There seems to be some confusion over what windmills are, so this weekend I show a selection of paintings of them across Europe. This article covers the period between 1500-1850, when they remained popular. From the twelfth century until the twentieth, they were a common sight on many skylines in northern Europe. Preceding the better-known vertical windmills were various horizontal designs, and windmills continued to flourish until the middle of the nineteenth century. Used wherever there was a need for driving a rotating axle, they were widely employed to grind cereals into flour, power sawmills, make paper, grind materials, and thresh corn.

Hieronymus Bosch’s uniquely imaginative paintings often featured realistic background landscapes. One recurring setting is a city based on Antwerp or his home town of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, with a windmill closest to the viewer. This appears in the centre panel of his triptych The Adoration of the Magi from about 1490-1500, for instance.

A similar windmill appears in a slightly different setting in the version of The Temptation of Saint Anthony now in Lisbon, from around 1500-10, in its right wing. This is shown in the detail below.

The Bruegels also worked amid many windmills, but none seems so prominently out of place than in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Procession to Calvary from 1564. Windmills were commonly built on hills, where they would benefit from the most consistent wind, but this example on a towering crag is not only geographically inappropriate, but completely impractical. It stands on a circular platform to allow the mill to rotate according to the direction of the wind, but would hardly have been above Jerusalem at the time of the Crucifixion.

More at home are the half dozen windmills clustered around the port of Dordrecht in the Netherlands, shown in Jan van Goyen’s View of Dordrecht with the Grote Kirk Across the Maas from 1644.

Rembrandt painted few non-narrative landscapes, but among them is this dramatic view of The Mill (1645-48) seen in the rich rays of twilight.

The great masters of Dutch landscape art like Jacob van Ruisdael must have painted many hundreds of windmills, of which one of the best-known is this view of The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede from about 1670. This small town, now a city, is on the bank of the River Rhine, an ideal location for delivering grain by barge, and shipping the resulting flour. This should have kept the mill as busy as the wind allowed, and its owner prosperous.

This view of a Landscape with Windmills near Haarlem was painted by John Constable in 1830, almost two centuries after the original made by Jacob van Ruisdael.

Windmills were also a common sight along the lower reaches of the River Thames. William Hogarth’s print from his Industry and Idleness series shows its anti-hero Idle being rowed out to join his ship at Cuckold’s Point on the River Thames, opposite what were then the West Indian docks, between Limehouse and Greenwich. Long after these windmills had gone, this section of the river was still involved with the grain trade.

There were other windmills upstream of the city of London too. In what must be Thomas Girtin’s most famous painting of The White House at Chelsea, from 1800, the artist looks upstream of the River Thames from a location close to the modern Chelsea Bridge. The landmarks shown include, from the left, Joseph Freeman’s windmill (or Red House Mill), a horizontal air mill, the white house close to where Battersea Park is now, Battersea Bridge, and Chelsea Old Church. Girtin painted this when he was twenty-five, and showing greater promise than his rival JMW Turner. Two years later Girtin died of asthma.

A few years later the topographic painter John Varley painted this close-up view of the same Red House Mill, Battersea, Surrey, looking back in the opposite direction.

Some of the well-known windmills supplying the city of Paris with its flour were those above its outskirts on Montmartre Hill. Georges Michel’s view of The Mill of Montmartre was probably painted in about 1820, by which time there were only a few left.

Richard Parkes Bonington probably painted Barges on a River in around 1825-6 when he was travelling near the French town of Nantes. The windmill seen behind the trees is reminiscent of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting.

During his detailed realist period early in his career, Johan Jongkind painted this View of Maassluis in Winter (1848). Following the long tradition of landscape painting in the Netherlands, he sets his horizon low and paints a wonderful winter sky.

In 1640, soon after Rembrandt and his wife Saskia had moved into their own house in a fashionable quarter of Amsterdam, she gave birth to their third child, who died shortly afterwards. The following year, their fourth was born, Titus, the only one to survive to adulthood, although even he died before Rembrandt.

His vast group portrait of The Night Watch (1642) is perhaps the most famous of all those of militia in the Dutch Republic. It’s more correctly titled Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq, and features the commander and seventeen members of his civic guard company in Amsterdam, and took the artist three years to complete from his first commission to its display in the guards’ great hall.

Captain Frans Banninck Cocq (in black with a red sash), followed by his lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch (in yellow with a white sash) are leading out this militia company, their colours borne by the ensign Jan Visscher Cornelissen. The small girl to the left of them is carrying a dead chicken, a symbol of arquebusiers, the type of weapon several are carrying.

At the time, Saskia’s health was declining rapidly, and she died in 1642, most probably from tuberculosis, which was rife at the time. Rembrandt hired a widow, Geertje Dircx, to look after his young son Titus, and she became the artist’s lover.

Another superb example of Rembrandt’s later techniques is in his painting of David and Jonathan from 1642.

Rembrandt painted few non-narrative landscapes, but among them is his dramatic view of The Mill (1645-48) seen in the rich rays of twilight. This is a post mill, whose wooden top was turned into the wind to set its sails turning.

His relationship with Titus’ nurse broke up acrimoniously in 1649, and he first had to pay her alimony, then the cost of confining her in a house of correction when she broke her side of their agreement. As they were parting, he began a relationship with the much younger Hendrickje Stoffels, who had been his maid.

Stoffels is claimed to have been the model for A Woman Bathing in a Stream, painted in 1654, when she was expecting their first child.

She probably appears again in his masterly painting of Bathsheba with King David’s Letter from 1654, showing an imagined moment late in this Old Testament story.

Bathsheba is at her bath, this time in the privacy of her bedchamber, her feet being cared for by an old and presumably worldly-wise maid or nurse. Clutched in Bathsheba’s right hand is a letter, the title tells us from the king himself. Her eyebrows are raised in surprise, and she stares dreamily down at her attendant. We must presume that this letter is the king’s invitation to her to join with him in adultery. Rembrandt skilfully heightens the suspense in the lighting, and enhances the intimate detail with Bathsheba’s jewellery and ornamented hair. The crumpled sheets behind her make it clear that David’s invitation isn’t to a public engagement, but to a very private one.

In June 1654, Stoffels was summoned by her church accused of committing “the acts of a whore with Rembrandt the painter”, for which she was banned from receiving communion. That October, she gave birth to their daughter, but the couple were unable to marry as Rembrandt would consequently have lost access to a trust set up by Saskia. His finances continued to worsen, and in 1656 he declared his insolvency, resulting in his house being sold at auction early in 1658. He was, though, allowed to keep his studio equipment, and he was able to live on as a tenant. That year Rembrandt’s son Titus and Hendrickje Stoffels formed a company of art dealers, thus enabling the artist to continue painting.

Rembrandt’s Baucis and Philemon (1658) shows Jupiter looking decidedly Christlike, and Mercury the younger, almost juvenile, figure, sat at the table of a dark and rough cottage, lit by a lamp behind Mercury. This dramatic lighting is precursor to similar effects in his later Ahasuerus and Haman and Conspiracy of the Batavians, shown below. Philemon and Baucis are crouched, chasing the evasive goose towards Jupiter. A humble bowl of food is in the centre of the table, and there is a glass of beer. As is usual in Rembrandt’s narrative paintings, he dresses them in contemporary rather than historic costume.

Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait from 1658 is one of the most insightful of his unique series of self-portraits, showing the artist bankrupt and growing old.

He drew Ahasuerus and Haman at the Feast of Esther (1660) from an Old Testament story in the book of Esther, via the contemporary play Hester by Johannes Serwouters, first performed the previous year. The original narrative revolved around Haman, one of King Ahasuerus’ officials, who proposed to hang Mordechai as a scapegoat for the Jewish nation, as revenge for their pride. In this painting, Haman is shown in the shadows on the left, with King Ahasuerus in the centre, and Esther – Mordechai’s cousin and Ahasuerus’s wife – radiant in her intervention to save Mordechai’s life.

In 1661, Rembrandt secured a major commission for what was then the new Amsterdam City Hall, completed in 1655, now the Royal Palace. The dozen large spaces intended for paintings were going to be filled by Govert Flinck, who had started but not completed them when he died in 1660. Rembrandt sketched what he is believed to have completed in the summer of 1662.

The painting that we see today as The Conspiracy of the Batavians under Claudius Civilis (1661-2) is but a small central rectangle within the original. His entire painting was hung in place for a while, but appears to have fallen into disfavour. It was taken down and returned to the artist, who wasn’t paid, and no longer had sufficient influence to change anyone’s mind in the matter. Meanwhile Jürgen Ovens (1623–1678) completed Flinck’s version, which was hung instead of Rembrandt’s. Rembrandt was desperately short of money at this time, so cut the painting down to a more saleable size, repainted parts of it, and sold it on.

Hendrickje Stoffels died in July 1663, leaving Rembrandt with his son Titus. Despite his advancing years and continuing battles to pay his rent and bills, Rembrandt’s paintings attained new heights. Typical of these are two portraits of Lucretia ending her life following her rape by Sextus Tarquinius.

In the earlier of the two, from 1664, Lucretia is seen just about to run the dagger home into her chest. Rembrandt dresses her in fine contemporary clothes, rather than the black robes of the story, and she is richly decorated with jewellery. She faces the viewer, but her head is slightly inclined to the right, and she stares emptily at her right hand. Her face shows calm resignation to her fate, with a tinge of wistful sadness. Her arms are outstretched to the edges of the canvas. The left hand is grubby and held open, palm towards the viewer, perhaps protesting her virtue. The right grasps the handle of a dagger, which is just being brought around in an arc to impale her chest and bring her end.

Rembrandt’s later painting of 1666 is more remarkable still: Lucretia has already pierced her chest with the blade. Her fine clothing has been pulled back to reveal her simple white shift, with a broad streak of fresh, bright red blood running down from the point at which the dagger was inserted. Her arms are outstretched here too, but for very different purposes. The right hand still clutches the dagger, which has dropped to waist level already. Her left hand is dragging a beaded bell-pull, presumably to summon her family to witness her final moments on earth. It is her face, though, that makes this painting. Her eyes, moistened by welling tears, are looking away to the right of the painting, in an absent-minded stare. Her brow is tensed with subtle anxiety. She knows that she is about to die, and is preparing herself for that moment.

Rembrandt continued to develop his mark-making right up to his death. It’s often at its most florid when he painted fabrics, such as the clothing of the couple shown in The Jewish Bride of about 1665. The Dutch Republic had long been a safe harbour for Jews fleeing from oppression in other European countries, and Rembrandt had cultivated close relationships with members of the large Jewish community in Amsterdam, some of whom had modelled for his paintings of Old Testament stories.

The Return of the Prodigal Son from about 1668, the year before the artist’s death, is a more conventional treatment of this parable from the Gospels, in which the younger son, almost barefoot and in rags, kneels in front of his father. Around them are members of the household, and details that are now hard to read. As with other late works, there’s a profound feeling of tenderness and redemption, which may have had personal significance.

Rembrandt’s son Titus van Rijn died in 1668, at the age of only 26, and Rembrandt died on Friday 4 October 1669. Three years later the Dutch Republic was invaded by French forces, and its Golden Age came to an abrupt end.

Rembrandt is probably the most famous artist of the Dutch Golden Age. Although his career is by no means typical, it does illustrate some of the forces at work behind the explosive growth of art during this period, and is a good excuse to show a few of his paintings for context with other artists of the period.

He was born in the city of Leiden, then the second largest in the Dutch Republic after Amsterdam, with a population of 45,000 in 1622, and growing rapidly. Its major industry was the weaving of textiles, and through the seventeenth century it attracted many weavers to migrate from Flanders. Another flourishing local industry was printing and publishing, which was helped by the city’s university, founded in 1575, and its role as a centre of learning and scientific development.

Rembrandt was the ninth child in a prosperous family, his father being a miller. He was well educated, initially at a school in the centre of the city, then from the age of 14 at the university. He soon opted to be apprenticed as a painter, and joined the workshop of Jacob van Swanenburg in Leiden, who had trained in Italy. After three years, Rembrandt went on to work for shorter periods with Pieter Lastman, a history painter in Amsterdam, and others there.

Rembrandt’s early painting of The Operation, from his late teens in 1624-25, shows a barber-surgeon and his assistant performing surgery on the side of a man’s head.

In 1625, when he was only 19, he became a master in his own right, and opened his first studio in Leiden, shared with his former fellow-student Jan Lievens. Two years later he started taking on his own apprentices.

In 1626-27, Rembrandt painted this portrait of a Man in a Gorget and a Plumed Cap, demonstrating the strange effects that cast shadows can have on perception of the face. This also shows his early mastery of surface textures and reflected highlights.

Rembrandt’s break came in 1629, when he was discovered by a distinguished poet and composer Constantijn Huygens, who was secretary to the head of state, held influence in the Hague, and was the father of Christiaan Huygens, a leading mathematician and physicist. Huygens helped arrange commissions for Rembrandt, and introduced his work to Prince Frederik Hendrik, then head of state.

Although several of his best-known chiaroscuro paintings were made in his old age, Rembrandt had long used the technique when appropriate, here in Saint Peter in Prison (The Apostle Peter Kneeling) from 1631.

Rembrandt’s The Abduction of Proserpina (c 1631) is probably the first masterpiece to show this myth. Pluto is trying to drive his chariot away, with Proserpine inside it. She’s putting up fierce resistance, and trying to fend him off. Hanging on to the hem of Proserpine’s floral dress is a woman who should perhaps be her mother Ceres, but bears the crescent moon normally associated with Diana. Pluto’s chariot is being drawn by two black horses through an ethereal almost fluid carpet of flowers. The horses and chariot are about to disappear into a black cleft in the earth to make their descent to Hades.

In 1631, Rembrandt moved his studio to Amsterdam, the centre of trade and business for the Dutch Republic, and growing rapidly from a population of about 50,000 in 1600 to exceed 200,000 in the 1660s. He started getting commissions to paint portraits of those enjoying success in the city.

Rembrandt painted his Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp in 1632, as an early commission soon after his arrival in Amsterdam. It’s a group portrait of distinguished members of the Surgeons’ Guild in their working environment, and a good example of his lucrative work. Portraits like this would typically be paid for by subscription of those included, often in proportion to their standing.

Rembrandt’s The Abduction of Europa (1632) isn’t well known today. It conforms to Ovid’s account in his Metamorphoses, but loses dramatic effect by placing the bolting bull in a dominant and very Dutch landscape, cluttered with Europa’s carriage, large trees, and a distant port.

His Philosopher in Meditation from 1632 shows the sinuous curves of a spiral staircase seemingly defying gravity as it rises to the storey above, and is one of his early interiors.

The young prophet Daniel (of lions’ den fame) was King Cyrus the Great’s confidant, according to the book of Daniel. When Cyrus asked Daniel why he didn’t worship the Persian god Bel (Baal), Daniel responded by saying that he worshipped a living god, not a mere idol. Cyrus then claimed that Bel too was a living god, and pointed to the offerings of food and wine that were placed before his statue, and were consumed each night. Daniel remarked cautiously that bronze statues do not eat, which for a moment threw Cyrus. But Daniel had exposed the deception of Bel’s priests.

In this painting of Daniel and Cyrus before the Idol Bel of 1633, Rembrandt has captured Cyrus, standing in the centre, pointing at the food and wine placed on the altar to Bel, whose huge idol is seen rather murkily at the upper right. Behind the modest figure of Daniel are some of the priests who maintained this deception.

Rembrandt painted this portrait of Bellona in 1633, when his career was flourishing. Given that she’s holding the Aegis normally associated with Minerva (Athena), I wonder whether there has been a misunderstanding here, but there’s no mention of the possibility that this might be Minerva instead.

His self-portrait from 1631-33 shows the artist in fancy dress with a large poodle, making it clear that he had truly arrived.

In 1634, Rembrandt became properly established in Amsterdam, when he was accepted as a member of Guild of Saint Luke, and married Saskia van Uylenburgh, daughter of a respected lawyer. The following year, the couple moved into a rented property with a view of the river. That December, she gave birth to their first child, a son, who lived for only two months.

Rembrandt and Saskia in the Parable of the Prodigal Son from about 1635, when the artist was just short of being thirty years old, shows the young wife sitting on his lap as he raises a large fluted glass of beer at the viewer.

With his artistic and commercial success, Rembrandt’s income rose rapidly. Like many successful Dutch citizens of the time, much of that income was spent on gathering possessions. In his case, these included a remarkable collection of Old Masters, including several paintings by Giorgione, objets d’arts, and even suits of armour. Some of these appear as props in his paintings.

Rembrandt’s Blinding of Samson from 1636 is an explicit depiction of the destruction of his eyes, as Delilah makes off behind with his hair and a pair of shears.

His outstanding painting of Belshazzar’s Feast was made in about 1635-38, when he was developing his distinctive techniques of depicting decorative metals, as shown in the detail below.

In the summer of 1638, Saskia gave birth to their second child, who died less than a month later.

The following year he followed fashion in painting this Still Life with Two Peacocks and a Girl (c 1639).

That Spring Rembrandt and his wife moved into their own house in one of the city’s more fashionable streets, among successful artists and dealers in art. To finance this purchase, the artist had to raise a substantial mortgage, which was to come back and haunt his later life, as I’ll describe in tomorrow’s conclusion.

Between the Middle Ages and the twentieth century there have been three periods in which European painting has changed dramatically: in the Renaissance, the Dutch Golden Age, and the nineteenth century. Of those, the Renaissance is usually viewed as the most important. In this series, I make the case for paintings of the Dutch Golden Age being more revolutionary than those of the Renaissance, and bringing greatest change.

The Low Countries, covering what’s currently the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and parts of north-eastern France, had been a patchwork of small duchies and other states under the overall rule of the Holy Roman Emperor. In 1568-1579, seven of the more northerly provinces revolted to form their own Dutch Republic with the Union of Utrecht.

These are shown in red, orange and yellow in this map. Centres of art in the Dutch Republic included The Hague, its de facto capital, Utrecht, Leiden, Delft, Harlem, and Amsterdam. To the south were the lands composing the Spanish Netherlands, notably Flanders and Brabant, including the cities of Antwerp and Brussels. Thus, Peter Paul Rubens who worked from his workshop in Antwerp until his death in 1640 was Flemish, while Rembrandt who was brought up in Leiden and worked in Amsterdam until his death in 1669 was one of the leading artists of the Dutch Republic.

Although the Dutch Republic existed between 1579-1795, the period known as its Golden Age is generally agreed as ending in around 1672, with the French invasion, and its start in art is usually delayed to around 1600. During that period of seventy years the provinces flourished, with extensive colonies overseas and rich trade with them and throughout Europe. The population of 1 to 1.5 million grew prosperous, with rising disposable income.

Society was liberal, with a high degree of religious tolerance and high immigration. Religious and ethnic minorities who were being oppressed in other parts of Europe were welcomed in the Republic, and the city of Amsterdam became a centre for migrants. This encouraged an increasingly learned society, with innovative science and academic institutions, rising literacy, and flourishing arts.

Paintings became popular possessions across much of Dutch society, and were sold in the first art fairs and by dealers, rather than being commissioned through a system of patronage. Few wall paintings were made in this period, and paintings of the Dutch Golden Age are almost exclusively ‘easel’ paintings, most of them relatively small so they didn’t require a large mansion for their exhibition.

Training of painters remained based on apprenticeships in workshops, and there was no academy system to stifle creativity. Once trained, masters joined their local Guild of Saint Luke and were able to establish their own workshop. Prices remained low so paintings were affordable by almost everyone. Production was extraordinary, with estimates of more than a million paintings being produced in a twenty-year period, and possibly as many as five million in the whole period of seventy years.

This resulted in the rapid development of new genres and themes in addition to those established by the Renaissance, and this is probably the most enduring effect of the Dutch Golden Age on European painting.

Portraits extended beyond those of single patrons or their close families.

Rembrandt painted his Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp in 1632, as an early commission soon after his arrival in Amsterdam. It’s a group portrait of distinguished members of the Surgeons’ Guild in their working environment. Another novel sub-genre was the group portrait of a section of the local militia, best-known now from Rembrandt’s huge Night Watch from 1642.

Painting other humans was extended to cover their livestock and other animals.

Paulus Potter, who became a member of the Guild of Saint Luke in Delft in 1646 founded the new genre of animal painting with his nearly life-size portrait of The Bull the following year. Beyond the animals here is the church of Rijswijk, between Delft and The Hague.

The tentative landscapes that had started to appear in the Renaissance flourished into what was probably the most popular genre of all.

Dutch landscape artists quickly realised that, even if they had relatively little earth and water to depict, the heavens above could be equally interesting. Horizons fell rapidly down their paintings, as seen in Jan van Goyen’s View of Dordrecht with the Grote Kirk Across the Maas from 1644.

Some painters, including Jacob van Ruisdael, turned their canvases to make portraits of towering clouds, as in his View of Haarlem with Bleaching Fields from about 1665. The distant town of Haarlem with its monumentally large church of Saint Bavo – works of man – is dwarfed by these high cumulus clouds, the works of God. This motif proved so popular that Van Ruisdael painted many variants of the same view, making it now one of the most widespread landscapes across the galleries of Europe.

Although Adriaen van de Velde from Amsterdam went on to paint farm animals, his early beach scenes, including The Beach at Scheveningen (1658), broke new ground that a century earlier would have seemed inconceivable in a painting. Others turned their attention to the rapidly growing cities.

Gerrit Berckheyde’s view of Groote Market in Haarlem, Amsterdam from 1673 shows one the largest of the city’s marketplaces at the end of the Golden Age.

Paintings of the Flemish Renaissance had often explored the optical properties of surfaces. These continued in the development of another new genre, that of still life.

Clara Peeters trained in Antwerp, then painted an outstanding series of still lifes in the Dutch Republic. Among those is her still life with Cheeses, Almonds and Pretzels from about 1615, a celebration of the very earthly sensuous pleasures of food.

Ambrosius Bosschaert painted this Flower Still Life in oil on copper in 1614. At first its eclectic mixture of different flowers and flying insects might appear haphazard. However, the flowers include carnation, rose, tulip, forget-me-nots, lilies of the valley, cyclamen, violet and hyacinth, which could never (at that time) have been in bloom at the same time. The butterflies, bee and dragonfly are as ephemeral as the flowers around them, suggesting that this has an underlying vanitas theme.

The son a of Flemish immigrant, David Bailly, who lived and painted in Leiden, painted this Self-Portrait with Vanitas Symbols in 1651, with its multiple portraits referring to the past. The figure shows him as a much younger man, holding the maulstick he used in painting. His actual self-portrait at the time is in the painting he is holding with his left hand. Next to that is a painting of his wife, who had already died, and a ghostly image of her is projected onto the wall behind the wine glass.

Gathered in front of the artist are ephemera and other signs of vanitas: the snuffed-out candle, a glass of wine, flowers, and soap bubbles, together with a string of pearls and a skull. If that message is not clear enough, he provides the quotation on a piece of paper: vanitas vanitum et omnia vanitas, together with his signature and date.

Of all the genres that flourished in the Golden Age, it was painting everyday life, now generally referred to as genre painting, that was most novel and popular.

Long before its value in preventing scurvy was realised (in 1747), or it was carbonated even later, still cloudy lemonade had become a popular soft drink. The extensive trade links of the Dutch Republic made the drink available to the middle classes, as celebrated in Gerard ter Borch’s The Glass of Lemonade (1655-60).

A fashionably-dressed young man is helping to prepare a glass of lemonade for a young woman, who is equally open about her love of fashionable clothing. Behind her is the woman’s nurse or maid, who is having to comfort her through the excitement of the experience. They are surrounded by a contemporary Dutch interior, with the inevitable bed lurking in the dark at the right.

It’s easy to mistake Pieter de Hooch’s A Woman Drinking with Two Men from about 1658 for a Vermeer, and like the latter he decorates the far wall with a contemporary map. The Eighty Years’ War had not long ended, and the Dutch Republic was flourishing. Discarded objects are scattered on its black-and-white tiled floor. There’s a large and empty fireplace, and above it hangs a religious painting.

I hope you’ll join me in the coming weeks as I explore how painting flourished and changed in the Dutch Golden Age.

As a primary colour, red is essential to most palettes, but it has also proved technically challenging to find pigments that are both intense and lasting. This weekend I look at the history of two contenders, in vermilion and crimson, names also steeped in history.

There’s one red that looks as brilliant today as when it was first brushed out five hundred or even two thousand years ago. It’s a pigment known to, and used by, the Romans, and in ancient China was not only used extensively in art, but was scattered in graves. Vermilion is one of the most toxic pigments, and over the last century has been displaced by cadmium red and more novel organic pigments. Look at many paintings made before 1870, and their reds are likely to be dominated by vermilion.

For a long time, vermilion paint was made using powdered cinnabar, naturally-occurring mercuric sulphide, and is then technically known as cinnabar rather than vermilion. Its manufacture from liquid mercury was probably brought from China to Europe, since when much of the vermilion pigment used in Europe has been synthetic.

The main source of cinnabar, and of the metal mercury, in Europe were the mines at Almadén in Spain. These were used by the Romans, and until their closure in 2000 had produced more cinnabar and mercury than any other location. In 1563, deposits were discovered in Huancavelica in Peru, and they were the second largest source over the following three hundred years. Other important sources have been located in China, Slovenia, Italy, Mexico, and the USA.

The mining of cinnabar has long been recognised as hazardous due to its great toxicity, something known as far back as the Romans. Locked in pigment particles in oil paint it’s less hazardous than in water-based paints such as egg tempera; it’s wisest not to use cinnabar or vermilion in dry form, as in pastels, even with good respiratory and skin protection. Even with careful handling, pigment residues pose a serious threat to the environment.

The brightest of the reds in Duccio’s Transfiguration, from the Maestà Predella Panels painted in 1307-11, have the distinctive colour of vermilion. It is often associated with holy people, and holy objects, and contrasts with the other brilliant pigment of ultramarine, which is conventionally used in the clothing of the Virgin Mary.

Its one unfortunate habit is a tendency to blacken, by forming the black version of cinnabar known as metacinnabar. This tends to happen more often in the thinner, less protective paint films of aqueous media, particularly egg tempera, as shown in Nardo di Cione’s Saint John the Baptist, Saint John the Evangelist and Saint James from 1363-65. The lining of the clothing of the saint at the right uses vermilion, and has darkened in patches as a result.

Masaccio’s panel of Saints Jerome and John the Baptist from the Santa Maria Maggiore Altarpiece, from 1428-29, is another fine example of the use of a lot of vermilion (as cinnabar). The robes of Saint Jerome, on the left, may also show a little darkening in patches, but contrast well with the paler and pinker red of Saint John the Baptist at the right.

Cinnabar saw extensive and highly effective use by the van Eycks in The Ghent Altarpiece (c 1432). Because this was painted in oils, the chances of discolouration are much lower.

Botticelli used cinnabar in several passages in his Mystic Nativity (1500), where its persistent colour contrasts with his use of other red pigments, which haven’t retained their colour as well.

All the Masters and most other significant artists of the past used cinnabar, or vermilion when it was being manufactured in Europe by the early seventeenth century. Tintoretto was no exception, as shown in these two examples: Jupiter and Semele (1545) above, and The Origin of the Milky Way (c 1575), below.

Peter Paul Rubens’ centre panel of the Descent from the Cross (1612-14) in the huge triptych in Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathedraal, in Antwerp, is one of the most spectacular demonstrations of the use of vermilion, and its lasting chromatic brilliance.

Rembrandt is another Master who used vermilion to great effect, here in the dress of the woman at the right, in his Belshazzar’s Feast (c 1635-38). The colour draws attention to her as she is so shocked as to empty the goblet she is holding in her right hand. A duller colour might have allowed this dramatic action to pass unnoticed by the viewer.

Aelbert Cuyp’s Hilly River Landscape with a Horseman talking to a Shepherdess from about 1655-60 is one of the few oil paintings in which darkening of cinnabar has become obvious. The pigment serves well in the huntsman’s coat, but has darkened in patches.

William Hogarth played on another common association of the colour red in the third painting, The Inspection, from his series Marriage A-la-Mode (c 1743). Although in English we usually refer to a scarlet woman, rather than a vermilion one, his use of vermilion here is effective in portraying the woman as a prostitute.

Vermilion remained popular well into the latter half of the nineteenth century, long enough for it to grace the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite movement and the French Impressionists.

Although Claude Monet used just a few dabs and strokes of vermilion in his landmark painting Bathers at la Grenouillère (1869), he continued to use it well into the latter years of his career. By that time, though, the new cadmium reds were replacing vermilion, a process that is almost complete today, with cadmiums now being superceded by modern organic pigments.

Reference

RJ Gettens, RL Feller & WT Chase (1993) Artists’ Pigments, vol 2, ed Ashok Roy, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 75 3.

This is the third of four articles providing brief summaries and contents for this series of paintings telling myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and covers parts 37-54, from the fall of Icarus to King Midas.

Daedalus and his son Icarus try to escape Crete using wings of feathers and wax. Icarus flies too near the sun, his wings melt and he falls to his death. Daedalus’ nephew is transformed into a partridge.

37 The fall of Icarus

Calydon troubled by a wild boar. Many heroes hunt the animal, and Meleager is successful. He shares the glory of his prize with Atalanta, but his uncles take the prize, so Meleager kills them both.

38 The Calydonian Boar Hunt

Meleager’s mother Althaea avenges the deaths of her brothers by throwing a log on the fire, causing her son’s death. His sisters are turned into birds. Theseus travels home from the boar hunt and is entertained by Achelous, who explains how nymphs were transformed into the islands of the Echinades.

39 The feast of Achelous

Lelex tells of Jupiter and Mercury seeking hospitality when visiting Phrygia. Only the humble and poor couple Philemon and Baucis entertain them. The gods save them from a flood that drowns everyone else. They’re later transformed into intertwining oak and lime trees.

40 Hospitality to strangers and virtue rewarded

Achelous tells those at his banquet of three shape-shifters: Proteus the old man of the sea, Erysichthon who sold his daughter to assuage his hunger until he consumed his own body, and Achelous himself.

41 Shape-shifters and the Old Man of the Sea

Achelous and Hercules wrestle for the hand of Deianira. Achelous turns himself into a bull, and Hercules wrenches off one of his horns, which becomes cornucopia, the Horn of Plenty.

42 Wrestling for the Horn of Plenty

Hercules marries Deianira, but the centaur Nessus tries to abduct her, so Hercules kills him. Nessus gives Deianira some of his blood, and tricks her later into impregnating one of Hercules’ shirts with it, causing him to incinerate himself on a pyre. He is then turned into a god.

43 The death of Hercules

The birth of Hercules made difficult by Juno and Lucina. Other myths of Hercules as an infant.

44 The birth of Hercules

Dryope picks lotus flowers, and is punished by transformation into a Lotus Tree. Byblis dissolves into a spring after falling in love with her twin brother. A daughter raised as Iphis, a boy, who was transformed into a man immediately before marrying the woman Ianthe.

45 Dryope, Byblis and Iphis

Orpheus marries Eurydice, who is bitten by a snake and dies. He travels to the underworld and pleads for her to be allowed to return with him. That’s approved, provided he doesn’t look back. Near the end of their return journey, he does look back, and she fades away back into the underworld. He then shuns women for three years in his grief.

46 Orpheus and Eurydice

Cyparissus befriends a stag, then accidentally kills it, and in his grief is transformed into a cypress tree, now grown near cemeteries. Orpheus tells of the young Ganymede, who was abducted by Jupiter and taken to Mount Olympus to be cupbearer to the gods.

47 The cypress tree, and the abduction of Ganymede

Hyacinthus, lover of Apollo, is killed by the god’s discus, and transformed into the purple hyacinth flower.

48 Killed by Apollo’s discus

Pygmalion rejects libidinous behaviour in women, and remains celibate. He carves a statue of a woman in ivory, and asks Venus for a bride like her. His statue is transformed into a woman, they marry, and have a daughter Paphos.

49 Galatea transformed from a statue

Myrrha is made pregnant by her father following a deception. He tries to kill her, but she flees and calls on the gods, who transform her into a myrrh tree. Nevertheless, her baby is born, and becomes Adonis.

50 The making of myrrh and birth of Adonis

Venus tells Adonis of the story of Atalanta, who had been told not to marry, and became a fast runner. Hippomenes challenges her to a race for her hand in marriage. He tricks her during that by dropping three golden apples provided by Venus, and beats her to the finish as a result. He didn’t thank Venus for her help, so the couple make love in a shrine to Cybele. As punishment they are transformed into lions to draw Cybele’s chariot.

51 The race between Hippomenes and Atalanta

Despite the warnings of his lover Venus, Adonis goes hunting, is gored in the groin by a wild boar, and dies. His blood is turned into the red anemone.

52 Death of Adonis

Orpheus is attacked by a mob of Bacchantes, torn limb from limb, and dies. His remains are dispersed into rivers, and his soul reunited with Eurydice. The Bacchantes are transformed into an oak wood.

53 The death of Orpheus

Bacchus grants the wish of King Midas, and everything he touches is transformed into gold. This proves a disaster, so Bacchus removes that gift. Midas loses a music contest with Apollo, for which he is given ass’s ears.

54 How Midas got his touch and his ears

As one of the primary colours, yellow is a vital paint for artists. For many centuries there weren’t any particularly good greens that were also enduring, so many oil and watercolour paintings have relied on the mixture of blue and yellow to generate most of their greens. This weekend I show and tell the stories of three of the yellow pigments that have featured in well-known paintings. Today’s is about one pigment that went missing from the palette for two hundred years, and tomorrow I’ll consider two other yellows with unusual histories.

For much of that period many of the pigments used in artists’ paints were closely guarded secrets. Their precise manner of preparation, even the source of their ingredients, were considered part of the craft of paint-making, whether performed by a supplier or in the artist’s workshop. On at least one occasion, this led to the loss of a pigment from the palette: Lead-Tin Yellow, widely used in many of the greatest works of art prior to 1750, vanished until its rediscovery in 1940.

Like several other pigments, Lead-Tin Yellow seems to have originated in glassmaking, and there’s some evidence of its use as a pigment in glass made as early as about 400 CE. Its earliest use in paintings probably dates back to Giotto in about 1300, following which it became extremely popular.

My earliest example is this painting in egg tempera attributed to Jacopo di Cione: Noli me tangere from around 1368-70. Examination of the brilliant yellow lining to Christ’s robe has shown that its pigment is Lead-Tin Yellow of type II. That is a variant consisting of a lead-tin oxide with free tin and silicon that’s more strongly associated with glass-making, and prepared slightly differently from the ‘purer’ type I.

Both types of Lead-Tin Yellow have proved robust and stable pigments in a range of different binders, including egg tempera and oils.

The centre panel of Rogier van der Weyden’s St Columba Altarpiece, showing the Adoration of the Magi, from about 1455, has been found to contain Lead-Tin Yellow in the rich yellow sleeve of the king in the centre. This is shown better in the detail below.

By about 1450, Lead-Tin Yellow type I was increasingly being used in paint. For example, the infant Christ’s lemon yellow dress in Ambrogio Bergognone’s The Virgin and Child with Saint Catherine of Alexandria and Saint Catherine of Siena (c 1490) has been found to contain this ‘purer’ type.

Another very similar painting by Bergognone, his The Virgin and Child from 1488-90, has not, as far as I can tell, been examined to test for the use of Lead-Tin Yellow, but I strongly suspect the infant Christ’s dress here contains the pigment too. This is shown particularly well in the detail below.

Although believed to be a stable colour, one of the more surprising examples of the use of Lead-Tin Yellow is in one version of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Virgin with the Infant Saint John the Baptist adoring the Christ Child accompanied by an Angel, better-known as The Virgin of the Rocks. The panel from the S. Francesco Altarpiece of Milan, painted between 1491-1508 and now in the National Gallery in London, is shown here.

The light brown lining of the Virgin’s blue cloak, shown in the detail below, contains Lead-Tin Yellow type I. The version in the Louvre, in which that lining is a bright yellow, doesn’t appear to have been reported on.

Yellow is a prominent colour in the paintings in Paolo Veronese’s series The Allegory of Love. In this the third, Respect from about 1575, Lead-Tin Yellow type II has been found in the primrose yellow impasto on the man’s tunic.

Veronese used type I in the first of the series, and type II in the third and fourth, suggesting that he used different sources of supply for his pigments over this period. The two types appear visually indistinguishable, and don’t seem to handle differently in oil paint.

Several of Peter Paul Rubens’ paintings, including his Hippopotamus and Crocodile Hunt from about 1615, have been found to contain Lead-Tin Yellow, although I don’t know which type he used.

Another fine example of the extensive use of Lead-Tin Yellow, here of type I, is in Rembrandt’s Belshazzar’s Feast (c 1635-38). Many of Rembrandt’s paintings have been found to contain the pigment, but here it has been applied in thick impasto to model the highlights on Belshazzar’s cloak.

Rembrandt here used a double ground, over which he applied earth pigments before applying the uppermost layers of lighter colours, including Lead-Tin Yellow, to model the detail. These are shown in the detail below.

Jan Vermeer is another of the Old Masters whose paintings often contain Lead-Tin Yellow. In The Milkmaid (c 1660), for example, it accounts for much of the pale yellow of the woman’s bodice.

What happened next is rather strange. During the first half of the eighteenth century, Lead-Tin Yellow declined markedly in popularity, and by 1750 it appears to have been replaced by other, sometimes less stable, pigments, including Naples Yellow (highly toxic lead antimonate). Once replaced, the recipes for its manufacture appear to have been lost, and its use was forgotten.

During the eighteenth century, there were also changes in the supply of pigments and paints to artists, and by the nineteenth century most were sourced from specialist colourmen, who appear not to have known about Lead-Tin Yellow as a pigment. By the time that commercial manufacture of oil and other paints became widespread in the late nineteenth century, the pigment had been long forgotten. This was aided by uncertainty over its traditional name, which led to confusion with the pigment Massicot (lead oxide or Lead Yellow).

It was Richard Jacobi, working at the Doerner Institute in Munich in 1940, who stumbled across the pigment when analysing yellow paints in Old Master paintings. He reported his radical findings in 1941, and from the late 1940s and 1950s onwards paint analyses looking for it have been performed quite widely, and have found its extensive use in works between 1300 and 1750. Since then it has even been re-introduced in some commercial paint ranges.

Reference

Hermann Kühn (1993) Artists’ Pigments, vol 2, ed Ashok Roy, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 75 3.

With his move to Berlin and the success of his painting of Salome, Lovis Corinth was reaching the peak of his career. Corinth formally joined the Berlin Secession in 1901, and quickly found himself involved with its direction. He relished his new-found reputation as ‘the painter of flesh’, and was now at the centre of Germany’s vibrant city of modern arts.

In 1902, he opened a painting school for women, and among his first pupils was Charlotte Berend (1880-1967), then just twenty-one and the daughter of a rich textile merchant.

The Family of the Painter Fritz Rumpf (1901) is a wonderfully informal family portrait, sadly omitting Fritz Rumpf (1856-1927) altogether, but Corinth painted him separately. The mother, at the right, is Margarethe née Gatterer, and all six of their children are included.

In the summer of 1902, Corinth painted Charlotte Berend for the first time, and the couple travelled to Pomerania together. That autumn they became engaged. By this time, Charlotte had already become Corinth’s muse and preferred model, as she was to remain for the rest of his life. That year, Corinth also visited Paris, Anvers, and the Netherlands.

Self portrait with Charlotte Berend-Corinth (1902) is his earliest double portrait with his fiancée. Its original title in German means self-portrait with his wife and a champagne glass although the glass that he’s holding clearly doesn’t contain champagne. This refers to Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait with Saskia (The Prodigal Son) (1636), below, in which Saskia is sat on Rembrandt’s lap, and he raises a large fluted glass of beer in his right hand. Charlotte, in the role of Saskia, looks quiet and calm, against Corinth/Rembrandt’s alcohol-fuelled mirth.

Swimming in Horst – Ostsee (1902) shows swimmers in the Baltic Sea at what was then known as Horst, and is now the Polish resort of Niechorze.

Presumably Paddling (1902) shows Charlotte’s turn to take to the waters there.

Charlotte Berend and Lovis Corinth married in the spring of 1903. He was 44, she was only 22. In the autumn of the following year, their first child, Thomas, was born, and in 1909 their daughter Wilhelmina.

Self-portrait with Model (1903) is the couple’s second joint portrait, and the first after their marriage. This time her pose refers to the classical images of muses by Rubens and Ingres, alluding to the story of Pygmalion.

Corinth appears to have painted with his left hand, so this image hasn’t been painted directly from a mirror, but he may well have used photographs instead.

Max Reinhardt moved to Berlin at the same time as Corinth, and in 1902 his Little Theatre staged what I think was the German premiere of Oscar Wilde’s play Salome. Richard Strauss saw the play there, and it inspired him to write his opera of the same name the following summer.

Corinth painted this wonderful portrait of its star and title role, Gertrud Eysoldt as Salome (1903). This makes an interesting contrast with his 1900 painting of the story. Although during this period he painted fewer mythical and other narrative works, the next painting is one of his most vivid stories.

Ulysses Fighting the Beggar (1903) shows a story from book 18 of Homer’s Odyssey, before the slaughter of the suitors (painted much earlier by Gustave Moreau, but never completed).

Odysseus/Ulysses has finally returned to his home city of Ithaca and is now determined to kill the many suitors to his wife Penelope. As he plans this, he goes around disguised as a beggar. This fragment of the elaborate story starts with the arrival of a real beggar named Arnaeus or Irus, who most unwisely picks a fight with Odysseus, who promptly floors the beggar, and stops just short of killing him.

Corinth captures the fight as Odysseus (centre) is getting the better of Irus (left of centre), with various suitors and bystanders watching. Although painted loosely, the artist has taken care to give each face its own expression, ranging from amusement to apprehension. The end result is a raucous collage of human emotion.

Corinth seems not to have taken this study of abduction, Frauenraub (1904), any further, and I don’t know its narrative context.

Landscapes are relatively infrequent over these years, but I could not resist including this delightful Blooming Farm Garden from 1904.

Corinth’s reputation as ‘the painter of flesh’ was maintained by two groups of nudes. The Harem (1904) uses an ever-popular ‘oriental’ setting for its abundance of female flesh, but has some distinctive touches too. The cat sat in the foreground ignores, in the way that only cats can, some sort of horseplay taking place behind, while a guard looks as bored as the cat. This isn’t the sumptuous silk and divan lounge shown in the nineteenth century, though. Indeed, it all looks rather tawdry.

In complete contrast, Charlotte Berend in a Deck Chair (1904) is a tender and intimate sketch of his wife relaxing away from their son, her wedding ring prominent on her left hand.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.