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.

No one knows when people started attaching big sheets of paper to walls as posters, but it wasn’t until large-format colour printing became popular in the middle of the nineteenth century that the modern poster became commonplace. Within a couple of decades walls in many public places became covered with announcements, particularly those promoting events and products, and the advertising industry developed. In this week’s two articles about the reading of paintings, I show examples of the use of posters in paintings, and how their contents can be relevant.

One of the earliest examples of a poster contributing to the reading of a painting is one of Richard Dadd’s watercolour series of the Passions, in Want, the Malingerer dated 26 November 1856. From a hill overlooking the River Medway at Chatham, where Dadd was born and brought up, he shows a small family of destitutes. The father, his face hidden behind a poster seeking a “good Christian home to a poor forlorn outcast”, appears to be a military veteran, has a couple of crutches, and bare feet. The mother, her face aged beyond her years, is slumped in her tattered clothing, her right hand stretched out, its wrinkled palm seeking charity. Behind them is their son, and beyond the father their dog holds a tin begging bowl in its mouth.

A couple of years later, in the third of Augustus Leopold Egg’s series Past and Present telling the story of the breakup of a family as the result of the mother’s extra-marital relationship, she is seen homeless, sat among the debris under the arches of one of London’s bridges. She stares wide-eyed and fearful at a star in the sky, cradling a young baby to her, under her thin cloak. Behind her, on the side of the arch, are old posters, one with the word VICTIMS prominent, another advertising excursions to Paris.

Posters have further significance in the intricate details of Ford Madox Brown’s visual essay on Work from 1863.

This crowded street scene is set in Heath Street, Hampstead, one of London’s ‘leafy’ suburbs at the time, into which Brown has crammed references to many aspects of contemporary Victorian society, including an election campaign.

At its centre is a gang of navvies, the term originating from the word navigators, usually Irish labourers, who had dug the canals during the previous century. They’re engaged in digging up a road to lay a sewer as part of the campaign to improve the hygiene of Victorian London. Inspired by the moralising series painted by William Hogarth, Brown is effectively giving a meticulously detailed account of the breadth and depth of contemporary society, using multiple interwoven narratives in this single image.

At the left is a file of people making their way down the pavement. To the rear, heading uphill, is a porter carrying a green case on his head. Next down are two well-dressed women carrying parasols. The woman behind is carrying religious tracts, one of which has floated in front of the navvies, while the woman in front of her represents ‘genteel glamour’. In front is a barefoot flower-seller who lives in a flophouse in Flower and Dean Street in Whitechapel. She is on her way to scrape a living from the wicker basket full of freshly picked wild flowers.

Posters on the wall at the extreme left advocate voting for Bobus, and warn of a man wanted for robbery. Bobus is a character in the writings of Thomas Carlyle who uses ill-gotten gains from his business to sell himself as a politician, one of many links from this painting to contemporary thought.

Although many of the paintings of vagrants made by Augustus Edwin Mulready appear over-sentimental or even disingenuous, and his models are invariably sparklingly clean and well cared-for, some had more worthy messages. His Uncared For from 1871 shows a young girl with exceptionally large brown eyes staring straight at the viewer as she proffers a tiny bunch of violets.

Behind her and her brother are the remains of posters: at the top, The Triumph of Christianity is attributed to the French artist and illustrator Gustave Doré, who illustrated an edition of the Bible in 1866, visited London on several occasions afterwards, and in 1871 produced illustrations for London: A Pilgrimage, published the following year, showing London’s down and outs.

This association between posters in the streets and destitution remained strong, but posters also appeared in other roles.

In Giovanni Battista Quadrone’s witty Every Opportunity is Good (1878), we’re given a detailed look at the painter’s paraphernalia, including several paint bladders on the low table behind the easel, and one on the floor. On the wall at the right, behind the young couple, is a poster showing the anatomy of human muscles, a reassurance that this artist works from an understanding of science.

Laura Theresa Alma-Tadema, young wife of the painter Lawrence, was quick to achieve recognition in her work. Her first painting to be exhibited at the Salon in Paris was in 1873, and that same year she started to exhibit at the Royal Academy in London. The Tea Party is undated but recorded as being her seventh painting, and shows the artist’s step-daughter Laurense, playing with her dolls. Behind her are some of the girl’s own drawings, and a poster with a story told in a series of drawings as a storyboard or comic.