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Legends of England in Paint: Lady Godiva
The legends of Robin Hood, which I examined yesterday, are long and involved, and seem to have been depicted mainly in illustrations to accompany the text. Today’s look at paintings of popular English...
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Plutarch’s Lives in Paint: 16 Agesilaus and Pompey
History is often neither fair nor kind. In this next pair of Plutarch’s Lives, the memory of the first, the Spartan king and general Agesilaüs, has been lost, but the Roman general Pompey is now far...
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Celebrating the 500th anniversary of Tintoretto, 13: Three rapes and a Senator
Towards the end of the 1570s, Jacopo Tintoretto and his workshop began work on a dozen paintings for the walls to complete the Sala superiore in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. At about the same time,...
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Pierre Bonnard: On Reflection
Many figurative painters engage in a little mirror-play. Titian used mirrors occasionally, and Velázquez used a mirror in the ‘Rokeby’ Venus (1647-51) to reveal the face behind his graceful nude. But I...
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Down and Out in Catania: paintings of Antonino Gandolfo
Last week, I looked at some surviving narrative paintings by the Sicilian artist Giuseppe Sciuti (1834–1911). His last teacher, before he had to work as a decorative painter, was Antonino Gandolfo...
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Celebrating the 500th anniversary of Tintoretto, 14: The life of Christ in...
Having whet your appetite with a glimpse of the smallest two of the paintings which Jacopo Tintoretto made for the walls of the Sala superiore in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, this article looks at...
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Victor Hugo on Canvas: Quasimodo and Esmeralda
Over the last couple of weekends, I have looked at paintings of some fables and legends. When it comes to literary genres such as folk and fairy tales, categories become very blurry. This weekend I am...
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Folk Tales on Canvas: from Denmark to the USA
Having seen how popular paintings of the modern ‘legend’ of Quasimodo and Esmeralda became during the nineteenth century, this article looks briefly at paintings of other well-known folk tales from...
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Plutarch’s Lives in Paint: 17a Alexander (the Great) 1
Of Plutarch’s Lives, one of its longest and most painted is his account of Alexander ‘the Great’, the king of Macedonia, who in just a decade won the largest empire of the ancient world. Because it is...
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Celebrating the 500th anniversary of Tintoretto, 15: The Sala terrena of the...
Jacopo Tintoretto’s arrangement to provide paintings for the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, made in 1577, was most unusual. Instead of being paid for each painting as a separate commission, as was normal,...
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Pierre Bonnard: The world beyond
My final selection of paintings by Pierre Bonnard looks at one of his most interesting pictorial devices: the landscape view through French or other windows. Bonnard developed a taste for views from...
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The Painter as History: Ary Scheffer 1
In the early nineteenth century, French painting included some of the greatest artists of the period. Jacques-Louis David was in decline prior to his self-imposed exile in Belgium, but the bright new...
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The Painter as History: Ary Scheffer 2
My first article about the history painter Ary Scheffer (1795–1858) looked at his early work, up to 1831, a period in which he was politically very active, helped put Louis-Philippe on the throne of...
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After The Rain: The Impressionist streets of Lesser Ury, 1
Lesser Ury (1861–1931) is known as a “German-Jewish Impressionist” artist, which I find odd, if not faintly offensive. As you’ll see in the paintings which follow in this and the next article about him...
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After The Rain: The Impressionist streets of Lesser Ury, 2
In the first of these two articles about the life and work of the German Post-Impressionist painter Lesser Ury (1861–1931), I looked at his paintings up to 1903. Lesser Ury (1861–1931), Berlin Street...
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Plutarch’s Lives in Paint: 17a Alexander (the Great) 2
In my previous account of Plutarch’s biography of Alexander the Great, he had finally defeated the great king of Persia, Dareius, who had later been abandoned to die from wounds inflicted by Bessus,...
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Celebrating the 500th anniversary of Tintoretto, 16: Paradise
By 1883, Jacopo Tintoretto, his son Domenico and their workshop had completed the last paintings for the Sala terrena in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice. In his final decade, Jacopo, now in...
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Landscape with Castle: the paintings of Carl Friedrich Lessing, 1
No single art exists in isolation from others, and literature often has an overarching influence over other arts, including painting. Not only do written works supply narrative for paintings, but...
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Landscape with Castle: the paintings of Carl Friedrich Lessing, 2
By the late 1830s, Carl Friedrich Lessing (1808–1880) was well-established as a ‘Gothic’ Romantic painter, whose views of isolated castles in mountainous surroundings complemented increasingly popular...
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Celebrating the 500th anniversary of Tintoretto, 17: The Last Suppers
So great and lasting is the influence of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper (c 1498) that even today we tend to think of its formal composition as the standard approach to depicting this scene. So it may...
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