The architect and artificer Daedalus had been introduced by Ovid in his account of the death of the Minotaur, and the next myth in Metamorphoses tells of the tragic end to Daedalus’ stay on the island of Crete, where he and his son Icarus had effectively been imprisoned since the construction of the labyrinth that had confined the minotaur. Much as Daedalus yearned to leave the island and King Minos, there was no hope of him departing by sea, so he decided to take to the air.

Daedalus built two sets of wings made from feathers held together by beeswax. Once they were completed, he tested his by hovering in the air. He then cautioned his son to fly a middle course: neither so low that the sea would wet the feathers and make them heavy, nor so high that the heat of the sun would damage them. He also told Icarus to follow his lead, and not to try navigating by the stars.

Daedalus fitted his son with his wings, and gave him further advice about how to fly with them. He shed tears as he did that, and his hands trembled. Once they were both ready, Daedalus kissed his son, and flew off in the lead just like a bird with its fledgeling chick in tow.

Towards the end of his career in Rome in 1645-46, the great French painter Charles Le Brun painted Daedalus and Icarus. This shows the master artificer fastening wings made of feathers and wax on his son’s back, prior to their escape from Crete.

Andrea Sacchi’s Daedalus and Icarus (c 1645) shows Daedalus at the left, fitting Icarus’ wings, prior to the boy’s flight. Icarus has his right arm raised to allow the fitting, and looks intently at his new wings. Daedalus is concentrating on adjusting the thin ribbons passing over his son’s shoulders, and may be explaining to him the importance of flying at the right altitude.

Anthony van Dyck’s Daedalus and Icarus (1615-25) shows Daedalus giving his son the vital pre-flight briefing. From the father’s gestures, he is here explaining the importance of keeping the right altitude.

Frederic, Lord Leighton’s Icarus and Daedalus (c 1869), shows the pair on the roof of a tower overlooking the coast. Daedalus is fitting his son’s wings, and looks up at Icarus. The boy holds his right arm up, partly to allow his father to fit the wings, and possibly in a gesture of strength and defiance, as the two will shortly be escaping from Crete. Icarus looks to the right, presumably towards their mainland destination, and Daedalus is wearing a curious scalp-hugging cap intended for flight.

Charles Paul Landon’s (1760–1826) Icarus and Daedalus (1799) shows the moment that Icarus launches into flight from the top of the tower, his arms held out and treading air with his legs during this first flight. Daedalus stands behind, his arms still held horizontally forward from launching his son.

The pair flew over a fisherman holding his rod, a shepherd leaning on his crook, and a ploughman with his plough, amazing them with the sight. They flew past Delos and Paros, and approached further islands, but Icarus started to enjoy the thrill of flying too much, and soared too high. As he neared the sun, the wax securing the feathers in his wings softened, and his wings fell apart.

As Icarus fell from the sky, he called to his father, before entering the water in what’s now known in his memory as the Icarian Sea, between the Cyclades and the coast of modern Turkey. All Daedalus could see were the feathers, remnants of wings, on the surface of the water.

Rubens’ initial oil sketch of The Fall of Icarus (1636) above, was presumably turned into a finished painting by his apprentice Jacob Peter Gowy, below. Icarus, his wings in tatters and holding his arms up as if trying to flap them, plunges past Daedalus. The boy’s mouth and eyes are wide open in shock and fear, and his body tumbles as it falls. Daedalus is still flying, though, his wings intact and fully functional; he looks towards the falling body of his son in alarm. They are high above a bay containing people with a fortified town at the edge of the sea.

Merry-Joseph Blondel’s spectacular painted ceiling showing The Sun or the Fall of Icarus (1819) combines a similar view of Daedalus flying onward, and Icarus in free fall, with Apollo’s sun chariot being driven across the heavens.

Joos de Momper’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c 1565), above, show Icarus’ descent within a much bigger landscape, including some of Ovid’s finer details:

• an angler catching a fish with a rod and line,
• a shepherd leaning on a crook,
• a ploughman resting on the handles of his plough.

To aid the viewer, de Momper has painted their clothing scarlet.

De Momper may also have made the copy, below, of Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s famous Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. Here, Brueghel makes the viewer work harder to see the crucial elements of the story: all there is to be seen of Icarus are his flailing legs and some feathers, by the stern of the ship at the right. Daedalus isn’t visible at all, but the shepherd leaning on his crook is looking up at him, up to the left. As in de Momper’s own version, Brueghel also shows the ploughman and the angler.

Vlaho Bukovac (Biagio Faggioni) (1855–1922) painted two different versions of Icarus reaching earth: in The Fall of Icarus (1898), one panel of a diptych about this story, he shows Icarus on the seabed, as he drowns, the remains of his wings still visible.

His earlier Icarus on the Rocks (1897) departs from Ovid’s account and has Icarus crash onto rocks; his posture is similar in the two paintings.

Finally, Herbert Draper’s (1863–1920) Lament for Icarus (1898) shows an apocryphal and more romantic view, in which three nymphs have recovered the apparently dry body of Icarus, and he is laid out on a rock while they lament his fate to the accompaniment of a lyre. Perhaps influenced by contemporary thought about human flight, Draper gives Icarus huge wings, and those are shown intact, rather than disintegrated from their exposure to the sun’s heat.

Daedalus was full of remorse, and buried his son’s body on the nearby island. As he was digging his son’s grave, a solitary partridge watched him from a nearby oak tree. The partridge had originally been Daedalus’ nephew, who had been brought to him as an apprentice. As the nephew’s skills and ingenuity grew, Daedalus became envious of him, seeking to kill him and pretend it had been an accident. When Daedalus threw him from the roof of her temple on the Acropolis, Pallas Athena saved the apprentice by transforming him into a partridge in mid-air. The bird still remembers being saved from its fall, and to this day won’t fly far above the ground.

More than 80,000 children from China were adopted by American families. While many appreciate how the adoptions reshaped their own lives, they are also glad to see the program conclude.

© Jon Cherry for The New York Times

In the first of these two articles celebrating the work of generations of women who washed clothes and linen outdoors, and have been featured in landscape paintings, I covered the period up to the end of the 1870s, when Impressionism was at its height. This account resumes at about 1880, and moves on to the early twentieth century.

Alice Havers’ Washerwomen, which given her tragically brief life must have been painted around 1880, shows a wide range of ages, working together, some repairing the clothes, others talking. On the other side of the river, the fruit trees are in blossom.

Later in Eugène Boudin’s career he painted Washerwomen by the River (c 1880-85), above, and Laundresses on the Beach, Low Tide, Aval Cliff, Étretat (c 1890-94), below. The latter painting is remarkable for its rough facture, and for the number of women gathered by one of the most recognisable landmarks on the Normandy coast, the arch of Étretat.

Early in his career, the American artist Charles Courtney Curran painted a series of works showing young women at work outdoors, among which the most successful, A Breezy Day (1887) won the Third Hallgarten Prize for Oils from the National Academy of Design the following year.

Painted when Vincent van Gogh was at Arles, one of his best-known groups of works includes The Langlois Bridge at Arles with Women Washing (1888). This is one of four oil paintings, a watercolour, and at least four drawings he made of this motif, with the aid of a perspective frame he had made for himself. This shows a traditional wooden drawbridge, one of several over the canal running from Arles to Bouc. Built in the early nineteenth century, it was sadly replaced by concrete in 1930.

In the same year, Paul Gauguin painted a group of women hard at work near Arles in his Washerwomen of Arles I (1888).

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s The Laundress (1891) sets a single, quite well-dressed woman doing her washing in one of his sumptuously soft-focus landscapes.

The Norwegian painter Jahn Ekenæs teaches us that, even in the bitter Nordic winters, the washing still had to be done: his Women Doing Laundry Through a Hole in the Ice (1891) seem to have the toughest job of all. Note that only one of them is wearing anything on her hands.

Peder Mørk Mønsted’s Laundry Day (1899) shows kinder conditions during the summer, when doing the washing would surely have been a more popular task.

In common with many of these paintings, Manuel Garcia y Rodriguez uses the white of the linen heightened in sunshine to generate contrast, in his White and Black. Andalucian Landscape. Laundresses in the River Guadaíra from 1903.

As indoor domestic water supplies became widespread during the twentieth century, washing clothing and linen in the countryside died out, and vanished from the landscape.

More than 80,000 children from China were adopted by American families. While many appreciate how the adoptions reshaped their own lives, they are also glad to see the program conclude.

Until well into the twentieth century, running water was what came through the roof when it rained, and didn’t come from a tap. Although only the rich could afford to wear clothes for short periods and expect them to be laundered, soiled clothing and linen still had to be washed, normally in the nearest outdoor body of water. This weekend I’m celebrating the many centuries that women washed clothes outdoors, and were painted as part of the landscape. This first article covers the period up to the height of Impressionism at the end of the 1870s, and tomorrow’s resumes in 1880 and concludes in the early twentieth century.

Pierre-Salomon Domenchin de Chavanne’s Landscape with Washerwomen, probably from around 1700-20, shows a common sight, as do many early landscapes: a small group of women have taken sheets and clothes in large wicker baskets to a small lake, and are washing them as well as they can.

Alessandro Magnasco’s Landscape with Washerwomen (1710-20) shows a similar scene, the women having walked down from the town glimpsed in the distance. At the lower left is a man out hunting with his dog and gun.

On a grey day of showers in 1842, the major French landscape artist Eugène Isabey caught laundresses at work above The Town and Harbour of Dieppe. There’s a second group at the extreme left edge whose washing looks in danger of being blown away over the town below.

Henri Harpignies had initially learned to paint in oils, but from 1851 also took to watercolour. He painted this dawn View of Moulins in watercolour between about 1850-60, close to the dead centre of France. This looks over the Allier River, past the line of washerwomen on its far bank, towards the spires and towers of the town whose linen was being cleaned in that river.

By this time, in northern France, the move towards Impressionism was just starting. The landscape painter Johan Jongkind returned to Paris in 1859, where he painted this view of Le Pont de la Tournelle, Paris (1859), with a small group of washerwomen at work by the water’s edge.

The bridge shown here had been built in 1654, to replace a series of predecessors from the first in 1620. It connects the city to the south with the Île Saint-Louis, which had originally been two smaller islands close to the Île Notre Dame, on which the cathedral stands. Jongkind isn’t interested in the market for topographic paintings, though, and his attention is on the washerwomen and the old bridge.

By the late nineteenth century, with the growth of towns and cities, laundry had became more organised, as shown in Martín Rico’s Washerwomen of Varenne (1865). A group of fifteen women, some with babies and children, are on the bank of the local river, most of them probably performing this as a commercial service, as it was one of the few occupations open to women of the lower classes. For Rico they transform his landscape with their activity and the rhythm of their figures.

Working women are also featured in some of Eugène Boudin’s painterly oil sketches made in front of the motif, such as this of Washerwoman near Trouville from 1872-76. This laundress appears to be beating her washing with a mallet to drive the dirt out.

In the early years of the Impressionist movement, Berthe Morisot’s Hanging the Laundry out to Dry (1875) shows a communal drying area at the edge of a town. The women have a large black cart to transport the washing, and are busy putting it out on the lines to dry in the sunny spells. Next to that area is a small allotment where a man is growing vegetables, and in the distance are the chimneys of the city.

While most of Alfred Sisley’s landscapes are relatively unpopulated, he also experimented with introducing more figures into the foreground of some, including this riverside view of Washerwomen near Champagne from 1879. They appear to have brought their washing down to the water in wicker baskets, on an ancient wheelbarrow.

The surgeon general is warning about parents’ stress, a sign that intensive parenting may have become too intense for parents.

© Adam Vaughan/EPA, via Shutterstock

Few of us ever get to visit the Pacific North-West, but one painter, more than anyone else, has defined its ‘look’. She’s also one of a very few prolific women artists for whom there are sufficient good images to justify a short series of articles: she is Emily Carr (1871–1945), one of the major painters of North America.

She was born in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1871, to parents who had emigrated from England. Their large family was quite affluent thanks to her father’s business dealings, but her mother died of tuberculosis when Emily was only fourteen, and her father died two years later. Thanks to her guardian, Carr started studies at the California School of Design in San Francisco in 1890, but in 1893, when family finances became tight, she had to return home.

Her still life of Melons dates from those years as a student in California, in 1892.

Back in Victoria, she started teaching art in her studio, enabling her to save up enough money to study abroad again.

In 1898, she travelled to Ucluelet, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, where she stayed among the Nuu-chah-nulth (‘Nootka’) people, her first exposure to First Nations culture. Cedar Cannibal House, Ucluelet, BC (1898) is a watercolour made during that visit. This group of tribes had early contact with European settlers; they had suffered badly from epidemics of infectious disease, and at the time that Carr visited, their population had probably fallen to around 3,500.

The following year, Carr travelled to London, where she studied at the Westminster School of Art. She found the teaching there was too conservative, and didn’t cope well with conditions in the sprawling city, so left there in 1901 to visit Paris, and later the Saint Ives art colony in Cornwall. She stayed there through the winter, being taught in the Porthmeor Studios by Julius Olsson (1864-1942) and his assistant. She later studied further in Hertfordshire under John Whiteley.

Carr then became unwell, and in 1903 entered the East Anglian Sanatorium with a diagnosis of hysteria. She was unable to paint there, and managed to return to Canada in 1904. She resumed teaching, this time in Vancouver. However, she didn’t get on well with society women who attended her classes, and they complained of her behaviour of smoking and swearing at them in class.

Carr’s Breton Church (1906) is a puzzle, as she was back in Canada at that time, and didn’t paint in Brittany until after 1910. This image also suggests that it’s high in chroma, which would have been more likely during or after her time studying with Harry Gibb there, when her style became overtly Fauvist.

In 1907, Emily and her sister Alice travelled to see the sights of Alaska, where she was enthralled by the totem poles of Sitka. It was here that Emily Carr first resolved to document the totems and First Nations villages of British Columbia, which may have been influenced by Theodore J Richardson (1855-1914), an American artist who spent years documenting in his paintings the peoples of Sitka and Alaska more generally.

One of the places that she visited was Skagway (1907), painted here in watercolour. Then a bustling small city, it was the port of entry to the south-east ‘pan-handle’ of Alaska. It had expanded greatly with the gold rush of 1897 onwards, but by the time that the Carr sisters visited that was long since over, and the economy was in sustained decline.

The sisters also visited Baranof Island, where they saw the famous Totem Walk at Sitka (1907), shown in this watercolour. These totems were made by the Tlingit and Haida peoples, but had been removed from their original locations for display at the St Louis World’s Fair in 1904. Following that, they were moved again into this newly constructed National Park.

Carr’s fascination with trees in the landscape developed early during her career. Her Arbutus Tree (c 1909) is a sophisticated watercolour portrait of one such tree, probably painted near Vancouver.

Beacon Hill Park (1909) is a watercolour in Impressionist style, showing a small corner of this 200 acre park in Victoria, on Vancouver Island. This overlooks Juan de Fuca Strait, and is shown here with the flowers of late spring or early summer, with arbutus trees in the distance. The Carr family home bordered on this park.

Carr also started painting distinctive works showing the dense trunks of a Wood Interior (1909), here lit powerfully by rays of low sunshine. This was to remain a recurrent motif throughout her career.

Alert Bay (1910) is another watercolour, showing a small village on Cormorant Island, at the opposite (north) end of Vancouver Island from Victoria. Home to the ‘Na̱mg̱is nation of the Kwakwaka’wakw, this illustrates her rapidly developing interest in documenting the totems of the north-west coastal area.

In 1910, Carr returned to Paris with her sister Alice, for a further year of study. Again she found living in a big European city was stifling, and spent time in a spa in Sweden. She studied with Harry Phelan Gibb (1870-1948) at Crécy-en-Brie just outside Paris, and in Brittany. This was her first exposure to Fauvism, and proved a major influence on her style.

I suspect that Carr’s already high chroma has been further exaggerated in this image of her famous painting of Autumn in France (1911), representing her Fauvism at its height. She uses bold and confident brushstrokes rich with raw colour to show the countryside of Brittany in brilliant summer sunlight.

Two of Carr’s paintings were accepted for the autumn Salon in Paris in 1911. She returned to Vancouver in 1912, and promptly exhibited her Fauvist work in her studio there. She then set out on her project to document the First Nations peoples of the north-west coast, as I’ll relate in the next article in this series.

References

Wikipedia.
Lisa Baldissera (2015) Emily Carr, Life & Work, Art Canada Institute. ISBN 978 1 4871 0044 5. Available in PDF from Art Canada Institute.
Ian M Thom (2013) Emily Carr Collected, Douglas & McIntyre. ISBN 978 1 77100 080 2.

Readers offer different answers in response to a guest essay. Also: Protests on campus; China’s adoption policy; Trump the fixer; hearing loss.

Once a cereal crop had been harvested and gathered for threshing, the fields might then be scavenged for any remaining grain, a process known as gleaning. Although this has been described since Old Testament times, there’s uncertainty as to who gleaned, and where they were able to glean. This article shows a selection of paintings from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries showing gleaning, to see if they cast further light on those questions.

Biblical accounts establish that gleaning was then a means for the poorest in society to acquire their own free supply of grain, and was a right of the poor. Some assume that the same practice continued, under the same right, until it fell into disuse in the late twentieth century. That ignores complex changes in land ownership and rights, and national law, and makes assumptions about rural economies that may not be correct.

The majority of those living in the country between 1500 and 1800 had little need for money. Almost everything they required in life was grown or made locally, and there were few if any consumer goods that they would need to purchase. Most lived in two sets of clothes: working dress, which was handed down, patched and repaired until it was unwearable, and a Sunday outfit worn when attending church, similarly inherited. Furniture was scant, made from local wood, and handed down through generations. Food and other goods that the family couldn’t supply itself would normally be obtained by barter with a neighbour. While those with more land and animals could sell them at market, and use the proceeds to buy luxuries, that remained out of the reach of the majority. It appears to have been that majority who gleaned the fields after harvest.

Although some countries in Europe retained gleaning rights on the strength of Biblical law, as land was enclosed and brought into increasingly complex systems of private ownership and rights, some land owners challenged that ancient right, and in 1788 a notable English legal case set the precedent that there was no universal right to glean, no matter how poor you might be. Nevertheless, many landowners continued to allow gleaning on their land, and in some areas these were celebrated alongside the harvest itself. Gleaning, like much else in the country, thus varied from country to country, and by region and village, but wasn’t confined to the poorest by any means.

One pitfall in looking at paintings of gleaning is that some are retelling the Biblical story of Ruth and Boaz, rather than depicting contemporary gleaning.

In Samuel Palmer’s The Gleaning Field (c 1833), as in other accounts, gleaners appear to have been mostly women.

In 1854, Jules Breton returned to live in his home village of Courrières, not far from Calais in north-east France, and started painting agricultural workers in the local landscape. His style changed dramatically, and the following year he enjoyed success with his first masterpiece, The Gleaners (1854), which won him a third-class medal at the 1855 Paris Salon. Overseeing this gleaning is the garde champêtre or village policeman, an older man distinguished by his official hat and armband, who was probably an army veteran. In the background, behind the grainstacks that were later to be such popular motifs for the Impressionists, is the village church tower, surrounded by its houses.

Breton had started to plan this painting soon after his return. He made a series of studies, several of which survive, for its figures, but the view appears to be faithful to reality. The figure of the young woman walking across the view from the right (in front of the garde champêtre) seems to have been modelled on the daughter of Breton’s first art teacher, whom the artist married in 1858.

Jean-François Millet’s hope for the Salon two years later was his substantial painting of The Gleaners (1857), which is completely different in concept. The distant wagon, grainstacks, and village may appear common elements, as are the three women bent over to glean in the foreground, but that is as far as the similarities go.

Millet’s composition is sparse, concentrating on those three figures. There are no distractions, such as the garde champêtre to add colour or humour: it’s all about poverty, and smacked of socialism; unlike Breton’s painting it got the thumbs-down from both the rich and the middle classes who frequented the Salon. Millet had also been born and brought up in the country, in his case further west on the north coast of France, in the Normandy village of Gruchy, where he had worked on the land.

Breton’s Calling in the Gleaners (also known as The Recall of the Gleaners, Artois) (1859) is one of the treasures of the Musée d’Orsay. With the light now fading, and the first thin crescent of the waxing moon in the sky, the loose flock of weary women and children make their way back home with their hard-won wheat. At the far left, the garde champêtre calls the last in, so that he can go home for the night. Behind them a flock of sheep is grazing on the adjacent pasture.

Painted in 1880, Eugène Burnand’s Gleaners are set in high Alpine meadows, two girls with meagre gleanings. They are dressed in plain working clothes, but don’t appear particularly poor. Behind them a cart carries away the main harvest.

Léon Augustin Lhermitte’s most enduring expression of rural poverty was in showing four women salvaging the remains left in the fields after the harvest: the Gleaners, here his version of 1887. Lhermitte was another son of the country, this time Mont-Saint-Père in Picardy, inland in north-east France, although his father was a schoolteacher.

Cowed from 1887 shows gleaners at work in a field after the harvest in Denmark, but there’s much more to Hans Andersen Brendekilde’s story than that. The owner of the large farm in the left distance has gathered in their grain, and their harvesters have been paid off for their effort. Then out come the gleaners to scavenge what they can from the fields.

The family group in front of us consists of three generations: mother is still bent over, hard at work gleaning her handful of corn. Her husband is taking a short break, sitting on the sack in his large blue wooden clogs. Stood looking at him is their daughter, engaged in a serious conversation with her father, as her young child plays on the ground.

The daughter is finely dressed under her coarse gleaning apron, and wears a hat more appropriate to someone in service as a maid, or similar, in a rich household in the nearby town. She looks anxious and flushed, and is almost certainly an unmarried mother, abandoned by her young child’s father, and it’s surely she who is oppressed or ‘cowed’. Their difficult family discussion is being watched by another young woman at the far left, who might be a younger sister, perhaps.

Brendekilde took his name from the small village of Brændekilde, near Odense on the island of Funen in Denmark. The son of a clog maker, he lived with his grandparents for several years when a child, and at the age of ten made his living as a shepherd.

The Impressionists seldom seem to have painted controversial social issues. One of the few exceptions to this proved a lesson for Camille Pissarro in the practicality of Divisionism. He started work on his intensely sensory and idyllic painting The Gleaners in early 1888, using a squared-up study in gouache to finalise his composition. He found the painting hard, and wrote that he needed models so that he could complete its detail, which did the following year.

As Europe moved into the twentieth century, gleaning became increasingly unreal and romantic.

Gleaners were still commonplace in the Essex grain fields at harvest time, trying to scrape enough waste grain from the ground to feed their families. In Sir George Clausen’s Gleaners Coming Home from 1904, swirling brushstrokes make the gleaners’ improbably smart clothes appear to move as they walk home in the evening sunlight.

Clausen’s The Gleaners Returning (1908) is a marvellous contre-jour (into the light) view, again with swirling brushstrokes imparting movement in the women’s clothes, and no hint of their poverty.

Lhermitte’s Gleaners Near Haystacks (1912) shows a group of women gleaning, two of them almost bent double.

Even when he was well into his seventies, Lhermitte seemed able to find time and energy for just another painting of gleaners, in his Gleaning Women of 1920.

With the increasing depopulation of Europe’s rural areas and the introduction of mechanical methods of harvesting, gleaning seems to have died out by the middle of the twentieth century, only to reappear around 2000. It’s now an organised voluntary activity arranged with farmers, to recover crops unsuitable for mechanical harvesting, and other recoverable sources.

As with many other aspects of rural life, gleaning appears to have varied according to era and location. In some areas it seems to have been confined to those who were struggling to provide sufficient food for themselves, in the Biblical tradition. In others it was more general, and a normal phase of the harvest supplying most families with a free top-up of grain they could get ground by a miller to add to their supply of bread in the coming winter. It could also yield substantial amounts of grain: one report claims a widow and her three sons gleaned 325 kg (720 pounds) of wheat from one harvest. After all, if left in the field where it was, it would only have been ploughed back into the ground later in the autumn, and gone to waste.

Reference

David Hoseason Morgan (1982) Harvesters and Harvesting 1840-1900, Routledge ISBN 978 1 138 74476 9.

The previous article looked at paintings of three classical myths which extolled the principle of hospitality to strangers by warning people of the dire consequences of failing to respect it: Atlas was turned to stone, people were drowned in a flood, and others turned into frogs. There are also many examples of hospitality given in the Old and New Testaments, although these start to reflect changing values which perhaps anticipated more modern codes.

Henry Ossawa Tanner’s painting of Abraham’s Oak (1905) shows an ancient oak tree that died as recently as 1996. Tradition holds this to mark the place where three angels appeared to Abraham, or Abraham pitched his tent. The location is just southwest of Mamre, near Hebron, and its story runs that Abraham washed the feet of three strangers who appeared there, and showed them hospitality. They revealed themselves to be angels, and informed Abraham that his wife would become pregnant and bear him a son.

Perhaps the most revealing stories are those in the teachings of Jesus Christ, concerning Israelites whose origins were in Samaria, the Samaritans, who by that time had become shunned by the Jews, hardly in accordance with the ancient code of hospitality.

In Maximilien Luce’s Good Samaritan (1896), for example, the artist combines a brilliantly colourful dusk landscape with a classical narrative painting, showing the well-known parable of the Good Samaritan from the New Testament, in which a Samaritan gives aid to a traveller who has been robbed and beaten up on the roadside. Jesus uses this to explain who your ‘neighbour’ is, a key point in the obligation of hospitality.

Less known is the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well, told in the Gospel of John, chapter 4, verses 4-26, in which Christ arrived at a well in Samaria, tired and thirsty after his journey. A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus asked her to give him a drink. That surprised her, as at that time most Jews wouldn’t have spoken to a Samaritan like her. They then became involved in conversation, in which Jesus preached to her, and revealed himself as the Messiah.

Henri-Jean Guillaume Martin’s Christ and the Samaritan Woman (1894) depicts this using fine brushstrokes to build colour and form, and in places those strokes have become organised in the way that Vincent van Gogh’s rather coarser strokes did.

More startling still is Odilon Redon’s Christ and the Samaritan Woman (The White Flower Bouquet) from about 1895. In this unique interpretation, Christ appears to be holding a bouquet of white flowers for the woman. There are other adornments, such as the elaborate floral object between the two, and a bright blue object high above Christ’s head. Both the figures have their eyes closed.

The brilliant Polish artist Jacek Malczewski cast himself in the title role of his Christ and the Samaritan Woman from 1911.

Hospitality to strangers has been a recurrent theme in the lives of many different saints.

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo painted a particularly apposite scene in his Saint Thomas of Villanueva (Villanova) Dividing his Clothes among Beggar Boys from about 1667. This shows a story from the childhood of Saint Thomas of Villanueva de los Infantes (1488-1555), claiming that when he was a child, he often came home naked, having given all his clothing to poorer children. Thomas became a friar of the order of Saint Augustine, and was famed for his care of the poor when he later became the Archbishop of Valencia.

Thomas is the boy in the clean white shirt to the right of centre, who has just given his jacket to the boy to the left, who is dressed in dirty rags. It looks like Thomas is preparing to part with his trousers too.

Early paintings of hospitals also stress their original role in hospitality.

The sick have traditionally been cared for by their families. But for those without families, particularly anyone away from home, there have long been charitable institutions and others prepared to offer hospitality. They could have been slaves in the Roman empire, soldiers in mediaeval Baghdad, those returning from the Crusades in Europe, or refugees crossing mountainous areas through passes.

Few early hospitals provided much in the way of medical care, which was generally expensive and in any case ineffective. Most were little more than large inns, and any care staff were usually members of religious orders. A few took in cases of transmissible diseases which had become proscribed locally, conditions such as leprosy, and plague, in an attempt to confine the disease and prevent spread. The richer you were, though, the greater the chance and desire of being nursed at home.

Jacopo Pontormo’s fresco showing an Episode from Life in Hospital from 1514 shows nuns from a religious order caring for other women, perhaps the sick from their own convent.

The rise of social realism and Naturalism during the nineteenth century provides insights into contemporary society, and its attitudes to strangers and those outcast from society.

Évariste Carpentier’s The Foreigners from 1887 shows the arrival of outsiders in a close-knit community. At the right, sat at a table under the window, a mother and daughter dressed in the black of recent bereavement are the foreigners looking for some hospitality. Instead, everyone in the room, and many of those in the crowded bar behind, stares at them as if they have just arrived from Mars. Even the dog has come up to see whether they smell right.

Although many of the paintings of vagrants made by Augustus Edwin Mulready appear over-sentimental or even disingenuous, and his models are invariably sparklingly clean and well cared-for, some had more worthy messages. His Uncared For from 1871 shows a young girl with exceptionally large brown eyes staring straight at the viewer as she proffers a tiny bunch of violets.

Behind her and her brother are the remains of posters: at the top, The Triumph of Christianity is attributed to the French artist and illustrator Gustave Doré, who illustrated an edition of the Bible in 1866, visited London on several occasions afterwards, and in 1871 produced illustrations for London: A Pilgrimage, published the following year, showing London’s down and outs.

Naturalists like Jean-Eugène Buland took on challenging motifs with challenging readings. In Alms of a Beggar (1880), a young woman dressed immaculately in white is sat outside a church seeking charity. Approaching her, a coin in his right hand, is a man who can only be a beggar himself. His clothes are patched on patches, faded and filthy, and he wears battered old wooden shoes. Yet he is about to give the young woman what is probably his last coin. And we don’t doubt that she accepted it.

In the past, hospitality to strangers was high on the list of virtues expected of everyone, however rich or poor they might have been. To ensure that those living in the ancient world respected the code of hospitality, there were several myths to help guide the mind. Today I look at how paintings of those myths have communicated the need to be hospitable, and tomorrow’s sequel will look at more recent religious and moral teaching.

The first myth is brief, part of the saga of Perseus and Andromeda, but memorable.

After Perseus has beheaded the gorgon Medusa, he flies over the desert sands of Libya, the blood still dripping from Medusa’s head and falling onto the sand to form snakes. With dusk approaching, he decides to set down in the lands of the giant Atlas. He introduces himself to Atlas, including explanation of his divine paternity, and asks for rest and lodging for the night.

The giant, mindful of a prophecy that a son of Jupiter will ruin him, rudely refuses his request, and starts to wrestle with his spurned guest. Perseus responds by offering him a gift, then, taking care to avert his own face, points Medusa’s face at Atlas, who is promptly transformed into a mountain.

In Edward Burne-Jones’ Atlas Turned to Stone (1878) the giant has been turned to stone and now stands bearing the cosmos on his shoulders as Perseus flies off to Aethiopia.

The definitive classical myth stressing the importance of showing hospitality is the story of Philemon (husband) and Baucis (wife), as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book 8. This pious elderly couple live in a town in Phrygia, now west central Anatolia, in Turkey. One day, two ordinary peasants walked into the town, looking for somewhere to stay for the night. Everyone else rejected them, but when they asked this couple, who were among the poorest inhabitants and had but a simple rustic cottage, they were welcomed in. Philemon and Baucis served their guests food and wine, and when they realised they were entertaining gods, the couple raised their hands in supplication and craved indulgence for their humble cottage and fare.

Revealing themselves as the gods Jupiter/Zeus and Mercury/Hermes, the guests told them to leave town, as it was about to be destroyed, together with all those who hadn’t offered them hospitality. The gods then took the couple out to climb a mountain, telling them not to look back until they had reached the top. Once at the summit, they turned to see the town obliterated by a flood; their cottage had been spared, turned into a temple, and Philemon and Baucis were made its guardians.

Adam Elsheimer, in his small oil on copper painting Jupiter and Mercury with Philemon and Baucis (1609-10), shows Philemon (right) and Baucis (centre right) giving their hospitality generously to Jupiter (left) and Mercury (centre left), in their tiny, dark cottage. All four are depicted in more contemporary dress, although Mercury’s winged helmet is an unmistakeable clue as to his identity. Their modest stock of food is piled in a basket in the right foreground, and a goose is just distinguishable in the gloom at the lower edge of the painting, below Mercury’s feet.

David Rijckaert, in his Philemon and Baucis Giving Hospitality to Jupiter and Mercury, gives what has become the most popular depiction: Mercury (left) and Jupiter (left of centre) seated at the table, with Philemon (behind table) and Baucis (centre) waiting on their every need, ensuring that they eat and drink their fill. Baucis has almost caught their evasive goose, and an additional person is shown in the background preparing and serving food for the gods.

Rembrandt’s Baucis and Philemon (1658) shows Jupiter (looking decidedly Christlike) and Mercury (the younger, almost juvenile, figure) sat at the table of a very dark and rough cottage, lit by a lamp behind Mercury.

Philemon and Baucis are crouched, chasing their evasive goose towards Jupiter. A humble bowl of food is in the centre of the table, and there is a glass of what appears to be beer. As is usual in Rembrandt’s narrative paintings, he dresses them in contemporary rather than historic costume.

The moral here doesn’t need to be spelled out any further: fail in your duty to offer hospitality to strangers and the gods may end your life. Another myth told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses isn’t quite as damning. Instead of death, you could be turned into a frog instead. So says Ovid’s account of the Lycians who shunned the goddess Leto when all she needed was a drink of water.

Fearing reprisals from the jealous Hera (Juno), when Leto (Latona) is about to give birth to her twins, she flees to Lycia, at the western end of the south coast of modern Turkey. This was a centre for Leto’s worship, but at some stage the goddess must have become scorned by those living in the country there.

When the twins, Diana and Apollo, had drunk Leto’s milk and she was dry and thirsty under the hot sun, she saw a small lake among marshes, where local peasants were cutting reeds. She went down and was about to drink from the lake when those locals stopped her. Leto told them that drinking the water was a common right, and that she only intended to drink and not to bathe in it.

The locals continued to prevent her, threatening her and hurling insults. They then stirred up the mud on the bottom of the lake, to muddy the water, incurring the goddess’s anger and causing her to curse them to remain in that pool forever as frogs. It’s this transformation that forms the basis for the many paintings of this myth.

Annibale Carracci’s Latona and the Lycian Peasants probably from 1590-1620 is the first truly masterly painting of this myth. Latona is here placing her curse on the locals, and behind them one appears to have already been transformed into a frog. Although the babies’ heads are disproportionately small (as was the case for several centuries), they and their mother are very realistically portrayed, and contrast markedly with the uncouth and obdurate locals.

Jan Brueghel the Elder’s panel showing Latona and the Lycian Peasants (1595-1610) is one of the finest depictions. Set in a dense forest, surely inappropriate for Lycia, the locals are busy cutting reeds and foraging. Leto, at the bottom left, is seen remonstrating with a peasant, over to the right. As the detail below shows, the goddess is in need, as are her babies. The peasant closest to her, brandishing his fist, is already rapidly turning into a frog. There are many other frogs around, including a pair at the bottom left corner, near the feet of one of the babies.

David Teniers the Younger’s Latona and the Frogs from around 1640–50 isn’t in the same class as Brueghel’s, but still tells the story well, and shows Lycians being transformed for refusing to help the goddess.

François Lemoyne’s Latona and the Peasants of Lycia (1721) stops short of showing the metamorphosis or resulting frogs, but Latona and the peasants are clearly engaged in their dispute.

The story survived in narrative painting well into the latter half of the nineteenth century, when Gabriel Guay, an eminent former pupil of Jean-Léon Gérôme, painted his Latona and the Peasants (1877). Leto and her babies now seem not just real but almost contemporary, minimising her divinity.

Book 8 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses resumes his account of King Minos of Crete waging war against the Greeks, and the hapless Cephalus who had inadvertently killed his wife Procris with his javelin. Cephalus and his party return to Athens, by which time King Minos is already laying waste to Megara, and attacking the city of Alcathous ruled by King Nisus. The latter has a lock of purple hair on his head, a talisman that ensures the safety of his kingdom.

Nisus’ daughter Scylla regularly watches the forces of Minos from her royal tower, and has got to know many of the Cretan commanders, including Minos himself. From her watching, she feels that she has fallen in love with him, and has an impulse to go to him to bring the fighting to an end, and to marry him. One night, she’s determined to act, so sneaks into her father’s bedroom, and cuts off his lock of purple hair to end the protection it had given his kingdom. She then makes her way out of the city, through the Cretan lines, until she meets King Minos. She tells him what she has done, and presents him with the lock of hair.

She’s shocked that, far from winning Minos’ love and hand in marriage, he calls on the gods to curse her, and refuses to let her enter Crete. Nevertheless, Minos conquers the city before setting sail once more in his ships. Scylla lets loose a long tirade of insults at Minos, and calls on her father Nisus to punish her for her treachery. With a final insulting reference to Minos’ wife Pasiphae and her mating with a bull, Scylla announces that she will cling to Minos’ ship and follow him over the sea. The gods had changed her father Nisus into an osprey, which then pursues Scylla, who is in turn transformed into a seabird, probably a shearwater.

Ovid then summarises the story of Minos and the Minotaur of Crete. He tells of Minos’ return, and his sacrifice of a hundred bulls to Jupiter. But he couldn’t escape the shame of his wife Pasiphae’s bestial adultery with a bull, resulting in the birth of the Minotaur, a beast with the head of a bull and the body of a man.

Gustave Moreau appears to have started to paint Pasiphaé in the 1880s but then to have abandoned it, probably because of difficulties it would raise in depicting her bestial relationship.

Minos had the architect and artificer Daedalus design and build a maze, within which the Minotaur was confined. Every nine years, the monster was fed on Athenian victims, but at the third such feeding, Minos’ daughter Ariadne helps Theseus kill the Minotaur.

This detail of a wonderful painted cassone The Legend of Crete from around 1500-25 shows what has become a popular image of the labyrinth constructed by Daedalus. At its centre, Theseus has just decapitated the Minotaur, while Ariadne waits, holding the thread enabling him to retrace his steps to the exit.

George Frederic Watts was apparently driven to paint The Minotaur (1885) as a response to a series of articles in the press revealing the industry of child prostitution in late Victorian Britain; those referred to the myth of the Minotaur, so early one morning he painted this image of human bestiality and lust. His Minotaur has crushed a small bird in its left hand, and gazes out to sea, awaiting the next shipment of young men and virgin women from Greece.

Earlier in his career, Gustave Moreau painted this scene of Athenians Being Delivered to the Minotaur (1855). Wearing laurel wreaths to mark their distinction and sacrifice, the young men and women hold back while Theseus crouches, waiting to do battle with the beast, seen at the right.

Henry Fuseli captured the dynamics of the situation, in his spirited mixed-media sketch of Ariadne Watching the Struggle of Theseus with the Minotaur (1815-20). Theseus appears almost skeletal as he tries to bring his dagger down to administer the fatal blow, and Ariadne looks like a wraith or spirit.

Theseus, Victor over the Minotaur (c 1791) is one of only three paintings by Charles-Édouard Chaise known to survive. With its crisp neo-classical style, it shows Theseus standing in triumph over the lifeless corpse of the Minotaur. He’s almost being mobbed by the young Athenian women whose lives he has spared. At the left, his thread rests on a wall by an urn, suggesting that the young woman by it may be Ariadne; she is being helped by a young man.

Ovid then races through the rest of the story, where Theseus abducts Ariadne and takes her to the island of Naxos, only to abandon her there. Ariadne meets the god Bacchus, who comforts and marries her. Finally, Theseus takes Ariadne’s wedding diadem and sets it in the heavens as the constellation Corona Borealis.

The little we know of Sappho is, like the little remaining of her poetry, scant and fragmentary. She was arguably the greatest classical Greek lyrical poet, a lesbian of renown, and was alleged to have thrown herself from a cliff when a male lover left her.

Dearth of information about her, and its apparent inconsistency, hasn’t stopped a wealth of speculative writing, and her appearance in a great many paintings, few of which are consistent with her sexuality. Here I’ll consider one text, the fictional letter written for her by Ovid in his Heroines, and a selection of those paintings.

Born around 630 BCE into a wealthy family on the Greek island of Lesbos, legend has associated her romantically with two men: a contemporary poet, Alcaeus, and Phaon a local ferryman. Her own name and that of her island have been associated with her sexuality since the late nineteenth century, and Ovid makes it clear that her love of women was well-known among Romans in his time.

Since around 300 BCE, there has been a legend that tells of her love for Phaon the ferryman, who plied the waters between Lesbos and the Anatolian mainland. Almost certainly illiterate and hardly a good audience for Sappho’s verse, Phaon’s redeeming feature was apparently the gift of great physical beauty. He was given this one day when he carried Venus/Aphrodite in his boat; the goddess was travelling in disguise as an old woman, Phaon didn’t charge her for the crossing, so she returned the favour by transforming his physical appearance.

Ovid’s description of Sappho’s affair with Phaon leaves little to the imagination, even down to their lovemaking.

Among those who seem to have accepted the truth of this legend was Jacques-Louis David, in this painting of Sappho and Phaon from 1809. David was necessarily not as explicit as Ovid, showing the couple fawning over one another with their recently occupied bed behind them, and a post-orgasmic gaze on Sappho’s face. In case you haven’t got the message, Cupid holds her lyre, and two doves peck affectionately on the window sill.

A little deeper into Victorian prudery, Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s Sappho (1881) shows Sappho resting on a lectern and staring intently at Alcaeus, who is playing a lyre. She’s supported by her ‘school of girls’, one of whom rests her arm on Sappho’s back. The artist’s hints at a lesbian interpretation are necessarily subtle: the marble benches bear the names of some of her female lovers.

Yet nearly twenty years earlier, Simeon Solomon was far more open in his watercolour of Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene (1864). Sappho is shown on the right, her dark hair and complexion in accordance with Ovid’s description. Although Erinna, another woman poet of the time, might have joined Sappho in her community of young women on Lesbos, she is now thought to have lived on the island of Telos, and slightly later.

Solomon’s career was all but destroyed by his own sexuality: a brave pioneer of homosexual themes in his painting, he was arrested for homosexual offences in 1873, and was shunned thereafter.

Ovid’s fictional letter from Sappho to Phaon was written after the legendary ferryman moved to Sicily. It’s unusual among his Heroines for depicting a real, historical figure, albeit in this legendary story.

The letter can be read in at least two ways. It could, in spite of its multiple clear references to Sappho’s lesbian lifestyle, be just another male denial of female homosexuality. This seems unlikely for many reasons, not least of which is the gross implausibility of everything about the letter. This has led some to doubt that Ovid even wrote it, an issue that remains hotly debated. Ovid shows profound and progressive insights into human sexuality; if this letter was written by him, it comes over as an excellent debunking of the legend of Phaon, and a witty and irreverent commentary on the life and loves of another great poet.

The story of Sappho and Phaon has, however, stuck. Its climax, when the broken-hearted Sappho throws herself from the top of the Leucadian Cliff, became an extremely popular motif in nineteenth century painting.

Pierre-Narcisse Guérin paints a portrait of Sappho looking in sad reflection, her head resting on a symbolic lyre. There is little to indicate that she is on the top of cliffs, apart from the title, and no narrative references.

Théodore Chassériau’s watercolour of Sappho Leaping into the Sea from the Leucadian Promontory (c 1840) shows her clutching her lyre, her arms braced across her chest, as she steps off the edge of the cliff.

Sappho’s suicide became something of an obsession for Gustave Moreau, who painted her repeatedly between about 1870 and 1893.

Moreau’s Death of Sappho was probably in progress when the Franco-Prussian War broke out, and wasn’t completed until after order was restored to Paris the following year. It shows the poet moments after she had thrown herself from the cliff, her body lying in peaceful repose, her lyre beside her, and a seagull in mourning. The contrast between the elaborate decoration of her body, clothing, and lyre and the stark rocks and gloomy sea and sky couldn’t be greater.

Sappho (1871-72) was his second painting of her, this time a richly-detailed watercolour. Here she is swooning over her lover shortly before flinging herself to her doom. Her lyre is slung over her shoulder, and to emphasise her status as a great poet, Apollo’s gryphon is shown on a column behind her. Her elaborately decorated clothing and pose were taken from a Japanese woodcut, Genji taking the air in summer on the Sumida by Utagawa Kunisada (Toyokuni III), that Moreau had bought in Paris.

Moreau returned to his consideration of Sappho’s suicide in this watercolour of Sappho at the Leucadian Cliff (c 1885), showing her clinging to her lyre as she falls to her death on the rocks below. This is lit by one of Moreau’s saturnine suns.

In Moreau’s late oil painting of Sappho from about 1893, she is seen stepping off the cliff, with the sun setting behind her.

During this period, those influenced by Moreau also painted the poet. Jules-Élie Delaunay’s undated Sappho Embracing her Lyre shows her at the top of the cliff holding her lyre close, as if it were her lover.

Ary Renan painted Sappho at least twice. The first from 1893 appears influenced by Moreau’s paintings. Sappho reclines underwater amid a fantastic and deep layer of vegetation, her lyre some distance from her head, at the right edge.

Renan’s later painting shows her just as she has stepped off the top of the cliff, and is about to plunge to her death. She holds her lyre aloft in her left hand, as a surprised seagull flies past.

Ovid’s letter, written two millennia ago, shows wittily how absurd the legend of Sappho and Phaon is. Yet so many artists since have continued to depict it in paint, perpetuating its naïve denial.

Stories of the abduction of women and their enforced marriage have persisted for an extraordinary length of time. One of the most popular, and still much-loved, musicals is Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, a successful movie in 1954, and as late as 1982-83 it was remade for television. It tells of seven ‘shotgun’ marriages, and was based on a short story The Sobbin’ Women, which in turn was a parody of the story of the rape of the Sabine women in about 750 BCE.

As popular in classical Greek and Roman times was an equally disturbing myth concerning Hypermnestra and her sisters the Danaïds, which was largely forgotten after the Middle Ages, only to be revived around the start of the twentieth century. It was told by Hyginus, Apollodorus, Aeschylus, and Horace, and referred to by many others.

Danaus and Aegyptus were twin brothers who lived in North Africa. Aegyptus was a mythical king of Egypt who had fifty sons, and his brother had fifty daughters, from their polygamous relationships. When Aegyptus decided that his sons would marry his brother’s daughters, Danaus fled with those daughters to Argos, in Greece, where the reigning king generously handed over his throne to him.

Aegyptus and his sons were not to be put off so easily, joined Danaus and his daughters in Argos, and pressed ahead with the plans for the weddings. The couples were assigned by lot, apart from two matches between Hypermnestra and Lynceus, and Gorgophone and Proteus, deemed necessary because of the rank of their mothers, who were princesses.

On the day of their weddings, Danaus equipped his daughters with swords, and told them to murder their husbands in bed that night. Once those drunken grooms had fallen asleep, the daughters each followed their father’s instructions, except for Hypermnestra: by the morning, of the fifty brothers only Lynceus survived.

This story was told in the fourteenth of Giovanni Boccaccio’s De Mulieribus Claris (Concerning Famous Women), published in 1374, and illustrated as Hypermnestra, Lynceus and the Danaïdes (1473) in this hand coloured woodcut from the translation by Heinrich Steinhöwel. Four of the brothers are seen, their throats cut in bed, but the helpfully labelled figures of Hypermnestra and ‘Linus’ are still in a loving embrace.

Robinet Testard shows a similar scene in The Danaides Kill Their Husbands (c 1510), his miniature for Octavien de Saint-Gelais’ translation of Ovid’s Heroides. Hypermnestra’s sisters have each dutifully cut the throats of their new husbands, and sit holding their swords. At the left, though, Hypermnestra and Lynceus sit together on their marriage bed, unharmed.

Danaus was furious with the disobedience of Hypermnestra, who was dragged to a dungeon by her hair to await her fate. It’s at this point that Ovid set his fictional letter from Hypermnestra to Lynceus, the fourteenth letter in his Heroines.

Ovid’s Hypermnestra makes it clear from the outset that she has been charged with the crime of faithfulness, which should surely be praised, not condemned. She reveals the quandary that she found herself in, as she held her father’s sword at the neck of Lynceus and agonised over whether she should kill him or not. Three times she raised the sword in preparation for his murder, and three times her love for Lynceus overpowered her, and spared his life.

Hypermnestra was not summarily executed by her father, but brought before a court, which acquitted her of any wrongdoing. Lynceus (sometimes erroneously named Linus) then killed Danaus, and succeeded him as the King of Argos with Hypermnestra as his queen.

This maiolica plate painted by Francesco Xanto Avelli in 1537 shows the later scene of Hypermnestra Watching Lynceus Take Her Father’s Crown. Lynceus (labelled here as ‘Lino’) has taken Danaus’ crown, and is about to put him to the sword. Hypermnestra stands at a window, most probably not that of a dungeon. Below its lintel is a Cupid bearing the famous saying omnia vincit amor – love conquers all – which actually comes from Virgil’s last Eclogue and is unrelated.

In the end, while Lynceus and Hypermnestra lived happily ever after, the other forty-nine sisters were punished in Hades for the sin of murder. They were given an impossible task, of filling a large container with water; as that container had holes in its bottom, they now spend the rest of eternity carrying water to the container and pouring it in.

Unlike the hapless Sisyphus, who was condemned to push a hefty rock up a steep hill in his Sisyphean task, the Danaïds haven’t been commemorated in figurative language, but have appeared in a surprising number of paintings.

The murderous sisters don’t seem to have had much of a showing in art until Martin Johann Schmidt painted The Labour of the Danaides (1785) on copper. He makes the allusion to Danaïds also being known as water-nymphs, like Naiads, by placing a river god at the left.

John William Waterhouse revived them for two paintings, of which this, The Danaides, was the first, and completed in 1903. He made a second slightly more complex composition in 1906, now hanging in Aberdeen Art Gallery in Scotland. Rather than a battered and leaky barrel, Waterhouse has the Danaïds filling an ornamental cauldron.

I have been unable to find a date for Walter Crane’s version, The Danaides, which was probably for a triptych painted between 1890-1915 and shows a remarkably similar cauldron.

Towards the end of his life, John Singer Sargent painted this vast canvas to show The Danaïdes (c 1922-25), now decorating the entrance to the Library of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Of all the accounts of this unusual myth, yet again only Ovid looks deep into the relationships involved. He explores the situation of a woman who didn’t commit a crime at her father’s behest, but stayed true to her morals and to her love for Lynceus: a real heroine whose virtue was, for once, rewarded.

The early years of Harriet Backer’s career saw her progress from early Salon-ready realism to the more painterly and colourful style of her personal interpretation of Impressionism. Her landscapes captured the intensity of the Norwegian summer, and she had been exploring the play of light indoors in interiors. By 1890, her career was established, her art recognised and increasingly appreciated, and she had started teaching. She now turned her attention from the play of natural light to that of lamplight.

Syende kvinne ved lampelys (By Lamplight) (1890) reverses the lighting of her previous interiors. Now the view through the window is the blackness of night, and the interior is lit by a kerosene lamp on the table inside. The play of light is changed into the play of shadow, with the woman’s shadow magnified on the wall behind her.

Her Aften, interiør (Evening, Interior) (Reading) (1890) takes this further, and shows the influence of Japonisme, particularly in the scarlet lampshade at the right. Backer shows how the harsh directional light casts strange shadows with the effect of altering our reading of facial features, the folds in clothing, and magnifying the shadow on the wall. Although the light doesn’t create the woman and the objects around her, by determining how we see her, it transforms our perceptions and interpretation.

Kone som syr (Woman Sewing) (1890) takes us back to more familiar daytime lighting, as a woman (a wife in the Norwegian title) sits at her sewing. This appears to have been a quick oil sketch, with its gestural depictions of potted plants, table, and chair, going beyond Impressionism.

In her Pike ved vinduet (Girl by the window) (1891), the girl looks out from the sunlit interior to a world we cannot discern, beyond the miniature internal world of chair, stove, and potted plants.

Inngangskoner (Churching) (1892) shows a traditional ceremony in which a woman who has just completed the confinement following the birth of her child is received back at church, where she gives thanks for the survival of her baby and herself, and prays for their continuing health. This is believed to show the sacristy to the left of the altar in Tanum Kirke, in Bærum, Norway. Backer marks this important moment in a mother’s life with the light of hope, as emergence from the suffuse light of the nursery.

The next event in the life of mother and baby is shown in her Barnedåp i Tanum Kirke (Christening in Tanum Church) (1892), one of Backer’s most sophisticated paintings. Again she places the viewer inside, looking now both outward and inward.

The left of the canvas takes the eye deep through the church door to the outside world, where a mother is bringing her child in for infant baptism. The rich green light of that outside world colours the heavy church door, and its inner wood panelling, and the floorboards and perspective projection bring the baptismal party in.

At the right, two women are sat in an enclosed stall waiting for the arrival of the baptismal party. One has turned and partly opened the door to their stall in her effort to look out and see the party enter church. Backer controls the level of detail and looseness to brilliant effect, ensuring we always see just what she wants us to, enough to bring the image to life, but never so much that our attention becomes lost in the irrelevant.

This painting of the ages of woman is believed to have been influenced by Wilhelm Leibl’s (1844-1900) Three Women in Church (1882), which Backer had seen when studying in Munich. She considered this to be her greatest painting, and it was favourably received when exhibited at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893.

Gamlestua på Kolbotn (Old Living Room at Kolbotn) (1896) is an intimate view of the living room of a farm in Østerdalen, Norway. Friends of the artist Hulda and Arne Garborg are seen sat at the table, Arne holding his fiddle. Behind them are paintings, among them two landscapes painted by Backer’s friend Kitty Kielland. Kielland, Backer and the Garborgs had first met in Paris in 1885.

Backer hadn’t abandoned landscapes, but they too had moved on from regular Impressionism. Einundfjell (1897) shows her skills in capturing the more subtle light and colour of twilight. The bright surface of the distant lake separates the dark hills behind from the more colourful meadows of the foreground.

Thorvald Boecks bibliotek (Thorvald Boeck’s Library) (1902) is one of Backer’s few interiors devoid of people, here replaced by books from floor to ceiling. The intricate detail of their many spines, furniture, and other decorations contrasts markedly with the bare floorboards in the foreground.

In 1907, Backer had her first solo exhibition in Oslo. During that first decade of the twentieth century, her interiors switched away from the intimacy of the rural home, to those of Norway’s country churches.

Of the many wonderful later paintings that she made of church interiors, the finest must be Uvdal Stave Church (1909).

Stave churches were once numerous throughout Europe, but are now only common in rural Norway. Their construction is based on high internal posts (staves) which give them a characteristic tall, peaked appearance. Uvdal is a particularly good example, dating from around 1168. As with many old churches, its interior has been extensively painted and decorated, and this has been allowed to remain, unlike many painted churches in Britain which suffered removal of all such decoration.

Backer’s richly-coloured view of the interior of the church is lit from windows behind its pulpit, throwing the brightest light on the altar. The walls and ceiling are covered with images and decorations, which she sketches in, again manipulating the level of detail to control their distraction. Slightly to the left of centre the main stave is decorated with rich blues, divides the canvas, but affords us the view up to the brightly lit altar. To the left of the stave a woman, dressed in her Sunday finest, sits reading outside the stalls.

This is an expression of Backer’s own deep religious beliefs, her career-long exploration of lit interiors, and her profound love of her native country and its people.

In 1912, the year that she retired from teaching, she was awarded the gold King’s Medal of Merit, and in 1921 was made the State Laureate in Painting (Statens kunstnerlønn), an appointment previously held by Henrik Ibsen and Edvard Grieg. She was the first woman to be so appointed. She is known to have completed about 180 paintings in all before she died in Oslo on 25 March 1932, and the grand old age of 87.

References

Wikipedia (English), Wikipedia (Norwegian).
Many of her best paintings are in Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo, where they’re viewable online.

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Readers discuss gun laws, trying the suspect as an adult, defining mass shootings and more. Also: A view from AIPAC; an anti-family Republican Party.

The climax of the year in arable farming is the harvest, when the sustained labour of the previous year pays off. For the farmer, this is the return on that investment, and for the labourers it’s when they hope to get paid their bonus. It’s the one time of the year when everyone turns to and works from before dawn until well after dusk in a united effort to harvest the ripe crop, before the weather breaks and it might be ruined.

The harvest depends on the crop being grown; as cereals, particularly wheat, were the most important across much of Europe, I’ll here concentrate on the processes required to turn them from ripe plants to grain ready for the miller to grind into flour. This article looks at the first step in that, cutting the crop, bundling it into sheaves and stacking those in stooks.

Current accounts of the grain harvest distinguish several tools used to cut the crop:

• handheld sickle, lightweight and normally with a serrated blade,
• handheld reaping hook, lightweight and with a smooth blade,
• handheld bagging or fagging hook, heavier and with a smooth blade, used in conjunction with a hooked stick or metal pick thank,
• long-handled scythe, heavy and held with both hands, with a smooth blade.

Some claim that reaping using a handheld sickle or hook was used for wheat and rye, but that barley and oats were more usually mown with a larger scythe. Although that doesn’t appear to be accurate, it’s clear that the use of scythes was considerably more efficient. While it took about 4 worker-days to cut an acre of grain using a sickle or hook, using a scythe typically took only 2 worker-days per acre. Scythes appear to have been used almost exclusively by men, while sickles and hooks were used by both men and women.

The tool used also determined the length of straw stalk cut with the head of grain, thus the height of the stubble left on the field. Sickles and hooks were often used when less straw was required, leaving high stubble that might be mown with a scythe later. Low reaping or bagging, or mowing with a scythe, created longer straw that was suitable for thatching.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Harvesters from 1565 shows men cutting a crop of wheat close to the base of the stem using scythes, leaving short stubble. This ensures the best yield of straw as well as grain.

Behind these workers eating bread baked from flour ground from cereal grown in the same fields, cut cereal is tied first into sheaves before they’re gathered into stooks.

Anne Vallayer-Coster’s Garden Still Life, with Implements, Vegetables, Dead Game, and a Bust of Ceres (The Attributes of Hunting and Gardening) from 1774 shows at its left edge a long-handled scythe, and at the right a sickle or reaping hook. Scythes were also used extensively for mowing hay and weeds.

In about 1833, when Samuel Palmer painted his wonderful Harvest Moon near Shoreham in Kent, harvesting went on well into the night. These are mostly women wielding sickles or reaping hooks to cut a small field of wheat. The cut stalks are then formed into stooks and piled onto the oxcart for transport to nearby farm buildings.

Palmer’s mentor John Linnell painted The Harvest Cradle twenty-five years later, in 1859. The harvesters have their backs to the viewer, but appear to be using scythes to cut this wheat crop. Bundles of cut grain are tied as sheaves, then assembled into stooks in the foreground.

Jean-François Millet’s Ceres (The Summer) from about 1864-65 is unusual in that the goddess is shown holding a sickle with a serrated edge, and is surrounded by sheaves of wheat.

Léon Augustin Lhermitte’s famous Harvesters’ Pay from 1882 shows four harvesters, bearing their heavy-duty scythes, as they await payment by the farmer’s factor, who holds a bag of coins for the purpose. In the right foreground are two tied sheaves of cut wheat, with a lightweight sickle resting on them.

During the nineteenth century some attached cradles to the blade, to make sheaving easier. This is shown in Laurits Andersen Ring’s painting of Harvest. The crop being cut here may well be rye rather than wheat. The artist got his brother to model for this “monument to the Danish peasant” during the summer of 1885, while working on his farm near Fakse, on Sjælland (Zealand), Denmark.

Volodymyr Orlovsky’s Harvest in Ukraine from 1880 shows wheat being cut on the steppe, with the worker in the foreground carrying a scythe, but those cutting in the middle distance bent over as if using hooks instead.

The young woman in Mykola Pymonenko’s portrait of a Reaper from 1889 has been cutting what could be rye or wheat using a heavier bagging hook, although she isn’t using the hooked stick normally required for the technique, so could be using it as a regular reaping hook. The woman behind her demonstrates that these harvesters are cutting low to keep a good length of straw on the harvested crop.

Anna Ancher, wife of Danish painter Michael Ancher, caught this procession of Harvesters on their way to their work in 1905, near her home in Skagen on the north tip of Jylland (Jutland). The leader carries his scythe high as they pass through ripe wheat.

Finally, conventional corn stooks were by no means universal across Europe.

By tradition on Norwegian farms, cut corn (cereal) wasn’t left to dry in low stooks, as in most of Europe and America, but built onto poles. In a series of paintings and prints, Nikolai Astrup developed these Corn Stooks (1920) into ghostly armies standing on parade in the fields, the rugged hills behind only enhancing the feeling of strangeness.

These paintings suggest that, between 1550 and 1890, wheat was generally cut using scythes when suitable men were available. Otherwise, it would be cut using a hook, most likely for reaping rather than bagging. Wheat was normally cut low to preserve the stalk as straw suitable for thatching, then tied into sheaves before being stacked into stooks.

That left the fields ready for gleaning.

As lawyers rose to prominence in life during the nineteenth century, two artists in particular targeted them with their scathing satire: Honoré Daumier and Jean-Louis Forain.

For the satirical eye of Honoré Daumier, Three Lawyers (1855-57) meeting was the gathering of an elite who were out to help themselves, rather than the unfortunate people they purported to represent. Their heads tipped back and clutching thick bundles of papers, Daumier had less respect of them than they had for themselves.

In his undated Two Lawyers Conversing, you can be sure that they’re up to no good, except for themselves.

Jean-Louis Forain was a successful painter, caricaturist and political satirist in the late nineteenth century, who had long admired Daumier’s work. When Forain turned his attention to justice and the law after about 1902, he went beyond Daumier’s biting images of lawyers by entering the courtroom itself.

Forain’s The Court from about 1902-03 is one of the first of his series of courtroom views, and most neutral in its approach. In the foreground, a lawyer discusses the case with a woman, who is bent forward to hear his whispering. In the distance the court appears detached, perhaps disinterested, the judges sat behind large piles of papers, under a large painting of the crucifixion. The artist sold this work to Edgar Degas.

By the time that Forain painted this Trial Scene from 1904, his satire had come to the surface. The court here is so completely disinterested in the case before it that its judge is incapable of remaining awake, and the jurors at the left are hardly attentive either.

A young woman stands out in Forain’s Scene at the Tribunal (1906), as a lawyer turns and scowls disapprovingly at her.

Two women are shown in his Scene of the Tribunal from 1910, a lawyer talking to them as the court appears oblivious to their presence.

Legal Assistance (c 1900-12) shows an ordinary family man, cradling his young child in his arms as he presents a paper to a barrister or judge (wearing his short cylindrical hat). This painting was bought by Henri Rouart, an industrialist who was a good patron of the arts, as well as a fine amateur painter himself.

Sadly only available in this monochrome image, Forain’s undated painting of Recess of the Court is his most scathing. The judge leans back, fast asleep, as chaos takes hold in the court. Laywers are talking among themselves, and furniture is being moved around. Where is justice?

It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that a growing interest in contemporary courts, and well-publicised trials, made them more popular in paintings. As few people ever see the inside of a courtroom, one of the first tasks of artists was to reveal what they looked like.

Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Pugin’s painting of The Old Bailey, Known Also as the Central Criminal Court from 1808, here seen in an aquatint, is a good topographic view of this most famous English court. The presiding judge sits under a Damoclean sword of justice at the left, and the twelve men of the jury are to the right of centre. At the far right stands the accused, in front of whom is a large collection of witnesses ready to testify.

That was, and remains, an exceptional court. More typical of the type of court that ordinary citizens might encounter is Adolph Tidemand’s Scene before a Magistrate in the Country (before 1858), seen here in a lithograph. Set somewhere in rural Norway, the bench of magistrates sits at the right in more cramped and modest surroundings. Its justice may have been rougher, but the experience was far less daunting, and less overwhelmed by lawyers.

Ferdinand Brütt’s Before the Judges from 1903 shows the end of an era in the courtroom, as an official lights the candles in its chandelier, and its three judges sit hearing the case being put to them.

Depictions of courts of law aren’t common, and fall into five main groups: those showing cases and events from legend and history, modern documentary records of trials, others purely fictional, some satirical accounts, and a few general views without narrative. This article covers the first three, leaving satire and general views to come tomorrow.

The first is an account of a corrupt judge in the Achaemenid Empire around 525 BCE, and the extreme penalty he paid.

The story given by Herodotus about the corruption of Sisamnes, known as the Judgement of Cambyses, is today obscure. However, in 1489 it formed the basis for two paintings by Gerard David now viewed as forming a diptych. Sisamnes was a notoriously corrupt judge under the rule of King Cambyses II of Persia, and accepted a bribe in return for delivering an unjust verdict.

In the left panel, Sisamnes is being arrested by the king and his men, as the judge sits in his official chair. Hand gestures indicate the bribery that had been at the root of Sisamnes’ crime.

King Cambyses sentences Sisamnes to be flayed alive, as shown in the foreground of the right panel. In the upper right, David uses multiplex narrative to show the judge’s skin then covering the official chair, as a reminder to all who sit in judgement of the fate that awaits them should they ever become corrupt or unfair.

David’s gruesome pair of paintings were a pointed reminder to the authorities in Bruges of the importance of an independent judiciary, and the penalty for any judge who was tempted by bribery or any other form of influence, cautions with contemporary value even now.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Phryne before the Areopagus from 1861 harks back to a classical legend of an unusual court case in Athens. Phryne had been a highly successful and very rich courtesan (hetaira) in ancient Greece, who was brought to trial for the serious crime of impiety. When it seemed inevitable that she would be found guilty, one of her lovers, the orator Hypereides, took on her defence. A key part of that was to unveil her naked in front of the court, in an attempt to surprise its members, impress them with the beauty of her body, and arouse a sense of pity. The legend claims that this ploy worked perfectly.

Gérôme shows a whole textbook of responses to surprise among the members of the court, although Phryne herself is covering not her body, but her eyes; each of the men in the court, of course, is looking straight at her. At the time that Gérôme painted this, France was well into its Second Empire, when Napoleon III had removed the gag from the French press, and was moving from his early authoritarian regime towards the more liberal. The legend of Phryne was a convenient vehicle for Gérôme to express his political opinion, and her nakedness suggests her role is that of Truth.

The other much better-known story of judgement is that of King Solomon, told in the Old Testament, and in a succession of marvellous paintings since the Renaissance. Two women each claimed to be the mother of the same healthy baby, alleging that the other was the mother of a dead child. Solomon’s wise judgement was to threaten to cut the living baby in two, which elicited the correct protective response from the real mother of that child.

Nicolas Poussin’s famous painting of 1649 uses a classical composition, the two disputing women and their actions preventing it from becoming too symmetrical. Timed slightly before the raising of the sword, the master of painted narrative depicts the body language with great clarity. 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 following the King’s instructions 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, perhaps indicating their reactions to Solomon’s judgement.

Coverage of prominent court cases came to dominate reporting in the press throughout Europe and North America. Several cases became so popular that they moved artists to depict them, and one, the Dreyfus Affair in France, had lasting influence on that nation’s history.

Frederick Sargent’s painting of The Tichborne Trial (1873-1899) shows one of the most prominent cases in England. In 1854, Roger Tichborne, heir to a title and family riches, was presumed to have died in a shipwreck. The following year, an Australian butcher came forward with the claim that he was that heir, which was tested in a civil court case, heard between 1871-72.

The outcome of that rejected the claim, and the Australian butcher then underwent criminal prosecution for perjury, in one of the longest criminal cases heard in an English court, during 188 days between 1872-73. Sargent’s painting shows that case in progress, with the accused sitting just below the centre and looking straight ahead of him. Standing to the right of him is his barrister, Edward Kenealy, with ‘mutton chop’ whiskers.

The Australian butcher was convicted, sentenced to fourteen years in prison, and eventually died destitute in 1898. His barrister’s career was also finished, and he was subsequently disbarred. He went on to be elected as a Member of Parliament for his own political party in 1875, but died shortly after losing that seat in 1880.

Courts in some jurisdictions have long been reticent about allowing parties, judges, or juries to be drawn, painted or photographed. Although American practice has long allowed artists as reporters, in 1925 Britain made it illegal to draw inside a courtroom during a trial. The thirst for images for publication has since been satisfied by artists who work entirely from memory.

Arnold Mesches’ Courtroom sketch of the US Navy’s court of inquiry about USS Pueblo’s capture by North Korea from 1969 is perhaps more of an illustrative record of a court in session, sketched from a square and conventional position. But other artists and cases are quite different.

Robert Clark Templeton’s Drawing for CBS Evening News of Bobby G. Seale and others (1971) shows the head and shoulders of the accused, who co-founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and was here on trial in New Haven, CT, for the murder of Alex Rackley. The jury was unable to reach a verdict and the case was declared a mistrial.

Another fine example of courtroom art is Elizabeth Williams’ portrait of Faisal Shahzad, The “Times Square Bomber” Sentencing, Manhattan Federal Court: October 5, 2010 (2010). Shahzad had pleaded guilty to five counts of federal terrorism-related crimes committed when he planted a car bomb in Times Square, New York, on 5 May 2010, for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.

There have also been a few paintings of fictional trials.

Abraham Solomon’s wonderful pair of paintings is set immediately outside a court. In the first, the father and family of the accused are seen Waiting for the Verdict (1859) at the end of a trial. The court appears in cameo up to the right, in that strange state of suspended animation as it awaits the decision.

Solomon’s pendant shows the elation when the verdict of Not Guilty (1859) is returned. The man, now freed from the dock, is embraced by his wife, who is kneeling in supplication, as their young child reaches out to touch father’s face. His father, eyes damp with tears of relief, is thanking their barrister earnestly.

In place of the view of the distant court, which is being symbolically dismissed as the barrister closes a door at the right edge, the left side of the painting now leads out to the warm light of the early dusk in the outside world, indicating freedom.

The melodrama of legal process is shown in William Frederick Yeames’ ‘problem picture’ Defendant and Counsel from 1895. An affluent married woman wearing an expensive fur coat sits with a popular newspaper open in front of her, as a team of three barristers and their clerk look at her intensely, presumably waiting for her to speak. As we’re told that she is the defendant, the viewer is encouraged to speculate what she is defending: a divorce claim, or a criminal charge?

Ovid ends Book 7 of his Metamorphoses with one of his best stories. It’s told by Cephalus, the envoy from Athens, to the sons of King Aeacus on the island of Aegina, following the king’s account of the Myrmidons.

Having told Cephalus of the plague and the Myrmidons that followed it, King Aeacus falls asleep, so his son Phocus takes Cephalus and his companions to their accommodation. There Phocus notices the unusual javelin carried by Cephalus, with its gold tip on a shaft of wood that he cannot identify. This leads Cephalus to tell him that the javelin killed his wife, and so to explain the circumstances.

Within two months of his marriage to the beautiful Procris, when he was laying nets to catch a deer at dawn, Aurora saw Cephalus and tried to abduct him (she has a track record of affairs with humans). Cephalus protested and told Aurora of his love for his wife, so she let him go, warning him that if she saw him again, he would regret ever marrying Procris.

Nicolas Poussin’s Cephalus and Aurora (1630) shows the dawn scene of Cephalus trying to avoid the obviously amorous intentions of the goddess Aurora, who is seated and nearly naked. Behind Cephalus is the winged horse drawing the chariot of the dawn. A winged putto is holding up an image for him to view, presumably showing Procris, to help his resolve. At the left is a river god. Beyond the horse is another deity bearing a coronet: although difficult to see, that might be Diana, given her association with hunting and her role in this myth.

Peter Paul Rubens’ oil sketch of Aurora Abducting Cephalus was probably made in 1636-37, late in Rubens’ life, for his workshop to complete as a painting for King Philip IV of Spain’s hunting lodge at Torre de la Parada, near Madrid. In addition to showing the willing Aurora trying to persuade the reluctant Cephalus to join her in her chariot, it includes some details at odds with Ovid’s story: Diana’s hunting dog and javelin, which Procris gave to her husband after their reconciliation, later in the story. Here they may be intended as attributes to confirm his identity.

Over the following couple of centuries, there was a steady stream of paintings showing the abduction of Cephalus, but to my eye the next major work using this theme was Pierre-Narcisse Guérin’s romantic Aurora and Cephalus (1810). Instead of a substantial chariot, the seductive figure of Aurora is bearing a sleeping Cephalus aloft on a bed of cloud, as dawn breaks over the mountains below.

Forty years later, Pierre Claude François Delorme uses a similar motif recomposed into his Cephalus Carried off by Aurora (c 1851). This features ingeniously interlocking arms and embraces: Aurora cradles Cephalus’ shoulder and chest, Cephalus reaches out to Cupid, and Cupid back to Cephalus.

As he went back to his wife, Cephalus started to worry whether his wife had been unfaithful to him. He became aware that Aurora had changed his appearance, and entered the city of Athens unrecognised. When he got home, his household and wife didn’t recognise him either, so Cephalus put Procris to the test: with his wife still thinking him a stranger, he offered her great riches to spend a night with him, and managed to get her to waver with uncertainty.

He then revealed himself to be her husband, and accused her of being unfaithful. She said not a word, but fled to the mountains, where she joined the followers of Diana.

Cephalus yearned for his wife, so begged her forgiveness, and admitted that he too would have given way when made such an irresistible offer. Procris returned to him, and the couple lived happily again together. She brought back with her gifts from Diana: a hunting dog who outran all other dogs, and that unusual javelin.

Then the city of Thebes was once again put into difficulty, after Oedipus had broken the siege imposed by the Sphinx. This time the problem took the form of a wild beast that ate all its livestock. All the younger men, including Cephalus, went to hunt the beast, but it eluded them and their dogs. Cephalus then unleashed Diana’s hound to chase the beast. The dog caught it, but it broke free again. Cephalus prepared to throw his javelin, then noticed that his dog and the beast had suddenly been transformed into marble statues.

Cephalus returned to his now blissfully happy marriage with Procris. He went hunting alone at dawn, always feeling safe with his javelin. As the heat of the day came on, he would call on an imaginary zephyr of the cool breeze, talking to it as if it was a real nymph. One day he must have been overheard, and word was taken back to Procris that he was meeting a woman when he was supposed to be hunting. His wife was shocked, but refused to accept the story without herself witnessing her husband’s deceit.

The following morning, Cephalus was out hunting at dawn again, and when he grew hot, he rested and spoke to his imaginary zephyr as usual. He thought that he heard a sound nearby, which he suspected was an animal. He turned and threw his javelin at that noise.

He next heard his wife’s voice, rushed towards it, and found her mortally wounded, with his javelin buried deep in her chest. He took her up into his arms and tried in vain to stop blood from pouring from the wound. Knowing that she was dying, Procris implored him not to take the zephyr as his wife. He then realised the fatal misunderstanding, that Procris believed that he had been unfaithful. As Procris died in his arms, Cephalus tried to explain to her that the zephyr was only imaginary, and that seemed to bring her some comfort in her last moments.

In the foreground of Paolo Veronese’s account from about 1580, Procris has fallen, the javelin embedded in her upper abdomen, and her life is fading fast. Cephalus isn’t embracing her, though, merely holding her hand as he tries to plead his innocence. Veronese leaves us with two small puzzles too. The first is the large hunting hound behind Cephalus’ right shoulder, remembering that Diana’s dog was turned into stone while hunting the beast of Thebes. More puzzling is another figure, and a second dog, in the distance, at the left edge of the painting. These might represent the first part of the scene, before Cephalus throws his javelin, in multiplex narrative.

Peter Paul Rubens offers another oil sketch, of Cephalus and Procris (1636-37), showing the couple just before Cephalus throws the fateful javelin, which rests at his side.

There is another painting that has been claimed to show The Death of Procris, but which is more accurately titled A Satyr Mourning over a Nymph, made by Piero di Cosimo in about 1495.

A brilliant painting, it uses the full width of a panoramic panel to show a satyr with his goat legs and distinctive ears, ministering to a dying or dead nymph, who has a severe wound in her throat. At her feet is a hunting dog, with another three in the distance. But there’s no reason to show Cephalus as a satyr; Procris was impaled in the chest by the javelin; Procris was behind cover, where she was spying on Cephalus, not out in the open; and Cephalus had only one hound, a gift from Diana, which had in any case already been turned to marble. It’s a superb painting of a different story.

Ovid ends the book with Cephalus and his audience in tears, as Aeacus arrives with his other two sons and the army which they have been raising to counter the forces of Minos, setting the scene for the start of the next book.

In the first of these two articles, I showed paintings illustrating school life from the early seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth, a period of more than two centuries when few artists painted the inside of the classroom. This changed from 1850, although the theme still failed to attract the best-known painters.

Albert Anker, father of Swiss painting and known for his large output of ‘genre scenes’, probably painted more classrooms than any other. He painted The Village School in 1848 nearly half a century afterwards, in 1896, presumably from his own recollection of his final year at school in Neuchâtel. Compared to earlier paintings, this classroom is packed, relatively orderly, and well-equipped with benches and desks, even though the children are shabbily dressed, indicating their poverty.

Anker’s earlier painting of The School Exam from 1862 shows a more contemporary scene. It’s not clear whether the pupils are undergoing examination, or the school is. Three of them seen standing out at the front are so poor that they cannot afford shoes at all, but effort is at last being put into their education.

Winslow Homer is perhaps the most famous painter to have made more than one work showing The Country School, believed to be of a country schoolroom in the Catskills, New England. This painting, dated 1871, is the first of a series of three or more showing the same largely empty classroom, with its impossibly wide age range. Two of the boys reading to the teacher are too poor for shoes, although the girls on the right look much better-dressed.

Following the collapse of the Second Empire during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, the Third Republic targeted education for special development. Schools in France had earlier been largely run by the Catholic Church, but from 1833 communes had been required to provide schools for boys but not girls. The anti-clerical Minister for Public Instruction, Jules Ferry, introduced laws in 1881 to establish free education throughout the country, even for girls, and progressively replaced existing Catholic schools with the modern Republican School through the 1880s.

François Bonvin’s The Scholar of 1874 is one of a few paintings showing individual pupils in the classroom. This boy has been granted the privilege of his own desk, at the front of the class, and is working on after the end of the school day. The teacher’s hat and coat are draped over his desk, ready for when this pupil completes his extra work.

Jean-Baptiste Jules Trayer’s wonderful watercolour of A Breton Infants School from 1882 predates any celebration of the Republican policy: the crucifix high on the wall at the right shows that this is one of the older Catholic schools. It shows a teacher helping one of her students with writing, in a class entirely wearing traditional Breton costume. There’s clearly room for improvement, though, as one girl is sleeping on her book, doubtless exhausted from her early morning work on the family farm.

Rising standards of schooling were also reaching out to some of the more remote communities in Nordic countries. Oscar Björck’s painting of Madam Henriksen’s School for Girls in Skagen from 1884 shows a tiny and personal class in this small, isolated community at the northern tip of Jylland (Jutland), home to a major artists’ colony and birthplace of Danish Impressionism.

Then, in the mid 1880s, something remarkable happens to paintings of the schoolroom in France: they become strikingly photographic in their reality, with the advent of Naturalism.

Within two years of the early death of Jules Bastien-Lepage, Paul Louis Martin des Amoignes’ In the Classroom (1886) looks as if it may have been painted from photographs. One boy, staring intently at the teacher in front of the class, is caught crisply, pencil poised in his hand. Beyond him the crowd of heads becomes more blurred.

Jean Geoffroy’s Primary School Class from 1889 doesn’t give us the same depth of field effect, but shows one of the Republic’s new lay teachers working diligently in the classroom with her pupils. They’re still a bit of a shower, with the younger ones at the back working on traditional slates, but this is the public face of the modern Republican School.

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.

Of course France wasn’t the only country to be improving its educational system at this time. Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky’s Mental Arithmetic. In Public School of S. A. Rachinsky from 1895 shows a class of poor students in the village of Tatev in Smolensk province, at the western edge of the Russian Empire in central eastern Europe. They were fortunate enough to have a pioneering educator as their local teacher.

Sergey Rachinsky had been a professor of botany in Moscow until 1867, when he abandoned academic life to run the village school in Tatev. The elderly professor is seen with his students working on a challenging mental arithmetic problem. The teacher died in 1902.

My final painting, by the Ukrainian artist Max Silbert, shows a Singing Lesson in a School in Holland in 1907, and is a fascinating chance discovery. Although its realism isn’t as detailed or photographic as the French paintings from the 1880s above, it shows a similar photographic depth of field effect. The pupils closest to the artist are shown in sharp focus, and those in the further distance are markedly blurred. It’s impossible to tell whether this results from Silbert painting this work from photographs with the same blurring, or it was a deliberate effect introduced by the artist to give it a photographic look.

As the calendar passes into September, it’s time for the summer holidays to end and for children and older students to return to their schools and colleges. This weekend I mark that with depictions of what has really been going on in our educational establishments. Although this hasn’t been a theme for more major artists, these paintings appear disarmingly honest, and should reassure you of the great improvements achieved in recent times.

Isaac van Ostade lived only briefly between 1621–1649, so I suspect this painting of a Village School from his circle was probably made by about 1650, possibly earlier. Although it has seen better days, it shows a schoolmaster at the right supervising a group with a wide age range, all in various levels of poverty, and in primitive stages of education. The classroom itself is almost bare of furniture, with most of the children sitting or squatting on the floor.

Later in the seventeenth century, Jan Steen’s The Village School (c 1665) shows one reason for the apparent unpopularity of school as a motif: physical punishment. The child at the right holds out a hand for teacher to strike it with a wooden spoon, presumably in return for the screwed-up piece of paper on the floor. The children here are better-dressed, and the room better-furnished. One boy at the far right is writing intently, and another, his face almost covered by the brim of his hat, is reading a book.

A few years later, Steen painted a scene in a larger and more chaotic classroom, in The Village School from about 1670. Although there are two staff sat at the teachers’ desk, the man is distracted, perhaps in cutting himself a fresh quill. The woman teacher sat next to him is engaged in explaining something to a pupil.

Around them, all hell is breaking loose. In the distance, a boy is stood on one of the trestle tables. Older children are teaching younger ones, and a small group at a table at the right are trying to write while others get up to mischief. One younger child in the middle of the foreground has fallen asleep against a hat.

In those early schools, boys and girls were not segregated, but enjoyed equally derelict schooling. By the middle of the eighteenth century, in larger schools at least, it became more common for the genders to be taught in separate classes or even different schools.

Boys’ School is a copy of an original painting by Jan Josef Horemans the Younger from the middle of the eighteenth century. Its schoolmaster looks to be the only figure sat at a desk, and is engaged with a couple of the older boys, while the rest of the class catches up with their social lives. A few writing tablets are visible, as are scraps of paper, but the only real books seem to be those well out of reach, above the schoolmaster’s head.

Its sister painting showing a Girls’ School is more peaceful and purposeful, but seems intended to trap young women in their narrow social role. Although one girl is reading, others are engaged in fibrecraft or dressmaking, or apparently learning how to make a brush from a bundle of twigs. More academic learning was only really possible in richer homes, under exceptional private tutors.

Francisco Goya’s With Pain Comes Gain. School Scene from 1780-85 is small and quite Hogarthian in its depiction of corporal punishment in a school. The teacher raises a whip to strike the bare buttocks of one of a succession of pupils, as the more studious continue at their work seemingly disinterested in the suffering of their comrades. Goya is one of the few masters to have painted series of children at play.

In towns and cities, there was greater economic drive for children to work throughout the year, and to obtain a better education. These seem to have taken some schools, at least, to operate well into the evening, as George Gillis Haanen shows in his beautifully lit Night School from 1835. The schoolmaster, ensconced at his elevated desk, does at least look more academic, and there are slates for writing and children reading books.

The nineteenth century also brought the concept of self-improvement, and a growing desire among many of the working and middle classes to better themselves by education, to improve their income and family prospects, also among a growing minority of girls.

Changes remained slower in the country, as seen in this undated painting by one of Eduard Ritter’s circle, of Brave Girls, Bad Boys, School Class in Tyrol, probably from between 1835-1849, the reign of Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria shown in one of its portraits. The children are enjoying a rich range of fruit, and there’s no shortage of paper, even if some of it is being used to make hats rather than for writing. Its elderly schoolmaster looks delightfully benign, and the stem on his smoking pipe is the longest I have seen.

Schools in Europe had arisen to meet the need for clergy and to support the church; those in other cultures were no different, as shown in John Frederick Lewis’s undated watercolour of an Arab School, probably from around 1850. This is what is more properly known as a maktab, providing general schooling between the ages of 6-14, following which children specialise more in their subjects prior to going on to higher education at a madrasah.

Thomas Faed’s paintings have faded from view since it was claimed that he did for Scottish painting what Robert Burns did for Scottish song. His Visit to the Village School from 1852 shows an elderly couple listening to some young children reading, as the schoolmaster is trying to impress his visitors. Older children, though, are not being quite so obliging, and stood against the wall at the far left is a pupil wearing a dunce’s hat in shame.

Scotland, for all the difficulties posed by its far-flung rural and island populations, was in the vanguard of introducing free public schooling: in 1561 the Church of Scotland declared that every parish church should have its own teacher, and that education should be provided free to the poor; an act of the Scottish Parliament raised taxes for that purpose in 1633.

Thomas Brooks didn’t have the benefit of a Scottish education, and his painting of The New Pupil from 1854 clearly shows the more disorderly rabble in an English country school, as a mother introduces her reluctant son to his new class. Brooks’ eye for fine detail and the modern lightness in this work are leading up to what would later be termed Naturalism.

Charles Hunt’s Visit to the Schoolroom from 1859 returns to more traditional style, as a well-dressed mother appears taken aback by the antics going on behind the teacher, and extra-curricular activities include a girl who is about to snip a lock from a boy’s head. At the far right another dunce stands on a chair wearing the trademark conical hat.

I used to consider the work I needed to do around the house expendable. I now see it as integral to my and my family’s happiness.

Harriet Backer (1845–1932) is one of Norway’s most famous artists, a pioneering woman painter, and an influential teacher. Despite an internationally successful career, she’s now hardly known outside her native country. This is the first of two articles in which I show a small selection of her finest paintings.

Born into a wealthy family living at Holmestrand on the west bank of Oslofjord, south of Oslo, she showed an early aptitude for drawing. When the family moved to Oslo in 1857 she was originally sent to a school for governesses. She started drawing and painting lessons in Oslo in 1867, and was able to travel in the company of her sister, the concert pianist and composer Agathe Backer-Grøndahl. Her talent was recognised, and in 1874 she went to Munich where she became a pupil of her compatriot Eilif Peterssen.

Avskjeden (The Farewell) (1878) was probably Backer’s first successful painting. It shows a grown daughter, left of centre, bidding farewell to her family as she leaves home. She probably painted this from her own emotional experience, as her father died in 1877, and she had informed her mother that she did not intend returning home, but would pursue her painting career instead.

It also marked the year that she went to Paris, where she was a pupil of Léon Bonnat and Jean-Léon Gérôme, and for a brief time of Jules Bastien-Lepage.

In France, her style started to loosen up: Solitude from about 1880 was another early success, and her first painting accepted for the Salon that year. This was one of her first interiors featuring limited light, whose play was to become a dominant theme in her paintings. Although she remained based in Paris, she returned to Norway each summer, where she seems to have painted mostly landscapes.

Asta Nørregard, another Norwegian painter studying in Paris at the time, modelled for her Blått interiør (Blue Interior) (1883). This develops the theme of the play of light from the window on the person and contents of the interior of the room, its composition complicated by the large mirror at the left. Her brushstrokes are now overtly painterly, and bright colours are starting to bring harmonies and contrasts.

To barn og tregruppe (Two children and a group of trees) (1885) is a good example of Backer’s summer landscapes, which were probably at least started en plein air, if finished in the studio, perhaps. She had learned to paint outdoors in Paris, where it had become generally popular, not just among the Impressionists.

På Bleikeplassen, Jæren (At the Bleaching Place, Jæren) (1886) is a pure plein air oil sketch, in which time didn’t permit the addition of details to the buildings or figures. It shows three women hard at work laying linen garments out to bleach in the sunshine.

På blekevollen (Bleaching Linen) (1886-7) is a more finished painting of similar activity. At this time her style was clearly Impressionist, but expressed in her distinctive manner.

Back in Paris, she continued to explore the play of light in interiors, with Chez Moi from 1887 as an example. She strikes a good balance between fine detail and the more painterly: the piano keys, dress, plant, and reflections on the pictures hanging on the wall, are each shown with precision.

In 1888 she finally returned to Norway and settled in Sandvika, on the outskirts of Oslo. There she continued to concentrate on interiors, including those illuminated by lamplight.

During the summer, she still went out into the rich countryside to paint en plein air and capture the glorious colours of the intense Norwegian summer. Her Landskap fra Ulvin (Landscape from Ulvin) (1889) is a good example; sadly, relatively few of her landscapes seem to have made their way into public collections, remaining in private ownership and inaccessible.

Growing recognition, including the award of a silver medal at the Exposition Internationale of 1889, brought requests for her to take on pupils, and in that year she started teaching in what soon developed into a thriving art school. The final years of the 1800s and the start of the new century marked the peak of her career, with a succession of major paintings in addition to that teaching, as I’ll show in next week’s second and concluding article.

References

Wikipedia (English), Wikipedia (Norwegian).
Many of her best paintings are in Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo, where they’re viewable online.

For countless generations, since humans first started farming the land, improving the soil and fields has been a constant task. Once the plough has passed, there’s still work to be done in many areas, where there are stones mixed in the soil. This has been the burden of those who have worked the land, and has been featured in occasional paintings.

Hans Andersen Brendekilde’s Worn Out (1889) follows in the Naturalist tradition of Jules Bastien-Lepage. An old man has collapsed when working in the fields. A younger woman, his daughter perhaps, is giving him aid and shouting for all she’s worth to summon assistance. The soil around them is poor, and full of flints; the two were engaged in the toil of the poorest of the poor, picking out the large stones and putting them into piles for collection. It’s backbreaking work for the young, and clearly proved too much for this man.

Once ploughed to a fine tilth and rid of its stones, the soil is ready for the seed of the next crop, accomplished by manual broadcasting, a term in common use long before it came to be applied to radio then TV transmissions.

Sowing is one of the basic tasks in arable farming, and one at the heart of the changes that took place between 1600 and 1900. Broadcasting is tedious, time-consuming and inefficient in use of seed, making it one of the first tasks for attempts to mechanise farming. Although early types of seed drill had been tried before, it’s Jethro Tull, an English gentleman farmer from the early eighteenth century, who has generally been credited with inventing the first successful seed drill, in 1701. Today his name is better-known as that of one of the great rock bands formed in 1967.

Alongside the use of a seed drill was the requirement for a horse hoe, a light and small plough drawn by a single horse, to ensure the seed was well covered by soil. Unfortunately, early drills proved too fragile for general use, and it wasn’t until the early nineteenth century that metal could be turned to manufacture more durable drills, that became widespread across Western Europe during the rest of that century. However, contemporary painting continued to show sowers still broadcasting seed.

The first of these is Jean-François Millet’s The Sower, completed in 1850, shown at the Salon that year and now recognised as his first real masterpiece. It shows an agricultural worker striding across a field, broadcasting seed for the summer’s crop. In the distance to the right, and caught in the sunlight, is another worker harrowing with a pair of oxen. This was being used to ensure the seed sown was covered with soil, and not exposed to the flurry of birds trying to eat any seed left on the surface.

Millet revisited his successful painting of a sower from fifteen years earlier, here with two pastel paintings with the same title, The Sower, from around 1865. That above is now in the Walters, and that below in the Clark. These feature a different background, including the tower of Chailly, harrowing using a pair of horses, and a swirling flock of crows in the sky.

By the late nineteenth century, manual broadcasting was becoming less common as farms turned to seed drills, but the image of the sower continued to appear in paintings.

The title of Hans Thoma’s Säender Bauer (1886) apparently means Sowing Framer (thanks to Gregory for his accurate translation). A sower in Millet’s tradition is at work in the ploughed field in the foreground. Beyond, the heavens have opened in a sudden downpour. Two years later, when he was living in Arles in November 1888, Vincent van Gogh painted his version of The Sower.

Millet’s influence is also manifest in the first of Albin Egger-Lienz’s versions of The Sower, from 1903, a motif which was to recur in his later works. Its earth colours, increasing looseness, and emphasis on simplicity were to set the style for much of the rest of his career.

Laurits Andersen Ring admired Millet’s social realism, and would undoubtedly have seen at least one of Millet’s depictions of this motif. In 1910, Ring painted this, The Sower, in such great detail that you can see every seed frozen in mid-air. This suggests that he may have been influenced by photography, the first means of producing such images.

Ring’s friend and contemporary Hans Andersen Brendekilde responded in 1914 with A Sower on a Sunny Spring Day at Brendekilde Church. This is thought to show Holme-Olstrup Church, near Næstved on the island of Sjælland (Zealand), close to where Brendekilde was born and from where he had taken his name. The sower, walking over poor soil with abundant stones, has been identified as Ole Frederik Jensen (1870-1953).

This motif seems to have long outlasted the practice of broadcasting. By 1900, even gardeners and smallholders were being offered mechanical seed drills. As those used less than a third of the seed than broadcasting, it’s hard to see any farmer in the early twentieth century still preferring traditional methods.

With the young plants growing vigorously, all that remained for the growing season was to keep them free from weeds, another laborious and back-breaking task often assigned to women.

The Weeders (1868) is a smaller variant of a painting of the same name that Jules Breton made in 1860, which was acclaimed when exhibited in the Salon the following year and the Exposition Universelle in 1867. Set in the fields just outside Courrières, the labourers are pulling up thistles and other weeds until the last moment that there is insufficient light for them to work any longer. Breton wrote of their faces encircled by the pink transparency of their violet bonnets, as if worshipping the life-giving star.

Although only peasants, the light transforms these women into classical beauties, an observation made by the critics at the time. This gives rise to a phenomenon repeated across Breton’s panoramas of country work, in which these classical figures appear in thoroughly socially-realist landscapes, showing their sanctity in labour.

Jakub Schikaneder’s Weeder (1887) shows a woman bent double as she pulls weeds from a young crop, and would pass for a social realist work from the likes of Millet or Breton.

In yesterday’s article, I showed examples of apotheoses. Following a couple of even more liberal interpretations, this article moves on to the second and third items in this list:

• Apotheosis, when a pre-christian hero is elevated to the status of god or goddess;
• Catasterisation, when a mortal is changed into a celestial body such as a star or constellation;
• Assumption, when the Virgin Mary was taken up into Heaven;
• Ascension, when Jesus Christ ascended into Heaven, and sometimes available to saints on their martyrdom.

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.

In Vasily Vereshchagin’s bleak Apotheosis of War (1871), ravens/crows perch on a huge pile of human skulls in a barren landscape outside the ruins of a town.

A few Christian religious paintings came close to being apotheoses.

Alexandre Cabanel’s The Death of Moses (1850) tackles one of the vaguer episodes in the life of this Old Testament prophet. When he was 120 years old, according to the book of Numbers, Moses assembled the tribes of Israel on the banks of the River Jordan, reminded them of the laws under which they must live, sang a song of praise, blessed the people, and passed his authority to Joshua. He then ascended Mount Nebo, looked over the Promised Land, and died. Cabanel shows this as an apotheosis, with God the Father (upper left) welcoming Moses (centre right) with open arms.

Being transformed into a celestial body in catasterisation was an honour accorded those mortals who couldn’t aspire to deity, among them the giant Orion. He arrived at Chios, where he became drunk, and raped Merope, the daughter of Oenopion. As punishment for that, Oenopion blinded Orion and cast him from his land. Orion then went to Lemnos, where Hephaistos took pity on him, and lent him his servant Kedalion to sit astride his shoulders and act as his guide. An oracle advised Orion to proceed east into the rays of the rising sun, so that those rays would restore his sight. So cured, Orion then went to Crete to hunt.

There are differing accounts of Orion’s death. Some involve his love affair with Eos, which was opposed (possibly out of jealousy) by Artemis. In these, Artemis ended up killing Orion with her arrows. Other versions claim he was killed by a giant scorpion. In death, Artemis asked that Zeus catasterised him, together with the scorpion, to form the constellation Scorpio. Once there, Orion pursues the daughters known as the Pleiades, which form a prominent open star cluster nearby.

Poussin’s Landscape with Orion, or Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun was painted late in his career, in 1658, at a time when the artist’s hands were suffering a tremor that was starting to disrupt his ability to paint. It is among his finest allegorical landscapes, and one of the most intensely studied works of his career.

Set in one of Poussin’s wonderful idealised landscapes, near the coast, the giant Orion is striding purposefully towards the rising sun. He carries a huge hunting bow, and a quiver taller than a man. Standing on his shoulders is Kedalion, servant to Hephaistos, who is acting as his guide. Above and beyond Orion is a strange formation of backlit cloud, generally interpreted as being storm-cloud. Atop that is the standing figure of Artemis, with her distinctive crescent moon coronet, and an owl perched on her left shoulder. She leans nonchalantly against the cloud, her head propped against her right hand. In the far distance is the sea, with a prominent lighthouse.

There have been few other attempts to tell any part of the story of Orion on canvas. In 1685, Daniel Seiter ( –1705) painted this view of Diana by the Corpse of Orion, following in the brushstrokes of his teacher Johann Carl Loth. This shows Diana (Artemis), with her distinctive crescent moon, looking regretfully at the dead Orion, after she had killed him with her arrows.

Sidney Hall’s etching of Orion, a hand-coloured plate in a set of celestial cards from 1825, is an ingenious lesson in observational astronomy.

The Pleiades were originally the seven daughters of the titan Atlas and the sea-nymph Pleione. When Atlas was made to carry the heavens on his shoulders, Orion started to pursue the Pleiades, so Zeus transformed them first into doves, then into stars. Their name is given to a star cluster, which appears to be chased across the night sky by the constellation of Orion.

Elihu Vedder’s painting of The Pleiades (1885) was made in association with his first illustration for the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, representing Khayyam’s horoscope. Each of the sisters is connected by a thread to their corresponding star, perhaps representing the process of catasterisation.

There are a great many paintings of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, of which I show here just a tiny sample.

Francesco Botticini’s spectacular example painted in about 1475-76 places unusual emphasis on Paradise, with its triple tiers of figures rising to those of the Virgin Mary kneeling in front of Christ at its summit.

Tintoretto painted several versions of The Assumption of The Virgin, this one for the Cappella di Santa Maria Assunta, in the Gesuiti, Venice. It’s thought that Tintoretto had promised to paint this in the style of Veronese.

Poussin’s Assumption of the Virgin from about 1650 is plainer and more orthodox.

Gaetano Previati’s Divisionist rendering of the Assumption from about 1901-03 shows a group of winged angels raising Mary’s body to Heaven.

Raising children is crucial work. Why don’t we treat it that way?

There are three events that have been widely depicted in European art that can readily be confused, and a fourth that doesn’t often appear in paintings. Each involves the elevation of a heroic figure from this earthly world into the heavens:

• Apotheosis, when a pre-christian hero is elevated to the status of god or goddess;
• Catasterisation, when a mortal is changed into a celestial body such as a star or constellation;
• Assumption, when the Virgin Mary was taken up into Heaven;
• Ascension, when Jesus Christ ascended into Heaven, and sometimes available to saints on their martyrdom.

This article considers the first of those, and its sequel tomorrow tackles the second and third. The last has seldom appeared explicitly in paint, except as the final scene in a series depicting the Passion and Crucifixion.

Strictly speaking, apotheosis was only open to demi-gods and -goddesses, one of whose parents were divine and the other mortal. However, it later became open to anyone whose achievements were sufficiently heroic that they merited promotion to deity.

What happened to Hercules at the end of his life, when he threw himself on his pyre, has resulted in confused imagery, such as Tiepolo’s wonderful The Apotheosis of Hercules (c 1765). Because Hercules was the son of Jupiter/Zeus, as his body was burning, Jupiter decreed that only his mortal ‘half’ would be consumed by fire. His divine part was then conveyed in a chariot in an apotheosis to the gods on Olympus, often portrayed as a saintly ascension. Once there, Hercules reconciled previous quarrels with Juno/Hera, and, as a god in his own right, married Hebe (the Roman Juventas), his half-sister, as classical deities were wont to do.

Peter Candid’s Aeneas Taken to Olympus by Venus from around 1600 shows Venus at the right, in her chariot with Cupid, anointing Aeneas, on the left, with nectar and ambrosia. Above them is the pantheon, arrayed in an imposing semicircle, and above them Jupiter himself, clutching his thunderbolts and ready to receive the new god. Aeneas qualified on the grounds that he was the son of Aphrodite/Venus by his mortal father Anchises.

Charles Le Brun painted The Deification of Aeneas in about 1642-44. This is a faithful depiction from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, with the river god Numicus sat in the front, and Venus anointing Aeneas with ambrosia and nectar to make him immortal as the god Jupiter Indiges. At the right is Venus’ mischievous son Cupid, trying on Aeneas’s armour, and the chariot towed by white doves is ready to take the hero up to join the gods.

Tiepolo’s sketch for a fresco ceiling in the Royal Palace in Madrid, The Apotheosis of Aeneas from about 1765, is another impressive account. The artist made this a little more elaborate by combining the apotheosis with the presentation of arms to Aeneas by his mother Venus. Aeneas is to the left of centre, dressed in prominent and earthly red. Above and to the right of him is his mother, Venus, dressed in white, ready to present the arms forged for him by Vulcan, her partner, who is shown below supervising their fabrication. Aeneas’ destination is the Temple of Immortality, glimpsed above and to the left of him, through a break in the divine clouds.

Jean-Baptiste Nattier is perhaps the only artist to have painted the apotheosis of the founder of Rome, in his Romulus being taken up to Olympus by Mars from about 1700. Mars is embracing Romulus, with the standard of Rome being borne at the lower left, and the divine chariot ready to take Romulus up to the upper right corner, where the rest of the gods await him. Romulus qualified by virtue of his father being Mars, while his mortal mother was Rhea Silvia.

In post-classical history and legend, apotheosis was opened up more, and became an opportunity to fill a painting with an array of memorable figures in what’s more of a tribute than an elevation to heaven.

JAD Ingres’ Apotheosis of Homer from 1827 gathers together all those figures for whom Ingres had greatest respect, and were major influences. Although its own narrative is very simple, it invokes and pays tribute to those who Ingres saw as the great masters of narrative.

The group is posed on the steps in front of a classical Greek theatre, in formal symmetric composition. Homer sits at its centre, being crowned with laurels by the winged figure of the Universe.

Among those standing at the left are Dante, Virgil, Raphael, Sappho, Apelles, Euripides, Sophocles (holding a scroll), and the personification of the Iliad (seated, in red); in the lower file are Shakespeare, Tasso, Poussin, and Mozart.

From the right are, among others, Alexander the Great, Aristotle, Michelangelo, Socrates, Plato, Hesiod, Aesop (under the lyre), and the personification of the Odyssey (seated, in green, with an oar); in the lower file are Gluck, Molière, and others less known today.

Henry de Bourbon, King Henry IV of France, was the son of Jeanne III of Navarre and her husband Antoine de Bourbon, King of Navarre, neither of whom had any claim to deity. When Peter Paul Rubens was painting his vast cycle for Marie de’ Medici, he started its second half with Henry’s apotheosis or assumption, following the king’s assassination on the day after Marie’s coronation ceremony.

This is shown more clearly in this oil study (above) now in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. Below is the finished painting now in the Louvre’s dedicated gallery.

As in the rest of the cycle, Rubens doesn’t depict a real scene from history, but shows it in allegorical terms, using figures from classical mythology mixed with those from real history. Instead of painting a scene of Henry’s assassination, he made The Apotheosis of Henry IV and Homage to Marie de’ Medici, one of three landscape-format canvases in the series.

The left side of the painting shows the assassinated king being welcomed into heaven as a victor by the gods Jupiter and Saturn. Jupiter, as king of the Olympian gods, is Henry’s divine counterpart; Saturn, holding a sickle in his right hand, marks the end of Henry’s earthly existence. Below them is Bellona, an ancient Roman goddess of war, who is stripped of her armour and appears tormented.

On the right side, Marie is seated on her throne as Regent, wearing black widow’s weeds, as the personification of France kneels in homage and presents her with an orb of office. Behind the Regent, at the far right, is Minerva bearing her Aegis, the shield emblazoned with the image of Medusa’s head. Also present are Prudence and Divine Providence, and her court are paying tribute from below.