scandal
In 1870, before he was made First Baronet of Rottingdean and of the Grange in 1894, Edward Coley Burne-Jones became the focus of a scandal when he was ‘invited’ to remove one of his paintings from an...
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Changing Paintings: 21 The fate of Phineus, and the Muses on Helicon
Ovid starts the fifth book of his Metamorphoses at the wedding feast of Perseus and Andromeda, just after the groom has made the greatest wedding speech of all time, describing how he beheaded Medusa...
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Reading visual art: 134 Flags A
Flags and standards probably originated with land battles, where they have been used extensively for identification. Even before battle is joined, working out which battalion is whose can be difficult....
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Reading visual art: 135 Flags B
From their military and maritime origins, flags steadily became symbols of nationhood. This is best seen in the case of France’s tricolour. Léon Cogniet (1794–1880), July 1830, or The Flags (study)...
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Sea of Mists: Barren trees
Another pervasive theme among Caspar David Friedrich and other German Romantic painters is that of the barren tree, one of the bleakest sights of winter in northern Europe. Caspar David Friedrich...
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A to Z of Landscapes: Panoramas
In this alphabetic tour of landscape painting, this week it’s the turn of P, for panoramas, most commonly seen as exaggeration of the ‘landscape’ orientation to widen an image’s field of view. It’s...
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