Following the conundrums of the group portraits of the first of these two articles, this shows some that appear more straightforward, although they still need to be approached by asking who, where and when.

Raphael’s Portrait of Pope Leo X with Cardinals Giulio de’ Medici and Luigi Rossi (1517-19) groups its three figures closely together. The Pope sits not on a throne, but more informally, a magnificent illuminated book (thought to be the ‘Hamilton’ Bible from about 1350) open in front of him and a magnifying glass in his left hand.

Augustin Théodule Ribot’s Breton Fishermen and Their Families (c 1880-85) is a gritty collection of nameless faces from the coast of the north-west of France. Their features are as hard as the weather that they must have faced.

Moving towards the end of the nineteenth century, and to the artist’s colony of Skagen at the northern tip of Jutland in Denmark, we come to PS Krøyer’s magnificent group portrait of many of the Nordic Impressionists who gathered there each summer. From the left, moving around the table, this shows: Martha Møller Johansen, Viggo Johansen, Christian Krohg, PS Krøyer, Degn Brøndum, Michael Ancher, Oscar Björck, Thorvald Niss, Helene Christensen, Anna Ancher, and Helga Ancher. While this may appear a spontaneous record of an actual event, in fact it was over four years in the painting, and it seems unlikely that this group ever met in these circumstances.

The French Naturalist artist Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret was technically one of the most brilliant of all Cabanel’s students. He could achieve realism of photographic quality, as shown appropriately in this Wedding at the Photographer’s from 1879. Here is a painted group portrait of a couple and their family being photographed for their group portrait.

Many of the greatest portrait painters also created fine group portraits.

Some of Sir Godfrey Kneller’s many portraits of the British gentry include children or groups, such as The Harvey Family, painted in 1721.

In Sir Joshua Reynolds’ portrait of Lady Elizabeth Delmé and Her Children (1777-9) his brushwork becomes painterly for their clothes and in the background.

Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun painted more than thirty portraits of Marie Antoinette (1755-1793), wife of King Louis XVI, who was guillotined on 16 October 1793 during the French Revolution. This family portrait from 1787 shows Marie-Antoinette de Lorraine-Habsbourg, Queen of France, and Her Children. Vigée Le Brun started work on this on 9 July 1786, her sitter choosing a red dress fit for a queen. With her are Marie-Thérèse, the Duchess of Angoulême, Louis-Charles, who was to become Louis XVII of France, and Louis-Joseph, who became the Dauphin. The empty cradle was for Marie-Sophie-Béatrice, who died on 19 June, shortly before she would have been one.

My final paintings are all by artists of their families.

Benjamin West’s group portrait of The Artist and His Family from about 1772 gives insight into his peculiar circumstances. It shows, from the left, the Wests’ older son, Benjamin West’s wife Betsy, cradling their newborn second son in her lap, Benjamin West’s brother Thomas, and father John (who had been born in England), and standing in his lavender gown, holding palette and maulstick, is the artist himself.

Often compared with a traditional Nativity scene, it was described at the time as a “neat little scene of domestic happiness”. But looking at the directions of gaze, and the extraordinary detachment of Thomas and John West, who are staring into the distance, domestic happiness seems far away.

The short-lived Philipp Otto Runge painted this group portrait of We Three in 1805, the year after he had finished his Academy training, and shortly after his marriage. This shows his older brother Johann Daniel on the left, with the artist and his bride Pauline. This may have been painted after the couple had moved back to Hamburg later that year, although they soon returned to live with his parents in Wolgast.

During the summer of 1867, Frédéric Bazille started work on Portraits of the *** Family also known as The Family Gathering, which he didn’t complete until January 1868. This seems to have been one of his most carefully composed paintings, and he devoted a series of sketches to getting the arrangement of the figures and the terrace just right.

The figures include the artist, squeezed in last at the extreme left, an uncle, Bazille’s parents seated on the bench, Bazille’s cousin Pauline des Hours and her husband standing, an aunt and Thérèse des Hours (model for The Pink Dress) seated at the table, his brother Marc and his partner, and at the right Camille, the youngest of the des Hours sisters. This painting marked a special version of a regular summer meeting, as Pauline des Hours and Bazille’s brother Marc married the partners shown in the late summer of 1867.

At the time, such group portraits were exceptional in French art. It was exhibited at the Salon in 1868, and remains one of Bazille’s finest and most innovative works.

By contrast, Michael Peter Ancher’s family portrait on Christmas Day 1900, completed in 1902, looks funereal. A family bible is open on the table as they gaze grimly away from the magnificent triptych of waves behind them. I believe that the woman at the far right is Anna Ancher, then aged 40; she wears a distinctive necklace with an anchor, the Danish for which is anker.

One of Lovis Corinth’s most popular paintings from the early years of the twentieth century is this group portrait of The Artist and his Family (1909). All dressed up for what may have been intended to be a more formal group portrait, the artist’s wife Charlotte sits calmly cradling their daughter Wilhelmine, then just five months old, as the artist is struggling to paint them. Their son Thomas, aged five years, stands on a desk so that he can rest his hand on mother’s shoulder.

Since ancient times there have been some who need to live in temporary shelters. If you don’t have a dense wood to hand, then one of the better options is a tent consisting of animal skins or fabric stretched over a frame. If you want to be truly nomadic, then you can pack up your tent and tow it around wherever you want to go. This pair of articles looks at paintings featuring tents; today’s mainly in depictions of stories and events that took place in the more distant past, and tomorrow’s concentrates on their more modern use.

Armies have long been one of the main users of tents, to accommodate their many soldiers in field conditions. For the Greek forces during the war against Troy, that meant a period of ten years. Having lived in a two-man tent in the Antarctic for a period of nine months over the winter, that’s actually not as arduous as it might sound.

Tiepolo shows some of those tents in his fresco in the Villa Valmarana, Vicenza, from 1757. This, the last of them, shows the scene as Eurybates and Talthybius Take Briseis, Achilles’ Concubine, to Agamemnon, who presumably was also living under canvas throughout. As you’ll see in the paintings below, these tents are conical, and likely to be constructed around a central pole or stave.

Francesco de’ Rossi’s fresco of The Inhabitants of Sutrium Supplicate to Camillus to Free them from Tyranny shows a moment in early Roman history, with Camillus and his troops camped outside the town, when the city of Rome was being sacked by Gauls in around 390 BCE. Again, these tents are conical and of similar appearance.

Albrecht Altdorfer’s breathtaking view of the Battle of Issus (1529), fought between Alexander the Great and Darius III of the Achaemenid Empire, in 333 BC, shows a large tented camp in the distance.

Charles Le Brun’s account of The Queens of Persia at the Feet of Alexander, also called The Tent of Darius, is faithful to Plutarch, in placing this event in Darius’ abandoned tent. This appears a more ornate structure, and lacks a central pole, being most probably set on a wooden frame.

Johann Georg Platzer’s magnificent Rococo The Amazon Queen, Thalestris, in the Camp of Alexander the Great, was painted on copper towards the middle of the eighteenth century. At its centre are the figures of a monarch who could be Thalestris, wearing her crown, waving with her right hand to the arriving Amazons, and showing a fine pair of legs. Next to her is Alexander, who seems to be talking to or about the horse to the right of him (on his left), who could be Bucephalus. Alexander’s tent is great indeed, and pyramidal rather than conical in form, although others look simpler.

The armies that left Europe to fight the Crusades also lived for long periods in tents. Those are shown in paintings of Torquato Tassi’s epic Jerusalem Delivered, a fictional account of the first Crusade of 1096-99.

Here, David Teniers the Younger shows Armida before Godfrey of Bouillon (1628-30), amid the tents of the Christian forces, complete with their guy lines, used to tension and brace the structure.

Ary Scheffer’s painting of The Death of Saint Louis from about 1817 is one of a pair commemorating the death of the French King Saint Louis IX (1214-1270). He was a great reformer who got rid of barbarism from justice, including the banning of trials by ordeal. Louis took part in the seventh and eighth Crusades, and died of dysentery during an epidemic that struck the latter. This shows him in a tent on the Libyan coast in the throes of death, surrounded by his court, with the high spears of warriors in the left background.

William Hogarth’s portrait of David Garrick as Richard III from about 1745 shows William Shakespeare’s character waking in his tent with a start following a dream. In the distance are the long rows of conical tents housing his army.

Marià Fortuny’s vast and uncompleted canvas of The Battle of Tetouan (1862-66) shows Spanish forces attacking an Arab camp, to the left, as they advanced towards the city of Tétouan in Morocco in February 1860.

Vasily Vasilyevich Vereshchagin’s After the Attack. Plevna, 1877-1878 (1881) is a brutally frank depiction of the human devastation at a field hospital, with the wounded, dying and dead littered outside its long framed tents.

The architect and artificer Daedalus had been introduced by Ovid in his account of the death of the Minotaur, and the next myth in Metamorphoses tells of the tragic end to Daedalus’ stay on the island of Crete, where he and his son Icarus had effectively been imprisoned since the construction of the labyrinth that had confined the minotaur. Much as Daedalus yearned to leave the island and King Minos, there was no hope of him departing by sea, so he decided to take to the air.

Daedalus built two sets of wings made from feathers held together by beeswax. Once they were completed, he tested his by hovering in the air. He then cautioned his son to fly a middle course: neither so low that the sea would wet the feathers and make them heavy, nor so high that the heat of the sun would damage them. He also told Icarus to follow his lead, and not to try navigating by the stars.

Daedalus fitted his son with his wings, and gave him further advice about how to fly with them. He shed tears as he did that, and his hands trembled. Once they were both ready, Daedalus kissed his son, and flew off in the lead just like a bird with its fledgeling chick in tow.

Towards the end of his career in Rome in 1645-46, the great French painter Charles Le Brun painted Daedalus and Icarus. This shows the master artificer fastening wings made of feathers and wax on his son’s back, prior to their escape from Crete.

Andrea Sacchi’s Daedalus and Icarus (c 1645) shows Daedalus at the left, fitting Icarus’ wings, prior to the boy’s flight. Icarus has his right arm raised to allow the fitting, and looks intently at his new wings. Daedalus is concentrating on adjusting the thin ribbons passing over his son’s shoulders, and may be explaining to him the importance of flying at the right altitude.

Anthony van Dyck’s Daedalus and Icarus (1615-25) shows Daedalus giving his son the vital pre-flight briefing. From the father’s gestures, he is here explaining the importance of keeping the right altitude.

Frederic, Lord Leighton’s Icarus and Daedalus (c 1869), shows the pair on the roof of a tower overlooking the coast. Daedalus is fitting his son’s wings, and looks up at Icarus. The boy holds his right arm up, partly to allow his father to fit the wings, and possibly in a gesture of strength and defiance, as the two will shortly be escaping from Crete. Icarus looks to the right, presumably towards their mainland destination, and Daedalus is wearing a curious scalp-hugging cap intended for flight.

Charles Paul Landon’s (1760–1826) Icarus and Daedalus (1799) shows the moment that Icarus launches into flight from the top of the tower, his arms held out and treading air with his legs during this first flight. Daedalus stands behind, his arms still held horizontally forward from launching his son.

The pair flew over a fisherman holding his rod, a shepherd leaning on his crook, and a ploughman with his plough, amazing them with the sight. They flew past Delos and Paros, and approached further islands, but Icarus started to enjoy the thrill of flying too much, and soared too high. As he neared the sun, the wax securing the feathers in his wings softened, and his wings fell apart.

As Icarus fell from the sky, he called to his father, before entering the water in what’s now known in his memory as the Icarian Sea, between the Cyclades and the coast of modern Turkey. All Daedalus could see were the feathers, remnants of wings, on the surface of the water.

Rubens’ initial oil sketch of The Fall of Icarus (1636) above, was presumably turned into a finished painting by his apprentice Jacob Peter Gowy, below. Icarus, his wings in tatters and holding his arms up as if trying to flap them, plunges past Daedalus. The boy’s mouth and eyes are wide open in shock and fear, and his body tumbles as it falls. Daedalus is still flying, though, his wings intact and fully functional; he looks towards the falling body of his son in alarm. They are high above a bay containing people with a fortified town at the edge of the sea.

Merry-Joseph Blondel’s spectacular painted ceiling showing The Sun or the Fall of Icarus (1819) combines a similar view of Daedalus flying onward, and Icarus in free fall, with Apollo’s sun chariot being driven across the heavens.

Joos de Momper’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c 1565), above, show Icarus’ descent within a much bigger landscape, including some of Ovid’s finer details:

• an angler catching a fish with a rod and line,
• a shepherd leaning on a crook,
• a ploughman resting on the handles of his plough.

To aid the viewer, de Momper has painted their clothing scarlet.

De Momper may also have made the copy, below, of Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s famous Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. Here, Brueghel makes the viewer work harder to see the crucial elements of the story: all there is to be seen of Icarus are his flailing legs and some feathers, by the stern of the ship at the right. Daedalus isn’t visible at all, but the shepherd leaning on his crook is looking up at him, up to the left. As in de Momper’s own version, Brueghel also shows the ploughman and the angler.

Vlaho Bukovac (Biagio Faggioni) (1855–1922) painted two different versions of Icarus reaching earth: in The Fall of Icarus (1898), one panel of a diptych about this story, he shows Icarus on the seabed, as he drowns, the remains of his wings still visible.

His earlier Icarus on the Rocks (1897) departs from Ovid’s account and has Icarus crash onto rocks; his posture is similar in the two paintings.

Finally, Herbert Draper’s (1863–1920) Lament for Icarus (1898) shows an apocryphal and more romantic view, in which three nymphs have recovered the apparently dry body of Icarus, and he is laid out on a rock while they lament his fate to the accompaniment of a lyre. Perhaps influenced by contemporary thought about human flight, Draper gives Icarus huge wings, and those are shown intact, rather than disintegrated from their exposure to the sun’s heat.

Daedalus was full of remorse, and buried his son’s body on the nearby island. As he was digging his son’s grave, a solitary partridge watched him from a nearby oak tree. The partridge had originally been Daedalus’ nephew, who had been brought to him as an apprentice. As the nephew’s skills and ingenuity grew, Daedalus became envious of him, seeking to kill him and pretend it had been an accident. When Daedalus threw him from the roof of her temple on the Acropolis, Pallas Athena saved the apprentice by transforming him into a partridge in mid-air. The bird still remembers being saved from its fall, and to this day won’t fly far above the ground.

There are three events that have been widely depicted in European art that can readily be confused, and a fourth that doesn’t often appear in paintings. Each involves the elevation of a heroic figure from this earthly world into the heavens:

• Apotheosis, when a pre-christian hero is elevated to the status of god or goddess;
• Catasterisation, when a mortal is changed into a celestial body such as a star or constellation;
• Assumption, when the Virgin Mary was taken up into Heaven;
• Ascension, when Jesus Christ ascended into Heaven, and sometimes available to saints on their martyrdom.

This article considers the first of those, and its sequel tomorrow tackles the second and third. The last has seldom appeared explicitly in paint, except as the final scene in a series depicting the Passion and Crucifixion.

Strictly speaking, apotheosis was only open to demi-gods and -goddesses, one of whose parents were divine and the other mortal. However, it later became open to anyone whose achievements were sufficiently heroic that they merited promotion to deity.

What happened to Hercules at the end of his life, when he threw himself on his pyre, has resulted in confused imagery, such as Tiepolo’s wonderful The Apotheosis of Hercules (c 1765). Because Hercules was the son of Jupiter/Zeus, as his body was burning, Jupiter decreed that only his mortal ‘half’ would be consumed by fire. His divine part was then conveyed in a chariot in an apotheosis to the gods on Olympus, often portrayed as a saintly ascension. Once there, Hercules reconciled previous quarrels with Juno/Hera, and, as a god in his own right, married Hebe (the Roman Juventas), his half-sister, as classical deities were wont to do.

Peter Candid’s Aeneas Taken to Olympus by Venus from around 1600 shows Venus at the right, in her chariot with Cupid, anointing Aeneas, on the left, with nectar and ambrosia. Above them is the pantheon, arrayed in an imposing semicircle, and above them Jupiter himself, clutching his thunderbolts and ready to receive the new god. Aeneas qualified on the grounds that he was the son of Aphrodite/Venus by his mortal father Anchises.

Charles Le Brun painted The Deification of Aeneas in about 1642-44. This is a faithful depiction from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, with the river god Numicus sat in the front, and Venus anointing Aeneas with ambrosia and nectar to make him immortal as the god Jupiter Indiges. At the right is Venus’ mischievous son Cupid, trying on Aeneas’s armour, and the chariot towed by white doves is ready to take the hero up to join the gods.

Tiepolo’s sketch for a fresco ceiling in the Royal Palace in Madrid, The Apotheosis of Aeneas from about 1765, is another impressive account. The artist made this a little more elaborate by combining the apotheosis with the presentation of arms to Aeneas by his mother Venus. Aeneas is to the left of centre, dressed in prominent and earthly red. Above and to the right of him is his mother, Venus, dressed in white, ready to present the arms forged for him by Vulcan, her partner, who is shown below supervising their fabrication. Aeneas’ destination is the Temple of Immortality, glimpsed above and to the left of him, through a break in the divine clouds.

Jean-Baptiste Nattier is perhaps the only artist to have 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. Romulus qualified by virtue of his father being Mars, while his mortal mother was Rhea Silvia.

In post-classical history and legend, apotheosis was opened up more, and became an opportunity to fill a painting with an array of memorable figures in what’s more of a tribute than an elevation to heaven.

JAD Ingres’ Apotheosis of Homer from 1827 gathers together all those figures for whom Ingres had greatest respect, and were major influences. Although its own narrative is very simple, it invokes and pays tribute to those who Ingres saw as the great masters of narrative.

The group is posed on the steps in front of a classical Greek theatre, in formal symmetric composition. Homer sits at its centre, being crowned with laurels by the winged figure of the Universe.

Among those standing at the left are Dante, Virgil, Raphael, Sappho, Apelles, Euripides, Sophocles (holding a scroll), and the personification of the Iliad (seated, in red); in the lower file are Shakespeare, Tasso, Poussin, and Mozart.

From the right are, among others, Alexander the Great, Aristotle, Michelangelo, Socrates, Plato, Hesiod, Aesop (under the lyre), and the personification of the Odyssey (seated, in green, with an oar); in the lower file are Gluck, Molière, and others less known today.

Henry de Bourbon, King Henry IV of France, was the son of Jeanne III of Navarre and her husband Antoine de Bourbon, King of Navarre, neither of whom had any claim to deity. When Peter Paul Rubens was painting his vast cycle for Marie de’ Medici, he started its second half with Henry’s apotheosis or assumption, following the king’s assassination on the day after Marie’s coronation ceremony.

This is shown more clearly in this oil study (above) now in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. Below is the finished painting now in the Louvre’s dedicated gallery.

As in the rest of the cycle, Rubens doesn’t depict a real scene from history, but shows it in allegorical terms, using figures from classical mythology mixed with those from real history. Instead of painting a scene of Henry’s assassination, he made The Apotheosis of Henry IV and Homage to Marie de’ Medici, one of three landscape-format canvases in the series.

The left side of the painting shows the assassinated king being welcomed into heaven as a victor by the gods Jupiter and Saturn. Jupiter, as king of the Olympian gods, is Henry’s divine counterpart; Saturn, holding a sickle in his right hand, marks the end of Henry’s earthly existence. Below them is Bellona, an ancient Roman goddess of war, who is stripped of her armour and appears tormented.

On the right side, Marie is seated on her throne as Regent, wearing black widow’s weeds, as the personification of France kneels in homage and presents her with an orb of office. Behind the Regent, at the far right, is Minerva bearing her Aegis, the shield emblazoned with the image of Medusa’s head. Also present are Prudence and Divine Providence, and her court are paying tribute from below.