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A Traveller among Mountains: the landscape paintings of Wú Lì
Many of the books on Chinese landscape painting, and visual art in general, stop short at the end of the Ming dynasty in 1644. If they cover any work after that time, it is patchy and sporadic compared...
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Travellers among Mountains: the Six Masters of the Early Qing
Yesterday, I commemorated the three-hundredth anniversary of the death of one of the Six Masters of the early Qing period in China: Wú Lì, promising today to show the work of the other five. Wáng...
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Changing Stories: Ovid’s Metamorphoses on canvas, 76 – Ulysses’ crew turned...
In his Metamorphoses, Ovid is retelling episodes from Virgil’s Aeneid, in which the hero Aeneas has reached the coast midway between Naples and Rome, at Caieta (Gaeta). There he went ashore, and two of...
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Amsterdam for Real: Paintings of George Breitner 1
I can’t think why I hadn’t heard of George Hendrik Breitner (1857–1923). He was a major figure in painting in the Netherlands at the time, he painted with Vincent van Gogh, was an early adopter of...
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Amsterdam for Real: Paintings of George Breitner 2
In this second article about the Dutch Naturalist and Amsterdam Impressionist painter George Hendrik Breitner (1857–1923), I resume a small selection of his works from the mid 1890s, when he had an...
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Pigment: Vermilion, the red of heaven
There’s one red which looks as brilliant today as when it was first brushed out five hundred or even two thousand years ago. It’s a pigment which was known to, and used by, the Romans, and in ancient...
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Lovers die swimming the Hellespont: the tragedy of Hero and Leander
There can be no more hapless lovers than Hero and Leander. It’s bad enough that his parents would have disapproved, so the relationship has to be kept secret. But when the couple are separated by one...
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No Greater Naturalist: Paintings of Bruno Liljefors, 1
The more prescient painters of the nineteenth century could see where the upstart technology of photography was heading. Even before 1850, photographers were setting up portrait studios and stealing...
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No Greater Naturalist: Paintings of Bruno Liljefors, 2
During the 1880s, Bruno Liljefors (1860–1939) excelled as a wildlife artist, and was appointed head of the art school in Gothenburg, Sweden, in succession to Carl Larsson. But his personal life was in...
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Changing Stories: Ovid’s Metamorphoses on canvas, 77 – Circe’s bad habit
Macareus, one of the survivors of the Odyssey, has been telling his account of the sojourn of Ulysses and his men on Circe’s island. Having told of their arrival and transformation into pigs, he...
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Jules Bastien-Lepage: Avatar of Naturalism, 1
Studies of Naturalism, Realism, or Social Realism differ in their definitions, the period during which it flourished, artists and even countries involved, and more. But there is one painter whose work...
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Jules Bastien-Lepage: Avatar of Naturalism, 2
The first of these two articles looked at the paintings made by Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848–1884) leading to his ‘high Naturalism’. This article moves on to consider the remarkable series of paintings...
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Pigment: Copper rust, Verdigris and Copper Resinate
Wherever we use metallic copper, it weathers and corrodes. As most copper salts are blue-green in colour, ‘copper rust’ turns statues, rooves, pipes, and every other copper object exposed to the air...
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The Face that Launched a Thousand Artists: Helen (and Paris)
After the Virgin Mary, Helen is probably the most famous and most frequently-painted woman. She is also one over whom there has been no consensus: was she abducted, seduced, or seducer? Victim or...
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The Last Naturalist: Émile Friant, 1
He’s been called the Last Naturalist, and like many of the Naturalists whom I have featured here, was both popular in his day and almost forgotten now. Émile Friant (1863–1932) rebelled against the...
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The Last Naturalist: Émile Friant, 2
For the Naturalist artist Émile Friant (1863–1932), 1889 was a watershed. His painting of All Saints’ Day (1888) had been a great success at the Salon in Paris, and received a gold medal at the...
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Changing Stories: Ovid’s Metamorphoses on canvas, 78 – Aeneas in Italy, and...
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Achaemenides and Macareus have been telling stories from the Odyssey. With those complete, Aeneas (hero of Virgil’s Aeneid) moves on to found Alba, the precursor to Rome...
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The Organ Rehearsal: The paintings, friends, and collection of Henry Lerolle
Artists are sometimes known for a single work, one which may be quite atypical of most of their lifetime output. Henry Lerolle (1848–1929) was a painter who, in most of his easel paintings, showed...
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Strikes, Politics, and Zola’s ‘Germinal’: Paintings of Alfred Roll
Naturalism is regarded as a predominantly literary phenomenon, centred on the novels of Émile Zola, which are visually vivid in their descriptive passages. In painting, it has almost slipped altogether...
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Pigment: Arsenic, Orpiment and Realgar
Spike Bucklow’s marvellous book The Alchemy of Paint describes well how paint-making and painting were, and in many respects remain, alchemical mysteries. Oddly, though, it omits two pigments which, by...
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