Before the Dutch Golden Age, painting scenes at night had been restricted to religious and other narrative works, and very few if any landscapes had been depicted during the hours of darkness. After all, what’s the point of a view if it’s all dark and you can’t admire it?

The Dutch Republic changed that, in part because it was in Northern Europe, where for several months each year it’s mostly dark, and these nocturnes had novelty value. Among those of the middle class who could afford to, it was fashionable to cover the walls inside your house with paintings, and nocturnes, known then as maneschijntjes (moonshines), certainly brought variety to those collections.

Aelbert Cuyp’s view of the Sea by Moonlight from about 1648 is one of the earlier maritime nocturnes, something of a sub-sub-genre that must have been sought after. Unlike many others, this appears to be faithful to the original light.

During the 1640s, Aert van der Neer, a landscape painter in Amsterdam, started experimenting with his first nocturnes, and came to specialise in them.

His River View by Moonlight from about 1650-55 shows a bustling village on a river, with several boats under way and two windmills in the distance. The moon appears to be depicted faithfully in terms of size, without the common tendency to exaggerate that as a result of the Moon Illusion. Surviving studies for some of these nocturnes demonstrate that van der Neer initially sketched a landscape in daylight, and based the detail in his finished studio painting on that.

In about 1655, he painted this finely detailed River Landscape with Moonlight, with a larger moon lighting clouds dramatically.

Some of his best nocturnes are lit by a combination of the moon and the warmer light from a fire. This undated Estuary Landscape by Moonlight uses light from both sources to great effect. Landscape details are shown largely in silhouette, and lack internal detail except in the group gathered around the fire in the foreground. Van der Neer is unusually faithful to reality in this monochrome, the result of the severely impaired colour vision we all suffer in conditions of low light, when there’s insufficient to enable colour vision using the cone cells in the human retina.

At some stage, van der Neer started painting more destructive fires, including this undated Fire in Amsterdam by Night, leading to another sub-sub-genre that was taken up by others.

In mid 1652, Jan Abrahamsz Beerstraaten seems to have witnessed the destruction by fire of part of the centre of Amsterdam, which formed the basis of his studio painting of The Old Town Hall of Amsterdam on Fire, 7 July 1652 (1652-55). Local inhabitants are walking in orderly queues to boats, in which they escape from the scene. This may have been the same fire painted by van der Neer, above.

Egbert van der Poel specialised in these brandjes,, and probably painted more than any other artist in history. He moved to Delft in 1650, and four years later was a victim of the massive explosion in a gunpowder store there on 12 October 1654. That killed one of his children, and he moved again to Rotterdam.

It has been thought that most of van der Poel’s Fire of a Church with Staffage and Cattle from 1658 is a carefully-composed composite of his experiences. A small church at the edge of a village is well ablaze, and the inhabitants are abandoning it, taking all the possessions they can, including their horses and livestock, and leaving the fire to burn itself out.

Van der Poel’s undated A Fire at Night shows a similar scene and composition, set this time on the bank of a canal.

One established exception to this is van der Poel’s Fire in De Rijp of 1654, completed in 1662. This shows a fire that worked its way through more than eight hundred buildings in the town of De Rijp during the night of 6 January 1654. This left only the northern section of the town standing and inhabitable, and resulted in more casualties than did the more famous explosion in Delft at the end of that year.

Doubt is cast on this received account of van der Poel’s work by sketches such as this, of The Fire in the Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam, in 1645, made in front of the motif using washes with touches of pen and brown ink. Perhaps he was the first ‘ambulance chaser’ who travelled out to sketch fires, from which he later painted his famous brandjes in the studio.

For the non-specialist like Jacob van Ruisdael, winter was an ideal opportunity to explore the effect of negative images, where objects that would normally be seen as dark on a light background were reversed to white on dark.

Van Ruisdael painted at least two such landscapes featuring trees. Both are now known by the same name, and are believed to be from the same decade. This Winter Landscape (c 1660-70), in the Mauritshuis, picks out frosted leaves in the half-light of dusk or dawn, by a hamlet at the water’s edge. In the far distance, to the left of the buildings, there is a church with a spire.

The other version of Winter Landscape (c 1660-70) is in Birmingham, Alabama. With similar sky, cloud, lighting, and composition, the water here appears to have frozen over. The frost on the trees is just as delicately handled.

Almost all who paint in oils use conventional brushes, but there’s a significant minority who sometimes, or frequently, use different tools to apply and shape the paint layer. Of those, the most popular are palette knives, generally used to move and mix paint on the palette. Others have used the other end of the brush stick to incise, or their fingers.

Marie Bashkirtseff’s painting of a class in the Académie Julien in Paris in 1881 demonstrates how oil painting should be done by the textbook. The artist, shown in her self-portrait in the centre foreground, is using a long-bladed palette knife to prepare the paint on her palette. At her feet, on an old sheet of newspaper, are her brushes, all with handles of typical length, and the pupil behind her is using a maul stick to rest her right hand while painting with her brush.

Gustave Courbet applied his paint using a palette knife for some of his paintings. This has been identified from the facture in some of his paintings of caves that he made from about 1864, including The Grotto of Sarrazine near Nans-sous-Sainte-Anne above.

Another enthusiast for painting with a knife was Auguste Renoir.

In 1866, Renoir painted his friend Jules Le Coeur and his Dogs in the Forest of Fontainebleau. This is unusual among his works, as it was preceded by two studies, and all three were made using the palette knife rather than brushes. This makes it most likely to have been painted before Renoir abandoned the knife and returned to the brush, by the middle of May 1866.

Renoir returned to the technique in The Mosque, also known as Arab Festival, in 1881. Small strokes of bright colour and energetic work with the palette knife give it a strong feeling of movement, and it so impressed Claude Monet that he bought it from Durand-Ruel in 1900.

Anna Althea Hills’ Fall, Orange County Park (1916) is a classic and highly accomplished plein air painting that appears to have been made with extensive and deft use of the knife, particularly in the foreground.

Perhaps the most famous artist who is known to have painted with his fingers is Leonardo da Vinci.

This Annunciation, painted in oil and tempera on a poplar panel, is generally agreed to be one of the earliest of Leonardo’s own surviving paintings. When it was painted is in greater doubt, but a suggestion of around 1473-75 seems most appropriate. There are numerous pentimenti, particularly in the head of the Virgin. Its perspective projection is marked in scores in its ground and Leonardo used his spontaneous and characteristic technique of fingerpainting in some of its passages.

Finally, some painters are well-known for their use of brushes with exceptionally long handles. These enabled them to stand back, sometimes almost on the opposite side of their studio, get an overall view of their canvas, and paint from the same distance as a viewer.

Like all plein air painters, Paul César Helleu (1859–1927) shown in John Singer Sargent’s An Out-of-Doors Study from about 1889, is using brushes with handles of modest length. His canvas is fairly small, and he’s working close-in while clutching a brace of brushes in his left hand. Some designed for use when painting in front of the motif have even shorter handles, but when back in the studio Helleu would almost certainly have opted for longer.

Whistler was renowned for using brushes with handles over one metre (39 inches) long, and appears to have used them when painting Symphony in White No. 1: The White Girl in 1862 on a canvas just over two metres (78 inches) tall. He reworked it between 1867-72 to make it more ‘spiritual’ and reduce its original realism.

Early in his career, Joaquín Sorolla established his reputation of painting ‘voraciously’, often using brushes with extremely long handles and large canvases. Although Sewing the Sail from 1896 may look a spontaneous study of the effects of dappled light, Sorolla composed this carefully with the aid of at least two drawings and a sketch, and given its 2.2 metre (87 inches) height, he was almost certainly using brushes of similar length.

When a group of devils armed with long hooks threatens Dante, Virgil hurries him along towards the next rottenpocket in Hell. They work their way around some of the damage wrought by Christ’s harrowing of Hell following his crucifixion. With those devils still hanging around, they then reach a pit of boiling tar, in which the spirits of barrators are trapped. These had traded in public office and bought influence in courts of law.

The devils pull out one of the souls for Dante and Virgil to talk to, but quickly return to hacking with their hooks.

Unlike others, he springs free and escapes their lunges as he plunges back into the pitch.

Dante and Virgil leave the devils attacking other barrators, and walk on in silence. Dante reflects on one of Aesop’s fables about the frog, the rat and the hawk. He blames himself for the tormenting of the devils behind them, but as he looks back he sees them on the wing again heading towards them. As they cross into the next rottenpocket, they realise the pack of devils can’t pursue them beyond that point.

Next are hypocrites, who are dressed up in hooded habits like monks. Although those are coloured bright gold, they’re weighted with lead, forcing the hypocrites into eternal labour against the mass of their clothes.

Dante meets two Bolognese friars, Catalano de’ Malavolti and Loderingo degli Andalò, who formed a fake religious order. They point out a figure staked out naked on the ground, who is Caiaphas, the High Priest of Jerusalem who advised scribes and pharisees that Christ’s death would be a good solution.

Virgil moves Dante on towards the damaged crossing to the next rottenpocket for thieves. After negotiating their descent, Dante sees its pit full of snakes, binding the hands of the souls there and covering their naked bodies.

A snake strikes one of the sinners at the back of the neck, causing the ghost to burst into flames then turn into ash, which falls onto the ground and reconstitutes itself.

There they talk with one of the thieves by the name of Vanni Fucci, a black Guelph from Pistoia near Florence who had stolen holy objects from a chapel and betrayed an accomplice for execution in his place. The snakes then take charge of him, winding their coils around his neck and body, and putting him into a reptile straightjacket.

Dante and Virgil move on and meet a centaur.

The artists

William Blake (1757–1827) was a British visionary painter and illustrator whose last and incomplete work was an illustrated edition of the Divine Comedy for the painter John Linnell. Most of his works shown in this series were created for that, although he did draw and paint scenes during his earlier career. I have a major series on his work here.

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Early in his career, he produced a complete set of seventy illustrations for translations of the Inferno, first published in 1857 and still being used. These were followed in 1867 by more illustrations for Purgatorio and Paradiso. This article looks at his paintings.

John Flaxman (1755–1826) was a British sculptor and draughtsman who occasionally painted too. When he was in Rome between 1787-91, he produced drawings for book illustrations, including a set of 111 for an edition of The Divine Comedy. In 1810, he was appointed the Professor of Sculpture to the Royal Academy in London, and in 1817 made drawings to illustrate Hesiod, which were engraved by William Blake.

Joseph Anton Koch (1768-1839) was an Austrian landscape painter, who worked mainly in Neoclassical style. During his second stay in Rome, he was commissioned to paint frescos in the Villa Massimi on the walls of the Dante Room there, which remain one of the most florid visual accounts of Dante’s Inferno. He completed those between 1824-29. He also appears to have drawn a set of illustrations for Dante’s Inferno in about 1808.

Bartolomeo Pinelli (1781-1835) was a Roman illustrator and engraver who provided illustrations for a great many books, and specialised in the city of Rome. He made 145 prints to illustrate Dante’s Divine Comedy, most probably in the early nineteenth century.

Jan van der Straet, also commonly known by his Italianised name of Giovanni Stradano (1523-1605), was a painter who started his career in Bruges and Antwerp in Belgium, but moved to Florence in 1550, where he worked for the remainder of his life. Mannerist in style, he worked with printmakers in Antwerp to produce collections of prints, including an extensive set for The Divine Comedy.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

Robin Kirkpatrick (trans) (2012) Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, Penguin Classics. ISBN 978 0 141 19749 4.
Richard Lansing (ed) (2000) The Dante Encyclopedia, Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 87611 7.
Guy P Raffa (2009) The Complete Danteworlds, A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy, Chicago UP. ISBN 978 0 2267 0270 4.
Prue Shaw (2014) Reading Dante, From Here to Eternity, Liveright. ISBN 978 1 63149 006 4.

In yesterday’s article I showed excerpts from two cycles of paintings of the journey of life, by Nicolas Poussin and Thomas Cole, and started the epic series of 34 images by Louis Janmot that constitute his Le Poème de l’âme (Poem of the Soul). The last painting of his depicted the child growing up in an idyllic country landscape in Spring.

The child’s family are at home during a thunderstorm, shown by flashes of lightning at the window. Grandmother reads a psalm to calm the spirit, while the mother and another young woman sit and sew. Father (a self-portrait at the age of thirty) looks on with concern. An even older woman, perhaps the great-grandmother, sits in the shadows near the window.

The couple have grown now, and find themselves walking along a path by the university. In the niches alongside the path are its professors, each offering false learning that might replace their faith. That learning is represented by the combination of papers and a lighted candle. In the niche closest to the viewer is the figure of death itself, its niche decorated with skeletons. The land is rocky and barren, with a wizened tree, where an owl is perched.

Still dressed in their gowns from their First Communion at church, the two sit together by a pond, with high mountain peaks in the distance. The boy is stroking a dove, a symbol of peace, while the girl strokes a panther, indicating tamed passions. They both hold a lily, for purity, which separates and unifies them.

In a revisit of Jacob’s Ladder, the pair fall asleep in the woods, and dream of a perpetual cycle of nine angels ascending and descending a staircase leading towards God in heaven. The angels each carry a symbol of the arts, such as a musical instrument.

The couple now face life’s challenges, symbolised by the ascent of a mountain, a task they accomplish together. So they achieve the ideals of life, both earthly and spiritual. This also indicates their exploration of space, and the world in which they live.

Later, when they have reached adulthood, she bids him farewell when she is called to ascend to heaven.

Now a man, returned to earth alone, his spirit back in heaven, he kneels before a wooden cross decorated with a garland of flowers that she left him. (It’s said this refers back to flowers she wore at their First Communion, but no such flowers appear in the paintings.) He pines for her memory, as breaks in the cloud cast bright sunlight down on patches of the earth.

Janmot’s story concludes in his series of charcoal drawings, where the man falls in love, but is abandoned. He then experiences doubt and falls into evil ways in an orgy. He suffers, and ages as a result of his sins, but his plight is taken by his mother to Jesus and the Virgin Mary in heaven for their intercession.

The intercession was successful, and a team led by an angel arrives to address the man’s plight. The woman’s corpse is despatched into the waves, perhaps in a form of burial at sea. The angel’s team consists of two other women, who sit and read from books held open by putti. At their feet are symbolic animals: a lion (strength), fox (cunning), and sheep (the sacrifice of Jesus Christ). Above them are three more putti, bearing symbolic objects including a large fish-hook, whose meaning is obscure.

The man is welcomed back at a heavenly Eucharist – the title is from the early words of the service, in Latin. Angels swing censors, there are rows of pious kings and clergy, and in the distance, descending a flight of steps, is the figure of Christ himself, bearing a lamb on his shoulders. The group at the right foreground contains the man’s soul, who looks directly at the viewer. With this, Janmot’s epic is concluded.

Just over a decade after Janmot completed that series of 34 images, Walter Crane condensed his account of the journey of life into a single painting.

Crane’s allegorical narrative of life as a bridge appears unique to him. It shows a newborn baby arriving in the hand of a winged angel in a white punt/gondola, left of centre. The baby is handed over to a mother or nurse, fed at the breast at the bottom left corner, walking up the steps, and learning at the top. Children play, then grow into young adults, and marry as they reach the top of the bridge. Throughout this runs the thread of life.

The mature adult in the middle of the bridge (by its keystone) then ages steadily, bearing the whole globe during the descent. He then gains a long white beard and walking stick during the descent into old age, finally dying, his body being placed in the black punt/gondola, where it is attended by the angel of death. Grieving relatives stand on the shore and make their farewells, one cutting the thread securing the boat to the shore with a pair of traditional scissors.

Crane explained the theme of his Bridge of Life (1884) as “fortune and fame pursued and ever eluding the grasp; til the crown perhaps is gained, but the burden of the intolerable work has to be borne.” It was first shown at the Grosvenor Gallery, then toured venues in the East End of London during a period of social and labour unrest.

My final series is the second of two Friezes of Life assembled by the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. He seems to have started thinking about this during the 1880s, but it wasn’t until the early 1890s that it crystallised in his personal notebooks. He talked about building them into a ‘symphony’ in early 1893, and by the end of that year exhibited his first self-contained series of images in Berlin, under the title A Human Life.

During 1893 and 1894, Munch painted most of the works that were to form his first Frieze of Life, exhibited in March 1895, in Ugo Barroccio’s gallery in Berlin. His own explanation is that “the paintings are moods, impressions of the life of the soul, and together they represent one aspect of the battle, between man and woman, that is called love” (Heller, in Wood, 1992).

Munch later assembled his second and mature version, titled Frieze: Cycle of Moments from Life, and exhibited it in Berlin in 1902. It then consisted of twenty-two paintings, arranged in four sections. Here I show a small selection of some of the better-known paintings from that.

The Boston version of Summer Night’s Dream (The Voice) (1893), included in the 1895 version of the Frieze, was here titled Evening Star. It shows Munch’s lover ‘Mrs Heiberg’ at the edge of the Borre Woods, to the north of Åsgårdstrand. This features a brilliant golden-yellow pillar of reflected moonlight on the fjord, forming a distinctive ‘i‘ that appears in other paintings. This work initiates a sequence in which Munch gives his personal account of the process of falling in love.

Evening on Karl Johan shows the crowd from his painting Anxiety in an autobiographical scene. During Munch’s affair with ‘Mrs Heiberg’, he had arranged to meet her on Karl Johans Gate, the long, straight main street in the centre of Oslo. As he waited for her, his anxiety grew, exacerbated by crowds of people walking towards him.

Munch’s later depiction of this greatly foreshortens the perspective of this section of the street from the Royal Palace towards the Storting (parliament building), a distance of around 300 metres. This packs the pedestrians together and, coupled with their nightmarish faces, enhances its troubling feeling of anxiety.

A later section closes with The Scream, showing the isolated figure of Munch before the distant city of Oslo, its fjord with ships at anchor, and the surrounding hills. As the artist’s notes explain:
I was walking along a path with two friends. The sun was setting. I felt a breath of melancholy. Suddenly the sky turned blood-red. I stopped and leant against the railing, deathly tired, looking out across flaming clouds that hung like – blood and a sword over the deep blue fjord and town. My friends walked on – I stood there trembling with anxiety, and I felt a great, infinite scream pass through nature.

By the Deathbed (1895) is Munch’s painting from memory of his sister Sophie resting in her deathbed in 1877, when she was 15 and the artist wasn’t quite 14 years old. She died of tuberculosis, an unfortunately common event at the time. Munch explained that, when painting from memory like this, he depicted only what he could remember, and was careful to avoid trying to add details he no longer saw.

Sophie is seen from her head, looking along her length to her feet, her figure compressed into almost nothing by extreme foreshortening. Her deathbed resembles the next step, in which her body will be laid out in a coffin prior to burial. More than half the painting is filled by the rest of the family, father with his hands clasped in intense prayer. At the right is the mother, who had died of tuberculosis herself nearly nine years earlier.

References

Janmot’s Le Poème de l’âme: Wikipedia (in French).
Janmot’s Poem of the Soul 1
Janmot’s Poem of the Soul 2
Janmot’s Poem of the Soul 3
Janmot’s Poem of the Soul 4

Munch’s Frieze of Life
The Munch Museum, Oslo.
Wood, Mara-Helen (ed) (1992) Edvard Munch, The Frieze of Life, National Gallery Publications. ISBN 978 1 857 09015 4.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

The appearance of new objects or unexpected phenomena in the sky was an event of great significance in the past, and often considered to be a portent of the future, good or bad. This article considers the few that were recorded in paintings, and starts with the most famous of all, the star of Bethlehem that appears in many depictions of the birth of Christ.

The linked stories of the birth of Christ in a shed at Bethlehem, and the subsequent adoration of the infant by three wise men, kings or Magi “from the east”, are among the most popular and enduring among paintings in the Christian canon. The outlines given in the Gospels of Luke, chapter 2, and Matthew, chapter 2, have conventionally become elaborated.

Three wise men had seen a new star, possibly a comet or an unusually bright planet, which they believed would lead them to the birth of a great prophet. They travelled by the guidance of that star, to arrive at Bethlehem. There they found the newborn Christ with Mary his mother, paid homage to him in the shed in which the holy family was lodging, and presented their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

Giotto’s Adoration of the Magi from about 1305 shows the star as a celestial ball of fire streaking across the sky, and the three wise men pay their respects to the newborn Christ and his mother.

Above Bosch’s view of the local Brabant countryside in his Adoration of the Magi of 1490-1500 he places a more modest and stationary star shining bright over its distant city, as shown in the detail below.

Blake’s version of the Adoration of the Kings is conventional in showing the three wise men presenting their gifts to Jesus and his parents. At the left, outside, shepherds are tending to their flocks of sheep beneath a stylised star, and at the right are the ox and ass.

There remains controversy over what celestial event might have occurred at the time.

Very few paintings show known events in the sky, and I know of only one depicting a full solar eclipse.

Although many painters, particularly the Impressionists, have shown fleeting effects of light and the occasional rainbow, Enrique Simonet took the opportunity of a solar eclipse on 30 August 1905 to paint his Eclipse (1905). This was visible across eastern and northern Spain between about 1300 and 1320 UTC, and this painting is one of its few remaining records.

Realistic paintings of comets are also rare, and unimpressive.

Generally acclaimed as William Dyce’s finest painting, Pegwell Bay, Kent – a Recollection of October 5th 1858 (c 1858) shows this bay on the Kent coast, during a family holiday visit: a coastal scene worked up into a large finished oil painting. Although not easily seen in this image, there’s a small point of light high in the middle of the sky which is Donati’s comet, not due to return until 3811. Couple that with the inclination of the sun and the state of the tide, and you should be able to place this view precisely in both time and space, and confirm that it does indeed show this bay on 5 October 1858.

A few paintings show impossible celestial events.

John Martin’s painting of The Deluge from 1834 has two points of reference: the Biblical account of the flood, and Martin’s personal belief in prior catastrophe. As the sciences became ascendant during the nineteenth century, some educated people believed that in the past there had been an alignment of the sun, earth, and moon, and the collision of a comet resulting in global flooding. This was promoted by the French natural scientist Baron Georges Cuvier, and subscribed to by Martin.

True to form, his painting is dark and apocalyptic: near the centre, tiny survivors are just about to be overwhelmed by an immense wave bearing down at them from the left and above. The misaligned sun and moon barely penetrate the dense cloud, and to the top right is a melée of rock avalanche and lightning bolt. This was awarded a gold medal at the Paris Salon of 1835.

Several of Paul Nash’s surrealist landscapes show the moon in its phases, among them Landscape of the Vernal Equinox (III) from 1944, which presents the impossible view of a full moon and the sun visible close together and just above the horizon.

In the autumn of 1888, Christian Krohg married Oda Engelhardt, his former pupil, in Oslo. Although their relationship appears to have been open and stormy at times, Krohg now had a partner and a family to paint.

In the summer of 1888, the Krohgs returned to Skagen in Denmark where he painted Oda Krohg (1888). Although not as clinical as his series of portraits of the Gaihede family there, he uses the same profile pose, with his subject looking straight ahead as if in an identity photograph. That contrasts with his informal and sketchy facture.

Krohg’s three-quarter length Portrait of the Painter Oda Krohg, née Lasson (1888) is a marked contrast. Although still quite formal in its composition, Oda is here shown in her role as a ‘princess of the Bohemians’ that sadly overshadowed her own art.

Over this period Krohg had been working on his next major painting, The Struggle for Existence, also translated as The Struggle for Survival (1889). It shows Karl Johan Street in Oslo in the depths of winter, almost deserted except for a tight-packed crowd of poor women and children queuing for free bread. This is the central street in the capital city, and three years later was to be the setting for Edvard Munch’s famous painting of Evening on Karl Johan Street.

These people are wrapped up in patched and tatty clothing, clutching baskets and other containers in which to put the food. A disembodied hand is passing a single bread roll out to them, from within the pillars at the left edge. That was yesterday’s bread; now stale, the baker is giving it away only because he cannot sell it. A policeman, wearing a heavy coat and fur hat, walks in the distance, down the middle of the icy street, detached from the scene.

On this pessimistic note, Krohg’s ‘naturalism’ or social realism came to an end.

The Krohgs spent the summer of 1889 not at Skagen, but in the coastal resort of Åsgårdstrand, about sixty miles (100 km) south of Oslo. Nearly ten years later, Edvard Munch was to buy a summer house here. The Krohgs’ son Per, their second child, was born there that summer, and was almost certainly the model for In the Bathtub (1889). This shows the ceremonial surrounding the bathing of a newborn baby, with the mother and women relatives providing endless advice and taking charge of the event.

In the autumn, the family travelled to Copenhagen, Denmark, where they lived until early summer of 1890. They made a short visit to France, where Krohg was awarded a bronze medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. At this time, he had been working as a journalist and teaching, particularly at the painting school run by Harriet Backer.

When he was living in Copenhagen, Krohg painted one of his few works in Impressionist style, View over Frederiksberg, Copenhagen (1890), but decided not to further pursue landscape painting.

Instead, Krohg painted some history of contemporary relevance. Returning to his seafaring theme, his next successful work was a period drama dear to the Nordic heart: Leiv Eirikson Discovering America (1893). Leif Erikson was Nordic and had probably been one of the Norse inhabitants of Iceland between about 970-1020. The son of Erik the Red, who colonised Greenland, Leif visited Norway in about 999, and according to the Icelandic Sagas went on later to discover Newfoundland in Canada. When Krohg painted this, no archaeological evidence had been discovered to support the sagas, and that didn’t follow until 1960.

Krohg’s choice of motif drew on growing contemporary desire for complete independence of Norway from Sweden, and referred to the many Norwegians who had migrated to a better life in the US.

Probably painted in the same year, Krohg’s 17th of May 1893 was an even bolder statement about Norway’s nationhood. The seventeenth of May had been increasingly celebrated as Constitution Day since the signing of the national constitution in 1814. Not only is this painting full of Norwegian people, but the Norwegian flag shown lacks the ‘herring salad’ badge marking the union of Norway with Sweden, a clear indication of his feelings about independence.

From the autumn of 1893, Krohg was away from home almost constantly. He first went to Copenhagen, then on to Berlin and Paris. He stayed in Skagen for his last summer there in 1894 before returning to Oslo.

In 1895, he painted one of his more enigmatic works, a throwback to his social narratives, and something of a ‘problem picture’: Eyewitnesses. It’s nighttime in a living room. Two fishermen stand in front of a door, still wearing their soaked and soiled oilskins, and appear to have entered the room straight after coming ashore from the sea. One stares in shock towards the viewer, the other looks down and away. Both appear full of unease, silent and immobile.

At the right, a young woman is standing, leaning forward towards the men, as if listening to them. She looks anxious, with her hands clasped in front of her chest. Behind her an oil lamp burns brightly, there are the leaves of a large potted plant, and a couple of paintings on the wall behind a large blue settee.

One possible reading is that the men have brought news of the loss at sea of the woman’s husband, an event of which they were eyewitnesses.

In the coming years Krohg was to return to the sea in his paintings.

References

Skagens Museum, Denmark
Øystein Sjåstad (2017) Christian Krohg’s Naturalism, U Washington Press. ISBN 978 0 295 74206 9.

Before the Dutch Golden Age, paintings of everyday life, now widely termed genre paintings, were seldom seen. That changed in the Dutch Republic, when they became among the most popular, if not the majority. Several of the best known artists of this period specialised in them, among them Gerard ter Borch (1617–1681) who made himself something of an international career as a result.

Ter Borch was born in the city of Zwolle, well to the east of Amsterdam. As his father was also an artist with the same name, he’s sometimes distinguished as Gerard ter Borch the Younger. He had already started to travel in 1632, when he was training in Amsterdam, and for the next twenty years or so he painted in England, Germany, France, Spain and Italy.

For the thirty years between 1618-1648, central Europe had been engulfed in a bitter war between the Habsburg states, including the Holy Roman Empire and Spain, and their enemies, including the Dutch Republic. Ter Borch’s magnificent painting of The Ratification of the Treaty of Münster, 15 May 1648 (1648) recorded the moment that the Thirty Years War ended, with the ratification of this treaty between the Dutch Republic and Spain. It also marked the birth of the Dutch Republic as an independent country.

The artist even seized the opportunity to include himself among the ranks of dignitaries: he is at the far left, with long hair and looking directly at the viewer. Although this may look a large and grand work, ter Borch painted it on copper, and it is little larger than a miniature.

But most of his surviving works are portraits and interior scenes of everyday life.

The Messenger, popularly know as Unwelcome News, from 1653, develops what came to be one of his favourite themes. The young man at the left is still booted and spurred from riding to deliver a message to this couple. Slung over his shoulder is a trumpet, to announce his arrival and importance. The recipient wears a shiny breastplate and riding boots, and is taken aback at the news. His wife leans on her husband’s thigh, her face looking serious.

The scene is the front room of a house in the Golden Age. Behind them is a traditional bed (typical in living areas at the time), with some of their possessions resting on a table between the couple and their bed. Hanging up on a bedpost is the husband’s sword, and behind them is a gun and powder horn. Is the letter news of his recall to military service, perhaps? Will he soon have to ride away from his wife, leaving her to bring up their family?

At about the same time, ter Borch painted A Maid Milking a Cow in a Barn (c 1652-54), incorporating its own still life of everyday farming objects including a winnowing sieve and an axe.

Mother Combing the Hair of Her Child (c 1652-53) shows a regular domestic routine, expressed more bluntly in its alternative title of Hunting for Lice. The mother is looking intently at her young daughter’s hair for traces of lice and nits, and running a fine-tooth comb through it to remove any.

Three Figures Conversing in an Interior (c 1653-55) is another of his narrative genre works, and more popularly known as Paternal Admonition. Standing with her back to us, wearing a plush going-out dress, is the daughter. To her left is a table, on which there is a small reading stand with books, almost certainly including a Bible. Her parents are young, and they too are fashionably dressed. Her mother appears to be drinking from a glass, but her father is at the very least cautioning his daughter, if not giving her a thorough dressing-down. He wears a sword at his side. Behind them is a large bed, and to the right the family dog looks on from the gloom.

Ter Borch’s half-sister Gesina, herself a painter, appears to have been his model for Woman Writing a Letter (c 1655), which makes obvious his connection with Vermeer. Move this woman to a desk lit through windows at the left, light her surroundings, and you have a painting very similar to some of Vermeer’s. This painting shows a heavy decorated table cover pushed back to make room for the quill, inkpot, and letter. Behind the woman is her bed, surrounded by heavy drapery, and at the lower right is the brilliant red flash of the seat.

The Spinner is dated to about 1655, but may well have been the pendant to Mother Combing the Hair of Her Child (c 1652-53), and uses the same model. Here she looks intently at her work, a small dog on her lap.

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

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

The Letter from about 1660-62 returns to his favourite theme of the reading and writing of letters. Two young women are working together, apparently to write a reply to the letter which is being read by the woman on the right. A boy, perhaps their younger brother, has just brought in a tray bearing an ornate pitcher of drink. In front, a small dog is curled up asleep on a stool.

Ter Borch’s backgrounds become lighter in his later work, as shown in The Music Lesson from about 1668. A teacher stands over a young woman, who is learning to play the lute. By this time, the basic lute had become extended to accommodate additional strings for a wider register. This is often referred to as a theorbo, although in modern terminology it’s probably more of an archlute, and seems to have been fashionable in the Dutch Republic at this time. Resting on the table is a cello, and asleep on a chair is a small dog. Note that the room still contains a bed in the background.

Just as mothers had to check their children for parasites in the hair, so pet owners had to remove fleas from their pets. Ter Borch’s late painting of A Boy with his Dog, also known as The Flea-Catcher (after 1666), shows this, in fairly barren surroundings.

If you’ve left plates coated with egg for a while, you’ll know how difficult its residue can be to remove. No one knows when people first took advantage of this in paints, but earliest surviving examples date from late classical times. By the Renaissance, egg yolk was popular as a binder in artists’ paints, and the technique of egg tempera was used to create many of the masterpieces of the day.

Pure egg tempera technique uses the proteins, fats and other constituents of the yolk of fresh hens’ eggs as its binder; being water-based, water is its diluent. Applied thinly to an absorbent ground such as powdered chalk in a gesso, this quickly sets to form a hard if not brittle paint layer which, unlike glue tempera, can’t readily be removed by water.

Because egg tempera forms such a hard paint layer but is applied thinly, it’s prone to cracking unless the support is rigid and doesn’t change dimensions over time. Early egg tempera paintings were almost exclusively made on wood, but more recently stretched canvas has been used instead. That can lead to cracks and eventual mechanical failure of the paint layer. Egg tempera on wood panel was the favoured combination for easel paintings during the early Renaissance, particularly in Italy.

The finest paintings in egg tempera use only fresh eggs; as eggs age, particularly when they’re not refrigerated, separating the yolk becomes more difficult, and the resulting paint layer doesn’t appear as strong.

Since the nineteenth century, some paint manufacturers such as Sennelier have offered tubed paints with egg as their main binder, but with the addition of some drying oil to form an egg-oil emulsion. These have some of the properties of pure egg tempera, but are more versatile in their handling, and can be used like gouache and even, to a degree, like oil paints. These appear to have been derived from recipes recorded during the Renaissance.

Earliest European examples of egg tempera, such as Margarito d’Arezzo’s The Virgin and Child Enthroned, with Scenes of the Nativity and the Lives of the Saints from the middle of the thirteenth century, often incorporate extensive gilding and today might appear ‘primitive’.

Even the earliest paintings in egg tempera can be remarkably well preserved, such as Duccio’s Healing of the Man born Blind from the early fourteenth century. Although it only forms a thin paint layer, egg yolk is sufficient to preserve high levels of chroma in the pigments.

As the modelling of flesh and clothing became more realistic, egg tempera proved more than sufficient for the task.

One of the finest early works painted entirely in egg tempera is the anonymous Wilton Diptych in London’s National Gallery. Thought to have been made in France at the end of the fourteenth century, its exquisite detail would have been painted in multiple thin layers using fine brushes, much like miniatures painted on vellum.

But it was in Italy that painting in egg tempera reached its apogee, with masters like Masaccio, in his Santa Maria Maggiore Altarpiece from about 1428-29 (above) and Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ (below) of a decade later.

During the fifteenth century, egg tempera was progressively replaced by oils in Italy, as it had been earlier in the Northern Renaissance.

Uccello’s large panel of the Battle of San Romano incorporated some drying oils, including walnut and linseed, although it was still fundamentally painted in egg tempera.

By the end of the fifteenth century, many studios had changed to oils. Among the last large egg tempera paintings are Botticelli’s Primavera (above) and The Birth of Venus (below), from the 1480s. The craft labour involved in producing these large works must have been enormous. Although Primavera was painted on a panel, Venus is on canvas, making it more manageable given its size of nearly 2 x 3 metres (79 x 118 inches).

In the closing years of the fifteenth century, Michelangelo kept to the hallowed tradition of egg tempera on wood in this unfinished painting of the Virgin and Child known now as The Manchester Madonna. This shows how he painstakingly completed each of the figures before moving onto the next, and the characteristic green earth ground.

By this time, the only common use for egg tempera was in the underpainting before applying oils on top. This remains a controversial practice: performed on top of gesso ground it can be successful, but increasingly studios transferred to oils. Egg tempera didn’t completely disappear, though. With so many fine examples of how good its paintings both look and age, there were always some artists who have chosen it over oils.

Some nineteenth century movements that aimed to return to the more wonderful art of the past experimented again with egg tempera. In the late 1870s, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope started to use the medium, and made one of his finest works, Love and the Maiden (1877), using it.

A later exponent who was rigorous in his technique was Adrian Stokes, who used it to great effect in this landscape of Autumn in the Mountains in 1903.

But for my taste, the greatest painter in egg tempera since the Renaissance has to be one of the major artists of the twentieth century: Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009). As his works remain in copyright, I recommend that you browse his official site, where you can see just how effective egg tempera can be in the hands of a great master. It may not be as popular as in the past, but egg tempera still has a great deal to offer.

In their descent into the depths of Hell, Virgil and Dante have just entered circle eight for those who committed fraud in its broadest sense. This consists of what Dante refers to as malebolge, best translated as rottenpockets, a series of ten deep trenches each of which caters for a different type of fraud. Dante compares these to the defensive earthworks surrounding the outer walls of castles of the day.

Virgil leads Dante into the first of these rottenpockets, where souls are being lashed by demons to keep them moving constantly. These are pimps and seducers, among whom is a Bolognese man, a Guelph, who pimped his sister, the beautiful Ghisolabella, for political gain.

The pair move on past other sinners being scourged, where they see Jason, who seduced then abandoned the young Hypsipyle, queen of Lemnos, and later did the same with Medea. They then enter the second rottenpocket, for flatterers, who are wallowing in excrement.

They find a contemporary figure from Lucca, and see Thaïs, a Greek courtesan who notoriously flattered her partners. She is now covered in filth and thoroughly crabby.

In the third rottenpocket, Dante and Virgil come across corrupt religious leaders or Simonists, who sold church privileges, and are trapped headfirst in rock holes, their protruding feet being roasted with flames. The key figure here is Pope Nicholas III, who at first confuses Dante with Pope Boniface VIII, who is also in the same rottenpocket. Pope Nicholas was known for his nepotism, which included appointing three of his own family as cardinals.

Virgil carries Dante on to the fourth rottenpocket, reserved for soothsayers. Their heads are turned to face backwards, so that the tears streaming from their eyes wet their buttocks.

Virgil identifies several of them from classical times, including the Theban Tiresias; Dante recounts how he became a soothsayer after he had twice changed gender, as told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses. The list concludes with three near-contemporaries: Michael Scot, a scholar and astrologer to Emperor Frederick II, and two well-known Italians.

The fifth rottenpocket they find to be filled with corrupt public officials, or barrators, who sold public appointments and are immersed in a sea of boiling pitch, while being further tormented by a pack of vicious devils known as malebranche, ‘evil-claws’.

The latter are armed with long hooks, which they use to push the souls down into the pitch, much as you might push down lumps of meat that rise to the surface of a stew. Those devils are so evil as to threaten Dante, so Virgil whisks him on to the next rottenpocket for hypocrites.

Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is not only intentional, but of their own making.

The artists

William Blake (1757–1827) was a British visionary painter and illustrator whose last and incomplete work was an illustrated edition of the Divine Comedy for the painter John Linnell. Most of his works shown in this series were created for that, although he did draw and paint scenes during his earlier career. I have a major series on his work here.

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Early in his career, he produced a complete set of seventy illustrations for translations of the Inferno, first published in 1857 and still being used. These were followed in 1867 by more illustrations for Purgatorio and Paradiso. This article looks at his paintings.

Giotto di Bondone (c 1267–1337) was one of the great masters who bridged between the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. He was born near Florence, and is reputed from about 1296 to have painted a cycle of frescoes in the Basilica di San Francesco d’Assisi, in Assisi. This is hotly disputed though, and those may have been painted by Cimabue instead. The scene of The Devotion of the Devils from Arezzo shows what may, directly or indirectly, have been an inspiration to Dante, although I don’t know whether there is any evidence that the poet ever visited Assisi.

Jan van der Straet, also commonly known by his Italianised name of Giovanni Stradano (1523-1605), was a painter who started his career in Bruges and Antwerp in Belgium, but moved to Florence in 1550, where he worked for the remainder of his life. Mannerist in style, he worked with printmakers in Antwerp to produce collections of prints, including an extensive set for The Divine Comedy.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

Robin Kirkpatrick (trans) (2012) Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, Penguin Classics. ISBN 978 0 141 19749 4.
Richard Lansing (ed) (2000) The Dante Encyclopedia, Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 87611 7.
Guy P Raffa (2009) The Complete Danteworlds, A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy, Chicago UP. ISBN 978 0 2267 0270 4.
Prue Shaw (2014) Reading Dante, From Here to Eternity, Liveright. ISBN 978 1 63149 006 4.

This weekend we’re visiting what used to be a small village on the bank of the River Oise, where several of the French Impressionists developed their skills in painting landscapes en plein air. In yesterday’s first article we had reached 1876, the year of the second Impressionist Exhibition in Paris.

In complete contrast to his few landscapes influenced by Paul Cézanne, in 1876 Pissarro also painted some views of the commercial barges trading on the River Oise, including this of Barges at Pontoise, the only canvas in which the boats dominate his composition. This painting remained unsold at the time of the artist’s death, and wasn’t even exhibited until 1936.

The Oise near Pontoise in Grey Weather is another of Pissarro’s views of the River Oise from 1876.

The Rainbow, Pontoise, which Pissarro painted in 1877, was shown at the Third Impressionist Exhibition that year. It’s a panoramic view of the fields around the neighbouring area of Épluches viewed from Pontoise, with a modest and realistic rainbow.

Around 1877, when Pissarro was probably in company with Paul Cézanne at Pontoise, the pair of them painted the same motif hidden or revealed by the same trees. Pissarro’s version of Côte des Bœufs, Pontoise, above, is the more famous, and captures texture in everything, from the smoother surface of the track to the smaller branches, and presents an essay on the form and structure of trunks and branches.

Cézanne’s La Côte Saint-Denis à Pontoise shows little or no anatomical basis to the construction of his trees, whose branches are only loosely related to foliage. He simplifies throughout, with little or no texture, and more basic shadows, on the trunks, and the foliage is depicted as amorphous areas of leaf colour.

Béliard’s Moulin de Chauffour, Effect of Snow (1878) is another winter scene from the area near Pontoise, and is significantly less painterly than Pissarro or Cézanne.

By 1880, when Pissarro painted this Landscape at Le Valhermeil, Auvers-sur-Oise, his work was losing its conventional Impressionist facture, as he adopted smaller, staccato brushstrokes and his style became more ‘pointillist’.

Pissarro also started to transfer his attention from the land to its inhabitants, here the rural poor of these Cottages at Le Valhermeil, Auvers-sur-Oise (1880).

Pissarro’s Peasant Woman Digging, the Jardin de Maubuisson, Pontoise (1881) shows two women working in the vegetable garden of this large house in the village. This painting was first shown at the seventh Impressionist Exhibition the following year.

The Harvest, Pontoise, from 1881, is one of several of Pissarro’s paintings focussing more closely on agricultural activities, and now becoming overtly ‘pointillist’. Because of the brushwork involved, he couldn’t have painted this in front of the motif, and it turns out to be a second copy of an earlier and apparently identical painting.

This increasingly human content, in paintings such as his Peasant Woman and Child Returning from the Fields, Auvers-sur-Oise from 1881, drew comparisons with Millet, from whom Pissarro sought to distance himself in terms of modernity. This painting was bought by Durand-Ruel later that year, and shown at the seventh Impressionist Exhibition.

Pissarro later concentrated his attention on Éragny, then cityscapes of Paris. Cézanne returned to his family home in Aix-en-Provence, and Béliard became the mayor of Étampes further south. Today Pontoise is part of the ‘new town’ of Cergy-Pontoise, and its population has grown to well over 30,000, within an urban area of nearly a quarter of a million.

This weekend we travel to what used to be a small village of around six thousand on the bank of the River Oise, to the north-west of Paris. Pontoise was the centre of early Impressionist landscape painting in front of the motif, and appears in hundreds of works painted there from the late 1860s. It’s where Camille Pissarro lived and developed his skills, Paul Cézanne learned to paint en plein air, and others including Vincent van Gogh and Charles Daubigny painted.

The country around Pontoise has also been painted extensively. In these two articles, I include some from Auvers-sur-Oise, a little upstream, but exclude those from Ennery to the south, Éragny down river, where Pissarro settled later, and Osny to the north-west, all names you’ll see in the titles of significant Impressionist paintings.

We start in 1867, in the early days of the development of Impressionism, with Camille Pissarro’s Côte de Jalais, Pontoise. This realist view shows the hill of Les Jalais at l’Hermitage, where Pissarro lived at the time, viewed from the Chemin des Mathurins in Pontoise.

The year after he painted these Apple Trees at Pontoise, the House of Père Gallien (1868), the Pissarro family moved to Louveciennes, also to the north-west of Paris, where they intended to settle down in a large rented house. It was here that Pissarro first got to know Alfred Sisley well, when they painted in company, and alongside Monet and Renoir, all four of them starving and fighting off despair from their lack of sales.

The forgotten Impressionist Édouard Béliard may well have painted Boulevard de Fossés in Pontoise alongside Pissarro, Cézanne and Guillaumin in 1872.

Béliard’s Pontoise, View of the Lock (1872-5) was probably among his paintings shown at the first Impressionist Exhibition in 1874. Its composition is reminiscent of Sisley’s The Canal Saint-Martin, Paris from 1872, and its style is similar to those of Pissarro and Sisley at that time.

Paul Cézanne started learning to paint en plein air alongside Pissarro’s easel in 1873, when he painted this view of the House of Père Lacroix, Auvers-sur-Oise. As with all beginners, he took a long time getting the painting to look right, so different sections of the roof were painted several hours apart, as reflected in the orientation of the shadows here.

This view from Cézanne’s first campaign along the River Oise shows the northern bank near the hamlet of Valhermeil, slightly up-river from Pontoise.

Of all the paintings shown at the first Impressionist Exhibition in Paris in 1874, Cézanne’s The Hanged Man’s House, Auvers-sur-Oise (1874) was among the most successful, as he sold it to the collector Count Doria for three hundred francs.

Béliard’s Pothuis Quay in Pontoise, Effect of Snow from 1875 may have been exhibited at the second Impressionist Exhibition in 1876, and is similar in subject and style to the winter scenes painted around Louveciennes by Pissarro and Sisley from 1870 onwards.

In February 1875, with snow still falling, the Pissarros returned to their house in Pontoise, for Camille to paint there again. Effect of Snow at L’Hermitage, Pontoise (1875) strikes a fine balance between an impression captured in haste, and sufficient detail to make it more than just a passing moment.

That year a few of Pissarro’s paintings appear to have been influenced by Cézanne. Perhaps the best example is The Small Bridge, Pontoise, which could easily be mistaken for one of Cézanne’s views in the woods of northern France.

View of the Côte des Gratte-Coqs, Pontoise from the same year is also less distinctively one of Pissarro’s works.

In 1876, Pissarro painted this large view of one of the gardens in Pontoise: The Garden of Les Mathurins at Pontoise, belonging to the Deraismes Sisters. In fact, the sisters were only renting this large and impressive property, just down the road from where the Pissarros lived, in the Hermitage district of Pontoise. It had formerly been a convent until the French Revolution.

Spades are agricultural tools of ancient origin, with a flat blade in line with its shaft, and used for digging. Their closest relative is the shovel with a broader blade for moving loose earth, gravel and snow, and the hoe whose blade is mounted at a right angle to the shaft. In some common applications, such as lifting potatoes and other root crops, a fork with three or more tines is normally preferred.

As a well-known tool for digging, the spade is often associated with the digging of graves, and appears in some religious paintings depicting the imminent interment of Christ’s body following the Crucifixion.

Jacopo Tintoretto’s huge and magnificent Crucifixion from 1565 shows a man digging a conventional grave, as seen in the detail below.

On the left of this detail, two men are gambling with dice in a small rock shelter suggestive of a tomb. To the right of them, a gravedigger has just started his work with a spade.

A spade may also appear in depictions of Christ’s subsequent resurrection, in his appearance to Mary as a gardener, often known by the Latin words from the Vulgate as Noli Me Tangere, “touch me not”, the words attributed to Christ in the Gospels.

In her Jesus Appears to Mary Magdalene from 1581, Lavinia Fontana re-locates this encounter between Mary and Jesus, dressing him in the garb of a mediaeval Italian gardener, and holding a fine gardener’s spade with his left hand.

The eccentric Alessandro Magnasco painted his Noli Me Tangere (1705-10) over a background of ruins made by a collaborator. Christ is shown standing, holding a long-hafted spade with his left hand. Mary is on her knees, a small urn in front of her. Their clothes are rough, and Christ’s appear to be his burial linen, blowing in the wind.

Spades are not uncommon in paintings set in the countryside.

Hans Andersen Brendekilde’s On Forbidden Roads from 1886 shows one of the core themes of Naturalist painting: itinerant workers making their way through neglected corners of the countryside. These two men are equipped for forestry, with a two-man saw, axes, and spades. Almost hidden among the vegetation at the far left is a third figure, who looks anxiously towards them. Maybe none of them should really be there at all.

There’s a more complex story behind Brendekilde’s People by a Road from 1893. The group at the left are old road-workers, breaking larger rocks into coarse gravel. They lived out under the wooden shelter behind them, as they made their way slowly around the country roads. The woman holds what is either a small shovel or spade used in their work. Standing and apparently preaching to them is a cleanly dressed carpenter, his saw held in his left hand. The building behind them, on the opposite side of the road, is a church, from which a large congregation has just emerged.

One of the most physically demanding tasks of the year was clearing snow in the winter. Brendekilde’s The Rest (1887) shows a younger man taking a short break from cutting a track through to the elderly lady’s farmhouse. The blade of his spade is flat, confirming that it’s used to dig through compacted snow and pile the slabs seen behind him.

In Brendekilde’s Home for Dinner from 1917, a young girl holding some fresh fish stands talking to a man with a spade.

The following year, Brendekilde painted a gardening story, in Afternoon Work (1918). A younger man is out on his finely tilled vegetable patch in front of his thatched cottage, wielding his spade as a weapon. Standing just outside the door, behind him, is his young daughter, and through the window is an older woman, presumably his wife. Both are watching him intently, with an air of fear at what he is about to do. He is about to attack a small crop of molehills that have appeared freshly in the midst of his seedling vegetable plants.

As Europeans and Americans started taking to the beaches, they realised how much fun it is to dig sand and build sandcastles using small buckets and spades.

This is William Dyce’s finely detailed view of Pegwell Bay, Kent, on the coast of south-east England, out of season, at the end of a fine day in early October. Visitors to the beach are wrapped for warmth as well as modesty. In the distance, a group of donkeys are being taken to graze for the night, after the day’s work being hired out for children to ride. In the foreground, at the left, a child holds a spade, although there is precious little sand suitable for sandcastles.

Later in the nineteenth century, at Le Tréport on the Channel coast of France near Dieppe, Évariste Carpentier’s Le Tréport, Bathing Time shows progress in the development of beach costume and culture. A young girl in the left foreground is playing with her bucket and spade, while her older brother is admiring the fashionable young woman parading her new clothes. A far cry indeed from the grave-digger.

During his summer stay at Skagen in 1883, Christian Krohg documented life in this remote artists’ colony in Denmark, and turned to develop some new themes that were to dominate his painting in the coming years.

From the sick child came a series of works showing exhausted or worried mothers with their children, of which Mother and Child (1883) is an early example. A young infant lies asleep in their crib, their exhausted mother fallen asleep on the head of her bed, her hand still resting where it had been rocking the child to sleep.

Around those figures and furniture, the room is barren and clinical, and the mother’s clothes plain, simple and dark grey. This follows a trend among the Skagen painters to paint motifs like this that had been popular with Dutch artists in the past.

Later that year, Krohg opened the theme that was to make him almost infamous, that of the fallen woman and prostitution. Madeleine (1883) shows another barren bedroom, here with a young woman sat on a thin mattress on a basic iron bedstead. She is dressed for bed, and the sheets and pillow behind her show that her single bed has recently been occupied. Her body and head are bowed, forehead propped on her left hand, her eyes shielded from the viewer. In her other hand she holds a small mirror (or possibly a hairbrush). Her hair, though, is braided and tied back.

Krohg hints that she is falling into, or already engaged, in prostitution. We are left to speculate as to the cause of her grief, what has just happened, and what lies ahead for her.

In January 1884, Oda Engelhardt (née Othilia Pauline Christine Lasson, 1860-1935) enrolled as a pupil in Krohg’s art school. Oda and Krohg’s first child was born the following year, and they married in 1888, after she had divorced. Their relationship was quite openly open: Oda, Christian, and Hans Jæger were in a love triangle in the months immediately prior to the Krohg’s marriage, and Oda is reputed to have had affairs with most of the people in their circle apart from Edvard Munch. Oda was an accomplished artist in her own right, although her paintings were sadly eclipsed by her image as a ‘princess’ in their Bohemian circle.

Look Ahead, Bergen Harbour (1884) is an unusual painting from Krohg’s maritime series, this time set inside the sheltered waters of Bergen Harbour. A young man in shirtsleeves and wearing a trilby is rowing a small boat towards the middle of the harbour, and looks over his shoulder at the traffic that lies ahead of him.

This appears to have been prompted by one of Gustave Caillebotte’s paintings of boating activities near his estate at Yerres, Oarsman in a Top Hat (1877-78), below.

Mother at her Child’s Bed (1884) returns indoors, to the theme of motherhood, sickness, and sleep. In another barren bedroom, a girl lies asleep in her bed, with her mother sat anxiously at the bedside. The mother is dressed plainly in a prim dark blue jacket, with her hair plaited and wound up in a coif. The light coming from a window behind the viewer makes it clear that the curtains are open and that it’s likely to be daytime rather than night.

From the theme of fatigue and sleep came another development, in Tired (1885). The young woman seen here is no mother, neither is she in or near a bed. Instead, she is a seamstress, one of the many thousands who worked at home at that time, toiling for long hours by lamplight for a pittance. At the left is an empty cup, that had probably contained the coffee she drank to try to stay awake at her work.

Home work as a seamstress was seen as the beginning of the descent into prostitution. The received story was that the paltry income generated by sewing quickly proved insufficient, and women sought alternatives. Prostitution had officially become a criminal offence in Norway in 1842, but was tolerated in Oslo (then known as Kristiania) from 1840, with the introduction of police and medical supervision of women sex-workers.

For much of 1885, Krohg was in Belgium at the Exposition Universelle in Antwerp, where he exhibited, and he also had his first solo exhibition in Oslo.

Just before Christmas 1886, Krohg’s first novel Albertine was published by a left-wing publisher. Its central theme is contemporary prostitution in Norway, and the police quickly seized all the copies they could find, banning it on the grounds of violating the good morals of the people. Krohg was found guilty of the offence the following March and fined, although the police were only able to seize 439 of the first 1600 copies to go into circulation.

At the same time as he was writing that novel, Krohg had been working on his largest and most complex painting: Albertine in the Police Doctor’s Waiting Room (1885-87). He also painted several other scenes from the book.

In the novel, Albertine starts as a poor seamstress, who is mistaken for a prostitute by the police officer in charge of the section controlling prostitutes. He plies her with alcohol then rapes her. She is summoned to be inspected by the police doctor, whose examination further violates her, making her think that she is destined to be a prostitute, and that is exactly what happens.

Albertine is not the prominent woman in the centre looking directly at the viewer. Krohg’s heroine is the simple and humble country girl at the front of the queue to go into the police doctor for inspection. Behind her is a motley line of women from a wide range of situations. At the right, in the corner of the room, is another country girl with flushed cheeks. Others are apparently more advanced in their careers, and stare at Albertine, whose profiled face is barely visible from behind her headscarf. Barring the way to the surgery door, and in control of the proceedings, is a policeman.

The wide range of dress and appearance among the women is striking.

Towards the end of his career, Krohg painted this looser and more sketchy version of Albertine in the Police Doctor’s Waiting Room (1917), in which the women stare more pointedly at Albertine, who is about to go through the open door leading into the doctor’s examination room. Krohg said at the time that he thought this was a better composition, and less theatrical, joking that his earlier masterpiece had been a sketch for this later painting.

Most surprising is the fact that Krohg and fellow left-wingers and liberals weren’t campaigning for the liberalisation of prostitution, but for it to be banned altogether, arguing that enforcement of the criminal law would limit the numbers of women entering the trade. This is, of course, the exact opposite of many later arguments in favour of its decriminalisation.

Braiding her Hair (1888) is a variation on the theme of motherhood in poverty, and reminiscent of much older Dutch and other paintings of mothers combing their child’s hair for nits and lice. Both the mother and her daughter face away from the viewer, rendering them anonymous, and both wear plain old clothing in a barren room.

For much of 1888, Krohg was out of Norway, in Copenhagen for the first half, including a visit to Paris, then went on to Skagen for the summer.

Back in Skagen, Krohg resumed his almost clinical account of the Gaihede family, in this portrait of Ane Gaihede (1888).

As her husband rests in Niels Gaihede’s Afternoon Nap (1888), Ane sits knitting in the shadows to the right.

In the autumn of 1888, with her divorce completed, Christian Krohg married his former pupil Oda Engelhardt in Oslo. It was time for him to paint his own family.

References

Skagens Museum, Denmark
Øystein Sjåstad (2017) Christian Krohg’s Naturalism, U Washington Press. ISBN 978 0 295 74206 9.

As organised occupational groups, guilds have ancient origins, and in Roman times were known as collegia. Although they were an important part of Renaissance society, few if any appear to have commissioned group portraits, which were largely confined to families at that time. This changed in the Dutch Golden Age, and some of its best-known paintings depict occupational and other groups.

In 1617, Michiel van Mierevelt and his son Pieter, specialists in portraiture, painted The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Willem van der Meer, one of the earliest portraits of a social group from the Dutch Golden Age. Members of this group are all ignoring the cadaver in front of them, preferring to look at the painter, and are thought to be members of the Surgeons’ Guild of the city of Delft, who commissioned this work.

Rembrandt painted his Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp in 1632, as an early commission soon after his arrival in Amsterdam. It’s a group portrait of distinguished members of the Surgeons’ Guild in their working environment. Most remarkable is the fact that its principal, Dr Tulp, and most of his colleagues aren’t looking at the dissected forearm.

As cities developed in the Dutch Republic, guilds and associations flourished. This wasn’t a period of peace, and most towns and cities required adult males to be members of the local civic militia or schutterij for mutual defence. These were operated using the guild model, with local men appointed to military rank for their command. Their roles included helping defend the town or city in the event of attack or revolt, and manning a night watch, in which members took turns to patrol the streets.

One of the earlier of these group portraits is Frans Hals’ Banquet of the Officers of the Calivermen Civic Guard from 1627. Contemporary records have enabled their identification as (from the left) Willem Claesz. Vooght, Johan Damius, Willem Warmont, Johan Schatter, Gilles de Wildt, Nicolaes van Napels, Outgert Akersloot, Matthijs Haeswindius, Adriaen Matham, Lot Schout, Pieter Ramp, and Willem Ruychaver at the right.

The cost of these group portraits was relatively modest, as it was normally shared between those depicted. In most cases shares weren’t equal, but determined by the member’s rank in the organisation.

Hendrik Gerritsz Pot used the novel technique of putting indigo layers over underpainting, without the protection of glazes, in his Portrait of the St Adrian Civic Guard, Haarlem from 1630. As a result of fading of the indigo, what were originally bright blue sashes have become almost white, as shown in the detail below.

Frans Hals’ Officers and Sergeants of the St Adrian Civic Guard (1633) not only shows the same group of men, but has suffered exactly the same fate with their formerly blue sashes.

Hals’ Militia Company of District XI under the Command of Captain Reynier Reael (1633-37) shows a group known as the Meagre Company. He was commissioned to paint this in 1633, but three years later it remained unfinished, and the commission was transferred to Codde to complete the right side of the canvas and many of the hands and faces a year later.

Painted a decade later, Rembrandt’s vast group portrait of The Night Watch (1642) is perhaps the most famous of them all, although it’s more correctly titled Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq. It features the commander and seventeen members of his civic guard company in Amsterdam, and took the artist three years to complete from his first commission to paint this for display in the great hall of the guards.

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

Some of these militia group portraits commemorated events of greater significance than social occasions. On 15 May 1648, peace between Philip IV of Spain and the Lords States General of the Dutch Republic was finally ratified to end the Eighty Years’ War, and on 18 June this was marked by The Celebration of the Peace of Münster, 18 June 1648, in the Headquarters of the Crossbowmen’s Civic Guard (St George Guard), Amsterdam, painted here by Bartholomeus van der Helst with Jan Vos.

At the right with a silver horn is Captain Cornelis Jansz. Witsen, who is shaking the hand of Lieutenant Johan Oetgens van Waveren. In the centre, seated behind the drum with a flag draped over him, is Reserve Officer Candidate Jacob Banning, and around him are Sergeants Dirck Claesz. Thoveling and Thomas Hartog.

Neighbourhood and welfare organisations also flourished, and the latter distributed money, food, clothes and fuel to the poor. These were run by the middle classes, who formed themselves into regents for the purpose of their administration.

Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck’s Regentesses of the St. Elisabeth’s Hospital (1641) shows the group of august ladies who oversaw that charitable foundation in Haarlem. Time has shown that they too were victims of fugitive pigment, as their tablecloth was originally a rich green. Its unprotected indigo blue has faded from much of its surface, leaving most of it an odd yellow ochre hue.

The gentlemen shown in Frans Hals’ group portrait of the Regents of the Old Men’s Alms House, Haarlem from 1664 were responsible for running the alms house for poor elderly men in the city of Haarlem.

Earlier in this series, I showed an example of the origin of all modern paintings in the decorated caves of pre-history. As shelters became buildings, our ancestors continued to paint their walls, using a technique now known as secco wall or mural painting, where wet paint is applied to dry stone or plaster.

Secco has been widely used outside Europe, and can still be seen in some very old European wall paintings, such as those in Braunschweig Cathedral, including Christ Pantocrator, thought to date from the early thirteenth century. Long before that was created, though, wall painting advanced to improve adhesion between its paint layer and ground. In secco technique, only thin layers of pigment can be used, resulting in weak colours, little detail, and the need for periodic re-painting as pigment is gradually lost over time.

Artists experimented with different binders and secco techniques. Although dry plaster is more absorbent and a better ground than bare stone, success has been limited, and failure a constant danger. At some time before about 1700 BCE, one of the Mediterranean cultures discovered that it was possible to apply paint onto a layer of wet plaster, and the technique of fresco (strictly, buon fresco) was born.

The Romans loved frescos that made their rooms look as if they were in a spacious outdoors, like this from the House of the Golden Bracelet in Pompeii.

In fresco, the support remains the wall or ceiling of the building, but the ground is absorbent wet plaster applied to that surface. Pigment is diluted in water and applied directly to the ground while the latter is still wet; this allows the paint to be absorbed into the ground, providing good and durable bonding of the pigment. Plaster is made using lime, derived from crushed limestone, and sets by reaction with carbon dioxide in the air to form calcium carbonate (from which both chalk and limestone are composed) and water, which evaporates during drying.

Techniques became even more refined, with the use of additional layers of plaster prepared in specific ways, to which red pigment sinopia might be added, allowing the artist to draw construction and other lines to assist in final painting. Because these frescos are on a grand scale, transferring the design of a painting from final sketch to the wall or ceiling is also a challenge.

The central problem for the painter is that, to be successful, fresco has to be painted onto the plaster when it is still wet. That means only a limited area can be plastered and painted each day, known as giornate (singular giornata), a day’s work. For all but the smallest of ground-level fresco paintings, work has to be undertaken at height, from a scaffold, posing the very real risk that the artist would fall, or the scaffolding fail. Many fresco painters have fallen at work, some suffering serious injuries or death as a result.

Despite all these practical difficulties, some of the most important European works of art are frescos painted during the Renaissance in places of worship with their high walls and ceilings.

Masaccio’s magnificent fresco of The Holy Trinity in the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, was painted in 1426-28. At the outset he would have made a preliminary plan including his giornate starting at the top and working downwards. Once ready to start the painting, a team of carpenters will have erected wooden scaffolding to give the artist and his assistants access to the whole of that section of the wall, to the full height of over six metres (21 feet). The first stage would then have been completed by assistants, who laid a rough under-layer of plaster known as the arriccio over the whole wall, and left it to dry for several days. This layer often contains abrasive sand particles to provide a key for the final layer of plaster.

Once that had dried completely, Masaccio and his assistants transferred the drawings onto the surface of the arriccio. This may have been performed by scaling up from the squared drawing and painting with sinopia, or full-size drawings may have been pricked to make holes in the paper and a bag of soot banged against the sheet held against the wall, a technique known as pouncing. Masaccio is known to have used both techniques, and may well have used each in different sections of this work.

On each day of painting, assistants would prepare the colours by mixing pigments in water. The day’s supply of plaster, the intonaco, is then prepared by mixing water with lime. That day’s giornata is covered with a thin layer of intonaco, and about an hour later Masaccio started painting into it. He then had about eight hours before it dried and he could apply no more fresh paint. Like many of the best fresco painters, Masaccio extended his painting time by using paint mixed with milk or casein and a little lime, effectively a lime-based casein medium, which could be laid onto dry intonaco.

The geometric requirements of this painting also merited special measures. When the intonaco was first applied, it was marked to indicate key construction lines, such as those in the barrel-vaulted ceiling, and down the pillars at the side. The remains of these incised lines are still visible when the fresco is viewed in raking light. In this case, there is evidence that Masaccio used lengths of string attached to a nail sunk at the vanishing point of the linear projection, below the base of the cross.

Although we think of frescos as being fixed, this one has now been moved twice within the same church, which hasn’t helped its appearance. During conservation work and movement of Masaccio’s painting in the 1950s, the opportunity was taken to study its construction. Leonetto Tintori drew up a plan of all the identified construction lines and edges of giornate; I have sketched in the latter from a reproduction of a drawing made at that time, which has since been destroyed.

It’s estimated the whole painting would have required some 24 giornate, although because of the long history of damage and attempts at its restoration, that number remains flexible. Assuming that Masaccio painted six days a week, that would have required a minimum of four weeks working for at least ten hours each day. Fresco painting doesn’t permit easy alterations either: if any repainting was required and couldn’t be accomplished using dry technique, that day’s giornata would have to be removed, replaced and repainted.

Giornate can sometimes become obvious over time, as shown in Giotto’s fresco in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Italy.

Perhaps the most famous fresco is Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement (1536-41) in the Sistine Chapel of the Vatican. It covers an area of 13.7 by 12 metres (539 by 472 inches), and took over four years to complete.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, fresco became relatively neglected.

Some new frescos were commissioned for places of worship and other public buildings, and in the early nineteenth century Johann Friedrich Overbeck painted a series telling the story of Torquato Tasso’s epic Jerusalem Delivered, in the Casa Massimo in Rome. There are similar series showing Dante’s Divine Comedy and other long narratives, which are particularly suited to the medium.

In 1845, the Scottish artist William Dyce was invited to paint frescos for the Royal Family, for which he travelled to Italy to learn technique. On his return in 1847, he painted this curious composition in Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s new and luxurious holiday palace of Osborne House, at East Cowes, on the Isle of Wight. Neptune Resigning to Britannia the Empire of the Sea (1847) is an impressive fresco, and remains in pristine condition at the top of the main staircase in the house.

Frescos have continued in religious painting, with artists such as Sergei Fyodorov painting them in churches and cathedrals, and for the occasional trompe l’oeil. John Dixon Batten’s The Creation of Pandora was painted anachronistically in egg tempera on a fresco ground by 1913. Batten was one of the late adherents of the Pre-Raphaelite movement; this painting was deemed unfashionable in 1949, and was put into storage and quietly forgotten until its rediscovery in 1990.

New frescos are still painted in some public buildings too. This work by Finnish painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela is one of a series he painted in the National Museum of Finland in Helsinki in 1928, but most other wall paintings of the twentieth century, such as those of John Singer Sargent in public buildings in Boston, have been painted in oils on canvas rather than buon fresco.

Frescos aren’t the only way of making very large and monumental paintings for places like churches, though. The walls of Venetian buildings are particularly unsuitable for secco or fresco, because they remain so damp all year round. Hence the painters of Venice were innovators in constructing very large canvases, and you will find few frescos there as a result.

From their tragic encounter with tormented souls in the Suicide Wood, Virgil leads Dante onto a barren and sandy plain, where groups of spirits are in different postures, naked under steady showers of flakes of fire. These fall on their flesh, and set the sand afire underneath them. They are being punished for their differing acts of violence against God: blasphemers lie flat on their backs, sodomites are moving at all times, and usurers crouch with purses strung from their necks.

The two talk with Capaneus, a huge man who was once a powerful king and waged war against the city of Thebes, and a blasphemer who was struck by a thunderbolt for his arrogance towards the (classical and pagan) gods.

Among the sodomites is the prominent Guelph encyclopaedist Brunetto Latini (c 1220-94), who may well have been Dante’s mentor at one time. Also identified are Priscian a Latin grammarian, Francesco d’Accorso a legal scholar, and Andrea de’ Mozzi a bishop of Florence, together with three other Florentines.

Virgil explains some more of the topography of Hell, how waters originating from a statue on Mount Idaeus (Ida) on the island of Crete flow down to form its three principal rivers, the Acheron, Styx and Phlegethon. The statue of the Old Man of Crete has a gold head, silver arms, brass torso, and iron below, apart from a terracotta foot. This follows the mythical ‘ages of mankind’ in descent, and its tears feed the waters of Hell.

Dante is next led down towards a vile monster with the face of an honest man but the body of a serpent, its body seemingly tattooed with knots and whorls, and a sting at the end of its great tail: this is Geryon, in classical myth a cruel king who was killed by Hercules, and here forming an image of fraud.

Before reaching that monster, the pair see some usurers on the ground. They are identified as contemporary members of prominent Florentine and Paduan families known for their riches and usury.

Virgil then jumps onto Geryon’s back, and encourages Dante to have courage to join him there. Once they have both boarded, Virgil tells Geryon to fly off, and the monster carries them down through a hundred spiralling turns to the foot of a high cliff.

Virgil and Dante have now descended to circle eight.

The artists

William Blake (1757–1827) was a British visionary painter and illustrator whose last and incomplete work was an illustrated edition of the Divine Comedy for the painter John Linnell. Most of his works shown in this series were created for that, although he did draw and paint scenes during his earlier career. I have a major series on his work here.

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Early in his career, he produced a complete set of seventy illustrations for translations of the Inferno, first published in 1857 and still in current use. They were followed in 1867 by more illustrations for Purgatorio and Paradiso. This article looks at his paintings.

John Flaxman (1755–1826) was a British sculptor and draughtsman who occasionally painted too. When he was in Rome between 1787-91, he produced drawings for book illustrations, including a set of 111 for an edition of The Divine Comedy. In 1810, he was appointed the Professor of Sculpture to the Royal Academy in London, and in 1817 made drawings to illustrate Hesiod, which were engraved by William Blake.

Joseph Anton Koch (1768-1839) was an Austrian landscape painter, who worked mainly in Neoclassical style. During his second stay in Rome, he was commissioned to paint frescos in the Villa Massimi on the walls of the Dante Room there, which remain one of the most florid visual accounts of Dante’s Inferno. He completed those between 1824-29. He also appears to have drawn a set of illustrations for Dante’s Inferno in about 1808.

Bartolomeo Pinelli (1781-1835) was a Roman illustrator and engraver who provided illustrations for a great many books, and specialised in the city of Rome. He made 145 prints to illustrate Dante’s Divine Comedy, most probably in the early nineteenth century.

Francesco Scaramuzza (1803–1886) was an Italian painter who specialised in mythological and historical narratives. He became obsessed with Dante’s Divine Comedy, and for much of his career worked on producing paintings and drawings of its scenes. He worked mainly in Parma, in Italy.

Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770–1844) was the greatest Danish sculptor, and one of the foremost in Europe. He worked most of his life in Italy, although the Thorvaldsens Museum with much of his work is in the city of Copenhagen, in a place of honour by the Christiansborg Palace. From humble origins, he trained at the Royal Danish Academy of Art, where he was extremely successful. He arrived in Rome in 1797, and remained there until 1838, when he was welcomed as a returning hero in Copenhagen.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

Robin Kirkpatrick (trans) (2012) Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, Penguin Classics. ISBN 978 0 141 19749 4.
Richard Lansing (ed) (2000) The Dante Encyclopedia, Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 87611 7.
Guy P Raffa (2009) The Complete Danteworlds, A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy, Chicago UP. ISBN 978 0 2267 0270 4.
Prue Shaw (2014) Reading Dante, From Here to Eternity, Liveright. ISBN 978 1 63149 006 4.

In 1868, Frédéric Bazille completed two of his most successful figurative paintings, The Family Gathering, started the previous summer, and View of the Village.

Another painting of figures in a landscape he made that summer is Fisherman with a Net (1868), which the following year was refused by the Salon jury. This was painted on the banks of the River Lez, close to Bazille’s family’s estate at Méric. Unlike most of his other figures in a landscape, it was executed relatively quickly with a single preparatory drawing.

The stark contrast between the flesh figures and the rich greens of the surrounding vegetation makes the two men pop out almost incongruously.

Bazille remained productive through the following winter, in part because he and Renoir reorganised their shared studio. His portrait of Pierre Auguste Renoir (1868-69) was a quick oil sketch that probably filled in some free time when waiting for models to become available. It was painted over an abandoned still life, and is a wonderfully painterly snapshot in oils.

His growing success ensured that he had no difficulty finding models. Woman in Moorish Costume was painted during the winter of 1868-69, and is a nod towards the vogue of ‘orientalism’ at the time.

He also painted his second portrait of Edmond Maître in early 1869. He had met Maître (1840-1898) in 1865. Like Bazille, he had moved to Paris to study, in his case law in 1859, but had become a civil servant to allow him sufficient free time to enjoy his pursuits, including music and art. They were to remain close friends until Bazille’s death.

He was visited by Daubigny, and Alfred Stevens invited him to his evening meetings. With continuing hostility from some members of the Salon jury, notably Jean-Léon Gérôme, Bazille had only one painting, View of the Village, accepted for the Salon of 1869. However, he wasn’t discouraged, and seems to have relished the ongoing battle between the Impressionists and Gérôme.

Bazille started painting Summer Scene, also known as Bathers, during the summer of 1869 when he was on holiday in Montpellier. He had already made a series of compositional studies starting in February that year, but when he was working on the canvas, he found it hard going, and complained of headaches and other pains.

He eventually opted for a composition based on strong diagonals, in which the bathers in the foreground are in shade, while the two wrestlers in the distance are lit by sunshine. The landscape background was painted from the hot green mixture of grass with birch and pine trees, typical of the banks of the River Lez near Montpellier. He completed this in early 1870, and it was accepted for the Salon of that year, where it was well-received by the critics.

La Toilette (1870) was one of his three planned projects for the winter of 1869-70. However, with three models required, he had to ask his father for money to cover their cost. This was refused by the Salon jury of 1870, when Daubigny resigned from the jury in protest.

Bazille’s Studio, or The Studio on the Rue La Condamine, was another project he worked on during that winter.

Bazille clearly liked painting his studio, but the three canvases he completed showing his different studios aren’t as simple as they might appear. Inspired by Fantin-Latour’s A Studio in the Batignolles Quarter (1869-70), which includes Bazille, it is in some ways its antithesis.

Bazille was careful in the choice of paintings shown, which include View of the Village on the easel, Fisherman with a Net, Terrace at Méric, and La Toilette as yet unfinished. The largest painting hanging is Renoir’s Landscape with Two Figures, and there is also a small still life by Monet. Bazille used these as pictures within a picture to map his career, from the past to his aspirations for the Salon in 1870, not in his successes so much as in the paintings refused, and better appreciated by the colleagues shown.

Flowers (c 1870) is one of a small group of floral paintings made during the Spring of 1870, when he moved to his own studio in the rue des Beaux-Arts.

Bazille painted two related but different versions of La négresse aux pivoines (Young Woman with Peonies) in the Spring of 1870. His professional model is the same as that used for La Toilette. She is normally read as being a servant engaged in making the floral arrangement, although in the other version (at the National Gallery of Art in Washington) she appears to be a flower seller.

At the time, the dominant flower, the peony, was a relatively recent import to France, and would probably have been seen as bringing a touch of exoticism to the two paintings. The striking vase may have been borrowed from Fantin-Latour. Rishel has proposed that this painting in Montpellier was intended as homage to Gustave Courbet, and that in Washington to Eugène Delacroix.

In the summer of 1870, Bazille worked on three paintings when he was staying alone at Méric. Study for a Young Male Nude appears odd because it was painted over an unfinished painting of two women in a garden, and the lower third of the canvas shows the lower part of their dresses.

On 19 July 1870, France declared war on Prussia. Within a month, Bazille had enlisted in the Third Zouave Regiment. He spent September training in Algeria, then returned into combat in France. On 28 November 1870, Bazille was killed at the Battle of Beaune-la-Rolande. He would have celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday just over a week later.

In but eight years of painting, Bazille had shown great technical skill, originality, and high promise for his future in the Impressionist movement. Unlike his close friends Monet and Renoir, he was particularly interested in and adept at depicting figures in landscapes. That brilliant future, which would surely have changed Impressionism too, was abruptly ended in a futile attempt to relieve the Siege of Paris.

References

Wikipedia.

Hilaire, Michel, & Perrin, Paul (eds) (2016), Frédéric Bazille and the Birth of Impressionism, Flammarion. ISBN 978 2 080 20285 7.

Impressionist painting is today known overwhelmingly from the many landscapes painted by Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro. The figurative paintings of Auguste Renoir are often thought of as more of a commercial undertaking, those of Edgar Degas are seen as exceptions, and Paul Cézanne’s are usually glossed over altogether.

One of the reasons that Impressionist figurative painting is now largely ignored is that its greatest exponent was killed in 1870, just as he was reaching his peak. When Frédéric Bazille was shot dead by Prussian soldiers during the Franco-Prussian War, that changed the course of Impressionism. This weekend I show some of the paintings from the seven short years of his career as an oil painter before his sudden death.

Jean Frédéric Bazille was born into an affluent family in Montpellier, France, a city on the Mediterranean coast with one of the oldest universities in the world. He was inspired to paint when he saw some of Delacroix’s works, but his family wanted him to study medicine. An accommodation was reached, and in 1859, he started his medical studies at Montpellier University.

In November 1862, Bazille left his home city to transfer to medical studies in Paris. A friend introduced him to Charles Gleyre’s studio, and some time in early 1863, he seems to have started as a pupil there, while continuing his medical training. He met Claude Monet there in March or April of that year, and started painting en plein air with him, probably with Sisley and Renoir too. By the end of 1863, he seems to have been making good progress with Gleyre, although his parents were keen to remind him of the precedence of his medical studies.

In January 1864, he started renting his first studio, and that summer travelled to Normandy with Monet. Shortly after that, he failed his medical exams, and dropped out from those studies, leaving him painting full-time.

In the late summer of 1864, in an effort to convince his family that he was serious about his career in art, Bazille started work on his La Robe Rose (The Pink Dress). Using his cousin Thérèse des Hours, aged fourteen, as his model, he painted this from a drawing he made at Méric, looking towards the village of Castelnau-le-Lez, near Montpellier.

In his drawing, the model is looking to the right and out of the picture plane, with her head rotated by about ninety degrees from that shown in this painting. As this was his first painting of a figure set in a landscape, Bazille seems to have wanted to avoid tackling her face, and opted for her looking away from the viewer.

This painting wasn’t seen by the public until 1910, but since then has become accepted as one of his major works, which is surprising for such a challenging motif and such a relative novice.

In the autumn of 1864, when he returned to Paris, Bazille didn’t go back to Gleyre’s studio, but painted mostly from the models in Monet’s studio. In January 1865, the two painters moved into a new studio together, above Delacroix’s former flat in rue de Furstenberg.

It’s not clear exactly when he painted his Self-Portrait with Palette, but it was most probably in 1865. It’s a remarkably accomplished work, given the complexity of arranging the mirror and canvas to result in this unusual pose.

In May 1865, Bazille left the city for the Forest of Fontainebleau, where the Barbizon School had been centred. There he painted Landscape at Chailly in company with Monet, and possibly Renoir and Sisley. Although clearly influenced by that style, Bazille’s colours are much brighter, and escape the sombre browns and greens that dominated Barbizon paintings.

In May of the previous year, Bazille and Monet had travelled to the Channel coast, to Le Havre. This was Monet’s home ground, but the first time that Bazille had explored this coast. Oddly, Bazille painted The Beach at Sainte-Adresse a year later, in May 1865, as one of a pair of paintings for an uncle. It appears to have been partially copied from a painting of the same name by Monet, made when the two had visited Sainte-Adresse the year before. Bazille re-arranged the yachts and changed the staffage of the beach, but the sea, sky, and coastline are essentially the same.

During the summer of 1865, Bazille painted Monet lying in bed, injured, at the Lion d’Or Inn, in The Improvised Field Hospital (1865); sadly I have been unable to find a good image of that painting.

In the late autumn, Gustave Courbet visited Monet and Bazille, and congratulated them on their work. However, in January 1866, Bazille left their shared studio to set up in his own at last. In the Spring, he submitted two paintings to the Salon, of which one, Still Life with a Fish, was accepted. For a while during the winter of 1866-67, Monet lodged in Bazille’s studio.

During this period, he started to paint The Little Gardener (1865-67), but seems to have abandoned it with the foreground incomplete. It was another step in his development of figures in landscapes, and a precursor to his paintings of 1868.

Bazille first wanted to paint at Aigues-Mortes, east of Montpellier, in the summer of 1866, but didn’t get there until May 1867. He then produced one of his most painterly and brilliant landscapes of The Western Ramparts at Aigues-Mortes, as well as several other views, including many sketches.

I include this Portrait of Paul Verlaine (1867) because of its controversial history. On the strength of the signature on it (which isn’t legible in this image), it had been attributed to Gustave Courbet, but most recently has been claimed to have been painted by Bazille. If that’s accurate, its painterly style is surprising and impressive.

In the Spring of 1867, Bazille submitted two more paintings for the Salon, but both were refused. He drafted a petition calling for a new Salon des Refusés, which was signed by Daubigny, a distinguished member of the Salon jury at the time.

During the summer of 1867, Bazille started work on Portraits of the *** Family also known as The Family Gathering, which he didn’t complete until January the following year. This seems to have been one of his most carefully composed paintings, and he devoted a series of sketches to getting the arrangement of the figures and the terrace just right.

The figures include the artist, squeezed in last at the extreme left, an uncle, Bazille’s parents seated on the bench, Bazille’s cousin Pauline des Hours and her husband standing, an aunt and Thérèse des Hours (model for The Pink Dress) seated at the table, his brother Marc and his partner, and at the right Camille, the youngest of the des Hours sisters. This painting marked a special version of a regular summer meeting, as Pauline des Hours and Bazille’s brother Marc married the partners shown in the late summer of 1867.

At the time, such group portraits were exceptional in French art, although they were popular in Britain, and had been so in the past in the Netherlands, of course. It’s perhaps unsurprising that it was exhibited at the Salon in 1868, and remains one of Bazille’s finest and most innovative works.

In January 1868, Bazille moved into a new studio with Renoir, at what was renamed the following year rue La Condamine, in the Batignolles. He was a regular attender at the Café Guerbois with Manet, Degas, Duranty, Zola, Astruc, and Cézanne.

Bazille painted another of his best-known works, View of the Village, during the summer of 1868. He based this on sketches made in the Spring at Saint-Sauveur, of a farmer’s daughter in her Sunday-best dress, in Bel-Air Wood, overlooking the River Lez, near Montpellier. Its location and composition are variations of the theme he first developed in The Pink Dress, and he was also reminded of his model for that painting, his cousin Thérèse des Hours.

He probably completed this in the autumn and early winter of 1868, and the following year it was exhibited at the Salon. Puvis de Chavannes and several of the critics were full of praise for it, and for Bazille. He also made an etching of it, the only print made from one of Bazille’s paintings during his lifetime. It remains his greatest success.

References

Wikipedia.

Hilaire, Michel, & Perrin, Paul (eds) (2016), Frédéric Bazille and the Birth of Impressionism, Flammarion. ISBN 978 2 080 20285 7.

The humble domestic chicken is probably the most common and widely distributed farm animal. It originated in about 8,000 BCE in south-east Asia and spread its way steadily across every continent except Antarctica. It probably reached Europe before the Roman Empire, and since then has been commonplace. Perhaps because of its small size and frequent presence, it features in relatively few paintings.

The cruel sport of cockfighting accompanied its spread, and is depicted in Jean-Léon Gérôme’s first successful painting in 1846.

This motif had started from a relief showing two adolescent boys facing off against one another. Gérôme felt he needed to improve his figurative painting, and after Delaroche’s advice decided to develop that image by replacing one of the boys with a girl. In both Greek and English (but not French) the word cock is used for both the male genitals and a male chicken, and the youthful Gérôme must have found this combined visual and verbal pun witty and very Neo-Greek.

There’s a curious ambivalence in its reading too: two cocks are fighting in front of the young couple. Is one of the birds owned by the girl, and if so, is it the dark one on the left, which appears to be getting the better of the bird being held by the boy? Either way, it’s a lightly entertaining reflection on courtship and gender roles, and a promising debut. The Cock Fight earned Gérôme a third-class medal, and he sold the painting for a thousand francs. With the benefit of favourable reviews from critics, the following year brought him lucrative commissions, and a growing reputation.

A dead chicken plays a significant role in one of Rembrandt’s most famous group portraits.

His vast group portrait of The Night Watch (1642) is the most famous of all those of militia in the Dutch Republic. It features the commander and seventeen members of his civic guard company in Amsterdam. Captain Frans Banninck Cocq (in black with a red sash), followed by his lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch (in yellow with a white sash) are leading out this militia company, their colours borne by the ensign Jan Visscher Cornelissen. The small girl to the left of them is carrying a dead chicken, a curious symbol of arquebusiers, the type of weapon several are carrying.

For a young child, cockerels can appear large and threatening, as used by Gaetano Chierici in a delightful visual joke.

His undated painting of A Scary State of Affairs calls on our experience of the behaviour of cockerels and geese. An infant has been left with a bowl on their lap, and their room is invaded first by cockerels, then by those even larger and more aggressive geese. The child’s eyes are wide open, their mouth at full stretch in a scream, their arms raised, and their legs are trying to fend the birds away.

Being among the most humble and everyday domestic species, chickens seldom make the limelight in religious narratives.

Murillo’s Adoration of the Shepherds from about 1650 is an exception featuring unusual additional details including the old woman carrying a basketful of eggs, and chickens in front of the kneeling shepherd.

In most paintings including chickens, though, they are just extras in the farmyard.

Paulus Potter’s Figures with Horses by a Stable (1647) includes finely painted horses, chickens, a dog, and distant cattle, with a magnificent tree in the centre and a sky containing several birds.

In Chickenfeed from 1867, Hans Thoma tackles this genre scene in a traditional and detailed realist style.

Alberto Pasini’s Market Scene from 1884 has an eclectic mixture of produce, ranging from live chickens to pots and the artist’s signature melons.

Évariste Carpentier’s undated Eating in the Farmyard, an example of the rural deprivation which sparked Naturalist art, shows two kids surrounded by animals and birds in this much-used space.

Here, Carpentier’s old woman is busy Feeding the Chickens.

Friedrich Eckenfelder’s Zollernschloss, Balingen from about 1884-5 shows a small yard just below the back of this castellated farm in Germany, with its lively flock of chickens.

Gustav Klimt had probably painted his first small landscapes between 1881-87, and returned to the genre more seriously in about 1896. This work, variously known as After the Rain, Garden with Chickens in St. Agatha, or similar, is thought to have been painted when Klimt stayed in the Goiserer Valley with the Flöge family in the summer of 1898.

Very occasionally, a chicken may come as something of a surprise.

Hieronymus Bosch’s Ship of Fools, a fragment from a larger Wayfarer triptych painted in 1500-10, is actually a small boat, into which six men and two women are packed tight. Its mast is unrealistically high, bears no sail, and has a large branch lashed to the top of it, in which is Bosch’s signature owl. Its occupants are engaged in drinking, eating what appear to be cherries from a small rectangular tabletop, and singing to the accompaniment of a lute being played by one of the women. A man has climbed a tree on the bank to try to cut down the carcass of a chicken from high up the mast.

Next month we will commemorate the centenary of the death of one of the most influential Nordic artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Christian Krohg (1852–1925). Although he never achieved great international fame, he was a key figure in the artistic development and life of Edvard Munch, was the first professor and director of the Oslo State Academy of Art, a widely-read author and critic, and a social and political campaigner.

Krohg’s background was anything but poor: his grandfather had been a government minister, and his father was a lawyer and statesman. However, his mother died when he was only eight years old, and the oldest of his four sisters, Marie, assumed responsibility for running the household and bringing him up. His family expected him to study law, but his aspiration was to become a painter. The compromise was that he studied law for four years at university, and attended a drawing school.

In 1873, with the death of his father and the completion of his law studies in Oslo, he went to study painting in Karlsruhe, Germany, where he was taught by the great Norwegian landscape artist Hans Gude among others. In 1875, he transferred to the Royal Academy in Berlin, where he was inspired to become a ‘naturalist’ by Max Klinger and Georg Brandes.

Among the earliest of Krohg’s surviving paintings is his Portrait of Lucy Parr Egeberg, 1876, a demonstration of his skills in line and form.

In 1879, on the encouragement of the artist Frits Thaulow, Krohg travelled to Skagen at the northern tip of Jylland (Jutland) in Denmark, where he joined the group of Nordic painters there who were working largely in Impressionist style. Krohg started his first major project to document the lives of the Gaihede family of Skagen over the next decade.

His early painting of Ane Gaihede as a Woman Cutting Bread (1879) was the start of his social realism. Krohg documents her in almost ethnographic detachment. She is aligned in profile, against an almost bare wall, perfectly framed at three-quarter length.

Another major work from this period began his career-long series of paintings of working seamen, in Port Side! (1879). Krohg started this when he was still in Berlin, and completed it when at Skagen that first summer. It was one of two of his paintings exhibited at the Salon in Paris in 1882, and although it didn’t attract much critical attention, its reviews were positive.

Krohg crops this closer, leaving just a few millimetres beyond the tips of his fingers. He adds the dynamics by ensuring that no lines are anywhere near horizontal or vertical, and you can almost feel the heel of the ship’s deck under your feet. The seaman’s oilskins have been patched repeatedly, and have deeply ingrained grime.

In Niels Gaihede Netting (c 1880), another of his Skagen series, he shows the Gaihedes together, with Niels at work on his fishing net, and Ane in the background, staring sternly. Their surroundings are less spartan, but still frugal: the furniture is basic wood, and has seen better days, probably long ago. A clock and some sheets of prints taken from a magazine are the only objects on the blank white wall behind. Niels wears large wooden working clogs, and his trousers have been patched many times.

After his time in Skagen, Krohg started teaching at an art school for women, which in common with others across Europe was trying to address the growing demand from budding women artists, and the conservative attitudes persisting in major academies at the time. Perhaps influenced by this experience, he opened another theme which he was to explore repeatedly, that of illness in the family, with his Sick Girl (1881). The sickness in question is tuberculosis, then prevalent throughout Norway and much of the rest of Europe, King Death as it was nicknamed at the time.

The girl’s face indicates that her end is drawing near. On her lap is a single pale pink rose, its leaves dropped like tears down the blanket covering her legs. He again crops the image closely. This was a direct inspiration for a motif taken up early in the paintings of Edvard Munch, who eventually made around twenty variants of the same theme.

In 1881, Krohg met the Skagen artist Peder Severin Krøyer, and went to live in Paris for a year. He was particularly influenced by the Impressionists, Edouard Manet, and Gustave Courbet, together with the social realism of Jules Breton, Jules Bastien-Lepage, and Léon Lhermitte.

Among the Impressionists, he seems to have been most attracted to the work of Gustave Caillebotte. Krohg’s Portrait of the Swedish Painter Karl Nordström (1882) (above) appears to have been motivated by Caillebotte’s Man on a Balcony, Boulevard Haussmann (1880), below, which in turn was developed from Caillebotte’s earlier painting of his brother as a Young Man at His Window (1875). Curiously, Krohg didn’t paint this in Paris, but towards the end of his time in France, in the artists’ colony of Grez-sur-Loing, in the Spring of 1882.

Perhaps just before Krohg went to Grez, he may have visited Normandy, to paint this interesting little view of a Village Street in Normandy (1882). Its curved recession of umbrellas with disembodied legs is striking.

Krohg then went to stay in Skagen over much of the next couple of years. His sailing painting Hard Alee (1882) was exhibited in the Salon in Paris that year, and was one of the silver wedding gifts from the Norwegian people to King Oscar II and Queen Sophia of Nassau, who were also the king and queen of Sweden, as the countries were in union at the time.

This time his seaman is sailing a small yacht singlehanded. The tiller, his arms, and a line he is holding, trace a bold and dynamic zigzag down the centre of the canvas. Again Krohg is careful to ensure that there is only one horizontal (or vertical) line, that of the horizon.

Krohg’s paintings from this period at Skagen form an absorbing account of life in the artists’ colony there, and several are displayed in the excellent Skagen Museum there. Charles Lundh in Conversation with Christian Krohg (1883) shows this Norwegian painter who lived from 1856-1908, and Krohg’s legs. Lundh stayed in Skagen that summer, living in a house with Krohg, then painted in Persia for five years. Krohg visited Paris again in the Spring of 1883, then returned to Skagen for the summer.

This Self-portrait (1883) of him clutching his huge smoking pipe with a well-used palette in the other hand, shows him at the age of about 31.

It contrasts with The Day After, Self-portrait (1883) which reflects the intensity of the social events held in Skagen, a true confluence of spirits.

References

Skagens Museum, Denmark
Øystein Sjåstad (2017) Christian Krohg’s Naturalism, U Washington Press. ISBN 978 0 295 74206 9.

Landscape painting was another of the genres that had developed little before the Dutch Golden Age, when it became one of the most popular. It also proved an interesting challenge for its exponents, who had to fill their canvases with a land that was almost completely flat. The favoured solution was to look to the heavens, resulting in the first cloudscapes.

Simon de Vlieger’s Beach View from 1643 uses boats, many figures, and careful composition to swell the land over the bottom of its panel. It shows well, though, how important is the sky, marvellously rendered here, with a small group of white birds shown against the grey of the clouds. De Vlieger was born in Rotterdam, and painted in Delft and Amsterdam, where he was best known for his landscapes.

Jan van Goyen’s View of Dordrecht with the Grote Kirk Across the Maas from 1644 is another example of a low horizon cramming a lot of detail into the foot of the painting, leaving the major part devoted to sky.

The action and excitement, even fear, in Aelbert Cuyp’s Thunderstorm over Dordrecht from about 1645 is in its bolt of lightning, with the cattle lying passive in the fields below.

At about the same time, Jacob van Ruisdael painted his first panoramic landscape, this View of Naarden and the Church of Muiderberg from 1647. Still working on a very wide support orientated conventionally in ‘landscape’ mode, his immense sky is no passive backdrop to the land, but the scene of intriguing cloud formations.

Salomon van Ruysdael filled his panels and canvases with the sky, as in his View of Alkmaar from the Sea from about 1650, where he has turned his panel from the usual ‘landscape’ mode. Clouds had now become subjects in their own right, and differences in their form and texture some of the most important features.

At their best, Cuyp’s coastal landscapes, such as The Maas at Dordrecht from about 1650, are full of rich light, earning him the nickname of the Dutch Claude Lorrain. This shows a passage boat packed with passengers, together with its drummer, below a finely detailed sky.

Cuyp also populated the strip at the foot of his landscapes with farm animals. In his Cows in a River from about 1650, the landscape has been minimised to concentrate on the cattle, although most of his panel is still taken by its striking sky.

Unless backed by elevated dunes, there was no way that an artist could expand thin strips of beach and sea. The dominant towers of cumulus clouds in Adriaen van de Velde’s View of a Beach from 1663-65 have become his subjects.

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

Other artists like Philip de Koninck marvelled at cloud formations, here in his River Landscape from just after the end of the Golden Age, in 1676.

In the distant past, fresco painting was ideal for brightening up the walls or ceiling of a substantial building, but there was also demand for smaller, more portable works of art. Some would have been painted onto animal skins, and were ultimately developed into miniatures in beautiful manuscripts, using the precursors of watercolours. One alternative medium developed most successfully was wax, in encaustic painting.

Characteristically this uses binder that in most ambient temperatures is solid, but becomes liquid paint at higher temperatures, usually no higher than the boiling point of water. This enables the painter to heat mixtures of pigment and binder kept at around 50˚-90˚C (120˚-200˚F), apply them while still hot, and for them to bind the pigment to its ground once the paint cools.

People started to keep bees by around 7000 BCE, and one of their most important products has been the wax from which they build their hives. Beeswax has a typical melting point of about 63˚C (145˚F), a temperature readily achieved by heating water but well above daytime maximum air temperatures experienced where people live, which very seldom reach 50˚C (120˚F). Beeswax was therefore most probably the first binder used for encaustic painting.

Encaustic paint is thus unusual as it doesn’t rely on a chemical process to form the dry paint layer, but a physical change of state, which is fully reversible. Common supports include panels of wood, which originally didn’t have any ground applied. More recently grounds of gesso have been used successfully, but encaustic paints have also been applied to a wide range of supports including dried and fired clay tablets, pots, and sculpture.

One significant limitation with the process of painting using encaustic media is that heated paint tends to be thin and runny. Most artists therefore apply their paint with the support laid flat, and leave their work horizontal until the paint has solidified. Instead of painting stood up in front of an easel, they tend to work lying down.

Although encaustic paintings are susceptible to physical damage and decay, some from before the Christian era have survived, and it’s thought that the medium was used for several hundred or even thousands of years before the birth of Christ. The best-known early encaustic paintings are those made by colonists from Greece and Rome when living in Egypt between about 80-250 CE, particularly those found in the Fayum (or Faiyum) Basin. These were first discovered in about 1615, with most being removed during the nineteenth century and spread across collections in Europe and America. These funerary portraits are among the most haunting images in European art, and demonstrate how skilled encaustic painting can rival other media. It can achieve a remarkable lucency, although this depends on the processing of the beeswax and its ageing.

This Funerary Portrait of a Woman ‘Isidora’ is rendered in fine, close-packed strokes of encaustic wax to model the form, and the eyelashes have been formed by scraping away wax to reveal the underlying black ground. Originally painted on a rectangular cedar board, small squares of gold leaf were applied around her neck, and the board cut down to size to fit the facial area of the woman’s mummy for interment.

Modelling of the skin in this Funerary Portrait of the Boy Eutyches is well in advance of its time, and appears more characteristic of portraits from the Renaissance over a thousand years later.

A tradition of encaustic painting also grew up in early Christian communities, where it was used to create icons for places of worship and the homes of the wealthiest.

This encaustic painting of the Virgin Mary and Child with Saints Theodor of Amasea and George, and Angels was made in about 580 CE for Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, not far from where the Fayum portraits had been interred.

A few artists continued to paint in encaustic even after the Renaissance, although this has remained a minority pursuit. Giovanni Francesco Romanelli’s painting of Boys Fishing from about 1640 curiously uses cardboard as its support, suggesting it may have been more of an experiment.

The nineteenth century saw a resurgence in the use of more traditional media such as egg tempera. In addition to painting with that, some like Arnold Böcklin returned to try encaustics, here in one of his major works, the first version of Villa by the Sea from 1864.

More followed suit in the twentieth century, including James Ensor, Diego Rivera and Jasper Johns, and today encaustic methods have a small but enthusiastic following.

Virgil has led Dante into a gorge taking them from the heretics further into the depths of Hell. As they descend, Virgil advises they should take their time so they can become accustomed to the stench emanating from these depths. This allows him to explain to Dante the layout of the parts they are about to enter.

Within the next pit are three sub-divisions, catering for the sins of malice in their different forms. The first ring is for those of violent will, and is divided again into three, for homicides and bandits, for suicides, and blasphemers. Dante’s verbal descriptions of these sub-divisions can readily become confusing, and have been turned into diagrammatic maps by several artists.

One of the most famous is Botticelli’s Map of Hell from 1480-90, in which these lower zones are shown as a funnel at the bottom, leading to the Devil himself.

Jan van der Straet’s diagram from 1587 is similar in form, and packs these zones into the narrow section at the foot.

Dante opens Canto 12 as the pair are scrambling down boulders as if in the Alps, dislodged during the earthquake resulting from Christ’s harrowing of Hell, to meet the Minotaur from Crete.

Like so many of Dante’s beasts, the Minotaur is drawn from classical mythology. This monstrous cross between a bull and human was kept in the labyrinth on Crete, where it was periodically fed with young Greek men and virgin women. For George Frederic Watts, in his painting of The Minotaur from 1885, it represented the worst of Victorian society and its moral values, in the industry of child prostitution flourishing in London at the time.

Dante and Virgil hurry past the Minotaur when they can, and continue their descent through more fallen boulders and scree, to enter the seventh circle, for sins of violence. They are then hailed by one of a group of centaurs armed with bows and arrows. Virgil responds that they will discuss their mission with Chiron, rather than the hot-headed Nessus. Chiron was a centaur in mythology, but one known for his wisdom, and for teaching the young Achilles. Nessus was another centaur, who tried to abduct Heracles’ wife Deianeira and was killed for that, but laid a plot that led to Heracles’ death.

Chiron directs Nessus to aid Virgil and Dante in their passage.

They pass along the rocks beside the damned souls, who are immersed in boiling blood to a depth appropriate to their sins. Dante recognises some as they go: Alexander the Great, Dionysius the Elder and tyrant of Syracuse, one of the d’Este family who was suffocated by his own son. Further on are Attila the Hun, Pyrrhus, Sextus son of Pompey, and a couple of infamous contemporary highwaymen.

Virgil then leads Dante into a strange wood, whose thorn trees form the nests of Harpies. These composite creatures have the heads of humans and the bodies and talons of birds, and live in sub-ring number two. In classical legend, the Harpies inhabited the Strophades, islands where they attacked Aeneas and his companions in Virgil’s Aeneid.

Virgil tells Dante to break a small branch from one of the trees. When he does, the tree screams out in pain, and the wound oozes blood. The tree explains that they were once people, but had taken their own lives. In this case, Dante is talking to the poet Pier della Vigna, who was ruined by envious rivals.

Dante is filled with pity for the spirit, who can only look forward to the Day of Judgement, while they are tortured by the Harpies feeding on their leaves. After learning of another two suicides from Siena and Florence, Dante moves on in profound sorrow.

The artists

William Blake (1757–1827) was a British visionary painter and illustrator whose last and incomplete work was an illustrated edition of the Divine Comedy for the painter John Linnell. Most of his works shown in this series were created for that, although he did draw and paint scenes during his earlier career. I have a major series on his work here.

Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510) was one of the leading painters of the early Southern Renaissance, working in his native city of Florence. In addition to his huge egg tempera masterpieces of Primavera (c 1482) and The Birth of Venus (c 1485), he was a lifelong fan of Dante’s writings. He produced drawings that were engraved for the first printed edition of the Divine Comedy in 1481, but these weren’t successful, most copies only having two or three of the 19 engraved. He later began a manuscript illustrated edition on parchment, but few pages were ever fully illuminated.

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Early in his career, he produced a complete set of seventy illustrations for translations of the Inferno, first published in 1857 and still continuing in use. These were followed in 1867 by more illustrations for Purgatorio and Paradiso. This article looks at his paintings.

John Flaxman (1755–1826) was a British sculptor and draughtsman who occasionally painted as well. When he was in Rome between 1787-91, he produced drawings for book illustrations, including a set of 111 for an edition of The Divine Comedy. In 1810, he was appointed the Professor of Sculpture to the Royal Academy in London, and in 1817 made drawings to illustrate Hesiod, that were engraved by William Blake.

Joseph Anton Koch (1768-1839) was an Austrian landscape painter, who worked mainly in Neoclassical style. During his second stay in Rome, he was commissioned to paint frescos in the Villa Massimi on the walls of the Dante Room there, which remain one of the most florid visual accounts of Dante’s Inferno. He completed those between 1824-29. He also appears to have drawn a set of illustrations for Dante’s Inferno in about 1808.

Jan van der Straet, also commonly known by his Italianised name of Giovanni Stradano (1523-1605), was a painter who started his career in Bruges and Antwerp in Belgium, but moved to Florence in 1550, where he worked for the remainder of his life. Mannerist in style, he worked with printmakers in Antwerp to produce collections of prints, including an extensive set for The Divine Comedy.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

Robin Kirkpatrick (trans) (2012) Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, Penguin Classics. ISBN 978 0 141 19749 4.
Richard Lansing (ed) (2000) The Dante Encyclopedia, Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 87611 7.
Guy P Raffa (2009) The Complete Danteworlds, A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy, Chicago UP. ISBN 978 0 2267 0270 4.
Prue Shaw (2014) Reading Dante, From Here to Eternity, Liveright. ISBN 978 1 63149 006 4.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those of us in the northern hemisphere are just sliding into the autumn/fall, as those in the southern are entering Spring. This weekend I celebrate the seasons with the help of an array of some of the finest painters of their time. This article shows sets up to that painted by Pieter Brueghel the Younger. Tomorrow I conclude from the most famous set of all, completed by Nicolas Poussin shortly before his death in 1665, up to the early twentieth century. In each case, I show the seasons in chronological order, starting with Spring, and ending with winter.

The earliest paintings in modern Europe depicting seasons were calendar miniatures in Books of Hours like those of the Limbourg Brothers, such as the famous Très Riches Heures of the Duc de Berry, from about 1411-1416.

One of the early artists who transferred the theme to full-size easel paintings was Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who made several of his marvellous anthropomorphic portraits in sets of four. Less well-known, but more ambitious, is his Four Seasons in One Head from about 1590. He combines different passages to represent the seasons in turn. Spring is in the flowers on the body, summer in the sheaves of ripe corn, autumn in the fruits decorating the hair, and winter in the leafless face and branches.

Although best known for these anthropomorphic paintings, Arcimboldo was by no means their only exponent. At about the same time, Joos de Momper painted anthropomorphic landscapes, in which figures appear from crafted landforms. These come together in an undated series of four allegories of the seasons.

The most conventional platform for depicting the seasons was, inevitably, in landscape paintings. In another series, de Momper painted one of the finest landscape sets between about 1612-15. Each of these is carefully composed with a checklist of different details: trees and their foliage, domestic animals, birds both species and activity, human dress and activity, weather, sky, and so on. This provides much common ground with traditional East Asian paintings of the seasons, as shown in tomorrow’s article.

The Bruegels had also been working for many years on their series showing the seasons. Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c 1525-1569) had been commissioned to produce designs for prints in the mid 1560s, but after his early death the incomplete project was taken over by Hans Bol (1534-1593) and completed as prints in 1570. Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1564–1638) used those as the basis for one of his standard series of paintings, of which two complete sets are known to survive. The images below are of the set in the National Museum of Art of Romania, in Bucharest.

In Spring, gardeners are planting out a formal Italianate flower-garden, a sight that was probably inspired by Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s visit to Italy. It has been suggested that this composition is even more ingenious, in showing March in the foreground, April behind, and May at the furthest end of the garden.

Summer shows the conventional country sight of the wheat harvest, as more fully developed in other paintings by the Brueghels, and one of the most familiar with its golden stooks and bustling activity.

The composition used for Autumn is taken from Bol’s print, although here the number of figures has been reduced to simplify and clarify. The villagers are busy slaughtering and preparing animals, as stooks of corn are laid up in lofts.

Winter draws on several earlier paintings showing skating on ice, and is influenced by those and Bol’s composition used in his 1570 series of prints.

Few small pieces of cloth have such a broad range of associations, from the blindfold used in teasing games, to that covering the eyes of someone about to be shot. In paintings a blindfold is also the clearest visual statement that its wearer can’t see.

From classical civilisations onwards, it has been widely held that love is blind, and accordingly depictions of Cupid often show him wearing a blindfold.

Piero della Francesca’s fresco showing Cupid Blindfolded (1452-66) illustrates both the ancient saying and the Roman concept of an infant archer with spectacular wings.

This is maintained by Botticelli in the Cupid shown at the top of his Primavera (Spring) (c 1482).

The controversial Félicien Rops transferred this into a contrasting image.

Pornocrates, or Woman with a Pig from 1878 is his best-known work, showing a nearly-naked woman being led by a pig tethered on a lead like a dog. She wears a blindfold, and an exuberant black hat, suggesting she is a courtesan or prostitute. In the air are three winged amorini, and below is a frieze containing allegories of sculpture, music, poetry and painting.

The other classical figure likely to be blindfolded is the personification of Fortune.

Giovanni Bellini’s Allegory of Winged Fortune (1490) may look weird, but features the following symbols:

• the blindfold represents Fortune’s salient characteristic, her blindness in dispensing good fortune and misfortune;
• ill fate is normally associated with a peacock tail, wings, and lion’s paws;
• the two pitchers represent the dispensation of good and bad fortune;
• abundant and long hair at the front of the head, and little at the back, symbolises Kairos, the moment of opportunity, which can be seized by the hair when approaching, but once passed cannot.

In history paintings, a blindfold is almost universally the sign of seriously bad fortune.

Paul Delaroche’s convincing painting of The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (1833) shows the fate of a contender for the crown of England following the early death of King Edward VI at the age of just 15 in 1553. As he had no natural successor, he had drawn up a plan for a cousin, Lady Jane Grey, to become Queen. Her rule started on 10 July 1553, but King Edward’s half sister Mary deposed her on 19 July. She was committed to the Tower of London, convicted of high treason in November 1553, and executed on Tower Green by beheading on 12 February 1554 at the age of just 16 (or 17).

Lady Jane Grey and the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir John Bridges, take the centre of the canvas. She is blindfolded, the rest of her face almost expressionless. As she can no longer see, the Lieutenant is guiding her towards the executioner’s block, in front of her. Her arms are outstretched, hands with fingers spread in their quest for the block. Under the block, straw has been placed to take up her blood.

At the right, the executioner stands high and coldly detached, his left hand holding the haft of the axe which he will shortly use to kill the young woman. Coils of rope hang from his waist, ready to tie his victim down if necessary. At the left, two of Lady Jane Grey’s attendants or family are resigned in their grief. Lady Jane Grey wears a silver-white gown which dominates the entire painting, forcing everything and everyone else back into sombre mid tones and darker.

Although Delaroche made one major alteration to history, as she was actually executed in the small court-like space within the Tower known as Tower Green, he otherwise appears to have been faithful.

Antonio Gisbert’s huge painting of The Execution by Firing Squad of Torrijos and his Companions on the Beach at Málaga (1888) shows a terrible scene: the summary execution of nearly fifty people on 11 December 1831.

General José María de Torrijos y Uriarte was highly successful in his military career, and during liberal government in 1820-23 was Captain General of Valencia, and Minister for War. When that regime came to an end in 1823, General Torrijos first fled to France, then to England, where he lived in London, being assisted by the Duke of Wellington, then Prime Minister.

From 1827, the liberal Spanish exiles organised themselves for a popular uprising in Spain, and in 1831, Torrijos and his followers travelled to Gibraltar in readiness. They supported several attempts at insurrection in early 1831, each of which was brutally suppressed by the absolutist government under Ferdinand VII. The Governor of Málaga then tricked General Torrijos into believing that he was a supporter of the planned insurrection. On the morning of 2 December, General Torrijos and fifty-nine others landed at Málaga after a surprise attack by the ship Neptune. They intended to encourage a liberal uprising, and had brought a printed manifesto and several proclamations which they intended to promulgate.

They were eventually ambushed after several days of walking, on 4 December, and surrendered, hoping that the situation in Málaga had improved. They underwent no trial, but at 1130 on Sunday 11 December 1831, all 49 who had been captured were shot dead by a firing squad on the beach.

Our sense of sight is celebrated in a peculiar, ancient, and widespread game played by children and adults alike: blind man’s buff (or bluff). This involves putting a blindfold on the ‘victim’, who is then required to ‘tag’ one of the sighted players. It was recorded in ancient Greece, and more recently is known from much of Asia, including Japan, throughout Europe, and the Americas.

The game also rejoices under many fascinating names: in ancient Greece it was known as copper mosquito, in Bangladesh as blind fly, in Germany as blind cow, and in France as Colin-Maillard, after a tenth century warrior.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Blind-Man’s Buff (1750-52) shows a red-faced young woman wearing the blindfold, being teased by her young man, and a child using a simple fishing rod. Her torso is tightly constricted by a tubular corset which gives her what appears to be an anatomically impossible figure, and if she’s not very careful, she will fall down the stone steps in front of her.

Francisco Goya shows a more usual form of Blind Man’s Buff (1788), in which the sighted players hold hands and form a ring around the blindfolded ‘victim’. Although this should provide them with more safety, this group has chosen to play on the bank of a river.

Konstantin Makovsky’s Игра в жмурки (Blind Man’s Buff) (c 1895) shows another variant being played indoors.

In the closing years of the nineteenth century, following the publication of his illustrated edition of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Walter Crane was becoming more involved in teaching. He lectured at the Manchester School of Art, and for a short period was principal at the Royal College of Art in London. He also travelled, and in 1900 paid a successful visit to Budapest in Hungary to promote a retrospective exhibition of his work.

His watercolour portrait of the beautiful woman knight Britomart from 1900 was probably a sequel to his Spenser project, as she is one of the major figures in that epic, and an allegory of virtue. She is shown on a very English beach, with the chalk cliffs of the south coast behind her, staring wistfully into the distance, her chin propped on the heel of her right hand. She wears full armour, mixed with more feminine clothing. Her left arm rests on her shield, there’s an enchanted lance beside her, and her helmet on a dune behind her.

In the same year, Death, the Reaper may have drawn inspiration from faerie paintings of the previous century, in particular those of Richard Dadd, in the tiny humans cavorting among the wild flowers. Crane invokes one of the most exaggerated moon illusions I’ve seen, to add more atmosphere.

A Masque for the Four Seasons, painted in oils between 1905-09, is one of Crane’s most overtly Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and possibly his last major work in oils. Drawing on his memories of Botticelli’s Primavera, it uses a similar frieze of figures before a dense woodland background, and copious displays of seasonal wild flowers. The four Grace-like women wear loose classical robes, and are colour-coded. From the left they represent Spring, summer, autumn and winter.

Gaps in the trees provide two cameo glimpses of appropriately seasonal agriculture, with Spring ploughing on the left, and the grain harvest in the centre. At the right is Father Time playing the pipes, his hourglass beside him. This coincided with Evelyn De Morgan’s similar frieze The Cadence of Autumn, shown below, also from 1905.

Crane appears to have travelled more widely in the early twentieth century, as far as Colombo in modern Sri Lanka, where he painted this gouache Under the Palms at the Galle Face, Ceylon on 17 February 1907.

Original artwork for illustration can become more difficult to classify, as shown in this watercolour and ink drawing for The Mirror, one of Crane’s illustrations for Arthur Kelly’s The Rosebud and Other Tales from 1909.

Although Crane’s Race of Hero Spirits Pass from 1909 may have been in preparation for an illustration to accompany Charles Kingsley’s poem The World’s Age (1849), it was painted in tempera on canvas, suggesting it may have been intended as a standalone easel painting. This was accompanied by the quotation:
“Still the race of Hero-spirits
Pass the lamp from hand to hand;
Age from age the Words inherits –
‘Wife, and Child, and Fatherland.'”

The fourth modern Olympic Games had been held in London the previous year (1908), and may have been his inspiration.

The Judgment of Paris, painted in 1909 in watercolour, returns to the Pre-Raphaelite frieze. Although competent, it lacks the flair and innovation of his earlier depictions of myth.

On 27 February 1910, Crane was on his travels again, this time in North Africa, where he painted this watercolour of Porte de France, Tunis.

I also have two interesting undated paintings I suspect may have come from Crane’s later years.

Painted in a combination of transparent watercolour and gouache, A Diver is an unusual and challenging motif.

His more illustrative watercolour of Nyads and Dryads melds its Dryads in with their trees, puts the ‘Nyads’ or Naiads (water nymphs) in the water, and has a river god watching from the reeds in the distance.

Late in 1914, after the start of the First World War, his wife Frances became unwell and went on a ‘rest cure’ in Kent. She then suffered an episode of acute mental illness and killed herself. Walter Crane died on 14 March 1915, at the age of 69. Although his paintings had already lost their popularity, as a children’s illustrator his accomplishments live on.

References

Wikipedia

O’Neill M (2010) Walter Crane. The Arts and Crafts, Painting, and Politics, 1875-1890, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 16768 9.