There are few greater challenges to the figurative artist than painting figures in movement when they’re dancing. This week’s two articles about reading visual art consider the significance of rising to that challenge, and how we should read that dancing. I have already looked at paintings associated with death in the Danse Macabre, and won’t be revisiting that here.

As a rhythmic physical activity, dance has long been associated with the natural rhythm of time, particularly the hours of the day.

Nicolas Poussin’s brilliant Dance to the Music of Time (c 1634-6) shows four young people dancing, who are sometimes interpreted as being the seasons. That probably isn’t the case, as they’re most likely Poverty (male at the back, facing away), Labour (closest to Time and looking at him), Wealth (in golden skirt and sandals, also looking at Time), and Pleasure (blue and red clothes) who fixes the viewer with a knowing smile. Opposite Pleasure is a small herm of Janus, whose two faces look to the past and the future. Above them, in the heavens, Aurora (goddess of the dawn) precedes Apollo’s sun chariot, on which the large ring represents the Zodiac. Behind the chariot are the Horai, the hours of the day.

Gaetano Previati’s Dance of the Hours from 1899 shows the Horai dancing in the air around a golden ring, with the orbs of the moon in the foreground and the sun far beyond. Every fine brushstroke is rich in meaning: in the Horai they give the sensation of movement, elsewhere they form a third dimension, or give texture to the ether.

In addition to this association with the Horai, when they’re not playing their musical instruments, the Muses are often depicted as dancing.

Andrea Mantegna’s Mars and Venus, known better as Parnassus, (1496-97) refers to the classical myth of the affair between Mars and Venus, the latter being married to Vulcan, who caught them in bed together and cast a fine net around them for the other gods to come and mock their adultery. The lovers are shown standing together on a flat-topped rock arch, as the Muses dance below. To the left of Mars’ feet is Venus’ child Cupid aiming his blowpipe at Vulcan’s genitals, as he works at his forge in the cave at the left. At the right is Mercury, messenger of the gods, with his caduceus and Pegasus the winged horse. At the far left is Apollo making music for the Muses on his lyre.

More unusual is Hans Thoma’s Eight Dancing Women with Bird Bodies from 1886, which most probably shows the sirens dancing to their alluring voices.

Putti and their relatives such as amorini are also prone to dance, usually in the sky, presumably with the joy of love.

Thoma’s Spring Fairytale, An Allegory (1898) shows a woman who may have been influenced by the figure of Flora in Botticelli’s famous Primavera (c 1482). She’s surrounded by meadow flowers, two small fawns, and sundry winged putti dancing in the sky.

Similarly, the little people in ‘faery’ paintings are adept at formation dancing.

Richard Dadd’s Come unto These Yellow Sands (1842) refers to William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, rather than A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and was exhibited with the descriptive quotation:
Come unto these yellow sands,
And then take hands,
Curt’sied when you have, and kissed
(The wild waves whist).
Foot it featly here and there,
And sweet sprites the burden bear.

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

This leads us to country and folk dancing, which in northern Europe has long been associated with traditional mid-summer feasts.

One of Jules Breton’s major paintings from the 1870s is The Festival of Saint-Jean, shown in the Salon of 1875; I’ve been unable to locate a suitable image of that finished painting, but this study for it, The Feast of Saint John (1875) may give you an idea of its magnificence.

Anders Zorn’s major painting of 1897 was Midsummer Dance, capturing the festivities in his home town in Sweden, with women and men dancing outdoors in their uniform country dress.

The title of Teodor Axentowicz’s painting of folk dancing, Oberek Folk Dance in Front of a House, appears confusing. Although it names this dance as the Oberek, the second most popular Polish folk dance after the polka, the first word Kołomyjka makes it clear that this is what’s now known as kolomyika (Ukrainian: кoлoмийкa). That’s a combination of a fast and vigorous folk dance with music and rhymed verse. It originated in the Hutsul town of Kolomyia in Ukraine, but has also become popular in north-eastern Slovenia and parts of Poland.

Hans Thoma’s eight Children Dancing in a Ring (1872) are set in a Bavarian alpine meadow, with pastures and high mountains in the far distance.

Tomorrow I’ll start with the most formalised expression of dancing, at the ballet.

It’s not that long ago that a great many homes in the UK and Europe were heated by open fires. During the 1960s, the house where I lived in the suburbs of London had a single main fireplace burning ‘smokeless’ processed coal throughout the winter months. Even after colour television came in the early 1970s, the National Coal Board was advertising the virtues of open fires in the home. Today’s paintings of interiors show fireplaces and the objects we surrounded them with.

Jules Breton’s Grandfather’s Birthday (1864) shows three generations of a Courrières family living in modest comfort, although their floors are made of bare and worn tiles, furniture is sparse, and the fire is hardly alight. One of the grandchildren is just about to present their grandpa with a simple birthday cake, no icing, as another of the women prepares a celebratory meal in the kitchen. Maybe some firewood might have been a better present. This fireplace has an unusually high mantelpiece, providing just enough room to fit in some cherished plates below the ceiling.

Judging by the thin summer dress worn by the young woman reading in Francis Davis Millet’s Cosey Corner from 1884, the fire burning in this open hearth is primarily to boil water in the large black kettle for her cup of tea. This is a more modern fireplace fabricated in wrought iron. It has a grate to let spent ashes drop into the ash tray underneath, making it simpler to remove them before building the first fire of the day. On either side of the fire are fire dogs, and a kettle is suspended above the glowing embers.

Virginie Demont-Breton’s original painting of The Man is at Sea, above, was completed in or before 1889. This shows a fisherman’s wife warming herself and her sleeping infant by the fire, while her husband is away fishing at sea. It was exhibited at the Salon in 1889, following which it was rapidly engraved for prints. Later that year, Vincent van Gogh saw an image of that painting when he was undergoing treatment in the Saint Paul asylum at Saint-Rémy, and made a copy of it, shown below.

Laurits Andersen Ring’s contrasting The Artist’s Wife and Children, from 1904, shows his wife Sigrid with their young son and daughter, in front of the roaring fire typical of the more affluent middle class home in the early twentieth century. The fireplace is here built into a substantial structure.

Carl Larsson’s Christmas Eve from 1904 shows his large extended family gathering to celebrate in grand style, with a huge turkey, a roaring fire in the large open fireplace, and a cat under the table, trying to get into the party.

William McGregor Paxton’s open fire In the Studio (1905) is appropriately classy and glows confidently in the background. He deliberately defocussed it in what he termed Vermeer’s “binocular vision”. His model is in crisp focus, and as the eye wonders further away from her as the optical centre of the painting, edges and details become progressively more blurred.

Among Douglas Fox Pitt’s views of domestic interiors, Interior with Maid from about 1913 is notable for its display of two of the artist’s collection of paintings by the Camden Town Group. Above the fireplace is Harold Gilman’s Norwegian Street Scene (Kirkegaten, Flekkerfjord) (1913), and above the bright cushion is Charles Ginner’s The Wet Street, Dieppe (1911). The fire is being tended by a maid, and is thoroughly suburban, with tools including a poker at the left. Its mantelpiece is relatively low, and home to a precisely arranged row of ornaments.

Henry Tonks’ Sodales – Mr Steer and Mr Sickert (1930) shows two British painters in their old age: Philip Wilson Steer is dozing in front of the fire while Walter Sickert was visiting him at home in Cheyne Walk, London. This mantelpiece is cluttered with various small objects.