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Interiors by design: Introduction to a new painting series
Under the academies that dominated painting as an art during the seventeenth and subsequent centuries, paintings were distinguished in genres. These consisted of history, portraits, genre (scenes of...
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Canals of Venice 1895-1903
By the end of the nineteenth century, the city of Venice had become established as an essential visit for every aspiring landscape artist. It not only attracted those painting traditional views...
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Canals of Venice 1903-1910
In the early years of the twentieth century, the city of Venice grew in importance as a centre of art, with the Venice Biennale increasingly encouraging contemporary styles. That drew a succession of...
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Changing Paintings: 42 Wrestling for the Horn of Plenty
Ovid ended Book 8 of his Metamorphoses with a teaser, telling how the river god Achelous was able to transform himself into a snake or bull, and that he had recently lost one of the bull’s two horns....
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Reading visual art: 168 Wedding, narrative
No matter what your background, religion or culture, there’s one universal cause for feasting and celebration, a wedding. One of the great challenges for the figurative painter, weddings are the...
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Reading visual art: 169 Wedding, personal
After yesterday’s accounts of the extraordinary weddings in myth and other narrative, in this article I consider a small selection of depictions of more normal wedding celebrations, from the personal...
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The Real Country: 10 Cattle
Modern domestic cattle originated during the Stone Age from the aurochs, in the Fertile Crescent. Although they remained in Europe until they became extinct in the seventeenth century, aurochs were...
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Interiors by design: The Dutch Golden Age
Painting in the Dutch Golden Age underwent remarkable evolution. In the fifty years between the 1620s and the French invasion of the Dutch Republic in 1672, established genres grew novel sub-genres,...
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Painting Don Quixote: Arise the knight
Telling a story in a painting intended to be viewed independently of its literary account requires great skill. Illustrations have the advantage that they’re going to be seen alongside the words, but a...
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Painting Don Quixote: Decline and fall
The first twenty or so chapters of Miguel de Cervantes’ groundbreaking modern novel Don Quixote consist of a series of largely self-contained comic misadventures. After the knight and his...
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Changing Paintings: 43 The death of Hercules
Once Achelous had completed telling the story of how his lost horn had been transformed into the Horn of Plenty, the floods had abated, so his guests left the banquet, leaving Ovid to explain the...
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Reading visual art: 170 Mermaid
Mermaids and mermen are mythical creatures with origins outside the classical Mediterranean civilisations. Conventionally, their upper body is human, while below the waist they have the form of a fish....
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The Real Country: Hay
In the more northerly latitudes, grass that’s essential for cattle to graze grows little during the winter months. Farmers keeping cattle therefore have to provide alternative feed for their livestock...
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Commemorating the centenary of the death of Hans Thoma: 1, to 1885
Little known today outside his native Germany, Hans Thoma (1839–1924) was a prolific painter with a distinctive style, who died a century ago, on 7 November 1924. In this article, I look at his career...
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Interiors by design: Revival
After the popularity of genre scenes and interiors in the Dutch Golden Age, the middle classes had less influence over themes in art until the nineteenth century. Matthäus Kern (1801–1852), A Study...
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Paintings of Gloucester Harbour: 1850-1910
This weekend I’d like you join me on a trip to one of the oldest artist’s colonies in America, and once one of it’s busiest ports, the city of Gloucester in Massachusetts, just over thirty miles (50...
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Paintings of Gloucester Harbour and Dogtown: 1910-1936
We’re spending this weekend in the city of Gloucester, to the north-east of Boston, Massachusetts, in the company of some of the fine paintings of its harbour and coast. In the first of these two...
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Changing Paintings: 44 The birth of Hercules
Having just told us of the events leading to the death and apotheosis of Hercules, Ovid continues book 9 of his Metamorphoses by telling the story of his birth. He leads into this by telling us that...
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Reading visual art: 171 Coffin
After death, most of us will end up in a coffin, sometimes known euphemistically as a casket. Despite their widespread use, they seldom appear in paintings, perhaps because they obscure the body....
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The Real Country: Potatoes
One important staple crop has been largely forgotten from both agricultural and rural history: the humble potato. First imported from South America to Europe in the latter half of the sixteenth...
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