Clik here to view.
The Real Jules-Alexis Muenier: 2 Painting from photographs
In the first of these two articles about the paintings of Jules-Alexis Muenier (1863–1942), I looked at his life and a selection of paintings which exemplify his work. This article looks at how he used...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Pigment: Azurite Blue, the mainstay
Ultramarine was and remains an important and beautiful pigment, but wasn’t the mainstay of painters before Prussian Blue became available in 1710. If you could have looked at the palettes of most...
View ArticleClik here to view.
In Hospital: 1, Doom
The sick have traditionally been cared for by their families. But for those without families, particularly anyone away from home, there have long been charitable institutions and others prepared to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
In Hospital: 2, Light
In the late nineteenth century, hospitals were transformed by the nursing revolution, the use of general anaesthesia for surgery, scientific advances in medicine, and more. So too were paintings of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Plutarch’s Lives in Paint: 4a Themistocles
Plutarch’s fourth book of biographies of famous Greek and Roman figures contrasts the Greek statesman and general Themistocles, known as the saviour of the city-state of Athens and Greece as a whole,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Pierre Bonnard: Form or Colour, 1912-1914
Early into the new year of 1912, Pierre Bonnard went to stay in Grasse, in le Midi, where he remained at the Villa Antoinette until April. In August, he holidayed with Marthe in Vernon, where they...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Ordering Colour: before the 20th century
Colour has fascinated people for millenia. The ancient Greeks speculated how many colours were primary, and how many formed fundamental categories. Although it was much later that Newton demonstrated...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Ordering Colour: Albert Henry Munsell (1858-1918)
By the start of the twentieth century, several systems had been proposed for ordering and specifying colour, but none had won over many users. It was the painter and art teacher Albert Henry Munsell...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Pigment: the green earth of Cyprus
Like people, some pigments are brash and flashy, and live in the limelight. Others, like the Green Earths, live quiet, purposeful lives away from publicity. This doesn’t make them any less important,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Art of the Law: paintings of courts 1, to 1903
Courts, where citizens are tried for alleged crimes or pursue grievances against others, are as ancient as rulers. Their name indicates how they were once a hearing in front of a monarch or their...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Art of the Law: paintings of courts 2, Forain and court artists
In the first article in this series, I showed how, during the nineteenth century, paintings of courts of law came to depict those of the day, and to tell stories of contemporary cases. The early years...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Plutarch’s Lives in Paint: 4b Camillus
Just as the Athenian statesman and general Themistocles had saved his home city, and Greece as a whole, from being conquered by Xerxes and his Persians, so Marcus Furius Camillus saved Rome from...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Pierre Bonnard: Tea, coffee, and models, 1915-1917
During 1915, Pierre Bonnard divided his time between working in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and being in Vernon (mainly, perhaps, at his house in Vernonnet – the two places being almost synonymous). The...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Berthold Woltze and his problem pictures
Sometimes my eye is caught by a single painting by an artist I haven’t come across before. This takes me to look at their other work, and not infrequently a welcome surprise. On this occasion, it took...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Too Real: the narrative paintings of Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1
If one of the aims of studying history is to gain an understanding of the past, art history has failed miserably to accomplish that for the late nineteenth century. Whether viewed in the Salon, the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Pigment: What used to be Naples Yellow
Many of the more traditional pigments have changed through the ages. Buy some Ultramarine Blue today, and it will have been made in a chemical plant rather than crushed from lapis lazuli won from a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Monkeying Around: Painting apes 1
Monkeys, or apes, are one of the oldest motifs in European painting, and have been significant features in every century’s art since the 1400s. Until little more than a century ago, though, monkeys...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Monkeying Around: Painting apes 2
In the first of this pair of articles looking at paintings in which monkeys or apes are a substantial part of the motif, I showed examples from over 3,500 years ago, and in each century from the 1400s...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Plutarch’s Lives in Paint: 5a Aristides
Plutarch’s Lives progresses with a Greek hero who was a contemporary of Themistocles: Aristides (sometimes referred to as Aristeides). The two differed in their views over the way the Athenian...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Pierre Bonnard: Domestic Symphony, 1918-1920
During the final year of the First World War, 1918, Bonnard worked mainly in Vernon. In the summer, Marthe and he spent time together in Uriage-les-Bains, a small spa town in the Isère, just outside...
View Article