With Julius Caesar transformed into a star following his assassination, Ovid ends the last book of his Metamorphoses with praise of the contemporary Emperor Augustus, and expresses his own aspirations to immortality.

Jupiter foretells some of the accomplishments of Caesar’s adopted heir, Augustus, who was then still known as Octavius or Octavian. These include successes in battle, the fall of Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, and the growth of the Roman Empire. Ovid then looks ahead to Augustus’ own future apotheosis, when he will become a god. Finally, the author wishes for his words to be read throughout the empire, and to live on in fame.

Cleopatra’s legendary beauty has been expressed in paint by several artists, among them Louis Gauffier, whose Cleopatra and Octavian of 1787 shows the young Augustus and Queen Cleopatra conversing under the watchful eye of Julius Caesar’s bust. Cleopatra allied herself with Antony, and was eventually defeated at the Battle of Actium, ending years of civil war in Rome. Antony fell on his sword, and Cleopatra is reputed to have killed herself with the bite of an asp.

It’s Jean-Léon Gérôme who reminds us of the great events that were taking place at the eastern end of the Mediterranean during the reign of Augustus, in The Age of Augustus, the Birth of Christ (c 1852-54). The emperor sits on his throne, overseeing a huge gathering of people from all over the Roman Empire. Grouped in the foreground in a quotation from a traditional nativity is the Holy Family, whose infant son was to transform the empire in the centuries to come. Sadly for Ovid, and even Virgil, Gérôme’s throng doesn’t appear to include distinguished poets from the Augustan age.

Several painters have, though, shown Augustus’ favourite Virgil at the emperor’s court. Jean-Joseph Taillasson’s Virgil reading the Aeneid to Augustus and Octavia from 1787 shows the poet at the left, holding a copy of his Aeneid, reading a passage to the emperor Augustus and his sister Octavia. Augustus has been moved to tears by the passage praising Octavia’s dead son Marcellus, and his sister has swooned in her emotional response.

Ovid was in no position to commit Augustus’ eventual death and apotheosis to verse, but this is shown in an exquisite sardonyx cameo known as The Great Cameo of France from the first century CE. Augustus is here being brought up to the gods at the top of the scene.

Although a fan of Virgil and a minor author in his own right, Augustus wasn’t a strong patron of the arts. Until 8 BCE, his friend Gaius Maecenas acted as cultural advisor to Augustus, and was a major patron of Virgil. Tiepolo’s Maecenas Presenting the Liberal Arts to Emperor Augustus from 1743 shows Maecenas at the left introducing an anachronistic woman painter and other artists to the emperor.

Ovid’s major patron was Marcus Valerius Messalia Corvinus, and is thought to have been friends with poets in the circle of Maecenas. But all this became irrelevant when Ovid offended Augustus, and in 8 CE was banished to Tomis, on the western coast of the Black Sea, at the north-eastern edge of the Roman Empire.

It is perhaps JMW Turner who has best captured this in his Ancient Italy – Ovid Banished from Rome, exhibited in 1838. In a dusk scene more characteristic of Claude Lorrain’s contre-jour riverscapes, Turner gives a thoroughly romantic view of Ovid’s departure by boat from the bank of the Tiber.

Ovid died in Tomis in 17 or 18 CE, and by a quirk of fate his banishment from the city of Rome wasn’t formally revoked until 2017, two millennia later.

But Ovid saw his road to immortality not by apotheosis, rather through his work being read, and living on in the minds of those countless readers. In that, he undoubtedly succeeded: his Metamorphoses and other poems continue to be read, both in their original Latin and in translation into many languages, and depicted in many great paintings.

This is the second of two articles looking at paintings of the Zealand countryside from the early nineteenth century up to the 1930s. I have reached the start of the twentieth century, and proceed with the landscapes of the two Andersens, Laurits Andersen Ring and Hans Andersen Brendekilde.

After LA Ring married Sigrid, daughter of the ceramicist Herman Kähler, the family settled in the village of Baldersbrønde, midway between what’s now the western edge of Copenhagen’s conurbation, and the city of Roskilde, on Zealand. By the Village Pond at Baldersbrønde from 1911 shows this village with its rutted mud track, in early Spring when the pollards are still bare of leaves.

The other painting Andersen of the day was LA Ring’s friend and contemporary originally named Hans Andersen, who adopted the surname of Brendekilde after the village of Brændekilde, on the island of Funen (Fyn), where he was born.

Brendekilde’s A Sower on a Sunny Spring Day at Brendekilde Church from 1914 shows Holme-Olstrup Church, near Næstved on Zealand. The sower, walking over poor soil with abundant stones, has been identified as Ole Frederik Jensen (1870-1953).

LA Ring later moved to the tiny rural island of Enø, linked to Zealand by a bridge at Karrebæksminde.

The Bridge at Karrebæksminde from 1912 must be one of Ring’s most intricately detailed works, showing the bridge connecting the large and populous island of Zealand with tiny Enø. This canal was dug in the early nineteenth century to connect Karrebæk Fjord with the waters of the Baltic, and has a strong tidal stream, as demonstrated here.

By 1911, LA Ring and his family had bought a caravan, which in those days resembled a railway goods wagon and usually weighed several tons. Most had to be towed by a truck or one of the traction engines still used on farms, and were barely mobile. The Artist’s Wife with the Family Caravan (1911) shows his wife Sigrid in a loose-fitting dress, under the shade of a parasol, enjoying a holiday amid sand dunes, somewhere on the Danish Baltic coast.

In the summer of 1913 Ring and his family holidayed again in their caravan. In his View of a Shore with the Artist’s Wagon and Tent at Enö, they are seen on the south-west coast of the island of Enø. They have spilled out into a tent, whose heavy guy ropes are being used to dry washing.

After the start of the First World War, LA Ring retired to a house built for him near the city of Roskilde, in the centre of Zealand. This was ideally situated in what was then the neighbouring village of Sankt Jørgensbjerg. Although generally flat and low country, the land rises to 40 metres (130 feet) above the water of Roskilde Fjord. Ring’s house and environs gave him fine views over the city, country, and the fjord itself to the north, that dominated his paintings during the final eighteen years of his life.

In the winter of 1916 he painted one of his finest landscapes, View of Roskilde from Sankt Jørgensbjerg. It’s a dull grey day, with the snow still lying on the ground. Although distant, the great cathedral dominates from its position at the top of the hill. In seemingly painting every single branch and twig on the barren trees, Ring has brought a fine, rhythmic texture to the foreground that extends right to the skyline. The detail below shows his rich vocabulary of textures in the trees, field, and buildings, which compensate for the muted colours.

Spring Day at Køge from 1931 was painted at this town to the south of Roskilde, on the coast opposite southern Sweden.

One of the last of LA Ring’s landscapes shows this View Over the Roofs at Sankt Jørgensbjerg, Denmark, from 1932. By this time, he was 78, still a superb artist with great precision in his detail of the leafless trees, and in the texture of the thatch. The church behind the trees is that of Sankt Jørgensbjerg, and this view is from the artist’s house.

The island of Zealand (Sjælland) lies between Germany and Scania (Skåne) in southern Sweden, on the south-western edge of the Baltic Sea, and is the most populous of the Danish islands. The capital Copenhagen (København) is on its eastern coast, looking across Øresund, the strait separating it from Malmö in Sweden.

Like most European cities, Copenhagen grew rapidly during the nineteenth century, from a population of just over 100,000 to four times that in 1901. Many of those migrated from the surrounding countryside, where they had farmed the land. This weekend I show paintings of the Zealand countryside from the early nineteenth century up to the 1930s.

Although JC Dahl had been born in Norway, he painted for much of his early career in Copenhagen, and later returned to the Zealand countryside. In 1829, he painted this Winter Landscape at Vordingborg, showing barren trees and snowy fields near the town of Vordingborg, in the south of Zealand. Plenty of sinister crows in the air and on the ground help build the sense of grim foreboding.

In Dahl’s Copenhagen Harbour by Moonlight (1846), he shows many ‘fully-rigged’ sailing ships in this major port at the south-western end of the Baltic Sea.

Painted in 1856, his Burning Windmill at Stege is an unusual brandje (a painting of fire) following a traditional sub-genre of the Dutch Golden Age. Although completed well before Impressionism, Dahl echoes the red of the flames in the field and trees to the left of the windmill, and even in his signature. Stege is a small town on an island in the south of the Zealand archipelago.

Laurits Andersen adopted his surname Ring from the village where he was born in the south of Zealand. His Young Girl Looking out of a Roof Window (1885) eloquently expresses the feelings of a migrant from the countryside when trapped in a garret amid the grey urban roofscape of Copenhagen.

His painting of Harvest shows his brother cutting what’s most probably rye rather than wheat, as a “monument to the Danish peasant”. He painted this during the summer of 1885, when his brother was working on his farm near Fakse on Zealand.

Erik Henningsen’s painted record of Farmers in the Capital from 1887 is one of the few contemporary accounts of migrants from the country. This family group consists of an older man, the head of household, two younger women, and a young boy. Everyone else is wearing smart leather shoes or boots, but these four are still wearing filthy wooden clogs, with tattered and patched clothing. The two men are carrying a large chest containing the family’s worldly goods, and beside them is their farm dog. The father is speaking to a mounted policeman, presumably asking him for directions to their lodgings. The large brick building in the background is the second version of Copenhagen’s main railway station, opened in 1864, and replaced by the modern station in 1911.

LA Ring’s Mogenstrup Church (1888-89) shows an elderly couple in their tattered Sunday best clothing, slowly making their way home after attending this church near his home village of Ring. The man’s shoes are still polished and his top hat also shiny, but like many country couples these two were no strangers to hunger or deprivation.

In 1891, Ring visited Herman Kähler’s ceramics factory in Næstved in the south of Zealand, and in the adjacent village painted this rural genre work, Conversation in the Countryside, Lille Næstved. It shows a mother with her two young children talking to an older boy, who sits on a doorstep staring at the viewer. Although the mother and family appear clean and fairly well-dressed, the boy’s clothing is worn out and tattered. Running behind them is the small stream that functioned as the dirt road’s main drain. Most of the cottages are small, and thatched, with the chimney of Kähler’s factory in the background.

The bog at Carlsminde in Søllerød, Zealand from 1906 is one of LA Ring’s finest landscapes, although perhaps more appropriate for pre-Impressionist painting in the middle of the nineteenth century. It shows a lake in the grounds of a Baroque mansion in Søllerød, to the north of Copenhagen. This estate had been bought by Isak Glückstadt in 1903, who expanded it and had it landscaped around this lake, with its stock of pike and tench. Glückstadt seems to have been eccentric, at one time keeping two Indian elephants here.

By 1890, Lovis Corinth was financially independent, had his own studio in Königsberg, the city near his home village, and was starting to become a successful artist. His Pietà from 1889, which was sadly destroyed in 1945, received an honourable mention at the Paris Salon of 1890; encouraged by that and the greater prospects of working in what was then the arts capital of Germany, he moved to Munich in 1891.

Corinth set up his studio in what was at the time the most bohemian and artistic district of Munich, and painted this quick sketch of the View from the Studio, Schwabing (1891). He realised that his progressive style of painting was at variance with both the Munich Academy and the critics, and in 1892 he took part in the foundation of the Munich Secession to bring change. The following year he co-founded the Free Association (Freie Vereinigung). He also expanded his skills, started etching in 1891, and lithography in 1894.

Much of his painting during his nine years in Munich was experimental, although modern critics accuse him of spending more time drinking copious quantities of red wine and champagne.

He painted this Self-portrait with Skeleton in his Munich studio in 1896, and shows in his face the effects of his high life in Munich.

In the 1890s he started to take landscape painting more seriously, including this Landscape with a Large Raven painted in the late autumn of 1893. As in Vincent van Gogh’s late landscapes, ravens, crows, and other similar black birds are taken as harbingers of death. In this otherwise deserted countryside, with the winter drawing close, this painting could be read as indicating Corinth’s bleak melancholy. Although he certainly suffered feelings of mortality and had episodes of depression, those aren’t part of the received image of his social life, nor of many of his paintings.

This shows the beautiful fishermen’s Cemetery in Nidden (1893) on the Kurische Nehrung, a long sand spit near the southern border of Lithuania, on the shore of the Baltic not far from Königsberg. During the 1890s, Corinth travelled from Munich to visit his home village, and went as far afield as Italy.

Like some of the Masters before him, most notably Rembrandt, he painted a series of studies In the Slaughterhouse (1893). As the son of a tanner, Corinth was familiar with such scenes.

The Deposition (Descent from the Cross) (1895) was one of his major paintings from this time in Munich, and won a gold medal when exhibited in the Glaspalast in Munich that year. It shows the traditional station of the cross commemorating the lowering of the dead body of Christ from the cross, attended by Joseph of Arimathea and Mary Magdalene.

This work is a thoroughly modern approach to its traditional theme, in its framing, composition, and faces. Its close-in cropped view suggests the influence of photography, and the faces shown appear contemporary and not in the least historic. These combine to give it the immediacy of a current event, rather than something that happened almost two millennia ago. Corinth returned to the subject of the Deposition, and the theme of the Crucifixion, in many of his later paintings.

Autumn Flowers (1895) is a delightful full-figure portrait of a girl, her dress held out in front of her to carry her collection of flowers, which also decorate her hair and the background.

A Forest. Flooding on Lake Starnberg (1896) was one of the landscapes that he painted in the countryside near Dachau, and shows a flooded stand of birch trees at the edge of the lake, probably in the spring.

Bacchanale (1896) is the first of his series of paintings of the wild and licentious antics of worshippers of Bacchus. These provided the opportunity for him to compose some of his many studies of nudes into grander paintings, although this one is non-narrative.

He returned to the theme of meat and animal carcasses in his Butchers in Schäftlarn on the Isar (1897), painted in this Bavarian town not far from Munich.

He painted this portrait of Fräulein Heck (in a Boat on the Starnberger See) (1897) on this picturesque lake near Dachau. This form of portrait, of a woman carrying a parasol in a boat, was popular at the time.

Corinth continued to paint figure studies, such as his Nude Woman (1897), for their value in his more substantial figurative works.

The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1897) visits another traditional religious theme, well-known for encouraging inventive and sometimes highly imaginative paintings. As with his earlier Deposition, Corinth shows the saint surrounded by modern temptations, in a real style. There’s a wealth of detail here, from the bright eyes of the owl in the top left corner, down to the sinister flick of the snake’s tongue at the lower right, demonstrating the history painter’s eye for detail and Corinth’s own Symbolist leanings in narrative.

The Witches (1897) is more subtle than it looks, as this isn’t a depiction of sensuous rites taking place in a coven. Instead, the women are preparing a younger woman to attend a masked ball. Their subject has just got out of the wooden tub in the foreground, has been dried off, and is about to don the fine clothes laid over the chair at the left, including the black mask.

Although Corinth undoubtedly drank more than his fair share of red wine and champagne while painting in Munich, his technique and style were maturing fast. The best of his paintings from this period are the equal of better-known works from later in his career. The stage was set for his first truly momentous painting.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.

Until well into the twentieth century, many of the people across Europe and North America spent time in church. For most communities, a local church was its centre, where everyone underwent their rites of passage from christening to funeral. Church registers recorded those events, and are now a rich source of information for genealogists and historians. Relatively few painters seem to have recorded the interiors of churches, though. Here are some examples.

Royal weddings were full of pageantry, as shown in William Frith’s painting of the Marriage of the Prince of Wales, 10 March 1863, completed in 1865. This took place under the watchful eye of the groom’s mother, Queen Victoria (on the balcony at the upper right), who seems to be attracting as much attention as the wedding in progress below her. The groom was to become King Edward VII on the death of the Queen; his bride was Alexandra of Denmark, who was only eighteen at the time. The ceremony took place in Saint George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle, which must be one of the grandest chapels in Britain.

Marià Fortuny painted this intricately detailed view of a contrasting Spanish Wedding in 1870. The scene is the interior of a sacristy, where a wedding party is going through the administrative procedures of the marriage ceremony. The groom is bent over a table, signing a document, while the bride behind him (holding a fan) is talking to her mother. The rest of the wedding party waits patiently, but a woman at the back of the small group turns towards a penitent, who stands to the right of the group. He carries an effigy of the soul burning in flames, hardly appropriate for the occasion.

Elizabeth Nourse was born into a Catholic family, and appears to have remained a devout believer all her life. In 1890 she seems to have visited central Italy, where she painted the superb frescoes in the Papal Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, in The Church of Saint Francis of Assisi.

Paul César Helleu’s Interior of the Basilica of Saint-Denis (c 1891) is an example of his interest in churches and their stained glass, which included Reims Cathedral. The Basilica of Saint-Denis was the burial place for almost every French king between the tenth and eighteenth centuries, and now lies within the north of the city of Paris, although Saint-Denis was formerly its own city. The window shown is that of the north transept, featuring the tree of Jesse; a south transept rose shows the Creation.

It was the Norwegian painter Harriet Backer who took greatest interest in church interiors.

Backer’s Churching (1892) shows a traditional ceremony in which a woman who has just completed the confinement following the birth of her child is received back at church, where she gives thanks for the survival of her baby and herself, and prays for their continuing health. This is believed to show the sacristy to the left of the altar in Tanum Kirke, in Bærum, Norway.

The next event in the life of mother and baby is shown in Backer’s Christening in Tanum Church (1892), one of her most sophisticated and greatest paintings which must be among the finest paintings in Post-Impressionism.

This looks both outward and inward. The left of the canvas takes the eye deep, through the heavy wooden church door to the outside world, where a mother is bringing her child in for infant baptism. The rich green light of that outside world colours that door and inner wood panelling, and the floorboards and perspective projection bring the baptismal party in. At the right, two women are sat in an enclosed stall waiting for the arrival of the baptismal party. One has turned and partly opened the door to their stall in her effort to look out and see the party enter church.

Of the many later paintings she made of church interiors, the finest must be Uvdal Stave Church (1909). Stave churches were once numerous throughout Europe, but are now only common in rural Norway. Their construction is based on high internal posts (staves) giving them a characteristic tall, peaked appearance. Uvdal is a particularly good example, dating from around 1168. As with many old churches, its interior has been extensively painted and decorated, and this has been allowed to remain, unlike many painted churches in Britain which suffered removal of all such decoration.

Backer’s richly-coloured view of the interior of the church is lit from windows behind its pulpit, throwing the brightest light on the altar. The walls and ceiling are covered with images and decorations, which she sketches in, manipulating the level of detail to control their distraction. Slightly to the left of centre the main stave is decorated with rich blues, divides the canvas, but affords us the view up to the brightly lit altar. To the left of the stave a woman, dressed in her Sunday finest, sits reading outside the stalls.

Known now for his pioneering paintings of New York skyscrapers, Colin Campbell Cooper also visited Britain and painted The Interior of Lincoln Cathedral in about 1905. This shows the area of the organ in this English cathedral dating from 1088. The organ shown had only recently been installed by the classical organ-builder Henry Willis. Cooper captures particularly well the lofty and distinctive vaulted ceiling and incoming shafts of light.

Léon Augustin Lhermitte had painted a few religious works earlier in his career, but his late pastel of The Prayer, the Church of Saint-Bonnet (before 1920) is probably the most moving. Odilon Redon and other contemporary pastellists also depicted stained glass windows to great effect.

At the start of the First World War, the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Reims, where the Kings of France were once crowned, had been commissioned as a hospital and demilitarised. German shells hit the cathedral during opening engagements on 20 September 1914, setting alight scaffolding, and destroying some of the stonework. The fire spread through woodwork, melting the lead on the roof, and destroying the bishop’s palace. The French accused the Germans of the deliberate destruction of part of its national and cultural heritage.

Georges Rochegrosse’s Interior of the Cathedral of Reims in Flames (1915) casts this in a curious combination of the physical reality of the shattered masonry and fire, the ancient glory of the cathedral’s stained glass, and an Arthurian figure (possibly the Madonna herself) reaching up to seek divine intervention.

Long before its commercialisation as entertainment, wrestling was an important form of hand-to-hand combat, developed into a sport by the ancient Greeks, and a feature of Spartan military training and classical games, the origin of the Olympics. Although never a popular theme for paintings, wrestling has narrative significance, as shown in this small selection of examples.

In ancient myth, Achelous and the hero Hercules (Heracles) engaged in a wrestling match, during which Achelous transformed himself into a bull, Hercules wrenched one of his horns off, and that became the cornucopia, horn of plenty.

Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem’s painting of Hercules and Achelous, probably from around 1590, shows a late stage in their wrestling, with Achelous the bull brought to the ground by Hercules, who is here trying to twist his horns off.

Guido Reni’s Hercules and Achelous (1617-21) opts for a more conventional wrestling match, with Achelous still in human form.

Noël Coypel, father of the better-known history painter Antoine Coypel, painted Hercules Fighting Achelous in about 1667-69. This too opts to show the pair during the first phase of their fight. In addition to wearing his lionskin, Hercules wields his fearsome club, although Ovid doesn’t refer to its use on this occasion.

Another ancient narrative involving wrestling is told in the Old Testament book of Genesis, chapter 32 verses 22-31, when Jacob is on his journey to Canaan:

And he rose up that night, and took his two wives, and his two womenservants, and his eleven sons, and passed over the ford Jabbok. And he took them, and sent them over the brook, and sent over that he had.

And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day. And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob’s thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him. And he said, “Let me go, for the day breaketh.” And he said, “I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.” And he said unto him, “What is thy name?” And he said, “Jacob.”

And he said, “Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.” And Jacob asked him, and said, “Tell me, I pray thee, thy name.” And he said, “Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name?” And he blessed him there.

And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved. And as he passed over Peniel the sun rose upon him, and he halted upon his thigh.

Eugène Delacroix’s large and magnificent painting of Jacob Wrestling with the Angel (1854-61) shows the moment the stranger touches Jacob on the tendon of his thigh and renders him helpless (detail below). To the right are flocks of sheep with Jacob’s shepherds driving them on horses and camels.

Jacob and the Angel (1874-78) is Gustave Moreau’s finished oil painting showing the young Jacob wrestling heroically with the invisible power that is God, the angel standing nonchalantly by.

The other well-known story of wrestling in ancient times is that of Samson and the lion. When he was young, Samson fell in love with a Philistine woman. Despite the objections of his parents, he decided to marry her, and travelled to make his proposal. On that journey, he was attacked by a lion, which he wrestled with, and tore apart, thanks to the strength given him by God. He told no one about that episode, and when he was on his way to his wedding, he came across the carcass of that lion. In its body was a bees’ nest containing honey. This inspired the line ‘out of strength came forth sweetness’, long used as a motto on tins of golden syrup.

During Samson’s wedding feast, he posed his thirty Philistine groomsmen a riddle based on his encounters with that lion: Out of the eater came something to eat. Out of the strong came something sweet. They failed to guess the answer, which Samson only revealed after they had threatened him, and his bride had begged him to do so.

In 1891 Léon Bonnat reaffirmed his brilliance at painting figures in Samson’s Youth.

Franz von Stuck’s Samson (1891) is meticulously labelled, and shows the immensely strong Israelite warrior fighting with the huge lion.

During the nineteenth century, folk and Greco-Roman wrestling developed into a sport popular enough by the time of the first modern Olympic Games in 1896 to qualify for inclusion there.

Gustave Courbet’s Wrestlers from 1853 shows two well-muscled men grappling with one another to the entertainment of distant crowds. Unusually for his figurative paintings of the time, Courbet makes it clear that the wrestlers were painted in the studio and appear almost pasted into the setting, without integration of their shadows, for example, and his perspective looks slightly askew.

Frédéric Bazille started painting Summer Scene, also known as Bathers, during the summer of 1869 when he was on holiday in Montpellier. He had already made a series of compositional studies, from as early as February that year, but when he was working on the canvas, he didn’t find it easy going, and complained of headaches and other pains.

He eventually opted for a composition based on strong diagonals, with the bathers in the foreground in shade, while the two wrestlers in the distance are lit by sunshine. The landscape background was painted from the hot green mixture of grass with birch and pine trees, typical of the banks of the River Lez, near Montpellier. He completed this painting in early 1870, and it was accepted for the Salon of that year, where it was well-received by the critics.

Twenty years later, the Naturalist Émile Friant painted The Fight, or Wrestling, (1889), in a rural scene from near Nancy, France. A group of boys have gathered by a small river, and look ready to enter the water. Two are in the foreground, on the opposite bank, engaged in a fight. They are strained over, as one holds the other in a wrestling lock, with their legs spread wide apart and tensed.

Almost a century ago, on 17 July 1925, one of the greatest German painters of modern times died. From the early 1880s until then, Lovis Corinth painted prolifically in every genre from classical myths to landscapes. At the height of his career in December 1911 he almost died as the result of a major stroke, but with the devoted support of his wife he learned to paint again. In this series I look at a selection of his paintings, and how they changed over the course of more than forty years.

He was born Franz Heinrich Louis Corinth in the village of Tapiau, in what was then the northern part of East Prussia, and is now the town of Gvardeysk near Kaliningrad, Russia. He was schooled in the city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), and soon resolved to be an artist. He started attending the Academy of Fine Arts in Königsberg in 1876, where he decided that he wanted to be a history painter, and concentrated on painting the figure.

On the advice of his teachers in Königsberg, Corinth moved to Munich in the spring of 1880, where he initially studied with Franz von Defregger. At that time, Munich almost rivalled Paris as a progressive centre for the arts, and had been the preference of William Merritt Chase, who had left Munich only two years previously. Corinth learned both traditional and modern techniques of oil painting in the studio of Ludwig von Löfftz, where he concentrated on painting from life.

Even his earliest figures, such as his Crucified Thief from 1883, were powerful, and showed influence from the Dutch Masters.

Like William Merritt Chase, Corinth was particularly fond of the work of Van Dyck and Frans Hals, as revealed in his portrait of Laughing Girl (1883).

Black Othello (1884) was probably his first success, and was exhibited to acclaim in Königsberg. That same year another of his paintings won a bronze medal in London, and was exhibited at the Salon in Paris the following year.

Corinth completed his training in Munich in 1884, and moved to Antwerp for a few months, before he settled in Paris that autumn. There he enrolled in the Académie Julian, where he studied under Bouguereau and Robert-Fleury, and concentrated on female nudes and building his repertoire of mythological scenes. He was influenced by the 1885 retrospective exhibition of the works of Jules Bastien-Lepage, who had died suddenly in 1884, and that aided a move towards greater naturalism.

Examples of his paintings from life from his time in Paris include his study of a Nude Girl (1886) above, and below of a Sitting Female Nude from the same year.

In 1886 he visited Germany, and painted some landscapes and portraits en plein air on the Baltic coast near Kiel. When he returned to Paris that autumn, he was becoming increasingly frustrated by his inability to achieve success at the Salon. He only had two paintings accepted there, in 1885 and 1887, and neither had achieved critical success or a medal. He left Paris, and joined the Nasser Lappen (‘Wet Rags’) group in Berlin for a while, trying to progress his history painting. It was then that he painted his first self-portrait.

This Self Portrait of 1887 shows Corinth at the age of twenty-nine in Berlin.

In 1888, he returned to Königsberg, adopted the name of Lovis Corinth, and started to find form at last. Woman Reading shows his early style maturing well, with its subtle use of light.

His father, who had been a successful tanner, fell ill, prompting Corinth’s sensitive painting of his final illness in Father, Franz Heinrich Corinth, in Hospital (1888). After his father died early the following year, Corinth became financially independent, and set up a proper studio in Königsberg at last.

He painted portraits, including this of Franz Lilienthal (1889), another East Prussian student at the Académie Julian. That same year he was inspired by an exhibition of the work of contemporary German painters including von Lenbach, Böcklin and von Uhde, as a result of which he finally obtained an honourable mention at the Salon in 1890.

That year he painted one of his most accomplished early portraits, Innocentia (1890), and made his first attempts at a history painting of a popular narrative.

Corinth painted two versions of Susanna Bathing (Susanna and the Elders) in 1890: that above, now in the Museum Folkwang, and that below, thought to be in a private collection.

The story of Susanna (or Shoshana) and the Elders is told in the Old Testament book of Daniel, chapter 13, and centres on voyeurism, blackmail, and justice. Susanna was a beautiful married woman who was bathing in her garden one afternoon, having dismissed her servants. Two lustful elders spied on her, and as she returned to her house they stopped her, and threatened that, unless she agreed to have sex with them, they would claim that she had met her lover in the garden. Being virtuous, Susanna refused their blackmail, and was promptly arrested, charged with promiscuity, and awaited her execution.

The young prophet Daniel interrupted the process, demanding that the elders should be properly questioned before such a severe penalty was applied. When questioned individually, the two elders gave different accounts, most notably in the type of tree under which Susanna allegedly met her lover. The accusations were thus revealed to be false, Susanna was acquitted of the charge, and the two elders were executed instead.

From the early Renaissance, this has been a popular story in painting, almost universally depicted as a nude bather being spied on by two nasty old men. As narrative, this is weak, as the crux is the conflicting evidence of the elders, which is much harder to paint, and is usually just an excuse to paint a female nude with some gratuitous anti-semitism.

Corinth shows what had become a fairly traditional version, in which Susanna is seen in the flesh but not under any tree in the garden: she is instead being spied on from behind a curtain, with only one of the two elders clearly visible.

Of his two versions, that in the Museum Folkwang appears the less finished, but both emphasise Susanna’s nakedness with her clothes, and add refinements by way of her discarded jewellery and a flower from her hair. Her figure reflects the effort that Corinth had put into life studies, and makes his simple composition successful.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.

Once the god Aesculapius is ensconced in his temple on Tiber Island in the city of Rome, Ovid is ready to round off his Metamorphoses with salient points from the life of Julius Caesar, and links to the contemporary Emperor Augustus. These are politically charged topics, and merit inoffensive coverage and language. In his whirlwind summary of some of Julius Caesar’s achievements, Ovid is obliged to write that it was Augustus who was the greater, before tackling the thorny issue of Caesar’s assassination.

When swords were taken into the Senate House in preparation, Venus pleaded Caesar’s case, and Jupiter responded that the emperor’s life was already complete, and it was time for him to join the gods. Venus then descended quickly and rescued Caesar’s soul as he lay dying on the floor of the Senate. Julius Caesar therefore underwent transformation into a star (catasterisation) as his apotheosis, on his assassination.

Caesar’s assassins were senators of Rome, a group of more than thirty led by three conspirators including his former friend and ally Marcus Junius Brutus. Several of Caesar’s closest aides had warned him not to attend the Senate on the Ides of March, and he had to be brought by one of the conspirators. As he arrived at the Senate, Caesar was presented with a petition, and the conspirators crowded around him.

Karl von Piloty’s The Murder of Caesar from 1865 shows this moment, with Julius Caesar sat on a throne in the portico of the Senate. Immediately behind him, one of the conspirators has raised his dagger above his head, ready to strike the first blow.

Casca, one of the conspirators, produced his dagger and struck the dictator a glancing wound in his neck. The whole group closed in and stabbed Caesar repeatedly.

This is the stage shown by Vincenzo Camuccini in The Assassination of Julius Caesar from 1804-05, although this isn’t taking place on the steps in the portico, and Caesar has already moved forward from his seat.

Blinded by his blood, Caesar then tripped over and fell, and was stabbed further on the lower steps of the portico of the Senate. The conspirators made off, leaving Caesar dead where he lay, with around twenty-three knife wounds.

In Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Death of Caesar from 1859-67, Caesar’s corpse lies abandoned on the floor, as his assassins make their way out of the Senate, brandishing their daggers above their heads.

None of those paintings shows the goddess Venus or Caesar’s apotheosis.

It’s Virgil Solis’s engraving of The Deification of Julius Caesar (before 1562) that shows simultaneously the assassination of the dictator at the left, and Venus taking him up to the gods, above, where Jupiter is addressing the other gods (upper right).

Shakespeare’s play develops subsequent events in more detail, and contains two most memorable lines: Et tu Brutus? (“you too, Brutus?”), said when Brutus stabs Caesar, and Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears as the opening words of Brutus’ oration over Caesar’s corpse.

Later, as Brutus and Cassius prepare to wage war against a triumvirate of Mark Antony, Octavius (later granted the honorific name Augustus) and Lepidus, Caesar’s ghost appears to Brutus to warn of his imminent defeat.

This engraving of Richard Westall’s painting Brutus and the Ghost of Caesar, from about 1802, shows Brutus in his role of general, sat at a writing desk, as Caesar’s ghost fills the upper left of the painting, warning Brutus of his imminent death with the portentous words Thou shalt see me at Philippi.

William Blake painted a similar scene in his Brutus and Caesar’s Ghost from 1806, for an illustrated folio edition of Shakespeare from 1632. This series of illustrations for this play are not well-known among Blake’s work, and were made early in his career.

Edwin Austin Abbey, in his painting Within the Tent of Brutus: Enter the Ghost of Caesar from 1905, spatters the white robe of the ghost with the blood from multiple stab wounds.

With Julius Caesar dead, it’s time for Ovid to draw his Metamorphoses to a close by praising the Emperor Augustus.

By the 1880s, some established painters had begun to use photographs in the development of their paintings, although they appear to have kept quiet about those techniques. During the next decade this became more widespread, and raised the question of whether photography should be accepted as a new art.

In the 1890s Edgar Degas experimented with photography. This is an albumen print of patron and amateur painter Henry Lerolle with two of his daughters, Yvonne and Christine, taken by Degas in 1895-96.

Degas also took this self-portrait with Christine and Yvonne Lerolle in the same period.

In Degas’ oil painting of After the Bath from about 1895, the woman has adopted a strange and unnatural position, as if she has almost fallen from the edge of the deep bath. Her left foot is still cocked over its edge, as the rest of her lies on her right side on a towel. A maid stands behind her, attending to her long hair.

Degas didn’t just draw and paint women bathing, but made photos as well, such as this print of After the Bath, Woman Drying Her Back from 1896.

The realist painter Jean-Léon Gérôme not only experimented with photography for many years, but was an enthusiastic advocate for its recognition as an art in its own right.

Gérôme’s Truth Coming out of her Well to Shame Mankind (1896) is based on a quotation attributed to Democritus, “Of a truth we know nothing, for truth is in a well” (or, more literally, ‘in an abyss’). Gérôme used the same allusion in his preface to Émile Bayard’s posthumous collection of collotype plates of photographs of nudes, Le Nu esthétique. L’Homme, la Femme, L’Enfant. Album de documents artistiques inédits d’après Nature, published in 1902, where he wrote:
Photography is an art. It forces artists to discard their old routine and forget their old formulas. It has opened our eyes and forced us to see that which previously we have not seen; a great and inexpressible service for Art. It is thanks to photography that Truth has finally come out of her well. She will never go back.

It’s almost certain that Jules-Alexis Muenier became a photographer between 1880, when he went to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts, and when he travelled to North Africa with Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret in 1888, armed with cameras. Although he may have found it difficult to set up the necessary darkroom and processing laboratory when he was still living in Paris, in 1885 he moved to a large house on his parents-in-law’s estate in Coulevon, which should have been ideal.

Although I have been unable to find a suitable image of the painting, this photograph shows Muenier with his painting of The Harpsichord Lesson in about 1911, which became his most famous painting during his lifetime. Muenier, Gérôme and Dagnan-Bouveret weren’t just happy snapper photographers, but believed in photography as fine art. All three were early members of local photographic clubs, and Muenier and Dagnan-Bouveret exhibited their photographs as seriously as their paintings.

Franz von Stuck’s remarkable Dancers (1896) is one of his earlier paintings exploring images of dancing women. This seems to have been inspired by some of the more flamboyant dresses of the day, and as an experiment in the portrayal of motion, in turn influenced by contemporary photography.

Joaquín Sorolla’s portrait of The Photographer Christian Franzen from 1903 brings this full circle. Franzen (1864-1923) was Danish by birth, trained in Copenhagen, then worked throughout Europe until he established his studio in Madrid in 1896. He was appointed court photographer to King Alfonso XIII.

By the twentieth century, some of the most prolific and painterly painters were also dedicated photographers.

Marthe in the Bathtub (1907) is one of the thousands of photos of Marthe taken by Pierre Bonnard.

Kneeling Woman or Nude with Tub from 1913 is a painting that surely reflects Bonnard’s photographs.

I Werners Eka (In Werner’s Rowing Boat) from 1917 is one of Anders Zorn’s last great paintings of a nude outdoors.

Zorn had also been an enthusiastic photographer who used photos for his paintings. This undated print was taken At Lake Siljan, close to his home town of Mora.

To finish, I leap forward a century to the painstakingly real paintings of Ellen Altfest. To ensure her painted representations are exact, she measures angles with metal skewers, and places marks to maintain her orientation in forests of hair. She eschews grids and projections so she can retain a sense of herself, and not lapse into mechanical reproduction. She only paints in natural light, and often outdoors.

The end result is nothing like a photograph. Her oil paintings result from the most prolonged and intense looking, and slow, meticulous painting. I feel sure that Gérôme would have loved them.

Painters were among the pioneers of photography, as many of them used the camera obscura or camera lucida as an optical aid to drawing. But until the early nineteenth century there was no practical way to fix that image to make it permanent. As various chemical processes were developed and improved to the point where photographs became readily available, painters saw the threat to their effective monopoly, particularly in the lucrative business of portraits.

Photography quickly became all the rage. A few famous painters had their portraits taken: in 1847, John Jabez Edwin Mayall made a daguerreotype of JMW Turner, just four years before his death, and went on to take the first carte-de-visite photos of Queen Victoria in 1860.

The camera in Frederick Daniel Hardy’s The Young Photographers (1862) is almost hidden beneath the bright red cloth covering it and the photographer. The message that photography was just child’s play may not have been what he intended, and wasn’t true at that time.

Paintings of photography seem to have peaked around 1870, when photographs were still relatively novel and unusual, and not perceived as much of a threat to the painter.

Philipp Sporrer’s The Photo (1870) is probably the most pointed painted propaganda. The young photographer is not the sort of man you would leave your wife or daughter with. He’s down at heel, unkempt, and his straw hat is abominably tatty. His studio is poorly-lit, probably an old shed, its floor littered with rubbish, and its window broken. His subject is manifestly poor and uncouth, sitting in ill-fitting clothes and picking his nose as he waits for the photographer to fiddle with his equipment.

Lajos Bruck’s The Photographer (1870) is perhaps fairer to the new medium, with a whole village and their innumerable children being cajoled into smiles ready for the camera. The itinerant photographer’s partner, though, seems disinterested, as she sits resting her head against her hand and looking away.

Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret’s A Wedding at the Photographer’s (1879) seems more calculated. Hugely successful at the Salon, this artist saw no threat from wedding photography, a market in which there was no competition between painting and photography. But he still takes the opportunity to show the photographer and his studio as being tatty and tawdry.

Gradually, painting started to become influenced by the nascent art of photography.

Gustave Caillebotte’s major painting of 1875 shows three workmen preparing a wooden floor in the artist’s studio at 77 rue de Miromesnil. It’s thoroughly detailed, Realist, and despite its innovative view and unusual subject, it conformed to the highest standards of the Salon at the time.

Caillebotte was hurt and angry when he was informed that this painting had been rejected by the Salon jury. The grounds given seem extraordinary now: apparently the jury was shocked at this depiction of the working class at work, and not even fully-clothed. It was deemed to have a ‘vulgar subject matter’ unsuitable for the public to view. Or was it really because of his wide-angle photographic effect?

Caillebotte was one of the first established painters to experiment with photography, as demonstrated in another wide-angle view of Paris Street, Rainy Day from 1877.

Soon, Thomas Eakins was using photographs to aid his painting.

His preparatory studies for Swimming (1885) grew from a series of photographs taken by the artist and his friends. But photos never replaced his own sketches: for this work, Eakins made several figure studies, details such as the dog, and different landscape backgrounds, and then brought them together in oil sketches.

Once he was happy, he embarked on his final version. In at least some cases, including his paintings of shad fishing from 1881-82, the figures in his Arcadia (c 1883), and Swimming (1885), he put final photographic images into a ‘magic lantern’ projector, which he then projected at the canvas.

He developed a sophisticated system not only for using the projected image to make a graphite underdrawing, but as the painting progressed, to incise key points and lines of reference in the paint surface. This enabled him to create paintings that were accurately calibrated to his reference images: a great advance on the traditional system of enlargement using grids, and one factor in his detailed realism. This technique was discovered by Mark Tucker and Nica Gutman.

Together with other photos and various studies, Eakins then painted Swimming (The Swimming Hole) in 1885.

Paul Louis Martin des Amoignes’ wonderful In the Classroom was painted the following year. It bears unmistakeable evidence that it was either painted from photographs or strongly influenced by them. One boy, staring intently at the teacher in front of the class, is caught crisply, pencil poised in his hand. Beyond him the crowd of heads becomes more blurred.

In Amsterdam, George Hendrik Breitner painted from photographs of his model Marie Jordan (1866-1948), whom he later married.

This photographic print of Marie Jordan Nude, Lying on the Bed from about 1888 is one of a series he made at about the same time that he was working on a painting of her.

Although conventionally dated to about 1887, there can be little doubt that Breitner’s Reclining Nude was based on that print.

This is the summary and contents for the series titled Urban Revolutionaries showing paintings of the urban growth of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe and North America.

The lure of city life was all about the promise of material goods and wealth, fine clothes, and smart carriages, all the things that were lacking in rural life. By 1780, Paris had trebled in size from that of the early fourteenth century, to reach a population of 650,000. Its accelerated growth during the nineteenth century saw it grow to 2.7 million in 1901. This was enabled by the agricultural and industrial revolutions.

Introduction

During these centuries, the majority of those who had farmed the country abandoned their homes and livelihoods for a fresh start in the growing cities. This Danish family group has just arrived in the centre of Copenhagen, and stick out like a sore thumb, with their farm dog and a large chest containing the family’s worldly goods.

1 Leaving the country

Those who arrived from the country found towns and cities to be alien places. Although many were extensively redeveloped during the nineteenth century, common people were often forced into cramped slums away from their grand buildings and streets, such as these tenements for immigrants in New York City.

2 Living in the city

Urban areas had to provide paid work, often in mills and factories. Towns grew rapidly across the coalfields of northern Europe as mines were sunk to extract coal, and again where iron ore was readily available.

3 Factories

Industry turned to coal to fuel its growth, and mining expanded in the coalfields across northern Europe. Industrial nations developed an insatiable need for young men to work as miners. In Britain alone, annual production of coal grew from 3 to 16 million tons between 1700 and 1815, and doubled again by the middle of the nineteenth century.

4 Coal and construction

Unrest grew among the workers in industrial towns and cities, leading to the Paris Commune of 1871, and a succession of strikes across Belgium in 1886. Those spread to other areas, resulting in violent confrontations between workers and the police and military.

5 On strike

Cities had plenty of inns and taverns where folk could consume alcoholic drinks until they couldn’t pay for them any more. While alcohol abuse also took place in the country, it was in the towns and cities that it became most obvious and destructive.

6 Demon drink

Women were widely engaged in light factory work, such as production of fabrics and garments by spinning, weaving and assembly. Many were also employed in domestic service industries including laundry and sewing, to service the middle and upper classes.

7 Women’s work

Prostitution was one of the most common ways for women to earn a living in the growing cities of Europe during the nineteenth century. Like bars and places of entertainment, it only thrived where there were plenty of potential customers with money, in cities like London and Paris.

8 The Oldest Profession

Few who migrated from the country ever made their fortune in the city, and most faced a constant battle to avoid poverty. Just as some social realists painted rural poverty in the middle of the nineteenth century, others depicted urban poverty.

9 Poverty

A few who migrated to the towns and cities did prosper. For young women, success could come through the growing world of fashion.

10 Rags to riches

As population density rose, so accommodation became crowded, the streets were often full of people, and vehicle traffic threatened the safety of pedestrians.

11 Crowds and traffic

As cities grew and swallowed up surrounding countryside, some substantial areas within them were retained as urban parks. But those who used them were overwhelmingly middle class, not the city’s workers.

12 Parks

Holidays were a privilege for the lower classes, and unpaid until legislation often as late as the twentieth century. Despite that, some workers saved all year and took a week’s unpaid leave to travel by railway to coastal and other resorts.

13 Holidays

Early cities were swept by epidemics of plague. In the nineteenth century, those were replaced by other communicable diseases including cholera, influenza and tuberculosis. Although improvements in sanitation brought cholera under control, epidemics continued to take their toll.

14 Epidemic

Although life in the country could be thoroughly miserable, stress of city life brought (and still brings) strain resulting from the stress of everyday life.

15 Angst

In the days before contraception and family planning, when infant and child mortality were very high, many families had many babies and younger children, even though few would be expected to survive to have their own children. Households that could afford the space were able to dedicate rooms to the children, and sometimes their sheer number required it. This week’s paintings of interiors afford a glimpse at those central to the world of the child.

In the country, local schools were often held in a dedicated room in or adjacent to the teacher’s house, as seen in this undated painting by one of Eduard Ritter’s circle. Brave Girls, Bad Boys, School Class in Tyrol was probably painted between 1835-1849, during the reign of Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria who is 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 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 ever seen.

Pierre Olivier Joseph Coomans’ Children most probably dates from the late 1860s, with the artist’s two daughters Diana (1861-1952) and Héva (1860-1939) at play in the dark corner of a room. One is taking a swing at her sister’s articulated wooden doll in an apparent bid to continue dismembering it, the other is seated on an animal skin. Coomans’ daughters and a son all became successful painters.

Giuseppe Sciuti’s marvellous depiction of The Joys of the Good Mother, also known as The Geography Lesson, from 1877, shows three children from a close-knit family. The baby is feeding at mother’s breast, while the oldest is learning to read with her, and (with the assistance of a nurse in traditional dress) the middle child is learning about their country, Italy.

Lawrence Alma-Tadema and his wife Laura Theresa were both accomplished painters, and took delight in painting their two daughters from his first marriage, Anna (1864-1940) who also became a fine painter, and Laurense (1865-1940) who was a prolific novelist and poet.

Laura Theresa Alma-Tadema’s early painting of The Tea Party shows her step-daughter Laurense playing peacefully with her dolls in a corner of the girls’ room. Its walls are decorated with her drawings, and a comic-like story that may have been drawn by her step-mother.

Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s double portrait This is Our Corner from 1873 shows Anna in front of Laurense in their bedroom.

William Merritt Chase was also devoted to his family, and painted his children frequently as they grew up. However, if his Children Playing Parlor Croquet is correctly dated to about 1888, it must show the daughters of others. These two girls have taken over a room to play the indoor version of this game, which was popular at the time.

In 1889, Fritz von Uhde and his family were living in an apartment in the city of Munich, Germany, that was large enough to provide their three young daughters with The Nursery. The woman seen knitting at the right is likely to be a nanny or relative, as the artist’s wife had died three years earlier.

Helen Allingham’s undated In the Nursery shows a young woman employed as a nurse to a middle-class family, in their dedicated nursery. The fire has a guard, which would have been unusual in rooms used by adults. On the mantelpiece are what appear to be fans, probably part of the Japonisme that swept Europe and America during the late nineteenth century. Rocking chairs remain popular for helping infants and young children to sleep, of course.

It’s not clear whether the rather barren room shown in Georgios Jakobides’ Children’s Concert from 1894 is dedicated to these children. Given the cacophony they’re making with their musical instruments, it seems unlikely that any adult would want to be within earshot of them.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century narrative painters in Europe and North America followed the popular trend set by detective and mystery literary narrative, and produced paintings that:

• told a story previously unknown to the viewer, although they were likely to be familiar situations;
• intentionally didn’t resolve their narrative;
• deliberately offered several resolutions;
• often referred to contemporary moral and ethical concerns.

The only work for which William Frederick Yeames is now remembered, And when did you last see your Father?, painted in 1878, is unusual for its historical rather than contemporary setting, although its moral issues are timeless.

For anyone familiar with costume at the time of the English Civil War, and the Puritan dress of conical hats and plain clothes, this immediately places the event shown at that time. Contrasting with those are the opulent silks of the mother and children, who are clearly Royalists, the other side. Yeames tells us what the young boy is being questioned about in the painting’s title, without which the narrative would be largely lost.

The unresolved question is whether the boy did reveal the whereabouts of his Cavalier father, an act which is clearly bringing great anguish to his sisters and mother.

Hans Andersen Brendekilde’s Cowed from 1887 also requires careful reading that would have been considerably easier for viewers of the time. Superficially, it shows gleaners at work in a field after the harvest, but there’s more to its story than that.

Being gleaners, the figures seen are among the poorest of the poor. The owner of the large farm in the left distance has gathered in their grain, and their harvesters have been paid off for their effort. Then out come the losers, to scavenge what they can from the barren fields.

The family group in front of us consists of three generations: mother is still bent over, hard at work gleaning her handful of corn. Her husband is taking a short break, sitting on the sack in his large blue wooden clogs. Stood looking at him is their daughter, engaged in a serious conversation with her father, as her young child plays on the ground.

The daughter is finely dressed under her coarse gleaning apron, and wears a hat more appropriate to someone in service as a maid, or similar, in a rich household in the nearby town. She looks anxious and flushed. She may well be an unmarried mother, abandoned by her young child’s father, and it’s surely she who is oppressed or cowed. Their difficult family discussion is being watched by another young woman at the far left, who might be a younger sister, perhaps.

Yeames’ Defendant and Counsel, from 1895, was exhibited in London, illustrated as an engraving in newspapers, and so became the first mass-market painting of this kind.

It shows an affluent married woman wearing an expensive fur coat, sat with a popular ‘tabloid’ newspaper open in front of her, as a team of three barristers and their clerk look at her intensely, presumably waiting for her to speak.

As she must be the defendant, the viewer is encouraged to speculate what she is defending: a divorce claim, or a criminal charge? This also opens the thorny issue of counsel who discover that their defendant is lying, but still mount their defence in court, and may succeed in persuading the court to believe what they know to be false.

The press quickly seized on the ambiguities and oddities in Yeames’ picture. A critic in the upper-class newspaper The Times claimed that the painting was mistitled, and should have referred to the woman not as defendant, but as the respondent in a divorce case. They also questioned why the lawyers were still wigged and gowned when so obviously outside the courtroom, an issue the artist was forced to explain.

Yeames was besieged with inquiries from people who claimed they were unable to sleep because they couldn’t resolve the painting’s narrative. The following year, he agreed to judge the best explanation for one of his later paintings in The Golden Penny, a popular journal mainly about football, and had to wade through about seventy entries. It became clear that Yeames himself had little idea of the resolution of the story he’d painted, and awarded the prize to an account that didn’t actually resolve it at all.

While the chattering classes in Britain were puzzling over those paintings, the public in Spain were trying to resolve José Uría’s After a Strike, also from 1895. This story revolves around a strike and its violent consequence, and I have no supporting information about the artist’s intent.

The scene is a large forge that’s apparently standing idle because of a strike. At the far right is a row of mounted police or military, and what may be lifeless bodies laid out on the ground. Inside the factory a woman, presumably a wife, kneels and embraces her child, beside what is presumably the dead body of her husband, who was a worker there. Close to his body is a large hammer, apparently the instrument of his death. In the distance, one of two policemen comfort a younger woman.

This might show the tragic consequence of the violence resulting from a strike. Was the deceased trying to continue working when his colleagues had withdrawn their labour in a dispute, then came to blows with one of them, when he was struck and killed? Although in a sense the story has a form of resolution, it’s unclear how it got there, and invites speculation on the part of the viewer.

The most successful of all the British painters of problem pictures was John Collier, whose work reached a peak in The Sentence of Death in 1908.

At first, this disappointed the critics, but it quickly became enormously popular. Sadly the original work hasn’t lasted well, and I rely here on this contemporary reproduction that does it better justice.

A young middle-aged, and presumably family, man stares blankly at the viewer, having just been told by his doctor – visual clues given include a brass microscope and sphygmomanometer – that he is dying. The doctor appears disengaged, and is reading from a book, looking only vaguely in the direction of his doomed patient.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a time of great advances in medicine, but the big killers in Europe and North America like tuberculosis remained common and barely affected by improvements in surgery and hospitals. In some ways, this painting may at the time have seemed quite everyday, but Collier’s genius was in confronting the viewer with mundane reality.

Not only did this problem picture tackle the great Victorian obsession with death and mortality, but it did so with an adult male patient, assumed by society to keep a ‘stiff upper lip’ and not to be emotional. This led to speculation as to the expected male response to such news, and questions as to what condition might be bringing about his death. There was even public debate about interpretations of the doctor-patient relationship.

Problem pictures lingered on in the early decades of the twentieth century, but were well past their peak.

William McGregor Paxton, a great admirer of Vermeer who adopted the Dutch master’s optical techniques, seems to have painted The Breakfast in 1911 as a ‘problem picture’. As their maid walks out of the dining room, a young wife stares thoughtfully away from her husband, who is showing no interest in her at all, as he hides behind the pages of a broadsheet newspaper. You could cut the atmosphere here with a knife, which is perhaps what this wife would like to do.

My final example is one that breaks the rule of this narrative not being known to the viewer, although in the case of Félix Vallotton’s Chaste Suzanne from 1922, that requires decoding of its carefully obscured reference to the Old Testament tale of Susanna and the Elders. Once that has clicked, you might presume this shows the two elders trying to blackmail Susanna into being unfaithful. But should we assume that Vallotton’s retelling ends in the same way as the ancient original?

Reference

Fletcher PM (2003) Narrating Modernity, the British Problem Picture 1895-1914, Ashgate. ISBN 978 0 754 63568 0.

For many centuries if not a couple of millennia, narrative painting relied on depicting stories the viewer already knew, and knew the ending. Because painting a single synchronous image can only show one moment in time, most artists accepted that the viewer would have to set that into a narrative sequence in their mind. If they didn’t recognise the story, then the painting was lost on them.

Knowing the underlying story to a narrative painting is required for closure. Even the most skilled narrative painters like Nicolas Poussin were unable to achieve full closure in a painting alone. But without closure, the viewer would be left wondering and unsatisfied.

During the nineteenth century storytelling in literature changed. New genres such as detective and ‘mystery’ novels started to challenge the convention of narrative closure. Readers of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories in the first half of the century, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels towards the end, developed a taste for something rather different. In this week’s two articles about reading paintings I demonstrate how some of the finest problem pictures can be read.

As far as I can discover, one of the earliest major paintings lacking narrative closure is William Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience, painted during the period 1851-53. As with most masterly narrative paintings, its story is assembled from the multitude of clues to be found in its image.

It shows a fashionable young man seated at a piano in a small if not cramped house in the leafy suburbs of London, in reality Saint John’s Wood. Half-risen from the man’s lap is a young woman who stares absently into the distance. They’re clearly a couple in an intimate relationship, but conspicuous by its absence is any wedding ring on the fourth finger of the woman’s left hand, at the focal point of the painting. Thus their relationship is extra-marital.

Around them are signs that she is a kept mistress with time on her hands. Her companion, a cat, is under the table, where it has caught a bird with a broken wing, a symbol of her plight. At the right edge is a tapestry to while away the hours, and her wools below form a tangled web in which she is entwined. On top of the gaudy upright piano is a clock. By the hem of her dress is her lover’s discarded glove, symbolising her ultimate fate when he discards her into prostitution. The room itself is decorated as gaudily as the piano, in poor taste.

The couple have been singing together from Thomas Moore’s Oft in the Stilly Night when she appears to have undergone a revelatory experience, causing her to rise. For Hunt this is associated with a verse from the Old Testament book of Proverbs: “As he that taketh away a garment in cold weather, so is he that singeth songs to an heavy heart.” Hunt leads us to imagine that this kept mistress has had a religious moment, seeing the route to her redemption as her conscience is awakened. The image brings hope, but without resolution.

Three years later, Philip Hermogenes Calderon exhibited Broken Vows (1856) at the Royal Academy, where the painting proved a great success, and remains his best-known work. It’s also the earliest true ‘problem picture’ I have come across, as it goes out of its way to encourage the viewer to speculate as to its reading.

A beautiful young woman, displaying her wedding ring, stands with her eyes closed, clutching a symbolic ‘heart’ area on her chest to indicate that her love life is in trouble. On the ground near the hem of her dress is a discarded necklace or ‘charm’ bracelet. The ivy-covered wall behind her would normally indicate lasting love, her aspiration.

A set of initials are carved on the fence, and on the other side a young man holds a small red flower in front of his forehead, which a young woman is trying to grasp with her right hand. The wooden fence appears tatty, and has holes in it indicating its more transient nature, and it provides glimpses of the couple behind.

Whereas clues in Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience lead to consistent if unresolved narrative, Calderon has here deliberately introduced considerable ambiguity. The eyes of the shorter person behind the fence are carefully occluded, leaving their gender open to speculation. Most viewers are likely to conclude that the taller figure behind the fence is the unfaithful husband of the woman in front, but that requires making assumptions unsupported by visual clues. Whose vows are being broken? Calderon leaves us to speculate.

Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin tales became highly popular across Europe when they were published from 1841 onwards, and in 1868 Émile Gaboriau’s serialised detective story Monsieur Lecoq shot to fame throughout France. That same year, Degas started work on his own detective story.

Degas’ Interior (1868-9), also known as The Interior and even The Rape, appears strongly narrative, but has so far defied all attempts to produce a reading consistent with its details.

A man and a woman are in a bedroom together. The woman is at the left, partly kneeling down, and facing away from the man. Her hair is cropped short, she wears a white shift which has dropped off her left shoulder, and her face is obscured in the dark. Her left forearm rests on a small stool or chair, over which is draped a dark brown cloak or coat. Her right hand rests against a wooden cabinet in front of her. She appears to be staring down towards the floor, off to the left.

The man stands at the far right, leaning against the inside of the bedroom door, and staring at the woman. He’s well dressed, with a black jacket, black waistcoat and mid-brown trousers. Both his hands are thrust into his trouser pockets, and his feet are apart. His top hat rests, upside down, on top of the cabinet on the other side of the room, just in front of the woman.

Between them, just behind the woman, is a small occasional table, on which there’s a table-lamp and a small open suitcase. Some of the contents of the suitcase rest over its edge. In front of it, on the table top, is a pair of scissors and other items which appear to be from a clothes repair kit or ‘housewife’.

The single bed is made up, and its cover isn’t ruffled, but it may possibly bear a bloodstain at the foot. At the foot of the bed, on its large arched frame, another item apparently of the woman’s clothing (perhaps a coat) hangs loosely. On that end of the bed is a woman’s dark hat with ribbons, and her corset has been dropped on the floor by the foot of the bed.

She clearly arrived in the room before the man, removed her outer clothing, and at some stage started to undress further, halting when she was down to her shift or chemise. Alternatively, she may have undressed completely, and at this moment have dressed again as far as her chemise.

The suitcase appears to belong to the woman; when she arrived, she placed it on the table, and opened it. This indicates that she was expecting to stay in the bedroom overnight, and brought a change of clothing and travelling kit including the housewife.

The man is obstructing the door, the only visible exit to the room. Although he looks as if he may have come no further across the room, his top hat says otherwise.

The man and woman appear to be a couple, who have met in that room to engage in a clandestine sexual relationship. However, the bed is a single not a double, and shows no sign of having been used, nor has the bedding been disturbed in any way. There is a mature fire burning in the fireplace behind the woman and the lamp.

There are four paintings or similar objects hanging on the walls, of which only one appears to be decipherable. This is the large rounded rectangular one above the fireplace. Although that appears to be a mirror, the image shown in it doesn’t resemble a reflection of the room’s interior, but looks to be a painting. This might show a bright figure, resembling the woman, in front of some shrubs, behind which are classical buildings. This doesn’t resemble any of Degas’ paintings, nor any well-known work.

Degas provides a lot of small details, just as in a detective story, none of which points clearly to a resolution. You can discuss and debate its narrative endlessly, as has been done for the last 150 years.

Berthold Woltze’s Der lästige Kavalier (1874), best rendered into English as The Annoying Bloke, is a fine example from a German specialist in the sub-genre.

The story takes place in a railway carriage, where there are two men and a young woman. She’s dressed completely in black, and stares towards the viewer with tears in her eyes (detail below). Beside her is a carpet-bag, and opposite is a small wooden box and grey drapes.

Leaning over the back of her seat, and leering at her, is a middle-aged dandy with a brash moustache and mutton-chop whiskers, brandishing a lit cigar. He appears to be trying to chat her up, entirely inappropriately and much against her wishes. Behind him, and almost cropped off the left edge of the canvas, is an older man with a dour, drawn face.

The young woman appears to have suffered a recent bereavement, and may even be travelling back after the funeral. She looks too young to have just buried a husband, so I think it more likely that she has just lost her last parent, and is now living alone, and prey to the likes of this annoying and abusive bloke. Woltze tackles a modern theme that became popular in ‘problem pictures’: relationships between men and women at a time when society was changing rapidly, and most particularly the changing roles of women.

My last example for today comes from the American genre artist Eastman Johnson at about the same time as Woltze’s encounter in the railway carriage.

Johnson’s painting only makes any sense when you know its title of Not at Home (c 1873), and apparently shows the interior of the artist’s home. Without those three words of the title, all you see is a well-lit and empty parlour, and the presumed mistress of the house starting up the stairs, in relative gloom in the foreground. At the right is a child’s push-chair, parked up and empty.

Those three words, of course, are the classic excuse offered in someone’s absence – “I am sorry, but the Mistress is not at home” – even when they are very much at home, but simply don’t want to see the visitor. So the title could imply that the woman is ascending the stairs in order not to see the visitor. Or, if we know that this is the artist’s home, could it be that it’s Johnson himself who is not at home?

Reference

Fletcher PM (2003) Narrating Modernity, the British Problem Picture 1895-1914, Ashgate. ISBN 978 0 754 63568 0.

After telling of the death of Numa, King of Rome, Ovid continues his potted legendary history of Rome with a short series of strange events claimed to have occurred during its early period.

First, an Etruscan was ploughing his fields when one of the clods of earth was transformed into a prophet named Tages. Ovid then mentions the spear of Romulus being transformed into a tree on the top of the Palatine Hill. He moves on to the great early Roman general Cipus, who one day discovered he had grown horns on his head. He was invited to become King of Rome, but used a ploy to have himself banned from even entering the city. The Senate then gave him a plot of land outside the walls, commemorating his actions in a carving on the city’s nearby gate.

The major event during this period was the plague that struck Rome in 293 BCE, for which the god Aesculapius (Asclepius) was brought to the city.

When the oracle at Delphi was consulted, the Romans were told to seek the aid of the son of Apollo. Therefore the Roman Senate despatched a party to the port of Epidaurus in quest of Aesculapius, a son of Apollo. The envoy leading that mission had a dream one night, in which he saw Aesculapius beside his bed, holding a staff around which a snake was entwined. The god told the envoy that he would transform himself into a larger snake for the Romans to take back with them.

Sebastiano Ricci’s The Dream of Aesculapius (c 1718) shows the god clutching his staff with snake in his right hand, appearing in the Roman envoy’s dream at Epidaurus.

The following morning, the Romans gathered at the temple, where they saw a large golden snake, which the priest told them was the god Aesculapius. The snake promptly slithered down to the port where the Roman ships were berthed and boarded one of them, so the Roman party set sail to take it to Rome.

Ovid provides a long illustrated list of the places that they sailed past on their return journey, including a stop at Antium during bad weather. The ships finally sailed up the River Tiber to the city of Rome, where they were greeted by great crowds. The snake chose the island in the River Tiber for its home, and so ended the deadly epidemic that had killed many Romans.

Although Jules-Élie Delaunay’s The Plague of Rome (1869) is based on the account in Jacques de Voragine’s The Golden Legend, that in turn refers to Ovid’s story. A pair of good and bad angels appeared: the good angel then gave commands for people to die of the plague, and the bad angel carried those commands out. At the upper right edge of the canvas, an anachronistic white statue shows Aesculapius, who was to be the city’s salvation.

A drawing attributed to Jacques-Charles Bordier du Bignon, Aesculapius Routing Death (1822), also appears to have its roots in Rome’s plight. Aesculapius has two staffs with which he is despatching the grim reaper of death. The woman to the right of Aesculapius is thought to be the goddess Ceres, as she is pouring out her breast milk to feed the starving, a detail omitted from Ovid’s account.

There are also general representations of the god with his trademark serpentine staff, including Giovanni Battista Cipriani’s drawing of Aesculapius Holding a Staff Encircled by a Snake, completed before the artist’s death in 1785.

Johannes Zacharias Simon Prey painted this group of Aesculapius, Apollo and Hippocrates in 1791. Aesculapius, holding his distinctive rod, is shown in the centre of the trio, with Hippocrates, the rather less legendary ‘father of medicine’, to the right, clutching the basal half of a human skull, and Apollo, Aesculapius’ father, behind. Hippocrates’ mantle is trimmed with the Greek letters ΓΝΩΘΙ ΣΕΑΥΤΟΝ (gnothi seauton), “know thyself”, a maxim from the temple of Apollo at Delphi. They have entered a contemporary pharmacy, where an assistant uses a large mortar and pestle, and another works the bellows of a furnace. There are decorative and mischievous putti at play in the foreground.

Few traces remain of the temple of Aesculapius on Tiber Island, but Giovanni Battista Piranesi was able to find masonry that had formed a great stone ship complete with its decorated prow.

He shows this prow (above) in etchings made in 1756, and below in more detail. Carved into the rock is the unmistakable form of the serpent wound around Aesculapius’ rod, marking the site of the temple.

Ovid’s fifteenth and final book of his Metamorphoses continues his account of the early rulers of Rome, making its way steadily to reach the Emperor Augustus. Following the apotheosis of Romulus, the next to feature is his successor Numa, who becomes the narrator for an overview of the Metamorphoses in terms of Pythagorean philosophy.

Fame nominates Numa as successor to Romulus as the ruler of Rome. Numa had left Cures, the town of his birth, to travel to Crotona (Crotone), in the far south of the Italian peninsula, where he visited Croton, its ruler.

This is the cue for a story about Myscelus, who founded Crotona. Hercules appeared to him in a dream, and told him to travel to the river Aesar, despite his being forbidden from leaving his native land of Argos. Driven by dreams of Hercules, Myscelus tried to leave but was accused of treason, and appealed to Hercules to save him from the mandatory death penalty. At that time, trial juries voted by casting black or white pebbles into an urn; being undoubtedly guilty, all those cast in Myscelus’ case were black when they were placed in the urn. But when the urn was emptied they had all changed to white, and Myscelus was saved, and able to sail to found Crotona on the River Aesar.

After he had fled Samos, Ovid tells us that Pythagoras lived in exile at Crotona, and this leads to a long discourse on his doctrines and philosophy. Having assured us of Pythagoras’ diligent observation of the world around him and careful analysis of what he saw, Ovid starts with an exhortation to vegetarianism.

Within this discourse, Ovid makes reference to preceding sections and themes of Metamorphoses. Pythagoras’ words hark back to the Golden Age covered in the first book. Pythagoras lays claim to reincarnation too, saying that in a previous life he had been Euphorbus, who had been killed by Menelaus in the Trojan War. This leads Pythagoras to discussing change and transformation, the central theme of these fifteen books.

Pythagoras sees change in the waves of the sea, in the sequence of day and night, in the four seasons, in the ageing of humans, and in the transformation of the elements (earth, air, water, and fire).

Pythagoras then illustrates this constant change with a long list of places whose geography had changed in recorded history, and of places that cause change in those who visit them. After those, he returns to the theme of change in animals, telling the legend of the Phoenix reborn from the ashes of its parent. This leads on to consideration of some great cities that have fallen, and the chance to point out that Troy never fell completely, as it reached its destiny of founding the city and empire of Rome. Pythagoras concludes by exhorting vegetarianism by looking for harmless food rather than killing other animals.

In his magnificant fresco in the Palazzo Apostolico, The School of Athens painted in about 1509-11, Raphael includes Pythagoras at the lower left corner.

This detail shows Pythagoras writing in a large book, with a chalk drawing on a small blackboard in front of his left foot. Others are looking over his shoulder and studying what he is doing.

Peter Paul Rubens collaborated with Frans Snyders to paint Pythagoras Advocating Vegetarianism in about 1618-20. The mathematician and philosopher sits to the left of centre, with a group of followers further to the left. The painting is dominated by its extensive display of fruit and vegetables, which is being augmented by three nymphs and two satyrs. One of the latter seems less interested in the food than he is in one of the nymphs.

Today, Pythagoras is best known for his geometric discoveries, rather than the doctrines detailed by Ovid. Fyodor Bronnikov’s painting of Pythagoreans Celebrate Sunrise from 1869 is perhaps more in keeping with the Classical perception. These followers are decidedly musical, holding between them four lyres, a harp, and a flute, and worshipping the rising sun.

After Numa had learned the doctrines of Pythagoras (an historical impossibility, as Numa lived between about 753-673 BCE, and Pythagoras between about 570-495 BCE and lived in Croton from about 530 BCE), he returned to Rome and established its early laws and institutions.

Numa’s success depended on his wife, the nymph Egeria. Although Ovid isn’t explicit, other sources make the couple’s meeting a key step in the development of Rome, as Egeria was said to have dictated the first set of laws of Rome to Numa.

Nicolas Poussin’s Numa Pompilius and the Nymph Egeria from 1631-33 is thought to have been painted for his long-term friend and patron Cassiano Dal Pozzo (1588-1657), a scholar and patron of the arts, who was secretary to Cardinal Francesco Barberini.

It shows the meeting of King Numa, at the right, with Egeria, at the left, as she was being entertained by a young man with a lute, who may signify the Muses who apparently inspired Egeria to provide the laws of Rome. However, Numa hasn’t come equipped with any means of recording them, suggesting that this wasn’t the occasion on which Egeria dictated those laws.

Felice Giani’s much later painting of Numa Pompilius Receiving from the Nymph Egeria the Laws of Rome (1806) shows that process of dictation in full swing, with Numa working through scrolls, which are then transcribed onto the tablets of stone seen at the left. The nymph is the one sat on a throne, and is clearly in command, wagging her index finger at the King of Rome.

Ulpiano Checa’s The Nymph Egeria Dictating to Numa Pompilius the Laws of Rome (c 1886) offers a similar account, with King Numa sat writing down the laws on scrolls of paper using a reed pen. Egeria is quite different, though, and appears a simple and very naked nymph.

Inevitably, Numa grew old and then died. His wife Egeria was heartbroken: she left the city of Rome, and went deep into the forest, where her moaning disturbed those at the nearby shrine built by Orestes to Diana. Sister nymphs tried to comfort her, but couldn’t help. They told Egeria the tragic tale of Phaedra and Hippolytus, but that didn’t ease her grief either, and she dissolved into tears to be transformed by Diana into a spring.

The only accessible painting showing Egeria’s grief following the death of Numa is Claude Lorrain’s Landscape with the Nymph Egeria Weeping Over Numa from 1669.

Unfortunately, confusion has arisen over the true nature of this painting, as two images of details have been published on the internet purporting to be quite different and complete paintings. Claude’s painting itself is something of a puzzle too, and the result is that many of the images shown online of this work make no sense at all.

The full painting, above, shows a group of people and dogs in the left foreground, set in an idealised classical landscape on the coast.

The detail, shown below, reveals the five women in that group. Second from left is most probably the figure of Egeria, although there is nothing to show her profuse weeping or grief. One of the three women to the right of Egeria is Diana, with her spear, bow, arrows, and hunting dogs. It is unclear whether she is on bended knee, or stood behind holding the leash of one of the dogs.

More puzzling is the gesture of the woman (Diana or nymph) who is kneeling on one knee. Her left hand points towards Egeria, and her right is pointing away, towards the buildings down by the water. Her meaning is obscure in the context of the story of Egeria.

Whether this painting by Claude shows the story of Egeria and her grief over the death of Numa must surely be in doubt, and the evidence bears careful re-examination.

Nicolas Poussin’s pure landscape paintings developed from settings of myths. The other French founding father of landscape painting, Claude Lorrain (1604/5–1682), drew from art imported from Northern Europe to Italy in the early seventeenth century. One of the key figures in this change in the south was the Flemish artist Paul Bril, who moved to Rome around 1582. Although he found plenty of demand there for mythological scenes, he also painted some pure landscapes.

Bril’s superb View of the Roman Forum from 1600 shows livestock wandering across what had been the very centre of life in classical Rome, with the remaining columns of the temples of Castor and Pollux, and Hadrian’s Basilica. The figures are lifelike, and engaged in everyday activities, excellent staffage bringing the whole view to life.

His panoramic View of Bracciano from about 1622 is strongly Italianate, but a painting ahead of its time. It’s a fairly faithful depiction of a real place, with all sorts of fascinating little scenes within it, like the young boy doffing his hat to the passing dignitary in their coach with an armed guard.

Bril balances this view between its subject on the left, and the deep view over the town’s volcanic lake on the right, where there’s greater foreground action in the form of the approaching coach. This asymmetric and less formal balance helps make it look more faithful to reality, and less an artificial construction.

It’s thought that one of Bril’s pupils when he was in Rome was Agostino Tassi, who in turn taught Claude Lorrain, whose original family name was Gellée. Claude may have been orphaned, although that’s disputed, and travelled to Italy in his early teens, where he ended up being employed in Tassi’s household as a servant and cook.

During his employment with Tassi, the artist taught Claude to draw and then paint, and moved him from the kitchen to his busy workshop, then very active making frescoes in palaces. Altogether, Claude probably worked there between about 1622-25. After further training, perhaps back in the Vosges, then part of the Duchy of Lorraine, Claude returned to Rome to paint in his own right in about 1626 or 1627, just after Paul Bril had died there.

One of Claude’s early paintings shows an almost uncanny link with Bril: Capriccio with Ruins of the Roman Forum from about 1634. Compare that with Bril’s View of the Roman Forum from over thirty years earlier. Claude opts for repoussoir only on the right, and lights his version richly, otherwise his composition is similar.

By the end of the 1630s, Claude’s reputation was made. Like Poussin, he drew and sketched in front of the motif, a practice he showed in An Artist Studying from Nature (1639). This is another asymmetric and informal view, reversing the composition of Bril’s View of Bracciano, putting the castle on the right to balance the foreground and distance on the left. Once again, Claude bathes it with rich golden light.

Of course paintings like his Landscape with Nymph and Satyr Dancing (1641) weren’t made outdoors, but assembled from his library of sketches which had been made in front of the motif. This is a good example of van Mander’s principles of composition at work, with the group of figures in the centre foreground, low so that they don’t distract from the more distant view along the coast of an estuary.

Claude does seem to have tipped his hat in the direction of his master Tassi in his maritime paintings, such as the Embarkation of St Paula. This follows the format for which Claude is most famous: a view along a river opening out to the distant sea, with towering classical buildings on both banks, giving it great depth and drawing the eye from its foreground figures to the low sun. Unlike the majority of landscape paintings, Claude orientates his canvas into the ‘portrait’ mode to accommodate the buildings.

Nearly two centuries later, the English landscape artist JMW Turner was a great admirer of Claude’s work.

In 1817 Turner painted his Claudean Decline of the Carthaginian Empire looking straight into the setting sun.

Many of Turner’s paintings are similarly contre-jour, such as this view of The Harbour of Dieppe from about 1826. Turner’s landscapes were firmly rooted in the many sketches he made in front of the motif, but he faced similar challenges to those of both Claude and Poussin in painting finished works in the studio.

This weekend I look at two founding fathers of European landscape painting, both of them French expatriates in Italy. Today I trace the story of Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), who took three attempts to get to Rome, where he transferred from painting myths to idealised landscapes. Tomorrow I look at Claude Lorrain (1604/5–1682), who developed his distinctive style from imports from Northern Europe, also in Rome.

On Poussin’s first attempt to travel to Rome in 1617 or 1618, he got as far as Florence, where he suffered some sort of accident, and was forced to return home. On his second attempt in 1622, he only got as far as Lyon before turning back. When he finally arrived there in the Spring of 1624, it must have been with a great sense of relief.

The new Pope, Urban VIII, wanted Rome to remain Europe’s artistic capital, and the Academy of Saint Luke was led by another French artist, Simon Vouet, who provided Poussin with accommodation. Although Rome had a thriving art market at the time, Poussin needed patrons, particularly those with good connections, and must have been even more relieved when he was introduced to Cardinal Francesco Barberini, who happened to be the Pope’s brother. The next few years were troubled, though: the Cardinal was made papal legate to Spain, so left Rome, and Poussin fell ill with syphilis. It was only through the assistance of a chef that he was able to convalesce, and once he was well again in 1630, he married the chef’s daughter, which demonstrates how little was known about syphilis at the time.

Although it was Cardinal Barberini and his associates who paid Poussin’s bills, by far the most important of his patrons in Rome was the Cardinal’s secretary, Cassiano dal Pozzi (1588-1657), who was of noble birth, had been raised in Florence and educated at the University of Pisa. He was appointed secretary in 1623, and like his master was a member of the Accademia dei Lincei, one of Europe’s earliest scientific societies.

Dal Pozzi was an obsessive collector. He was fascinated by natural history, antiquities, and curiosities of all kinds. He met and corresponded with Galileo, and, as much as his modest means allowed, was a patron of the arts. He bought paintings by Simon Vouet, Artemisia Gentileschi, Pietro da Cortona, even the renegade Caravaggio, but most of all Poussin’s.

Cassiano dal Pozzi lived with his younger brother Carlo and Carlo’s wife Teodora in a palace in the Via Chiavari, which steadily filled with their museum, to which they added other collections of scientific instruments, and a huge library. He employed young draughtsmen to make copies of Rome’s many antiquities, which he bound together in more than 23 volumes, in what was probably the first attempt to document the remains of the classical city.

Following dal Pozzi’s return from Spain in late 1626, he employed Poussin to make some drawings of antiquities, and to paint life-sized pictures of birds such as eagles and ostriches. Sadly, all those ornithological paintings by Poussin have vanished without trace. In return, Poussin was paid, and learned a great deal about Rome, natural history, and other subjects that fascinated his patron. In a fairly short time, the Cardinal’s secretary had assembled a collection of more than fifty of Poussin’s paintings, and it was he who encouraged Poussin to paint scenes from the the artist’s most enduring literary source, Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered.

With the support of dal Pozzi, Poussin became well-read and erudite, and composed each of his paintings with exceptional care and thought. One of his central concepts drew from modes in music, in which adoption of a tonal mode set the mood of the work.

In his early career, Poussin was an outstanding figurative painter who specialised in classical narrative, such as his famous Abduction of the Sabine Women (c 1634-35). It’s set against the historical background of the Capitoline Hill and the Tarpeian Rock, because of their importance in the narrative. As the bearded figure of Romulus stands overseeing the abduction, the hill and its precipitous cliffs dominate the distance.

In Landscape with a Man Scooping Water from a Stream (c 1637) Poussin has painted a landscape dominated by trees, most probably his lifelong favourite, oaks, in this case the Holm Oak, Quercus ilex. Each is carefully constructed from the trunk and branch anatomy, and their canopies, although dense, are clearly formed from leaves rather than solid masses. The distant view is that of an idealised Roman campagna, which was to reappear in his later works.

Landscape with Saint John on Patmos (1640) shows another idealised landscape, probably based on the western Italian coast rather than Patmos in the Dodecanese, in the eastern Aegean. Instead of placing trees at the edges, Poussin sets them further back; again these have the look of oaks. There is a richer variety in the middle distance, breaking the more regular lines of ancient ruins.

In Landscape with the Funeral of Phocion from 1648, the narrative figures in the foreground are small, and mixed with others who are part of its non-narrative background. Among that staffage are some who recur in his later landscapes: the shepherd with his flock, and the horseman. Deciding which are intended to be part of the narrative isn’t always obvious, and part of the fascination of Poussin’s paintings.

It was dal Pozzi who commissioned Poussin’s magnificent Stormy Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe (1651). Here the classical tragedy of the deaths of the lovers is being played out against one of Poussin’s most exciting landscapes. The lioness from that story has escaped into the middle ground and is attacking a horse, as everyone else is fleeing from the imminent thunderstorm. The mode is impending catastrophe.

Landscape with a Calm from about 1651 is one of his late pure landscape paintings, of a view that never existed except in the artist’s imagination, although there’s something familiar about each of the elements within it. Like an Advent calendar, it contains scattered scenes which the viewer is tempted to try to construct into a coherent narrative, but are probably just part of the painting’s mode.

In the foreground is a herdsman with his dog, tending to a small flock of goats grazing erratically at the borders of a track that meanders down to the lake. The only distinctive feature of the man, and indeed of this whole passage, is how non-descript he is. He has nothing that could be interpreted as an attribute, and gives no clue as to his identity. Just above his head is the distinctive arrowhead of broken water in the otherwise mirror-like surface of the lake, but there is nothing else of remark.

The most prominent feature of the painting is its large Italianate villa. In front of its outermost earthworks, two herdsmen tend a flock of sheep and cattle. The man on the left is playing bagpipes. There are figures scattered just outside and within the grounds of the villa, and two visible at its ground floor windows. There’s nothing that appears to be out of the ordinary here either.

The greatest human activity in the painting is at the left, where there are two horses with riders, and another horse visible within the outbuilding. One horse and its rider are just galloping off to the left; the other horse, its rider still mounted, is drinking from a trough under a portico at the end of the building. Above that horse’s hindquarters is an inscription that is illegible.

Among the background details there are bonfires. One burns vigorously with bright orange flames, and their smoke wafts erratically into the air, indicating the calm.

All the clues which the artist gives us point towards the mode of calm and peace in this landscape. Its one small burst of activity is a galloping horse. The air is so calm that the lake reflects like a mirror, and one tiny patch of broken water stands out.

It was Poussin who made the transition from painting mythological stories set in the countryside, to pure landscapes, albeit idealised composites assembled from quotations of reality.

Some of our most popular furniture is primarily intended for storage and display. This article looks at paintings of cupboards, and their specialist relatives sideboards and (Welsh) dressers. Although of ancient origins, cupboards reached a peak during the Dutch Golden Age, when the middle classes became highly acquisitive. Dressers have been traditional in some areas, including Wales, and Brittany in France, while sideboards came of age in the nineteenth century dining room.

The cupboard standing behind Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s Laundress (1761) was commonplace in many European households, and is here in the dilapidated servants’ area, probably in a cellar, where this provocative and flirtaceous young maid is washing the household linen. This was painted for Greuze’s patron, Ange-Laurent de La Live de Jully, when the artist was enjoying great success at the Salon. His reputation faded after 1780, and he lost everything in the French Revolution, dying a pauper.

Edward Burne-Jones’ Cinderella from 1863 shows her reverted to her plain clothes after the ball, but still wearing one (the left) glass slipper. She is seen in a scullery or similar area, with a dull, patched, and grubby working dress and apron. Behind her is a densely packed display of blue crockery in the upper section of a large dresser.

A decade later in New York, the American genre artist Eastman Johnson painted an open narrative work that only makes any sense when you know its title of Not at Home (c 1873). This apparently shows the interior of the artist’s home, where there’s a small dresser in the parlour with a more modest display of plates and mementos.

Briton Rivière’s Cupboard Love, from 1881, is a visual and verbal pun. The phrase refers to affection in return for gain, shown well in the two dogs whose interest lies in the food which the young woman is about to produce from the heavy wooden cupboard behind them.

William Merritt Chase’s many paintings of his studio became something of a shop window for prospective customers. In his Studio Interior from about 1882, a fashionably dressed young woman is glancing through a huge bound collation of Chase’s work, sat by a grand carved wooden sideboard, decorated with almost outlandish objects including a model ship, a lute, and sundry objets d’art.

Some cupboards have highly specialised roles, such as that in Joaquín Sorolla’s Kissing the Relic from 1893. At the end of Mass in the church of Saint Paul in Valencia, close to Sorolla’s childhood home, the congregation have been invited to kiss a reliquary containing an alleged relic of a revered saint, drawn from the cupboard behind the priest.

Laurits Andersen Ring’s wife Sigrid sits reading the newspaper Politiken At Breakfast (1898), with a modern sideboard behind her. This houses a mixture of tableware and personal mementos rather than serving as a buffet.

Further north in Sweden, Carl Larsson’s wife Karin is Getting Ready for a Game (1901) as she prepares a tray of refreshments in her dining room. At the left is a tall glass-fronted display cabinet containing glassware, while at the right is a simple sideboard with separate shelving to display decorated crockery.

Free-standing cupboards are nothing compared to those you can walk into.

Félix Vallotton’s Woman Searching through a Cupboard (1901) uses its gloomy repoussoir to frame a woman crouching low over its contents. On the shelves above her are thick bundles of papers, such as those used in law and public administration.

A couple of years later, in his Interior, Woman in Blue Searching in a Cupboard (1903), Vallotton painted his wife Gabrielle from behind as she stood searching in a free-standing cupboard of books.

Elizabeth Nourse’s painting of a Breton Interior from about 1907 shows a well-stocked dresser beside this young girl’s bed. As dressers were unusual in bedrooms, this combination suggests the family home is very cramped, and the child has to sleep in the same room as the family eats.

Parrots, parakeets, cockatoos and the humble budgerigar (a small parakeet) have long been popular domestic pets in Europe, and are featured in many paintings. In this second look at a selection of paintings including these birds, I start with still lifes from the Dutch Golden Age.

From the days of the Northern Renaissance, artists in the Low Countries had pursued the accurate depiction of optical effects in their paintings. Pieter Boel’s Still Life with a Globe and a Parrot from about 1658 continues that tradition, with its outstanding three-dimensional effects in the plate and goblet in the foreground.

The globe shows the Pacific Ocean and the north-west coast of America, with the ‘Dutch’ East Indies at its left edge. The bas-relief plate shows a scene from mythology, in which male and female deities are riding in a chariot. The two porcelain bowls at the far right appear Chinese, and there’s a white parrot or cockatoo, together with a small dog at the bottom left corner.

After Hungaro-British painter Jakob Bogdani (1658–1724) moved to London via Amsterdam in 1688, he painted several works featuring animals and birds. Those included Capuchin squirrel monkey, two guinea pigs, a blue tit and an Amazon Saint Vincent parrot with Peaches, Figs and Pears in a landscape towards the end of his career, in 1710-20.

Johann Amandus Winck’s Still life with a Parrot, Game Fowl, Guinea Pigs and Fruit must have been painted in the late eighteenth century.

Parrots also appear in some more curious contexts.

Painters have long been attracted to the spectacle of humans who look different. In Agostino Carracci’s case, he combined three strange examples in his Hairy Harry, Mad Peter and Tiny Amon, completed between 1598-1600, not long before his death. From the left are Tiny Amon (Rodomonte) the dwarf, Arrigo Gonzalez the hirsute (Hairy Harry) from the Canary Islands, and Mad Peter (Pietro the buffoon). Accompanying them are a large parrot, a couple of dogs, and two monkeys.

Since then, parrots and their relatives have continued to appear sporadically in paintings.

In 1876, Frank Duveneck and William Merritt Chase painted a young boy carefully posed with a parrot, in Chase’s Munich studio. Duveneck’s The Turkish Page, above, is technically brilliant, and an ambitious work for someone within seven years of starting their training. It was exhibited at the National Academy of Design in New York the following year, but had a mixed response. Viewers found its still life approach lost narrative, and were puzzled by the depiction of the child. By the time it was displayed at the Pennsylvania Academy in its 1893-4 exhibition, changing taste brought it acclaim, and it sold.

Chase’s version, below, was surprisingly different in many respects. I leave it to you to decide which you prefer, although I think the parrot seems happy with both.

Henry Tonks’ Summer (1908) is a dazzlingly rich and intricate view of the garden at Arfleet, near Corfe Castle, Dorset, England. Using a real mother and her son as models, the boy’s rocking horse and a cockatoo are unusual objects to see in an English garden in summer.

The expatriate New Zealand artist Frances Hodgkins painted Wings over Water during the winter of 1931-32. It shows a view from her rooms in Bodinnick, Cornwall. Carefully placed in the foreground is a still life consisting of three large seashells with floral and plant arrangements. Sitting on the fence in the middle of the view is her landlady’s parrot, beyond which is the expanse of the nearby River Fowey.

Finally, for Pierre Bonnard parrots came by chance. His Woman with Parrot is set in le Midi in 1910, with intensely bright and hot colours, against which the large blue parrot, some pots, and foliage make contrast. This was painted in Saint Tropez during Bonnard’s visit in September that year, and was based on an experience that the artist wrote about in a letter to his mother, in which he had passed a young dark-haired girl with an enormous blue parrot. As you do.

Parrots, parakeets, cockatoos and the humble budgerigar (a small parakeet) have long been popular domestic pets in Europe, and haven’t escaped the attention of artists. According to Richard Verdi, who has written a monograph on the subject, they appear in many paintings, often being symbols of the Virgin birth of Christ, or witnesses of the Fall of Man. In this week’s two articles considering the reading of paintings, I show a selection of works featuring these birds in different roles.

Parrots have been added to mythological paintings to supplement their original story.

In Tintoretto’s Leda and the Swan, from about 1578-83, there are two caged birds, a duck being taunted by a cat in the left foreground, and a parrot in the background. These allude to one of the most bizarre of Jupiter’s many rapes of mortal women, here in the form of a swan, resulting in his victim Leda laying eggs.

Tiepolo’s magnificent Death of Hyacinthus from about 1752-53 was inspired by an Italian translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses from 1561, where the fatal discus is replaced by what looks like a tennis ball, actually taken from the popular game of pallacorda. This classical story is told in the right foreground, with the pale Hyacinthus visibly bruised on his cheek, Apollo swooning above him, and Cupid to the right. Above that group is a grinning Pan in the form of a Herm, and at the top right a brightly coloured parrot, who appears oddly out of place.

Peter Paul Rubens’ version of The Fall of Man painted in 1628-29 changes Titian’s original depiction of Adam and adds a parrot as witness to Eve taking the apple from the serpent with a child’s head and body.

Alfred Stevens was an early enthusiast for Japonisme as it swept Paris, and provided insights into his life in his Psyché or My Studio from about 1871. The French word psyché refers to the full-length mirror seen in this apparently informal view of Stevens’ studio, the name deriving from the legend of Cupid and Psyche. For this painting, Stevens doesn’t use a genuine psyché, but has mounted a large mirror on his easel, suggesting that art is a reflection of life. A Japanese silk garment is draped over the mirror to limit its view to the model, and breaks up her form in an unnatural way. At the lower right, the artist indicates his presence with a cigarette, and there’s a small parrot who might imitate his speech.

The association between parrots and beautiful women has a long history.

Tintoretto’s Summer (c 1546) poses a reclining Titianesque nude before she removed her clothes against the summer harvest ripening behind her. She is joined by three birds, one an exotic parrot, with flowers of the dog rose, and hanging bunches of grapes.

In 1858, a popular translation of tales in Persian by Ṭūṭī-nāma of Żiyā’ al-Dīn Naḫšabī, who died around 751/1350-51, was published in Britain. Valentine Cameron Prinsep’s Lady of the Tooti-Nameh, or The Legend of the Parrot (c 1865) refers to that book, and was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1865, where it must have caused quite a sensation with its fleshly glimpses inside the woman’s blouse. The parrot perched on her hand is a hint of the exotic, but couldn’t have anticipated the painting shown by Gustave Courbet in the Paris Salon the following year.

Courbet’s model for his erotically charged Woman with a Parrot from 1866 was Joanna Hiffernan. The structure behind and to the right is a perch and feeder for the bird. This inevitably brought scandal, but didn’t deter others from painting pretty women with parrots. Édouard Manet’s A Young Lady in 1866, nicknamed Woman with a Parrot, was shown at the Salon two years later, and Auguste Renoir’s Woman with Parakeet followed in 1871, although at least their models were decently dressed.

Henry Tonks’ early portrait of A Girl with a Parrot from about 1893 provides an intimate glimpse into the private world of a young girl.

A brilliant green parakeet with its bright red bill adds colour to John William Godward’s Dolce Far Niente from 1897.

Painted late in his career, Émile Friant’s The Birds (1921) is a brilliantly colourful and detailed erotic fantasy demonstrating his great technical skills, but has drifted far from his earlier Naturalism and social concerns.

After the delightful tale of Vertumnus and Pomona, King Proca dies, and Ovid’s narrative rushes through the founding of Rome by Romulus, so bringing Book 14 of his Metamorphoses to a close.

Ovid tells us that the walls of the city of Rome were founded on the feast day of Pales, 21 April.

Romulus yoked a plough with a bronze ploughshare to a bull and a cow, and drove a deep furrow around the city’s boundary. This is shown in Annibale Carracci’s fresco in the Palazzo Magnani of Romulus Traces the Boundaries of Rome (1589-92). The bronze ploughshare is at the left, being fixed to a wheeled plough, with Romulus at the right, ready to lead the bull and cow around the boundary.

Next Ovid mentions war with the Sabines led by Tatius, and the Vestal Virgin Tarpeia’s infamous betrayal of the citadel itself. The intruders entered through a gate unlocked by Juno, which Venus couldn’t secure because gods aren’t allowed to undo what other gods have done.

Naiads living next to the shrine of Janus tried to block the intrusion by flooding their spring, but the torrent of water sent down to the open gate didn’t help. So they put sulphur under the spring, and turned it into a river of smoking, molten tar, holding the intruders back until Romulus was able to attack. After a bloody battle, the Romans and Sabines agreed peace, but their king Tatius died (in a riot at Lavinium) and Romulus thus came to rule over both peoples.

Even in Ovid’s time, war with the Sabines and the rape of the Sabine women were controversial, and not a subject that his Metamorphoses dwelt on.

Jacques-Louis David’s The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799) is unusual among depictions of the episode of the Sabine women in showing its resolution, rather than the seizure of the women that brought the conflict about.

After the overwhelmingly male population of the nascent city of Rome had seized the wives and daughters of their neighbours the Sabines, the two groups of men proceeded to fight. David shows Roman and Sabine men joined in battle before the great walls of Rome, with the Sabine women and their children mixed in, trying to restore peace. Looming over the city is the rugged Tarpeian Rock, from which traitors and other enemies of Rome were thrown. Named in dishonour of the treacherous Tarpeia, she wasn’t its first victim: she was crushed to death by the shields of the Sabines she had let into the citadel, and is reputed to have been buried in the rock.

Highlighted in her brilliant white robes in the foreground, and separating two of the warriors, is the daughter of the Sabine king Tatius, Hersilia, whom Romulus married. The warriors are, of course, her father and her husband, and the infants strategically placed by a nurse between the men are the children of Romulus.

David started this painting when he was imprisoned following his involvement in the French Revolution. He intended it to honour his estranged wife, who had continued to visit him during his incarceration, and to make the case for reconciliation as the resolution of conflict.

Guercino’s Hersilia Separating Romulus and Tatius (1645) concentrates on the three figures of Tatius, Hersilia, and Romulus, and tucks the rest of the battle away in the distance behind them.

The time came for Romulus to hand on the new Roman state to his successor; Mars therefore called a council of the gods, and proposed that the founder of Rome should be transformed into a god, which Jupiter approved. With that Mars descended to the Palatine hill in Rome, where he found Romulus laying down laws for the city. The body of Romulus dissolved into thin air and he was carried up to the heavens to become the Roman god Quirinus.

Only Jean-Baptiste Nattier painted the apotheosis of the founder of Rome, in his Romulus being taken up to Olympus by Mars from about 1700. Mars is embracing Romulus, with the standard of Rome being borne at the lower left, and the divine chariot ready to take Romulus up to the upper right corner, where the rest of the gods await him.

When his queen Hersilia mourned the loss of Romulus, Juno sent Iris to invite her to join her husband. Hersilia then rose with a star to become the goddess Hora. This sets the stage for the opening of the fifteenth and final book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

From the opening to the public of the Museo Nacional del Prado in November 1819, it has drawn a steady succession of aspiring painters to Madrid to study the works of Hieronymus Bosch, El Greco, Peter Paul Rubens, Titian, Diego Velázquez, Francisco Goya, and others. This weekend I show a small selection of landscape paintings made of the interior of Spain by visitors and natives, and in this second article have reached the start of the twentieth century.

The founder of the School of Fine Arts at Yale University, John Ferguson Weir, had studied in Europe, and his brother Julian Alden Weir was a student at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Later in his career, John Ferguson Weir returned to Europe on several trips, and in about 1901 painted this fine view of The Alhambra, Granada, Spain.

As far as I can tell, Laurits Tuxen was the first Danish artist to paint a View of the Alhambra. He did so in 1902, the year after marrying his second wife. He was one of the leading members of the Skagen painters, Nordic Impressionists, and completed this en plein air on 4 May, in wonderfully fine weather.

James Dickson Innes, a painter from Wales who was a member of the Camden Town Group, visited Spain in 1912-13, where he painted this Spanish Landscape in oils on a wood panel.

Innes had a particular affection for dusk, as seen in his Deep Twilight, Pyrenees, painted in 1912-13.

Muñoz Degrain’s view of the Alhambra from Albaicin District is remarkable for the rhythm established by the poplar trees around its base, which become an integral part of the fortified ridge.

His View of the Alhambra is one of my favourite paintings of this motif, for its intriguing foreground details, and the poplars lit as white-hot pokers in the fiery light of sunset.

Joaquín Sorolla, best known for his figurative works, also painted fine landscapes. This undated view of Albaicin looks down from one of the Alhambra’s towers at the bleached white buildings below.

In 1917, when he was exhausted after completing fourteen large murals for the Hispanic Society of America building in Manhattan, Sorolla recovered by painting landscapes. In his Sierra Nevada, Granada, the mountains dominate, with patches of cloud adding uncertainty to their forms.

This canvas by the Spanish artist Enrique Simonet shows a thoroughly Spanish motif: Autumn in the Dehesa, a type of landscape characteristic of southern and central Spain and Portugal, where it’s known as montado. This is a traditional mixed, multifunctional environment providing grazing for cattle, goats, sheep and pigs, mixed trees centred on oaks, and support for many endangered species such as the Iberian lynx and Spanish imperial eagle.

Simonet’s La Moncloa Landscape from 1918-20 shows another rural area, with its ancient woodland and open plains. There may also be a pun intended, as the term La Moncloa can be used to refer to the central government of Spain.

Most of Simonet’s later paintings, such as Reflections on the River (1918-23), are pure landscapes.

During 1921-22, Simonet was director of landscape painting courses held in El Paular, to the north-west of Madrid. There he painted some of the finest of these late works, such as his El Paular Landscape from 1921.

His Hiruela Waterfall (1921-23) is set in dense woodland to the north of Madrid.

Around 1920, the Japanese artist Torajirō Kojima appears to have visited Spain, where he painted the Alhambra, and this wonderful view of a mountainous Landscape in Spain スペインの風景.

Late in his distinguished career, when he was teaching Winston Churchill to paint, the British painter, print-maker and illustrator Sir William Nicholson travelled to Andalucia in Spain. There he met the novelist Marguerite Steen (1894-1975), and she became his companion for the remaining fifteen years of his life. She had a passion for bullfights, and Nicholson found himself working up a study of the Plaza de Toros, Malaga into a major painting. This finished version shows his distinctive use of colour as a result of the intense light in southern Spain. This was exhibited in London the following year.

La Malagueta, as this bull ring is known, was a lifelong inspiration for Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), who was born and brought up in the city. Unlike Picasso, though, Nicholson’s interest was more distant, in the bullring’s form and position, rather than the thrill and spectacle of bullfights.

On Christmas Eve 1734 Europe came close to losing many of its greatest paintings, when the Royal Alcázar of Madrid caught fire. At the time it housed much of the Spanish royal collection; although some were lost, many survived to form the core of the Museo Nacional del Prado, which opened to the public in November 1819. Since then a steady succession of aspiring painters have made their way to Madrid to study the works of Hieronymus Bosch, El Greco, Peter Paul Rubens, Titian, Diego Velázquez, Francisco Goya, and others in the Prado.

Although few of its masterworks depict landscapes, the Prado has drawn many landscape artists who have also taken the opportunity to paint Spanish views. This weekend I show a small selection of landscape paintings made of the interior of the country by visitors and natives.

The French animalière Rosa Bonheur seems to have visited the Pyrenees, the mountain range forming the north-east border of Spain, on at least two occasions. Her Spanish Muleteers Crossing the Pyrenees from 1857 incorporates one of her most spectacular landscapes, some of which were painted in collaboration with her father. At the time mules like these were still an important means of trade over the Pyrenees, via traditional routes over passes that had been used by animals and humans for millennia.

While Martín Rico was studying at the prestigious Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, he painted a series of watercolour landscapes of his home town and its environs. Among them is this View of the Village of El Escorial with the Church of Saint Barnabus (1852-58). This appears to have been painted in front of the motif, and for the rest of his career, Rico was an enthusiastic painter en plein air.

Rico progressed to oils by 1858, when he painted Guadarrama Landscape, shown at that year’s National Exhibition. This rugged area is now a national park, and is to the north-east of El Escorial. The mountains shown are the Sierra de Guadarrama. This dramatic view shows the influence of his Professor of Landscape Painting at the Academy, who was a renowned Romantic.

His landscape painted Near Azañón in 1859 places a Wanderer figure in arid country in his native Spain. Unusually, this Wanderer faces the viewer rather than looking away. This is in the province of Guadalajara in central Spain.

Country View from 1861 is another of his landscapes from the early years of his career, before he discovered Venice and devoted his later life to painting its canals.

Antonio Muñoz Degrain’s early Landscape of El Pardo as the Fog Clears from 1866 is set in El Pardo Mountain Reserve, the hunting grounds of the Spanish royal family, where one of its rangers is taking his horse to water. The mountain in the background is Guadarrama, which is surprisingly alpine and rugged. This is close to the location seen in Rico’s Guadarrama Landscape above.

In 1867, Franz von Lenbach and a student of his travelled from Munich to Madrid to copy the Masters there for his patron Baron Adolf von Schack. The following year, von Lenbach painted two works in Granada: The Alhambra in Granada (1868) is a magnificent sketch including the backdrop of the distant mountains, and appears to have been painted in front of the motif.

Mariano Fortuny’s Granada Landscape from 1871 is a plein air oil sketch painted when the artist was living in Granada between 1870-72.

Ferdinand Hodler travelled from Geneva in Switzerland to Madrid in 1878 to study the works of the masters there for several months. While he was there his landscapes became brighter, higher in chroma, and increasingly artistic rather than just representational, as shown in this Landscape Near Madrid (1878).

When the great American landscape artist and teacher William Merritt Chase was in Europe in the summer of 1882, he painted Sunny Spain (1882).

The German artist Edmund Ludwig Eduard Wodick painted this view of Granada in 1886; shortly afterwards he developed pneumonia and died at the age of 69. He located himself just outside the city walls, looking across at the Alhambra and its towers, down towards the lush green plain and the snow-capped peaks in the far distance.

This is a contrasting view of the Alhambra painted by Hernandez Miguel Vico, a local artist. The Cuesta de los Chinos is the steep road seen here, and forms one of the pedestrian accesses to the palace.

Many artists are considered to have been part of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and even more adopted Pre-Raphaelite style, but there were only ever seven members of the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood that started it all. Three weren’t even painters, but the other four included William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and someone named James Collinson who’s hardly mentioned.

James Collinson was born two centuries ago today, on 9 May 1825, to a Nottinghamshire bookseller and his wife. He made friends with Hunt and Rossetti when they were students together in the Royal Academy Schools in London, and in 1848 they formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with the other four.

Most of the paintings by members of the Brotherhood at that time were religious in theme. Collinson painted a few works before the group started to fragment in 1850, as the result of controversy surrounding John Everett Millais’ Christ in the House of His Parents shown at the Royal Academy that year.

Millais’ painting, also known as The Carpenter’s Shop appeared with a quotation from the Old Testament book of Zechariah 13:6: “And one shall say unto him, What are those wounds in thine hands? Then he shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.” It shows an entirely imagined scene, one not even alluded to in the Gospels, in which the young Jesus Christ is being comforted by his kneeling mother, after he has cut the palm of his left hand on a nail.

The figures and objects are depicted with great and meticulous realism, and were painted from nature. Nevertheless the composition abounds with symbols of Christ’s life and future crucifixion: the cut on his palm is one of the stigmata, and blood dripped from that onto his left foot is another. The young Saint John the Baptist has fetched a bowl of water, indicating his future baptismal role. A triangle above Christ’s head symbolises the Trinity, and a white dove perched on the ladder is the Holy Spirit. A flock of sheep outside represents the Christian flock.

Among its harshest critics was the great novelist Charles Dickens, who claimed that the Holy Family had been made to look like alcoholics and slum-dwellers. Collinson felt that the Brotherhood was bringing the Christian religion into disrepute, and resigned. The group failed to agree on a replacement, and disbanded later that year.

Late that summer, it’s thought that Collinson stayed on the Isle of Wight with Richard Burchett, as both painted views across the same bay from similar locations.

Collinson’s Mother and Child by a Stile, with Culver Cliff, Isle of Wight, in the Distance was painted along a path that still runs between the eastern end of Cliff Copse down to what was then Saint John’s Church (now known as Saint Blasius’) in Shanklin. It’s claimed that either or both the views were made from above or beyond Shanklin Down, which is incorrect: they were both made to the north-east of that down, which towers above those locations, about a mile from our house.

For some time, I believed that there were two significant discrepancies between these paintings and the views these artists would have seen: the distant white tower, the Earl of Yarborough’s Monument, appeared too far to the left in both, and in Burchett’s painting, Saint John’s Church looked incorrect. Although I still have my doubts about the church, and the exact site from which Collinson painted his view, I have since discovered that the distant monument is placed correctly, as it was moved from there to its present location in the 1860s.

That year Collinson also painted one of a series of three works on the theme of reading and writing, Answering the Emigrant’s Letter (1850). These may have had their origins in the contemporary campaign for literacy inspired by Dickens’ novel The Old Curiosity Shop (1841). This may be a humble working class family, but both the father and the oldest of their children are writing with quills.

The Emigration Scheme (1852) is the second in this series, with another older boy demonstrating his reading skills to two families. Emigration was a theme adopted by other Pre-Raphaelites, and many in Britain seized the opportunity to migrate to North America or Australasia.

Collinson painted Home Again after the end of the Crimean War in 1856, to show the problems faced by returning veterans and their dependents. A soldier in the Coldstream Guards here rejoins his family after he was blinded in the war. His large extended family now face the future without the income he had brought in.

In 1858, Collinson married and concentrated his painting on further secular themes, apparently becoming quite popular.

His undated painted oval To Let is perhaps a little too subtle today. This pretty young woman stands at a window in which she’s advertising an apartment to let. She’s wearing black suggesting that she might be a widow, but there’s no sign of a wedding ring on her left hand. Maybe she intends her tenant to take up more permanent residence.

This study for a finished painting titled For Sale also has subtle open narrative and gives even fewer clues as to the artist’s intent.

Collinson served as secretary to the Society of British Artists between 1861-70, then went to live in Brittany. He died in 1881, and has since been almost entirely forgotten, the only one of the four painters among the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood who has vanished.

Reference

Wikipedia

In two-dimensional visual art, particularly painting, the term frieze is used to describe an arrangement of figures that are flattened into a plane parallel to the plane of the picture, thus resembling those seen in architectural friezes. These returned to fashion in the late nineteenth century for their unusual visual effect.

John Roddam Spencer Stanhope’s Why seek ye the living among the dead? (St Luke, Chapter 14, verse 5) (1896) refers to the account of the Resurrection in which Mary Magdalene and companion(s) return to Christ’s tomb, only to find its door open and the tomb empty. They are then greeted by two men who inform them that Christ has risen from the dead. Stanhope depicts this in the style of a frieze, the four figures arranged across the painting in a single parallel plane. Although part of a complex narrative, he depicts only a limited window from the story, and in doing so makes his painting simpler and more direct.

In 1902 Gustav Klimt painted a frieze of 24 metres in length for the fourteenth exhibition of the Vienna Secession, his Beethoven Frieze, of which the above is a section known as The Hostile Powers, and that below is Nagging Grief. This is not only a frieze in the sense of a flat wall painting, but its composition is flattened as well.

Another frieze or mural painted at this time is Hodler’s Unanimity from 1913, in the Neue Rathaus in Hanover, Germany. This has survived adverse criticism, the Nazi regime, and the bombing of the city during the Second World War. At its centre is the figure of Dietrich Arnsborg (1475-1558), who on 26 June 1533 brought together an assembly of the (male) citizens of Hanover in its market square, by the old town hall. Together they swore to adhere to the new Reformation doctrine of Martin Luther, as shown here in their unanimous raising of right hands.

Evelyn De Morgan’s Cadence of Autumn from 1905 shows five women in a frieze against a rustic background. From the left, one holds a basket of grapes and other fruit, two are putting marrows, apples, pears and other fruit into a large net bag, held between them. The fourth crouches down from a seated position, her hands grasping leaves, and the last is stood, letting the wind blow leaves out from each hand.

There are also a few paintings in which a frieze forms the background rather than figures in the foreground.

Frederick Sandys shows Medea (1866-68) at work, preparing a magic potion for one of Jason’s missions. In front of her is a toad, and other ingredients. Behind her, in a gilt frieze, is Jason’s ship the Argo.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting of Arthurian legend, How Sir Galahad, Sir Bors and Sir Percival Were Fed with the Sanct Grael; but Sir Percival’s Sister Died by the Way from 1864, awards haloes to what at first appear to be secular women. In fact he has stretched this legend to include the Virgin Mary, in the left foreground with her white lilies, also given haloes, and a host of angels with wings forming a background frieze.

Finally, paintings may incorporate a frieze above or below a more conventional three-dimensional image.

Félicien Rops’ notorious Pornocrates (1878) shows a blindfolded and nearly-naked woman being led by a pig tethered on a lead like a dog. Below is a frieze containing allegories of sculpture, music, poetry and painting. Make of them what you wish.

In architecture, a frieze is a section of a building above the columns or walls and below the roof, commonly the location of decorative sculpture or a bas-relief.

This is the monumental hall of Walhalla, commissioned in the nineteenth century as a memorial to the great figures of German history. On its north side is this pediment frieze showing the victory of Arminius and the Germanic tribes over the Romans at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest. This is an unusual frieze as it adds more depth to the figures than would appear in a normal relief.

The most famous is shown in Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s beautiful painting of Phidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to his Friends (1868), whose admiring figures include Pericles (at the right), Aspasia, Alcibiades and Socrates.

In two-dimensional visual art, particularly painting, the term frieze is also used to describe an arrangement of figures that are flattened into a plane parallel to the plane of the picture, thus resembling those seen in architectural friezes.

Among the most spectacular wall-paintings of Pompeii are those in the Villa of the Mysteries showing Dionysian Rites from before about 62 CE. Room 5 contains a frieze of 29 figures at nearly life size, apparently depicting a sequence of ritual events involving a mixture of Pompeiians and deities.

In the period before three-dimensional linear projection became widely adopted in European art, many paintings adopted a similar approach for groups of figures. But long afterwards the frieze continued to be used in the right circumstances.

Masaccio’s Adoration of the Magi (1426-7) delivers a frieze-like view of this popular subject. The Virgin Mary is sat on a golden portable folding chair decorated with lion heads and paws, the infant Christ on her knee. To the left of her is the standard group of ox and ass in a shed, and behind her is Joseph, holding one of the gifts from the Magi. Hints at depth are given in the heights of some figures, but they are confined to a shallow plane parallel to the picture plane.

When Raphael painted The Marriage of the Virgin known by its Italian name of Il Sposalizio (‘the marriage’), in 1504, he combined the frieze of figures in the foreground with grand architecture expertly projected in depth. This demonstrates the contrast between the flat frieze in the foreground and the depth of the building behind.

Some motifs are prone to creating frieze effects, and painters have gone out of their way to avoid that.

William Blake Richmond’s An Audience in Athens During Agamemnon by Aeschylus from 1884 is a study of the enraptured audience of a play. Its classical setting has strong formal symmetry, with its central figure perhaps representing the playwright himself. Richmond uses greatly exaggerated aerial perspective, with intense chroma in the foreground falling off rapidly towards the back of the theatre, to give depth to what would otherwise have appeared flat and frieze-like.

Late in the nineteenth century some artists like Ferdinand Hodler adopted frieze effects.

Hodler’s World-Weary (1891-92) was an important early work in the development of his style of Parallelism, with its emphasis on the symmetry and rhythms seen in society. He painted this frieze from models who sat for him in a local cemetery during the autumn of 1891.

The Disappointed Souls (1892), another in this series, also shows five older men, this time dressed in black robes and sat on a bench in barren fields.

Following the apotheosis of Aeneas, Ovid lists a succession of rulers of Latium and Alba, the city founded by Aeneas, until he reaches King Proca, who prompts his next stories of transformation, starting with the delightful cautionary tale of Pomona and Vertumnus, who lived during that king’s reign.

Pomona is a devoted and highly capable gardener, who cares for her plants with passion; shunning male company, she has no interest in the many men who seek her love. One, Vertumnus, god of seasons, gardens, and plant growth, loves Pomona more than any other, but is no more successful in attracting her. He is able to change his form at will, and in his quest for Pomona’s love he has posed as a reaper, a hedger, and in various other gardening roles. Through these he had been able to gain entry into her garden, but made no progress in winning her hand.

One day Vertumnus comes up with a new disguise as an old crone with a bonnet over her white hair, leaning on her walking stick. This too gets him into the garden, and he is able to engage the beautiful Pomona in conversation. Vertumnus almost gives himself away when he kisses her over-enthusiastically, but manages to control himself and tries giving Pomona some womanly advice about marriage by encouraging her to wed Vertumnus.

The Roman god Vertumnus was most famously painted by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, in his idiosyncratic portrait of Rudolf II of Hamburg from 1590. Given the nature of the god, Arcimboldo’s choice of fruit and flowers couldn’t have been more appropriate.

Most paintings of this story show Vertumnus in his disguise as an old crone, chatting up a beautiful, and quite fleshly, Pomona.

Francesco Melzi’s Vertumnus and Pomona (c 1518-28) follows Ovid’s account carefully, giving Vertumnus quite masculine looks to ensure the viewer gets the message. In the background is a wonderful Renaissance fantasy landscape with heaped-up hills similar to those seen in ancient Chinese landscapes.

Hendrik Goltzius gets close up in his Vertumnus and Pomona from 1613, and arms Pomona with a vicious-looking pruning knife. There is a wonderful contrast between the two women’s faces and hands here, making this a fine study of the effects of ageing.

Abraham Bloemaert’s Vertumnus and Pomona (1620) uses gaze to great effect: while the persuasive Vertumnus looks up at Pomona, her eyes are cast down, almost closing their lids.

Anthony van Dyck and Jan Roos collaborated in painting Vertumnus and Pomona in about 1625, which is remarkable for its rich symbolism and visual devices. Pomona has her left arm around Vertumnus, but in her right hand holds a silver sickle. She gazes wistfully into the distance, as if in a dream. Vertumnus is again looking up, pleading his case with the young woman, and his left hand (on a very muscular and masculine arm) is behind Pomona’s left knee, between her legs. At the right, Cupid grimaces at the deception, his back turned, pointing at what is going on with apparent disapproval. Then at the lower left corner is a melon cut open to reveal its symbolic form, with its juice and seeds inside as an overt anatomical allusion.

Adriaen van de Velde’s fine Vertumnus and Pomona from 1670 has been marred by the fading of the yellow he used to mix some of his greens, turning some of its foliage blue. He avoids any dangerous allusions, and returns to a more distant view of the pair talking together.

Jean Ranc’s startlingly contemporary Vertumnus and Pomona (c 1710-22) clothes the pair in the fashion of the day, but loses all reference to Pomona as a passionate gardener. At least Vertumnus’ hands are those of a man.

Seemingly influenced by the earlier painting of van Dyck and Roos, François Boucher puts the pair into an embrace in his Earth: Vertumnus and Pomona (1749), and Cupid’s mask play alludes to the deception.

Having cunningly promoted his own cause, Vertumnus tells Pomona the cautionary tale of Iphis and Anaxarete to press his case.

Iphis was a young man of humble origins, and unfortunately fell in love with the high-born Anaxarete. Knowing the hopelessness of his love for her, Iphis told her nurse, and persuaded her maids to take notes and flowers for her. Anaxarete’s response was iron-hearted and cruel: she laughed at him, and shut him out. Iphis was broken by this, and after a brief soliloquy, he hung himself from her door. Her servants cut his body down, but it was too late, he was dead. They carried his body to his widowed mother, who led it in funeral procession to the pyre. As she watched this from a window in an upper room in her house, Anaxarete was transformed into the cold stone of a statue.

Antonio Tempesta’s etching of Anaxarete Seeing the Dead Iphis (1606) condenses the story into a single image, in which Iphis hangs dead, and Anaxarete has just been transformed into stone in front of him, in what is really a form of multiplex narrative.

Virgil Solis adheres more rigorously to Ovid’s account, in his Iphis and Anaxarete, which must have been engraved before Solis’ death in 1562. His multiplex narrative incorporates two separate scenes: in the left foreground, the body of Iphis has been discovered hanging outside the door to Anaxarete’s house. In the right distance, Iphis’ corpse is carried to his funeral pyre, with his mother in close attendance, as Anaxarete looks on from her balcony, and is turned to stone.

Having tried trickery and his cautionary tale, Vertumnus is still getting nowhere with Pomona, so he transforms himself back into his own form, as a young man, which finally wins her heart. This brings Ovid’s conclusion that deception will fail, and success can only come through honesty.

It’s that outcome that Peter Paul Rubens hints at in his late oil sketch of Vertumnus and Pomona of 1636. There is now no pretence that Vertumnus is a woman: he lacks breasts, and even has heavy beard stubble. However, the embrace of his right arm still brings Pomona to push him away with her left arm.

Perhaps the outstanding depiction of this wonderful story is Rubens’ earlier and finished Vertumnus and Pomona from 1617-19. Vertumnus has assumed his real form, that of a handsome young man. Pomona looks back, her sickle still in her right hand, and her rejection of his advances is melting away in front of our eyes. Rubens even offers us a couple of rudely symbolic melons, and provides distant hints at Vertumnus doing the work in the garden while Pomona directs him, at the upper left.

What did we do in the evenings before the arrival of TV and radio? People read, talked to one another, played games, and made music. Many middle class homes had a piano, and many children became accomplished musicians. For this, we went into the music room. In one of the houses in which I grew up, we had a drawing-cum-music room containing a wonderful German upright piano that I practiced on daily. Here are some examples from the modest to the grand and regal.

Music features in several of Vermeer’s paintings, in The Concert (c 1663-66) more particularly than any other. Two ladies are making music, one playing a decorated harpsichord (or similar), the other singing. In the left foreground is a cello resting on its back. Tragically, on 18 March 1990 this and a dozen other works were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, MA, and it remains unrecovered.

If your home happened to be the palace at Versailles, then you could have a grander music room or two, as shown in François Flameng’s undated painting of a Concert at Versailles.

In the case of Adolph Menzel’s Concert for Flute with Frederick the Great in Sanssouci (1850-52), you could get the composer CPE Bach to accompany you on the harpsichord, and your flute teacher, Johann Joachim Quantz, to listen at the far right. This concert would have taken place in this palace near Potsdam in Germany about a century earlier, in about 1750.

The Music Room, painted by Herman Frederik Carel ten Kate in 1871 also shows a concert from the previous century. While this slightly more modest music room features a couple singing to the accompaniment of the piano, and there are musical instruments in the centre foreground, everyone else in the room is engaged in decidedly non-musical activities.

James Tissot’s Hush! from about 1875 shows a musical performance in a private residence, no doubt attended by the cream of society. Among the honoured guests at the right are two from the Asian continent, but the distinguished host is still awaited, their chair empty, and the violinist poised to begin her command performance once they are ready.

Fritz von Uhde’s Family Concert from 1881 is more typical of a musical evening in a middle class household, apart from the bedraggled crow in the foreground, who seems out of place.

Although the piano in the left foreground isn’t being played, Hanna Pauli’s group portrait of Friends (1900-07) shows an interesting group gathered in her family home. Among those present are the writer Ellen Key (1849-1926), a ‘difference’ feminist and advocate of child-centred parenting and learning, who is reading to the others.

Julius Schmid’s Schubertiade returns to the chandeliers of the past. This was painted in 1897 to celebrate the Austrian composer’s centenary, and shows him performing to a packed music room in the early years of the century.

Music rooms were also features of more compact homes.

Between 1908-26, Édouard Vuillard lived in a fifth floor apartment in Rue de Calais, Paris, overlooking what was then known as Place Vintimille, now Place Adolf-Max. In his Morning Concert, Place Vintimille from 1937-38, a trio of friends are playing for the artist in his apartment.

By that time, some music rooms featured cabinet radios and gramophones for family groups to listen to music performed by those not present.