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Telling a story, narrative, in a painting is one of its most common purposes, and greatest challenges. A landscape painting shows a view at a moment in time, but doesn’t normally tell a story, as that requires a minimum of two states, with the story linking them. So, although we might speculate what’s going in that countryside, without an indication of what went before, or what happened afterwards, there’s no story there.

Over the centuries, even millennia, since humans have been painting, several techniques have developed for telling a story with more than one timepoint shown in paintings. Although the terms used have varied, in general those fall into the following categories:

• instantaneous, where the image is intended to show what was happening at a single moment in time, even though it’s likely to contain references to other moments in time;
• multi-image, where a series of separate images (paintings) is used to tell the story;
• multiplex, where a single image contains representations of two or more moments in time from a story;
• multi-frame, where two or more picture frames are used to tell a story, as in comics or manga;
• polymythic, where a single image contains two or more distinct stories.

In this article and tomorrow’s sequel, I show examples of each of these.

Instantaneous

Nicolas Poussin’s Rinaldo and Armida from about 1630 draws its narrative from one of his favourite literary works, a then-popular epic poem by Torquato Tasso (1544-1595) titled Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered), and published in 1581. I have written a series of fourteen articles showing paintings and telling its story, which start here. This particular episode is detailed here.

The sleeping knight is Rinaldo, the greatest of the Christian knights engaged in Tasso’s romanticised and largely fictional account of the First Crusade, who has stopped to rest near the ‘ford of the Orontes’. On hearing a woman singing, he goes to the river, where he catches sight of Armida swimming naked.

Armida, though, had an evil aim, in that she had been secretly following Rinaldo, intending to murder him with her dagger. As the ‘Saracen’ witch who is trying to destroy the crusaders’ campaign, she had singled out its greatest knight for this fate. Having revealed herself to him, she sings and lulls him into an enchanted sleep so that she can thrust her dagger home.

Just as she is about to do this, she falls in love with him instead, and that’s the instant, the twist or peripeteia (to use Aristotle’s term), shown here. A winged amorino, lacking the bow and arrows of a true Cupid, restrains her right arm bearing her weapon. Her facial expression and left hand reveal her new intent to enchant and abduct him in her chariot, so he can become infatuated with her, and forget the Crusade altogether.

This is a single moment in time, in which Poussin has ingeniously incorporated references to the past and future. Provided that you’re familiar with Tasso’s story, it’s a superb example of instantaneous narrative, as practised throughout the history of painting across all continents and cultures.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Cleopatra before Caesar (1866) also depicts a single instant, but again has references to prior events, particularly the screwed up carpet, used by Cleopatra to gain entry. Her dreamy look towards Caesar also anticipates her affair with him. It therefore has instantaneous narrative.

Sometimes paintings with instantaneous narrative can make quite small and subtle references to other events in the story, and confirm their narrative nature. In Edward Burne-Jones’s Cinderella (1863) the only such reference is the missing slipper on Cinderella’s right foot.

Although Édouard Detaille’s Le Rêve (The Dream) (1888) contains two images, these aren’t in fact linked by normal narrative, but the dream image shown in the clouds could be considered as a form of analepsis, or flashback, making it instantaneous narrative.

Multi-image

I’ll be brief with these, as I have covered more examples here and here.

In 1856, Arthur Hughes told the story of The Eve of St Agnes in this triptych, read from left to right. At the left Porphyro is approaching the castle. In the centre he has woken Madeline, who hasn’t yet taken him into her bed. At the right the couple make their escape over drunken revellers.

Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s triptych showing the Aino Myth (1891) contains three separate images telling one of the stories from the Kalevala myths. It is therefore multi-image narrative, within which each image is itself conventional instantaneous narrative.

Multi-frame

Multi-frame paintings are by no means uncommon, but most usually adopt rectangular or square form. Indeed many of the more spectacular frescoes are in effect multi-framed, where there are several images on a single continuous surface. This is similar to the more recent development of comics/BD/graphic novels.

Gaudenzio Ferrari’s Stories of The Life and Passion of Christ (1513) arranges twenty frames covering the life of Christ around a central frame with four times the area of the others, showing the Crucifixion. The frames are naturally (for the European) read from left to right, along the rows from top to bottom, although the Crucifixion is part of the bottom row. This is a layout which is commonly used throughout graphic novels too, of course, and is a superb example of multi-frame narrative more than three centuries before Rodolphe Töpffer started experimenting with comic form.

The four separate episodes forming Hans Sebald Beham’s Scenes from the Life of David (1534) are arranged in a square, so that each occupies a triangular frame, clearly separated from the others, and quite different from a normal linear layout. The snag with this is that the panel is really only suitable for viewing when laid flat on a table, otherwise only one of the frames is correctly orientated. Beham clearly liked the symmetry afforded by this layout, and enhanced it in his composition of the two frames shown here at the top and bottom.

Frans Francken the Younger’s The Crucifixion of Christ, with Scenes from the Life of Jesus (1600s) puts the Crucifixion scene at the centre of a rectangle, around which are twelve scenes from the life painted in either normal or brown grisaille. Unfortunately those peripheral scenes are difficult to differentiate from one another, thus to identify, but they appear to be read in a clockwise direction from the upper right, rather than linearly.

Polymythic

Although linked, and often told together, the stories of Echo and of Narcissus can be separated, and it’s therefore feasible to classify John William Waterhouse’s Echo and Narcissus (1903) as being unusual in showing polymythic narrative.

A few paintings appear even more complex: Velázquez’s Las Hilanderas (The Spinners) may contain one narrative in the foreground, a second in the background, and a third in the painting of The Rape of Europa shown in the far background. This would make it polymythic narrative at the very least.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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