In this second article about reading dancing in paintings, I move on to its most formalised expression, in ballet, which came to dominate the work of several artists in the late nineteenth century, most notably that of Edgar Degas.

His ballet paintings came to concentrate on smaller groups of dancers, focussing more on their form and movement, as in Swaying Dancer (Dancer in Green) from 1877-79. This is painted not in oils, but a combination of pastel and gouache.

Depicting movement has always been a technical challenge. At the end of the century, Franz von Stuck appears to have used flowlines in his Dancers in 1896, rather than simple motion blur.

A decade after the dancing career of La Carmencita went into decline, John Singer Sargent used his virtuoso brushstrokes to capture her motion. His inspiration was the swish of Giovanni Boldini, in the movement of the fabric rather than its form.

Exotic dancing also featured in Orientalist paintings, with their erotic associations.

Théodore Chassériau painted this sketchy portrait of two Moorish Dancers in 1849, in the style of Delacroix.

Georges Rochegrosse’s undated Palace Entertainment shows a dancer with a musical group entertaining some Algerian men, her routine involving a pair of short swords.

The early Christian church had developed moral concerns over popular performing arts including music and dancing, and by the time of Hieronymus Bosch they were included alongside gambling in those who had gone to Hell.

Edward Poynter’s The Ionian Dance: Motus doceri gaudet Ionicos, Matura virgo et fingitur artubus (1895) quotes the ‘Roman’ Odes of Horace, and describes the ‘corruption’ of a young woman who learns the ‘lascivious’ movements of this particular dance. The Latin text may be translated as it pleases the mature virgin to be taught the movements of the Ionian Dance, and shapes her limbs. However, artubus may be a double entendre, as it can also refer to the sexual organs.

Poynter’s painting shows a shapely young woman, wearing nothing but a diaphanous dress, dancing vigorously in front of an audience of eight other women, who seem critically engaged in her performance. This appears decidedly Aesthetic, as well as more than a little risqué.

Although it may seem a paradoxical subject for the slow and painstaking Divisionist approach to painting, Georges Seurat’s Le Chahut (The Can-Can) (1889-90) is a well-known celebration of a dance that became notorious in its day.

It was an infamous dance from a reinterpretation of the martyrdom of John the Baptist that swept Europe and North America in the early twentieth century, that of Salome.

The paintings Gustave Moreau made of Salome initiated this, among them being this later oil version of The Apparition from 1876-77. Those prompted Gustave Flaubert to write a short story telling this radical rewriting of the martyrdom, from which Oscar Wilde wrote his play Salomé, and that in turn led Richard Strauss to write his opera. In 1906, the dancer and choreographer Maud Allan produced a show in Vienna featuring the Dance of the Seven Veils that had been included in both Wilde’s play and Strauss’s opera, and many considered to be nothing short of a striptease.

Strauss’s opera arrived in New York in 1907, and inspired Robert Henri to invite a Mademoiselle Voclexca to perform the notorious Dance of the Seven Veils in his studio. He then interpreted her dance into a series of paintings, including this Salome (1909), in which John’s head has been omitted altogether.

We’ve strayed a long way from faeries and country folk.

Aside from the ecstasy brought by intense religious experiences, considered in the first of these two articles, this trance-like state can most commonly result from physical pleasure. Until recently, professional painters have been cautious to stay within the bounds of what has been deemed decent for their time and society. One way to push those boundaries is to depict classical times.

Lovis Corinth’s painting of Ariadne on Naxos from 1913 shows a group of figures from classical myth on a symbolic, if not token, island. At the left and in the foreground, Ariadne lies in ecstasy on Theseus’ left thigh, as shown in the detail below. He wears an exuberant helmet, and appears to be shouting angrily and anxiously towards the other figures to the right. They are from the later part of this myth, after Theseus abandoned Ariadne on the island. Bacchus then turned up and the couple married.

Bacchic festivities or Bacchanals are another opportunity for a bit of physical ecstasy.

In 1896, Lovis Corinth painted this Bacchanal, with several of its participants staring heavenward with open mouths, clearly in physical ecstasy.

The ecstasy of love and sex was a trickier theme left for the brave or foolish, like Jacques-Louis David in 1809, when Napoleon was approaching the height of his power. David then chose to paint a legend that tells of the love of the poet Sappho for Phaon the ferryman, who plied the waters between Lesbos and the Anatolian mainland. Almost certainly illiterate and hardly a good audience for Sappho’s verse, Phaon’s redeeming feature was his great physical beauty. He was given this one day when he carried Venus in his boat; the goddess was travelling in disguise as an old woman, Phaon didn’t charge her for the crossing, so she returned the favour by transforming his physical appearance. Ovid’s description of Sappho’s affair with Phaon leaves little to the imagination, even down to their lovemaking.

David’s Sappho and Phaon was necessarily not as explicit as Ovid, showing the couple fawning over one another with their recently occupied bed behind them, and an ecstatic gaze on Sappho’s face, resembling those of Corinth’s Bacchantes.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was more coy in his pen and ink painting of Sir Launcelot in the Queen’s Chamber from 1857, taken from the seamy side of Arthurian legend. While Lancelot is brandishing his sheathed sword at knights on the other side of the door, Guinevere, King Arthur’s queen, already seems to be transported in ecstasy, to the consternation of her chambermaids behind. At least she conforms to Victorian standards of decency in being fully clothed, and doesn’t even expose her feet.

My remaining examples are taken from the transition of the story of John the Baptist’s martyrdom at the whim of Herodias, to the femme fatale of Salome in the closing years of the nineteenth century. Following Gustave Moreau’s startling paintings that changed the original post-Biblical story in The Apparition (c 1876), Oscar Wilde wrote his play Salomé, published in 1893.

Richard Strauss saw Wilde’s play performed in Berlin in 1902, and his opera of the same name premiered in Dresden at the end of 1905. The following year, as an even more immediate inspiration for Franz von Stuck, the dancer and choreographer Maud Allan produced the show Vision of Salomé in Vienna, featuring a notorious version of the Dance of the Seven Veils, and sparking the wave of ‘Salomania’ that swept Europe.

Von Stuck’s Salome (1906) is one of several similar versions. His Salome is the erotic dancer of Wilde, Strauss, and Allan, decked with flamboyant ‘oriental’ jewellery, naked to the waist and in ecstasy. Behind her, in the dark shadows, an ape-like creature grins, and holds out a platter on which is the head of John the Baptist.

Gustav Klimt had already conflated this novel Salome with Judith, who had killed the enemy general Holofernes.

Klimt’s approach was influenced by his decorative experience, and he returned to using gold leaf in what therefore became known as his Golden Phase. In his Judith I from 1901 he emphasises her neck with a broad gold choker studded with gems, and echoed in a golden belt at the foot of this painting. Her glazed eyes are almost closed and her mouth open in overt ecstasy.

In 1909, Klimt followed that with greater ambiguity in what could be Judith II or Salome (1909). Below her is the severed head of either Holofernes or John the Baptist, in a disturbing link between erotic ecstasy and death.