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Medium Well Done: 9 Ink and casein
Since ancient times, writing, drawing and paintings have been made using pigments and/or dyes in water, often without any binder as such. These are generically inks, which don’t conform to other media...
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Gustave Courbet 2: The group
Before the young Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) had even completed The Stone Breakers, he had already started work on an even greater masterpiece, A Burial at Ornans, one of the canonical paintings of the...
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Like an obelisk: Nabi paintings of Jan Verkade
If some of the more prolific Nabis have become quite obscure, those who had brief artistic careers like Jan Verkade (1868–1946) have all but vanished. Known in the group as le nabi obéliscal (the...
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King Arthur’s women: 1 Morgan le Fay
Rich and compelling though the Arthurian legends are, they are also a bit of a nightmare in terms of narrative, as are their paintings. There are so many stories, each of which comes in different...
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King Arthur’s women: 2 Queen Guinevere
If Morgan le Fay is a wicked witch for much of Arthurian legend, and only comes good as Arthur lies dying, Queen Guinevere turns out to be unfaithful, and is almost burned at the stake, a punishment...
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The First Impressionist? Johan Jongkind’s Bicentenary – first period in France
Four great painters who are candidates for the role of First Impressionist, before Monet, Pissarro, Renoir and the rest of the core members of the movement in France, include: Camille Corot...
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The Divine Comedy: Inferno 14 From treachery to cannibalism
After meeting some political traitors, Dante and Virgil come across Count Ugolino, who is gnawing the back of the head of Archbishop Ruggieri as a dog chews a bone. Their story is one of the most...
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Medium Well Done: 10 Acrylics
Traditional oil paints were the mainstay medium used by professional painters in the west from the Renaissance until the late twentieth century, a period of well over half a millenium. Although other...
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Gustave Courbet 3: Allegory
In the mid-1850s, Gustave Courbet painted several fine landscapes, mainly of the countryside around his native Ornans. He also painted one of the most enigmatic works of the entire century, shown...
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The Dutch Nabi: Meijer de Haan
At around 0300 on 16 October 2012, thieves broke into the Kunsthal in Rotterdam and made off with a small haul of modern masters. A couple of Monet’s paintings of London, one each by Picasso, Matisse,...
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The Balcony: Outside In
Balconies have been a valuable device in painting, and this weekend I’m going to look at two groups of views which use them with effect. This article looks from outside the balcony towards it, and the...
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The Balcony: Inside Out
In yesterday’s opening article of this pair, I looked at paintings of balconies; today we get to join the rich and famous on their balconies, and look out and down on the world below. Before cheap and...
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The First Impressionist? Johan Jongkind’s Bicentenary – Impressionism
The Dutch landscape painter Johan Barthold Jongkind (1819-1891) was still struggling for a breakthrough when he was working in France in 1855, so he returned to the Netherlands, where he set up his...
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The Divine Comedy: Inferno 15 Lucifer
Dante and Virgil move on towards a great contraption which looks from a distance a bit like a windmill. As they grow closer, they pass by shades of the dead frozen and stacked up. Joseph Anton Koch...
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Medium Well Done: Wood panels
So far in this series, I have looked almost exclusively at the paints used to make paintings, particularly in terms of the binder that holds pigment particles to the ground. What I have largely glossed...
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Gustave Courbet 4: The erotic
Having explored figurative and landscape painting, and posed one of the great artistic enigmas of the century, in the 1860s Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) followed his Sleeping Nude from 1858 with a...
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Three Women in Church and a Christening
Women visiting the Palace of Fine Arts at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 must have been delighted to see at least one work with which they could all identify, painted by a...
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Rolling Thunder: lightning in the landscape
For many people in the past, the most awe-inspiring and impressive events in their lives were thunderstorms. Even today, lightning strikes make hot favourite movies and still images in social media....
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Rolling Thunder: stories of storms
In the first of these two articles looking at paintings of thunderstorms and lightning, I showed a succession of landscapes which didn’t attempt to tell stories. Here, I look at some paintings in which...
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The First Impressionist? Johan Jongkind’s Bicentenary – Decline
By the end of the 1860s, Johan Barthold Jongkind (1819-1891) had painted with several of the founders of French Impressionism, and had a major impact on their styles and plein air painting techniques....
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