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

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.

Separation of living from sleeping accommodation has become increasingly popular in most societies as they have become more affluent and housing has become more spacious. In its extreme, among the wealthy, bedrooms have acquired supplementary areas for dressing and personal grooming, leaving the bedroom itself dedicated to the bed and sleep. For that it’s usually the most private room in a house or apartment.

Emmery Rondahl’s Doctor’s Orders (1882) shows a Danish country doctor writing a prescription for an older patient who is tucked up in a magnificent fitted bed in their own home. Although still a humble dwelling, with an uneven and uncarpeted stone floor, the bed has luxuriant curtains and there’s even a short net curtain at the window.

Edgar Degas’ famously enigmatic Interior from 1868-69 remains fascinating even if you ignore its two figures. The woman’s outer clothing is placed at the foot of the bed, and her corset has been hurriedly or carelessly cast onto the floor beside it. Just behind her is a small occasional table, on which there is a table-lamp and a small open suitcase. Some of the contents of the suitcase rest over its edge. In front of it, on the table top, is a small pair of scissors and other items from a small clothes repair kit or ‘housewife’.

The man’s top hat rests, upside down, on top of the cabinet on the far side of the room, just in front of the woman. Despite the obvious implication that they are a couple who have met in that room to engage in a clandestine sexual relationship, the bed is a single not a double. It also shows no sign of having been used, nor has the bedding been disturbed in any way.

There’s a mature fire burning in the fireplace behind the woman and the lamp. There are four paintings or similar objects hanging on the walls, of which only one appears to be decipherable. This is the large rounded rectangular one above the fireplace. Although it appears to be a mirror, the image shown on it doesn’t resemble a reflection of the room’s interior, but looks to be a painting. This might show a bright figure, resembling the woman, in front of some shrubs, with classical buildings behind.

A few years later, in 1876-77, probably when Degas was starting his series depicting women drying themselves after they had bathed, he painted a woman in pastel over a monotype, where the figure is set in the broader context of a bedroom, in Woman Drying Herself after the Bath. This is a plain and simple bedroom, with a single bed and a dressing table with a mirror. Other paintings in this series are closer cropped on the woman.

Morning, Interior (1890) is one of Maximilien Luce’s best-known Divisionist paintings from the late nineteenth century. This is a humbler bedroom situated in the uppermost part of the house, a garret perhaps, his dressing table lacks a mirror, and the bed is a lightweight folding model with a thin mattress.

Before the end of the century, Pierre Bonnard had started painting the intimate interiors that were to dominate his art for much of the rest of his life. Few, though, depicted the bedroom he shared with his partner Marthe.

In 1898, Bonnard painted the first of his controversial works revealing his private life with Marthe, in Man and Woman in an Interior. He stands naked, looking away, as Marthe is getting dressed on the bed. He has also cropped this unusually, as if it was a ‘candid’ photo, enhancing its voyeurism.

Félix Vallotton’s disturbing domestic scenes continued with Interior, Bedroom with Two Figures from 1904. The lady of the house is standing, her back to the viewer, over her maid as the latter is sewing up an evening gown for her. The lady’s face is revealed in her reflection in the large mirror on the wardrobe at the back of the room, where her maid is all but invisible.

John Collier followed Degas’ enigmatic interiors with Mariage de Convenance from 1907. A mother, dressed in the black implicit of widowhood, stands haughty, her right arm resting on the mantlepiece of her daughter’s bedroom. The latter cowers on the floor, her arms and head resting on her bed, in obvious distress. Laid out on the bed is the daughter’s wedding dress, the crux of this painting’s riddle.

Édouard Vuillard’s portrait of Lucy Hessel Reading in her bedroom from 1913 needs more context. Lucy was the wife of the art dealer Jos Hessel (1859-1942), and she was a frequent model, companion and long-term lover of Vuillard. At this time, her husband was Vuillard’s sole dealer.

Just before the Second World War, Eric Ravilious painted a series of contemporary and deserted bedrooms.

The Bedstead (1939), with its wide angle projection, is full of patterns: the wallpaper, floorboards and rugs, and features a mass-produced iron bedstead.

In his Farmhouse Bedroom (1939) the patterns are overwhelming, and its projection has become so extreme that it distorts.

In the first of these two articles looking at the reading of balconies in paintings, I looked at views of balconies from the outside; today we get to join the rich and famous and look out and down on the world below. Before cheap and easy travel became available in the late nineteenth century, standing on a balcony was probably one of the more elevating experiences for most of the population.

There has been speculation as to whether Carpaccio’s Two Venetian Ladies from about 1490 were bored upper class wives, or courtesans in between gigs, although opinion currently favours their nobility. They sit amid a menagerie of peacock, doves and two dogs, staring into the blank distance.

Views from the balcony came of age in the early nineteenth century, with the arrival of paintings of figures standing in front of windows. These developed most obviously in German painting, in Caspar David Friedrich’s Woman at the Window of 1822, further elaborated two years later by his friend and follower Carl Gustav Carus.

First came Carus’ Friedrichian Woman on the Balcony from 1824. High above the rolling wooded countryside of central Germany, a young woman dressed in black sits contemplating the view and facing away from the viewer. The artist tells us where he painted this view from, and adds some foreground detail to help mystify the viewer.

When Carus visited Naples in about 1829-30, he stayed close to Castel dell’Ovo, and framed a view in his Balcony Room with a View of the Bay of Naples (via Santa Lucia and the Castel dell’Ovo). Instead of a figure, there’s a musical instrument, presumably to reinforce that this is Italy. The interior is mainly used for its framing and repoussoir effect.

After Manet’s The Balcony (1868-69), Berthe Morisot, who modelled for that and was soon to become his sister-in-law, painted her own Woman and Child on a Balcony in 1872. She uses the balcony primarily to combine full-length portraits of the two figures with an aerial landscape of Paris. The pillar and flowerpot at the right steer the eye from immediate foreground in a zigzag past the figures to end in the far distance. On the skyline just to the left of the woman is the dark mass of Notre Dame.

It was Gustave Caillebotte who recast and modernised the precursors of Friedrich and Carus for his painting of his brother René, the Young Man at His Window, in 1875.

Strictly speaking, Caillebotte’s younger brother René isn’t on a balcony here, merely standing in front of a balustraded window in the family apartment on the rue de Miromesnil in Paris. But the artist has here realised the interplay between the rich red upholstery of the interior and the bright exterior with its pale buildings and trees. Between those two worlds is a substantial stone balustrade. Caillebotte gives his figures the mysterious anonymity of facing away from us too.

Five years later, Caillebotte embarked on a series of paintings from the balconies of his apartment, of which the best-known is Man on a Balcony, Boulevard Haussmann (1880). The interior has been replaced by intermediate details: a trough of flowers, the ornate iron balustrade, and a colourful awning.

Less well-known are two views looking along the length of A Balcony (1880), above, and another Man on a Balcony (1880), below. Both are revelatory in showing the faces of their figures who are looking across our direction of view, down at the exterior world below. Both are strongly projected to a vanishing point close to one edge of the canvas, and the view above places the head of one of its two figures at that focal point.

Caillebotte went on to paint a couple of tightly-cropped images showing small sections of balustrade with the trees and buildings below. Finally in 1884, he bought Manet’s The Balcony for his private collection.

The Norwegian painter Hans Heyerdahl, who was living in Paris at the time, responded with his close-cropped At the Window in 1881 (above), and the following year his compatriot Christian Krohg painted his Portrait of the Swedish Painter Karl Nordström (below) using the same artistic device. Krohg didn’t paint this in Paris, but as he neared the end of his time in France in the artists’ colony of Grez-sur-Loing, in the Spring of 1882.

Heyerdahl engages deeply in the interplay between the woman’s interior world, with a half-open book on her lap, and her distant gaze towards the bright exterior.

Prior to this development of the themes of Friedrich and Carus, balconies had often played minor roles in portrait paintings. Maybe the sitter leaned on a section of balustrade, or a flowerpot cascaded its blooms from a pillar. In the late nineteenth century, balconies acquired greater prominence in a wide range of portraits and figurative paintings. Some of that was undoubtedly the result of their increasing availability: with the growth of cities, balconies became popular features of upmarket city apartments, particularly those in Paris.

This portrait of Maximilien Luce’s then unmarried partner and model Ambroisine ‘Simone’ Bouin, Madame Luce on the Balcony from 1893, is an example with objects from its interior set out in the outside sunshine.

Richard Bergh’s Nordic Summer’s Evening (1899-1900) features two distinguished models, Prince Eugen, Duke of Närke, and the singer Karin Pyk, who were both close friends of the artist. In fact, it’s a wonderful composite: the pillars shown were borrowed from the floor below, where they supported this balcony, and Pyk was actually painted when she was in Assisi in Italy. Their figures look not at one another, but their gazes cross paths as they stare at the still parkland beyond, lit by the low sun.

We can only imagine the ‘cheating’ that Isaak Brodsky must have contrived to paint this marvellous Self-portrait with Daughter in 1911. Here, the balcony is an integral part of an aerial precinct in the town; there is no sight of ground level. Brodsky’s world exists a couple of stories above.

Lovis Corinth painted this Balcony Scene in Bordighera in 1912 early during his convalescence in the Midi after his stroke the previous year.

The scene in Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky’s Lady on a Balcony appears more relaxed. His sitter, I.A. Yusupova, looks to be enjoying the fine summer weather in Koreiz, not far from Yalta, on the northern coast of the Black Sea. At about this time, the Balkans had been plunged into crisis following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and by the end of July the Great War had begun. During its closing stages, the Crimean Peninsula was swept up in the Russian Civil War, and changed hands every few months, with tens of thousands being massacred during the chaos.

The last artist whose paintings I show here had a lasting fascination for painting views through windows, extending to the balconies he had added to his homes: Pierre Bonnard.

In La Fenêtre (The Window) from 1925, Bonnard frames the view from his villa in Le Cannet looking inland, and includes part of the all-important balcony.

One of Bonnard’s fullest views of a balcony comes in The French Windows with Dog from 1927, where our gaze is led from its interior, out through the French windows, over the decking and wooden balustrade, to the palms and town of Le Cannet beyond.

The view from the balcony is a journey through life.