Clik here to view.
The Story in Paintings: Daumier’s gestures
Among all the other things that were going on in narrative painting in the 1800s – as seen in the works of Delacroix, Moreau, Gérôme and others – there were the remarkable paintings of Honoré Daumier...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Story in Paintings: allegory, symbol, and realism
This series has, quite accidentally, come to highlight the problems which came to dominate if not overwhelm narrative painting during the 1800s, and how they somehow seem to have become resolved by the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Illusions of reality: the paintings of Jean-Léon Gérôme
I have already considered some of the highly detailed and ‘finished’ paintings of Jean-Léon Gérôme in the context of narrative. In taking me back to look at his work again, I realised that there was a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Story in Paintings: So what is a narrative painting?
Sometimes you use a term over which you think there is longstanding general agreement, only to discover that others have used it with very different meaning. This is a particular danger in fields in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Winslow Homer in Cullercoats: 1 Purpose and place
In 1881, Winslow Homer, a modestly successful painter in watercolours who had been living reclusively in Gloucester, MA, travelled to England to study the work of JMW Turner. He then lived for over a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Winslow Homer in Cullercoats: 2 Watchers
Winslow Homer had visited England primarily to study the watercolours of JMW Turner, and to understand his colour theories and their implementation. By mid March 1881, he had completed that phase, and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Winslow Homer in Cullercoats: 3 Women at work
Most who have written about Winslow Homer’s paintings from Cullercoats have noted that a large proportion show the fishlasses and fishwives of the community, and that in those few which show both men...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Winslow Homer in Cullercoats: 4 Boats and the beach
This short series has been looking at Winslow Homer’s paintings from Cullercoats. Life in fishing communities was centred on when the boats came in: the return of the men and boys, hopefully with large...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Winslow Homer in Cullercoats: 5 Puzzles and achievements
This short series has been looking at Winslow Homer’s paintings from Cullercoats. I have shown how he pictured the fishlasses and fishwives watching for the return of the boats, working ashore, and the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Winslow Homer in Cullercoats: 6 The bigger picture
This article rounds off my series looking at Winslow Homer’s paintings from Cullercoats, by setting them into a narrative context. Many individual paintings have their own, small narratives. What I...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Story in Paintings: Hogarth’s progress
One solution to the problem of paintings being a singular medium for narrative, and not a serial medium like text, is to paint a formal series of works, which are then viewed in a particular order....
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Story in Paintings: Hogarth’s marriage and the progress of time
In the last article, I examined Hogarth’s first two series, A Harlot’s Progress (c 1731), and its compliment, A Rake’s Progress (1732-5). This article looks at his most famous Marriage A-la-Mode (c...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Tools for making timelines
You don’t have to be a fan of Edward Tufte‘s marvellous books on charts and visualisation to like timelines, nor to want a better way of building them. Much of what we write about can usefully be cast...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Story in Paintings: Victorian serials
Hogarth’s painted narrative series proved to be a significant influence on later artists. Among those listed by Martin Meisel (1983) are: George Morland (1763-1804) – his Laetitia series (1786) of 6...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Story in Paintings: Thomas Cole’s grand series
Thomas Cole (1801–1848) is generally accepted as the founder of the Hudson River School of landscape painting, and is one of the founding fathers of American landscape painting. A migrant who arrived...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Marking Time: introducing the timeline
Time is the warp through which we weave narrative. Though we can directly visualise most other elements within a narrative, we cannot see time, and can only represent it indirectly in the form of a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Winslow Homer in Cullercoats: 7 Missing months
In an earlier article on Winslow Homer’s nineteen months stay in Cullercoats, on the English north-east coast, I mentioned some remaining puzzles. Among these were whether he had travelled much beyond...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Marking Time: Timeline 3D
The first and simplest of the apps which I have used for creating media-rich timelines is Timeline 3D, which I briefly covered earlier. Free from the Mac App Store, you need to make in-store purchases...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Marking Time: Aeon Timeline
The second app which I have used to create timelines with is Aeon Timeline, at £29.99 one of the Mac App Store’s middleweights. Whereas Timeline 3D exports similarly laid-out timelines in a rich range...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Hogarth’s print series: Industry and Idleness 1-6
When I covered Hogarth’s narrative series here and here, I mentioned two which were not painted, but which went straight to prints. Since then I have been able to obtain images of the original drawings...
View Article