A few weeks ago I featured paintings of one of Boccaccio’s stories from his Decameron, retold in 1818 by the British poet John Keats (1795-1821) in his Isabella, or the Pot of Basil. Today’s article looks at paintings inspired by some of Keats’ other writings, and tomorrow those based on the works of Tennyson.

Keats completed and published his poem Endymion in 1818, when he was only twenty-three. This elaborates on the story of the shepherd of the same name who became the object of affection from the goddess Selene. However, instead of using her name, Keats used an alternative name for the goddess Artemis, who later became confounded with Selene.

George Frederic Watts’ painting of Endymion (1872) may well refer to Keats’ poetic reinterpretation, showing Endymion making love with the Titan goddess of the Moon, Selene. This is one of Watts’ most painterly works, and appears to have come straight from his emotions. This also marks his transition from painting Pre-Raphaelite staples such as mediaeval knights and legends, to his later works that were more allegorical if not frankly symbolist.

Edward Stott’s Trees Old and Young, Sprouting a Shady Boon for Simple Sheep from 1888 is unusual as it’s one of his few paintings with a literary reference, its title being a quotation from Endymion. However, its shepherdess is neither Endymion nor Selene/Cynthia.

The following year, Keats wrote the narrative poem The Eve of St. Agnes, which was published a year later, remains one of his finest works, and has formed the basis for at least three major paintings by Pre-Raphaelites.

Madeline has fallen in love with Porphyro, who is an enemy to her family. Older women have told Madeline that she can receive sweet dreams of love on the night of St. Agnes Eve, preceding the day on which the patron saint of virgins is celebrated, 21 January.

On that night, Porphyro gains entry to the castle where Madeline lives, and looks for Angela, who remains a friend to his family despite the feud. Angela reluctantly agrees to take him to Madeline’s room, so that he can gaze at her sleeping there. She takes him there, where he hides in a large wardrobe and watches her prepare for bed, seeing her full beauty in the moonlight.

He creeps out to prepare a meal for her, but she wakes, and seeing the same figure she had just been dreaming, takes him into her bed. She then wakes fully and realises her mistake. They declare their mutual love before escaping from the castle past drunken revellers, and flee into the night.

In this study for William Holman Hunt’s The Flight of Madeline and Porphyro During the Drunkenness Attending the Revelry from 1848, he shows the climax of the poem. Madeline and Porphyro, dressed in their cloaks, are creeping past the drunken bodies of those who have been at the feast. Through the arches at the left the drinking and feasting can be seen still in progress. In the foreground one of the revellers is clutching an empty cask of drink, while other remains of the drinking are scattered on the floor to the right. Two large dogs appear to be somnolent and not reacting to events.

Madeline’s face has a neutral expression, and she has her right arm across Porphyro’s chest to restrain him, her left hand in contact with his right hand on the hilt of his (smaller) sword, as if to restrain him from drawing it. Porphyro’s face shows tension, almost amounting to anger, perhaps, as his left hand holds a door behind him, at the right edge of the painting. That door bears a key, suggesting it’s an outer door. His right hand grips the handle of his sword, as if about to draw it.

Instead of Holman Hunt’s elaborate and ingenious composition, Arthur Hughes opts for a triptych, read from left to right. At the left, Porphyro is approaching the castle. In the centre, he has woken Madeline, who has not yet taken him into her bed. At the right, he almost quotes from Holman Hunt’s version, showing the couple’s escape over drunken revellers. There is also a second, undated version in the Ashmolean, Oxford, in which the painting at the left shows a slightly later moment, where Porphyro meets Angela at the entrance to the castle.

Hughes felt the need to provide the viewer with an excerpt of the original text:
They told her how, upon St Agnes’ Eve,
Young virgins might have visions of delight,
And soft adorings from their loves receive
Upon the honey’d middle of the night.
If ceremonies due they did aright,
And supperless to bed they must retire,
And couch supine their beauties lily white,
Nor look behind, nor sideways, but require
Of heaven with upward eyes for all that they desire.

This painting was very well received when shown at the Royal Academy in 1856, with the critic John Ruskin and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti being enthused by it.

John Everett Millais’ The Eve of St Agnes from 1863 is one of the few Pre-Raphaelite paintings to have been purchased by the British Royal Collection: despite the great achievements of the movement, their works were not favoured by Queen Victoria.

This shows Madeline completing the rituals prescribed for the night, as she prepares to undress for bed, in verses 25-26 of Keats’ poem:
Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,
And threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast,
…her vespers done,
Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;
Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;
Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:
Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,
Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees,
In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed,
But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled.

This curiously static scene from an action-packed narrative was painted from life: Millais used the King’s Bedroom in the Jacobean house at Knole Park, near Sevenoaks in Kent, with his wife Effie as his model. The special bull’s eye lantern producing the eerie lighting effect was a detail over which he took meticulous care. The end result is another evocative, sensual painting that’s almost devoid of narrative.

Before The Eve of St. Agnes was published, Keats wrote La Belle Dame Sans Merci, a ballad about a femme fatale, derived in part from a fifteenth century poem by Alain Chartier. This concerns a fairy who seduces a knight with her eyes and singing, then condemns him to an unpleasant fate. It was published in its original version in 1819, and in a revised version in 1820. It includes the the verses

I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful, a fairy’s child;
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.

I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.

Walter Crane is one of the earlier artists to represent this in a painting, with subsequent similar depictions by Arthur Hughes and Frank Dicksee. The ‘belle dame’ of the title is shown riding side-saddle on the knight’s horse, flowers in her long, flowing tresses, and the knight clad in armour and heraldic overgarments, holds her hand.

Early in 1821, when he was only twenty-five, John Keats died of the complications of tuberculosis.

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.

This second collection of paintings that were made one hundred years ago, in 1924, opens with some narrative works, followed by a couple of interiors, miscellaneous works, and ends with an early sporting painting.

Lovis Corinth’s Trojan Horse proved to be his last major painting from classical myth, showing the wooden horse made by the Greeks to gain access to the city of Troy so they could destroy it. The city is seen in the background, with its lofty towers and impregnable walls. The select group of Greek soldiers who undertook this commando raid are already concealed inside the horse, and those around it are probably Trojans sent from the city to check it out.

Although there are suggestions of an allegorical relationship between this painting and the First World War, Troy had been a hot topic in Berlin since the excavations at Hisarlık in Turkey in the late nineteenth century by Heinrich Schliemann and Wilhelm Dörpfeld.

Ker-Xavier Roussel’s Sleeping Diana uses a simpler motif of the goddess asleep under the watchful eye of one of her devotees, as a deer comes to drink at the pool between them.

Kazimierz Sichulski’s Bacchanal shows three naked bacchantes cavorting with Bacchus. This is set during the grape harvest, with bowls of the fruit and a couple of donkeys laden with buckets for the crop.

Mykola Ivasyuk’s Riders on the Steppe is one of this Ukrainian artist’s late Cossack paintings. Two years later, Ivasyuk was appointed professor at the Kyiv Art Institute, but started to fall out of favour and was transferred to Odesa, where criticism became more serious. In the autumn of 1937, he was arrested, imprisoned, convicted of being a terrorist on the basis of his art, and was shot by a firing squad in Kyiv on 25 November 1937. Much of his art was confiscated or destroyed, and it wasn’t until 1980 that he was rehabilitated and his surviving paintings could be seen again.

In Édouard Vuillard’s Reading in the Dining Room, Vaucresson, Lucy Hessel has already left her husband Jos reading the newspaper at the breakfast table, and gone to busy herself in the next room. Behind this mundane domestic scene is deeper complexity: Jos and Lucy Hessel were close friends of the artist, so close that at the time of this painting Vuillard, then in his mid-fifties, and Lucy were lovers.

Until relatively recently, Icelandic society remained strongly traditional, and homes in its capital Reykjavik were still decorated in older style. Þórarinn Þorláksson’s glimpse into The Artist’s Home shows this well.

I believe that Henri Le Sidaner’s White Garden at Dusk shows a corner of the artist’s garden in the old village of Gerberoy.

The pioneer Swedish natural history painter Bruno Liljefors never lost his fascination for the relationship between predators and prey, as seen in his Sea Eagles Chasing an Eider.

By the early years of the twentieth century, circuses were an established if itinerant part of society. Children in neighbourhoods engaged in circus games, as shown so delightfully in Heinrich Zille’s lithograph Circus Games.

When Charles Demuth was unwell as a result of his diabetes he sought solace in floral paintings, such as these exquisite Fruit and Sunflowers.

Lovis Corinth sometimes painted purely for fun: this superb depiction of a Königsberger Marzipantorte (Royal Marzipan Cake) must have been completed at speed before his family consumed the model.

The American artist George Bellows is perhaps best-known for his paintings and prints of boxing matches, many of them clandestine. Dempsey and Firpo, though, shows a famous historic boxing match between the heavyweights Jack Dempsey, world champion since 1919, and Luis Ángel Firpo, an Argentinian challenger. This took place in the Polo Grounds of New York City on 14 September 1923.

From the start of the first round, the fight was gripping in excitement, with Dempsey knocking Firpo down seven times. Towards the end of the first round, Dempsey was trapped against the ropes, and Firpo knocked him out of the ring, the moment shown here. Dempsey finally knocked Firpo out late in the second round. This was made from contemporary press photographs.

The association between two plants, holly and ivy, with the feast of Christmas appears peculiarly British, and best expressed in the traditional carol The Holly and the Ivy. Apparently, holly has been a symbolic reference to Jesus Christ since the Middle Ages, now explained by its red berries representing the drops of blood of the crucifixion, and the crown of thorns worn by Jesus. Ivy then forms a symbolic reference to Christ’s mother, the Virgin Mary.

This is seen in cameo in two paintings by British artists of the nineteenth century.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted a couple of works on and about Christmas, of which A Christmas Carol from 1867 is probably the more interesting. His model is Ellen Smith, described as a ‘laundry girl’, who is dressed in items from the artist’s collection. There are several allusions to Christmas, particularly the Virgin and Child just above the model’s face, and a sprig of holly with its red berries at the end of her musical instrument.

Sophie Gengembre Anderson’s undated Christmas Time – Here’s The Gobbler! includes a larger spray of holly on the wall at the top right.

Otherwise, holly is only exceptionally identifiable in paintings, and the only reference I have found is in a single work by James Tissot, where it appears together with ivy, but not in reference to Christmas.

Tissot painted The Farewells soon after his flight to London following the Franco-Prussian War and Paris Commune. This couple, separated by the iron rails of a closed gate, are in late eighteenth century dress. The man stares intently at the woman, his gloved left hand resting on the spikes along the top of the gate, and his ungloved right hand grasps her left. She plays idly with her clothing with her other hand, and looks down, towards their hands.

Reading her clothing, she is plainly dressed, implying she is perhaps a governess. A pair of scissors suspended by string on her left side would fit with that, and they’re also symbols of the parting taking place. This is reinforced by the autumn season, and dead leaves at the lower edge of the canvas. However, there is some hope if its floral symbols are accurate: ivy in the lower left is indicative of fidelity and marriage, while holly at the right invokes hope and passion.

Ivy has longer and more extensive traditions throughout European painting, although it too is only exceptionally identifiable.

In mythology, a thyrsus or thyrsos is a form of staff or even spear decorated with plant matter. In its strictest form, it should be a wand made from the giant fennel plant, decorated with ivy leaves and tipped with a pine cone or artichoke. It’s almost invariably an attribute of the god Dionysus (Roman Bacchus), and his devotees, maenads or bacchantes. It’s thus associated with prosperity, fertility and their over-indulgence in the form of hedonism. In the extreme, it can be tipped with a metal point and used as a club.

Annibale Carracci’s Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne (1597-1602) is a marvellous fresco on a ceiling in the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. Dionysus is sat in his chariot with his thyrsus, here a long staff wound with ivy leaves but without any tip. Although a feature of many other paintings, this is one of very few decorated with ivy.

Ivy also makes an appearance in a not dissimilar painting with open narrative, this time by Philip Hermogenes Calderon in 1856.

Calderon’s Broken Vows is an early ‘problem picture’. A beautiful young woman, displaying her wedding ring, stands with her eyes closed, clutching a symbolic ‘heart’ area on her chest to indicate that her love life is in trouble. On the ground near the hem of her dress is a discarded necklace or ‘charm’ bracelet. The ivy-covered wall behind her would normally indicate lasting love, which was her aspiration.

A set of initials are carved on the fence, and on the other side a young man holds a small red flower in front of his forehead, which a young woman is trying to grasp with her right hand. The wooden fence appears tatty, and has holes in it indicating its more transient nature, and affording glimpses of the couple behind, but only tantalisingly small sections of their faces.

Calderon here deliberately introduces considerable ambiguity. The eyes of the shorter person behind the fence are carefully occluded, leaving their gender open to speculation. Most viewers are likely to conclude that the taller figure behind the fence is the unfaithful husband of the woman in front, but that requires making assumptions that aren’t supported by visual clues. Whose vows are being broken? Calderon invites us to speculate.

Like laurel, ivy can also be worked into a crown.

Francisco Pradilla’s watercolour of A Flute Player Crowned with Ivy is a delightful example from 1880. But it took Pierre Puvis de Chavannes to envisage ivy being used instead of a length of rope.

In Puvis’ Fantasy from 1866, one of the two people in this idyllic wooded landscape is using a length of ivy to school a winged white horse, either Pegasus or a hippogriff.

Although seldom clearly identifiable in landscape paintings of trees, one of Paul Nash’s last conventional landscapes is an exception.

Oxenbridge Pond from 1927-28 shows a pond at Oxenbridge Farmhouse, Iden, not far from the artist’s home. Patterns of brushstrokes are assembled into the textures of foliage, ivy covering a tree-trunk, even the lichens and moss on the trunk closest to the viewer, at the right edge.

Reference

Wikipedia on the carol The Holly and the Ivy.

Ovid’s sequel to the story of Pygmalion’s marriage to his former statue is a darker tale of incest, transformation, and obstetrics in the arboretum, resulting in myrrh and the unique birth of Adonis.

Pygmalion’s great granddaughter Myrrha was cursed by the Fates and blighted in love. Although she had many suitors, she fell in love with her father, King Cinyras. Ovid relates her long soliloquy in which she wrestles with her own mind over this. When her father asked her what to do about her suitors, she first stayed silent, then burst into tears, eventually confessing that she wanted a husband like her father.

That night she lay awake in bed, her mind in turmoil, until resolving that her only solution was suicide. She tied a noose around a beam in her bedroom, and was just about to hang herself from it when her old nurse came in. Eventually, Myrrha confessed to her shameful desire, and her nurse promised to arrange the matter for her.

When the festival of Ceres came, Cenchreis, Myrrha’s mother, was busy with her duties, allowing the nurse to arrange Myrrha’s liaison with her father. The nurse ensured that Cinyras had plenty to drink, and promised him a night making love to a girl as young as his daughter. Later that night, the nurse took Myrrha to her father, and put her to bed with him, making her pregnant. Myrrha and her father continued to sleep together night after night, Cinyras still oblivious of who his partner really was. Eventually, he brought in a lamp so that he could see her, and was shocked to discover his own daughter.

He drew his sword to kill her, but she fled and wandered in the desert until it was time for her child to be born. Myrrha then called on the gods to help her, but wanted to neither live nor die. She was transformed into a myrrh tree, providing the precious resin myrrh from the sap generated from her tears of grief.

Adonis, the child who had been growing within her, was then delivered by Lucina, goddess of childbirth, and laid on soft leaves by the Naiads to be anointed with his mother’s myrrh.

This classical fresco from the Golden House of Nero in Rome shows Lucina presenting Venus, who stands clutching the top of a myrrh tree, with the newborn Adonis.

Possibly one of Titian’s earliest works, although this is disputed and even Giorgione has been credited, this cassone panel of The Birth of Adonis probably dates from 1505-10. At the left, Myrrha and her father Cinyras lie together, although this would of course make certain his knowledge of her identity. In the centre, a baby is delivered from the woody womb of Myrrha as a tree, in multiplex narrative.

At about the same time, Bernardino Luini painted his fresco account of The Birth of Adonis (1509-10), which also adopts multiplex narrative to explain the origin of Myrrha’s pregnancy. In the foreground, the couple are shown together, and at the top left the miraculous birth has just taken place. In an alternative reading, the couple in the foreground could be Adonis as a young man, with the goddess Venus as his lover.

Over a century later, this wonderful panel was painted, showing The Birth of Adonis and Transformation of Myrrha. This was possibly after Luigi Garzi, although again its origin remains disputed. Reference to Myrrha’s dark past has been concealed, and she is here shown as a chimera between woman and tree, with the infant Adonis just delivered by a whole team of midwives and maids. The helper at the right wears a coronet with the crescent moon on it, signifying the goddess Diana. On the left side of the tree, one of the other helpers is holding up a tray with a small container of myrrh to anoint Adonis. In the foreground, a wingless putto is laying out a napkin for the infant.

One artist painted this story repeatedly: Marcantonio Franceschini, a Baroque painter in the Italian city of Bologna.

This version of Franceschini’s The Birth of Adonis probably dates from around 1685-90, and is now in Dresden. Myrrha is a distinctive cross between tree and woman, and a couple of satyrs are laughing in the bushes behind her. Two young women are rather pointedly looking in amazement at the origin of Myrrha’s baby. In the centre, Adonis is being given by Diana, with her crescent moon, to Venus, who stars in his later life, and is already admiring his beauty.

Franceschini’s later version from around 1692-1709 is now in Vienna, and arranges a similar composition into vertical format. Here Diana is handing Adonis over to another goddess, possibly Venus, who is preparing to assume the role of wet-nurse. Behind them, the two women looking in amazement appear to be less anatomically engaged, and Pan and a satyr are providing some celebratory music. The napkin-bearing putto is here a winged Cupid.

Apart from a slightly later painting by Boucher, which I have been unable to illustrate here, those seem to have been the last paintings of this disturbing story of the origins of myrrh and Adonis, until recently.

Contemporary artist Rafael Metz’s The Transformation of Myrrh and the Birth of Adonis (2006) shows only the final part of the story, as the infant is being cradled by another woman, under the chimeric tree of Myrrha with its ornate and decorative branches. Myrrh resin is already exuding from the bark.

A century ago today, 15 December, the French artist Henri Jules Jean Geoffroy died in Paris. Also known by his pen name of Géo, he is one of the great painters of children and childhood in the European canon.

Geoffroy was born the son of a tailor in Marennes, on the west coast of France, half way up the Bay of Biscay. He went to study in Paris, probably at the École des Beaux Arts in about 1871, where he’s claimed to have been a pupil of Léon Bonnat and others, although Bonnat didn’t become a professor there until 1882.

He first exhibited at the Salon in 1874, when he was just 21. From 1876, he undertook commissions to illustrate books about childhood and youth for the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel (1814-86), who also published the work of Gustave Doré, and discovered the author Jules Verne. Despite this promising start, Geoffroy doesn’t seem to have achieved much artistic recognition until the mid 1880s, by which time he signed himself simply as Géo.

Around 1879-1882, Geoffroy painted this work showing a well-known scene from Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, of Jean Valjean and Cosette. This shows the hero Valjean when he arrives in Montfermeil on Christmas Eve and discovers young Cosette fetching a pail of water for her abusive guardians the Thénardiers, early in the novel.

He followed that with Whoever Breaks the Glass Pays for It in 1881. This shows a group of three young boys who have apparently broken a glass from a street café. The boy at the right is pointing down at the fragments of glass on the ground, and looking daggers at the other two. He is being admonished by the street vendor whose glass has been broken, and has been told that he has to pay for the damage. Geoffroy gives subtle insight into the social background in the children’s clothing: the apparently uninvolved boy at the left wears clean and fancy boots, while the one at the right who is assumed to be the miscreant wears worn and dirty clothing and footwear.

By 1882, Geoffroy had entered the schools where he was to be most successful and prolific; he apparently lodged above a school, with a couple of teachers. Snack Time shows the pupils outside their primary school during a break, armed with their lunchboxes and baskets. Again he tells their stories using subtle hints including their clothes. A well-dressed girl in white is being harassed by a smaller boy into surrendering some of her food. He wears rougher clothes but seems in control of the situation, as others watch on and laugh.

In 1885, he was appointed a knight in the Legion of Honour.

Geoffroy’s painted insights into the world of childhood extend to illness and the hospital. In his dazzlingly modern and clinical Visiting Day at the Hospital from 1889, the boy’s father clearly could never have afforded state-of-the-art care for his sick son. Although probably understood by the contemporary viewer, the painting doesn’t reveal to modern eyes that the boy is most probably dying of tuberculosis, an all too common problem at the time.

In Primary School Class from 1889, Geoffroy shows one of the new lay teachers, introduced by the Third Republic, working diligently in the classroom with her pupils. This was clearly deemed sufficiently positive to the State as to be purchased by the French National Ministry of Education, where it still hangs.

Less welcomed by the State was The Night Hostel or The Soup Kitchen from 1891, showing homeless women and children being fed and sheltered in what appears to be almost a prison.

Returning to school scenes in 1895, Geoffroy shows a Drawing Lesson in a class of older boys, who are following the classical tradition of drawing casts and appear remarkably diligent and well-behaved.

Geoffroy’s The Nursery from 1899 is one of very few paintings showing modern approaches to the early rearing of children under the Third Republic. Hospitals developed a rigorous almost military approach to nurseries and feeding that endured well into the twentieth century, and separated mothers from their infants for much of the time.

In 1900, at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, Geoffroy was awarded a gold medal, forming the peak of his career.

In Geoffroy’s In School from about 1900, another lay teacher in a modern Republican infants class is caring for the French men and women of the future.

Bastille Day, from the same year, shows a group of children celebrating the national day of France on 14 July. For young boys in the years before the First World War, this was becoming increasingly militaristic rather than just patriotic.

I have been unable to locate an image of Geoffroy’s painting from which Charles Baude made this print of Prize-Giving at an Infants School in 1904, but it is a fine example of the artist’s depictions of groups of young children and their social interactions.

This undated painting of It’s Hard to Share shows another of the tribulations of childhood. These young boys have just emerged from a sweet shop, and the child in the centre is reluctant to share the paper cone of sweets he has just bought. His face says it all, as he looks with great suspicion at his less fortunate friend, and a dog also looks up expectantly.

I have been unable to find any of Geoffroy’s later paintings, and he died in Paris in 1924, at the age of 71.

Two centuries ago today, 14 December, the major French painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was born in Lyon. In this second and concluding article celebrating his career and art, I continue from the years following the Franco-Prussian War, when his work achieved broad appeal despite the bitter divisions in French society. Their unreal and classical motifs painted in a plain style using pale colours must have been refreshingly different from social realism, the Academy, and the increasingly sketchy landscapes of the Impressionists. Puvis responded by painting increasingly symbolic themes in the same style.

Death and the Maiden from 1872 is most probably based on Schubert’s song of the same title, expressing the inevitability of death, almost in terms of vanitas, which had last been popular during the Dutch Golden Age. This linked with the recent war, when so many young French and Prussian people had died, and with contemporary scourges such as tuberculosis, which killed many young adults. The maidens are seen dancing together, and picking wild flowers, as the personification of death is apparently asleep on the grass at the lower left, his black cloak wrapped around him and his hand resting on the shaft of his scythe.

Completed for and exhibited at the Salon of 1879, Young Women at the Seaside must be one of the palest and plainest paintings of any visit to the beach. Only one of the three young women faces the viewer, and she looks as if she’s about to die of ennui. Even the sea looks cold and distant.

Two years later, in 1881, Puvis exhibited The Poor Fisherman (1881), which proved to be one of his most successful works. Significantly more colourful, he provides more detail, although keeping well away from anything that might be mistaken for social realism or the increasingly popular Naturalism. A thin if not quite emaciated fisherman stands, Christ-like, in his boat waiting for his catch to fill his net. Behind him on the marshy land is his wife picking flowers, and their infant, another possible reference to Jesus Christ.

Puvis painted at least four versions of this work, it was reproduced as a lithograph, and numerous contemporaries copied and admired it, declaring its importance in the development of painting at the time. It’s thus one of the formative works leading to the Symbolist movement, whose manifesto was published five years later.

In 1882, Puvis painted the much paler Pleasant Land, which returns to the south coast of France and a small group of young women and their children who are engaged in dolce far niente just above the beach.

For the Salon of 1883, Puvis intensified the unreality with his nocturne The Dream. In a similarly placid and contemplative Mediterranean coastal setting, a traveller (vagrant), their meagre possessions tied up in a cloth, is asleep under a crescent moon. Three angelic but wingless figures from a dream are shown in mid-air, two scattering stars and one bearing a laurel wreath.

Puvis had painted a succession of murals in France from the 1860s onwards. During the 1880s, these turned increasingly to the recurrent motif of classical figures in a sacred grove.

This panoramic easel painting of The Sacred Grove, Beloved of the Arts and the Muses, made in the period 1884-89, is a good example of this series. Puvis alludes to the Muses, but doesn’t identify them with their customary attributes. Instead, two women (wingless again) are flying, one apparently playing the lyre. The figures below are engaged in contemplation, discussion, and the central group are listening to a recital of poetry or song. Most of them wear golden laurel wreaths in their hair, and all are dressed in classical robes.

Charity (1887) is a personification of one of the seven Christian virtues, again set in timeless classical terms. She is the mother of twins, one of whom she holds by her breast. She is clasping the back of the neck of a dark wolf, lying beside her, adding a more unusual touch. This had become a popular motif, and only nine years previously had been painted by William-Adolphe Bouguereau in contrasting Academic style.

Of his surviving murals, I think The Sacred Wood is perhaps the most impressive. Completed in 1889, it graces Le Grand Amphithéâtre of La Sorbonne in Paris, and is his ultimate expression of this theme. It includes many classical and artistic references: near the centre, bent over the surface of a pond, is Narcissus, and towards the right, dressed in red, what looks like Dante.

In 1890, Puvis was co-founder and first president of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, which became the dominant Salon in Paris.

Puvis continued his low-chroma paintings of coastal scenes with The Shepherd’s Song in 1891. Oddly, the shepherd referred to in the title is the smallest of its figures, perched part-way up an ill-defined rocky slope at the left, above two black goats, as three women are fetching water in the foreground.

During the early 1890s, Puvis developed the theme of the sacred grove and relocated it to a hillside above the city of Rouen, in his Inter artes et naturam (meaning Between Art and Nature), from about 1890-95. His viewpoint is Bonsecours, to the south-east of the city, looking north-west over its bridges and distinctive skyline. Clothing worn suggests a curious conflation of periods, from the classical at the left edge, to the contemporary at the mid-right.

The last of these paintings is The Poet from 1896, which returns to the Mediterranean coast, where a poet, who has just dropped his lyre behind him, is swooning, as a winged angel comforts and supports him. At the upper right is a white dove representing the Holy Spirit. Perhaps this was his prescience of death.

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes died in Paris, where he had worked most of his life, on 24 October 1898, at the age of 73. Only three months before, he had finally married his partner of more than forty years, a Romanian princess who died just a month after their wedding.

Two centuries ago tomorrow the major French painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was born in Lyon. In this and tomorrow’s concluding article I briefly celebrate his career and work.

Puvis had never intended to be an artist, but serious illness cut short his studies, and after his convalescence he travelled to Italy. He there became inspired to paint, studying briefly under Eugène Delacroix before he closed his studio. He was then a pupil under Henri Scheffer and Thomas Couture, but proved something of a loner and didn’t follow contemporary Academic tradition. Although his first paintings were accepted for the Salon in 1850, recognition didn’t come until much later.

Puvis painted two completely different versions of The beheading of John the Baptist. This is the earlier, from 1856, alternatively known as The Daughter of Herodias Gives the Signal for the Ordeal of Saint John the Baptist, which in itself raises questions. Salome dominates the painting, her right hand holding the empty platter high above her head as she is about to drop it to signal John’s execution. John the Baptist is still alive at this stage, seen in the murky distance at the left. Another figure, perhaps Herodias, is hiding in Salome’s robe, behind her.

His later painting, from about 1869 and in the National Gallery in London with a smaller version in Birmingham, is more in accord with the biblical account of this story.

The Wine Press, from about 1865, is more typical of his mature paintings, showing a classical figurative motif executed simply using low chroma throughout. In this case, a bearded young man wearing a wreath as a loincloth stands awkwardly on a wooden step-ladder, tipping freshly harvested grapes into the large wooden press. Three young women, dressed loosely in classical robes, are delivering him the grapes from the vineyard, as a pair of longhorned cattle look on.

During the 1860s, Puvis reacted to the popular trend towards realism by painting increasingly unreal works, such as Fantasy from 1866. Two naked people of indeterminate gender are in an idyllic wooded landscape near the foot of sheer cliffs. One sits plucking flowers to form a wreath, the other uses a length of ivy to school a winged white horse which could be Pegasus or a hippogriff. Puvis’ application of paint is so thin that the wings of the horse are semi-transparent, and his colours are muted in the extreme. In almost every respect, this was the antithesis of social realism, pre-Impressionist landscapes and Academic painting of the time.

Puvis increasingly turned to allegory and personifications, as in this painting of Vigilance, completed in 1866 and accepted for the Salon of that year. Traditional attributes associated with this personification are the oil lamp she holds aloft, a book and a rod, which are omitted.

The following year Puvis painted a pair of allegories, Peace (above) and War (below), using stronger colours to make it easier to read their greater detail. Both are set in classical times in an idyllic landscape. Peace is a group dolce far niente which would later have passed for Aestheticism: men, women and children engaged in nothing more strenuous than milking a goat.

In War, three horsemen are blowing a fanfare on their war trumpets, haystacks in the surrounding fields are alight and pouring black smoke into the sky, and the people are suffering, even though signs of destruction are slight and none is wounded. The timing of these paintings wasn’t coincidence: France was in the process of sliding inexorably towards its war with Prussia, and the Second Empire of Napoleon III was about to self-destruct.

Shortly before the Franco-Prussian War, he painted this unusual and relatively colourful maritime scene of Marseilles, Gateway to the Orient (c 1868). Set aboard a fanciful sailing ship, it shows the mixed ethnicity of those who crewed and travelled in the vessels trading through the port of Marseille, on the Mediterranean coast. The city itself is in the distance, making its title the more odd. I suspect this was a study for one of the murals he made for the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Marseilles in the 1860s.

Puvis was deeply affected by the Franco-Prussian War, and the Paris Commune that followed in 1871.

The role of balloons during the siege of Paris was inspiration for The Balloon of 1870, which became popular as a lithograph made by Émile Vernier. The following year, Puvis painted a pendant The Pigeon (below), showing another means of communication used during the siege.

Here a woman seen almost in silhouette waves at one of the balloons bearing news, as it flies near Mount Valérien. In her right hand she holds a musket, symbolic of the arming of the people of Paris at the time. The same woman appears in mourning in The Pigeon, collecting a carrier pigeon that had fought its way through the predatory hawks flown by the Prussians.

The two paintings meant a great deal to Puvis, who reluctantly gave them to the government a few years later, to be prizes in a lottery organised to provide aid to the survivors of the great fire of Chicago in 1871. They didn’t return to Paris until 1987, and are now both in the Musée d’Orsay.

Puvis’ Hope from 1872 develops this post-war theme further, and was exhibited at the Salon that year, the first to follow the war. A young woman sits amid a landscape that has been destroyed by fighting. The bleached rubble of a farmhouse is seen in the right distance, and there are two improvised graveyards with clusters of crosses. She holds a sprig of oak as a symbol of the recovery of the nation.

His three paintings provoked reflection rather than taking sides, and became popular across the range of public opinion. They proved a turning point in his career, as I’ll show tomorrow.

At the end of each year I trawl through images of paintings that are thought to have been created a century ago. Together they show how rich and varied art was at a time when most histories are devoted to accounts of the rise of modernism. Today’s collection of work from 1924 consists of portraits, self-portraits and other figurative paintings.

Although the great majority of paintings seen in galleries and collections are made in oils, or watercolours, my first two works were both created in pastels by specialists in that medium.

Firmin Baes’s double portrait of Two Brothers was painted using pastels, in the studio against a backdrop perhaps showing their home in the countryside.

Ants Laikmaa was another accomplished pastellist who painted many fine portraits. Among them is this posthumous Portrait of Fr. R. Kreutzwald, also known as In the Distance I See Home Thriving. Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald (1803-1882) is the father of Estonian national literature, and in addition to being a distinguished physician, he is the author of the national epic Kalevipoeg which is closely related to the Finnish epic, the Kalevala.

Léon Bakst is best known for his designs for Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, but in the years following the 1917 Revolution he painted portraits. He completed this Portrait of Rachel Strong, future Countess Henri de Buazhelen against a background that could have been one of his stage sets.

Lovis Corinth was nearing the end of his life when he painted his wife in Carmencita, Portrait of Charlotte Berend-Corinth in Spanish Dress. She was an artist in her own right, and had continued painting in the early twentieth century, joining the Berlin Secession in 1912. She also painted actively when at their chalet. In 1933, after her husband’s death, she emigrated to the USA, where she produced the first catalogue raisonné of his paintings.

Corinth painted other members of his family at this time. His Wilhelmine in a Yellow Hat shows their shy daughter starting to develop her mother’s vivacity.

His Large Self-portrait in Front of Walchensee illustrates his race against time before he died the following year.

Five to Twelve was one of Christian Krohg’s last paintings, showing the artist with a long white beard, and almost bald, asleep in a chair underneath a pendulum clock. The face of the clock is completely blank, but the title tells us the time: it’s ten minutes to midnight, very late in his life. The following year Krohg retired as the director of the State Academy of Art, and died in Oslo a few months later.

For Emily Carr 1924 was a crucial year, in which she met with Seattle artists, most importantly Mark Tobey, who helped rebuild her confidence in her art. Her Self-portrait shows her still suffering from her earlier rejection, as she faces away from the viewer, and is working on a painting that is unrecognisably vague and formless.

Meanwhile, Pierre Bonnard’s life in the Midi was coming to something of a crisis.

Several of the artists who had moved to the French Mediterranean coast around the turn of the century were keen yachtsmen. Here Bonnard shows Paul Signac on board his yacht, in Signac and his Friends Sailing.

Bonnard’s private life hadn’t found the same fair winds, though. In Before Dinner, there are two places laid at the table, and two women behind. One at the left has her back towards the other, who stands by the table as if waiting for something to happen. A dog is just emerging from behind the chair at the left, and looks up the standing woman. The following year Bonnard finally married his longstanding partner Marthe in a quiet civil ceremony in Paris, in August. None of their friends attended that wedding, and within a month his former lover Renée Monchaty shot herself in the chest, as she lay in a bath of white roses.

Late in his career, the radical artist Paul Sérusier drew more heavily again on early modern painting, including that of the late Middle Ages in paintings such as Tapestry (Five Weavers). So much for modernism.

After Ovid has told of the tragic death of Hyacinthus, he moves on to one of his most unusual myths. Almost all the myths of transformation gathered in his Metamorphoses involve one or more people changing into animals, plants, or inanimate objects. The ultimate function of his stories may thus be to explain the origin of something, such as the hyacinth flower, or as a salutary example of punishment for disrespect of the gods. The story of Pygmalion reverses the usual direction of transformation, in that it centres on an inanimate object transformed into a person, and it is neither about punishment nor a story of origins.

Ovid prefaces this with contrasting tales. He tells first of the shameful memories of the Cerastae, who desecrated an altar, for which Venus turned them into bulls. Venus is then the link to mention of the Propoetides, women who denied the divinity of Venus. For that, the goddess first hardened their hearts by turning them into prostitutes, and finally into hard flint rocks.

Pygmalion had seen the Propoetides, and became celibate as a result of his revulsion towards their behaviour. He still wanted married love, and carved himself the most perfect and lifelike statue of a woman in ivory. He kissed it lovingly, spoke to it, and dressed it in fine clothing.

When the festival of Venus arrived, Pygmalion prayed that he should have a bride who was the living likeness of his statue. Venus heard this, and the sacred flame rose to signify her response. Pygmalion returned home, rejoicing that his prayer might be answered, and went straight to the statue and kissed it repeatedly. As he did so, it transformed from cold, unyielding ivory to warm, soft flesh. His marriage to the former statue was blessed by Venus, and nine months later they celebrated the birth of their daughter, whom they called Paphos, after whom the island was named.

Telling the story of this transformation in a single painting proved too great a challenge for artists before the late nineteenth century.

Jean-Baptiste Regnault’s The Origin of Sculpture (Pygmalion Praying Venus to Animate His Statue) (1786) is one of the best of these traditional versions, but lacks any visual clue that this statue will shortly turn into a flesh-and-blood woman. It does, though, hint at another story of great interest to the arts, of Pygmalion as the original sculptor, which isn’t told by Ovid.

Edward Burne-Jones’ solution was to paint a series titled Pygmalion and the Image. He did this twice, once between 1868-70, and again in 1878. I show here the paintings from his second version of the series, exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in London in 1879, that helped secure his position as one of Britain’s leading artists.

The Heart Desires shows Pygmalion in his celibacy. In the left background are Propoetides, or other women engaged in debauchery. They’re echoed by and contrasted with Pygmalion’s statues of the three Graces on the right. He stands alone, pondering his next sculpture.

The Hand Refrains shows Pygmalion’s statue of the perfect woman. He stands back, his tools still in his hands and scattered at the foot of his work. Too scared to touch the statue now, he looks longingly at it, as if falling in love.

In The Godhead Fires, Venus (left) comes to Pygmalion’s statue while he is praying to her at the temple. The goddess transforms the inanimate marble, rather than Ovid’s ivory, into a living woman, and their arms interlace.

The final painting in the series, The Soul Attains, shows Pygmalion’s discovery that his statue has come to life, and him seeking her hand in marriage, with a symbolic pink rose on the floor by her left foot.

Just over ten years later, it was Jean-Léon Gérôme who devised the best narrative approach. Known principally now as a realist painter of fine detail, Gérôme was also a sculptor, and in a series of paintings he explored relationships between the sculptor, model, and sculpture. Among these were his first studies for what must be the most brilliant narrative painting of Ovid’s myth.

This study for Pygmalion and Galatea from 1890 was an early attempt at the composition, where Pygmalion’s future bride is still a marble statue at her feet, but very much flesh and blood from the waist up. That visual device was perfect, but Gérôme recognised that his painting could be shunned because of its full-frontal nudity, so he reversed the view.

Gérôme’s finished Pygmalion and Galatea (c 1890) extends the marble effect a little higher, and by showing Galatea’s buttocks and back and concealing the kiss, it stays on the right side of contemporary standards of decency. His attention to detail is as delightful as ever, with two masks against the wall at the right, Cupid ready with his bow and arrow, an Aegis bearing the head of Medusa, and a couple of statues about looking and seeing. For Gérôme too recognised the other stories about sculpture and seeing that could be brought in to enrich Ovid’s original narrative.

Two hundred years ago today, 9 December, one of the most celebrated French artists of the early nineteenth century died in Paris. He was known in full as Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, shortened simply to Girodet. Born in the town of Montargis, about seventy miles (110 km) south of Paris, his parents died when he was a young man, and after a false start in a military career, he became a pupil of Jacques-Louis David in Paris.

In 1789, Girodet won the prestigious Prix de Rome with his religious painting of Joseph Recognised by his Brothers.

His account of the happy resolution of Joseph’s time in Egypt, told in the Old Testament book of Genesis (chapter 45), is busy indeed. Joseph was by this time the Vizier, and had recognised his brothers, but they didn’t recognise him until he told them who he was. Joseph stands at the right, in front of his golden throne, his arm reaching out to reunite with his family.

His prize was to transfer to the French Academy in Rome, where he studied until 1793. On his return, his paintings won him acclaim at the Salon, and his reputation was made. Unfortunately, this coincided with the start of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. However, his relationship with David – a key figure in the Revolution who was adept at protecting himself against all the odds – and his popular following, ensured his safety. When the rule of the Directory (Directoire) was established in 1795, Girodet continued to flourish.

In 1798, he came into conflict with one of his models. Mademoiselle Lange, as she was known to the public, had made her official debut as an actress at the Comédie-Française in 1788, and by 1793 had risen to take the title role in the popular Pamela or Virtue Rewarded, by Nicolas-Louis François de Neufchâteau. Unfortunately that play fell foul of the revolutionaries, and the Committee of Public Safety shut it down and arrested the actors and author.

Mlle Lange had a tense few months afterwards, spending some time in prison, but friends in high places kept her well away from the guillotine, and she was eventually released to return to work at the Théâtre Feydeau. When the Directory came to power she started an affair with the supplier to the French army, who kept her in style in one of his houses. She was also the mistress of a banker, by whom she had a daughter. There were rumours of an affair with Paul Barras, a Director of the Directory, but those may not have been true.

In 1798, Girodet painted Mlle Lange’s portrait as Venus, but his model decided afterwards that his painting was unflattering. She refused to pay the artist, and demanded that the painting should be removed from view at the Salon where it was being exhibited.

It’s hard to understand her case. Perhaps Girodet had been a little too obviously ingenious in not showing her face in the mirror being held by the putto, but the rest of the portrait is surely as flattering as possible, and free of any critical elements. Girodet’s revenge was swift and sweet. In a matter of a few days, he painted a second portrait which, the story says, was hung in the Salon in place of the original. It shows Mlle Lange as a money-grabbing prostitute, unable to see her own faults.

Her new role as Danaë was perhaps not as biting as it might have been. Danaë was the daughter of King Acrisius of Argos and Queen Eurydice, whose father wanted a male heir. To keep Danaë childless, he locked her away in an underground chamber. But Zeus wanted her, so he impregnated her in the form of golden rain that fell from the roof of her cell, resulting in her son Perseus.

As a motif in painting, Danaë had come to be represented as a reclining, beautiful, nude woman, on whom a stream of golden coins was falling, and it was that stream which Girodet wanted to exploit. It could have only one reading in this context: that Mlle Lange sold her body in return for money, and Girodet was happy to be even more explicit.

At the lower left of the tondo is a turkey, representing Michel-Jean Simons, her final lover by whom she had a son in 1797, and who married her, hence the ring on the turkey’s foot. A scroll by that is apparently the script for the play Asinaria, by the Roman Titus Maccius Plautus, whose title means the one with the asses, a comedy about mistresses, lovers and money.

At the lower right is the severed head of one of her previous lovers, and a white dove, wounded on one wing by one of the falling coins, and being strangled by a gold collar bearing the word Fidelitas, meaning fidelity.

In its upper reaches, there’s a spider in its web, catching some of the coins. Mlle Lange herself wears peacock feathers, a symbol of her vanity. But most barbed of all, she holds up a mirror that is cracked, and in which there is no reflection at all. With her gaze concentrated on the falling coins, she has no interest in looking at what she has become.

Mlle Lange, now Madame Simons, lived in his Château de Bossey in Switzerland, her stage career over. Her husband died a decade later, a ruined man, and she died in solitary obscurity six years afterwards.

Girodet went on to paint some of the most famous portraits of Napoleon and his family, and to teach many pupils, including Alexandre-Marie Colin and Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury, who were to be influential in painting in the nineteenth century. I don’t think that anyone tried to mess with him again.

In Girodet’s ink and chalk drawing of The Meeting of Orestes and Hermione (c 1800), Hermione is seen at the right, her arms folded, looking coy as Orestes approaches her. The second woman, with Orestes, is presumably Hermione’s maid.

This is one of a series of illustrations made by Girodet to accompany Racine’s play, and has subtleties that you might expect from a great narrative artist. Visible in the gap between the figures is a table-leg in the form not of a Fury which might have foretold Orestes’ fate, but of a siren, implying that Hermione is luring Orestes to her.

Hermione, for all her apparent coyness, has let the right shoulder-strap of her robe slip, in her enticement of Orestes. She has assumed the role of femme fatale, as portrayed by Euripides and Racine.

Girodet’s painting of the Apotheosis of the French Heroes Who Died for the Fatherland during the War of Liberation, Ossian receiving the Ghosts of the French Heroes was probably completed in 1802, and is perhaps the most elaborate and complex painting inspired by the bogus Scottish poet Ossian. It’s unclear how those French war heroes became involved with Ossian, but an extraordinary mixture of myths and legends from contrasting cultures.

His Aurora and Cephalus (1805) shows the goddess abducting Cephalus at dawn, and taking him up into the sky still asleep.

In 1810, Girodet painted the only reasonably accurate account of The Revolt of Cairo of 21 October 1798, in which Napoleon massacred as many as five thousand of its residents. Most were killed when French cannons fired at the Al-Azhar Mosque where they were seeking refuge. This is a late oil sketch for the finished painting.

In the following years, Girodet’s health started to decline, and with it his artistic output. By 1812 he could only manage a single submission for the Salon, and on the ninth of December, 1824, he died in Paris at the age of only 57.

In this second day of our visit to the coast of California in paintings, we have reached the years of the First World War, whose trenches and mud in northern Europe must have seemed so far removed.

In 1915, Anna Althea Hills painted The Quiet Sea, probably close to Laguna Beach, where she settled at that time, and went on to help found the Laguna Beach Art Museum shortly before her untimely death at the age of just forty-eight, in 1930. As this demonstrates, she was an early and accomplished painter en plein air, which she taught in her painting school there.

Hill’s Spell of the Sea (also known as Laguna Beach, near Moss Point) (1920) must be among her best, and compares well with those being painted on the south coast of France at the time. She painted this further down the coast to the south-east of central Laguna Beach, away from areas becoming more popular with visitors.

Guy Rose also painted along this section of coast, as shown in his Laguna Trees from about 1916. These are seen looking to the north-west over the bay, in a Mediterranean light.

Rose’s Carmel Dunes from about 1918-20, shows unspoilt land near Carmel-by-the-Sea, in a small bay to the south of Monterey, on the coast south of San Jose. Carmel wasn’t developed until the early twentieth century, and still only has a resident population of three thousand. It was featured in the International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915, but has never been developed in the way that many other resorts along this coast have.

At the end of the war, Rose painted this Monterey Cypress as if influenced by the paintings of twisted trees along the French Mediterranean coast.

Granville Redmond’s later paintings include a few moonlit motifs, such as this of the Catalina Island Coast under a Moonlit Sky in 1920. Redmond became a close friend of the movie actor Charlie Chaplin. Catalina, or Santa Catalina, Island is about 35 km (22 miles) off the coast of California, south of Los Angeles. Redmond’s sky is formed from innumerable short, fine brushstrokes in apparently random directions, and gives the effect of the atmospheric buzz of small insects, contrasting with the dark mass of rock.

Steamer leaving Avalon, Catalina Island (1920) is a small and painterly sketch in oils on cardboard made by Redmond during his visits to the island. The small town (officially a city!) of Avalon is situated on its natural harbour, and has grown from tents and three wooden huts in 1883 to a modern resort now attracting a million visitors every year. Its development for tourists started in the late 1880s, but when Redmond visited in 1920 it had recently been purchased by the chewing gum magnate William Wrigley, Jr, who opened a casino there in 1929.

Redmond’s Malibu Coast, Spring from about 1929 shows the 21 mile beach of this coastal resort thirty miles to the west of central Los Angeles, in the summer with golden poppies and purple lupines in full flower. At this time, Malibu was only just starting development, with the small Malibu Colony and a ceramic tile factory which had been funded by May K Rindge, owner of the land.

William Frederic Ritschel’s wonderfully rough Carmel-by-the-Sea Seascape was painted in 1930.

Paul Dougherty painted this section of California Cliffs after 1935, in calmer conditions more conducive to working en plein air.

It’s too cold along the coast of New England for this weekend’s travels, so let’s go to the West Coast, to California instead. In this article and its sequel tomorrow I’ll show you some of the few accessible paintings made of that coast, from San Francisco to Laguna Beach, and from 1872 to after 1935.

In May 1872, Albert Bierstadt visited the Farallon Islands, a group of uninhabited rocks thirty miles to the west of San Francisco. From this came his dramatic Seals on the Rocks, Farallon Islands (c 1872-73), one of a short series that he painted of the islands in those years.

Although I don’t have a date for Jean Mannheim’s painting of Irvine Cove – Laguna Beach, California, I suspect it was completed long before this resort to the south-east of Los Angeles became a city in 1927. Its first hotel was built in 1886, and this section of the coast became popular with artists in the early twentieth century, but this part at the north-west end of Laguna Beach seems to have remained relatively unspoilt until the completion of the Pacific Coast Highway in 1926. Mannheim was one of the early painters to visit and work en plein air here.

Granville Redmond’s early paintings of this coast are in Tonalist style, with muted colours. His Coastal Storm from 1905 contrasts the wind and heavy rain sweeping in from the right with the distant view of the coast in much fairer conditions. He appears to have used fine scratching in the diagonals of the falling rain.

Redmond’s Sailboats on Calm Seas is a small oil sketch from the following year, with masterly modelling of wave-splash at the bows of the yacht. His colours remain muted.

Morning on the Pacific (1911) is an intermediate step towards Redmond’s later style, in this painterly view of the sea. My only puzzle here is that the title clearly establishes the time of day as morning, but the direction of view appears to be to the west, where you’d expect the sun to be in the later afternoon.

Redmond’s A Field of California Poppies, also from 1911, erupts into a richly coloured carpet of California or Golden Poppies, the state flower associated with the Golden State, and the Gold Rush. There are also a few smaller patches of what may be the large-leaved or purple lupine.

At some time in 1911 or later, William Frederic Ritschel painted Monterey Coast, to the south of San Francisco. Monterey itself has a long history, and in 1777 became the capital of the province of “Both Californias”. Away from the port and city, though, this section of coast is rugged and much remains inaccessible.

For The Sand Cart (1917), George Bellows travelled to the coast of California, where he caught working men engaged in manual labour, this time against a very different coastal background. This painting was shown on his return to New York, where it was well-received by critics, who compared it with the coastal paintings of Winslow Homer.

A domestic interior is an ideal setting for something unusual if not downright unsettling. Amid everyday furniture and decor, something odd is going on. Although best known today as one of the Nabis, Félix Vallotton painted disturbing interiors from the late 1870s, before he joined Maurice Denis and others in the movement, until the early twentieth century, well after he had moved on.

He started gently with this oil painting of The Visit or The Top Hat, Interior in 1887, the year that he left the Académie Julian and exhibited his first two paintings (both portraits) at the Salon. A top hat and walking stick are parked on a chair just inside an apartment, whose door is partly open. Everything looks in order, except for the painting on the wall at the right, which is hanging at an odd angle.

Two years later, Vallotton met his first partner, Hélène Chatenay, who later came to model for two further domestic interiors he painted in 1892.

The Sick Girl adopts a theme popular with Naturalist painters throughout the 1880s and into the 1890s. Vallotton curiously obscures the face of the young woman in her sickbed by reversing the bed’s expected orientation. Who would ever position their bed to face away from a window and look straight at a near-blank wall? Another strange feature is that the maid who has just entered the room appears to be heading towards the viewer, and isn’t even looking towards her patient.

The Cook also features Hélène Chatenay as Vallotton’s model. She stands at the solid-top range in a kitchen strangely almost devoid of the one thing that kitchens are about, food. The only edible item visible is a bunch of onions suspended in mid-air. Everything – the chairs, pots and pans, and the range itself – is spotless as if they have never been used, and appear thoroughly unnatural.

Vallotton then put his interiors on pause for six years while he engaged with the Nabis. He also bought himself an early Kodak mass-market camera, and from 1898 experimented with it for capturing these domestic scenes. He changed partners in 1899, when he married Gabrielle Rodrigues-Hénriques, the widowed daughter of Alexandre Bernheim, one of the leading art dealers of the day.

Vallotton remained under Nabi influence when he painted The Red Room in 1898 to the extent that he used distemper, a traditional medium that the group had resurrected. A man and woman stand in a loose embrace in the doorway of a living room with brick red decor. Above the fireplace is what appears be a mirror, in which a person dressed in black is standing in the distance, apparently facing away from the couple.

A similar well-dressed couple embrace more closely in The Visit from 1899, also painted in distemper. Once again, Vallotton leaves the painting’s underlying narrative open.

He followed that in 1900 with The Laundress, Blue Room, that appears to be set in the Vallotton apartment in Paris, with two of his step-children squatting on the folds of large fabric sheets, inside a bedroom with blue decor. Two women are sat working, one apparently on the sheets, the other on separate fabrics.

A year later Vallotton’s Woman Searching through a Cupboard (1901) became even stranger. He shuts out half this painting’s image with black screens and the doors to the cupboard, in a gloomy repoussoir. The woman, in spite of a lamp by her side, is also little more than a black silhouette, who appears to absorb the light falling on her. The lamp is strange, with a shade showing sailing ships at sea, its stand being a vertical statuette of Truth, perhaps.

For the following year (1902), he painted this quartet of gamblers in a Poker session. Tucked away in a plush back room behind a club or bar, these four are in full evening dress, playing for stakes which could be breathtaking and bankrupting. In the centre foreground is another lamp with a patterned shade, again showing sailing boats.

A couple of years later, in his Interior, Woman in Blue Searching in a Cupboard (1903), Vallotton painted his wife Gabrielle from behind as she stood searching in a cupboard of books.

His Interior with the Back of a Woman in Red from 1903 develops the framing effect of multiple sets of doors, drawing the eye deeper towards the distant bedroom. The woman wearing a red dress looks away, her skirts swept back as if she has been moving towards the three steps that divide this interior into foreground and background. There are tantalising glimpses of detail on the way: discarded fabric on a settee, clothing on a chair in the next room, and half a double bed with a bedside lamp in the distance.

In 1904, Vallotton painted what proved to be one his last disturbing domestic scenes, in Interior, Bedroom with Two Figures. Its narrative is so incomplete that it’s worthy of the sub-genre of the ‘problem picture’. This is another bedroom, where the lady of the house is standing over her maid as the latter is sewing up her evening gown. The mistress stands with her back to the viewer, and her face is only revealed in her reflection in the large mirror on the wardrobe at the back of the room, where the maid is all but invisible. These three figures appear in perspective recession, and to the right of the wardrobe is a doorway, presumably leading through to the master’s bedroom.

There’s dispute as to whether this painting shows a Woman Reading in an Interior, as given by its French title, or a woman writing. Vallotton painted this in 1904, and charged it with less mystery. But I wonder if the lower of the two paintings on the wall might be one of Degas’ works showing horse-riding. As usual, the single figure doesn’t show her face as she sits at the small bureau, backlit by the window.

The following year Vallotton moved on, eventually painting a series of transcendental landscapes, a far cry from these disturbing domestics.

This second article considering the reading of knitting and crochet in paintings concludes with its most frequent use, as a sign of the peasant and poverty. This first became prominent in the social realist paintings of the mid-nineteenth century, starting with those of Jean-François Millet.

Millet’s pastel of The Knitting Shepherdess (1856-57) continued his established pastoral theme, showing a young woman engaged in knitting as her flock grazed in broken woodland behind her. In common with other occupations that left the hands free, shepherdesses commonly knitted for their family while they were at work.

A few years later, Millet revisited the theme in his Young Girl Watching her Sheep from about 1860-62. She is knitting in the round with several needles, to produce a long stocking or sleeve.

Young Girl Knitting (1860) is the second painting Jules Breton made of a young woman from his home village of Courrières knitting indoors. Many of his more intimate works like this were sold to private collectors and have never been exhibited.

Breton’s A Peasant Girl Knitting (c 1870) was probably started, if not completed, en plein air in an old orchard near Douarnenez, where the artist and his family often spent their summers. Note that she’s not even wearing clogs, but her feet are bare.

LA Ring’s Smallholders in the village of Ring from 1887 shows a working class couple who lived in the artist’s home village. ‘Polish Niels’ made his living as the village plumber, and supplemented those earnings by selling seeds. He is here making paper bags in which to sell his seeds, as his wife is engaged in knitting, once again in the round.

The Canadian artist Clarence Gagnon’s Brittany Goose Girl from 1908 walks along in her wooden clogs quietly knitting in the golden sunlight of autumn.

When the American painter Winslow Homer lived in the fishing village of Cullercoats on the north-east coast of England in the early 1880s, much of his time was spent painting among the fishlasses and fishwives while their menfolk were at sea. During that time, the women continued with their supporting tasks of knitting and repairing clothing, and repairing nets and gear, as in his charcoal and chalk drawing of Fisher Girls on Shore, Tynemouth from 1884. Rather than wearing wooden clogs, these two have working boots.

One of Henry Herbert La Thangue’s earliest major paintings is this view of The Boat Builder’s Yard, Cancale, Brittany painted in 1881, when he was staying on the Brittany coast. The young Breton woman shown appears out of place, with her working dress, clogs and knitting. She’s surrounded by the tools of and shavings from boat-building in wood. Behind her is the frame of a part-constructed fishing boat similar to those seen in the background at the right, a working boat known as a chaloupe thonière.

These two articles are dedicated to my editor-in-chief, the most prolific knitter I have known, my wife, in thanks for all her support, and technical advice.

Knitting, and its close relative crochet, form strands of wool or yarn into loops that assemble the fibres into fabric. Although machines have long been used to make knitted garments commercially, until the nineteenth century most woollen clothing was still knitted (or crocheted) by hand. Today what’s viewed as a traditional craft almost exclusively for women was, in the past, a popular if not essential activity for many men too, as it was the only way that they could have socks, warm gloves and other garments to wear.

In this article and tomorrow’s sequel, I show a selection of depictions of both knitting and crocheting; tomorrow’s paintings focus on their association with poverty, while this article shows some of their other readings.

By the late nineteenth century, when Thomas Eakins painted some of his few watercolours, knitting by hand was in decline, and seen as a sign of the past.

Eakins’ Seventy Years Ago, from 1877 explores the early Federal period in Philadelphia, prompted by increased interest in that era resulting from the national centennial the previous year. His subject is knitting in the round on three needles, forming a tubular section of garment, perhaps a sock or sleeve. A spinning wheel at the left edge shows her to an accomplished fibrecrafter.

In the autumn of 1860, William Dyce stayed in the Conwy Valley in Wales for six weeks, where he sketched and painted avidly. After his return to London, he painted this Welsh Landscape with Two Women Knitting, showing the rough and rugged scenery above the valley, a rock outcrop filling much of the left half of the painting.

In its centre is an old woman, and to the right a young one, each dressed in traditional clothes, and knitting. The younger wears a formal ensemble that had recently been revived and designated ‘Welsh national costume’, as might be worn for Eisteddfods and other special occasions. They’re both knitting stockings from scavenged scraps of wool, an activity that might have been common earlier in the century and performed indoors at home. It had largely disappeared by 1860, and is conspicuously incongruous for such an outdoor location. Dyce’s painting remains enigmatic.

Depending on the pattern being knitted, the knitter may require periods of intense concentration, making it a sign of detachment from or disinterest in surrounding activities.

William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River (1876-77) is the first of three paintings by Thomas Eakins showing this wood sculptor carving his Water Nymph and Bittern for a fountain in Philadelphia’s waterworks, in 1808. The water nymph is an allegory of the Schuylkill River, at that time the city’s primary source of water.

Rush had been a founder of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and an enthusiast for the use of nude models in art, as was Eakins. This painting was at least in part an attempt to promote the practice of working from nude models. Seated at the right of the model is a chaperone, who is clearly more interested in her knitting. The model’s complicated clothing is hung and scattered in the light, as if to emphasise her total nudity (apart from a hair-band!). Unfortunately, those scattered garments didn’t go down well, and were deemed scandalous at the time.

LA Ring’s Housewife’s Evening Party from 1905 shows a very different sort of party from those being painted at the time in cities like Paris. This housewife sits crocheting her way through the height of the party, as her husband and a friend discuss a book by the light of the kerosene lantern.

Through the ages, knitting and crochet have been peaceful and productive pastimes for many.

Fibrecraft may have declined in popularity in the cities of the nineteenth century, but it remained commonplace in the provinces and country. François-Joseph Navez here shows a group of Women Spinning in Fondi in 1845, a town roughly midway between Rome and Naples. Two of the women are actively spinning, one has dropped her distaff to gaze pensively at her young baby, and the woman in red in the centre is probably knitting.

In Hans Thoma’s A Peaceful Sunday from 1876, an elderly couple are sat at a plain wooden table, in their urban apartment. She works at her knitting or crochet, while he reads. You can almost hear the soft, measured tick of the clock that’s out of sight, slowly passing their remaining years.

Gustave Caillebotte’s portrait of Mademoiselle Boissière Knitting (1877) is one of the first in which he might be said to be painting in Impressionist style. This elderly spinster is working intently.

Anna Ancher’s skills as a colourist and impressionist brighten her Sunshine in the Blue Room, Helga Ancher Crocheting in her Grandmother’s Room, from 1891, as she progressed from realism and became increasingly painterly in her brushstrokes.

In the summer of 1901 Anders Zorn painted this Girl from Dalecarlia Knitting. ‘Cabbage Margit’ (1901) in his town of Mora, deep in the Swedish countryside. She too is knitting in the round.

The Sick Man, painted by LA Ring in 1902, stares grimly, wide-eyed and straight ahead, as if already looking death in the face. Meanwhile his wife sits knitting peacefully, already swathed in black apart from her apron.

After Orpheus has told of the abduction of Ganymede, he moves on to tell of another shameful passion, that of Apollo for the young Spartan, Hyacinthus. One midday, Apollo and Hyacinthus undressed, as they were wont to do prior to athletics, oiled their limbs, and threw the discus together. Apollo used his divine powers to throw it high through the clouds.

As the discus was falling, Hyacinthus ran out to catch it, not thinking of its likely speed and kinetic energy. The discus ricocheted from the hard earth and struck him full in the face, inflicting a mortal wound. The youth went white as he bled from his wound, and Apollo blanched too as he tried to arrest Hyacinth’s haemorrhage.

Apollo lamented the youth’s imminent death, accepting responsibility for it. As the blood of Hyacinthus poured from his wound, the god decreed that from it would grow a new flower in his memory, and the Spartans would celebrate him in an annual festival. So the blood of Hyacinthus became the purple hyacinth flower, and was commemorated in the festival of Hyacinthia.

In 1636, when he was in retirement, Peter Paul Rubens made one of his wonderful oil sketches of The Death of Hyacinth, capturing the scene vividly, as Hyacinthus’ head rests against the fateful discus. But apparently he didn’t turn that into a finished painting.

It was Jan Cossiers, then assisting Rubens in some of his remaining projects, who made the finished version from that oil sketch in 1636-38. There are perhaps the first signs of plants growing in the blood under the dying youth’s right shoulder, although they aren’t recognisable as hyacinths yet.

The most complete narrative painting of this story must be Tiepolo’s magnificent The Death of Hyacinthus from about 1752-53. Tiepolo has been inspired by an Italian translation of the Metamorphoses from 1561, that changed the discus into a tennis ball, actually from the popular game of pallacorda.

The classical story is told in the right foreground, with the pale Hyacinthus visibly bruised on his cheek, but hardly in the throes of death. Apollo is swooning above him, and the Cupid to the right also seems to have suffered some facial injury, perhaps in sympathy. Above that group is a grinning Pan, in the form of a Herm, and a brightly coloured parrot, who seems to have escaped from another story.

On the left of the painting are a motley group of witnesses, wearing the most extraordinary headgear and clothing. Tiepolo does manage to show some hyacinth flowers, at the right bottom corner, at the foot of which are the racquet and balls. The colour of those flowers is far from that of Tyrian purple, as given in Ovid’s account, but may of course have faded over time.

For completion, Tiepolo tucks some cypress trees in the background, alluding both to the previous story of Cyparissus, and Apollo’s grief.

Jean Broc’s The Death of Hyacinth (1801) is a dramatically-lit and overtly homoerotic interpretation, which includes the discus at the lower left, and some hyacinth flowers at the lower right.

There is still controversy over whether the flowers that arose from the blood of Hyacinthus were actually intended to be hyacinths. As no one seems to have come up with a more plausible alternative, and none of the paintings here shows them particularly well, I close with one of the finest floral still life paintings of hyacinths.

Alfrida Baadsgaard was a talented floral artist and author, and her undated Still Life with Hyacinths and Butterfly provides a good choice of colours. All we need do is add a few to the foot of Tiepolo’s wickedly humorous painting.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, as cities across Europe were growing rapidly, the Arts and Crafts Movement spread from its origins in England to bring a new wave of interest in furniture and other features of domestic interiors. This article shows some paintings of interiors by Nordic artists of that period, giving insight into changes in design taking place across the countries of northern Europe.

Prior to this, interiors in much of this region were vernacular, as shown in Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s Rustic Life from 1887. A young woman sits spinning next to a bed, while an older man is repairing one of his boots in front of the open fire. There’s little in the way of furniture, and what there is has been rough-hewn and is functional.

That same year, the young Swedish artist Carl Larsson painted The Toy Corner inside the family home. His wife Karin was a talented artist who concentrated on interior design, and was responsible for most of the interiors shown in her husband’s paintings. From 1888, their family home just outside Falun in Dalarna became the centre of Larsson’s watercolours that were later published across Europe as examples that many others aspired to.

Homework (1898) shows two of the Larsson children working in the evening by the light of a kerosene lamp, amid decor designed by their mother.

Getting Ready for a Game (1901) shows Karin Larsson preparing a tray of adult refreshments, while two of their young daughters watch from behind the more appropriate teaset. From the layout of the room seen through the open door, the grown-ups are about to enjoy an evening of cards together with friends, surrounded by one of Karin’s exemplary interiors.

The Danish artist Laurits Andersen Ring married Sigrid Kähler, daughter of a ceramic artist, who seems to have taken more than a passing interest in the design of their domestic interiors.

In Ring’s At Breakfast from 1898, Sigrid sits reading the ‘leftist’ daily newspaper Politiken in the sunshine.

Ring’s 1904 painting of The Artist’s Wife and Children shows Sigrid with their young son and daughter, in front of a roaring fire. In the next room is the same table from At Breakfast above, and the table in the left foreground has a carefully-polished surface allowing Ring to show subtle reflections.

Ring went on to paint more traditional homes, including this Interior with a Farmer Reading a Newspaper from 1911. This farmer, better-off than the average peasant for sure, sits reading the newspaper by the light streaming in from its windows. Roses provide a brilliant splash of colour to the far left, and there’s a clock ticking on the wall. The open doors lead through into the far end of the house, which is sparsely furnished by heavy wooden items like a wardrobe and a chest.

Although life in small villages in the fjords of Norway was more rustic, there was still scope for a little design flair. Nikolai Astrup’s Interior Still Life: Living Room at Sandalstrand from about 1921 includes a tapestry hanging in the corner, a painting on the wall, potted plants, a bowl of fruit, and an articulated wooden figure leaning against the pitcher of milk.

Until relatively recently, Icelandic society had remained strongly traditional, and homes in its capital Reykjavik were decorated in older style. Þórarinn’s glimpse into The Artist’s Home (1924) shows this well.

In yesterday’s article, I showed examples of paintings using classical deities and resolved conflicts in ancient history to depict the concept of peace. Today I move on to more recent and modern history.

Benjamin West was commissioned by William Penn’s son Thomas to paint The Treaty of Penn with the Indians or William Penn’s Treaty with the Indians (1771-72), the one ‘modern history’ painting he showed alongside four more traditional narrative works at the Royal Academy in 1772.

This shows the Quaker founder of the state of Pennsylvania purchasing land for his colony from the Lenape people, with a treaty of peace between the colonists and the ‘Indians’, an event that took place ninety years earlier in 1682. This proved as popular and successful as West’s famous painting of The Death of General Wolfe, being reproduced in prints and on all manner of other surfaces, even bedspreads! Like that earlier work, it was also savaged for its historical inaccuracies, to say nothing of its misrepresentation of the reality of westward expansion in North America.

In 1867, France was in the process of sliding inexorably towards its war with Prussia, and the Second Empire of Napoleon III was about to self-destruct.

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes painted a pair of allegories, Peace (above), and War (below), using colours stronger than usual to enable reading of their greater detail. Both are set in classical times in an idyllic landscape. Peace is a group dolce far niente that might later have passed for Aestheticism: men, women and children engaged in nothing more strenuous than milking a goat.

In War, three horsemen are blowing a fanfare on their war trumpets, haystacks in the surrounding fields are alight and pouring black smoke into the sky, and the people are suffering, even though signs of destruction are slight and none is wounded.

By the start of 1871, Prussia had inflicted a crushing defeat on France, whose Second Empire was forced to agree an armistice.

Édouard Detaille’s depiction of The Armistice of 28th January 1871 (1873) shows the moment that the symbolic white flag was raised, over a bleak plain.

By a strange coincidence, that same year the Russian war artist Vasily Vasilyevich Vereshchagin painted his powerful Apotheosis of War (1871), showing ravens or crows perching on a huge pile of human skulls in a barren landscape outside the ruins of a town. This was his reaction to the series of battles fought by the Russian Empire against those living in lands that it wanted to acquire.

My final paintings are products of what was then known as the Great War, but proved to be only the first of the two World Wars of the twentieth century.

Paul Nash’s pen and ink drawing of Sunrise: Inverness Copse, showing the aftermath of heavy fighting during the Battle of Langemarck, became his finished oil painting of We are Making a New World (1918). Although richer in colour, the slime green furrowed mud dominates the lower half of the canvas. Its intensely ironic title and use of the early morning sun makes the artist’s response to the war very clear, and it has remained one of the strongest images of that war.

Nash’s Menin Road (1919) was commissioned by the British War Memorials Committee in April 1918 for its Hall of Remembrance. It shows a section of the Ypres Salient known as Tower Hamlets, after what is now a part of eastern London. This area was destroyed during the Battle of the Menin Road Ridge.

William Nicholson’s The Cenotaph the Morning of the Peace Procession is an interesting historical record of 1919, as well as a detailed oil sketch. The cenotaph shown here isn’t the current memorial in central London, but a temporary structure erected for a ‘peace celebration’, also known as a ‘victory parade’, that took place in London on 19 July 1919, following the signing of the Treaty of Versailles to formally end that war.

This was designed very quickly by Sir Edwin Lutyens, approved on 7 July, and hastily constructed in wood and plaster. It was unofficially unveiled on the day before the celebration, and soon attracted the laying of wreaths by the public. Following great public demand, a permanent version was constructed to a slightly modified design the following year, and that remains the focus for all similar events in London. Just twenty years later the world was dragged into yet another war.

Painting war and conflict is demanding on composition and technique, but how about painting peace? In this week’s two articles examining how to read visual art, I show how some of the masters have risen to that challenge. This article shows examples based on myths and ancient history, and tomorrow’s comes more up to date with more recent events.

One popular approach to depicting the abstract is to use deities from classical mythology who are already associated with war, peace and related concepts.

Jacopo Tintoretto’s marvellous painting of Minerva and Mars from 1578 is an early example of Minerva (in blue) pushing the god of war (in black armour, at the right) away from her, as her right hand rests on the shoulder of Peace, with Prosperity at the left edge of the canvas.

It was Peter Paul Rubens who excelled in this, as an important international diplomat living at a time of wars throughout Europe, and a master of mythological art.

In the young Rubens’ The Triumph of Victory (c 1614), made when he was the finest painter in Flanders, Mars is almost glorified.

The Treaty of Antwerp had been signed in 1609, and the city was flourishing in the Twelve Years’ Truce that ensued. Rubens painted this in about 1614 for the Antwerp Guild of St George, its organisation of archers. Mars dominates, his bloody sword resting on the thigh of Victoria, the personification of victory. She reaches over to place a wreath of oak or laurel on Mars, and holds a staff in her left hand. At the right, Mars is being passed the bundle of crossbow bolts that make up the attribute of Concord. Under the feet of Mars are the bodies of Rebellion, in the foreground, who still holds his torch, and Discord, on whose cheek a snake is crawling. The bound figure resting against the left knee of Mars is Barbarism.

In 1629-30, when Rubens was acting as envoy to King Philip IV of Spain and trying to agree peace between Spain and King Charles I of England, he painted Minerva Protects Pax from Mars (Peace and War), one of his greatest narrative paintings, as a gift with a message for the king of England.

Its central figures are those of Demeter (Ceres), here in the role of Pax (the personification of peace), and Athena, behind her. In attendance are Mars, Hymen, Plutus, and Alecto (one of the Furies), with sundry Bacchantes, a Satyr, putti, and the attributes of Bacchus and Mercury. It’s like an away day from Olympus, or part of an index to Ovid.

If the use of classical deities is too indirect, another approach is to paint historical events of conflicts being resolved in peace.

Early in the history of Rome, its new citizens were overwhelmingly men, and devised a plan to abduct the wives of the nearby Sabine people. That inevitably took the Sabines to war under their king and general Tatius, who led them in their march against Rome. Their task wasn’t easy, as in those days its citadel was on the Capitol hill, a strongpoint for defence. The captain of the guard there had a daughter named Tarpeia. In return for the golden armlets that Sabine warriors wore on the left arm, Tarpeia betrayed the city of Rome by leaving its gates open at night, allowing the Sabines to enter.

As the Sabines swarmed in, Tatius told them to leave what they carried on their left arm with Tarpeia. As they also carried their shields, many misunderstood the command, and Tarpeia was buried under so many shields and golden armlets that she was crushed to death. She was buried where she fell, and that became known as the Tarpeian Rock, the place from which traitors and other enemies of Rome were thrown to their deaths.

With the Sabines in possession of the Capitol, Romulus challenged them to fight. There followed a series of indecisive battles, until Romulus was struck on the head by a rock, and his troops started to retreat to the Palatine hill. He had just regained order and commanded his forces to stand and fight, when the abducted Sabine women invaded the battlefield.

Guercino’s Hersilia Separating Romulus and Tatius (1645) concentrates on the three figures of Tatius, Hersilia, and Romulus, and tucks the rest of the battle away in the distance behind them.

Jacques-Louis David’s The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799) is unusual among depictions of this episode in showing its resolution, rather than the seizure of the women that brought the conflict about. David shows Roman and Sabine men joined in battle in front of the great walls of Rome, with the Sabine women and their children mixed in, trying to restore peace. Looming over the city is the rugged Tarpeian Rock, where the body of Tarpeia was reputed to have been left buried.

Highlighted in her brilliant white robes in the foreground, and separating two of the warriors, is the daughter of the Sabine king Tatius, Hersilia, whom Romulus married. The warriors are, of course, her father and her husband, and the infants strategically placed by a nurse between the men are the children of Romulus.

David started this painting when he was imprisoned following his involvement in the French Revolution. He intended it to honour his estranged wife, who had continued to visit him during his incarceration, and to make the case for reconciliation as the resolution of conflict.

Moving swiftly on to the rule of Charlemagne in Europe in the late eighth century, we come to his prolonged and bloody series of campaigns against the Saxons in Germany.

Charlemagne forced the Engrians to submit to him in 773, pushing on later to Sigiburg. A series of revolts led by Widukind ensured that his forces were kept busy. This turned more savage in 782, when his courts started to hand down death penalties to Saxon pagans who refused to convert to Christianity, and Charlemagne ordered the execution of 4,500 prisoners in the Massacre of Verden. After a further three years of war, the Saxons were finally subdued, and Widukind submitted to baptism. Over a millennium later, Ary Scheffer painted Charlemagne Receives the Submission of Widukind at Paderborn in 785 (1835).

In 1175 and 1176, the emperor Barbarossa was defeated at Alessandria and in the Battle of Legnano, where he was wounded and nearly killed. The following year, he was reconciled with Pope Alexander III, and had to humble himself before the Pope in Venice. He also established permanent peace with the Lombards in the second Treaty of Konstanz, in 1183.

The Rathaus in Konstanz has a series of remarkable external murals showing key moments in history, including this undated painting of Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa concludes peace in Constance with the Lombards. Although the name Barbarossa appears in the inscription below, his beard doesn’t appear to be in the slightest bit red, as he shakes hands to seal the peace with the leader of the Lombards.

After telling the tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice, Ovid relates a series of shorter myths involving transformations. He introduces these by listing each tree that gave Orpheus shade as he sang in mourning with his lyre, from ash to willow. He then adds two species that were the result of transformations: the Italian pine and cypress. The former he attributes to Attis, who had been consort to Cybele, known to the Romans as the Great Mother goddess.

Ovid’s main story here is of Cyparissus, a youth who had been the love of Apollo. A majestic giant stag had become quite tame in that area, and was a favourite of Cyparissus, who used to lead the stag to pasture, and ride it around on occasion. In the middle of a hot summer’s day, when the stag was asleep, Cyparissus accidentally killed it with his javelin. The youth was heartbroken, and was transformed into a cypress tree. Ever since that tree has grown in and by cemeteries and other places of grief.

Surprisingly, this overtly pederastic relationship between Apollo and Cyparissus has been shown in several paintings, of which Claude-Marie Dubufe’s Apollo and Cyparissus (1821) is perhaps an early example. Cyparissus here rests against the stag, but there’s no sign of its wounding or death, although the god is comforting the youth.

There’s no ambiguity in Alexander Andreyevich Ivanov’s Apollo, Hyacinthus and Cyparissus Making Music and Singing (1834). While Hyacinthus plays the pipes, Apollo embraces Cyparissus. The stag lies sleeping on a rock at the right.

By far the most complete depiction of this myth is that painted by Domenichino and his assistants in the Villa Aldobrandini, Frascati, as part of the Stanza di Apollo in its garden pavilion. He has wisely kept the god out of this section of the fresco, and shows the stag dead on the ground, although killed by an arrow rather than a javelin. Next to the animal’s body, a distraught Cyparissus is already changing into a cypress tree.

While considering the cypress as a companion of grief, I cannot ignore the greatest paintings of cypresses of all time, particularly in the context of Vincent van Gogh’s imminent fate.

He may not have known of this myth, but this painting is surely about the grief of Cyparissus, and that of Vincent van Gogh himself.

Orpheus then takes over the narration, telling briefly of Jupiter’s shameful passion for the Trojan prince, Ganymede, and how the god, in the form of an eagle, abducted him to Olympus, where the young man became his cupbearer, to Juno’s evident displeasure.

Ganymede was one of the early citizens of Troy. One day during his youth, he was tending the family flock of sheep near Mount Ida, well inland from the city of Troy, when Jupiter abducted him using an eagle; the bird has been variously described as Jupiter himself or his agent. Ganymede was taken to Mount Olympus, the home of the gods, where he was given eternal youth and immortality, and served as the cupbearer to the gods. Jupiter compensated Ganymede’s father by having Hermes deliver him fine horses.

According to Pliny, writing in his Natural History in 77-79 CE, depictions of the story of Ganymede, and his abduction in particular, changed in about 325 BCE, when Leochares cast a wonderful bronze sculpture showing Ganymede being carried off by an eagle. Sadly the original is long lost, but this marble copy remains in the Vatican.

This copy of a drawing by Michelangelo (1475-1564) sets the precedent for many later paintings: an eagle as large as, or larger than, Ganymede bears him up to Zeus. Ganymede’s posture is shameless in revealing the purpose of the abduction.

Correggio’s The Abduction of Ganymede (1520-40) introduces two new features: Ganymede’s dog, left barking at the departing eagle, and the woodland from which he is abducted. The youth looks younger here, and is less flagrantly sexualised.

Rembrandt’s Abduction of Ganymede (1635) makes him little older than a large toddler, no longer fitting with the story about him tending the family flocks. His face, though, is wonderfully expressive.

Peter Paul Rubens’ The Rape of Ganymede (1636-37) is a surprise in using this story with profane humour, with the placement of both ends of Ganymede’s quiver. Clearly this wasn’t intended for viewing by polite mixed company.

Le Sueur’s The Abduction of Ganymede by Jupiter (1644) is more respectable, although still not free from pederastic taint.

Nicolaes Maes, in his Portrait of George Bredehoff de Vicq as Ganymede, must have been extremely naive to have chosen the story for a portrait of an infant.

There followed further paintings of the abduction of Ganymede, although its popularity in narrative painting waned.

Then in 1886, Gustave Moreau painted this watercolour which retold the new version, complete with barking dog and the surrounding wood. With his detailed knowledge of classical times, it’s hard to believe that Moreau didn’t understand its connotation.

Around the start of the twentieth century, Frank Kirchbach made a drawing that was turned into an engraving, and came to inspire still more bizarre connections.

In 1904, Kirchbach’s print was borrowed for an advertisement for Budweiser beer. The advertiser’s ‘modern vision of Ganymede’ is taken almost directly from Leochares sculpture of 325 BCE, over two millennia earlier. It’s hard to believe that no one recognised its associations with pederasty, then becoming known as paedophilia and recognised for the crime that it is today.

With the Age of Enlightenment, former associations of butterflies became obscure, and they were most often included in increasingly faithful paintings of natural history.

Painted in 1804, Johann Amandus Winck’s magnificent still life of Flowers and Fruits on a Stone Ledge with Butterflies and Mice makes good use of two butterflies, a housefly (perhaps a vanitas reference), a mouse and a snail.

For William Holman Hunt, in his Our English Coasts, 1852, native species of butterfly were a symbol of the British countryside. Composed from several passages from different motifs, it was assembled in a similar way to the Pre-Raphaelites’ figurative works. Hunt went to great lengths to work from nature: the peacock butterflies at the lower left were one of the last details to be completed, and were painted from a single live specimen the artist examined indoors after the rest of the painting was all but complete.

One of the few paintings that captures the experience of dense clouds of butterflies is Gustave Doré’s Summer from about 1860-70. Set in what appears to be an upland or alpine meadow, its butterflies look like large flowers that have taken to the air.

In Charles Edward Perugini’s undated Ephemeral Joy, a young woman who has been picking flowers in a garden pauses with a brimstone butterfly on the back of her hand. This species was seen as quintessentially British, although it’s widespread throughout Europe, Asia and North Africa.

Although numerous paintings of butterflies had been made from dead specimens, some of the earliest to attempt to show them in realistic environments appeared in the late nineteenth century, thanks to new wildlife artists like the masterly Bruno Liljefors. Redstarts and Butterflies, from 1885, shows what the artist called ‘five studies in one frame’, five separate studies from nature combined into a single image, including this very dark small tortoiseshell butterfly, which is about to become a meal for one of the insectivorous redstarts.

Late in his career, Vincent van Gogh painted the largest European species of moth, the giant peacock moth, in 1889. Its wingspan can reach 20 cm (8 inches).

The following year, van Gogh painted Butterflies and Poppies (1890), showing what are probably two clouded yellow butterflies rather than brimstones. This appears to have been painted on unprimed canvas.

The Japanese Western-style artist Fujishima Takeji 藤島武二 painted Butterflies in 1904, just before he travelled to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts. Like Doré’s painting above, this shows a dense cloud of butterflies gathering around flowers.

In the twentieth century, butterflies provided an opportunity for artistic invention to take flight. Odilon Redon’s Butterflies, from around 1910, shows a highly imaginative collection of butterflies, flowers, plants, and rocks, many being outlined to emphasise their form.

In Anastasiya Markovich’s recent Effect of Butterfly, the insect’s wings are breaking up into shreds of unreality.

My final painting of this selection is in many ways the most fascinating, based on scenes from one of William Shakespeare’s plays set in faerie style by Richard Dadd during his confinement in London’s Bethlem hospital for the mentally ill.

Dadd’s Contradiction: Oberon and Titania from 1854-8 develops his early faerie paintings into a new and unique style, and was painted for the hospital’s first resident Physician-Superintendent, William Charles Hood.

Dadd takes its theme from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, and there’s hardly a square millimetre of canvas into which he hasn’t squeezed yet another curious detail. Like other great imaginative painters such as Bosch before, Dadd’s dense details dart about in scale: there are tiny figures next to huge leaves and butterflies, and towards the top of this tondo these distortions of scale generate an exaggerated feeling of perspective.

The contradiction of the title refers to the battle of wills between Oberon and Titania centred on an Indian boy. Titania, inevitably somewhat masculine, stands just to the right of centre, the boy bearing her skirts. To the left of centre is the bearded figure of Oberon, an elfin lad holding him back by his right arm. At the right are Helena and Demetrius whose love remains unrequited despite Helena’s efforts. Beyond those central figures is an overwhelming mass of detail, miniature scenes and stories involving hundreds of extras, flowers (including the ‘Morning Glory’ convulvulus at the feet of Titania), leaves, an ornate swallowtail butterfly, a floating jade egg, fungi, and far more.

I think that’s the best place to end.

Butterflies are now most strongly associated with their beauty, fine summer weather, and the transience of their existence. In visual art, they have other interpretations that seem strange today. This article and its sequel tomorrow try to unravel some of those, starting with oddest by far.

Cornelis van Haarlem’s The Fall of the Titans from 1588-90 might seem a strange painting in which to find butterflies. This shows the classical myth in which the gods have defeated the Titans who preceded them. As a result the Titans fell from the heavens and were imprisoned in Tartarus, or Hell, as shown here. It’s claimed that flying insects, including butterflies, were associated with the fire of the underworld, although the two butterflies and one dragonfly here appear quite incongruous.

Another early painting of butterflies is also unusual. Dosso Dossi shows the senior of the classical gods painting butterflies in a pseudo-Christian act of creation in his Jupiter, Mercury and Virtue from 1524. The underlying myth stems from a quarrel between Virtue and Fortune, a case brought by Virtue to Jupiter. But he is too busy painting the wings of butterflies, so Mercury tells her to wait before pleading her case. Jupiter’s painting is so real, like that of Apelles, that as he completes each butterfly it takes life and flies off. Behind him is a rainbow providing the brilliant colours for his painting, making it an allegory of painting as well.

Edward Poynter’s painting of Psyche in the Temple of Love from 1882 tells a story from classical mythology that has been painted with butterflies on several occasions. Cupid has fallen in love with Psyche, and takes her to the Temple of Love where he visits her each night, but never in daylight. Here Psyche is whiling away the daytime, holding a sprig out to attract a butterfly as her attribute, although the common and prosaic small white rather than anything more exotic. However, Psyche’s enemy Venus is not far away, as shown by the doves in the temple behind her.

By the early nineteenth century, Europeans were travelling overseas to look for exciting new species of butterfly. Carl Spitzweg’s The Butterfly Catcher from about 1840 shows every hunter’s dream: discovering the largest, most spectacular butterflies ever seen. Compare the size of the hunter’s net with the unrealistically large butterflies in the foreground.

Winslow Homer’s Butterflies from 1878 shows a young woman hunting eastern tiger swallowtail butterflies with her net. This swallowtail species is widespread in the eastern USA, and related to the Old World swallowtail found across Europe. She’s carrying a box in which to place her specimens, in which they’d be killed, ready to mount in a glass cabinet. Collecting butterflies was considered sufficiently ladylike, because of their beauty, while less aesthetically satisfying insects such as beetles were left to male entomologists.

Sophie Anderson entered the faerie painting sub-genre with Take the Fair Face of Woman, and Gently Suspending, With Butterflies, Flowers, and Jewels Attending, Thus Your Fairy is Made of Most Beautiful Things from 1880. The title is taken from some verse allegedly by Charles Ede, although the only literary person of that name who I can identify was born long after this work was completed. Not only are there butterflies adorning this fairy’s hair, but she also appears to have butterfly wings.

The ephemeral lives of butterflies made them a popular candidate for vanitas paintings expressing a weariness of earthly life.

The first of those started to appear in the early sixteenth century. In Jan Sanders van Hemessen’s Vanitas from about 1535-40, an androgynous angel with butterfly wings cradles a human skull with fragmentary Latin inscriptions. Those wings were modelled after the swallowtail butterfly.

A few years later, an anonymous follower of Hieronymus Bosch painted Christ among the Doctors (c 1545), with a large butterfly settled in the foreground.

Many other paintings of butterflies simply represent their beauty.

Pisanello’s egg tempera Portrait of a Princess, showing Ginevra d’Este in 1435-49, surrounds her with flowers and four butterflies. The two on the left are red admirals, and one of the right is a swallowtail, two of the larger and more spectacular species that are abundant in southern Europe.

For their familiarity, bright colours, and natural beauty, butterflies were popular in the Dutch Golden Age, particularly in smaller paintings such as still lifes destined for the collector’s cabinet. Nicolaes de Vree’s undated A Forest Floor Still Life with Flowering Plants and Butterflies from the latter half of the seventeenth century, is a fine example of a painting that goes beyond the normal still life and depicts a more natural scene.

Jan van Os’s Flowers from about 1780 is a much later example, featuring a peacock, swallowtail and red admiral. Each would have been painted from a dead specimen in a collection; collections became popular as the Age of Enlightenment encouraged the better-educated to take an active interest in developing sciences such as entomology.

In the seventeenth century, Cardinal Leopoldo de’ Medici started collecting self-portraits of painters. This collection has grown to include over two thousand paintings, sculptures and drawings, and is now part of the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, Italy. During the eighteenth century, as painting interiors was developing as a genre, some artists took to painting not just themselves, but their studio as well. Here’s a selection of those.

The American artist John Ferguson Weir’s first major painting was An Artist’s Studio from 1864, in which the artist in question is his father, not himself. It has the air of meticulous veracity, and was exhibited, sold, and brought the painter’s election as an associate of the National Academy.

Paul Cézanne’s roughly painted Stove in the Studio from about 1865 includes the two most important items, the stove to provide heat, and a canvas to provide a painting surface.

Frédéric Bazille’s broad view of his Studio on the Rue La Condamine, from 1869-70, reveals the wide open space that he shared with Renoir at the time. The artist stands at the centre, next to his easel with his View of the Village in progress. Manet painted himself standing in front of Bazille, with a hat and beard.

In 1878, the American artist William Merritt Chase rented the main gallery in the Tenth Street Studio Building at 51 West Tenth Street, Greenwich Village, New York City. For the next seventeen years this was to be his place of work, public image, extended persona, private stage, personal gallery, and the motif for at least a dozen of his paintings.

The building, designed by Richard Morris Hunt, had been completed in 1857, was demolished in 1956, and was one of the first in America to be designed specifically for visual artists. Notable previous occupants include Winslow Homer, Frederic Church, and Albert Bierstadt. When Chase moved in, the building was owned by John Taylor Johnston, who later became the first president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Painted just the year after he moved in, Chase’s Studio Interior (c 1879) is one of his few paintings of studios lacking figures, but shows off his ornately carved wooden chest, a copy of an Old Master, and some of his more exotic props. Chase was quick to recognise the promotional value of his studio: as it grew steadily more exotic, and more populated with his own work, he encouraged the press to write about it, to promote his image as a successful artist.

His Tenth Street Studio from 1880 shows one of his portraiture clients, engaged in discussion with a painter who could be Chase, but recedes into the shadows. At the woman’s feet is an elegant dog, and she is surrounded by intriguing and tasteful objects.

In his Studio Interior (c 1882), another fashionably dressed young woman is glancing through a huge bound collation of Chase’s work, sat by an even grander carved wooden sideboard, decorated with almost outlandish objects including a model ship, a lute, and sundry objets d’art.

A Corner of My Studio (c 1895) is a more formal and finished record of Chase’s studio in its final year. Through the curtained doorway, we see in the distance one of Chase’s students painting diligently.

William McGregor Paxton’s open fire In the Studio (1905) is appropriately classy, glowing in the background. He deliberately defocussed it in what he termed Vermeer’s “binocular vision”. His model is in crisp focus, and as the eye wonders further away from her as the optical centre of the painting, edges and details become progressively more blurred.

Olga Boznańska, the Polish Impressionist, painted this uncomplicated Interior of the artist’s studio in Krakow in 1906.

When Carl Larsson painted his Self-Portrait in his new studio in 1912, he sits back with the ease of a successful artist in his late fities. Around him are the creature comforts furnished by that success, and designed by his wife. There are some gentle touches of eccentricity, like the sword passing through the huge book open in front of him, and the statue whose feet are propping the book up.

Sage and wise people are harder to distinguish visually, without using the cliché of the white-haired and bearded figure more commonly seen as Father Time. To the Romans, the personification of Wisdom was the goddess Minerva or Athena, whose complex background proved a challenge for painters.

Hendrik Goltzius shows a classical and fairly complete set of her attributes: the owl, her distinctive helmet here decorated with olive leaves, a spear, books, a writing quill, and great beauty.

Athena may go back to an even earlier Mycenean goddess. In archaic images, she’s often seen with an owl perched on her hand, and there is a suggestion that she may have originally been a bird goddess, nearly two thousand years BCE. Whatever the origins, there’s no doubt that Athena then Minerva were goddesses of wisdom, learning, crafts, and skill, and that they were strongly associated with owls, who became proxies for wisdom and knowledge. Minerva of the Romans also had Etruscan influences that determined her name in the goddess of war Menrva, with origins from an Italic moon goddess of similar name, hence her helmet and spear.

Solon was a key figure in the development of classical Greek civilisation, most significantly for laying down the tables of law for Athens, and best known for his legendary involvement with Croesus, the fabulously rich king whose name endures in English and other languages in the phrase as rich as Croesus.

Gaspar van den Hoecke’s Croesus Showing his Treasures to Solon is one of several similar paintings made in about 1635, presumably from a common source; others attributed to Cornelis de Vos and Frans Francken II survive. Here Croesus at the right is showing the bald and bearded Solon one of his treasure chambers. Troops in the background may refer to Croesus’ imminent fate at the hands of Cyrus and his Persian forces.

Accounts of wisdom in the Old Testament are generally focussed on the judgement skills of King Solomon, as displayed when he was called to settle a dispute between two women claiming to be the mother of one baby. Solomon commanded that the infant should be cleaved in two by a sword, leading to the real mother relinquishing her claim to the child, to ensure its survival.

Nicolas Poussin’s famous painting of The Judgement of Solomon from 1649 is timed slightly before the sword is raised, and depicts the body language clearly. Solomon’s hands indicate his role as the arbiter, in showing a fair balance between the two sides. The true mother, on the left, holds her left hand up to tell the soldier to stop and spare the infant. Her right hand is extended towards the false mother, indicating that she has asked for the baby to go to her rather than die. The false mother points accusingly at the child, her expression full of hatred. Hands are also raised in the group at the right, suggesting reactions to Solomon’s judgement. Without knowing the story well, though, there are no visual cues to suggest this young king is exceptionally wise.

This panel attributed to Giorgione and dated around 1505 mirrors the composition of his Trial of Moses (c 1496-9), to which it might have been a pendant. Solomon is shown in advanced age, thus inherently wise, commanding a courtier who has raised his short sword ready. The two women straddle the midline of the panel, their body language not clear enough to indicate who is the true mother.

More problematic still are visual accounts of the adoration of the Magi, three ‘wise men’ who are drawn by their observations of a comet to pay homage to the infant Jesus. Most take the easy option of depicting them as three kings, and only a few show them as pioneering astronomers.

Giotto’s frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel at Padua, Italy, show a more elaborate depiction of The Adoration of the Magi (c 1305). The infant Christ rests on the Virgin Mary’s knee; she was originally clad in her signature ultramarine blue, but that has worn away with the years. Mary is accompanied by Joseph and an angel, and the Holy Family is within a wooden shed. The three Magi pay their respects and present their gifts, accompanied by camels and at least two attendants. The comet that attracted their attention is shown as a fireball crossing the sky.

Diego Velázquez broke with tradition in his Adoration of the Magi from 1619 in depicting the figures as real humans rather than idealised models. He had to be careful to maintain distinct appearances for those such as Mary and Jesus who are divine, even covering the Virgin’s feet for the sake of propriety. But the other figures here all look to be real, living and breathing people, and the Magi for once aren’t visual clichés.

With the Age of Enlightenment, paintings came to include the most enlightened in more innovative ways, as ‘philosophers’, particularly in the chiaroscuro images of Joseph Wright of Derby.

In 1766, Wright exhibited one of his most enduring images of the period, A Philosopher Giving that Lecture on the Orrery, in which a Lamp is Put in Place of the Sun. The orrery, a miniature planetarium showing the movements of the planets and their moons, was an impressive high-end Grand Orrery, an expensive device that would undoubtedly have captivated the minds of those able to gaze at it.

There are numerous cues here to different narratives: to Locke’s educational theories with their emphasis on geography, understanding of astronomy, and Newton’s gravitation and mechanics. It has been proposed that the philosopher in the red gown is modelled on Isaac Newton, and the figure at the left taking notes is Wright’s friend Peter Perez Burdett.

In the nineteenth century, wisdom was strongly associated with science and technology, and the equipment used.

Joaquín Sorolla’s Portrait of Dr. Simarro at the Microscope from 1897 shows Doctor Luis Simarro Lacabra (1851-1921), who was an eminent psychiatrist in Madrid, and undertook pioneering research looking at the fine structure of the brain. Among his many achievements was a modification of an established technique for staining microscopic sections of brain, which proved a major advance and an inspiration to the great Spanish neurohistologist Ramon y Cajal. He is shown here with one of the most popular scientific instruments associated with knowledge and wisdom, the microscope.

Few artists have ever gathered as many of the great and wise as Raphael, in his large fresco of The School of Athens, painted between about 1509-10.

This wasn’t recognised as depicting eminent Greek philosophers until 1695, with Vasari’s account in his biography of Raphael assuming that it included a group of evangelists, and others claiming the figures are taken from Dante’s Divine Comedy.

This assorted collection of Greek philosophers, with a few extras, are chatting, teaching, and generally loafing about in an impressive building of grand classical style that is probably Raphael’s extended fantasy based on the contemporary architecture of Bramante. Although there’s no coherent narrative, it contains numerous diverting scenes in which the viewer is challenged to recognise the participants.

The central figures are Plato (left), who carries in his left hand a book titled TIMEO, and Aristotle (right), whose book bears the word ETICA. Seen further to the left in profile is Socrates, and below him is Pythagoras, who is writing in a book while a boy holds in front of him a small blackboard showing the theory of harmony.

His opposite number on the right is Euclid, who is bent over and holding a pair of compasses in his right hand. Behind him are Ptolemy, who is holding a globe and facing away, and Zoroaster, who holds a celestial sphere with his right hand. One striking figure for which I haven’t seen any plausible identification is the woman behind Pythagoras, who appears to have just walked out of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

Jesters or fools appear to have originated as entertainers in ancient Rome, and were features in many of the royal courts in Europe. Among the most famous are those in the plays of William Shakespeare. In this article, I look at paintings of fools and jesters, and tomorrow those of their intellectual complements, sages and sundry wise persons.

Some of Shakespeare’s fools play significant roles in the plot, of whom the most famous must be Yoric, on whose skull Hamlet gives one of the most memorable speeches in the English language.

This was sufficient for Philip Hermogenes Calderon to paint a speculative scene of The Young Lord Hamlet in 1868, showing the prince long before the start of the play. Set in happier days before the death of Hamlet’s father, its reading is an interesting challenge. If the figure on hands and knees, wearing the standard jester’s rig, is Yoric, then presumably the young boy riding on his back is Hamlet, and the younger infant in the care of the three women on the right might be the young Ophelia.

Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret shows the famous scene of Hamlet and the Gravediggers (1883) as the prince is about to lament the passing of Yoric to the gravediggers, opening with the words “To be, or not to be…”.

The fool in King Lear has a lesser role, although at least he remains alive and well throughout the play. His most prominent moment is when he accompanies the enraged king out into a tempest.

Ary Scheffer’s watercolour of King Lear and the Fool from 1834 places the pair on Shakespeare’s bleak heath.

In William Dyce’s King Lear and the Fool in the Storm from about 1851, the king is having a good rant into the wind of the storm, his body language profuse. Resting with his head propped on the heels of his hands, the Fool also looks up to the heavens.

Shakespeare’s other plays feature fools and jesters who sing and entertain, like Touchstone in As You Like It.

JW Waterhouse painted his portrait in watercolour, in his undated Jester.

Daniel Maclise’s Wrestling Scene in ‘As You Like It’ from 1854 shows the wrestler Charles on the left, as Orlando on the right prepares for their contest. The two daughters, Celia and Rosalind, embrace one another in anxiety, and Touchstone is seated at the front.

John Collier’s undated painting of Touchstone and Audrey catches the jester in one of his more serious moments, as he woos the simple Audrey.

My last Shakespearean fool appears in Twelfth Night.

Walter Deverell’s Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene IV (1850) show Feste the clown singing to Orsino and Viola, disguised as Cesario.

A few non-theatrical fools and jesters also appear in paintings.

“Keying Up” – The Court Jester was one of William Merritt Chase’s student paintings, made in 1875 when he was studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany. He sent this back to his sponsors in St. Louis, Missouri, where it went on to win a medal at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition that year.

Georges Clairin had a reputation of being a socialite, but his King’s Fool from 1880 is unusual and great fun.

Other than the fictional Yoric, few jesters or fools have attained fame. One notable exception to this is Stańczyk, a Polish court jester who lived between about 1480-1560.

In 1917 Kazimierz Sichulski painted this Portrait of Józef Piłsudski with Wernyhora and Stańczyk in pastels. Piłsudski was a major Polish statesman who was to become Chief of State after the First World War. Stańczyk (left) here symbolises Poland’s struggle for independence. Wernyhora (right) is a legendary Cossack bard who apparently told of the fall of Poland and its subsequent rebirth as a great nation. Both Piłsudski and Wernyhora feature in contemporary paintings by Jacek Malczewski.

After he has told us of the birth of Hercules, Ovid uses Alcmena’s link with Hercules’ former lover Iole to introduce several obscure stories, starting with the transformation of Dryope.

Iole tells the tale of her sister Dryope, the fairest in all Oechalia. She had been raped by Apollo, then married Andraemon, by whom she had a baby boy. When her son was only one and still at the breast, Dryope and Iole came to a lake, and picked crimson water-lotus flowers to please the infant. They were horrified to see drops of blood on the foliage; these later turned out to be from the nymph Lotis, who had been transformed into that bush after fleeing from Priapus.

As Dryope tried to run away, she found herself literally rooted to the spot as she was transformed into a Lotus Tree, as punishment for picking the lotus flowers. Her distraught husband came and took his son away to be cared for by a nurse.

Baur’s engraving from about 1639 shows Dryope and Iole distant, at the right. As Dryope transforms into a Lotus Tree, she’s still holding her son, and Iole is praying to the heavens. Presumably the two males in the foreground are Dryope’s husband and a friend.

By the end of Iole’s story, Alcmena is in tears. They are then interrupted by Iolaus, Hercules’ former charioteer who took part in the Calydonian boar hunt, who had just been rejuvenated as a result of the intervention of Hercules, now a god, and Hebe, his heavenly wife.

Ovid briefly mentions the sons of Achelous’ daughter Callirhoe, whose years were advanced by Hebe to allow them to avenge their father’s murder. This in turn resulted in discord among the gods over Iolaus’ rejuvenation. Ovid uses this aside to link to the story of Byblis and Caunus, twins born to Miletus and the beautiful nymph Cyanee, the first of two concerning ‘unnatural love’ concluding book 9 of the Metamorphoses.

Byblis was strongly attracted to her twin brother Caunus. At first this was nothing more than sisterly love, but it grew into something more passionate, if not obsessive, as demonstrated in her long soliloquies. Eventually, Byblis decided the best way ahead was to write to her brother confessing her love for him. She did this on wax tablets, but kept erasing her words, until she eventually arrived at a long and elaborate message, given in full by Ovid, that she signed with her signet ring and despatched to Caunus via a slave.

On starting to read his sister’s message, Caunus flew into a rage, threw the tablets to the ground, and angrily sent the slave back to Byblis, with a clear message that his sister’s proposition was shameful. In another soliloquy, Byblis blamed herself for getting it so badly wrong, saying she shouldn’t have put her feelings in writing, but should have told them orally to her brother. She then pondered whether the slave had made some error, or that her brother had mistaken her true love for him for simple lust.

Becoming more confused and upset all the time, Byblis beat herself, tore her clothing, and ran through the countryside, until she fell on the ground by a forest. The wood nymphs there tried to comfort her, to no avail, as she dissolved in her tears to form a spring.

Despite its sensitive subject of an incestuous relationship, the story of Byblis and Caunus has appeared in a few paintings. In each case, they show Byblis’ transformation into a spring, or rather they provide an opportunity to paint a young nude woman outdoors.

Jean-Jacques Henner includes a spring of sorts, and some garments that have been cast off, not exactly torn, in his Byblis Turning into a Spring (1867).

This is a smaller version of Bouguereau’s painting of Biblis from 1884, the larger one having been exhibited at the Salon in 1885. His spring is more substantial, but there’s nothing to suggest that this wasn’t just another carefully posed nude.

This undated account by Armand Point, Biblis Changed into a Spring, reads a little more faithfully to Ovid’s story, but this image of it is too poor to see other potential narrative elements such as the figures in front of the temple at the left.

Ovid then concludes Book 9 of his Metamorphoses with one of his most remarkably insightful tales. I have to keep reminding myself that he wrote this over two thousand years ago, but the issues he considers are thoroughly modern, and his approach to the story of Iphis and Ianthe is sensitive even by current standards.

Ligdus lived in Phaestos in Crete, not far from the great Knossos. Telethusa his wife was pregnant with their first child. They weren’t rich, and as a consequence Ligdus told her that she had to bear him a son, as they couldn’t afford to have a daughter. If she were to give birth to a girl, he said the child would have to die. Telethusa begged her husband to accept a daughter, but he wouldn’t budge.

Late in her pregnancy, Telethusa had a vision of the Egyptian goddess Isis, with attendant deities. Isis told her to keep and rear the baby, whether it was a boy or girl, if necessary by deception. The goddess promised that she would answer her prayers and help in times of need. Telethusa promptly went into labour that morning, and was delivered of a girl. She followed Isis’ instruction and declared the child to be a boy. The couple then raised their daughter as a son named Iphis, a name ambivalent in gender.

Thirteen years later, Ligdus found his son a bride, Ianthe, and their match appeared excellent, each falling in love with the other. Iphis, though, knew that she was a girl, and became upset that because of her gender, their marriage couldn’t happen. She postponed the wedding, delayed it further, but eventually ran out of excuses, and a final date had to be fixed.

The day before their marriage, Telethusa prayed to Isis, with Iphis at her side. As they walked back together, Iphis was transformed into a man who then married Ianthe, and lived happily ever after, remembering to make offerings to Isis in thanks for the remarkable transformation.

As you can imagine, few if any patrons in the past would have commissioned artists to paint this story, although it has been tackled by those illustrating this book of the Metamorphoses.

Bernard Picart’s engraving Isis Appears to Telethusa, from about 1732, dodges the real issues at stake by showing Telethusa’s vision of Isis and her entourage of Egyptian deities.

Johann Wilhelm Baur was braver in his engraving, showing Isis Changing the Sex of Iphis (c 1639) shortly before the wedding, although his composition keeps well away from any troublesome detail in the figure of Iphis.

One artist who did show an interest in this story is John William Godward, whose own lifestyle demonstrated he wasn’t afraid to shock. Sadly, his two paintings of Ianthe dodge the issues, and are only weakly narrative in any case, although they’re still rather beautiful. Godward’s Ianthe (1889) above simply shows the bride-to-be, and I can see no hint of Ovid’s story.

His undated painting, again of Ianthe below is more elaborate, but I still cannot see any references to the issues or events.

There is another painting which, in recent years, had become associated with the story of Iphis and Ianthe, and on some websites has been re-titled to make it appear to be about this story.

This is Angelica Kauffmann’s The Artist in the Character of Design Listening to the Inspiration of Poetry (1782), which has been misinterpreted as showing a pre-transformed Iphis embracing Ianthe, as if in a lesbian relationship. As its real title demonstrates, that suggestion would be a travesty of Kauffmann’s intent. I also suspect that George Bowles, for whom she painted it, would have been shocked if someone had suggested that this was actually Iphis and Ianthe.

Perhaps Latin poetry can remain subtle enough for Ovid to get away with such a remarkable story so long ago, whereas the visual explicitness of a painting could never have enjoyed such licence. We could do with more brave paintings now, to challenge some of modern society’s remaining prejudices.

When the French painter James Tissot arrived in London in the summer of 1871, he had just a hundred francs to his name, and had left his reputation behind. He was soon earning more than enough to pay the bills, through his paintings of elegant women in fashionable scenes. He also resumed his narrative series, embarking on his first set in a tavern on the bank of the River Thames in London, probably in Rotherhithe or Wapping.

The first of those to be exhibited was An Interesting Story from about 1872, which set the pattern. It’s the late eighteenth century, and an old soldier is telling one (or more) pretty young women interminable and incomprehensible stories about his military career, with the aid of charts spread out on the table. In this case, the word interesting is ironic to everyone except the veteran.

In The Tedious Story (c 1872), there can be no doubt the young woman has drifted off into a world of her own, one far away from the veteran’s charts.

Tissot moved the exterior location further up-river for his Bad News (The Parting) (1872). The soldier is now young, and has just been recalled to duty, to leave the two young women who appear as heartbroken as he does. In the centre of the painting, a small boat full of uniformed soldiers is in transit, presumably coming to take this soldier away with them. He again returns to the enduring theme of loss and separation.

In contrast, Too Early (1873) is an insightful social comedy: this group has arrived at the soirée on time, when social convention is always to be late, so you aren’t the first to arrive. The four guests are embarrassed, and don’t know what to do, so they stand prominently in the middle of the empty floor while the hostess prepares the musicians, and the host waits idly at the door.

The first of the four paintings in his series The Prodigal Son in Modern Life, The Departure (c 1882) is set in another of his favourite waterside haunts along the Thames. The windows are now grimy, and the light filtered through the smoke of the city. Father, an elderly man, sits giving his younger son advice, having filled that son’s wallet with his share of inheritance. Bags are already packed and ready to go, and under the table a kitten seems to be leaving its litter too. Behind the younger son, one petal has fallen from the vase of nasturtiums. To the left, the older son stares with disappointed disinterest out towards the river. A sister (or perhaps the older brother’s wife) looks up from her sewing towards father and son.

The next two paintings take the younger son out to Japan, for clear allusions to immoral conduct, then to the prodigal son’s return on board a ship carrying pigs and cattle.

The final painting, The Fatted Calf (c 1882), shows the prodigal son sharpening a knife for carving the roast joint of meat concealed under the silver platter on the table. The older brother has just climbed up from a boat on the river, where his friends remain, and is arguing with their father as to why his younger brother should be welcomed back with a ‘fatted calf’. There are other cues carefully placed in this painting: climbing on the trellis are nasturtiums, the flowers securely clustered together again. The mother strokes a dog, a symbol of fidelity, and the prodigal son appears to have gained a pretty female partner too.

This series was first exhibited as the centrepiece of his one-man exhibition in the Dudley Gallery, London, in 1882. He finally won a gold medal for it at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889.

In the middle of the 1870s, Tissot had begun an intimate relationship with his Irish model, Kathleen Newton. She was a divorcee with a family of her own, but his Catholic faith was a barrier to their marriage. She developed tuberculosis in about 1880, and died in his arms in late 1882. He moved back to Paris, where he painted his largest series yet, fifteen canvases on the theme of the Woman of Paris.

Women of Sport (The Amateur Circus) from 1883-5 must be among the strangest of this set, here showing many ‘modern women’ being entertained by scantily clad male trapeze artists.

In 1885, Tissot re-discovered his Catholic faith, and embarked on the most ambitious project of his career, to paint the whole of the life of Jesus Christ in more than 350 gouache paintings. This coincided with some experiments with the spirit world, and efforts to contact his dead partner.

Over the next decade, Tissot travelled to research locations and details of the period, and started this enormous task. In the spring of 1894, 270 of his paintings were exhibited in Paris to massive public acclaim. This show visited London in 1896, and toured America in 1898. The whole series of 350 paintings was then published, first in Paris then overseas, in a series of editions lasting until 1910. Critical views were mixed at best, but this was the greatest commercial success of Tissot’s career.

Despite the sheer effort and quantity involved, many of his images are innovative and artistic rather than being simply illustrative. Above is his account of Jesus Goes Up Alone onto a Mountain to Pray, and below is his provocative view of What Our Lord Saw from the Cross. His originals are now in the Brooklyn Museum in New York.

In his final years, Tissot worked on a series showing scenes from the Old Testament, of which he had completed almost a hundred when he died suddenly in 1902. Within a year, his paintings had collapsed in value, and by the 1920s he had been largely forgotten.

References

Wikipedia.

English translation of Tissot’ book, fully illustrated: volume 1, volume 2.

Dolkart JF (ed) (2009) James Tissot, the Life of Christ, Brooklyn Museum and Merrell. ISBN 978 1 8589 4496 8.
Marshall NR & Warner M (1999) James Tissot, Victorian Life / Modern Love, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 08173 2.
Wood C (1986) Tissot, Weidenfeld and Nicolson. ISBN 978 0 297 79475 2.

If you want to see fine paintings, visit more provincial galleries. While they don’t have many van Goghs, Rembrandts or Vermeers, you will have the chance to see some of the best paintings by artists whose work isn’t as overvalued. This weekend I look at a small selection of narrative works by the Anglo-French artist James Tissot, a contemporary of the Impressionists. Since his death in 1902, his work initially fell into deep disfavour, but in the late twentieth century became more popular again.

Jacques Joseph Tissot was born in the busy port of Nantes, in the north-west of France, in 1836. His father was a prosperous draper there, dealing daily with women’s fashions and apparel. The young Tissot resolved to become a painter when he was seventeen, but it took a further three years before he could persuade his family to allow him to study in Paris. He had also become an Anglophile, and adopted the name of James at about that time.

In Paris, he first stayed with a family friend, the painter Élie Delaunay (1828-1891), and studied under Hippolyte Flandrin briefly, and for several years under Louis Lamothe, both former pupils of JAD Ingres. Although Lamothe’s work is now forgotten, he also taught Edgar Degas, and ensured Tissot’s technical brilliance. The young Tissot also became friends with Whistler, Degas, and Manet. His first successful submission to the Salon was in 1859, when he was fascinated by the Middle Ages.

His Dance of Death or the Way of Flowers, Way of Tears was among his paintings exhibited at the Salon in 1860, and one of that series based on the Middle Ages.

At this time, he started a series of scenes based on Goethe’s Faust. In this he was influenced by another largely forgotten painter, the Belgian Baron Henri Leys (1815-1869). Tissot loved this historical romanticism, which was also becoming popular in the work of Delaroche, Gérôme, Ingres, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in Britain.

The best-known painting of the introduction of Gretchen into Goethe’s play is that by James Tissot in the Musée d’Orsay. I haven’t been able to locate an image of that work, Faust Meets Marguerite, from 1860, but above is his signed study for it.

He continued with this carefully executed view of Faust and Marguerite in the Garden (1861), shown here in its finished version, also in the Musée d’Orsay. The couple are sat talking together on a bench, still quite distant, with Gretchen looking intently at a daisy she’s holding.

This scene from Act 4 of Faust, Marguerite in Church (c 1861) shows her cast in the role of the penitent Magdalene, a theme that Tissot was to revisit in his later paintings of the life of Christ. Two innocent children kneel in front of a shrine, praying in the normal and obvious manner. Marguerite’s inner turmoil cannot bring her any closer to that shrine, or even to break herself out of her posture of dejection, eyes cast down, hands apart rather than held together in prayer. Above her is a painting of the Last Judgement, anticipating her own fate in Act 5.

Tissot’s explorations of Faust reached their climax in about 1861, and he next painted a series of much-admired works based on the theme of the prodigal son. These are derived from the parable related by Jesus, told in the Gospel of Luke chapter 15 verses 11-32. This shows the scene most popular among artists of all ages, The Return of the Prodigal Son (1862).

He then abandoned formal narrative painting and started to paint scenes from modern life. By the end of the 1860s, though, life in Paris was clearly changing for the worse, when he painted this young woman practising her skills with firearms At the Rifle Range (1869).

Tissot’s life changed dramatically with the Franco-Prussian War that followed in 1870. He served in the National Guard in the defence of Paris, following which he may have become involved in the Commune, perhaps to protect his own property. When the Commune was suppressed, Tissot fled to London, where he arrived in June 1871 with just a hundred francs to his name.

Tissot painted The Farewells soon after his flight to London that summer. This couple, separated by the iron rails of a closed gate, are in late eighteenth century dress. The man stares intently at the woman, his gloved left hand resting on the spikes along the top of the gate, and his ungloved right hand grasps her left. She plays idly with her clothing with her other hand, and looks down, towards their hands.

Reading her clothing, she is plainly dressed, implying she was a governess, perhaps. A pair of scissors suspended by string on her left side would fit with that, and they’re also symbols of the parting taking place. This is reinforced by the autumn season, and dead leaves at the lower edge of the canvas. However, there is some hope if the floral symbols are accurate: ivy in the lower left is indicative of fidelity and marriage, while holly at the right invokes hope and passion.

In tomorrow’s article, I will show how his art flourished in England.

References

Wikipedia.

English translation of Tissot’s Life of Christ, fully illustrated: volume 1, volume 2.

Dolkart JF (ed) (2009) James Tissot, the Life of Christ, Brooklyn Museum and Merrell. ISBN 978 1 8589 4496 8.
Marshall NR & Warner M (1999) James Tissot, Victorian Life / Modern Love, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 08173 2.
Wood C (1986) Tissot, Weidenfeld and Nicolson. ISBN 978 0 297 79475 2.