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The Divine Comedy: Purgatory 3 The valley of kings
Dante and Virgil are steadily making their way up the island mountain of Purgatory, and have just met Pia de’ Tolomei, who was murdered by her husband, but still has to wait here because of her late...
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Medium Well Done: 15 Ground
Many of the best supports don’t provide a surface which is suitable for the direct application of paint. This is particularly true of egg tempera and oil paints on wood panels or stretched fabrics,...
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The Nabis: 3 Peak
After the Nabis coalesced as a group in the early 1890s, they reached their peak in the middle of that decade, and exhibited together in June 1894 in Toulouse. It had never occurred to me when looking...
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Misfit: Henri Fantin-Latour 3 Absent friends
As the destruction and slaughter of the Paris Commune subsided in 1871, Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904) emerged from his father’s Paris apartment, where he had been hiding since the start of the...
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Calm meadows: the bicentenary of Henri Harpignies 2
By the late 1880s, the French landscape painter Henri Harpignies (1819–1916) was well into his sixties, and still painting very actively. He’d started with realism, been on the periphery of the...
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Arteries of Industry: paintings of canals 1
We’ve come to associate different forms of transport with art movements: railways are decidedly Impressionist, and aircraft contrastingly modernist, for instance. But long before the railways cut their...
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Arteries of Industry: paintings of canals 2
During the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century, and until the spread of the railways a hundred years later, canals across Europe had been major routes for the transport of grain and other...
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The Divine Comedy: Purgatory 4 Pride and Envy
Once Dante and Virgil pass through the entrance to Purgatory, the gatekeeper angel warns them not to look back, or they will be ejected and remain outside its wall. They climb along a trough of moving...
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Medium Well Done: 16 Varnish
Long before paintings became movable objects of great value used by the rich as investments, artists and the owners of their paintings wanted to protect the paint layer which had been so carefully...
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The Nabis: 4 Divergence
By 1895, the Nabis were at their peak as an art movement. Involved with the Natanson’s La Revue Blanche, and decorating the Théâtre de l’Œuvre in Paris, the group consisted of the following painters:...
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Misfit: Henri Fantin-Latour 4 Music
By 1880, Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904) was making his living from selling beautiful floral still lifes, but hadn’t made the mark that he had aspired to with his group portraits of the avant garde. He...
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Sorolla’s Naturalist paintings 1: Fishermen and white slaves
Three of my favourite painters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are John Singer Sargent, Anders Zorn, and Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863–1923). Although I had never thought of any...
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Painting the Intangible: Explaining the non-visual in allegory
The great majority of paintings show what we can see: people, landscapes, vases of flowers, and everything else in the world around us. Sometimes the artist wants to express non-visual concepts such as...
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Painting the Intangible: The non-visual cast as a figure
In the previous article, I looked at examples of allegory in paintings which have been used to express non-visual concepts in visual terms. Because these were usually both elaborate and dependent on...
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The Divine Comedy: Purgatory 5 Wrath, Sloth and Avarice
Dante, guided by the spirit of Virgil, is making his way steadily up the island-mountain of Purgatory. The pair are taken up to the third terrace by one of the guardian angels, as Virgil explains to...
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Medium Well Done: 17 Putting it all together
Over the last few months, I have looked at most of the media used by painters to form their work, from the support of massive stone walls to the last layer of varnish. This article summarises the...
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The Nabis: 5 Destinations – Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis, Sérusier
Having peaked as an art movement by 1895, the Nabis steadily moved apart, and by about 1906 there was little to show, it seems, for their work together apart from friendships which lasted unto death....
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Misfit: Henri Fantin-Latour 5 Ethereal
By the late 1880s, the French painter Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904) was in his fifties, commercially successful, and living a relatively withdrawn family life. He had avoided becoming embroiled in...
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Sorolla’s Naturalist paintings 2: Science and the sea
At the Salon in Paris is 1895, Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863–1923) had enjoyed continuing success with his Naturalist paintings, including Return from Fishing (1894), which won him a gold medal, was...
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Bridges in paintings: Before Impressionism
For several millenia, the largest human civil engineering projects have been palaces, temples and other places of worship, fortifications, harbours, and bridges. The Romans were inveterate builders of...
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