The revival of paintings of interiors in the middle of the nineteenth century flourished in several ways. For some, it was an opportunity to reveal their studio, and perhaps provide the viewer with a little insight into the artist. For others it was a way to recreate interiors of the past, or to deliver open-ended narrative.

The Painter and His Model (1855) shows one of Alfred Stevens’ young and fashionable models leaning over his shoulder, as he works on her portrait.

Stevens was an early enthusiast for the Japonisme that swept Paris. Insights into his life such as his The Psyché (My Studio) (c 1871) repay closer reading. 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 actually use a proper psyché, but has mounted a large mirror on his easel, perhaps to suggest that art is a reflection of life. A Japanese silk garment is draped over the mirror to limit its view to the model, breaking up her form in an unnatural way. At the lower right, the artist indicates his presence with a cigarette, and there is a small parrot who might imitate his speech. The studio is littered with Japanese prints and the artist’s canvases, and one painting on the wall is a study for his early What They Call Vagrancy, lacking most of its figures.

Léon Frédéric’s extraordinary Studio Interior from 1882 appears to be a fantasy self-portrait of the artist naked with a skeleton on his lap. The latter has been dressed up in undergarments with a long starry veil over them. His palette and brushes are at the lower right, and his clothes, including a top hat, are draped on chairs.

Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s Sunday Morning from about 1871 goes back to the interior of a house in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. The mistress of the house has just had a baby, and her midwife is holding that baby as she looks out into the daylight. This is a smaller version of a previous painting by Alma-Tadema titled A Birth Chamber, Seventeenth Century (1868), that extended the view to include the mother in bed.

The Music Room, painted by Herman Frederik Carel ten Kate in 1871 using oils, shows the fine quality of his conservative oil paintings. It’s worth bearing in mind that at this time the French Impressionists had already established their very different style, and this work is more typical of paintings from a century earlier. While this 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.

In 1872, James Tissot embarked on a series of paintings and engravings set in a tavern on the bank of the River Thames in London, probably in Rotherhithe or Wapping. The first to be exhibited was his An Interesting Story (c 1872). It’s the late 1700s, and an old soldier is telling one or more pretty young women interminable and incomprehensible stories about his military career, with the aid of charts spread out on the table. Here, the story is dubbed ‘interesting’ in irony.

Edgar Degas painted A Cotton Office in New Orleans in 1873, when he visited his mother’s family in New Orleans. It features several family portraits, and has a narrative background, showing a cotton buyer visiting the Musson cotton merchants. The elderly gentleman wearing a top hat, in the foreground, is Michel Musson, Degas’ uncle, and a partner in the business. Edgar Degas’ brothers Achille and René are slightly further back on the left (leaning idly against the open window), and sat reading a newspaper, respectively. Standing at the desk on the right is John Lavaudais, the cashier. The figures echo and repeat one another across and into the depths of the room, in dress, posture, and appearance.

While almost everyone else in the painting is lounging around, business is being transacted between the buyer and broker on either side of the table covered with the cotton, the broker being at the centre of the canvas. This small pool of commerce within an image dominated by idleness and dolce far niente reflects the situation of Degas and his family at the time.

At about the same time in New York, the American genre artist Eastman Johnson painted a narrative work that only makes any sense when you know its title of Not at Home (c 1873), showing 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 visitors. Or, if we know that this is the artist’s home, could it be that it’s Johnson himself who’s not at home?

Interiors don’t have to be domestic, as demonstrated by Louis Béroud’s early Staircase of the Opéra Garnier from 1877.

At about this time, Nordic artists started to realise the potential of interiors as explorations of light, led by the work of Harriet Backer.

Avskjeden (The Farewell) (1878) was probably Backer’s first really successful painting. It shows a grown daughter, left of centre, bidding farewell to her family as she leaves home. Backer probably painted this from her own emotional experience, as her father died in 1877, and she had informed her mother that she didn’t intend returning home, but to pursue her painting career instead.

When she travelled to France, her style began to loosen up: another early success was her Solitude (c 1880), her first painting accepted for the Salon in 1880. This was one of her first interiors featuring limited light, whose play was to become a dominant theme in her art.

Backer’s Blue Interiør from 1883 develops the theme of the play of light from the window on the person and contents of the interior of the room. Here the composition is complicated by the presence of a large mirror at the left.

One century ago today, 7 November 1924, the German painter Hans Thoma died in Karlsruhe, Germany. This is the second of two articles commemorating his life and art. Prior to 1886, he had struggled to get the critical attention and patronage that he thought his work deserved.

Apollo and Marsyas (1886) is his painting of the grisly myth of the contest between the god Apollo and the satyr Marsyas, playing the aulos, a type of double oboe commonly referred to as a flute. This was judged by the nine Muses, and resulted in the horrific flaying of the satyr, a popular motif for the great classical narrative painters. Thoma chooses to show the contest itself, with Marsyas playing, and only three of the Muses in the background. Although not a strongly narrative painting, as it makes no reference to the outcome, this was probably appreciated by contemporary viewers.

Eight Dancing Women with Bird Bodies (1886) is a more puzzling mythological painting. The best-known women with bird bodies were the sirens, who range in number from two to five. In another painting showing the sirens trying to lure a passing ship, Thoma paints similar figures, suggesting these are intended to be sirens.

The Sower in Thoma’s 1886 painting is strongly reminiscent of Jean-François Millet’s sowers, here at work in the ploughed field in the foreground. Beyond, the heavens have opened in a sudden downpour.

Memories of Orte from 1887 refers to Thoma’s second visit to Italy, and this ancient town about forty miles north of Rome. Two cloaked riders are silhouetted against the glowing buildings of Orte, perched on its tuff butte above the valley of the River Tiber.

Lonely Ride (1889) shows a mediaeval knight riding alone in full armour, through rolling, hilly countryside. This and others of his paintings suggest Thoma may have seen and been influenced by paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite movement when he visited Britain.

In 1890, Thoma’s career was transformed by his first one-man show in Munich, which brought him critical acclaim and national recognition. For the next twenty years or so, he was ranked among the leading artists in Germany.

Summer (Landscape near Karlsruhe) (1891) shows a fine summer’s afternoon on a country track, on the plain which he must have known well.

He returned to his idiosyncratic mythology with this fascinating painting of Wondrous Birds completed in 1892. The birds shown here aren’t storks or cranes, but are based on the grey heron, a common sight across much of the countryside of Europe. There are various myths and legends associated with storks and cranes, but I’m not aware of any for the heron.

Spring (1895) refers not to the season, but to the source of water shown here, in German, Die Quelle, the source). Thoma avoids the conventional classical treatment with an old river god, but shows a young man slaking his thirst. The woman with the lute could perhaps be a water nymph, or Naiad.

Thoma does refer to the season in his Spring Fairytale, An Allegory (1898), showing a woman who may have been influenced by the figure of Flora in Botticelli’s famous Primavera (c 1482). She is surrounded by meadow flowers, two small fawns, and sundry winged putti. Thoma seldom if ever depicted his putti with bird-like wings, but seems to have preferred the more unusual insect or butterfly wings, with their rich colours.

By 1899, Thoma had become associated with the Kronberg artists’ colony, and could afford to move his family into an apartment with its own studio near to the Schloss Friedrichshof in Kronberg im Taunus, outside Frankfurt. He was appointed professor at the academy in Karlsruhe (to the south of Frankfurt), and director of the Kunsthalle in that city, posts he held until he retired in 1920.

Thoma’s Self-portrait in Front of a Birch Grove (1899) is his best-known self-portrait, and probably marked his sixtieth birthday that year.

The Lauterbrunnen Valley (1904) shows one of the deepest valleys in the Swiss Alps, a gorge travelling five miles up to the spectacular Staubbach Falls, with the Eiger and other peaks beyond.

From 1905 to 1918, Thoma served in the upper chamber of the Baden State Parliament.

Prior to the First World War, like many German artists of the day including Lovis Corinth, Thoma was strongly supportive of the militarisation of Germany. His painting of War from 1907 thus seems strange, with its bleak apocalyptic vision.

In the year that war broke out, Thoma painted Spring Melody (1914), which could be interpreted as an idealistic longing for peace, rather than a statement of nationalism.

Thoma continued to paint through the war, and completed this Landscape in 1917. Then in his late seventies, this almost deserted view expresses a tranquillity that must have been wishful thinking at the time.

His eightieth birthday in 1919 was marked by a celebration organised by Ernst Oppler and Lovis Corinth. He died five years later, in 1924.

Reference

Wikipedia (in German).

After death, most of us will end up in a coffin, sometimes known euphemistically as a casket. Despite their widespread use, they seldom appear in paintings, perhaps because they obscure the body. Although there’s no shortage of deaths in classical myth and legend, I’ve been unable to find any conventional narrative painting that includes a coffin. There is, though, one remarkable history painting that does.

This is Francisco Pradilla’s painting of Doña Juana “la Loca” – Juana or Joanna the Mad – from 1877, which won the Medal of Honour at the National Exhibition in Spain, went on to the Exposition Universel in Paris, and won further acclaim in Berlin.

Queen Joanna of Castile, or Juana the Mad, brought about the union of the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, forming the basis of modern Spain. She married Philip the Handsome in 1496, shortly before her seventeenth birthday. He was crowned king of Castile in 1506, and was the first of the Habsburg monarchs in Spain. He died suddenly later that year, probably from typhoid fever, and Juana became mentally ill, refusing to let Philip’s body be buried. This is the basis of Pradilla’s painting, where Juana is shown in the nun’s habit she would have worn when she was eventually secreted into a convent. When her father, Ferdinand II, died in 1516, Juana inherited Aragon, and Spain was ruled under the personal union of her son Charles I, who was also elected Holy Roman Emperor.

Coffins do appear more in symbolic roles.

In 1923-24, Albin Egger-Lienz painted a thoroughly modern account of the Resurrection of Christ. His finished painting includes contemporary peasants, and the risen Christ standing in his own coffin.

They also appear in Frederic, Lord Leighton’s unusual And the Sea Gave Up the Dead Which Were in It (1892), whose title is a quotation from the Book of Revelation:
And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works.
(Revelation Chapter 20, verse 13.)

Considered to be one of his most dramatic paintings, it was initially intended to decorate Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London, but was rejected as unsuitable. It was then commissioned at reduced size by Henry Tate for his new gallery of British art, now The Tate Gallery in London.

Unlike much of the fearsome imagery of the Second Coming described in the book of Revelation, this is essentially an optimistic scene, being the resurrection and spiritual salvation of those who have died at sea, an all too common fate around the British coast. A central family group shows stages of awakening: the man has been fully awakened, his son is just starting to breathe but still white, and his wife still bears the pale green hue of the dead.

Around them, others are likewise being awoken from their coffins, presumably from burial at sea, or from the water itself. Leighton’s tones and colours refer to Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1819), by far the most famous painting of shipwreck and death at sea, with which Leighton was very familiar. There are also references to Michelangelo’s Entombment (1500-1), in the National Gallery and a favourite of Leighton’s at the time.

This third version of Arnold Böcklin’s famous Island of the Dead was painted in 1883 for his dealer. As with others he painted, this shows a coffin being brought by boat to the island for interment.

The few other paintings of coffins show them in more ordinary funerals.

At the end of his training in Munich, Teodor Axentowicz paid his first visit to the lands of the Hutsul people, in the Carpathian Mountains of Ukraine. His oil painting of a Hutsul Funeral from 1882 shows the Hutsul in the rigours of winter, the coffin being towed on a sledge behind a cart, and the mourners clutching candles as they make their way through the snow to the stave church in the distance.

Jakub Schikaneder’s finished version of The Sad Way from 1886 shows a single weary horse drawing the cart bearing a coffin. The woman, presumably a widow before her time, stares emptily at the rutted mud track, as a man walks beside them. In the background is the floodplain of a river in full flood. It appears to be in the late autumn, with the last of the brown leaves remaining on the trees. Schikaneder’s world is barren, bleak, and forlorn.

In his village in Norway, Nikolai Astrup recorded the public rites of the community, as in his Funeral Day in Jølster (before 1908). With the grandeur of the hills behind, a small party escorts the coffin of one of the villagers. The artist’s father, the pastor, leads the procession to the small churchyard.

Perhaps the most famous painting of a burial in European art is that below, Gustave Courbet’s Burial at Ornans (1849-50).

Courbet’s monumental Burial at Ornans (1849-50), shows in remarkably unemotional and objective terms the funeral of the artist’s great uncle in this small provincial town. The event took place in September 1848, but the painting gives the impression that it is a faithful record.

Courbet actually painted the work entirely in the studio, using those who were present as models. It shows a moment that could only have existed in the artist’s memory: like Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, it doesn’t necessarily represent an image that ever existed in reality. But it has been carefully researched, imagined, composed, and painted to give the impression of accuracy and objectivity, rather than some Romantic fantasy. Another feature it has in common is that its most significant object, the coffin, is almost obscured here by the bearers.

Finally, there’s one painting that explores one of the great fears of the nineteenth century, that of being presumed dead and being buried alive.

After his mother’s death, Antoine Wiertz became progressively more obsessed with death. His Premature Burial (1854) visits this not uncommon dread of the nineteenth century: that of being presumed dead, buried, and then recovering to find yourself in a coffin. This did happen, particularly during cholera epidemics, as indicated by the lettering on the opening coffin. The profound shock resulting from choleric dehydration could make the pulse and breathing so feeble as to escape detection; with hundreds or thousands of dead, many were dumped hurriedly into mass-produced coffins and so into mass graves. And a very few managed to survive, leading to coffins being designed with bells that could be rung by a recovered occupant. Wiertz’s victim is left with the nightmare scenario of trying to make it back to the land of the living.

Having just told us of the events leading to the death and apotheosis of Hercules, Ovid continues book 9 of his Metamorphoses by telling the story of his birth. He leads into this by telling us that Alcmena, Hercules’ mother, had found Iole, Hercules’ lover, a good confidante. Since Hercules’ apotheosis, and at the hero’s instruction, Hyllus had married Iole, and she was now pregnant with his child.

This reminds Alcmena of her own pregnancy with Hercules, that had been cursed by Juno to be a difficult one. She was in labour for seven days and nights, in agony, and called on Lucina and the multiple Roman deities of childbirth to deliver her child. But Lucina had received instructions from Juno, and would not let the labour progress.

Lucina sat on an altar by the door, her legs crossed and her hands linked, preventing delivery. One of Alcmena’s most loyal maids, Galanthis, took matters into her own hands, and announced to Lucina that Hercules had been born. The goddess was so shocked that she jumped up, parting her hands, so allowing Alcmena’s labour to conclude at last. But Galanthis ridiculed Lucina for this. The goddess seized Galanthis by her hair and dragged her along the ground. As the maid struggled to rise she was transformed into a weasel, and Hercules entered the world.

I’ve been unable to find any paintings of this story, but there are several engravings.

Virgil Solis engraved Alcmena’s Labour at some time around 1550. Alcmena is in the left foreground, in the throes of her protracted labour, with four women attending to her. In the background, two women are talking, and at the far right, Lucina is dragging Galanthis to the ground by her hair. There’s also a weasel walking past.

Subsequent engravings have drawn on this. Some show Lucina and Galanthis fighting in the background, but most omit the weasel. One other comes close to showing the story as told by Ovid.

The unknown engraver who made Alcmena Giving Birth to Hercules: Juno, Jealous of the Child, Attempts to Delay the Childbirth, in about 1606, has an almost identical group around Alcmena. The same two women are talking in the background, but the weasel is prominent.

Other stories about Hercules as a baby and young child, which Ovid doesn’t tell here, have been much better represented in paintings. According to older Greek myths, the sons of Jupiter could only become divine if they were suckled at Juno’s breast. Shortly after the birth of Hercules, Mercury took the infant to Juno, who put him to her breast. When she realised who the baby was, she pulled him away, and the excess milk released as a result sprayed over the heavens, forming the Milky Way.

There are two outstanding paintings showing this unusual scene.

Jacopo Tintoretto’s The Origin of the Milky Way from about 1575 shows the infant Hercules being pulled away by an anonymous assistant, with fine streams of milk gushing upwards to generate individual stars. In the background, Jupiter’s eagle appears to have a crablike object in its talons, perhaps representing the constellation of the Crab (Cancer), and Juno’s peacocks are at the right.

Just a few years before his death, Rubens painted an even more wonderful version, The Birth of the Milky Way (1636-37). Jupiter sits in the background on the left, seemingly bored. Juno’s milk arcs out from her left breast over the heavens, and her peacocks look distressed.

Other myths tell that Juno was still furious that Hercules had been born, so she placed two serpents in his cradle, in an attempt to kill the child. Hercules’ mortal twin Iphicles (not mentioned by Ovid) screamed at the snakes, bringing their father Amphitryon running. He found Hercules strangling the serpents with his bare hands: proof that he was indeed the son of Jupiter.

Several fine paintings seize this unique opportunity to show an infant strangling serpents.

This painting from the mid seventeenth century, attributed to Bernardino Mei, has been neutrally titled Scene from the Infancy of Hercules. Rather than let his father discover the baby’s strange abilities, it’s Alcmena who has come running into his nursery.

Pompeo Batoni’s account, The Infant Hercules Strangling Serpents in his Cradle from 1743, succeeds because it shows so well Hercules’ parents, disturbed from their bed, discovering their baby despatching the snakes, all by the light of an oil lamp.

The third version of this story comes from Sir Joshua Reynolds, who was commissioned by Catherine the Great of Russia in 1785 to paint her a history subject of his choice. Reynolds thought that he could flatter the Empress of Russia, perhaps, and produced this preparatory study for the heart of his final work.

The Infant Hercules was painted between about 1785-88, then exhibited at the Royal Academy before being sent to Russia. Reynolds is reputed to have used a real baby as his model, and later reused this for a painting of Puck as a baby.

Reynolds’ finished painting of The Infant Hercules Strangling Serpents in his Cradle (1788) loses the baby among its elaborate supporting cast. It has also suffered problems with deterioration in its paint layer, a common issue with many of Reynold’s paintings.

We’re spending this weekend in the city of Gloucester, to the north-east of Boston, Massachusetts, in the company of some of the fine paintings of its harbour and coast. In the first of these two articles, I showed views from those of pioneer Fitz Henry Lane in 1850, up to Frank Duveneck in 1910.

To remind you of the location, here’s the map from 1893 again.

Louise Upton Brumback was a pupil of William Merritt Chase, friend and contemporary of Frank Duveneck. She learned to paint en plein air in Chase’s summer school on Long Island, before moving to live in Kansas City, Missouri. From 1909, the Brumbacks spent their summers in the artists’ colony of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and the rest of the year in Manhattan; those summers were to prove her most productive seasons.

From the outset, Brumback’s paintings reflected her nature. Bathers Along the Shore (1910) is decidedly post-Impressionist, highly individual, colourful, and expressed in strong terms.

Gloucester, Massachusetts (1912) is an unusual view of part of what had been one of the USA’s busiest seaports.

In 1912 the Brumbacks had a house built for them in East Gloucester, and Louise started to exhibit more frequently, and much more successfully. By 1914, she showed paintings at the National Academy of Design, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC and in Boston, and had a solo show at the Fine Arts Institute in Kansas City. Her husband had been able to retire early from his legal practice, and devoted his time and effort to supporting her career.

With her more mature style, she became best-known for vibrantly colourful beach scenes, such as her Good Harbor Beach, showing the coast near Gloucester in 1915.

Her undated Good Harbor Gloucester was probably painted in the same, or an adjacent, summer.

Three Umbrellas (undated) features impasto across the beach, and unusual brushstrokes in the sky.

Even some of her later paintings have a primitive look about them, as in Grey Day Gloucester from 1920, with its boxy houses, relaxed perspective, and simple reflections.

Although I have only been able to obtain this monochrome image of her later view of Gloucester Harbour from about 1921, its details show a marked contrast. She died in Gloucester in 1929.

My last artist was another of Chase’s pupils, who was influenced by Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists: the Modernist painter Marsden Hartley. Although more strongly associated with his native Maine, he too visited Gloucester.

Gloucester Fantasy (c 1934-36) shows the seaport of Gloucester Harbour, with graffiti made by Hartley using a pencil in the oil paint.

Both Brumback and Hartley visited a historic area in the hills between Gloucester and Rockport. Between 1693 and 1830, this had been a flourishing settlement known as Dogtown. In the middle of the eighteenth century this housed up to a hundred families. The growth of Gloucester drew people away, and in the early nineteenth century Dogtown had been largely depopulated, leaving a few occupants, some of whom were accused of witchcraft. The last building was demolished in 1845, and the land returned to dense forest.

Louise Upton Brumback’s Dogtown, Cape Ann, Massachusetts (1920) shows this area. Rocky and with poor soil, it now consists of woodland with a mesh of trails and old roads, as seen in the valley on the right.

When Marsden Hartley returned to the USA in 1930, he toured some of the classic locations in Massachusetts, including Dogtown. On an early visit there in 1931, he painted his Blueberry Highway, Dogtown, an unusual take on this desolate wooded and rocky area, which must have been in the fall/autumn. He wrote that Dogtown was a cross between Easter Island and Stonehenge.

Dogtown Common (1936) is Hartley’s later and more conventional depiction of this abandoned settlement.

This weekend I’d like you join me on a trip to one of the oldest artist’s colonies in America, and once one of it’s busiest ports, the city of Gloucester in Massachusetts, just over thirty miles (50 km) north-east of Boston. Its large natural harbour has been painted by a succession of many of the greatest American landscape artists since the middle of the nineteenth century, and my selection of their works in this weekend’s two articles is a potted history of modern painting styles.

This map of the Cape Ann peninsula from 1893 shows the areas that you’ll see pictured, around Gloucester Harbor that encloses Ten Pound Island to the south of the city, surrounding beaches, and as a finale to tomorrow’s article, the old abandoned settlement of Dogwood in the hills to the north.

It was local artist Fitz Henry Lane who first started painting the coast here, in the first half of the nineteenth century. His early style steadily evolved through paintings like this of Gloucester Harbor from 1850 as he increasingly explored the effects of light and atmosphere.

By about 1860, when Lane painted Ship in Fog, Gloucester Harbor, this had reached Luminism, an approach allied with the writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalist movement.

In the summer of 1873, the aspiring Boston artist Winslow Homer visited, at a critical time in his career. He was in the process of making watercolour his preferred medium, and abandoning work as an illustrator, to devote his time to landscape painting.

This matching pair of watercolour (above) and oil (below) versions of the same motif demonstrate his skill in both.

Perhaps as a result of his visit to France, many of Homer’s paintings during the 1870s showed very loose brushwork, and greater emphasis on markmaking than previously. At first the critics were disparaging of his watercolours, but they were popular and sold well. He also developed and often used a wide range of techniques to enhance his watercolours. These included the use of both transparent and opaque watercolour, thin layered washes, scraping, texture, resist, splattering, and even abrasive paper.

In the late 1870s Homer became more reclusive, lived in Gloucester, and at one time in Eastern Point Lighthouse, before he travelled to England, where he lived and painted in the coastal village of Cullercoats in 1881-82.

Willard Metcalf, an American Impressionist who was born near Boston, visited and painted Gloucester Harbour in 1895. This is his view of Smith Cove in East Gloucester, looking towards its inner harbour, with the town itself on the opposite shore. It’s a superb set-piece of what had been a couple of decades earlier the busiest port in the USA. With the rapid decline of sail at the end of the nineteenth century, though, it was slowly returning to a quieter existence, with its supporting industries reducing.

In about 1899, Metcalf’s contemporary Frederick Childe Hassam, another American Impressionist, visited and painted Gloucester Inner Harbor. Hassam had also been born in Boston, and like Homer had been a successful illustrator before visiting Europe in 1883.

Frank Duveneck had been born in Kentucky and joined the German community in Cincinnati, Ohio, before studying alongside William Merritt Chase in Munich, Germany. When he returned to the USA, he found first success in Boston. Later in his career, he spent his summers in and around Gloucester, where he painted his Horizon at Gloucester (c 1905), showing the port’s distinctive skyline from Eastern Point.

The Yellow Pier Shed (c 1910) is another of Duveneck’s summer paintings of Gloucester’s harbour.

Curiously, in his final years he painted several views of Brace’s Rock (c 1916), off Eastern Point, Gloucester. Fitz Henry Lane had done the same shortly before his death.

After the popularity of genre scenes and interiors in the Dutch Golden Age, the middle classes had less influence over themes in art until the nineteenth century.

They were then able to indulge in a few paintings and framed prints of their own, although most would have been family portraits rather than anything of greater aesthetic or cultural value. Matthäus Kern’s watercolour showing A Study Interior at St. Polten from 1837 is unusual for being an early pure interior, with no sign of figures, except in the portraits.

Then came Orientalist interiors.

Eugène Delacroix’s Women of Algiers in their Apartment is his first Orientalist masterpiece, based in part on the watercolours and sketches made of local models during his visits to Morocco and Tangier, combined with studio work in Paris using a European model dressed in clothing the artist had brought back from North Africa. The black servant at the right appears to be an invention added for effect, as an extra touch of exoticism. The end result is harmonious, and makes exceptional use of light and colour, the fine details of the interior giving the image the air of complete authenticity.

In the mid-1850s, Théodore Chassériau’s Orientalism took the inevitable turn towards the erotic. This started with his Orientalist Interior: Nude in a Harem from 1850-52, referring strongly to Delacroix’s Women of Algiers, and equally rich in detail.

Narrative painting also started to turn away from classical themes, and became framed around open-ended narrative and ‘problem pictures’ to challenge those trying to read them.

As far as I can discover, one of the earliest major paintings that intentionally lacks 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 a multitude of clues to be found in the 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. This is, therefore, extra-marital.

The interior around them has signs that she’s 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 with which she whiles 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 some 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.” Ironically, his model was his girlfriend at the time, Annie Miller, an uneducated barmaid who was just sixteen.

The only artist in the nineteenth century who seems to have painted any significant number of narrative works based on popular contemporary writers is Robert Braithwaite Martineau. The Tate Gallery has two such paintings of his: above is Kit’s Writing Lesson (1852), showing a less than memorable scene from Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop, with its elaborately detailed interior. The other (not shown here) is Picciola (1853), based on the 1836 novel of the same name by the obscure French novelist Xavier Boniface Saintine (1798-1865).

Rebecca Solomon’s Appointment (1861) appears to be another early problem picture, with a deliberately open-ended narrative set in an interior. A beautiful woman stands in front of a mirror, and looks intently at a man, who is only seen in his reflection in the mirror, and is standing in a doorway behind the viewer’s right shoulder. The woman is dressed to go out, and is holding a letter in her gloved hands. The clock on the mantlepiece shows that it’s about thirteen minutes past seven.

John Everett Millais painted his Eve of St Agnes in 1863, in the King’s Bedroom in the Jacobean house at Knole Park, near Sevenoaks in Kent. His model is his wife Effie, formerly Euphemia Gray, who married John Ruskin, and is here set in a rich period interior.

The last of these open-ended narratives set in interiors is the most puzzling, Edgar Degas’s Interior from 1868-9, also known as The Rape.

A man and a woman are in a bedroom together. She’s at the left, partly kneeling down, facing to the left, and partially (un)dressed. He’s at the right, fully dressed in street clothes, standing in front of the door, with his hands thrust deep into his trouser pockets.

The woman’s outer clothing is placed at the foot of the bed, and her corset has been hurriedly or carelessly cast onto the floor beside 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.

Just behind the woman is a small occasional table, on which there is 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 small pair of scissors and other items from a clothes repair kit or ‘housewife’. There’s a wealth of detail that can fuel many different accounts of what is going on in this interior.

Little known today outside his native Germany, Hans Thoma (1839–1924) was a prolific painter with a distinctive style, who died a century ago, on 7 November 1924. In this article, I look at his career and a small selection of his paintings up to the time that he achieved recognition around 1885, to be concluded next week marking the anniversary of his death.

Thoma was born in the Black Forest, in Germany, and started his training as a lithographer in Basel, before turning to painting ornamental clock faces. From 1859, he studied at the academy in Karlsruhe, under Johann Wilhelm Schirmer and Ludwig Des Coudres.

Autumn Tree, Wiesenthal was painted when he was still a student in Karlsruhe, in about 1862-63. It has the high chroma colours and gestural brushwork indicative of Impressionist style, at a time when Claude Monet was still painting in a tighter, realist manner.

After completing his training in 1866, Thoma moved from Karlsruhe to Basel in north-west Switzerland, then to Düsseldorf. At that time, Düsseldorf was home to one of the leading landscape painting schools in Europe, and was a significant influence on the Hudson River School in the USA, and several of its members trained there.

In Chickenfeed (1867), Thoma tackles this genre scene in a more traditional and detailed realist style.

At first sight, Thoma’s In the Sunshine (1867) appears to show an oddly flattened face, with both the woman’s eyes visible. In fact the woman’s head is shown in profile, and what seems to be her left eye is not part of her face at all. Otherwise he has combined colour contrasts with a carefully detailed landscape.

The following year he moved to Paris, where he came to admire the work of Gustave Courbet, and the Barbizon School. He returned to Germany in 1870, where he settled in Munich, then the centre of German arts, until 1876.

Under the Elderberry (1871) is a delightful portrait of a mother and her young child, with finely detailed hair and elder flowers. His colours are softer than before, as suits this subject.

These eight Children Dancing in a Ring (1872) are set in a Bavarian alpine meadow, with pastures and high mountains in the far distance.

Thoma’s painting of two lovers in Summer from 1872 returns to a more painterly style in its flowers and vegetation. It also demonstrates his inclination towards mediaeval romance and ‘faerie’ paintings, with the chain of three winged putti in the upper right.

Siblings (1873) is an example of his domestic genre scenes. The brother sits disconsolate at the table, while his sister reads intently. By the window is a spinning wheel, the wool above it adorned with a blue ribbon.

In 1874, Thoma visited Italy for the first time.

Ring dancing appears again in his Children and Putti in a Ring (1874), although now the winged putti have come down from the sky to follow a young faun-like figure and a nymph. At the bottom left is a snake threatening to disrupt the scene. As with his other mythical settings, Thoma doesn’t appear to be telling a specific story, but populates his enchanted landscape with curious creatures.

Thoma’s pure landscapes include explorations of big skies and the transient effects of light, as in his Mainebene (1875), showing the plain of the River Main lit by shafts of light. At the lower left is a team ploughing.

He handles backlighting skilfully in A Peaceful Sunday (1876). An elderly couple are sat at a plain wooden table, in their urban apartment. She works at her crochet, he reads. You can almost hear the soft, measured tick of the clock which is out of sight, slowly passing their remaining years.

Three Mermaids (1879) is a complete contrast, with its raucous nudity and frolics with fish under the light of the moon. Thoma’s mermaids are remarkably human in form, lacking fishtails.

In 1878, Thoma moved to Frankfurt, where he was a close friend of the painter Wilhelm Steinhausen. The following year he visited Britain, and a year later returned to Italy.

As was popular during the nineteenth century, Thoma repurposed Nordic mythology with a more Germanic interpretation. The Trek of the Gods to Valhalla (1880) shows a scene that may have been inspired by Wagner’s Ring cycle, first performed at Bayreuth in 1876. This is the group of gods known as the Æsir riding across the bridge Bifröst, which is formed from a burning rainbow and reaches between Midgard (the realm of humans) and Asgard (the realm of the gods). The Æsir traditionally include Odin, Frigg, Thor, Baldr, and Týr. Recognisable on the bridge are Odin, holding his staff, with Frigg, and Thor with his hammer. At the left is probably Iðunn, holding an apple of her youth aloft. In Nordic mythology, this is an event foretold as part of the process of Ragnarök.

I’m not sure of the mythical background to his Sea Wonders (1881), where four boys have raised up a surface on which stands a winged putto clutching an egg. It is, nevertheless, a powerful image.

The Öd, View of Holzhausenpark in Frankfurt am Main (1883) shows what is perhaps better-known as Adolph-von-Holzhausen Park, which started as the larger Holzhausen Oed in around 1552, and became a public park in 1912-13. The prominent white building is its distinctive moated baroque summer residence.

Reference

Wikipedia (in German).

Mermaids and mermen are mythical creatures with origins outside the classical Mediterranean civilisations. Conventionally, their upper body is human, while below the waist they have the form of a fish. Mermaids seem invariably young, beautiful and buxom, and are most frequently encountered by fishermen and those who go down to the sea. In the Middle Ages they became confounded with the sirens of Greek and Roman myth, who were part human and part bird.

John William Waterhouse’s diploma study for the Royal Academy, painted in 1900, shows a conventional image of A Mermaid, seen combing her long tresses on the shore.

Despite their separate origin, mermaids have been depicted in accounts of some classical myths, perpetuating medieval confusion.

Gustave Moreau’s Venus Rising from the Sea from 1866 shows the goddess as she has just been born from the sea, and sits on a coastal rock, her arms outstretched in an almost messianic pose. On the left, a mermaid attendant holds up half an oyster shell with a single large pearl glinting in it. On the right, a merman proffers her a tree of bright pink coral, and cradles a large conch shell.

Ary Renan’s Charybdis and Scylla (1894) is an imaginative painting of one of the dangers to mariners in the Strait of Messina, between Sicily and the Italian mainland. Scylla was said to be a six-headed sea monster, but was actually a rock shoal, and Charybdis was a whirlpool. Renan shows both together, the whirlpool with its mountainous standing waves at the left, and the rocks at the right, with the form of a beautiful mermaid embedded in them.

As the First World War was ending, Franz von Stuck returned to his favourite faun motif in A Faun and a Mermaid (1918). This has survived in two almost identical versions, the other now being in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin. His version of a mermaid is a maritime equivalent of a faun, with separate scaly legs rather than the more conventional single fish tail. She grasps the faun’s horns and laughs with joy as the faun gives her a piggy-back out of the sea.

Perhaps the earliest painting of a mermaid in European art is in a Christian religious painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder, from 1518-20.

Cranach’s Saint Christopher shows the saint with his back and legs flexed as he bears the infant Christ on his left shoulder. In the foreground is an unusual putto-mermaid with a long coiled fish tail.

Mermaids feature in folktales from many of the traditions of Europe, where they’re known by local names such as havfrue in Denmark.

John Reinhard Weguelin’s watercolour of The Mermaid of Zennor (1900) tells the legend of a mermaid living in a cove near Zennor in Cornwall. This scene brings her together with Matthew Trewhella, a local chorister, whose voice she had fallen in love with. The legend tells that the couple went to live in the sea, and that his voice can still be heard in the cove.

Peter Nicolai Arbo’s Liden Gunver and the Merman (1874-1880) is drawn from an opera The Fishers, by Johannes Ewald and Johann Hartmann, first performed in Copenhagen in 1780. The young woman Liden Gunver, on the right, is taken to sea by the alluring but deceptive merman on the left.

Hans Thoma’s Three Mermaids (1879) lack fishtails as they frolic raucously with fish under the light of the moon.

Gustav Klimt’s Mermaids (Silverfish) (c 1899) appear to be tadpole-like creatures with smiling, womanly faces.

Once Achelous had completed telling the story of how his lost horn had been transformed into the Horn of Plenty, the floods had abated, so his guests left the banquet, leaving Ovid to explain the events leading to the death of the great hero Hercules. This reverses the chronological order, as the next story after that in Metamorphoses tells of his birth.

Having won her hand by defeating Achelous, Hercules married the beautiful Deianira, and was returning with her to his native city. The couple reached the River Euenus, which was still in spate from the winter’s rains. Hercules feared for his bride trying to cross the river, but the centaur Nessus came up and offered to carry her across.

Hercules had thrown his club and bow to the other bank and had swum across the river when he heard Deianira’s voice calling. He suspected Nessus was trying to abduct her, so shouted warning to him before loosing an arrow at the centaur’s back.

Ovid’s description of these events poses a problem for those trying to depict them, in choosing the right point of view and composition to remain faithful to that account.

Guido Reni’s masterly painting from around 1620, one of the finest of its period in the Louvre, almost fills the canvas with Nessus, who looks worryingly heroic, and Deianeira, who seems to be flying. The small figure of Hercules in the distance is well-lit, but loses the details of bow and arrow. In any case, that arrow could hardly strike Nessus in the chest.

Paolo Veronese’s painting from about 1586 also elects for this early moment, as Hercules is readying his bow and arrow, with Nessus just reaching the opposite bank. He shows the scene from Hercules’ position, but discovers the problems with that point of view: Nessus and Deianeira are now small, and Nessus is looking away with his chest concealed, and even Hercules’ face is turned from the viewer. The result makes its hero look more like a furtive stalker.

This marvellous painting was probably made by Rubens’ workshop around the time of the Master’s death in 1640. It views the events from the bank on which Hercules is poised to shoot his arrow into Nessus. This has the centaur running across the width of the canvas, his face and body well exposed for Hercules’ arrow to enter his chest. To make clear Nessus’ intentions, a winged Cupid has been added, and Deianeira’s facial expression is clear in intent. An additional couple, in the right foreground, might be intended to be a ferryman and his friend, who appear superfluous apart from their role in achieving compositional balance.

Antonio del Pollaiolo’s painting from about 1475–80 tries a side-on view, requiring Nessus to be shot while still in the river, in a slight adjustment to the original story. Deianeira appears precariously balanced, and must be grateful that Nessus’ muscular arms save her from being dropped into the river below. The artist also leaves it to the viewer to know that Hercules’ poisoned arrow strikes Nessus rather than Deianeira.

Three centuries later, Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée clearly understood the compositional problem, but didn’t arrive at such a good solution. Nessus, bearing a distressed Deianeira in his arms, has just reached the opposite bank, in the foreground. Hercules is on the left in the distance, and we can at least see his face, bow and arrow. There appears to be no way that Hercules’ arrow could impale Nessus’ chest, without first passing through some of the abundant Deianeira, nor his back. Lagrenée also adds a ferryman, who seems to have been knocked over in Nessus’ haste to make off with his captive.

Gustave Moreau’s final drawing of about 1860, squared up and ready to transfer to canvas for painting, alters the story to make its composition feasible. He puts Nessus in the foreground, with the attendant risk of making him appear the hero, somehow supporting the upstretched body of Deianeira. In the right distance, Hercules has already loosed the fatal arrow, which is prominently embedded not in the front of Nessus’ chest, but in his back. The centaur’s legs have collapsed under him, and his head and neck are stretched up in the agony of death.

Gustave Moreau and Jules Élie Delaunay seem to have worked on a compositional solution together, resulting in Delaunay’s brilliant painting of 1870, which is sadly not available for use here.

That single shot ran Nessus through. He tore the arrow out, and his blood spurted freely, mixed with poison from the Lernaean hydra. Determined to avenge his own death, the centaur gave Deianira his tunic soaked with that poison, telling her to keep it to “strengthen waning love.”

In about 1706, Sebastiano Ricci embroidered this story further, showing Hercules, his left hand grasping Nessus’ mouth, about to club the centaur to death, while a slightly bedraggled Deianeira watches in the background. There’s no arrow in Nessus’ chest, and Hercules’ quiver is puzzlingly trapped under Nessus’ right foreleg. Three other figures of uncertain roles are at the right, and a winged putto hovers overhead, covering its eyes with its right hand.

In Arnold Böcklin’s puzzling painting from 1898, Nessus is far from part-human, and Deianeira isn’t the beauty she was claimed to be. As those two wrestle grimly, Hercules has stolen up behind them, and is busy pushing a spear into Nessus’ bulging belly. Blood pours from the wound, but Deianeira is in no position to collect it.

Years passed after Nessus’ death, and Hercules was away in Oechalia, intending to pay his respects to Jupiter at Cenaeum. Word reached Deianira that her husband had fallen in love there with Iole. Initially, she was upset, but then tried to devise a strategy to address his rumoured unfaithfulness. It was then that she recalled the blood of Nessus, and his dying words to her. She therefore impregnated a shirt with that blood, and gave that to Lichas, Hercules’ servant, to take to her husband.

This is shown in this beautiful miniature accompanying Octavien de Saint-Gelais’ translation of Ovid’s Heroides from about 1510.

Hercules donned the shirt as he was about to pray to Jupiter. He felt warmth spreading throughout his limbs, quickly growing into intense pain. Trying to tear the shirt off, he obtained no relief, and only ripped off his burnt skin from the burning flesh underneath. Hercules roamed through Oeta like a wounded beast, still trying to tear the shirt off his body. He came across Lichas, and accused him of being his murderer. His servant tried to protest his innocence, but Hercules picked him up, swung him around, and flung him out to sea, where he was transformed into a rock pinnacle.

Hercules then cut down trees and built himself a funeral pyre. Ordering this to be lit, he climbed on top, and lay back on his lionskin.

This is illustrated in another miniature, The Death of Hercules (c 1470), this time for Raoul Le Fèvre’s Histoires de Troyes.

Francisco de Zurbarán’s powerful Death of Hercules (1634) uses chiaroscuro as stark as any of Caravaggio’s to show a Christian martyrdom, with its victim staring up to heaven, commending his soul to God.

Jupiter came to the aid of the dying hero, calling on the gods to consent to Hercules being transformed into a god; they agreed, and his immortal form was carried away on a chariot drawn by four horses, into the stars above.

Tiepolo’s wonderful Apotheosis of Hercules (c 1765) portrays this as a saintly ascension, which seems inappropriate.

Painting in the Dutch Golden Age underwent remarkable evolution. In the fifty years between the 1620s and the French invasion of the Dutch Republic in 1672, established genres grew novel sub-genres, with artists specialising in each. These included ‘genre’ scenes of everyday life, with artists devoted to painting taverns, women working, festivities, markets, or domestic interiors. The latter appear to have been among the first such depictions in modern art.

During the 1650s, interiors started to become distinct from other scenes of everyday life, as the significance of their figures diminished, although few if any dispensed with them altogether.

Gerard ter Borch (1617–1681) specialised in domestic interiors, some containing open-ended narratives to encourage the viewer to speculate on their resolution. Two centuries later, those were to be become popular again, particularly in Britain, where they were known as problem pictures and featured in the press.

Ter Borch’s The Messenger, usually know as Unwelcome News, from 1653, develops his favourite theme of the arrival of a message. The young man at the left is still booted and spurred from riding to deliver a message to this couple. Slung over his shoulder is a trumpet, to announce his arrival and assert his importance. The recipient wears a shiny breastplate and riding boots, and is taken aback at the news the messenger brings. His wife leans on her husband’s thigh, her face serious.

The scene is the front room of a house in the Golden Age. Behind them is a traditional bed typical of living areas at the time, with some of their possessions resting on a table between the couple and their bed. Hanging up on a bedpost is the husband’s sword, and behind them are a gun and powder horn. Is this letter news of his recall to military service, perhaps? Will he soon have to ride away from his wife, leaving her alone to bring up their family?

Although the three figures take the limelight, ter Borch picks out the mundane details of the room behind them instead of letting them fade into darkness.

Three Figures Conversing in an Interior is another of ter Borch’s narrative genre works, and more popularly known as Paternal Admonition (c 1653-55). Standing with her back to us, wearing a plush going-out dress, is the daughter. To her left is a table, on which there’s a small reading stand with books, almost certainly including a Bible.

Her parents are young, and they too are fashionably dressed. Her mother appears to be drinking from a glass, but her father is at the very least cautioning his daughter, if not giving her a thorough dressing-down. He wears a sword at his side. Behind them is a large bed, and to the right the family dog looks on from the darkness.

Ter Borch’s half-sister Gesina appears to have been his model for Woman Writing a Letter (c 1655), which makes obvious his connection with Vermeer. Move this woman to a desk lit through windows at the left, light her surroundings, and you have a painting similar to Vermeer’s interiors. This shows a heavy decorated table cover pushed back to make room for the quill, ink-pot, and letter. Behind the woman is her bed, surrounded by heavy drapery, and at the lower right is the brilliant red flash of the seat.

The Letter from about 1660-62 returns to ter Borch’s favourite theme of the reading and writing of letters. Two young women are working together, apparently replying to the letter being read by the woman on the right. A boy, perhaps their younger brother, has just brought in a tray bearing an ornate pitcher of drink. In front, a small dog is curled up asleep on a stool. Above them is an unlit chandelier suspended from a hanging ceiling.

Other specialists in genre painting like Gabriël Metsu also ventured towards interiors. His Washerwoman from about 1650 looks authentic and almost socially realist: the young woman is a servant, dressed in her working clothes, in the dark and dingy lower levels of the house. She looks tired, her eyes staring blankly at the viewer. She’s surrounded by the gear she uses, including a rope and pitcher to the right, and an earthenware bowl on display below it. The mantlepiece in the background features a blue and white plate.

It’s easy to mistake Pieter de Hooch’s A Woman Drinking with Two Men from about 1658 for a Vermeer, and like the latter he decorates the far wall with a contemporary map. The Eighty Years’ War had not long ended, and the Dutch Republic was flourishing. Discarded objects are scattered on its black-and-white tiled floor. There’s a large and empty fireplace, and above it hangs a religious painting.

It was Jan Vermeer whose few surviving works explored interiors the most.

In his Milkmaid from about 1660, a woman servant is pouring milk from a jug, beside a tabletop with bread. In the left foreground the bread and pots rest on a folded Dutch octagonal table, covered with a mid-blue cloth. A wicker basket of bread is nearest the viewer, broken and smaller pieces of different types of bread behind and towards the woman, in the centre. Behind the bread is a dark blue studded mug with pewter lid, and just in front of the woman (to the right of the mug) a brown earthenware ‘Dutch oven’ pot into which the milk is being poured. An ultramarine blue cloth (matching the woman’s apron) rests at the edge of the table. There are many other intriguing details in this interior.

Vermeer’s Young Woman with a Water Pitcher from slightly later is another fine example, this time with more obvious control of focus effects for which his paintings are renowned. Details in this interior include the ornate tablecloth, a small lockable chest on the right of the table, the map hanging behind, and the window she is holding with her right hand.

Interiors then vanished from painting until their rebirth in the nineteenth century.

After yesterday’s accounts of the extraordinary weddings in myth and other narrative, in this article I consider a small selection of depictions of more normal wedding celebrations, from the personal and tender to some amid spectacular scenery.

When Peter Paul Rubens married for the first time, to Isabella Brant in the autumn of 1609, he painted this touching celebration, the Honeysuckle Bower, the closest that he could come to the modern wedding photo of bride and groom. Honeysuckle was a well known symbol for faithfulness, and hands laid over one another (“dextrarum iunctio”) have symbolized matrimony since ancient times. Tragically, their bliss was to be short-lived, as Isabella was to die of the plague in 1626 when she was only thirty-four.

Antoine Watteau’s first masterpiece, Marriage Contract and Country Dancing from about 1711, combines three stages of a wedding in a single image, as if in multiplex narrative. In the distance at the far left is the tower of the church where the priest brought the couple together in union in front of God. In the centre, they sign their contract of marriage, while around them is the country dancing of the secular celebration.

Eugène Delacroix started painting his Jewish Wedding in Morocco in 1837, apparently as a commission, and completed it in time for the 1841 Salon. The viewer is given the opportunity to see one of the women dancing in honour of the bride, in a ceremony clearly intended to be very private.

Weddings in the villages around the fjords of the far south-west of Norway, to the east of Bergen, were very special events. To show this, Hans Gude joined forces with Adolph Tidemand in this marvellous painting of Bridal Journey in Hardanger in 1848. Tidemand’s figures are seamlessly integrated into Gude’s majestic landscape.

Weddings continued through winter in the Carpathian Mountains, in modern Ukraine. Kazimierz Sichulski’s Hutsul Wedding from 1909 shows a wedding party in traditional dress making their way through the snow.

Royal weddings merited pageantry of a different form, 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. By this time, Victoria’s husband Prince Albert had died and she had effectively withdrawn from public life.

Marià Fortuny, whose interest in ceremony and costume has led to him being dubbed a Costumbrist, painted this intricately detailed view of The Spanish Wedding in 1870. The scene is the interior of a sacristy, where a wedding party is going through the administrative procedures of the 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. The wedding party, and a group seated at the right, are shown in richly-patterned dress, as if attending a masked ball. Their detail contrasts with the more painterly rendering of the surroundings.

In the late nineteenth century weddings changed forever, when they became the preserve of the photographer.

Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret’s A Wedding at the Photographer’s (1879) comes close to a photographic realism throughout the image. He was calculating in his choice of motif: the wedding market wasn’t one that could be catered for by painters, at least not in the way that photographers were starting to capitalise on it. The image gives the appearance of veracity, and uses subtle signs to make photography appear cheap and nasty compared with painting. There is an irony in this painting too, in that Dagnan-Bouveret was one of the first painters to incorporate photography into his working methods, later using it in conjunction with more traditional sketches and studies when preparing major works.

A year or two later, Dagnan-Bouveret revisited the wedding theme without the aid of a photographer, in his Blessing of the Young Couple Before Marriage (1880-81). This traditional subject is lit by brilliant sunshine from the right, which almost makes the bride’s dress appear to be on fire.

By coincidence, William Frith also returned to the theme at the same time, in For Better, For Worse from 1881. This is one of his Hogarthian paintings, most definitely not by Royal command, and passing comment on contemporary society with its glaring inequalities. He contrasts an affluent couple departing for their honeymoon in a hansom cab, with a poor couple and their two children watching at the lower left, a theme that I’m sure the author Charles Dickens would have appreciated had he not died a decade earlier.

My final nineteenth century wedding painting is by another Naturalist, Jean-Eugène Buland, although here being more than a little sentimental and romantic, even populist. His idyllic Innocent Wedding from 1884 shows a young couple strolling arm in arm through blossom with their home village in the distance.

No matter what your background, religion or culture, there’s one universal cause for feasting and celebration, a wedding. One of the great challenges for the figurative painter, weddings are the central feature in three classical myths and one religious story examined in this article; tomorrow’s sequel looks at the depiction of less famous, personal weddings.

Of the three great mythical weddings, the first in chronological order was that of Hippodame and Pirithous, which brought an end to the dominance of centaurs on earth, the Centauromachy. This was celebrated in prominent places: the subsequent battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs was shown in sculpture on the temple of Zeus at Olympia, and on the Parthenon at Athens. It was Ovid, though, who chose to tell this story in the context of the Trojan War.

When Pirithous married Hippodame, the couple invited centaurs to the feast. Unfortunately, passions of the centaur Eurytus became inflamed by drink and lust for the bride, and he carried off Hippodame by her hair. The other centaurs followed suit by each seizing a woman of their choice, turning the wedding feast into utter chaos, like a city being sacked. Theseus castigated Eurytus and rescued the bride, so the centaur attacked him. Theseus responded by throwing a huge wine krater at Eurytus, killing him. The centaurs then started throwing goblets and crockery, and the battle escalated from there.

Piero di Cosimo’s The Fight between Lapiths and Centaurs (1500-15) is my favourite among the earlier paintings of the ultimate wedding feast gone wrong. In the centre foreground, Hylonome embraces and kisses the dying Cyllarus, a huge arrow-like spear resting underneath them. Immediately behind them, on the large carpets laid out for the wedding feast, centaurs are still abducting women. All around are scenes of pitched and bloody battles, with eyes being gouged out, and Lapiths and Centaurs wielding clubs and other weapons at one another. This is definitely a wedding to remember, if you survived it.

Towards the end of his life, Peter Paul Rubens painted The Rape of Hippodame (1636-38). At the right, Eurytus is trying to carry off Hippodame, the bride, with Theseus just about to rescue her from the centaur’s back. At the left, Lapiths are attacking with their weapons, and behind them another centaur is trying to abduct a woman.

The next wedding to be grateful you missed was that between the great hero Perseus and the princess whom he rescued from Cetus the sea monster. Andromeda’s parents were so delighted at their daughter’s rescue that she, who had already been promised in marriage to Phineus, was quickly married instead to Perseus. At the wedding feast, Phineus and his friends were understandably rather miffed, and a violent quarrel broke out between them and Perseus. As happens at the most memorable of weddings, this turned seriously nasty when weapons came out and bodies started to fall. The solution for Perseus was to brandish the head of Medusa and turn Phineus and his friends into cold statuary.

Annibale Carracci and Domenichino combined their talents in painting this fresco of Perseus and Phineas (1604-06) in the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. As Perseus stands in the centre brandishing the Gorgon’s face towards his attackers, Andromeda and her parents shelter behind, shielding their eyes for safety.

Surprisingly few paintings of this wedding make reference to the goddess Minerva’s protection of Perseus, which is clearly expressed in Jean-Marc Nattier’s undated painting of Perseus, Under the Protection of Minerva, Turns Phineus to Stone by Brandishing the Head of Medusa. The goddess, Perseus’ half-sister, is sat on a cloud to the right of and behind the hero. She wears her distinctive helmet, grips her spear, and her left hand holds the Aegis, providing narrative closure.

Perseus points his weapons away from himself and Minerva, and is looking up towards the goddess. In the foreground, one of Phineus’ party seems to be sorting through the silverware, perhaps intending to make off with it. The happy couple picked themselves up from the bodies, statues and debris, and moved on. Perseus gave thanks to Minerva for her support and the loan of her shield, by the votive offering of Medusa’s head, which Minerva had set into her shield, turning it into the Aegis.

The wedding of Thetis, sea nymph and spinster of this parish, and Peleus, king of Phthia and bachelor of that parish, was celebrated with a great feast on Mount Pelion attended by most of the gods. The happy couple were given many gifts by the gods, but one, Eris the goddess of discord, had not been invited. As an act of spite at her exclusion, she threw a golden apple ‘of discord’ into the middle of the goddesses, to be given as a reward to ‘the fairest’.

This is Jacob Jordaens’ The Golden Apple of Discord from 1633, based on a brilliant oil sketch by Rubens. The facially discordant Eris, seen in midair behind the deities, has just made her gift of the golden apple, which is at the centre of the grasping hands, above the table. At the left, Minerva (Pallas Athene) reaches forward for it. In front of her, Venus, her son Cupid at her knee, points to herself as the goddess most deserving of the apple. On the other side of the table, Juno reaches her hand out for it too. This sets up the Judgement of Paris, and the rest is legendary.

For once it’s the most modern version, painted by Edward Burne-Jones as The Feast of Peleus in 1872-81, that sticks most closely to the story. In a composition based on classical representations of the Last Supper, he brings Eris in at the far right, her golden apple still concealed. Every head has turned towards her, apart from that of the centaur behind her right wing. Even the three Fates, in the left foreground, have paused momentarily in their work.

This wedding banquet set up the beauty contest between Juno, Venus and Minerva in the Judgement of Paris. Venus won following her bribe promising Paris the most beautiful woman in the world, who happened at the time to be married to King Menelaus of Sparta. After Paris abducted Helen to Troy, the Greeks united to wage war against Troy, eventually capturing and destroying the city.

In 1562, Paolo Veronese was commissioned to paint a large work for the refectory of the Benedictine Monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. Its central narrative is an episode of the ministry of Christ as recorded in the gospels: Christ and his disciples were invited to a wedding feast in Cana, Galilee. Towards its end, the wine started to run out, and he was asked what they should do. He directed servants to fill jugs with water, which he then miraculously turned into wine.

This huge canvas shows Christ, distinguished by his halo, at the centre of his disciples, with the Virgin Mary (also with halo) at his right, and sundry disciples arrayed along that side of the tables. The wedding group is at the far left of the party.

At the far right of the canvas, wine is shown being poured from a large container, a clear cue to the gospel narrative.

There’s also a great deal of other activity in every part of the painting. On the balcony behind Christ there are scenes of the butchery of meat, which is generally claimed to be lamb and symbolic of Christ’s future death as a sacrifice for mankind, as the ‘Lamb of God’, although there are no visual clues to support that interpretation. In the musicians below, and other guests, it is claimed that there are portraits of artists, including Veronese himself, and Titian. Other important figures who are supposed to be shown include Eleanor of Austria, Francis I of France, Mary I of England, Suleiman the Magnificent, and Emperor Charles V.

Finally, I turn to one of many weddings in more modern European literature.

The eighth story told on the fifth day of Boccaccio’s Decameron concerns the misfortunes of one Nastagio Degli Onesti, involving one ghost killing and dismembering the ghost of a woman, a strange and grisly tale told in a series of four panels by Botticelli. The fourth and last shows the hero Nastagio’s wedding, the bride and her women sitting to the left, and the men to the right, in formal symmetry. The groom is sat on the other side of the same table as the bride.

Ovid ended Book 8 of his Metamorphoses with a teaser, telling how the river god Achelous was able to transform himself into a snake or bull, and that he had recently lost one of the bull’s two horns. Book 9 opens by explaining how that came about.

With a little prompting from Theseus, Achelous resumes his narration, lamenting that he’s about to tell a story of a battle lost. He and Hercules both asked for the beautiful Deianira’s hand in marriage, forcing other suitors to resign their claims and leave the matter to them to plead their cases. Hercules wasn’t happy to do this in words, so rushed at his competitor to engage him in a fight.

Achelous gives a flattering account of the pair wrestling, eventually admitting that Hercules got the better of him and forced him onto his knees. The river god then shifted shape, changing first to a snake so he could slither away from his opponent. Hercules mocked him for that, reminding him of his conquest of the Lernean Hydra. When Hercules got a stranglehold on him, Achelous changed into his third and final form, that of a bull. Once again Hercules brought him down, and wrenched off one of his horns. The missing horn was transformed into the Horn of Plenty, cornucopia, and the guests were then served fruit in such a horn at their banquet.

This exquisitely engraved rock crystal plaque by Annibale Fontana, showing Hercules and Achelous wrestling, is one scene from a life of Hercules. This was originally set with others into a gilded casket owned by the ducal Gonzaga family, of the city of Mantua in Italy. Hercules, on the right, wears his signature lion-skin, and Achelous is conventionally old, bearded, and shaggy.

Cornelis van Haarlem’s painting of Hercules and Achelous, probably from around 1590, shows a late stage in the wrestling, with Achelous in the form of a 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 his initial human form.

Noël Coypel, the 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 lion-skin, Hercules wields his fearsome club, although Ovid doesn’t refer to its use on this occasion.

Nicolas Bertin’s Hercules fighting Achelous (1715-30) is more elaborate. Hercules has almost got Achelous onto the ground, and looks as if he’s about to punch him with his fist. Hercules’ club rests in the foreground. The woman at the right is Deianira, over whom they are fighting, and a winged goddess is ready to place the laurel wreath on the victor.

For once, the most detailed and magnificent account of one of Ovid’s myths is modern, painted in 1947 for a department store in Kansas City. Thomas Hart Benton’s Achelous and Hercules (1947) is a gem of narrative painting.

At the centre, Hercules, stripped to the waist and wearing denim jeans, is about to grasp Achelous’ horns. Immediately to the right, Deianira is also shown in contemporary American form, with a young woman next to her bearing a laurel crown. They’re sat on the Horn of Plenty, and Benton is one of few to include this important reference.

To the left of centre, Benton shows a second figure of Hercules holding a rope, making this multiplex narrative. That is part of a passage referring to ranching and cowboys, and further to the left to the grain harvest. To the right, the Horn of Plenty links into the cultivation of maize (corn), the other major crop from the area.

My final painting to accompany this short story is another collaboration between the workshop of Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder: Nymphs Filling the Horn of Plenty (c 1615). Although it has no references to the fight between Hercules and Achelous, it’s good to see the staff preparing the second course of Achelous’ banquet.

In the early years of the twentieth century, the city of Venice grew in importance as a centre of art, with the Venice Biennale increasingly encouraging contemporary styles. That drew a succession of Post-Impressionists to depict the city and its famous canals.

Henri-Edmond Cross’s watercolour sketch of Venice – The Giudecca from 1903 is similar in approach to those painted by Paul Signac before he viewed Paul Cézanne’s late watercolours in 1908.

Cross’s Regatta in Venice from 1903-04 is a finished Pointillist painting in oils, bearing a strong similarity to those painted at this time by Paul Signac. In the middle distance there appears to be a race taking place.

Paul Signac’s fascination with Venice had been inspired by the writings of John Ruskin, in particular The Stones of Venice. In the course of the early years of the twentieth century, he turned his large collection of studies made in front of the motif into a succession of major Neo-Impressionist oil paintings. Among the first, which he completed in 1904, was this view of the Giudecca Anchorage showing the church of Santa Maria della Salute. This set the compositional approach for many of his views of ports, with colourful vessels in the foreground, and lofty buildings dissolving in the distance.

Another example from 1904 is Signac’s painting of The Lagoon. Yellow Sail with its rhythmic reflections.

Signac’s The Green Sail (1904) features the church of San Giorgio in the distance.

Meanwhile, John Singer Sargent found more unusual views of activities and parts of the city not normally seen by the visitor. This watercolour from 1904 shows Unloading Boats in Venice in the city’s port.

Basin of San Marco, Venice, completed by Signac in 1905, is one of the largest of his paintings of ports. This shows, at the left, San Giorgio Maggiore, in the centre Santa Maria della Salute, and to the right the Doges’ Palace and the Campanile of Piazza San Marco. In the foreground is a flotilla of bragozzi with their colourful sails. Signac’s preparations for this had been careful if not painstaking. They led from his watercolour sketches to a squared drawing with formal geometry and a planned colour scheme, which he then enlarged onto the canvas. He was clearly pleased with the result, and this work was featured in many of his subsequent major exhibitions.

My favourite among Signac’s views of Venice is his Entrance to the Grand Canal, Venice (1905). Its foreground is dominated by a shimmering and jumbled parade of gondolas, and melting into the distance is the towering silhouette of Santa Maria della Salute.

Sargent’s bravura watercolour sketch Grand Canal, Venice (1907) gives an idea as to his approach and style. It’s composed of a sparse collection of brushstrokes of watercolour which assemble into a detailed view. He sees Venice from the level of a gondola, the bows of which are also shown. His palette for these sketches is generally centred on earth colours for the buildings, with blue for the sky, water, and usually the shadows too.

In 1908, Ivan Trush visited northern Italy, where he painted this famous view of Venice, San Giorgio Maggiore. One of the smaller islands there, it has been painted extensively, perhaps most famously in Claude Monet’s late series. The church and its high campanile are prominent landmarks whose detail Trush has captured in this impressive oil sketch.

Signac painted Venice. Customs House in 1908, following a return visit to the city. This reverses his previous compositions by placing the Customs House in the mid-ground, with masts and sails behind. This loses the depth and grandeur of those earlier works.

Martín Rico maintained his summer visits to Venice right up to the year of his death, when he painted this unusual view Near the Grand Canal, Venice (1908). A person is in the water beside the gondola, and the boatman is assisting them with a boathook while the other occupants seem quite detached from what is going on.

Sargent’s watercolours were by no means dependent on the sophistication of his technique: Rio dei Mendicanti, Venice from about 1909 works its magic almost entirely from a combination of wet on dry and wet on wet. There isn’t even much in the way of a graphite drawing under its thin washes.

Although the rise of Modernism brought fewer painters to the canals of Venice, they increasingly flocked to the Venice Biennale during the twentieth century, and Venice remains a focus of art.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the city of Venice had become established as an essential visit for every aspiring landscape artist. It not only attracted those painting traditional views (vedute) of its canals, but was drawing those in the avant-garde. This was encouraged by the start of the city’s biennial art exhibition, the Venice Biennale, the first of which opened on 30 April 1895.

The American Post-Impressionist Maurice Brazil Prendergast had a particular affection for the city, which he visited in 1898. The Canal, Venice from 1898-99 shows Riva di San Severo, and makes good comparison with Sargent’s looser watercolours of the canals, such as his Scuola di San Rocco from about 1903, shown later in this article.

Henri-Edmond Cross’s A Canal in Venice is also dated from 1899, and is an unusual Pointillist oil sketch of gondolas in one of the city’s smaller canals. Cross visited the city at this time, and again in 1903 and 1908.

The young Roger Fry, who was to become an influential critic and promoter of Post-Impressionism, went to Venice in 1899 to learn to paint. His early works, including this view of Venice, appear realist with Impressionist tendencies.

Martín Rico was still visiting Venice each summer. Some of his later paintings of the city are more populous and bustling, such as his San Lorenzo River with the Campanile of San Giorgio dei Greci, Venice from about 1900.

In about 1902, Rico painted this more direct view of the church of Santa Maria della Salute, Venice, with a small fleet of gondolas.

The British artist Walter Sickert visited Venice on several occasions between 1894 and 1904. His paintings make interesting comparison with those of John Singer Sargent, who was painting the city mostly in watercolour at the time. Sickert’s oil sketch of Venice, la Salute, thought to have been completed in about 1901, uses muted colours. He has cropped this unusually, showing only a portion of the famous domed church of Santa Maria della Salute. The artist also stressed how he had painted this in “full colour”.

John Singer Sargent visited Venice repeatedly from about 1874, even before he became a student at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and continued to do so after he moved his studio to London in 1886. His watercolour of Rio dell Angelo from 1902 is typically painterly and rich in chroma.

Sargent’s Scuola di San Rocco from about 1903 is one of his best-known watercolours, and another bravura painting.

In 1903, Mykhaylo Berkos visited the city, where he painted this watercolour view of boats On a Canal Near Venice (1903). Although few examples appear to have survived, he was an accomplished and prolific painter in watercolours as well as oils.

Frits Thaulow was an accomplished print-maker, and I think that this version of the Marble Steps (1903) in Venice is an aquatint. It shows the different approach he used to represent the broken water surface and its reflections.

In the early twentieth century, Venice was to become a focus of attention for the more avant-garde, notably Post-Impressionists with Pointillist techniques.

Under the academies that dominated painting as an art during the seventeenth and subsequent centuries, paintings were distinguished in genres. These consisted of history, portraits, genre (scenes of everyday life), landscapes, animals and still life. These gave rise to a twisted system of aesthetics that assigned greater artistic merit to a formulaic depiction of classical myth, than any landscape painting. The established genres were constraints that were quickly outgrown, as I’m going to examine in this new series looking at paintings of interiors.

Painting the inside of a house first flourished during the Dutch Golden Age, as a novel genre to appeal to collectors. Initially, most included some figures and were conveniently classed as genre works, but their object of interest increasingly lay in the room and its furnishings, as a still life on a grander scale.

Three Figures Conversing in an Interior is one of Gerard ter Borch’s narrative interiors, more popularly known as Paternal Admonition (c 1653-55). Standing with her back to us, wearing a plush going-out dress, is the daughter. To her left is a table, on which there is a small reading stand with books, almost certainly including a Bible.

Her parents are young, and they too are fashionably dressed. Her mother appears to be drinking from a glass, but her father is at the very least cautioning his daughter, if not giving her a thorough dressing-down. He wears a sword at his side. Behind them is a large bed, and to the right the family dog looks on from the gloom.

Interiors reached their height in the few brilliant paintings of Jan Vermeer.

Vermeer’s better-lit Young Woman with a Water Pitcher from about 1662-64 is a good example of this change in emphasis. The viewer’s attention is diverted from this anonymous young woman engaged in mundane activity, to her surroundings, the open chest on the table, the map on the wall behind her, and the play of the light coming in through the window.

Genre and interiors went into decline, before becoming more popular again in the nineteenth century, particularly in works aimed more at the less affluent.

The middle classes were able to indulge in a few paintings and framed prints of their own, although most would have been family portraits rather than anything of greater aesthetic or cultural value. Matthäus Kern’s watercolour showing A Study Interior at St. Polten (1837) gives an idea of what might have been expected among the middle class, perhaps.

Narrative painting started to turn away from classical themes, and became framed around open-ended narrative and ‘problem pictures’ to challenge their reading.

Edgar Degas’ Interior (1868-9), also known as 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. She is at the left, partly kneeling down, facing to the left, and partially (un)dressed. He is at the right, fully dressed in street clothes, standing in front of the door, with his hands thrust deep into his trouser pockets.

The woman’s outer clothing is placed at the foot of the bed, and her corset has been hurriedly or carelessly cast onto the floor beside 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.

Just behind the woman is a small occasional table, on which there is 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 small pair of scissors and other items from a small clothes repair kit or ‘housewife’. There’s a wealth of detail that can fuel many different accounts of what is going on in this small room.

Interiors became sufficiently established by the late nineteenth century that they were widely exhibited.

Anna Alma-Tadema’s small watercolour of The Drawing Room, Townshend House, painted in 1885, demonstrates her skills at depicting surface light and texture. This painting was exhibited at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, in 1893, a remarkable achievement for someone who was only eighteen at the time that it was painted.

Interiors became popular among those in the avant garde, including Neo-Impressionists like Maximilien Luce.

Morning, Interior (1890) is one of Luce’s best-known Divisionist paintings from the late nineteenth century. Although it adheres to the technique of applying small marks of contrasting colours to build the image, Luce’s marks are less mechanical than those seen, for example, in Seurat’s paintings. In places they become more gestural and varied, particularly in highlights.

Nordic art adopted the interior with enthusiasm, and the skills of some of its finest painters.

Harriet Backer’s Gamlestua på Kolbotn (Old Living Room at Kolbotn) from 1896 is an intimate view of a friends’ living room on their farm in Østerdalen, Norway. Hulda and Arne Garborg are seen, sat at the table, with Arne holding his fiddle. Behind them are paintings, among them two landscapes painted by Backer’s friend Kitty Kielland.

Some came to specialise in distinctive interiors, such as the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi. His Room in the Artist’s Home in Strandgade, Copenhagen, with the Artist’s Wife from 1901 is typical of his explorations of light in rooms that effectively became large still lifes.

Thorvald Boecks bibliotek (Thorvald Boeck’s Library) (1902) is one of Backer’s few interiors that’s devoid of people, here replaced by books from floor to ceiling. The intricate detail of their many spines, furniture, and other decorations contrasts markedly with the bare floorboards in the foreground.

In France, the former Nabi artist Félix Vallotton painted a series of enigmatic interiors in the early years of the twentieth century.

His Interior with the Back of a Woman in Red from 1903 develops the framing effect of multiple sets of doors, drawing the eye deeper towards the distant bedroom. The woman wearing a red dress looks away, her skirts swept back as if she has been moving towards the three steps dividing the space into foreground and background. There are tantalising glimpses of detail on the way: discarded fabric on a settee, clothing on a chair in the next room, and half of a double bed with a bedside lamp in the distance.

In Britain, members of the Camden Town Group led by Walter Sickert headed in a different direction.

Alongside others in the group, Spencer Gore painted mundane domestic interiors such as The Gas Cooker (1913), showing his wife Mollie in the tiny kitchen of their flat in Houghton Place in London.

In Norway, Nikolai Astrup, a former pupil of Harriet Backer, provided the occasional peek into his domestic life. Interior Still Life: Living Room at Sandalstrand (c 1921) shows his family home, with a tapestry hanging in the corner, an unidentified painting on the wall, potted plants, a bowl of fruit, and an articulated wooden figure leaning against a pitcher of milk.

I hope these paintings have whetted your appetite for the rest of this series, which starts next week with the Dutch Golden Age.

As Ovid draws Book 8 of his Metamorphoses to a close, Lelex has just told the touching story of Philemon and Baucis, who were transformed into an intertwining pair of trees. Achelous, host of the banquet, then takes over as narrator, to tell of three examples of shape-shifters, who can transform whenever they want.

His first example is probably the most accomplished of all: Proteus, who apparently can transform himself into all manner of creatures and objects, at one moment a boar, the next a snake or a fire. Both Hans Thoma and Cy Twombly have painted Proteus, but I regret that neither of their works is available to show here.

This leads Achelous on to tell the longer story of another shape-shifter, the daughter of Erysichthon, who remains unnamed here, elsewhere being known as Mestra or Mnestra. But he first has to introduce her father, by telling the story of his downfall.

Erysichthon was an irreligious man, even desecrating Ceres’ sacred grove by chopping down a giant and ancient oak within it. As he prepared to swing his axe at the tree, it shuddered and turned pale. A man stood in his way, so he was peremptorily beheaded. As he raised his axe ready, its nymph warned him that her death would bring him punishment.

The other Dryads (wood nymphs) prayed to Ceres to punish Erysichthon. The goddess decided to bring him insatiable hunger, but as it was decreed that Ceres and the goddess of hunger could never meet, Ceres sent an Oread as her messenger. The Oread found Hunger in the Caucasus mountains, and passed the message. Ovid then gives a detailed account of how Erysichthon was wracked with hunger, even in his dreams. Nothing could satisfy his appetite, and he spent his entire wealth trying to do so. When he ran out of money, he sold his own daughter to raise money for more food.

Erysichthon’s daughter then called on Neptune, who had previously raped her, to be spared from slavery. The god then transformed her into a fisherman, and her father, not recognising his daughter, called on the fisherman to tell him where his daughter had gone. She denied all knowledge of her former female self, and the man who had bought her went away. Knowing her ability to transform herself, Erysichthon sold her to a succession of people, enabling her to cheat on them and be sold again in a different form. He fed his constant hunger from the money she brought him, until he started to eat his own flesh and limbs.

Johann Wilhelm Baur’s engraving showing Erysichthon Sells His Daughter Mestra (c 1630) is a simple depiction of Ovid’s story, but has the interesting feature of Neptune, with his traditional horses and trident, down on the water to the right.

It’s Neptune and water that provide a thread running through much of Ovid’s narrative here. For Neptune not only raped Mestra and enabled her shape-shifting, but he is the father of Proteus, the most adept of all shape-shifters, and both Achelous and Neptune are gods of the waters. Neptune has been painted frequently, but I can find no reference to him being shown with his son Proteus, nor with Mestra. But there is one painting in which father and son might appear together.

Nicolas Poussin’s The Birth of Venus (1635-36) is controversial, as there is no general agreement as to what it is actually about, nor the identity of the goddess at its centre. One reading maintains that its current title is correct, and the central goddess is Venus, who has just been born from sea foam. To the left is clearly Neptune (Poseidon), bearing his trident, and astride his horses. In the far distance, riding on the clouds, Venus’ chariot is being towed towards her by swans.

There are other figures to identify, but one man in the distance at the left edge looks similar to Neptune, and could well be his son, The Old Man of the Sea, Proteus himself. An alternative interpretation is that it’s the sea nymph Galatea, being drawn on a chariot of cockleshells by a school of dolphins, at the centre, rather than Venus.

There is another more recent painting that appears to have been influenced by Poussin’s: William Dyce’s remarkable fresco in Queen Victoria’s holiday palace on the Isle of Wight, Osborne House.

In Dyce’s Neptune Resigning to Britannia the Empire of the Sea (1847), Neptune stands astride his three white seahorses with their fish tails, holding their reins in his right hand, and passing his crown with the left. The crown is just about to be transferred by Mercury (with wings on his cap) to the gold-covered figure of Britannia, who holds a ceremonial silver trident in her right hand. Neptune is supported by his entourage in the sea, including the statutory brace of nudes and conch-blowers. At the right, Britannia’s entourage is more serious in intent, and includes the lion of England, and figures representing industry, trade, and navigation.

The depiction of Neptune, and much of the left half of the painting, has more than a passing resemblance to Poussin’s. But look into the distance, below Mercury and behind Neptune, and there’s an Old Man of the Sea with two nymphs. Could that also be Proteus?

In the closing lines of the book, Ovid then reveals through Achelous the link to the start of Book 9: Achelous reveals that he too is a shape-shifter, able to transform himself into a snake or a bull. But that bull had recently lost one of its two horns, the basis of the next myth.

In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, Venice became increasingly popular with painters. Access to the city had improved in the 1860s, when its Santa Lucia railway station opened at the north-west end of the Grand Canal, although the famous Simplon Orient Express train didn’t start operating into Venice until well into the twentieth century.

One of the earliest of this succession of artists was Martín Rico from Spain. It was his discovery of Venice in 1873 that led to the perfection of his artistic style and the creation of many of his most emblematic works. From this first trip until his death thirty-six years later, Rico spent every summer with the exception of one painting there, until he died in Venice in 1908.

Many of his paintings show lesser-known canals and less-frequented areas, like A Canal in Venice from about 1875. Although populated by the occasional gondola and a small clutch of children, they have a wonderful air of peace and serenity. His broken reflections are painted quite tightly although he is reputed to have painted mainly en plein air.

This undated view of the Grand Canal just catches the dome of the church of Santa María della Salute, Venice, and is also known by the fuller title of Grand Canal and the Church of Santa María della Salute, Venice.

Rico’s Canal in Venice is another undated view of one of the minor ‘backstreet’ canals that is deeply serene.

His undated cross-canal view of Venice appears to be a ‘proper’ plein air oil sketch with rougher facture for once.

The first of several Impressionists to visit Venice, Pierre-Auguste Renoir chose a view of the famous Piazzetta adjoining Saint Mark’s Square in his Doge’s Palace, Venice from 1881. The tops of the roofs follow the horizontal centreline, with the Campanile reaching well above that, and various boats below the band of buildings.

The American Impressionist John Henry Twachtman was one of several great American landscape painters who visited Venice. His watercolour Venice (1881) was clearly painted quickly en plein air. The lower half of his paper contains only reflections; the upper half is a view from the water placing the Campanile slightly to the right of centre, little higher than neighbouring church domes. Superimposed on that waterfront are passing boats, their sails and rigging complicating the buildings behind. His palette is also limited to earth colours, with grey-blue on the water below.

The French Naturalist Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret also visited Venice, where his brushwork was surprisingly loose and his marks painterly, as shown in his sketched View of Venice (1882).

While he was working in Europe, the American Frank Duveneck visited the city on several occasions. His Grand Canal in Venice (c 1883) was a study for his Water Carriers below.

Duveneck was also a successful print-maker, as exemplified in his Bridge of Sighs (1883).

Water Carriers, Venice from 1884 is probably Duveneck’s finest painting of Venice, combining the view from his earlier study with an intimate insight into the daily work of ordinary Venetians. His visits to the city stopped when his wife died in 1888, and he returned to the USA.

In about 1885, Henri Rouart, one of the patrons of the French Impressionists and a talented painter in his own right, visited Italy. While there, he painted Venice, San Michele, showing the church of San Michele in Isola, on the island with the city’s main cemetery.

Towards the end of his career in the 1890s, Eugene Boudin visited Venice several times. Among his paintings there is Piazzetta San Marco in Venice (1895), which adopts the same view and composition as Renoir’s earlier Doge’s Palace, Venice from 1881. This painting is sometimes mis-titled as the Piazza San Marco, which it doesn’t show, although the tower is its high Campanile.

Franz Richard Unterberger was a landscape painter from the Austrian Tirol who produced many fine views of Venice in a more traditional Romantic manner. His Rio San Barnaba, Venice (date not known, but probably around 1895) gives a good account of his approach and style. The motif isn’t far from Saint Mark’s, but the tower shown isn’t the Campanile.

Although not as highly finished as the classical works of Canaletto, Unterberger puts great detail into buildings, figures, and other staffage, even down to painting the ties and walking sticks of figures. However, fine brushstrokes are distinct over the faces of buildings and in the water, and the clouds display marks more clearly.

In just a few years, at the turn of the century, Venice was to become popular with the most radical artists, including Divisionists such as Henri-Edmond Cross and Paul Signac, as well as John Singer Sargent.

A century ago today, 12 October, the Spanish painter Antonio Muñoz Degrain (1840–1924) died in Málaga, Spain. Although now largely forgotten outside his native country, he was an accomplished artist and achieved international recognition. Of the relatively few of his works that remain accessible, there are several that are striking and individual.

He was born in Valencia, Spain, and started his studies at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Carlos there, before abandoning them and travelling to Rome, where he largely taught himself. He then returned to Spain, where he started exhibiting his landscapes in 1862.

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. His style is detailed realist, perhaps a little behind the times.

He developed his skills as a narrative painter with a series of commissioned historical works, including a painting of Queen Isabella with Christopher Columbus, for which he was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Charles III.

In 1880, he started painting a series showing the climax of William Shakespeare’s play Othello. The first, Othello and Desdemona shows Othello entering Desdemona’s bedchamber to find her asleep.

Muñoz Degrain returned to Rome in 1882 on a two-year fellowship.

In 1888, he appears to been commissioned to depict The Conversion of Recaredo for the Palace of the Spanish Senate in Madrid. This shows Reccared I (c 559-601) abandoning Arianism and converting to Catholicism during the Third Council of Toledo in 589. This was organised by Saint Leander but convened in the name of Reccared, the Visigothic King of Hispania and Septimania. The king had already renounced Arianism in January 587, and his public confession was read aloud at the council, which marked the start of his new Catholic kingdom.

The details of jewellery and costume in this painting are extraordinary.

Ten years later, he was appointed chair of landscape painting at the prestigious Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, where he became its director in 1901.

Over this period, his landscape paintings had grown steadily more painterly, although this view of the Port of Bilbao from 1900 remains in the earth colours of Barbizon rather than the bright hues of Impressionism.

In Washerwomen just three years later, he has become full Impressionist, with profuse visible brushstrokes and higher chroma.

A few years on, between 1905-10, his Seascape View of Palma de Mallorca is almost Fauvist, with a rich range of textures.

Muñoz Degrain’s view of the Alhambra from Albaicin District from 1914 is remarkable for the rhythm established by the poplar trees around its base, which become an integral part of the fortified ridge.

Finally, his undated 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.

Muñoz Degrain died in Málaga on 12 October 1924, at the age of eighty-three.

Reference

Wikipedia.

At the start of 1937, Emily Carr was sixty-five, and about to confirm her international recognition with representation in group exhibitions in London’s Tate Gallery the following year, and at the New York World’s Fair of 1939. Painting from her caravan, The Elephant, she was continuing to innovate in her views of the landscape around Victoria, British Columbia.

Carr described Above the Gravel Pit (1937) as “a skyscape with roots and gravel pits”, that she wanted to be “free and jubilant, not crucified into one spot, static.” Her paintings in these final years of her career show the ultimate development of her brushstrokes into the unifying framework. Vibrant blue waves of the sky contrast with the greens and browns of the earth below. But Carr links the sky and trees with both hints of colour and echoing patterns made by her brush: these extend into the shallow chalk scarp and the two tree-stumps in the right foreground.

Then she suffered her first heart attack; The Elephant was too much effort for her, and she had to rent summer houses and cabins to continue her painting. She turned more to writing, and in 1941 won a literary award for her first book, Klee Wyck, a collection of short stories about her travels in the Pacific North-West.

In her Dancing Sunlight (1937-40), vortexes of brushstrokes have replaced all solid form. Trees, light, foliage, even the sky have been swept into those strokes sweeping across the canvas like a whirlwind. She had earlier been absorbed by abstract art, but had continued to represent real objects using techniques which restructured them, rather than abstracting.

Somberness Sunlit (1937-40) shows a similar approach, in this case with the sunlight that has penetrated through the canopy, dissolving the form of the tree trunks.

Over this period, Carr had a growing concern with the deforestation occurring on the West Coast, which paralleled the earlier encroachments and destruction by Europeans of First Nations cultures. Themes that she had previously expressed in paintings such as Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky (1931) were now rephrased using patterned and unifying brushstrokes, in paintings such as this untitled work from 1938-39.

Odds and Ends (1939) is another of her most important paintings, not just from this period, but from her whole career. It shows the young and very high trees left behind as being of no commercial value after felling. Carr described the low stubs left on the stumps as being the trees’ tombstones.

In 1939, she suffered her second heart attack, further curtailing physical activity.

In Plumed Firs (1939-41), Carr revisits a similar motif, following felling, with greater unification of her brushstrokes and marks between sky, forest, and the bare land left afterwards.

She suffered her first stroke in 1940, and a second in 1944. Although she continued to paint in her final years her pace was drastically reduced, and she concentrated her efforts on writing.

In 1941-42, Carr painted a small series based on her earlier sketches and paintings among the First Nations peoples in around 1912. A Skidegate Beaver Pole (1941-42) is one of those, developed from a group of sketches made in the Haida village of Skidegate in 1912. Its totem is painted more confidently earlier; those old sketches and paintings now looked tentative in their careful accuracy. Here the surrounding vegetation, forest and sky are all expressed in swirling brushstrokes.

In August 1942, she travelled to Mount Douglas Park, near Victoria, for her last painting trip. She had been organising works to be given in trust for the citizens of British Columbia, which now form the core of the Emily Carr Trust collection. She died in 1945.

References

Wikipedia.
Lisa Baldissera (2015) Emily Carr, Life & Work, Art Canada Institute. ISBN 978 1 4871 0044 5. Available in PDF from Art Canada Institute.
Thom, Ian M (2013) Emily Carr Collected, Douglas & McIntyre. ISBN 978 1 77100 080 2.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Few cities in Europe have been painted as much as Venice, with its distinctive canals and other waterways. First popularised by Giovanni Antonio Canal (1697–1768), better known as Canaletto, a native of the city whose vedute (views) sold so well to rich tourists undertaking their Grand Tours during the eighteenth century, they had faded by the start of the nineteenth.

In this series of four articles, I show how they were revived in the paintings of visiting artists, and played important roles in the development of twentieth century art. We start today with an English painter who was only twenty-three years old, and was to die within two years: Richard Parkes Bonington.

On the Grand Canal (1826) is a brilliant plein air oil sketch painted from a boat, showing the entrance to the Grand Canal, which snakes its way through the centre of the city. Bonington has removed one of the palazzi, but otherwise appears faithful to the motif.

Riva degli Schiavoni, from near S. Biagio (c 1827) shows the San Marco basin from the Arsenal traghetto, near the south-eastern entrance to the Grand Canal. Although only a small watercolour, Noon considers it was painted well after Bonington’s return from Italy.

Ducal Palace with a Religious Procession (1827) was apparently painted in late 1827 for James Carpenter, from graphite studies Bonington had made during his visit in 1826. Painted on a white ground, it unfortunately underwent severe shrinkage, and was extensively retouched as a result. However, it was generally very well received at the time, despite the liberties taken with its representation of the view.

Grand Canal, the Rialto in the Distance – Sunrise (1828) is one of Bonington’s finest oil paintings, made in the studio from graphite and other sketches from 1826. This painting has quite commonly been described as showing sunset, but as the view faces almost due east, must have been set in the early morning.

The Grand Canal Looking Toward the Rialto (1826), painted on millboard, may have been started en plein air, but appears to have been completed later in the studio, when Bonington had returned to Paris, which may account for the difference in hues in the sky. By the summer of 1828, Bonington was back in London, where he died of tuberculosis at the age of only twenty-five.

Between 1838-1848, the English traveller, writer and painter Edward Lear lived in Rome, making occasional visits to Britain. This quick plein air watercolour sketch of Venice, the Doge’s Palace is undated, but may well have been painted during this period.

JMW Turner paid many visits to Venice, where he painted some of his most radical landscapes.

Although Turner wasn’t particularly consistent in his reflections, at his most faithful he remains accurate in this famous view of Campo Santo, Venice from 1842, where reflected sails appear angelic in form.

Turner’s clouds and buildings in The Dogano, San Giorgio, Citella, from the Steps of the Europa, from the same year, have a similar softness in form typical of his later oil paintings.

John Ferguson Weir visited the city in 1868, following which he painted The Grand Canal, Venice (1869) in the studio, probably when he was back in the USA in the autumn of the following year.

Next Sunday, I’ll show paintings from the closing years of the nineteenth century, when Venice became even more popular.

Five hundred years – half a millennium – ago today, the pioneering landscape painter Joachim Patinir died in the city of Antwerp. A friend of Albrecht Dürer, and contemporary of Albrecht Altdorfer, like them he was one of the first serious landscape artists in Europe, and is thought to be the originator of the World View, a forerunner of the panorama.

Patinir was born in about 1480 in the town of Dinant or Bouvignes, not far from Brussels in modern Belgium. He may have been an apprentice to Gerard David in Bruges, and first registered as a Master in his own right in the Guild of Saint Luke in Antwerp by 1515. Between then and his death in Antwerp on 5 October 1524, he led a large workshop and appears to have been productive if not prolific. However, only five of his signed paintings have survived, with a total of as many as 29 being attributed to him or members of his workshop.

Most of his surviving paintings are at heart landscapes, incorporating a scene from a religious story in their foreground to satisfy the expectations of his patrons.

He is thought to have completed this Landscape with St John the Baptist Preaching in about 1510, when he was thirty, and had probably only recently registered as a Master with the Guild. Already, he is using repoussoir with the foreground tree at the left, and has exaggerated aerial perspective to make its horizon appear almost infinitely deep. This is the start of the World View.

Patinir may have enlisted the help of his friend Quentin Matsys when painting this triptych of The Penitence of Saint Jerome in about 1512. The left wing shows Christ being baptised by John, with the penitent Jerome in the centre panel, and the temptation of Anthony in the right wing. The landscape is continuous across the three panels, with exaggerated aerial perspective again, and the red clouds of dawn or dusk in the centre. Among the animals featured in the distance beyond Jerome is a fully laden camel.

The Baptism of Christ from 1510-20 is a fully developed version of the left wing in that triptych employing similar details, such as the Holy Ghost, in the form of a white dove, flying down from God the Father in the heavens above. In the left background, John is preaching in a recapitulation of his earlier Landscape with St John the Baptist Preaching above.

Patinir is known to have joined forces with Quentin Matsys (1466-1530) in their Temptation of St Anthony, either from about 1515 or 1520-24, where Matsys is believed to have been responsible for the figures in the foreground. Anthony is being taunted and tempted by a small devil behind him, a trio of beautiful women, and an ugly old hag to the left. Suitable cameos are embedded in the landscape, and there appears to be a war going on up in the dark clouds overhead,

The Rest on The Flight into Egypt from 1515-24 features Mary with the infant Jesus on her lap, and Joseph’s traditional walking stick, although he is missing from the family group. The landscape is Netherlandish, with a major port town in the right distance, and a windmill closer. It also incorporates one of Patinir’s distinctive landscape forms, the castle nestling inside a rock pinnacle in the upper centre. That reappears in several of his imagined landscapes.

His Landscape with the Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah from about 1520 is perhaps more reminiscent of his near-contemporary Hieronymus Bosch. At the right edge, the Lot family are making their escape with the aid of angels, as the cities burn behind them. The cameo scene in a tent above them might show the temptation of Lot by his daughters.

His famous Crossing the River Styx (1520-4) is unusual for its mythological scene, including fire and damnation in Hell on the right. It’s perhaps his ultimate World View: the spectator is elevated above the surface and looks on and down over a richly-detailed landscape stretching to the far horizon.

There is some confusion, though. In classical mythology, the River Styx separates the earthly world from that of Hell. Here Patinir appears to show Charon the boatman navigating between Hell, on the right, and an Elysian vision, complete with angels, on the left. This may reflect an adjustment of myth to incorporate the Christian dichotomy of heaven and hell.

Although Patinir paints a crisp and clear horizon to the sea, he uses marked aerial perspective for the land on the left, making it recede into distant haze, to give the feeling of great depth of view, one of the key features both of the World View style and of panoramic landscapes more generally.

This wonderful World View of The Battle of Pavia has been attributed to Patinir, although there are strong reasons for disbelief, in that he is recorded to have died on 5 October 1524, but this battle didn’t take place until the morning of 24 February the following year. It does, though, follow Patinir’s lead with its World View.

Reference

Wikipedia

After more than a decade of neglect, Emily Carr’s art had finally achieved the recognition that it deserved during the late 1920s, and by 1930 her career was transformed. She was a national if not international success.

Big Raven (1931) is one of Carr’s major works, and evolved from her original watercolour showing this massive totem at Cumshewa in 1912, through The Raven (1928-29), included in the previous article. Vegetation around the totem has transformed into viscous waves, swirling around the hillside and the base of the totem. The raven itself is a smooth, preternatural sculpted object. Even the sky now resembles the inside of a huge theatre, with sheets of light around. The whole painting has a monumental appearance, an elegiac gravity typical of her new approach to First Nations motifs.

Zunoqua of the Cat Village (1931) shows a totem of particular interest to Carr, representing the female ogre Dzunukwa or Zunoqua. She is the ‘wild woman of the woods’, a thief of children but capable of bringing wealth to the Kwakwaka’wakw peoples. Carr wrote that she found these figures terrifying in their expression of power and domination. Scattered among the swirling vegetation are many cats, which look equally menacing.

As Carr returned to visit villages in the Haida Gwaii that she had last seen in about 1912, she noticed the changes that had taken place: suppression of the potlatch system, and clear-cutting of the forest. This comes through in these later paintings of First Nations cultures, as mourning for the disappearing people, a pervasive grief for what was rapidly being lost.

Lawren Harris had advised Emily Carr to concentrate on “the tremendous elusive what lies behind” those First Nations villages, and during the 1930s she shifted her attention more to the forest and landscape. Forest, British Columbia (1931-32) is one of her finest paintings of a theme she had been developing since Totem Walk at Sitka (1907) and Wood Interior (1909), shown earlier in this series.

Its broken processional composition consists of a series of theatrical planes, behind which columns of tree-trunks recede into the depths. These are illuminated from within. Carr had been influenced by abstract art, although she didn’t intend to paint abstracts herself, producing many finished charcoal drawings of the interiors of forests as she worked her ideas up for these paintings.

Old Tree at Dusk (c 1932) uses similar sculptural language in a more open setting, with the heightened drama of night. Her brushwork is also starting to build structure into the bark of the trees.

Blue Sky (1932-34) is another major work, showing a clearing with an elevated canopy formed by high trees. Her brushwork in the sky continues to become more structured, forming a high arch to echo that in the trees and resemble the interior of a cathedral.

In 1933, she bought a caravan which she named The Elephant, and had towed to different landscapes around Victoria to enable her to paint there. Two years later, Carr held her first solo exhibition in eastern Canada, hosted in Toronto by the Women’s Art Association of Canada.

During the mid 1930s, Carr painted some wonderful coastal views, including her watercolour Seascape (c 1935). I suspect this is a view not too far from Victoria, where she lived. Unusually for watercolour, she appears to have used colour almost straight from the tube, and structured both land and sea with her brushstrokes.

Her Young Pines and Sky (c 1935) shows less sculptural form, and greater reliance on brushwork, both in forming the slender trees and in the arched cloud and sky.

She took the theme of exceptionally tall trees to its extreme in her Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky (1936). Using a point of view close to the ground, in the middle of a cleared area, three isolated trees reach right up into the sky, where her patterned brushstrokes shimmer in the light.

Carr uses rich colours and intensely patterned brushwork in her dramatic Strait of Juan de Fuca (c 1936). This runs between Vancouver Island to the north, and the Olympic Peninsula, and her view captures the majesty of its scenery, sea and sky. The patterning of Carr’s brushstrokes and the sweep of the land to the left is echoed in an upward sweep apparent in the sea at the right. This suggests that she may have been envisioning the landscape through the optical distortion of a very wide-angle or fish-eye lens.

In the distance, on the opposite side of the strait, are the blue Olympic Mountains, contrasting with the rich green of the near shore at the left, and the orange-red of the sun.

Emily Carr was now 65, and finally established among the leading North American artists of the day. As the world headed inexorably towards war, her paintings were about to travel to Europe at last.

References

Wikipedia.
Lisa Baldissera (2015) Emily Carr, Life & Work, Art Canada Institute. ISBN 978 1 4871 0044 5. Available in PDF from Art Canada Institute.
Thom, Ian M (2013) Emily Carr Collected, Douglas & McIntyre. ISBN 978 1 77100 080 2.

In the first of these two articles showing tents in paintings, I covered those depicting historical battles of the more distant past. Today’s sequel brings those up to date with tents of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, starting with one of John Singer Sargent’s works as a war artist in the closing months of the First World War.

Sargent painted several scenes in military medical facilities, including this watercolour of the Interior of a Hospital Tent, with its packed rows of folding camp beds and a multitude of guy ropes visible through its large windows.

During his travels in the Middle East, Alberto Pasini must have become very familiar with the sight of An Arab Camp, shown here at a small watering place in 1866. From the dress and preponderance of horses, this was probably further north into Syria or even Turkey.

Albert Bierstadt’s The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak (1863) was one of his most successful paintings based on the studies from his first visit to the west in 1859. This shows a summit of 3,187 metres (10,456 feet), named by its surveyors after a general who died in the Civil War. The First Nation people shown are Shoshone, seen in their traditional wigwams with their characteristic circular opening.

Nearly fifty years after the event, François-Auguste Biard painted The Duke of Orleans Received in a Lapland Camp, August 1795 (1841). This shows the Duke looking disdainful and detached in a Sami tent, apparently shunning the bowl that is being offered to him. The tent’s framework of poles is clearly visible, and put to good use bearing the weight of the pot and drying furs.

Tents were also popular with explorers and those prospecting for valuable minerals such as gold.

Ludwig Becker painted this watercolour view of his prospector’s tent at Bendigo, in the Australian outback during the early years of its gold rush in 1853, one of several paintings he exhibited in Melbourne the following year. At its height, similar tents and shacks housed forty thousand prospectors, including the artist.

Edward Adrian Wilson’s rough pencil sketch of Camping after Dark (1910) shows a cutaway of a ‘pyramid’ tent in the Antarctic, its three occupants crammed in tightly together. From their tangle of legs and boots to the mittens and balaclava hats hanging to thaw and dry above them, it’s cramped but warm and sheltered. Wilson was one of Captain Scott’s party who died during their return from the South Pole two years later.

Tents had also become popular temporary shelters at fun events across the world.

William Powell Frith’s famous painting of Derby Day (1856-58) shows some of the canvas palaces installed for this horse-racing festival at Epsom, to the south of London. The tent in the left foreground is that of the Reform Club, an exclusive private members club in London, founded in 1836.

One of Émile Friant’s earliest works is this 1881 painting of The Entrance of the Clowns, showing the interior of the Big Top at the moment that the clowns, acrobats, and other entertainers parade. Many circuses relied on these huge tents to contain their spectators around the ring where the entertainers performed.

Pierre Bonnard’s The Beach (Arcachon) from about 1922, shows this beach packed with tents and awnings covering the golden sand, and crowds of people and moored yachts in the distance.

In the summer of 1913, the Danish painter Laurits Andersen Ring and his family holidayed 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, perhaps not such a far cry from the armies of long past.

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.

At the end of the Calydonian boar hunt, what should have been an occasion for rejoicing turned sour when the two sons of Thestius objected to Atalanta being given the prize, and the enraged Meleager ran them both through with his sword. This leads Ovid on to describe the strange death of Meleager, following that with a series of stories told at a feast hosted by the river god Achelous.

When Meleager’s mother Althaea first hears of his success in killing the boar, she gives thanks to the gods. She then learns that he has also killed her two brothers, and is plunged into profound grief, and anger at her son. She determines to avenge the deaths of her brothers, and recalls that when Meleager was born, the Fates gave her a burning log they said would determine the life of her child: he would live as long as that log remained, and wasn’t consumed by fire. As soon as the Fates had gone, Althaea took the log from the fire, extinguished its flame, and kept it in a safe place, so preserving her son’s life.

She now decides to throw that log of life onto a fire of her hatred. Four times she tries to throw the log onto the flames and cannot bring herself to do it. She lets loose a long soliloquy (one of Ovid’s finest) in which she frames her dilemma, then finally throws the log on the fire, where it’s rapidly consumed.

Meleager doesn’t know what is happening, only that he has a deep internal burning pain. As he groans, he calls for his mother, brothers, and sisters in his suffering, and dies with his sisters at his side. Two of Meleager’s sisters are thus transformed into birds, most probably guinea hens.

This marble relief from a Roman sarcophagus shows the Death of Meleager using multiplex narrative. At the right, Meleager has killed one of the sons of Thestius, and is about to kill the other. In the centre, he lies on a couch, in the throes of death, his sisters beside him. At the left, his mother Althaea throws a log or brand onto the fire to bring about her son’s death.

By comparison, François Boucher’s The Death of Meleager from 1727 is more formulaic. Meleager is ailing fast on the left, his family and friends around him. One sister at the right is apparently being fondled quite inappropriately by the man behind her. Although there is a figure in the centre background who might be Althaea, there’s no clear visual reference to the burning log.

Ovid then moves on to the next set of stories, which take place during Theseus’ journey home after the boar hunt. It has been raining very heavily and the rivers are swollen when he reaches the River Achelous, whose river god invites Theseus to pause with him until his waters have fallen. Theseus accepts this invitation, and is taken to a hut made of pumice and volcanic tufa, with a damp and mossy floor, and a ceiling decorated with conch and murex shells. There Achelous hosts a banquet, his guests being Theseus, Ixion’s son Lelex, and others, who recline on couches as they feast.

Theseus looks out and sees an island which he doesn’t recognise. Achelous informs him that it’s actually five islands, the Echinades. They had been five nymphs, who had sacrificed ten bullocks to the gods, but forgot to invite Achelous. The river god raged in anger, and washed them out to sea, where they formed those islands. Achelous points out one island in the distance which is dear to him, and named Perimele: she had been a nymph beloved by Achelous, but had lost her virginity. Her father Hippodamas was so incensed that he threw her from a cliff. Achelous saved her, and called on Neptune to turn her into an island too.

Hendrick de Clerck’s The Banquet of Achelous was probably the first of a run of depictions of this myth in the seventeenth century, and was painted in about 1610. The four men are feasting, sat around a table rather than reclining in Roman style. The rock pergola surrounding them is suitably decorated with shells, and a bevy of bare-breasted young women serve seafood and fruit. In the distance, to the right, nymphs are cavorting in a bay, a delightful reference to Achelous’ story of the creation of the Echinades.

Jan Brueghel the Younger and Hendrick van Balen combined talents to paint The Feast of Achelous slightly later, by about 1620. It follows a similar composition to de Clerck’s painting, but is reversed, with the distant nymphs on the left. (I apologise for the poor quality of this image.)

At about the same time, around 1615, Peter Paul Rubens collaborated with Jan Brueghel the Elder (father of Jan Brueghel the Younger) in The Feast of Achelous. There are now nine men around the table, and the distant nymphs are nowhere to be seen.

At some time during the first half of the seventeenth century, a painter from Rubens’ school made this rather less convincing and closer composition of The Banquet of Achelous. The stone hut has closed in on the group, and the distant landscape views are gone. The arrangement is reminiscent of the Last Supper or a New Testament wedding feast, with the figure of Theseus presiding, even down to a loaf of bread on the table, and wine being poured. There is precious little to link this painting with Ovid’s story of the Echinades.

After Achelous has told this story, Lelex starts the next, of Philemon and Baucis, one of Ovid’s most touching myths, which doesn’t appear in any other source.