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Paintings of 1918: War
Each year, I look back at the paintings which were made a century earlier. This time, this is rather special, as 1918 was the year in which the Great War, as it was known then, ended, and in which so...
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Jerusalem Delivered: 8 Armida abducts Rinaldo
In the middle of the night following the crusaders’ first major assault on the city of Jerusalem, Clorinda burned their siege towers down. Unrecognised by Tancred, he then mortally wounded her in a...
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The Naturalist Andersens: HA Brendekilde 1895-1906
We know that the two Danish Naturalist artists Hans Andersen Brendekilde (1857–1942) and L A Ring had painted together in a village near Odense in 1893, and their friendship seems to have extended well...
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The Naturalist Andersens: LA Ring 1895-1906
When Laurits Andersen Ring (1854–1933) returned from his tour of Italy, he could so easily have fallen into another bout of depression. His desperately unrequited affair with Johanne Wilde had ended in...
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Fog: Turner to Homer
For much of the history of Western Art, one of its underlying principles has been to reveal rather than to hide. Atmospheric and other effects which tend to obscure the image being painted have...
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Fog: Pissarro to Ury
After three centuries in which European art had concentrated on showing full details of landscapes, it was the innovative paintings of JMW Turner and Caspar David Friedrich which had started to...
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Plutarch’s Lives in Paint: From Alexander the Great to Cato the Younger
In my second and final look at the greatest stories and paintings from Plutarch’s Lives, I consider two of his longest and best biographies, of Alexander and Julius Caesar, together with one which...
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Paintings of 1918: Looking back
The end of the Great War in 1918 may have seen the avant garde entering late Cubism or dabbling with Dada, but there were still many significant and wonderful artists with styles that owed more to the...
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Jerusalem Delivered: 9 In Armida’s Garden
The crusaders led by Godfrey of Bouillon desperately need Rinaldo back if they are to resume their assault on Jerusalem. Guelph’s party, notably the knights Charles (Carlo) and Ubaldo, have gone off in...
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The Naturalist Andersens: HA Brendekilde 1906-1914
In the early twentieth century, Hans Andersen Brendekilde (1857–1942) was painting religious motifs and rather sentimental rural scenes. He was part of the art establishment too: like his long-standing...
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The Naturalist Andersens: LA Ring 1906-1914
Laurits Andersen Ring (1854–1933), like his long-time friend HA Brendekilde, turned more to landscape painting in the middle and later years of his career. With the birth of his son in 1902, Ring moved...
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Scourge of the Early Renaissance: the Black Death 1
Imagine for a moment what it would be like if half of all the people that you know were to suddenly fall ill and die within a fortnight. For most of us, that’s so far beyond experience that we can only...
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Scourge of the Early Renaissance: the Black Death 2
In the first of these two articles, I looked at the spread of the Black Death across Europe around 1348-50, and some early apocalyptic paintings of its effects. After a century during which many...
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Paintings of 1918: Narrative and Figurative
As we’re told everywhere, history and other forms of narrative painting died in the nineteenth century. To examine how true that might be, in this look at some of the great paintings of 1918, I start...
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Jerusalem Delivered: 10 Rinaldo rescued
The ‘Saracen’ sorceress Armida had abducted the crusader knight Rinaldo to her enchanted garden far to the west, on the Fortunate Isles. A rescue team of the knights Charles and Ubaldo sailed out in a...
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The Naturalist Andersens: HA Brendekilde 1915-1942
At the start of the First World War, Hans Andersen Brendekilde (1857–1942) was in the process of divorcing his first wife, Ida Juliane Antonie Brendekilde (1860–1920), and in the midst of an affair...
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The Naturalist Andersens: LA Ring 1915-1933
In 1915, Laurits Andersen Ring (1854–1933) celebrated his sixty-first birthday, and his first year of retirement to the house which had been built for him and his much younger family to the north-west...
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Boccaccio and the Decameron: Invitation to a new series
As you will have gathered, I love a good story, and most of all I love it painted well, preferably by some masters spanning the period from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. We looked at some...
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The Four Seasons: Before Poussin
As secular painting became increasingly popular, and patrons were commissioning works which showed landscapes and scenes from everyday life, so painters turned to the four seasons for their motifs....
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The Four Seasons: Poussin to Mucha
Towards the end of his life, Nicolas Poussin’s hands developed a severe tremor which made painting fine details very hard for him. Despite that, his final years saw some of his greatest landscape...
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