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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reference

Wikipedia on the carol The Holly and the Ivy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some of the hundred individual stories told by Boccaccio in his Decameron only attained fame much later. A good example is the tragic tale of Lisabetta related by Filomena on the fourth day, when it was the fifth of those whose love ended unhappily.

In 1818, the British poet John Keats (1795-1821) wrote his version, titled Isabella, or the Pot of Basil, which wasn’t published until shortly after the poet’s untimely death at the age of just twenty-five. It became one of Keats’ most popular works in the nineteenth century. Here I tell Boccaccio’s original version complete with its names, mindful that Keats called his leading lady Isabella rather than Lisabetta, although her lover’s name is Lorenzo according to both authors.

Following the death of a rich merchant of Messina, his three sons inherited his riches, and Lisabetta their sister remained unmarried despite her beauty and grace. She fell in love with Lorenzo, a Pisan who directed operations in one of the brothers’ trading establishments, and their relationship was consummated. The couple had tried keeping their affair secret, but one night she was observed by one of her brothers making her way to Lorenzo’s bedroom; Lisabetta remained unaware of this discovery. Her brother was distressed by this, but decided to keep quiet, and discuss it with his brothers next morning.

The following day, the brothers decided that they would also keep quiet until the opportunity arose to end their sister’s relationship. One day they pretended that they were going to the country for pleasure, and took Lorenzo with them. When they reached an isolated location, the three murdered him, buried his body, then told their sister that they had sent him away on a trading mission.

Lisabetta was anxious for her lover’s return, and persistently asked her brothers for news of him. Eventually, one of them rebuked her for this nagging, so she stopped mentioning him altogether. But each night she kept repeating his name and pining for him. One night, having finally fallen asleep in her tears, she saw him in a dream, when he told her that her brothers had murdered him, and where they had buried his body.

In her grief, Lisabetta obtained the permission of her brothers to go to the country for pleasure. Once she had located where she thought Lorenzo was buried, she quickly found his corpse, which remarkably showed no signs of decay. As she couldn’t move his whole body for more appropriate burial, she cut off his head and hid it in a towel.

When she returned home, Lisabetta cried greatly over Lorenzo’s head, washing it with her tears, then wrapped it in cloth and put it in a large pot. She covered it with soil and in that planted some sprigs of basil. These she watered daily with her tears, as she sat constantly beside the pot in between bouts of crying over it. As a result, the basil grew strong and lush, and richly fragrant.

William Holman Hunt’s Isabella and the Pot of Basil from 1867 is intricately detailed, with several references to elements of the story, such as the relief of a skull on the side of the pot, a red rose on a tray by Lisabetta’s left foot, and a silver watering can at the bottom right. Behind her is the image of a bedroom, possibly showing Lorenzo coming to her in a flashback to their affair.

Joseph Severn’s Isabella, or the Pot of Basil from 1877 appears remarkably high in chroma, and shows Lisabetta fondly embracing the pot and crying over the basil. Severn had been a personal friend of John Keats, and painted this just a couple of years before his own death.

Edward Reginald Frampton’s Isabella, or the Pot of Basil was probably painted towards the end of the nineteenth century, or possibly in the early twentieth. Lisabetta is kneeling before her pot of basil at an altar, with a crucifix behind.

Ricciardo Meacci’s watercolour of Isabella and the Pot of Basil from 1890 shows Lisabetta embracing her pot of basil, as her three brothers watch with growing anger at her behaviour.

Lisabetta’s brothers began to suspect something, so had the pot removed from her room. This caused their sister deeper grief, and she kept asking after the pot.

John Melhuish Strudwick’s Isabella from about 1886 shows Lisabetta staring in grief at the stand where her pot of basil had stood. Through the window, two of her brothers are seen making off with the pot, looking back at her.

The brothers examined its contents and discovered Lorenzo’s head. Scared that his murder might cause problems for them, they reburied the head, wound up their business, and left Messina for Naples. Lisabetta’s grief only grew deeper, and destroyed her health completely. Still asking for her pot of basil, she finally cried herself to death.

Although the brothers had done everything to keep these events secret, eventually they became widely known, and were celebrated in folk verse.

The first and still greatest depiction of Keats’ retelling is John Everett Millais’ Isabella (Lorenzo and Isabella) from 1848-49, completed before he was twenty, and one of the earliest examples of Pre-Raphaelite art. This is a composite of different references to Keats’ poem and Boccaccio’s story, set at an imaginary family meal the three brothers, Lisabetta and Lorenzo are taking together.

Lorenzo is sharing a blood orange with Lisabetta, white roses and passion flowers climbing from behind their heads. The dog, acting as a surrogate for Lorenzo, is being petted by Lisabetta, but one of her brothers aims a kick at it. Various other symbols are shown of the plot to kill Lorenzo: a brother staring at a glass of red wine, spilt salt on the table, and a hawk pecking at a white feather. The pot of basil is already on the balcony, awaiting Lorenzo’s head.

As far as I can tell, not one major artist had depicted Boccaccio’s story until Keats’ poem had been published nearly half a millennium later.

In the 650 years since Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron started to sweep across Europe, this collection of a hundred short stories has proved one of the most enduring works of literature. I have already given an account of its more painted passages, but this weekend I look in detail at two of them: today that of Cimon and Iphigenia, as told by Panfilo on the fifth day, and tomorrow the tragic tale of Lisabetta related by Filomena on the fourth.

Boccaccio was born in or near Florence in Italy in 1313. He became a scholar and writer based mainly in Florence, and might have been there when it was struck by the Black Death in 1348. The Decameron’s framing story describes that catastrophe, and how a group of seven young women were taking shelter in one of the city’s great churches. They fled as a group to the country nearby, in the company of some servants and three young men. Once settled in an abandoned mansion, the ten decided that one of the means they would use to pass their self-imposed exile was by telling one another stories. Over the next two weeks, each told one story every weekday, delivering the total of a hundred.

For the fifth day of these stories, Fiammetta chose the theme of the adventures of lovers who survived calamities or misfortunes and reached a state of happiness. The first of these is the story of Cimon (or Cymon) and Iphigenia told by Panfilo, which has probably been painted more than any other story in the whole of the Decameron, by masters from Rubens to Frederic, Lord Leighton. What’s most unusual is that every one of those paintings shows a single scene from the second page of a story that runs on for another ten pages, and develops a very different plot.

Cimon’s father was a wealthy Cypriot, but Cimon, a nickname given in honour of his apparent simplicity and uncouthness, was his problem child. He was exceedingly handsome and had a fine physique, but behaved as a complete imbecile. He appeared unable to learn anything, even basic manners, so was sent to live with the farm-workers on his father’s large estates.

One afternoon in May, Cimon was out walking when he reached a fountain in a clearing surrounded by tall trees. Lying asleep on the grass by that fountain was a beautiful young woman, Iphigenia, wearing a flimsy dress that left nothing to the imagination. Sleeping by her were her attendants, two women and a man. Cimon was immediately enraptured, leaned on his stick, and stared at her. As he did so, his simple mind started to change.

As with many of Boccaccio’s stories, this is shown on a wedding cassone, here from about 1525. It’s relatively simple: there’s no sign of Iphigenia’s attendants, but there is a second image of Cimon walking along a path at the far right.

In about 1617, Peter Paul Rubens joined talents with Frans Snyders (who painted the still life with monkeys at the lower right) and Jan Wildens (for its landscape background) in their marvellous Cymon and Iphigenia. This is accurate in its details too, with the correct quota of attendants, and a splendid fountain at the left. Cimon really does look like Boccaccio’s uncouth simpleton.

Willem Van Mieris’ Cymon and Iphigenia from 1698 treats the scene more in the vein of Poussin or Claude, again remaining true to Boccaccio’s details.

Benjamin West was more coy in both his depictions of this scene. His earlier Cymon and Iphigenia from about 1766 (above) was well-received at the time. Six years later, in 1773, he reversed the composition, and was even more restrained in the display of flesh, as shown below.

A few years later, in about 1780, Angelica Kauffman painted this delightful tondo of Cymon and Iphigenia, another variation on the same theme. The cultural contrast between the young man and woman isn’t as stark.

When he was only eighteen, John Everett Millais painted what was to be his last work before he embraced Pre-Raphaelite style: Cymon and Iphigenia (1848). This bears less resemblance to Boccaccio’s story, which is to be expected as Millais didn’t use the Decameron as his literary reference, but a later re-telling by the English poet John Dryden, to which this is more faithful.

In 1884, Frederic, Lord Leighton painted what I think remains the most luxuriant and sensuous treatment of this scene. This study shows Leighton confirming his composition and use of colour.

His finished painting, Cymon and Iphigenia from 1884, shows Iphigenia stretched out languidly in her sleep, in the last warm light of the day; behind her the full moon is just starting to rise. Leighton has changed the season to autumn, with the leaves already brown but the days still hot. Cymon stands in shadow on the right, idly scratching his left knee, gazing intently at Iphigenia.

As far as the painters are concerned, that’s it, and you’d presume the couple lived happily ever after. Not according to Boccaccio, though.

When Iphigenia finally awoke, she was surprised to see Cimon there, and recognised him immediately. Cimon insisted on accompanying her to her house, then went to his family home, where he turned a new leaf, and over the period of four years transformed himself into the best-dressed, most cultured and refined young man on Cyprus. Despite this transformation, Cimon was unable to persuade Iphigenia’s father to allow him to marry the young woman, but was told that she was betrothed to a noble on the island of Rhodes. When the time came for her marriage, Cimon took an armed vessel and gave chase to the ship carrying Iphigenia to Rhodes. He boarded her ship and abducted her.

With Iphigenia on board, Cimon headed for the island of Crete, where he and his crew had relatives and friends. But shortly after they had altered course, a storm blew up, so violent that it threatened to sink the ship. Unable to tell where they were heading, they ended up taking shelter off the coast of Rhodes, where they were caught up by the ship from which they had just abducted Iphigenia.

When their vessel ran aground, Cimon and his crew were forced ashore where they were quickly rounded up and thrown into prison, and Iphigenia was returned to her family ready for her wedding. Iphigenia’s fiancé implored the chief magistrate of Rhodes, Lysimachus, to put Cimon to death, but he was held in custody with the rest of his crew. It happened that Lysimachus was deeply in love with a young woman of Rhodes, who was betrothed to Iphigenia’s future brother-in-law. To Lysimachus’ relief, that marriage had been postponed several times, but it was then decided to hold both weddings in the same ceremony.

Lysimachus was aggrieved by this, and decided the only way he could marry the Rhodian woman that he loved was to abduct her. In order to do so, he needed the help of Cimon and his crew, who would undoubtedly be delighted to be able to abduct Iphigenia again. Lysimachus offered Cimon a deal whereby they would together make off with their partners from the scene of the joint wedding, and they agreed to proceed with that.

Two days later, at dusk, as the weddings were just getting under way, Lysimachus, Cimon and his crew entered the house of the two bridegrooms and seized their brides. Unfortunately, the grooms were armed and mounted a determined resistance. Cimon killed Iphigenia’s fiancé with a single blow to the head, and the other woman’s intended husband fell dead following a blow by Lysimachus.

Lysimachus, Cimon, their crew and the two abducted brides then fled to a ship which they sailed to exile in Crete, where the two couples were married, amid great and joyous celebrations. In time, the people of Cyprus and Rhodes forgave them for the violent way they had stolen their brides; Lysimachus and his wife were able to return to Rhodes, and Cimon and Iphigenia returned to live happily ever after on Cyprus.

None of which was even hinted at by those paintings, however wonderful they are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Many other paintings of butterflies simply represent their beauty.

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

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

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

Book 9 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses ended with several obscure myths that have been painted little, but Book 10 opens with one of the greatest and most enduring stories of the European canon: that of Orpheus and Eurydice. Ovid links to this through Hymen, the god of marriage, and the wedding of Eurydice to the outstanding musician and bard Orpheus. It was a wedding marred by tragedy: after the ceremony, just as the bride was wandering in joy with Naiads in a meadow, she was bitten by a snake on the heel, and died.

Among the earliest paintings of this story in the post-classical era is Jacopo da Sellaio’s superb panel showing Orpheus, Eurydice and Aristaeus from 1475-80. This is one of a series that’s now dispersed across continents. It employs multiplex narrative to show the start of the story, with Orpheus left of centre, tending a flock of sheep, as his bride is bitten by the snake. At the far right, Orpheus, with the assistance of Aristaeus, puts Eurydice’s body in a rock tomb.

One of Poussin’s most famous narrative works, Landscape with Orpheus and Eurydice (c 1650-53) shows Orpheus with his lyre at the right, and Eurydice standing in white, as a snake approaches from the left. Poussin had a thing about snakes, and painted other landscapes with snakes threatening people, and his enigmatic Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake (c 1648). Here his normally peaceful rustic landscape is showing ominous signs of falling apart: the distant castle is on fire, with smoke billowing into the sky.

In Eurydice and the Serpent, a pastel from 1915, Ker-Xavier Roussel shows them just a moment before the bite, with the snake seen on the ground in front of her.

Ary Scheffer’s moving painting of Orpheus Mourning the Death of Eurydice is one of his early works from about 1814. The snake is still visible at the far left, and Orpheus cradles the limp body of his new bride, and breaks down in grief. Scheffer’s handling of complex limb positions is masterful, with the symmetry of their right forearms, and the parallel of her left arm with his left leg. His lyre rests symbolically on the ground behind his left foot.

Orpheus was heart-broken, and mourned her so badly that he descended through the gate of Tartarus to Hades to try to get her released from death. He came across Persephone and her husband Hades, and pleaded his case before them. He said that, if he was unable to return with her to life on earth, then he too would stay in the Underworld with her. He then played his lyre, music so beautiful that those bound to eternal chores were forced to stop and listen. Tantalus, Ixion, the Danaids, even Sisyphus paused and sat on the rock that he normally tried to push uphill. The Fates themselves wept with emotion.

Henri Regnault’s Orpheus in the Underworld (1865) was probably based more on the popular opera by Offenbach, first performed in 1858. Orpheus is seen at the left, his lyre in his hand, singing to the dead. Behind him, at the left edge, are two of the heads of Cerberus, who guards the entrance to the Underworld, and sat on the double throne at the upper right are Persephone, who only spends half the year in the Underworld, and Hades himself.

Persephone summoned Eurydice, and let Orpheus take her back, on the strict understanding that at no time until he reached the earth above could he look back, or she would be returned to the Underworld for ever.

Peter Paul Rubens’ atmospheric painting of the flight of Orpheus and Eurydice (1636-38) was made during his later years of retirement, a few years before his death. Orpheus, clutching his lyre, is leading Eurydice away from Hades and Persephone, as they start their journey back to life. He opts for an unusually real-world version of Cerberus at the bottom right corner.

Camille Corot’s Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld (1861) shows the couple as they near the light at the exit of the underworld. He is instantly recognisable by his lyre held high in front of him, and both are moving towards the right edge of the painting, the edge of the dark wood. Rather than use an abstract form to represent the underworld, Corot has used a wood, with a pool in the middle distance. Behind that are spirits of the dead, some still grieving their death.

Edward Poynter’s Orpheus and Eurydice (1862) takes the couple on an arduous journey, striding past snakes and along a dizzying path on the mountainside. While he looks straight ahead, she seems to be struggling to keep up.

John Roddam Spencer Stanhope’s Orpheus and Eurydice on the Banks of the Styx (1878) takes the couple further still, onto the bank of the River Styx, where Orpheus is summoning Charon the boatman to take them back across the water. He clutches her closely and still looks straight ahead, the couple bound together by the black sash of the Underworld.

The couple trekked up through the gloom, and were just reaching the brighter edge of the Underworld when Orpheus could resist no longer, and looked back to make sure that his wife was still coping with the journey. The moment that he did she melted away back into Hades’ realm. As he tried to grasp her, his hands clutched at empty air. She was gone.

It’s hard to know whether George Frederick Watts’ undated painting of Orpheus and Eurydice shows Orpheus embracing the dead body of Eurydice immediately after she has been bitten by the snake, or (more probably) Orpheus clutching in vain at her spirit as it melts away back into the Underworld, after he has looked back.

Orpheus tried to persuade the ferryman to take him back across the River Styx into the Underworld, but was refused. For a week he sat there in his grief. He then spent three years shunning the company of women, despite their attraction to him, and brought shade to an exposed meadow with his singing, leading to the next myth.

The final painting in this series is Gustave Moreau’s Orpheus at the Tomb of Eurydice (c 1891), showing the bard, his ghostly lyre slung from the dead treestump behind him, lamenting the loss of Eurydice after his failed attempt to bring her back from the Underworld. Moreau painted this dark and funereal work to mark his own inconsolable grief at the death of his partner, Alexandrine Dureux.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My last Shakespearean fool appears in Twelfth Night.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

Wikipedia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

Wikipedia.

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

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

After death, most of us will end up in a coffin, sometimes known euphemistically as a casket. Despite their widespread use, they seldom appear in paintings, perhaps because they obscure the body. Although there’s no shortage of deaths in classical myth and legend, I’ve been unable to find any conventional narrative painting that includes a coffin. There is, though, one remarkable history painting that does.

This is Francisco Pradilla’s painting of Doña Juana “la Loca” – Juana or Joanna the Mad – from 1877, which won the Medal of Honour at the National Exhibition in Spain, went on to the Exposition Universel in Paris, and won further acclaim in Berlin.

Queen Joanna of Castile, or Juana the Mad, brought about the union of the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, forming the basis of modern Spain. She married Philip the Handsome in 1496, shortly before her seventeenth birthday. He was crowned king of Castile in 1506, and was the first of the Habsburg monarchs in Spain. He died suddenly later that year, probably from typhoid fever, and Juana became mentally ill, refusing to let Philip’s body be buried. This is the basis of Pradilla’s painting, where Juana is shown in the nun’s habit she would have worn when she was eventually secreted into a convent. When her father, Ferdinand II, died in 1516, Juana inherited Aragon, and Spain was ruled under the personal union of her son Charles I, who was also elected Holy Roman Emperor.

Coffins do appear more in symbolic roles.

In 1923-24, Albin Egger-Lienz painted a thoroughly modern account of the Resurrection of Christ. His finished painting includes contemporary peasants, and the risen Christ standing in his own coffin.

They also appear in Frederic, Lord Leighton’s unusual And the Sea Gave Up the Dead Which Were in It (1892), whose title is a quotation from the Book of Revelation:
And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works.
(Revelation Chapter 20, verse 13.)

Considered to be one of his most dramatic paintings, it was initially intended to decorate Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London, but was rejected as unsuitable. It was then commissioned at reduced size by Henry Tate for his new gallery of British art, now The Tate Gallery in London.

Unlike much of the fearsome imagery of the Second Coming described in the book of Revelation, this is essentially an optimistic scene, being the resurrection and spiritual salvation of those who have died at sea, an all too common fate around the British coast. A central family group shows stages of awakening: the man has been fully awakened, his son is just starting to breathe but still white, and his wife still bears the pale green hue of the dead.

Around them, others are likewise being awoken from their coffins, presumably from burial at sea, or from the water itself. Leighton’s tones and colours refer to Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1819), by far the most famous painting of shipwreck and death at sea, with which Leighton was very familiar. There are also references to Michelangelo’s Entombment (1500-1), in the National Gallery and a favourite of Leighton’s at the time.

This third version of Arnold Böcklin’s famous Island of the Dead was painted in 1883 for his dealer. As with others he painted, this shows a coffin being brought by boat to the island for interment.

The few other paintings of coffins show them in more ordinary funerals.

At the end of his training in Munich, Teodor Axentowicz paid his first visit to the lands of the Hutsul people, in the Carpathian Mountains of Ukraine. His oil painting of a Hutsul Funeral from 1882 shows the Hutsul in the rigours of winter, the coffin being towed on a sledge behind a cart, and the mourners clutching candles as they make their way through the snow to the stave church in the distance.

Jakub Schikaneder’s finished version of The Sad Way from 1886 shows a single weary horse drawing the cart bearing a coffin. The woman, presumably a widow before her time, stares emptily at the rutted mud track, as a man walks beside them. In the background is the floodplain of a river in full flood. It appears to be in the late autumn, with the last of the brown leaves remaining on the trees. Schikaneder’s world is barren, bleak, and forlorn.

In his village in Norway, Nikolai Astrup recorded the public rites of the community, as in his Funeral Day in Jølster (before 1908). With the grandeur of the hills behind, a small party escorts the coffin of one of the villagers. The artist’s father, the pastor, leads the procession to the small churchyard.

Perhaps the most famous painting of a burial in European art is that below, Gustave Courbet’s Burial at Ornans (1849-50).

Courbet’s monumental Burial at Ornans (1849-50), shows in remarkably unemotional and objective terms the funeral of the artist’s great uncle in this small provincial town. The event took place in September 1848, but the painting gives the impression that it is a faithful record.

Courbet actually painted the work entirely in the studio, using those who were present as models. It shows a moment that could only have existed in the artist’s memory: like Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, it doesn’t necessarily represent an image that ever existed in reality. But it has been carefully researched, imagined, composed, and painted to give the impression of accuracy and objectivity, rather than some Romantic fantasy. Another feature it has in common is that its most significant object, the coffin, is almost obscured here by the bearers.

Finally, there’s one painting that explores one of the great fears of the nineteenth century, that of being presumed dead and being buried alive.

After his mother’s death, Antoine Wiertz became progressively more obsessed with death. His Premature Burial (1854) visits this not uncommon dread of the nineteenth century: that of being presumed dead, buried, and then recovering to find yourself in a coffin. This did happen, particularly during cholera epidemics, as indicated by the lettering on the opening coffin. The profound shock resulting from choleric dehydration could make the pulse and breathing so feeble as to escape detection; with hundreds or thousands of dead, many were dumped hurriedly into mass-produced coffins and so into mass graves. And a very few managed to survive, leading to coffins being designed with bells that could be rung by a recovered occupant. Wiertz’s victim is left with the nightmare scenario of trying to make it back to the land of the living.

Having just told us of the events leading to the death and apotheosis of Hercules, Ovid continues book 9 of his Metamorphoses by telling the story of his birth. He leads into this by telling us that Alcmena, Hercules’ mother, had found Iole, Hercules’ lover, a good confidante. Since Hercules’ apotheosis, and at the hero’s instruction, Hyllus had married Iole, and she was now pregnant with his child.

This reminds Alcmena of her own pregnancy with Hercules, that had been cursed by Juno to be a difficult one. She was in labour for seven days and nights, in agony, and called on Lucina and the multiple Roman deities of childbirth to deliver her child. But Lucina had received instructions from Juno, and would not let the labour progress.

Lucina sat on an altar by the door, her legs crossed and her hands linked, preventing delivery. One of Alcmena’s most loyal maids, Galanthis, took matters into her own hands, and announced to Lucina that Hercules had been born. The goddess was so shocked that she jumped up, parting her hands, so allowing Alcmena’s labour to conclude at last. But Galanthis ridiculed Lucina for this. The goddess seized Galanthis by her hair and dragged her along the ground. As the maid struggled to rise she was transformed into a weasel, and Hercules entered the world.

I’ve been unable to find any paintings of this story, but there are several engravings.

Virgil Solis engraved Alcmena’s Labour at some time around 1550. Alcmena is in the left foreground, in the throes of her protracted labour, with four women attending to her. In the background, two women are talking, and at the far right, Lucina is dragging Galanthis to the ground by her hair. There’s also a weasel walking past.

Subsequent engravings have drawn on this. Some show Lucina and Galanthis fighting in the background, but most omit the weasel. One other comes close to showing the story as told by Ovid.

The unknown engraver who made Alcmena Giving Birth to Hercules: Juno, Jealous of the Child, Attempts to Delay the Childbirth, in about 1606, has an almost identical group around Alcmena. The same two women are talking in the background, but the weasel is prominent.

Other stories about Hercules as a baby and young child, which Ovid doesn’t tell here, have been much better represented in paintings. According to older Greek myths, the sons of Jupiter could only become divine if they were suckled at Juno’s breast. Shortly after the birth of Hercules, Mercury took the infant to Juno, who put him to her breast. When she realised who the baby was, she pulled him away, and the excess milk released as a result sprayed over the heavens, forming the Milky Way.

There are two outstanding paintings showing this unusual scene.

Jacopo Tintoretto’s The Origin of the Milky Way from about 1575 shows the infant Hercules being pulled away by an anonymous assistant, with fine streams of milk gushing upwards to generate individual stars. In the background, Jupiter’s eagle appears to have a crablike object in its talons, perhaps representing the constellation of the Crab (Cancer), and Juno’s peacocks are at the right.

Just a few years before his death, Rubens painted an even more wonderful version, The Birth of the Milky Way (1636-37). Jupiter sits in the background on the left, seemingly bored. Juno’s milk arcs out from her left breast over the heavens, and her peacocks look distressed.

Other myths tell that Juno was still furious that Hercules had been born, so she placed two serpents in his cradle, in an attempt to kill the child. Hercules’ mortal twin Iphicles (not mentioned by Ovid) screamed at the snakes, bringing their father Amphitryon running. He found Hercules strangling the serpents with his bare hands: proof that he was indeed the son of Jupiter.

Several fine paintings seize this unique opportunity to show an infant strangling serpents.

This painting from the mid seventeenth century, attributed to Bernardino Mei, has been neutrally titled Scene from the Infancy of Hercules. Rather than let his father discover the baby’s strange abilities, it’s Alcmena who has come running into his nursery.

Pompeo Batoni’s account, The Infant Hercules Strangling Serpents in his Cradle from 1743, succeeds because it shows so well Hercules’ parents, disturbed from their bed, discovering their baby despatching the snakes, all by the light of an oil lamp.

The third version of this story comes from Sir Joshua Reynolds, who was commissioned by Catherine the Great of Russia in 1785 to paint her a history subject of his choice. Reynolds thought that he could flatter the Empress of Russia, perhaps, and produced this preparatory study for the heart of his final work.

The Infant Hercules was painted between about 1785-88, then exhibited at the Royal Academy before being sent to Russia. Reynolds is reputed to have used a real baby as his model, and later reused this for a painting of Puck as a baby.

Reynolds’ finished painting of The Infant Hercules Strangling Serpents in his Cradle (1788) loses the baby among its elaborate supporting cast. It has also suffered problems with deterioration in its paint layer, a common issue with many of Reynold’s paintings.

Little known today outside his native Germany, Hans Thoma (1839–1924) was a prolific painter with a distinctive style, who died a century ago, on 7 November 1924. In this article, I look at his career and a small selection of his paintings up to the time that he achieved recognition around 1885, to be concluded next week marking the anniversary of his death.

Thoma was born in the Black Forest, in Germany, and started his training as a lithographer in Basel, before turning to painting ornamental clock faces. From 1859, he studied at the academy in Karlsruhe, under Johann Wilhelm Schirmer and Ludwig Des Coudres.

Autumn Tree, Wiesenthal was painted when he was still a student in Karlsruhe, in about 1862-63. It has the high chroma colours and gestural brushwork indicative of Impressionist style, at a time when Claude Monet was still painting in a tighter, realist manner.

After completing his training in 1866, Thoma moved from Karlsruhe to Basel in north-west Switzerland, then to Düsseldorf. At that time, Düsseldorf was home to one of the leading landscape painting schools in Europe, and was a significant influence on the Hudson River School in the USA, and several of its members trained there.

In Chickenfeed (1867), Thoma tackles this genre scene in a more traditional and detailed realist style.

At first sight, Thoma’s In the Sunshine (1867) appears to show an oddly flattened face, with both the woman’s eyes visible. In fact the woman’s head is shown in profile, and what seems to be her left eye is not part of her face at all. Otherwise he has combined colour contrasts with a carefully detailed landscape.

The following year he moved to Paris, where he came to admire the work of Gustave Courbet, and the Barbizon School. He returned to Germany in 1870, where he settled in Munich, then the centre of German arts, until 1876.

Under the Elderberry (1871) is a delightful portrait of a mother and her young child, with finely detailed hair and elder flowers. His colours are softer than before, as suits this subject.

These eight Children Dancing in a Ring (1872) are set in a Bavarian alpine meadow, with pastures and high mountains in the far distance.

Thoma’s painting of two lovers in Summer from 1872 returns to a more painterly style in its flowers and vegetation. It also demonstrates his inclination towards mediaeval romance and ‘faerie’ paintings, with the chain of three winged putti in the upper right.

Siblings (1873) is an example of his domestic genre scenes. The brother sits disconsolate at the table, while his sister reads intently. By the window is a spinning wheel, the wool above it adorned with a blue ribbon.

In 1874, Thoma visited Italy for the first time.

Ring dancing appears again in his Children and Putti in a Ring (1874), although now the winged putti have come down from the sky to follow a young faun-like figure and a nymph. At the bottom left is a snake threatening to disrupt the scene. As with his other mythical settings, Thoma doesn’t appear to be telling a specific story, but populates his enchanted landscape with curious creatures.

Thoma’s pure landscapes include explorations of big skies and the transient effects of light, as in his Mainebene (1875), showing the plain of the River Main lit by shafts of light. At the lower left is a team ploughing.

He handles backlighting skilfully in A Peaceful Sunday (1876). An elderly couple are sat at a plain wooden table, in their urban apartment. She works at her crochet, he reads. You can almost hear the soft, measured tick of the clock which is out of sight, slowly passing their remaining years.

Three Mermaids (1879) is a complete contrast, with its raucous nudity and frolics with fish under the light of the moon. Thoma’s mermaids are remarkably human in form, lacking fishtails.

In 1878, Thoma moved to Frankfurt, where he was a close friend of the painter Wilhelm Steinhausen. The following year he visited Britain, and a year later returned to Italy.

As was popular during the nineteenth century, Thoma repurposed Nordic mythology with a more Germanic interpretation. The Trek of the Gods to Valhalla (1880) shows a scene that may have been inspired by Wagner’s Ring cycle, first performed at Bayreuth in 1876. This is the group of gods known as the Æsir riding across the bridge Bifröst, which is formed from a burning rainbow and reaches between Midgard (the realm of humans) and Asgard (the realm of the gods). The Æsir traditionally include Odin, Frigg, Thor, Baldr, and Týr. Recognisable on the bridge are Odin, holding his staff, with Frigg, and Thor with his hammer. At the left is probably Iðunn, holding an apple of her youth aloft. In Nordic mythology, this is an event foretold as part of the process of Ragnarök.

I’m not sure of the mythical background to his Sea Wonders (1881), where four boys have raised up a surface on which stands a winged putto clutching an egg. It is, nevertheless, a powerful image.

The Öd, View of Holzhausenpark in Frankfurt am Main (1883) shows what is perhaps better-known as Adolph-von-Holzhausen Park, which started as the larger Holzhausen Oed in around 1552, and became a public park in 1912-13. The prominent white building is its distinctive moated baroque summer residence.

Reference

Wikipedia (in German).

Mermaids and mermen are mythical creatures with origins outside the classical Mediterranean civilisations. Conventionally, their upper body is human, while below the waist they have the form of a fish. Mermaids seem invariably young, beautiful and buxom, and are most frequently encountered by fishermen and those who go down to the sea. In the Middle Ages they became confounded with the sirens of Greek and Roman myth, who were part human and part bird.

John William Waterhouse’s diploma study for the Royal Academy, painted in 1900, shows a conventional image of A Mermaid, seen combing her long tresses on the shore.

Despite their separate origin, mermaids have been depicted in accounts of some classical myths, perpetuating medieval confusion.

Gustave Moreau’s Venus Rising from the Sea from 1866 shows the goddess as she has just been born from the sea, and sits on a coastal rock, her arms outstretched in an almost messianic pose. On the left, a mermaid attendant holds up half an oyster shell with a single large pearl glinting in it. On the right, a merman proffers her a tree of bright pink coral, and cradles a large conch shell.

Ary Renan’s Charybdis and Scylla (1894) is an imaginative painting of one of the dangers to mariners in the Strait of Messina, between Sicily and the Italian mainland. Scylla was said to be a six-headed sea monster, but was actually a rock shoal, and Charybdis was a whirlpool. Renan shows both together, the whirlpool with its mountainous standing waves at the left, and the rocks at the right, with the form of a beautiful mermaid embedded in them.

As the First World War was ending, Franz von Stuck returned to his favourite faun motif in A Faun and a Mermaid (1918). This has survived in two almost identical versions, the other now being in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin. His version of a mermaid is a maritime equivalent of a faun, with separate scaly legs rather than the more conventional single fish tail. She grasps the faun’s horns and laughs with joy as the faun gives her a piggy-back out of the sea.

Perhaps the earliest painting of a mermaid in European art is in a Christian religious painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder, from 1518-20.

Cranach’s Saint Christopher shows the saint with his back and legs flexed as he bears the infant Christ on his left shoulder. In the foreground is an unusual putto-mermaid with a long coiled fish tail.

Mermaids feature in folktales from many of the traditions of Europe, where they’re known by local names such as havfrue in Denmark.

John Reinhard Weguelin’s watercolour of The Mermaid of Zennor (1900) tells the legend of a mermaid living in a cove near Zennor in Cornwall. This scene brings her together with Matthew Trewhella, a local chorister, whose voice she had fallen in love with. The legend tells that the couple went to live in the sea, and that his voice can still be heard in the cove.

Peter Nicolai Arbo’s Liden Gunver and the Merman (1874-1880) is drawn from an opera The Fishers, by Johannes Ewald and Johann Hartmann, first performed in Copenhagen in 1780. The young woman Liden Gunver, on the right, is taken to sea by the alluring but deceptive merman on the left.

Hans Thoma’s Three Mermaids (1879) lack fishtails as they frolic raucously with fish under the light of the moon.

Gustav Klimt’s Mermaids (Silverfish) (c 1899) appear to be tadpole-like creatures with smiling, womanly faces.

Once Achelous had completed telling the story of how his lost horn had been transformed into the Horn of Plenty, the floods had abated, so his guests left the banquet, leaving Ovid to explain the events leading to the death of the great hero Hercules. This reverses the chronological order, as the next story after that in Metamorphoses tells of his birth.

Having won her hand by defeating Achelous, Hercules married the beautiful Deianira, and was returning with her to his native city. The couple reached the River Euenus, which was still in spate from the winter’s rains. Hercules feared for his bride trying to cross the river, but the centaur Nessus came up and offered to carry her across.

Hercules had thrown his club and bow to the other bank and had swum across the river when he heard Deianira’s voice calling. He suspected Nessus was trying to abduct her, so shouted warning to him before loosing an arrow at the centaur’s back.

Ovid’s description of these events poses a problem for those trying to depict them, in choosing the right point of view and composition to remain faithful to that account.

Guido Reni’s masterly painting from around 1620, one of the finest of its period in the Louvre, almost fills the canvas with Nessus, who looks worryingly heroic, and Deianeira, who seems to be flying. The small figure of Hercules in the distance is well-lit, but loses the details of bow and arrow. In any case, that arrow could hardly strike Nessus in the chest.

Paolo Veronese’s painting from about 1586 also elects for this early moment, as Hercules is readying his bow and arrow, with Nessus just reaching the opposite bank. He shows the scene from Hercules’ position, but discovers the problems with that point of view: Nessus and Deianeira are now small, and Nessus is looking away with his chest concealed, and even Hercules’ face is turned from the viewer. The result makes its hero look more like a furtive stalker.

This marvellous painting was probably made by Rubens’ workshop around the time of the Master’s death in 1640. It views the events from the bank on which Hercules is poised to shoot his arrow into Nessus. This has the centaur running across the width of the canvas, his face and body well exposed for Hercules’ arrow to enter his chest. To make clear Nessus’ intentions, a winged Cupid has been added, and Deianeira’s facial expression is clear in intent. An additional couple, in the right foreground, might be intended to be a ferryman and his friend, who appear superfluous apart from their role in achieving compositional balance.

Antonio del Pollaiolo’s painting from about 1475–80 tries a side-on view, requiring Nessus to be shot while still in the river, in a slight adjustment to the original story. Deianeira appears precariously balanced, and must be grateful that Nessus’ muscular arms save her from being dropped into the river below. The artist also leaves it to the viewer to know that Hercules’ poisoned arrow strikes Nessus rather than Deianeira.

Three centuries later, Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée clearly understood the compositional problem, but didn’t arrive at such a good solution. Nessus, bearing a distressed Deianeira in his arms, has just reached the opposite bank, in the foreground. Hercules is on the left in the distance, and we can at least see his face, bow and arrow. There appears to be no way that Hercules’ arrow could impale Nessus’ chest, without first passing through some of the abundant Deianeira, nor his back. Lagrenée also adds a ferryman, who seems to have been knocked over in Nessus’ haste to make off with his captive.

Gustave Moreau’s final drawing of about 1860, squared up and ready to transfer to canvas for painting, alters the story to make its composition feasible. He puts Nessus in the foreground, with the attendant risk of making him appear the hero, somehow supporting the upstretched body of Deianeira. In the right distance, Hercules has already loosed the fatal arrow, which is prominently embedded not in the front of Nessus’ chest, but in his back. The centaur’s legs have collapsed under him, and his head and neck are stretched up in the agony of death.

Gustave Moreau and Jules Élie Delaunay seem to have worked on a compositional solution together, resulting in Delaunay’s brilliant painting of 1870, which is sadly not available for use here.

That single shot ran Nessus through. He tore the arrow out, and his blood spurted freely, mixed with poison from the Lernaean hydra. Determined to avenge his own death, the centaur gave Deianira his tunic soaked with that poison, telling her to keep it to “strengthen waning love.”

In about 1706, Sebastiano Ricci embroidered this story further, showing Hercules, his left hand grasping Nessus’ mouth, about to club the centaur to death, while a slightly bedraggled Deianeira watches in the background. There’s no arrow in Nessus’ chest, and Hercules’ quiver is puzzlingly trapped under Nessus’ right foreleg. Three other figures of uncertain roles are at the right, and a winged putto hovers overhead, covering its eyes with its right hand.

In Arnold Böcklin’s puzzling painting from 1898, Nessus is far from part-human, and Deianeira isn’t the beauty she was claimed to be. As those two wrestle grimly, Hercules has stolen up behind them, and is busy pushing a spear into Nessus’ bulging belly. Blood pours from the wound, but Deianeira is in no position to collect it.

Years passed after Nessus’ death, and Hercules was away in Oechalia, intending to pay his respects to Jupiter at Cenaeum. Word reached Deianira that her husband had fallen in love there with Iole. Initially, she was upset, but then tried to devise a strategy to address his rumoured unfaithfulness. It was then that she recalled the blood of Nessus, and his dying words to her. She therefore impregnated a shirt with that blood, and gave that to Lichas, Hercules’ servant, to take to her husband.

This is shown in this beautiful miniature accompanying Octavien de Saint-Gelais’ translation of Ovid’s Heroides from about 1510.

Hercules donned the shirt as he was about to pray to Jupiter. He felt warmth spreading throughout his limbs, quickly growing into intense pain. Trying to tear the shirt off, he obtained no relief, and only ripped off his burnt skin from the burning flesh underneath. Hercules roamed through Oeta like a wounded beast, still trying to tear the shirt off his body. He came across Lichas, and accused him of being his murderer. His servant tried to protest his innocence, but Hercules picked him up, swung him around, and flung him out to sea, where he was transformed into a rock pinnacle.

Hercules then cut down trees and built himself a funeral pyre. Ordering this to be lit, he climbed on top, and lay back on his lionskin.

This is illustrated in another miniature, The Death of Hercules (c 1470), this time for Raoul Le Fèvre’s Histoires de Troyes.

Francisco de Zurbarán’s powerful Death of Hercules (1634) uses chiaroscuro as stark as any of Caravaggio’s to show a Christian martyrdom, with its victim staring up to heaven, commending his soul to God.

Jupiter came to the aid of the dying hero, calling on the gods to consent to Hercules being transformed into a god; they agreed, and his immortal form was carried away on a chariot drawn by four horses, into the stars above.

Tiepolo’s wonderful Apotheosis of Hercules (c 1765) portrays this as a saintly ascension, which seems inappropriate.

The first twenty or so chapters of Miguel de Cervantes’ groundbreaking modern novel Don Quixote consist of a series of largely self-contained comic misadventures. After the knight and his long-suffering squire Sancho Panza release a group of convicts, they fear for their safety, so head for the mountains. Once there, events become more interrelated and complex, presenting even greater challenges to those who tried to paint them in standalone works, rather than illustrations accompanying the text.

The pair find a hoard of gold coins apparently abandoned with a notebook in a travel bag. Then Don Quixote catches a glimpse of a man leaping around the bushes half-naked, and suspects that he’s the owner of the bag and its coins. A little way around the hillside, they find a dead mule whose owner they think had carried that bag.

This scene must have fascinated the French artist Honoré Daumier, who painted a series of oil sketches of it in about 1867.

In the first, the knight leads his squire towards the dead mule.

This rough oil sketch shows them drawing even closer.

Sancho Panza and Don Quixote in the Sierra is more generic, and omits the dead mule altogether.

A little later, Sancho Panza’s donkey is stolen, so the knight dispatches him on his own horse Rocinante to obtain three replacement donkeys, and deliver a letter to the Lady Dulcinea, Quixote’s semi-imaginary ‘lady’ of his chivalric quests. Meanwhile, the knight laments and feigns madness for the lady. Panza meets their village priest and barber, and they agree to deceive Quixote in a bid to persuade him to return to the village for his madness to be treated.

As the three head back towards Don Quixote, they meet Dorotea, who had previously been tricked and seduced. She agrees to dress up as a fine lady and pose as Princess Micomicona, who purports to have come all the way from Guinea to ask a boon of the knight.

Pedro González Bolívar’s painting of The Introduction of Dorotea to Don Quixote from 1881 shows their meeting. Without that background information, this would prove impossible to read.

Don Quixote is persuaded to leave the mountains and return home with them, but that’s the start of another series of misadventures. During these, Dorotea’s true identity is revealed, and at dinner Don Quixote gives a long and impassioned speech in which he argues surprisingly rationally in favour of the pre-eminence of arms over learning.

This is recorded in Manuel García Hispaleto’s painting of Don Quixote’s Speech of Arms and Letters from 1884. Sancho Panza stands immediately behind the knight, at the head of the table, on the right. Seated along the table’s length are a man who has just arrived from Algiers with a Moorish woman, the village priest, and others.

Don Quixote’s madness only continues, and eventually he has to be bundled into an oxcart and taken home.

On a Sunday when all the locals are out in the square, the oxcart bearing Don Quixote enters his village at noon, as shown in Hippolyte Lecomte’s undated Don Quixote’s Homecoming. At the left, Don Quixote’s niece or housekeeper holds her hands up in horror at his condition. To the left of the cart are the priest and barber, still mounted. Sancho Panza is riding his donkey, and has been greeted by his wife and their children, who are more interested in how many fine skirts he brought back for her, and how many pairs of shoes for their children.

The priest and barber leave Don Quixote alone to recover for a month after their return, then reassess him, as shown by Miguel Jadraque in this Visit of the Priest and Barber to Don Quixote from 1880. Don Quixote is becoming animated with them as he sits up in bed. In the left background are the knight’s niece and housekeeper, praying in vain for his recovery.

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza then leave on their third sally, which first takes them on a futile mission to El Toboso in quest of the Lady Dulcinea. After that, they head towards the city of Saragossa, and meet a cart full of players in costume, who create mayhem.

Carlos Vásquez Úbeda shows this encounter in his undated painting of Don Quixote. At this stage, the pair are still on their mounts, but shortly afterwards a clown causes Rocinante to bolt and throw Don Quixote, and one of the other players rides off on the squire’s donkey. For once, Sancho manages to persuade his master not to retaliate, and they continue on their way without coming to grief.

Later, they meet a group from a village, and are invited to attend a wedding there the following day.

The wedding brings an elaborate deception in which the bride’s first suitor appears to impale himself on his own sword so that he can marry the bride as his dying wish, but then miraculously comes back to life, to cheat the groom from marrying the bride as had been expected. Manuel García Hispaleto’s painting of The Marriage of Basilio and Quiteria from 1881 shows the priest officiating in the centre, as the bride to the right is married to the dying suitor, who is supported by Don Quixote with his lance. The groom stands at the front of the tent at the right, staring in disbelief at what’s going on.

The newlyweds entertain Don Quixote and Sancho Panza for three days, enabling them to visit the Cave of Montesinos and the Lakes of Ruidera nearby. Gustave Doré, whose illustrations for the whole book have been used by others as the basis for further illustrated editions, painted this non-narrative scene of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza Entertained by Basil and Quiteria in about 1863.

In the middle of Cervantes’ second book of Don Quixote, the knight and his squire Sancho Panza become guests of a Duke and Duchess who had already read Cervantes’ first book, and set out to trick the pair into further comical misadventures. Soon after their arrival, the Duke’s chaplain asserts that Don Quixote isn’t a knight errant at all, causing the knight to deliver a searing riposte.

Out of the blue, maids arrive to wash and lather the knight’s beard, and that of the Duke, in a procedure that defuses a tense situation by transforming it into the absurd. Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro’s painting of Don Quijote in the Duke’s House from 1878 shows this bizarre moment, with the rotund figure of Sancho Panza at the left, the gaunt Don Quixote in the centre, and the Duke and Duchess seated at the right, in obvious amusement.

Although Cervantes had completed Don Quixote in 1615, and it quickly became popular across Europe, it appears to have been painted infrequently before the nineteenth century. Only Valero Iriarte seems to have painted its comical adventure stories in the previous century. Although Eugène Delacroix painted the non-narrative Don Quixote in his Library in 1824, Cervantes’ novel was generally ignored by the major narrative artists of the nineteenth century, who continued depicting mostly classical myth.

These paintings demonstrate how modern fiction can form the basis for successful narrative painting, even though that has remained unusual.

Telling a story in a painting intended to be viewed independently of its literary account requires great skill. Illustrations have the advantage that they’re going to be seen alongside the words, but a narrative painting could be exhibited almost anywhere. The most popular solution is to depict the best-known myths and legends, typically from classical times, stories that all educated viewers should be familiar with.

Painting a modern novel is even more of a challenge, making those showing Miguel de Cervantes’ epic Don Quixote, published in 1605 and 1615, among the boldest of all narrative paintings. A few years ago I published a long series of summaries of the book accompanied by paintings and illustrations. This weekend I look at just the former, from outside the immediate context of the literary account, considering whether they work as narrative paintings.

Cervantes himself spent at least two periods in prison, and it’s claimed that he started work on Don Quixote during the second of those. Mariano de la Roca’s painting of Miguel de Cervantes imagining El Quixote from 1858 may be as fictitious as the book, but reveals a clear vision of the knight and his squire, Sancho Panza. Their mounts are caricatured, but Don Quixote is fully detailed complete with the barber’s basin he wears as a helmet.

Nils Kreuger’s portrait of Don Quixote’s Horse Rocinante from 1911 is non-narrative, but nevertheless a fine painting, with the knight seated against the base of a tree and staring into the distance.

Quixote’s first, solo and briefest sally takes him to an inn, where he insists the innkeeper dubs him as a knight, as depicted by Valero Iriarte, who is now known almost exclusively for his paintings of this book.

Iriarte’s first scene of Don Quixote at the Inn (c 1720) shows one of the earliest comic events in the book, in which the landlord pours wine into a hollowed-out length of cane to enable the aspiring knight to drink through his helmet. Immediately beforehand, the two women had fed him, as his hands had been fully occupied in holding up his cardboard visor. To anyone familiar with the opening chapters of Cervantes’ book, this would have been instantly recognisable.

Iriarte’s second scene is set inside the inn, with Don Quixote Dubbed a Knight (c 1720). Quixote is on his knees ready for the ceremony, while the fat innkeeper stands behind with his back to the viewer, busy rehearsing his reading. To the left of Quixote is a young lad holding a candle, and a prostitute is holding the knight’s lance as she’s negotiating with her next customer, to the right. Again, Iriarte tells the story true to Cervantes’ account, and it’s readily recognisable.

After a couple of tragi-comic adventures, Don Quixote returns home battered and bruised.

One of his neighbours came past with a donkey, on which the knight was placed. To avoid any embarrassment, they don’t enter the village until after dark. Wilhelm Marstrand’s undated painting captures the sense of defeat during Don Quixote’s First Ride Home.

Don Quixote recruits Sancho Panza to be his squire during the fortnight he spends at home after that first sally. The pair then ride out together and engage in the most famous of their adventures, when Quixote attacks a windmill, convinced that it’s a giant.

José Moreno’s painting of Don Quixote and the Windmills from about 1900 portrays the climax perfectly, as the knight and his charger are hoisted aloft by one of the windmill’s sails, as it rotates with the wind.

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza then endure further misadventures, during which the knight loses part of his helmet and some of his left ear. They accept the hospitality of some goatherds for the night, and the following morning attend the burial of a local scholar whose death resulted from his unrequited love for a young shepherdess. She appears at the burial and denies responsibility, as painted by Cecilio Pla and Valero Iriarte.

Pla’s Marcela the Shepherdess from 1905 shows her standing defiantly above the scholar’s grave.

Valero Iriarte’s Story of Shepherds Grisóstomo and Marcela (c 1701-44) is overambitious in its detail. The shepherdess stands at the far right, well away from the burial taking place at the far left. Between them are Sancho Panza and Don Quixote, engaged in conversation.

The pair become involved in further unfortunate incidents, culminating in Don Quixote leaving an inn without paying for their accommodation. The knight then makes another spectacular error when he mistakes flocks of sheep for armies about to join in battle, a story that sticks in the mind.

As Johann Baptist Zwecker shows in his painting of Don Quixote from 1854, the knight then charges at the armies of sheep with his lance, to the annoyance of the drovers, who retaliate by knocking out several of his teeth with their slingshot.

A turning point in this second sally occurs when the pair free a dozen convicts who turn on them by bombarding them with rocks, then run away. Fearing that they are in danger, the knight and his squire ride off to hide in the mountains, as shown below in Adrien Demont’s painting of Don Quixote from 1893.

Tomorrow I’ll show paintings of what happened next.

No matter what your background, religion or culture, there’s one universal cause for feasting and celebration, a wedding. One of the great challenges for the figurative painter, weddings are the central feature in three classical myths and one religious story examined in this article; tomorrow’s sequel looks at the depiction of less famous, personal weddings.

Of the three great mythical weddings, the first in chronological order was that of Hippodame and Pirithous, which brought an end to the dominance of centaurs on earth, the Centauromachy. This was celebrated in prominent places: the subsequent battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs was shown in sculpture on the temple of Zeus at Olympia, and on the Parthenon at Athens. It was Ovid, though, who chose to tell this story in the context of the Trojan War.

When Pirithous married Hippodame, the couple invited centaurs to the feast. Unfortunately, passions of the centaur Eurytus became inflamed by drink and lust for the bride, and he carried off Hippodame by her hair. The other centaurs followed suit by each seizing a woman of their choice, turning the wedding feast into utter chaos, like a city being sacked. Theseus castigated Eurytus and rescued the bride, so the centaur attacked him. Theseus responded by throwing a huge wine krater at Eurytus, killing him. The centaurs then started throwing goblets and crockery, and the battle escalated from there.

Piero di Cosimo’s The Fight between Lapiths and Centaurs (1500-15) is my favourite among the earlier paintings of the ultimate wedding feast gone wrong. In the centre foreground, Hylonome embraces and kisses the dying Cyllarus, a huge arrow-like spear resting underneath them. Immediately behind them, on the large carpets laid out for the wedding feast, centaurs are still abducting women. All around are scenes of pitched and bloody battles, with eyes being gouged out, and Lapiths and Centaurs wielding clubs and other weapons at one another. This is definitely a wedding to remember, if you survived it.

Towards the end of his life, Peter Paul Rubens painted The Rape of Hippodame (1636-38). At the right, Eurytus is trying to carry off Hippodame, the bride, with Theseus just about to rescue her from the centaur’s back. At the left, Lapiths are attacking with their weapons, and behind them another centaur is trying to abduct a woman.

The next wedding to be grateful you missed was that between the great hero Perseus and the princess whom he rescued from Cetus the sea monster. Andromeda’s parents were so delighted at their daughter’s rescue that she, who had already been promised in marriage to Phineus, was quickly married instead to Perseus. At the wedding feast, Phineus and his friends were understandably rather miffed, and a violent quarrel broke out between them and Perseus. As happens at the most memorable of weddings, this turned seriously nasty when weapons came out and bodies started to fall. The solution for Perseus was to brandish the head of Medusa and turn Phineus and his friends into cold statuary.

Annibale Carracci and Domenichino combined their talents in painting this fresco of Perseus and Phineas (1604-06) in the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. As Perseus stands in the centre brandishing the Gorgon’s face towards his attackers, Andromeda and her parents shelter behind, shielding their eyes for safety.

Surprisingly few paintings of this wedding make reference to the goddess Minerva’s protection of Perseus, which is clearly expressed in Jean-Marc Nattier’s undated painting of Perseus, Under the Protection of Minerva, Turns Phineus to Stone by Brandishing the Head of Medusa. The goddess, Perseus’ half-sister, is sat on a cloud to the right of and behind the hero. She wears her distinctive helmet, grips her spear, and her left hand holds the Aegis, providing narrative closure.

Perseus points his weapons away from himself and Minerva, and is looking up towards the goddess. In the foreground, one of Phineus’ party seems to be sorting through the silverware, perhaps intending to make off with it. The happy couple picked themselves up from the bodies, statues and debris, and moved on. Perseus gave thanks to Minerva for her support and the loan of her shield, by the votive offering of Medusa’s head, which Minerva had set into her shield, turning it into the Aegis.

The wedding of Thetis, sea nymph and spinster of this parish, and Peleus, king of Phthia and bachelor of that parish, was celebrated with a great feast on Mount Pelion attended by most of the gods. The happy couple were given many gifts by the gods, but one, Eris the goddess of discord, had not been invited. As an act of spite at her exclusion, she threw a golden apple ‘of discord’ into the middle of the goddesses, to be given as a reward to ‘the fairest’.

This is Jacob Jordaens’ The Golden Apple of Discord from 1633, based on a brilliant oil sketch by Rubens. The facially discordant Eris, seen in midair behind the deities, has just made her gift of the golden apple, which is at the centre of the grasping hands, above the table. At the left, Minerva (Pallas Athene) reaches forward for it. In front of her, Venus, her son Cupid at her knee, points to herself as the goddess most deserving of the apple. On the other side of the table, Juno reaches her hand out for it too. This sets up the Judgement of Paris, and the rest is legendary.

For once it’s the most modern version, painted by Edward Burne-Jones as The Feast of Peleus in 1872-81, that sticks most closely to the story. In a composition based on classical representations of the Last Supper, he brings Eris in at the far right, her golden apple still concealed. Every head has turned towards her, apart from that of the centaur behind her right wing. Even the three Fates, in the left foreground, have paused momentarily in their work.

This wedding banquet set up the beauty contest between Juno, Venus and Minerva in the Judgement of Paris. Venus won following her bribe promising Paris the most beautiful woman in the world, who happened at the time to be married to King Menelaus of Sparta. After Paris abducted Helen to Troy, the Greeks united to wage war against Troy, eventually capturing and destroying the city.

In 1562, Paolo Veronese was commissioned to paint a large work for the refectory of the Benedictine Monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. Its central narrative is an episode of the ministry of Christ as recorded in the gospels: Christ and his disciples were invited to a wedding feast in Cana, Galilee. Towards its end, the wine started to run out, and he was asked what they should do. He directed servants to fill jugs with water, which he then miraculously turned into wine.

This huge canvas shows Christ, distinguished by his halo, at the centre of his disciples, with the Virgin Mary (also with halo) at his right, and sundry disciples arrayed along that side of the tables. The wedding group is at the far left of the party.

At the far right of the canvas, wine is shown being poured from a large container, a clear cue to the gospel narrative.

There’s also a great deal of other activity in every part of the painting. On the balcony behind Christ there are scenes of the butchery of meat, which is generally claimed to be lamb and symbolic of Christ’s future death as a sacrifice for mankind, as the ‘Lamb of God’, although there are no visual clues to support that interpretation. In the musicians below, and other guests, it is claimed that there are portraits of artists, including Veronese himself, and Titian. Other important figures who are supposed to be shown include Eleanor of Austria, Francis I of France, Mary I of England, Suleiman the Magnificent, and Emperor Charles V.

Finally, I turn to one of many weddings in more modern European literature.

The eighth story told on the fifth day of Boccaccio’s Decameron concerns the misfortunes of one Nastagio Degli Onesti, involving one ghost killing and dismembering the ghost of a woman, a strange and grisly tale told in a series of four panels by Botticelli. The fourth and last shows the hero Nastagio’s wedding, the bride and her women sitting to the left, and the men to the right, in formal symmetry. The groom is sat on the other side of the same table as the bride.

Ovid ended Book 8 of his Metamorphoses with a teaser, telling how the river god Achelous was able to transform himself into a snake or bull, and that he had recently lost one of the bull’s two horns. Book 9 opens by explaining how that came about.

With a little prompting from Theseus, Achelous resumes his narration, lamenting that he’s about to tell a story of a battle lost. He and Hercules both asked for the beautiful Deianira’s hand in marriage, forcing other suitors to resign their claims and leave the matter to them to plead their cases. Hercules wasn’t happy to do this in words, so rushed at his competitor to engage him in a fight.

Achelous gives a flattering account of the pair wrestling, eventually admitting that Hercules got the better of him and forced him onto his knees. The river god then shifted shape, changing first to a snake so he could slither away from his opponent. Hercules mocked him for that, reminding him of his conquest of the Lernean Hydra. When Hercules got a stranglehold on him, Achelous changed into his third and final form, that of a bull. Once again Hercules brought him down, and wrenched off one of his horns. The missing horn was transformed into the Horn of Plenty, cornucopia, and the guests were then served fruit in such a horn at their banquet.

This exquisitely engraved rock crystal plaque by Annibale Fontana, showing Hercules and Achelous wrestling, is one scene from a life of Hercules. This was originally set with others into a gilded casket owned by the ducal Gonzaga family, of the city of Mantua in Italy. Hercules, on the right, wears his signature lion-skin, and Achelous is conventionally old, bearded, and shaggy.

Cornelis van Haarlem’s painting of Hercules and Achelous, probably from around 1590, shows a late stage in the wrestling, with Achelous in the form of a bull, brought to the ground by Hercules, who is here trying to twist his horns off.

Guido Reni’s Hercules and Achelous (1617-21) opts for a more conventional wrestling match, with Achelous still in his initial human form.

Noël Coypel, the father of the better-known history painter Antoine Coypel, painted Hercules Fighting Achelous in about 1667-69. This too opts to show the pair during the first phase of their fight. In addition to wearing his lion-skin, Hercules wields his fearsome club, although Ovid doesn’t refer to its use on this occasion.

Nicolas Bertin’s Hercules fighting Achelous (1715-30) is more elaborate. Hercules has almost got Achelous onto the ground, and looks as if he’s about to punch him with his fist. Hercules’ club rests in the foreground. The woman at the right is Deianira, over whom they are fighting, and a winged goddess is ready to place the laurel wreath on the victor.

For once, the most detailed and magnificent account of one of Ovid’s myths is modern, painted in 1947 for a department store in Kansas City. Thomas Hart Benton’s Achelous and Hercules (1947) is a gem of narrative painting.

At the centre, Hercules, stripped to the waist and wearing denim jeans, is about to grasp Achelous’ horns. Immediately to the right, Deianira is also shown in contemporary American form, with a young woman next to her bearing a laurel crown. They’re sat on the Horn of Plenty, and Benton is one of few to include this important reference.

To the left of centre, Benton shows a second figure of Hercules holding a rope, making this multiplex narrative. That is part of a passage referring to ranching and cowboys, and further to the left to the grain harvest. To the right, the Horn of Plenty links into the cultivation of maize (corn), the other major crop from the area.

My final painting to accompany this short story is another collaboration between the workshop of Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder: Nymphs Filling the Horn of Plenty (c 1615). Although it has no references to the fight between Hercules and Achelous, it’s good to see the staff preparing the second course of Achelous’ banquet.

In the first of these two articles looking at the reading of balconies in paintings, I looked at views of balconies from the outside; today we get to join the rich and famous and look out and down on the world below. Before cheap and easy travel became available in the late nineteenth century, standing on a balcony was probably one of the more elevating experiences for most of the population.

There has been speculation as to whether Carpaccio’s Two Venetian Ladies from about 1490 were bored upper class wives, or courtesans in between gigs, although opinion currently favours their nobility. They sit amid a menagerie of peacock, doves and two dogs, staring into the blank distance.

Views from the balcony came of age in the early nineteenth century, with the arrival of paintings of figures standing in front of windows. These developed most obviously in German painting, in Caspar David Friedrich’s Woman at the Window of 1822, further elaborated two years later by his friend and follower Carl Gustav Carus.

First came Carus’ Friedrichian Woman on the Balcony from 1824. High above the rolling wooded countryside of central Germany, a young woman dressed in black sits contemplating the view and facing away from the viewer. The artist tells us where he painted this view from, and adds some foreground detail to help mystify the viewer.

When Carus visited Naples in about 1829-30, he stayed close to Castel dell’Ovo, and framed a view in his Balcony Room with a View of the Bay of Naples (via Santa Lucia and the Castel dell’Ovo). Instead of a figure, there’s a musical instrument, presumably to reinforce that this is Italy. The interior is mainly used for its framing and repoussoir effect.

After Manet’s The Balcony (1868-69), Berthe Morisot, who modelled for that and was soon to become his sister-in-law, painted her own Woman and Child on a Balcony in 1872. She uses the balcony primarily to combine full-length portraits of the two figures with an aerial landscape of Paris. The pillar and flowerpot at the right steer the eye from immediate foreground in a zigzag past the figures to end in the far distance. On the skyline just to the left of the woman is the dark mass of Notre Dame.

It was Gustave Caillebotte who recast and modernised the precursors of Friedrich and Carus for his painting of his brother René, the Young Man at His Window, in 1875.

Strictly speaking, Caillebotte’s younger brother René isn’t on a balcony here, merely standing in front of a balustraded window in the family apartment on the rue de Miromesnil in Paris. But the artist has here realised the interplay between the rich red upholstery of the interior and the bright exterior with its pale buildings and trees. Between those two worlds is a substantial stone balustrade. Caillebotte gives his figures the mysterious anonymity of facing away from us too.

Five years later, Caillebotte embarked on a series of paintings from the balconies of his apartment, of which the best-known is Man on a Balcony, Boulevard Haussmann (1880). The interior has been replaced by intermediate details: a trough of flowers, the ornate iron balustrade, and a colourful awning.

Less well-known are two views looking along the length of A Balcony (1880), above, and another Man on a Balcony (1880), below. Both are revelatory in showing the faces of their figures who are looking across our direction of view, down at the exterior world below. Both are strongly projected to a vanishing point close to one edge of the canvas, and the view above places the head of one of its two figures at that focal point.

Caillebotte went on to paint a couple of tightly-cropped images showing small sections of balustrade with the trees and buildings below. Finally in 1884, he bought Manet’s The Balcony for his private collection.

The Norwegian painter Hans Heyerdahl, who was living in Paris at the time, responded with his close-cropped At the Window in 1881 (above), and the following year his compatriot Christian Krohg painted his Portrait of the Swedish Painter Karl Nordström (below) using the same artistic device. Krohg didn’t paint this in Paris, but as he neared the end of his time in France in the artists’ colony of Grez-sur-Loing, in the Spring of 1882.

Heyerdahl engages deeply in the interplay between the woman’s interior world, with a half-open book on her lap, and her distant gaze towards the bright exterior.

Prior to this development of the themes of Friedrich and Carus, balconies had often played minor roles in portrait paintings. Maybe the sitter leaned on a section of balustrade, or a flowerpot cascaded its blooms from a pillar. In the late nineteenth century, balconies acquired greater prominence in a wide range of portraits and figurative paintings. Some of that was undoubtedly the result of their increasing availability: with the growth of cities, balconies became popular features of upmarket city apartments, particularly those in Paris.

This portrait of Maximilien Luce’s then unmarried partner and model Ambroisine ‘Simone’ Bouin, Madame Luce on the Balcony from 1893, is an example with objects from its interior set out in the outside sunshine.

Richard Bergh’s Nordic Summer’s Evening (1899-1900) features two distinguished models, Prince Eugen, Duke of Närke, and the singer Karin Pyk, who were both close friends of the artist. In fact, it’s a wonderful composite: the pillars shown were borrowed from the floor below, where they supported this balcony, and Pyk was actually painted when she was in Assisi in Italy. Their figures look not at one another, but their gazes cross paths as they stare at the still parkland beyond, lit by the low sun.

We can only imagine the ‘cheating’ that Isaak Brodsky must have contrived to paint this marvellous Self-portrait with Daughter in 1911. Here, the balcony is an integral part of an aerial precinct in the town; there is no sight of ground level. Brodsky’s world exists a couple of stories above.

Lovis Corinth painted this Balcony Scene in Bordighera in 1912 early during his convalescence in the Midi after his stroke the previous year.

The scene in Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky’s Lady on a Balcony appears more relaxed. His sitter, I.A. Yusupova, looks to be enjoying the fine summer weather in Koreiz, not far from Yalta, on the northern coast of the Black Sea. At about this time, the Balkans had been plunged into crisis following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and by the end of July the Great War had begun. During its closing stages, the Crimean Peninsula was swept up in the Russian Civil War, and changed hands every few months, with tens of thousands being massacred during the chaos.

The last artist whose paintings I show here had a lasting fascination for painting views through windows, extending to the balconies he had added to his homes: Pierre Bonnard.

In La Fenêtre (The Window) from 1925, Bonnard frames the view from his villa in Le Cannet looking inland, and includes part of the all-important balcony.

One of Bonnard’s fullest views of a balcony comes in The French Windows with Dog from 1927, where our gaze is led from its interior, out through the French windows, over the decking and wooden balustrade, to the palms and town of Le Cannet beyond.

The view from the balcony is a journey through life.