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.

Achelous the river god is hosting Theseus, Ixion’s son Lelex, and others at a banquet. Once Achelous has told the story of the nymphs who were turned into the Echinades, Lelex launches into the next, of Philemon (husband) and Baucis (wife). This is one of Ovid’s most touching myths, which doesn’t appear in any other source.

Lelex claims that Achelous made the gods appear too great, so tells his story to prove that whatever the gods decree will happen does take place. His story is set in Phrygia (now west central Anatolia, in Turkey), at a place where an oak and a lime tree grow side by side. Nearby is a marsh, where once the land was habitable, and Lelex explains how those came to be.

One day, Jupiter and his son Mercury were walking in Phrygia. When they grew tired and wanted to rest, they tried a thousand homes, but every one rejected the visitors, until they came to a poor thatched cottage. There they met the elderly Philemon and Baucis, who had married in their youth, and had lived good and pious lives together ever since. The couple welcomed the gods into their tiny and humble home.

Philemon and Baucis waited on their guests’ every needs, lighting a fire, providing them with warm water to bathe their feet, then serving them food and wine; the latter was strange, because as fast as they could pour wine into their guests’ beechwood goblets, the pitcher of wine refilled itself. The couple tried to catch the goose that guarded their cottage, to kill and cook it for their guests, but it ran to the safety of a guest’s lap.

Adam Elsheimer’s exquisite oil on copper painting of Jupiter and Mercury with Philemon and Baucis (1609-10) shows Philemon (right) and Baucis (centre right) giving their hospitality generously to Jupiter (left) and Mercury (centre left), in their tiny, dark cottage. All four are depicted in contemporary dress, although Mercury’s winged helmet is an unmistakeable clue as to his identity. Their modest stock of food is piled in a basket in the right foreground, and the goose is just distinguishable in the gloom at the lower edge of the painting, below Mercury’s feet.

David Rijckaert’s undated painting of Philemon and Baucis Giving Hospitality to Jupiter and Mercury provides the basis of what has become the most popular depiction: Mercury (left) and Jupiter (left of centre) seated at the table, with Philemon (behind table) and Baucis (centre) waiting on their every need. Baucis has almost caught the evasive goose, and an additional figure is in the background preparing and serving food for the gods. Rijckaert adds some subtle details such as Jupiter’s eagle perched in the rafters.

Rembrandt’s Baucis and Philemon (1658) is one of his late works, and shows Jupiter looking decidedly Christlike, and Mercury the younger, almost juvenile, figure, sat at the table of a dark and rough cottage, lit by a lamp behind Mercury. This dramatic lighting is precursor to similar effects in his later Ahasuerus and Haman (1660) and Conspiracy of the Batavians (1661-2). Philemon and Baucis are crouched, chasing the evasive goose towards Jupiter. A humble bowl of food is in the centre of the table, and there is a glass of beer. As is usual in Rembrandt’s narrative paintings, he dresses them in contemporary rather than historic costume.

Although Rembrandt created many wonderfully narrative paintings, he seldom depicted stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. He has made the painting using rough brushstrokes and highly gestural marks of paint, as roughly hewn as the cottage which it depicts. It isn’t just an outstanding account of this myth, but one of his finest narrative paintings.

Johann Carl Loth, in his Jupiter and Mercury with Philemon and Baucis (c 1659-62), appears to have reworked the narrative from Ovid’s original. While Baucis and Philemon are waiting on their guests, with Philemon holding the jug containing wine, Mercury (centre) appears to be remonstrating with Jupiter (right), holding out his right index finger and pointing it at the other god. The evasive goose is shown behind Mercury’s back, apparently about to peck his left hand. The whole scene is set in a well-lit area, perhaps outside the cottage in daylight.

This painting from the circle of Appiani, possibly by Stefano Tofanelli or Pietro Benvenuti, shows Jupiter and Mercury with Philemon and Baucis in less straitened circumstances. Jupiter (left) holds a glass of wine in his left hand, and Mercury (centre) is both eating grapes and looking longingly at a fresh bowl of fruit that Philemon (right) is just about to place on the table. Baucis (front right) is looking at Jupiter, and holding out her right hand, as if to refill his glass.

The gods then revealed their divinity, and told their hosts that those who had shunned them would pay for their wickedness, but the old couple would be spared. Jupiter and Mercury then took them outside, and led them up the nearby mountain. When close to the top, Philemon and Baucis looked back to see all the land below was flooded, except for their tiny cottage, which had been transformed into a temple with a roof of gold.

Peter Paul Rubens’ Stormy Landscape with Philemon and Baucis from about 1625 is one of the few paintings to show a broader view of this later moment in Ovid’s story. His dramatic landscape shows storm-clouds building over the hills, a raging torrent pouring down the mountainside, dragging large trees and animals in its swollen waters, and the four figures on a track at the right. Philemon and Baucis are struggling up the track with their sticks, Jupiter points to a rainbow formed over a waterfall at the lower left corner, and Mercury is all but naked.

Jupiter then asked the couple what they most wanted. After a moment’s consultation, they agreed that they wanted to be the priests of that temple, and that, when their time came, they should both die together. Their wish was granted, and later, when they were even older, they both turned into an intertwining pair of trees, one an oak, the other a lime (linden), just as Lelex had described.

Despite their popularity as crops for millennia, cereals require preparation into more palatable form before they can form the mainstay of most diets, as one of the staple sources of carbohydrates, as they were across Europe before the popularisation of the potato after 1750. Wheat and rye were most commonly crushed into flour in mills, then that was baked into bread.

Early manual milling was replaced during classical times by mills driven by a range of natural power, including animals, wind and water. In 1786, the first steam-powered grain mill opened for business in London, although wind and water were to remain dominant in many rural districts until well into the twentieth century.

Windmills developed during the Middle Ages, and by 1500 were widespread across many parts of Europe. Although their design evolved and improved into the nineteenth century, their common principle is to expose rotating sails to wind, and transfer that rotating force to one of a pair of large millstones, within which the grain or grist is ground into flour.

Rembrandt painted few non-narrative landscapes, but among them is his dramatic view of The Mill (1645-48) seen in the rich rays of twilight. This is a post mill, whose wooden top was turned into the wind to set its sails turning. It’s sited on a small hill giving it the greatest exposure to wind.

The great masters of Dutch landscape art like Jacob van Ruisdael must have painted many hundreds of windmills, of which one of the best-known is this view of The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede from about 1670. This small town, now a city, is on the bank of the River Rhine, an ideal location for delivering sacks of grain by barge, and shipping the resulting sacks of flour. This should have kept this tower mill as busy as the wind allowed, and its owner prosperous.

The British topographic painter John Varley painted this close-up view of the well-known Red House Mill, Battersea, Surrey, with its good access by barge and proximity to the city of London. This is a wooden smock mill, a design pioneered by the Dutch in the seventeenth century.

Samuel Palmer’s Summer Storm near Pulborough, Sussex from about 1851 refers to Dutch landscape painting, but in a very Kentish context. A storm is seen approaching the rolling countryside near Pulborough, now in West Sussex, in the south-east of England. On the left, in the middle distance, a small bridge leads across to a hamlet set around a prominent windmill, whose blades are blurred as they’re driven by the wind. Beyond that mill are fields of ripening cereal.

Some windmills used their power to cut wood in sawmills, and others raised water, tasks also powered by water in watermills. These were of even more ancient origin, devised by combining waterwheels with toothed gears in the couple of centuries before the Christian era.

The Old Water Mill from 1790 is one of British painter George Morland’s finest landscapes, and shows a small undershot watermill deep in the English countryside.

A contemporary of Morland, James Ward wasn’t shy of showing the increasing dereliction in the troubled British countryside at this time. An Overshot Mill (1802-1807) shows a rickety overshot watermill used for the grinding of grain. Its fabric is in dire need of repairs, and the thatchers are already making a start on its roof.

John Constable’s contrasting view of Parham Mill, Gillingham from about 1826 shows an undershot watermill near the town of Gillingham in Dorset, visited by the artist during the early 1820s. Also known as Parham’s Mill and later Purns Mill, it burned to the ground in 1825.

When the German-American landscape artist Albert Bierstadt was painting in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1855 he made this idyllic view of A Rustic Mill which is clearly overshot, being fed along a wooden aqueduct. In contrast to many of the other paintings of mills from this period, this appears in an excellent state of repair and prosperous.

Nikolai Astrup’s Going to the Mill from about 1900-05 is a complete essay on watermills, pictured in perfect rainy milling weather, with the streams in spate during the autumn/fall. A mill race, running down its wooden channel, feeds a small undershot paddle in the centre, used to turn a millstone for sharpening knives and tools. Water flow to that is regulated by the simple valve upstream, currently in the off position, and shedding the water to either side. The man and his son are taking a sack of grain up to another mill, possibly the small shed seen in the centre distance, to grind flour for the family’s baking.

That completes my pictorial account of cereals in arable farming prior to mechanisation, from plowing the soil to milling the grain into flour. Pure arable farming was unusual, though, and the companions to fields of cereals were often sheep, the subject of next week’s article.

In the past, hospitality to strangers was high on the list of virtues expected of everyone, however rich or poor they might have been. To ensure that those living in the ancient world respected the code of hospitality, there were several myths to help guide the mind. Today I look at how paintings of those myths have communicated the need to be hospitable, and tomorrow’s sequel will look at more recent religious and moral teaching.

The first myth is brief, part of the saga of Perseus and Andromeda, but memorable.

After Perseus has beheaded the gorgon Medusa, he flies over the desert sands of Libya, the blood still dripping from Medusa’s head and falling onto the sand to form snakes. With dusk approaching, he decides to set down in the lands of the giant Atlas. He introduces himself to Atlas, including explanation of his divine paternity, and asks for rest and lodging for the night.

The giant, mindful of a prophecy that a son of Jupiter will ruin him, rudely refuses his request, and starts to wrestle with his spurned guest. Perseus responds by offering him a gift, then, taking care to avert his own face, points Medusa’s face at Atlas, who is promptly transformed into a mountain.

In Edward Burne-Jones’ Atlas Turned to Stone (1878) the giant has been turned to stone and now stands bearing the cosmos on his shoulders as Perseus flies off to Aethiopia.

The definitive classical myth stressing the importance of showing hospitality is the story of Philemon (husband) and Baucis (wife), as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book 8. This pious elderly couple live in a town in Phrygia, now west central Anatolia, in Turkey. One day, two ordinary peasants walked into the town, looking for somewhere to stay for the night. Everyone else rejected them, but when they asked this couple, who were among the poorest inhabitants and had but a simple rustic cottage, they were welcomed in. Philemon and Baucis served their guests food and wine, and when they realised they were entertaining gods, the couple raised their hands in supplication and craved indulgence for their humble cottage and fare.

Revealing themselves as the gods Jupiter/Zeus and Mercury/Hermes, the guests told them to leave town, as it was about to be destroyed, together with all those who hadn’t offered them hospitality. The gods then took the couple out to climb a mountain, telling them not to look back until they had reached the top. Once at the summit, they turned to see the town obliterated by a flood; their cottage had been spared, turned into a temple, and Philemon and Baucis were made its guardians.

Adam Elsheimer, in his small oil on copper painting Jupiter and Mercury with Philemon and Baucis (1609-10), shows Philemon (right) and Baucis (centre right) giving their hospitality generously to Jupiter (left) and Mercury (centre left), in their tiny, dark cottage. All four are depicted in more contemporary dress, although Mercury’s winged helmet is an unmistakeable clue as to his identity. Their modest stock of food is piled in a basket in the right foreground, and a goose is just distinguishable in the gloom at the lower edge of the painting, below Mercury’s feet.

David Rijckaert, in his Philemon and Baucis Giving Hospitality to Jupiter and Mercury, gives what has become the most popular depiction: Mercury (left) and Jupiter (left of centre) seated at the table, with Philemon (behind table) and Baucis (centre) waiting on their every need, ensuring that they eat and drink their fill. Baucis has almost caught their evasive goose, and an additional person is shown in the background preparing and serving food for the gods.

Rembrandt’s Baucis and Philemon (1658) shows Jupiter (looking decidedly Christlike) and Mercury (the younger, almost juvenile, figure) sat at the table of a very dark and rough cottage, lit by a lamp behind Mercury.

Philemon and Baucis are crouched, chasing their evasive goose towards Jupiter. A humble bowl of food is in the centre of the table, and there is a glass of what appears to be beer. As is usual in Rembrandt’s narrative paintings, he dresses them in contemporary rather than historic costume.

The moral here doesn’t need to be spelled out any further: fail in your duty to offer hospitality to strangers and the gods may end your life. Another myth told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses isn’t quite as damning. Instead of death, you could be turned into a frog instead. So says Ovid’s account of the Lycians who shunned the goddess Leto when all she needed was a drink of water.

Fearing reprisals from the jealous Hera (Juno), when Leto (Latona) is about to give birth to her twins, she flees to Lycia, at the western end of the south coast of modern Turkey. This was a centre for Leto’s worship, but at some stage the goddess must have become scorned by those living in the country there.

When the twins, Diana and Apollo, had drunk Leto’s milk and she was dry and thirsty under the hot sun, she saw a small lake among marshes, where local peasants were cutting reeds. She went down and was about to drink from the lake when those locals stopped her. Leto told them that drinking the water was a common right, and that she only intended to drink and not to bathe in it.

The locals continued to prevent her, threatening her and hurling insults. They then stirred up the mud on the bottom of the lake, to muddy the water, incurring the goddess’s anger and causing her to curse them to remain in that pool forever as frogs. It’s this transformation that forms the basis for the many paintings of this myth.

Annibale Carracci’s Latona and the Lycian Peasants probably from 1590-1620 is the first truly masterly painting of this myth. Latona is here placing her curse on the locals, and behind them one appears to have already been transformed into a frog. Although the babies’ heads are disproportionately small (as was the case for several centuries), they and their mother are very realistically portrayed, and contrast markedly with the uncouth and obdurate locals.

Jan Brueghel the Elder’s panel showing Latona and the Lycian Peasants (1595-1610) is one of the finest depictions. Set in a dense forest, surely inappropriate for Lycia, the locals are busy cutting reeds and foraging. Leto, at the bottom left, is seen remonstrating with a peasant, over to the right. As the detail below shows, the goddess is in need, as are her babies. The peasant closest to her, brandishing his fist, is already rapidly turning into a frog. There are many other frogs around, including a pair at the bottom left corner, near the feet of one of the babies.

David Teniers the Younger’s Latona and the Frogs from around 1640–50 isn’t in the same class as Brueghel’s, but still tells the story well, and shows Lycians being transformed for refusing to help the goddess.

François Lemoyne’s Latona and the Peasants of Lycia (1721) stops short of showing the metamorphosis or resulting frogs, but Latona and the peasants are clearly engaged in their dispute.

The story survived in narrative painting well into the latter half of the nineteenth century, when Gabriel Guay, an eminent former pupil of Jean-Léon Gérôme, painted his Latona and the Peasants (1877). Leto and her babies now seem not just real but almost contemporary, minimising her divinity.