It’s time to head off for a weekend away from the January gloom in Granada, Andalusia, southern Spain, where we’ll visit the Alhambra. It’s one of the oldest, grandest, most fascinating and beautiful palaces in Europe.

It started as one of many hill forts used by the Romans in a series of campaigns to control a succession of tribal revolts, and stamp the Empire’s presence close to North Africa. It was rebuilt in 889 CE, but nothing palatial became of it until around 1250, when the ruling Nasrid emir started to turn it into something much grander.

At that time, much of the south of the Iberian peninsula wasn’t ruled by people from Europe to the north, but by Muslim dynasties who had swept up from the south. The Emirate of Granada was the last substantial part of Iberia to remain under Muslim rule, and in 1333 the Sultan of Granada, Yusuf I, decided to transform the Alhambra into a royal palace. In doing so, he and his successors built one of the most exquisite expressions of Arabic Muslim art and architecture along a ridge about half a mile (0.7 km) long overlooking the city of Granada.

This plan from Openstreetmap and its contributors shows the modern site, as of 2013.

Constantin Uhde’s plan of 1892 shows the layout of the Nasrid palaces:

• Red is the site of the Palace of Comares and the Palaces of the Ambassadors.
• Green is the Palace of the Lions.
• Yellow is the Mexuar.
• Blue is the Garden of Lindajar and later quarters of the Emir.

This article shows a selection of views of the palace up to 1883, and tomorrow’s sequel brings that up to the start of the First World War in 1914.

Early paintings of the Alhambra were mainly topographic views, painted in watercolour during the eighteenth century, such as José de Hermosilla’s View of the Alhambra from the Torres Bermejas Castle of 1767. These are similar to views of landmarks being produced in Britain at the time.

Others, like John Frederick Lewis in 1835, came to record details of the remains of the Alhambra’s buildings, as in The Torre de Comares, Alhambra, drawn carefully in graphite and only slightly highlighted and coloured with watercolour and gouache.

While every seriously aspiring landscape painter was flocking to paint en plein air in the Roman Campagna in the early nineteenth century, the Alhambra seems not to have been included in the circuit.

It was the vogue for Orientalist views in the middle of the nineteenth century that first attracted artists to paint the Alhambra in oils. This is David Roberts’ undated view of Alhambra and Albaicin. Roberts is much better-known for his sketches turned into prints from multiple tours of Egypt and the ‘near east’ made between 1838-40. This work probably originated in sketches made when he visited Spain in 1832, and would have then been painted in this form back in Britain after about 1833, and turned into a print by 1837.

Achille Zo was a Basque painter who specialised in views of Spain during the 1860s, such as this Patio in the Alhambra from 1860. These were well received at the Salon in Paris, earning him a gold medal in 1868, following which he too turned to Orientalism.

It was the fine collection of paintings of the Prado in Madrid that attracted many great artists to Spain. In 1867, Franz von Lenbach and a student of his travelled to Madrid to copy the masters there for his patron Baron Adolf von Schack. The following year, he painted two works in Granada: The Alhambra in Granada (1868) is a magnificent sketch including the backdrop of the distant mountains, and appears to have been painted in front of the motif.

Von Lenbach’s Tocador de la Reina shows the exterior of the Queen’s Dressing Room in the palaces, with his student sketching.

Just two years before he was killed in the Franco-Prussian War, Henri Regnault toured Spain, and when he was in Granada he painted this view of the Colonnade of the Court of the Lions at the Alhambra (1869). I suspect this is unfinished, and he intended to complete the detail in its lower half.

Martín Rico was one of the most important painters in Spain at this time. Influenced mainly by the Barbizon school, he painted this finely-detailed view of The Tower of the Ladies in the Alhambra in 1871-72. It captures the dilapidation the Alhambra had fallen into before more recent work to restore it to its former glory.

If Marià Fortuny’s more Impressionist view of a Courtyard at Alhambra (Patio in Granada) from 1873 is to be believed, some parts of the Alhambra had been turned into smallholdings, with free-ranging chickens.

More distant views of the ridge, such as Heinrich Hansen’s undated painting of Granada with the Alhambra in the Nineteenth Century, show its imposing grandeur.

John Haynes Williams (or Haynes-Williams) recognised the merits of views painted from the Alhambra as a high point, in his undated Albaicin from the Alhambra.

The late nineteenth century saw new visitors to copy masters at the Prado: those Americans who came to study painting in France and Germany. Among then, Childe Hassam visited during the summer of 1883, with his friend Edmund H Garrett, and sketch this view of The Alhambra then. This shows the Palace of the Ambassadors, and remains one of the most frequently painted parts of the site.

From even further afield, the Anglo-Australian Tom Roberts visited Granada when he was in Spain in 1883, when he painted this detailed realist view of A Moorish Doorway, Alhambra. Roberts had migrated with his family in 1869, returned to Britain to study at the Royal Academy Schools from 1881, then went to Spain with the Australian John Peter Russell. He returned to Australia in 1884, becoming one of the early Australian Impressionists.

Reference

Wikipedia.

Wherever you go in the world, the feast of Christmas is now associated with decorated trees, a relatively modern tradition outside Germany, where they originated and became popular as recently as the nineteenth century. That compares with Nativity scenes, plays and cribs that had originated in the fourteenth century and had quickly spread across Europe.

In the early nineteenth century, following marriages between German royalty and those of other European nations, Christmas trees spread across Europe. They reached Britain by 1800, Denmark a few years later, and Austria in 1816. They became more generally popular as a result of Queen Victoria’s fondness for them, and from the 1840s swept the rest of Europe, followed by North America.

Nordic countries had a plentiful supply of suitable trees. Hans Andersen Brendekilde’s finely detailed Cutting Christmas Trees from 1885 shows the men and boys of Danish families preparing some for their homes.

Those who couldn’t go off to the woods to cut their own Christmas trees bought them in one of the seasonal markets that set up in most towns, as shown in Carl Wenzel Zajicek’s watercolour of the Christmas Market in Am Hof Vienna from 1908. This is the largest square in the centre of Vienna, and still hosts a large seasonal market.

A Danish artist and member of the Skagen group of Impressionists, Viggo Johansen painted this wonderfully loose study for a finished painting of Christmas Eve in 1891.

Because of an earlier family tragedy, Johansen had been banned from dancing around the family Christmas tree when he was a child. When he came to have his own family, he went out of his way to ensure that his six children weren’t so deprived. That year he bought one of the largest Christmas trees in Copenhagen, and painted his family celebrating around it. That took him about four months, while the tree shed most of its needles, and his family had to keep attaching freshly cut branches to maintain its appearance.

The younger Carl Oesterley captured history in his painting of Queen Marie of Hanover Giving Presents to the Poor and Needy (1908). Princess Marie of Saxe-Altenburg, as she’s more properly known, lived between 1818-1907. The artist’s father, Carl Oesterley senior, had been court painter to her family, but in 1866 her father’s kingdom was annexed by Prussia. The Princess married King George V of England, and her family never relinquished the throne. Princess Marie is shown as a saintly figure, bathed in light as the poor and needy, including a sick boy in the bed behind her, worship her grace.

Leopold Graf von Kalckreuth brings together what has since become a cliché of Christmas cards in his sentimental group of Children by the Christmas Tree from about 1912.

On Christmas Eve at the end of 1913, Lovis Corinth painted this delightful scene of their two young children enjoying their Christmas Decorations. Charlotte, the artist’s wife, is seen at the left edge dressed as Father Christmas. Their son Thomas stands with his back to the viewer in front of a nativity scene close to his mother. Daughter Wilhelmine is at the right edge, inspecting one of the presents. Corinth uses high chroma traditionally associated with Christmas to enrich the scene.

In Nikolai Astrup’s woodcut print of his family’s Christmas Eve at Sandalstrand from 1918, his wife and young son have fallen asleep exhausted, amid traditional Norwegian decorations, including their well-decked tree.