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Painting poetry: John Keats

A few weeks ago I featured paintings of one of Boccaccio’s stories from his Decameron, retold in 1818 by the British poet John Keats (1795-1821) in his Isabella, or the Pot of Basil. Today’s article looks at paintings inspired by some of Keats’ other writings, and tomorrow those based on the works of Tennyson.

Keats completed and published his poem Endymion in 1818, when he was only twenty-three. This elaborates on the story of the shepherd of the same name who became the object of affection from the goddess Selene. However, instead of using her name, Keats used an alternative name for the goddess Artemis, who later became confounded with Selene.

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George Frederic Watts (1817–1904), Endymion (1872), oil on canvas, 65 × 52 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

George Frederic Watts’ painting of Endymion (1872) may well refer to Keats’ poetic reinterpretation, showing Endymion making love with the Titan goddess of the Moon, Selene. This is one of Watts’ most painterly works, and appears to have come straight from his emotions. This also marks his transition from painting Pre-Raphaelite staples such as mediaeval knights and legends, to his later works that were more allegorical if not frankly symbolist.

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Edward Stott (1855–1918), Trees Old and Young, Sprouting a Shady Boon for Simple Sheep (date not known), oil on canvas, 50 x 73 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Edward Stott’s Trees Old and Young, Sprouting a Shady Boon for Simple Sheep from 1888 is unusual as it’s one of his few paintings with a literary reference, its title being a quotation from Endymion. However, its shepherdess is neither Endymion nor Selene/Cynthia.

The following year, Keats wrote the narrative poem The Eve of St. Agnes, which was published a year later, remains one of his finest works, and has formed the basis for at least three major paintings by Pre-Raphaelites.

Madeline has fallen in love with Porphyro, who is an enemy to her family. Older women have told Madeline that she can receive sweet dreams of love on the night of St. Agnes Eve, preceding the day on which the patron saint of virgins is celebrated, 21 January.

On that night, Porphyro gains entry to the castle where Madeline lives, and looks for Angela, who remains a friend to his family despite the feud. Angela reluctantly agrees to take him to Madeline’s room, so that he can gaze at her sleeping there. She takes him there, where he hides in a large wardrobe and watches her prepare for bed, seeing her full beauty in the moonlight.

He creeps out to prepare a meal for her, but she wakes, and seeing the same figure she had just been dreaming, takes him into her bed. She then wakes fully and realises her mistake. They declare their mutual love before escaping from the castle past drunken revellers, and flee into the night.

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William Holman Hunt (1827–1910), The flight of Madeline and Porphyro during the drunkenness attending the revelry (The Eve of St. Agnes) (study) (1848), oil on panel, 25.2 x 35.5 cm, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool England. Wikimedia Commons.

In this study for William Holman Hunt’s The Flight of Madeline and Porphyro During the Drunkenness Attending the Revelry from 1848, he shows the climax of the poem. Madeline and Porphyro, dressed in their cloaks, are creeping past the drunken bodies of those who have been at the feast. Through the arches at the left the drinking and feasting can be seen still in progress. In the foreground one of the revellers is clutching an empty cask of drink, while other remains of the drinking are scattered on the floor to the right. Two large dogs appear to be somnolent and not reacting to events.

Madeline’s face has a neutral expression, and she has her right arm across Porphyro’s chest to restrain him, her left hand in contact with his right hand on the hilt of his (smaller) sword, as if to restrain him from drawing it. Porphyro’s face shows tension, almost amounting to anger, perhaps, as his left hand holds a door behind him, at the right edge of the painting. That door bears a key, suggesting it’s an outer door. His right hand grips the handle of his sword, as if about to draw it.

The Eve of St Agnes 1856 by Arthur Hughes 1832-1915
Arthur Hughes (1832–1915), The Eve of St Agnes (1856), oil on canvas, 71 x 124.5 cm, The Tate Gallery, London (Bequeathed by Mrs Emily Toms in memory of her father, Joseph Kershaw 1931). Photographic Rights © Tate 2016, CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported), http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hughes-the-eve-of-st-agnes-n04604

Instead of Holman Hunt’s elaborate and ingenious composition, Arthur Hughes opts for a triptych, read from left to right. At the left, Porphyro is approaching the castle. In the centre, he has woken Madeline, who has not yet taken him into her bed. At the right, he almost quotes from Holman Hunt’s version, showing the couple’s escape over drunken revellers. There is also a second, undated version in the Ashmolean, Oxford, in which the painting at the left shows a slightly later moment, where Porphyro meets Angela at the entrance to the castle.

Hughes felt the need to provide the viewer with an excerpt of the original text:
They told her how, upon St Agnes’ Eve,
Young virgins might have visions of delight,
And soft adorings from their loves receive
Upon the honey’d middle of the night.
If ceremonies due they did aright,
And supperless to bed they must retire,
And couch supine their beauties lily white,
Nor look behind, nor sideways, but require
Of heaven with upward eyes for all that they desire.

This painting was very well received when shown at the Royal Academy in 1856, with the critic John Ruskin and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti being enthused by it.

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John Everett Millais (1829–1896), The Eve of St Agnes (1863), oil on canvas, 117.8 x 154.3 cm, The Royal Collection of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, London. Wikimedia Commons.

John Everett Millais’ The Eve of St Agnes from 1863 is one of the few Pre-Raphaelite paintings to have been purchased by the British Royal Collection: despite the great achievements of the movement, their works were not favoured by Queen Victoria.

This shows Madeline completing the rituals prescribed for the night, as she prepares to undress for bed, in verses 25-26 of Keats’ poem:
Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,
And threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast,
…her vespers done,
Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;
Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;
Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:
Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,
Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees,
In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed,
But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled.

This curiously static scene from an action-packed narrative was painted from life: Millais used the King’s Bedroom in the Jacobean house at Knole Park, near Sevenoaks in Kent, with his wife Effie as his model. The special bull’s eye lantern producing the eerie lighting effect was a detail over which he took meticulous care. The end result is another evocative, sensual painting that’s almost devoid of narrative.

Before The Eve of St. Agnes was published, Keats wrote La Belle Dame Sans Merci, a ballad about a femme fatale, derived in part from a fifteenth century poem by Alain Chartier. This concerns a fairy who seduces a knight with her eyes and singing, then condemns him to an unpleasant fate. It was published in its original version in 1819, and in a revised version in 1820. It includes the the verses

I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful, a fairy’s child;
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.

I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.

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Walter Crane (1845–1915), La Belle Dame Sans Merci (1865), oil on canvas, 48 × 58 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Walter Crane is one of the earlier artists to represent this in a painting, with subsequent similar depictions by Arthur Hughes and Frank Dicksee. The ‘belle dame’ of the title is shown riding side-saddle on the knight’s horse, flowers in her long, flowing tresses, and the knight clad in armour and heraldic overgarments, holds her hand.

Early in 1821, when he was only twenty-five, John Keats died of the complications of tuberculosis.

Interiors by Design: Bedrooms

Separation of living from sleeping accommodation has become increasingly popular in most societies as they have become more affluent and housing has become more spacious. In its extreme, among the wealthy, bedrooms have acquired supplementary areas for dressing and personal grooming, leaving the bedroom itself dedicated to the bed and sleep. For that it’s usually the most private room in a house or apartment.

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Emmery Rondahl (1858-1914), The Doctor’s Orders (1882), oil on canvas, 43.2 x 55.9 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Emmery Rondahl’s Doctor’s Orders (1882) shows a Danish country doctor writing a prescription for an older patient who is tucked up in a magnificent fitted bed in their own home. Although still a humble dwelling, with an uneven and uncarpeted stone floor, the bed has luxuriant curtains and there’s even a short net curtain at the window.

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Edgar Degas (1834–1917), Interior (‘The Rape’) (1868-9), oil on canvas, 81.3 x 114.3 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA. Wikimedia Commons.

Edgar Degas’ famously enigmatic Interior from 1868-69 remains fascinating even if you ignore its two figures. 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 it. Just behind her 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’.

The man’s top hat rests, upside down, on top of the cabinet on the far side of the room, just in front of the woman. Despite the obvious implication that they are a couple who have met in that room to engage in a clandestine sexual relationship, the bed is a single not a double. It also shows no sign of having been used, nor has the bedding been disturbed in any way.

There’s a mature fire burning in the fireplace behind the woman and the lamp. There are four paintings or similar objects hanging on the walls, of which only one appears to be decipherable. This is the large rounded rectangular one above the fireplace. Although it appears to be a mirror, the image shown on it doesn’t resemble a reflection of the room’s interior, but looks to be a painting. This might show a bright figure, resembling the woman, in front of some shrubs, with classical buildings behind.

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Edgar Degas (1834–1917), Woman Drying Herself after the Bath (c 1885, or 1876-77), pastel over monotype, 43 × 58 cm, Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA. Wikimedia Commons.

A few years later, in 1876-77, probably when Degas was starting his series depicting women drying themselves after they had bathed, he painted a woman in pastel over a monotype, where the figure is set in the broader context of a bedroom, in Woman Drying Herself after the Bath. This is a plain and simple bedroom, with a single bed and a dressing table with a mirror. Other paintings in this series are closer cropped on the woman.

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Maximilien Luce (1858–1941), Morning, Interior (1890), oil on canvas, 64.8 × 81 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (bequeathed by Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot (1876–1967)), New York, NY. Courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art, via Wikimedia Commons.

Morning, Interior (1890) is one of Maximilien Luce’s best-known Divisionist paintings from the late nineteenth century. This is a humbler bedroom situated in the uppermost part of the house, a garret perhaps, his dressing table lacks a mirror, and the bed is a lightweight folding model with a thin mattress.

Before the end of the century, Pierre Bonnard had started painting the intimate interiors that were to dominate his art for much of the rest of his life. Few, though, depicted the bedroom he shared with his partner Marthe.

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Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947), Man and Woman in an Interior (1898), oil on board, 51.5 x 62 cm, Private collection. The Athenaeum.

In 1898, Bonnard painted the first of his controversial works revealing his private life with Marthe, in Man and Woman in an Interior. He stands naked, looking away, as Marthe is getting dressed on the bed. He has also cropped this unusually, as if it was a ‘candid’ photo, enhancing its voyeurism.

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Félix Vallotton (1865–1925), Interior, Bedroom with Two Figures (1904), oil on cardboard, 61.5 × 56 cm, Hermitage Museum Государственный Эрмитаж, Saint Petersburg, Russia. Wikimedia Commons.

Félix Vallotton’s disturbing domestic scenes continued with Interior, Bedroom with Two Figures from 1904. The lady of the house is standing, her back to the viewer, over her maid as the latter is sewing up an evening gown for her. The lady’s face is revealed in her reflection in the large mirror on the wardrobe at the back of the room, where her maid is all but invisible.

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John Collier (1850–1934), Mariage de Convenance (1907), oil on canvas, 124 x 165 cm, Cyfarthfa Castle Museum & Art Gallery, Merthyr Tydfil, Wales. The Athenaeum.

John Collier followed Degas’ enigmatic interiors with Mariage de Convenance from 1907. A mother, dressed in the black implicit of widowhood, stands haughty, her right arm resting on the mantlepiece of her daughter’s bedroom. The latter cowers on the floor, her arms and head resting on her bed, in obvious distress. Laid out on the bed is the daughter’s wedding dress, the crux of this painting’s riddle.

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Édouard Vuillard (1868–1940), Lucy Hessel Reading (1913), oil on canvas, 100.2 x 82.9 cm, The Jewish Museum, New York, NY. Wikimedia Commons.

Édouard Vuillard’s portrait of Lucy Hessel Reading in her bedroom from 1913 needs more context. Lucy was the wife of the art dealer Jos Hessel (1859-1942), and she was a frequent model, companion and long-term lover of Vuillard. At this time, her husband was Vuillard’s sole dealer.

Just before the Second World War, Eric Ravilious painted a series of contemporary and deserted bedrooms.

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Eric Ravilious (1903–1942), The Bedstead (1939), watercolour, further details not known. Wikimedia Commons.

The Bedstead (1939), with its wide angle projection, is full of patterns: the wallpaper, floorboards and rugs, and features a mass-produced iron bedstead.

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Eric Ravilious (1903–1942), Farmhouse Bedroom (1939), watercolour, further details not known. Wikimedia Commons.

In his Farmhouse Bedroom (1939) the patterns are overwhelming, and its projection has become so extreme that it distorts.

Paintings of 1924: 2 Narrative and miscellaneous

This second collection of paintings that were made one hundred years ago, in 1924, opens with some narrative works, followed by a couple of interiors, miscellaneous works, and ends with an early sporting painting.

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Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), The Trojan Horse (1924), oil on canvas, 105 × 135 cm, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin. Wikimedia Commons.

Lovis Corinth’s Trojan Horse proved to be his last major painting from classical myth, showing the wooden horse made by the Greeks to gain access to the city of Troy so they could destroy it. The city is seen in the background, with its lofty towers and impregnable walls. The select group of Greek soldiers who undertook this commando raid are already concealed inside the horse, and those around it are probably Trojans sent from the city to check it out.

Although there are suggestions of an allegorical relationship between this painting and the First World War, Troy had been a hot topic in Berlin since the excavations at Hisarlık in Turkey in the late nineteenth century by Heinrich Schliemann and Wilhelm Dörpfeld.

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Ker-Xavier Roussel (1867–1944), The Sleeping Diana (c 1924), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA. Wikimedia Commons.

Ker-Xavier Roussel’s Sleeping Diana uses a simpler motif of the goddess asleep under the watchful eye of one of her devotees, as a deer comes to drink at the pool between them.

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Kazimierz Sichulski (1879–1942), Bachanale (1924), tempera on cardboard, 69 x 98 cm, Lviv National Art Gallery, Lviv, Ukraine. Wikimedia Commons.

Kazimierz Sichulski’s Bacchanal shows three naked bacchantes cavorting with Bacchus. This is set during the grape harvest, with bowls of the fruit and a couple of donkeys laden with buckets for the crop.

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Mykola Ivasyuk (1865–1937), Riders on the Steppe (1924), oil on panel, 46.5 x 36.7 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Mykola Ivasyuk’s Riders on the Steppe is one of this Ukrainian artist’s late Cossack paintings. Two years later, Ivasyuk was appointed professor at the Kyiv Art Institute, but started to fall out of favour and was transferred to Odesa, where criticism became more serious. In the autumn of 1937, he was arrested, imprisoned, convicted of being a terrorist on the basis of his art, and was shot by a firing squad in Kyiv on 25 November 1937. Much of his art was confiscated or destroyed, and it wasn’t until 1980 that he was rehabilitated and his surviving paintings could be seen again.

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Édouard Vuillard (1868–1940), Reading in the Dining Room, Vaucresson (1924), oil on board, 39.5 x 55 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

In Édouard Vuillard’s Reading in the Dining Room, Vaucresson, Lucy Hessel has already left her husband Jos reading the newspaper at the breakfast table, and gone to busy herself in the next room. Behind this mundane domestic scene is deeper complexity: Jos and Lucy Hessel were close friends of the artist, so close that at the time of this painting Vuillard, then in his mid-fifties, and Lucy were lovers.

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Þórarinn B. Þorláksson (1867-1924), The Artist’s Home (1924), media not known, 35 x 25 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Until relatively recently, Icelandic society remained strongly traditional, and homes in its capital Reykjavik were still decorated in older style. Þórarinn Þorláksson’s glimpse into The Artist’s Home shows this well.

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Henri Le Sidaner (1862–1939), White Garden at Dusk (1924), oil on canvas, 60 x 73.8 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

I believe that Henri Le Sidaner’s White Garden at Dusk shows a corner of the artist’s garden in the old village of Gerberoy.

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Bruno Liljefors (1860–1939), Sea Eagles Chasing an Eider (1924), oil on canvas, 125 × 160 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

The pioneer Swedish natural history painter Bruno Liljefors never lost his fascination for the relationship between predators and prey, as seen in his Sea Eagles Chasing an Eider.

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Heinrich Zille (1858–1929), Circus Games (1924), coloured lithograph, dimensions and location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

By the early years of the twentieth century, circuses were an established if itinerant part of society. Children in neighbourhoods engaged in circus games, as shown so delightfully in Heinrich Zille’s lithograph Circus Games.

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Charles Demuth (1883-1935), Fruit and Sunflowers (c 1924-25), watercolour over graphite on white wove paper, 45.7 x 29.7 cm, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum (Louise E. Bettens Fund), Cambridge, MA. Courtesy of Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum.

When Charles Demuth was unwell as a result of his diabetes he sought solace in floral paintings, such as these exquisite Fruit and Sunflowers.

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Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), Königsberger Marzipantorte (Royal Marzipan Cake) (1924), oil on panel, 55.5 × 71 cm, Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Münster, Germany. Wikimedia Commons.

Lovis Corinth sometimes painted purely for fun: this superb depiction of a Königsberger Marzipantorte (Royal Marzipan Cake) must have been completed at speed before his family consumed the model.

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George Bellows (1882–1925), Dempsey and Firpo (1924), oil on canvas, 129.5 × 160.7 cm, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Wikimedia Commons.

The American artist George Bellows is perhaps best-known for his paintings and prints of boxing matches, many of them clandestine. Dempsey and Firpo, though, shows a famous historic boxing match between the heavyweights Jack Dempsey, world champion since 1919, and Luis Ángel Firpo, an Argentinian challenger. This took place in the Polo Grounds of New York City on 14 September 1923.

From the start of the first round, the fight was gripping in excitement, with Dempsey knocking Firpo down seven times. Towards the end of the first round, Dempsey was trapped against the ropes, and Firpo knocked him out of the ring, the moment shown here. Dempsey finally knocked Firpo out late in the second round. This was made from contemporary press photographs.

The Real Country: Idyll

Ask anyone who has lived in the country and they’ll recall its idyllic moments. To end this series, I celebrate a few of those in paintings from the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries.

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Mykola Kuznetsov (1850-1929), In Celebration (1879-81), oil on canvas, 55 x 98 cm, Tretyakov Gallery Государственная Третьяковская галерея, Moscow, Russia. Wikimedia Commons.

This Ukrainian farm labourer is caught relaxing for a moment in the sun and flowers of early summer in Mykola Kuznetsov’s early In Celebration (1879-81).

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Giovanni Segantini (1858–1899), Ploughing (1890), oil on canvas, 117.6 x 227 cm, Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Germany. Image © Ad Meskens, via Wikimedia Commons.

The pair of ploughmen in Giovanni Segantini’s Ploughing may not have had time to study the fine mountain views near the Alpine village of Savognin, but they and the other labourers in the right distance are enjoying the fine weather.

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Giovanni Segantini (1858–1899), High Noon in the Alps (1892), oil on canvas, 86 x 80 cm, Ohara Museum of Art 大原美術館, Kurashiki, Japan. Wikimedia Commons.

A couple of years later, Segantini’s High Noon in the Alps (1892) catches this shepherdess enjoying a brief break in her work, in the intense summer sunshine of the high plateau.

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Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret (1852–1929), In the Forest (1893), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, Musée des beaux-arts de Nancy, Nancy, France. Image by G.Garitan, via Wikimedia Commons.

Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret shows that even itinerant workers could sit together and eat to the music of a violin when living In the Forest in 1893. Behind them are two oxen, and the forest that’s currently their home.

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Teodor Axentowicz (1859–1938), Kołomyjka, Oberek Taniec ludowy przed domem (Oberek Folk Dance in Front of a House) (1895), oil on canvas, 85 x 112.5 cm, Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie, Warsaw, Poland. Wikimedia Commons.

In Poland, Teodor Axentowicz’s painting of Oberek Folk Dance in Front of a House from 1895 shows locals dancing the second most popular Polish folk dance after the polka. Most of these dancers are barefoot.

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Edward Stott (1855–1918), Peaceful Rest (c 1902), oil on canvas, 60.5 x 81 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Edward Stott’s shepherd has stolen a moment of Peaceful Rest as his small flock drinks from a pond. He’s lighting a clay tobacco pipe, with his crook resting on his leg. Most of the painting uses a limited palette, with three splashes of colour standing out: the man’s face lit by the flame, the watchful sheepdog behind him, and a blue object protruding from the man’s jacket pocket.

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Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848–1884), Love in the Village (1882), oil on canvas, 194 × 180 cm, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts Музей изобразительных искусств им. А.С. Пушкина, Moscow, Russia. Wikimedia Commons.

Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Love in the Village shows a young couple on either side of a tumbledown fence, chatting intimately among the vegetable patches.

Idyllic moments indeed, but what happens in the country is often a far cry from the town.

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Nikolai Astrup (1880–1928), Fjøsfrieri (Early Courting) (1904), oil, dimensions not known, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Nikolai Astrup’s humorous painting of Early Courting from 1904 shows a young couple at the far left engaged in ‘clothed courting’ in the unromantic surroundings of a cowshed. He has a bottle of drink in his pocket; whether that’s to give him courage or to weaken the resistance of his girlfriend is unclear.

The couple have sought the privacy of the cowshed, out of everyone’s way, but the boyfriend appears unaware that they’re being watched by someone up in the roof. From the apparent direction of gaze of the girlfriend and the blush on her cheeks, she has just noticed the peeping tom or watchful relative. The setting is enhanced by the sunlight pouring through the far window, illuminating two rows of the back-ends of cows. The wood floor between the cows appears to be decorated with small sketches, but those are actually piles of cow dung. Courting in the country must have been a sensorily rich experience.

Reading visual art: 180 The holly and the ivy

The association between two plants, holly and ivy, with the feast of Christmas appears peculiarly British, and best expressed in the traditional carol The Holly and the Ivy. Apparently, holly has been a symbolic reference to Jesus Christ since the Middle Ages, now explained by its red berries representing the drops of blood of the crucifixion, and the crown of thorns worn by Jesus. Ivy then forms a symbolic reference to Christ’s mother, the Virgin Mary.

This is seen in cameo in two paintings by British artists of the nineteenth century.

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Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), A Christmas Carol (1867), oil on panel, 45.5 x 38 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted a couple of works on and about Christmas, of which A Christmas Carol from 1867 is probably the more interesting. His model is Ellen Smith, described as a ‘laundry girl’, who is dressed in items from the artist’s collection. There are several allusions to Christmas, particularly the Virgin and Child just above the model’s face, and a sprig of holly with its red berries at the end of her musical instrument.

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Sophie Gengembre Anderson (1823–1903), Christmas Time – Here’s The Gobbler! (date not known), oil on canvas, 112 × 84 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Sophie Gengembre Anderson’s undated Christmas Time – Here’s The Gobbler! includes a larger spray of holly on the wall at the top right.

Otherwise, holly is only exceptionally identifiable in paintings, and the only reference I have found is in a single work by James Tissot, where it appears together with ivy, but not in reference to Christmas.

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James Tissot (1836–1902), The Farewells (1871), oil on canvas, 100.3 x 62 cm, Bristol Museums and Art Gallery, Bristol, England. Wikimedia Commons.

Tissot painted The Farewells soon after his flight to London following the Franco-Prussian War and Paris Commune. This couple, separated by the iron rails of a closed gate, are in late eighteenth century dress. The man stares intently at the woman, his gloved left hand resting on the spikes along the top of the gate, and his ungloved right hand grasps her left. She plays idly with her clothing with her other hand, and looks down, towards their hands.

Reading her clothing, she is plainly dressed, implying she is perhaps a governess. A pair of scissors suspended by string on her left side would fit with that, and they’re also symbols of the parting taking place. This is reinforced by the autumn season, and dead leaves at the lower edge of the canvas. However, there is some hope if its floral symbols are accurate: ivy in the lower left is indicative of fidelity and marriage, while holly at the right invokes hope and passion.

Ivy has longer and more extensive traditions throughout European painting, although it too is only exceptionally identifiable.

In mythology, a thyrsus or thyrsos is a form of staff or even spear decorated with plant matter. In its strictest form, it should be a wand made from the giant fennel plant, decorated with ivy leaves and tipped with a pine cone or artichoke. It’s almost invariably an attribute of the god Dionysus (Roman Bacchus), and his devotees, maenads or bacchantes. It’s thus associated with prosperity, fertility and their over-indulgence in the form of hedonism. In the extreme, it can be tipped with a metal point and used as a club.

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Annibale Carracci (1560–1609), Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne (1597-1602), fresco, Palazzo Farnese, Rome. Wikimedia Commons.

Annibale Carracci’s Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne (1597-1602) is a marvellous fresco on a ceiling in the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. Dionysus is sat in his chariot with his thyrsus, here a long staff wound with ivy leaves but without any tip. Although a feature of many other paintings, this is one of very few decorated with ivy.

Ivy also makes an appearance in a not dissimilar painting with open narrative, this time by Philip Hermogenes Calderon in 1856.

Broken Vows 1856 by Philip Hermogenes Calderon 1833-1898
Philip Hermogenes Calderon (1833–1898), Broken Vows (1856), oil on canvas, 91.4 x 67.9 cm, The Tate Gallery (Purchased 1947), London. © The Tate Gallery and Photographic Rights © Tate (2016), CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported), http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/calderon-broken-vows-n05780

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

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

Calderon here deliberately introduces considerable ambiguity. The eyes of the shorter person behind the fence are carefully occluded, leaving their gender open to speculation. Most viewers are likely to conclude that the taller figure behind the fence is the unfaithful husband of the woman in front, but that requires making assumptions that aren’t supported by visual clues. Whose vows are being broken? Calderon invites us to speculate.

Like laurel, ivy can also be worked into a crown.

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Francisco Pradilla Ortiz (1848–1921), Muchacho flautista coronado de hiedra (Flute Player Crowned with Ivy) (1880), watercolour on paper, 71 x 45 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Francisco Pradilla’s watercolour of A Flute Player Crowned with Ivy is a delightful example from 1880. But it took Pierre Puvis de Chavannes to envisage ivy being used instead of a length of rope.

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Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898), Fantasy (1866), oil on canvas, 263.5 x 148.5 cm, Ohara Museum of Art 大原美術館, Kurashiki, Japan. Wikimedia Commons.

In Puvis’ Fantasy from 1866, one of the two people in this idyllic wooded landscape is using a length of ivy to school a winged white horse, either Pegasus or a hippogriff.

Although seldom clearly identifiable in landscape paintings of trees, one of Paul Nash’s last conventional landscapes is an exception.

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Paul Nash (1892–1946), Oxenbridge Pond (1927-28), oil on canvas, 99.7 x 87.6 cm, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, Birmingham, England. The Athenaeum.

Oxenbridge Pond from 1927-28 shows a pond at Oxenbridge Farmhouse, Iden, not far from the artist’s home. Patterns of brushstrokes are assembled into the textures of foliage, ivy covering a tree-trunk, even the lichens and moss on the trunk closest to the viewer, at the right edge.

Reference

Wikipedia on the carol The Holly and the Ivy.

Changing Paintings: 50 The making of myrrh and birth of Adonis

Ovid’s sequel to the story of Pygmalion’s marriage to his former statue is a darker tale of incest, transformation, and obstetrics in the arboretum, resulting in myrrh and the unique birth of Adonis.

Pygmalion’s great granddaughter Myrrha was cursed by the Fates and blighted in love. Although she had many suitors, she fell in love with her father, King Cinyras. Ovid relates her long soliloquy in which she wrestles with her own mind over this. When her father asked her what to do about her suitors, she first stayed silent, then burst into tears, eventually confessing that she wanted a husband like her father.

That night she lay awake in bed, her mind in turmoil, until resolving that her only solution was suicide. She tied a noose around a beam in her bedroom, and was just about to hang herself from it when her old nurse came in. Eventually, Myrrha confessed to her shameful desire, and her nurse promised to arrange the matter for her.

When the festival of Ceres came, Cenchreis, Myrrha’s mother, was busy with her duties, allowing the nurse to arrange Myrrha’s liaison with her father. The nurse ensured that Cinyras had plenty to drink, and promised him a night making love to a girl as young as his daughter. Later that night, the nurse took Myrrha to her father, and put her to bed with him, making her pregnant. Myrrha and her father continued to sleep together night after night, Cinyras still oblivious of who his partner really was. Eventually, he brought in a lamp so that he could see her, and was shocked to discover his own daughter.

He drew his sword to kill her, but she fled and wandered in the desert until it was time for her child to be born. Myrrha then called on the gods to help her, but wanted to neither live nor die. She was transformed into a myrrh tree, providing the precious resin myrrh from the sap generated from her tears of grief.

Adonis, the child who had been growing within her, was then delivered by Lucina, goddess of childbirth, and laid on soft leaves by the Naiads to be anointed with his mother’s myrrh.

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Artist not known, Birth of Adonis (date not known), fresco from the Golden House of Nero in Rome, dimensions not known, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, England. Image by Carole Raddato, via Wikimedia Commons.

This classical fresco from the Golden House of Nero in Rome shows Lucina presenting Venus, who stands clutching the top of a myrrh tree, with the newborn Adonis.

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Titian (1490–1576), The Birth of Adonis (c 1505-10), oil on cassone panel, 35 x 162 cm, , Musei civici di Padova, Padua, Italy. Wikimedia Commons.

Possibly one of Titian’s earliest works, although this is disputed and even Giorgione has been credited, this cassone panel of The Birth of Adonis probably dates from 1505-10. At the left, Myrrha and her father Cinyras lie together, although this would of course make certain his knowledge of her identity. In the centre, a baby is delivered from the woody womb of Myrrha as a tree, in multiplex narrative.

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Bernardino Luini (c 1480/82-1532), The Birth of Adonis (1509-10), fresco transferred to panel, 135 x 235 cm, Villa Rabia “La Pelucca”, Milan, Italy. Wikimedia Commons.

At about the same time, Bernardino Luini painted his fresco account of The Birth of Adonis (1509-10), which also adopts multiplex narrative to explain the origin of Myrrha’s pregnancy. In the foreground, the couple are shown together, and at the top left the miraculous birth has just taken place. In an alternative reading, the couple in the foreground could be Adonis as a young man, with the goddess Venus as his lover.

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Luigi Garzi (after) (1638-1721), The Birth of Adonis and Transformation of Myrrha (date not known), oil on panel, dimensions not known, The Wellcome Library, London. Courtesy of Wellcome Library, via Wikimedia Commons.

Over a century later, this wonderful panel was painted, showing The Birth of Adonis and Transformation of Myrrha. This was possibly after Luigi Garzi, although again its origin remains disputed. Reference to Myrrha’s dark past has been concealed, and she is here shown as a chimera between woman and tree, with the infant Adonis just delivered by a whole team of midwives and maids. The helper at the right wears a coronet with the crescent moon on it, signifying the goddess Diana. On the left side of the tree, one of the other helpers is holding up a tray with a small container of myrrh to anoint Adonis. In the foreground, a wingless putto is laying out a napkin for the infant.

One artist painted this story repeatedly: Marcantonio Franceschini, a Baroque painter in the Italian city of Bologna.

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Marcantonio Franceschini (1648–1729), The Birth of Adonis (c 1685-90), oil on copper, 48.5 × 69 cm, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Dresden, Germany. Wikimedia Commons.

This version of Franceschini’s The Birth of Adonis probably dates from around 1685-90, and is now in Dresden. Myrrha is a distinctive cross between tree and woman, and a couple of satyrs are laughing in the bushes behind her. Two young women are rather pointedly looking in amazement at the origin of Myrrha’s baby. In the centre, Adonis is being given by Diana, with her crescent moon, to Venus, who stars in his later life, and is already admiring his beauty.

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Marcantonio Franceschini (1648–1729), The Birth of Adonis (c 1692-1709), oil, dimensions not known, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vienna, Austria. Wikimedia Commons.

Franceschini’s later version from around 1692-1709 is now in Vienna, and arranges a similar composition into vertical format. Here Diana is handing Adonis over to another goddess, possibly Venus, who is preparing to assume the role of wet-nurse. Behind them, the two women looking in amazement appear to be less anatomically engaged, and Pan and a satyr are providing some celebratory music. The napkin-bearing putto is here a winged Cupid.

Apart from a slightly later painting by Boucher, which I have been unable to illustrate here, those seem to have been the last paintings of this disturbing story of the origins of myrrh and Adonis, until recently.

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Rafael Metz (dates not known), The Transformation of Myrrh and the Birth of Adonis (2006), further details not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Contemporary artist Rafael Metz’s The Transformation of Myrrh and the Birth of Adonis (2006) shows only the final part of the story, as the infant is being cradled by another woman, under the chimeric tree of Myrrha with its ornate and decorative branches. Myrrh resin is already exuding from the bark.

Commemorating the centenary of the death of Henri Jules Jean Geoffroy, painter of childhood

A century ago today, 15 December, the French artist Henri Jules Jean Geoffroy died in Paris. Also known by his pen name of Géo, he is one of the great painters of children and childhood in the European canon.

Geoffroy was born the son of a tailor in Marennes, on the west coast of France, half way up the Bay of Biscay. He went to study in Paris, probably at the École des Beaux Arts in about 1871, where he’s claimed to have been a pupil of Léon Bonnat and others, although Bonnat didn’t become a professor there until 1882.

He first exhibited at the Salon in 1874, when he was just 21. From 1876, he undertook commissions to illustrate books about childhood and youth for the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel (1814-86), who also published the work of Gustave Doré, and discovered the author Jules Verne. Despite this promising start, Geoffroy doesn’t seem to have achieved much artistic recognition until the mid 1880s, by which time he signed himself simply as Géo.

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Henri Jules Jean Geoffroy (1853–1924), Jean Valjean and Cosette (1879-1882), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, Maison de Victor Hugo, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.

Around 1879-1882, Geoffroy painted this work showing a well-known scene from Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, of Jean Valjean and Cosette. This shows the hero Valjean when he arrives in Montfermeil on Christmas Eve and discovers young Cosette fetching a pail of water for her abusive guardians the Thénardiers, early in the novel.

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Henri Jules Jean Geoffroy (1853–1924), Whoever Breaks the Glass Pays for It (1881), further details not known. Wikimedia Commons.

He followed that with Whoever Breaks the Glass Pays for It in 1881. This shows a group of three young boys who have apparently broken a glass from a street café. The boy at the right is pointing down at the fragments of glass on the ground, and looking daggers at the other two. He is being admonished by the street vendor whose glass has been broken, and has been told that he has to pay for the damage. Geoffroy gives subtle insight into the social background in the children’s clothing: the apparently uninvolved boy at the left wears clean and fancy boots, while the one at the right who is assumed to be the miscreant wears worn and dirty clothing and footwear.

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Henri Jules Jean Geoffroy (1853–1924), Snack Time (1882), oil on canvas, 98 x 131 cm, Private collection. The Athenaeum.

By 1882, Geoffroy had entered the schools where he was to be most successful and prolific; he apparently lodged above a school, with a couple of teachers. Snack Time shows the pupils outside their primary school during a break, armed with their lunchboxes and baskets. Again he tells their stories using subtle hints including their clothes. A well-dressed girl in white is being harassed by a smaller boy into surrendering some of her food. He wears rougher clothes but seems in control of the situation, as others watch on and laugh.

In 1885, he was appointed a knight in the Legion of Honour.

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Henri Jules Jean Geoffroy (1853-1924), Visiting Day at the Hospital (1889), oil on canvas, 120 x 95 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.

Geoffroy’s painted insights into the world of childhood extend to illness and the hospital. In his dazzlingly modern and clinical Visiting Day at the Hospital from 1889, the boy’s father clearly could never have afforded state-of-the-art care for his sick son. Although probably understood by the contemporary viewer, the painting doesn’t reveal to modern eyes that the boy is most probably dying of tuberculosis, an all too common problem at the time.

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Henri Jules Jean Geoffroy (1853-1924), Primary School Class (1889), oil on canvas, 145 x 220 cm, Ministère de l’Education Nationale, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.

In Primary School Class from 1889, Geoffroy shows one of the new lay teachers, introduced by the Third Republic, working diligently in the classroom with her pupils. This was clearly deemed sufficiently positive to the State as to be purchased by the French National Ministry of Education, where it still hangs.

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Henri Jules Jean Geoffroy (1853–1924), The Night Hostel (or, The Soup Kitchen) (1891), further details not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Less welcomed by the State was The Night Hostel or The Soup Kitchen from 1891, showing homeless women and children being fed and sheltered in what appears to be almost a prison.

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Henri Jules Jean Geoffroy (1853–1924), Drawing Lesson (1895), further details not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Returning to school scenes in 1895, Geoffroy shows a Drawing Lesson in a class of older boys, who are following the classical tradition of drawing casts and appear remarkably diligent and well-behaved.

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Henri Jules Jean Geoffroy (1853–1924), The Nursery (1899), oil on canvas, 166 x 108 cm, Museu de Arte do Rio Grande do Sul Ado Malagoli, Porto Alegre, Brazil. Wikimedia Commons.

Geoffroy’s The Nursery from 1899 is one of very few paintings showing modern approaches to the early rearing of children under the Third Republic. Hospitals developed a rigorous almost military approach to nurseries and feeding that endured well into the twentieth century, and separated mothers from their infants for much of the time.

In 1900, at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, Geoffroy was awarded a gold medal, forming the peak of his career.

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Henri Jules Jean Geoffroy (1853-1924), In School (c 1900), further details not known. Wikimedia Commons.

In Geoffroy’s In School from about 1900, another lay teacher in a modern Republican infants class is caring for the French men and women of the future.

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Henri Jules Jean Geoffroy (1853–1924), Bastille Day (c 1900), oil on canvas, 46 x 61 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Bastille Day, from the same year, shows a group of children celebrating the national day of France on 14 July. For young boys in the years before the First World War, this was becoming increasingly militaristic rather than just patriotic.

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Henri Jules Jean Geoffroy (1853–1924), Prize-Giving at an Infants School (1904), woodcut (?) by Charles Baude (1853-1935) after a painting by Geoffroy, further details not known. Wikimedia Commons.

I have been unable to locate an image of Geoffroy’s painting from which Charles Baude made this print of Prize-Giving at an Infants School in 1904, but it is a fine example of the artist’s depictions of groups of young children and their social interactions.

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Henri Jules Jean Geoffroy (1853–1924), It’s Hard to Share (date not known), oil on canvas, 60.3 x 49.6 cm, Museu Antônio Parreiras (MAP), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Wikimedia Commons.

This undated painting of It’s Hard to Share shows another of the tribulations of childhood. These young boys have just emerged from a sweet shop, and the child in the centre is reluctant to share the paper cone of sweets he has just bought. His face says it all, as he looks with great suspicion at his less fortunate friend, and a dog also looks up expectantly.

I have been unable to find any of Geoffroy’s later paintings, and he died in Paris in 1924, at the age of 71.

Celebrating the bicentenary of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes 2

Two centuries ago today, 14 December, the major French painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was born in Lyon. In this second and concluding article celebrating his career and art, I continue from the years following the Franco-Prussian War, when his work achieved broad appeal despite the bitter divisions in French society. Their unreal and classical motifs painted in a plain style using pale colours must have been refreshingly different from social realism, the Academy, and the increasingly sketchy landscapes of the Impressionists. Puvis responded by painting increasingly symbolic themes in the same style.

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Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898), Death and the Maiden (1872), oil on canvas, 146 x 107 cm, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA. Wikimedia Commons.

Death and the Maiden from 1872 is most probably based on Schubert’s song of the same title, expressing the inevitability of death, almost in terms of vanitas, which had last been popular during the Dutch Golden Age. This linked with the recent war, when so many young French and Prussian people had died, and with contemporary scourges such as tuberculosis, which killed many young adults. The maidens are seen dancing together, and picking wild flowers, as the personification of death is apparently asleep on the grass at the lower left, his black cloak wrapped around him and his hand resting on the shaft of his scythe.

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Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898), Young Women at the Seaside (1879), oil on canvas, 61 x 47 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.

Completed for and exhibited at the Salon of 1879, Young Women at the Seaside must be one of the palest and plainest paintings of any visit to the beach. Only one of the three young women faces the viewer, and she looks as if she’s about to die of ennui. Even the sea looks cold and distant.

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Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898), The Poor Fisherman (1881), oil on canvas, 155.5 x 192.5 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.

Two years later, in 1881, Puvis exhibited The Poor Fisherman (1881), which proved to be one of his most successful works. Significantly more colourful, he provides more detail, although keeping well away from anything that might be mistaken for social realism or the increasingly popular Naturalism. A thin if not quite emaciated fisherman stands, Christ-like, in his boat waiting for his catch to fill his net. Behind him on the marshy land is his wife picking flowers, and their infant, another possible reference to Jesus Christ.

Puvis painted at least four versions of this work, it was reproduced as a lithograph, and numerous contemporaries copied and admired it, declaring its importance in the development of painting at the time. It’s thus one of the formative works leading to the Symbolist movement, whose manifesto was published five years later.

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Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898), Pleasant Land (1882), oil on canvas, 25.7 x 47.6 cm, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. Wikimedia Commons.

In 1882, Puvis painted the much paler Pleasant Land, which returns to the south coast of France and a small group of young women and their children who are engaged in dolce far niente just above the beach.

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Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898), The Dream (1883), oil on canvas, 82 x 102 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Image by Shonagon, via Wikimedia Commons.

For the Salon of 1883, Puvis intensified the unreality with his nocturne The Dream. In a similarly placid and contemplative Mediterranean coastal setting, a traveller (vagrant), their meagre possessions tied up in a cloth, is asleep under a crescent moon. Three angelic but wingless figures from a dream are shown in mid-air, two scattering stars and one bearing a laurel wreath.

Puvis had painted a succession of murals in France from the 1860s onwards. During the 1880s, these turned increasingly to the recurrent motif of classical figures in a sacred grove.

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Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898), The Sacred Grove, Beloved of the Arts and the Muses (1884-89), oil on canvas, 93 x 231 cm, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. Wikimedia Commons.

This panoramic easel painting of The Sacred Grove, Beloved of the Arts and the Muses, made in the period 1884-89, is a good example of this series. Puvis alludes to the Muses, but doesn’t identify them with their customary attributes. Instead, two women (wingless again) are flying, one apparently playing the lyre. The figures below are engaged in contemplation, discussion, and the central group are listening to a recital of poetry or song. Most of them wear golden laurel wreaths in their hair, and all are dressed in classical robes.

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Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898), Charity (1887), oil on canvas, 56 x 47 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Image by Rama, via Wikimedia Commons.

Charity (1887) is a personification of one of the seven Christian virtues, again set in timeless classical terms. She is the mother of twins, one of whom she holds by her breast. She is clasping the back of the neck of a dark wolf, lying beside her, adding a more unusual touch. This had become a popular motif, and only nine years previously had been painted by William-Adolphe Bouguereau in contrasting Academic style.

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Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898), The Sacred Wood (1889), wall painting in Le Grand Amphithéâtre of La Sorbonne, Paris, dimensions not known, La Sorbonne, Paris. Image by Sigoise, via Wikimedia Commons.

Of his surviving murals, I think The Sacred Wood is perhaps the most impressive. Completed in 1889, it graces Le Grand Amphithéâtre of La Sorbonne in Paris, and is his ultimate expression of this theme. It includes many classical and artistic references: near the centre, bent over the surface of a pond, is Narcissus, and towards the right, dressed in red, what looks like Dante.

In 1890, Puvis was co-founder and first president of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, which became the dominant Salon in Paris.

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Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898), The Shepherd’s Song (1891), oil on canvas, 104.5 × 110 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Wikimedia Commons.

Puvis continued his low-chroma paintings of coastal scenes with The Shepherd’s Song in 1891. Oddly, the shepherd referred to in the title is the smallest of its figures, perched part-way up an ill-defined rocky slope at the left, above two black goats, as three women are fetching water in the foreground.

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Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898), Inter artes et naturam (Between Art and Nature) (c 1890-95), oil on canvas, 40.3 x 113.7 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Wikimedia Commons.

During the early 1890s, Puvis developed the theme of the sacred grove and relocated it to a hillside above the city of Rouen, in his Inter artes et naturam (meaning Between Art and Nature), from about 1890-95. His viewpoint is Bonsecours, to the south-east of the city, looking north-west over its bridges and distinctive skyline. Clothing worn suggests a curious conflation of periods, from the classical at the left edge, to the contemporary at the mid-right.

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Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898), The Poet (1896), oil on canvas, 67 x 47 cm, Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo, Norway. Wikimedia Commons.

The last of these paintings is The Poet from 1896, which returns to the Mediterranean coast, where a poet, who has just dropped his lyre behind him, is swooning, as a winged angel comforts and supports him. At the upper right is a white dove representing the Holy Spirit. Perhaps this was his prescience of death.

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes died in Paris, where he had worked most of his life, on 24 October 1898, at the age of 73. Only three months before, he had finally married his partner of more than forty years, a Romanian princess who died just a month after their wedding.

Celebrating the bicentenary of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes 1

Two centuries ago tomorrow the major French painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was born in Lyon. In this and tomorrow’s concluding article I briefly celebrate his career and work.

Puvis had never intended to be an artist, but serious illness cut short his studies, and after his convalescence he travelled to Italy. He there became inspired to paint, studying briefly under Eugène Delacroix before he closed his studio. He was then a pupil under Henri Scheffer and Thomas Couture, but proved something of a loner and didn’t follow contemporary Academic tradition. Although his first paintings were accepted for the Salon in 1850, recognition didn’t come until much later.

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Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898), The beheading of John the Baptist (The Daughter of Herodias Gives the Signal for the Ordeal of Saint John the Baptist) (1856), oil on panel, 140 × 89.5 cm, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Wikimedia Commons.

Puvis painted two completely different versions of The beheading of John the Baptist. This is the earlier, from 1856, alternatively known as The Daughter of Herodias Gives the Signal for the Ordeal of Saint John the Baptist, which in itself raises questions. Salome dominates the painting, her right hand holding the empty platter high above her head as she is about to drop it to signal John’s execution. John the Baptist is still alive at this stage, seen in the murky distance at the left. Another figure, perhaps Herodias, is hiding in Salome’s robe, behind her.

His later painting, from about 1869 and in the National Gallery in London with a smaller version in Birmingham, is more in accord with the biblical account of this story.

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Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898), The Wine Press (c 1865), oil on canvas, 18.5 x 13.6, Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. Wikimedia Commons.

The Wine Press, from about 1865, is more typical of his mature paintings, showing a classical figurative motif executed simply using low chroma throughout. In this case, a bearded young man wearing a wreath as a loincloth stands awkwardly on a wooden step-ladder, tipping freshly harvested grapes into the large wooden press. Three young women, dressed loosely in classical robes, are delivering him the grapes from the vineyard, as a pair of longhorned cattle look on.

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Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898), Fantasy (1866), oil on canvas, 263.5 x 148.5 cm, Ohara Museum of Art 大原美術館, Kurashiki, Japan. Wikimedia Commons.

During the 1860s, Puvis reacted to the popular trend towards realism by painting increasingly unreal works, such as Fantasy from 1866. Two naked people of indeterminate gender are in an idyllic wooded landscape near the foot of sheer cliffs. One sits plucking flowers to form a wreath, the other uses a length of ivy to school a winged white horse which could be Pegasus or a hippogriff. Puvis’ application of paint is so thin that the wings of the horse are semi-transparent, and his colours are muted in the extreme. In almost every respect, this was the antithesis of social realism, pre-Impressionist landscapes and Academic painting of the time.

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Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898), Vigilance (1866), oil on canvas, 271.4 x 104 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Image by Rama, via Wikimedia Commons.

Puvis increasingly turned to allegory and personifications, as in this painting of Vigilance, completed in 1866 and accepted for the Salon of that year. Traditional attributes associated with this personification are the oil lamp she holds aloft, a book and a rod, which are omitted.

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Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898), Peace (1867), oil on canvas, 109 x 148.7 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA. Wikimedia Commons.

The following year Puvis painted a pair of allegories, Peace (above) and War (below), using stronger colours to make it easier to read their greater detail. Both are set in classical times in an idyllic landscape. Peace is a group dolce far niente which would later have passed for Aestheticism: men, women and children engaged in nothing more strenuous than milking a goat.

In War, three horsemen are blowing a fanfare on their war trumpets, haystacks in the surrounding fields are alight and pouring black smoke into the sky, and the people are suffering, even though signs of destruction are slight and none is wounded. The timing of these paintings wasn’t coincidence: France was in the process of sliding inexorably towards its war with Prussia, and the Second Empire of Napoleon III was about to self-destruct.

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Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898), War (1867), oil on canvas, 109.6 x 149.3 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA. Wikimedia Commons.
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Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898), Marseilles, Gateway to the Orient (c 1868), oil on canvas, 38.8 x 57.6 cm, Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. Wikimedia Commons.

Shortly before the Franco-Prussian War, he painted this unusual and relatively colourful maritime scene of Marseilles, Gateway to the Orient (c 1868). Set aboard a fanciful sailing ship, it shows the mixed ethnicity of those who crewed and travelled in the vessels trading through the port of Marseille, on the Mediterranean coast. The city itself is in the distance, making its title the more odd. I suspect this was a study for one of the murals he made for the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Marseilles in the 1860s.

Puvis was deeply affected by the Franco-Prussian War, and the Paris Commune that followed in 1871.

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Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898), The Balloon (1870), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Image by Rama, via Wikimedia Commons.

The role of balloons during the siege of Paris was inspiration for The Balloon of 1870, which became popular as a lithograph made by Émile Vernier. The following year, Puvis painted a pendant The Pigeon (below), showing another means of communication used during the siege.

Here a woman seen almost in silhouette waves at one of the balloons bearing news, as it flies near Mount Valérien. In her right hand she holds a musket, symbolic of the arming of the people of Paris at the time. The same woman appears in mourning in The Pigeon, collecting a carrier pigeon that had fought its way through the predatory hawks flown by the Prussians.

The two paintings meant a great deal to Puvis, who reluctantly gave them to the government a few years later, to be prizes in a lottery organised to provide aid to the survivors of the great fire of Chicago in 1871. They didn’t return to Paris until 1987, and are now both in the Musée d’Orsay.

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Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898), The Pigeon (1871), oil on canvas, 136.7 x 86.5 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Image by Rama, via Wikimedia Commons.
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Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898), Hope (1872), oil on canvas, 102.5 x 129.5 cm, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD. Wikimedia Commons.

Puvis’ Hope from 1872 develops this post-war theme further, and was exhibited at the Salon that year, the first to follow the war. A young woman sits amid a landscape that has been destroyed by fighting. The bleached rubble of a farmhouse is seen in the right distance, and there are two improvised graveyards with clusters of crosses. She holds a sprig of oak as a symbol of the recovery of the nation.

His three paintings provoked reflection rather than taking sides, and became popular across the range of public opinion. They proved a turning point in his career, as I’ll show tomorrow.

Paintings of 1924: 1 Portraits and figures

At the end of each year I trawl through images of paintings that are thought to have been created a century ago. Together they show how rich and varied art was at a time when most histories are devoted to accounts of the rise of modernism. Today’s collection of work from 1924 consists of portraits, self-portraits and other figurative paintings.

Although the great majority of paintings seen in galleries and collections are made in oils, or watercolours, my first two works were both created in pastels by specialists in that medium.

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Firmin Baes (1874–1943), Two Brothers (1924), pastel, 99 x 79 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Firmin Baes’s double portrait of Two Brothers was painted using pastels, in the studio against a backdrop perhaps showing their home in the countryside.

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Ants Laikmaa (1866–1942), Portrait of Fr. R. Kreutzwald (also “In the Distance I See Home Thriving”) (1924), pastel on paper, dimensions not known, Private collection. Image courtesy of Enn Kunila, via Wikimedia Commons.

Ants Laikmaa was another accomplished pastellist who painted many fine portraits. Among them is this posthumous Portrait of Fr. R. Kreutzwald, also known as In the Distance I See Home Thriving. Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald (1803-1882) is the father of Estonian national literature, and in addition to being a distinguished physician, he is the author of the national epic Kalevipoeg which is closely related to the Finnish epic, the Kalevala.

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Léon Bakst (1866–1924), Portrait of Rachel Strong, future Countess Henri de Buazhelen (1924), further details not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Léon Bakst is best known for his designs for Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, but in the years following the 1917 Revolution he painted portraits. He completed this Portrait of Rachel Strong, future Countess Henri de Buazhelen against a background that could have been one of his stage sets.

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Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), Carmencita, Portrait of Charlotte Berend-Corinth in Spanish Dress (1924), oil, 130 x 90 cm, Städelsches Kunstinstitut und Städtische Galerie, Frankfurt, Germany. Wikimedia Commons.

Lovis Corinth was nearing the end of his life when he painted his wife in Carmencita, Portrait of Charlotte Berend-Corinth in Spanish Dress. She was an artist in her own right, and had continued painting in the early twentieth century, joining the Berlin Secession in 1912. She also painted actively when at their chalet. In 1933, after her husband’s death, she emigrated to the USA, where she produced the first catalogue raisonné of his paintings.

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Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), Wilhelmine in a Yellow Hat (1924), oil on canvas, 85 × 65 cm, Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Lübeck, Germany. Wikimedia Commons.

Corinth painted other members of his family at this time. His Wilhelmine in a Yellow Hat shows their shy daughter starting to develop her mother’s vivacity.

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Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), Large Self-portrait in Front of Walchensee (1924), oil on canvas, 135.7 × 107 cm, Neue Pinakothek, Munich. Wikimedia Commons.

His Large Self-portrait in Front of Walchensee illustrates his race against time before he died the following year.

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Christian Krohg (1852–1925), Five to Twelve (c 1924), oil on paperboard, 79 x 33 cm, Nasjonalmuseet (purchased 1990), Oslo, Norway. Courtesy of Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo.

Five to Twelve was one of Christian Krohg’s last paintings, showing the artist with a long white beard, and almost bald, asleep in a chair underneath a pendulum clock. The face of the clock is completely blank, but the title tells us the time: it’s ten minutes to midnight, very late in his life. The following year Krohg retired as the director of the State Academy of Art, and died in Oslo a few months later.

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Emily Carr (1871–1945), Self-portrait (1924-25), oil on paperboard, 39.4 x 44.9 cm, Emily Carr Trust. Wikimedia Commons.

For Emily Carr 1924 was a crucial year, in which she met with Seattle artists, most importantly Mark Tobey, who helped rebuild her confidence in her art. Her Self-portrait shows her still suffering from her earlier rejection, as she faces away from the viewer, and is working on a painting that is unrecognisably vague and formless.

Meanwhile, Pierre Bonnard’s life in the Midi was coming to something of a crisis.

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Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947), Signac and his Friends Sailing (1924), oil on canvas, 124 x 139 cm, Kunsthaus, Zurich, Switzerland. The Athenaeum.

Several of the artists who had moved to the French Mediterranean coast around the turn of the century were keen yachtsmen. Here Bonnard shows Paul Signac on board his yacht, in Signac and his Friends Sailing.

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Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947), Before Dinner (1924), oil on canvas, 90.2 x 106.7 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. The Athenaeum.

Bonnard’s private life hadn’t found the same fair winds, though. In Before Dinner, there are two places laid at the table, and two women behind. One at the left has her back towards the other, who stands by the table as if waiting for something to happen. A dog is just emerging from behind the chair at the left, and looks up the standing woman. The following year Bonnard finally married his longstanding partner Marthe in a quiet civil ceremony in Paris, in August. None of their friends attended that wedding, and within a month his former lover Renée Monchaty shot herself in the chest, as she lay in a bath of white roses.

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Paul Sérusier (1864–1927), Tapestry (Five Weavers) (1924), oil on canvas, dimensions and location not known. Image by Bastenbas, via Wikimedia Commons.

Late in his career, the radical artist Paul Sérusier drew more heavily again on early modern painting, including that of the late Middle Ages in paintings such as Tapestry (Five Weavers). So much for modernism.

The Real Country: People

During the nineteenth century, paintings depicting ‘real’ life of ordinary people became increasingly popular, first in what has become known as social realism, pioneered by Jean-François Millet, then Naturalism, championed by Jules Bastien-Lepage until his untimely death in 1884. Among other themes, these put the case for the rural poor, and the desperate poverty that those living in the country had to endure.

Look carefully at many of their paintings, though, and the underlying stories aren’t as simple. One of the most evident problems is that many of those campaigning paintings used models who had been carefully posed. Look at their hands, feet and hair and you’ll often see someone who appears remarkably clean and kempt with no evidence of prolonged and arduous manual labour, even clothes that lack the dirt and mud so typical of those who work and walk on unpaved tracks and ploughed fields.

At the same time, photographic portraits of the poor became popular among some who sought to advance the art of photography. There are some notorious examples of early photographers who were caught posing carefully selected models in deliberately misleading circumstances, demonstrating how the camera can be made to lie.

My small selection of paintings of country people from the nineteenth century is an attempt to show some that appear most faithful records that weren’t intended to support political views or attract praise at a Salon.

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Jules Breton (1827–1906), Young Girl Knitting (2) (1860), oil on canvas mounted on panel, 36 × 30 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Jules Breton had been born and brought up in the rural village of Courrières, and returned there to paint intimate portraits of those who continued to live there, including this Young Girl Knitting, seen in 1860. Many of these intimate works were sold to private collectors and have never been seen at exhibition.

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Jules Breton (1827–1906), Mother Feeding her Baby (1863), oil on canvas, 55.2 x 45.1 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

His portrait of this Mother Feeding her Baby from 1863 shows her wearing clogs, and clothing that has seen better days. She is feeding a very young baby in front of a frugal fire in what can only be her normal domestic conditions.

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Jean-François Millet (1814–1875), A Norman Milkmaid at Gréville (1871), oil on cardboard, 80 × 55.6 cm, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA. Wikimedia Commons.

Jean-François Millet had been born in the village of Gruchy, and was the first child of a farming family. Although his portrait of A Norman Milkmaid at Gréville from 1871 lacks fine detail to reinforce its authenticity, she’s clearly grubby and wasn’t painted in the studio.

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Max Liebermann (1847–1935), The Preserve Makers (1879), oil on mahogany wood, 49 × 65.3 cm, Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig, Germany. Wikimedia Commons.

Max Liebermann’s The Preserve Makers from 1879 shows a shed full of country women preparing foodstuffs for bottling and canning; the latter gradually came into use after 1810, but didn’t become popular until the First World War. This shows well the light factory work that was introduced to country areas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the women who provided its labour force.

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Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret (1852–1929), An Accident (1879), oil on canvas, 90.7 x 130.8 cm, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD. Wikimedia Commons.

Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret’s An Accident from 1879 is an exception among these, in that it was not only submitted to the Salon of 1880, but won the artist a first-class medal. It was also supposedly painted from memory, showing an incident that the artist witnessed with a medical friend who was similarly called to assist with an injury.

Despite that, it shows a country doctor cleaning and bandaging the injured hand of a boy, as the rest of the extended family looks on. Conditions appear primitive: the small bowl of water is heavily blood-stained, and the cloth by it looks filthy. It’s also rich in detail that appears authentic, from the boy’s shoe compared with that of the doctor, to the bald man standing in front of a treasured grandfather clock in the right background.

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Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848–1884), Pas Mèche (Nothing Doing) (1882), oil on canvas, 132.1 x 89.5 cm, Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland. Wikimedia Commons.

Of Bastien-Lepage’s many portraits of country people, his Nothing Doing from 1882 appears the most convincing. From his unlaced mud-caked boots to his filthy and frayed waistcoat, this young agricultural worker looks the part. Bastien had spent his childhood in the village of Damvillers, although he was the son of a local artist. He frequently returned to his home village to paint local characters, such as this boy.

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Jules Breton (1827–1906), Song of the Lark (1884), oil on canvas, 110.6 × 85.8 cm, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. Wikimedia Commons.

The young woman in Breton’s Song of the Lark (1884) has detailed features that appear true to life, in her bare feet with grubby and battered toenails, and hands that have seen hard work with the hook she holds.

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Évariste Carpentier (1845–1922), The Turnip Washer (1890), oil on canvas, 130 x 195 cm, Musée des beaux-arts de Liège, Liège, Belgium. Wikimedia Commons.

Évariste Carpentier had been born into a farming family near the small town of Kuurne in Belgium. The Turnip Washer from 1890 is among the last of his thoroughly Naturalist paintings. Alongside the farmyard birds, two figures are busy washing piles of turnips in a small and dirty pond.

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Léon Augustin Lhermitte (1844–1925), The Farmworkers’ Supper (1913), pastel on paper, dimensions and location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Throughout the career of Léon Augustin Lhermitte he painted the working lives of farmworkers and country people. In his pastel of The Farmworkers’ Supper from 1913, he shows those who have been working outdoors during the long day enjoying a meal at its end.

Together these paintings build a dispassionate image of a countryside that might have been lacking in worldly goods, but was hardly starved and pestilent. And, as I’ll show in the next and concluding article, at times rural life could still be idyllic.

Changing Paintings: 49 Galatea transformed from a statue

After Ovid has told of the tragic death of Hyacinthus, he moves on to one of his most unusual myths. Almost all the myths of transformation gathered in his Metamorphoses involve one or more people changing into animals, plants, or inanimate objects. The ultimate function of his stories may thus be to explain the origin of something, such as the hyacinth flower, or as a salutary example of punishment for disrespect of the gods. The story of Pygmalion reverses the usual direction of transformation, in that it centres on an inanimate object transformed into a person, and it is neither about punishment nor a story of origins.

Ovid prefaces this with contrasting tales. He tells first of the shameful memories of the Cerastae, who desecrated an altar, for which Venus turned them into bulls. Venus is then the link to mention of the Propoetides, women who denied the divinity of Venus. For that, the goddess first hardened their hearts by turning them into prostitutes, and finally into hard flint rocks.

Pygmalion had seen the Propoetides, and became celibate as a result of his revulsion towards their behaviour. He still wanted married love, and carved himself the most perfect and lifelike statue of a woman in ivory. He kissed it lovingly, spoke to it, and dressed it in fine clothing.

When the festival of Venus arrived, Pygmalion prayed that he should have a bride who was the living likeness of his statue. Venus heard this, and the sacred flame rose to signify her response. Pygmalion returned home, rejoicing that his prayer might be answered, and went straight to the statue and kissed it repeatedly. As he did so, it transformed from cold, unyielding ivory to warm, soft flesh. His marriage to the former statue was blessed by Venus, and nine months later they celebrated the birth of their daughter, whom they called Paphos, after whom the island was named.

Telling the story of this transformation in a single painting proved too great a challenge for artists before the late nineteenth century.

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Jean-Baptiste Regnault (1754–1829), The Origin of Sculpture (Pygmalion Praying Venus to Animate His Statue) (1786), oil on canvas, 120 x 140 cm, Château de Versailles, Versailles, France. Wikimedia Commons.

Jean-Baptiste Regnault’s The Origin of Sculpture (Pygmalion Praying Venus to Animate His Statue) (1786) is one of the best of these traditional versions, but lacks any visual clue that this statue will shortly turn into a flesh-and-blood woman. It does, though, hint at another story of great interest to the arts, of Pygmalion as the original sculptor, which isn’t told by Ovid.

Edward Burne-Jones’ solution was to paint a series titled Pygmalion and the Image. He did this twice, once between 1868-70, and again in 1878. I show here the paintings from his second version of the series, exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in London in 1879, that helped secure his position as one of Britain’s leading artists.

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Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898), Pygmalion and the Image – The Heart Desires (1878), oil on canvas, 99 x 76.3 cm, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham, England. Wikimedia Commons.

The Heart Desires shows Pygmalion in his celibacy. In the left background are Propoetides, or other women engaged in debauchery. They’re echoed by and contrasted with Pygmalion’s statues of the three Graces on the right. He stands alone, pondering his next sculpture.

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Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898), Pygmalion and the Image – The Hand Refrains (1878), oil on canvas, 98.7 x 76.3 cm, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham, England. Wikimedia Commons.

The Hand Refrains shows Pygmalion’s statue of the perfect woman. He stands back, his tools still in his hands and scattered at the foot of his work. Too scared to touch the statue now, he looks longingly at it, as if falling in love.

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Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898), Pygmalion and the Image – The Godhead Fires (1878), oil on canvas, 143.7 x 116.8 cm, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham, England. Wikimedia Commons.

In The Godhead Fires, Venus (left) comes to Pygmalion’s statue while he is praying to her at the temple. The goddess transforms the inanimate marble, rather than Ovid’s ivory, into a living woman, and their arms interlace.

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Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898), Pygmalion and the Image – The Soul Attains (1878), oil on canvas, 99.4 x 76.6 cm, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham, England. Wikimedia Commons.

The final painting in the series, The Soul Attains, shows Pygmalion’s discovery that his statue has come to life, and him seeking her hand in marriage, with a symbolic pink rose on the floor by her left foot.

Just over ten years later, it was Jean-Léon Gérôme who devised the best narrative approach. Known principally now as a realist painter of fine detail, Gérôme was also a sculptor, and in a series of paintings he explored relationships between the sculptor, model, and sculpture. Among these were his first studies for what must be the most brilliant narrative painting of Ovid’s myth.

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Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904), Pygmalion and Galatea (study) (1890), oil on canvas, 94 x 74 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

This study for Pygmalion and Galatea from 1890 was an early attempt at the composition, where Pygmalion’s future bride is still a marble statue at her feet, but very much flesh and blood from the waist up. That visual device was perfect, but Gérôme recognised that his painting could be shunned because of its full-frontal nudity, so he reversed the view.

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Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904), Pygmalion and Galatea (c 1890), oil on canvas, 88.9 x 68.6 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Wikimedia Commons.

Gérôme’s finished Pygmalion and Galatea (c 1890) extends the marble effect a little higher, and by showing Galatea’s buttocks and back and concealing the kiss, it stays on the right side of contemporary standards of decency. His attention to detail is as delightful as ever, with two masks against the wall at the right, Cupid ready with his bow and arrow, an Aegis bearing the head of Medusa, and a couple of statues about looking and seeing. For Gérôme too recognised the other stories about sculpture and seeing that could be brought in to enrich Ovid’s original narrative.

Commemorating the 200th anniversary of the death of Girodet

Two hundred years ago today, 9 December, one of the most celebrated French artists of the early nineteenth century died in Paris. He was known in full as Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, shortened simply to Girodet. Born in the town of Montargis, about seventy miles (110 km) south of Paris, his parents died when he was a young man, and after a false start in a military career, he became a pupil of Jacques-Louis David in Paris.

In 1789, Girodet won the prestigious Prix de Rome with his religious painting of Joseph Recognised by his Brothers.

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Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson (1767-1824), Joseph Recognised by his Brothers (1789), oil, dimensions not known, Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris. Image by VladoubidoOo, via Wikimedia Commons.

His account of the happy resolution of Joseph’s time in Egypt, told in the Old Testament book of Genesis (chapter 45), is busy indeed. Joseph was by this time the Vizier, and had recognised his brothers, but they didn’t recognise him until he told them who he was. Joseph stands at the right, in front of his golden throne, his arm reaching out to reunite with his family.

His prize was to transfer to the French Academy in Rome, where he studied until 1793. On his return, his paintings won him acclaim at the Salon, and his reputation was made. Unfortunately, this coincided with the start of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. However, his relationship with David – a key figure in the Revolution who was adept at protecting himself against all the odds – and his popular following, ensured his safety. When the rule of the Directory (Directoire) was established in 1795, Girodet continued to flourish.

In 1798, he came into conflict with one of his models. Mademoiselle Lange, as she was known to the public, had made her official debut as an actress at the Comédie-Française in 1788, and by 1793 had risen to take the title role in the popular Pamela or Virtue Rewarded, by Nicolas-Louis François de Neufchâteau. Unfortunately that play fell foul of the revolutionaries, and the Committee of Public Safety shut it down and arrested the actors and author.

Mlle Lange had a tense few months afterwards, spending some time in prison, but friends in high places kept her well away from the guillotine, and she was eventually released to return to work at the Théâtre Feydeau. When the Directory came to power she started an affair with the supplier to the French army, who kept her in style in one of his houses. She was also the mistress of a banker, by whom she had a daughter. There were rumours of an affair with Paul Barras, a Director of the Directory, but those may not have been true.

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Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson (1767–1824), Mademoiselle Lange as Venus (1798), oil on canvas, 170 x 87.5 cm, Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig, Germany. Wikimedia Commons.

In 1798, Girodet painted Mlle Lange’s portrait as Venus, but his model decided afterwards that his painting was unflattering. She refused to pay the artist, and demanded that the painting should be removed from view at the Salon where it was being exhibited.

It’s hard to understand her case. Perhaps Girodet had been a little too obviously ingenious in not showing her face in the mirror being held by the putto, but the rest of the portrait is surely as flattering as possible, and free of any critical elements. Girodet’s revenge was swift and sweet. In a matter of a few days, he painted a second portrait which, the story says, was hung in the Salon in place of the original. It shows Mlle Lange as a money-grabbing prostitute, unable to see her own faults.

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Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson (1767–1824), Portrait of Mlle. Lange as Danae (1799), oil on canvas, 60.3 x 48.6 cm, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, MN. Wikimedia Commons.

Her new role as Danaë was perhaps not as biting as it might have been. Danaë was the daughter of King Acrisius of Argos and Queen Eurydice, whose father wanted a male heir. To keep Danaë childless, he locked her away in an underground chamber. But Zeus wanted her, so he impregnated her in the form of golden rain that fell from the roof of her cell, resulting in her son Perseus.

As a motif in painting, Danaë had come to be represented as a reclining, beautiful, nude woman, on whom a stream of golden coins was falling, and it was that stream which Girodet wanted to exploit. It could have only one reading in this context: that Mlle Lange sold her body in return for money, and Girodet was happy to be even more explicit.

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Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson (1767–1824), Portrait of Mlle. Lange as Danae (detail) (1799), oil on canvas, 60.3 x 48.6 cm, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, MN. Wikimedia Commons.

At the lower left of the tondo is a turkey, representing Michel-Jean Simons, her final lover by whom she had a son in 1797, and who married her, hence the ring on the turkey’s foot. A scroll by that is apparently the script for the play Asinaria, by the Roman Titus Maccius Plautus, whose title means the one with the asses, a comedy about mistresses, lovers and money.

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Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson (1767–1824), Portrait of Mlle. Lange as Danae (detail) (1799), oil on canvas, 60.3 x 48.6 cm, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, MN. Wikimedia Commons.

At the lower right is the severed head of one of her previous lovers, and a white dove, wounded on one wing by one of the falling coins, and being strangled by a gold collar bearing the word Fidelitas, meaning fidelity.

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Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson (1767–1824), Portrait of Mlle. Lange as Danae (detail) (1799), oil on canvas, 60.3 x 48.6 cm, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, MN. Wikimedia Commons.

In its upper reaches, there’s a spider in its web, catching some of the coins. Mlle Lange herself wears peacock feathers, a symbol of her vanity. But most barbed of all, she holds up a mirror that is cracked, and in which there is no reflection at all. With her gaze concentrated on the falling coins, she has no interest in looking at what she has become.

Mlle Lange, now Madame Simons, lived in his Château de Bossey in Switzerland, her stage career over. Her husband died a decade later, a ruined man, and she died in solitary obscurity six years afterwards.

Girodet went on to paint some of the most famous portraits of Napoleon and his family, and to teach many pupils, including Alexandre-Marie Colin and Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury, who were to be influential in painting in the nineteenth century. I don’t think that anyone tried to mess with him again.

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Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy-Trioson (1767-1824), The Meeting of Orestes and Hermione (c 1800), pen and brown and black ink, point of brush and brown and gray wash, with black chalk and graphite, heightened with white gouache on cream wove paper, 28.5 x 21.8 cm, Cleveland Museum of Art (Leonard C. Hanna, Jr. Fund), Cleveland, OH. Courtesy of Cleveland Museum of Art.

In Girodet’s ink and chalk drawing of The Meeting of Orestes and Hermione (c 1800), Hermione is seen at the right, her arms folded, looking coy as Orestes approaches her. The second woman, with Orestes, is presumably Hermione’s maid.

This is one of a series of illustrations made by Girodet to accompany Racine’s play, and has subtleties that you might expect from a great narrative artist. Visible in the gap between the figures is a table-leg in the form not of a Fury which might have foretold Orestes’ fate, but of a siren, implying that Hermione is luring Orestes to her.

Hermione, for all her apparent coyness, has let the right shoulder-strap of her robe slip, in her enticement of Orestes. She has assumed the role of femme fatale, as portrayed by Euripides and Racine.

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Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson (1767–1824) (attr), Apotheosis of the French Heroes Who Died for the Fatherland during the War of Liberation, Ossian receiving the Ghosts of the French Heroes (c 1801), oil on canvas, 192 x 182 cm, Musée national des châteaux de Malmaison et de Bois-Préau, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.

Girodet’s painting of the Apotheosis of the French Heroes Who Died for the Fatherland during the War of Liberation, Ossian receiving the Ghosts of the French Heroes was probably completed in 1802, and is perhaps the most elaborate and complex painting inspired by the bogus Scottish poet Ossian. It’s unclear how those French war heroes became involved with Ossian, but an extraordinary mixture of myths and legends from contrasting cultures.

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Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson (1767-1824), Aurora and Cephalus (1805), oil on canvas, 22.8 x 16.8 cm, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH. Wikimedia Commons.

His Aurora and Cephalus (1805) shows the goddess abducting Cephalus at dawn, and taking him up into the sky still asleep.

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Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson (1767–1824), The Revolt of Cairo (sketch) (1810), oil and India ink on paper mounted on canvas, 30.8 x 45.1 cm, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. Wikimedia Commons.

In 1810, Girodet painted the only reasonably accurate account of The Revolt of Cairo of 21 October 1798, in which Napoleon massacred as many as five thousand of its residents. Most were killed when French cannons fired at the Al-Azhar Mosque where they were seeking refuge. This is a late oil sketch for the finished painting.

In the following years, Girodet’s health started to decline, and with it his artistic output. By 1812 he could only manage a single submission for the Salon, and on the ninth of December, 1824, he died in Paris at the age of only 57.

Paintings of the Coast of California 2

In this second day of our visit to the coast of California in paintings, we have reached the years of the First World War, whose trenches and mud in northern Europe must have seemed so far removed.

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Anna Althea Hills (1882-1930), The Quiet Sea (1915), oil on board, 17.8 x 25.4 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

In 1915, Anna Althea Hills painted The Quiet Sea, probably close to Laguna Beach, where she settled at that time, and went on to help found the Laguna Beach Art Museum shortly before her untimely death at the age of just forty-eight, in 1930. As this demonstrates, she was an early and accomplished painter en plein air, which she taught in her painting school there.

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Anna Althea Hills (1882-1930), Spell of the Sea (Laguna Beach, near Moss Point) (1920), oil on canvas, 76.2 x 101.6 cm, Private collection. The Athenaeum.

Hill’s Spell of the Sea (also known as Laguna Beach, near Moss Point) (1920) must be among her best, and compares well with those being painted on the south coast of France at the time. She painted this further down the coast to the south-east of central Laguna Beach, away from areas becoming more popular with visitors.

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Guy Rose (1867–1925), Laguna Trees (c 1916), oil on canvas, 61 x 73.7 cm, Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA. Wikimedia Commons.

Guy Rose also painted along this section of coast, as shown in his Laguna Trees from about 1916. These are seen looking to the north-west over the bay, in a Mediterranean light.

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Guy Rose (1867–1925), Carmel Dunes (c 1918-20), oil on canvas, 61.2 x 73.8 cm, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA. Wikimedia Commons.

Rose’s Carmel Dunes from about 1918-20, shows unspoilt land near Carmel-by-the-Sea, in a small bay to the south of Monterey, on the coast south of San Jose. Carmel wasn’t developed until the early twentieth century, and still only has a resident population of three thousand. It was featured in the International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915, but has never been developed in the way that many other resorts along this coast have.

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Guy Rose (1867–1925), Monterey Cypress (c 1918), oil on canvas, 53.6 x 60.9 cm, Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA. Wikimedia Commons.

At the end of the war, Rose painted this Monterey Cypress as if influenced by the paintings of twisted trees along the French Mediterranean coast.

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Granville Redmond (1871–1935), Catalina Island Coast under a Moonlit Sky (1920), oil on cardboard, 25.4 × 35.6 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Granville Redmond’s later paintings include a few moonlit motifs, such as this of the Catalina Island Coast under a Moonlit Sky in 1920. Redmond became a close friend of the movie actor Charlie Chaplin. Catalina, or Santa Catalina, Island is about 35 km (22 miles) off the coast of California, south of Los Angeles. Redmond’s sky is formed from innumerable short, fine brushstrokes in apparently random directions, and gives the effect of the atmospheric buzz of small insects, contrasting with the dark mass of rock.

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Granville Redmond (1871–1935), Steamer leaving Avalon, Catalina Island (1920), oil on cardboard, 27.9 x 34.9 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Steamer leaving Avalon, Catalina Island (1920) is a small and painterly sketch in oils on cardboard made by Redmond during his visits to the island. The small town (officially a city!) of Avalon is situated on its natural harbour, and has grown from tents and three wooden huts in 1883 to a modern resort now attracting a million visitors every year. Its development for tourists started in the late 1880s, but when Redmond visited in 1920 it had recently been purchased by the chewing gum magnate William Wrigley, Jr, who opened a casino there in 1929.

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Granville Redmond (1871–1935), Malibu Coast, Spring (c 1929), oil on canvas, 50.8 x 63.5 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Redmond’s Malibu Coast, Spring from about 1929 shows the 21 mile beach of this coastal resort thirty miles to the west of central Los Angeles, in the summer with golden poppies and purple lupines in full flower. At this time, Malibu was only just starting development, with the small Malibu Colony and a ceramic tile factory which had been funded by May K Rindge, owner of the land.

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William Frederic Ritschel (1864-1949), Carmel-by-the-Sea Seascape (1930), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

William Frederic Ritschel’s wonderfully rough Carmel-by-the-Sea Seascape was painted in 1930.

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Paul Dougherty (1877-1947), California Cliffs (1935-), oil on wood, 50.9 x 60.9 cm, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. Wikimedia Commons.

Paul Dougherty painted this section of California Cliffs after 1935, in calmer conditions more conducive to working en plein air.

Paintings of the Coast of California 1

It’s too cold along the coast of New England for this weekend’s travels, so let’s go to the West Coast, to California instead. In this article and its sequel tomorrow I’ll show you some of the few accessible paintings made of that coast, from San Francisco to Laguna Beach, and from 1872 to after 1935.

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Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902), Seals on the Rocks, Farallon Islands (c 1872-73), oil on canvas, 66 x 91.4 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

In May 1872, Albert Bierstadt visited the Farallon Islands, a group of uninhabited rocks thirty miles to the west of San Francisco. From this came his dramatic Seals on the Rocks, Farallon Islands (c 1872-73), one of a short series that he painted of the islands in those years.

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Jean Mannheim (1863-1945), Irvine Cove – Laguna Beach, California (date not known), further details not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Although I don’t have a date for Jean Mannheim’s painting of Irvine Cove – Laguna Beach, California, I suspect it was completed long before this resort to the south-east of Los Angeles became a city in 1927. Its first hotel was built in 1886, and this section of the coast became popular with artists in the early twentieth century, but this part at the north-west end of Laguna Beach seems to have remained relatively unspoilt until the completion of the Pacific Coast Highway in 1926. Mannheim was one of the early painters to visit and work en plein air here.

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Granville Redmond (1871–1935), Coastal Storm (1905), oil on canvas, 106.6 × 127 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Granville Redmond’s early paintings of this coast are in Tonalist style, with muted colours. His Coastal Storm from 1905 contrasts the wind and heavy rain sweeping in from the right with the distant view of the coast in much fairer conditions. He appears to have used fine scratching in the diagonals of the falling rain.

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Granville Redmond (1871–1935), Sailboats on Calm Seas (1906), oil on canvas, 38.1 x 49.5 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Redmond’s Sailboats on Calm Seas is a small oil sketch from the following year, with masterly modelling of wave-splash at the bows of the yacht. His colours remain muted.

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Granville Redmond (1871–1935), Morning on the Pacific (1911), oil on canvas, 30.4 × 15.8 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Morning on the Pacific (1911) is an intermediate step towards Redmond’s later style, in this painterly view of the sea. My only puzzle here is that the title clearly establishes the time of day as morning, but the direction of view appears to be to the west, where you’d expect the sun to be in the later afternoon.

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Granville Redmond (1871–1935), A Field of California Poppies (1911), oil on canvas, 66 x 91.4 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Redmond’s A Field of California Poppies, also from 1911, erupts into a richly coloured carpet of California or Golden Poppies, the state flower associated with the Golden State, and the Gold Rush. There are also a few smaller patches of what may be the large-leaved or purple lupine.

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William Frederic Ritschel (1864-1949), Monterey Coast (1911-), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, OH. Wikimedia Commons.

At some time in 1911 or later, William Frederic Ritschel painted Monterey Coast, to the south of San Francisco. Monterey itself has a long history, and in 1777 became the capital of the province of “Both Californias”. Away from the port and city, though, this section of coast is rugged and much remains inaccessible.

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George Bellows (1882–1925), The Sand Cart (1917), oil on canvas, 76.8 × 111.9 cm, Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY. Wikimedia Commons.

For The Sand Cart (1917), George Bellows travelled to the coast of California, where he caught working men engaged in manual labour, this time against a very different coastal background. This painting was shown on his return to New York, where it was well-received by critics, who compared it with the coastal paintings of Winslow Homer.

Interiors by Design: Félix Vallotton’s disturbing domestics

A domestic interior is an ideal setting for something unusual if not downright unsettling. Amid everyday furniture and decor, something odd is going on. Although best known today as one of the Nabis, Félix Vallotton painted disturbing interiors from the late 1870s, before he joined Maurice Denis and others in the movement, until the early twentieth century, well after he had moved on.

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Félix Vallotton (1865–1925), The Visit, or Top Hat, Interior (1887), oil on canvas, 32.7 x 24.8 cm, Musée Malraux (MuMa), Le Havre, France. Image by Pymouss, via Wikimedia Commons.

He started gently with this oil painting of The Visit or The Top Hat, Interior in 1887, the year that he left the Académie Julian and exhibited his first two paintings (both portraits) at the Salon. A top hat and walking stick are parked on a chair just inside an apartment, whose door is partly open. Everything looks in order, except for the painting on the wall at the right, which is hanging at an odd angle.

Two years later, Vallotton met his first partner, Hélène Chatenay, who later came to model for two further domestic interiors he painted in 1892.

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Félix Vallotton (1865–1925), The Sick Girl (1892), oil on canvas, 73.5 x 100.5 cm, Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland. Wikimedia Commons.

The Sick Girl adopts a theme popular with Naturalist painters throughout the 1880s and into the 1890s. Vallotton curiously obscures the face of the young woman in her sickbed by reversing the bed’s expected orientation. Who would ever position their bed to face away from a window and look straight at a near-blank wall? Another strange feature is that the maid who has just entered the room appears to be heading towards the viewer, and isn’t even looking towards her patient.

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Félix Vallotton (1865–1925), The Cook (1892), oil on board, 33 x 41 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

The Cook also features Hélène Chatenay as Vallotton’s model. She stands at the solid-top range in a kitchen strangely almost devoid of the one thing that kitchens are about, food. The only edible item visible is a bunch of onions suspended in mid-air. Everything – the chairs, pots and pans, and the range itself – is spotless as if they have never been used, and appear thoroughly unnatural.

Vallotton then put his interiors on pause for six years while he engaged with the Nabis. He also bought himself an early Kodak mass-market camera, and from 1898 experimented with it for capturing these domestic scenes. He changed partners in 1899, when he married Gabrielle Rodrigues-Hénriques, the widowed daughter of Alexandre Bernheim, one of the leading art dealers of the day.

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Félix Vallotton (1865–1925), The Red Room (1898), distemper on cardboard, 50 x 68.5 cm, Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland. Wikimedia Commons.

Vallotton remained under Nabi influence when he painted The Red Room in 1898 to the extent that he used distemper, a traditional medium that the group had resurrected. A man and woman stand in a loose embrace in the doorway of a living room with brick red decor. Above the fireplace is what appears be a mirror, in which a person dressed in black is standing in the distance, apparently facing away from the couple.

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Félix Vallotton (1865–1925), The Visit (1899), distemper on cardboard, 55.5 x 87 cm, Kunsthaus, Zürich, Switzerland. Wikimedia Commons.

A similar well-dressed couple embrace more closely in The Visit from 1899, also painted in distemper. Once again, Vallotton leaves the painting’s underlying narrative open.

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Félix Vallotton (1865–1925), The Laundress, Blue Room (1900), oil on paper laid on canvas, 50 x 80 cm, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX. Wikimedia Commons.

He followed that in 1900 with The Laundress, Blue Room, that appears to be set in the Vallotton apartment in Paris, with two of his step-children squatting on the folds of large fabric sheets, inside a bedroom with blue decor. Two women are sat working, one apparently on the sheets, the other on separate fabrics.

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Félix Vallotton (1865–1925), Woman Searching through a Cupboard (1901), oil on canvas, 78 × 40 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

A year later Vallotton’s Woman Searching through a Cupboard (1901) became even stranger. He shuts out half this painting’s image with black screens and the doors to the cupboard, in a gloomy repoussoir. The woman, in spite of a lamp by her side, is also little more than a black silhouette, who appears to absorb the light falling on her. The lamp is strange, with a shade showing sailing ships at sea, its stand being a vertical statuette of Truth, perhaps.

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Félix Vallotton (1865–1925), Poker (1902), oil on cardboard, 52 x 67 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.

For the following year (1902), he painted this quartet of gamblers in a Poker session. Tucked away in a plush back room behind a club or bar, these four are in full evening dress, playing for stakes which could be breathtaking and bankrupting. In the centre foreground is another lamp with a patterned shade, again showing sailing boats.

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Félix Vallotton (1865–1925), Interior, Woman in Blue Searching in a Cupboard (1903), oil on canvas, 81 x 46 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Image by Oakenchips, via Wikimedia Commons.

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

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Félix Vallotton (1865–1925), Interior with Woman in Red (1903), oil on canvas, 92.5 x 70.5 cm, Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland. Wikimedia Commons.

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 that divide this interior 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 a double bed with a bedside lamp in the distance.

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Félix Vallotton (1865–1925), Interior, Bedroom with Two Figures (1904), oil on cardboard, 61.5 × 56 cm, Hermitage Museum Государственный Эрмитаж, Saint Petersburg, Russia. Wikimedia Commons.

In 1904, Vallotton painted what proved to be one his last disturbing domestic scenes, in Interior, Bedroom with Two Figures. Its narrative is so incomplete that it’s worthy of the sub-genre of the ‘problem picture’. This is another bedroom, where the lady of the house is standing over her maid as the latter is sewing up her evening gown. The mistress stands with her back to the viewer, and her face is only revealed in her reflection in the large mirror on the wardrobe at the back of the room, where the maid is all but invisible. These three figures appear in perspective recession, and to the right of the wardrobe is a doorway, presumably leading through to the master’s bedroom.

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Félix Vallotton (1865–1925), Woman Reading in an Interior (1904), oil on board, 60.3 x 34.6 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX. Wikimedia Commons.

There’s dispute as to whether this painting shows a Woman Reading in an Interior, as given by its French title, or a woman writing. Vallotton painted this in 1904, and charged it with less mystery. But I wonder if the lower of the two paintings on the wall might be one of Degas’ works showing horse-riding. As usual, the single figure doesn’t show her face as she sits at the small bureau, backlit by the window.

The following year Vallotton moved on, eventually painting a series of transcendental landscapes, a far cry from these disturbing domestics.

The Real Country: Drains and engines

The late nineteenth century brought great changes throughout Europe. Country areas were depopulated as cities attracted labour to work in their factories, lured by the empty promise of material comforts. Food markets became dominated by larger suppliers and merchants, and smaller farms with low yields found themselves unable to compete. Although mechanisation was developing rapidly, machinery cost money, and smaller farms were unable to benefit from the productivity improvements occurring on larger farms.

One substantial improvement that many could use was better drainage of arable land. Although hardly technological, as most land drains are made from baked clay, many areas across Europe had suffered waterlogging of their best fields during the winter. Land drains dug into the field to draw water to a ditch at the edge significantly increased areas under cultivation, as well as crop yields.

More substantial drainage works had already turned large areas of bog and marsh into productive farmland, throughout the Netherlands, and in areas like the Fens in England during the decades prior to 1820. Both remain among the largest civil engineering projects undertaken in Europe.

Steam engines came into agricultural use in the late nineteenth century. At first they were largely static, but from the 1860s they became self-propelled, now known as traction engines and still a popular feature of country fairs. Teams travelled the countryside hiring out the services of their steam engine for threshing and ploughing.

After the First World War, internal combustion engines replaced steam, and the first real tractors came into use.

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Heinrich Vogeler (1872–1942), Farmer Ploughing (c 1930-42), oil on canvas, 40 x 50 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Heinrich Vogeler’s Farmer Ploughing from the period 1930-42 shows a tractor with an internal combustion engine and its own tracks, towing a heavy plough.

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Percy Shakespeare (1906–1943), December on the Downs, Wartime (c 1939-44), oil on canvas, 62.5 x 92.5 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Lighter wheeled tractors became popular during the middle of the twentieth century. Percy Shakespeare’s painting of December on the Downs, Wartime, made in the period 1939-44, is its own lesson in agricultural history. In the distance, on one of the rolling chalk downs in the south of England, are three horse-drawn ploughs tackling some of the steeper ground.

With a high proportion of men serving in the armed forces, the two tractors in the foreground are being driven and tended by young women, dubbed the Women’s Land Army. The further of the two tractors is drawing a lighweight wheeled plough, better suited to this land.

Broken Tractor 1942 by Frances Hodgkins 1869-1947
Frances Hodgkins (1869–1947), Broken Tractor (1942), gouache on paper, 38.1 x 57.1 cm, The Tate Gallery (Purchased 1943), London. © The Tate Gallery and Photographic Rights © Tate (2016), CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported), https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hodgkins-broken-tractor-n05406

In 1942, when Frances Hodgkins was living in the south-west of England, at Corfe Castle in Dorset, she painted this gouache of Broken Tractor showing the mechanical disarray that overtook many farmyards during the twentieth century, as their ageing farm machinery fell beyond economic repair.

With networks of railways and later roads reaching deep into many country districts, agricultural produce could be transported in bulk and travel from producer to consumer in a matter of hours. Early morning trains carrying milk to cities became widespread.

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Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway (1844), oil on canvas, 91 x 121.8 cm, The National Gallery (Turner Bequest, 1856), London. Courtesy of and © 2018 The National Gallery, London.

JMW Turner was among the first painters to capture this in his Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway in 1844. This pioneering railway connected London with rich farming country across the south of England, down into western counties, eventually reaching Cornwall in 1859, fifteen years after Turner had completed this painting.

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Giuseppe De Nittis (1846–1884), The Passing of a Train (1869-80), oil on canvas, 31.1 x 37.6 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Giuseppe De Nittis here shows The Passing of a Train through productive French countryside between 1869-80.

The winners here though were those farmers who were already prospering. Smallholders and others who still farmed using traditional methods were left behind, in increasing poverty and neglect.

Reading visual art: 179 Knitting, poverty

This second article considering the reading of knitting and crochet in paintings concludes with its most frequent use, as a sign of the peasant and poverty. This first became prominent in the social realist paintings of the mid-nineteenth century, starting with those of Jean-François Millet.

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Jean-François Millet (1814–1875), The Knitting Shepherdess (1856-57), pastel, 33.7 × 25.4 cm, Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, MO. Wikimedia Commons.

Millet’s pastel of The Knitting Shepherdess (1856-57) continued his established pastoral theme, showing a young woman engaged in knitting as her flock grazed in broken woodland behind her. In common with other occupations that left the hands free, shepherdesses commonly knitted for their family while they were at work.

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Jean-François Millet (1814–1875), Young Girl Watching her Sheep (c 1860-62), oil on panel, 39.1 × 29.5 cm, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA. Wikimedia Commons.

A few years later, Millet revisited the theme in his Young Girl Watching her Sheep from about 1860-62. She is knitting in the round with several needles, to produce a long stocking or sleeve.

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Jules Breton (1827–1906), Young Girl Knitting (2) (1860), oil on canvas mounted on panel, 36 × 30 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Young Girl Knitting (1860) is the second painting Jules Breton made of a young woman from his home village of Courrières knitting indoors. Many of his more intimate works like this were sold to private collectors and have never been exhibited.

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Jules Breton (1827–1906), A Peasant Girl Knitting (c 1870), oil on canvas, 57.5 × 47 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Wikimedia Commons.

Breton’s A Peasant Girl Knitting (c 1870) was probably started, if not completed, en plein air in an old orchard near Douarnenez, where the artist and his family often spent their summers. Note that she’s not even wearing clogs, but her feet are bare.

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Laurits Andersen Ring (1854–1933), Smallholders in the Village of Ring (1887), oil on cardboard, 28 x 36 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

LA Ring’s Smallholders in the village of Ring from 1887 shows a working class couple who lived in the artist’s home village. ‘Polish Niels’ made his living as the village plumber, and supplemented those earnings by selling seeds. He is here making paper bags in which to sell his seeds, as his wife is engaged in knitting, once again in the round.

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Clarence Gagnon (1881-1942), Brittany Goose Girl (1908), oil on canvas, 63.5 x 92 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, Montreal, Canada. The Athenaeum.

The Canadian artist Clarence Gagnon’s Brittany Goose Girl from 1908 walks along in her wooden clogs quietly knitting in the golden sunlight of autumn.

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Winslow Homer (1836–1910), Fisher Girls on Shore, Tynemouth (1884), charcoal and chalk on paper, 58.4 × 44.1 cm, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT. Wikimedia Commons.

When the American painter Winslow Homer lived in the fishing village of Cullercoats on the north-east coast of England in the early 1880s, much of his time was spent painting among the fishlasses and fishwives while their menfolk were at sea. During that time, the women continued with their supporting tasks of knitting and repairing clothing, and repairing nets and gear, as in his charcoal and chalk drawing of Fisher Girls on Shore, Tynemouth from 1884. Rather than wearing wooden clogs, these two have working boots.

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Henry Herbert La Thangue (1859–1929), The Boat Builder’s Yard, Cancale, Brittany (1881), oil on canvas, 76.1 x 82.2 cm, Royal Museums Greenwich, London. Wikimedia Commons.

One of Henry Herbert La Thangue’s earliest major paintings is this view of The Boat Builder’s Yard, Cancale, Brittany painted in 1881, when he was staying on the Brittany coast. The young Breton woman shown appears out of place, with her working dress, clogs and knitting. She’s surrounded by the tools of and shavings from boat-building in wood. Behind her is the frame of a part-constructed fishing boat similar to those seen in the background at the right, a working boat known as a chaloupe thonière.

These two articles are dedicated to my editor-in-chief, the most prolific knitter I have known, my wife, in thanks for all her support, and technical advice.

Reading visual art: 178 Knitting, past and pastime

Knitting, and its close relative crochet, form strands of wool or yarn into loops that assemble the fibres into fabric. Although machines have long been used to make knitted garments commercially, until the nineteenth century most woollen clothing was still knitted (or crocheted) by hand. Today what’s viewed as a traditional craft almost exclusively for women was, in the past, a popular if not essential activity for many men too, as it was the only way that they could have socks, warm gloves and other garments to wear.

In this article and tomorrow’s sequel, I show a selection of depictions of both knitting and crocheting; tomorrow’s paintings focus on their association with poverty, while this article shows some of their other readings.

By the late nineteenth century, when Thomas Eakins painted some of his few watercolours, knitting by hand was in decline, and seen as a sign of the past.

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Thomas Eakins (1844–1916), Seventy Years Ago (1877), watercolour and gouache on cream wove paper with graphite border, 39.8 × 27.4 cm, Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ. Wikimedia Commons.

Eakins’ Seventy Years Ago, from 1877 explores the early Federal period in Philadelphia, prompted by increased interest in that era resulting from the national centennial the previous year. His subject is knitting in the round on three needles, forming a tubular section of garment, perhaps a sock or sleeve. A spinning wheel at the left edge shows her to an accomplished fibrecrafter.

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William Dyce (1806–1864), Welsh Landscape with Two Women Knitting (1860), oil on board, 36 x 58 cm, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, Wales. Wikimedia Commons.

In the autumn of 1860, William Dyce stayed in the Conwy Valley in Wales for six weeks, where he sketched and painted avidly. After his return to London, he painted this Welsh Landscape with Two Women Knitting, showing the rough and rugged scenery above the valley, a rock outcrop filling much of the left half of the painting.

In its centre is an old woman, and to the right a young one, each dressed in traditional clothes, and knitting. The younger wears a formal ensemble that had recently been revived and designated ‘Welsh national costume’, as might be worn for Eisteddfods and other special occasions. They’re both knitting stockings from scavenged scraps of wool, an activity that might have been common earlier in the century and performed indoors at home. It had largely disappeared by 1860, and is conspicuously incongruous for such an outdoor location. Dyce’s painting remains enigmatic.

Depending on the pattern being knitted, the knitter may require periods of intense concentration, making it a sign of detachment from or disinterest in surrounding activities.

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Thomas Eakins (1844–1916), William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River (1876-77), oil on canvas mounted on Masonite, 51.2 x 66.4 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA. Wikimedia Commons.

William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River (1876-77) is the first of three paintings by Thomas Eakins showing this wood sculptor carving his Water Nymph and Bittern for a fountain in Philadelphia’s waterworks, in 1808. The water nymph is an allegory of the Schuylkill River, at that time the city’s primary source of water.

Rush had been a founder of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and an enthusiast for the use of nude models in art, as was Eakins. This painting was at least in part an attempt to promote the practice of working from nude models. Seated at the right of the model is a chaperone, who is clearly more interested in her knitting. The model’s complicated clothing is hung and scattered in the light, as if to emphasise her total nudity (apart from a hair-band!). Unfortunately, those scattered garments didn’t go down well, and were deemed scandalous at the time.

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Laurits Andersen Ring (1854–1933), Housewife’s Evening Party (1905), oil on canvas, 72.5 x 87.5 cm, Statsministeriet, Copenhagen, Denmark. Wikimedia Commons.

LA Ring’s Housewife’s Evening Party from 1905 shows a very different sort of party from those being painted at the time in cities like Paris. This housewife sits crocheting her way through the height of the party, as her husband and a friend discuss a book by the light of the kerosene lantern.

Through the ages, knitting and crochet have been peaceful and productive pastimes for many.

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François-Joseph Navez (1787–1869), Women Spinning in Fondi (1845), oil on canvas, 148 x 187 cm, Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Germany. Wikimedia Commons.

Fibrecraft may have declined in popularity in the cities of the nineteenth century, but it remained commonplace in the provinces and country. François-Joseph Navez here shows a group of Women Spinning in Fondi in 1845, a town roughly midway between Rome and Naples. Two of the women are actively spinning, one has dropped her distaff to gaze pensively at her young baby, and the woman in red in the centre is probably knitting.

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Hans Thoma (1839–1924), A Peaceful Sunday (1876), oil on canvas, 79.5 × 107 cm, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany. Wikimedia Commons.

In Hans Thoma’s A Peaceful Sunday from 1876, an elderly couple are sat at a plain wooden table, in their urban apartment. She works at her knitting or crochet, while he reads. You can almost hear the soft, measured tick of the clock that’s out of sight, slowly passing their remaining years.

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Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894), Mademoiselle Boissière Knitting (1877), oil on canvas, 65.1 x 80 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX. Wikimedia Commons.

Gustave Caillebotte’s portrait of Mademoiselle Boissière Knitting (1877) is one of the first in which he might be said to be painting in Impressionist style. This elderly spinster is working intently.

Anna Ancher, Sunshine in the Blue Room, Helga Ancher Crocheting in her Grandmother's Room (1891), oil on canvas, 65.2 x 58.8 cm, Skagens Museum, Denmark. Wikimedia Commons.
Anna Ancher (1859-1935), Sunshine in the Blue Room, Helga Ancher Crocheting in her Grandmother’s Room (1891), oil on canvas, 65.2 x 58.8 cm, Skagens Museum, Denmark. Wikimedia Commons.

Anna Ancher’s skills as a colourist and impressionist brighten her Sunshine in the Blue Room, Helga Ancher Crocheting in her Grandmother’s Room, from 1891, as she progressed from realism and became increasingly painterly in her brushstrokes.

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Anders Zorn (1860–1920), Girl from Dalecarlia Knitting. ‘Cabbage Margit’ (1901), oil on canvas, 72 x 57 cm, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden. Wikimedia Commons.

In the summer of 1901 Anders Zorn painted this Girl from Dalecarlia Knitting. ‘Cabbage Margit’ (1901) in his town of Mora, deep in the Swedish countryside. She too is knitting in the round.

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Laurits Andersen Ring (1854–1933), The Sick Man (1902), oil on canvas, 52.7 x 45.7 cm, Den Hirschsprungske Samling, Copenhagen, Denmark. Wikimedia Commons.

The Sick Man, painted by LA Ring in 1902, stares grimly, wide-eyed and straight ahead, as if already looking death in the face. Meanwhile his wife sits knitting peacefully, already swathed in black apart from her apron.

Changing Paintings: 48 Killed by Apollo’s discus

After Orpheus has told of the abduction of Ganymede, he moves on to tell of another shameful passion, that of Apollo for the young Spartan, Hyacinthus. One midday, Apollo and Hyacinthus undressed, as they were wont to do prior to athletics, oiled their limbs, and threw the discus together. Apollo used his divine powers to throw it high through the clouds.

As the discus was falling, Hyacinthus ran out to catch it, not thinking of its likely speed and kinetic energy. The discus ricocheted from the hard earth and struck him full in the face, inflicting a mortal wound. The youth went white as he bled from his wound, and Apollo blanched too as he tried to arrest Hyacinth’s haemorrhage.

Apollo lamented the youth’s imminent death, accepting responsibility for it. As the blood of Hyacinthus poured from his wound, the god decreed that from it would grow a new flower in his memory, and the Spartans would celebrate him in an annual festival. So the blood of Hyacinthus became the purple hyacinth flower, and was commemorated in the festival of Hyacinthia.

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Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), The Death of Hyacinth (1636), oil on panel, 14.4 × 13.8 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, Spain. Wikimedia Commons.

In 1636, when he was in retirement, Peter Paul Rubens made one of his wonderful oil sketches of The Death of Hyacinth, capturing the scene vividly, as Hyacinthus’ head rests against the fateful discus. But apparently he didn’t turn that into a finished painting.

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Jan Cossiers (1600–1671), The Death of Hyacinth (1636-38), oil on canvas, 97 × 94 cm, Palacio Real de Madrid (Palacio de Oriente), Madrid, Spain. Wikimedia Commons.

It was Jan Cossiers, then assisting Rubens in some of his remaining projects, who made the finished version from that oil sketch in 1636-38. There are perhaps the first signs of plants growing in the blood under the dying youth’s right shoulder, although they aren’t recognisable as hyacinths yet.

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Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770), The Death of Hyacinthus (c 1752-53), oil on canvas, 287 × 232 cm, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain. Wikimedia Commons.

The most complete narrative painting of this story must be Tiepolo’s magnificent The Death of Hyacinthus from about 1752-53. Tiepolo has been inspired by an Italian translation of the Metamorphoses from 1561, that changed the discus into a tennis ball, actually from the popular game of pallacorda.

The classical story is told in the right foreground, with the pale Hyacinthus visibly bruised on his cheek, but hardly in the throes of death. Apollo is swooning above him, and the Cupid to the right also seems to have suffered some facial injury, perhaps in sympathy. Above that group is a grinning Pan, in the form of a Herm, and a brightly coloured parrot, who seems to have escaped from another story.

On the left of the painting are a motley group of witnesses, wearing the most extraordinary headgear and clothing. Tiepolo does manage to show some hyacinth flowers, at the right bottom corner, at the foot of which are the racquet and balls. The colour of those flowers is far from that of Tyrian purple, as given in Ovid’s account, but may of course have faded over time.

For completion, Tiepolo tucks some cypress trees in the background, alluding both to the previous story of Cyparissus, and Apollo’s grief.

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Jean Broc (1771–1850), The Death of Hyacinth (1801), oil on canvas, 175 x 120 cm, Musée Sainte-Croix, Poitiers, France. Wikimedia Commons.

Jean Broc’s The Death of Hyacinth (1801) is a dramatically-lit and overtly homoerotic interpretation, which includes the discus at the lower left, and some hyacinth flowers at the lower right.

There is still controversy over whether the flowers that arose from the blood of Hyacinthus were actually intended to be hyacinths. As no one seems to have come up with a more plausible alternative, and none of the paintings here shows them particularly well, I close with one of the finest floral still life paintings of hyacinths.

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Alfrida Baadsgaard (1839-1912), Still Life with Hyacinths and Butterfly (date not known), oil on canvas, 58 × 47.5 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Alfrida Baadsgaard was a talented floral artist and author, and her undated Still Life with Hyacinths and Butterfly provides a good choice of colours. All we need do is add a few to the foot of Tiepolo’s wickedly humorous painting.

Paintings of New York City, 1909-1921

In the first of these two articles looking at paintings depicting change in New York City between the mid-1880s and 1920, I had just introduced the paintings of skyscrapers by Colin Campbell Cooper.

For those less familiar with New York City at the end of the nineteenth century, this contemporary map might help.

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Author not known, New York and Surrounds (1885-1890), Meyers Konversations-Lexikon, further details not known. Wikimedia Commons.

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Colin Campbell Cooper (1856–1937), Broadway from the Post Office (Wall Street) (c 1909), oil on canvas, 130.5 x 89.9 cm, City of Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA. Wikimedia Commons.

Cooper’s Broadway from the Post Office (Wall Street) (c 1909) is another of his most famous skyscraper cityscapes, showing the Singer Building or Tower, at Liberty Street and Broadway, that had only just been completed, and was still the tallest building in the world. Below in Broadway itself the street is packed with people. The golden light on the walls of the buildings is particularly strong, and clouds of steam enhance its effect. The Singer Building, then the headquarters of the Singer Manufacturing Company, was demolished in 1968, and replaced by 1 Liberty Plaza.

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Colin Campbell Cooper (1856–1937), Columbus Circle (1909), oil on canvas, 66 × 91.4 cm, Allentown Art Museum, Allentown, PA. Wikimedia Commons.

Cooper’s Columbus Circle from 1909 is less about the vertical, and more the interaction of jumbled buildings, light, smoke, and steam. With Gaetano Russo’s landmark statue of Christopher Columbus just to the right of centre, the circle had only been completed in 1905, as part of Frederick Law Olmsted’s vision for Central Park, which is off to the right. In the foreground, Cooper shows some of the more intimate sights of this new elevated world, with a woman hanging out her washing amid the chimneys.

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Colin Campbell Cooper (1856–1937), New York from Brooklyn (c 1910), oil on board, 63.5 x 76.2 cm, Jersey City Museum, New Jersey, NJ. Wikimedia Commons.

New York from Brooklyn (c 1910) shows the busy piers of Brooklyn still operating as the major gateway into the East Coast, and the ultimate collection of skyscrapers, most of which had only recently been completed. The colour contrast between the pale gold faces in sunlight and the almost purple of cast shadow is characteristic of Cooper’s style.

George Bellows trained with Robert Henri in New York, and worked from his own studio in the city for much of his career. As Cooper was busy painting skyscrapers, Bellows concentrated on the lives of working class migrants living in the tenements of Lower East Side.

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George Bellows (1882–1925), Pennsylvania Station Excavation (c 1907-1908), oil on canvas, 79.4 × 97.2 cm, Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY. Wikimedia Commons.

He showed the deep excavations required for the construction of the city’s skyscrapers.

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George Bellows (1882–1925), The Bridge, Blackwell’s Island (1909), oil on canvas, 86.5 × 112 cm, Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH. Wikimedia Commons.

Bellows’ The Bridge, Blackwell’s Island (1909) shows the Queensboro Bridge linking Manhattan with Queens to the east. Its piers rest on Blackwell’s Island (now known as Roosevelt Island). This view was painted from the Manhattan end in December 1909, shortly after it had been opened, when it was the greatest cantilever bridge in the world.

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George Bellows (1882–1925), New York (1911), oil on canvas, 106.7 × 152.4 cm, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Wikimedia Commons.

New York (1911) balances the world of the people of New York, with that of their buildings. It was shown that year in the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design, in New York, and annually thereafter for the rest of Bellows’ career, but wasn’t sold until after his death.

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George Bellows (1882–1925), Cliff Dwellers (1913), oil on canvas, 102.1 × 106.8 cm, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA. Wikimedia Commons.

Bellows’ famous Cliff Dwellers (1913) shows the largely immigrant population of tenements in Lower East Side. This was the first painting to be purchased by the county of Los Angeles for its new museum of art, in 1916, where it remains today.

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Colin Campbell Cooper (1856–1937), New York Public Library (c 1915), oil on canvas, 73.7 × 92.1 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

In his later paintings, Cooper moved from the solid mass of skyscrapers to greater lightness and greenery. Although one high building is still present in his New York Public Library (c 1915), the street is less densely packed, and the plants and trees brilliant green.

Joseph Stella was Italian by birth, and first migrated to New York City in 1896 to study medicine. He soon changed his mind, though, and studied painting under William Merritt Chase, at the Art Students League and the New York School of Art. On completion of his training, he worked as an illustrator, but became increasingly unhappy, so returned to Italy in 1909. He travelled back to New York City in 1913, to give the US a second try, and stayed in the city until his death there in 1946.

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Joseph Stella (1877–1946), Luna Park (1913), oil on composition board, 44.5 x 59.4 cm, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Wikimedia Commons.

Stella was attracted to the dazzling electric lights of Luna Park (1913) on Coney Island, which had opened a decade earlier. His new style developed when he had been in Paris was startlingly different, and Futurist.

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Joseph Stella (1877–1946), Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras (c 1913-14), oil on canvas, 200.3 × 220 cm, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. Wikimedia Commons.

This was followed by Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras (1913), one of the earliest, and still among the greatest, of American Futurist paintings. Although it’s sometimes claimed that it was exhibited at the famous (even notorious) International Exhibition of Modern Art held in New York in early 1913, known now as the Armory Show, Stella didn’t complete it until the autumn of that year, when it went on display in a private gallery in New York.

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Joseph Stella (1877–1946), Brooklyn Bridge (1919-20), oil on canvas, 215.3 × 194.6 cm, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. Wikimedia Commons.

Stella was nothing if not eclectic. In 1919-20, he painted probably his best-known work, this Cubist geometric analysis of Brooklyn Bridge (1919-20).

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Colin Campbell Cooper (1856–1937), Hudson River Waterfront, New York City (c 1921), oil on canvas, 91.4 x 73.7 cm, New York Historical Society, New York, NY. Wikimedia Commons.

As he grew older, Colin Campbell Cooper still apparently craved the occasional skyscraper, and must have painted Hudson River Waterfront, New York City (c 1921) when he was back in his East Coast studio. The highlit and tallest building on the left is the Woolworth Building, completed in 1913, and until 1930 the tallest building in the world, at 241.4 metres. But here the clouds are also built up high, and rise to belittle such human structures, as they did in landscape paintings of the Dutch Golden Age.

Paintings of New York City, 1886-1908

At the start of the nineteenth century, the population of New York City was only 60,000, about a tenth that of Paris. By 1900, Paris had grown to about 2.7 million, and New York had outstripped it, reaching 3.4 million. This weekend I look at paintings depicting that change in New York between the mid-1880s and 1920. This article concentrates on the transition from leafy suburbs to skyscrapers of the early twentieth century, and tomorrow’s shows the human landscape a little later.

For those less familiar with New York City at the end of the nineteenth century, this contemporary map might help.

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Author not known, New York and Surrounds (1885-1890), Meyers Konversations-Lexikon, further details not known. Wikimedia Commons.

When William Merritt Chase returned from his training in Europe in 1878, he moved to New York, where he kept a studio for most of the rest of his life. From about 1886, he started painting outdoor scenes around Brooklyn and other parts of New York City, but ceased these by the time that he started teaching plein air painting at Shinnecock, Long Island, in 1891.

Over this period, Chase’s favourite scenes were those of the huge Prospect Park, then on the southern edge of Brooklyn. This had been the next project for Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux after they finished Manhattan’s Central Park, and had only been completed in 1873.

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William Merritt Chase (1849–1916), Brooklyn Landscape (c 1886), oil on panel, dimensions not known, Private collection. The Athenaeum.

Brooklyn Landscape (c 1886) shows a few buildings in the distance, which could as easily have been a more rural setting. The rough land in the foreground does at least have the appearance of urban waste ground, before the area became more densely developed.

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William Merritt Chase (1849–1916), The East River (c 1886), oil on panel, 25.4 x 40 cm, Private collection. The Athenaeum.

In his waterfront view of The East River (c 1886), Chase avoids getting too close to the factories and warehouses seen on the skyline. This is the waterway that separates Brooklyn from Manhattan Island to the north-west.

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William Merritt Chase (1849–1916), Harbor Scene, Brooklyn Docks (1886), oil on panel, dimensions not known, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. The Athenaeum.

In Harbor Scene, Brooklyn Docks (1886), he follows similar compositional principles, even bringing in some grass and trees on the left.

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William Merritt Chase (1849–1916), Boat House, Prospect Park (1887), oil on board, 26 x 40.6 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

The buildings Chase painted were seldom those typical of cities: Boat House, Prospect Park (1887) is far from urban, and the scene almost empty of people.

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William Merritt Chase (1849–1916), A City Park (c 1887), oil on canvas, 34.6 x 49.9 cm, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. Wikimedia Commons.

A City Park (c 1887) shows the edge of a park, where there are more people, and some distant buildings, but like his earlier waterfront views, they’re kept sufficiently small as to avoid their dominance.

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William Merritt Chase (1849–1916), Park in Brooklyn (Prospect Park) (c 1887), oil on panel, 41 x 61.3 cm, Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY. The Athenaeum.

This view of Prospect Park, Park in Brooklyn (c 1887), follows the same pattern.

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William Merritt Chase (1849–1916), Washing Day – A Backyard Reminiscence of Brooklyn (c 1887), oil on wood panel, 38.7 x 47.3 cm, Private collection. The Athenaeum.

Chase also painted a few works that take us into the backyards, including his Washing Day – A Backyard Reminiscence of Brooklyn (c 1887). Apart from the dominating washing, and the shrouded woman hanging it out, all we’re shown are trees and grass.

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William Merritt Chase (1849–1916), The Open Air Breakfast (c 1888), oil on canvas, 95.1 x 144.2 cm, Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH. Wikimedia Commons.

In his The Open Air Breakfast (c 1888), the house in the background is cunningly disguised, revealing only disembodied steps and a doorway.

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William Merritt Chase (1849–1916), View from Central Park (1889), further details not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Painted towards the end of this phase of his landscapes, his View from Central Park (1889) relegates the large buildings of Manhattan to its distant skyline.

Chase’s paintings of New York City are remarkable for his skill in turning each into a patch of green countryside, and carefully avoiding any passages which might look in the least bit urban, Brooklyn as leafy suburb.

Robert Henri’s art had centred largely on Philadelphia until he started teaching at the New York School of Art in 1902. By that time, he had rejected Impressionism and effectively joined what became known as the Ashcan School, for its gritty realist depictions of the contemporary American city.

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Robert Henri (1865–1929), Snow in New York (1902), oil on canvas, 81.3 x 65.5 cm, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Wikimedia Commons.

On 5 March 1902, Henri painted Snow in New York (1902), a true cityscape devoid of trees or green, its streets properly populated.

Colin Campbell Cooper initially trained with Thomas Eakins in Philadelphia, then studied in Paris. He moved to New York City in 1904, by which time he had already started to paint urban landscapes. Once he was among the growing skyscrapers of the city, they became something of an obsession, together with the crowded streets below. He was probably the first American painter who specialised in cityscapes.

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Colin Campbell Cooper (1856–1937), The Ferries, New York (c 1905), other details not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Cooper’s The Ferries, New York (c 1905) is a superb study of the dense crush of people on the ferries, the waterside warehouses, and the abundant smoke and steam among the higher buildings in the background.

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Colin Campbell Cooper (1856–1937), Flatiron Building, Manhattan (c 1908), casein on canvas, 102 x 76.2 cm, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX. Wikimedia Commons.

Flatiron Building, Manhattan (c 1908) is an important painting in many ways, and one of the few made by Cooper using casein paints, which had just come into vogue. This was painted just a few years after this distinctive landmark at 175 Fifth Avenue had been completed (1902). Then one of the tallest buildings in New York City, at 20 floors high, its triangular section makes it instantly recognisable. It was originally named the Fuller Building, after George A Fuller, the ‘father of the skyscraper’, but quickly gained its more popular title. It was equally quickly photographed in classic images by Alfred Stieglitz (1903) and Edward Steichen (1904), but Cooper’s composition, with its bustle of people, carriages, and aerial wisps of steam, makes his view one of the most impressive.

Tomorrow we’ll resume with Cooper’s skyscrapers.

Interiors by Design: Nordic flair

In the middle of the nineteenth century, as cities across Europe were growing rapidly, the Arts and Crafts Movement spread from its origins in England to bring a new wave of interest in furniture and other features of domestic interiors. This article shows some paintings of interiors by Nordic artists of that period, giving insight into changes in design taking place across the countries of northern Europe.

Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Rustic Life (1887), oil on canvas, 94 x 90 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.
Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865-1931), Rustic Life (1887), oil on canvas, 94 x 90 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Prior to this, interiors in much of this region were vernacular, as shown in Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s Rustic Life from 1887. A young woman sits spinning next to a bed, while an older man is repairing one of his boots in front of the open fire. There’s little in the way of furniture, and what there is has been rough-hewn and is functional.

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Carl Larsson (1853–1919), The Toy Corner (1887), further details not known. Wikimedia Commons.

That same year, the young Swedish artist Carl Larsson painted The Toy Corner inside the family home. His wife Karin was a talented artist who concentrated on interior design, and was responsible for most of the interiors shown in her husband’s paintings. From 1888, their family home just outside Falun in Dalarna became the centre of Larsson’s watercolours that were later published across Europe as examples that many others aspired to.

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Carl Larsson (1853–1919), Homework (1898), media and dimensions not known, Göteborgs konstmuseum, Göteborg, Sweden. Wikimedia Commons.

Homework (1898) shows two of the Larsson children working in the evening by the light of a kerosene lamp, amid decor designed by their mother.

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Carl Larsson (1853–1919), Getting Ready for a Game (1901), oil on canvas, 68 x 92 cm, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden. Courtesy of Nationalmuseum, via Wikimedia Commons.

Getting Ready for a Game (1901) shows Karin Larsson preparing a tray of adult refreshments, while two of their young daughters watch from behind the more appropriate teaset. From the layout of the room seen through the open door, the grown-ups are about to enjoy an evening of cards together with friends, surrounded by one of Karin’s exemplary interiors.

The Danish artist Laurits Andersen Ring married Sigrid Kähler, daughter of a ceramic artist, who seems to have taken more than a passing interest in the design of their domestic interiors.

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Laurits Andersen Ring (1854–1933), At Breakfast (1898), oil on canvas, 52 x 40.5 cm, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden. Wikimedia Commons.

In Ring’s At Breakfast from 1898, Sigrid sits reading the ‘leftist’ daily newspaper Politiken in the sunshine.

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Laurits Andersen Ring (1854–1933), The Artist’s Wife and Children (1904), oil on canvas, 83 x 102.5 cm, Statsministeriet, Copenhagen, Denmark. Wikimedia Commons.

Ring’s 1904 painting of The Artist’s Wife and Children shows Sigrid with their young son and daughter, in front of a roaring fire. In the next room is the same table from At Breakfast above, and the table in the left foreground has a carefully-polished surface allowing Ring to show subtle reflections.

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Laurits Andersen Ring (1854–1933), Interior with a Farmer Reading a Newspaper (1911), oil on canvas, 46 x 60 cm, Statsministeriet, Copenhagen, Denmark. Wikimedia Commons.

Ring went on to paint more traditional homes, including this Interior with a Farmer Reading a Newspaper from 1911. This farmer, better-off than the average peasant for sure, sits reading the newspaper by the light streaming in from its windows. Roses provide a brilliant splash of colour to the far left, and there’s a clock ticking on the wall. The open doors lead through into the far end of the house, which is sparsely furnished by heavy wooden items like a wardrobe and a chest.

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Nikolai Astrup (1880–1928), Interior Still Life: Living Room at Sandalstrand (c 1921), oil on board, 81.9 x 100.4 cm, Private collection. The Athenaeum.

Although life in small villages in the fjords of Norway was more rustic, there was still scope for a little design flair. Nikolai Astrup’s Interior Still Life: Living Room at Sandalstrand from about 1921 includes a tapestry hanging in the corner, a painting on the wall, potted plants, a bowl of fruit, and an articulated wooden figure leaning against the pitcher of milk.

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Þórarinn B. Þorláksson (1867-1924), The Artist’s Home (1924), media not known, 35 x 25 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Until relatively recently, Icelandic society had remained strongly traditional, and homes in its capital Reykjavik were decorated in older style. Þórarinn’s glimpse into The Artist’s Home (1924) shows this well.

The Real Country: The Year

For those working the land to grow crops, the start of the year was after the harvest was complete, when the first cooler days of autumn came in, before rain turned the fields and tracks to mud, and the winter’s frosts began. This was the time to start preparing arable fields for the growing season next year, with their first ploughing.

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Robert Bevan (1865–1925), The Turn Rice-Plough, Sussex (c 1909), oil on canvas, 66.4 x 90.2 cm, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT. Wikimedia Commons.

Robert Bevan’s The Turn Rice-Plough, Sussex from about 1909 shows two ploughmen turning a plough in a field in the south-east of England. Its title is probably a simple error for turnwrest, a dialect name used in Kent and Sussex to describe any type of one-way plough that needed to be turned at the end of a furrow as shown here.

Depending on the soil, weather and intended crop, this could be the first of more than five sessions with the plough, before the seed could be sown.

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Benjamin Williams Leader (1831–1923), February Fill Dyke (1881), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, Birmingham Museums Trust, Birmingham, England. Wikimedia Commons.

Pastures by rivers were often encouraged to flood during the winter, particularly in the month of February Fill Dyke as shown so well in Benjamin Williams Leader’s painting of country near Worcester in 1881. This both improved soil fertility and kept weeds at bay.

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Jean-François Millet (1814–1875), The Sower (c 1865), pastel and crayon on paper or pastel and pastel on paper (cream buff paper), 43.5 × 53.5 cm, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD. Wikimedia Commons.

Jean-François Millet revisited his successful painting of a sower from fifteen years earlier in two pastel paintings with the same title, The Sower, from around 1865. In the distance to the right are two horses drawing a spike harrow, used following ploughing to prepare the surface of the earth for seed.

Once the young plants were growing vigorously, all that remained for the growing season was to keep them free from weeds, a laborious and back-breaking task commonly assigned to women.

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Jules Breton (1827–1906), The Weeders (1868), oil on canvas, 71.4 × 127.6 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Wikimedia Commons.

Jules Breton’s The Weeders from 1868 is set in the fields just outside his home village of Courrières, where these labourers are pulling up thistles and other weeds until the moment the light becomes insufficient for them to work any longer.

Farmers with sheep or cattle usually timed the arrival of the lambs and calves for the spring, to give the young animals as much benefit as possible from the fine weather of the summer.

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Rosa Bonheur (1822–1899), Weaning the Calves (1879), oil on canvas, 65.1 × 81.3 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Wikimedia Commons.

Rosa Bonheur’s Weaning the Calves (1879) is set in a glorious summer Alpine or Pyrenean landscape, with a dry stone herdsman’s hut at the left, where the menfolk lived while they were away from their families during the summer transhumance to upland grazing.

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Anton Mauve (1838–1888), The Return of the Flock (1886-7), oil on canvas, 100.2 x 161.4 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA. Wikimedia Commons.

Anton Mauve’s Return of the Flock (1886-7) shows a small flock of unshorn ewes with young lambs, on the move in the late Spring or early summer.

In some cattle areas at least, once the Spring lambs and calves had been safely delivered into the care of their mothers, couples took the opportunity to get married, as confirmed by analyses of English parish registers. For those growing crops, though, there was little respite during the growing season, when fields had to be kept free of weeds before harvest.

By the end of the Spring or early summer, sheep and cattle were moved to summer grazing to allow the grass in hay meadows to grow ready for mowing during July or August, depending on the latitude and weather.

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Mykola Pymonenko (1862–1912), Haymaking (date not known), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, Fine Arts Museum Kharkiv Харківський художній музей, Kharkiv, Ukraine. Wikimedia Commons.

Mykola Pymonenko’s undated Haymaking shows women in Ukraine raking in the harvest to be transported by a hay wain drawn by a pair of oxen.

Samuel Palmer, The Shearers (c 1833-5), oil and tempera on wood, 51.4 x 71.7 cm, Private collection. WikiArt.
Samuel Palmer (1805–1881), The Shearers (c 1833-5), oil and tempera on wood, 51.4 x 71.7 cm, Private collection. WikiArt.

Samuel Palmer’s Shearers from about 1833-35 shows the seasonal work of a shearing gang, relieving these adult sheep of their fleece before the weather became too hot.

Meanwhile, the summer’s grain crop ripened and was ready for harvest.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Harvesters (1565), oil on panel, 119 x 162 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Wikimedia Commons.
Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1526/1530–1569), The Harvesters (1565), oil on panel, 119 x 162 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Wikimedia Commons.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Harvesters from 1565 includes most of the outdoor stages from cutting the grain using scythes to transporting the harvest by cart for threshing.

Once the harvest was home, demands on the arable farmer eased, and some English parish records show a peak of marriages during the early autumn in areas predominantly farming sheep and grain. This was also the time for the harvest of fruit such as apples.

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Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), Apple-Picking, Éragny (1887-1888), oil on canvas, 60.9 x 73.9 cm, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX. Wikimedia Commons.

Camille Pissarro’s overtly Divisionist painting of Apple Picking, Éragny, was largely completed during the autumn of 1887.

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Evelyn De Morgan (1855–1919), The Cadence of Autumn (1905), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, The De Morgan Centre, Guildford, Surrey, England. Wikimedia Commons.

This decisive phase of the year is shown well in Evelyn De Morgan’s Cadence of Autumn from 1905, here centred on the fruit harvest. Five women are shown in a frieze, against a rustic background. From the left, one holds a basket of grapes and other fruit, two are putting marrows, apples, pears and other fruit into a large net bag, held between them. The fourth crouches down from a seated position, her hands grasping leaves, and the last is stood, letting the wind blow leaves out from each hand. They wear loose robes coloured in accordance with their phases in the season.

The landscape behind them contains a watermill and surrounding buildings. At the left, the trees are heavy with fruit and the fields either green or ripe corn. At the right, the trees are barren, and the landscape hilly and more wintry. Soft blue-white patches of mist are visible in the foreground on the right. The passing of the season, and the fruit harvest, progresses in time from the left to the right.

By that time, the first fields were being ploughed in preparation for the following year.

Before the nineteenth century, when many farms either concentrated on sheep and arable, or on the raising of cattle, their economies were contrasting. The arable farmer was committed to labour-intensive work and investment throughout the year, with any cash return occurring once the harvest had been sold. Livestock farmers had lower labour requirements for much of the year, with their peak demand during Spring calving, and could spread the sale of animals more evenly over the year, with more immediate returns on their investment. This also enabled those involved in livestock farming to have more free time to engage in crafts and other sidelines.

Reading visual art: 177 Peace, modern

In yesterday’s article, I showed examples of paintings using classical deities and resolved conflicts in ancient history to depict the concept of peace. Today I move on to more recent and modern history.

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Benjamin West (1738–1820), The Treaty of Penn with the Indians (1771-72), oil on canvas, 190 x 274 cm, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA. Wikimedia Commons.

Benjamin West was commissioned by William Penn’s son Thomas to paint The Treaty of Penn with the Indians or William Penn’s Treaty with the Indians (1771-72), the one ‘modern history’ painting he showed alongside four more traditional narrative works at the Royal Academy in 1772.

This shows the Quaker founder of the state of Pennsylvania purchasing land for his colony from the Lenape people, with a treaty of peace between the colonists and the ‘Indians’, an event that took place ninety years earlier in 1682. This proved as popular and successful as West’s famous painting of The Death of General Wolfe, being reproduced in prints and on all manner of other surfaces, even bedspreads! Like that earlier work, it was also savaged for its historical inaccuracies, to say nothing of its misrepresentation of the reality of westward expansion in North America.

In 1867, France was in the process of sliding inexorably towards its war with Prussia, and the Second Empire of Napoleon III was about to self-destruct.

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Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898), Peace (1867), oil on canvas, 109 x 148.7 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA. Wikimedia Commons.

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes painted a pair of allegories, Peace (above), and War (below), using colours stronger than usual to enable reading of their greater detail. Both are set in classical times in an idyllic landscape. Peace is a group dolce far niente that might later have passed for Aestheticism: men, women and children engaged in nothing more strenuous than milking a goat.

In War, three horsemen are blowing a fanfare on their war trumpets, haystacks in the surrounding fields are alight and pouring black smoke into the sky, and the people are suffering, even though signs of destruction are slight and none is wounded.

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Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898), War (1867), oil on canvas, 109.6 x 149.3 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA. Wikimedia Commons.

By the start of 1871, Prussia had inflicted a crushing defeat on France, whose Second Empire was forced to agree an armistice.

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Édouard Detaille (1848–1912), The Armistice of 28th January 1871 (1873), media and dimensions not known, Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin, Germany. Wikimedia Commons.

Édouard Detaille’s depiction of The Armistice of 28th January 1871 (1873) shows the moment that the symbolic white flag was raised, over a bleak plain.

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Vasily Vasilyevich Vereshchagin (1842–1904), The Apotheosis of War (1871), oil on canvas, 127 x 197 cm, Tretyakov Gallery Государственная Третьяковская галерея, Moscow, Russia. Wikimedia Commons.

By a strange coincidence, that same year the Russian war artist Vasily Vasilyevich Vereshchagin painted his powerful Apotheosis of War (1871), showing ravens or crows perching on a huge pile of human skulls in a barren landscape outside the ruins of a town. This was his reaction to the series of battles fought by the Russian Empire against those living in lands that it wanted to acquire.

My final paintings are products of what was then known as the Great War, but proved to be only the first of the two World Wars of the twentieth century.

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Paul Nash (1892–1946), We are Making a New World (1918), oil on canvas, 71.1 x 91.4 cm, The Imperial War Museum, London. By courtesy of The Imperial War Museums © IWM (Art.IWM ART 1146).

Paul Nash’s pen and ink drawing of Sunrise: Inverness Copse, showing the aftermath of heavy fighting during the Battle of Langemarck, became his finished oil painting of We are Making a New World (1918). Although richer in colour, the slime green furrowed mud dominates the lower half of the canvas. Its intensely ironic title and use of the early morning sun makes the artist’s response to the war very clear, and it has remained one of the strongest images of that war.

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Paul Nash (1892–1946), The Menin Road (1919), oil on canvas, 182.8 x 317.5 cm, The Imperial War Museum, London. By courtesy of The Imperial War Museums © IWM (Art.IWM ART 2242).

Nash’s Menin Road (1919) was commissioned by the British War Memorials Committee in April 1918 for its Hall of Remembrance. It shows a section of the Ypres Salient known as Tower Hamlets, after what is now a part of eastern London. This area was destroyed during the Battle of the Menin Road Ridge.

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Sir William Nicholson (1872–1949), The Cenotaph the Morning of the Peace Procession (1919), further details not known. Wikimedia Commons.

William Nicholson’s The Cenotaph the Morning of the Peace Procession is an interesting historical record of 1919, as well as a detailed oil sketch. The cenotaph shown here isn’t the current memorial in central London, but a temporary structure erected for a ‘peace celebration’, also known as a ‘victory parade’, that took place in London on 19 July 1919, following the signing of the Treaty of Versailles to formally end that war.

This was designed very quickly by Sir Edwin Lutyens, approved on 7 July, and hastily constructed in wood and plaster. It was unofficially unveiled on the day before the celebration, and soon attracted the laying of wreaths by the public. Following great public demand, a permanent version was constructed to a slightly modified design the following year, and that remains the focus for all similar events in London. Just twenty years later the world was dragged into yet another war.

Reading visual art: 176 Peace, mythical and ancient

Painting war and conflict is demanding on composition and technique, but how about painting peace? In this week’s two articles examining how to read visual art, I show how some of the masters have risen to that challenge. This article shows examples based on myths and ancient history, and tomorrow’s comes more up to date with more recent events.

One popular approach to depicting the abstract is to use deities from classical mythology who are already associated with war, peace and related concepts.

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Jacopo Tintoretto (c 1518-1594), Minerva and Mars (E&I 203) (1578), oil on canvas, 148 x 168, Palazzo Ducale, Venice, Italy. Wikimedia Commons.

Jacopo Tintoretto’s marvellous painting of Minerva and Mars from 1578 is an early example of Minerva (in blue) pushing the god of war (in black armour, at the right) away from her, as her right hand rests on the shoulder of Peace, with Prosperity at the left edge of the canvas.

It was Peter Paul Rubens who excelled in this, as an important international diplomat living at a time of wars throughout Europe, and a master of mythological art.

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Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), The Triumph of Victory (c 1614), oil on oak panel, 161 x 236 cm, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Kassel, Germany. Wikimedia Commons.

In the young Rubens’ The Triumph of Victory (c 1614), made when he was the finest painter in Flanders, Mars is almost glorified.

The Treaty of Antwerp had been signed in 1609, and the city was flourishing in the Twelve Years’ Truce that ensued. Rubens painted this in about 1614 for the Antwerp Guild of St George, its organisation of archers. Mars dominates, his bloody sword resting on the thigh of Victoria, the personification of victory. She reaches over to place a wreath of oak or laurel on Mars, and holds a staff in her left hand. At the right, Mars is being passed the bundle of crossbow bolts that make up the attribute of Concord. Under the feet of Mars are the bodies of Rebellion, in the foreground, who still holds his torch, and Discord, on whose cheek a snake is crawling. The bound figure resting against the left knee of Mars is Barbarism.

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Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), Minerva Protects Pax from Mars (Peace and War) (1629-30), oil on canvas, 203.5 × 298 cm, The National Gallery (Presented by the Duke of Sutherland, 1828), London. Image courtesy of and © The National Gallery.

In 1629-30, when Rubens was acting as envoy to King Philip IV of Spain and trying to agree peace between Spain and King Charles I of England, he painted Minerva Protects Pax from Mars (Peace and War), one of his greatest narrative paintings, as a gift with a message for the king of England.

Its central figures are those of Demeter (Ceres), here in the role of Pax (the personification of peace), and Athena, behind her. In attendance are Mars, Hymen, Plutus, and Alecto (one of the Furies), with sundry Bacchantes, a Satyr, putti, and the attributes of Bacchus and Mercury. It’s like an away day from Olympus, or part of an index to Ovid.

If the use of classical deities is too indirect, another approach is to paint historical events of conflicts being resolved in peace.

Early in the history of Rome, its new citizens were overwhelmingly men, and devised a plan to abduct the wives of the nearby Sabine people. That inevitably took the Sabines to war under their king and general Tatius, who led them in their march against Rome. Their task wasn’t easy, as in those days its citadel was on the Capitol hill, a strongpoint for defence. The captain of the guard there had a daughter named Tarpeia. In return for the golden armlets that Sabine warriors wore on the left arm, Tarpeia betrayed the city of Rome by leaving its gates open at night, allowing the Sabines to enter.

As the Sabines swarmed in, Tatius told them to leave what they carried on their left arm with Tarpeia. As they also carried their shields, many misunderstood the command, and Tarpeia was buried under so many shields and golden armlets that she was crushed to death. She was buried where she fell, and that became known as the Tarpeian Rock, the place from which traitors and other enemies of Rome were thrown to their deaths.

With the Sabines in possession of the Capitol, Romulus challenged them to fight. There followed a series of indecisive battles, until Romulus was struck on the head by a rock, and his troops started to retreat to the Palatine hill. He had just regained order and commanded his forces to stand and fight, when the abducted Sabine women invaded the battlefield.

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Guercino (1591–1666), Hersilia Separating Romulus and Tatius (1645), oil on canvas, 253 x 267 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.

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

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Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799), oil on canvas, 385 x 522 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.

Jacques-Louis David’s The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799) is unusual among depictions of this episode in showing its resolution, rather than the seizure of the women that brought the conflict about. David shows Roman and Sabine men joined in battle in front of the great walls of Rome, with the Sabine women and their children mixed in, trying to restore peace. Looming over the city is the rugged Tarpeian Rock, where the body of Tarpeia was reputed to have been left buried.

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

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

Moving swiftly on to the rule of Charlemagne in Europe in the late eighth century, we come to his prolonged and bloody series of campaigns against the Saxons in Germany.

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Ary Scheffer (1795–1858), Charlemagne Receives the Submission of Widukind (Witikind) at Paderborn in 785 (1835), oil on canvas, 465 × 542 cm, Château de Versailles, Versailles, France. Image by PHGCOM, via Wikimedia Commons.

Charlemagne forced the Engrians to submit to him in 773, pushing on later to Sigiburg. A series of revolts led by Widukind ensured that his forces were kept busy. This turned more savage in 782, when his courts started to hand down death penalties to Saxon pagans who refused to convert to Christianity, and Charlemagne ordered the execution of 4,500 prisoners in the Massacre of Verden. After a further three years of war, the Saxons were finally subdued, and Widukind submitted to baptism. Over a millennium later, Ary Scheffer painted Charlemagne Receives the Submission of Widukind at Paderborn in 785 (1835).

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Artist not known, Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa concludes peace in Constance with the Lombards (date not known), media and dimensions not known, Rathaus, Konstanz, Germany. Image by Rainer Halama, via Wikimedia Commons.

In 1175 and 1176, the emperor Barbarossa was defeated at Alessandria and in the Battle of Legnano, where he was wounded and nearly killed. The following year, he was reconciled with Pope Alexander III, and had to humble himself before the Pope in Venice. He also established permanent peace with the Lombards in the second Treaty of Konstanz, in 1183.

The Rathaus in Konstanz has a series of remarkable external murals showing key moments in history, including this undated painting of Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa concludes peace in Constance with the Lombards. Although the name Barbarossa appears in the inscription below, his beard doesn’t appear to be in the slightest bit red, as he shakes hands to seal the peace with the leader of the Lombards.

Changing Paintings: 47 The cypress tree, and the abduction of Ganymede

After telling the tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice, Ovid relates a series of shorter myths involving transformations. He introduces these by listing each tree that gave Orpheus shade as he sang in mourning with his lyre, from ash to willow. He then adds two species that were the result of transformations: the Italian pine and cypress. The former he attributes to Attis, who had been consort to Cybele, known to the Romans as the Great Mother goddess.

Ovid’s main story here is of Cyparissus, a youth who had been the love of Apollo. A majestic giant stag had become quite tame in that area, and was a favourite of Cyparissus, who used to lead the stag to pasture, and ride it around on occasion. In the middle of a hot summer’s day, when the stag was asleep, Cyparissus accidentally killed it with his javelin. The youth was heartbroken, and was transformed into a cypress tree. Ever since that tree has grown in and by cemeteries and other places of grief.

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Claude-Marie Dubufe (1790–1864), Apollo and Cyparissus (1821), oil on canvas, 188 x 228 cm, Musée Calvet, Avignon, France. Wikimedia Commons.

Surprisingly, this overtly pederastic relationship between Apollo and Cyparissus has been shown in several paintings, of which Claude-Marie Dubufe’s Apollo and Cyparissus (1821) is perhaps an early example. Cyparissus here rests against the stag, but there’s no sign of its wounding or death, although the god is comforting the youth.

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Alexander Andreyevich Ivanov (1806–1858), Apollo, Hyacinthus and Cyparissus Making Music and Singing (1834), oil on canvas, 100 × 139.9 cm, The State Tretyakov Gallery Государственная Третьяковская галерея, Moscow, Russia. Wikimedia Commons.

There’s no ambiguity in Alexander Andreyevich Ivanov’s Apollo, Hyacinthus and Cyparissus Making Music and Singing (1834). While Hyacinthus plays the pipes, Apollo embraces Cyparissus. The stag lies sleeping on a rock at the right.

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Domenichino (1581-1641) and assistants, The Transformation of Cyparissus (1616-18), fresco transferred from Villa Aldobrandini, Frascati, to canvas and mounted on board, 120 x 88.3 cm, The National Gallery (Bought, 1958), London. Courtesy of and © The National Gallery, London.

By far the most complete depiction of this myth is that painted by Domenichino and his assistants in the Villa Aldobrandini, Frascati, as part of the Stanza di Apollo in its garden pavilion. He has wisely kept the god out of this section of the fresco, and shows the stag dead on the ground, although killed by an arrow rather than a javelin. Next to the animal’s body, a distraught Cyparissus is already changing into a cypress tree.

While considering the cypress as a companion of grief, I cannot ignore the greatest paintings of cypresses of all time, particularly in the context of Vincent van Gogh’s imminent fate.

Vincent van Gogh, Road with Cypress and Star (1890), oil on canvas, 92 x 73 cm, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo. WikiArt.
Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), Road with Cypress and Star (1890), oil on canvas, 92 x 73 cm, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo. WikiArt.

He may not have known of this myth, but this painting is surely about the grief of Cyparissus, and that of Vincent van Gogh himself.

Orpheus then takes over the narration, telling briefly of Jupiter’s shameful passion for the Trojan prince, Ganymede, and how the god, in the form of an eagle, abducted him to Olympus, where the young man became his cupbearer, to Juno’s evident displeasure.

Ganymede was one of the early citizens of Troy. One day during his youth, he was tending the family flock of sheep near Mount Ida, well inland from the city of Troy, when Jupiter abducted him using an eagle; the bird has been variously described as Jupiter himself or his agent. Ganymede was taken to Mount Olympus, the home of the gods, where he was given eternal youth and immortality, and served as the cupbearer to the gods. Jupiter compensated Ganymede’s father by having Hermes deliver him fine horses.

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Leochares (fl 340-320 BCE), Roman copy of bronze original, Ganymede carried off by the eagle (c 325 BCE), marble, height 103 cm, Musei Vaticani, The Vatican City. Image by Jastrow, via Wikimedia Commons.

According to Pliny, writing in his Natural History in 77-79 CE, depictions of the story of Ganymede, and his abduction in particular, changed in about 325 BCE, when Leochares cast a wonderful bronze sculpture showing Ganymede being carried off by an eagle. Sadly the original is long lost, but this marble copy remains in the Vatican.

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Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564), copy after, Ganymede (date not known), black chalk on off-white antique laid paper, 36.1 x 27 cm, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum (Gifts for Special Uses Fund), Cambridge, MA. Courtesy of Harvard Art Museums.

This copy of a drawing by Michelangelo (1475-1564) sets the precedent for many later paintings: an eagle as large as, or larger than, Ganymede bears him up to Zeus. Ganymede’s posture is shameless in revealing the purpose of the abduction.

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Antonio da Correggio (1490–1534), The Abduction of Ganymede (1520-40), oil on canvas, 163.5 x 72 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria. Wikimedia Commons.

Correggio’s The Abduction of Ganymede (1520-40) introduces two new features: Ganymede’s dog, left barking at the departing eagle, and the woodland from which he is abducted. The youth looks younger here, and is less flagrantly sexualised.

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Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606–1669), Abduction of Ganymede (1635), oil on canvas, 177 x 129 cm, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Dresden, Germany. Wikimedia Commons.

Rembrandt’s Abduction of Ganymede (1635) makes him little older than a large toddler, no longer fitting with the story about him tending the family flocks. His face, though, is wonderfully expressive.

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Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), The Rape of Ganymede (1636-37), oil on canvas, 181 × 87.3 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Wikimedia Commons.

Peter Paul Rubens’ The Rape of Ganymede (1636-37) is a surprise in using this story with profane humour, with the placement of both ends of Ganymede’s quiver. Clearly this wasn’t intended for viewing by polite mixed company.

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Eustache Le Sueur (1617–1655), The Abduction of Ganymede by Jupiter (1644), oil on canvas, 127 × 108 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.

Le Sueur’s The Abduction of Ganymede by Jupiter (1644) is more respectable, although still not free from pederastic taint.

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Nicolaes Maes (1634-1693), Portrait of George Bredehoff de Vicq as Ganymede (date not known), oil on canvas, 99 x 84.5 cm, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum (Kate, Maurice R., and Melvin R. Seiden Purchase Fund in honor of Lisbet and Joseph Leo Koerner), Cambridge, MA. Courtesy of Harvard Art Museums.

Nicolaes Maes, in his Portrait of George Bredehoff de Vicq as Ganymede, must have been extremely naive to have chosen the story for a portrait of an infant.

There followed further paintings of the abduction of Ganymede, although its popularity in narrative painting waned.

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Gustave Moreau (1826–1898), The Abduction of Ganymede (1886), watercolour and gouache on paper, 58.5 × 45.5 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Then in 1886, Gustave Moreau painted this watercolour which retold the new version, complete with barking dog and the surrounding wood. With his detailed knowledge of classical times, it’s hard to believe that Moreau didn’t understand its connotation.

Around the start of the twentieth century, Frank Kirchbach made a drawing that was turned into an engraving, and came to inspire still more bizarre connections.

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Frank Kirchbach (1859-1912) (after), advertisement for Budweiser beer after ‘The Rape of Ganymede’ (1904), advertisement in Theatre magazine, February 1906.

In 1904, Kirchbach’s print was borrowed for an advertisement for Budweiser beer. The advertiser’s ‘modern vision of Ganymede’ is taken almost directly from Leochares sculpture of 325 BCE, over two millennia earlier. It’s hard to believe that no one recognised its associations with pederasty, then becoming known as paedophilia and recognised for the crime that it is today.

Boccaccio’s Decameron: paintings of Lisabetta’s tragedy

Some of the hundred individual stories told by Boccaccio in his Decameron only attained fame much later. A good example is the tragic tale of Lisabetta related by Filomena on the fourth day, when it was the fifth of those whose love ended unhappily.

In 1818, the British poet John Keats (1795-1821) wrote his version, titled Isabella, or the Pot of Basil, which wasn’t published until shortly after the poet’s untimely death at the age of just twenty-five. It became one of Keats’ most popular works in the nineteenth century. Here I tell Boccaccio’s original version complete with its names, mindful that Keats called his leading lady Isabella rather than Lisabetta, although her lover’s name is Lorenzo according to both authors.

Following the death of a rich merchant of Messina, his three sons inherited his riches, and Lisabetta their sister remained unmarried despite her beauty and grace. She fell in love with Lorenzo, a Pisan who directed operations in one of the brothers’ trading establishments, and their relationship was consummated. The couple had tried keeping their affair secret, but one night she was observed by one of her brothers making her way to Lorenzo’s bedroom; Lisabetta remained unaware of this discovery. Her brother was distressed by this, but decided to keep quiet, and discuss it with his brothers next morning.

The following day, the brothers decided that they would also keep quiet until the opportunity arose to end their sister’s relationship. One day they pretended that they were going to the country for pleasure, and took Lorenzo with them. When they reached an isolated location, the three murdered him, buried his body, then told their sister that they had sent him away on a trading mission.

Lisabetta was anxious for her lover’s return, and persistently asked her brothers for news of him. Eventually, one of them rebuked her for this nagging, so she stopped mentioning him altogether. But each night she kept repeating his name and pining for him. One night, having finally fallen asleep in her tears, she saw him in a dream, when he told her that her brothers had murdered him, and where they had buried his body.

In her grief, Lisabetta obtained the permission of her brothers to go to the country for pleasure. Once she had located where she thought Lorenzo was buried, she quickly found his corpse, which remarkably showed no signs of decay. As she couldn’t move his whole body for more appropriate burial, she cut off his head and hid it in a towel.

When she returned home, Lisabetta cried greatly over Lorenzo’s head, washing it with her tears, then wrapped it in cloth and put it in a large pot. She covered it with soil and in that planted some sprigs of basil. These she watered daily with her tears, as she sat constantly beside the pot in between bouts of crying over it. As a result, the basil grew strong and lush, and richly fragrant.

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William Holman Hunt (1827–1910), Isabella and the Pot of Basil (1867), oil on canvas, 187 x 116 cm, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, England. Wikimedia Commons.

William Holman Hunt’s Isabella and the Pot of Basil from 1867 is intricately detailed, with several references to elements of the story, such as the relief of a skull on the side of the pot, a red rose on a tray by Lisabetta’s left foot, and a silver watering can at the bottom right. Behind her is the image of a bedroom, possibly showing Lorenzo coming to her in a flashback to their affair.

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Joseph Severn (1793-1879), Isabella, or the Pot of Basil (1877), further details not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Joseph Severn’s Isabella, or the Pot of Basil from 1877 appears remarkably high in chroma, and shows Lisabetta fondly embracing the pot and crying over the basil. Severn had been a personal friend of John Keats, and painted this just a couple of years before his own death.

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Edward Reginald Frampton (1870-1923), Isabella, or the Pot of Basil (date not known), further details not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Edward Reginald Frampton’s Isabella, or the Pot of Basil was probably painted towards the end of the nineteenth century, or possibly in the early twentieth. Lisabetta is kneeling before her pot of basil at an altar, with a crucifix behind.

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Ricciardo Meacci (1856-1938), Isabella and the Pot of Basil (1890), watercolour, dimensions not known, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Ricciardo Meacci’s watercolour of Isabella and the Pot of Basil from 1890 shows Lisabetta embracing her pot of basil, as her three brothers watch with growing anger at her behaviour.

Lisabetta’s brothers began to suspect something, so had the pot removed from her room. This caused their sister deeper grief, and she kept asking after the pot.

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John Melhuish Strudwick (1849-1937), Isabella (c 1886), oil on board, 31.1 x 23.2 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

John Melhuish Strudwick’s Isabella from about 1886 shows Lisabetta staring in grief at the stand where her pot of basil had stood. Through the window, two of her brothers are seen making off with the pot, looking back at her.

The brothers examined its contents and discovered Lorenzo’s head. Scared that his murder might cause problems for them, they reburied the head, wound up their business, and left Messina for Naples. Lisabetta’s grief only grew deeper, and destroyed her health completely. Still asking for her pot of basil, she finally cried herself to death.

Although the brothers had done everything to keep these events secret, eventually they became widely known, and were celebrated in folk verse.

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John Everett Millais (1829–1896), Isabella (Lorenzo and Isabella) (1848-49), oil on canvas, 103 x 142.8 cm, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, England. Wikimedia Commons.

The first and still greatest depiction of Keats’ retelling is John Everett Millais’ Isabella (Lorenzo and Isabella) from 1848-49, completed before he was twenty, and one of the earliest examples of Pre-Raphaelite art. This is a composite of different references to Keats’ poem and Boccaccio’s story, set at an imaginary family meal the three brothers, Lisabetta and Lorenzo are taking together.

Lorenzo is sharing a blood orange with Lisabetta, white roses and passion flowers climbing from behind their heads. The dog, acting as a surrogate for Lorenzo, is being petted by Lisabetta, but one of her brothers aims a kick at it. Various other symbols are shown of the plot to kill Lorenzo: a brother staring at a glass of red wine, spilt salt on the table, and a hawk pecking at a white feather. The pot of basil is already on the balcony, awaiting Lorenzo’s head.

As far as I can tell, not one major artist had depicted Boccaccio’s story until Keats’ poem had been published nearly half a millennium later.

Boccaccio’s Decameron: paintings of Cimon and Iphigenia

In the 650 years since Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron started to sweep across Europe, this collection of a hundred short stories has proved one of the most enduring works of literature. I have already given an account of its more painted passages, but this weekend I look in detail at two of them: today that of Cimon and Iphigenia, as told by Panfilo on the fifth day, and tomorrow the tragic tale of Lisabetta related by Filomena on the fourth.

Boccaccio was born in or near Florence in Italy in 1313. He became a scholar and writer based mainly in Florence, and might have been there when it was struck by the Black Death in 1348. The Decameron’s framing story describes that catastrophe, and how a group of seven young women were taking shelter in one of the city’s great churches. They fled as a group to the country nearby, in the company of some servants and three young men. Once settled in an abandoned mansion, the ten decided that one of the means they would use to pass their self-imposed exile was by telling one another stories. Over the next two weeks, each told one story every weekday, delivering the total of a hundred.

For the fifth day of these stories, Fiammetta chose the theme of the adventures of lovers who survived calamities or misfortunes and reached a state of happiness. The first of these is the story of Cimon (or Cymon) and Iphigenia told by Panfilo, which has probably been painted more than any other story in the whole of the Decameron, by masters from Rubens to Frederic, Lord Leighton. What’s most unusual is that every one of those paintings shows a single scene from the second page of a story that runs on for another ten pages, and develops a very different plot.

Cimon’s father was a wealthy Cypriot, but Cimon, a nickname given in honour of his apparent simplicity and uncouthness, was his problem child. He was exceedingly handsome and had a fine physique, but behaved as a complete imbecile. He appeared unable to learn anything, even basic manners, so was sent to live with the farm-workers on his father’s large estates.

One afternoon in May, Cimon was out walking when he reached a fountain in a clearing surrounded by tall trees. Lying asleep on the grass by that fountain was a beautiful young woman, Iphigenia, wearing a flimsy dress that left nothing to the imagination. Sleeping by her were her attendants, two women and a man. Cimon was immediately enraptured, leaned on his stick, and stared at her. As he did so, his simple mind started to change.

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Master of the Campana Panels (dates not known), Cymon and Iphigenia (c 1525), tempera on panel, 58 x 170 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

As with many of Boccaccio’s stories, this is shown on a wedding cassone, here from about 1525. It’s relatively simple: there’s no sign of Iphigenia’s attendants, but there is a second image of Cimon walking along a path at the far right.

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Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), Frans Snyders (1579–1657) and Jan Wildens (1584/86–1653), Cymon and Iphigenia (c 1617), oil on canvas, 208 × 282 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria. Wikimedia Commons.

In about 1617, Peter Paul Rubens joined talents with Frans Snyders (who painted the still life with monkeys at the lower right) and Jan Wildens (for its landscape background) in their marvellous Cymon and Iphigenia. This is accurate in its details too, with the correct quota of attendants, and a splendid fountain at the left. Cimon really does look like Boccaccio’s uncouth simpleton.

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Willem Van Mieris (1662-1747), Cymon and Iphigenia (1698), oil on canvas, 27 x 34.8 cm, Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan, Italy. Wikimedia Commons.

Willem Van Mieris’ Cymon and Iphigenia from 1698 treats the scene more in the vein of Poussin or Claude, again remaining true to Boccaccio’s details.

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Benjamin West (1738–1820), Cymon and Iphigenia (c 1766), oil on panel, 61.3 × 82.6 cm, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT. Wikimedia Commons.

Benjamin West was more coy in both his depictions of this scene. His earlier Cymon and Iphigenia from about 1766 (above) was well-received at the time. Six years later, in 1773, he reversed the composition, and was even more restrained in the display of flesh, as shown below.

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Benjamin West (1738–1820), Cymon and Iphigenia (1773), oil on canvas, 127 x 160.3 cm, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA. Wikimedia Commons.
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Angelica Kauffman (1741–1807), Cymon and Iphigenia (c 1780), oil on canvas, diam 62.2 cm, Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC. Wikimedia Commons.

A few years later, in about 1780, Angelica Kauffman painted this delightful tondo of Cymon and Iphigenia, another variation on the same theme. The cultural contrast between the young man and woman isn’t as stark.

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John Everett Millais (1829–1896), Cymon and Iphigenia (1848), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, Lady Lever Art Gallery, Liverpool, England. Wikimedia Commons.

When he was only eighteen, John Everett Millais painted what was to be his last work before he embraced Pre-Raphaelite style: Cymon and Iphigenia (1848). This bears less resemblance to Boccaccio’s story, which is to be expected as Millais didn’t use the Decameron as his literary reference, but a later re-telling by the English poet John Dryden, to which this is more faithful.

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Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830-1896), Cymon and Iphigenia (study) (1884), oil on canvas, 43.1 x 66.2 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Wikimedia Commons.

In 1884, Frederic, Lord Leighton painted what I think remains the most luxuriant and sensuous treatment of this scene. This study shows Leighton confirming his composition and use of colour.

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Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830-1896), Cymon and Iphigenia (1884), oil on canvas, 218.4 x 390 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Wikimedia Commons.

His finished painting, Cymon and Iphigenia from 1884, shows Iphigenia stretched out languidly in her sleep, in the last warm light of the day; behind her the full moon is just starting to rise. Leighton has changed the season to autumn, with the leaves already brown but the days still hot. Cymon stands in shadow on the right, idly scratching his left knee, gazing intently at Iphigenia.

As far as the painters are concerned, that’s it, and you’d presume the couple lived happily ever after. Not according to Boccaccio, though.

When Iphigenia finally awoke, she was surprised to see Cimon there, and recognised him immediately. Cimon insisted on accompanying her to her house, then went to his family home, where he turned a new leaf, and over the period of four years transformed himself into the best-dressed, most cultured and refined young man on Cyprus. Despite this transformation, Cimon was unable to persuade Iphigenia’s father to allow him to marry the young woman, but was told that she was betrothed to a noble on the island of Rhodes. When the time came for her marriage, Cimon took an armed vessel and gave chase to the ship carrying Iphigenia to Rhodes. He boarded her ship and abducted her.

With Iphigenia on board, Cimon headed for the island of Crete, where he and his crew had relatives and friends. But shortly after they had altered course, a storm blew up, so violent that it threatened to sink the ship. Unable to tell where they were heading, they ended up taking shelter off the coast of Rhodes, where they were caught up by the ship from which they had just abducted Iphigenia.

When their vessel ran aground, Cimon and his crew were forced ashore where they were quickly rounded up and thrown into prison, and Iphigenia was returned to her family ready for her wedding. Iphigenia’s fiancé implored the chief magistrate of Rhodes, Lysimachus, to put Cimon to death, but he was held in custody with the rest of his crew. It happened that Lysimachus was deeply in love with a young woman of Rhodes, who was betrothed to Iphigenia’s future brother-in-law. To Lysimachus’ relief, that marriage had been postponed several times, but it was then decided to hold both weddings in the same ceremony.

Lysimachus was aggrieved by this, and decided the only way he could marry the Rhodian woman that he loved was to abduct her. In order to do so, he needed the help of Cimon and his crew, who would undoubtedly be delighted to be able to abduct Iphigenia again. Lysimachus offered Cimon a deal whereby they would together make off with their partners from the scene of the joint wedding, and they agreed to proceed with that.

Two days later, at dusk, as the weddings were just getting under way, Lysimachus, Cimon and his crew entered the house of the two bridegrooms and seized their brides. Unfortunately, the grooms were armed and mounted a determined resistance. Cimon killed Iphigenia’s fiancé with a single blow to the head, and the other woman’s intended husband fell dead following a blow by Lysimachus.

Lysimachus, Cimon, their crew and the two abducted brides then fled to a ship which they sailed to exile in Crete, where the two couples were married, amid great and joyous celebrations. In time, the people of Cyprus and Rhodes forgave them for the violent way they had stolen their brides; Lysimachus and his wife were able to return to Rhodes, and Cimon and Iphigenia returned to live happily ever after on Cyprus.

None of which was even hinted at by those paintings, however wonderful they are.

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