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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Children deserve better than to feel left in the dark against their will.

© Illustration by Frank Augugliaro/The New York Times. Photographs by Getty Images

Readers discuss a guest essay by a woman who finds things to cherish in caring for her dad.

Children deserve better than to feel left in the dark against their will.

The star of “The Chosen” discusses his early struggles in Hollywood, fans who conflate him with his character and how his own faith informs his work.

© Philip Montgomery for The New York Times

A 38-day expedition in the remote Alto Mayo region, where development threatens wild habitats, turned up one previously unknown animal after another.

Separation of living from sleeping accommodation has become increasingly popular in most societies as they have become more affluent and housing has become more spacious. In its extreme, among the wealthy, bedrooms have acquired supplementary areas for dressing and personal grooming, leaving the bedroom itself dedicated to the bed and sleep. For that it’s usually the most private room in a house or apartment.

Emmery Rondahl’s Doctor’s Orders (1882) shows a Danish country doctor writing a prescription for an older patient who is tucked up in a magnificent fitted bed in their own home. Although still a humble dwelling, with an uneven and uncarpeted stone floor, the bed has luxuriant curtains and there’s even a short net curtain at the window.

Edgar Degas’ famously enigmatic Interior from 1868-69 remains fascinating even if you ignore its two figures. The woman’s outer clothing is placed at the foot of the bed, and her corset has been hurriedly or carelessly cast onto the floor beside it. Just behind her is a small occasional table, on which there is a table-lamp and a small open suitcase. Some of the contents of the suitcase rest over its edge. In front of it, on the table top, is a small pair of scissors and other items from a small clothes repair kit or ‘housewife’.

The man’s top hat rests, upside down, on top of the cabinet on the far side of the room, just in front of the woman. Despite the obvious implication that they are a couple who have met in that room to engage in a clandestine sexual relationship, the bed is a single not a double. It also shows no sign of having been used, nor has the bedding been disturbed in any way.

There’s a mature fire burning in the fireplace behind the woman and the lamp. There are four paintings or similar objects hanging on the walls, of which only one appears to be decipherable. This is the large rounded rectangular one above the fireplace. Although it appears to be a mirror, the image shown on it doesn’t resemble a reflection of the room’s interior, but looks to be a painting. This might show a bright figure, resembling the woman, in front of some shrubs, with classical buildings behind.

A few years later, in 1876-77, probably when Degas was starting his series depicting women drying themselves after they had bathed, he painted a woman in pastel over a monotype, where the figure is set in the broader context of a bedroom, in Woman Drying Herself after the Bath. This is a plain and simple bedroom, with a single bed and a dressing table with a mirror. Other paintings in this series are closer cropped on the woman.

Morning, Interior (1890) is one of Maximilien Luce’s best-known Divisionist paintings from the late nineteenth century. This is a humbler bedroom situated in the uppermost part of the house, a garret perhaps, his dressing table lacks a mirror, and the bed is a lightweight folding model with a thin mattress.

Before the end of the century, Pierre Bonnard had started painting the intimate interiors that were to dominate his art for much of the rest of his life. Few, though, depicted the bedroom he shared with his partner Marthe.

In 1898, Bonnard painted the first of his controversial works revealing his private life with Marthe, in Man and Woman in an Interior. He stands naked, looking away, as Marthe is getting dressed on the bed. He has also cropped this unusually, as if it was a ‘candid’ photo, enhancing its voyeurism.

Félix Vallotton’s disturbing domestic scenes continued with Interior, Bedroom with Two Figures from 1904. The lady of the house is standing, her back to the viewer, over her maid as the latter is sewing up an evening gown for her. The lady’s face is revealed in her reflection in the large mirror on the wardrobe at the back of the room, where her maid is all but invisible.

John Collier followed Degas’ enigmatic interiors with Mariage de Convenance from 1907. A mother, dressed in the black implicit of widowhood, stands haughty, her right arm resting on the mantlepiece of her daughter’s bedroom. The latter cowers on the floor, her arms and head resting on her bed, in obvious distress. Laid out on the bed is the daughter’s wedding dress, the crux of this painting’s riddle.

Édouard Vuillard’s portrait of Lucy Hessel Reading in her bedroom from 1913 needs more context. Lucy was the wife of the art dealer Jos Hessel (1859-1942), and she was a frequent model, companion and long-term lover of Vuillard. At this time, her husband was Vuillard’s sole dealer.

Just before the Second World War, Eric Ravilious painted a series of contemporary and deserted bedrooms.

The Bedstead (1939), with its wide angle projection, is full of patterns: the wallpaper, floorboards and rugs, and features a mass-produced iron bedstead.

In his Farmhouse Bedroom (1939) the patterns are overwhelming, and its projection has become so extreme that it distorts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ask anyone who has lived in the country and they’ll recall its idyllic moments. To end this series, I celebrate a few of those in paintings from the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries.

This Ukrainian farm labourer is caught relaxing for a moment in the sun and flowers of early summer in Mykola Kuznetsov’s early In Celebration (1879-81).

The pair of ploughmen in Giovanni Segantini’s Ploughing may not have had time to study the fine mountain views near the Alpine village of Savognin, but they and the other labourers in the right distance are enjoying the fine weather.

A couple of years later, Segantini’s High Noon in the Alps (1892) catches this shepherdess enjoying a brief break in her work, in the intense summer sunshine of the high plateau.

Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret shows that even itinerant workers could sit together and eat to the music of a violin when living In the Forest in 1893. Behind them are two oxen, and the forest that’s currently their home.

In Poland, Teodor Axentowicz’s painting of Oberek Folk Dance in Front of a House from 1895 shows locals dancing the second most popular Polish folk dance after the polka. Most of these dancers are barefoot.

Edward Stott’s shepherd has stolen a moment of Peaceful Rest as his small flock drinks from a pond. He’s lighting a clay tobacco pipe, with his crook resting on his leg. Most of the painting uses a limited palette, with three splashes of colour standing out: the man’s face lit by the flame, the watchful sheepdog behind him, and a blue object protruding from the man’s jacket pocket.

Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Love in the Village shows a young couple on either side of a tumbledown fence, chatting intimately among the vegetable patches.

Idyllic moments indeed, but what happens in the country is often a far cry from the town.

Nikolai Astrup’s humorous painting of Early Courting from 1904 shows a young couple at the far left engaged in ‘clothed courting’ in the unromantic surroundings of a cowshed. He has a bottle of drink in his pocket; whether that’s to give him courage or to weaken the resistance of his girlfriend is unclear.

The couple have sought the privacy of the cowshed, out of everyone’s way, but the boyfriend appears unaware that they’re being watched by someone up in the roof. From the apparent direction of gaze of the girlfriend and the blush on her cheeks, she has just noticed the peeping tom or watchful relative. The setting is enhanced by the sunlight pouring through the far window, illuminating two rows of the back-ends of cows. The wood floor between the cows appears to be decorated with small sketches, but those are actually piles of cow dung. Courting in the country must have been a sensorily rich experience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reference

Wikipedia on the carol The Holly and the Ivy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Children’s Aid provides essential help with food and housing for families in New York City, where tens of thousands of children live in poverty.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

During the nineteenth century, paintings depicting ‘real’ life of ordinary people became increasingly popular, first in what has become known as social realism, pioneered by Jean-François Millet, then Naturalism, championed by Jules Bastien-Lepage until his untimely death in 1884. Among other themes, these put the case for the rural poor, and the desperate poverty that those living in the country had to endure.

Look carefully at many of their paintings, though, and the underlying stories aren’t as simple. One of the most evident problems is that many of those campaigning paintings used models who had been carefully posed. Look at their hands, feet and hair and you’ll often see someone who appears remarkably clean and kempt with no evidence of prolonged and arduous manual labour, even clothes that lack the dirt and mud so typical of those who work and walk on unpaved tracks and ploughed fields.

At the same time, photographic portraits of the poor became popular among some who sought to advance the art of photography. There are some notorious examples of early photographers who were caught posing carefully selected models in deliberately misleading circumstances, demonstrating how the camera can be made to lie.

My small selection of paintings of country people from the nineteenth century is an attempt to show some that appear most faithful records that weren’t intended to support political views or attract praise at a Salon.

Jules Breton had been born and brought up in the rural village of Courrières, and returned there to paint intimate portraits of those who continued to live there, including this Young Girl Knitting, seen in 1860. Many of these intimate works were sold to private collectors and have never been seen at exhibition.

His portrait of this Mother Feeding her Baby from 1863 shows her wearing clogs, and clothing that has seen better days. She is feeding a very young baby in front of a frugal fire in what can only be her normal domestic conditions.

Jean-François Millet had been born in the village of Gruchy, and was the first child of a farming family. Although his portrait of A Norman Milkmaid at Gréville from 1871 lacks fine detail to reinforce its authenticity, she’s clearly grubby and wasn’t painted in the studio.

Max Liebermann’s The Preserve Makers from 1879 shows a shed full of country women preparing foodstuffs for bottling and canning; the latter gradually came into use after 1810, but didn’t become popular until the First World War. This shows well the light factory work that was introduced to country areas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the women who provided its labour force.

Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret’s An Accident from 1879 is an exception among these, in that it was not only submitted to the Salon of 1880, but won the artist a first-class medal. It was also supposedly painted from memory, showing an incident that the artist witnessed with a medical friend who was similarly called to assist with an injury.

Despite that, it shows a country doctor cleaning and bandaging the injured hand of a boy, as the rest of the extended family looks on. Conditions appear primitive: the small bowl of water is heavily blood-stained, and the cloth by it looks filthy. It’s also rich in detail that appears authentic, from the boy’s shoe compared with that of the doctor, to the bald man standing in front of a treasured grandfather clock in the right background.

Of Bastien-Lepage’s many portraits of country people, his Nothing Doing from 1882 appears the most convincing. From his unlaced mud-caked boots to his filthy and frayed waistcoat, this young agricultural worker looks the part. Bastien had spent his childhood in the village of Damvillers, although he was the son of a local artist. He frequently returned to his home village to paint local characters, such as this boy.

The young woman in Breton’s Song of the Lark (1884) has detailed features that appear true to life, in her bare feet with grubby and battered toenails, and hands that have seen hard work with the hook she holds.

Évariste Carpentier had been born into a farming family near the small town of Kuurne in Belgium. The Turnip Washer from 1890 is among the last of his thoroughly Naturalist paintings. Alongside the farmyard birds, two figures are busy washing piles of turnips in a small and dirty pond.

Throughout the career of Léon Augustin Lhermitte he painted the working lives of farmworkers and country people. In his pastel of The Farmworkers’ Supper from 1913, he shows those who have been working outdoors during the long day enjoying a meal at its end.

Together these paintings build a dispassionate image of a countryside that might have been lacking in worldly goods, but was hardly starved and pestilent. And, as I’ll show in the next and concluding article, at times rural life could still be idyllic.

（Abstract）令和年代，孩子的名字越来越多样化。不过相同读音还是会出现很多困扰。

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They serve a social function that’s surprisingly important.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The late nineteenth century brought great changes throughout Europe. Country areas were depopulated as cities attracted labour to work in their factories, lured by the empty promise of material comforts. Food markets became dominated by larger suppliers and merchants, and smaller farms with low yields found themselves unable to compete. Although mechanisation was developing rapidly, machinery cost money, and smaller farms were unable to benefit from the productivity improvements occurring on larger farms.

One substantial improvement that many could use was better drainage of arable land. Although hardly technological, as most land drains are made from baked clay, many areas across Europe had suffered waterlogging of their best fields during the winter. Land drains dug into the field to draw water to a ditch at the edge significantly increased areas under cultivation, as well as crop yields.

More substantial drainage works had already turned large areas of bog and marsh into productive farmland, throughout the Netherlands, and in areas like the Fens in England during the decades prior to 1820. Both remain among the largest civil engineering projects undertaken in Europe.

Steam engines came into agricultural use in the late nineteenth century. At first they were largely static, but from the 1860s they became self-propelled, now known as traction engines and still a popular feature of country fairs. Teams travelled the countryside hiring out the services of their steam engine for threshing and ploughing.

After the First World War, internal combustion engines replaced steam, and the first real tractors came into use.

Heinrich Vogeler’s Farmer Ploughing from the period 1930-42 shows a tractor with an internal combustion engine and its own tracks, towing a heavy plough.

Lighter wheeled tractors became popular during the middle of the twentieth century. Percy Shakespeare’s painting of December on the Downs, Wartime, made in the period 1939-44, is its own lesson in agricultural history. In the distance, on one of the rolling chalk downs in the south of England, are three horse-drawn ploughs tackling some of the steeper ground.

With a high proportion of men serving in the armed forces, the two tractors in the foreground are being driven and tended by young women, dubbed the Women’s Land Army. The further of the two tractors is drawing a lighweight wheeled plough, better suited to this land.

In 1942, when Frances Hodgkins was living in the south-west of England, at Corfe Castle in Dorset, she painted this gouache of Broken Tractor showing the mechanical disarray that overtook many farmyards during the twentieth century, as their ageing farm machinery fell beyond economic repair.

With networks of railways and later roads reaching deep into many country districts, agricultural produce could be transported in bulk and travel from producer to consumer in a matter of hours. Early morning trains carrying milk to cities became widespread.

JMW Turner was among the first painters to capture this in his Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway in 1844. This pioneering railway connected London with rich farming country across the south of England, down into western counties, eventually reaching Cornwall in 1859, fifteen years after Turner had completed this painting.

Giuseppe De Nittis here shows The Passing of a Train through productive French countryside between 1869-80.

The winners here though were those farmers who were already prospering. Smallholders and others who still farmed using traditional methods were left behind, in increasing poverty and neglect.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the first of these two articles looking at paintings depicting change in New York City between the mid-1880s and 1920, I had just introduced the paintings of skyscrapers by Colin Campbell Cooper.

For those less familiar with New York City at the end of the nineteenth century, this contemporary map might help.

Cooper’s Broadway from the Post Office (Wall Street) (c 1909) is another of his most famous skyscraper cityscapes, showing the Singer Building or Tower, at Liberty Street and Broadway, that had only just been completed, and was still the tallest building in the world. Below in Broadway itself the street is packed with people. The golden light on the walls of the buildings is particularly strong, and clouds of steam enhance its effect. The Singer Building, then the headquarters of the Singer Manufacturing Company, was demolished in 1968, and replaced by 1 Liberty Plaza.

Cooper’s Columbus Circle from 1909 is less about the vertical, and more the interaction of jumbled buildings, light, smoke, and steam. With Gaetano Russo’s landmark statue of Christopher Columbus just to the right of centre, the circle had only been completed in 1905, as part of Frederick Law Olmsted’s vision for Central Park, which is off to the right. In the foreground, Cooper shows some of the more intimate sights of this new elevated world, with a woman hanging out her washing amid the chimneys.

New York from Brooklyn (c 1910) shows the busy piers of Brooklyn still operating as the major gateway into the East Coast, and the ultimate collection of skyscrapers, most of which had only recently been completed. The colour contrast between the pale gold faces in sunlight and the almost purple of cast shadow is characteristic of Cooper’s style.

George Bellows trained with Robert Henri in New York, and worked from his own studio in the city for much of his career. As Cooper was busy painting skyscrapers, Bellows concentrated on the lives of working class migrants living in the tenements of Lower East Side.

He showed the deep excavations required for the construction of the city’s skyscrapers.

Bellows’ The Bridge, Blackwell’s Island (1909) shows the Queensboro Bridge linking Manhattan with Queens to the east. Its piers rest on Blackwell’s Island (now known as Roosevelt Island). This view was painted from the Manhattan end in December 1909, shortly after it had been opened, when it was the greatest cantilever bridge in the world.

New York (1911) balances the world of the people of New York, with that of their buildings. It was shown that year in the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design, in New York, and annually thereafter for the rest of Bellows’ career, but wasn’t sold until after his death.

Bellows’ famous Cliff Dwellers (1913) shows the largely immigrant population of tenements in Lower East Side. This was the first painting to be purchased by the county of Los Angeles for its new museum of art, in 1916, where it remains today.

In his later paintings, Cooper moved from the solid mass of skyscrapers to greater lightness and greenery. Although one high building is still present in his New York Public Library (c 1915), the street is less densely packed, and the plants and trees brilliant green.

Joseph Stella was Italian by birth, and first migrated to New York City in 1896 to study medicine. He soon changed his mind, though, and studied painting under William Merritt Chase, at the Art Students League and the New York School of Art. On completion of his training, he worked as an illustrator, but became increasingly unhappy, so returned to Italy in 1909. He travelled back to New York City in 1913, to give the US a second try, and stayed in the city until his death there in 1946.

Stella was attracted to the dazzling electric lights of Luna Park (1913) on Coney Island, which had opened a decade earlier. His new style developed when he had been in Paris was startlingly different, and Futurist.

This was followed by Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras (1913), one of the earliest, and still among the greatest, of American Futurist paintings. Although it’s sometimes claimed that it was exhibited at the famous (even notorious) International Exhibition of Modern Art held in New York in early 1913, known now as the Armory Show, Stella didn’t complete it until the autumn of that year, when it went on display in a private gallery in New York.

Stella was nothing if not eclectic. In 1919-20, he painted probably his best-known work, this Cubist geometric analysis of Brooklyn Bridge (1919-20).

As he grew older, Colin Campbell Cooper still apparently craved the occasional skyscraper, and must have painted Hudson River Waterfront, New York City (c 1921) when he was back in his East Coast studio. The highlit and tallest building on the left is the Woolworth Building, completed in 1913, and until 1930 the tallest building in the world, at 241.4 metres. But here the clouds are also built up high, and rise to belittle such human structures, as they did in landscape paintings of the Dutch Golden Age.