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The Story in Paintings: Nausicaä, boy meets girl and more
The Odyssey is one of the oldest and most influential stories, told in epic poetry, in the West. It tells of the ten years of adventures experienced by the Greek Odysseus (known to the Romans as...
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Between Turner and the 20th century: Alfred William Hunt
Following the death of JMW Turner in 1851, there did not appear to be any successor in British art. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had been formed, but was working in quite a different direction, and...
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The Story in Paintings: Perseus and Edward Burne-Jones 1
So far, most of the narratives which I have analysed in detail have been relatively simple, and with the exception of some of the moral tales of Hogarth and others, expressible in a single painting. I...
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The Story in Paintings: Perseus and Edward Burne-Jones 2
In the previous article, I summarised the story of Perseus and Andromeda, and explained how Edward Burne-Jones came to paint a series of ten works to show that story for Arthur Balfour, a young MP who...
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Achieving the right perspective
Aside from ‘pure’ art, painting has had many different and sometimes conflicting roles. Until the twentieth century, one of those has commonly been to represent a scene in some reasonably optically...
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Brief Candles: Masaccio part 1
… Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. (William Shakespeare, Macbeth Act 5, scene 5.) At the...
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Brief Candles: Masaccio part 2
In the previous article, Masaccio had completed the polyptych for Pisa, and was still working intermittently on frescoes for the Brancacci Chapel in Florence. I will complete my account of his painting...
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Palmyra, paintings, and cultural vandalism
We have been rightly horrified at the destruction wrought in Palmyra by ISIL, and at the looting and damage to the many cultural treasures in Afghanistan and Iraq. I’m just not so convinced that our...
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The Story in Paintings: Poussin’s Empire of Flora
Many of the finest paintings by masters of narrative painting are notoriously difficult to read, and remain controversial centuries after they were created. This article looks at one of the most...
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The Story in Paintings: Frescoes of the Brancacci Chapel
Before I move on from Masaccio, the early southern Renaissance, and the city of Florence, I would like to take a careful look at narrative in the frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel of the church of Santa...
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The Story in Paintings: Philemon and Baucis, virtue rewarded
There is a deep and fundamental difference between the role of the classical Roman and Greek gods, and those of the major monotheistic religions. For the Romans and Greeks, their gods were the means of...
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Tucking it away safely: archival media
Most of us have old family photo albums and other personal records which might go back many decades – possibly even to the 1800s. Passed down from generation to generation, they give us insight into...
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The Story in Paintings: Composite images of the Renaissance
I have several times written that early western painting, until the late Renaissance, not uncommonly incorporated multiple copies of the same characters within a single painting, as a narrative...
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Georges Seurat’s Poseuses: new wine in an old skin?
In my recent article on complex narrative forms (‘continuous narrative’) in early painting, I remarked that such paintings became more unusual after 1500, with works becoming almost exclusively...
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A personal language: Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s unique portraits
Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526/7–1593, also sometimes known as Arcimboldi) might have been just another of the thousands of Mannerist painters who satisfied the need for portraits, religious works, and the...
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Into the light: George Clausen’s transformation
Read most art histories and you might come away with the impression that Western painting in the first few decades of the twentieth century was all about Cubism and other routes to Modernism. In fact...
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Into the light: George Clausen, Post-Impressionist
In the first article of this two-part series, I showed paintings from the first part of the career of Sir George Clausen (1852–1944), tracing the development of his style to that of Impressionism in...
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The Story in Paintings: Lovis Corinth’s Ariadne on Naxos
Lovis Corinth (1858–1925) defies simple classification, and has been variously described as a member of the Berlin Secession group, a Post-Impressionist, and an Expressionist. All those have a certain...
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Into the Light: Adrian Scott Stokes in St Ives and Hungary
Among the travesties perpetrated by the art critics of the twentieth century was that painting – as opposed to the ‘inferior craft’ of illustration – had to be avant garde. Anyone with the slightest...
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Storyspace 3.1: a world of difference
Ever since Eastgate Systems released Storyspace 3, I have been thinking how amazing it is that it has not only made it to El Capitan, but what a joy it is to use again. I developed and supported a...
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