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The Riches of the Table, and the Futility of Life: Clara Peeters’ still lifes
The early seventeenth century was a time of conflicting ideas. On the one hand, the Netherlands had entered its Golden Age, in which it was the foremost maritime and economic power in Europe, and...
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The Psychology of the Riddle: Oedipus and the Sphinx
The tragic story of Oedipus, his murder of his father, marriage to his mother, and subsequent agony, has been popular in plays and literary works since classical times. Perhaps because of its...
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Figures in a Landscape: 2 Figures, narrative, ground
Few landscape paintings are made so far from the landscape that figures could not be seen in that view. John Brett (1831–1902), Florence from Bellosguardo (1863), oil on canvas, 60 x 101.3 cm, The Tate...
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Changing Stories: Ovid’s Metamorphoses on canvas, 22 – Perseus’ Wedding Feast
Ovid concluded Book 4 of his Metamorphoses at the wedding feast of Perseus and Andromeda, and it is there that he opens Book 5. Perseus has just finished his stories of how he beheaded Medusa, and how...
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Figures in a Landscape: 3 Seeing the Andes
On 29 April 1859, the first of more than twelve thousand people walked into the Studio Building on West 10th Street in New York City, to stand in awe and amazement in front of Frederic Edwin Church’s...
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Changing Stories: Ovid’s Metamorphoses on canvas, 23 – Minerva and the Muses
After their catastrophic wedding feast, Perseus and Andromeda returned to his home at Seriphos, still under the protection of Perseus’ half-sister, the goddess Minerva. Ovid then leads on to a complex...
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Totems and trees: Emily Carr’s paintings, 1892-1911
Few of us ever get to visit the Pacific North-West, but one painter has, more than anyone else, defined its ‘look’. She is also one of a very few prolific women artists for whom there are sufficient...
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King Cyrus the Great: 1 False gods
Western painting has been remarkably selective about its heroes and legends. Even quite minor and obscure Greek and Roman figures can end up in dozens of fine paintings, now admired by crowds visiting...
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King Cyrus the Great: 2 Hell hath no fury
Cyrus the Great may have been King of Kings, but he has appeared in remarkably few Western paintings. Apart from some showing a rather gruesome legend about his infancy, and Rembrandt’s magnificent...
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Figures in a Landscape: 4 Drawing a line under Turner
When you see a landscape painting by a landscape painter who has little or no record of painting narrative works, it is not difficult to make the assumption that any figures in that painting are most...
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Changing Stories: Ovid’s Metamorphoses on canvas, 24 – The rape of Proserpine
Minerva is with the nine Muses on Helicon. She has just been told the story of their contest with the Pierides, and the Muses offer to repeat the stories which Calliope had sung so successfully in that...
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Totems and trees: Emily Carr’s paintings, 1912-1913
When Emily Carr returned to Vancouver from Paris in 1912, she first established herself there as a Fauvist when she exhibited her work from France in her studio. Equipped with what she had learned over...
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Figures in a Landscape: 5 Pissarro and the human landscape
Camille Pissarro is probably the ideal ‘core’ French Impressionist whose work shows the evolution of figures in landscape paintings during the latter half of the nineteenth century. As one of the...
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Changing Stories: Ovid’s Metamorphoses on canvas, 25 – Arethusa
Calliope, the Muse of epic poetry, has just finished telling the long and harrowing story of the rape of Proserpine. She moves on to her concluding and far shorter stories, the first being about...
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Two Marriages of Great Convenience: 1 Marie de’ Medici’s grand plan
I love visiting the Louvre, but there are rooms in which I feel a little lost. One is the Galerie Médicis, in the Richelieu Wing, where Rubens’ paintings in the Marie de’ Medici Cycle hang. They are...
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Two Marriages of Great Convenience: 2 The exchange of princesses
Marie de’ Medici, the Regent of France after her husband King Henry IV had been assassinated in 1610, planned to bring peace to Europe by marriage. In 1612, she had negotiated the betrothals of Anne of...
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Carl Larsson’s Ideal Home: 1 France 1877-1885
For Carl Larsson (1853–1919), painting was a route out of the abject poverty and abusive environment of his childhood. You’d never guess from his later watercolours of his wife and children enjoying...
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Totems and trees: Emily Carr’s paintings, 1914-1930
In 1913, Emily Carr’s exhibition of two hundred of her paintings of totems and villages of the First Nations in the Pacific North-West had flopped. Despite trying to enlist the support of the minister...
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Changing Stories: Ovid’s Metamorphoses on canvas, 26 – Triptolemus and Lyncus
As Ovid reaches the end of book 5 of his Metamorphoses, there is time for one last story, narrated indirectly by the Muse Calliope. The Story With Arethusa transformed into an underground river, Ceres...
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Figures in a Landscape: 6 Constable’s gestures
These days, particularly in comparison with his rival JMW Turner, John Constable’s paintings may look rather staid and traditional. But in many respects, Constable was every bit as radical as Turner,...
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