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Franz von Stuck’s Thoroughly Modern Histories: 2 1892-1900
The Munich Secession, in 1892, was a watershed in von Stuck’s life and his art. Together with Lovis Corinth and almost a hundred other artists, von Stuck resigned from the official Artists’...
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Changing Stories: Ovid’s Metamorphoses on canvas, 13 – Tiresias, Echo and...
After the remarkable birth of Bacchus, Ovid breaks from his Theban cycle to introduce Tiresias, who at first seems an irrelevant distraction, but leads us into one of the best stories in the whole of...
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Jules Breton’s Eternal Harvest: 3 1870-1876
By 1870, Jules Breton’s art was flourishing. He had fallen in love with Brittany, and his paintings of rural scenes and people around his home town of Courrières were being augmented by the contrasting...
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Fooled you! The deception of the trompe l’oeil
Today, the First of April, is traditionally a day of practical jokes and pranks: what more appropriate day to consider how painters, working on flat surfaces, can deceive the eye? In the trompe l’oeil,...
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A Troubled Woman, Centaur’s Blood, and Hercules as Martyr
Paintings only too easily become separated from their original titles. Devoid of that crucial clue, Evelyn De Morgan‘s full-length portrait of an overtly troubled woman, above, becomes an insoluble...
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Cross-Dressing, Feminism, and the Greek Demi-God
In yesterday’s article about Deianira, I promised to return to the odd story of Hercules and Omphale, for which I showed a fine painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder, in which Hercules is dressed up in...
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Franz von Stuck’s Thoroughly Modern Histories: 3 1901-1909
By 1900, Franz von Stuck had built upon his already substantial reputation, and remained active in the Munich Secession. Franz von Stuck (1863–1928), Spring (1902), oil, dimensions not known,...
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Changing Stories: Ovid’s Metamorphoses on canvas, 14 – Pentheus and Bacchus
Having introduced Tiresias to us as a seer, and after taking a short break from the Theban cycle, Ovid’s last story in Book 3 of his Metamorphoses involves a prophecy from Tiresias about Theban events,...
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Jules Breton’s Eternal Harvest: 4 1877-1889
After the success of The Festival of Saint-Jean, which was sold before it went on display at the Salon, and shortly afterwards sold on to another dealer for 45,000 Francs, Jules Breton came under...
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Children and the sea: the paintings of Virginie Demont-Breton
Although it is fairly widely known that Jules Breton had a daughter, Virginie Demont-Breton (1859–1935), who went on to paint, I had not realised just how successful she was, and how distinctive and...
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Painting the Impossible: Music
Sensory associations with music since the end of the nineteenth century have undoubtedly been greatly influenced by the progressive dissociation between music and live performance. Although...
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Spouse-swapping, matricide, and Harry Potter
If you want a quick summary of this story before you skip ahead to the paintings, here’s the TL;DR: Helen, daughter of Zeus and Leda, who was the wife of King Tyndareus of Sparta, married Menelaus,...
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Franz von Stuck’s Thoroughly Modern Histories: 4 1910-1913
The first decade of the twentieth century had been highly successful for Franz von Stuck, with paintings such as Salome (1906), and his ennoblement in the Order of Merit of the Bavarian Crown. Over the...
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Changing Stories: Ovid’s Metamorphoses on canvas, 15 – Pyramus and Thisbe
The fourth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses starts with the introduction of a team of narrators, the daughters of Minyas, who take it in turns to tell us stories within their story. These women provide a...
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Jules Breton’s Eternal Harvest: 5 1890-1906
The 1880s had been a period of continuing success for Jules Breton. Although concentrating on compositionally simpler paintings, his work was sought-after in Europe and North America, and his poetry...
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Franz von Stuck’s Thoroughly Modern Histories: 5 1914-1928
By the start of the First World War, Franz von Stuck was successful, ennobled, and had just had a new studio built at his Villa Stuck in Munich. One of its features, a dedicated floor for sculture, was...
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Easter in Paintings: From Gethsemane to the Tomb
For those wishing to observe Easter, and for anyone who appreciates the wealth of paintings depicting the events of the first Easter, here is a selection of paintings. Grand overviews Gaudenzio Ferrari...
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Mother of the Muses: Mnemosyne
Many classical Greek and Roman artists were generous enough to label the figures in their paintings. Where we have lost the context that their original owners might have enjoyed, these labels are often...
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Painting the Impossible: Touch
There isn’t really a single sense of touch. Somatic sensation comes in a range of different modalities, such as fine touch, pressure, heat, cold, and of course pain. Of all the senses, it is perhaps...
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Pride and Petulance: How one woman almost spared Troy
Homer’s Iliad centres on events during the war against Troy, but is far from being a comprehensive account of the decade during which combined ancient Greek forces tried to crush the mighty fortress...
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