Gates as a means of access through the walls of fortified cities have ancient origins, but it wasn’t until the Etruscans and the Romans that they acquired their own deity, notably in the Roman god Janus with his two faces. His association with gates, and the start and end of war, gave rise to an interesting tradition in classical Rome: the gates at each end of an open enclosure associated with the god were kept open in times of war, and closed when the city and empire was at peace. Opening the gates of the temple of Janus was therefore a mark of starting a war.

In Rubens’ Temple of Janus from 1634, those gates, here imagined to be those of a temple, are being opened to let a warrior through to battle. Above that doorway is a statue of Janus with his two faces.

In Biblical narratives, the prominent account involving gates, other than those of heaven or hell, occurs at the start of the Passion of Jesus, in his triumphal entry into Jerusalem riding a donkey, since celebrated by Palm Sunday. This has been depicted in two significant works in the late nineteenth century.

Gustave Doré painted several versions of Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem including this preparatory sketch, in preparation for his final huge version exhibited at the Salon in 1876, measuring 6 by 10 metres.

In 1897 Jean-Léon Gérôme painted his account of The Entry of Christ into Jerusalem. According to all four gospels, Jesus descended from the Mount of Olives, and as he proceeded towards Jerusalem, crowds laid their clothes on the ground to welcome his triumphal entry into the city. Aside from being one of the major events in the Passion to be shown in paintings, for Gérôme this may have had another reading. Just a few years earlier, his paintings were being welcomed by throngs at the Salon, and commanded huge sums when sold. A short time later, his work was largely ignored, and he may have seen himself as being prepared for crucifixion in public.

The gate of hell is featured in two of the major Christian literary works of the early modern period: Dante’s Divine Comedy (c 1308-1321) and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667).

At the start of Dante’s Inferno, the ghost of Virgil leads the author to the gate of Hell. Inscribed above it is a forbidding series of lines leaving the traveller in no doubt that they’re going to a place of everlasting pain and tortured souls. This culminates in the most famous line of the whole of the Divine Comedy:
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate
traditionally translated as Abandon hope all ye who enter here, but perhaps more faithfully as Leave behind all hope, you who enter, and is seen written in William Blake’s own hand below.

It’s also William Blake who depicts Satan at the gates of hell in his paintings to accompany the second book of Milton’s epic.

Two versions, that from the Thomas set above, and below that from the Butts set, show Satan at the gate of hell, on his way out and heading for heaven.

Although the phrase pearly gates, derived from a description of the gate to heaven in the book of Revelation, has been in common use, few if any paintings have depicted them literally. However, in paintings of secular life they can have symbolic significance.

James Tissot painted The Farewells soon after his flight to London in the summer of 1871. 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.

Edmund Blair Leighton’s Regency scene of The Elopement from 1893, shows a woman leaving home to run away with her lover, the oarsman in the boat. She closes the gate on her old life as she looks back and reflects, before boarding the boat in which she will start the journey of her new life.

In the nineteenth century many painters paid the bills by illustrating books, often those intended for children. Two in particular are now known as illustrators, overlooking their fine art: Gustave Doré and Walter Crane. In this series of three articles I look at the work and career of the latter, who was one of the leading children’s illustrators who shaped how children’s books would look well into the twentieth century.

Crane was also an accomplished and recognised painter, an enthusiastic fan of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, a close friend of William Morris, a key member of the Arts and Crafts movement, and an overt and active Socialist.

He started his training as an apprentice to the wood-engraver William James Linton, between 1859 and 1862. In 1863 Edmund Evans employed him to illustrate ‘toy books’ for children, and he continued to create book illustrations until well after 1900. In the later years, he extended his repertoire to include special editions of the Faerie Queene, a volume of Arthurian legends, and a book about the New Forest.

His career in painting had started slightly earlier, though, when his first work was accepted by the Royal Academy in 1862, and he continued to paint independently of his illustrations.

Crane was one of the first artists to base a painting on Alfred Lord Tennyson’s (1809–1892) poem The Lady of Shalott, published in 1833 and 1842. This tells part of the Arthurian legends, that of Elaine of Astolat, as given in an Italian novella from the 1200s.

The Lady of Shalott lives in a castle connected to Camelot by a river. She’s subject to a mysterious curse confining her to weaving images on her loom, and must not look directly at the outside world. One day, while she sits and weaves, she catches sight of the knight Lancelot. She stops weaving and looks out of her window directly towards Camelot, invoking the curse. She abandons her castle, finds a boat on which she writes her name, then floats downriver to Camelot, dying before she arrives. Lancelot sees her body, and the poem ends:
But Lancelot mused a little space
He said, “She has a lovely face;
God in his mercy lend her grace,
The Lady of Shalott.”

Crane’s Lady of Shalott from 1862 shows her white in death, laid out in her boat, tresses and flowing sleeve draped over its gunwhales into the still water at the river’s edge. This is set in an ancient wood, in dramatic twilight, presumably dusk. This painting was accepted for exhibition at the Royal Academy, and must have influenced JW Waterhouse’s much better-known version just over 25 years later (below).

The following year he chose a story from the Old Testament. According to various sources in the Bible, Boaz was a wealthy landowner in Bethlehem who noticed Ruth, a widow in such difficult financial circumstances that she came to glean grain from his fields. Boaz invited her to eat with him and his workers, and started deliberately leaving grain for her to glean. Because they were distantly related, Ruth then asked Boaz to exercise right of kinship and marry her. They had children, and David was their great-grandson.

Crane’s painting, which is in oils despite resembling a watercolour illustration, shows the couple at the end of lunch, during Ruth’s gleaning. Their dress is an odd composite of the Biblical and Arthurian. She is looking down at her hands, as if contemplating grain held in her left palm. He has turned and looks towards her. In the background Boaz’s workers continue the harvest, and saddled horses are idle, a castellated house set in the crag behind them.

Two years later he was one of the first artists to depict John Keats’ ballad of La Belle Dame Sans Merci, written in 1819, and later revised slightly. It gives a simple story of love and death, including 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.

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. This appears to have inspired later paintings by Arthur Hughes and Frank Dicksee.

There’s some dispute over whether this triptych from about 1870 shows The Danaïdes, or Europe, Asia, Africa, or maybe both. The fifty daughters of Danaus were forced to marry the sons of their uncle Aegyptus, but their father told them to kill their husbands on their wedding night. All but one followed his instructions, for which they were condemned to eternally carry water in leaking vessels. Alternatively, the woman on the left could be African, that on the right Asian, and the woman in the middle European.

Crane married in 1871, and the couple travelled in Europe for the next two years. They visited Florence where they must have seen some of Botticelli’s paintings.

Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (c 1486) is one of the world’s most famous paintings, and shows the goddess Venus, when she was born from the waters as an adult, arriving at the shore.

Crane bases his Renaissance of Venus (1877) on Botticelli’s painting, and links her rebirth back to the Renaissance. She is stood at the edge of a placid sea, the water just above her ankles. Three attendant graces are also getting out of the water in the middle distance, but appear to have been bathing. A train of white doves flies down and behind Venus, to start landing on the shore at the right. In the distance are the remains of a classical building at the water’s edge, and what appears to be a section of Mediterranean coastline. Further out at sea, a sailing boat passes by. Crane painted this in tempera, just as Botticelli did.

In classical Greek mythology, Persephone, daughter of Zeus and Demeter, is the queen of the underworld. She acquired that role when Hades, god of the underworld, was overcome with love and lust from one of Cupid’s arrows, and had seen Persephone picking flowers with friends. Hades then abducted her to be his queen.

Crane’s Fate of Persephone from 1878 shows her at the moment of abduction. She had been picking spring flowers in the meadow with the three other women shown at the left. Hades brought his chariot, complete with its pair of black horses symbolising the underworld, and is seen gripping Persephone’s right arm, ready to move her into the chariot and make off.

It’s remarkable that, although their body language is emphatic and clear, each of the five figures has a completely neutral facial expression. This helps its appearance as a frieze, an effect enhanced by Crane’s use of oil and tempera. The horses appear in complete contrast, champing at their bits and poised to set off at a gallop.

The following year he’s believed to have painted this elaborate setting of George Howard, 9th Earl of Carlisle, and Rosalind, Countess of Carlisle, seated in the gardens at Naworth Castle, Cumbria, with a companion, standing holding a book. However, it was later signed clumsily by “E Burne Jones”, possibly in an attempt to pass it off as a more valuable work.

This couple had married in 1864, and were ardent supporters of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, and friends of Crane since they were both students, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. Howard was an accomplished painter who had trained at Heatherly School of Fine Art in London, and later became a trustee of the National Gallery in London.

Edward FitzGerald’s translation of a selection from the poetry attributed to Omar Khayyam (1048-1131) was published in 1859, was popularised from 1861, and appreciated by several of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement. Walter Crane’s painting from 1882 was accompanied by the following quotation from FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat:

Would that some winged angel ere too late
Arrest the yet unfolded Roll of Fate,
And make the stern recorder otherwise
Enregister, or quite obliterate!

Ah love! could you and I with him conspire
To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire,
Would we not shatter it to bits – and then
Remould it nearer to the heart’s desire!

A male winged angel is on bended knee before the figure of Time, who holds his scroll recording the destiny of all mankind. The angel’s hands are intertwined with those of Time: both right hands grasp the quill used to record destiny, both left hands are at the other end of the scroll. The angel looks up pleading at Time, but Time looks down at him with a frowning scowl. In front of the dais on which the angel kneels and Time sits is an hour glass. The whole is set inside a circular building revealing the stars through its roof, like a planetarium.

Endymion was a classical Greek mythological character, an Aeolian shepherd. Although accounts differ, some tell that Selene, Titan goddess of the moon and in Roman terminology, Diana, fell in love with Endymion, when she found him asleep one day. Selene asked Zeus to grant him eternal youth, resulting in him remaining in eternal sleep. In spite of his somnolence, she still managed to have fifty daughters by him. In Crane’s beautiful pastoral watercolour of Diana and Endymion from 1883, he is fast asleep in a meadow. Diana is in her hunting role with her dogs, bow and arrows. Endymion’s flock of sheep is in the distance.

References

Wikipedia

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

After hearing Francesca’s story in the Second Circle of Hell, for those guilty of the sin of lust, Dante weeps for her and faints. When he comes to, he realises that he has already descended to the Third Circle, where it’s pouring with rain, with snow and huge hailstones falling down in sheets. This soaks the ground, turning it into stinking mud.

He sees Cerberus, the fearsome three-headed canine monster that guards this circle, also soaked by the unceasing rain.

Agostino Carracci’s portrait of Pluto from 1592 shows Cerberus alongside his master, and the god holding the key to his kingdom.

Its heads bare their fangs at Dante, but his guide Virgil scoops up three handfuls of mud and throws them into the mouths of Cerberus to assuage its hunger.

Dante and Virgil walk on the flat plain among the prostrate forms of the gluttons. One of them sits up and accosts Dante, reminding him that they knew one another. He is Ciacco (a nickname, literally ‘Hoggio’), who tells Dante of his suffering there, and the names of five other Florentines of noble rank who are to be found in the lower circles of Hell.

Ciacco then falls flat on his face in the stinking mud to await the Final Judgement.

As Virgil leads Dante down to the next circle, they talk of what will happen when the Apocalypse comes, until they reach the dreaded figure of Plutus.

Cerberus is a good example of the redeployment of pre-Christian mythology into Christian beliefs: it was originally the guardian of the Underworld, as depicted by Carracci, and prevented those within from escaping back to the earthly world. It even features in the twelve labours of Hercules, in which he captured Cerberus. With Virgil’s explicit involvement, Dante here incorporates it into his Christian concepts of the afterlife.

The artists

Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527–1593) was a highly original and individualistic Italian painter now best known for his portraits consisting of assemblies of fruit, vegetables and other objects to form human images. He also painted more conventional works which are largely forgotten today, and was court painter to the Habsburgs in Vienna and Prague. You can see some of his portraits in this article.

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

Agostino Carracci (1557-1602) was one of the Carracci trio, the others being his brother Annibale and cousin Ludovico, who were largely responsible for the reputation of the School of Bologna in Italy. After working as an engraver, he painted a series of major frescos showing the story of Jason and Medea, and the early history of Rome.

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

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

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

Philippe Semeria is a young contemporary artist who is an enthusiast for comics and is an aspiring illustrator.

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

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

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

Lovis Corinth wasn’t the only artist to have his own suit of armour. Rembrandt apparently bought at least one, while Jean-Léon Gérôme seems to have kept a suit hanging in his studio.

The End of the Pose (1886) is the first of Gérôme’s series of unusual compound paintings, which are at once self-portraits of him as a sculptor, studies in the relationship between a model and their sculpted double, and further forays into issues of what is seen, visual revelation, and truth.

Here, while Gérôme cleans up, his model is seen covering up her sculpted double with sheets, as she remains naked. Hanging against the wall behind is a complete suit of armour, and there is a single red rose on the wooden platform on which the model and statue stand.

Armour has occasionally been purely symbolic, most famously in the collaborative painting of Touch by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens in their series The Five Senses from 1618.

Touch extends beyond its title to encompass other tactile sensory modalities. Heat is associated with a brazier, fine touch with brushes nearby. Much of the panel is devoted to a collection of armour, weapons, and their manufacture by gunsmiths and armourers. The many suits on display, seen in the detail below, appear to be equipment that isolates rather than stimulates the sense of touch.

During the nineteenth century, many painters looked back at the age of knights and chivalry, which inspired German Romantics, Pre-Raphaelites, and some of the last academic artists of the century.

The crusades presented Carl Friedrich Lessing with an ideal combination of mediaeval history, romance, and chivalry. In The Return of the Crusader from 1835, he shows a lone knight in full armour dozing as his horse plods its way up a path from the coast. Although his armour is still shiny, a tattered battle pennant hangs limply from his lance. This is based on a Romantic poem by the writer Karl Leberecht Immermann (1796-1840).

Edmund Blair Leighton’s Conquest from 1884 shows a stereotype knight in shining armour walking through an arch with its portcullis raised, a fair maiden walking behind him, as this victor enters the castle he has just conquered. The knight appears to be an idealised self-portrait.

Leighton’s The Accolade (1901) apparently shows Henry VI the Good – of Poland, not the British Henry VI – being dubbed a knight. Every link in his chain mail has been crafted individually.

Manuel García Hispaleto’s Don Quixote’s Speech of Arms and Letters (1884) shows the hero, his squire Sancho Panza behind, delivering one of his many orations after dinner, in a full suit of armour, as you would.

Eugène Delacroix visited tales of chivalry in his Combat Between Two Horsemen in Armour, painted at some time between 1825-30.

Plate armour continued to be worn by soldiers well into the twentieth century, and appears in some paintings of contemporary history.

Paul-Émile Boutigny’s undated Scene from the Franco-Prussian War shows soldiers from both sides of this short war in 1870-71. The soldier on the left is French, and holds a French Chassepot musketon with a long yataghan bayonet, while his colleague on the right appears to be Prussian, with his pickelhaube spiked helmet and a heavy cavalry cuirass that’s essentially modernised armour. (I’m grateful to Boris for his expert interpretation of this motif.)

François Flameng’s undated scene of Germans from the First World War shows the odd combination of archaic plate armour with modern gas masks.

Finally, as everyone knows, a knight goes to their grave in their armour.

Briton Rivière’s Requiescat from 1888 epitomises the faithful relationship between a dog and its master. As the knight’s body is laid out clad in armour, so his dog sits pining by the side of his body.

Armour, either in the form of plates of metal or chain mail with its many interlocked rings, is the primary attribute and symbol of the warrior. As such, several of the classical deities are often depicted wearing armour.

Peter Paul Rubens painted The Triumph of Victory in about 1614 for the Antwerp Guild of St George, its organisation of archers. Mars in his short suit of black armour 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.

Jacob Jordaens’ finished version of an original sketch by Rubens now known as The Golden Apple of Discord (1633) shows the wedding feast of the deities where Eris (Discord) makes her gift of the golden apple to set up the Judgement of Paris, leading to the Trojan War. At the left, Athena/Minerva, wearing her plumed helmet and a suit of ornate plate armour, reaches forward for that apple.

Just to confuse, the Roman goddess of war, Bellona (Greek Enyo), is also shown in or with armour by convention.

Peter Paul Rubens’ undated Portrait of Marie de’ Medici as Bellona shows her in the midst of cannon, arms and armour, with an exuberantly decorated helmet, a sceptre and a statue of a winged woman.

Armour inevitably plays a role in some of the events reported during the war against Troy. After his close friend Patroclus had been killed while wearing the armour of Achilles, he demanded a fresh suit made by Vulcan/Hephaestus before he would return to engage in battle.

Anthony van Dyck’s Thetis Receiving the Weapons of Achilles from Hephaestus from about 1630-32 shows the scene when Thetis is collecting her son’s new armour from Hephaestus, at the left.

Benjamin West’s Thetis Bringing the Armour to Achilles from 1804 shows the Greek warrior being presented with the armour and helmet by his mother Thetis.

When Achilles is killed in battle, in accordance with warrior tradition, his armour was handed on to the next in line, who could have been either Ajax or Odysseus.

Leonaert Bramer’s small painting on copper of The Quarrel between Ajax and Odysseus was made between about 1625-30. The pair stand in their armour, next to tents pitched at the foot of Troy’s mighty walls. At their feet is the armour of Achilles, and all around them are Greek warriors, some in exotic dress to suggest more distant origins.

Armour also leaked through into Christian religious paintings.

Lucas Cranach the Younger sets The Conversion of Saul (1549) in mediaeval northern Europe, with Paul and his party riding knightly chargers in their armour. Paul’s horse has fallen to the ground, with Paul still in the saddle rather than prostrate on the ground. Paul holds his hands up and looks to the heavens, where the figure of Christ is seen in a break in the clouds at the top left corner.

It was the young French martyr Joan of Arc, though, who is most often depicted wearing armour.

JAD Ingres painted Joan of Arc at the Coronation of Charles VII, in Reims Cathedral (1854). She stands close to the crown, resplendent in full armour and holding a standard, the two-pointed oriflamme embroidered for her by the women of Orléans, in her right hand.

The second scene in Jules Eugène Lenepveu’s Joan of Arc Murals (1886-90) shows Joan leading the French forces against the English, who were laying siege to the French city of Orléans. There had been controversy in Joan’s trial as to whether she had used weapons against the English; Lenepveu hedges here, showing her holding a sword in her right hand, but brandishing the Dauphin’s standard to rally the French, in the role that she described of herself. She’s wearing a suit of plate armour, which she was provided with in preparation for this operation. As this would have been designed to fit a man, this was part of the case against her for ‘cross-dressing’ in men’s clothes.

Lovis Corinth is one of several major painters who acquired themselves a suit of armour. This featured in two symbolic paintings made before and after the First World War.

When war broke out on 28 July 1914, Lovis Corinth and most of the other artists in Berlin shared an enthusiastic patriotism that initially gave them a buoyant optimism. He expressed this openly in his In Defence of Weapons from 1915.

Armour Parts in the Studio is Corinth’s summary of Germany’s defeat in 1918. The suit of armour is now empty, broken apart, and cast on the floor of his studio.

In the First Circle of Hell, Dante and his guide Virgil saw the souls caught in Limbo. From there they descend to the Second Circle, where they find those guilty of the sin of lust. They pass the figure of Minos, who extracts a confession from every sinner as they begin their descent, and directs them onward to the appropriate circle for their sins.

Here the light is dim, and there is an eternal storm blowing those in this circle, ensuring they never obtain any comfort or relief from its incessant blast. The first of those described by Virgil to Dante is Semiramis, who married her father and made such incestuous relationships legal. (This is now known to be a false legend recorded by Orosius, popular in Dante’s time.)

Then they see Cleopatra, Achilles, Paris and Tristan. Dante tells the story of Francesca in most detail, and possibly for the first time in literature. She appears, blown in the wind, with her lover Paolo, but it’s Francesca who speaks to Dante.

Francesca da Rimini was the aunt of Dante’s host when he lived his later years in Ravenna. In about 1275, she married Gianciotto of the ruling family in Rimini, for political reasons. There’s strong suspicion that she had been tricked into this: her husband turned out to be disfigured and uncouth, but pre-nuptial negotiations were conducted by his handsome and eloquent brother Paolo, suggesting she was duped.

Soon after the marriage, Paolo and Francesca became lovers, apparently inspired by the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. Gianciotto suspected the couple, and one day caught them together in his wife’s bedroom.

Paolo had become stuck when trying to escape through a trapdoor. Francesca was unaware of that, and let her husband in, who then attacked his brother with his sword. But Francesca stepped in between them to save her lover and was killed; Gianciotto then killed his brother, and after his own death had descended further into Hell for that double murder.

Dante’s story has inspired a succession of masterly paintings.

It was William Blake’s Whirlwind of Lovers that transformed these depictions.

This story is told in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s watercolour triptych: at the left, the lovers are reading the legend of Lancelot and Guinevere. In the centre are Dante and Virgil, and at the right Paolo and Francesca are being blown in the storms of the Second Circle of Hell.

Dante faints at the tragic story that Francesca has told him, and collapses as if dead.

The artists

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

Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) was an Italian painter and sculptor whose tragically short career was a major influence over the development of Futurism. Drafted into the Italian Army during the First World War, he was thrown from his horse and trampled to death when he was only thirty-three.

Alexandre Cabanel (1823–1889) was a major French painter of history in an academic style, and a precocious artist. He won the Prix de Rome in 1845, and was appointed a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1864, teaching many successful pupils including Jules Bastien-Lepage. This article summarises his career and work.

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Early in his career, he produced a complete set of seventy illustrations for translations of the Inferno, first published in 1857 and still being used. These were followed in 1867 by more illustrations for Purgatorio and Paradiso, and this painting was highly praised when shown at the Paris Salon in 1863. This article looks at his paintings.

Giuseppe Frascheri (1809–1886) was an Italian painter in fresco and oils who has been almost completely forgotten.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) was a major French painter in Neoclassical style, best known for his history and other narrative paintings. He was a pupil of Jacques-Louis David, and continued much in his tradition, and in opposition to the more Romantic painting of Eugène Delacroix. His work extended from portraits to Orientalism.

Gaetano Previati (1852–1920) was an Italian painter who worked mainly in Divisionist style, but is now known for his Symbolism. He was most famous in the period 1880-1920, during which he was involved in the Venice Biennale and exhibitions in Italy and Paris.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) was of Italian descent but born in London. In 1848, he co-founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and was a major figure in British painting until his early death in 1882. A published poet and author himself, many of his paintings were in response to literature, particularly the poems of John Keats. He had a succession of relationships with his models and muses, including Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth, and William Morris’s wife Jane. The triptych shown here is the earliest of at least three paintings of his showing Paolo and Francesca, another similar triptych being from 1862.

Ary Scheffer (1795–1858) was a major narrative painter of the first half of the nineteenth century, born in the Netherlands but trained and working in Paris. Among his favourite literary themes were Goethe’s Faust, and the story of Paolo and Francesca. This article looks at his narrative work.

George Frederic Watts (1817–1904) was a major British painter and sculptor in the middle and late nineteenth century who was associated with several artistic circles and movements including the Pre-Raphaelites, but who worked independently in more Symbolist style. This article looks at his career and paintings.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

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

Dante lost consciousness just before he was expecting to be ferried across the River Acheron in Charon’s boat, from Hell’s Gate to its First Circle.

Botticelli’s Map of Hell from 1480-90 shows these stages of their descent at the very top: highest are the woods through which Dante was wandering when he encountered the three wild beasts. At the left, Virgil led Dante down to the area in which the cowards are trapped, neither being allowed admittance to Heaven, nor to Hell. Charon’s boat then crosses the River Acheron, shown in blue, taking Dante and his guide Virgil to the First Circle of Limbo.

Dante is woken by thunder, and realises that he’s on the edge of the abyss that is Hell. Virgil leads him down into darkness, where there is no grief or pain, and explains that the multitude there never sinned at all, but none was baptised in faith as they had lived before the Christian era. This is where Virgil’s ghost now inhabits, for despite his merit and attainments, he never revered the Christian God.

Dante asks whether any of those in Limbo, as this circle is known, have ever been blessed and been able to leave. This allows Virgil to explain the Harrowing of Hell by Christ after his crucifixion. This occurred not long after Virgil’s death: following his crucifixion, Jesus Christ descended into Hell, where he reached the First Circle, blessed and liberated from it the many Old Testament figures who had been faithful to the God of the Jews, also known as Anastasis.

The descent of Christ into Limbo and his Harrowing of Hell was a popular theme in religious painting until the end of the Renaissance, and would have been familiar to Dante’s readers. Here is a small selection of some of the finest paintings of this, from 1530 to 1600.

Virgil then introduces the great classical writers: Homer, Horace the satirist, Ovid and Lucan. Together with Virgil, these five invite Dante to join them as the sixth among the ranks of great writers, in an ambitious piece of self-promotion.

The group walk on to the Dome of Light, and further to a castle surrounded by seven curtain walls and a moat. When they enter that they see many ancient heroes, including Electra, Hector, Aeneas, and other figures from classical history and legend. Next Dante notices a group of philosophers, including Socrates, Plato and others. Finally, he sees other learned figures from the past, including Euclid, Ptolemy and Hippocrates.

Here Dante and Virgil bid farewell to the spirits of those great figures as they move onward to the next circle.

The artists

Domenico di Pace Beccafumi (1486–1551) was one of the last of the Sienese School of Painting, which contrasted with the better-known Renaissance painting of Florence. He has been aptly summarised as “a mediaeval believer of miracles awaking in Renaissance reality.”

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

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

Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568–1625) was the son of Pieter Brueghel the Elder, who specialised in floral still lifes. The painting shown above was made in collaboration with the figure painter Hans Rottenhammer, a relationship that lasted between 1595-1610. At the time of this painting, Brueghel had returned to Antwerp, and Rottenhammer was in Venice.

Pablo de Céspedes (1538–1608) was a Spanish polymath from Córdoba, who was an accomplished painter, poet and architect who worked for twenty years in Italy, largely because he fell foul of the Inquisition of Valladolid in Spain. He was also a linguist and theologian.

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

Hans Rottenhammer (1564–1625) was a German figure painter who worked in Italy from 1593-1606. Later during that period, when he was in Venice, he collaborated with Jan Brueghel the Elder on the work shown above. He was probably responsible for the early training of Adam Elsheimer, and for introducing him to the technique of painting on a small scale using oil on copper plate.

Jacopo Tintoretto (c 1518-1594) was one of the three grand masters working in Venice in the middle and late sixteenth century, alongside the more senior figure of Titian, and Paolo Veronese. Primarily a religious painter, I have looked in detail at his major works and biography. His painting shown above was made to accompany his Crucifixion for the church of San Cassiano in Venice.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

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

In the first of these two articles I showed paintings of Hercules (Heracles) brandishing a large olive-wood club and wearing a lion-skin, as a stereotype of the ultimate high-testosterone uncouth hero. That association was strong enough to make its way into some more Christian images.

In Frans Francken the Younger’s composite painting of Mankind’s Eternal Dilemma – The Choice Between Virtue and Vice from 1633, the upper section of Paradise sets heroes including Hercules, to the left of centre with his trademark club and lion-skin, in an idealised landscape. Above them is an angelic musical ensemble serenading the figures below. This clearly was a Paradise for the artist’s patron, not the common person.

Clubs also appeared in other examples of hand-to-hand combat drawn from classical mythology.

In Peter Paul Rubens’ finished painting of The Rape of Hippodame (Lapiths and Centaurs) (1636-38) the figure at the upper right is just about to bring his club down on this wedding feast that turned into a pitched battle.

Sebastiano Ricci’s Battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs from about 1705 uses multiplex narrative to tell the same story. In the left background, Hippodame is seen being carried away by Eurytus, and a centaur in the centre foreground is swinging his club at one of the Lapiths.

Although the original story of the death of Orpheus at the hands of Bacchantes has them club him with their thyrsi, more modern interpretations are content with ordinary clubs.

Louis Bouquet’s The Death of Orpheus (1925-39) transports this scene to a beach, where the naked Bacchantes are armed with clubs, and just starting to tear the body of Orpheus with their bare hands and teeth.

Some earlier paintings of Christian devils show them with clubs.

Painted in 1430-32, Stefano di Giovanni’s St Anthony Beaten by the Devils identifies the saint by his Tau crucifix. Three devils, clearly fallen angels by their wings, are beating him with clubs. Those devils are fairly conventional figures, part animal and part man, with horns.

In contrast, Hercules’ lion-skin developed different associations, and involved other species.

Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier’s romanticised view of The Siege of Paris from 1870 combines almost every symbol relevant to the city’s distress, and dresses the symbolic figure of Marianne in a lion-skin against a battle-worn flag.

By the end of the nineteenth century, animal skins had gone from the uncouth to the mildly erotic, as seen in several of John William Godward’s paintings of doing nothing, or Dolce Far Niente.

This first from 1897 returns to a classical Roman setting, and adds a brilliant green parakeet to accompany this woman on a tiger-skin, in her diaphonous dress.

Seven years later (in 1904), Godward painted his more complex version, also known as Sweet Idleness, or A Pompeian Fishpond. More modestly clad, his lone woman rests with her knees drawn up into a sleeping (near-foetal) position on another animal skin, with a peacock-feather fan in the foreground.

A couple of years after that (in 1906), Godward’s beautiful woman is stretched out on an animal skin on marble, a colour-co-ordinated garden and distant Mediterranean waterscape beyond: a far cry from the uncouth Hercules.

If you see a well-muscled man brandishing a large olive-wood club and wearing a lion-skin, you can be fairly certain he is Hercules, or Heracles if you prefer the original Greek. He’s the ultimate high-testosterone uncouth hero, who doesn’t understand why others wear fabrics, and relies on his club to settle all disputes. In this and tomorrow’s article I explore how reliably paintings meet that expectation, and who else wielded clubs and liked animal hide next to their skin.

One of the most unusual summaries of Hercules’ career is this mosaic from Llíria, Valencia, showing each of his twelve labours around its central panel. His club goes with him in every one except that in the centre, seen in the detail below.

There, in the midst of all his swashbuckling masculinity, Hercules is seen holding a distaff and spindle for spinning, and is dressed as a woman, while Queen Omphale sits on his Nemean lion-skin on her throne, clutching his club. This comes from a curious myth of role reversal and cross-dressing, in which Hercules served as a slave to the Queen of Lydia for a year as penalty for murdering Iphitus.

Bartholomeus Spranger’s Hercules and Omphale (c 1585) uses the same exchange of attributes, and plays openly with the eroticism of Omphale’s position. Note also the colour-coding of their skin.

Luigi Garzi’s Hercules and Omphale (c 1700-10) lets Hercules put his spinning gear behind him, as he entertains the court with a song and the tambourine. Omphale seems to be enjoying her new position on the lion-skin, while fondling his club in her left hand.

Byam Shaw ignores the figure of Hercules altogether, showing a triumphant and erotically-charged Omphale (1914) against a background of the twelve labours, in a remarkable reconfiguration of that ancient Roman mosaic.

Elsewhere, there are many depictions that identify the uncouth hero with his attributes.

In Hans Thoma’s Hercules Delivering Hesione (1890) Hercules stands on the beach in front of the early city of Troy, his trademark club in his right hand. A naked Telamon is busy keeping the sea monster at bay by throwing boulders at it, while Hercules is bargaining with the fair Hesione.

In about 1706, Sebastiano Ricci embroidered the story of Hercules Fighting with the Centaur Nessus showing the hero wearing his lion-skin, and his left hand grasping Nessus’ mouth, about to club the centaur to death, while a slightly bedraggled Deianeira watches in the background.

Noël Coypel, the father of the better-known history painter Antoine Coypel, painted Hercules Fighting Achelous in about 1667-69. This opts to show the pair during the first phase of their fight. In addition to wearing his lion-skin, Hercules wields his fearsome club.

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. He is wearing the poisoned shirt inadvertently given him by Deianeira, rather than his lion-skin, and his club rests at his feet.

Dante has been rescued from three wild beasts by the ghost of Virgil, who leads him along the only possible route, taking them to the gate of Hell. Inscribed above that gate is a forbidding series of lines leaving the traveller in no doubt that they’re going to a place of everlasting pain and tortured souls. This culminates in the most famous line of the whole of the Divine Comedy:
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate
traditionally translated as Abandon hope all ye who enter here, but perhaps more faithfully as Leave behind all hope, you who enter, and is seen written in William Blake’s own hand below.

Virgil explains its meaning to Dante before the two enter. Dante is then struck by the terrible sounds that he hears, those of tormented sinners in Hell mixed with the noise of the first group of dead: those who have been refused entry to Hell or to Heaven, because of their cowardice in failing to choose between God and the Devil. They form a river of naked bodies drawn by a banner, their faces constantly stung by wasps and hornets, streaking them with blood and tears.

Among them is one who has been identified as Pope Celestine V, who resigned from office in 1294, and another candidate is Pontius Pilate, who refused to pass judgement on Christ.

Then Charon, an irascible old man with white hair and coal-black eyes, appears in his boat. He tells Dante to get away from the dead, as he won’t be carried across by him with those souls, and will have to arrange another crossing. Virgil intercedes to ensure that they too will be ferried across the marshy River Acheron to Hell.

Those souls destined for Hell rush to board the boat, with Charon sweeping them in using his oar to hit those who are slow. The boat then carries them across, as another load gathers on the shore ready for its return.

There is then a violent gust of wind and a red bolt of lightning, and Dante loses consciousness.

Although Dante doesn’t describe his crossing of the Acheron in Charon’s boat, this has been imagined by several painters.

In 1822, the young Eugène Delacroix painted one of his finest narrative works, The Barque of Dante, showing the pair crossing a stormy river Acheron in a very small boat. He painted this quickly, over an intense period of a little over two and a half months, just in time for submission to the Salon. Dante, wearing his distinctive scarlet chaperon (hat), holds his hand up as he leans back onto the shoulder of Virgil his guide. This has been interpreted as showing how, when we encounter challenges from the modern we should look to tradition for support.

This is one of the most remarkable paintings of the Inferno, as an early experiment with colour. In the detail below, water droplets on the bodies of those surrounding the boat contain at least three different colours: their reflected highlights are pure white, the rest of the body of the droplet and its trail are the dark green of the water below, and the droplet itself has a shadow of the same pink that Delacroix uses to shade flesh. Their overall effect is of an unusually three-dimensional and realistic droplet.

The artists

José Benlliure y Gil (1855–1937) was a Spanish painter who was born in Valencia but spent much of his working life in Rome, where he became the director of the Spanish Academy there. After painting small genre works, he turned to classical narratives including the painting shown here.

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

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) was a major French painter whose Romantic and painterly style laid the groundwork for the Impressionists. In addition to many fine easel works, he painted murals and was an accomplished lithographer too. Many of his paintings are narrative, and among the most famous is Liberty Leading the People from 1830. This article introduces a series featuring his major works.

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

Alexander Dmitrievich Litovchenko (1835-1890) was born in Kremenchuk, Ukraine, but spent most of his career painting historical events in Russia. His painting of Charon won him a gold medal.

Paolo Vetri (1855–1937) was a precocious Italian painter who was born in Sicily. He was a pupil of the great narrative artist Domenico Morelli, and completed several major murals as well as many easel paintings.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

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

A century ago today, on 17 July 1925, the great German artist Lovis Corinth died. To complete this series commemorating his career and art, I show a selection of the best of his narrative paintings. Some modern art historians claim that narrative painting died during the nineteenth century, but that certainly didn’t apply to Corinth.

Corinth’s first really successful narrative paintings were the two that he made in 1890, showing the Old Testament story of Susanna and the Elders, a subject he returned to as late as 1923. Identical in their composition, they have an unusual setting, as this scene of the two elders acting as voyeurs is more commonly shown in Susanna’s garden, or even woodland, as described in the original story.

Towards the end of his time in Munich, Corinth painted this first version of another famous story, this time the temptations that Saint Anthony was reported to have undergone. This is more typical of Corinth’s mature work, with many figures crammed into the composition in a raucous and highly expressive human circus. Although painterly in parts, he is careful to depict fine detail in the joint of meat being held by Saint Anthony, and the saint’s amazing face.

Corinth’s narrative paintings reached their peak at the time that he moved to Berlin, in this second version of Salome. Not only was it highly influential on a wide range of other artists and their arts, but its use of gaze is remarkably subtle and its success based on being implicit rather than explicit.

Corinth wasn’t as restrained when he tackled the story from Homer’s Odyssey of Ulysses Fighting the Beggar. He packs a crowd in, gives every one of them a unique and intriguing facial expression, then pits Ulysses against the beggar in almost comic combat. Note too how his figures are becoming looser.

If Corinth’s first Temptation of Saint Anthony showed a human circus, the rest of the animals and performers came for this his second. Those figures are also becoming significantly more painterly, and the Queen of Sheba has similarities with his earlier figure of Salome.

Of all his narrative paintings, his Homeric Laughter must be the most complex. It refers to a story within the story of Homer’s Odyssey, told by the bard Demodocus to cheer Odysseus up when he is being entertained by King Alcinous on the island of the Phaeacians. It’s another raucous spectacle, in which we join the other gods in seeing Mars and Venus caught red-faced making love.

Corinth returned to narrative after his stroke, painting The Blinded Samson with its obvious autobiographical references. Samson’s body is painted more roughly, although the artist has taken care to give form to the drops of blood running down Samson’s cheeks. This version of Samson contrasts with his others in showing the man alone.

Less than two years after his stroke, Corinth returned with another elaborate and wild painting, this time depicting the story of Ariadne on Naxos. This is another highlight of Corinth’s career, particularly as it condenses several different moments in time into its single image, using multiplex narrative; that might have been fairly commonplace during the Renaissance, but was exceptional for the early twentieth century. It works wonderfully.

Late during the First World War, Corinth moved on from crowded and vivacious narrative paintings, and became more autobiographical again. The huge and stark figure of Cain heaping rocks onto the body of his brother Abel fits with Corinth’s growing horror and despair as the war drew on.

Corinth’s last painting of Susanna and the Elders is a remarkable contrast with his first, from over thirty years earlier. He still avoids a pastoral or garden setting, and his figures are now fading forms in patches of colour and texture.

For what must have been his last great narrative painting, Corinth looked to the events leading up to the fall of Troy, in particular The Trojan Horse. The great walls and towers of the city appear as a mirage, their forms indistinct from the dawn sky. Although roughly painted using coarse marks, the soldiers and the horse itself are more distinct in the foreground.

Corinth’s style evolved through his career, but he also continued to paint stories right up to the last. Together, they form one of the most sustained and brilliant series of narrative paintings of any artist since Rembrandt.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)

This second article concludes my virtual exhibition of a selection of Peter Paul Rubens’ paintings of myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Rubens and his workshop painted several different accounts of Ovid’s great story of the Calydonian Boar Hunt. This is the first, from about 1611-12, with Meleager just about to finish the wounded boar off. Atalanta’s arrow is visible by its left ear, and the body of Ancaeus lies just behind Meleager’s left foot. The wall of horses behind the boar, and the crowd of hunters behind Meleager, including Atalanta in blue, frame the combatants in the foreground, with some spears directing the gaze at a visual centre of the boar’s snout.

A few years later, in about 1618-19, Rubens reworked his composition in this marvellous study of Meleager and Atalanta and the Hunt of the Calydonian Boar. This shifts the visual centre closer to the geometric centre, and brings the gaze in using a greater range of radials. It also gives Atalanta a more active part, as in Ovid’s text.

Rubens’ finished result is The Hunt of Meleager and Atalanta probably from around 1618-20. Meleager has aged slightly, and the boar rests its hoof on the body of Ancaeus. Radial lines of spears are augmented by a dog and some human figures, and the centre of the painting now includes a landscape, with bright sky used to emphasise the visual centre. It also seems to show not just Atalanta at the right hand of Meleager, but two other women behind her, and possibly another in blue robes on a horse just above the middle of the painting.

Rubens and his workshop’s Meleager Presents Atalanta with the Head of the Calydonian Boar (before 1640) shows the award of the trophy by Meleager. The couple are here alone, apart from an inevitable winged cupid, and a goddess, most probably Diana, watching from the heavens. Meleager stands on the forelegs of the dead boar, and his spear behind is still covered in its blood.

Around 1615, Rubens collaborated with Jan Brueghel the Elder (father of Jan Brueghel the Younger) in The Feast of Achelous. There are nine men around the banqueting table, without any distant nymphs.

His Stormy Landscape with Philemon and Baucis from about 1625 is one of the few paintings to show a broader view of this late moment in Ovid’s story. His dramatic landscape shows storm-clouds building over the hills, a raging torrent pouring down the mountainside, dragging large trees and animals in its swollen waters, and the four figures on a track at the right. Philemon and Baucis are struggling up the track with their sticks, Jupiter points to a rainbow formed over a waterfall at the lower left corner, and Mercury is all but naked.

Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder also collaborated in Nymphs Filling the Horn of Plenty, again in about 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.

This marvellous painting was probably made by Rubens’ workshop around the time of the Master’s death in 1640. It views The Abduction of Deianeira by the Centaur Nessus 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.

A few years before his death, Rubens painted a wonderful account of 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.

His atmospheric painting of the flight of Orpheus and Eurydice (1636-38) was also 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.

Rubens’ The Rape of Ganymede (1636-37) is surprising for its use of profane humour, with the placement of both ends of Ganymede’s quiver. Clearly this wasn’t intended for viewing by polite mixed company.

In 1636, when he was in retirement, 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. This doesn’t seem to have been turned into a finished painting.

Rubens skilfully reversed Titian’s composition in his undated Venus and Adonis. Adonis is trying to depart to the left with his back to the viewer, bringing the beauty of Venus into full view, and strengthening its triangular composition. It also provides a natural place for Cupid, holding onto Adonis’s leg to stop him from going to his death. Cupid’s quiver, left on the ground behind him, is a reminder of the origin of the relationship.

In or just before 1614, Rubens made this oil sketch of Venus Mourning Adonis, a complex composition with the addition of three Graces, and the young Cupid at the right.

Rubens’ finished version of Death of Adonis retains the same composition. A rather portly Venus cradles her lover’s head as the Graces weep in grief with her. Rubens has been generous with the young man’s blood, which is splashed around his crotch and spills out onto the ground, where the hounds are sniffing it. The fateful spear rests under Adonis’s legs.

His painting of The Rape of Hippodame (Lapiths and Centaurs) (1636-38), remains faithful to his earlier sketch and its composition. Facial expressions, particularly that of the Lapith at the left bearing a sword, are particularly powerful.

Rubens’ The Death of Achilles (c 1630-35) also adheres faithfully to an earlier oil sketch. Achilles’ face is deathly white, and this brings to life the supporting detail, particularly the lioness attacking a horse at the lower edge of the canvas, symbolising Paris’s attack on Achilles.

Rubens included this oil sketch in his Achilles series, showing Thetis Dipping the Infant Achilles into the River Styx (1630-35). This is taking place in the foreground, while in the middle distance Charon is seen ferrying the dead across the River Styx into the Underworld.

In his late oil sketch of Vertumnus and Pomona of 1636, there’s no pretence that Vertumnus is a woman: he lacks breasts, and even has heavy beard stubble. However, the embrace of his right arm still brings Pomona to push him away with her left arm.

The outstanding depiction of Ovid’s story is Rubens’ earlier Vertumnus and Pomona from 1617-19. Vertumnus has assumed his real form, that of a handsome young man. Pomona looks back, her sickle still in her right hand, and her rejection of his advances is melting away in front of our eyes. Rubens even offers us a couple of rudely symbolic melons, and provides distant hints at Vertumnus doing the work in the garden while Pomona directs him, at the upper left.

In about 1618-20, Rubens collaborated with Frans Snyders to paint Pythagoras Advocating Vegetarianism. The mathematician and philosopher sits to the left of centre, with a group of followers further to the left. The painting is dominated by its extensive display of fruit and vegetables, which is being augmented by three nymphs and two satyrs. One of the latter seems less interested in the food than he is in one of the nymphs.

Several Masters have specialised in painting myths told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Although Nicolas Poussin painted many, perhaps the most prolific is Peter Paul Rubens, whose work has featured in nearly half the articles in this series. Here, possibly for the first time, I bring together a virtual exhibition of some of his best narrative paintings drawn from Ovid.

Rubens’ Deucalion and Pyrrha (1636) shows an aged couple, clearly beyond any hope of parenthood, which at least explains why this metamorphosis was needed. As their more reasonably sized rocks transform, they follow an ontogenetic process, instead of behaving like sculpted blocks. Rubens also treats us to some interesting details: the couple’s boat is shown at the top right, and a newly transformed couple appear already to be engaged in the initial stages of making the next generation without the aid of metamorphosis.

His late oil sketch of Pan and Syrinx from about 1636 is one of the few paintings that attempts to show Syrinx undergoing her transformation into reeds, and succeeds in making Pan appear thoroughly lecherous.

Rubens’ finest painting of the story of the rape of Io is his Juno and Argus from about 1611, showing this part of its outcome. Juno, wearing the red dress and coronet, is receiving eyes that have been removed from Argus’ severed head, and is placing them on the tail feathers of her peacocks. The headless corpse of Argus lies contorted in the foreground. Rubens took the opportunity of adding a visual joke, in which Juno’s left hand appears to be cupped under the breasts of the woman behind.

His The Fall of Phaeton, started in about 1604, is perhaps the best of several superb paintings of this story. He seems to have reworked this over the following three or four years, and elaborates the scene to augment the chaos: accompanying Phaëthon in the chariot of the sun are the Hours (Horae, some shown with butterfly wings), who are thrown into turmoil, and time falls out of joint as Phaëthon tumbles out of the chariot.

His is also one of the best accounts of Jupiter and Callisto (1613). Diana looks a tad more masculine than in most depictions, and their facial expressions are more serious, with Callisto hesitant and suspicious. Most importantly, Rubens tells us that this Diana is more than meets the eye: parked in the background is Jupiter’s signature eagle, with a thunderbolt in its talons.

This is the better of his two versions of Erichthonius Discovered by the Daughters of Cecrops, from about 1616. Aglauros has just given way to temptation and taken the top off the basket entrusted to the sisters by Minerva, revealing the infant Ericthonius and a small snake inside. To the right is a fountain in honour of the Ephesian Artemis (Roman Diana), distinctive with her multiple breasts, each of which is a source of water. At the left, in the distance, is a herm, at the foot of which is a peacock, suggesting that Juno isn’t far away.

Rubens’ workshop is credited with this oil sketch of Cadmus Sowing Dragon’s Teeth from between 1610-90, the start of Ovid’s history of Thebes. Cadmus stands at the left, Minerva directing him from the air. The warriors are shown in different states, some still emerging from the teeth, others killing one another. Behind Cadmus is the serpent, dead and visibly edentulous.

His oil sketch of The Death of Semele from about 1620 reveals Semele pregnant on a bed and in obvious distress. Jupiter grasps his thunderbolt in his right hand, as his dragon-like eagle swoops in through the window.

Rubens’ Perseus and Andromeda (c 1622) shows a late moment when the height of action is just past, but its outcome more obvious. Andromeda is at the left, unchained but still almost naked. Perseus is in the process of claiming her hand as his reward, for which he is being crowned with laurels, as the victor. He wears his winged sandals, and holds the polished shield that still reflects Medusa’s face and snake hair. One of several putti (alluding to their forthcoming marriage) holds Hades’ helmet of invisibility, and much of the right of the painting is taken up by Pegasus, derived from a different version of the myth. At the lower edge is the dead Cetus, its fearsome mouth wide open.

The young and flourishing Rubens painted this remarkable Head of Medusa in about 1617. This shows the head after Perseus had placed it on a bed of seaweed once he had rescued Andromeda. He includes an exuberant mass of snakes, even a lizard and a scorpion, more of which appear to be forming in the blood exuding at the neck.

His superb The Rape of Proserpina (1636-38) shows a composite of Ovid’s account. Pluto’s face looks the part, his eyes bulging and staring at Minerva, who is trying to stop the girl from being abducted. Below the chariot, the basketful of flowers which Proserpine had been picking is scattered on the ground. Rubens shows irresistible movement to the right, as Pluto struggles to lift the girl into his chariot. Two winged Cupids are preparing to drive the black horses on, once the couple are secured inside.

Rubens’ surviving oil study of Pallas and Arachne (1636-7) tells this story in a conventional view. In the foreground, the angry Minerva is striking Arachne on the forehead with the shuttle. To the right is one of the images woven by Arachne, showing Europa riding Jupiter disguised as a white bull, an image that Rubens was familiar with from Titian’s Rape of Europa (c 1560-62), copied so well by Rubens in 1628-29. However, this version is different from either of those. Behind Minerva and Arachne, two women are sat at a loom, and it’s tempting to think that they too might represent the pair, in multiplex narrative. However, neither is dressed in red as is Arachne, leaving the question open.

His Tereus Confronted with the Head of his Son Itys (1636-38) shows the two sisters dressed as Bacchantes, one carrying her thyrsus with her left arm, and their breasts bared. Tereus is just reaching for his sword with his right hand, and his eyes are wide open in shock and rage. In the background, a door is open, and one of the court watches the horrific scene.

Rubens painted Boreas Abducting Orithyia in about 1620, when he was at the peak of his career. Boreas is shown in his classical guise, as a roughly bearded old man with wings. He is sweeping Orithyia up in his arms, while a cluster of Cupids are engaged in a snowball fight, a lovely touch of humour, and a subtle reference to winter.

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

His oil sketch of Cephalus and Procris (1636-37), shows the couple just before Cephalus throws the fateful javelin at his wife.

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

This is the last of four articles providing brief summaries and contents for this series of paintings telling myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and covers parts 55-74, from the foundation of Troy to the age of Augustus.

The foundation of Troy by Laomedon who failed to repay Apollo and Neptune for their help, so Neptune floods the city. Peleus marries the Nereid Thetis, with their wedding banquet on Mount Pelion, attended by the gods. Eris, goddess of discord, throws a golden apple into the group as a reward for the fairest, setting up the Judgement of Paris and leading to the war against Troy. Thetis gives birth to Achilles.

55 The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis

Chione boasts she is fairer than Diana, so the goddess shoots an arrow through her tongue, and she bleeds to death. Her father is turned into a hawk. Ceyx and Halcyone are turned into kingfishers. Aesacus is turned into a seabird after the death of Hesperia from a snake bite.

56 The hawk, kingfishers and a diver

After his judgement, Paris abducts Helen and triggers the war against Troy. The thousand ships of the Greeks gather at Aulis, where they’re delayed by storms. Their leader Agamemnon had offended Diana, so has to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to propitiate the goddess. At the last moment, Diana may have substituted a deer.

57 The sacrifice of Iphigenia

The Greek fleet sets sail against Troy, and when it arrives Protesilaus, the first to land, is killed by Hector. Achilles kills Cycnus, who is transformed into a swan. Caeneus was born a woman and raped by Neptune, for which she was turned into a male warrior. Nestor tells of the battle between Lapiths and Centaurs at the wedding of Pirithous and Hippodame.

58 A wedding ruined by centaurs

Neptune’s hatred for Achilles leads to the warrior’s death from an arrow shot by Paris.

59 The death of Achilles

Ajax and Ulysses contest for the armour of Achilles, but Ajax loses and falls on his sword. His blood is turned into the purple hyacinth flower. Troy falls, Priam is killed, Hector’s son Astyanax is thrown from a tower, and Troy is sacked by the Greeks.

60 The sack of Troy

Queen Hecuba’s youngest son is murdered, and her daughter Polyxena is sacrificed to gain fair winds for the departing Greek fleet. Hecuba blinds Polymestor and is transformed into a dog. Aurora laments the death of her son Memnon.

61 Sacrifice of Polyxena

Aeneas flees Troy with his father Anchises and son Ascanius, but his wife Creusa dies before she can escape. They sail with a fleet of Trojan survivors to Delos, then on to Crete.

62 Aeneas flees Troy

Aeneas sails on to land on Sicily. Galatea tells the story of her love for Acis, and the jealousy of Polyphemus the Cyclops, who killed Acis, whose blood was turned into a stream.

63 The tragedy of Galatea

Glaucus pursues Scylla, and is refused, so he visits Circe, who turns the lower part of Scylla’s body into a pack of dogs, then finally into a rock in the Straits of Messina. Together with Charybdis the whirlpool, they pose a threat to Odysseus’ ship.

64 Scylla meets Glaucus

Aeneas is rowed through the straits only to be blown south to Carthage, where he has an affair with Queen Dido. When he departs she falls on a sword he gave her and dies on her funeral pyre. Aeneas returns north to land at Cumae to visit its Sibyl. The pair visit the underworld, where they meet the ghost of Anchises.

65 The Cumaean Sibyl

A survivor left from Ulysses’ crew tells of their encounter with the Cyclops Polyphemus, who had held them captive. Ulysses got him drunk and blinded his single eye. The crew escaped tied under a flock of sheep. As they fled in their ship, the Cyclops threw a huge rock at them.

66 The tale of Polyphemus

A second of Ulysses’ crew tells of their time on Circe’s island. She turned them into pigs, but they were transformed back after Ulysses and Circe married.

67 Circe and her swine

Circe transforms Picus, King of Latium, into a woodpecker. Aeneas arrives at Latium, where he has to fight Turnus for the throne. Aeneas’ ships are burned and transformed into sea nymphs. As the end of Aeneas’ life draws near, he undergoes apotheosis to become Indiges.

68 Apotheosis of Aeneas

Pomona, a dedicated gardener who shuns men, is courted unsuccessfully by Vertumnus, god of the seasons. He assumes the guise of an old woman to try to persuade her, and tells her the tragic story of Iphis and Anaxarete, who was transformed into a statue. Vertumnus finally succeeds.

69 Vertumnus and Pomona

Rome is founded by Romulus. Its war with the Sabines, the death of the Sabine King Tatius, and Romulus becomes ruler of both peoples. Romulus is transformed into the god Quirinus, with his wife Hersilia as the goddess Hora.

70 Romulus and the founding of Rome

Myscelus is saved from death and goes on to found Crotona, where Pythagoras lived in exile. Pythagoras expounds change and transformation underlying everything in nature, and the central theme of Metamorphoses. The virtues of vegetarianism. King Numa returns to Rome and establishes its laws.

71 Pythagoras and Numa

Plague strikes Rome. The oracle at Delphi tells the Romans to bring the god Aesculapius to the city. He is taken as a snake from Epidaurus to his temple on Tiber Island, and the Romans are saved from plague.

72 Plague and Aesculapius

The assassination of Julius Caesar, who then undergoes apotheosis.

73 Julius Caesar

Jupiter foretells the accomplishments of Augustus, including success in battle, the fall of Cleopatra, and growth of the empire. The fate of Ovid in banishment to Tomis on the Black Sea.

74 The Age of Augustus

Most urban societies have had some form of police, in addition to soldiers and armed guards. In the Roman Empire these were known as lictors, employed to act as bodyguards to magistrates, who could also arrest suspects and punish offenders under the magistrate’s authority.

Henryk Siemiradzki’s Christian Dirce of 1897 refers to Dirce, a figure in Greek mythology who was killed by being tied to the horns of a bull. Accounts of Roman martyrdoms report that the killing of Christian women sometimes occurred in enactments of the death of Dirce, hence the scene shown here, in which a woman’s near-naked body is draped over the body of a bull. Siemiradzki shows the emperor and his entourage, including two lictors holding their fasces, symbolic rods and axes, gazing at the grim aftermath. The word Fascism is derived from the fasces, which are themselves often symbolic of Fascist groups.

Various police forces evolved across Europe after the Middle Ages, but it wasn’t until the early nineteenth century that they became recognisable in modern form, with organised professionals. Although by no means the first, the city of London’s Metropolitan Police force was created by Act of Parliament in 1829, and quickly became known as Peelers after the minister responsible.

These police forces adopted distinctive dress, typically dark blue, to set them apart from civil guard and other military formations. Most also wore headgear that made them instantly recognisable as officers of the law.

Jules Breton’s first masterpiece, The Gleaners (1854), shows their oversight by the garde champêtre or village policeman, an older man distinguished by his official hat and armband, who was probably an army veteran.

William Powell Frith’s The Railway Station (1862) is set in the crowded and busy Paddington railway station in London that had only been completed a decade earlier by the great Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The centre of action is at the right of the painting, where an arrest is being made, shown in the detail below. A man dressed in brown clothes is about to board the train, within which a woman stares aghast at the scene. Two Scotland Yard detectives, complete with top hats, are in the process of serving him a warrant for his arrest, the other stood ready with a pair of handcuffs.

Police forces came to the fore later in the century when industrial unrest spread across the coalfields of Europe.

One of the first prominent paintings of a strike is Alfred Philippe Roll’s Miners’ Strike, exhibited in the Salon of 1880 or perhaps the following year. It’s most probably based on a strike at Denain in the Nord-Pas de Calais coalfield of that year. It shows the desperate and increasingly worrying gathering of striking miners and their families. A woman is restraining one man from throwing a rock at the pithead buildings. Mounted police are present, handcuffing one of the strikers.

Police also became involved in the regulation of prostitution in some cities.

Just before Christmas 1886, Christian Krohg’s first novel Albertine was published by a left-wing publisher. Its central theme is prostitution in Norway at the time, and the police quickly seized all the copies they could find, banning it on the grounds of violating the good morals of the people. At the same time as he was writing that novel, Krohg had been working on his largest and most complex painting: Albertine in the Police Doctor’s Waiting Room (1885-87).

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

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

In Denmark, Erik Henningsen’s first major painting bears the enigmatic title of Summum jus, summa injuria. Infanticide (1886). The Latin quotation comes from Cicero’s De Officiis I, 33, and literally means the highest law, the greatest injustice. It is a warning still used that strict application of rights and the law carries the danger of doing some people a huge injustice, and Henningsen’s narrative is an important example of a serious social and legal problem at the time.

Two labourers are digging a small pit at the side of a track across sand dunes. They are supervised by two policemen, one of whom keeps a written record. Behind and to the right is another policeman who holds a young woman by the elbow. She looks down as she is petting a dog.

The subtitle provides the clue as to what is going on. The labourers are trying to find the body of a baby, who is the subject of a police investigation. The young woman is the child’s mother. Unmarried, she had the baby in secret, smothered it at birth, and disposed of its body. She knows that if her baby is discovered, her punishment will be severe. But this was the only course open to her, as having a baby out of wedlock was against accepted religious and moral standards of the day.

The following year, Henningsen’s Farmers in the Capital (1887) shows migrants freshly arrived in Copenhagen from the country. The father is speaking to a mounted policeman, presumably asking him for directions to their lodgings.

Krohg’s The Struggle for Existence (also translated as The Struggle for Survival) (1889) shows Karl Johan Street in Oslo in the depths of winter, almost deserted except for a tight-packed crowd of poor women and children queuing for free bread. A policeman, wearing a heavy coat and fur hat, walks in the distance, down the middle of the icy street, detached from the scene.

Henningsen’s Evicted from 1892 shows a family of four being evicted into the street in the winter snow. With them are their meagre possessions, including a saw suggesting the father may be a carpenter. In the background he is still arguing with a policeman.

José Uría’s After a Strike, from 1895, revolves around a strike and its violent consequence. The scene is a large forge that’s apparently standing idle because of a strike. At the far right is a row of mounted police, and what may be lifeless bodies laid out on the ground. Inside the factory a woman, presumably a wife, kneels and embraces her child, beside what is presumably the dead body of her husband, who was a worker there. Close to his body is a large hammer, apparently the instrument of his death. In the distance, one of two policemen comfort a younger woman.

The role of police forces has remained as controversial ever since.

During the 1920s, in the last years of his career, Lovis Corinth’s paintings reached a new peak, both in their quantity and their innovative exploration of colour and texture.

Although Corinth was clearly relishing this intensity, his Large Self-portrait in Front of Walchensee (1924) shows his race against the effects of age.

The Trojan Horse (1924) is Corinth’s last major painting from classical myth, showing the wooden horse made by the Greeks in order to gain access to the city of Troy, so they could sack and destroy it. The lofty towers and impregnable walls of the city are in the background. The select group of Greek soldiers who undertook this commando raid have already been concealed inside the horse, and those around it are probably Trojans, sent out from the city to check it out before it was taken inside.

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

Corinth also painted for fun: this superb depiction of a Königsberger Marzipantorte (Royal Marzipan Cake) (1924) must have been completed at great speed before his family consumed his model.

The Jochberg at Walchensee (1924) shows this 5,141 foot (1,567 metre) mountain dividing the Walchensee from the Kochelsee.

Walchensee, Vegetable Garden (1924) was painted away from his normal vantage point above the lake, to include the colours and textures of this vegetable patch.

Walchensee (1924) is a watercolour sketch reportedly painted on vellum.

Carmencita, Portrait of Charlotte Berend-Corinth in Spanish Dress (1924) probably doesn’t refer directly to the famous Spanish dancer Carmen Dauset Moreno, who had died in 1910. Charlotte Corinth, or Berend-Corinth, had continued painting in the early twentieth century, and joined the Berlin Secession in 1912. She also painted actively when at their chalet. In 1933, she emigrated to the USA, where she produced the first catalogue raisonné of her husband’s paintings. She died in 1967, so I am unable to show any of her paintings.

Corinth painted members of his family more often at this time, as he probably suspected he was reaching the end of his artistic career. In Wilhelmine in a Yellow Hat (1924) his shy daughter is starting to show some of her mother’s vivacity.

Thomas in Armour (1925) shows Corinth’s older child, then 21, wearing the suit of armour that had appeared in several of Corinth’s paintings over the years, in a visual record of his son’s transition into adult life.

Corinth painted Ecce Homo at Easter, 1925, as an act of meditation to mark the festival. It shows the moment that Pilate presents Christ to the hostile crowd, just before the Crucifixion. Christ has been scourged, bound, and crowned with thorns, and Pilate’s words are quoted from the Vulgate translation, meaning behold, the man. In keeping with his earlier contemporary interpretations of the scenes of the Passion, Pilate (left) is shown as an older man in a white coat, and the soldier (right) wears a suit of armour.

Corinth completed this in four days. This was bought for the Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 1929, but in 1937 was condemned by the Nazi party as being ‘degenerate art’. Thankfully, it escaped destruction when it was bought by the art museum in Basel in 1939.

The Beautiful Woman Imperia was one of the last paintings that Corinth completed in the late spring of 1925, and his final fleshly work. It’s based on Balzac’s anthology of tales Cent Contes Drolatiques from 1832-37. This shows the courtesan Imperia, naked in front of a priest, in surroundings suggesting contemporary decadent cabarets, or a far older ‘perfumed room’.

Corinth’s Last Self-Portrait, painted just two months before his death in 1925, is unusual in showing him with his reflection in a mirror. He is now balding rapidly, his cheeks sunken, and his eyes are bloodshot and tired. That summer he travelled to the Netherlands to view Old Masters, including Rembrandt and Frans Hals. He developed pneumonia, and died at Zandvoort on 17 July, four days before his sixty-eighth birthday.

He had painted more than a thousand works in oil, and hundreds of watercolours. He also made more than a thousand prints, an area of his work that I haven’t touched on. Ironically, it was the rise of the Nazi party from 1933 that prevented him from achieving the international recognition his work deserved.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.

In the autumn of 1919, Lovis Corinth and his family had moved into their chalet at Urfeld, on the shore of Walchensee (Lake Walchen), to the south of Munich. From then until Corinth’s death, they divided their time between the bustle of Berlin and their garden of Eden by the lake and the mountains.

Corinth combined his new enthusiasm for painting floral arrangements with a gentle portrait of his eleven year-old daughter in Flowers and Daughter Wilhelmine (1920). The flowers shown are dominated by amaryllis, arums, and lilacs, and its composition reflects Wilhelmine’s shyness.

During the final six years of his life, Corinth must have painted more than sixty views around their chalet in Bavaria, of which I can only show a small selection. Like many others, Landscape at the Walchensee with Larch (1920) was painted from an observation point on a hill across from their chalet. This painting was bizarrely classified as being ‘degenerate art’ by the Nazis in 1937.

The local terrain produces some deceptive appearances, but many of Corinth’s late landscapes have marked tilting in their horizontals, and Walchensee by Moonlight (1920) even shows the same leftward lean in its verticals. This had been prominent in the earliest of his paintings in 1912, following his stroke. Here it probably reflects his shift of emphasis from form to areas of colour, particularly the impasto reflections of the moon on the lake’s still surface.

In 1921, Corinth was awarded an honorary doctorate and made a professor of arts by the University of Königsberg, where he had started his training.

Walchensee, Landscape with Cow (c 1921) is another view painted from his ‘pulpit’ vantage point across from the chalet.

Throughout his career, Corinth had made loose watercolour sketches, usually as preparatory studies for finished oil paintings. Now he started painting watercolour landscapes, such as his Walchensee, Evening Air (1921), capturing the colours of dusk.

Pink Clouds, Walchensee (1921) is another watercolour showing the rich colours of land and sky as the sun sets.

In 1922, his work led the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale, with a total of thirty of his paintings on display.

Red Christ (1922) is the last, most striking and original of all his many scenes of the Crucifixion. Although thoroughly modern in its approach and facture, he chose a traditional wood panel as its support, in keeping with older religious works. The red of Christ’s blood, spurting from the wound made by a spear, and oozing from his other cuts, is exaggerated by the red of the clouds and the sun’s rays.

Easter at Walchensee was painted from their chalet in 1922, as the winter snow was melting on the tops of the hills.

Corinth also painted some watercolours indoors. His Flower Vase on a Table (1922) has patches of pure, high-chroma colour for the flowers and the armchair at the right, and few suggestions of form.

During this period of frenetic painting, Corinth appeared at first to flourish in the sunshine and fresh air. His Self-portrait in a Straw Hat from 1923 shows him looking in rude health.

Susanna and the Elders (1923) revisits the Old Testament story from the book of Daniel, which had brought him early success in 1890. The two versions he had painted then followed tradition, and show the naked Susanna being spied on by two elders, who then tried to blackmail her. Here he shows the three figures talking, as the elders put their proposition to Susanna.

Back in his ‘pulpit’ above the lake, Tree at Walchensee (1923) has the most rectilinear form of all his views of Walchensee, set by the horizontal snow-line and the trunk of the tree.

Walchensee in Winter (1923) is another evocative snowscape.

Chrysanthemums II (1923) is my favourite of his late floral works, as the texture of the paint matches the fine petals perfectly.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.

When the First World War broke out on 28 July 1914, Lovis Corinth and his family had only just come to terms with his stroke in 1911, then found themselves living in a country at war. He and most of the other artists in Berlin shared an enthusiastic patriotism that initially gave them a buoyant optimism.

This patriotism was expressed openly in paintings like Corinth’s In Defence of Weapons from 1915. The same suit of armour in which he had posed proudly for his self-portrait prior to his stroke now saw service in the cause of his country.

But both Corinth and his wife were growing older and more tired. Portrait of Charlotte Berend-Corinth (1915) shows a very different woman from the younger mother of a few years earlier. Her brow is now knitted, and her joyous smile gone.

The answer, for Corinth and his family, was to get out of Berlin and enjoy the countryside. In the summer they travelled to Lake Müritz (1915) in Mecklenburg, and Corinth started painting more landscapes again.

He also continued to paint still lifes, such as this wonderful Still Life with Pagoda (1916), with its curious combination of Asian and crustacean objects.

Every year from 1916 to 1918, Corinth returned to his home village Tapiau and the nearby city of Königsberg where he had started his professional career, to see the terrible effects of the war on the people. In 1917, he was honoured by their citizens in recognition of his achievements. A substantial one-man exhibition of his paintings was also held in Mannheim and Hanover that year.

Cain (1917) is probably Corinth’s most significant work from the war years, and continued his series of stories from the Old Testament. He shows Cain finishing off his brother Abel, burying his dying body. Cain looks up to the heavens as he places another large rock on his brother, and threatening black birds fly around.

This stark and powerful painting may also reflect Corinth’s own feelings of his battle following his stroke, and those invoked when the US first entered the war that year, as its remorseless slaughter continued.

Götz von Berlichingen (1917) shows the historical character of Gottfried ‘Götz’ von Berlichingen (1480-1562), a colourful Imperial Knight and mercenary. After he lost his right arm in 1504, he had metal prosthetic hands made for him, that were capable of holding objects as fine as a quill. His swashbuckling autobiography was turned into a play by Goethe in 1773, and a notorious quotation from that led to his name becoming a euphemism for the phrase ‘he can lick my arse/ass’.

Corinth celebrated his sixtieth birthday in 1918, and was made a professor in the Academy of Arts of Berlin. However, with the end of the war and its unprecedented carnage, disaster for Germany, and the revolution, Corinth slid into depression.

Armour Parts in the Studio (1918) is his summary of the situation. The suit of armour is now empty, broken apart, and cast on the floor of his studio.

He still managed some fleshly paintings, such as this Girl in Front of a Mirror (1918).

His self-portraits show clearly the effects of war and age. In Self-Portrait in a White Coat (1918) he’s visibly more gaunt. He is shown painting with his left hand, and has used the open sleeve to stow some brushes for ready use.

Just a year later, his Self-Portrait at the Easel (1919) reveals a still older man, looking directly at the viewer, grappling with the changing times.

Magdalen with Pearls in her Hair (1919), one of Corinth’s few works now in the UK (in the Tate Gallery), is one of several he made of Mary Magdalen, a popular subject for religious paintings. This follows the established tradition of showing her as a composite, based mainly on Mary of Magdala who was cleansed by Christ, witnessed the Crucifixion, and was the first to see him resurrected. Apocryphal traditions held that she was a reformed prostitute, and most depictions of Mary tread a fine line between the fleshly and spiritual.

This is Corinth’s most intense and dramatic depiction of Mary, her age getting the better of her body, and her eyes puffy from weeping. She’s shown with a skull to symbolise mortality, and with pearls in her hair to suggest the contradiction of her infamous past and as a halo for her later devotion to Christ.

Corinth also kept up his floral paintings, here with Roses (1919).

In the summer of 1918, Corinth and his family had first visited Urfeld, on the shore of Walchensee (Lake Walchen), to the south of Munich. They fell in love with the countryside there, and the following year bought some land on which Charlotte arranged for a simple chalet to be built. In the coming years, the Walchensee was to prove Corinth’s salvation, and the motif for at least sixty landscape paintings.

In September of 1919, their new chalet was ready, and the Corinths moved in to watch the onset of autumn. Walchensee, Blue Landscape (1919) appears to have been painted quite early, before the first substantial fall of snow.

October Snow at Walchensee (1919) shows an initial gentle touch of snow as autumn becomes fully established.

Later in the season, when the ground was well-covered with snow, Corinth painted it in Walchensee, Snowscape (1919).

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.

Historically the most sustained purpose for umbrellas has been to shelter from sun rather than the rain, when they act as parasols. In contrast to the story of the umbrella in rain, its use in the fair weather of Europe has become a matter of fashion, as an accessory almost exclusively to shade women. That excludes specialist use by painters and anglers.

Girolamo dai Libri’s Umbrella Madonna, more prosaically titled Madonna Enthroned with Jesus between St. Joseph, St. Raphael the Archangel and Tobias from 1530, shows an intermediate step between the ecclesiastical umbraculum and an ornate parasol. The winged putto supporting the umbrella seems to be skewering it into the top of the Virgin’s throne, and Raphael the Archangel wears an ancient precursor of the modern printed T-shirt.

Umbrellas and parasols became used by women of the nobility, as shown in Anthony van Dyck’s Portrait of Marchesa Elena Grimaldi Cattaneo from about 1623. The Marchesa was a Genoese aristocrat, whose appearance and deportment reinforce her status, from her matching scarlet cuffs to the gold braid around the lower edge of her underskirt.

When people started gathering on the beaches of Europe, it was only natural that ladies should take their parasols with them. Eugène Boudin’s marvellous paintings of these incongruous soirées show participants seated on upright chairs, wearing heavy outdoor clothing, their parasols superfluous under the overcast sky at dusk, here in The Beach from 1864.

When Claude Monet’s family and friends took to The Beach at Trouville in 1870, they too brought their parasols. The woman on the left is thought to be Monet’s first wife Camille, and that at the right is probably Eugène Boudin’s wife. This was painted during the Monets’ honeymoon. This also marks an interesting period of transition: Madame Boudin wears black and holds a black parasol, similar to those seen in her husband’s earlier beach scenes. Camille Monet wears white and holds a white parasol, attributes of the younger generation.

The following year, Jules Breton and his family spent much of the summer and autumn in their customary haunts in Brittany. Breton painted his wife Élodie with a Sunshade, Baie de Douarnenez (1871), with its magnificent view over that bay to the low hill of Ménez-Hom in the far distance. Although Breton was closer to Boudin’s generation than that of Monet, his wife opted for a more modern look than that of Madame Boudin.

Camille Monet appears again in fashionable white, with a white parasol, in Monet’s La Promenade, or Woman with a Parasol, from 1875.

Édouard Manet’s portrait of Jeanne Demarsy in his Spring from 1881 shows this actress who lived from 1865-1937, and modelled for both Manet and Renoir. At the age of just sixteen, and here still aspiring to the stage, she wouldn’t have been seen dead with an old black parasol.

John Singer Sargent’s model for his painting of her Morning Walk (1888) also opted for fashionable white.

So far, these parasols and umbrellas have declared their roots in the umbraculum, complete with lacy trimmings and plain fabrics. In the 1880s, the new fashion for Japonisme took Paris and the rest of Europe by storm.

In 1888, Olga Boznańska painted her sister in this Portrait of a Young Woman with a Red Umbrella, holding a brightly decorated east Asian parasol complete with its bamboo ribs.

A few years later, in 1892, Olga Boznańska painted this ingenious Self-portrait with a Japanese umbrella.

Victor Gabriel Gilbert’s undated Loving Flower Care was most probably painted at around this time, and features another Japanese parasol with more subtle colours than those of Boznańska. His model is hardly dressed for the task of gardening, though.

Paul Helleu’s wife Alice was his favourite model, and features in his loose oil sketch in blue and white of Portrait of Mrs Helleu with an Umbrella (1899).

Several of the many sketches made by John Singer Sargent of his friends during their travels in the Alps and elsewhere include their white parasols, as in this Group with Parasols (A Siesta) from about 1905.

In Helleu’s panoramic view On the Beach from 1908, his model’s parasol reclines on its own, apparently deployed as a compositional device.

Joaquín Sorolla, another of the virtuoso painters alongside Sargent at the turn of the twentieth century, shows the white parasol as part of full dress for a formal promenade of the beach at Valencia, Spain, in his Strolling along the Seashore (1909).

William Orpen’s Midday on the Beach (1910) shows a British day out before the First World War, with lighter dress, parasols, and a large wicker hamper containing a packed lunch.

When crossing the Simplon Pass through the Alps, in The Tease (1911), Sargent’s friends still travelled in their voluminous dresses, hats, and a white parasol.

Meanwhile, down at the coast on Good Harbor Beach (1915) in Gloucester, MA, large brightly-coloured beach umbrellas had become a feature of a more modern beach scene, as painted by Louise Upton Brumback in her bold and crisp style.

Japonisme wasn’t dead yet, though. Painted after 1915, Anna Ancher’s Young Woman in the Garden with an Orange Parasol shows an umbrella at least inspired by east Asian style, and once again bright in its colours.

My final example was painted in 1918, at the end of the First World War, far from the mud and blood of Europe’s battlefields. Colin Campbell Cooper’s Summer (1918) is inspired by Japonisme, fortified here by the east Asian influence of California, and by Monet’s paintings of his garden at Giverny.

In 1909, when Lovis Corinth was fifty-one, he had painted his wife Charlotte and their two young children, as they were enjoying everything that Berlin had to offer the successful artist. He had worked hard, and by the end of 1911 had painted more than three hundred substantial works in oils.

He seized this moment during The Model’s Break in 1909 to capture a more informal and natural full-length portrait of her. This is a not uncommon ruse resulting in some fine paintings by others, and works well for Corinth. This was exhibited in the 1913 exhibition of the Berlin Secession.

He painted the occasional urban landscape of the city too, such as this wintry Ice Rink in the Berlin Tiergarten (1909), where Berliners are skating on one of the frozen lakes in the park’s zoo.

Corinth continued to explore Christ’s Passion in real terms, in his Christ Carrying the Cross (1909). Although this contains most of the usual elements seen in traditional depictions, his language is contemporary, almost secular. Two men, one of them apparently African, are helping Christ bear his exhausting load, while a couple of soldiers are whipping him on and threatening him with their spears. A third soldier is controlling the crowd at the upper left, and behind is a mounted soldier and one of the disciples.

Homeric Laughter (1909) is one of Corinth’s more complex paintings of classical myth. He provides a good clue as to its interpretation in the inscription, which rendered from the original into English reads:
unquenchable laughter arose among the blessed gods as they saw the craft of wise Hephaestus
together with the citation of Homer’s Odyssey book 8 line 326.

This refers to a section in which Odysseus is being entertained by King Alcinous, after meeting Nausicaä on the island of the Phaeacians. To cheer Odysseus up, the bard Demodocus tells a tale of the illicit love affair between Ares/Mars (god of war) and Aphrodite/Venus (goddess of love), that has featured extensively in art.

One day Hephaistos/Vulcan catches the couple making love in his marriage bed, and throws a fine but unbreakable net over them. Hephaistos then summons the other gods, who come and roar with laughter at the ensnared couple.

In this first version, Corinth shows Aphrodite recumbent on the bed, shielding her eyes from the crowd around her. Ares is struggling in frustration with the net securing the couple. Hephaistos, clad in black with his tools slung around his waist, is talking to Poseidon (wearing a crown) with Dionysos/Bacchus behind him (clutching a champagne glass). At the right edge is Hermes/Mercury, with his winged helmet. Sundry putti are playing with Ares’ armour, and an arc of them adorns the sky.

Corinth also painted a second version, which he etched in 1920 to make prints.

Morning Sun (1910) is a wonderfully painterly oil sketch of Charlotte enjoying the sunshine in bed.

Contrasting with that is this more formal Portrait of Charlotte Corinth in a Brown Blouse from 1910.

Earlier in his career, Corinth doesn’t appear to have painted many floral or other still lifes, but after 1900 he seems to have been more attracted to them. Roses (1910) strikes a perfect balance between botanical detail in their blooms, and looseness in the foliage and background.

Over these years, Corinth and his family travelled, here to a Terrace in Klobenstein, The Tirol (1910). Klobenstein or Collalbo is a mountain resort at an altitude of just over 1,000 metres in the South Tirol, in Italy. This painting shows the Hamburg businessman and art collector Henry B Simms (1861-1922) on holiday there during the summer. Simms was a keen collector of Corinth’s work, and later also became an early purchaser of Picasso’s works. The children shown are almost certainly his, and Corinth painted a more formal portrait of him in the same year.

Woman with a Fishtank (1911) shows Charlotte in their flat on Klopstockstraße in Berlin. The aquarium, full of goldfish, is surrounded by quite a jungle of indoor plants, her little corner of vegetation within their city flat. According to her later memoirs, Corinth took just four days to complete this painting.

Corinth’s celebration of his fifty-third birthday on 21st July was more restrained than his fiftieth, but he seems to have enjoyed painting a Large Still Life with Figure (1911), featuring Charlotte in a surprising outfit. They must have enjoyed quite a banquet afterwards, judging by the dead game on the table.

Carl Hagenbeck in his Zoo (1911) is one of his more unusual portraits, painted not of the splendid walrus, but of Carl Hagenbeck (1844-1913), a merchant of wild animals. Hagenbeck was the originator of the modern zoo with its ‘open’ and naturalistic enclosures, and established the most successful private zoo in Germany at Stellingen just outside Hamburg. He died a couple of years after this portrait, when he was bitten by one of his snakes.

At this time Corinth also seems to have done a good trade in more conventional portraits, such as this Portrait of Frau Kaumann (1911) in richly dappled light.

Then in December 1911, Corinth suffered a major stroke: his left side, both arm and leg, were paralysed. Corinth had painted his entire professional career with his left hand, and was only 53.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.

Lovis Corinth’s art and career reached their peak once he had joined the Berlin Secession, and in the Spring of 1903 had married his former student Charlotte Berend. Although their early family and social life had reduced the number of paintings he produced, their quality remained consistently high, and he was living up to his reputation as ‘the painter of flesh’.

The Childhood of Zeus (1905-6) shows Zeus, senior god in the Greek pantheon, as a young boy at its centre. According to various myths, he was the son of the Titans Cronus and Rhea. Cronus swallowed his other children, so to save Zeus from the same fate, Rhea gave birth to him in Crete, and handed Cronus a rock disguised as a baby, which he promptly swallowed.

Rhea then hid Zeus in a cave, where he was raised by one or more of a long list of surrogates, including Gaia, a goat, a nymph, and others, several of which appear in this raucous painting. Corinth adds Dionysus to provide an abundant supply of nourishing grapes, and lend a little ironic humour.

In 1906, he took his wife Charlotte to his home village of Tapiau and the city of Königsberg where he had started his training and career, and the following year they travelled to Florence, where he copied frescos using pastels.

Following his earlier paintings of the Deposition, Corinth came even closer to harsh reality in The Great Martyrdom from 1907. He takes the example of an ordinary man being crucified, then secularises the image and places it in a vivid context, making clear the vicious inhumanity of crucifixion.

In The Capture of Samson (1907), Corinth revisited another of his favourite subjects, whom he had painted in 1893 in company with Delila, and again in 1899 in a related scene of his capture. Here, with some simple props including an eclectic and anachronistic range of headgear, he shows the chaotic brawl that resulted in Samson’s bondage. Corinth places himself as one of Samson’s captors in the left foreground, and Delila kneels, naked, at the top centre.

From 1907, he led formal teaching sessions in life classes in Berlin.

To celebrate his fiftieth birthday in 1908, Corinth painted several canvases, including Nakedness reflecting his fleshly reputation. This was completed over a few days at the end of March that year, and the following month was delivered to the Secession’s exhibition, where it was well received.

Bacchante Couple (1908) is another self-portrait with Charlotte, with the couple apparently enjoying their wild lifestyle at the time. This may have been another birthday celebration.

Female Half-Nude by a Window (1908) is one of the popular sub-genre of ‘woman at the window’ scenes, and a less roughly hewn nude shown in delicate lighting.

Corinth’s second painting of The Temptation of St Anthony after Gustave Flaubert from 1908, shown below, demonstrates how his style had changed over a period of just a decade, compared with his first painting (above) from 1897 when he was in Munich.

This second version is based on Flaubert’s account La Tentation de Saint-Antoine, and focusses on a scene in which the Queen of Sheba appears in the saint’s visions. Shown with her is a train consisting of an elephant, camels, and naked women riding piebald horses. This new Saint Anthony is far younger, and surrounded by this outlandish circus of people and animals. In his left hand he holds a heavy chain, and there’s a skull in his right hand.

According to later recollections of the artist’s son Thomas, Corinth painted this from professional models in his studio on Berlin’s Handelstraße. Charlotte modelled only for the arm and hand of the Queen of Sheba. Together with Nakedness, this must have been completed by the end of March 1908, and was shown at the Secession’s exhibition from April to June. It was also among Corinth’s works representing Germany at the thirteenth Venice Biennale in 1922, and was the basis for an etching he made in 1919.

Self-portrait, Painting shows the artist at work in 1909 when he was 51. He has signed his name using Greek letters, and on the right side has inscribed aetatis suae LI, meaning his age 51.

Another of his most popular paintings from this period is his group portrait of The Artist and his Family (1909). All dressed up for what may have been intended to be a more formal group portrait, Charlotte sits calmly cradling daughter Wilhelmine, then just five months old, as the artist seems to be struggling to paint them. Their son Thomas, aged five years, stands on a desk so he can rest his hand on mother’s shoulder. I suspect this was aided by a photograph.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.

With his move to Berlin and the success of his painting of Salome, Lovis Corinth was reaching the peak of his career. Corinth formally joined the Berlin Secession in 1901, and quickly found himself involved with its direction. He relished his new-found reputation as ‘the painter of flesh’, and was now at the centre of Germany’s vibrant city of modern arts.

In 1902, he opened a painting school for women, and among his first pupils was Charlotte Berend (1880-1967), then just twenty-one and the daughter of a rich textile merchant.

The Family of the Painter Fritz Rumpf (1901) is a wonderfully informal family portrait, sadly omitting Fritz Rumpf (1856-1927) altogether, but Corinth painted him separately. The mother, at the right, is Margarethe née Gatterer, and all six of their children are included.

In the summer of 1902, Corinth painted Charlotte Berend for the first time, and the couple travelled to Pomerania together. That autumn they became engaged. By this time, Charlotte had already become Corinth’s muse and preferred model, as she was to remain for the rest of his life. That year, Corinth also visited Paris, Anvers, and the Netherlands.

Self portrait with Charlotte Berend-Corinth (1902) is his earliest double portrait with his fiancée. Its original title in German means self-portrait with his wife and a champagne glass although the glass that he’s holding clearly doesn’t contain champagne. This refers to Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait with Saskia (The Prodigal Son) (1636), below, in which Saskia is sat on Rembrandt’s lap, and he raises a large fluted glass of beer in his right hand. Charlotte, in the role of Saskia, looks quiet and calm, against Corinth/Rembrandt’s alcohol-fuelled mirth.

Swimming in Horst – Ostsee (1902) shows swimmers in the Baltic Sea at what was then known as Horst, and is now the Polish resort of Niechorze.

Presumably Paddling (1902) shows Charlotte’s turn to take to the waters there.

Charlotte Berend and Lovis Corinth married in the spring of 1903. He was 44, she was only 22. In the autumn of the following year, their first child, Thomas, was born, and in 1909 their daughter Wilhelmina.

Self-portrait with Model (1903) is the couple’s second joint portrait, and the first after their marriage. This time her pose refers to the classical images of muses by Rubens and Ingres, alluding to the story of Pygmalion.

Corinth appears to have painted with his left hand, so this image hasn’t been painted directly from a mirror, but he may well have used photographs instead.

Max Reinhardt moved to Berlin at the same time as Corinth, and in 1902 his Little Theatre staged what I think was the German premiere of Oscar Wilde’s play Salome. Richard Strauss saw the play there, and it inspired him to write his opera of the same name the following summer.

Corinth painted this wonderful portrait of its star and title role, Gertrud Eysoldt as Salome (1903). This makes an interesting contrast with his 1900 painting of the story. Although during this period he painted fewer mythical and other narrative works, the next painting is one of his most vivid stories.

Ulysses Fighting the Beggar (1903) shows a story from book 18 of Homer’s Odyssey, before the slaughter of the suitors (painted much earlier by Gustave Moreau, but never completed).

Odysseus/Ulysses has finally returned to his home city of Ithaca and is now determined to kill the many suitors to his wife Penelope. As he plans this, he goes around disguised as a beggar. This fragment of the elaborate story starts with the arrival of a real beggar named Arnaeus or Irus, who most unwisely picks a fight with Odysseus, who promptly floors the beggar, and stops just short of killing him.

Corinth captures the fight as Odysseus (centre) is getting the better of Irus (left of centre), with various suitors and bystanders watching. Although painted loosely, the artist has taken care to give each face its own expression, ranging from amusement to apprehension. The end result is a raucous collage of human emotion.

Corinth seems not to have taken this study of abduction, Frauenraub (1904), any further, and I don’t know its narrative context.

Landscapes are relatively infrequent over these years, but I could not resist including this delightful Blooming Farm Garden from 1904.

Corinth’s reputation as ‘the painter of flesh’ was maintained by two groups of nudes. The Harem (1904) uses an ever-popular ‘oriental’ setting for its abundance of female flesh, but has some distinctive touches too. The cat sat in the foreground ignores, in the way that only cats can, some sort of horseplay taking place behind, while a guard looks as bored as the cat. This isn’t the sumptuous silk and divan lounge shown in the nineteenth century, though. Indeed, it all looks rather tawdry.

In complete contrast, Charlotte Berend in a Deck Chair (1904) is a tender and intimate sketch of his wife relaxing away from their son, her wedding ring prominent on her left hand.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.

The scales of justice are of ancient origin. In ancient Egypt, the heart of a dead person was weighed against the feather of truth in the judgement of their soul. That transferred to the Greek goddess of justice Dike, who judged using a set of scales, and so into the personification of justice in ancient Rome, Iustitia, and her modern descendant Lady Justice, whose statue is mounted on many courts of law.

This triple allegorical portrait of The Virtues: Justice, Charity, and Prudence (Wisdom) (1664) is one of Elisabetta Sirani’s more complex works. This shows Charity nursing children, Justice brandishing a sword and holding a set of scales, while Prudence draws attention to their own images.

Elihu Vedder’s most prominent and lasting achievements are the murals in the Lobby to the Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Among them, Corrupt Legislation (1896) is an elaborate composition looking at the consequences of poor government. The central figure is more floozy than goddess, holding a set of scales in her left hand. At the right of the painting, and on that left hand, is a lawyer, with an open book labelled The Law. At his feet, banknotes fall out of an urn, there are small sacks of grain, and a small portable ‘safe’. At the left, apparently pleading with the central figure, is a young girl holding any empty distaff and bobbin for spinning. Behind her are shards from a broken pot, and a broken-down wall.

George Frederic Watts’ Time, Death and Judgement (1900) evolved over a series of versions first started around 1870. Surprisingly, he retained the same composition in all of them, and they differ only in small details. The figure of Time is at the left, holding the traditional scythe; unusually, Watts depicts Time as a young and muscular man, rather than the more conventional ‘Father Time’ with white hair and beard. At the right, Death is a young woman, the lap of her dress containing fading flowers. Time and Death are linked by holding hands. Behind, and towering over them, is the figure of Judgement, holding the scales of justice in her left hand, and brandishing a fiery sword.

Although justice is generally taken to be secular, the concept of weighing the souls of the dead has passed down into some paintings of Christian paradise.

This huge painting of Paradise in the Palazzo Ducale in Venice is seven metres (almost twenty-three feet) high and twenty-two metres (over seventy feet) across, and was probably designed by Jacopo Tintoretto and largely entrusted to his son Domenico and their workshop to paint. In conformity with the rules of the commission, its composition focusses on the Coronation of the Virgin, inspired by Dante’s Paradise, as shown in the detail below.

At the top, the Virgin Mary, behind whom is her traditional symbol of the white lily, stands with Jesus Christ, in their matching red and blue robes. Between them is the white dove of the Holy Ghost, and all around are cherubic heads of infant angels. To the right are the scales of justice, also for the weighing of souls.

This reappears three centuries later in Léon Frédéric’s polyptych All Things Die, But All Will Be Resurrected through God’s Love, painted over the period 1893-1918. Three panels at its right represent Heaven, a pastoral landscape densely packed with a multitude of naked mothers and children. A pair of women in priestly clothing stand at the wings. The figure on the right is holding a stone tablet on which a single word appears: LEX (law), and near her children are playing with the scales of justice. Near the woman at the left two children are swinging censers to generate the smoke of burning incense. Above them all is a double rainbow, and floating in the air the figure of Christ, his arms reaching out over still more figures of children, this time clothed in white robes.

Scales occasionally play a part in legendary history, including the siege of Rome by the Gauls. Conditions drove the Romans trapped in the Capitol to make peace with the Gauls besieged in the rest of the city. Rome was to pay the Gauls a thousand pounds of gold, but even there the Gauls cheated the Romans and tampered with the scales. While this was going on, Camillus entered Rome as its appointed leader, and told the Gauls to quit without any gold, as Rome delivered its city with iron instead.

Francesco de’ Rossi shows this in composite form in his fresco of the Attack on the Gauls who Sacked Rome. In the foreground, the Gauls and Romans are still arguing about the weight of gold, as Camillus’ forces start to take possession of the ruins of what had been Rome.

Finally, scales can appear in their everyday role for weighing out produce in shops and markets.

Léon Augustin Lhermitte’s detailed painting of an Apple Market, Landerneau, Brittany from about 1878 shows sellers ready with their scales in this quiet country town.

Lovis Corinth didn’t just spend his years in Munich drinking red wine and champagne, but experimented in his painting and evolved his mature style. In 1897, he moved studio within Munich, and started making increasingly frequent visits to Berlin, where he was able to obtain lucrative commissions for portraits. Corinth was among the founding members of the Berlin Secession in 1898, and by 1900 was renting a studio in Berlin. In the autumn of 1901, he closed his studio in Munich and moved fully to Berlin.

He had no shortage of attractive young women, like Ellÿ (1898), to paint, but he pressed on with his campaign to improve his style and technique.

Reclining Nude (1899) is usually considered to mark the peak of Corinth’s nudes, and was painted during one of his visits to Berlin. Its brushwork is so painterly that it has sometimes been mistakenly supposed that it was made well into the twentieth century, but is now securely dated to the end of his time in Munich.

Morning (1900) shows another very modern nude in personal and intimate surroundings.

In Max Halbe’s Garden (1899) shows a group of friends in an informal setting, chatting as they eat fruit next to the washing line. Max Halbe (1865-1944) was a German playwright with a growing reputation at the time, and is seen to the right of centre, with his wife at the right.

Portrait of Mother Rosenhagen (1899) most probably shows the mother of one of Corinth’s friends in Munich.

In addition to single-person portraits, Corinth was commissioned to paint a few group portraits, including this of The Lodge Brothers from 1898-99. He modelled this after Rembrandt’s smaller group portraits, placing the Master of the Lodge in the centre, where his gaunt face stares up to the heavens.

In these last few years in Munich, Corinth worked on a series of two paintings exploring the story of Salome and John the Baptist’s execution. He seems to have started this work with a drawing in 1897, which eventually led to one of his greatest paintings.

The original narrative is biblical, and straightforward: the unnamed daughter of Herodias (subsequently identified as Salome) performed a dance at a birthday feast thrown by King Herod. The dance so pleased Herod that he offered her anything that she wanted, up to half his kingdom. She asked not for riches, but for the head of Saint John the Baptist, the earthly messenger sent to announce the birth and ministry of Jesus Christ. Herod reluctantly agreed, John was beheaded in prison, and his head brought to her on a plate, which the dancer gave to her mother.

A popular story for religious paintings, Corinth decided to paint a scene close to that most commonly chosen, in which John’s head has been brought to Salome on a platter. This contrasts with the choices made by Gustave Moreau almost twenty-five years earlier.

The basic cast and arrangement of figures is the same in each version: the severed head of John the Baptist is at the centre, Salome leaning over and touching it with her right hand. Behind her are two women. The receptacle containing John’s head is itself on the head of a slave, who kneels at the feet of the executioner, who stands holding the bloodied sword in his right hand, facing Salome. To the lower right, three other figures are partly cropped out: the feet of John’s dead body, and another slave bent over them to look at the head of an older man.

Corinth’s first painting of Salome from 1899 shows the dancer dressed as a tart, her breasts hanging loose, her face sneering down at John’s face with contempt as she touches it. The young woman at the top right laughs as she looks towards the left, apparently detached from the gruesome scene in front of her. No gazes meet, thus the figures do not integrate into a whole.

His second Salome from the following year is less roughly worked and more finished to show finer detail. Although its figures haven’t moved, subtle changes have transformed the painting and its reading.

Salome has a more neutral facial expression, and is staring intently at the lower abdomen of the executioner. Her right hand is stretching open the left eye of John’s head, which appears to be staring up at her. The executioner and the young woman at the top right are laughing at one another, but the third woman beside her has a serious, almost sad expression, as she stands holding a large peacock fan. Visible at the top of her clothing, directly below her chin, is the small image of a human skull.

Corinth has also added detail to the cropped figures at the lower right. John’s legs are spattered with his blood, and possibly bear wounds or sores from his imprisonment. The two figures there are engaged in eye-to-eye contact, and there is also a profusion of hands there, as the older man appears to be raising John’s right arm.

The chain of gaze here is central to the painting’s narrative: John’s eye stares at Salome, who stares at the executioner’s crotch, who laughs at the young woman at the top right, who laughs back at him. Watching sombre and detached from behind is the figure of death.

Oscar Wilde’s one-act play Salome had been first published in French in 1891, and was soon translated into English and German. Banned from public performance in Britain, it received its premier in Paris in 1896, but wasn’t performed in public in England until 1931. Wilde had been influenced by Gustave Moreau’s paintings of Salome, and in turn influenced both Corinth’s paintings and Richard Strauss’s later opera (1905).

In Salome’s words at the end of Wilde’s play (he calls John the Baptist Jokanaan):
But, wherefore dost thou not look at me Jokanaan? Thine eyes that were so terrible, so full of rage and scorn, are shut now. Wherefore are they shut? Open thine eyes! Lift up thine eyelids, Jokanaan! Wherefore dost thou not look at me? Art thou afraid of me, Jokanaan, that thou wilt not look at me?
If thou hadst looked at me thou hadst loved me. Well I know that thou wouldst have loved me, and the mystery of love is greater that the mystery of death.

At the centre of Wilde’s play is the perversion of lust and desire in Salome, captured so well by Corinth in the chain of gaze.

This second painting was rejected by the Munich Secession, but welcomed by the Berlin Secession. As a result, Corinth was dubbed ‘the painter of flesh’, establishing his reputation and securing his future in Berlin.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.

With Julius Caesar transformed into a star following his assassination, Ovid ends the last book of his Metamorphoses with praise of the contemporary Emperor Augustus, and expresses his own aspirations to immortality.

Jupiter foretells some of the accomplishments of Caesar’s adopted heir, Augustus, who was then still known as Octavius or Octavian. These include successes in battle, the fall of Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, and the growth of the Roman Empire. Ovid then looks ahead to Augustus’ own future apotheosis, when he will become a god. Finally, the author wishes for his words to be read throughout the empire, and to live on in fame.

Cleopatra’s legendary beauty has been expressed in paint by several artists, among them Louis Gauffier, whose Cleopatra and Octavian of 1787 shows the young Augustus and Queen Cleopatra conversing under the watchful eye of Julius Caesar’s bust. Cleopatra allied herself with Antony, and was eventually defeated at the Battle of Actium, ending years of civil war in Rome. Antony fell on his sword, and Cleopatra is reputed to have killed herself with the bite of an asp.

It’s Jean-Léon Gérôme who reminds us of the great events that were taking place at the eastern end of the Mediterranean during the reign of Augustus, in The Age of Augustus, the Birth of Christ (c 1852-54). The emperor sits on his throne, overseeing a huge gathering of people from all over the Roman Empire. Grouped in the foreground in a quotation from a traditional nativity is the Holy Family, whose infant son was to transform the empire in the centuries to come. Sadly for Ovid, and even Virgil, Gérôme’s throng doesn’t appear to include distinguished poets from the Augustan age.

Several painters have, though, shown Augustus’ favourite Virgil at the emperor’s court. Jean-Joseph Taillasson’s Virgil reading the Aeneid to Augustus and Octavia from 1787 shows the poet at the left, holding a copy of his Aeneid, reading a passage to the emperor Augustus and his sister Octavia. Augustus has been moved to tears by the passage praising Octavia’s dead son Marcellus, and his sister has swooned in her emotional response.

Ovid was in no position to commit Augustus’ eventual death and apotheosis to verse, but this is shown in an exquisite sardonyx cameo known as The Great Cameo of France from the first century CE. Augustus is here being brought up to the gods at the top of the scene.

Although a fan of Virgil and a minor author in his own right, Augustus wasn’t a strong patron of the arts. Until 8 BCE, his friend Gaius Maecenas acted as cultural advisor to Augustus, and was a major patron of Virgil. Tiepolo’s Maecenas Presenting the Liberal Arts to Emperor Augustus from 1743 shows Maecenas at the left introducing an anachronistic woman painter and other artists to the emperor.

Ovid’s major patron was Marcus Valerius Messalia Corvinus, and is thought to have been friends with poets in the circle of Maecenas. But all this became irrelevant when Ovid offended Augustus, and in 8 CE was banished to Tomis, on the western coast of the Black Sea, at the north-eastern edge of the Roman Empire.

It is perhaps JMW Turner who has best captured this in his Ancient Italy – Ovid Banished from Rome, exhibited in 1838. In a dusk scene more characteristic of Claude Lorrain’s contre-jour riverscapes, Turner gives a thoroughly romantic view of Ovid’s departure by boat from the bank of the Tiber.

Ovid died in Tomis in 17 or 18 CE, and by a quirk of fate his banishment from the city of Rome wasn’t formally revoked until 2017, two millennia later.

But Ovid saw his road to immortality not by apotheosis, rather through his work being read, and living on in the minds of those countless readers. In that, he undoubtedly succeeded: his Metamorphoses and other poems continue to be read, both in their original Latin and in translation into many languages, and depicted in many great paintings.

By 1890, Lovis Corinth was financially independent, had his own studio in Königsberg, the city near his home village, and was starting to become a successful artist. His Pietà from 1889, which was sadly destroyed in 1945, received an honourable mention at the Paris Salon of 1890; encouraged by that and the greater prospects of working in what was then the arts capital of Germany, he moved to Munich in 1891.

Corinth set up his studio in what was at the time the most bohemian and artistic district of Munich, and painted this quick sketch of the View from the Studio, Schwabing (1891). He realised that his progressive style of painting was at variance with both the Munich Academy and the critics, and in 1892 he took part in the foundation of the Munich Secession to bring change. The following year he co-founded the Free Association (Freie Vereinigung). He also expanded his skills, started etching in 1891, and lithography in 1894.

Much of his painting during his nine years in Munich was experimental, although modern critics accuse him of spending more time drinking copious quantities of red wine and champagne.

He painted this Self-portrait with Skeleton in his Munich studio in 1896, and shows in his face the effects of his high life in Munich.

In the 1890s he started to take landscape painting more seriously, including this Landscape with a Large Raven painted in the late autumn of 1893. As in Vincent van Gogh’s late landscapes, ravens, crows, and other similar black birds are taken as harbingers of death. In this otherwise deserted countryside, with the winter drawing close, this painting could be read as indicating Corinth’s bleak melancholy. Although he certainly suffered feelings of mortality and had episodes of depression, those aren’t part of the received image of his social life, nor of many of his paintings.

This shows the beautiful fishermen’s Cemetery in Nidden (1893) on the Kurische Nehrung, a long sand spit near the southern border of Lithuania, on the shore of the Baltic not far from Königsberg. During the 1890s, Corinth travelled from Munich to visit his home village, and went as far afield as Italy.

Like some of the Masters before him, most notably Rembrandt, he painted a series of studies In the Slaughterhouse (1893). As the son of a tanner, Corinth was familiar with such scenes.

The Deposition (Descent from the Cross) (1895) was one of his major paintings from this time in Munich, and won a gold medal when exhibited in the Glaspalast in Munich that year. It shows the traditional station of the cross commemorating the lowering of the dead body of Christ from the cross, attended by Joseph of Arimathea and Mary Magdalene.

This work is a thoroughly modern approach to its traditional theme, in its framing, composition, and faces. Its close-in cropped view suggests the influence of photography, and the faces shown appear contemporary and not in the least historic. These combine to give it the immediacy of a current event, rather than something that happened almost two millennia ago. Corinth returned to the subject of the Deposition, and the theme of the Crucifixion, in many of his later paintings.

Autumn Flowers (1895) is a delightful full-figure portrait of a girl, her dress held out in front of her to carry her collection of flowers, which also decorate her hair and the background.

A Forest. Flooding on Lake Starnberg (1896) was one of the landscapes that he painted in the countryside near Dachau, and shows a flooded stand of birch trees at the edge of the lake, probably in the spring.

Bacchanale (1896) is the first of his series of paintings of the wild and licentious antics of worshippers of Bacchus. These provided the opportunity for him to compose some of his many studies of nudes into grander paintings, although this one is non-narrative.

He returned to the theme of meat and animal carcasses in his Butchers in Schäftlarn on the Isar (1897), painted in this Bavarian town not far from Munich.

He painted this portrait of Fräulein Heck (in a Boat on the Starnberger See) (1897) on this picturesque lake near Dachau. This form of portrait, of a woman carrying a parasol in a boat, was popular at the time.

Corinth continued to paint figure studies, such as his Nude Woman (1897), for their value in his more substantial figurative works.

The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1897) visits another traditional religious theme, well-known for encouraging inventive and sometimes highly imaginative paintings. As with his earlier Deposition, Corinth shows the saint surrounded by modern temptations, in a real style. There’s a wealth of detail here, from the bright eyes of the owl in the top left corner, down to the sinister flick of the snake’s tongue at the lower right, demonstrating the history painter’s eye for detail and Corinth’s own Symbolist leanings in narrative.

The Witches (1897) is more subtle than it looks, as this isn’t a depiction of sensuous rites taking place in a coven. Instead, the women are preparing a younger woman to attend a masked ball. Their subject has just got out of the wooden tub in the foreground, has been dried off, and is about to don the fine clothes laid over the chair at the left, including the black mask.

Although Corinth undoubtedly drank more than his fair share of red wine and champagne while painting in Munich, his technique and style were maturing fast. The best of his paintings from this period are the equal of better-known works from later in his career. The stage was set for his first truly momentous painting.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.

Long before its commercialisation as entertainment, wrestling was an important form of hand-to-hand combat, developed into a sport by the ancient Greeks, and a feature of Spartan military training and classical games, the origin of the Olympics. Although never a popular theme for paintings, wrestling has narrative significance, as shown in this small selection of examples.

In ancient myth, Achelous and the hero Hercules (Heracles) engaged in a wrestling match, during which Achelous transformed himself into a bull, Hercules wrenched one of his horns off, and that became the cornucopia, horn of plenty.

Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem’s painting of Hercules and Achelous, probably from around 1590, shows a late stage in their wrestling, with Achelous the 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 human form.

Noël Coypel, 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 lionskin, Hercules wields his fearsome club, although Ovid doesn’t refer to its use on this occasion.

Another ancient narrative involving wrestling is told in the Old Testament book of Genesis, chapter 32 verses 22-31, when Jacob is on his journey to Canaan:

And he rose up that night, and took his two wives, and his two womenservants, and his eleven sons, and passed over the ford Jabbok. And he took them, and sent them over the brook, and sent over that he had.

And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day. And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob’s thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him. And he said, “Let me go, for the day breaketh.” And he said, “I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.” And he said unto him, “What is thy name?” And he said, “Jacob.”

And he said, “Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.” And Jacob asked him, and said, “Tell me, I pray thee, thy name.” And he said, “Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name?” And he blessed him there.

And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved. And as he passed over Peniel the sun rose upon him, and he halted upon his thigh.

Eugène Delacroix’s large and magnificent painting of Jacob Wrestling with the Angel (1854-61) shows the moment the stranger touches Jacob on the tendon of his thigh and renders him helpless (detail below). To the right are flocks of sheep with Jacob’s shepherds driving them on horses and camels.

Jacob and the Angel (1874-78) is Gustave Moreau’s finished oil painting showing the young Jacob wrestling heroically with the invisible power that is God, the angel standing nonchalantly by.

The other well-known story of wrestling in ancient times is that of Samson and the lion. When he was young, Samson fell in love with a Philistine woman. Despite the objections of his parents, he decided to marry her, and travelled to make his proposal. On that journey, he was attacked by a lion, which he wrestled with, and tore apart, thanks to the strength given him by God. He told no one about that episode, and when he was on his way to his wedding, he came across the carcass of that lion. In its body was a bees’ nest containing honey. This inspired the line ‘out of strength came forth sweetness’, long used as a motto on tins of golden syrup.

During Samson’s wedding feast, he posed his thirty Philistine groomsmen a riddle based on his encounters with that lion: Out of the eater came something to eat. Out of the strong came something sweet. They failed to guess the answer, which Samson only revealed after they had threatened him, and his bride had begged him to do so.

In 1891 Léon Bonnat reaffirmed his brilliance at painting figures in Samson’s Youth.

Franz von Stuck’s Samson (1891) is meticulously labelled, and shows the immensely strong Israelite warrior fighting with the huge lion.

During the nineteenth century, folk and Greco-Roman wrestling developed into a sport popular enough by the time of the first modern Olympic Games in 1896 to qualify for inclusion there.

Gustave Courbet’s Wrestlers from 1853 shows two well-muscled men grappling with one another to the entertainment of distant crowds. Unusually for his figurative paintings of the time, Courbet makes it clear that the wrestlers were painted in the studio and appear almost pasted into the setting, without integration of their shadows, for example, and his perspective looks slightly askew.

Frédéric Bazille started painting Summer Scene, also known as Bathers, during the summer of 1869 when he was on holiday in Montpellier. He had already made a series of compositional studies, from as early as February that year, but when he was working on the canvas, he didn’t find it easy going, and complained of headaches and other pains.

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

Twenty years later, the Naturalist Émile Friant painted The Fight, or Wrestling, (1889), in a rural scene from near Nancy, France. A group of boys have gathered by a small river, and look ready to enter the water. Two are in the foreground, on the opposite bank, engaged in a fight. They are strained over, as one holds the other in a wrestling lock, with their legs spread wide apart and tensed.

Almost a century ago, on 17 July 1925, one of the greatest German painters of modern times died. From the early 1880s until then, Lovis Corinth painted prolifically in every genre from classical myths to landscapes. At the height of his career in December 1911 he almost died as the result of a major stroke, but with the devoted support of his wife he learned to paint again. In this series I look at a selection of his paintings, and how they changed over the course of more than forty years.

He was born Franz Heinrich Louis Corinth in the village of Tapiau, in what was then the northern part of East Prussia, and is now the town of Gvardeysk near Kaliningrad, Russia. He was schooled in the city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), and soon resolved to be an artist. He started attending the Academy of Fine Arts in Königsberg in 1876, where he decided that he wanted to be a history painter, and concentrated on painting the figure.

On the advice of his teachers in Königsberg, Corinth moved to Munich in the spring of 1880, where he initially studied with Franz von Defregger. At that time, Munich almost rivalled Paris as a progressive centre for the arts, and had been the preference of William Merritt Chase, who had left Munich only two years previously. Corinth learned both traditional and modern techniques of oil painting in the studio of Ludwig von Löfftz, where he concentrated on painting from life.

Even his earliest figures, such as his Crucified Thief from 1883, were powerful, and showed influence from the Dutch Masters.

Like William Merritt Chase, Corinth was particularly fond of the work of Van Dyck and Frans Hals, as revealed in his portrait of Laughing Girl (1883).

Black Othello (1884) was probably his first success, and was exhibited to acclaim in Königsberg. That same year another of his paintings won a bronze medal in London, and was exhibited at the Salon in Paris the following year.

Corinth completed his training in Munich in 1884, and moved to Antwerp for a few months, before he settled in Paris that autumn. There he enrolled in the Académie Julian, where he studied under Bouguereau and Robert-Fleury, and concentrated on female nudes and building his repertoire of mythological scenes. He was influenced by the 1885 retrospective exhibition of the works of Jules Bastien-Lepage, who had died suddenly in 1884, and that aided a move towards greater naturalism.

Examples of his paintings from life from his time in Paris include his study of a Nude Girl (1886) above, and below of a Sitting Female Nude from the same year.

In 1886 he visited Germany, and painted some landscapes and portraits en plein air on the Baltic coast near Kiel. When he returned to Paris that autumn, he was becoming increasingly frustrated by his inability to achieve success at the Salon. He only had two paintings accepted there, in 1885 and 1887, and neither had achieved critical success or a medal. He left Paris, and joined the Nasser Lappen (‘Wet Rags’) group in Berlin for a while, trying to progress his history painting. It was then that he painted his first self-portrait.

This Self Portrait of 1887 shows Corinth at the age of twenty-nine in Berlin.

In 1888, he returned to Königsberg, adopted the name of Lovis Corinth, and started to find form at last. Woman Reading shows his early style maturing well, with its subtle use of light.

His father, who had been a successful tanner, fell ill, prompting Corinth’s sensitive painting of his final illness in Father, Franz Heinrich Corinth, in Hospital (1888). After his father died early the following year, Corinth became financially independent, and set up a proper studio in Königsberg at last.

He painted portraits, including this of Franz Lilienthal (1889), another East Prussian student at the Académie Julian. That same year he was inspired by an exhibition of the work of contemporary German painters including von Lenbach, Böcklin and von Uhde, as a result of which he finally obtained an honourable mention at the Salon in 1890.

That year he painted one of his most accomplished early portraits, Innocentia (1890), and made his first attempts at a history painting of a popular narrative.

Corinth painted two versions of Susanna Bathing (Susanna and the Elders) in 1890: that above, now in the Museum Folkwang, and that below, thought to be in a private collection.

The story of Susanna (or Shoshana) and the Elders is told in the Old Testament book of Daniel, chapter 13, and centres on voyeurism, blackmail, and justice. Susanna was a beautiful married woman who was bathing in her garden one afternoon, having dismissed her servants. Two lustful elders spied on her, and as she returned to her house they stopped her, and threatened that, unless she agreed to have sex with them, they would claim that she had met her lover in the garden. Being virtuous, Susanna refused their blackmail, and was promptly arrested, charged with promiscuity, and awaited her execution.

The young prophet Daniel interrupted the process, demanding that the elders should be properly questioned before such a severe penalty was applied. When questioned individually, the two elders gave different accounts, most notably in the type of tree under which Susanna allegedly met her lover. The accusations were thus revealed to be false, Susanna was acquitted of the charge, and the two elders were executed instead.

From the early Renaissance, this has been a popular story in painting, almost universally depicted as a nude bather being spied on by two nasty old men. As narrative, this is weak, as the crux is the conflicting evidence of the elders, which is much harder to paint, and is usually just an excuse to paint a female nude with some gratuitous anti-semitism.

Corinth shows what had become a fairly traditional version, in which Susanna is seen in the flesh but not under any tree in the garden: she is instead being spied on from behind a curtain, with only one of the two elders clearly visible.

Of his two versions, that in the Museum Folkwang appears the less finished, but both emphasise Susanna’s nakedness with her clothes, and add refinements by way of her discarded jewellery and a flower from her hair. Her figure reflects the effort that Corinth had put into life studies, and makes his simple composition successful.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.

Once the god Aesculapius is ensconced in his temple on Tiber Island in the city of Rome, Ovid is ready to round off his Metamorphoses with salient points from the life of Julius Caesar, and links to the contemporary Emperor Augustus. These are politically charged topics, and merit inoffensive coverage and language. In his whirlwind summary of some of Julius Caesar’s achievements, Ovid is obliged to write that it was Augustus who was the greater, before tackling the thorny issue of Caesar’s assassination.

When swords were taken into the Senate House in preparation, Venus pleaded Caesar’s case, and Jupiter responded that the emperor’s life was already complete, and it was time for him to join the gods. Venus then descended quickly and rescued Caesar’s soul as he lay dying on the floor of the Senate. Julius Caesar therefore underwent transformation into a star (catasterisation) as his apotheosis, on his assassination.

Caesar’s assassins were senators of Rome, a group of more than thirty led by three conspirators including his former friend and ally Marcus Junius Brutus. Several of Caesar’s closest aides had warned him not to attend the Senate on the Ides of March, and he had to be brought by one of the conspirators. As he arrived at the Senate, Caesar was presented with a petition, and the conspirators crowded around him.

Karl von Piloty’s The Murder of Caesar from 1865 shows this moment, with Julius Caesar sat on a throne in the portico of the Senate. Immediately behind him, one of the conspirators has raised his dagger above his head, ready to strike the first blow.

Casca, one of the conspirators, produced his dagger and struck the dictator a glancing wound in his neck. The whole group closed in and stabbed Caesar repeatedly.

This is the stage shown by Vincenzo Camuccini in The Assassination of Julius Caesar from 1804-05, although this isn’t taking place on the steps in the portico, and Caesar has already moved forward from his seat.

Blinded by his blood, Caesar then tripped over and fell, and was stabbed further on the lower steps of the portico of the Senate. The conspirators made off, leaving Caesar dead where he lay, with around twenty-three knife wounds.

In Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Death of Caesar from 1859-67, Caesar’s corpse lies abandoned on the floor, as his assassins make their way out of the Senate, brandishing their daggers above their heads.

None of those paintings shows the goddess Venus or Caesar’s apotheosis.

It’s Virgil Solis’s engraving of The Deification of Julius Caesar (before 1562) that shows simultaneously the assassination of the dictator at the left, and Venus taking him up to the gods, above, where Jupiter is addressing the other gods (upper right).

Shakespeare’s play develops subsequent events in more detail, and contains two most memorable lines: Et tu Brutus? (“you too, Brutus?”), said when Brutus stabs Caesar, and Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears as the opening words of Brutus’ oration over Caesar’s corpse.

Later, as Brutus and Cassius prepare to wage war against a triumvirate of Mark Antony, Octavius (later granted the honorific name Augustus) and Lepidus, Caesar’s ghost appears to Brutus to warn of his imminent defeat.

This engraving of Richard Westall’s painting Brutus and the Ghost of Caesar, from about 1802, shows Brutus in his role of general, sat at a writing desk, as Caesar’s ghost fills the upper left of the painting, warning Brutus of his imminent death with the portentous words Thou shalt see me at Philippi.

William Blake painted a similar scene in his Brutus and Caesar’s Ghost from 1806, for an illustrated folio edition of Shakespeare from 1632. This series of illustrations for this play are not well-known among Blake’s work, and were made early in his career.

Edwin Austin Abbey, in his painting Within the Tent of Brutus: Enter the Ghost of Caesar from 1905, spatters the white robe of the ghost with the blood from multiple stab wounds.

With Julius Caesar dead, it’s time for Ovid to draw his Metamorphoses to a close by praising the Emperor Augustus.