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Ferdinand Hodler, Early Realism, to 1885
Next month, I will be commemorating here the centenary of the death of the great Swiss artist Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918). He is not a painter that I have known well, and I can’t recall seeing any of...
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Pigment: Indigo the unreliable
Like Madder, Indigo is a vegetable dye which has been used to colour fabrics since ancient times. According to classical authorities, its European variant Woad was used by ancient Britons to colour...
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Sargent’s Summer with Rosina
In the summer of 1878, John Singer Sargent had just completed his studies with Carolus-Duran, and had already started to have success at the Salon in Paris. He went off on a working holiday to Capri,...
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The Second Most Famous Georgian: Niko Pirosmani, 1 Animals
Georgia – the nation, rather than the US state – is a bridge between Asia Minor, the Black Sea coast with its ancient ports, central Asia, and the Middle East. In its markets you’ll meet traders from...
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The Second Most Famous Georgian: Niko Pirosmani, 2 People and Places
In the first of these two articles commemorating the centenary of the death of the great Georgian artist Niko Pirosmani (1862–1918), I looked at his paintings of animals. This article considers his...
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Changing Stories: Ovid’s Metamorphoses on canvas, 83 – Augury and pestilence
As Ovid nears the end of the last book of his Metamorphoses, he has just told of the transformation of King Numa’s inconsolable widow Egeria into a spring. He still has some key moments in Roman...
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Ferdinand Hodler, Transition, 1886-94
The first article in my series to commemorate the centenary of the death of the Swiss artist Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918) showed some of his realist paintings from the early years of his career. During...
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The Awe of the Alps: Alexandre Calame 1
By the nineteenth century, ‘genteel’ people (such as patrons of the arts) were starting to discover the challenges and rewards of Europe’s mountainous and wild regions, including the Alps and...
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Pigment: Blackest Black
For something which many say is not a colour in its own right, merely the absence of colour and light, black has attracted a lot of attention among painters. For centuries they argued over which was...
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Louisa Beresford: a truly vanished Pre-Raphaelite
My interest in the paintings of Louisa Anne Beresford (née Stuart), Marchioness of Waterford (1818-1891) arose as the result of today being the bicentenary of her birth, on 14 April 1818, and the...
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Anatomy lessons, autopsies, and surgery: they’re different
Accustomed as we are to viewing bloody casualty simulations and surgical procedures on TV, Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp still strikes many modern viewers as a strange painting. In...
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Changing Stories: Ovid’s Metamorphoses on canvas, 84 – The death of Julius...
Once the god Aesculapius is ensconced in Rome, Ovid is ready to round off his Metamorphoses with salient points from the life of Julius Caesar, and links to the contemporary emperor, Augustus. These...
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All Out! Paintings of strikes
Many, perhaps most, artists have come from the working classes, and painted largely for the wealthy. In times of social unrest, they were faced with difficult choices. Had they taken up the social...
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Ferdinand Hodler, Distant mountains, 1895-1902
By 1895, Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918) was turning to more Symbolist paintings and developing his mature ‘Parallelism’ from there. Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918), Retreat from Marignano (composition...
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The Awe of the Alps: Alexandre Calame 2
By the end of the 1840s, Alexandre Calame (1810–1864) had established himself as a major painter of dramatic, sometimes even melodramatic, views of the Swiss landscape, and had a steady stream of...
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Pigment: The Forgotten Yellow of the Masters
Until relatively recently, many pigments were closely guarded secrets. Their precise manner of preparation, even the source of their ingredients, were considered part of the craft of paint-making,...
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Woman Sewing: By hand 1
Men in paintings get all the best roles: armoured champions over dragons and sea-monsters, explorers and adventurers going where no man has been before, and so on. Outside of genre paintings, roles...
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Woman Sewing: By hand 2
In the first of these three articles, I looked at paintings of women sewing by hand from Velázquez in the 1640s to Renoir in 1882. This article concludes coverage of hand sewing from then into the...
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Woman Sewing: Slave to the sewing machine
The first functional sewing machines started to appear in the middle of the nineteenth century, and by 1870, several factories were making them for sale to anyone with sufficient money. Sales rose,...
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Italian Masters go commercial: the Bridgeman deal is bad for art
The bad news last week for anyone interested in art history is the acquisition by Bridgeman Images of rights to images for all the 439 state-owned museums and galleries in Italy. Those include the...
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