Series paintings of times of the day and the seasons have been popular, but those trying to depict the whole of life are unusual and challenging. This weekend I look at some of the better attempts to tell the story of the journey of life. Because some of these series consist of more than five paintings, I here show selections of those longer accounts.

One of the earliest painted accounts of life is Nicolas Poussin’s series The Seven Sacraments. His first version of this was started in about 1636 as a commission for his patron and mentor Cassiano dal Pozzi, and was completed four years later.

The first in the series shows The Baptism of Christ, as an unusual example of a baptismal scene. The white dove of the Holy Spirit above the figure of Christ is one link across some of the others in the series.

The white dove reappears in Poussin’s genteel account of Marriage.

The series is completed by Extreme Unction, showing the sacrament being administered to a cadaveric man as his family are gathered around his deathbed.

Although several of William Hogarth’s series were biographical, such as his first two of A Harlot’s Progress (c 1731) and its compliment A Rake’s Progress (1732-5), none attempted to depict the whole journey of life from birth to death.

The next is probably Thomas Cole’s Voyage of Life, painted in 1839-42. Like Poussin before him, Cole wasn’t satisfied with painting this cycle of four phases. When he was in Rome in 1842, fearing that he wouldn’t see his series again, nor be allowed to exhibit it, he painted a second version, now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and shown here. He had already painted a precursor cycle, The Course of Empire, in 1833-36, telling the story of an idealised civilisation, inspired by Byron’s poem Pilgrimage (1812-8).

Cole’s first series The Voyage of Life was commissioned to show a Christian allegory of the stages of life. He divided this into childhood, youth, manhood, and old age.

Childhood establishes the scene: the lush coastal undercliff, rich in flowers and the vibrant green of vegetation. A boat has emerged from a large cave in the cliff, symbolising the mother’s birth canal and the process of birth. A young baby is standing in the boat, with an angel at its tiller. A carved angelic figure forming the prow holds out an hourglass as the symbol for time.

In Youth, the young man has taken the helm of the boat, leaving the angel on the bank. The morning light is bright, and the weather fair. The young man is navigating the boat along the river, through lush waterside meadows and avenues, towards a distant vision of a celestial temple. The coastal cliffs are now in the background on the right, and in the centre distance is a rocky mountain spire.

By Manhood, the hero has noticeably matured, and his boat is on a fast-flowing river just approaching dangerous rapids passing through a rocky chasm. It is now dusk, and the angel is watching over from a break in the dark and forboding clouds. The man no longer holds the tiller, indeed the rudder is missing altogether, but both hands are clasped in prayer, as he looks anxiously up towards the heavens. In the foreground on the right are twisted trees, splintered by storms, with autumnal leaves.

Old Age shows the man in the boat far older, bald and with a grey beard. His boat is now in placid waters at the coast again, making no way. The boat itself is battered, its figurehead missing. He sits in the boat talking with the angel, who beckons him up through a parting in the black clouds, to a distant angel, far up in the heavens, rising through beams of sunshine towards brightness at the top left.

The painter who came closest to creating an epic in his works must be Louis Janmot, whose series Le Poème de l’âme (Poem of the Soul) consists of no less than 34 images, of which the first eighteen are painted in oils, and the remaining sixteen are in charcoal. Miraculously, the complete series is still together in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, France. Although the captions don’t report it, each of the oil paintings is 130-145 cm in height, and 140-145 cm in width, although I have also seen them stated as being much larger, approximately 394 x 500 cm.

Like Blake and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Janmot was also an accomplished poet, and his series is accompanied by an epic poem of nearly three thousand lines. He had a deep Catholic faith, and both the poem and the paintings are framed within his beliefs.

The series opens in heaven, with the mystical formation of a human soul, shown in symbolic form as a baby. This takes place under the watch of the Holy Trinity, although the three figures surrounding the newborn soul include a woman who represents love. Around this tight group are seemingly endless ranks of angels.

The newborn soul is brought down to earth by its guardian angel. This view, midway between heaven and earth, shows the succession of newborn souls being taken down to earth in the centre, and the judgement of the dead taking place at the side. The souls of the virtuous are seen being accompanied back up to heaven by their guardian angels, at the left. On the right are those destined for hell.

Below, on the right, is the figure of Prometheus bound, being attacked by an eagle. Prometheus is a strange figure from classical mythology to appear in this series, but a strong symbol of eternal suffering.

This is set by the Lake of Moras, where the mother sits with the newborn soul on her lap. Its guardian angel is kneeling in prayer for the mother and the soul of her new child. This painting combines the images of the annunciation to the Virgin Mary, and the Virgin Mary with the infant Jesus, in a unique way.

As the child grows up, Janmot represents it as a duality of boy, shown here in pink, and girl, in white symbolising purity and innocence. The pair are shown at play, picking flowers, in an idyllic country landscape during the spring.

This mystical duality continues through most of the rest of the oil paintings. At times, the pair appear to be brother and sister, or even lovers, but as we will see in tomorrow’s sequel, in the end they represent the earthly body (boy) and the spirit (girl). They are usually colour-coded, the boy wearing pink, and the girl white.

References

Poussin’s Sacraments
Cole’s Voyage of Life
Janmot’s Poem of the Soul 1
Janmot’s Poem of the Soul 2
Janmot’s Poem of the Soul 3
Janmot’s Poem of the Soul 4

In this second and concluding article showing the seasons in paintings, I resume with one of the treasures of the Louvre in Paris. Towards the end of his life, Nicolas Poussin’s hands developed a severe tremor making painting fine details very difficult. Despite that, his final years saw some of his greatest landscape paintings, and standing head and shoulders above those is his series of the Seasons, believed to have been painted between 1660-64.

Each of these is both a fine painting of an idealised landscape, together with narrative referring to a Biblical story. They not only move through the seasons of the year, but through the times of the day, starting in the early morning of Spring, and ending at night for winter, a device used later by others including William Hogarth.

Spring starts at the beginning of the Bible, with the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Eve is persuading Adam to join her in an apple, the opening step of the Fall.

For Summer, Poussin chose the story of Boaz discovering Ruth gleaning after the wheat had been cut in his fields, as told in the Book of Ruth. In its contrasting Italian coastal setting, this shares common ground with earlier paintings of the Brueghels.

Poussin refers to a story from the Book of Numbers for Autumn, in which Israelite spies visited the Promised Land, and brought back grapes as evidence of what lay ahead.

Winter returns to the Book of Genesis, to show the great flood, with lightning crackling through the sky, and survivors trying to escape the rising waters. This also demonstrates Poussin’s lifelong dread of snakes: one is slithering up the rocks on the left, and there is another in the water, although not visible in this image.

Early in William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s career he was commissioned to paint a series showing The Four Seasons (1854-55) for the music pavilion in the garden of the Monlun banking family in La Rochelle. In keeping with their opulent surrounds, these were painted on gold grounds, a layer of gold leaf into which the artist embossed a geometric pattern to result in this unusual appearance. He painted a series of young women with seasonal attributes. These include the flowers of Spring, with their reference to Flora, sheaves of ripened corn (Ceres), a bacchante with her goblet of wine and thyrsus, and wrapped up for winter with snow on her clothing.

The greatest series of mythological allegories of the seasons is that painted in the final years of Eugène Delacroix’s life. These were commissioned by the Alsacian industrialist Frederick Hartmann, and completed just before the artist’s death in 1863. Although considered to be allegories, in that they don’t directly show each season, they are unconventional in using stories from classical myths that are tied into the seasons.

For Spring, Delacroix chose Eurydice Bitten by a Serpent while Picking Flowers (Eurydice’s Death), in which the bride Eurydice is bitten on the foot (or ankle) by a snake immediately after her wedding, and dies.

For summer, the story is another tragic myth of Diana Surprised by Actaeon, again set in the season shown. Actaeon stumbled across the goddess bathing when he was out hunting; as a result of his unintentional glimpse of her naked body, he’s turned into a stag and killed by his own hunting dogs. He’s already in transition, with antlers growing from his head.

Delacroix’s choice for autumn draws on the common association between that season and wine, with Bacchus and Ariadne. After being abandoned on the island of Naxos by Theseus, who had promised to marry her, Ariadne is discovered by the young Bacchus. Here, the god has just arrived and is helping the gloomy and despondent Ariadne to her feet. They then fall in love and marry.

For the final season of winter, the artist chose Juno Beseeches Aeolus to Destroy Ulysses’ Fleet, with a slight conflation between the stories of Ulysses and Aeneas. In the Aeneid, Juno offers Aeolus a nymph as a wife if he will let loose his winds on the fleet of Aeneas. That he does, and the fleet is driven onto the coast of North Africa by a winter storm.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Alphonse Mucha made several series of prints showing the four seasons. Among these is The Four Seasons, probably from around 1897-1900. These make interesting comparison with Bouguereau’s more conventional paintings above.

A Masque for the Four Seasons, painted in oils between 1905-09, was possibly Walter Crane’s last major work in oils. This draws on Botticelli’s Primavera, in its frieze before a dense woodland background, and copious seasonal wild flowers. Its four Grace-like women are colour-coded from the Spring on the left.

The seasons are also a pervasive feature of much of East Asian art, and I close with a relatively modern example.

Araki Jippo 荒木 十畝 painted Birds and Flowers of Four Seasons 四季花鳥 on silk in 1917, which makes a fascinating comparison with the landscapes of de Momper.

As we near the grain harvest in the northern hemisphere, so come the summer storms. Just as the farmworkers have ventured out into the fields of dry, ripe wheat, the heavens above become inky black as towering clouds bring torrential rain and rolling thunder. This weekend we’re in for more than our fair share, in the company of many of the great landscape artists.

At the dawn of modern landscape painting, Giorgione’s The Tempest from about 1504-8 centres on an approaching storm. The sky is filled with inky dark clouds, and there’s a bolt of lightning in the distance. The figures here imply an underlying narrative, but today that can only be speculated.

Nicolas Poussin’s setting of a Landscape during a Thunderstorm with Pyramus and Thisbe (1651) shows the city of Babylon in the distance, along a picturesque and pastoral valley. But the peacefulness of this landscape has been transformed by the sudden arrival of a thunderstorm: the gusty wind is already bending the trees, and near the centre of the view a large branch has broken with its force. Two bolts of lightning make their way to the hills below.

There’s frantic activity in response not only to the storm, but to a lioness attacking a horse, whose rider has fallen. An adjacent horseman is about to thrust his spear into the back of the lioness, while another, further ahead, is driving cattle away from the scene. Others on foot, and a fourth horseman, are scurrying away, driven by the combination of the lioness and the imminent storm.

In the foreground, Pyramus lies dying, his sword at his side, and his blood flowing freely on the ground, down to a small pond. Thisbe has just emerged from sheltering in the cave, has run past the bloodied shawl at the right, and is about to reach the body of her lover.

Still attributed to Poussin’s pupil and brother-in-law Gaspard Dughet, this Landscape with Lightning from 1667-69 lacks the subtlety and finesse of the master himself, but shows a bolt of lightning striking ground and setting a fire in the countryside. In the foreground, a couple flee from among trees being shattered by the strong gusts brought by the storm.

The founding fathers of landscape painting in the Northern Renaissance weren’t to be outdone by those of the south: Aelbert Cuyp’s Thunderstorm over Dordrecht from about 1645 is amazingly effective and accurate, considering it was painted more than two centuries before anyone saw high-speed photographic images of lightning.

In Claude-Joseph Vernet’s series The Four Times of Day from 1757, by Midday the clouds of early morning have built into squally showers. While two people are fishing with nets, a couple with an infant and a dog, in the left foreground, are hurrying for shelter before heavy rain starts. Behind them a shepherd has brought their flock under a grove of trees. Seagulls are wheeling and soaring in the strengthening wind.

George Morland’s Before a Thunderstorm (1791) shows well the rising wind and threatening sky just before a summer storm strikes.

When he was only sixteen, in 1821, Samuel Palmer painted this watercolour sketch At Hailsham, Sussex: a Storm Approaching, a faithful representation of Cumulus congestus building in the distance.

Palmer’s watercolour Summer Storm near Pulborough, Sussex from about 1851 refers to Dutch landscape painting, but set in a very Kentish context. A storm is seen approaching the rolling countryside near Pulborough, now in West Sussex, in the south-east of England. On the left, in the middle distance, a small bridge leads across to a hamlet set around a prominent windmill, whose blades are blurred as they’re driven by the wind. Beyond that mill are fields of ripening cereal.

John Constable’s half-size and well-developed study for Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows places an angler in the foreground, as a thunderstorm builds over the Wiltshire countryside behind. Sadly, the fisherman didn’t survive into Constable’s finished painting.