In the first article of this pair looking at paintings of windmills, I covered traditional views up to the first of the pre-Impressionists. This article takes this account from around 1850 up to the period between the two World Wars. Although the development of steam power during the nineteenth century brought great changes to many industries, windmills continued to flourish until the middle of the century, and even then they only declined gradually until the Second World War.

Samuel Palmer’s Summer Storm near Pulborough, Sussex from about 1851 refers to Dutch landscape painting, in a very Kentish context. A storm is seen approaching the rolling countryside near Pulborough, now in West Sussex. On the left, in the middle distance, a small bridge leads across to a hamlet set around a prominent windmill, whose blades are blurred as they are being driven by the rising wind.

Windmill styles differ outside northern Europe. When Jean-Léon Gérôme travelled down the River Danube in about 1855, he claimed to have witnessed this moving scene of Recreation in a Russian Camp, Remembering Moldavia (1855). A group of Russian soldiers in low spirits is being uplifted by making music, under the direction of their superior. Gérôme has captured an atmosphere which few of his other paintings achieved: the marvellous light of the sky, the skein of geese on the wing, and the parade of windmills in the distance, all draw together with the soldiers in their sombre greatcoats.

The following year, JC Dahl’s Burning Windmill at Stege is an unusual fire-painting following a traditional sub-genre of the Dutch Golden Age. Although painted well before Impressionism, Dahl echoes the red of the flames in the field and trees to the left of the windmill, and even in his signature.

During the winter of 1864, Johan Jongkind returned to the Netherlands, where he painted this Winter View with Skaters, which is more overtly pre-Impressionist.

Jongkind’s watercolour sketch of a Windmill at Antwerp of 1866 is even more painterly.

Claude Monet’s second visit to the Netherlands in 1874 ensured that The Windmill on the Onbekende Gracht, Amsterdam (1874) became a part of the history of Impressionism. This shows a windmill known as Het Land van Beloften, De Eendracht or De Binnen Tuchthuismolen, which was built in the late seventeenth century, and was moved from there to Utrecht just a couple of years after Monet painted it on the banks of the River Amstel.

Frits Thaulow’s painstakingly detailed View of Amerikavej in Copenhagen (1881) shows a windmill in the background, where it’s being used to provide power to the adjacent industrial site.

Volodymyr Orlovsky’s Ukrainian Landscape from 1882 shows one of the distinctive windmills on the elevated bank alongside a major river and its more populated floodplain to the right.

It may not have been Monet who first made the visual association between Dutch windmills and fields of tulips in flower, but his 1886 painting of Tulip Field in Holland must be its best-known depiction.

When Vincent van Gogh moved to Paris in 1886, he stayed with his brother Theo in Montmartre. He painted a series of marvellous views of the remaining windmills there, including the most famous of them all, Le Moulin de la Galette (1887), in whose gardens Renoir had painted his Bal du moulin de la Galette a decade earlier.

Paul Signac’s Rotterdam. The Windmill. The Canal. Morning (1906) is a Divisionist view of a windmill in the centre of this major port.

It was a Dutch painter who took windmills from Impressionism to the modernist styles of the twentieth century: Piet Mondrian.

Piet Mondrian’s gentle nocturne of Oostzijdse Mill on the River Gein by Moonlight from about 1903 is one of several views of windmills that he painted in Impressionist and post-Impressionist style.

When he started experimenting with vibrant colour and patterned brushstrokes in about 1908, this painting of a Mill in Sunlight marks his point of departure.

The Red Mill (1911) continues Mondrian’s move towards areas of flat colour. That year he left the windmills of Amsterdam and moved to Paris. To mark his move into the avant garde of that city, he dropped the second ‘a’ from his surname, going from Mondriaan to Mondrian. He became increasingly influenced by Georges Bracque and the Cubist works of Pablo Picasso, and the purely abstract paintings for which he remains well-known today.

Serhii Svitoslavskyi’s Ukrainian Landscape with Windmills, probably from about 1911, shows a small cluster of windmills with grazing livestock.

By the end of the First World War, milling grain had become more centralised, and the hundreds of thousands of small windmills across northern Europe lost their business. A few have been preserved, and some are still used for specialist products such as stoneground flour. But the unmistakable sight of a windmill on the skyline had been lost from much of the land.

During the 1930s, the Raviliouses started spending time in Sussex, where they became close friends with Peggy Angus, whose house The Furlongs at Beddingham, East Sussex, became a second home. Eric Ravilious became particularly fond of painting the chalk downs there, as in his Windmill (1934). This isn’t a windmill in the traditional sense, but a smaller wind-driven pump to extract water from the chalk, mainly for irrigation.

There seems to be some confusion over what windmills are, so this weekend I show a selection of paintings of them across Europe. This article covers the period between 1500-1850, when they remained popular. From the twelfth century until the twentieth, they were a common sight on many skylines in northern Europe. Preceding the better-known vertical windmills were various horizontal designs, and windmills continued to flourish until the middle of the nineteenth century. Used wherever there was a need for driving a rotating axle, they were widely employed to grind cereals into flour, power sawmills, make paper, grind materials, and thresh corn.

Hieronymus Bosch’s uniquely imaginative paintings often featured realistic background landscapes. One recurring setting is a city based on Antwerp or his home town of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, with a windmill closest to the viewer. This appears in the centre panel of his triptych The Adoration of the Magi from about 1490-1500, for instance.

A similar windmill appears in a slightly different setting in the version of The Temptation of Saint Anthony now in Lisbon, from around 1500-10, in its right wing. This is shown in the detail below.

The Bruegels also worked amid many windmills, but none seems so prominently out of place than in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Procession to Calvary from 1564. Windmills were commonly built on hills, where they would benefit from the most consistent wind, but this example on a towering crag is not only geographically inappropriate, but completely impractical. It stands on a circular platform to allow the mill to rotate according to the direction of the wind, but would hardly have been above Jerusalem at the time of the Crucifixion.

More at home are the half dozen windmills clustered around the port of Dordrecht in the Netherlands, shown in Jan van Goyen’s View of Dordrecht with the Grote Kirk Across the Maas from 1644.

Rembrandt painted few non-narrative landscapes, but among them is this dramatic view of The Mill (1645-48) seen in the rich rays of twilight.

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

This view of a Landscape with Windmills near Haarlem was painted by John Constable in 1830, almost two centuries after the original made by Jacob van Ruisdael.

Windmills were also a common sight along the lower reaches of the River Thames. William Hogarth’s print from his Industry and Idleness series shows its anti-hero Idle being rowed out to join his ship at Cuckold’s Point on the River Thames, opposite what were then the West Indian docks, between Limehouse and Greenwich. Long after these windmills had gone, this section of the river was still involved with the grain trade.

There were other windmills upstream of the city of London too. In what must be Thomas Girtin’s most famous painting of The White House at Chelsea, from 1800, the artist looks upstream of the River Thames from a location close to the modern Chelsea Bridge. The landmarks shown include, from the left, Joseph Freeman’s windmill (or Red House Mill), a horizontal air mill, the white house close to where Battersea Park is now, Battersea Bridge, and Chelsea Old Church. Girtin painted this when he was twenty-five, and showing greater promise than his rival JMW Turner. Two years later Girtin died of asthma.

A few years later the topographic painter John Varley painted this close-up view of the same Red House Mill, Battersea, Surrey, looking back in the opposite direction.

Some of the well-known windmills supplying the city of Paris with its flour were those above its outskirts on Montmartre Hill. Georges Michel’s view of The Mill of Montmartre was probably painted in about 1820, by which time there were only a few left.

Richard Parkes Bonington probably painted Barges on a River in around 1825-6 when he was travelling near the French town of Nantes. The windmill seen behind the trees is reminiscent of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting.

During his detailed realist period early in his career, Johan Jongkind painted this View of Maassluis in Winter (1848). Following the long tradition of landscape painting in the Netherlands, he sets his horizon low and paints a wonderful winter sky.

Gates as a means of access through the walls of fortified cities have ancient origins, but it wasn’t until the Etruscans and the Romans that they acquired their own deity, notably in the Roman god Janus with his two faces. His association with gates, and the start and end of war, gave rise to an interesting tradition in classical Rome: the gates at each end of an open enclosure associated with the god were kept open in times of war, and closed when the city and empire was at peace. Opening the gates of the temple of Janus was therefore a mark of starting a war.

In Rubens’ Temple of Janus from 1634, those gates, here imagined to be those of a temple, are being opened to let a warrior through to battle. Above that doorway is a statue of Janus with his two faces.

In Biblical narratives, the prominent account involving gates, other than those of heaven or hell, occurs at the start of the Passion of Jesus, in his triumphal entry into Jerusalem riding a donkey, since celebrated by Palm Sunday. This has been depicted in two significant works in the late nineteenth century.

Gustave Doré painted several versions of Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem including this preparatory sketch, in preparation for his final huge version exhibited at the Salon in 1876, measuring 6 by 10 metres.

In 1897 Jean-Léon Gérôme painted his account of The Entry of Christ into Jerusalem. According to all four gospels, Jesus descended from the Mount of Olives, and as he proceeded towards Jerusalem, crowds laid their clothes on the ground to welcome his triumphal entry into the city. Aside from being one of the major events in the Passion to be shown in paintings, for Gérôme this may have had another reading. Just a few years earlier, his paintings were being welcomed by throngs at the Salon, and commanded huge sums when sold. A short time later, his work was largely ignored, and he may have seen himself as being prepared for crucifixion in public.

The gate of hell is featured in two of the major Christian literary works of the early modern period: Dante’s Divine Comedy (c 1308-1321) and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667).

At the start of Dante’s Inferno, the ghost of Virgil leads the author to the gate of Hell. Inscribed above it is a forbidding series of lines leaving the traveller in no doubt that they’re going to a place of everlasting pain and tortured souls. This culminates in the most famous line of the whole of the Divine Comedy:
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate
traditionally translated as Abandon hope all ye who enter here, but perhaps more faithfully as Leave behind all hope, you who enter, and is seen written in William Blake’s own hand below.

It’s also William Blake who depicts Satan at the gates of hell in his paintings to accompany the second book of Milton’s epic.

Two versions, that from the Thomas set above, and below that from the Butts set, show Satan at the gate of hell, on his way out and heading for heaven.

Although the phrase pearly gates, derived from a description of the gate to heaven in the book of Revelation, has been in common use, few if any paintings have depicted them literally. However, in paintings of secular life they can have symbolic significance.

James Tissot painted The Farewells soon after his flight to London in the summer of 1871. 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 was a governess, perhaps. 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 the floral symbols are accurate: ivy in the lower left is indicative of fidelity and marriage, while holly at the right invokes hope and passion.

Edmund Blair Leighton’s Regency scene of The Elopement from 1893, shows a woman leaving home to run away with her lover, the oarsman in the boat. She closes the gate on her old life as she looks back and reflects, before boarding the boat in which she will start the journey of her new life.

In the nineteenth century many painters paid the bills by illustrating books, often those intended for children. Two in particular are now known as illustrators, overlooking their fine art: Gustave Doré and Walter Crane. In this series of three articles I look at the work and career of the latter, who was one of the leading children’s illustrators who shaped how children’s books would look well into the twentieth century.

Crane was also an accomplished and recognised painter, an enthusiastic fan of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, a close friend of William Morris, a key member of the Arts and Crafts movement, and an overt and active Socialist.

He started his training as an apprentice to the wood-engraver William James Linton, between 1859 and 1862. In 1863 Edmund Evans employed him to illustrate ‘toy books’ for children, and he continued to create book illustrations until well after 1900. In the later years, he extended his repertoire to include special editions of the Faerie Queene, a volume of Arthurian legends, and a book about the New Forest.

His career in painting had started slightly earlier, though, when his first work was accepted by the Royal Academy in 1862, and he continued to paint independently of his illustrations.

Crane was one of the first artists to base a painting on Alfred Lord Tennyson’s (1809–1892) poem The Lady of Shalott, published in 1833 and 1842. This tells part of the Arthurian legends, that of Elaine of Astolat, as given in an Italian novella from the 1200s.

The Lady of Shalott lives in a castle connected to Camelot by a river. She’s subject to a mysterious curse confining her to weaving images on her loom, and must not look directly at the outside world. One day, while she sits and weaves, she catches sight of the knight Lancelot. She stops weaving and looks out of her window directly towards Camelot, invoking the curse. She abandons her castle, finds a boat on which she writes her name, then floats downriver to Camelot, dying before she arrives. Lancelot sees her body, and the poem ends:
But Lancelot mused a little space
He said, “She has a lovely face;
God in his mercy lend her grace,
The Lady of Shalott.”

Crane’s Lady of Shalott from 1862 shows her white in death, laid out in her boat, tresses and flowing sleeve draped over its gunwhales into the still water at the river’s edge. This is set in an ancient wood, in dramatic twilight, presumably dusk. This painting was accepted for exhibition at the Royal Academy, and must have influenced JW Waterhouse’s much better-known version just over 25 years later (below).

The following year he chose a story from the Old Testament. According to various sources in the Bible, Boaz was a wealthy landowner in Bethlehem who noticed Ruth, a widow in such difficult financial circumstances that she came to glean grain from his fields. Boaz invited her to eat with him and his workers, and started deliberately leaving grain for her to glean. Because they were distantly related, Ruth then asked Boaz to exercise right of kinship and marry her. They had children, and David was their great-grandson.

Crane’s painting, which is in oils despite resembling a watercolour illustration, shows the couple at the end of lunch, during Ruth’s gleaning. Their dress is an odd composite of the Biblical and Arthurian. She is looking down at her hands, as if contemplating grain held in her left palm. He has turned and looks towards her. In the background Boaz’s workers continue the harvest, and saddled horses are idle, a castellated house set in the crag behind them.

Two years later he was one of the first artists to depict John Keats’ ballad of La Belle Dame Sans Merci, written in 1819, and later revised slightly. It gives a simple story of love and death, including 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.

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. This appears to have inspired later paintings by Arthur Hughes and Frank Dicksee.

There’s some dispute over whether this triptych from about 1870 shows The Danaïdes, or Europe, Asia, Africa, or maybe both. The fifty daughters of Danaus were forced to marry the sons of their uncle Aegyptus, but their father told them to kill their husbands on their wedding night. All but one followed his instructions, for which they were condemned to eternally carry water in leaking vessels. Alternatively, the woman on the left could be African, that on the right Asian, and the woman in the middle European.

Crane married in 1871, and the couple travelled in Europe for the next two years. They visited Florence where they must have seen some of Botticelli’s paintings.

Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (c 1486) is one of the world’s most famous paintings, and shows the goddess Venus, when she was born from the waters as an adult, arriving at the shore.

Crane bases his Renaissance of Venus (1877) on Botticelli’s painting, and links her rebirth back to the Renaissance. She is stood at the edge of a placid sea, the water just above her ankles. Three attendant graces are also getting out of the water in the middle distance, but appear to have been bathing. A train of white doves flies down and behind Venus, to start landing on the shore at the right. In the distance are the remains of a classical building at the water’s edge, and what appears to be a section of Mediterranean coastline. Further out at sea, a sailing boat passes by. Crane painted this in tempera, just as Botticelli did.

In classical Greek mythology, Persephone, daughter of Zeus and Demeter, is the queen of the underworld. She acquired that role when Hades, god of the underworld, was overcome with love and lust from one of Cupid’s arrows, and had seen Persephone picking flowers with friends. Hades then abducted her to be his queen.

Crane’s Fate of Persephone from 1878 shows her at the moment of abduction. She had been picking spring flowers in the meadow with the three other women shown at the left. Hades brought his chariot, complete with its pair of black horses symbolising the underworld, and is seen gripping Persephone’s right arm, ready to move her into the chariot and make off.

It’s remarkable that, although their body language is emphatic and clear, each of the five figures has a completely neutral facial expression. This helps its appearance as a frieze, an effect enhanced by Crane’s use of oil and tempera. The horses appear in complete contrast, champing at their bits and poised to set off at a gallop.

The following year he’s believed to have painted this elaborate setting of George Howard, 9th Earl of Carlisle, and Rosalind, Countess of Carlisle, seated in the gardens at Naworth Castle, Cumbria, with a companion, standing holding a book. However, it was later signed clumsily by “E Burne Jones”, possibly in an attempt to pass it off as a more valuable work.

This couple had married in 1864, and were ardent supporters of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, and friends of Crane since they were both students, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. Howard was an accomplished painter who had trained at Heatherly School of Fine Art in London, and later became a trustee of the National Gallery in London.

Edward FitzGerald’s translation of a selection from the poetry attributed to Omar Khayyam (1048-1131) was published in 1859, was popularised from 1861, and appreciated by several of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement. Walter Crane’s painting from 1882 was accompanied by the following quotation from FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat:

Would that some winged angel ere too late
Arrest the yet unfolded Roll of Fate,
And make the stern recorder otherwise
Enregister, or quite obliterate!

Ah love! could you and I with him conspire
To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire,
Would we not shatter it to bits – and then
Remould it nearer to the heart’s desire!

A male winged angel is on bended knee before the figure of Time, who holds his scroll recording the destiny of all mankind. The angel’s hands are intertwined with those of Time: both right hands grasp the quill used to record destiny, both left hands are at the other end of the scroll. The angel looks up pleading at Time, but Time looks down at him with a frowning scowl. In front of the dais on which the angel kneels and Time sits is an hour glass. The whole is set inside a circular building revealing the stars through its roof, like a planetarium.

Endymion was a classical Greek mythological character, an Aeolian shepherd. Although accounts differ, some tell that Selene, Titan goddess of the moon and in Roman terminology, Diana, fell in love with Endymion, when she found him asleep one day. Selene asked Zeus to grant him eternal youth, resulting in him remaining in eternal sleep. In spite of his somnolence, she still managed to have fifty daughters by him. In Crane’s beautiful pastoral watercolour of Diana and Endymion from 1883, he is fast asleep in a meadow. Diana is in her hunting role with her dogs, bow and arrows. Endymion’s flock of sheep is in the distance.

References

Wikipedia

O’Neill M (2010) Walter Crane. The Arts and Crafts, Painting, and Politics, 1875-1890, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 16768 9.

Another of the new genres to emerge and develop in the Dutch Golden Age is animal painting. This appears to have started among Flemish painters at the end of the sixteenth century, but didn’t become popular until about 1640, when a succession of painters in the Dutch Republic depicted domestic animals as part of their landscapes.

Aelbert Cuyp is thought to have painted this Landscape with Cattle when he was only about nineteen, in 1639. It’s set against the background of the city of Dordrecht, the oldest in the two provinces of Holland, and situated on the Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt river delta. The herdsman and animals in the foreground are engaged in diversions from that landscape: the man is taunting a billy goat, while the cow at the far right is urinating copiously.

Cuyp continued to develop his landscapes with more diverse themes. Orpheus with Animals in a Landscape from about 1640 is one of at least two different paintings he made of this story from mythology. Here he has included a wide range of both domestic and exotic animals and birds, including a distant elephant, an ostrich, herons and wildfowl.

His paintings of domestic animals also took him indoors, for example in this fascinating painting of Sheep in a Stable from about 1645. The sheep are faithfully depicted, and surrounded by objects suggesting elements of a still life. In the foreground are empty mussel shells, a couple of earthenware pots, and two wickerwork baskets with some scarlet cloth. He also renders the texture of the fleeces using painterly brushstrokes, particularly that of the standing ram.

Artists who had travelled to lands in the growing Dutch Empire sent back paintings of the animals they saw there. Albert Eckhout, who had been born in Groningen, accompanied John Maurice, Prince of Nassau-Siegen, Dutch governor of Brazil, when he landed at Recife in January 1637, to document local inhabitants and wildlife.

Eckhout’s Study of Two Brazilian Tortoises is believed to have been painted in Brazil in about 1640.

Paulus Potter was probably the first dedicated animal-painter, through his brief career in Delft, The Hague and Amsterdam.

Potter’s first masterpiece is The Bull (also widely known as The Young Bull) (1647), which is nearly life-sized, and almost hyperreal in its surface details. Originally intended just as a portrait of the central bull, Potter enlarged the canvas to accommodate (from the left) a ram, lamb, ewe, herdsman, cow, and above them a bird of prey, possibly a buzzard. Beyond them are more cattle in the meadows, which recede to the church of Rijswijk, which is between Delft and The Hague.

He went on to paint portraits such as Two Pigs in a Sty (1649), featuring two hairy pigs at rest. Many of the older breeds of pig were more hirsute than modern varieties, and Potter has painted their coats realistically, as well as skilfully lighting the face of the sow sat on her haunches.

Potter’s Cows Grazing at a Farm from 1653 was one of his last paintings, and apart from its meticulous detail, its rich lighting effects might be more typical of Corot two hundred years later. Potter died tragically young the following year, but the new sub-genre was taken up by others, including Adriaen van de Velde.

Van de Velde’s undated Milkmaid with Cow and Goats in Front of a Barn is a farmyard delight, with the cow being milked looking directly at the viewer.

The Hut (1671) was one of van de Velde’s last paintings, and has long been esteemed in the Netherlands. It’s one of his most natural compositions, sparkling with bright colour in the clothing and animals. The artist even adds the reality, perhaps as a touch of humour, of some fresh cowpats.

Jan Weenix’s early painting of a Landscape with Shepherd Boy from 1664 reveals his true forte in the realistic depiction of the sheep and dog.

Some specialised even further: Melchior d’Hondecoeter concentrated on birds and game.

Concert of the Birds (1670) is one of his more elaborate paintings featuring a wide range of native species.

D’Hondecoeter painted this huge Portrait of Three Children in a Landscape with Game in the latter half of the 1600s. The children appear to have taken to field sports at a very early age, and have here amassed an impressive ‘kill’, with their muzzle-loading gun, although I hope that an unseen adult may have had a hand in its use. The lone tortoise being ignored by each of the children and dogs is slowly crawling its way towards them, as if it has just emerged into the wrong painting.

In the long-distant past, our ancestors discovered that processing some natural products created glues. The raw materials either came from boiling animal bones, hide, and other offal, or from natural exudates of plants, and these came to be used as the binder for paints. Being ancient in origin, different combinations of binder, pigment, and other substances developed, and those have left a confusion of terms, including glue tempera, and distemper. These represent a spectrum of paints, ranging from those using only glue and pigment, to others also incorporating substantial amounts of powdered chalk or lime to increase their opacity, and related to whitewash.

Glue tempera was used in antiquity, and outside Europe remains in widespread use. It has several disadvantages for the painter, including:

• ‘Drying light’; as the paint dries, so it undergoes marked colour change, reducing the intensity of chroma.
• Mechanical fragility of the paint layer, which is particularly susceptible to abrasion and/or cracking.
• Solution on re-wetting, so that glue tempera can easily be reworked like watercolour, but is unsuitable for exposure to water or damp. Hardening of the glue binder isn’t the result of a stable polymerisation as with oil paints, and can readily be reversed.
• Relatively poor protection of light-sensitive pigments, resulting in some fading over time.

Taken together these mean that what we see in glue tempera paintings today is often quite different from how they looked at the time they were painted.

In the early Renaissance, some artists used glue tempera extensively and with great success, although surviving works haven’t aged as well as those painted using egg tempera or oils.

Dieric Bouts’ The Entombment from about 1450 was painted using glue tempera on linen. As it’s now well over half a millennium old its colours have faded, but it remains worth seeking out when you next visit The National Gallery in London.

In the south of Europe, Andrea Mantegna was one of its great exponents, as shown in his marvellous glue tempera and gold painting of A Sibyl and a Prophet from about 1495. Because this is monochrome and uses gold as the pigment, this has neither changed colour nor faded.

Some artists, such as Joris Hoefnagel, continued to use these ancient techniques, as shown in this painting of Diana and Actaeon from 1597. This is finely executed in glue tempera and gold on vellum, and its colours have survived well.

With the widespread adoption of oil paint, glue tempera almost disappeared until it was revived at the end of the eighteenth century by William Blake.

Blake painted a series of major works in what he termed tempera, using glue as their binder. This Adoration of the Kings from 1799 shows the dulling of colour and fine cracking from his use of stretched canvas as its support.

Some of Blake’s glue tempera paintings have survived in better condition: The Christ Child Asleep on the Cross, or Our Lady Adoring the Infant Jesus Asleep on the Cross from 1799-1800 has fared better, retaining more of its original colour.

Paintings such as Blake’s Virgin and Child in Egypt from 1810 show the fine modelling he was able to achieve in its figures. Overall, though, the condition of his glue tempera paintings isn’t good. It has been suggested that some of their variation is attributable to different sources of glue, clearly of major importance. For a long time, glues provided for this and similar purposes in painting have been referred to as rabbit skin glue, but in reality the great majority have been derived from a wide range of animal products, often in uncontrolled conditions.

After Blake, the medium fell back into obscurity until later in the nineteenth century, when it was revived by movements attempting to return to techniques of the past, most prominently the Nabis in France.

Pierre Bonnard used glue tempera early in his career, when painting this exquisite three-panelled Japoniste screen of The Stork and Four Frogs in about 1889, as the Nabis were forming. Using more modern pigments, Bonnard has achieved high chroma, comparable to anything in oils, and quite unlike traditional glue tempera.

Odilon Redon experimented with glue tempera in his painting of Buddha from 1904.

Édouard Vuillard used glue tempera in many of his paintings both during his Nabi period and later, for example in this view Under the Trees of the Red House from about 1905.

Vuillard’s At The Pavillons in Cricqueboeuf. In Front of the House, from 1911, shows how effective the medium can be.

Vuillard continued to use glue tempera in his late realist paintings, such as Morning Concert, Place Vintimille from 1937-38, showing a trio of friends playing for the artist in his Paris apartment.

Glue tempera remains in use today by a very few artists, who at least have a wider range of lightfast pigments to choose from, and more consistent formulations of glue to act as binder.

After hearing Francesca’s story in the Second Circle of Hell, for those guilty of the sin of lust, Dante weeps for her and faints. When he comes to, he realises that he has already descended to the Third Circle, where it’s pouring with rain, with snow and huge hailstones falling down in sheets. This soaks the ground, turning it into stinking mud.

He sees Cerberus, the fearsome three-headed canine monster that guards this circle, also soaked by the unceasing rain.

Agostino Carracci’s portrait of Pluto from 1592 shows Cerberus alongside his master, and the god holding the key to his kingdom.

Its heads bare their fangs at Dante, but his guide Virgil scoops up three handfuls of mud and throws them into the mouths of Cerberus to assuage its hunger.

Dante and Virgil walk on the flat plain among the prostrate forms of the gluttons. One of them sits up and accosts Dante, reminding him that they knew one another. He is Ciacco (a nickname, literally ‘Hoggio’), who tells Dante of his suffering there, and the names of five other Florentines of noble rank who are to be found in the lower circles of Hell.

Ciacco then falls flat on his face in the stinking mud to await the Final Judgement.

As Virgil leads Dante down to the next circle, they talk of what will happen when the Apocalypse comes, until they reach the dreaded figure of Plutus.

Cerberus is a good example of the redeployment of pre-Christian mythology into Christian beliefs: it was originally the guardian of the Underworld, as depicted by Carracci, and prevented those within from escaping back to the earthly world. It even features in the twelve labours of Hercules, in which he captured Cerberus. With Virgil’s explicit involvement, Dante here incorporates it into his Christian concepts of the afterlife.

The artists

Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527–1593) was a highly original and individualistic Italian painter now best known for his portraits consisting of assemblies of fruit, vegetables and other objects to form human images. He also painted more conventional works which are largely forgotten today, and was court painter to the Habsburgs in Vienna and Prague. You can see some of his portraits in this article.

William Blake (1757–1827) was a British visionary painter and illustrator whose last and incomplete work was an illustrated edition of the Divine Comedy for the painter John Linnell. Most of his works shown in this series were created for that, although he did draw and paint scenes during his earlier career. I have a major series on his work here.

Agostino Carracci (1557-1602) was one of the Carracci trio, the others being his brother Annibale and cousin Ludovico, who were largely responsible for the reputation of the School of Bologna in Italy. After working as an engraver, he painted a series of major frescos showing the story of Jason and Medea, and the early history of Rome.

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Early in his career, he produced a complete set of seventy illustrations for translations of the Inferno, first published in 1857 and still in use. These were followed in 1867 by more illustrations for Purgatorio and Paradiso. This article looks at his paintings.

John Flaxman (1755–1826) was a British sculptor and draughtsman who occasionally painted. When he was in Rome between 1787-91, he produced drawings for book illustrations, including a set of 111 for an edition of The Divine Comedy. In 1810, he was appointed the Professor of Sculpture to the Royal Academy in London, and in 1817 made drawings to illustrate Hesiod, which were engraved by William Blake.

Joseph Anton Koch (1768-1839) was an Austrian landscape painter, who worked mainly in Neoclassical style. During his second stay in Rome, he was commissioned to paint frescos in the Villa Massimi on the walls of the Dante Room there, which remain one of the most florid visual accounts of Dante’s Inferno. He completed those between 1824-29.

Philippe Semeria is a young contemporary artist who is an enthusiast for comics and is an aspiring illustrator.

Jan van der Straet, also commonly known by his Italianised name of Giovanni Stradano (1523-1605), was a painter who started his career in Bruges and Antwerp in Belgium, but moved to Florence in 1550, where he worked for the remainder of his life. Mannerist in style, he worked with printmakers in Antwerp to produce collections of prints, including an extensive set for The Divine Comedy.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

Robin Kirkpatrick (trans) (2012) Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, Penguin Classics. ISBN 978 0 141 19749 4.
Richard Lansing (ed) (2000) The Dante Encyclopedia, Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 87611 7.
Guy P Raffa (2009) The Complete Danteworlds, A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy, Chicago UP. ISBN 978 0 2267 0270 4.
Prue Shaw (2014) Reading Dante, From Here to Eternity, Liveright. ISBN 978 1 63149 006 4.

Once the ripe grain had been cut, the crop had to be gathered into sheaves, then those were assembled into stooks for transport by cart to await threshing, mechanical separation of the precious grain from straw. The latter was an important building material, and was used as thatch for the roof of most country buildings across Europe.

Anna Ancher, wife of Danish painter Michael Ancher, caught this procession of Harvesters on their way to their work in 1905, near her home in Skagen on the north tip of Jylland (Jutland). The leader carries his scythe high as they pass through a field of ripe wheat.

Léon Augustin Lhermitte’s famous Harvesters’ Pay from 1882 shows four harvesters bearing their heavy-duty scythes, at the end of the day. They are awaiting payment by the farmer’s factor, who holds a bag of coins for the purpose. In the right foreground are two tied sheaves of cut wheat, with a lightweight sickle resting on them.

Adrian Stokes had further to travel for this golden view of Harvest Time in Transylvania (c 1909), one of many paintings that he and his wife made of their protracted visits to Eastern Europe.

By tradition on Norwegian farms, cut cereal wasn’t left to dry in low stooks, as in most of Europe and America, but built onto poles. In a series of paintings and prints, Nikolai Astrup developed these Corn Stooks (1920) into ghostly armies standing on parade in the fields, the rugged hills behind enhancing their strangeness.

John Linnell’s Harvest Home, Sunset: The Last Load (1853) shows the final wagonload of cut grain leaving the fields at dusk, as the harvest is completed.

Félix Vallotton’s The Sheaves from 1915 is one of his moving and symbolic images of the Great War. It’s late summer in 1914, harvest time, and the ripe corn is being cut and stacked in sheaves. But where are all those farmworkers, whose rakes rest against the sheaves, and whose lunch-basket sits on the ground ready to be eaten? Where is the wagon collecting the harvest, and why is the white gate in the distance closed?

In PS Krøyer’s Threshing in the Abruzzi from 1890, teams of oxen are trampling the crop to thresh it.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Grain Threshers, Egypt (1859) also shows this as one of the more traditional employments for animals, here drawing a threshing sledge.

By the end of the nineteenth century, animals were being used as a source of power, as shown in Albert Rigolot’s painting of The Threshing Machine, Loiret from 1893. One of the early uses for steam engines was to power similar machines before they were made mobile under their own power, as traction engines.

This is the time of year when, in the Northern Hemisphere, the grain harvest is in full swing, when the fields of cereal crops have ripened gold in the summer sun and are ready to be cut. This weekend I celebrate the climax of the farming year with some of the finest paintings of harvest in European art. Today I concentrate on cutting using a reaping hook or scythe, and tomorrow I look at the formation of sheaves and stocks, and threshing to separate the grain.

In the centuries before mechanical harvesting, cutting the crop was hard work and labour-intensive. It took about 4 worker-days to cut an acre of grain using a sickle or hook, while using a scythe typically took only 2 sweated worker-days per acre. Scythes appear to have been used almost exclusively by men, while sickles and hooks were used by both men and women.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Harvesters from 1565 shows the whole village turned out to cut, process and transport the crop. This is a visual encyclopaedia of each of the steps involved in the grain harvest, as shown in the details below.

These men are cutting a crop of wheat close to the base of the stem using scythes, leaving short stubble. This ensures the best yield of straw as well as grain.

Behind these workers eating bread baked from flour ground from cereal grown in the same fields, cut cereal is tied first into sheaves before they are gathered into stooks.

In about 1833, when Samuel Palmer painted his wonderful Harvest Moon near Shoreham in Kent, harvesting usually went on well into the night. These are mostly women wielding sickles or reaping hooks to cut a small field of wheat. The cut stalks are then formed into stooks and piled onto an oxcart for transport to nearby farm buildings.

Palmer’s mentor John Linnell painted The Harvest Cradle twenty-five years later, in 1859. The harvesters have their backs to the viewer, but appear to be using scythes to cut this wheat crop. Bundles of cut grain are tied as sheaves, then assembled into stooks in the foreground.

He painted Wheat for the dealer Thomas Agnew in about 1860, and it became one of Linnell’s more successful works. It was shown at the Royal Academy shortly after completion, then at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867.

Jean-François Millet’s Ceres (The Summer) from about 1864-65 is unusual in showing the goddess holding a sickle with a serrated edge, surrounded by sheaves of wheat. On her left she holds a shallow winnow used to separate the lighter chaff from the heavier grain, after threshing.

During the nineteenth century some attached cradles to the blade, to make sheaving easier. This is shown in Laurits Andersen Ring’s painting of Harvest. The crop being cut here may well be rye rather than wheat. The artist got his brother to model for this “monument to the Danish peasant” during the summer of 1885, while working on his farm near Fakse, on Sjælland (Zealand), Denmark.

Volodymyr Orlovsky’s Harvest in Ukraine from 1880 shows wheat being cut on the steppe, with the worker in the foreground carrying a scythe, but those cutting in the middle distance bent over as if using hooks instead.

The young woman in Mykola Pymonenko’s portrait of a Reaper from 1889 has been cutting what could be rye or wheat using a heavier bagging hook, although she isn’t using the hooked stick normally required for the technique, so could be using it as a regular reaping hook. The woman behind her demonstrates that these harvesters are cutting low to keep a good length of straw on the harvested crop.

Lovis Corinth wasn’t the only artist to have his own suit of armour. Rembrandt apparently bought at least one, while Jean-Léon Gérôme seems to have kept a suit hanging in his studio.

The End of the Pose (1886) is the first of Gérôme’s series of unusual compound paintings, which are at once self-portraits of him as a sculptor, studies in the relationship between a model and their sculpted double, and further forays into issues of what is seen, visual revelation, and truth.

Here, while Gérôme cleans up, his model is seen covering up her sculpted double with sheets, as she remains naked. Hanging against the wall behind is a complete suit of armour, and there is a single red rose on the wooden platform on which the model and statue stand.

Armour has occasionally been purely symbolic, most famously in the collaborative painting of Touch by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens in their series The Five Senses from 1618.

Touch extends beyond its title to encompass other tactile sensory modalities. Heat is associated with a brazier, fine touch with brushes nearby. Much of the panel is devoted to a collection of armour, weapons, and their manufacture by gunsmiths and armourers. The many suits on display, seen in the detail below, appear to be equipment that isolates rather than stimulates the sense of touch.

During the nineteenth century, many painters looked back at the age of knights and chivalry, which inspired German Romantics, Pre-Raphaelites, and some of the last academic artists of the century.

The crusades presented Carl Friedrich Lessing with an ideal combination of mediaeval history, romance, and chivalry. In The Return of the Crusader from 1835, he shows a lone knight in full armour dozing as his horse plods its way up a path from the coast. Although his armour is still shiny, a tattered battle pennant hangs limply from his lance. This is based on a Romantic poem by the writer Karl Leberecht Immermann (1796-1840).

Edmund Blair Leighton’s Conquest from 1884 shows a stereotype knight in shining armour walking through an arch with its portcullis raised, a fair maiden walking behind him, as this victor enters the castle he has just conquered. The knight appears to be an idealised self-portrait.

Leighton’s The Accolade (1901) apparently shows Henry VI the Good – of Poland, not the British Henry VI – being dubbed a knight. Every link in his chain mail has been crafted individually.

Manuel García Hispaleto’s Don Quixote’s Speech of Arms and Letters (1884) shows the hero, his squire Sancho Panza behind, delivering one of his many orations after dinner, in a full suit of armour, as you would.

Eugène Delacroix visited tales of chivalry in his Combat Between Two Horsemen in Armour, painted at some time between 1825-30.

Plate armour continued to be worn by soldiers well into the twentieth century, and appears in some paintings of contemporary history.

Paul-Émile Boutigny’s undated Scene from the Franco-Prussian War shows soldiers from both sides of this short war in 1870-71. The soldier on the left is French, and holds a French Chassepot musketon with a long yataghan bayonet, while his colleague on the right appears to be Prussian, with his pickelhaube spiked helmet and a heavy cavalry cuirass that’s essentially modernised armour. (I’m grateful to Boris for his expert interpretation of this motif.)

François Flameng’s undated scene of Germans from the First World War shows the odd combination of archaic plate armour with modern gas masks.

Finally, as everyone knows, a knight goes to their grave in their armour.

Briton Rivière’s Requiescat from 1888 epitomises the faithful relationship between a dog and its master. As the knight’s body is laid out clad in armour, so his dog sits pining by the side of his body.

Armour, either in the form of plates of metal or chain mail with its many interlocked rings, is the primary attribute and symbol of the warrior. As such, several of the classical deities are often depicted wearing armour.

Peter Paul Rubens painted The Triumph of Victory in about 1614 for the Antwerp Guild of St George, its organisation of archers. Mars in his short suit of black armour 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.

Jacob Jordaens’ finished version of an original sketch by Rubens now known as The Golden Apple of Discord (1633) shows the wedding feast of the deities where Eris (Discord) makes her gift of the golden apple to set up the Judgement of Paris, leading to the Trojan War. At the left, Athena/Minerva, wearing her plumed helmet and a suit of ornate plate armour, reaches forward for that apple.

Just to confuse, the Roman goddess of war, Bellona (Greek Enyo), is also shown in or with armour by convention.

Peter Paul Rubens’ undated Portrait of Marie de’ Medici as Bellona shows her in the midst of cannon, arms and armour, with an exuberantly decorated helmet, a sceptre and a statue of a winged woman.

Armour inevitably plays a role in some of the events reported during the war against Troy. After his close friend Patroclus had been killed while wearing the armour of Achilles, he demanded a fresh suit made by Vulcan/Hephaestus before he would return to engage in battle.

Anthony van Dyck’s Thetis Receiving the Weapons of Achilles from Hephaestus from about 1630-32 shows the scene when Thetis is collecting her son’s new armour from Hephaestus, at the left.

Benjamin West’s Thetis Bringing the Armour to Achilles from 1804 shows the Greek warrior being presented with the armour and helmet by his mother Thetis.

When Achilles is killed in battle, in accordance with warrior tradition, his armour was handed on to the next in line, who could have been either Ajax or Odysseus.

Leonaert Bramer’s small painting on copper of The Quarrel between Ajax and Odysseus was made between about 1625-30. The pair stand in their armour, next to tents pitched at the foot of Troy’s mighty walls. At their feet is the armour of Achilles, and all around them are Greek warriors, some in exotic dress to suggest more distant origins.

Armour also leaked through into Christian religious paintings.

Lucas Cranach the Younger sets The Conversion of Saul (1549) in mediaeval northern Europe, with Paul and his party riding knightly chargers in their armour. Paul’s horse has fallen to the ground, with Paul still in the saddle rather than prostrate on the ground. Paul holds his hands up and looks to the heavens, where the figure of Christ is seen in a break in the clouds at the top left corner.

It was the young French martyr Joan of Arc, though, who is most often depicted wearing armour.

JAD Ingres painted Joan of Arc at the Coronation of Charles VII, in Reims Cathedral (1854). She stands close to the crown, resplendent in full armour and holding a standard, the two-pointed oriflamme embroidered for her by the women of Orléans, in her right hand.

The second scene in Jules Eugène Lenepveu’s Joan of Arc Murals (1886-90) shows Joan leading the French forces against the English, who were laying siege to the French city of Orléans. There had been controversy in Joan’s trial as to whether she had used weapons against the English; Lenepveu hedges here, showing her holding a sword in her right hand, but brandishing the Dauphin’s standard to rally the French, in the role that she described of herself. She’s wearing a suit of plate armour, which she was provided with in preparation for this operation. As this would have been designed to fit a man, this was part of the case against her for ‘cross-dressing’ in men’s clothes.

Lovis Corinth is one of several major painters who acquired themselves a suit of armour. This featured in two symbolic paintings made before and after the First World War.

When war broke out on 28 July 1914, Lovis Corinth and most of the other artists in Berlin shared an enthusiastic patriotism that initially gave them a buoyant optimism. He expressed this openly in his In Defence of Weapons from 1915.

Armour Parts in the Studio is Corinth’s summary of Germany’s defeat in 1918. The suit of armour is now empty, broken apart, and cast on the floor of his studio.

Although there are a few still life paintings from classical Roman times, the first known in modern painting was made by Hans Memling in about 1485, and Caravaggio painting one in about 1599. There were precious few until after 1610, and it wasn’t until the Dutch Golden Age that they appeared in any quantity. Once they started, they quickly became popular, and may have accounted for as much as 10% of all paintings sold in Leiden, for instance. Their success was the result of religious intolerance.

Unlike the Italian Renaissance, the Flemish Renaissance revelled in the faithful depiction of surface textures and adventures in optics. Centres such as Antwerp trained painters in the skills needed, but Flanders and Brabant formed the Catholic Spanish Netherlands, where religious paintings were expected. Artists who followed the Reformed tradition rather than Catholicism or who wanted to paint secular works found themselves oppressed, and many migrated to the north, to paint in the Dutch Republic.

One of the most successful of the pioneer still life painters of the early seventeenth century was also a woman, Clara Peeters, and one of the finest still life painters of any age. We don’t even know when she was born, but she seems to have trained in Antwerp, then pursued her career successfully in the Dutch Republic. She’s thought to have been internationally successful by 1611, when at least four of her paintings were sold to Spain. Her last reliably-dated works are from 1621, although there are a few attributed to her from later.

Venetian Glass, Roemer and a Candlestick (1607) is one of Peeters’ earliest known works, which shows an extraordinary skill in rendering the varied surfaces and their optical properties. It is also one of the first still lifes in which the artist has included their own image reflected in the motif, here the base of the candlestick holder.

As in many still lifes, its contents have interesting symbolic meaning. The confectionery shown is sweet and ephemeral, the ring a sign of earthly riches and temporal relationships, the fly an indicator of earthly decay, and the burning candle combines remembrance with the strict limits on lifespan in this world. This is not just a still life, but an expression of vanitas, the futility and limits of our earthly existence, a theme for a separate article in this series.

Her paintings from 1611 that ended up in the Spanish Royal Collection, and are now in the Prado, move on from that impressive start.

This Table is laid out for a meal, with its range of food and surfaces with different optical properties. Settings for meals, particularly that of breakfast, were later to become a sub-genre in their own right.

Over the coming centuries, still life paintings featuring game were to become popular throughout Europe. Peeters’ Still Life with Game Piece and Poultry is their ancestor. Shells are another vanitas association.

Her Still Life of Fish and a Candlestick is one of the earliest and most accomplished paintings of the fruits de mer, which were to find favour with William Merritt Chase nearly three centuries later.

In the last of these from the Spanish collection, Clara Peeters makes another cameo appearance in its reflections, providing tantalising glimpses of herself.

The following year, her still life with Flowers and Gold Cups of Honour (1612) reveals multiple miniature self-portraits reflected in the gold cup at the right.

In her still life with Cheeses, Almonds and Pretzels from about 1615, her surface and optical rendering is breathtaking, and all thoughts of vanitas have gone. This is a celebration of the thoroughly earthly and sensuous pleasures of food. These are sustained in several of her other later paintings.

She hadn’t entirely forgotten the spiritual dimension, though. Another of her most interesting paintings returns to the concept of vanitas and the ephemeral.

Peeters established herself an international reputation, sold her paintings into major art collections, and pioneered what was to come in the rest of the century, yet is omitted from many accounts of painting in the Dutch Golden Age.

By this time, still life paintings were enjoying growing popularity in the buoyant market of the Dutch Golden Age. Ambrosius Bosschaert (1573–1621) painted this Flower Still Life in oil on copper in 1614, during the early years. He had been born in Antwerp, but because of the threat of religious persecution moved to Middelburg in the Dutch Republic, where he founded a school of floral painting.

At first its eclectic mixture of different flowers and flying insects appears haphazard. These merit a deeper reading, though: the flowers include carnation, rose, tulip, forget-me-nots, lilies of the valley, cyclamen, violet and hyacinth. These could never, at that time, have bloomed at the same time. The butterflies, bee and dragonfly are as ephemeral as the flowers around them. This too has more than a touch of vanitas.

By 1620, still life paintings were much in demand in northern Europe, and had ceased being occasional curiosities. Bosschaert’s career and family business was founded on the still life, which had come of age at last.

Collations of food grew ever more inventive, with Pieter Claesz combining a table of bread and delights in his Still Life with Musical Instruments from 1623. His underlying themes here are the rich browns of the food, wood and tortoise, and their curved forms. Claesz had been born near Antwerp, trained in that city and became a master there in 1620, when he too migrated to the Dutch Republic, where he established his studio in Haarlem.

Other artists developed the still life in the direction of food, as shown in Willem Kalf’s Still Life with Ewer, Vessels and Pomegranate from about 1645. He brings together an impressive variety of surface optical effects too, in this bravura display of technique.

Still life paintings pressed on into culinary exhibitions, usually centred on the breakfast table (ontbijtjes), which in Spain developed into bodegone, populated by caterers and their customers at roadside stalls.

Another fine example is Pieter Claesz’s Still Life with Salt Tub from about 1644, with its combination of bread, fish, sea salt, and an ornate glass goblet with its optical effects.

I’ve already shown some still life paintings including living creatures. Those developed into another sub-genre of dead game, which in turn linked to hunting and the depiction of wildlife.

Jan Weenix specialised in this sub-genre. His Still Life of a Dead Hare, Partridges, and Other Birds in a Niche from about 1675 is one of a large number of finely detailed and realistic paintings which he made. Weenix was born in Amsterdam, where he lived and worked for much of his life, but was a Catholic who worshipped in ‘hidden’ churches that were tolerated in the Dutch Republic.

These piles of animal corpses spilled out into a strangely dark countryside, in paintings such as his Still Life of Game including a Hare, Black Grouse and Partridge, a Spaniel looking on with a Pigeon in Flight from about 1680. These became popular at the time, and Weenix was commissioned to decorate the houses of the rich with large murals on canvas, and to paint series for European royal courts. The more ostentatious paintings were known as pronkstilleven.

Others used the still life as a link to what later became natural history painting.

For their familiarity, bright colours, and natural beauty, butterflies were popular in the Dutch Golden Age, particularly in smaller paintings such as still lifes destined for the collector’s cabinet. Nicolaes de Vree’s undated Forest Floor Still Life with Flowering Plants and Butterflies from the latter half of the seventeenth century is a fine example of a painting that goes beyond the normal still life and depicts a more natural scene.

Still life painting during the Dutch Golden Age flourished and brought commercial success to many artists. It also laid the foundations for several sub-genres which were to be developed later. Far from being the lowest of the genres, for around a century in the Dutch Republic they were among the most innovative and exciting.

Unlike watercolour, oil paint ‘dries’ by an irreversible process of chemical polymerisation. Once ‘dried’ it resists solvents and can be painted over without any risk of its pigments mixing between layers. Unlike modern acrylic paints, oil paint usually takes at least a week or two before its surface is dry, so allows the painter to control mixing of an existing layer with fresh paint. Skilful control of paint viscosity and drying rate thus gives fine control over the softness of edges and their blurring or sharpness.

This is illustrated well in Lucas Cranach the Elder’s portrait of Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist from about 1530. Crisp edges appear where you expect, for example between skin and clothing. In some places, he also outlined edges with thin lines of dark shadow for emphasis. Where skin tone changes more subtly, and in Salome’s eyebrows, there are soft transitions achieved by painting wet on wet and blurring the edge, a technique often known as sfumato, as seen in the detail below.

Cranach and the staff of his workshop would have worked on that painting over a period of many weeks to achieve those effects. In contrast, sketching with oil paints in front of the motif is far simpler, and on a more modest scale. Because of constantly changing light and shadow, most proficient landscape artists aim to complete their oil sketches in under two hours, and an hour is ideal.

Robert Henri’s Landscape Sketch at Escorial (1906) was painted on a wooden pochade panel, almost certainly in a single short session outside the city of Madrid, in the hills near the Escorial. Although he used the viscosity of different paints to make its skyline sharp, you can see where his coarse brushstrokes have been applied and colours mixed and laid in streaks.

The young Canadian artist Tom Thomson excelled in rapid sketching in oils, with several witnessed accounts of him dashing off a painting in little more than fifteen minutes. As a result he was able to capture many transient effects, such as the passing thunderstorm in Thunderhead from 1912-13. He has found it harder to keep a crisp skyline, and clearest separation of paint is in the white masts of the boats at the edge of the water. Those were painted last, in single strokes with as little diluent as possible.

Before the nineteenth century, quick oil sketches were almost never shown to the public, but used by masters including Valenciennes and Constable purely as preparative studies. When fashions changed, it became acceptable if not desirable for paintings to look sketchy and rushed, although appearances can sometimes be deceptive.

Some masters of fast painting used these skills in multiple sessions, to increase the amount of detail they could incorporate into a landscape. When Pissarro suffered from eye problems late in his career, he painted from rooms with views over the streets of Paris, and produced some of his finest cityscapes.

Boulevard Montmartre, Spring Morning (1897) is composed primarily of buildings and streets, a plethora of figures, and countless carriages to move those people around, the ingredients for so many of his late paintings.

In the foreground, Pissarro may have formed each quite roughly, but he has painted in sufficient detail. Three white horses range in tone and colour, with highlights on the front of each head. You can see which people are wearing hats, and spot ladies in their fashionable clothing.

Deeper into the distance, detail is lost, and the carriages and crowds merge into one another. Still they have a rhythm, highlights and shadows, and form. He must have spent day after day at his hotel window populating these busy streets.

Other Impressionist paintings appear at first sight to have been painted quickly in front of the motif, but were more likely worked on over a period of months in the studio. Once the public had come to expect an Impressionist painting to look as if it had been painted quickly, they expected the same look even though some paintings may have required several months painting.

Monet’s Flowering Plum Trees (1879), for example, has a complex structure in its paint layer, as seen from the surface in the detail below. Some marks have been added wet-in-wet, but many wet-on-dry, demonstrating it must have been worked on over a period of weeks or months.

The myth about Monet’s Grainstacks series is that they depict transient effects of season, weather, and light, as they were painted en plein air over the course of the winter. Looking at all twenty-five, I have long had my doubts, and suspect that Monet spent a lot of the time prior to their exhibition making further changes to them. This in no way lessens Monet’s sublime achievement, nor their art in any way. It’s just that they aren’t quite the paintings described by the myth that has grown around them.

Looking at Grainstacks, End of Summer, considered to be one of the earliest in the series and numbered 1266, the trees behind the two grainstacks are still in full summer leaf, with no indication of the advent of autumn. Yet Monet’s signature gives the year as 1891. Looking at its paint surface in detail (below), some has been applied wet-in-wet and blended with underlying and adjacent paint, but many other brushstrokes have clearly been applied over dry underlayers.

The blue-grey shadow of this grainstack was applied with relatively dilute paint wet-on-dry over thicker off-white paint with marked surface texture. However, that off-white paint has itself been applied wet-on-dry over a pale green layer. This couldn’t have been achieved in the same day, even when the ambient temperatures were warmer during the early autumn, but probably reflects at least three sessions with drying time in between them.

Grainstack, Sun in the Mist, numbered 1286, is thought to be one of the later paintings in the series, apparently showing the sole remaining grainstack in the Spring of 1891. It too has multiple layers applied wet-on-dry, with many hatched brushstrokes in shades of orange and pink apparently applied over a well-dried surface. These are again shown well in the detail (below) of the grainstack itself.

At the right side of the foot of the grainstack, the lowest layer of paint consists of dull blue and green that appear to have been applied at about the same time and have blended in places. When that layer had dried, infrequent and relatively thick streaks of white were added wet-on-dry. When that had dried, brown-orange was applied to form the uppermost layer. That uppermost layer has also been used to remodel the form of the grainstack using thickly-applied flesh, pale yellow and orange paint.

The evidence points to Monet starting each of this series with a sketch using more dilute paint in front of the motif in the circumstances described in the title. He then brought each canvas into his studio, where he continued to work on it, making further adjustments, adding partial layers of paint, and tweaking each work in comparison to the others in the series. This would have taken place over a period of several weeks: in the case of the canvases that he had started at the end of the summer of 1890, such as W1266 above, that period could have amounted to six months.

That may well have been longer than the time taken by Cranach to paint Salome.

In the First Circle of Hell, Dante and his guide Virgil saw the souls caught in Limbo. From there they descend to the Second Circle, where they find those guilty of the sin of lust. They pass the figure of Minos, who extracts a confession from every sinner as they begin their descent, and directs them onward to the appropriate circle for their sins.

Here the light is dim, and there is an eternal storm blowing those in this circle, ensuring they never obtain any comfort or relief from its incessant blast. The first of those described by Virgil to Dante is Semiramis, who married her father and made such incestuous relationships legal. (This is now known to be a false legend recorded by Orosius, popular in Dante’s time.)

Then they see Cleopatra, Achilles, Paris and Tristan. Dante tells the story of Francesca in most detail, and possibly for the first time in literature. She appears, blown in the wind, with her lover Paolo, but it’s Francesca who speaks to Dante.

Francesca da Rimini was the aunt of Dante’s host when he lived his later years in Ravenna. In about 1275, she married Gianciotto of the ruling family in Rimini, for political reasons. There’s strong suspicion that she had been tricked into this: her husband turned out to be disfigured and uncouth, but pre-nuptial negotiations were conducted by his handsome and eloquent brother Paolo, suggesting she was duped.

Soon after the marriage, Paolo and Francesca became lovers, apparently inspired by the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. Gianciotto suspected the couple, and one day caught them together in his wife’s bedroom.

Paolo had become stuck when trying to escape through a trapdoor. Francesca was unaware of that, and let her husband in, who then attacked his brother with his sword. But Francesca stepped in between them to save her lover and was killed; Gianciotto then killed his brother, and after his own death had descended further into Hell for that double murder.

Dante’s story has inspired a succession of masterly paintings.

It was William Blake’s Whirlwind of Lovers that transformed these depictions.

This story is told in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s watercolour triptych: at the left, the lovers are reading the legend of Lancelot and Guinevere. In the centre are Dante and Virgil, and at the right Paolo and Francesca are being blown in the storms of the Second Circle of Hell.

Dante faints at the tragic story that Francesca has told him, and collapses as if dead.

The artists

William Blake (1757–1827) was a British visionary painter and illustrator whose last and incomplete work was an illustrated edition of the Divine Comedy for the painter John Linnell. Most of his works shown in this series were created for that, although he did draw and paint scenes during his earlier career. I have a major series on his work here.

Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) was an Italian painter and sculptor whose tragically short career was a major influence over the development of Futurism. Drafted into the Italian Army during the First World War, he was thrown from his horse and trampled to death when he was only thirty-three.

Alexandre Cabanel (1823–1889) was a major French painter of history in an academic style, and a precocious artist. He won the Prix de Rome in 1845, and was appointed a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1864, teaching many successful pupils including Jules Bastien-Lepage. This article summarises his career and work.

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Early in his career, he produced a complete set of seventy illustrations for translations of the Inferno, first published in 1857 and still being used. These were followed in 1867 by more illustrations for Purgatorio and Paradiso, and this painting was highly praised when shown at the Paris Salon in 1863. This article looks at his paintings.

Giuseppe Frascheri (1809–1886) was an Italian painter in fresco and oils who has been almost completely forgotten.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) was a major French painter in Neoclassical style, best known for his history and other narrative paintings. He was a pupil of Jacques-Louis David, and continued much in his tradition, and in opposition to the more Romantic painting of Eugène Delacroix. His work extended from portraits to Orientalism.

Gaetano Previati (1852–1920) was an Italian painter who worked mainly in Divisionist style, but is now known for his Symbolism. He was most famous in the period 1880-1920, during which he was involved in the Venice Biennale and exhibitions in Italy and Paris.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) was of Italian descent but born in London. In 1848, he co-founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and was a major figure in British painting until his early death in 1882. A published poet and author himself, many of his paintings were in response to literature, particularly the poems of John Keats. He had a succession of relationships with his models and muses, including Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth, and William Morris’s wife Jane. The triptych shown here is the earliest of at least three paintings of his showing Paolo and Francesca, another similar triptych being from 1862.

Ary Scheffer (1795–1858) was a major narrative painter of the first half of the nineteenth century, born in the Netherlands but trained and working in Paris. Among his favourite literary themes were Goethe’s Faust, and the story of Paolo and Francesca. This article looks at his narrative work.

George Frederic Watts (1817–1904) was a major British painter and sculptor in the middle and late nineteenth century who was associated with several artistic circles and movements including the Pre-Raphaelites, but who worked independently in more Symbolist style. This article looks at his career and paintings.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

Robin Kirkpatrick (trans) (2012) Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, Penguin Classics. ISBN 978 0 141 19749 4.
Richard Lansing (ed) (2000) The Dante Encyclopedia, Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 87611 7.
Guy P Raffa (2009) The Complete Danteworlds, A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy, Chicago UP. ISBN 978 0 2267 0270 4.
Prue Shaw (2014) Reading Dante, From Here to Eternity, Liveright. ISBN 978 1 63149 006 4.

The element chromium gains its name from the rich colours seen in many of its salts and compounds. One of them, chromium oxide, was discovered in about 1798 by Louis-Nicolas Vauquelin, who immediately recognised its future use as a pigment, because of its “fine emerald colour”. But painters were still enamoured with more toxic greens, and straight chromium oxide doesn’t look particularly brilliant, being a rather dull yellow-green. Its introduction into paintings probably didn’t start until around 1840, when landscape painting outdoors was becoming all the rage.

Some of the earliest paintings known to use chromium oxide are those of Moritz von Schwind, of which the first example that I can show is his Mermaids Watering a Stag from about 1846. He seems to have used the pigment quite extensively here in foliage, although probably in combination with other pigments.

Von Schwind’s King Krokus and the Wood Nymph from about 1855 is a clearer image, where he probably used chromium oxide in combination for most of his greens.

As these works were being painted, an improved version of chromium oxide was being developed: hydrated chromium oxide, which became known as viridian during the 1860s. This first became available at a reasonable price after Guignet started to make it in quantity in 1859, so has also been known as Guignet’s green. It’s sometimes termed émeraude or emerald, which only serves to confuse viridian with copper acetoarsenate, more widely known as emerald green.

Viridian came into use during the 1860s, and has proved far more popular than chromium oxide. Both pigments are reliably lightfast, opaque, and have good covering power, but viridian is the more intense, and doesn’t appear dull like plain chromium oxide.

Anselm Feuerbach’s painting of Paolo and Francesca from 1864 is one of the earlier works found to contain viridian among its many rich greens.

The best example showing off the colour of viridian is perhaps Édouard Manet’s The Balcony (1868-69), where he appears to have used the pigment throughout the blinds and railings, most probably mixed with lead white, and unmixed for the woman’s parasol.

Arnold Böcklin’s Triton and Nereid from 1874 is unusual in several respects. It’s reported as being painted in tempera rather than oils, but its deep lustrous greens were developed using a base of predominantly viridian, over which Böcklin applied a copper resinate glaze.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s La Yole (The Skiff) of 1875 uses viridian as the main colour for the reeds in the left foreground.

Analysis of Claude Monet’s series of paintings of the Gare Saint-Lazare in 1877 has revealed extensive use of viridian in mixtures, including the green shadows in the roof. In Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare (1877), the pigment is apparent (and confirmed) throughout the green foreground of the platform, an optical effect resulting from light passing through the glass roof of the station.

Renoir used viridian together with malachite green and other pigments for the greens in his Chrysanthemums (1881-82).

If you care to spend some time examining the myriads of tiny dots in Georges Seurat’s monumental Divisionist painting of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-86), I’m assured that you’ll find many of those forming its vegetation contain viridian.

Viridian remained popular among the post-Impressionists, from whom I have two well-known paintings as examples.

Vincent van Gogh included viridian in the pigments used in the range of greens in his A Wheatfield, with Cypresses (1889), which is more unusual for his use of ultramarine blue mixed to form green.

Paul Cézanne is known to have had a strong preference for viridian as one of the key colours in his palette. However, in his Hillside in Provence (1890-92), it is emerald green that is the more prominent, and the major part of the painting’s more brilliant greens, even into its pale turquoise sky. Some green passages, such as the patch of yellow-green grass at the edge of the path in the foreground, at the right edge of the canvas, have been built with a base of lead white and viridian, over which he has applied a yellow lake glaze.

Chromium oxide and viridian remain widely available today; although the former is not popular or widely used, viridian remains a mainstay green widely recommended for its colour and other properties. Being virtually insoluble, chromium oxide and viridian pose minimal risks of toxicity to the artist. However, there is growing concern over their environmental effects, and great care is needed when handling waste paint containing either pigment.

Reference

Richard Newman (1997) Artists’ Pigments, vol 3, ed Elisabeth West FitzHugh, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 76 0.

Rumours still abound as to the cause of Napoleon’s death over two centuries ago. One theory, not currently in favour, is that he was poisoned by arsenic in the wallpaper. At the time, that would have been unusual, but by the 1860s such deaths were significant enough to be reported in newspapers. Their ultimate cause was also one of the factors behind the success of Impressionist landscape painting: emerald green.

Getting a good range of green pigments was vital for landscape painting, and more generally for coloured commercial products such as wallpaper and clothing. The first of the ‘poison greens’ to be discovered was that named after Carl Wilhelm Scheele, the Swedish chemist who originally made it in 1775: copper arsenite, a highly toxic salt of arsenic. Soon after its introduction from about 1780, it became clear that it tended to darken with age, and the search began for a replacement.

Little attention has been paid to the use of Scheele’s green, and it isn’t clear how widely it was used, or even when it was first used in painting.

JMW Turner’s early oil sketch of Guildford from the Banks of the Wey, painted in about 1805, has been found to contain Scheele’s green. Given its range of greens, that could be quite extensive.

Wilhelm Sattler, a paint manufacturer in Schweinfurt, Germany, worked with Friedrich Russ to discover an even better arsenic compound for use as a colourant, and from 1814 Sattler’s company manufactured Schweinfurt or emerald green, the equally toxic copper acetoarsenite. Its alluringly brilliant green colour appears very stable, with only slight darkening resulting from reaction with hydrogen sulphide, a common atmospheric pollutant.

By about 1830-32, when Turner painted Going to School as an illustration for Rogers’s Poems, he had switched to using emerald green, obvious from its characteristic colour standing out from the small bag on the boy’s back.

Turner used emerald green again in this watercolour painting of Rouen, Looking Downstream from about 1832, here in combination with other pigments, so less brashly.

Concerns over the established toxicity of these two greens were raised by 1839, when warnings were first issued in Bavaria. Despite those, the use of emerald green became more widespread, and it was even ‘fixed’ to ball gowns using albumen or dextrin, which allowed its poisonous dust to brush free from the garment when dancing. It also became particularly popular, and insidiously toxic, in coloured wallpapers. When applied on damp walls, as were common at the time, fungal products could produce trimethyl arsine gas, which is thought to have been responsible for many of the symptoms and deaths that were reported.

Édouard Manet’s Music in the Tuileries (1862) is an unusual example of a painting containing both Scheele’s and emerald greens. Manet used them in combination in two different glazes applied to the areas of foliage. In one transparent glaze, they are mixed with yellow lake, small amounts of ivory black, and yellow ochre; the other more opaque glaze consists of the two greens, with yellow ochre and white.

The last recorded use of Scheele’s green was by Edwin Landseer in 1866.

The Impressionists relied heavily on emerald green for its brilliance and intensity of colour. Frédéric Bazille’s Self-Portrait with Palette (1865) shows some emerald green paint on his palette, squeezed out and ready to paint vegetation such as sunlit grass.

Claude Monet used emerald green among other green pigments and mixtures in his famous Bathers at la Grenouillère, painted in 1869. It has also been found widely in the landscapes of Cézanne, Gauguin, Pissarro and Vincent van Gogh.

By the late nineteenth century, concern over the consequences of using emerald green in household products had risen to the point where the pigment was banned in a succession of countries.

Paul Gauguin’s Arlésiennes (Mistral) (Old Women at Arles) (1888) uses emerald green for the band of bright green grass sweeping up across the painting from the right. It is also mixed for the skin and hair of some of the figures, and in the foliage more generally.

Odilon Redon’s pastel painting of Sîta from about 1893 uses emerald green, chrome yellow and chalk in the prominent yellow-green halo surrounding the woman’s head. Working with soft pastels containing this pigment was particularly hazardous, because of the likelihood of inhaling their dust. At least today we have effective respiratory protection available.

During the twentieth century, genuine emerald green was withdrawn from use as a pigment, although it wasn’t completely discontinued until the 1960s. Since then, paints sold as being emerald green have contained alternatives that are far less toxic.

Emerald green has been found in mixtures used by Paul Cézanne in the patches of vegetation in his huge The Large Bathers (1906). Alongside lead white, vermilion and ultramarine blue, this pigment appears to have been among his most frequently used.

Childe Hassam’s watercolour of White Mountains from Poland Springs from 1917 is one of the last major paintings that appears to have relied on emerald green. Its use in the meadow in the foreground is perhaps the pigment’s last brash farewell.

Reference

Inge Fiedler and Michael Bayard (1997) Artists’ Pigments, vol 3, ed Elisabeth West Fitzhugh, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 76 0.

As we all should really be on holiday, I’m taking a long weekend to look at the stories of three green pigments, starting today with the oldest and most elusive of them, the mineral malachite.

Because green is a secondary colour, it might seem better mixed from blue and yellow, as it has been in various recipes such as Prussian green. But the painter always prefers using single pigments for the purity of their chroma, and the fact that the more pigments that get mixed, the closer the colour comes to muddy grey.

Given the shortage of lightfast bright greens, it’s surprising how little-used malachite green is in European painting, despite its rich colour. For a while it rejoiced quietly under traditional names including chrysocolla, green verditer, and even green bice, but it only ever became popular in Japan and China.

As a natural mineral, malachite is not uncommon, and a reliable source of pure pigment, which is chemically basic carbonate of copper. Malachite green was known to the ancient Egyptians, who appear to have used it as eye-paint. Found abundantly in Japanese and Chinese paintings from the seventh century onwards, it wasn’t used much in Europe until the Renaissance. After that, it almost died out in Europe until the nineteenth century, when it enjoyed a brief revival.

Two versions of the painting by Watanabe Kazan 渡辺崋山 of Sato Issai 佐藤一斎（五十歳）像 show malachite green at its finest.

This version from 1824, now in the Freer in Washington, is known to use malachite green with a slightly blue shade and deep in colour.

This smaller and earlier version from 1821, now in Tokyo, is a lighter, more yellow shade. I’m not aware of its pigment having been analysed, but I’d be surprised if it was straight malachite green.

The biggest problem with its adoption in Europe was the popularity there of oil paint. The pigment worked well where it could be ground quite coarsely and used in water-based media like fresco and egg tempera, but the finer you grind it, the paler it becomes. Oil painters like smooth buttery paints with fine pigment particles, which sadly didn’t work for malachite green.

The rich, almost emerald green robes of Spinello Aretino’s Virgin Enthroned with Angels from about 1380 contain malachite green, here in tempera medium.

Among its earliest appearances in oil paint is this spectacular centre panel of the van Eyck brothers’ Ghent Altarpiece, famous in its own right as the Adoration of the Lamb (c 1425-1432).

Continuing use of egg tempera in the Southern Renaissance helped it survive. Piero della Francesca’s famous The Baptism of Christ (after 1437), made in egg tempera on poplar wood, relies on the pigment for its greens. Microscopic examination of the paint layer here shows coarse mineral particles typical of natural malachite.

In Francesco del Cossa’s Saint Vincent Ferrer from about 1473-75, it has been identified in the dark green grass at the foot of the painting. This too was made using egg tempera.

However, microscopy of this paint layer shows that these pigment particles don’t seem to have been fractured as if they have been ground, but are globular, as occurs when the malachite green has been made by a process of precipitation. Such artificial malachite green didn’t appear in European paintings until after about 1430, just in time for Francesco del Cossa.

Although he painted in oils, Tintoretto was an enthusiastic user of malachite green. To obtain the range of greens seen in the rich and varied colours of vegetation in his Saint George and the Dragon from about 1555, he used this pigment with copper resinate glazes, a technique found in other paintings of the period.

Tintoretto’s vast oil painting of The Last Judgment (1560-62) in the Chiesa della Madonna dell’Orto, Venice, has been found to contain malachite green, I suspect in the band of green depicting the Flood just below the centre. The detail below makes this a bit clearer.

When painting the frescoes formerly in the Villa Aldobrandini between 1616-18, Domenichino and his assistants relied heavily on malachite green. It has been formally identified in this section, showing Apollo pursuing Daphne, where it’s the mainstay colour remaining, and is suspected in most of the others.

Although only classed as moderately permanent, these and other examples of very old frescoes show how well malachite green has retained its colour after four centuries or more. But with the rise of oil painting in European art, it fell from favour.

One of those who participated in its revival in the nineteenth century was Pierre-Auguste Renoir, whose painting of Chrysanthemums from 1881-82 shows how it could still be used in oil paint. But by then there was a much wider choice of more modern green pigments; the revival was short-lived, and malachite green has hardly been used since.

Reference

Rutherford J Gettens and Elisabeth West Fitzhugh (1993) Artists’ Pigments, vol 2, edited by Ashok Roy, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 75 3.

In 1640, soon after Rembrandt and his wife Saskia had moved into their own house in a fashionable quarter of Amsterdam, she gave birth to their third child, who died shortly afterwards. The following year, their fourth was born, Titus, the only one to survive to adulthood, although even he died before Rembrandt.

His vast group portrait of The Night Watch (1642) is perhaps the most famous of all those of militia in the Dutch Republic. It’s more correctly titled Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq, and features the commander and seventeen members of his civic guard company in Amsterdam, and took the artist three years to complete from his first commission to its display in the guards’ great hall.

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

At the time, Saskia’s health was declining rapidly, and she died in 1642, most probably from tuberculosis, which was rife at the time. Rembrandt hired a widow, Geertje Dircx, to look after his young son Titus, and she became the artist’s lover.

Another superb example of Rembrandt’s later techniques is in his painting of David and Jonathan from 1642.

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

His relationship with Titus’ nurse broke up acrimoniously in 1649, and he first had to pay her alimony, then the cost of confining her in a house of correction when she broke her side of their agreement. As they were parting, he began a relationship with the much younger Hendrickje Stoffels, who had been his maid.

Stoffels is claimed to have been the model for A Woman Bathing in a Stream, painted in 1654, when she was expecting their first child.

She probably appears again in his masterly painting of Bathsheba with King David’s Letter from 1654, showing an imagined moment late in this Old Testament story.

Bathsheba is at her bath, this time in the privacy of her bedchamber, her feet being cared for by an old and presumably worldly-wise maid or nurse. Clutched in Bathsheba’s right hand is a letter, the title tells us from the king himself. Her eyebrows are raised in surprise, and she stares dreamily down at her attendant. We must presume that this letter is the king’s invitation to her to join with him in adultery. Rembrandt skilfully heightens the suspense in the lighting, and enhances the intimate detail with Bathsheba’s jewellery and ornamented hair. The crumpled sheets behind her make it clear that David’s invitation isn’t to a public engagement, but to a very private one.

In June 1654, Stoffels was summoned by her church accused of committing “the acts of a whore with Rembrandt the painter”, for which she was banned from receiving communion. That October, she gave birth to their daughter, but the couple were unable to marry as Rembrandt would consequently have lost access to a trust set up by Saskia. His finances continued to worsen, and in 1656 he declared his insolvency, resulting in his house being sold at auction early in 1658. He was, though, allowed to keep his studio equipment, and he was able to live on as a tenant. That year Rembrandt’s son Titus and Hendrickje Stoffels formed a company of art dealers, thus enabling the artist to continue painting.

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

Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait from 1658 is one of the most insightful of his unique series of self-portraits, showing the artist bankrupt and growing old.

He drew Ahasuerus and Haman at the Feast of Esther (1660) from an Old Testament story in the book of Esther, via the contemporary play Hester by Johannes Serwouters, first performed the previous year. The original narrative revolved around Haman, one of King Ahasuerus’ officials, who proposed to hang Mordechai as a scapegoat for the Jewish nation, as revenge for their pride. In this painting, Haman is shown in the shadows on the left, with King Ahasuerus in the centre, and Esther – Mordechai’s cousin and Ahasuerus’s wife – radiant in her intervention to save Mordechai’s life.

In 1661, Rembrandt secured a major commission for what was then the new Amsterdam City Hall, completed in 1655, now the Royal Palace. The dozen large spaces intended for paintings were going to be filled by Govert Flinck, who had started but not completed them when he died in 1660. Rembrandt sketched what he is believed to have completed in the summer of 1662.

The painting that we see today as The Conspiracy of the Batavians under Claudius Civilis (1661-2) is but a small central rectangle within the original. His entire painting was hung in place for a while, but appears to have fallen into disfavour. It was taken down and returned to the artist, who wasn’t paid, and no longer had sufficient influence to change anyone’s mind in the matter. Meanwhile Jürgen Ovens (1623–1678) completed Flinck’s version, which was hung instead of Rembrandt’s. Rembrandt was desperately short of money at this time, so cut the painting down to a more saleable size, repainted parts of it, and sold it on.

Hendrickje Stoffels died in July 1663, leaving Rembrandt with his son Titus. Despite his advancing years and continuing battles to pay his rent and bills, Rembrandt’s paintings attained new heights. Typical of these are two portraits of Lucretia ending her life following her rape by Sextus Tarquinius.

In the earlier of the two, from 1664, Lucretia is seen just about to run the dagger home into her chest. Rembrandt dresses her in fine contemporary clothes, rather than the black robes of the story, and she is richly decorated with jewellery. She faces the viewer, but her head is slightly inclined to the right, and she stares emptily at her right hand. Her face shows calm resignation to her fate, with a tinge of wistful sadness. Her arms are outstretched to the edges of the canvas. The left hand is grubby and held open, palm towards the viewer, perhaps protesting her virtue. The right grasps the handle of a dagger, which is just being brought around in an arc to impale her chest and bring her end.

Rembrandt’s later painting of 1666 is more remarkable still: Lucretia has already pierced her chest with the blade. Her fine clothing has been pulled back to reveal her simple white shift, with a broad streak of fresh, bright red blood running down from the point at which the dagger was inserted. Her arms are outstretched here too, but for very different purposes. The right hand still clutches the dagger, which has dropped to waist level already. Her left hand is dragging a beaded bell-pull, presumably to summon her family to witness her final moments on earth. It is her face, though, that makes this painting. Her eyes, moistened by welling tears, are looking away to the right of the painting, in an absent-minded stare. Her brow is tensed with subtle anxiety. She knows that she is about to die, and is preparing herself for that moment.

Rembrandt continued to develop his mark-making right up to his death. It’s often at its most florid when he painted fabrics, such as the clothing of the couple shown in The Jewish Bride of about 1665. The Dutch Republic had long been a safe harbour for Jews fleeing from oppression in other European countries, and Rembrandt had cultivated close relationships with members of the large Jewish community in Amsterdam, some of whom had modelled for his paintings of Old Testament stories.

The Return of the Prodigal Son from about 1668, the year before the artist’s death, is a more conventional treatment of this parable from the Gospels, in which the younger son, almost barefoot and in rags, kneels in front of his father. Around them are members of the household, and details that are now hard to read. As with other late works, there’s a profound feeling of tenderness and redemption, which may have had personal significance.

Rembrandt’s son Titus van Rijn died in 1668, at the age of only 26, and Rembrandt died on Friday 4 October 1669. Three years later the Dutch Republic was invaded by French forces, and its Golden Age came to an abrupt end.

Rembrandt is probably the most famous artist of the Dutch Golden Age. Although his career is by no means typical, it does illustrate some of the forces at work behind the explosive growth of art during this period, and is a good excuse to show a few of his paintings for context with other artists of the period.

He was born in the city of Leiden, then the second largest in the Dutch Republic after Amsterdam, with a population of 45,000 in 1622, and growing rapidly. Its major industry was the weaving of textiles, and through the seventeenth century it attracted many weavers to migrate from Flanders. Another flourishing local industry was printing and publishing, which was helped by the city’s university, founded in 1575, and its role as a centre of learning and scientific development.

Rembrandt was the ninth child in a prosperous family, his father being a miller. He was well educated, initially at a school in the centre of the city, then from the age of 14 at the university. He soon opted to be apprenticed as a painter, and joined the workshop of Jacob van Swanenburg in Leiden, who had trained in Italy. After three years, Rembrandt went on to work for shorter periods with Pieter Lastman, a history painter in Amsterdam, and others there.

Rembrandt’s early painting of The Operation, from his late teens in 1624-25, shows a barber-surgeon and his assistant performing surgery on the side of a man’s head.

In 1625, when he was only 19, he became a master in his own right, and opened his first studio in Leiden, shared with his former fellow-student Jan Lievens. Two years later he started taking on his own apprentices.

In 1626-27, Rembrandt painted this portrait of a Man in a Gorget and a Plumed Cap, demonstrating the strange effects that cast shadows can have on perception of the face. This also shows his early mastery of surface textures and reflected highlights.

Rembrandt’s break came in 1629, when he was discovered by a distinguished poet and composer Constantijn Huygens, who was secretary to the head of state, held influence in the Hague, and was the father of Christiaan Huygens, a leading mathematician and physicist. Huygens helped arrange commissions for Rembrandt, and introduced his work to Prince Frederik Hendrik, then head of state.

Although several of his best-known chiaroscuro paintings were made in his old age, Rembrandt had long used the technique when appropriate, here in Saint Peter in Prison (The Apostle Peter Kneeling) from 1631.

Rembrandt’s The Abduction of Proserpina (c 1631) is probably the first masterpiece to show this myth. Pluto is trying to drive his chariot away, with Proserpine inside it. She’s putting up fierce resistance, and trying to fend him off. Hanging on to the hem of Proserpine’s floral dress is a woman who should perhaps be her mother Ceres, but bears the crescent moon normally associated with Diana. Pluto’s chariot is being drawn by two black horses through an ethereal almost fluid carpet of flowers. The horses and chariot are about to disappear into a black cleft in the earth to make their descent to Hades.

In 1631, Rembrandt moved his studio to Amsterdam, the centre of trade and business for the Dutch Republic, and growing rapidly from a population of about 50,000 in 1600 to exceed 200,000 in the 1660s. He started getting commissions to paint portraits of those enjoying success in the city.

Rembrandt painted his Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp in 1632, as an early commission soon after his arrival in Amsterdam. It’s a group portrait of distinguished members of the Surgeons’ Guild in their working environment, and a good example of his lucrative work. Portraits like this would typically be paid for by subscription of those included, often in proportion to their standing.

Rembrandt’s The Abduction of Europa (1632) isn’t well known today. It conforms to Ovid’s account in his Metamorphoses, but loses dramatic effect by placing the bolting bull in a dominant and very Dutch landscape, cluttered with Europa’s carriage, large trees, and a distant port.

His Philosopher in Meditation from 1632 shows the sinuous curves of a spiral staircase seemingly defying gravity as it rises to the storey above, and is one of his early interiors.

The young prophet Daniel (of lions’ den fame) was King Cyrus the Great’s confidant, according to the book of Daniel. When Cyrus asked Daniel why he didn’t worship the Persian god Bel (Baal), Daniel responded by saying that he worshipped a living god, not a mere idol. Cyrus then claimed that Bel too was a living god, and pointed to the offerings of food and wine that were placed before his statue, and were consumed each night. Daniel remarked cautiously that bronze statues do not eat, which for a moment threw Cyrus. But Daniel had exposed the deception of Bel’s priests.

In this painting of Daniel and Cyrus before the Idol Bel of 1633, Rembrandt has captured Cyrus, standing in the centre, pointing at the food and wine placed on the altar to Bel, whose huge idol is seen rather murkily at the upper right. Behind the modest figure of Daniel are some of the priests who maintained this deception.

Rembrandt painted this portrait of Bellona in 1633, when his career was flourishing. Given that she’s holding the Aegis normally associated with Minerva (Athena), I wonder whether there has been a misunderstanding here, but there’s no mention of the possibility that this might be Minerva instead.

His self-portrait from 1631-33 shows the artist in fancy dress with a large poodle, making it clear that he had truly arrived.

In 1634, Rembrandt became properly established in Amsterdam, when he was accepted as a member of Guild of Saint Luke, and married Saskia van Uylenburgh, daughter of a respected lawyer. The following year, the couple moved into a rented property with a view of the river. That December, she gave birth to their first child, a son, who lived for only two months.

Rembrandt and Saskia in the Parable of the Prodigal Son from about 1635, when the artist was just short of being thirty years old, shows the young wife sitting on his lap as he raises a large fluted glass of beer at the viewer.

With his artistic and commercial success, Rembrandt’s income rose rapidly. Like many successful Dutch citizens of the time, much of that income was spent on gathering possessions. In his case, these included a remarkable collection of Old Masters, including several paintings by Giorgione, objets d’arts, and even suits of armour. Some of these appear as props in his paintings.

Rembrandt’s Blinding of Samson from 1636 is an explicit depiction of the destruction of his eyes, as Delilah makes off behind with his hair and a pair of shears.

His outstanding painting of Belshazzar’s Feast was made in about 1635-38, when he was developing his distinctive techniques of depicting decorative metals, as shown in the detail below.

In the summer of 1638, Saskia gave birth to their second child, who died less than a month later.

The following year he followed fashion in painting this Still Life with Two Peacocks and a Girl (c 1639).

That Spring Rembrandt and his wife moved into their own house in one of the city’s more fashionable streets, among successful artists and dealers in art. To finance this purchase, the artist had to raise a substantial mortgage, which was to come back and haunt his later life, as I’ll describe in tomorrow’s conclusion.

Dante lost consciousness just before he was expecting to be ferried across the River Acheron in Charon’s boat, from Hell’s Gate to its First Circle.

Botticelli’s Map of Hell from 1480-90 shows these stages of their descent at the very top: highest are the woods through which Dante was wandering when he encountered the three wild beasts. At the left, Virgil led Dante down to the area in which the cowards are trapped, neither being allowed admittance to Heaven, nor to Hell. Charon’s boat then crosses the River Acheron, shown in blue, taking Dante and his guide Virgil to the First Circle of Limbo.

Dante is woken by thunder, and realises that he’s on the edge of the abyss that is Hell. Virgil leads him down into darkness, where there is no grief or pain, and explains that the multitude there never sinned at all, but none was baptised in faith as they had lived before the Christian era. This is where Virgil’s ghost now inhabits, for despite his merit and attainments, he never revered the Christian God.

Dante asks whether any of those in Limbo, as this circle is known, have ever been blessed and been able to leave. This allows Virgil to explain the Harrowing of Hell by Christ after his crucifixion. This occurred not long after Virgil’s death: following his crucifixion, Jesus Christ descended into Hell, where he reached the First Circle, blessed and liberated from it the many Old Testament figures who had been faithful to the God of the Jews, also known as Anastasis.

The descent of Christ into Limbo and his Harrowing of Hell was a popular theme in religious painting until the end of the Renaissance, and would have been familiar to Dante’s readers. Here is a small selection of some of the finest paintings of this, from 1530 to 1600.

Virgil then introduces the great classical writers: Homer, Horace the satirist, Ovid and Lucan. Together with Virgil, these five invite Dante to join them as the sixth among the ranks of great writers, in an ambitious piece of self-promotion.

The group walk on to the Dome of Light, and further to a castle surrounded by seven curtain walls and a moat. When they enter that they see many ancient heroes, including Electra, Hector, Aeneas, and other figures from classical history and legend. Next Dante notices a group of philosophers, including Socrates, Plato and others. Finally, he sees other learned figures from the past, including Euclid, Ptolemy and Hippocrates.

Here Dante and Virgil bid farewell to the spirits of those great figures as they move onward to the next circle.

The artists

Domenico di Pace Beccafumi (1486–1551) was one of the last of the Sienese School of Painting, which contrasted with the better-known Renaissance painting of Florence. He has been aptly summarised as “a mediaeval believer of miracles awaking in Renaissance reality.”

William Blake (1757–1827) was a British visionary painter and illustrator whose last and incomplete work was an illustrated edition of the Divine Comedy for the painter John Linnell. Most of his works shown in this series were created for that, although he did draw and paint scenes during his earlier career. I have a major series on his work here.

Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510) was one of the leading painters of the early Southern Renaissance, working in his native city of Florence. In addition to his huge egg tempera masterpieces of Primavera (c 1482) and The Birth of Venus (c 1485), he was a lifelong fan of Dante’s writings. He produced drawings that were engraved for the first printed edition of the Divine Comedy in 1481, but those weren’t successful, most copies only having two or three of the 19 that were engraved. He later began a manuscript illustrated edition on parchment, but few pages were ever fully illuminated.

Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568–1625) was the son of Pieter Brueghel the Elder, who specialised in floral still lifes. The painting shown above was made in collaboration with the figure painter Hans Rottenhammer, a relationship that lasted between 1595-1610. At the time of this painting, Brueghel had returned to Antwerp, and Rottenhammer was in Venice.

Pablo de Céspedes (1538–1608) was a Spanish polymath from Córdoba, who was an accomplished painter, poet and architect who worked for twenty years in Italy, largely because he fell foul of the Inquisition of Valladolid in Spain. He was also a linguist and theologian.

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Early in his career, he produced a complete set of seventy illustrations for translations of the Inferno, that were first published in 1857 and continue to be used. These were followed in 1867 by more illustrations for Purgatorio and Paradiso. This article looks at his paintings.

Hans Rottenhammer (1564–1625) was a German figure painter who worked in Italy from 1593-1606. Later during that period, when he was in Venice, he collaborated with Jan Brueghel the Elder on the work shown above. He was probably responsible for the early training of Adam Elsheimer, and for introducing him to the technique of painting on a small scale using oil on copper plate.

Jacopo Tintoretto (c 1518-1594) was one of the three grand masters working in Venice in the middle and late sixteenth century, alongside the more senior figure of Titian, and Paolo Veronese. Primarily a religious painter, I have looked in detail at his major works and biography. His painting shown above was made to accompany his Crucifixion for the church of San Cassiano in Venice.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

Robin Kirkpatrick (trans) (2012) Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, Penguin Classics. ISBN 978 0 141 19749 4.
Richard Lansing (ed) (2000) The Dante Encyclopedia, Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 87611 7.
Guy P Raffa (2009) The Complete Danteworlds, A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy, Chicago UP. ISBN 978 0 2267 0270 4.
Prue Shaw (2014) Reading Dante, From Here to Eternity, Liveright. ISBN 978 1 63149 006 4.

In the first of these two articles showing masterly landscape paintings of summer storms, I had reached John Constable in the early 1830s.

Of Constant Troyon’s early paintings the most outstanding must be The Approaching Storm from 1849. Set on a river worthy of Constable, two anglers appear to be readying themselves for the torrential rain heading towards them, while others still wander in the last patch of sunshine on the far bank.

Jules Noel’s Panorama of the Town of Dieppe (c 1865) shows a large picnic party on the cliffs overlooking the town of Dieppe on the coast of northern France. These families seem blissfully unaware of the dark clouds and heavy rain already over the land to the right.

One of the finest and most dramatic of Albert Bierstadt’s paintings from his second expedition to the West in 1863 is this of A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie from 1866. Its foreground shows a pastoral valley floor with a native American camp, in mottled light. Some people and their animals are seen making haste to return from the pastures to the shelter of the camp. A small rocky outcrop has trees straggling over it, which are silhouetted against the brilliant sunlight on the lake behind, in the middle distance.

Behind the lake the land rises sharply, with rock crags also bright in the sunshine. In the background the land is blanketed by indigo and black storm-clouds. Those are piled high, obscuring much of Mount Rosalie, but its ice-clad peaks show proud, high up above the storm, with patches of blue sky above and beyond them. A single large bird, an eagle perhaps, is seen in silhouette, high above the lake.

It was Volodymyr Orlovsky’s painting of Harvest on the steppe in Ukraine, in 1882, that apparently earned the artist’s promotion to Professor in the Imperial Academy.

Few artists ever get to witness tropical storms, but after his time painting winter storms at Cullercoats in England, Winslow Homer witnessed and painted this Hurricane, Bahamas in 1898.

In 1903, Gustav Klimt spent his summer holiday at Attersee with his partner’s family, where he painted this landscape of an Approaching Thunderstorm. Many of his other landscape paintings made during his summers away show no sky at all, but this is an exception.

Thunderstorm at Vernouillet is an atmospheric landscape painted by Pierre Bonnard in 1908, or the following year. Vernouillet is on the southern bank of the river Seine, midway between the centre of Paris and Monet’s property at Giverny.

The young Canadian artist and canoeist Tom Thomson excelled in rapid sketching in oils, with several witnessed accounts of him dashing off a painting in little more than fifteen minutes. As a result he was able to capture many transient effects, such as the passing thunderstorm in Thunderhead from 1912-13.

If you’re fortunate, the storm is soon gone, its humid air blows away, and summer returns.

Arkhyp Kuindzhi specialised in painting in spectacular light. After a Thunderstorm from 1879 is one of his oil sketches capturing the brilliant colour and light following heavy summer rain on the steppe.

As we near the grain harvest in the northern hemisphere, so come the summer storms. Just as the farmworkers have ventured out into the fields of dry, ripe wheat, the heavens above become inky black as towering clouds bring torrential rain and rolling thunder. This weekend we’re in for more than our fair share, in the company of many of the great landscape artists.

At the dawn of modern landscape painting, Giorgione’s The Tempest from about 1504-8 centres on an approaching storm. The sky is filled with inky dark clouds, and there’s a bolt of lightning in the distance. The figures here imply an underlying narrative, but today that can only be speculated.

Nicolas Poussin’s setting of a Landscape during a Thunderstorm with Pyramus and Thisbe (1651) shows the city of Babylon in the distance, along a picturesque and pastoral valley. But the peacefulness of this landscape has been transformed by the sudden arrival of a thunderstorm: the gusty wind is already bending the trees, and near the centre of the view a large branch has broken with its force. Two bolts of lightning make their way to the hills below.

There’s frantic activity in response not only to the storm, but to a lioness attacking a horse, whose rider has fallen. An adjacent horseman is about to thrust his spear into the back of the lioness, while another, further ahead, is driving cattle away from the scene. Others on foot, and a fourth horseman, are scurrying away, driven by the combination of the lioness and the imminent storm.

In the foreground, Pyramus lies dying, his sword at his side, and his blood flowing freely on the ground, down to a small pond. Thisbe has just emerged from sheltering in the cave, has run past the bloodied shawl at the right, and is about to reach the body of her lover.

Still attributed to Poussin’s pupil and brother-in-law Gaspard Dughet, this Landscape with Lightning from 1667-69 lacks the subtlety and finesse of the master himself, but shows a bolt of lightning striking ground and setting a fire in the countryside. In the foreground, a couple flee from among trees being shattered by the strong gusts brought by the storm.

The founding fathers of landscape painting in the Northern Renaissance weren’t to be outdone by those of the south: Aelbert Cuyp’s Thunderstorm over Dordrecht from about 1645 is amazingly effective and accurate, considering it was painted more than two centuries before anyone saw high-speed photographic images of lightning.

In Claude-Joseph Vernet’s series The Four Times of Day from 1757, by Midday the clouds of early morning have built into squally showers. While two people are fishing with nets, a couple with an infant and a dog, in the left foreground, are hurrying for shelter before heavy rain starts. Behind them a shepherd has brought their flock under a grove of trees. Seagulls are wheeling and soaring in the strengthening wind.

George Morland’s Before a Thunderstorm (1791) shows well the rising wind and threatening sky just before a summer storm strikes.

When he was only sixteen, in 1821, Samuel Palmer painted this watercolour sketch At Hailsham, Sussex: a Storm Approaching, a faithful representation of Cumulus congestus building in the distance.

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

John Constable’s half-size and well-developed study for Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows places an angler in the foreground, as a thunderstorm builds over the Wiltshire countryside behind. Sadly, the fisherman didn’t survive into Constable’s finished painting.

In the first of these two articles I showed paintings of Hercules (Heracles) brandishing a large olive-wood club and wearing a lion-skin, as a stereotype of the ultimate high-testosterone uncouth hero. That association was strong enough to make its way into some more Christian images.

In Frans Francken the Younger’s composite painting of Mankind’s Eternal Dilemma – The Choice Between Virtue and Vice from 1633, the upper section of Paradise sets heroes including Hercules, to the left of centre with his trademark club and lion-skin, in an idealised landscape. Above them is an angelic musical ensemble serenading the figures below. This clearly was a Paradise for the artist’s patron, not the common person.

Clubs also appeared in other examples of hand-to-hand combat drawn from classical mythology.

In Peter Paul Rubens’ finished painting of The Rape of Hippodame (Lapiths and Centaurs) (1636-38) the figure at the upper right is just about to bring his club down on this wedding feast that turned into a pitched battle.

Sebastiano Ricci’s Battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs from about 1705 uses multiplex narrative to tell the same story. In the left background, Hippodame is seen being carried away by Eurytus, and a centaur in the centre foreground is swinging his club at one of the Lapiths.

Although the original story of the death of Orpheus at the hands of Bacchantes has them club him with their thyrsi, more modern interpretations are content with ordinary clubs.

Louis Bouquet’s The Death of Orpheus (1925-39) transports this scene to a beach, where the naked Bacchantes are armed with clubs, and just starting to tear the body of Orpheus with their bare hands and teeth.

Some earlier paintings of Christian devils show them with clubs.

Painted in 1430-32, Stefano di Giovanni’s St Anthony Beaten by the Devils identifies the saint by his Tau crucifix. Three devils, clearly fallen angels by their wings, are beating him with clubs. Those devils are fairly conventional figures, part animal and part man, with horns.

In contrast, Hercules’ lion-skin developed different associations, and involved other species.

Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier’s romanticised view of The Siege of Paris from 1870 combines almost every symbol relevant to the city’s distress, and dresses the symbolic figure of Marianne in a lion-skin against a battle-worn flag.

By the end of the nineteenth century, animal skins had gone from the uncouth to the mildly erotic, as seen in several of John William Godward’s paintings of doing nothing, or Dolce Far Niente.

This first from 1897 returns to a classical Roman setting, and adds a brilliant green parakeet to accompany this woman on a tiger-skin, in her diaphonous dress.

Seven years later (in 1904), Godward painted his more complex version, also known as Sweet Idleness, or A Pompeian Fishpond. More modestly clad, his lone woman rests with her knees drawn up into a sleeping (near-foetal) position on another animal skin, with a peacock-feather fan in the foreground.

A couple of years after that (in 1906), Godward’s beautiful woman is stretched out on an animal skin on marble, a colour-co-ordinated garden and distant Mediterranean waterscape beyond: a far cry from the uncouth Hercules.

If you see a well-muscled man brandishing a large olive-wood club and wearing a lion-skin, you can be fairly certain he is Hercules, or Heracles if you prefer the original Greek. He’s the ultimate high-testosterone uncouth hero, who doesn’t understand why others wear fabrics, and relies on his club to settle all disputes. In this and tomorrow’s article I explore how reliably paintings meet that expectation, and who else wielded clubs and liked animal hide next to their skin.

One of the most unusual summaries of Hercules’ career is this mosaic from Llíria, Valencia, showing each of his twelve labours around its central panel. His club goes with him in every one except that in the centre, seen in the detail below.

There, in the midst of all his swashbuckling masculinity, Hercules is seen holding a distaff and spindle for spinning, and is dressed as a woman, while Queen Omphale sits on his Nemean lion-skin on her throne, clutching his club. This comes from a curious myth of role reversal and cross-dressing, in which Hercules served as a slave to the Queen of Lydia for a year as penalty for murdering Iphitus.

Bartholomeus Spranger’s Hercules and Omphale (c 1585) uses the same exchange of attributes, and plays openly with the eroticism of Omphale’s position. Note also the colour-coding of their skin.

Luigi Garzi’s Hercules and Omphale (c 1700-10) lets Hercules put his spinning gear behind him, as he entertains the court with a song and the tambourine. Omphale seems to be enjoying her new position on the lion-skin, while fondling his club in her left hand.

Byam Shaw ignores the figure of Hercules altogether, showing a triumphant and erotically-charged Omphale (1914) against a background of the twelve labours, in a remarkable reconfiguration of that ancient Roman mosaic.

Elsewhere, there are many depictions that identify the uncouth hero with his attributes.

In Hans Thoma’s Hercules Delivering Hesione (1890) Hercules stands on the beach in front of the early city of Troy, his trademark club in his right hand. A naked Telamon is busy keeping the sea monster at bay by throwing boulders at it, while Hercules is bargaining with the fair Hesione.

In about 1706, Sebastiano Ricci embroidered the story of Hercules Fighting with the Centaur Nessus showing the hero wearing his lion-skin, and his left hand grasping Nessus’ mouth, about to club the centaur to death, while a slightly bedraggled Deianeira watches in the background.

Noël Coypel, the father of the better-known history painter Antoine Coypel, painted Hercules Fighting Achelous in about 1667-69. This opts to show the pair during the first phase of their fight. In addition to wearing his lion-skin, Hercules wields his fearsome club.

Francisco de Zurbarán’s powerful Death of Hercules (1634) uses chiaroscuro as stark as any of Caravaggio’s to show a Christian martyrdom, with its victim staring up to heaven, commending his soul to God. He is wearing the poisoned shirt inadvertently given him by Deianeira, rather than his lion-skin, and his club rests at his feet.

The Renaissance modernised the art of the late Middle Ages with realistic images that strived to resemble what we actually see, rather than presenting a world of stereotypes and symbols. This is best seen by comparing paintings of a common theme spanning the period, here those of the Madonna and Child.

Cimabué’s Maestà was painted in egg tempera for the main altar of the church of Santa Trinita in Florence, between 1280-90. Little attempt is made to distinguish surface textures, although some use is made of lightness and pattern in fabrics to depict their folds. Faces are uniform and devoid of expression or emotion, most turned in directions determined by its structured composition. There’s no sign of any landscape or other background, and no impression of reality.

While Ghirlandaio’s Madonna and Child from about 1470-75 was still painted in egg tempera, it’s much more realistic in its approach to the figures and the folds in fabrics. Modelling of the figures is still restrained, and there’s no natural background, but its intent is clearly to resemble a real mother and her infant.

Raphael’s Madonna della Sedia (Madonna of the Chair) from 1513-14 shows a thoroughly real and natural mother with two infants, every surface texture rendered as in life, with wisps of hair, differentiation between types of fabric, and convincing expressions and postures.

Many of the changes seen here in the Renaissance can be elaborated as follows:

• surface texture of skin, hair and fabrics;
• individual faces expressing emotions;
• telling stories using body language;
• individual natural posture;
• realistic landscape backgrounds;
• three-dimensional perspective projection with controlled vanishing points;
• varied composition;
• the air of reality;
• use of oil paints;
• increasing production of easel paintings;
• references to both secular and classical literature;
• introduction of new genres such as landscapes and secular paintings;
• direct patronage;
• independent and secular masters.

Technically the Renaissance provided the painter with all the tools for painting anything that might be seen in life. However, the great majority of paintings were commissioned for religious use, so depicted motifs drawn from the Bible and other Christian writing.

One of the early and most skilled practitioners of oil painting was the brilliant but short-lived Venetian master Giorgione, who has the added distinction of painting what was probably the first landscape painting of the southern Renaissance.

Giorgione’s revolutionary landscape The Tempest from just after 1500 remains enigmatic today, and may have religious references, but it marked the start of a new and wholly secular genre.

Late in the Italian Renaissance, emphasis shifted from its birthplace Florence to other centres such as Bologna and, most of all, Venice, where the effects of colour (Italian colore) came to dominate form and design (Italian disegno).

Jacopo Tintoretto’s Crucifixion from 1565 is over 5 metres (17 feet) high, and 12 metres (40 feet) across, larger than many frescoes of the Renaissance. He makes use of this space with a narrative technique based on the popular ‘multiplex’ form: its single image shows events at more than a single point in time, in an ingenious and modern manner.

Naturally, the painting centres on Christ crucified, but the two thieves executed beside him are not shown, as would be traditional, already hanging from their crosses. Instead, to the right of Christ, the ‘bad’ thief is still being attached to his cross, which rests on the ground. To the left of Christ, the ‘good’ thief is just being raised to the upright position.

Tintoretto’s Annunciation is thought to have been painted even later, in about 1582. Its composition is unusual by any contemporary standards, with natural rendering of brickwork, a wicker chair, and a splendidly realistic carpenter’s yard at the left. This is coupled with an aerial swarm of infants, at the head of which is the dove of the Holy Ghost in a small mandorla. Christ’s origins are here very real, tangible, and contemporary, in stark contrast to most traditional depictions of this scene.

If any single workshop brought the Renaissance to a close and moved on to what has become termed the Baroque it’s that of the Carraccis, initially in Bologna, then in Rome.

Annibale Carracci’s Latona and the Lycian Peasants, probably from 1590-1620, is the first truly masterly painting of this myth told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and for once an easel painting on canvas rather than a fresco. Although not a religious theme, this drew on the other acceptable source of narratives at the time, classical myth.

If there’s one artist who clearly defined the start of a new era it was Caravaggio, who began his career in Milan, but transformed art when he was painting in Rome.

His portrait of Narcissus from 1594-96 demonstrates how the tools of realism could be used in thoroughly secular paintings, but still of classical myth.

Caravaggio wasn’t alone. Among those who adopted and developed his style, the Caravaggists, was Lavinia Fontana, who came from Bologna and worked at the height of her career in Rome. Her Judith with the Head of Holofernes from 1600 also contrasts completely with the tondo Madonna by Raphael at the start of this article.

There was, of course, much more to the Baroque than Caravaggism. In 1604-06, Annibale Carracci and Domenichino (also from Bologna) joined forces in the Palazzo Farnese in Rome to paint this fresco of Perseus and Phineas. As Perseus stands in the centre brandishing the Gorgon’s face towards his attackers, Andromeda and her parents shelter behind, shielding their eyes for safety. The Renaissance was in the past, and Florence was no longer the beacon that it had been.

Signs of change occurred earlier in the north, where the first tentative steps were made towards a broadening of genres.

It was probably Hans Memling (c 1340-1494) who painted one of the first still lifes, on the back of a panel bearing a portrait of a young man praying, in about 1485. It has been proposed that this was part of a diptych or triptych, and could have formed its back cover when folded.

His choice of jug and flowers confirms its religious nature: Christ’s monogram is prominent on the body of the jug, and each of the flowers has specific references. Lilies refer to the purity of the Virgin Mary, the irises to her roles as Queen of Heaven and in the Passion, and the small aquilegia flowers have associations with the Holy Spirit. The eastern pattern on the rug is so distinctive of the artist that these became referred to as Memling rugs.

Coming closer to what was soon to become the Dutch Republic, Pieter Bruegel the Elder founded a dynasty of Flemish artists who broke from the Renaissance mould and started depicting the everyday.

Two of his major paintings from 1565 were formative influences on what was to come in the Dutch Golden Age. The Harvesters is a complete account of the grain harvest in the Low Countries, and Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap below is a pure landscape.

There are no figures particularly close by, and those on the ice are not demonstrating the many different activities they could be undertaking. It also happens that this was one of the first paintings to show Netherlandish people on the ice in the winter, a theme that shortly became very popular, and whose influence extended throughout Europe, across centuries and styles.

By 1600 the techniques of depicting the real world were well understood, and all it required was an abundant trade in art materials including drying oils and pigments, an increasingly wealthy population, seemingly insatiable demand for paintings, and an army of painters. Those all came in the Dutch Republic.

Before I delve into painting media, it’s helpful to establish the terms I’m going to use. Although at their simplest paintings consist of a fairly flat and even surface with a layer of paint on it, in practice most have a more complex anatomy.

Earliest surviving paintings, such as these from around thirty-six millennia ago, in the Chauvet-Pont d’Arc Cave in the Ardèche, were simple applications of pigment to a stone surface. It’s a miracle that any have survived, given the lack of bonding between pigment and stone.

Fast-forward over thirty-five thousand years, and in 1570-72 Giorgio Vasari created something similar in his painting of Perseus and Andromeda consisting of pigment bound in a drying oil, applied to slate. The big difference is in his paint, which was developed over several centuries to form a strong bonded layer adhered to the surface of the rock.

Stone and walls make a robust support for a painting, but aren’t exactly portable unless they’re as small as Vasari’s sheet of slate. Alternatives were constructed from wood in panels, and could be painted on an easel rather than up a scaffold, hence these portable works of art are widely known as easel paintings, and use wood panel supports.

The next step in development was to apply a primer to the wooden panel to form a smooth surface to which the paint layer would bond better, forming the ground.

When Leonardo da Vinci abandoned his Adoration of the Magi as he left Florence in about 1482, he had applied little paint to its ground, on which he had already made extensive underdrawings and prepared tonal modelling for the paint layer he never completed.

Our easel painting now has a physical support, a purely mechanical task, and on that the ground on which the paint is applied. Those roles are distinct, even when a single surface such as a wall or sheet of paper fulfils both. Most traditional paintings by professional painters made in the last few centuries have been on supports of stretched canvas, which have been sized to protect their fibres, then had a white or tinted ground such as chalk bound to them.

Support and ground form the receiver, on which colour in the form of pigments has to be bound. Although it’s possible to get pigment to adhere to a suitably rough ground, part of the principle behind painting in pastels, the result isn’t durable, and clients and patrons are likely to be wary about paying for a painting that literally crumbles into dust in front of their eyes.

Not all paints contain pigments: some prefer soluble dyes instead. Generally dyes, often derived from plants, aren’t as durable. Pigments consist of large insoluble particles, as seen in the cross-section above, to protect them from physical damage, chemical reactions, and most importantly the adverse effects of exposure to light, which can cause their intensity to fade.

The goal of many paint systems is to trap these pigment particles in a solid layer formed by a chemical binder which is liquid when applied but hardens by the chemical process of polymerisation into a solid. In the case of oil paints, the binder is an oil that undergoes slow oxidation to form the polymer, a drying oil such as linseed obtained from the common flax plant.

The final component involved in a painting is one that should vanish during the process of applying the paint: a diluent or solvent used to thin the paint, and clean wet paint from brushes and the other tools used in the process. Diluents are often confused with binders, but they are usually opposites: an ideal diluent should evaporate quickly, leaving no residues and a robust if thin paint layer behind, for the binder to turn it into a strong, enduring and faithful record of what the artist intended.

In traditional oil painting, typical diluents are organic solvents such as turpentine and white spirit, used to spread a thin layer of drying oil binder and pigment particles. Remove most of the drying oil and use largely diluent, though, as in peinture à l’essence, used by Degas, and you can end up without any proper paint layer at all, with powdery pigment trying not to fall off.

Degas’ Danseuse dans sa loge (Dancer in her Dressing Room) (c 1879) is one of his experimental paintings using both pastel and peinture à l’essence applied to canvas.

In this respect, watercolours are strangely named. Oil paints rely on drying oils as their binder, but in watercolours the water is the diluent not the binder, which is gum arabic; many other painting methods also rely on water as diluent, but aren’t called watercolour as a result.

We finally end up with a rigid support, on which is the ground, that provides an adherent base for the paint layer, composed of pigment particles in a binder, that was originally thinned using a diluent. In most older paintings, those are then coated with layers of varnish intended to protect the surface of the paint layer.

Just like Giorgio Vasari with his oil painting on slate, there’s always someone who breaks conventions. This painting of Dandenongs from Heidelberg was made by Charles Conder on a sheet of wood from a cigar box. Conder was a member of a group of Australian artists who held a ‘9 by 5’ exhibition of paintings they had made on wooden cigar-box panels of 9 by 5 inches (23 x 13 cm) in size. Similar panels had been used extensively by Georges Seurat for his oil sketches, for which he had invented the term croquetons. They also resembled the small wood panels used by the Macchiaioli for their plein air oil sketches.

In thirty-six thousand years we have progressed from painting the walls of caves to sketching on a wooden cigar box.

Key terms

• easel painting, on a portable support rather than a wall or ceiling;
• support, a more or less rigid surface for a painting;
• ground, a priming layer applied to the support to form an adherent base for paint;
• paint layer, consisting of pigment particles in a binder, thinned during painting with a diluent;
• varnish, to protect the surface of the paint layer.

Dante has been rescued from three wild beasts by the ghost of Virgil, who leads him along the only possible route, taking them to the gate of Hell. Inscribed above that gate is a forbidding series of lines leaving the traveller in no doubt that they’re going to a place of everlasting pain and tortured souls. This culminates in the most famous line of the whole of the Divine Comedy:
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate
traditionally translated as Abandon hope all ye who enter here, but perhaps more faithfully as Leave behind all hope, you who enter, and is seen written in William Blake’s own hand below.

Virgil explains its meaning to Dante before the two enter. Dante is then struck by the terrible sounds that he hears, those of tormented sinners in Hell mixed with the noise of the first group of dead: those who have been refused entry to Hell or to Heaven, because of their cowardice in failing to choose between God and the Devil. They form a river of naked bodies drawn by a banner, their faces constantly stung by wasps and hornets, streaking them with blood and tears.

Among them is one who has been identified as Pope Celestine V, who resigned from office in 1294, and another candidate is Pontius Pilate, who refused to pass judgement on Christ.

Then Charon, an irascible old man with white hair and coal-black eyes, appears in his boat. He tells Dante to get away from the dead, as he won’t be carried across by him with those souls, and will have to arrange another crossing. Virgil intercedes to ensure that they too will be ferried across the marshy River Acheron to Hell.

Those souls destined for Hell rush to board the boat, with Charon sweeping them in using his oar to hit those who are slow. The boat then carries them across, as another load gathers on the shore ready for its return.

There is then a violent gust of wind and a red bolt of lightning, and Dante loses consciousness.

Although Dante doesn’t describe his crossing of the Acheron in Charon’s boat, this has been imagined by several painters.

In 1822, the young Eugène Delacroix painted one of his finest narrative works, The Barque of Dante, showing the pair crossing a stormy river Acheron in a very small boat. He painted this quickly, over an intense period of a little over two and a half months, just in time for submission to the Salon. Dante, wearing his distinctive scarlet chaperon (hat), holds his hand up as he leans back onto the shoulder of Virgil his guide. This has been interpreted as showing how, when we encounter challenges from the modern we should look to tradition for support.

This is one of the most remarkable paintings of the Inferno, as an early experiment with colour. In the detail below, water droplets on the bodies of those surrounding the boat contain at least three different colours: their reflected highlights are pure white, the rest of the body of the droplet and its trail are the dark green of the water below, and the droplet itself has a shadow of the same pink that Delacroix uses to shade flesh. Their overall effect is of an unusually three-dimensional and realistic droplet.

The artists

José Benlliure y Gil (1855–1937) was a Spanish painter who was born in Valencia but spent much of his working life in Rome, where he became the director of the Spanish Academy there. After painting small genre works, he turned to classical narratives including the painting shown here.

William Blake (1757–1827) was a British visionary painter and illustrator whose last and incomplete work was an illustrated edition of the Divine Comedy for the painter John Linnell. Most of his works shown in this series were created for that, although he did draw and paint scenes during his earlier career. I have a major series on his work here.

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) was a major French painter whose Romantic and painterly style laid the groundwork for the Impressionists. In addition to many fine easel works, he painted murals and was an accomplished lithographer too. Many of his paintings are narrative, and among the most famous is Liberty Leading the People from 1830. This article introduces a series featuring his major works.

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Early in his career, he produced a complete set of seventy illustrations for translations of the Inferno, first published in 1857 and continue to be used. These were followed in 1867 by more illustrations for Purgatorio and Paradiso. This article looks at his paintings.

Alexander Dmitrievich Litovchenko (1835-1890) was born in Kremenchuk, Ukraine, but spent most of his career painting historical events in Russia. His painting of Charon won him a gold medal.

Paolo Vetri (1855–1937) was a precocious Italian painter who was born in Sicily. He was a pupil of the great narrative artist Domenico Morelli, and completed several major murals as well as many easel paintings.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

Robin Kirkpatrick (trans) (2012) Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, Penguin Classics. ISBN 978 0 141 19749 4.
Richard Lansing (ed) (2000) The Dante Encyclopedia, Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 87611 7.
Guy P Raffa (2009) The Complete Danteworlds, A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy, Chicago UP. ISBN 978 0 2267 0270 4.
Prue Shaw (2014) Reading Dante, From Here to Eternity, Liveright. ISBN 978 1 63149 006 4.

Until the advent of chemistry in the eighteenth century, early in the Age of Enlightenment, the vast majority of pigments occurred in nature, even if the minerals or plant matter from which they were derived had to be specially processed. The first truly synthetic pigment was so ancient that it had been forgotten completely by the Middle Ages: Egyptian blue was originally made before about 3000 BCE by heating together powdered rocks and sand, but that was an exception. It wasn’t until the early years of the eighteenth century that a hydrated iron hexacyanoferrate complex soon known as Prussian blue was synthesized.

No one knows who first made Prussian blue, nor exactly when it was first synthesized. It seems to have appeared initially around 1704, and its origins have been attributed variously to Diesbach in Berlin, or Mak in Leipzig. For once its name is appropriate, as it was a product of the Prussian Empire. Its potential as a colourant was recognised by 1710 when it went on sale in Berlin, and by about 1724 it was being manufactured across Europe.

Among the earliest surviving oil paintings to use Prussian Blue is that by Adriaen van der Werff and Henrik van Limborch, of Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph. This was started by van der Werff before he died in 1722, and the paint containing Prussian blue pigment is thought to have been applied by him to the curtain at the upper left. After van der Werff’s death, his pupil Henrik van Limborch finished the painting between 1727-28.

Another early example of the proven use of Prussian blue is Antoine Watteau’s The Italian Comedians from about 1720.

Canaletto is one of the first Masters to have used the new pigment extensively. Grand Canal from Palazzo Balbi toward the Rialto from 1720-23 has been attributed to him as one of his earliest surviving works, and its blues have been found to contain Prussian blue.

Canaletto was quick to adopt the pigment for use in almost all his paintings, including this view of the Rio dei Mendicanti from 1723-24, above, and his famous The Stonemason’s Yard (c 1725), below.

As experience was gained in using this pigment, it became controversial. Some artists were confident that its colour was stable and didn’t change or fade, but others experienced problems as bad as or even worse than those of the notoriously fugitive indigo blue, which it had generally replaced. It has gradually become understood that adverse results of lightfastness testing (and experience in paintings) have depended on the mixture of Prussian blue with other colours, particularly with white paint, and the presence of impurities in the pigment.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, Prussian blue was widely used with a range of binding media, with the notable exception of fresco and other alkaline media with which it proved incompatible.

William Hogarth’s paintings in his Marriage A-la-Mode series have been found to contain both smalt and Prussian blues. In The Tête à Tête (c 1743), smalt has been found in the ornate carpet, and I suspect that the ornamental pillars behind the woman rely on Prussian blue, at least in part. Hogarth trained as Prussian blue came to the ascendant, and wouldn’t have painted much before it had become widely available.

Jean-Baptiste Perronneau’s A Girl with a Kitten from about 1743 is a fine example of the use of Prussian blue in pastels: the girl’s blue dress and the background have both been found to contain the pigment.

Prussian blue also became popular in water-based media. William Blake’s Lucia Carrying Dante in his Sleep, from his series depicting Dante’s Divine Comedy painted in watercolour between 1824-27, is a good example. In this and several other of his paintings, Blake used the pigment on its own and mixed with gamboge yellow in what was known as Prussian green.

Prussian blue pigment has been found in the blue passages in Whistler’s The Princess from the Land of Porcelain (1863-65), from his Peacock Room, shown above and in the detail below.

The use of different blue pigments varied markedly among the French Impressionists and their successors. Paul Cézanne and Georges Seurat appear to have used Prussian blue seldom if at all, but it’s well known in the work of Edgar Degas, Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh.

Although Monet’s Bathers at la Grenouillère (1869) contains cobalt blue in the brighter mid-blues of the water surface and details in the boats, darker blues towards the left, and in the clothing of some of the figures and their reflections, are almost certainly Prussian blue.

Vincent van Gogh’s portrait of La Mousmé from 1888 illustrates some of the difficulties of identifying pigment use. Its unusual title is derived from the Japanese word musume, meaning girl; at the time the French word was understood to mean an ‘easy’ girl.

Infra-red images demonstrate van Gogh’s use of at least two different blues, one of which has been identified as Prussian blue. The two (or more) blue pigments aren’t distributed evenly: on the girl’s jacket, the three blue stripes to the left of the row of buttons contain the most Prussian blue, while the three under her right armpit, which look darker, contain little or no Prussian blue. Van Gogh also mixed yellow with Prussian blue to form the green of the flowers she holds in her hand.

Prussian blue remained a popular pigment in oil and watercolour paints well into the twentieth century, and is still offered in commercial ranges. For many artists, though, it has been replaced by much more recent synthetic blue pigments, such as phthalocyanine (‘phthalo’) blue, introduced around 1970, and is seldom used in Prussian green.

Reference

Barbara H Berrie (1997) Artists’ Pigments, vol 3, ed Elisabeth West Fitzhugh, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 76 0.

Blue pigments used in painting include some of the oldest used by man, and others that led the change to modern synthetic pigments driven by the arrival of chemistry in the eighteenth century. This weekend I look at two examples, today the queen of pigments, ultramarine, and tomorrow the first synthetic chemical, Prussian blue.

Originally made by crushing and grinding the semi-precious stone lapis lazuli, the cost of ultramarine has exceeded that of gold. Seen in paintings, it produces a rich slightly reddish blue which stands the test of time, as distinctive and effective today as when it was first used. And its use has a history of unmasking fakes and forgeries.

The sole source of lapis lazuli in Europe and the West were quarries in Badakshan, described by Marco Polo and now in Afghanistan. It appears that wall paintings made around 507-554 CE adjacent to the great Buddahs of Bamiyan were the first to have used the mineral as a pigment. It was then used in early Persian miniatures, and in early Chinese and Indian paintings too. Tragically, these wall paintings in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, were damaged by the Taliban in 2001 when the two statues were destroyed, and their restoration has made little progress since.

The powdered pigment had made its way, first along the Silk Road, then by sea, to traders in Venice by about 1300. By the Renaissance, it was established as one of the most important and precious of all the pigments used in European art.

Because of its beauty and high cost, ultramarine blue was used for the robes of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary. Duccio’s panels from the Maestà Predella, including this of The Healing of the Man born Blind, show this tradition in its earliest years, around 1307-11. As a pigment, it proved practical in egg tempera as here, and in oils, watercolour, and fresco.

Ultramarine blue has been found in the van Eyck brothers’ Ghent Altarpiece from about 1432 (above), and particularly in its most famous panel, The Mystic Lamb, below.

Sandro Botticelli’s early tempera on panel painting Adoration of the Kings from about 1470, apparently made with Filippino Lippi, shows two different blue colours and purple. He painted the purple with an opaque underpainting of lead white tinted with a red lake derived from madder, to create pink. That was then glazed with quite coarse particles of ultramarine blue, so the pigment was thinly dispersed.

Peter Paul Rubens used ultramarine blue widely in his magnificent triptych now in Antwerp Cathedral. In its centre panel, Descent from the Cross (1612-14), it has been found combined with indigo and other pigments.

In van Dyck’s Charity from 1627-8, its most obvious use is in the blue cape, where ultramarine blue was painted over indigo, applied as both a tint and as a glaze over the top.

Visit any of the larger galleries with substantial collections of paintings made before 1700, and you will see works with drapery that I can only describe as arresting in the brilliance of their ultramarine blue. One stunning example in the National Gallery in London is Sassoferrato’s The Virgin in Prayer from 1640-50. The Virgin’s cloak looks as if it was painted only yesterday, and that colour makes you stop in your tracks and draws you into the painting, like no other pigment can.

Given its importance, and limited supply, considerable effort was devoted to ensuring that natural ultramarine blue was of the highest quality, and alternative sources were sought. Deposits in the Chilean Andes, and near Lake Baikal in Siberia, weren’t developed until the nineteenth century, and attempts to make synthetic ultramarine proved unsuccessful until 1828, when Jean Baptiste Guimet was awarded a prize of six thousand francs for his discovery. Almost simultaneously, C G Gmelin of Tübingen discovered a slightly different method.

Commercial production had started by 1830, and it became known as French ultramarine, to distinguish it from the natural pigment. Although almost identical in colour and performance, there are significant differences between natural and synthetic ultramarine when tested in the laboratory. This has enabled the examination of paintings to determine the source of their pigment, and has brought some surprises. These most often relate to later overpainting during restoration. For example, two areas of much later painting have been discovered in the van Eycks’ Ghent Altarpiece.

Examination of Édouard Manet’s Corner of a Café-Concert, from 1878-80, has shown that he used synthetic ultramarine in its blue passages, for example.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s The Umbrellas, from about 1881-86, uses synthetic ultramarine in a methodical fashion. The first stage in its painting used only cobalt blue, but in its second stage synthetic ultramarine was applied extensively.

Vincent van Gogh’s A Wheatfield, with Cypresses (1889) contains synthetic ultramarine in its deepest blues, and in some areas of green, although it’s unusual to find ultramarine mixed to form green. Before synthetic pigment became available, this would have been far too expensive a way of making any significant amount of green, but once much cheaper pigment came onto the market, that became more feasible, if still unusual.

The ability to distinguish synthetic ultramarine, which didn’t exist before about 1828, and the natural pigment has proved important in detecting some forgeries. Only the most ignorant would attempt to pass off a painting made with synthetic ultramarine as being very old, but a few fakes fell at that hurdle.

Han van Meegeren was far too knowledgeable and cunning to be caught so easily. He used natural ultramarine, for example when he sold The Men at Emmaus (1937) to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen as a Vermeer. What no one knew at the time was that his ultramarine looked genuine, but had been contaminated with a small amount of cobalt blue, which wasn’t discovered until 1803-04, and was first used as a pigment in 1806.

In 1960, the modern artist Yves Klein worked with the paint supplier Edouard Adam to ‘invent’ a paint he termed International Klein Blue (IKB). Although its formulation is a secret, it’s almost entirely synthetic ultramarine blue pigment in a polyvinyl acetate binder.

Like all the best queens, ultramarine blue has an unnerving habit of revealing the truth.

Reference

Joyce Plesters (1993) Artists’ Pigments, vol 2, ed Ashok Roy, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 75 3.