© The New York Times
© Doug Mills/The New York Times
Following her story of the transformation of Hippomenes and Atalanta, Venus resumes the account of her affair with Adonis, whom she had warned of the dangers of lions and savage beasts.
John William Waterhouse’s The Awakening of Adonis was completed in 1899 but wasn’t shown to the public until the following year, when it was hung at the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition. One of a series of his works telling stories of classical myths, it received great critical praise. Although Waterhouse shows an early moment in Adonis’s affair with Venus, where she’s the active partner, he hints at the outcome with a small group of red anemone flowers by his side. Those contrast with the white anemones on much of the rest of the grass.
Annibale Carracci’s Venus and Adonis from about 1595, three centuries before Waterhouse’s painting, is a superb painting of Venus, her winged son Cupid, and Adonis. The latter has his bow in his left hand, and his hounds by his side, as if about to go hunting. Carracci shows Cupid with an arrow in his left hand, and there’s a small red wound between Venus’s breasts, implying this is the moment that she fell in love with Adonis.
Paolo Veronese shows a later moment in the relationship between Venus and Adonis (c 1580), with Adonis asleep on his lover’s lap, and Cupid fondling the hounds. You can hear Cupid’s mother whispering forcefully to her son, telling him to restrain the dog from rushing forward, licking the face of Adonis, and waking him up. Veronese, as with most later artists, dresses Adonis in red, symbolising the blood that will be shed when he dies.
Titian takes us further into Ovid’s story, in his earlier painting Venus and Adonis, from about 1555-60. With the young Cupid asleep, cradled in a tree, Adonis wants to go hunting. He has his spear in his right hand, and his hounds on leashes held in his left. But Venus is terrified of what will happen, restraining him and telling the story of Hippomenes and Atalanta.
Peter Paul Rubens skilfully reversed Titian’s composition in his Venus and Adonis from the early seventeenth century. Adonis is now trying to depart to the left with his back to the viewer, bringing the beauty of Venus into full view, and strengthening its triangular composition. It also provides a natural place for Cupid, holding onto Adonis’s leg to stop him from going to his death. Cupid’s quiver, left on the ground behind him, is a reminder of the origin of the relationship.
Once Venus had left in her chariot drawn by swans, Adonis flouted her warning, and took his hounds out to hunt wild boar. They quickly found the scent of one, at which Adonis threw his spear. The spear struck the boar a glancing blow, and it was able to shake the weapon loose. As the young man was running away in fear, the injured boar charged at him, and gored him deeply in his groin.
Adonis lay dying from his wounds on a patch of yellow sand as Venus passed by in her chariot, on her way to Cyprus. She heard his groans of agony, stopped, and found him almost dead in pools of his own blood. She tore her clothes in grief, beat her breast, and cursed the Fates. She resolved to make a permanent memorial to him in the form of the blood-red anemone flower, and his blood was transformed into those flowers.
The manner of Adonis’s fatal wounding is seen as poetic justice: those who live by the sword, die by the sword, and the retribution for his adulterous relationship with the goddess Venus, Vulcan’s wife, is to be gored in the groin. This was clearly no scene for the visual explicitness of a painting.
Hendrik Goltzius painted this breathtakingly foreshortened projection of the Dying Adonis (1609) on a square canvas stood on one corner, to frame the figure tightly. A token splash of blood on his thigh is matched by crimson anemone flowers, although Venus hasn’t yet arrived on the scene, and is at the apex, still in her chariot. Beside Adonis is his spear, although there’s no sign of blood on its tip.
In or just before 1614, Rubens made this oil sketch of Venus Mourning Adonis, a more complex composition with the addition of three Graces, and the young Cupid at the right.
Rubens’ finished Death of Adonis was completed in 1614, and retains the same composition. A rather portly Venus cradles her lover’s head as the Graces weep in grief with her. Rubens has been more generous with the young man’s blood, which is splashed around his crotch and spills out onto the ground, where the hounds are sniffing it. The fateful spear rests under Adonis’s legs.
I particularly like Cornelis Holsteyn’s Venus and Cupid Lamenting the Dead Adonis from 1647. Although he’s coy about showing much blood, his arrangement of Adonis’s body is novel, and his use of colour apt. Venus sheds real tears as she’s about to sweep her lover into her arms, and in the distance is the shadow of a wild boar with the hounds in chase.
Marcantonio Franceschini is one of the few artists to show The Metamorphosis of the Dead Adonis, in this painting from about 1700. Venus is sprinkling a jar of nectar over the corpse of her lover, and anemones are already bursting into bloom.
With that, Ovid closes book ten of his Metamorphoses.
© Dustin Chambers for The New York Times
如题
一直在使用 iterm2 ，配合 alfred 的 terminalFinder 插件，选中文件夹后执行 fi 以新窗口打开对应的终端
今天看周刊下了个 Ghostty ，找了好多资料，似乎 Ghostty 不支持 AppleScript ，无法通过 terminalFinder 打开？
我又想到了 finder 用右键快速操作，open with Ghostty
Login
for i in "$@"
do
open -a "/Applications/Ghostty.app" "$f"
done
试了一下也不奏效，或者大伙有更好的方式吗，finder 里快速打开终端真的对我真的很重要，不然就用回去 iterm2 了
I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 289. Here are my solutions to them.
The most affordable Mac ever (Apple’s tagline for it) at under $500 (its starting price was $499) has just shrunk further (the original Mac mini, released on 11 January 2005, in its latest M4 incarnation is even smaller).
Apple’s most personal device yet (Apple’s tagline for it) came in April (although announced the previous September, it was released on 24 April 2015) with San Francisco Compact (the face in Apple’s new system font designed for use on it).
With four fonts (it came with just Times, Helvetica, Courier and Symbol with PostScript) and a canon inside (the print engine was made by Canon), it co-founded a desktop revolution (with the Mac and Aldus PageMaker, it founded the Desktop Publishing revolution when it was released on 1 March 1985).
I look forward to your putting alternative cases.
In this the second of the pair of articles showing paintings exploring the physical and optical properties of winter ice, I resume my account in 1883, after Impressionism had started to sweep across Europe.
The Norwegian artist Frits Thaulow was one of the Nordic Impressionists who met in Skagen, Denmark. During the 1880s he developed what came to dominate the paintings of his later career, optical effects on the surface of rivers. He painted this scene of Winter at the River Simoa in 1883. A lone woman, dressed quite lightly for the conditions, is rowing her tiny boat over the quietly flowing river, toward the tumbledowns on the other side. The surface of the river shows the glassy ripples so common on semi-turbulent water, and the effect on the reflections is visibly complex. The distant side of the river is also partly frozen, breaking its reflections further.
Thaulow’s Spring Thaw from 1887 captures perfectly the peculiar softness of such scenes in early spring, as the meltwater is still icy cold and ice remains around its edges.
Emile Claus’s dazzling view of a small group of skaters in The Ice Birds (1891) was inspired by a contemporary novella, and shows the flooded swampy area near Waregem when frozen over in winter. Claus draws a distinction here between the less reflective surface of snow, and the ice that’s richly coloured in the winter sunlight.
Another Norwegian artist, Jahn Ekenæs here demonstrates that even in the bitter Nordic winters, the washing still had to be done, and only one of the women in his Women Doing Laundry Through a Hole in the Ice (1891) is wearing anything on her hands. Broken blocks of ice in the right foreground demonstrate its thickness, although that’s barely adequate to support the horse and sledge in safety.
One of Lesser Ury’s more conventional motifs, his beautiful pastel of Tiergarten in Winter from 1892 shows the large park to the west of the Brandenburger Tor in Berlin, with its blue river frozen over and a good covering of snow.
Hans Andersen Brendekilde’s Melting Snow from 1895 is a wonderful depiction of a harsh winter in the country. An elderly couple are doing the outside jobs in typically grey and murky weather, in the backyard of their thatched smallholding. He has walked down to fetch a pail of water from a hole in the ice on the river. Around it the ice is discoloured from contaminants in the water and surely not fit to drink.
During the early New Year of 1898, Eugène Jansson painted Riddarfjärden. A Stockholm Study from his studio, with ghostly blue ice covering much of the water below. A small steam vessel is making its way along the ice-free channel towards the foreground.
When Lovis Corinth lived and worked in Berlin, he too painted the occasional urban landscape of the city, including this wintry Ice Rink in the Berlin Tiergarten from 1909, where Berliners are skating on frozen lakes in the city’s zoo.
A couple of years later, at the other end of the earth, Edward Wilson’s watercolour of The Great Ice Barrier – looking east from Cape Crozier was painted in the austral summer, on 4 January 1911. This shows small groups of penguins on the ice cliffs at the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf in the Antarctic.
Back in the Northern Hemisphere, the young Canadian artist Tom Thomson painted After the Sleet Storm in his studio during the winter of 1915-16, from oil sketches he had made in front of the motif. This shows the beautiful effects not of frost as such but of sleet frozen onto the canopies of birch trees, in the winter half-light. Pale pinks and blues shown on the trees here are reminiscent of spring blossom.
Thomson’s Snow in October (1916-17) is another well-known studio painting that Thomson made the following winter. Its fine geometric reticulations of frozen white canopies are a surprise, and an opportunity for the artist to use subtle colour and patterns in its shadows.
It’s high time to return indoors and warm up with a glass of mulled wine.
Now we’re into January, the proper winter weather should be here. It’s time to don our duvet jackets, woolly hats and mittens and go out to see lakes and rivers transformed from their usual liquid state into solid ice. This weekend I tour the world in search of those paintings seizing this opportunity to explore the physical and optical properties of ice in nature, in this article up to the advent of Impressionism in the late nineteenth century, and tomorrow from then until the First World War.
Among the best-known of winter paintings, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap (1565) was copied repeatedly by his son Pieter, and by others in the family workshop. At least sixty copies are believed to have been made, one dated as late as 1626, sixty years after the original. This is among the early landscapes showing people walking or skating on a frozen river, and to the right of the canoe-like boat a small group is engaged in the popular game of colf. As is usual with many rivers, the ice here has a pale ochre tinge.
Aert van der Neer’s beautifully-lit Sports on a Frozen River (c 1660) includes several playing colf, an antecedent of golf that was also played during the warmer months, but was most distinctively played on frozen rivers and canals. The reflection of the low sun on the ice is particularly well shown here, giving the ice a polished sheen.
Scenes of frozen rivers and canals became increasingly popular during the Golden Age. Although Aelbert Cuyp doesn’t appear to have painted many of these, his Ice Scene Before the Huis te Merwede near Dordrecht from about 1655 is among the finest. Notable here are his foreground reflections on the mirror-like surface, and the wonderful sky with its warm clouds. The castle seen here was built to the south-east of Dordrecht in the early fourteenth century, and ruined a hundred years later.
Jacob van Ruisdael painted several seasonal landscapes, including two similar versions of Winter Landscape (c 1660-70). This is the Mauritshuis version, which is perhaps slightly preferable to that in Birmingham, Alabama, although both show similar finely detailed frost on the trees and vegetation, heightened by the darkness of the ice and sky.
Caspar Wolf painted this finished version of The Geltenbach Falls in the Lauenen Valley with an Ice Bridge in about 1778, from what appears to have been a sketch made en plein air. Although not particularly early for a plein air oil sketch, given the logistic problems associated with working outdoors in oils in this remote rural location, it’s quite an achievement. These falls were little-known at this time, but when nearby Gstaad became an internationally-known spa town in the nineteenth century, they were added to many tourist itineraries.
In 1839, François-Auguste Biard travelled with a French expedition to Spitsbergen and Lappland. The only painting from this expedition that I’ve been able to locate is this view From Magdalena Bay, Spitsbergen, apparently made in oils in front of the motif, despite its considerable detail. Although much of the sea is shown unfrozen, there are several small bluish icebergs and ice covering the shallows along the coast.
Two years later, Biard completed Magdalena Bay; View from the Tombeaux Peninsula, to the North of Spitsbergen, Effect of the Aurora Borealis. This was exhibited in the Salon of that year, and again at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1855. Lit by the eery light of the aurora is a small group of survivors, who are not mentioned in the title. Five rest on the snow in the foreground, all but one apparently already dead, and there is wreckage down among the heavier sea ice behind them. One person’s footsteps lead up to the viewpoint of the artist.
Johan Jongkind’s fine View of Maassluis in Winter from 1848 is a good example of his early work. Following the long tradition of landscape painting in the Netherlands, he sets his horizon low and paints a wonderful winter sky. Underneath that, the locals are skating along a frozen canal, which has both rutted areas and some that are more polished.
Jongkind revisited this theme in 1873, when he painted this Canal in Holland in Winter with his mature rough facture.
Although now exceptionally unusual, during the nineteenth century and earlier the River Thames in London often froze solid for long periods most winters. This afforded James Whistler the chance to paint The Thames in Ice in 1860, with its monochrome relieved only by earth browns. It’s thoroughly painterly, and its details appear to have been sketched in quickly, suggesting it might have been painted in front of the motif. However, it’s a relatively large canvas, and Whistler is known to have painted from memory in the studio.
In 1869, the marine artist William Bradford travelled on board the steamship Panther on an expedition to Greenland. An Arctic Summer: Boring Through the Pack in Melville Bay (1871) shows their ship working its way through pack ice close to the west coast of Greenland. Melville Bay is a huge bay on the island’s north-west coast, and an important area for whaling fleets in the nineteenth century.
© Trisha Mukherjee
Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation.
1: The most affordable Mac ever at under $500 has just shrunk further.
2: Apple’s most personal device yet came in April with San Francisco Compact.
3: With four fonts and a canon inside, it co-founded a desktop revolution.
As this is the first of the New Year, each solution consists of a product name and the year of its release.
I’ll post my solutions first thing on Monday morning.
Please don’t post your solutions as comments here: it spoils it for others.
It might seem extraordinary today, but the first Macs with Motorola 68000 processors couldn’t add two floating point numbers directly in their CPU. As with other early processors, they handled integers, not floating point, and that’s one reason why many features such as display coordinates started off using integers rather than floating point as they do today.
Of course the Mac and other computers could perform floating point calculations, but that required the use of maths routines in software libraries. Others had been implementing floating point support in hardware: for example, Intel started developing its own maths coprocessor the 8087 in 1977, and that became available to accompany its 8086 processor, but at that time Motorola didn’t have any equivalent.
Apple hired a young mathematician to define and implement what became known as the Standard Apple Numerics Environment or SANE, for Apple II, III, Lisa and Mac product lines, and it was SANE that formed the basis for Motorola’s 68881 maths coprocessor for its 68020 CPU in 1984. At the same time, the IEEE was standardising floating point maths for computing, and in 1985 published its first version of IEEE 754.
SANE was built into the first Mac 64K ROM, and when Macs started to come with 68020 CPUs and 68881 coprocessors, in the Macintosh II of 1987, they ran their floating point routines on the 68881 or its successor the 68882. In 1991, the first Quadra came with a Motorola 68040 and its integrated floating point unit, although as late as 1995 Apple was still releasing new Macs that lacked any hardware support for floating point maths. The most complete description of SANE is in a printed account published by Addison-Wesley, the second edition dating from 1988.
The change to PowerPC processors in 1994 brought an end to SANE, replacing it with PowerPC Numerics, which differed in many of its details. Floating point support in PowerPC CPUs included additional instructions to support Apple’s new standard. The period of transition was covered by providing SANE for backward compatibility with apps that had been built for Motorola 68K processors, and encouraging developers to rebuild their apps to use the PowerPC’s new Numerics. Tom Pittman and John Neil produced and marketed PowerFPU, a control panel for Power Macs, that ran 68K floating point code in emulation.
From 1996, the AIM Alliance of Apple, IBM and Motorola developed extensions to the PowerPC instruction set to support vector processing. Known variously as AltiVec, VMX for Vector Multimedia Extension, and Apple’s Velocity Engine, it was used to accelerate QuickTime and Quartz, when it was introduced in Mac OS X. Those extensions handle both integer and floating point in registers that are 128-bit wide to pack in multiple values for its operations. Velocity Engine was supported by Power Macs with G4 and G5 processors, from 1999 onwards.
When Macs changed architecture to use Intel CPUs, those had integral floating point support, including x87 maths co-processor emulation and Intel’s Streaming SIMD Extensions, SSE, providing a replacement for features in the PowerPC. From 2003, in Mac OS 10.3 Panther, Apple had collected its more advanced numerical and vector support into the Accelerate framework, covering signal processing, image processing, linear algebra with BLAS/LAPACK, vector maths and more.
The transition to Intel wasn’t as seamless as might have appeared though, because of differences that might at first look subtle. For instance, PowerPC floating point support included a single, fused operation to multiply and add, but Intel CPUs performed the operations separately, which could accumulate additional rounding error. Apple warned “that in cases involving catastrophic cancellation, this may give results that are vastly different after the addition or subtraction has completed.”
As Intel Macs developed, they acquired increasingly capable GPUs that offered an alternative for some floating point calculations. OpenCL was introduced in 2009 to facilitate this, and in 2015, with OS X 10.11 El Capitan, Apple added support for its own GPU programming using the Metal API. That has evolved since, with Metal 2 introduced in macOS 10.13 High Sierra, and subsequent enhancements.
From the first M1 chip, Apple silicon has put floating point performance to the fore. All the old variables that had originally been coded as integers have now become floating point, requiring fast and accurate scalar, vector and matrix support. CPU cores, even Efficiency cores, include extensive scalar instructions, with Arm’s NEON vector processing. GPUs support Metal 3, and matrix operations are catered for in a dedicated neural engine and an undocumented matrix coprocessor, the AMX. The latest M4 chip adds support for Arm’s SME matrix extensions in its ARMv9.2-A instruction set, although those are thought to be executed by the AMX.
While most of those are supported directly, access to the neural engine and (prior to the M4) the AMX coprocessor have been limited. It’s believed that appropriate functions in the Accelerate and related frameworks use whatever hardware is most appropriate.
Floating point calculations, often using very large matrices, are a key part of modern neural networks and both Machine Learning and Apple/Artificial Intelligence. Apple added support for a new floating point format, bfloat16, to Metal in 2023, and in its CPU core instruction set with the M2.
In the 40 years since the 128K Mac, crunching numbers has come a long way, thanks to Apple’s dedicated teams of mathematician-engineers.
One of the eternal problems when working with floating point numbers in hex is their encoding. Converting IEEE 754 hex format into decimal expressed in engineering notation is fairly arcane. My free Mints includes a floating point explorer, to convert between 32- and 64-bit floating point and decimal engineering/scientific formats.
PowerFPU, a brief account by Tom Pittman
IEEE 754 at Wikipedia
Inside Macintosh: PowerPC Numerics on the Internet Archive
Velocity Engine on the Internet Archive
SSE Performance Programming and the early Accelerate framework, on the Internet Archive
Accelerate framework (current)
Metal calculations on a GPU (current)
© Librado Romero/The New York Times
© Pool photo by Matias J Ocner
The magpie in its various species is common throughout much of the world, and in Europe has become associated with various folk tales and behaviours. A member of the family Corvidae (crows), it’s smart and capable of near-human skills such as working in teams and playing games. There are long-held associations with both good and evil, and an old English nursery rhyme starting “One for sorrow, two for joy” to express that ambivalence. They also have a justified reputation for collecting shiny objects, another of their human behaviours.
Although an everyday species, magpies are surprisingly popular in paintings, albeit in cameo appearances rather than as stars. One association in classical myth is with the nine daughters of King Pierus, the Pierides, who were turned into birds after being defeated by the Muses in a contest of song. While they’re often said to have become magpies, that’s now considered erroneous, and they were actually turned into jays.
Hendrick van Balen’s Minerva and the Nine Muses (c 1610) shows all the key figures involved. The nine Muses are seated, forming a small orchestra with their contemporary rather than classical instruments. Minerva, at the left, is being engaged by a tenth woman, whose identity isn’t clear. In the far distance, just beyond a waterfall, Pegasus is about to take off from a high cliff. Above there are two magpies, implying the imminent arrival of the Pierides.
From the early Northern Renaissance onwards, magpies feature in several prominent European paintings.
Out in the garden, midway between their knees, in Jan van Eyck’s Madonna of Chancellor Rolin from about 1435, there are two magpies, presumably here signifying joy. They’re shown in the detail below.
Another appears on the exterior tondo of Hieronymus Bosch’s Wayfarer triptych from 1500-10. This shows the figure of a travelling man in the foreground, against a countryside background with a single tumbledown building. To the right is a small field gate and a tree, behind which is a single magpie on the ground, and a cow. This could be ‘one for sorrow’ given in the rhyme.
In Jacopo Tintoretto’s Susannah and the Elders from about 1555, immediately above her head is a magpie, presumably for its association with mischief and theft. This is clearer in the detail below.
The associations in Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Magpie on the Gallows (1568) are darker still.
It has been suggested that this painting may allude to popular proverbs, such as ‘dancing on the gallows’ meaning mocking the state, or the folk role of the magpie as a gossip (and Ovid’s story of the Pierides), and gossip as being life-endangering in times of political tension. The magpie is shown in the detail below.
Magpies are capable of speaking, although not as well as parrots. I’m unsure whether that’s Alessandro Magnasco’s reference in his unusual painting of The Tame Magpie (Teaching the Magpie to Sing) from about 1707. Against a backdrop of ruins, a motley assortment of misfits and the poor are seen watching the young man in the centre trying to teach the tame magpie on the barrels to sing.
Around 1870, Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro painted many snow scenes. One of Monet’s best-known is paradoxically The Magpie (1868-9), where the bird is probably the smallest and least conspicuous part of the whole motif.
A magpie also makes a cameo appearance in Luc-Olivier Merson’s marvellous painting of The Wolf of Agubbio from 1877. Set in the town’s central piazza, it’s a cold winter’s day, so cold that the waters of its grand fountain are frozen as they cascade over its stonework. As the townspeople go about their business, there’s the large wolf of its title with a prominent halo, standing at the door of the butcher’s shop. Leaning out from that door, the butcher is handing a piece of meat to the wolf. In the details are a menagerie of creatures, including a magpie in the entrance to the butcher’s, as seen in the detail below.
After Ovid has told the bizarre myth of the birth of Adonis, he inserts a more straightforward tale about a couple who race against one another, and their unfortunate fate.
Adonis grew up to be a most beautiful young man. When Cupid was kissing his mother Venus, one of his arrows grazed her breast, and set her heart on fire for the young Adonis. Venus shunned her place with the gods, and spent her time on earth with Adonis. She warned him to keep clear of wild beasts, in order to remain safe. When he questioned that she told him the story of the race between Hippomenes and Atalanta.
As a girl, Atalanta always outran the boys, but had been told by an oracle that she shouldn’t marry. If she didn’t refuse a husband’s kisses, then she’d be deprived of her self. She therefore lived alone, and issued the challenge that she would only marry the man who was faster than her, and beat her in a running race.
Hippomenes was the great-grandson of Neptune, a fast runner, and when he saw Atalanta’s lithe body, fancied he might be able to beat her, and so win her hand in marriage. When he saw her run, though, he realised how fast and beautiful she really was, and challenged her. After she had looked him over, Atalanta was no longer sure that she wanted to win, wondering whether she might marry him. But she was mindful of the prophecy, and left in a quandary.
Hippomenes prayed anxiously to Cytherea (Venus), seeking her help in his challenge. She gave him three golden apples from a tree in Cyprus, and instructed him how to use them to gain an advantage over Atalanta.
The race was started with the sound of trumpets, and the two shot off at an astonishing pace. Atalanta slowed every now and again to drop back and look at Hippomenes, but reminding herself of the prophecy she accelerated ahead. Hippomenes then threw the first of his golden apples, which Atalanta stopped to pick up. This allowed Hippomenes to pass her, but she soon caught him up and resumed the lead. He repeated this with the second golden apple, and again Atalanta stopped to retrieve it, lost her lead, and caught it back up.
Tintoretto’s Race of Hippomenes from 1541-42 is the last of the series of myths that he painted early in his career. Although he painted a fine foreshortened figure of Hippomenes, in omitting his opponent and the crucial golden apples, he has only hinted at the original story.
Guido Reni’s Hippomenes and Atalanta from 1618—19 shows Atalanta picking up the second of the golden apples. Devoid of extraneous details, with its spectators shown only as tokens, the artist concentrates on the forms of the runners, specifically the alignment of their limbs and bodies. He includes some wonderful echoes, such as in their right arms, and his right hand with her left hand. There are also some effective contrasts, between their legs and the alignment of torsos, that emphasise their relative motion.
Jacob Peter Gowy’s Hippomenes and Atalanta (1635-37) also chooses this moment, but distracts more with the crowd of onlookers waving and cheering behind. The runners’ body language isn’t as clear, and their juxtaposition has some awkward moments: it looks as if Hippomenes’ left foot is kicking Atalanta’s left side, for example. But there’s more excitement and the atmosphere of a contest here.
Nicolas Colombel, in his Hippomenes and Atalanta from about 1680, has set the pair into an elaborate landscape, and added a winged Cupid to hint at the stakes. Atalanta is again just about to collect the second golden apple, and there’s less ambiguity in the overlap between the two figures.
Noël Hallé’s The Race between Hippomenes and Atalanta (1762-65) goes even further, in almost every respect. The scene is now of almost epic proportions, spread across a panoramic canvas. At the right are the local dignitaries, and a winged Cupid as a statue, watching on. Atalanta is still picking up the second golden apple, with Hippomenes holding the third behind him, in his right hand, as if he’s getting ready to drop it.
On the last lap, Hippomenes threw the third apple even further away. Venus intervened and forced Atalanta to chase the apple further still, and made it heavier to impede her progress. This allowed Hippomenes to win the race, and claim her as his prize.
Hippomenes failed to give thanks to Venus for her intervention, angering the goddess. When the couple were travelling back a few days later, Venus filled Hippomenes with desire for Atalanta, as the couple were passing by a temple to Cybele, beside which was an old shrine in a grotto. There Hippomenes made love to Atalanta, so defiling that shrine and offending Cybele. For their desecration of a holy place, Atalanta and Hippomenes were transformed into the lions that now draw Cybele’s chariot. Venus finally completes her story by telling Adonis that this is the reason to beware of lions and other savage beasts.
In showing the race, none of the artists gives us a hint of the couple’s eventual fate. It takes Antoine-François Callet’s magnificent Spring, or Zephyr and Flora Crowning Cybele (1780-81), now adorning the ceiling of the Galerie d’Apollon in the Louvre, to show the two lions drawing Cybele’s chariot, and bring closure to the story.
Each year I celebrate the lives and works of artists with anniversaries. This coming year there’s a host of major artists, from the pioneering woman painter Sofonisba Anguissola to John Singer Sargent. Here’s the crowded calendar for the coming twelve months.
8 January: in 1925, George Wesley Bellows died. Born in 1882 and brought up in Columbus, Ohio, he was a co-founder of the Ashcan School with his gritty views of life in New York during the early twentieth century, and after the First World War became famous for painting boxing contests.
13 January: in 1625, Jan Brueghel the Elder died. He was born in 1568, son of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and specialised in landscapes and floral still lifes. He collaborated with his friend Peter Paul Rubens in some of the finest paintings of the early seventeenth century.
13 March: in 1825, the Norwegian landscape painter Hans Fredrik Gude was born. He trained in Düsseldorf, and returned there to teach later, and then in Karlsruhe. In addition to magnificent views of Norway, he painted in Wales and Scotland, and died in 1903.
14 April: in 1925, John Singer Sargent died. He was born in 1856, and trained, worked and lived for much of his life in Europe, first as a sought-after portraitist in Paris, then in London. One of the most prolific and brilliant oil and watercolour artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he had a particular affection for Venice.
17 April: in 1825, Henry Fuseli died. Born in 1741 as Johann Heinrich Füssli in Zürich, Switzerland, he fled to England in 1765, where he established his reputation. He specialised in ‘Gothic’ narratives, and was appointed Professor of Painting in the Royal Academy.
9 May: in 1825, James Collinson was born. He was a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but resigned when he considered it was bringing Christianity into disrepute. He remained an outsider afterwards, and died in 1881.
8 July: in 1925, Robert Polhill Bevan died. Born in 1865, he trained in Paris and was invited to join the Camden Town Group by Walter Sickert. He had a particular interest in the remaining working horses in London, and painted their final years.
17 July: in 1925, Lovis Corinth died. Born Franz Heinrich Louis Corinth in 1858, in a village near what’s now Kaliningrad, he trained in Munich, and painted there and in Berlin. He was a founder member of first the Munich Secession then the Berlin Secession. When at the peak of his career in 1911 he suffered a major stroke, but successfully returned to painting.
28 July: in 1925, Léon Augustin Lhermitte died. Born in 1844, he trained in Paris and immediately specialised in painting rural life in realist style, and established an international reputation.
16 October: in 1925, the Norwegian painter Christian Krohg died. Born in 1852, he trained in Karlsruhe under Hans Gude, then in Berlin. He joined the Nordic Impressionists in Skagen, Denmark, and became a prolific social realist. He also wrote and worked as a journalist, and lived much of his career in Oslo, where he became the first director and professor of the State Academy of Art.
16 November: in 1625, Sofonisba Anguissola died. She was born in 1532 in Cremona, Lombardy, and became one of the first women artists to train in Italy. She enjoyed a long and highly successful career as a portrait painter, and even advised the young Anthony van Dyck.
20 November: in 1625, Paulus Potter was baptised. He was born into an artistic family, and was trained in his father’s workshop. He became one of the first specialist animal artists, but died from tuberculosis in 1654 at the age of only 28.
29 December: in 1925, Félix Vallotton died. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1865, he trained in Paris, and initially painted in a detailed realist style. He joined the Nabis, then afterwards painted a series of strange domestic interiors, followed by transcendental landscapes.
29 December: in 1825, Jacques-Louis David died. He was born in Paris in 1748, where he trained and rose to become the leading Neoclassical artist. He became involved with the French Revolution, and was close to Robespierre and other leaders, for which he was later imprisoned. He then aligned with Napoleon, and following his fall from power, David went into exile in Brussels.
I hope that you’ll join me in celebrating the lives and works of these painters in the coming year, and wish you a happy and successful New Year.
The second half of 2024 celebrated the bicentenary of the French artist Eugène Boudin, who more than anyone laid the foundations of Impressionism, both in acting as the young Claude Monet’s teacher and mentor, and pioneering its changes.
Boudin’s The Beach at Villerville from 1864 is a wonderful example of his loose oil paintings of beach scenes on the north French coast, set under a dusk sky.
200th anniversary of Eugène Boudin: Pioneer of Impressionism 1
200th anniversary of Eugène Boudin: Pioneer of Impressionism 2
Over these six months I have tried to gather a more accurate overview of rural life and agriculture between 1500-1930, in a series titled The Real Country. This draws together insights into how those changed as cities grew and the countryside became depopulated but increasingly productive. Contemporary paintings have some fascinating stories to tell, as seen in this copy of Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus from about 1558.
Although its landscape is fictitious, the ploughman in the foreground appears true to life, and his plough typical of much of Europe at that time, as shown in the detail below.
At the very front of the plough is a small jockey wheel, behind which is a vertical metal blade, the coulter or skeith, whose task is to cut into the ground just ahead of the share, a wooden board that turns the surface of the earth to one side. The effect on the ground is to cut furrows into its surface and turn the soil onto ridges. When repeated five or more times over the course of the autumn and winter, this could build ridges high enough for the water to drain into the furrows, and coupled with the action of ground frost could break up even heavy clays into a tilth ready for sowing in the Spring.
Another interesting detail revealed in Brueghel’s painting is how the course of the plough curves, swinging wide to make the turn. As tracks alongside those ploughed strips changed into basic roads, and were then paved or tarmacked in the twentieth century, they retained the curved course of the plough in winding country lanes.
Later in the series, I showed examples of paintings of what are today unusual crops.
Emile Claus here shows Flax Harvesting in 1904, near his cottage in East Flanders, Belgium. Flax is a crop of particular relevance to painting, as its seeds are crushed and processed to generate linseed oil, the main drying oil used in oil paint, and the fibres of the rest of the plant are turned into linen, to form the canvases on which that paint is applied.
More recent paintings grant us views deep into history. The Norwegian artist Harriet Backer is little-known outside the Nordic countries, but painted several views inside country churches that merit wider exposure.
Of the many wonderful later paintings that she made of church interiors, the finest must be Uvdal Stave Church (1909).
Stave churches were once numerous throughout Europe, but are now only common in rural Norway. Their construction is based on high internal posts (staves) giving them a characteristic tall, peaked appearance. Uvdal is a particularly good example, dating from around 1168. As with many old churches, its interior has been extensively painted and decorated, and this has been allowed to remain, unlike many painted churches in Britain which suffered removal of all such decoration.
Backer’s richly-coloured view of the interior of the church is lit from windows behind its pulpit, throwing the brightest light on the altar. The walls and ceiling are covered with images and decorations, which she sketches in, manipulating the level of detail to control their distraction. Slightly to the left of centre the main stave is decorated with rich blues, divides the canvas, but affords us the view up to the brightly lit altar. To the left of the stave a woman, dressed in her Sunday finest, sits reading outside the stalls.
Harriet Backer’s Nordic Light: to 1889
Harriet Backer’s Nordic Light: 1890-1932
I had long put off compiling a series covering the multitude of paintings of the canals of Venice, and finally published them for the period 1825-1910.
Grand Canal, the Rialto in the Distance – Sunrise (1828) is one of Richard Parkes Bonington’s finest oil paintings, made in the studio from graphite and other sketches from 1826. This painting has quite commonly been described as showing sunset, but as the view faces almost due east, must have been set in the early morning.
Canals of Venice: 1825-1870
Canals of Venice: 1875-1895
Canals of Venice: 1895-1903
Canals of Venice: 1903-1910
Another outstanding artist who is little-known outside her native country is the Canadian Emily Carr. My small selection of her paintings forms a series of five articles.
In Carr’s late Dancing Sunlight (1937-40), vortexes of brushstrokes have replaced all solid form. Trees, light, foliage, even the sky have been swept into those strokes sweeping across the canvas like a whirlwind. She had earlier been absorbed by abstract art, but had continued to represent real objects using techniques that restructured them rather than abstracting.
First totems 1892-1911
Haida 1912-1913
1914-1930
Sculptural form 1931-1936
Tombstones 1937-1945
Throughout the year I have added more themes to my compendium of articles to aid the reading of visual art. Sometimes these bring surprises, as they did in discovering one of the earliest depictions of a mermaid in European art, in a Christian religious painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder, from 1518-20.
Cranach’s Saint Christopher shows the saint with his back and legs flexed as he bears the infant Christ on his left shoulder. In the foreground is an unusual putto-mermaid with a long coiled fish tail.
Late in the year, I commemorated the centenary of the death of the German artist Hans Thoma.
Thoma developed his own distinctive mythology, as seen in this fascinating painting of Wondrous Birds completed in 1892. The birds shown here aren’t storks or cranes, but are based on the grey heron, a common sight across much of the countryside of Europe. There are various myths and legends associated with storks and cranes, but I’m not aware of any for the heron.
Commemorating the centenary of the death of Hans Thoma: 1, to 1885
Commemorating the centenary of the death of Hans Thoma: 2, from 1886
Most recently I marked the centenary of the death of the great French painter of childhood, Henri Jules Jean Geoffroy.
Geoffroy’s undated painting of It’s Hard to Share shows one of the tribulations of childhood. These young boys have just emerged from a sweet shop, and the child in the centre is reluctant to share the paper cone of sweets he has just bought. His face says it all, as he looks with great suspicion at his less fortunate friend, and a dog also looks up expectantly.
Commemorating the centenary of the death of Henri Jules Jean Geoffroy, painter of childhood
Finally, over a weekend I showed some of the many paintings of the Bay (or Gulf) of Naples, a location that has been justly popular with landscape artists for well over two centuries.
JMW Turner painted the same location and mythological theme in several of his narrative landscapes, including The Bay of Baiae, with Apollo and the Sibyl from 1823. Apollo is on the left, with his lyre, and the dark-haired Sibyl has adopted an odd kneeling position. She’s holding some sand in the palm of her right hand, asking Apollo to grant her as many years of life as there are grains. Opposite the couple, on the other side of the path, under the trees, is a white rabbit.
Paintings of the Bay of Naples: 79 CE to 1857
I leave 2024 pondering why that white rabbit?
I started 2024 with a new series telling the myths of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in paintings, and that continues into next year. While some of its stories are well-known, others may be less familiar if not obscure. The first episode includes the story of Jupiter and Lycaon, who tries to trick the god into cannibalism, for which he’s transformed into a wolf.
Jan Cossiers’ impressive Jupiter and Lycaon from about 1640 shows Jupiter’s eagle vomiting thunderbolts at Lycaon, who sits opposite the god. Lycaon’s head is thoroughly wolf-like already, as he hurriedly gets up from the table. Thunderbolts are seen behind the pillar in the background, and on the table is something resembling a modern burger bun.
Mediaeval folk mythology developed other tales of humans turning into wolves, although most were temporary transformations associated with cannibalistic episodes. They became progressively refined and popularised into the Gothic ‘horror’ stories of werewolves feeding on human blood, making Ovid’s account the origin of the werewolf.
1 Creation and Lycaon’s cannibalism
The year brought many artistic anniversaries, among them the bicentenary of the death of Théodore Géricault, famous for his vast painting of The Raft of the Medusa.
Towards the end of his brief life, Géricault compiled a series of ten portraits of people suffering from mental illness, then described as monomanias. He was introduced to these patients by one of the early practitioners of psychiatry, his friend Doctor Étienne-Jean Georget (1795-1828), who commissioned him to paint them to show to students as examples.
At the time, the pseudoscience of physiognomy remained popular, even among medical professionals. It claims that you can assess personality or character from a person’s outward appearance, particularly their face. In 1772, Johann Lavater codified what was at heart a pseudoscientific basis for racism and other forms of prejudice. Unfortunately, his writings were widely translated, and were enthusiastically adopted by many artists. Among more recent artists who used physiognomy in their painting are Joshua Reynolds, Henry Fuseli, William Blake and William Powell Frith.
Although intended as a finished portrait, Géricault’s Monomaniac of Envy (The Hyena), from about 1821-23, is surprisingly painterly beyond the woman’s face.
Commemorating the Death of Théodore Géricault: 3 Madness and Death
Another anniversary of note was the centenary of the death of Maurice Prendergast, whose paintings from his visit to Venice are vivacious and colourful.
Towards the end of his visit, Prendergast found a jostle of Umbrellas in the Rain (1899). They’re of any colour but dark grey, and form a brilliant arc across the painting.
In memoriam Maurice Prendergast who died a century ago
Jean-François Raffaëlli was nearly an Impressionist, but incurred the disapproval of Claude Monet by swamping their exhibitions with his paintings. In 1880, Raffaëlli showed thirty-seven, and Monet withdrew in response. The centenary of his death was an opportunity to look at his work with open mind and eye.
Although best-known for his portraits of the urban poor, The Abandoned Road (1904) is one of Raffaëlli’s finest paintings, showing where an old road running along the top of a sea cliff had been lost in a large landslip. The whaleback ridge in the foreground has an almost animal feel to it, and his use of figures and the village church gives the scene a grander scale.
Almost an Impressionist: Commemorating the death of Jean-François Raffaëlli 1
Almost an Impressionist: Commemorating the death of Jean-François Raffaëlli 2
Researching series is often a most rewarding experience, and in 2024 one of the most fascinating has been Sea of Mists, covering the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and the German Romantics.
Friedrich’s dark Seashore by Moonlight from 1835–6 is full of foreboding, perhaps of his own death. Three small fishing boats are shown at different distances from a rocky shore. Two small rowing boats are just visible in the gloom of the foreground, and there are black shadows of fishing gear. The horizon is lined by the bright reflection of the moon, the brightest tone in the whole painting, and moonlight glints on the central area of sea. The clouds are deep indigo, in smooth folds and curves threatening rain.
German Romantic painters, overview, including contents of this series
Another series came from a personal challenge to compile an alphabet of landscape paintings. Although this grew increasingly difficult towards the end, I think I got there without being over-ingenious. My personal favourite among them is F for flowers.
For Dennis Miller Bunker flowers were an integral part of the country fields he loved to paint. Wild Asters (1889) is a brilliant assembly of different types of mark, from the sinuous curves in the stream to the fine blotches of the aster flowers. Yet the following year the artist was dead from meningitis at the age of only 29.
Contents of the whole series
Flowers
Although I had shown several of JC Dahl’s paintings here previously, Sea of Mists was my first opportunity to look at his work more systematically, alongside that of his colleague and friend Friedrich.
Throughout his career, Dahl made copious oil sketches in front of the motif. He painted this tiny plein air sketch of Dresden at Night in 1845. How he did this in the dark without the aid of modern lighting I have absolutely no idea, but it’s one of the greatest technical accomplishments of nineteenth century painting.
JC Dahl 1818-1827
JC Dahl 1829-1856
Many artists struggle for years until they achieve greatness in a single painting. For Anna Palm de Rosa, who died a century ago, that came in a late night game of cards.
In the summer of 1885, the young Swedish painter Anna Palm visited the artist’s colony at Skagen in Denmark. One night she sketched two of the couples staying in the local hotel as they played cards by candlelight, in A game of L’hombre in Brøndum’s Hotel. There’s a silent tension as all four study their cards amid dense tobacco smoke making it literally atmospheric.
In memoriam Anna Palm de Rosa: painting the card game
Two hundred years ago, there were relatively few major collections of paintings that were open to the public. In Britain, John Julius Angerstein had assembled an art collection, and on 2 April 1824, the British government bought that for £60,000 to establish a national public collection housed in Angerstein’s former town house in London. On 10 May that year, London’s National Gallery first opened to the public, and two articles here celebrate that.
If you’re ever in London, the Wilton Diptych is a must-see. Painted some time between 1395-99, probably as a personal devotional for the king, it’s a jewel fashioned from egg tempera, probably some oils, and gold leaf. It’s one of those few paintings that’s truly breathtaking.
The National Gallery also has nine paintings by Vincent van Gogh.
Perhaps the most popular of all its paintings is his Still Life: Vase with 15 Sunflowers, known as the fourth version of this series, which has the most remarkable background of them all, with a unique metallic sheen that again has to be seen in the flesh.
Celebrating the 200th birthday of London’s National Gallery 1
Celebrating the 200th birthday of London’s National Gallery 2
Another high point of the year was the bicentenary of the birth of Jean-Léon Gérôme, whose paintings illustrate his quest for truth in art.
In The Artist’s Model from 1895, Gérôme attempts the ultimate introspection: he painted himself making a sculpture he had previously painted in a painting as a sculpture. Visual references in the props, paintings seen within the painting, and polychrome sculpture provide a visual summary of his professional career.
His final painting of the personification of Truth, completed in 1896 as his reputation was fast vanishing, is his manifesto not only for his art, but for the new art of photography. He saw visual truth, as demonstrated in his meticulous realism, as the objective for painting. In that, he differed fundamentally from Impressionism, which he viewed as misrepresentation of the way that we see the world, thus visual untruth, unlike photography.
The Quest for Visual Truth: the bicentary of Jean-Léon Gérôme
One artist whose death I will be commemorating in 2025 was the subject of a pair of articles over a weekend, Lovis Corinth. For some years I had an unread copy of a monograph on his painting. As I have explored that more I have come to realise what a great master he was, and how close he came to death when he suffered a major stroke in December 1911. At first his doctors weren’t even confident that he would survive, and when he did regain consciousness, he couldn’t recognise his wife Charlotte. His left arm and leg were completely paralysed; as he had painted his entire professional career with his left hand, it looked as if that career was over.
His first major painting following his stroke returned to an earlier theme of Samson. This autobiographical portrait of The Blinded Samson (1912) expressed his feelings about his own battle against the sequelae of his stroke. In the Samson story, it shows the once-mighty man reduced to a feeble prisoner, forced to grope his way around. No doubt Corinth didn’t intend referring to its conclusion: with the aid of God, he pulled down the two central columns of the Philistines’ temple to Dagon, and brought the whole building down on top of its occupants.
Corinth’s successful rehabilitation and the resumption of his career was largely dependent on his wife Charlotte.
Lovis Corinth and Charlotte Berend: 1 Painting days of wine and roses
Lovis Corinth and Charlotte Berend: 2 Recovering from disaster
My final selection from the first half of the year is from another centenary, this time of the death of Emile Claus.
The Old Gardener (1885) is another of those paintings in which every last detail is perfect, from the backlighting against the darkness of the trees to his gnarled feet.
In Memoriam Emile Claus: Into the light 1
In Memoriam Emile Claus: Into the light 2
I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 288. Here are my solutions to them.
Rubberised cloth (Mac, or Macintosh) from Issigonis in 1959 (Sir Alec Issigonis designed the Mini car, launched in 1959) is the smallest (the Mac mini is).
Waterproof cloak (a mac) is in favour of (pro, as in pros and cons) the tower (the Mac Pro is).
Scot (Mac, from the common prefix to Scottish names) with an atelier (a studio) in between them (it’s in between the mini and Pro).
I look forward to your putting alternative cases.
In the first of these two articles tracing the history of paintings of the Bay (or Gulf) of Naples, I reached the late work of Clarkson Frederick Stanfield in the 1850s. Just to recap and save you from having to look back, the Bay sweeps anti-clockwise through three-quarters of circle, from the island of Ischia in the north-west, through the great city of Naples in the north, past the slopes of Mount Vesuvius with the remains of Pompeii, to Sorrento in the south-east, and ends with the island of Capri in the south.
When Edgar Degas was in Italy between 1856-59, he made a number of landscape sketches, some in oil on paper, others like this View of Naples (1860) in watercolour. None seems to have been developed into anything more substantial, though, and he then switched to history painting and portraiture for the next decade or so.
After the rejection of his masterwork Florence from Bellosguardo, the Pre-Raphaelite landscape painter John Brett didn’t hang around in England, but went out to Italy again for the summer of 1863.
Massa, Bay of Naples (1863-64) is perhaps the most spectacular of the oil paintings that Brett completed during this Mediterranean campaign, and appears to have been painted from a vessel on the water.
He had travelled there on board the SS Scotia, although it’s unclear whether that ship served as his floating studio, or he may have transferred to another. The Scotia arrived in the Bay of Naples by 9 September, following which he went to stay in Sorrento, then Capri by November. It’s therefore likely that he continued to work on this finely detailed painting during the winter of 1863-64.
His work wasn’t in vain, as this transformed his career. Alfred Morrison bought this painting for the substantial sum of £250, and Brett was to benefit further from his generous patronage. By August the following year Brett could afford to buy his own yacht, and tried a change of tack: painting the British coast using studies made in front of the motif, and working on his finished paintings in his studio.
Alfred William Hunt’s Bay of Naples – A Land of Smouldering Fire (1871) was probably based on sketches and studies made during his tour of the Mediterranean during the winter of 1869-70. This view is taken from the top of the Vómero, a hill to the west of Naples. In the left foreground is a wall from the fortifications. In the far distance, across the bay, is Vesuvius, still partially lit by the rays of the setting sun.
The Italian Impressionist Giuseppe De Nittis painted this Seascape near Naples in 1873, early in his career.
The following year the Catalan artist Marià Fortuny painted Portici Beach on the waterfront of Naples. Tragically, he contracted malaria while painting there en plein air, and died from that when he was in Rome just a few months later.
Alessandro la Volpe was a local landscape painter, whose View of Capri from 1875 shows the island in a heat haze, from the hills above Sorrento.
Oswald Achenbach’s View of Capri (1884) shows the island from a similar vantage point in the hills above Sorrento. Achenbach was one of several members of the Düsseldorf School who visited Italy on multiple occasions during his career, ending with this extended visit that started in 1882.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted Bay of Naples, Evening during his stay of several weeks in Naples in 1881. He had been unable to paint when in Rome earlier, but once he arrived in this city was able to complete figurative works and two matching landscapes of the bay. Although it was recognised that these two views represent morning and evening, for some years they were confused, and this painting was thought incorrectly to show the bay in the morning.
In this painting of Sorrento from 1899, Ukrainian artist Mykhaylo Berkos shows trees growing in an old ruined building facing the Bay of Naples, on the Sorrentine Peninsula closest to Capri.
In his later years, the American landscape artist Charles Caryl Coleman lived on the nearby island of Capri. In 1906, at the start of Vesuvius’ eruption in April, he travelled to the mainland to paint A Shower of Ashes Upon Ottaviano in pastels. This shows the dust- and smoke-laden air of the Naples suburb Ottaviano at ten o’clock in the morning. Although Ottaviano was spared anything worse than dust and smoke in 1906, it was badly damaged during the volcano’s last substantial eruption in 1944.
My last two paintings are both by the Italian-American artist Joseph Stella, who came from the city of Muro Lucano, inland and to the east of Naples.
Stella’s Purissima from 1927 places a mystical woman between the two sacred Ibis birds. In the background is the Bay of Naples, with Mount Vesuvius at the right.
This undated landscape sketch of Vesuvius III probably dates from the same period, and looks south-east across the Bay of Naples, with Castel dell’Ovo nearest.
This weekend we’re not off skiing, but seeking the mild winter in the Bay (or Gulf) of Naples, on the western coast of south Italy. This sweeps anti-clockwise through three-quarters of circle, from the island of Ischia in the north-west, through the great city of Naples in the north, past the slopes of Mount Vesuvius with the remains of Pompeii, to Sorrento in the south-east, and ends with the island of Capri in the south.
Over the centuries it has been visited frequently by artists, many of whom have overwintered here, and on the island of Capri. In this article I show landscape paintings starting from before the catastrophic destruction of the Roman city of Pompeii, and ending just before the birth of Impressionism. I conclude tomorrow with paintings well into the first decades of the twentieth century.
Although it took nearly 1500 years before Giorgione made one of the first ‘proper’ landscape paintings in modern European art, by the first century CE the Romans of Pompeii were only too pleased to see pure landscapes with no discernible narrative content on the walls of their villas.
Above is a port scene found as a fresco in Stabiae, near Pompeii, presumably showing that port at its height just before it was destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE.
Seventeen hundred years later in Naples, a pioneering Welsh artist created one of the gems now in the National Gallery in London.
Thomas Jones started making landscape sketches in oils in the 1770s. He worked in Italy from 1776 to 1782, around Rome and Naples, where he completed many plein air paintings in oils, including this tiny Wall in Naples from about 1782. He’s now recognised as being the father of Welsh painting, and one of the first painters to make oil sketches in front of the motif.
A little later, a local landscape painter Giovanni Battista Lusieri became one of the first to create true panoramas in his watercolour views of the city. For this View of the Bay of Naples, Looking Southwest from the Pizzofalcone Toward Capo di Posilippo from 1791 he joined several sheets of paper together to depict the northern shore of the bay.
JMW Turner’s second version of Lake Avernus: Aeneas and the Cumaean Sybil, dates from 1814 or 1815, and is true to the spirit of Claude’s earlier landscapes. This is a beautiful setting of Lake Avernus, near Pozzuoli, to the west of the city of Naples. In the distance is Baiae and the cliffs of Cape Miseno. The Sibyl is seen holding aloft a golden sprig rather than a bough, and Aeneas stands with his back to the viewer, as if he too is enjoying the view.
Shortly afterwards, the great French landscape artist Achille Etna Michallon painted this Sea View, Salerno (1822), showing the coast to the south-east of Naples.
At about the same time, the Bay became a focus of attention for JC Dahl and some of the German Romantic artists. Dahl had aroused the interest of Prince Christian Frederik of Denmark, who had become his patron and friend while he was still in Copenhagen. In 1820, the prince invited Dahl to join him in the Bay of Naples to paint there for him.
Dahl’s The Gulf of Naples. Moonlight (1820-21) is deeply influenced by Caspar David Friedrich, with its Rückenfigur wearing a top hat looking out to sea, fishing boats and nets, and the bright moonlight.
His visit to the Bay coincided with an active phase for the local volcano Vesuvius, during which JMW Turner visited and painted an eruption. Although Dahl was sufficiently enthused to make several oil sketches and take some to completion as finished works, he didn’t become as obsessed as others did.
In The Bay of Naples by Moonlight, painted the following year, he has used the warm red light from a more modest eruption to provide colour contrast, and enhance fine details of fishing nets in the foreground.
In 1828 Carl Gustav Carus visited the Bay, where he painted this wonderful view of Castel dell’Ovo in Naples. Given that it was made in oils over a pencil drawing on paper, this appears to have been painted in front of the motif.
Carus appears to have visited Naples on other occasions too. In about 1829-30, he stayed close to Castel dell’Ovo and framed a view from sea level in his Balcony Room with a View of the Bay of Naples (via Santa Lucia and the Castel dell’Ovo). The district of Santa Lucia consists of the waterfront buildings seen here between Carus’ accommodation and the Castel dell’Ovo.
JMW Turner returned to the same location and mythological theme in The Bay of Baiae, with Apollo and the Sibyl in 1823. Apollo is on the left, with his lyre, and the dark-haired Sibyl has adopted an odd kneeling position. She’s holding some sand in the palm of her right hand, asking Apollo to grant her as many years of life as there are grains. Opposite the couple, on the other side of the path, under the trees, is a white rabbit.
When Ivan Aivazovsky was sponsored by the Imperial Academy to study in Europe, he travelled to Italy, where he visited Florence, Amalfi, and Sorrento, then stayed in Naples and Rome until 1842. During this period he painted many beautiful views of the Italian coast, and of Venice.
The Bay of Naples (1841) is a good example of Aivazovsky’s early paintings from Italy, in which he often sought the rich colours of sunrise and sunset. These aren’t large canvases, but he shows fine details such as the rivulets of water falling from the oars.
A later visitor was the accomplished British coastal painter Clarkson Frederick Stanfield.
This view of Ischia and the Castello d’Ischia, near Naples, from 1857, shows how subtle Stanfield could be when depicting the distant snow-capped mountains of Ischia.
This undated view of The Gulf of Pozzuoli appears to be one of his few coastal views in which there is not a breath of wind, and the sea is calm.
Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation.
1: Rubberised cloth from Issigonis in 1959 is the smallest.
2: Waterproof cloak is in favour of the tower.
3: Scot with an atelier in between them.
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.
In the final quarter of the nineteenth century, paintings followed the literary trend into detective stories, first posing the viewer an open-ended narrative, then inviting them to be a detective for problem pictures. Although now remembered for just one of these paintings, William Frederick Yeames was among the leaders, who even depicted a notorious suspicious death.
Yeames was the son of a British consul in Russia and was born in Taganrog, on the shore of the Sea of Azov, to the north of the Black Sea, when it was part of the Russian Empire. His father died when he was only seven, so he was bundled off to Dresden in Germany to be educated, and to start learning to draw and paint. His family brought him back to Britain, where he received private tuition before travelling to Florence at the age of only 17. He studied there, copied the Masters, and finally returned to London in 1859.
He took up residence in Saint John’s Wood, then an affluent and leafy suburb of the city, and formed what became known as the Saint John’s Wood Clique, with Philip Hermogenes Calderon, Frederick Goodall and George Adolphus Storey.
Yeames’ particular interest, and the basis for many of his best paintings, was the Tudor and Stuart period in English history. In Hiding the Priest (1868-74), he shows a ‘priest hole’ used to hide Catholic priests during several purges that took place during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. A priest is shown ascending into the hidden chamber by ladder, as one of the family, at the left, watches for the arrival of pursuivants who pursued Catholic priests during a purge. The room shown here is now known as the Punch Room, in Cotehele House, a superb sixteenth century manor house on the border between Devon and Cornwall, to the north of Plymouth, England.
For the Poor from about 1875 shows two nuns collecting food door-to-door to feed the poor during a bitter winter, probably on the edge of Dartmoor, Devon.
Yeames became fascinated by the macabre story of Amy Robsart, who had died in suspicious circumstances in 1560.
He introduces her in his 1877 narrative painting. She married Robert Dudley, son of the Duke of Northumberland, shortly before she reached the age of eighteen. He was then condemned to death after his father failed to stop Mary I’s accession as queen in 1553, but was released the following year. Dudley was called to court as Master of the Horse to Queen Elizabeth I when she acceded to the throne in 1558, became a favourite of hers, and allegedly one of her loves if not lovers.
Amy didn’t follow her husband to court, and hardly ever saw him. On the morning of 8 September 1560, when she was staying at a country house near Oxford, she dismissed all her servants, and was later found, as shown here, dead with a broken neck at the foot of the stairs. Although an inquest found no evidence of foul play and returned a verdict of accidental death, Amy’s husband was widely suspected of having arranged her death.
In the gloom above Amy’s body, Yeames shows Anthony Forster, one of Dudley’s men, leading his manservant down the stairs when they discover Amy’s body. The implication here is that Forster murdered Amy on Dudley’s orders, one of many speculative accounts of her sudden death.
In 1884, Yeames painted this portrait of Amy Robsart.
Like most of Yeames’ history paintings, And when did you last see your Father? (1878) is plausible but imaginary rather than based on historical records. It shows a Royalist household during the English Civil War between 1642-51. The men present are Roundheads, Parliamentarians, who are trying to locate and capture the head of the household, the small boy’s father.
The boy shown is based on Gainsborough’s famous portrait of The Blue Boy (1779), and modelled here by the artist’s nephew. Although he’s being questioned amicably if not sympathetically, the question put to him in the title of the painting exploits the openness of childhood in an effort to get the boy to betray his father’s whereabouts, an unpleasantly adult trick. Next in line for a grilling is an older girl, who is being comforted by a Roundhead soldier, but is already upset. Their mother and an older daughter wait anxiously at the far left.
Towards the end of the century, Yeames turned these open narratives into increasingly popular problem pictures, culminating in one of the finest of the sub-genre.
Defendant and Counsel (1895) would have been exhibited in London, illustrated as an engraving in newspapers, and no doubt generated a flurry of opinionated letters completing its story, and passing judgement on its subject. It shows an affluent married woman wearing an expensive fur coat, sat with a popular newspaper open in front of her, as a team of three barristers and their clerk look at her intensely, presumably waiting for her to speak.
As she is the defendant, the viewer is encouraged to speculate what she is defending: a divorce claim, or a criminal charge? This also opens the thorny issue of counsel who discover that a defendant is lying, but still mount their defence in court, and may succeed in persuading the court to believe what they know to be false. Like And when did you last see your Father? this may be an exploration of truth and the problems posed by it.
Yeames died at the age of 82, on 3 May 1918, in the Devon Riviera resort of Teignmouth. And when did you last see your Father? was bought by the Walker Gallery in Liverpool shortly after it opened in 1877. A tableau of the painting has also been in Madame Tussaud’s wax museum in London for many of the intervening years. But no one knows who killed Amy Robsart, or whether it was just a tragic accident.
William Frederick Yeames
Amy Robsart
