Balconies have been a significant device in painting, and in this and tomorrow’s articles I look at two groups of views using them with effect. This article looks from outside the balcony towards it, and the interior behind; tomorrow I’ll reverse that and look from balconies, typically from inside looking out at the world beyond.

These balconies are mostly platforms projecting from the upper part of a building, above ground level, normally capable of containing people, and constraining them from falling by a surrounding balustrade. They were popular features of some of the most ancient buildings in Europe, and much loved by classical civilisations.

For the visual artist they offer several opportunities, from their height above the ground affording good views or giving vertical extent, for the relationships between people on the balcony and those below, and most interestingly for their extension to the interior of a building into the exterior. Suspended in mid-air, they’re simultaneously both inside and outside, but neither.

Balconies play a significant role in several well-painted narratives, including that of David and Bathsheba, here in Jan Matsys’ painting of 1562. The action is taking place at ground level, where one of King David’s court has been sent down to express regal interest in the scantily-clad Bathsheba, to the wicked amusement of her maid. King David himself is leaning over the balustrade in the distance, elevated as his position demands, and looking down at us.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s much later Bathsheba from 1889 may have been painted three centuries later, but bears striking compositional similarities.

Another well-known story in which a balcony plays a key role is the love of Romeo and Juliet, as told in Shakespeare’s play, in which Act 3, scene 5 is known as the Balcony Scene. Richard Dadd’s version, in his watercolour Sketch for the Passions: Love from 1853, shows Romeo ascended and about to kiss Juliet, as a rather ugly nurse behind them looks away anxiously.

Ford Madox Brown’s interpretation from 1869-70 makes this even more vertiginous, with the couple alone and squeezed into a balcony smaller than a single bed. We ascend to the heights of love, and of ecstasy.

Balconies proved popular among those allied with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, such as Philip Hermogenes Calderon, who in his Home After Victory from 1867 uses one to lend a more courtly mediaeval air to this scene of rejoicing.

Balconies even appear in pioneer landscape painting. Possibly the smallest major painting of a balcony is that in Thomas Jones’s early plein air oil painting of A Wall in Naples, made on paper in about 1782. Not only is this painting tiny, little more than 10 x 15 cm (4 x 6 inches), but the balcony is so small that it’s really only good for hanging out the washing.

Another landmark painting of a balcony, Francisco Goya’s Majas on a Balcony, made between 1800-12, is unusual for ignoring almost all its compositional properties. These two young women are at much the same height as the viewer, and there’s no clear inside or out, just a couple of shady guys skulking behind them, and the black iron balustrade fencing them in. Majas were lower-class women in Spain, particularly its capital Madrid, who dressed in elaborate local style, here in florid mantillas, for example.

Goya apparently inspired Édouard Manet to paint The Balcony in 1868-69. Its four figures are Berthe Morisot (seated, left) who later became Manet’s sister-in-law, the painter Jean Baptiste Antoine Guillemet, Fanny Claus (standing, right, with umbrella) a violinist, and in the shadows behind Léon Leenhoff, Manet’s son. As with the painting that inspired it, this all but ignores the visual potential of the balcony.

Shortly after Manet had exhibited that to derision at the Salon, the young American Impressionist-to-be Mary Cassatt visited Spain, where she painted her more conventional take, The Flirtation – A Balcony in Seville (1872). Romeo and Juliet have been revisited, without a maja’s mantilla in sight.

It took the Valencian painter José Benlliure a trip to Italy to find his balcony, in The Carnival in Rome (1881), and exploit its potential more fully. Festooned with flowers and richly-decorated carpets, this balcony has become the carnival in miniature, its occupants dressed for the occasion. Even a pair of pigeons are joining in the revelry.

Balconies have also been places for more formal ceremonial, such as Papal and royal addresses. Jean-Jacques Scherrer uses this allusion for Charlotte Corday in Caen from 1894. It was Corday who assassinated the revolutionary Marat in his bath. Here Scherrer imagines her as heroine, greeting crowds of supporters beneath her balcony.

Around the end of the nineteenth century, the viewer became one of the riff-raff below the balcony of those richer and more famous. George Clairin’s undated Spanish Woman on Balcony looks down at us with disdain from lavish potted flowers.

In Clairin’s On the Balcony, from around 1910, we aren’t even close to those already halfway to heaven behind their ornate art nouveau balustrade.

Pierre Bonnard’s painting of the Blue Balcony from 1910 doesn’t reveal how important balconies became to him. But in each of two homes that he made with his lifelong partner (and later wife) Marthe, seen here on the balcony of the title, Bonnard had extensive balconies added.

This week’s two articles about reading paintings consider some of the more famous and unusual depictions of the likenesses of three or more people. Individual portraits have long been popular, and for many artists have brought in the income they’ve needed to paint as a career. Painting three or more portraits in a single image presents greater challenges, and in many cases complicates their reading considerably. Among the paintings included in today’s article are some of the hardest of all to read, that remain controversial.

The first and key step in starting to read a group portrait is to discover who, where and when. For some, a little digging around in contemporary historical records may be sufficient.

When Lavinia Fontana was in Rome, she painted the remarkable family Portrait of Bianca degli Utili Maselli with six of her children (1604-5), showing this nobleman’s wife, five of her sons, and her daughter Verginia, whose image is labelled to distinguish her from her brothers. The mother died in September 1605 after giving birth to her nineteenth child. Their lapdog was a sign of fidelity, and Fontana’s depiction of clothing exquisite.

In 1617, Michiel van Mierevelt and his son Pieter, specialists in portraiture, painted The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Willem van der Meer, one of the earliest portraits of a social group from the Dutch Golden Age. The members of this group are all ignoring the cadaver in front of them, preferring to look at the painter, and are thought to be members of the Surgeons’ Guild of the city of Delft, who commissioned this work.

Rembrandt painted his Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp in 1632, as an early commission soon after his arrival in Amsterdam. It’s a group portrait of distinguished members of the Surgeons’ Guild in their working environment. Most remarkable is the fact that its principal, Dr Tulp, and most of his colleagues aren’t looking at the dissected forearm.

A decade later, Rembrandt’s vast group portrait of The Night Watch (1642) is perhaps the most famous of them all, although it’s more correctly titled Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq. It features the commander and seventeen members of his civic guard company in Amsterdam, and took the artist three years to complete from his first commission to paint this for display in the great hall of the guards.

Captain Frans Banninck Cocq (in black with a red sash), followed by his lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch (in yellow with a white sash) are leading out this militia company, their colours borne by the ensign Jan Visscher Cornelissen. The small girl to the left of them is carrying a dead chicken, a symbol of arquebusiers, the type of weapon several are carrying.

Portraits of royal families have been regular commissions for their court painters. The best of these have greater artistic merit. Diego Velázquez’ Las Meninas, translated as The Maids of Honour, from about 1656-57 is another well-known example of a group portrait. In what is overtly a depiction of eleven people and a dog in a room in the Alcázar Palace, he uses composition and gaze to tell us more. Much depends on what we believe most of the figures are looking at. Reflected in the rectangular plane mirror on the far wall are King Philip IV and his wife Queen Mariana of Austria.

There has been dispute over whether the reflection shows the royal couple stood where the viewer is, or the mirror is reflecting their painted images on Velázquez’s canvas. How their images were generated is probably of secondary importance, as either way the gaze of most of the other figures is clearly directed not at the viewer, but at the King and Queen, who may be getting up to leave after sitting for Velázquez to paint them. In this reading, the most important people not in the painting only appear in reflection and the gaze of others.

In April 1800, Francisco Goya was commissioned by King Carlos IV to paint a family portrait, which proved to be the last of his royal commissions before the war with France, and his most important. It’s often said that Goya’s inspiration for his large canvas of Carlos IV of Spain and His Family (1800-01) was Las Meninas, but what he has painted is different in almost every respect other than the fact that the artist has taken the opportunity to include a self-portrait of himself painting the painting, as it were. Goya captures a moment of optimism when Spain and France were allies, and portrays his royal figures in stark reality.

In the mid-nineteenth century Gustave Courbet’s Painter’s Studio proved a turning point. One of the most unconventional group portraits, it influenced successors including Henri Fantin-Latour.

The Painter’s Studio from 1855 is one of the great ‘problem paintings’ that has been extensively analysed and ‘explained’ as allegory. Those classical approaches have recently been challenged by Herbert, who argues that trying to determine whether it is allegorical or realist is asking the wrong question.

The figures in the painting show individuals who had influence over Courbet’s life and artistic career. At the right are the artist’s friends and admirers, including his first patron Alfred Bruyas, critics Champfleury and Baudelaire who had been so positive in their reactions to his work, and others. At the left, a man with dogs has been interpreted as an allegory of the Emperor Napoleon III. Behind him are figures who were long assumed to be allegorical, but Hélène Toussaint has identified them as contemporary people, most of whom had been supporters of the Emperor’s regime.

Following a long series of studies, Henri Fantin-Latour’s first group portrait Homage to Delacroix was completed almost ten years later, in 1864. Its figures include two, Champfleury and Baudelaire, who had appeared in Courbet’s Painter’s Studio, together with those who Fantin rated as the brightest and best among modern painters, including his friends Whistler and Manet. Inevitably he included himself among such distinguished company.

But Fantin neither poses the puzzle of Courbet’s allegory, nor the social gathering of Manet’s Music in the Tuileries. Instead we have seven men looking at the viewer, and three gazing somewhere else. It almost looks like a ‘real’ group portrait, but lacking interactions between the figures, it’s clear that it’s eleven individual portraits, including that of Delacroix.

Fantin pressed on with his unusual group portraits, here in Studio at Les Batignolles from 1870, showing his friend Manet painting with a small group of friends peering over his shoulders. Its debt to Courbet is palpable. The figures were identified by the artist as:

• Otto Schölderer (standing, left),
• Pierre-Auguste Renoir,
• Émile Zola,
• Edmond Maître,
• Frédéric Bazille,
• Claude Monet (standing, right),
• Édouard Manet (seated, left)
• Zacharie Astruc (seated, right).

As a window into history, this is unique, showing Manet, Renoir, Zola, Bazille (who was to die that November in the Franco-Prussian War) and Monet in a fictional snapshot; it also inspired Bazille to paint a response and seems to have struck a chord with both artistic circles and the critics of the day. Although Fantin has integrated his figures better than in earlier paintings, this begs many questions such as what they’re all doing together, and whether the painting is about homage to Manet, who was still very much alive, or the meeting of an imaginary gentlemen’s club.

The sixth and last of Fantin’s group portraits, Around the Piano from 1885, shows members of a Wagner fan club in Paris at the time. They are each gazing at something different and not interacting in the least. Emmanuel Chabrier is playing the piano without looking at its keyboard or the music, and its other figures (bar one) appear distracted.

Maurice Denis was one of the few artists to take a deep interest in the late paintings of Paul Cézanne, and in 1900 paid his respects (although Cézanne didn’t die until 1906) in this Homage to Cézanne. The artist to whom this group of Nabis are paying their respects is represented by a painting, Cézanne’s Fruit Bowl, Glass and Apples. Although not entirely cohesive as a group, there are clear interactions taking place, and gazes reflect that, with Odilon Redon at the left and Paul Sérusier (foreground, at the right edge of the painting) clearly engaged with one another.

In 1902-03, Félix Vallotton painted a smaller group of Nabis in his Five Painters. Only Édouard Vuillard and Ker-Xavier Roussel seem to be joined in discussion, and there’s a strange array of hands around the centre of the canvas.

Tomorrow I’ll look at more conventional group portraits, including some featuring the families of artists.

Harvested cereal needs to be separated into grain, stems of straw, and miscellaneous fragments such as husk known as chaff. Of these, the grain is the most valuable as it will be ground into flour, a process shown in the next article in this series. Long straw was also a valuable commodity, as it was used extensively for thatching, while the chaff was usually discarded. Separating grain and chaff from straw was accomplished by threshing, one of the first processes in arable farming to be mechanised, while removing the chaff is referred to as winnowing.

In ancient civilisations, threshing was performed by striking the cut crop using flails, as show in this marginal drawing in the Luttrell Psalter from the east of England. This is thought to have been made in about 1325-35, when this tiring and inefficient method was still widespread.

In ancient Egypt, oxen were used, first to trample the grain with their hooves and later to draw a heavy rotating sledge or roller over the cut crop. This was usually performed on a flat and elevated area, where the wind could blow away much of the generated chaff.

Goya’s greatest achievement in his series showing the seasons, and probably the finest of all his cartoons, is that for summer, seen here in his sketch of The Threshing Floor from 1786. Although the huge finished version is more finely detailed, his brushwork there is also surprisingly loose. Two horses used to tow the heavy roller at the far left are here seen at rest, as the labourers relax. They’re holding pitchforks, used to load the threshing floor with cut cereal and gather the straw when the load has been threshed.

In PS Krøyer’s Threshing in the Abruzzi from 1890, a century later, teams of oxen are trampling the crop to thresh it.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Grain Threshers, Egypt (1859) shows this as one of the more traditional employments for animals, who are drawing a threshing sledge.

While much of the work of harvest remained intensely and exhaustively manual, some processes like the separation of grain seeds from inedible straw proved amenable to mechanisation.

In Franz Niklaus König’s Farmers, around the House;, or Farmer Family in the Barn from 1798, one of the early hand-cranked threshing machines is shown on the right, as the farmer is winnowing clouds of chaff from the grain it produced. Most barns were built with large openings at each end, to allow natural breezes to blow the chaff away and leave the denser grain in the large, shallow wickerwork trays used for winnowing.

By the end of the nineteenth century, animals and other sources of power were being used, as shown in Albert Rigolot’s painting of The Threshing Machine, Loiret from 1893, with a detail below. One of the early uses for steam engines was to power similar machines. The next step was to make those engines mobile under their own power, as traction engines.

Jean-François Millet’s portrait of Ceres (The Summer) from about 1864-65 shows her holding a traditional winnow in her left hand.

Storage was a major consideration, too. Although threshed grain generally keeps well, it’s prone to rodents and must be kept dry. A traditional solution was to build the sheaves of cut cereal into grainstacks, then protect them with a covering of thatch. These are different from the stacks of hay also common in the countryside, and played a major role in Impressionism.

Claude Monet first painted a series of canvases depicting grainstacks at Giverny, literally outside his back yard, in 1889. In the early autumn of 1890, Monet started a fresh series consisting of two grainstacks, now accorded Wildenstein numbers of W1266 to W1279. During that winter, the farmer was able to start threshing, and one of the grainstacks was consumed.

Apparently Monet paid the farmer to retain the single remaining grainstack so he could continue the series, allowing him to paint W1280 to W1290, each showing that single grainstack. After various delays during which Monet apparently made further adjustments to the paintings in the series, the first fifteen canvases were shown at an exhibition at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in Paris, which opened on 4 May 1891. They all sold, for sums of up to 1,000 francs, and provided Monet with an excellent return for his winter’s work.

Looking at Grainstacks, End of Summer, considered to be one of the earliest in the series and numbered 1266, the trees behind the two grainstacks are still in full summer leaf, with no indication of the advent of autumn. Yet Monet’s signature gives the year as 1891. Looking at its paint surface in detail, some has been applied wet-in-wet and blended with underlying and adjacent paint, but many other brushstrokes have clearly been applied over dry underlayers.

Grainstack, Sun in the Mist, numbered 1286, is thought to be one of the later paintings in the series, apparently showing the sole remaining grainstack in the Spring of 1891. It too has multiple layers applied wet-on-dry, with many hatched brushstrokes in shades of orange and pink apparently applied over a well-dried surface. Below is a summary of the whole series.

Among the great dangers to grainstacks was fire.

Jules Breton’s The Burning Haystack from 1856 is mistitled, as it in fact shows a grainstack, as seen in the sheaves being removed from it in haste. The panic-stricken villagers must work quickly if they are to save a substantial part of their grain store for the coming winter.

Granaries incorporated an ingenious solution to exclude rats and mice: they were constructed on a support of staddlestones, each a pair of stones fashioned into the form of a mushroom. These are now commonly seen in the country, where they’re used to prevent drivers from running their vehicles over grass borders outside properties. Rats and mice are happy to climb vertical surfaces, but can’t cope with the overhang of the cap of a staddlestone, an ancient solution to the problem.

As the calendar passes into September, it’s time for the summer holidays to end and for children and older students to return to their schools and colleges. This weekend I mark that with depictions of what has really been going on in our educational establishments. Although this hasn’t been a theme for more major artists, these paintings appear disarmingly honest, and should reassure you of the great improvements achieved in recent times.

Isaac van Ostade lived only briefly between 1621–1649, so I suspect this painting of a Village School from his circle was probably made by about 1650, possibly earlier. Although it has seen better days, it shows a schoolmaster at the right supervising a group with a wide age range, all in various levels of poverty, and in primitive stages of education. The classroom itself is almost bare of furniture, with most of the children sitting or squatting on the floor.

Later in the seventeenth century, Jan Steen’s The Village School (c 1665) shows one reason for the apparent unpopularity of school as a motif: physical punishment. The child at the right holds out a hand for teacher to strike it with a wooden spoon, presumably in return for the screwed-up piece of paper on the floor. The children here are better-dressed, and the room better-furnished. One boy at the far right is writing intently, and another, his face almost covered by the brim of his hat, is reading a book.

A few years later, Steen painted a scene in a larger and more chaotic classroom, in The Village School from about 1670. Although there are two staff sat at the teachers’ desk, the man is distracted, perhaps in cutting himself a fresh quill. The woman teacher sat next to him is engaged in explaining something to a pupil.

Around them, all hell is breaking loose. In the distance, a boy is stood on one of the trestle tables. Older children are teaching younger ones, and a small group at a table at the right are trying to write while others get up to mischief. One younger child in the middle of the foreground has fallen asleep against a hat.

In those early schools, boys and girls were not segregated, but enjoyed equally derelict schooling. By the middle of the eighteenth century, in larger schools at least, it became more common for the genders to be taught in separate classes or even different schools.

Boys’ School is a copy of an original painting by Jan Josef Horemans the Younger from the middle of the eighteenth century. Its schoolmaster looks to be the only figure sat at a desk, and is engaged with a couple of the older boys, while the rest of the class catches up with their social lives. A few writing tablets are visible, as are scraps of paper, but the only real books seem to be those well out of reach, above the schoolmaster’s head.

Its sister painting showing a Girls’ School is more peaceful and purposeful, but seems intended to trap young women in their narrow social role. Although one girl is reading, others are engaged in fibrecraft or dressmaking, or apparently learning how to make a brush from a bundle of twigs. More academic learning was only really possible in richer homes, under exceptional private tutors.

Francisco Goya’s With Pain Comes Gain. School Scene from 1780-85 is small and quite Hogarthian in its depiction of corporal punishment in a school. The teacher raises a whip to strike the bare buttocks of one of a succession of pupils, as the more studious continue at their work seemingly disinterested in the suffering of their comrades. Goya is one of the few masters to have painted series of children at play.

In towns and cities, there was greater economic drive for children to work throughout the year, and to obtain a better education. These seem to have taken some schools, at least, to operate well into the evening, as George Gillis Haanen shows in his beautifully lit Night School from 1835. The schoolmaster, ensconced at his elevated desk, does at least look more academic, and there are slates for writing and children reading books.

The nineteenth century also brought the concept of self-improvement, and a growing desire among many of the working and middle classes to better themselves by education, to improve their income and family prospects, also among a growing minority of girls.

Changes remained slower in the country, as seen in this undated painting by one of Eduard Ritter’s circle, of Brave Girls, Bad Boys, School Class in Tyrol, probably from between 1835-1849, the reign of Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria shown in one of its portraits. The children are enjoying a rich range of fruit, and there’s no shortage of paper, even if some of it is being used to make hats rather than for writing. Its elderly schoolmaster looks delightfully benign, and the stem on his smoking pipe is the longest I have seen.

Schools in Europe had arisen to meet the need for clergy and to support the church; those in other cultures were no different, as shown in John Frederick Lewis’s undated watercolour of an Arab School, probably from around 1850. This is what is more properly known as a maktab, providing general schooling between the ages of 6-14, following which children specialise more in their subjects prior to going on to higher education at a madrasah.

Thomas Faed’s paintings have faded from view since it was claimed that he did for Scottish painting what Robert Burns did for Scottish song. His Visit to the Village School from 1852 shows an elderly couple listening to some young children reading, as the schoolmaster is trying to impress his visitors. Older children, though, are not being quite so obliging, and stood against the wall at the far left is a pupil wearing a dunce’s hat in shame.

Scotland, for all the difficulties posed by its far-flung rural and island populations, was in the vanguard of introducing free public schooling: in 1561 the Church of Scotland declared that every parish church should have its own teacher, and that education should be provided free to the poor; an act of the Scottish Parliament raised taxes for that purpose in 1633.

Thomas Brooks didn’t have the benefit of a Scottish education, and his painting of The New Pupil from 1854 clearly shows the more disorderly rabble in an English country school, as a mother introduces her reluctant son to his new class. Brooks’ eye for fine detail and the modern lightness in this work are leading up to what would later be termed Naturalism.

Charles Hunt’s Visit to the Schoolroom from 1859 returns to more traditional style, as a well-dressed mother appears taken aback by the antics going on behind the teacher, and extra-curricular activities include a girl who is about to snip a lock from a boy’s head. At the far right another dunce stands on a chair wearing the trademark conical hat.