Clik here to view.
Annie Louisa Swynnerton: The Sense of Sight
High Pre-Raphaelite style was relatively short-lived, like the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood itself, but continued to influence British art through the rest of the nineteenth century. Among the highly...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Landscapes for All Reasons: Paintings of Aelbert Cuyp 1
On 20 October, we should celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of the birth of the Dutch Golden Age master Aelbert Cuyp (1620–1691). In this first of a series of three articles about his career and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Distant snowline: the coming of autumn in the mountains 1
Up in the mountains, one of the first signs of the arrival of autumn/fall, and the imminence of winter, is the appearance of snow on the slopes. In some places like Scotland, where mountains are...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Distant snowline: the coming of autumn in the mountains 2
In the first of these two articles looking at the snowline in paintings, I showed some nineteenth paintings up to 1880 which used snow on distant mountains to great effect. This article concludes by...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Goddess of the Week: Athena (Minerva)
Athena or Athene (Greek Ἀθηνᾶ), often prefaced by Pallas, and known to the Romans as Minerva, is a major Olympian goddess who is associated with a wide range of qualities including wisdom, crafts...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A History of Rome in Paintings: 10 War with Carthage
The first of the Punic Wars saw Rome defeat Carthage after twenty-three years of costly and destructive fighting over the island of Sicily. The cost to Carthage was increased by the reparations it was...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Faerie Queene 9: Acrasia’s Bower of Bliss
In the third episode of Book 2, Sir Guyon and Prince Arthur travelled together to the House of Temperance, where they first had to rout a thousand fiends who had been laying siege to it for seven...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Marianne Stokes: Madonna and Child
By the time that Marianne Preindlsberger (1855-1927) was born in 1855, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had largely dissolved. As she was born in Graz, Austria, it seems unlikely that she would have seen...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Landscapes for All Reasons: Paintings of Aelbert Cuyp 2
Last week I started this short series of articles which culminates on 20 October in a celebration of the four-hundredth anniversary of the birth of the Dutch Golden Age master Aelbert Cuyp (1620–1691)....
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Prodigal’s Return in paintings 1
The parable of the prodigal son, recorded in the Gospel of Luke chapter 15, verses 11-32, is one of the best-known stories in the New Testament, and its underlying narrative is known across several...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Prodigal’s Return in paintings 2
In the previous article looking at paintings telling the story of the parable of the Prodigal Son, I concentrated on masterpieces from the seventeenth century. Today I leap forward two hundred years,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
God of the Week: Apollo
Zeus may have been the senior of the deities, their captain, but among the most important and popular with the Greeks and Romans, and later with artists, is Apollo, son of Zeus by the goddess...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Landscapes for All Reasons: Paintings of Aelbert Cuyp 3
Four hundred years ago today, the Dutch Golden Age landscape painter Aelbert Cuyp (1620–1691) was born. In this last of my series of three articles about his career and paintings, I show some of his...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A History of Rome in Paintings: 11 The Road to Civil War
With the defeat of Carthage at the end of the second Punic War in 201 BCE, Rome was the dominant military force in the western Mediterranean. Although its neighbour to the east, Greece, had long been...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Faerie Queene 10: Britomartis
The last episode completed the story of Sir Guyon (Temperance), reaching the end of the second book of The Faerie Queene. This episode starts the third book, which is intertwined with the fourth in a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale: The Forerunner
She was only ten years old when Dante Gabriel Rossetti died, and was never a member of any Pre-Raphaelite circle, but Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale (1872–1945) was the last survivor of the Pre-Raphaelite...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Painting sculpture: 1 Senses, rude Romans, and sculptors
Painting, the creation of an image on a flat surface representing three-dimensional forms, has long been allied with sculpture, in which materials are formed in three dimensions to model 3D forms. They...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Painting sculpture: 2 Pygmalion and Gérôme
In the first of these two articles about paintings of sculptures, I looked at a range of paintings depicting sculpture for various reasons. The most obvious reason for including a statue in an image is...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Goddess of the Week: Artemis (Diana)
Twin sister of Apollo, Artemis (Greek Ἄρτεμις) is the daughter of Zeus and Leto. Her Greek original is goddess of hunting, wild places and animals, the Moon, and chastity. Although sworn never to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A History of Rome in Paintings: 12 Civil War
The period between the death of Gaius Marius in 86 BCE and the end of the Republic of Rome in 31 BCE was one of the most violent in the whole of Rome’s history. This was the result of a succession of...
View Article