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Urban Revolutionaries: 7 Women’s work
Women in towns and cities were widely engaged in light factory work, commonly that involving the production of fabrics and garments such as spinning, weaving and assembly. Large numbers were also...
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Strolling the Valèncian shore with Sorolla’s paintings: 1 Fishermen
València in Spain is well known in art from the dozens of paintings of well-dressed young ladies on its beaches, made by Joaquín Sorolla during the early years of the twentieth century. This weekend I...
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Strolling the Valèncian shore with Sorolla’s paintings: 2 Ladies
In the first of this weekend’s two articles, I showed how the Valèncian artist Joaquín Sorolla painted the arduous lives of fishermen working from local beaches, during the 1890s. Although he had been...
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Changing Paintings: 61 Sacrifice of Polyxena
Ovid has raced through the destruction of Troy and its nobility, including the death of Priam, the herding together of the Trojan women to be taken as trophies, and the vicious murder of Astyanax. As...
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Reading Visual Art: 197 Pain
Facial expressions are a rich source of information about our emotions, state of mind, and when we are in pain. While heroes always grin and bear it, and sometimes the most unlikely person appears...
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The bicentenary of Hans Gude: 1 Painting Norway
Tomorrow is the bicentenary of the birth of one of Norway’s greatest landscape artists, Hans Gude. In this and tomorrow’s article I celebrate his life and work with a selection of his paintings. Gude...
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The bicentenary of Hans Gude: 2 Painting Abroad
Two hundred years ago today, on 13 March 1825, the great Norwegian landscape painter Hans Gude was born in what was then Christiania, now Oslo, capital of Norway. This second article celebrating his...
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Interiors by Design: Wallpaper
Not content with adorning the walls of their mansions with paintings, some of the nobility covered them with tapestries, for which artists like Francisco Goya were employed to create cartoons. They...
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Napoleons of paintings: 1 Victories
The most famous French person, born a Corsican of Italian origin, who died on the British South Atlantic island of Saint Helena, was the Emperor Napoleon I. His life, battles, wives and descendants...
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Napoleons of paintings: 2 Defeat
Neither Napoleon nor his wife Joséphine were faithful during their marriage, but she failed to produce the heir that the Emperor wanted. In 1809, he informed her that he had to find a wife who could...
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Changing Paintings: 62 Aeneas flees Troy
Ovid assures us that the Fates didn’t completely crush the hopes of Troy in its destruction: from within the burning ruins, the hero Aeneas is fleeing, his aged father on his shoulders, and with his...
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Reading Visual Art: 198 Religious ecstasy
Now debased by hyperbole and its association with drugs, ecstasy was intended to denote a trance-like state normally attained in two contrasting contexts: religion, and physical pleasure. This week I...
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Reading Visual Art: 199 Physical ecstasy
Aside from the ecstasy brought by intense religious experiences, considered in the first of these two articles, this trance-like state can most commonly result from physical pleasure. Until recently,...
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Interiors by Design: Tiles
Most wall coverings such as tapestries, drapes and wallpaper aren’t designed for rooms that see arduous use, or get wet. For those an even older solution has stood the test of time, with baked clay or...
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Urban Revolutionaries: 8 The Oldest Profession
Prostitution isn’t the only occupation that has been claimed to be the earliest, and that claim wasn’t even made until the late nineteenth century. However, it certainly was one of the most common ways...
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Roman Landscapes: 1 Dawn
The countryside around the city of Rome has played a vital role in the history of landscape painting. For nearly a century, from the 1780s until the development of Impressionism, painting oil sketches...
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Roman Landscapes: 2 Development
Between about 1782-85, the great French landscape painter Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750–1819) built his personal library of oil sketches of the countryside around the city of Rome. He then...
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Changing Paintings: 63 The tragedy of Galatea
As Ovid nears the end of Book 13 of his Metamorphoses, Aeneas and his companions are in transit across the Mediterranean, heading towards Italy and destiny. He rushes them through a rapid succession of...
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Reading Visual Art: 200 Dancing, myth and folk
There are few greater challenges to the figurative artist than painting figures in movement when they’re dancing. This week’s two articles about reading visual art consider the significance of rising...
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Reading Visual Art: 201 Dancing, ballet and erotic
In this second article about reading dancing in paintings, I move on to its most formalised expression, in ballet, which came to dominate the work of several artists in the late nineteenth century,...
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