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Wet in wet: a brief history of watercolour – 1, origins to 1800
Of the most popular painting media, watercolour is the most inappropriately-named. Oil paint uses drying oils as its binder, which locks the pigment particles onto the ground; I have summarised its...
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Wet in wet: a brief history of watercolour – 2, 1800-1850
In the first article in this series, I showed how Dürer’s great innovations led to the use of watercolour as a medium for making studies, topographic views, and some quite substantial finished...
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Changing Stories: Ovid’s Metamorphoses on canvas, 41 Meleager, Atalanta, and...
As Ovid approaches the midpoint of Book 8 of his Metamorphoses, hence the middle of its fifteen books, he has just left Daedalus burying his son Icarus after their fantastic flight went wrong. Ovid...
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Edgar Degas: Narrative paintings to 1865
It is easy to forget that Edgar Degas was primarily a history and portrait painter for the first decade of his career. This article and the next look at his two phases of narrative work, and the...
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Edgar Degas: Narrative paintings from 1866
Edgar Degas started his career as a history painter, and by 1865 had completed a series of five works intended to launch that career. In the latter 1860s, Degas painted more portraits, and started to...
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Coast: Flatlands
For those painting coastal landscapes, the flat dunes, beaches, and marshes of much of the North Sea coast are a problem. No matter how beautiful or visually fascinating they might appear in real life,...
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Changing Stories: Ovid’s Metamorphoses on canvas, the best of the first half – 1
Over the last eight months, I have stepped through each of the stories in the first seven and a half books of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, summarising their verbal narrative and showing some of the best...
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Watch for Amazon Marketplace Rip-offs
With Amazon owning roughly half of the print book retail market, at least in the US and UK, it’s all too easy to assume that it offers good if not the best deals on printed books. Here I show how...
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Changing Stories: Ovid’s Metamorphoses on canvas, the best of the first half – 2
This is the second of two articles which together show eleven of the very best stories and the finest paintings from the first half of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. A full list of articles and an index to all...
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Wet in wet: a brief history of watercolour – 3, 1850-1890
The second article in this series showed the huge advances in watercolour painting during the first half of the nineteenth century, which made the medium popular, and increasingly so for those engaging...
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Wet in wet: a brief history of watercolour – 4, After Impressionism
The third article in this series looked at the advances which occurred in watercolour paints and painting during the late nineteenth century, which made it a first-class medium alongside oils. This...
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Edgar Degas: Landscapes
If Degas is not known today as a history painter, few would believe that he had ever painted landscapes – but he did, and quite a few too. This article may help persuade you that, although the great...
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Coast: Scottish seas by William McTaggart
Some landscape painters make a few coastal views, others make the coast the central thread in their work. William McTaggart (1835–1910) was in the latter group, to the point where I’m sure if you...
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Edgar Degas: Dancers 1, Form and movement
About half of Edgar Degas’ lifetime output is of drawings and paintings of the ballet and its dancers. This overwhelming obsession with dance did not develop until the late 1870s, but dominated his...
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Changing Stories: Ovid’s Metamorphoses on canvas, 42 The Death of Meleager,...
At the end of the Calydonian boar hunt, what should have been an occasion for rejoicing was marred when the two sons of Thestius objected to Meleager giving Atalanta the prize, and the enraged Meleager...
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Travels with Edward Lear: 1 Italy, Greece, Albania
On the face of it, Edward Lear (1812–1888) shouldn’t have survived beyond childhood, let alone become the enormously creative genius which he did. Best known for his nonsense rhymes, limericks, and...
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Travels with Edward Lear: 2 Israel, France, India
Despite his troubled childhood, grand mal epilepsy, asthma, bronchitis, bouts of depression, failing eyesight, and lack of formal art education, Edward Lear (1812–1888) had been Britain’s finest...
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Edgar Degas: Dancers 2, Lessons and rehearsal
Soon after 1870, when Edgar Degas started to paint individual dancers in the ballet of the Paris Opera, he made more complex compositions involving multiple dancers performing different activities....
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News feeds for this blog: getting less eclectic
If you want to receive notification of articles posted to this blog by news feed, you may find the following URLs helpful. Each is prefaced by http:// and not https://, as they are feeds rather than...
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Turner, painted propaganda, and the birth of Modern Europe
Sometimes you have to dig around a bit to understand what is going on in a painting, particularly some of JMW Turner’s. Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851), The Opening of the Wallhalla, 1842...
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