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Painting in the Rain 2: 1890-2006
In the first article of this series, I showed how reluctant European and American painters were to depict rainfall as oblique streaks down an image. There was no such reluctance among Japanese print...
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Ford Madox Brown constrained by Pre-Raphaelite ideals
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been looking at Ford Madox Brown’s narrative and landscape paintings. In this final article, I’m going to try to set his work in the context of the painting of others in...
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Orlando Furioso: Insatiable women and the ultimate self-sacrifice
When Doralice had rejected him, Rodomonte stormed off from the siege of Paris and headed home. Having reached the River Saône, he stayed in an inn whose landlord proved talkative at dinner that night,...
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Raphael and Painting: 1 The state of the art in 1500
Five hundred years ago, the southern Renaissance suffered a double blow: only the previous year (1519), Leonardo da Vinci had died, and on Good Friday 1520, Raphael died too – at the tender age of just...
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Portraiture and Symbolism: Edmond Aman-Jean 1
There a several definitions of Symbolism, but all are keen to point out that Symbolist visual arts don’t depict what you see in the physical world, but images of an alternative reality. This would...
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Portraiture and Symbolism: Edmond Aman-Jean 2
As I showed in the first of these two articles, prior to about 1900 Edmond Aman-Jean (1858–1936) had painted a range of motifs, some of which were strongly Symbolist. His surviving work since then...
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Dawn or Dusk? How can you tell when it was painted?
The great majority of paintings show a single moment in time. One of the fundamental questions when reading them is when that moment occurred: the time of year, and time of day. Sometimes these can be...
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Danish artist Laurits Andersen Ring comes to the US at last
If you can get to Greenwich, Connecticut, before 24 May this year, be sure to visit the Bruce Museum there. From today until then it has a new exhibition On the Edge of the World, which shows some of...
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Dawn or Dusk? Challenging paintings
Following yesterday’s article looking at the clues which can tell you whether a painting shows sunrise or sunset, here are ten paintings, some of them very well-known, with their titles removed from...
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Benjamin West and Modern History 1
This year, we commemorate the two hundredth anniversary of the death of the American painter Benjamin West (1738–1820), who spent almost his entire career in Britain. When West was born in Springfield,...
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Orlando Furioso: Saracens forced to retreat to Arles
Orlando had continued his rampage through France and Spain, and discovered Angelica and her new husband Medoro on the beach at Tarragon in Spain. She escaped from him by putting her magic ring in her...
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Raphael and Painting: 2 School of Perugino
Whatever you may think about Raphael’s art, there’s no disputing how important he had become by the time of his death almost five hundred years ago. Not only did Pope Leo X visit the artist several...
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Willard Metcalf, American Impressionist 1
There’s been a great artistic asymmetry across the Atlantic Ocean. North American collectors bought plenty of European paintings, many of which now grace galleries throughout the USA and Canada. But,...
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Willard Metcalf, American Impressionist 2
In the first of these two articles about the life and paintings of Willard Leroy Metcalf (1858–1925), I traced them into the early years of the twentieth century, when he was an Impressionist who was a...
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The story of painted narrative 1
The consensus claims that narrative painting died during the nineteenth century, and some even deny that it’s possible to tell a story in a single painting. If you’ve read more than a few of my...
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The story of painted narrative 2
In yesterday’s article about narrative painting, I laid the ground by giving a simplified terminology of different methods for telling stories in visual art, and showed examples of each, drawn largely...
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Benjamin West and Modern History 2
Benjamin West’s first commissioned painting for King George III, the King of Great Britain, had been completed the year before he painted The Death of General Wolfe, and was followed in 1770 by a...
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Orlando Furioso: The quest of jealousy, and the flight of the hippogriff
Rinaldo, his band of knights and private army of around seven hundred had attacked the Saracens besieging Paris by night, killed many, and put the survivors to rout. King Agramante had fled to Arles,...
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Raphael and Painting: 3 Becoming Raphael
Between 1503-08, Raphael appears to have worked in northern Italy, and from 1504-08 spent much of his time in Florence. This overlapped with the period in which Leonardo da Vinci was in that city, and...
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Painting in 4 dimensions: the Brancacci Chapel frescoes
Among the objectives in Renaissance painting were to make painted images more like real life, including the use of optically accurate perspective projection, and to tell visual stories better. Whilst...
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