© Maxine Wallace/The Washington Post, via Getty Images
© Stephanie Lecocq/Reuters
Before the Dutch Golden Age, painting scenes at night had been restricted to religious and other narrative works, and very few if any landscapes had been depicted during the hours of darkness. After all, what’s the point of a view if it’s all dark and you can’t admire it?
The Dutch Republic changed that, in part because it was in Northern Europe, where for several months each year it’s mostly dark, and these nocturnes had novelty value. Among those of the middle class who could afford to, it was fashionable to cover the walls inside your house with paintings, and nocturnes, known then as maneschijntjes (moonshines), certainly brought variety to those collections.
Aelbert Cuyp’s view of the Sea by Moonlight from about 1648 is one of the earlier maritime nocturnes, something of a sub-sub-genre that must have been sought after. Unlike many others, this appears to be faithful to the original light.
During the 1640s, Aert van der Neer, a landscape painter in Amsterdam, started experimenting with his first nocturnes, and came to specialise in them.
His River View by Moonlight from about 1650-55 shows a bustling village on a river, with several boats under way and two windmills in the distance. The moon appears to be depicted faithfully in terms of size, without the common tendency to exaggerate that as a result of the Moon Illusion. Surviving studies for some of these nocturnes demonstrate that van der Neer initially sketched a landscape in daylight, and based the detail in his finished studio painting on that.
In about 1655, he painted this finely detailed River Landscape with Moonlight, with a larger moon lighting clouds dramatically.
Some of his best nocturnes are lit by a combination of the moon and the warmer light from a fire. This undated Estuary Landscape by Moonlight uses light from both sources to great effect. Landscape details are shown largely in silhouette, and lack internal detail except in the group gathered around the fire in the foreground. Van der Neer is unusually faithful to reality in this monochrome, the result of the severely impaired colour vision we all suffer in conditions of low light, when there’s insufficient to enable colour vision using the cone cells in the human retina.
At some stage, van der Neer started painting more destructive fires, including this undated Fire in Amsterdam by Night, leading to another sub-sub-genre that was taken up by others.
In mid 1652, Jan Abrahamsz Beerstraaten seems to have witnessed the destruction by fire of part of the centre of Amsterdam, which formed the basis of his studio painting of The Old Town Hall of Amsterdam on Fire, 7 July 1652 (1652-55). Local inhabitants are walking in orderly queues to boats, in which they escape from the scene. This may have been the same fire painted by van der Neer, above.
Egbert van der Poel specialised in these brandjes,, and probably painted more than any other artist in history. He moved to Delft in 1650, and four years later was a victim of the massive explosion in a gunpowder store there on 12 October 1654. That killed one of his children, and he moved again to Rotterdam.
It has been thought that most of van der Poel’s Fire of a Church with Staffage and Cattle from 1658 is a carefully-composed composite of his experiences. A small church at the edge of a village is well ablaze, and the inhabitants are abandoning it, taking all the possessions they can, including their horses and livestock, and leaving the fire to burn itself out.
Van der Poel’s undated A Fire at Night shows a similar scene and composition, set this time on the bank of a canal.
One established exception to this is van der Poel’s Fire in De Rijp of 1654, completed in 1662. This shows a fire that worked its way through more than eight hundred buildings in the town of De Rijp during the night of 6 January 1654. This left only the northern section of the town standing and inhabitable, and resulted in more casualties than did the more famous explosion in Delft at the end of that year.
Doubt is cast on this received account of van der Poel’s work by sketches such as this, of The Fire in the Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam, in 1645, made in front of the motif using washes with touches of pen and brown ink. Perhaps he was the first ‘ambulance chaser’ who travelled out to sketch fires, from which he later painted his famous brandjes in the studio.
For the non-specialist like Jacob van Ruisdael, winter was an ideal opportunity to explore the effect of negative images, where objects that would normally be seen as dark on a light background were reversed to white on dark.
Van Ruisdael painted at least two such landscapes featuring trees. Both are now known by the same name, and are believed to be from the same decade. This Winter Landscape (c 1660-70), in the Mauritshuis, picks out frosted leaves in the half-light of dusk or dawn, by a hamlet at the water’s edge. In the far distance, to the left of the buildings, there is a church with a spire.
The other version of Winter Landscape (c 1660-70) is in Birmingham, Alabama. With similar sky, cloud, lighting, and composition, the water here appears to have frozen over. The frost on the trees is just as delicately handled.
© Dado Ruvic/Reuters
Almost all who paint in oils use conventional brushes, but there’s a significant minority who sometimes, or frequently, use different tools to apply and shape the paint layer. Of those, the most popular are palette knives, generally used to move and mix paint on the palette. Others have used the other end of the brush stick to incise, or their fingers.
Marie Bashkirtseff’s painting of a class in the Académie Julien in Paris in 1881 demonstrates how oil painting should be done by the textbook. The artist, shown in her self-portrait in the centre foreground, is using a long-bladed palette knife to prepare the paint on her palette. At her feet, on an old sheet of newspaper, are her brushes, all with handles of typical length, and the pupil behind her is using a maul stick to rest her right hand while painting with her brush.
Gustave Courbet applied his paint using a palette knife for some of his paintings. This has been identified from the facture in some of his paintings of caves that he made from about 1864, including The Grotto of Sarrazine near Nans-sous-Sainte-Anne above.
Another enthusiast for painting with a knife was Auguste Renoir.
In 1866, Renoir painted his friend Jules Le Coeur and his Dogs in the Forest of Fontainebleau. This is unusual among his works, as it was preceded by two studies, and all three were made using the palette knife rather than brushes. This makes it most likely to have been painted before Renoir abandoned the knife and returned to the brush, by the middle of May 1866.
Renoir returned to the technique in The Mosque, also known as Arab Festival, in 1881. Small strokes of bright colour and energetic work with the palette knife give it a strong feeling of movement, and it so impressed Claude Monet that he bought it from Durand-Ruel in 1900.
Anna Althea Hills’ Fall, Orange County Park (1916) is a classic and highly accomplished plein air painting that appears to have been made with extensive and deft use of the knife, particularly in the foreground.
Perhaps the most famous artist who is known to have painted with his fingers is Leonardo da Vinci.
This Annunciation, painted in oil and tempera on a poplar panel, is generally agreed to be one of the earliest of Leonardo’s own surviving paintings. When it was painted is in greater doubt, but a suggestion of around 1473-75 seems most appropriate. There are numerous pentimenti, particularly in the head of the Virgin. Its perspective projection is marked in scores in its ground and Leonardo used his spontaneous and characteristic technique of fingerpainting in some of its passages.
Finally, some painters are well-known for their use of brushes with exceptionally long handles. These enabled them to stand back, sometimes almost on the opposite side of their studio, get an overall view of their canvas, and paint from the same distance as a viewer.
Like all plein air painters, Paul César Helleu (1859–1927) shown in John Singer Sargent’s An Out-of-Doors Study from about 1889, is using brushes with handles of modest length. His canvas is fairly small, and he’s working close-in while clutching a brace of brushes in his left hand. Some designed for use when painting in front of the motif have even shorter handles, but when back in the studio Helleu would almost certainly have opted for longer.
Whistler was renowned for using brushes with handles over one metre (39 inches) long, and appears to have used them when painting Symphony in White No. 1: The White Girl in 1862 on a canvas just over two metres (78 inches) tall. He reworked it between 1867-72 to make it more ‘spiritual’ and reduce its original realism.
Early in his career, Joaquín Sorolla established his reputation of painting ‘voraciously’, often using brushes with extremely long handles and large canvases. Although Sewing the Sail from 1896 may look a spontaneous study of the effects of dappled light, Sorolla composed this carefully with the aid of at least two drawings and a sketch, and given its 2.2 metre (87 inches) height, he was almost certainly using brushes of similar length.
© David Guttenfelder/The New York Times
© Billy Hickey for The New York Times
© Noam Galai/Getty Images
© Noam Galai/Getty Images
When a group of devils armed with long hooks threatens Dante, Virgil hurries him along towards the next rottenpocket in Hell. They work their way around some of the damage wrought by Christ’s harrowing of Hell following his crucifixion. With those devils still hanging around, they then reach a pit of boiling tar, in which the spirits of barrators are trapped. These had traded in public office and bought influence in courts of law.
The devils pull out one of the souls for Dante and Virgil to talk to, but quickly return to hacking with their hooks.
Unlike others, he springs free and escapes their lunges as he plunges back into the pitch.
Dante and Virgil leave the devils attacking other barrators, and walk on in silence. Dante reflects on one of Aesop’s fables about the frog, the rat and the hawk. He blames himself for the tormenting of the devils behind them, but as he looks back he sees them on the wing again heading towards them. As they cross into the next rottenpocket, they realise the pack of devils can’t pursue them beyond that point.
Next are hypocrites, who are dressed up in hooded habits like monks. Although those are coloured bright gold, they’re weighted with lead, forcing the hypocrites into eternal labour against the mass of their clothes.
Dante meets two Bolognese friars, Catalano de’ Malavolti and Loderingo degli Andalò, who formed a fake religious order. They point out a figure staked out naked on the ground, who is Caiaphas, the High Priest of Jerusalem who advised scribes and pharisees that Christ’s death would be a good solution.
Virgil moves Dante on towards the damaged crossing to the next rottenpocket for thieves. After negotiating their descent, Dante sees its pit full of snakes, binding the hands of the souls there and covering their naked bodies.
A snake strikes one of the sinners at the back of the neck, causing the ghost to burst into flames then turn into ash, which falls onto the ground and reconstitutes itself.
There they talk with one of the thieves by the name of Vanni Fucci, a black Guelph from Pistoia near Florence who had stolen holy objects from a chapel and betrayed an accomplice for execution in his place. The snakes then take charge of him, winding their coils around his neck and body, and putting him into a reptile straightjacket.
Dante and Virgil move on and meet a centaur.
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.
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. This article looks at his paintings.
John Flaxman (1755–1826) was a British sculptor and draughtsman who occasionally painted too. 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. He also appears to have drawn a set of illustrations for Dante’s Inferno in about 1808.
Bartolomeo Pinelli (1781-1835) was a Roman illustrator and engraver who provided illustrations for a great many books, and specialised in the city of Rome. He made 145 prints to illustrate Dante’s Divine Comedy, most probably in the early nineteenth century.
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
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.
© Karsten Moran for The New York Times
I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 328. Here are my solutions to them.
Schwabe’s painting shows a chain of angels emerging from a belfry.
Doré’s engraving shows The Demons Threaten Virgil, from his illustrations to Dante’s Inferno.
They are each (secret) agents: James Bond from Ian Fleming, Jason Bourne from Robert Ludlum, George Smiley from John le Carré, and Modesty Blaise from Peter O’Donnell.
They are each run by launchd from property lists in folders titled LaunchAngels (new in Tahoe), LaunchDaemons and LaunchAgents.
I look forward to your putting alternative cases.
© John P. Dessereau
In yesterday’s article I showed excerpts from two cycles of paintings of the journey of life, by Nicolas Poussin and Thomas Cole, and started the epic series of 34 images by Louis Janmot that constitute his Le Poème de l’âme (Poem of the Soul). The last painting of his depicted the child growing up in an idyllic country landscape in Spring.
The child’s family are at home during a thunderstorm, shown by flashes of lightning at the window. Grandmother reads a psalm to calm the spirit, while the mother and another young woman sit and sew. Father (a self-portrait at the age of thirty) looks on with concern. An even older woman, perhaps the great-grandmother, sits in the shadows near the window.
The couple have grown now, and find themselves walking along a path by the university. In the niches alongside the path are its professors, each offering false learning that might replace their faith. That learning is represented by the combination of papers and a lighted candle. In the niche closest to the viewer is the figure of death itself, its niche decorated with skeletons. The land is rocky and barren, with a wizened tree, where an owl is perched.
Still dressed in their gowns from their First Communion at church, the two sit together by a pond, with high mountain peaks in the distance. The boy is stroking a dove, a symbol of peace, while the girl strokes a panther, indicating tamed passions. They both hold a lily, for purity, which separates and unifies them.
In a revisit of Jacob’s Ladder, the pair fall asleep in the woods, and dream of a perpetual cycle of nine angels ascending and descending a staircase leading towards God in heaven. The angels each carry a symbol of the arts, such as a musical instrument.
The couple now face life’s challenges, symbolised by the ascent of a mountain, a task they accomplish together. So they achieve the ideals of life, both earthly and spiritual. This also indicates their exploration of space, and the world in which they live.
Later, when they have reached adulthood, she bids him farewell when she is called to ascend to heaven.
Now a man, returned to earth alone, his spirit back in heaven, he kneels before a wooden cross decorated with a garland of flowers that she left him. (It’s said this refers back to flowers she wore at their First Communion, but no such flowers appear in the paintings.) He pines for her memory, as breaks in the cloud cast bright sunlight down on patches of the earth.
Janmot’s story concludes in his series of charcoal drawings, where the man falls in love, but is abandoned. He then experiences doubt and falls into evil ways in an orgy. He suffers, and ages as a result of his sins, but his plight is taken by his mother to Jesus and the Virgin Mary in heaven for their intercession.
The intercession was successful, and a team led by an angel arrives to address the man’s plight. The woman’s corpse is despatched into the waves, perhaps in a form of burial at sea. The angel’s team consists of two other women, who sit and read from books held open by putti. At their feet are symbolic animals: a lion (strength), fox (cunning), and sheep (the sacrifice of Jesus Christ). Above them are three more putti, bearing symbolic objects including a large fish-hook, whose meaning is obscure.
The man is welcomed back at a heavenly Eucharist – the title is from the early words of the service, in Latin. Angels swing censors, there are rows of pious kings and clergy, and in the distance, descending a flight of steps, is the figure of Christ himself, bearing a lamb on his shoulders. The group at the right foreground contains the man’s soul, who looks directly at the viewer. With this, Janmot’s epic is concluded.
Just over a decade after Janmot completed that series of 34 images, Walter Crane condensed his account of the journey of life into a single painting.
Crane’s allegorical narrative of life as a bridge appears unique to him. It shows a newborn baby arriving in the hand of a winged angel in a white punt/gondola, left of centre. The baby is handed over to a mother or nurse, fed at the breast at the bottom left corner, walking up the steps, and learning at the top. Children play, then grow into young adults, and marry as they reach the top of the bridge. Throughout this runs the thread of life.
The mature adult in the middle of the bridge (by its keystone) then ages steadily, bearing the whole globe during the descent. He then gains a long white beard and walking stick during the descent into old age, finally dying, his body being placed in the black punt/gondola, where it is attended by the angel of death. Grieving relatives stand on the shore and make their farewells, one cutting the thread securing the boat to the shore with a pair of traditional scissors.
Crane explained the theme of his Bridge of Life (1884) as “fortune and fame pursued and ever eluding the grasp; til the crown perhaps is gained, but the burden of the intolerable work has to be borne.” It was first shown at the Grosvenor Gallery, then toured venues in the East End of London during a period of social and labour unrest.
My final series is the second of two Friezes of Life assembled by the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. He seems to have started thinking about this during the 1880s, but it wasn’t until the early 1890s that it crystallised in his personal notebooks. He talked about building them into a ‘symphony’ in early 1893, and by the end of that year exhibited his first self-contained series of images in Berlin, under the title A Human Life.
During 1893 and 1894, Munch painted most of the works that were to form his first Frieze of Life, exhibited in March 1895, in Ugo Barroccio’s gallery in Berlin. His own explanation is that “the paintings are moods, impressions of the life of the soul, and together they represent one aspect of the battle, between man and woman, that is called love” (Heller, in Wood, 1992).
Munch later assembled his second and mature version, titled Frieze: Cycle of Moments from Life, and exhibited it in Berlin in 1902. It then consisted of twenty-two paintings, arranged in four sections. Here I show a small selection of some of the better-known paintings from that.
The Boston version of Summer Night’s Dream (The Voice) (1893), included in the 1895 version of the Frieze, was here titled Evening Star. It shows Munch’s lover ‘Mrs Heiberg’ at the edge of the Borre Woods, to the north of Åsgårdstrand. This features a brilliant golden-yellow pillar of reflected moonlight on the fjord, forming a distinctive ‘i‘ that appears in other paintings. This work initiates a sequence in which Munch gives his personal account of the process of falling in love.
Evening on Karl Johan shows the crowd from his painting Anxiety in an autobiographical scene. During Munch’s affair with ‘Mrs Heiberg’, he had arranged to meet her on Karl Johans Gate, the long, straight main street in the centre of Oslo. As he waited for her, his anxiety grew, exacerbated by crowds of people walking towards him.
Munch’s later depiction of this greatly foreshortens the perspective of this section of the street from the Royal Palace towards the Storting (parliament building), a distance of around 300 metres. This packs the pedestrians together and, coupled with their nightmarish faces, enhances its troubling feeling of anxiety.
A later section closes with The Scream, showing the isolated figure of Munch before the distant city of Oslo, its fjord with ships at anchor, and the surrounding hills. As the artist’s notes explain:
I was walking along a path with two friends. The sun was setting. I felt a breath of melancholy. Suddenly the sky turned blood-red. I stopped and leant against the railing, deathly tired, looking out across flaming clouds that hung like – blood and a sword over the deep blue fjord and town. My friends walked on – I stood there trembling with anxiety, and I felt a great, infinite scream pass through nature.
By the Deathbed (1895) is Munch’s painting from memory of his sister Sophie resting in her deathbed in 1877, when she was 15 and the artist wasn’t quite 14 years old. She died of tuberculosis, an unfortunately common event at the time. Munch explained that, when painting from memory like this, he depicted only what he could remember, and was careful to avoid trying to add details he no longer saw.
Sophie is seen from her head, looking along her length to her feet, her figure compressed into almost nothing by extreme foreshortening. Her deathbed resembles the next step, in which her body will be laid out in a coffin prior to burial. More than half the painting is filled by the rest of the family, father with his hands clasped in intense prayer. At the right is the mother, who had died of tuberculosis herself nearly nine years earlier.
References
Janmot’s Le Poème de l’âme: Wikipedia (in French).
Janmot’s Poem of the Soul 1
Janmot’s Poem of the Soul 2
Janmot’s Poem of the Soul 3
Janmot’s Poem of the Soul 4
Munch’s Frieze of Life
The Munch Museum, Oslo.
Wood, Mara-Helen (ed) (1992) Edvard Munch, The Frieze of Life, National Gallery Publications. ISBN 978 1 857 09015 4.
Series paintings of times of the day and the seasons have been popular, but those trying to depict the whole of life are unusual and challenging. This weekend I look at some of the better attempts to tell the story of the journey of life. Because some of these series consist of more than five paintings, I here show selections of those longer accounts.
One of the earliest painted accounts of life is Nicolas Poussin’s series The Seven Sacraments. His first version of this was started in about 1636 as a commission for his patron and mentor Cassiano dal Pozzi, and was completed four years later.
The first in the series shows The Baptism of Christ, as an unusual example of a baptismal scene. The white dove of the Holy Spirit above the figure of Christ is one link across some of the others in the series.
The white dove reappears in Poussin’s genteel account of Marriage.
The series is completed by Extreme Unction, showing the sacrament being administered to a cadaveric man as his family are gathered around his deathbed.
Although several of William Hogarth’s series were biographical, such as his first two of A Harlot’s Progress (c 1731) and its compliment A Rake’s Progress (1732-5), none attempted to depict the whole journey of life from birth to death.
The next is probably Thomas Cole’s Voyage of Life, painted in 1839-42. Like Poussin before him, Cole wasn’t satisfied with painting this cycle of four phases. When he was in Rome in 1842, fearing that he wouldn’t see his series again, nor be allowed to exhibit it, he painted a second version, now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and shown here. He had already painted a precursor cycle, The Course of Empire, in 1833-36, telling the story of an idealised civilisation, inspired by Byron’s poem Pilgrimage (1812-8).
Cole’s first series The Voyage of Life was commissioned to show a Christian allegory of the stages of life. He divided this into childhood, youth, manhood, and old age.
Childhood establishes the scene: the lush coastal undercliff, rich in flowers and the vibrant green of vegetation. A boat has emerged from a large cave in the cliff, symbolising the mother’s birth canal and the process of birth. A young baby is standing in the boat, with an angel at its tiller. A carved angelic figure forming the prow holds out an hourglass as the symbol for time.
In Youth, the young man has taken the helm of the boat, leaving the angel on the bank. The morning light is bright, and the weather fair. The young man is navigating the boat along the river, through lush waterside meadows and avenues, towards a distant vision of a celestial temple. The coastal cliffs are now in the background on the right, and in the centre distance is a rocky mountain spire.
By Manhood, the hero has noticeably matured, and his boat is on a fast-flowing river just approaching dangerous rapids passing through a rocky chasm. It is now dusk, and the angel is watching over from a break in the dark and forboding clouds. The man no longer holds the tiller, indeed the rudder is missing altogether, but both hands are clasped in prayer, as he looks anxiously up towards the heavens. In the foreground on the right are twisted trees, splintered by storms, with autumnal leaves.
Old Age shows the man in the boat far older, bald and with a grey beard. His boat is now in placid waters at the coast again, making no way. The boat itself is battered, its figurehead missing. He sits in the boat talking with the angel, who beckons him up through a parting in the black clouds, to a distant angel, far up in the heavens, rising through beams of sunshine towards brightness at the top left.
The painter who came closest to creating an epic in his works must be Louis Janmot, whose series Le Poème de l’âme (Poem of the Soul) consists of no less than 34 images, of which the first eighteen are painted in oils, and the remaining sixteen are in charcoal. Miraculously, the complete series is still together in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, France. Although the captions don’t report it, each of the oil paintings is 130-145 cm in height, and 140-145 cm in width, although I have also seen them stated as being much larger, approximately 394 x 500 cm.
Like Blake and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Janmot was also an accomplished poet, and his series is accompanied by an epic poem of nearly three thousand lines. He had a deep Catholic faith, and both the poem and the paintings are framed within his beliefs.
The series opens in heaven, with the mystical formation of a human soul, shown in symbolic form as a baby. This takes place under the watch of the Holy Trinity, although the three figures surrounding the newborn soul include a woman who represents love. Around this tight group are seemingly endless ranks of angels.
The newborn soul is brought down to earth by its guardian angel. This view, midway between heaven and earth, shows the succession of newborn souls being taken down to earth in the centre, and the judgement of the dead taking place at the side. The souls of the virtuous are seen being accompanied back up to heaven by their guardian angels, at the left. On the right are those destined for hell.
Below, on the right, is the figure of Prometheus bound, being attacked by an eagle. Prometheus is a strange figure from classical mythology to appear in this series, but a strong symbol of eternal suffering.
This is set by the Lake of Moras, where the mother sits with the newborn soul on her lap. Its guardian angel is kneeling in prayer for the mother and the soul of her new child. This painting combines the images of the annunciation to the Virgin Mary, and the Virgin Mary with the infant Jesus, in a unique way.
As the child grows up, Janmot represents it as a duality of boy, shown here in pink, and girl, in white symbolising purity and innocence. The pair are shown at play, picking flowers, in an idyllic country landscape during the spring.
This mystical duality continues through most of the rest of the oil paintings. At times, the pair appear to be brother and sister, or even lovers, but as we will see in tomorrow’s sequel, in the end they represent the earthly body (boy) and the spirit (girl). They are usually colour-coded, the boy wearing pink, and the girl white.
Poussin’s Sacraments
Cole’s Voyage of Life
Janmot’s Poem of the Soul 1
Janmot’s Poem of the Soul 2
Janmot’s Poem of the Soul 3
Janmot’s Poem of the Soul 4
Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation.
3: James Bond, Jason Bourne, George Smiley, Modesty Blaise.
To help you cross-check your solutions, or confuse you further, there’s a common factor between them.
I’ll post my solutions first thing on Monday morning.
Please don’t post your solutions as comments here: it spoils it for others.
The appearance of new objects or unexpected phenomena in the sky was an event of great significance in the past, and often considered to be a portent of the future, good or bad. This article considers the few that were recorded in paintings, and starts with the most famous of all, the star of Bethlehem that appears in many depictions of the birth of Christ.
The linked stories of the birth of Christ in a shed at Bethlehem, and the subsequent adoration of the infant by three wise men, kings or Magi “from the east”, are among the most popular and enduring among paintings in the Christian canon. The outlines given in the Gospels of Luke, chapter 2, and Matthew, chapter 2, have conventionally become elaborated.
Three wise men had seen a new star, possibly a comet or an unusually bright planet, which they believed would lead them to the birth of a great prophet. They travelled by the guidance of that star, to arrive at Bethlehem. There they found the newborn Christ with Mary his mother, paid homage to him in the shed in which the holy family was lodging, and presented their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
Giotto’s Adoration of the Magi from about 1305 shows the star as a celestial ball of fire streaking across the sky, and the three wise men pay their respects to the newborn Christ and his mother.
Above Bosch’s view of the local Brabant countryside in his Adoration of the Magi of 1490-1500 he places a more modest and stationary star shining bright over its distant city, as shown in the detail below.
Blake’s version of the Adoration of the Kings is conventional in showing the three wise men presenting their gifts to Jesus and his parents. At the left, outside, shepherds are tending to their flocks of sheep beneath a stylised star, and at the right are the ox and ass.
There remains controversy over what celestial event might have occurred at the time.
Very few paintings show known events in the sky, and I know of only one depicting a full solar eclipse.
Although many painters, particularly the Impressionists, have shown fleeting effects of light and the occasional rainbow, Enrique Simonet took the opportunity of a solar eclipse on 30 August 1905 to paint his Eclipse (1905). This was visible across eastern and northern Spain between about 1300 and 1320 UTC, and this painting is one of its few remaining records.
Realistic paintings of comets are also rare, and unimpressive.
Generally acclaimed as William Dyce’s finest painting, Pegwell Bay, Kent – a Recollection of October 5th 1858 (c 1858) shows this bay on the Kent coast, during a family holiday visit: a coastal scene worked up into a large finished oil painting. Although not easily seen in this image, there’s a small point of light high in the middle of the sky which is Donati’s comet, not due to return until 3811. Couple that with the inclination of the sun and the state of the tide, and you should be able to place this view precisely in both time and space, and confirm that it does indeed show this bay on 5 October 1858.
A few paintings show impossible celestial events.
John Martin’s painting of The Deluge from 1834 has two points of reference: the Biblical account of the flood, and Martin’s personal belief in prior catastrophe. As the sciences became ascendant during the nineteenth century, some educated people believed that in the past there had been an alignment of the sun, earth, and moon, and the collision of a comet resulting in global flooding. This was promoted by the French natural scientist Baron Georges Cuvier, and subscribed to by Martin.
True to form, his painting is dark and apocalyptic: near the centre, tiny survivors are just about to be overwhelmed by an immense wave bearing down at them from the left and above. The misaligned sun and moon barely penetrate the dense cloud, and to the top right is a melée of rock avalanche and lightning bolt. This was awarded a gold medal at the Paris Salon of 1835.
Several of Paul Nash’s surrealist landscapes show the moon in its phases, among them Landscape of the Vernal Equinox (III) from 1944, which presents the impossible view of a full moon and the sun visible close together and just above the horizon.
In the autumn of 1888, Christian Krohg married Oda Engelhardt, his former pupil, in Oslo. Although their relationship appears to have been open and stormy at times, Krohg now had a partner and a family to paint.
In the summer of 1888, the Krohgs returned to Skagen in Denmark where he painted Oda Krohg (1888). Although not as clinical as his series of portraits of the Gaihede family there, he uses the same profile pose, with his subject looking straight ahead as if in an identity photograph. That contrasts with his informal and sketchy facture.
Krohg’s three-quarter length Portrait of the Painter Oda Krohg, née Lasson (1888) is a marked contrast. Although still quite formal in its composition, Oda is here shown in her role as a ‘princess of the Bohemians’ that sadly overshadowed her own art.
Over this period Krohg had been working on his next major painting, The Struggle for Existence, also translated as The Struggle for Survival (1889). It shows Karl Johan Street in Oslo in the depths of winter, almost deserted except for a tight-packed crowd of poor women and children queuing for free bread. This is the central street in the capital city, and three years later was to be the setting for Edvard Munch’s famous painting of Evening on Karl Johan Street.
These people are wrapped up in patched and tatty clothing, clutching baskets and other containers in which to put the food. A disembodied hand is passing a single bread roll out to them, from within the pillars at the left edge. That was yesterday’s bread; now stale, the baker is giving it away only because he cannot sell it. A policeman, wearing a heavy coat and fur hat, walks in the distance, down the middle of the icy street, detached from the scene.
On this pessimistic note, Krohg’s ‘naturalism’ or social realism came to an end.
The Krohgs spent the summer of 1889 not at Skagen, but in the coastal resort of Åsgårdstrand, about sixty miles (100 km) south of Oslo. Nearly ten years later, Edvard Munch was to buy a summer house here. The Krohgs’ son Per, their second child, was born there that summer, and was almost certainly the model for In the Bathtub (1889). This shows the ceremonial surrounding the bathing of a newborn baby, with the mother and women relatives providing endless advice and taking charge of the event.
In the autumn, the family travelled to Copenhagen, Denmark, where they lived until early summer of 1890. They made a short visit to France, where Krohg was awarded a bronze medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. At this time, he had been working as a journalist and teaching, particularly at the painting school run by Harriet Backer.
When he was living in Copenhagen, Krohg painted one of his few works in Impressionist style, View over Frederiksberg, Copenhagen (1890), but decided not to further pursue landscape painting.
Instead, Krohg painted some history of contemporary relevance. Returning to his seafaring theme, his next successful work was a period drama dear to the Nordic heart: Leiv Eirikson Discovering America (1893). Leif Erikson was Nordic and had probably been one of the Norse inhabitants of Iceland between about 970-1020. The son of Erik the Red, who colonised Greenland, Leif visited Norway in about 999, and according to the Icelandic Sagas went on later to discover Newfoundland in Canada. When Krohg painted this, no archaeological evidence had been discovered to support the sagas, and that didn’t follow until 1960.
Krohg’s choice of motif drew on growing contemporary desire for complete independence of Norway from Sweden, and referred to the many Norwegians who had migrated to a better life in the US.
Probably painted in the same year, Krohg’s 17th of May 1893 was an even bolder statement about Norway’s nationhood. The seventeenth of May had been increasingly celebrated as Constitution Day since the signing of the national constitution in 1814. Not only is this painting full of Norwegian people, but the Norwegian flag shown lacks the ‘herring salad’ badge marking the union of Norway with Sweden, a clear indication of his feelings about independence.
From the autumn of 1893, Krohg was away from home almost constantly. He first went to Copenhagen, then on to Berlin and Paris. He stayed in Skagen for his last summer there in 1894 before returning to Oslo.
In 1895, he painted one of his more enigmatic works, a throwback to his social narratives, and something of a ‘problem picture’: Eyewitnesses. It’s nighttime in a living room. Two fishermen stand in front of a door, still wearing their soaked and soiled oilskins, and appear to have entered the room straight after coming ashore from the sea. One stares in shock towards the viewer, the other looks down and away. Both appear full of unease, silent and immobile.
At the right, a young woman is standing, leaning forward towards the men, as if listening to them. She looks anxious, with her hands clasped in front of her chest. Behind her an oil lamp burns brightly, there are the leaves of a large potted plant, and a couple of paintings on the wall behind a large blue settee.
One possible reading is that the men have brought news of the loss at sea of the woman’s husband, an event of which they were eyewitnesses.
In the coming years Krohg was to return to the sea in his paintings.
References
Skagens Museum, Denmark
Øystein Sjåstad (2017) Christian Krohg’s Naturalism, U Washington Press. ISBN 978 0 295 74206 9.
Before the Dutch Golden Age, paintings of everyday life, now widely termed genre paintings, were seldom seen. That changed in the Dutch Republic, when they became among the most popular, if not the majority. Several of the best known artists of this period specialised in them, among them Gerard ter Borch (1617–1681) who made himself something of an international career as a result.
Ter Borch was born in the city of Zwolle, well to the east of Amsterdam. As his father was also an artist with the same name, he’s sometimes distinguished as Gerard ter Borch the Younger. He had already started to travel in 1632, when he was training in Amsterdam, and for the next twenty years or so he painted in England, Germany, France, Spain and Italy.
For the thirty years between 1618-1648, central Europe had been engulfed in a bitter war between the Habsburg states, including the Holy Roman Empire and Spain, and their enemies, including the Dutch Republic. Ter Borch’s magnificent painting of The Ratification of the Treaty of Münster, 15 May 1648 (1648) recorded the moment that the Thirty Years War ended, with the ratification of this treaty between the Dutch Republic and Spain. It also marked the birth of the Dutch Republic as an independent country.
The artist even seized the opportunity to include himself among the ranks of dignitaries: he is at the far left, with long hair and looking directly at the viewer. Although this may look a large and grand work, ter Borch painted it on copper, and it is little larger than a miniature.
But most of his surviving works are portraits and interior scenes of everyday life.
The Messenger, popularly know as Unwelcome News, from 1653, develops what came to be one of his favourite themes. The young man at the left is still booted and spurred from riding to deliver a message to this couple. Slung over his shoulder is a trumpet, to announce his arrival and importance. The recipient wears a shiny breastplate and riding boots, and is taken aback at the news. His wife leans on her husband’s thigh, her face looking serious.
The scene is the front room of a house in the Golden Age. Behind them is a traditional bed (typical in living areas at the time), with some of their possessions resting on a table between the couple and their bed. Hanging up on a bedpost is the husband’s sword, and behind them is a gun and powder horn. Is the letter news of his recall to military service, perhaps? Will he soon have to ride away from his wife, leaving her to bring up their family?
At about the same time, ter Borch painted A Maid Milking a Cow in a Barn (c 1652-54), incorporating its own still life of everyday farming objects including a winnowing sieve and an axe.
Mother Combing the Hair of Her Child (c 1652-53) shows a regular domestic routine, expressed more bluntly in its alternative title of Hunting for Lice. The mother is looking intently at her young daughter’s hair for traces of lice and nits, and running a fine-tooth comb through it to remove any.
Three Figures Conversing in an Interior (c 1653-55) is another of his narrative genre works, and more popularly known as Paternal Admonition. Standing with her back to us, wearing a plush going-out dress, is the daughter. To her left is a table, on which there is a small reading stand with books, almost certainly including a Bible. Her parents are young, and they too are fashionably dressed. Her mother appears to be drinking from a glass, but her father is at the very least cautioning his daughter, if not giving her a thorough dressing-down. He wears a sword at his side. Behind them is a large bed, and to the right the family dog looks on from the gloom.
Ter Borch’s half-sister Gesina, herself a painter, appears to have been his model for Woman Writing a Letter (c 1655), which makes obvious his connection with Vermeer. Move this woman to a desk lit through windows at the left, light her surroundings, and you have a painting very similar to some of Vermeer’s. This painting shows a heavy decorated table cover pushed back to make room for the quill, inkpot, and letter. Behind the woman is her bed, surrounded by heavy drapery, and at the lower right is the brilliant red flash of the seat.
The Spinner is dated to about 1655, but may well have been the pendant to Mother Combing the Hair of Her Child (c 1652-53), and uses the same model. Here she looks intently at her work, a small dog on her lap.
Long before its value in preventing scurvy was realised in 1747, or it was carbonated even later, still cloudy lemonade had become a popular soft drink. Extensive trade links of the Dutch Republic made this drink available to the middle classes, as celebrated in ter Borch’s The Glass of Lemonade (1655-60).
A fashionably-dressed young man is helping to prepare a glass of lemonade for a young woman, who is equally open about her love of fashionable clothing. Behind her is the woman’s nurse or maid, who is having to comfort her through the excitement of the experience. They’re surrounded by a contemporary Dutch interior, with the inevitable bed lurking in the dark at the right, a small but heavily-built wooden table to the right, and a lighter-weight table at the lower left.
The Letter from about 1660-62 returns to his favourite theme of the reading and writing of letters. Two young women are working together, apparently to write a reply to the letter which is being read by the woman on the right. A boy, perhaps their younger brother, has just brought in a tray bearing an ornate pitcher of drink. In front, a small dog is curled up asleep on a stool.
Ter Borch’s backgrounds become lighter in his later work, as shown in The Music Lesson from about 1668. A teacher stands over a young woman, who is learning to play the lute. By this time, the basic lute had become extended to accommodate additional strings for a wider register. This is often referred to as a theorbo, although in modern terminology it’s probably more of an archlute, and seems to have been fashionable in the Dutch Republic at this time. Resting on the table is a cello, and asleep on a chair is a small dog. Note that the room still contains a bed in the background.
Just as mothers had to check their children for parasites in the hair, so pet owners had to remove fleas from their pets. Ter Borch’s late painting of A Boy with his Dog, also known as The Flea-Catcher (after 1666), shows this, in fairly barren surroundings.
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