Clik here to view.
Paintings of 1918: Landscapes
I dwell too much on the art of Europe. In 1918, there were many exciting artists working in North America, and many significant landscape paintings were created there. So in this concluding survey of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Jerusalem Delivered: 11 Erminia saves Tancred
Armida, abandoned by Rinaldo so he could return to the siege of Jerusalem, has joined the massed army of the King of Egypt. One of his leaders, Adrastus, has promised to rip Rinaldo’s heart out, and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Naturalist Andersens: Moments of Genius
Over the last few weeks, I have looked at the careers and works of two great Danish realist painters in parallel: Hans Andersen Brendekilde (1857–1942) and Laurits Andersen Ring (1854–1933). In this...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Decameron: Nastagio Degli Onesti, the penalty of the pure in body
The stories told each day in Boccaccio’s Decameron follow a theme appointed by the ‘ruler’ of that day, as they decree when they are crowned with laurels at the end of the previous day’s storytelling....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Lucrezia Borgia, femme fatale
Mention the surname Borgia and most people conjure up sinister connotations. Add the Christian name of Lucrezia and we recognise one of the classical femmes fatales, famous from books, movies, and art....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Painting and the Unconscious: Carl Gustav Carus 1
I hadn’t realised that Caspar David Friedrich had at least one pupil, and a rather unusual one at that: Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869), who when he was learning to paint was already a professor of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Painting and the Unconscious: Carl Gustav Carus 2
Up to the middle of the 1820s, the paintings of Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869) had shown close links with those of his teacher, Caspar David Friedrich. But increasingly Carus was developing his own...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Ossian: The painting of a literary hoax?
There have been plenty of hoaxes in painting, almost invariably over the identity of the artist (or forger) who painted a specific work. It’s unusual for most of a generation of painters to be caught...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Jerusalem Delivered: 12 Rinaldo saves Armida, and Jerusalem is delivered
With the massed Egyptian army approaching Jerusalem, Tancred had completed his duel with Argante, leaving the Circassian dead and Tancred badly wounded. Erminia, in company with Vafrine (who had been...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Painting Reality: 1 Emergence (1883)
The Paris Salon of 1883 was very large, with nearly 2,500 paintings on display. Among those emerged a new school of painting – not that of Impressionism, which had remained fiercely independent and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Decameron: Cimon and Iphigenia, a tale mostly untold in paint
On the fifth day of the Decameron’s stories, Fiammetta had chosen the theme of the adventures of lovers who survived calamities or misfortunes and reached a state of happiness. The previous article in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Alhambra: 1 History
Here in the UK daylight is now brief, the weather often grim, so I think it’s time to head off for a long weekend somewhere lighter, warmer, and less glum: this weekend we’ll go to Granada, in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Alhambra: 2 Landscapes 1767-1883
Given the very pleasant climate of Granada and the Alhambra, by rights it should have been painted as much as the Roman Campagna, which in the eighteenth century was the cradle of plein air oil...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Alhambra: 3 Landscapes 1886-1913
Landscape painters came to the Alhambra in the Andalucian city of Granada relatively late. But once they started to visit the Prado in Madrid to view and copy its magnificent collection of masters, a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Jerusalem Delivered: 13 Summary and highlights
In the last dozen articles in this series, I have worked through the plot and sub-stories of Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Jerusalem Delivered, showing the best of the paintings which have been made to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Painting Reality: 2 Origins
Having looked at the new wave of Naturalist paintings in the Salon of 1883, I proposed that their common characteristics include: They tend to show ordinary people, rather than nobility, gods, or...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Landscapes of Martín Rico: 1 1852-1872
My recent long weekend looking at paintings of the Alhambra in Granada, Spain, reminded me of how few Spanish landscape painters are now known outside the country of their birth. The work of Martín...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Landscapes of Martín Rico: 2 1873-1908
In the years prior to 1873, the Spanish landscape painter Martín Rico y Ortega (1833–1908) had trained in Madrid and Paris, and painted even further afield in Switzerland. But it was when he was...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Decameron: Temptation of a faithful wife
On the tenth and last day of stories in Boccaccio’s Decameron, the theme is set by Panfilo, the ‘king of the day’, as those who have performed liberal or munificent deeds in the cause of love, or for...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Out of darkness, light: The development of chiaroscuro 1
If painting is about light, so it must also be about its opposite, darkness. Their combination in the single term chiaroscuro is both appropriate and confusing, as it has been used to describe so many...
View Article