This article rounds off my series looking at Winslow Homer’s paintings from Cullercoats, by setting them into a narrative context.

Many individual paintings have their own, small narratives. What I want to do here is, using some of the best of his work from 1881-2, to see how they assemble into a larger narrative about the life of fishlasses, fishwives, and the fishermen of Cullercoats.

Like many fishing communities at that time, everything in the lives of individuals and the community as a whole was driven by the cycle of fishing activity. This cycle starts with the departure of the men and boys on board their boats, to go in search of a catch – an event which Homer does not seem to have painted.

With their menfolk away at sea, the women and girls returned to their maintenance tasks, of making and mending clothing, nets, and other fishing gear, and of caring for the other members of their families, who were too young or too old to go to sea.

Lighter work, such as preparing lines and tackle, was usually performed by the younger women. When the weather was fine they would sit outside in their yards putting bait onto lines, then coiling the lines carefully into the shallow wickerwork baskets from which they would be deployed.

Once the fishwives thought that the boats might return, they would post lookouts to scan the horizon for them. In fine weather they would take the whole family up on top of the low cliffs, and one would stand and act as lookout.

As they went about their work, wherever they were, they would look out to sea, watching for the boats to come in.

Whenever they had a moment, they would watch, waiting for the next stage in the cycle to begin.

When the weather was bad – in gales, rough seas, or fog – the watching became more tense. They knew that the risks to their menfolk were greater, and that the chances of losing a man overboard, injury, and death were increased.

They knew the violence of the sea, how it could drive large well-found vessels ashore. They feared the winter storms, with easterly gales which could bring shipwreck and disaster. The worse the weather, the more they watched, and the more anxious their watching.

Even when all the Cullercoats boats were safely stowed in harbour, they knew that their menfolk might have to take to the sea in the lifeboat, rowing out to rescue others in distress. They remembered the lifeboat which was lost with all hands, and watched, fearing for their men, and the risks that they took for others.

Once they could see the boats returning, they flocked down to receive them. As the first arrived they looked intently to see their own, poised ready with the fishbaskets, for when their boat comes in.

The whole family went down to greet the boats, transfer the fish to their baskets, and haul the catch back up to the village. There they prepared the fish for despatch to the fishmarket in North Shields, hoping to get good prices so that they could feed and clothe their families. Again, he does not appear to have painted the women processing the fish, nor the catch being despatched for sale.

Their menfolk brought the fishing gear back up, for the women to prepare once again for the start of the next cycle, when those men returned to sea to fish.

There were sometimes a few moments when they could sit up by the boats which were out of service, taking up some of the sunny spells. But always, through force of habit, they remained watching.

So, in eleven of Winslow Homer’s best watercolour paintings from his 19 months spent in and around Cullercoats, he has provided us with the very human and personal story of the fishlasses, fishwives, and fishermen of the community of Cullercoats, on the north-east coast of England, in the late 1800s.

References

National Gallery of Art virtual exhibition from 2005.

Cikovsky, Jr, N, Kelly F et al. (1995) Winslow Homer, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 3000 6555 8.
Griffin RC (2006) Winslow Homer, An American Vision, Phaidon Press. ISBN 978 0 7148 3992 9.
Tedeschi M and others (2008) Watercolors by Winslow Homer. The Color of Light, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 11945 9.

One solution to the problem of paintings being a singular medium for narrative, and not a serial medium like text, is to paint a formal series of works, which are then viewed in a particular order. This happened quite commonly with polyptychs, which often showed a series of scenes through the life of Christ, for example. As these were well-known narratives, such series were not particularly adventurous or novel in technique.

One prolific painter of narrative series, though, stands out: William Hogarth (1697–1764), who from about 1731 until 1754 painted a succession of moralising series, and his influence led several later British painters to create their own.

Hogarth was a largely self-taught painter, having entered the world of art as a copperplate engraver in 1720. His works in oil were usually strongly narrative, showing moments of climax and sometimes peripeteia in theatrical productions or everyday life in London. Many included social commentary, wit, and some overtly caricatured society. One of his reasons for painting was to provide a supply of original images for engraving, and all his series paintings were seen (from a commercial view, at least) as a means to producing lucrative series of prints.

In this article, I will examine his first two series, A Harlot’s Progress (c 1731), and its compliment, A Rake’s Progress (1732-5). The next article will examine his most famous Marriage A-la-Mode (c 1743), and the more unusual Four Times of the Day (1736). The article after that will consider those inspired by his series to tackle their own, including Augustus Leopold Egg (1816–1863) and William Powell Frith (1819-1909) in particular.

One inevitable question – particularly in view of Hogarth’s artistic origins in print-making – is whether these series are narrative paintings, or illustrations in oils. There is no definitive separation, although seen from the point of view of narrative alone, I suggest the following distinction:
a narrative painting, and series of narrative paintings, are by the artist’s intent to stand alone from any oral or written version of the narrative, possibly with the support of the painting’s title and a short excerpt of text; an illustration is intended by the artist to accompany a text version of the narrative; both can equally be works of art (cf. William Blake and many others).

Hogarth’s series of paintings were clearly never intended to accompany text narrative. Indeed, at the time of their production, there was no text version of their narrative available – another unusual feature, as each tells a story which is new to the viewer.

A Harlot’s Progress (c 1731)

The six paintings from which this series is comprised were completed in 1731, and first appeared in engravings in 1732. Tragically all the paintings were destroyed by fire when at Fonthill House in 1755, so we only have prints from which to study Hogarth’s first serially painted narrative.

The general outline of the story is of an innocent country girl, Moll Hackabout, who comes to London, and immediately falls into the hands of a notorious brothel-keeper and madame. Moll becomes the kept mistress of a wealthy merchant, but later slides into common prostitution. She is arrested, and ends up in London’s Bridewell Prison. Having contracted syphilis earlier, the disease progresses, steadily killing her. She finally dies at the age of 23, mourned only by her fellow prostitutes.

Moll Hackabout is first shown arriving at the Bell Inn, Cheapside. Her clothing, with a fine bonnet, white dress, and flower adornments, shows her to be an innocent country girl, but she is here being inspected by Elizabeth Needham, the notorious brothel-keeper and madame. Hogarth gives the latter black skin lesions intended to signal that she has longstanding sexually-transmitted disease (syphilis), and her face is aged. Hogarth tends to use caricature appearances rather than facial expressions.

In the doorway at the right is an equally notorious rake, Colonel Francis Charteris, and his pimp John Gourlay, who are also taking an interest in the arrival of a fresh young innocent. In Moll’s luggage is a symbolic dead goose, which suggests her death as a result of gullibility. The address on a label attached to the dead goose reads “My lofing cosen in Tems Stret in London”, suggesting that Moll’s move to London has been arranged through intermediaries, who may well have profited from her being trafficked into the hands of Elizabeth Needham.

Behind Moll, an itinerant preacher is engrossed in spreading the message to his small ad hoc congregation in the back of a covered wagon. In front of that a pile of pots is just about to collapse, as is Moll’s life.

In each engraving – and even more so in the original paintings – Hogarth packs in an abundance of cue, clues, and symbols to support the narrative.

Hogarth next shows us Moll at the top of the slippery slope to perdition, as the kept woman or mistress of a wealthy Jewish merchant; sadly anti-semitism was endemic at the time. The cues to this are abundant, in Old Testament paintings on the wall, which also seem to prophesy Moll’s fate at his hands.

Enjoying relative luxury at this stage, she has a black serving boy and a monkey. On a dressing table at the far left is a mask, for masquerade balls, and Moll has just deliberately knocked the table over to distract her merchant’s attention, whilst in the background another lover is able to tiptoe out.

Moll’s descent continues as she is here nothing but a common prostitute, her bed being the only substantial piece of furniture in the room. Her maid is already floridly syphilitic, with black pox marks on her face and a sunken bridge to her nose. She keeps a cat, who is posed in the manner of her mistress when at work.

She is surrounded by symbols of her evil, such as the black witches hat and broomstick, and above the bed is a wigbox belonging to a highwayman who was hanged on 11 May 1730. At the right, in the background, Sir John Gonson, a famous magistrate, is entering with three armed bailiffs to make her arrest. Meanwhile she is showing off a new and expensive pocket watch.

Moll ends up in Bridewell Prison, beating hemp to make nooses for hanging. Her jailer, at the extreme left, beats her to make her work harder, while his wife is stealing the clothes off her back. To the right of Moll is a card-sharp who is accompanied by his dog, and possibly the rest of his family. In the background is a black woman who appears pregnant, who could therefore not be executed or transported. In the foreground, at the right, is Moll’s maid, showing off a pair of Moll’s shoes. Moll herself now has growing black spots on her face, indicating the progress of her own syphilis.

With Moll in the final throes of her syphilis, she is attended by Dr. Richard Rock (dark hair) and Dr. Jean Misaubin (white hair), who are arguing over the best treatment. Another woman, possibly her landlady, is rifling Moll’s possessions, while Moll’s young son sits close to the fire. A Passover cake is hung by the door as a flytrap, suggesting that her former lover (the Jewish merchant) may be supporting her in her dying days.

Moll finally dies at the age of 23, on 2 September 1731, and her wake is attended mainly by fellow prostitutes. A parson sits, drunkenly fondling the woman next to him, and spilling his brandy (a sexually explicit symbol). Most of the women bear the hallmarks of syphilis, and Moll’s orphaned son sits innocently playing under her coffin. Various other visual cues and clues are given in Hogarth’s elaborate details.

A Rake’s Progress (1732-5)

No sooner were the prints being made of A Harlot’s Progress than Hogarth was at work with its successor, eight paintings showing the similar downfall of a man.

His outline is again quite simple and strongly moral: Tom Rakewell inherits a fortune on the death of his miserly father. Tom then squanders his money making himself appear grander, engaging in expensive pursuits, and in orgiastic nights in brothels. Pursued by bailiffs, he narrowly escapes arrest when on his way in a sedan chair to a party at St James’s Palace. He then has to marry a rich but ugly old woman for her money to settle his debts. But his descent continues with large losses gambling, and he is put into the Fleet debtor’s prison. There he becomes insane, and ends his days in Bethlehem Hospital (‘Bedlam’).

These are shown in Hogarth’s original oil paintings, now on display in Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, and in the prints derived from them.

Tom Rakewell has inherited a fortune from his father. The latter is portrayed as being extremely miserly by the house full of symbols of meanness, such as a half-starved cat, resoled shoes from the cover of a bible, etc. While he is being measured for new clothes by his tailor, Tom rejects his pregnant fiancée Sarah Young, who is crying at the left edge of the painting, her mother comforting her and remonstrating with Tom.

Tom sets out to make a new man of himself with the aid of many tutors and hangers-on. The composer Handel plays at the harpsichord, then there is a fencing master, a quarterstaff instructor, a dancing master with violin, Charles Bridgeman (a famous landscape gardener), Tom himself, an ex-soldier acting as bodyguard, a bugler from a foxhunt, and a jockey. In the background are others who are busy spending Tom’s inheritance on worthy causes no doubt.

At night, Tom spends more of his money in the Rose Tavern, a well-known brothel in Covent Garden, London. The prostitutes – and there are seven pictured and paid-for – bear Hogarth’s usual black pox marks to indicate their state of ill-health and occupation.

With his inheritance vanishing, Tom’s debts start to mount. Seen being carried in a sedan chair to St James’s Palace, Welsh bailiffs (with leeks on their hats) attempt to arrest him for debt. As it is St David’s Day (1 March), he can only be going to the palace to celebrate Queen Caroline’s birthday. Thankfully, his former fiancée Sarah Young, now a milliner, intervenes and saves his day. In a symbolic twist, a worker who is filling an oil street lantern behind and above Tom anoints him accidentally with oil, marking the ‘blessing’ by Sarah. A young thief is just making off with Tom’s silver-handled cane, though.

Tom’s only recourse is to marry money, in the shape of an ugly old spinster, which he does in St Marylebone. As Tom undergoes the wedding vows, he is already looking towards his new wife’s maid, who is younger and prettier. In the background, Sarah Young has arrived, holding her young child. Sarah’s mother is seen in a disagreement with one of the wedding guests. The two dogs and other details at the right provide further cues and clues to additional narrative.

Despite this influx of his new wife’s money, Tom’s descent continues unabated. Here he is in a gambling den, surrounded by London’s low-life, on bended knee, pleading to the Almighty for one last chance to recover his money.

Tom’s debts finally catch up with him, and he is thrown into the infamous Fleet debtors prison. He is surrounded by those demanding money from him, but is unable to do anything. Beside him is a rejected attempt to raise money by writing a play. In the background are signs of developing madness: an alchemy experiment, presumably to try to turn base metal into gold, and equipment for studying the stars, in the hope that they may signal a change in fortune.

Here Hogarth uses a rich range of facial expressions, together with body language, to heighten the sense of drama and welling crisis.

Tom’s crisis resolves into madness and violence, so he is taken to spend the rest of his days in London’s Bethlehem Hospital, whose common name of Bedlam has entered the English language. Tom is almost naked, tensed and stressed on the floor, with only Sarah Young to comfort him. Again he ignores her. Other inmates show the disturbing signs of their conditions, and two well-dressed ladies have come to watch the antics of those in Bedlam, as a social event.

References

Wikipedia on A Harlot’s Progress
Wikipedia on A Rake’s Progress
Sir John Soane’s Museum on A Rake’s Progress

Hallett M (2000) Hogarth, Art & Ideas, Phaidon Press. ISBN 978 0 7148 3818 2.

In the last article, I examined Hogarth’s first two series, A Harlot’s Progress (c 1731), and its compliment, A Rake’s Progress (1732-5). This article looks at his most famous Marriage A-la-Mode (c 1743), and the more unusual Four Times of the Day (1736).

Marriage A-la-Mode (c 1743)

A summary of the plot covered by the six paintings in this series might run:

A marriage is arranged between the son of the Earl of Squander, Viscount Squanderfield, and the daughter of an Alderman. The Earl of Squander has title and nobility but is near-bankrupt; the Alderman has wealth but no title or nobility. Despite their marriage, both pursue their own lives, she in an affair with Silvertongue, the Alderman’s lawyer, and he in brothels and other places of ill-repute. He contracts syphilis from prostitutes. She rises in society, attending masquerade balls and engaging in liaisons there.

After a masquerade, she takes Silvertongue to a rooming house to sleep with him, but is discovered there by her husband. Silvertongue kills her husband in the ensuing swordfight, and makes his escape through the window, but is arrested later. He is tried for the Viscount’s murder, and hanged. She returns to her father, the Alderman, where she drinks poison and dies, her infant child (who was born with congenital syphilis) reaching out for its mother.

Hogarth employed French engravers to make the plates for printing, and the resulting prints benefited from that. However his original canvases are beautifully painted, and make great use of colour and facture. They are well worth seeing as works of art, not just as a narrative series.

I acknowledge the excellent text and DVD accounts of Egerton (1997) as my sources for the readings of this series.

The Marriage Settlement. Hogarth opens the series in the Earl of Squander’s bedroom, in his town house, where the Earl and the Alderman, and their lawyers, are agreeing a contract of marriage and settlement for the Earl’s son, Viscount Squanderfield, to marry the Alderman’s daughter.

The Earl brandishes his nobility at every opportunity. At his left hand is a family pedigree tracing his ancestry back to William the Conqueror, which is almost certainly spurious. Coronets decorate many items in the room, even his crutches. He is finely dressed in a slightly old-fashioned court style, but his right foot suffers from gout. Outside, the builders of his new, more grandiose, house are idle as he has run out of money to pay them.

The Alderman is something of a social misfit, wearing plain rather than elegant clothes. He clutches the centrepiece of the painting, the document of marriage settlement, whilst he and the Earl continue to haggle over it. However his money, in the form of bags of gold coins, is already spread in front of the Earl.

At the left, backs towards one another, are the groom and the bride. The Viscount is dressed in the latest fashion, but is clearly a foolish fop. On the left side of his neck, he already bears the black poxmark of syphilis. His bride is in intimate discussion with her father’s young lawyer, Silvertongue. She wears her wedding dress in anticipation of the settlement, but is sullen and not engaged in the matter.

In front of the couple, a dog and bitch are chained together, as the bride and groom soon will be. Behind them all, the paintings are ‘dark old masters’, including the ominous Medusa, martyrdoms of Saints Lawrence and Agnes, Cain Slaying Abel, and Judith with the Head of Holofernes. They culminate, by the window, in a huge portrait of the Earl himself. Hogarth uses paintings within his paintings very extensively in this series, to add meaning from their content.

The Tête à Tête. Some months after the wedding, the Viscount has returned from a night in gaming houses and brothels. A dog sniffs at a scented cap from one of the prostitutes, which is in his jacket pocket, and another is wrapped around his sword, which lies broken inside its scabbard on the floor in front of him. He is the worse for wear, and his poxmark plainly visible on his neck.

She is not bothered by the Viscount’s condition, but has a knowing smile which could indicate her early pregnancy (suggested by her posture), or her continuing affair with Silvertongue. Behind her are the loose cards from a whist party. In front of the couple two violins in cases are positioned to suggest the act of copulation. A further cue from the open music has so far resisted identification. The rest of the room exudes bad taste.

In the background, a slovenly footman is loafing idly. On the left, the steward has abandoned any attempt to get the Viscount to settle a thick sheaf of bills.

Further cues are provided by the paintings, most notably one which is largely obscured by a green curtain: the little glimpse we are afforded suggests that it shows sexual activity too explicit to be seen, and a reminder of the couple’s separate couplings.

The Inspection. Hogarth next takes us to a doctor’s consulting room, in which the Viscount – who appears familiar with the room – is in company with a young girl and an older woman who is most probably her mother, both of them being prostitutes. They are seeking the aid of a doctor who is thoroughly foul in appearance, and himself suffering from severe congenital syphilis.

A crucial detail which may be hard to see in the image is of a link between three small boxes of black pills: the young woman holds one box, which is closed; a second closed box is on the seat of the chair just in front of the Viscount’s crotch; the third is open in the Viscount’s right hand, outstretched towards the doctor. The pills are black, in common with the poxmarks which appear on the Viscount and the mother, indicating that they are mercuric salts used to treat syphilis. The implication is that the Viscount is questioning their effectiveness with the doctor.

A skull on the table at the left bears the unmistakeable erosions produced by advanced syphilis. All around the group are various worrying items of medical equipment and specimens. More worrying still, the mother (whose sleeves are made of the same patterned fabric as the girl’s gown) is caressing a cutthroat surgical knife.

Hogarth sets up some revealing facial expressions here, and uses directions of gaze to provide clues as to the interactions taking place.

The Toilette. Some time later, the couple have inherited the late Earl’s title, and are now the Earl and Countess Squander. She is being entertained whilst completing her dressing and preparations for the day. By her right arm hangs a teething coral, indicating that she is now the mother of an unseen infant, who is being raised by a nurse.

To the right of the Countess, Silvertongue rests at ease, his feet uncouthly laid on the sofa, clearly intimate with her. He is offering her a ticket to a masquerade ball, where no doubt he will meet her. His left hand gestures towards a painted screen showing such a masquerade.

At the left an Italian castrato (by his wig and jewellery) is singing, to a flute accompaniment. The rest of the room are disinterested, apart from a woman in white, who is swooning at the singer. Beneath him are various invitation cards scattered on the floor. Servants are in attendance, including a French hairdresser, who is curling the Countess’s hair.

Hogarth’s selection of paintings for this scene is revealing and satirical. Above the castrato is the Rape of Ganymede, and above that a portrait of Silvertongue. Above the Countess is Io in ecstatic embrace with Jupiter, and Lot’s daughters making their father drunk so that he can inseminate them both.

The Bagnio. The climax of Hogarth’s story, and its peripeteia, is set in a bagnio, a room in a rooming house intended for illicit liaisons and gambling. The Earl stands, with the posture of a dying man, possibly referring to the deposition of Christ, mortally wounded in the chest, his sword impaled in the floor in front of him.

The Countess, dressed in bedclothes complete with a small cap, is on bended knee in front of him, apparently praying for forgiveness. Her clothes are scattered around the floor, as if removed in haste, her stays having fallen on a bundle of faggots (then a common term for prostitutes). A man – Silvertongue, also in night dress – is making his escape through an open window, having fought the Earl. His sword, covered in the Earl’s blood, rests in the foreground.

At the far right, a night watchman and constable force their way in, the watchman’s lantern casting the shadow of a cross on the door.

The implicit narrative is that the Countess and Silvertongue met as arranged at the masquerade, and adjourned to the bagnio to consummate their lust. The Earl had tracked them down, and entered the room. Silvertongue fought and killed him, but his attempt to escape will prove unsuccessful now that the police are involved. He will therefore be tried, sentenced to death, and hanged.

For this, Hogarth chose a tapestry of the Judgement of Solomon, and paintings showing Saint Luke, and a parody best described as a portrait of a harlot.

The Lady’s Death. The final scene takes place in the Alderman’s house, to which the Countess has fled in the aftermath of her husband’s murder and her lover’s execution. Its composition matches the first painting, but contrasts with it in the frugal appearance. Its furnishings are minimal and functional, and its floorboards bare.

The Countess is in the throes of death on an armchair, an empty vial of laudanum (tincture of opium) by her feet. Between her fashionable shoes and the vial is a printed broadsheet containing the dying speech of Silvertongue prior to his execution. Her father – wearing the same clothes as he did in the first painting – is removing her rings, as someone who committed suicide then could not retain any property.

A nurse holds the Countess’s infant for one last embrace. The infant bears the tragic marks and deformities of severe congenital syphilis. In the middle of the canvas, an apothecary is berating a servant for obtaining the laudanum. A doctor skulks in the background, powerless to save the dying Countess. A poor breakfast is laid up on the table, with a dog stealing the pig’s head from it.

Four Times of the Day (1736)

Compared with Hogarth’s other narrative series, this appears more experimental in terms of narrative. Instead of showing the same group of characters in a temporal series of scenes, he chose to show four views of various people going about their lives in different parts of London, each at a different time of day, and a different season. Thus their only real link is by time.

A lady, making her way to church, is crossing the west side of the piazza of Covent Garden, early on a winter’s morning. Holding, but not opening, her fan, she stares intently at two couples who are making love, the men fondling the women lustfully. A small group of children by them are warming up over an open fire. Behind the couples is Tom King’s Coffee House, which opened once the tavern doors closed. A fight appears to have broken out inside it, and a wig flies out. People in the background are setting up market stalls ready for the start of the day.

For noon, we move to Hog Lane, in the slums near Saint Giles in the Fields, seen in the background. It is spring. A group of Huguenots are leaving the French Church (now in Soho); they arrived as refugees during the 1680s, and engaged in silk and related trades, hence their fashionable dress and decorum.

Opposite is a contrasting group of Londoners outside a pie shop: a black man fondles the breast of a woman holding a pie, which looks about to fall as quickly as her virtue. In front of her a young boy bawls over his pie, which has broken, dropping fragments to feed a beggar below. The body of a dead cat rests on the dividing line between the two groups.

At dusk, in the warmth of the summer, we are outside the Sadler’s Wells theatre near Islington, then in open fields and countryside. With a background of a cow being milked, a dyer carries his tired young daughter, alongside his large wife. The cow’s horns are positioned so as to appear to be on the dyer’s head, a longstanding indication that he is a cuckold. Two children behind them replay a scene of marital discord. We can see that, inside the tavern, those escaping the oppressive air of the city are sat in the smoke of their pipes.

Here it is late at night on 29 May, Oak Apple Day, which celebrates the restoration of the monarchy. We are now back in the centre of London, in what was then the Charing Cross Road, now known as Whitehall. A bonfire has caused the Salisbury Flying Coach to overturn. In the foreground, the Worshipful Master of a Masonic Lodge, usually identified as the hard-line judge Sir Thomas de Veil, is so drunk that he is being helped home by his Tyler (doorkeeper); a chamberpot is being emptied over them from above. Around them are taverns well known for being brothels, and signs to bagnios of the type featured in Marriage A-la-Mode.

Inside the window at the right, a barber-surgeon is busy shaving a customer haphazardly, as if drunk. Below the window some homeless are settling down for the night, and a child blows on a firework.

I hope that you will agree that, despite their temporal association, these paintings and the scenes shown in them do not constitute any form of narrative as a series, although the individual paintings contain isolated fragments from various narratives.

Hogarth’s narrative series

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Hogarth’s narrative series is the sheer number of them. They included:

• A Harlot’s Progress (c 1731), 6 paintings and prints,
• A Rake’s Progress (1732-5), 8 paintings and prints,
• Four Times of the Day (1736) (non-narrative), 4 paintings and prints,
• Marriage A-la-Mode (c 1743-5), 6 paintings and prints,
• The Happy Marriage (started c 1745), 2 paintings, incomplete,
• Industry and Idleness (1747), 12 prints,
• The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751), 4 prints,
• The Humours of an Election (1755), 4 paintings and prints.

This makes a total of 8 series, of which 7 were narrative, and 5 painted narratives. The latter included no less than 27 paintings in total.

At the time, they were successful mainly, as he had intended, for the production of prints. Pirated copies of his prints became such a problem to him that he pressed for better protective legislation: the Engravers’ Copyright Act became law on 25 June 1735 to provide just that, and has since flourished into modern copyright law. The original act was known as Hogarth’s Act.

Hogarth used Alberti’s ‘laws’, but enhanced them with the addition of facial caricature, and most distinctively the use of paintings within paintings to develop his narrative.

However, his paintings are now full of puzzles and problems for the modern reader, as the references in his satire and fine details are largely forgotten. Thus narrative which, at the time, was seen as being topical, and hugely successful, has not stood the test of time, and now just appears mystifying.

There is a trade-off here: topical references often bring immediate popularity and commercial success, as well as making contemporary viewers see their relevance; longstanding classical references may be seen at the time as being hackneyed and irrelevant, but are more likely to stand the test of time. This is particularly true when trying to tell stories which are unlikely to be familiar to the viewer, either at the time or in the future.

Despite these issues, which must have been obvious to Victorian artists, these unique narrative series were to influence several British painters a century later – the subject of the next article.

References

Wikipedia on Marriage A-la-Mode
Wikipedia on Four Times of the Day

Egerton, J (1997, 2010) Hogarth’s Marriage A-la-Mode, National Gallery Company. ISBN 978 1 8570 9510 4. Complete with a DVD.
Hallett M (2000) Hogarth, Art & Ideas, Phaidon Press. ISBN 978 0 7148 3818 2.

Hogarth’s painted narrative series proved to be a significant influence on later artists. Among those listed by Martin Meisel (1983) are:

• George Morland (1763-1804) – his Laetitia series (1786) of 6 paintings and prints;
• James Northcote (1746-1831) – his Diligence and Dissipation series (1790-6) of 10 paintings and prints;
• William Etty (1787-1849) – his Judith triptych (1827-31) of paintings;
• Augustus Leopold Egg (1816–1863) – his Past and Present series (1858) of 3 paintings;
• William Powell Frith (1819-1909) – his Road to Ruin series (1877-8) of 5 paintings and prints, and his The Race for Wealth series (1877-80) of 5 paintings and prints.

George Morland was a painter with a life as colourful and rich in lessons about morality as any of these narrative series. His Laetitia series of about 1786 apparently used his wife as a model, and was summarised by Meisel as being a genteel version of Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress with a more forgiving ending. I have been unable to trace any images of the paintings, or the prints derived from them.

James Northcote‘s long series Diligence and Dissipation is described by Meisel as being “a synthesis of Industry and Idleness, A Harlot’s Progress, and Richardson’s novel Pamela”, which traces the careers of a modest girl and more wanton fellow servants in a gentleman’s house. Again, I have been unable to trace any images of the paintings or prints.

William Etty‘s triptych of paintings showing Judith and Holofernes, known in Farr’s catalogue raisonné simply as Judith, survives, but is in a very poorly state now, due to his extensive use of bitumen. The left wing shows Judith’s maid waiting outside Holofernes’ tent; the central canvas shows Judith taking hold of the hair of Holofernes’ head ready to decapitate him; the right wing shows Judith giving her maid the head to put in a meat bag. Hopefully these will undergo the necessary conservation treatment to recover their original appearance.

Augustus Egg‘s series Past and Present has thankfully received the care of the Tate Gallery, and is thus the most accessible of these series. It is also the least conventional, and does not follow Hogarth’s approach. As Meisel points out, the three paintings are not intended to be a sequence of three scenes: instead the first is the first scene, and the other two are later scenes which are simultaneous with one another.

The first shows an ordinary middle-class drawing room, in which there are mother, father, and two young daughters, each well-dressed. Most striking is the mother, who is stretched out across the green carpet, prone. Her arms are stretched beyond her head, which is buried face down between her upper arms, and the hands are clasped together in tension.

The father is sat at a substantial circular table, facing the viewer. He is staring, brow furrowed, looking extremely tense and worried. His left hand holds a small note; his right hand is clenched, and rests on the table. His left shoe presses a miniature painting into the carpet.

The daughters are playing together at the left, opposite their father. One kneeling, the other sat, on the carpet, they are building a house of cards, which appears to be just about to fall. One stares, her mouth slightly open in anxious surprise, looking towards where her mother might have been standing before she fell to the floor. The other girl is still looking intently at the house of cards.

As with Hogarth’s narrative series, the room is full of cues, clues, and symbols to the narrative. Among the more visible are: the collapsing house of cards; an apple has been cut in two, one half left on the table, the other on the carpet by the mother; the reflection of an open door indicating the imminent departure of the mother.

Egg also uses Hogarth’s technique of paintings within the painting. On the wall at the left is the expulsion of Adam and Eve titled The Fall, below which is a miniature portrait of the mother; at the right is a shipwreck by Clarkson Stanfield titled Abandoned, below which is a miniature portrait of the father.

Egg’s three paintings have no individual titles, but when exhibited were accompanied by the text:
August the 4th. Have just heard that B______ has been dead more than a fortnight, so his poor children have now lost both parents. I hear she was seen on Friday last near the Strand, evidently without a place to lay her head. What a fall hers has been!

The clear implicit narrative is that the mother was in an adulterous relationship, which was revealed to the father in this moment of peripeteia. The other two paintings show the consequences.

The two daughters are shown significantly older now. The senior is sat, staring vacantly out of the open window at a three-quarter full moon, while her younger sister buries her face between the older’s knees, kneeling partly in prayer, and partly in grief. On the wall, separated by the window, are the miniature portraits of their parents. The sparsely-furnished room, with bare floorboards, indicates their fall into relative poverty.

Meanwhile the mother is homeless, sat among the debris under the arches of one of London’s bridges. She stares wide-eyed and fearful at a star in the sky, cradling a young baby to her, under her thin cloak. Behind her, on the side of the arch, are old posters, one with the word VICTIMS prominent, another advertising excursions to Paris.

Although Egg’s departure from simple sequential narrative is innovative, and perhaps influenced by other narrative media at the time, he uses the same tools and techniques as did Hogarth, to good effect. Because the three paintings were (and remain) viewed together, we can enjoy his experiment with non-serial storytelling, a strength peculiar to narrative painting.

William Frith, whose more famous panoramas I considered here, painted two narrative series, both of which were turned into prints. Even now, critical opinion of these series is divided, but the difficulty in seeing those paintings individually, let alone as complete series, makes it impossible to form a reliable view.

The Road to Ruin series was first shown at the Royal Academy in 1878. Meisel (1983) shows Leopold Flameng’s 1878 etchings of the series, but the reproductions in the current reprint are too poor to make out much detail in them. Christopher Wood’s books (e.g. 1976) contain monochrome illustrations of the paintings, but I have yet to see good, large colour images of any of them. As far as I can tell, they remain in a private collection.

The first, shows the hero at College, playing cards all night with his circle of friends in a college room. The second shows him at Ascot, placing bets on the horse-racing there, and well on his way to ruin. The third shows him at the moment of Arrest by a bailiff, when in a gambler’s house. The fourth shows his Struggles, after he has fled to France, where he tries to write a play whilst his wife paints watercolours to try to pay for their accommodation. The fifth shows The End, with him locking the door of a poor room, his play rejected, and about to blow his brains out with a pistol.

Frith’s pictorial account of the downfall of an addicted gambler is well executed, and thoroughly in accordance with the tradition of Alberti and Hogarth. It lacks the latter’s brilliant satire, and his use of paintings within paintings. Its prints apparently sold very well.

The Race for Wealth series was first exhibited in 1880, and attracted much attention. Unfortunately its prints were produced using photogravure, and Frith considered them “far from satisfactory”. He did not attempt another narrative series. The paintings ended up in the Baroda Museum and Picture Galleries in India, apparently modelled on the more famous museums in South Kensington, London. Not only has one departed for Birmingham, England, but the remaining four do not appear to be viewable on the Internet.

Their story centres on a corrupt financier, the Spider. In the first, The Spider and the Flies, he is persuading prospective investors in an office in the City of London. In the second, The Spider at Home, he is entertaining in his drawing room, which is lavishly decorated with paintings (which sadly seem to lack Hogarth’s narrative cues). The third, Victims, shows one of the investors from the first canvas, a clergyman, devastated at his family breakfast when he learns that the company in which they invested their savings has suddenly collapsed. The fourth, Judgement, shows the Spider’s trial for fraud at the Old Bailey, with the ruined clergyman giving evidence.

The fifth and last, Retribution, shows the Spider exercising in the yard of Millbank Prison, during his imprisonment for fraud. This is also one of only two images of the inside of a Victorian prison. The other, according to Christopher Wood, is an illustration by Gustave Doré.

Conclusions

Attempts to repeat Hogarth’s success with narrative series of paintings were far from failures, but showed how much had depended on his sharp satire, and ingenious touches, particularly the use of paintings within paintings. Frith came to series late in his career, when he had tired of panoramas, at a time when huge changes were taking place in painting, with the arrival of Impressionism. Had the prints from his second series not been so disappointing, they would probably not have affected the sharp fall in his market value in the mid 1890s.

Britain in Victorian times loved a good serial: it was the publication of Dickens’ novels in serial form which first brought him popularity and commercial success. It is therefore surprising that there were not many more attempts at narrative series of paintings. The Victorians also had a great affection for stories of morality, which were the basis for all these series of paintings. It is consistent with contemporary morals that Frith kept a mistress, who lived just down the road, and bore him seven of his total of nineteen children, and that Morland’s life would have made several enthralling moral tales.

It is a crying shame that we are not able to enjoy any of these series now, except for that of Augustus Egg in the Tate Gallery. Those who are privileged enough to own paintings should treat them as works of art, and not just movable property.

References

Farr DLA (1958) William Etty, Routledge & Kegan Paul. No ISBN.
Meisel M (1983) Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England, Princeton UP. ISBN 978 0 6916 1293 5.
Wood C (1976) Victorian Panorama, Paintings of Victorian Life, Faber and Faber. ISBN 0 571 10780 X.

Thomas Cole (1801–1848) is generally accepted as the founder of the Hudson River School of landscape painting, and is one of the founding fathers of American landscape painting. A migrant who arrived at the age of 17 in 1818, he was taught by an itinerant portrait painter, and in 1825 helped found the National Academy of Design in New York City.

Many of his landscapes were very narrative, and his paintings bear comparison with the works of Poussin and Claude Lorraine in the early development of European landscape painting, and their themes.

The Course of Empire (1833-6)

In 1833 he started work on a series of five paintings intended to tell the story of an idealised civilisation, reflecting popular sentiments of the day. Another important inspiration for the series was Byron’s poem Pilgrimage (1812-8), and he quoted the following lines from that when advertising exhibition of the series:
There is the moral of all human tales;
‘Tis but the same rehearsal of the past.
First freedom and then Glory – when that fails,
Wealth, vice, corruption – barbarism at last.
And History, with all her volumes vast,
Hath but one page…
(Canto IV)

I have not been able to discover whether Cole was influenced by Hogarth or others to embark on such a series. At that time he had not visited Europe, and such influence would appear unlikely, so it is more probable that this was simply the logical extension of his previous narrative paintings.

The Savage State shows dawn, with a rainstorm clearing over a broad river estuary. In the distance, on the other bank of the estuary, is a rocky crag, dominated by a massive block. In a clearing at the right there are the native people’s tipis clustered around an open fire, and files of those natives are seen streaming through uncleared land to return to that camp. In the left foreground they are seen hunting with a bow and arrows, and they are also shown paddling along small rivers in canoes. These appear to refer to the original peoples of North America.

The Arcadian or Pastoral State is set in the morning of a spring or summer day, the showers having cleared. The landscape shows the same landmarks, although from a slightly different view than in the previous painting. In the middle distance, a stone circle (clearly modelled after Stonehenge, England) contains a large open fire. Boats are under construction on the bank of the river, and the land has been partly cleared to provide pasture and mature patches of deciduous trees. The inhabitants are scattered through the pastures, tending flocks of sheep in an idyllic European pastorale setting.

The Consummation of Empire is a complete transformation, with only the rocky crag in the distance and the river giving any clue that it is the same location, but much later in time. It is now noon on a fine summer’s day. The banks of the river are filled with majestic buildings in marble in classical Roman style, with many colonnades. Their steps descend to the water’s edge, where there are small sailing boats and throngs of people. The inhabitants appear opulent, wearing toga-like dress, feasting and feting throughout the city. Large golden statues are decorated with fine textiles, there are exuberant fountains and potted plants. In the distance terraces above the buildings contain further trees and plants. Smoke rises from chimneys of a prominent building at the left, which is presumably an analogue for the previous stone circle.

Destruction shows a slightly wider and shifted view of the same scene, but now in the process of physical destruction. During a short break in an autumnal storm, in the afternoon, many of the buildings are burning vigorously, others damaged and collapsed, and the people fleeing in desperation. The river is choppy in the strong wind, and several of the boats on it are ablaze. In the foreground, one span of a bridge has been destroyed, and has been replaced by a sagging wooden pier. Everywhere there are crowds jamming the open spaces, some trying to board already full boats. Closest to the viewer are bodies of those who have been killed in the catastrophe.

Desolation shows the remains of the city at dusk on a winter’s day. The ruins of its buildings are being overgrown by vegetation. The bridge has a great gap where the arches have been lost. There is not a person in sight.

Unlike Hogarth’s disjoint temporal sequence in Four Times of the Day (1736), Cole’s slightly different views are clearly of the same location: the distant rocky crag with its distinctive massive block is a repeated point of orientation, as is the river. In these he plays out the sequence of development of civilisation, through to its collapse and return to nature. The whole series thus forms a coherent narrative, which is of course an allegory.

The Voyage of Life (1839-1842)

With that ambitious if not grandiose series behind him, Cole was commissioned to paint another series showing a Christian allegory of the stages of life. He divided this into childhood, youth, manhood, and old age, and in 1839 produced a set of sketches which are now in the Albany Institute of History and Art.

Those were soon followed by his first version, starting with Childhood (1839-40). These are now in the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute.

When he was in Rome in 1842, fearing that he would not see his series again, nor be allowed to exhibit it, he painted a second version, which is now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

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

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

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

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

It is also worth studying the great detail which Cole has included in the man and his boat: the following detail views show the sequence of changes.

As with his The Course of Empire, there are sufficient consistent threads running through this to ensure that it remains a narrative. Overall it is comparable to, if much simpler than, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, and was well received given the religious views prevailing at the time.

Conclusions

Cole’s two narrative series presented Romantic visions of the development and collapse of human civilisation, and of the phases of a pious life. He did not use identical backgrounds in each, but was careful to provide sufficient cues to ensure the viewer saw each painting as part of the overall narrative.

His figures were too small for facial expressions to be visible, but body language and other cues proved good tools for his expression. The paintings are not as rich in cues, clues, and symbols as those of Hogarth’s series, but still make good use of timeless symbols to support their stories.

In short, they work well as narrative series, and each painting is both impressive and expressive. It is tragic that Cole died so soon after completing the second version of the second series.

References

Wikipedia on The Course of Empire
Wikipedia on The Voyage of Life
The Thomas Cole National Historic Site.

Time is the warp through which we weave narrative. Though we can directly visualise most other elements within a narrative, we cannot see time, and can only represent it indirectly in the form of a timeline, against which we can place the events which together compose the narrative.

A timeline, sibling of the time series chart, is a display of events against an axis representing the passage of time. The term is also widely used to describe a textual and chronological listing of events, as were the antecedents of modern timelines, such as Eusebian Tables. It is more appropriate to distinguish such tabulations as sequences of events or timetables, as they lack any conventional representation of time along a line.

Early timelines did not always give the time axis a uniform scale, Gerardus Mercator’s ancient examples being highly non-linear, but by the late 1700s several major figures of the Enlightenment had arrived at what we recognise today as a mature timeline. Among them was the pioneer scientist, Joseph Priestley (1733-1804). The history of timelines has been beautifully documented by Rosenberg & Grafton (2010).

From then on, historical timelines became longer, larger, and increasingly elaborate, culminating in the monster drawn up by Sebastian C Adams in 1878.

There have been many variants used over the last couple of centuries, some of which are illustrated by Rosenberg & Grafton. Although primarily for the depiction of sequences of discrete events, many have produced timelines which graph more continuous variables over time, as in a time series chart.

Trees, particularly those of taxonomy, natural evolution or artificial constructions modelled after nature, have also been incorporated, as shown in Bashford Dean’s timeline of the ‘evolution’ of armoured helmets.

The time axis can run horizontally or vertically, although printing and computers have tended to make the horizontal format more popular and almost a standard. In countries whose languages primarily read left to write, it is conventional for the earliest moment in time to appear to the left, and for the latest to be at the right; I do not know whether this convention extends to countries whose script runs from right to left. The direction of the time axis is more variable when it is vertical: historically these have tended to place earliest time at the top, but there is little rationale for doing so.

Because time as a concept passes at a uniform rate – despite its much more uneven perception – the great majority of timelines use a simple linear scale. Where the application makes it more appropriate, perhaps when dealing with extremely long periods, logarithmic scaling may be used instead, but that is both exceptional and poses most viewers conceptual difficulties.

The period represented in any given timeline is as variable as the intervals of time which we can measure. In physics it could be as short as the twinkling of an eye, or nanoseconds, and in geology as long as the existence of the earth. Being anthropocentric, most timelines apply to recorded human history, or windows of a few generations length within that.

Although Edward Tufte’s outstanding books examining the visual display of data do include several example of timelines, and there is no reason to suggest that timelines should be exempt any of his design principles, he avoids more specific discussion of this type of chart.

Manual construction of timelines, whether using physical materials such as paper or on a computer, is usually both time-consuming and tedious. The first step is to determine the physical length of the time axis, and the period in time which it needs to represent. The distance along the time axis from its origin is then calculated by proportions; on a computer this is conveniently performed using a spreadsheet.

There is a curious twist, that most computer users are more likely to use timelines as tools in other applications, than will ever use tools intended to produce timelines themselves. This is because the timeline has become established as a primary control in applications to edit serial media, such as audio and video: you will find and use them in products such as iMovie, GarageBand, Final Cut Pro, and even in OS X’s Time Machine backup app.

The single most important factor in determining whether a more dedicated application is suitable for the automatic generation of timelines is the required export format. As there appears to be no standardised format for exchanging timeline data between applications, there is little point constructing a superb timeline in an application which cannot export it in a form which can then be used for its display and viewing. Some dedicated timeline tools are unable to generate usable HTML, for example, and cannot therefore be used to develop web pages containing those timelines.

ChronoZoom is an open source environment which enables direct web development, but (being sponsored by Microsoft Research) requires Windows-based development tools and is hosted on Microsoft server products.

In subsequent articles in this series, I will focus on the use of applications which support the inclusion of rich media, such as images, within timelines, as they are most generally useful, and fewer in number. If you do not need such sophistication, then any of the wide range of project management tools could be suitable, provided that they support an appropriate export format.

Reference

Rosenberg D & Grafton A (2010) Cartographies of Time, A History of the Timeline, Princeton Architectural Press. ISBN 978 1 61689 058 2.

The first and simplest of the apps which I have used for creating media-rich timelines is Timeline 3D, which I briefly covered earlier. Free from the Mac App Store, you need to make in-store purchases to enable its rich export features. Unless you are on a very tight budget, the full unlock seems excellent value for £18.99.

To some degree, Timeline 3D is a one-trick pony, but in the most wonderful of ways. You can customise much about the appearance of your timeline, but its underlying format is fixed: it consists of a whole-timeline overview; then when you select any event or item from that timeline, that zooms into view as a hinged page, with the rest of the timeline turning into the background.

Entering the data for each event is quick and simple. Click the + button at the top left of the window to add a new event. Give it a title, start date and optional end date (which can be displayed in custom formats), drag and drop any image, and add the text which you want to appear next to the image. You can assign events to colour-coded categories, include weblinks, and tags.

The appearance of the timeline and its events is set by themes, which can be set separately for screen and print. The standard themes are very pleasant, but here I have set up my own custom theme for this example.

The theme editor gives you control over font, colours, and the background, for which you can use an image if you wish.

One slight niggle with the current underlying format for timelines is the way in which it handles period events: these are marked at the start, with the period dates given, but there is no continuous bar extending to the end of the period, neither is the end marked. I will suggest some good styles for showing such periods in a later article.

Once you are happy with the ingredients for your timeline, click on the 3D button at the top right, and the timeline will be generated ready for viewing.

As I warned in the first article, Timeline 3D is only as useful as its export options. Thankfully these seem to cater for almost all requirements, including print, presentation, and web.

Exporting to PDF (or print) generates a single large page of the whole timeline, as seen in its main view. Because you can use a different theme more suited to paper, including a different font as well as black/colour on white, this is eminently usable and useful.

Exporting to a movie gives you a wide range of formats, ranging from iOS devices up to full 4K. The resulting movie starts by showing the whole timeline, and then steps through each event in time sequence, with lovely smooth animation. For standalone presentations I think this would be my first choice because of its excellent quality.

You can export the timeline in PowerPoint’s native PPTX format, which is also fully accessible by Keynote. The standard output then features the whole timeline as the first slide, and each subsequent slide shows the events in time sequence and close-up. For the diehard presenter, this is again a lovely result.

Exporting to images simply generates the same sequence (whole timeline, then each event in order) into JPEG files at your chosen resolution. These would be suitable for embedding in other presentations, websites, etc.

The final export option is as WebGL, which generates a folder with all the images and JavaScript necessary to produce a beautiful interactive animated website, which works just as the app does. The only snag with this is that it is inevitably browser-dependent. I could not get mine to work with the current version of Safari, for example, as it decided to block the script displaying the images. However it worked a treat in Firefox. Such are the vagaries of the web.

Verdict

There is a great deal to like about Timeline 3D, if you like the way that it presents its timelines. If you use timelines anywhere, I recommend that you install it, try it out, and see whether you get on well with it. If you like its approach, you can then purchase export options to make it truly productive.

The second app which I have used to create timelines with is Aeon Timeline, at £29.99 one of the Mac App Store’s middleweights. Whereas Timeline 3D exports similarly laid-out timelines in a rich range of formats, Aeon Timeline has a huge range of features and controls to vary structure and layout, but a more limited range of export formats.

For a start, it is not just concerned with events (and event periods). It also has entities – typically people in a narrative, for example – and arcs, which are groups of events and entities. It thus copes with very complex timelines by allowing you to structure them, and has tools such as filters which help further.

It also does simple jobs, such as my timeline of paintings of trees, very well. Starting at that basic level, you just click the Add New Event tool at the top left of its window, and fill in the blanks for your first event. This new event editor does not give access to all the data for an event, but gets it on the timeline ready for completion using the Inspector.

Adding an image, or any other external link, is performed neatly using the tools provided in the Inspector’s External Links section. Because adding images to the document would quickly blow it up in size, Aeon Timeline makes a smart link to the original image file. You will also need to adjust the size of the images displayed on the timeline, using the Settings tool; by default they are tiny thumbnails, but can be grown to almost any size you might wish.

Double-clicking an image in a timeline event enlarges it using QuickLook, and you can click the button to open the image to full size in Preview if you wish.

Period events are shown as proper time bars, occupying the duration determined by the start and end times. However for some odd reason there appears to be no way to get them to extend a vertical line to the time axis at the top, marking their end. I did try to see if this could be performed better using entities, or in arcs, but it does not.

The settings tool offers a wide range of document settings, including date formats, display widgets, fonts, and more. However it does not appear capable of revealing the note text attached to events, which is only shown in the Inspector. This seems a curious omission, which means that the only text displayed is that of the date and the event label.

You can set all sorts of calendars and delimiters to determine the window of time which is shown on the timeline. Although it takes a little getting used to, the neatest way to do this is using the tool at the foot of the window: drag the right edge of the magnifier to alter the period shown in the timeline view above, and drag over it to move through time. At first this felt clumsy, but I quickly got the hang of it, and it is really ingenious and neat: an excellent piece of interface design.

Once you have tweaked your timeline to look right, you need to choose the best export format, and this is where Aeon Timeline cannot compete with Timeline 3D. It supports a range of image formats, PDF for viewing or printing, HTML tables rather than any graphical rendering, OPML and RTF, and some data interchange formats covering Timeline 3D (Bee Docs) and Simile (an open source Javascript timeline library). With no animation, there is no need for movie format export, and there is no more sophisticated web format.

That said, image and PDF output are exactly what you would expect, and would cater well for display wherever you want to use a timeline: they are just not interactive in any way.

This is just scratching the surface of a very powerful tool which is as useful for analysis (for example of literary works) as it is for creating display timelines.

Opinion

If you are looking for animation and clever tricks, Aeon might look relatively dull. But it is very sophisticated and capable, creating a very wide range of timeline types, with rich display and layout options. It is essential for anyone working seriously with timelines and chronologies.

When I covered Hogarth’s narrative series here and here, I mentioned two which were not painted, but which went straight to prints. Since then I have been able to obtain images of the original drawings which he did for those two series, and thought that it would be worth looking at those in more detail, both from the point of view of their narrative, and to see inside his print making process.

This article covers the first half of the longer and earlier series, Industry and Idleness (1847). The next concludes that series, and the final one covers The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751), his penultimate narrative series.

Industry and Idleness (1847)

For all his previous series, Hogarth had made paintings from which engravings were then made. Although it is sometimes stated that this series was created “solely” as engravings, the engravings were of course made from Hogarth’s drawings, and most of the latter remain, in the British Museum. Its set was owned by Horace Walpole (1717-1797), son of the first Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole. They were acquired by the Museum in 1896.

It has been suggested that Hogarth was inspired for the series by the play Eastward Hoe! by Marston, Chapman and Jonson, which was reprinted prior to his starting the drawings in 1747. The prints sold very well indeed, and spawned a pantomime, another play, and abundant literary comment at the time.

The story runs:
Two apprentices (‘prentices in Hogarth’s usage), named Francis Goodchild (the industrious ‘prentice) and Thomas Idle (the idle ‘prentice), start on equal terms, apprenticed to their Master, a Mr West. They behave true to form, with Goodchild diligently working and attending church, and Idle being idle whenever he could, gambling and cheating out in the churchyard rather than going to church. Goodchild is rewarded by promotion at work, gaining more of his Master’s trust; Idle, though, ends up going to sea and abandoning his apprenticeship. Goodchild then marries his Master’s daughter, in contrast with Idle, who returns from sea to lodge in a garret with a common prostitute.

Goodchild just continues to rise, growing rich from the family business, and becomes Sheriff of London. Idle, though, has progressed from highway robbery to murder, but is betrayed by his prostitute partner. The former apprentices meet again, when Idle is brought before Goodchild following his arrest, for committal to prison while awaiting trial. Idle is found guilty and hanged at Tyburn. Goodchild is made Lord Mayor of London in return for his hard-working and virtuous life.

The prints

In the first print, Hogarth shows the two apprentices together at their work, their Master at the far right. Goodchild, to the right of centre, is labouring away at a hand loom, which has not yet incorporated the fly shuttle invented by Kay in 1733. By his feet is an open book, with the title The Prentice’s Guide.

Idle is at the left, his eyes closed in sleep. His loom is locked off, and his clay pipe wedged into the loom handle. A cat plays with the idle shuttle, and a beer mug is balanced on its frame. His copy of The Prentice’s Guide is torn and tattered, and above his head is a ballad sheet titled Moll Flanders. Symbolic items decorate the frame: a mace of high office (for Goodchild), and the hangman’s noose (Idle).

The prints now trace their separate ways, first with Goodchild’s pious and upright lifestyle, in church (probably St Martin’s-in-the-Fields) on a Sunday. He stands in a pew, sharing a hymnal with the Master’s daughter. By Goodchild is a large and buxom woman, possibly the Master’s wife, keeping a close eye on the couple. At the left is a caretaker and pew-opener with her bunch of church keys. The preacher is in the distant pulpit, under which are a clerk and a reader.

While Goodchild is inside attending the service, Idle is seen gambling on a tombstone, in the company of three other aspiring minor villains. The church shown here is probably St Michael’s in Crooked Lane, or St Paul’s in Shadwell. In the foreground is an open grave which is planked over, with skulls and other remains behind. At the rear left is an irate churchwarden, with his cane raised, who has come to break up the group and move them on.

Back at work, Goodchild has been promoted from the loom, and now assists the Master in book-keeping and overseeing the factory, shown by the backs of women spinning and weaving in the background. Mr West, the Master, is shown in Quaker dress. He and Goodchild are stood in front of the escritoire which contains the factory ledgers. The pair of gloves in front of them are locked in a handshake symbolising the growing bond between the two men.

At the left is a porter from the City of London (whose arms he bears on a shield on his chest), carrying three rolls of cloth. Between the porter and the others a cat arches its back in response to a dog. Attached to the lower side of the escritoire is the London Almanack calendar.

Idle has abandoned his apprenticeship, tossing his indenture papers into the waves at the far left, and goes to sea. Hogarth shows him being rowed out to join his ship at Cuckold’s Point on the River Thames, opposite what were then the West Indian docks, between Limehouse and Greenwich. With Idle in the boat is his mother, who appears to be protesting his departure.

His colleagues in the boat are sailors, who are teasing him with a cat o’ nine tails whip, and pointing out a body hanging on distant gallows, as a portent of Idle’s future. On the shore in the distance, there are also four windmills, which were common in the area at that time.

Meanwhile Goodchild has successfully completed his apprenticeship, making him a journeyman weaver, and has joined his Master in partnership, their business sign hanging at the top of the print. The previous day, the Master’s daughter married Goodchild, and they are seen here handing out the remains of their wedding banquet to the poor.

Goodchild himself is handing out money through the open window, to the leader of a drum band, his wife being behind him inside. A footman at the door drops food from a plate into the apron of a poor woman, and at the left a legless ex-soldier in a tub holds out a songsheet headed “Jesse or the Happy Pair. A New Song”. The London Monument is seen in the background.

The drawings

I have been able to find preparatory drawings for all the prints in the series, apart from the twelfth and last. In most cases, there is an early rough sketch and a late or even final drawing from which the plate was made. In the series below, I add a final version which is the print mirrored, as if it were the plate. I provide those because the prints shown above are mirrored from the drawings, an artefact of the printing process; showing a mirrored print makes it easier to compare the drawings with the final printed version.

As would be expected, the sequence for each print adds increasing amounts of detail. Differences shown between the ‘finished’ drawing and the print indicate that Hogarth made the engravings himself, or was intimately involved in their engraving. He did not, though, select the Biblical quotations which were added: he trusted those to a friend, the Reverend Arnold King.

References

Wikipedia on Industry and Idleness
A short MA dissertation here.

Hallett M (2000) Hogarth, Art & Ideas, Phaidon Press. ISBN 978 0 7148 3818 2.
Ayrton M & Denvir B (1948) Hogarth’s Drawings, London Life in the 18th Century, Avalon Press. No ISBN. [This has been my source for images of many of the scans above. The book bears no information about copyright, the press has long since vanished as far as I can tell, and I assume ‘fair use’ of these orphaned images. If you know any different, please contact me.]

My previous article looked at the first half of Hogarth’s narrative series of prints, Industry and Idleness (1847); this looks at the remaining prints in the series, using the same format.

The prints

Idle has returned from his time at sea, and is now living in appalling conditions in a garret in London, with a woman who is working as a prostitute. The couple are shown in bed in utter squalor: the room is unfurnished apart from a broken double bed, and walls and ceiling in disrepair, there is no fire in the hearth, and floorboards have been ripped up to help prevent anyone from forcing the door open. There is no light either, and the woman’s hooped petticoat has been draped over a small window for seclusion and secrecy.

The room is strewn with stolen goods, and there is a pair of pistols, suggesting that Idle is now a highwayman or footpad, who holds up and robs travellers. A couple of hunter watches are laid out on the sheet by the woman, and she is studying an earring which has the appearance of the gallows. Idle is agitated by a cat which is just falling down the chimney, bringing with it three loose bricks.

The contrast with Goodchild’s situation could hardly be greater. Goodchild and his wife sit presiding over a great banquet held in Fishmongers’ Hall, London: they occupy the almost regal seats at the far side of the hall, under the large portrait of William III. The guests nearest the viewer are shown over-indulging in their food, several of them already very obese.

A beadle stands at the right, controlling a crowd of onlookers and checking invitation tickets. The statue is of Walworth, who killed Wat Tyler, the leader of the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt. A group of musicians is perched on a gallery at the top left, to entertain the diners, and several waiting staff attend to those at the tables.

Idle and his accomplice are shown dividing the spoils from their latest crime, while another pushes the dead body of the victim through a trap-door into the cellar. Set in the main bar of a dive traditionally known as Blood Bowl House, there is a roaring fire in the grate, and in the background a fight is in progress, with chairs being thrown.

Immediately behind Idle, his woman is pointing him out to the officers of the law, who are arriving from the left. In return for this, she is given a single coin. Idle’s arrest is imminent, and he will be caught red-handed.

Hogarth brings the two former apprentices back together for a final reckoning. Goodchild, by virtue of his office, sits as a magistrate; he is shown in the centre right, shielding his eyes from the sight of Idle, who is pleading with him, his hands clasped in prayer. To the right of Idle, his accomplice in crime is seen taking the oath, about to turn King’s evidence, and provide the information needed to convict Idle. Behind them another person holds up the sword and pistols used in his crimes.

Hogarth is also able to incorporate some touches of satire: the court official who is administering the oath has tucked his quill pen in his wig, to make himself look ridiculous. His right hand is held out behind him to receive some money, being paid by the well-dressed woman at the left edge of the print; it is not clear who she is, but the bribe is being given so that the official does not notice that Idle’s accomplice is swearing his oath with the wrong hand on the Bible, therefore invalidating it.

At the far right, completing the peripeteia, Goodchild’s clerk is seen writing out the warrant for Idle to be confined to Newgate jail.

Idle, having been found guilty of murder, has been sentenced to death, and is here shown being taken by cart to the gallows at Tyburn, which are prominent above the crowd in the right middle distance. The hangman is shown below the gallows, adjusting the length of the noose to ensure a swift death. Someone is nonchalantly perched on top of the gallows, smoking a pipe.

Idle is in the back of the cart just to the left of centre, reading, presumably from a prayerbook, accompanied by a Wesleyan minister who appears to be exhorting his repentance, and is stood with his back to his empty coffin. Soldiers follow that cart, and a dense crowd has already gathered to witness the hanging. All manner of minor events is taking place among the crowd, which resembles that of one of Frith’s much later panoramas, such as Derby Day.

From the window of a coach in the centre, the Ordinary of Newgate is addressing the crowd, in accordance with the will of Robert Dow, a merchant who left money to ensure that spiritual exhortations were provided for those about to die on the gallows. The fields in the distance are those of Notting Hill, long since built over.

Goodchild’s fate is far more glorious: he is chosen to be Lord Mayor of the City of London, and here is riding ceremonially in the official carriage, among the crowds thronging the streets of the city. He is inside the carriage, brandishing the sword of office and wearing an outsized white top hat. Among the crowd are members of a local militia, one of whom accidentally discharges his gun. At the far right a boy is selling an account of Idle’s execution, which places him in the Newgate Calendar, his mark of posterity.

The drawings

Here I show the remaining preparatory drawings for those prints, together with a mirrored version of the print. Plate 8 is an exception: the print shows no reversal from the original drawing. That may be the result of an error which resulted in the reversal of the drawing for that plate, or it may have been engraved directly in mirror version. There are no preparatory drawings available for the final print, number 12 in the series.

Hogarth also made drawings for at least two in the series which did not progress as far as engraving.

This shows Goodchild, seated, giving money to his father and mother, as a good son was expected to when he had become wealthy. Two other figures are shown: one lowering a bundle of goods from the balcony above, the other weighing goods on a large balance to the left. This might have replaced either plate 8 or 10 in the series, but was clearly abandoned at this stage.

Here Idle is seen kneeling at the door of his mother’s shop, she kissing him, while he passes a stolen tankard to an accomplice behind him. The letters on the tankard apparently spell out Fowler Cook-Shop, Fowler being Hogarth’s original working name for Idle. Above the door, the words Roast and Boil indicate that Idle’s mother runs a cook-shop, an early form of eating house with a very poor reputation. Various dishes are shown on the prominent shelf. Below them a person emerges from the basement, with a bird perched on their right hand, and another bird in a hanging cage.

Conclusions

From a commercial view, going straight from drawings to prints without the intermediate step of paintings was highly successful. It enabled Hogarth to produce this large series within a year, rather than the two or three years which might have been required for a similar series worked through oil paintings.

The end result is not as rich in detailed cues, clues, and symbols as his earlier series, though. He has, for example, made no use of his paintings within a painting, something characteristic of his earlier series. However those subtleties did not transfer well into black-and-white prints.

Hogarth also made it clear that he wanted this series to have wide appeal, which required the images to be easily read. Although that might have been in pursuit of greater sales, I think that he did feel a genuine need to disseminate his moralistic message as widely as possible.

References

Wikipedia on Industry and Idleness
A short MA dissertation here.

Hallett M (2000) Hogarth, Art & Ideas, Phaidon Press. ISBN 978 0 7148 3818 2.
Ayrton M & Denvir B (1948) Hogarth’s Drawings, London Life in the 18th Century, Avalon Press. No ISBN. [This has been my source for images of many of the scans above. The book bears no information about copyright, the press has long since vanished as far as I can tell, and I assume ‘fair use’ of these orphaned images. If you know any different, please contact me.]

Following his successful narrative series of prints Industry and Idleness, William Hogarth (1697-1764) decided to moralise again over one of his favourite issues: cruelty to animals. Victorian society was even harsher in its attitudes towards animals than it was towards the ‘lower classes’ of humans, and Hogarth saw the two as being linked.

The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751)

As with Industry and Idleness, Hogarth wanted to reach the hearts of the ordinary people, and to make his prints as affordable as possible. He admitted to simplifying his drawings in order to put his points across as clearly and accessibly as possible. He stated that “neither minute accuracy of design, nor fine engraving, were deemed necessary”.

In a further effort to cut costs, he commissioned them to be turned into woodcuts rather than engraved, but in the end only two of the plates were completed in wood, and Hogarth himself created conventional engravings. The great majority of prints in existence were made from Hogarth’s engravings, with woodcuts being much less common.

The prints

The simple narrative runs thus:
Tom Nero, a boy living in the slums of St Giles in London, is one of many children who get entertainment from torturing animals. When he grows up and becomes a Hackney coachman, he beats and harms his horse too. He progresses to become a thief, and brutally murders his pregnant lover. He is arrested, tried, and found guilty of her murder. After his death by hanging, his body is handed over for dissection, and it too is mutilated.

The First Stage of Cruelty: Children Torturing Animals (1751)

The schoolboy Tom Nero is seen, together with many of his peers, in a street in the slum district of St Giles in London. He is shown in a ragged white coat just below the centre of the image, inserting an arrow into a dog which is plainly in agony. The dog’s owner pleads for mercy, offering Tom a pie, but others help hold the dog for Tom. Just to his left, someone has drawn a hanged man with Tom’s name below, a grim prediction of what is to come.

All around there are vicious acts of cruelty taking place to animals. A cat and dog are fighting, cockfighting is in progress, another dog has a bone tied to its tail, two boys are burning a bird’s eyes out, two cats are suspended by their tails from a vintner’s sign, and a cat has been thrown out of a high window with balloons attached to it.

The Second Stage of Cruelty: Coachman Beating a Fallen Horse (1751)

Tom Nero has now grown up, and is the coachman of a Hackney carriage, shown here in front of Thavies Inn, with the famous Thavies Inn Gate in the background. Tom’s horse, clearly already old, underfed, and ill-treated, has collapsed at the lower left, and broken its right foreleg. Tom is beating it with a club, and has already blinded its left eye with his blows.

Inside Tom’s carriage are four large barristers, who struggle to get out. Also in the foreground, a drover is beating a sheep to death, a small boy is being run over by a brewer’s dray while the drayman sleeps, an overloaded ass is driven on, and an enraged bull has just tossed one of its tormentors.

Posters by the door to Thavies Inn advertise a cockfight, and a boxing match between James Field (who was hanged a couple of weeks before the first prints were issued) and George ‘The Barber’ Taylor, a previous English champion.

The Third Stage of Cruelty: Cruelty in Perfection – The Murder (1751)

It is now the dead of night, 0105 by the church clock, some time later, in a graveyard. Tom Nero has been apprehended by local people at the dead body of a woman, who turns out to be his pregnant partner. Her throat has been cut to the point of almost severing her neck, and she also has deep cuts at the left wrist and on the left index finger. That finger points to an open book which read “God’s Revenge against Murder”, and next to that is the book of Common Prayer. By her body is a box of her valuables, bearing her initials “A G” for Ann Gill, and a bag containing stolen goods.

On the ground around Tom is a pistol, a couple of presumably stolen pocket watches, and one of the group of men restraining him holds a letter from the dead woman reading:
Dear Tommy
My mistress has been the best of women to me, and my conscience flies in my face as often as I think of wronging her; yet I am resolved to venture body and soul to do as you would have me, so do not fail to meet me as you said you would, for I will bring along with me all the things I can lay my hands on. So no more at present; but I remain yours till death.
Ann Gill.

Next to that letter is its open envelope, addressed to Tom Nero.

The Fourth Stage of Cruelty: The Reward of Cruelty (1751)

Tom has been tried, convicted, and hanged, and his body handed over for dissection, as shown here. This was not, in 1751, routine: the following year the Murder Act made it standard that the bodies of murderers would be handed over for dissection, and would not be buried, as a further penalty for the crime.

The noose remains around his neck, and the mutilation which his body is subjected to reflects the cruelties previously inflicted on animals: his eye is removed, his intestines coiled out into a pail, a dog is about to make off with his heart (which is shown in popular rather than anatomical form), and incisions are being made in the chest and left foot. In the left foreground, previous skulls and bones are being boiled to prepare them for anatomical specimens.

The room is the round anatomical demonstration theatre of the Surgeon’s Hall. Presiding over the scene is John Freke, then President of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, who had been an admirer of Hogarth’s work until the pair quarrelled over Handel’s music.

The skeleton on the left is that of James Field, the boxer whose bout was advertised in the second image, and who was hanged just before the first prints were issued. That on the right is of Macleane, a notorious highwayman who was hanged in the previous year. One of the audience is pointing at Field’s skeleton (and looking at the viewer), and the two skeletons are pointing at one another. It is not clear why this is so, and may be a touch of dry humour.

The drawings

The complete set of final drawings, made in red chalk (with pencil, I suspect), is in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. I have been able to locate one early sketch, for the first plate, which gives an idea of Hogarth’s development of the prints. Some differences have been noted between prints made from the engravings, and those from the woodcuts, but I have not been able to locate any images of the latter to show them. As with the previous series, in this section I show the prints mirrored, to enable direct comparison with their drawings.

For this series, Hogarth invited another friend, the Reverend James Townley, to provide the moralising verses which are shown on each of the final prints.

Conclusions

This series was another commercial success, and Hogarth considered that it had some effect in reducing the prevalence and severity of animal cruelty.

As with Industry and Idleness, it lacks the richness of visual cues, clues, and symbols of his earlier series of paintings which were turned into prints; it is interesting that Hogarth returned to that slower and more laborious process for his final narrative series in The Humours of an Election in 1755 (a series which some commentators appear to have overlooked). However, the claim that Hogarth’s drawings for this series were crude or over-simplified does not appear to be borne out: they remain fine works of art, by the master of the narrative series.

References

Wikipedia on The Four Stages of Cruelty

Hallett M (2000) Hogarth, Art & Ideas, Phaidon Press. ISBN 978 0 7148 3818 2.
Ayrton M & Denvir B (1948) Hogarth’s Drawings, London Life in the 18th Century, Avalon Press. No ISBN. [This has been my source for images of many of the scans above. The book bears no information about copyright, the press has long since vanished as far as I can tell, and I assume ‘fair use’ of these orphaned images. If you know any different, please contact me.]

Storyspace and Tinderbox are sister applications with quite distinct purposes. Tinderbox is the most sophisticated notemaking app around, which helps you structure the information which you put into it, then export content as HTML, to Scrivener, etc. Storyspace is the most advanced environment for developing and accessing true hypertext – not just with HTML’s simple links, but with guard rules, scripts, and a lot more.

Both now provide strong support for timelines, and this article focusses on using them purely to create a timeline comparable to that generated by Aeon Timeline. The instructions below can be followed in either app, although I use the terms for Storyspace, such as writing spaces rather than notes. You can download a demo version of Storyspace 3 for OS X El Capitan from here if you want to try this for yourself. I also provide the document file at the end.

Start Storyspace and it will make you an Untitled and empty document.

Double-click in the left hand pane of the default Map view to create a new writing space (= note). This will be our prototype for paintings. Name it painting, and make two key attributes using the + button to the right of the name in the right-hand view. In the window that pops up, in the left list select Events, and in the right StartDate and EndDate.

Click on the main window to close that popup window, and you will see those two attributes exposed in the right-hand view. Then give it a Badge by clicking on the icon in the upper right of the writing space in the left-hand pane of the Map view. This will produce a popup window containing available badges: select a paintbrush or similar.

Turn painting into a prototype. Open the Properties Inspector using the Inspector command in the Window menu. In that select the properties tool by clicking on the icon with the figure 4 in it. In the Prototype tab, tick the Prototype box.

Finally, add the artist’s name to appear as the subtitle for a painting. Click the cogwheel icon at the right of the Inspector, and in the Visit tab, enter the following script
$Subtitle=$Name(parent)
This simply obtains the Name attribute (title) of the container writing space, and sets the painting’s Subtitle to be the same.

Then make a similar prototype for artist. Double-click in the Map view to create it, give it the name artist, make StartDate and EndDate key attributes, give it an appropriate Badge, turn it into a prototype, but do not add the Visit script, of course.

Now make your first artist writing space, for Peter Paul Rubens. Double-click in the left-hand pane of the Map view to make a new writing space, and name it Peter Paul Rubens. At the lower right of the tile there is a tab visible: click on it and a menu will pop up offering the artist prototype, which you should set it to. Click on the Edit tab in the right-hand pane to edit this writing space. Set the StartDate to his year of birth, e.g. 01/01/1577, and the end date to the year of his death, e.g. 30/12/1640 (using your normal localised date format). Copy and paste any relevant text into the text area there that you might wish.

Now create a writing space for one of Rubens’ paintings. Double-click in the Map view for a new writing space, give it the name of the painting, and switch it to use the painting prototype. Set its start date to the date attributed to the painting; if a range of dates is given, as here, give those as the StartDate and EndDate. Then drag and drop a small image of the painting (perhaps no larger than 512 x 512 pixels) into the text area, and add details about that painting.

Note that at this stage no subtitle is shown for the painting, because it is not yet inside a container. Once happy with the painting, drag and drop it (in the left-hand side of the Map view) onto the Peter Paul Rubens tile, making the latter its container.

With the Peter Paul Rubens container selected, you will see the painting inside, and the details for Rubens in the Outline view.

Double-click the top of the container to look inside it, and you will see the painting, complete with the subtitle of the artist’s name now. You can navigate back up to the top level of the document by clicking on the left item in the ‘breadcrumb bar’ above the left-hand pane of the Map view.

You then need to populate your document with artists and paintings, one at a time. This is a quick and simple process once you get into it. When you are ready to view the results using the Timeline view, use the View menu to show the toolbar, and switch the left hand pane to a Timeline view. You can close the Outline view, and adjust the remaining Timeline view so that it displays the complete date range. Navigate by selecting paintings or artists directly, or using the left and right cursor keys.

Here is my complete document, compressed using Zip, which can be opened in either Storyspace 3 or Tinderbox 6 if you prefer: TimelineDemo110316

Although neither Storyspace nor Tinderbox seem able to display thumbnails of images directly on the timeline, at present, the end result is excellent. Storyspace is geared mainly to creating hypertext to be read using its own reader (which is coming soon); Tinderbox has more sophisticated export options, and can be customised to meet most needs.

If all you want is a simple app to generate images of a timeline, then these are clearly overkill. However if you will be able to use their rich authoring environments, sophisticated links and scripts, they are unique products. My index of tutorials and other articles about Storyspace is here.

William Etty (1787–1849) was a very popular narrative painter of the early Victorian era in Britain, and a contemporary of JMW Turner. Unlike Turner, whose reputation and popularity has only grown since his death, Etty’s work soon fell from favour, and has only been re-examined properly in this century.

Trained at the Royal Academy Schools in London from 1807, nearly twenty years after Turner started there, he was praised, but achieved little external recognition until 1821. By 1828 he had ascended sufficient steps on the ladder of recognition to be elected to the Royal Academy, and from then until his death in 1849 was very popular. Throughout his career, he continued to attend life classes, and almost invariably incorporated at least one female or male nude figure in his narrative work. He also painted many separate nude figures.

Etty was an extremely skilled copyist; in his early career he painted several superb copies of Old Masters, including the best in existence of Titian’s Venus of Urbino.

He never married, but lived with his niece, Betsy, and it is generally accepted that the quality of his work deteriorated during the 1840s.

Pandora Crowned by the Seasons (1824)

In Classical Greek mythology, Pandora was the first woman created by the gods. She is best known for opening a jar (Pandora’s Box) which released all the evils on humanity, leaving only Hope inside the jar. Etty’s painting shows Pandora in the centre, after she had been animated by the gods, being crowned by the Seasons. This is prior to the opening of her jar of evils, which is a curious stage in the story for depiction.

This painting also gave rise to a lot of critical ambivalence, being seen as both academic but mischievous, and openly voluptuous.

Hero and Leander (1827-29)

Etty painted two main works telling the story of Hero and Leander.

Another classical legend, this tells of the hapless romance of Leander (a man) and Hero (a woman). She was a priestess of Aphrodite, living in a temple at Sestos on the European side of the Hellespont (now the Dardanelles in Turkey). He lived in Abydos on the opposite side of the strait, now in Asia Minor. Leander fell in love with Hero, and each night through the summer and autumn swam across the dangerous waters to be with her, consummating their relationship. To guide him across, Hero lit a torch at the top of her tower.

One night, a storm blew up, and extinguished the light as Leander was swimming across the rough waters. Leander lost his way, and was drowned in front of Hero. Seeing his corpse, she threw herself from the tower, to die and rejoin him.

Etty’s earlier painting of The Parting of Hero and Leander (1827) shows the two lovers embraced, at the moment that Leander is about to start his swim back over the Hellespont to Abydos, at night.

Its sequel, Hero, Having Thrown herself from the Tower at the Sight of Leander Drowned, Dies on his Body (1829), leaps forward to the moment after the climax, and the peripeteia of the story, at its ending: Leander has already drowned, Hero already thrown herself from the tower, and is now in the (rather unconvincing) throes of death, and just about to join her lover in the afterlife.

Despite Etty’s peculiar choice of images from the story, the second painting in particular was universally praised for its poignancy and avoidance of the macabre.

You can see Turner’s version here; that appears to be considerably more successful in terms of depiction of the narrative, but a dismal failure in terms of area of naked flesh displayed.

Study for Judith and Holofernes (c 1827)

This is a study for the central painting in Etty’s triptych telling this story, which is currently in need of rescue from the damage caused by his use of bitumen.

The apocryphal Book of Judith tells of how Judith, a beautiful Israelite widow, saved her people when they were threatened by the Assyrians. She dressed in her finest and perfumed herself lavishly, and went with her maidservant to the Assyrians, promising that she would show them a way to defeat the Israelites. She was taken to Holofernes, Nebuchadnezzar’s general, and stayed with him for three nights, winning his confidence. On the fourth night, he threw a banquet for her, where Holofernes drank so much wine that he fell into a drunken stupor.

With her maid standing guard outside Holofernes’ tent, Judith took his battle sword, and cut his head off:
Approaching to his bed, she took hold of the hair of his head, and said, “Strengthen me, O Lord God of Israel, this day!” And she smote twice upon his neck with all her might, and she took away his head from him. (Judith, 13:7-8.)

Judith then gave Holofernes’ head to her maid, who put it in her bag of meat. The pair them left the camp, and returned to the Israelites. Showing the head to them, there was great celebration that she had killed Holofernes, and the Assyrians fled in fear.

I have already shown some of the best of the classical depictions of this story here. In contrast to those, Etty dodges the gore and horror of the climax of the story, and opts to show Judith just before she starts to hack Holofernes’ head off: she has taken hold of the hair of his head, and raising his battle sword to the heavens, is calling on the Lord God of Israel to strengthen her.

Benaiah (1829)

The story of Benaiah is one of the less familiar narratives from the Old Testament, in the second book of Samuel. Benaiah was the leader of David’s army, who fought and killed ‘two lion-like men of Moab’, as Etty shows here. At the left rests the body of the first, face-down, and at the right the second is just about to die from a blow by Benaiah’s dagger.

Etty has shown the story at the climax of the action, although he is careful to avoid any distressful gore: even Benaiah’s dagger is barely tainted by the blood of the first victim. The body language is particularly striking, though, and the near-nude poses of the two living men impressive portrayals of musculature in tension. The critics unfortunately were quick to find fault with the proportions of Benaiah’s body (the legs in particular), which perhaps says more about the critics than it does about Etty’s painting.

Candaules, King of Lydia, Shews his Wife by Stealth to Gyges, One of his Ministers, as She Goes to Bed (1830)

This is a strange story which has been painted by several artists over the centuries, and usually raises controversy.

According to Herodotus, King Candaules of Lydia was proud of his wife Nyssia’s great beauty. To prove this to his bodyguard/general Gyges, Candaules invites Gyges to watch Nyssia undress for bed. She notices Gyges’ spying on her, and challenges him to either kill himself, or to kill the king and assume the throne himself. Gyges chooses the latter, of course.

Etty, in common with Jacob Jordaens and Eglon van der Neer (neither of whose paintings he would have seen), and Jean-Léon Gérôme much later, chose to show the moment that Nyssia removed the last item of her clothing which is prior to the climax or moment of peripeteia. There was a predictable reaction to this, with claims that Etty’s painting was lascivious. Etty, however, made the case that he was attacking the contemporary view of a wife as a man’s chattel. That may have explained the subject, but hardly the moment which he chose to show in his painting.

Youth on the Prow, and Pleasure at the Helm (1830-2)

Etty started work on this painting as early as 1818, and made an initial attempt at it in 1822. This is the version which he completed and exhibited in 1832, and is now in Tate Britain.

This is apparently inspired by a metaphor in Thomas Gray’s poem The Bard (1757). This compares the initially bright start to King Richard the Second’s reign, which rapidly became notoriously bad, to a gilded ship whose occupants were blissfully unaware of an approaching storm. He said that he intended this to be a moral warning about the pursuit of pleasure, and in doing so populates his ship with cavorting nudes. He does, though, show the approaching storm in the background.

Etty accompanied the painting with the following lines from The Bard:
Fair laughs the Morn, and soft the Zephyr blows,
While proudly riding o’er the azure realm,
In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes,
Youth on the prow and Pleasure at the Helm;
Regardless of the sweeping whirlwind’s sway
That, hushed in grim repose, expects its evening prey

The critics of the day struggled to understand Etty’s point, with some claiming that he had misinterpreted the poem, which was actually about King Edward the First’s slaughter of the country’s bards. Others simply accused him of having a lascivious mind.

Venus and her Satellites (replica) (1835)

This is another puzzling story to depict in a painting of that time: it shows Venus being assisted in her dressing and ‘toilet’ the morning after a night of passionate lovemaking with Mars. He is seen, back to the viewer, at the left, still sleeping it off, his suit of armour hanging by his head and his sword left on the ground. Venus, herself almost naked and post-coital, is surrounded by six nearly-naked maidens, who are being distracted by her beauty.

Even more strangely, his critics did not mention the event which Etty has shown, only complained once again at the amount of naked female flesh on display. Perhaps that was the more acceptable reason to put into print.

Musidora: The Bather ‘At the Doubtful Breeze Alarmed’ (replica) (c 1846)

This painting of a nude woman bathing in a stream is a popular motif, which Etty related to James Thomson’s poem Summer (1727). In this, Musidora slips into the cool of the stream. She in unaware that a man, Damon, is hidden in the bushes and watching her. Damon is torn between the desire to stay and delight in her nakedness, or to retreat out of respectful modesty. Etty accompanied the painting with the following lines from that poem:
How durst thou risk the soul-distracting view
As from her naked limbs of glowing white,
Harmonious swelled by nature’s finest hand,
In folds loose-floating fell the fainter lawn,
And fair exposed she stood, shrunk from herself,
With fancy blushing, at the doubtful breeze
Alarmed, and starting like the fearful fawn?
Then to the flood she rushed.

Although this motif (and its many variants) is usually considered to be a sly opportunity of showing a female nude when public opinion might find that objectionable, Etty may have been a bit more subtle in his approach here. He does not show Damon, but perhaps puts the viewer into his place, facing the same quandary. Thankfully his critics must have seen the quandary in which he had put them, and were very positive towards it.

Delilah before the Blinded Samson (date not known)

I have been unable to locate a date for this last painting by Etty. It shows the very familiar story of Samson and Delilah, from the Book of Judges. Samson was an Israelite with phenomenal strength, who was giving the Philistines a hard time. They approached Delilah and paid her to act as a temptress, to discover the reason for his strength, and attack it to weaken him. Delilah found out that cutting Samson’s hair would render him weak, so did that. Now that they could overpower him, the Philistines took him, blinded him, and fettered him in prison.

Etty again makes an unusual choice in the moment that he depicts: Delilah, dressed in regal but excessive clothing with her hair wrapped in pearls and jewels, has come to visit the blind Samson in prison where he is in chains. He sets this outdoors, rather than in a prison cell. Delilah appears to be trying to make her peace with him, but Samson struggles against his chains and is not to be tempted by her again.

Apart from his portraits, this is one of Etty’s least flesh-rich paintings, with only the body of Samson shown in relatively modest undress. This may have been Etty’s moral message, that once betrayed, you should recognise temptation when it revisits. However I have been unable to find any good commentary which reveals more information about this painting.

Conclusions

Technically, Etty was a very accomplished painter, but most of his narratives show moments which are neither of climax, nor peripeteia. As a result they do not have the power of more masterly narrative paintings. Several of them do seem to have been carefully calculated to be as provocative as possible without crossing the line of what was then considered indecent. Perhaps he was so innocent and enthralled by nude human figures, but I cannot help but think that he was more interested in pushing the bounds.

References

Wikipedia on Etty
Wikipedia on Candaules
Wikipedia on Youth
Wikipedia on Musidora

Three important paintings by Etty which I have been unable to show for copyright reasons are:
The World Before the Flood
The Destroying Angel and Daemons of Evil
The Sirens and Ulysses

Burnage S et al (eds) (2011) William Etty, Art & Controversy, York Museums Trust and Philip Wilson. ISBN 978 0 85667 701 4.
Farr D (1958) William Etty, Routledge & Kegan Paul. No ISBN. The most recent list of his works, with mainly monochrome images of them.

I have illustrated how you can use:

• Timeline 3D to create wizzy animated timelines of one basic pattern,
• Aeon Timeline to create a diverse range of static timelines,
• Storyspace and Tinderbox to create sophisticated interactive timelines within collections of notes or hypertext.

Additional techniques which you might like to consider include the following.

TikiToki Desktop – App Store £18.99.

This looks quite versatile, and can include images, video clips, and more. Its major drawback (and the reason that I have not looked at it in more detail) is that it currently does not export into generally accessible formats. To view its timelines in their full glory, you have to use its free reader app.

Bartas Temporis – $24.99

Looks to be a competent basic tool, which can export to PDF, graphics file, or XML. Intended as a companion to Bartas Transcriva, for making transcripts of meetings, etc.

timetoast makes and shares online timelines.

ChronoZoom is an open source environment which enables direct web development, but requires Windows-based development tools and is hosted on Microsoft server products.

Maxicode History Timeline Editor: Chronica and Chronica Plus – App Store £21.99 and £59.99

Look thoroughly capable if expensive, but only export to PDF or image files, and work in text without rich media.

SIMILE Widgets Timeline – a web widget for displaying timelines. Requires JavaScript code and more. Open source and free to use.

timemap – integrates Google and other maps with SIMILE Widgets Timeline. Open source.

Project Management apps, such as Project Planning Pro (App Store £52.99), OmniPlan 3 (App Store £109.99)

Seldom suited to making pure timelines, most incorporate special timeline views. If you want the rest of the project management features, these can be excellent; if you just want to create timelines, they are a waste of money and effort.

General design apps, from Affinity Designer and Scapple, up to Adobe Illustrator CC, can be used. To do this well and efficiently, you will need good user skills with the app. Making even small changes, e.g. to the duration of the whole timeline, can require an inordinate amount of additional work, though.

Spreadsheets, such as Microsoft Excel and Apple’s Numbers. The results are not good, and they are worth avoiding unless you have nothing better.

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) was a Romantic painter noted for his enigmatic landscapes which have provoked much speculation in interpretation. He was born in Greifswald, near the Baltic coast of north-east Germany, when it was still part of Swedish Pomerania, and considered himself to be part-Swedish. However he opted for German nationality and worked for most of his life in the city of Dresden, which is almost as far from the sea as you can get.

Several of Friedrich’s paintings look as if they might contain narrative. For example, his Chalk Cliffs on Rügen (after 1818) seems to show Friedrich and his wife on honeymoon, but there is a third person wearing a tricorn hat whose presence is hard to explain.

Earlier in his career, Friedrich painted several motifs including sailing vessels which are not dissimilar to those shown here. In his Morning (Boats leave) (c 1816–1818), a series of small boats are seen leaving the coast. Although shadows are not shown, this view appears to look north-east, and the vessels are for leisure rather than fishing.

Ships at Anchor (before 1820) shows three larger ships at anchor just off the coast. This view appears to be looking west into the setting full moon, although it is a strange light whatever it was intended to show.

It is generally stated that his The Stages of Life (1834-5) is set at dusk. It shows five figures and assorted fishing equipment at the water’s edge, with five vessels sailing behind them.

Two of the figures are children, who raise a small Swedish flag between them, a reminder of Friedrich’s origins. To their right is a young woman, pointing and looking towards the children. To their left is a mature man, wearing a top hat, who is turned towards an elderly man, the closest to the viewer, his back towards us and a walking stick in his right hand. The younger man is gesticulating, his right hand towards the old man, his left pointing down towards the children.

The vessels seem to mirror the figures. Closest in to the shore are two small fishing boats under full sail, heading towards the nearest of the three ships. Out in the deeper water behind them is a fully-rigged ship in the process of furling its sails. Further in the distance is a larger fully-rigged ship, also furling its sails, and on the horizon is the fifth, large ship, its sails still fully set.

This well-known painting has been interpreted as showing, in both figures and vessels, the ‘five stages of life’. Neither of the children is a baby, and their corresponding vessels are of similar size too. The children and two younger adults appear to form a family group, with the obvious visual reference to Sweden.

It has also been claimed that this painting is set on the beach at Utkiek, on the north-east German coast by Friedrich’s native Greifswald. If that is the case, then it cannot be depicting dusk accurately, as that part of the coastline faces east. If it is at that location, then it is either set at dawn, or Friedrich added the dusk effect contrary to the geography.

It is often stated that there are five ships. There are not: the two vessels closest to the viewer are small boats used for fishing, and for ferrying passengers and cargo between the shore and ships at anchor; they are being navigated away from the shore towards the closest of the three ships. There are three ships, each of which is sailing towards the viewer and the coast.

The five figures on the shore do not have a chest or other luggage with them. Although it is possible that the small boats are already ferrying their luggage out to the nearest ship, it seems most unlikely that Friedrich intended the viewer to interpret the painting as showing the departure of the figures. Furthermore the two children and young woman are not dressed for a sea voyage, although the two men could be.

At the time of this painting, Friedrich himself was sixty years old, his wife was 41, their oldest child Emma was 24, her younger sister Agnes was fifteen, and his son Gustav was ten. It is therefore most probable – as is usually claimed – that the three younger people shown here were his three children, that the top-hatted man standing with them was not Friedrich himself but his nephew Johann, and that Friedrich could instead be the man in the tricorn hat. Friedrich’s wife is conspicuous in her absence.

Most worryingly, it seems that this painting was only dubbed The Stages of Life in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, when there was a revival of interest in Friedrich’s paintings. Yet that posthumous title has coloured every interpretation of it since, inviting viewers to see the painting quite differently from the way that it is.

I do not think that this painting attempts to depict, directly or by allegory, any stages of life, nor its figures departing on any journey of life, as those are inconsistent with the painting itself. It does clearly show some narrative involving Friedrich and his family, but without much deeper insight into their life at the time, or an explanation by Friedrich himself, its story will remain enigmatic.

References

Wikipedia on Friedrich.
Wikipedia on this painting.

Hofmann W (2000) Caspar David Friedrich, Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978 0 500 09295 8.
Piotrovsky MB et al. (2008) Caspar David Friedrich & the German Romantic Landscape, Lund Humphries. ISBN 978 1 84822 017 1.

Not everyone can afford to have a graphic designer create their timelines for them, and sometimes even graphics professionals can benefit from advice. This is a short compilation of suggestions which should improve your timelines, together with some examples of where I think there was room for improvement. I apologise in advance to those whose work I am showing here, but hope that it will help me make my points.

Is a timeline the right chart?

Those familiar with the writing of Edward Tufte will know the first question to be put against every timeline: does the amount of data justify the space occupied by the timeline?

In this case, it may have been simpler, clearer, and more concise to have simply tabulated the years.

If you are going to create a graphical representation of events occurring over time, then a timeline is a well-recognised means of doing so. Don’t go it alone and try to invent something new unless you are certain that it is going to be superior to a well-designed timeline.

The time axis

One of the few essentials of any timeline is a clearly-labelled time axis. It saves you from having to label the events and periods with their times or dates, which greatly reduces the clutter and improves the readability of the chart.

That time axis can be horizontal or vertical. If horizontal, for languages that are written left-to-right, put the earliest time at the left, and the latest at the right. Vertical timelines can run up or down, so long as that direction is kept consistent within a given document or site.

The time axis should space time values regularly. Normally these should be linear (equal distances on the axis for equal periods), but in some circumstances it may be highly desirable to make the axis logarithmic: below, when working in a cosmological timescale.

Unfortunately a lot of timelines skip or squeeze periods which seem uninteresting, resulting in a non-linear time axis.

If there is a cluster of events close to one given time, and a long gap before the next, you may get away with interrupting the axis with a small gap, but that should be exceptional. Never make the spacing irregular, as time is universally agreed as proceeding at a uniform pace.

It is sometimes tempting to combine two timelines proceeding at different rates into one, as if the faster can be ‘zoomed’ into the middle of the slower. You might be able to get away with this using a magnifier in an animation, but when tried in most static timelines it becomes confusing, as shown above. It may be better to put the two timelines above one another, one shown as a magnification of a section of the other.

Label the times sensibly: sufficient labels to be clear, but not so many as to clutter the time axis up with the labels. Where helpful, duplicate the axis ticks and labels on the other side of the timeline, and consider adding vertical or horizontal gridlines spanning the timeline if that will help the viewer.

Where it might be helpful, consider expressing elapsed time in a different way on one of the two sides of the timeline. Here the lower axis gives absolute year, the upper the age of that individual: a very helpful addition when dealing with events for a single person.

Under no circumstances should you ever superimpose two timelines using different bases for their time axes: it will be disastrously confusing.

Events shown

Make it easy for the viewer to be able to work out the time of each event, by tracing that event to the time axis. If you use reasonably small points to mark each event, that should not be hard, but if the events contain images or more, run a line from the correct time of that event to the time axis to make this unambiguous.

Where an event has a duration which would be visible over the scale of the time axis being used, indicate that as a period rather than a single point event. Ensure that the start and finish of the period are correctly aligned against the time axis, using perpendicular lines running to that axis if necessary. If the start or finish are uncertain or vague, indicate that by a section of broken line at the appropriate end of the period. Do not use any marks derived from brackets, such as curly brackets, to indicate period events unless you have very good reason not to use a simple line.

Similarly, intermittent events can be indicated by a section of broken line for the period over which they occurred.

Event trees

Where events branch, such as in tree-structured timelines, be very careful about how you show branching. Some viewers may expect the point of branching to mean something which you do not. Avoid using faired curves which might look pretty but could mislead.

Straight line branching may look less artistic, but in the long run is much better for the viewer.

Do not put arrows into such branching trees (above) unless they have inherent meaning. The existence of a branch and the unidirectional march of time already make it clear what a branch means. However, where some branches may influence others, an arrow indicating the direction of influence is valuable.

Branching can sometimes be avoided by placing nodes along a period event: for example, where a product has gone through a series of versions or revisions, you can indicate the appearance of those versions along a single line, rather than branching it out into a tree. Although complex trees may look impressive, their information density may be quite low, and they are often very difficult to read properly.

Areas and colours

Generally speaking, the more complex the timeline, the less you should be tempted to colour any areas of it in, unless doing so adds information (and value). Viewers are likely to be left in a quandary as to whether the area which is coloured in, or the breadth of the area, have any numerical significance, and if so, how they can compare two areas of similar apparent breadth. If you need to indicate changing continuous variables along a timeline, then perhaps you would be better off with a more general time series chart, than a timeline.

Finally, ensure that your timeline is as readable by someone with impaired colour perception as it would be to someone with normal colour vision. The use of broken lines is likely to be ambiguous in meaning, suggesting that an event was dying out or insignificant. However careful choice of chroma and lightness rather than just hue, can go a long way to help those with the more common forms of impaired colour perception, particularly red-green colour blindness.

If you can think of other rules of thumb or tips for good design, please add them here as comments, or mail me.

Reference

Rosenberg D & Grafton A (2010) Cartographies of Time, A History of the Timeline, Princeton Architectural Press. ISBN 978 1 61689 058 2.

Théodore Géricault (1791–1824) would almost certainly have slipped into obscurity were it not for one vast narrative painting: The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19). Telling the horrific and scandal-ridden story of disaster at sea, it became an immediate celebrity, and even its tragic deterioration (due to his extensive use of asphalt) has not lessened its popularity in the Louvre.

Historical basis

In 1816, France was a nation in turmoil. Crushed militarily at the Battle of Waterloo the previous year, Napoleon’s empire had collapsed, and the rest of Europe had restored the rule of Louis XVIII, reverted the country’s boundaries to those of 1789, and were occupying the country until it paid a war indemnity.

In June 1816, the French Naval frigate Méduse (Medusa) sailed as the lead of a small group to accept the return of French Senegal from the British, as part of the peace process. She was under the command of Viscount de Chaumereys, who had had little experience at sea over the previous twenty years, but had been preferred under political policy.

The Méduse overtook the other ships instead of sailing in company, and poor navigation (attributed to the captain) took it more than 100 miles off course, to run aground on a sandbank off the coast of West Africa on 2 July. The decision to abandon the vessel was taken on 5 July, but with 400 souls on board and capacity for only around 250 in the ship’s boats, at least 146 men and one woman were put on board a raft which was built hastily for the purpose.

Although the ship’s boats had originally intended to tow the overloaded and partially-submerged raft, it was cut loose after only a few miles. The survivors on the raft then had little to keep them alive: a bag of ship’s biscuits (eaten on the first day), two barrels of water (soon lost overboard), and six of wine (hardly suitable to prevent dehydration). Over the following 13 days, most died or were killed, leaving just 15 alive when they were spotted by the Argus, a brig from the same group bound for Senegal.

Some of the survivors wrote a detailed account which was published in 1817, and deepened the embarrassment caused to the newly-restored French monarchy. What should have been a routine step in restoring a French colony became a lasting matter of shame in the press and public debate.

Searching for the right painting

In the winter of 1817-18, when Géricault must have decided to paint this disaster, he would have recognised the two changes of fortune (moments of peripeteia) in the story: the abandonment of the Méduse, and the rescue of the few survivors remaining in the raft. Classically, the best depictions of shipwreck and rescue have chosen the latter as preferable, as it shows both the result of the gruelling period of survival and the imminent hope of being saved. Géricault may also have considered this an opportune parallel with that time in the history of his nation.

During the spring and summer of 1818, Géricault worked on accumulating the information which he needed for the painting. He spent a long time talking to survivors, notably Savigny and Corréard, the principal authors of the book about the incident, and studied popular lithographs which were being produced illustrating it. Of the three example illustrations included in Eitner’s monograph, one showed the abandonment, one a mutiny on board the raft, and the last the sighting of the rescue ship.

He sketched various moments during the disaster, gradually honing in on the moment of rescue. This drawing shows one of the ship’s boats from the Argus reaching the raft, for example, and Géricault drew each event from the mutiny through to the raft being left empty once everyone had been rescued. Note that in this sketch, the raft is shown as a long rectangle.

Once he had selected the second moment of peripeteia, when the survivors first sighted the Argus, he then worked through different compositional options, resulting in an initial compositional study in oils.

He continued to develop from this, probably completing these preparations in the autumn of 1818.

Attention to detail

In this period of almost a year devoted to preparatory work, Géricault had also accumulated a great deal of information about the disaster. He had enlisted the help of another of the survivors, a carpenter, in constructing props for his studio painting. As figures resolved for inclusion in the painting, he made detailed studies of those elements in readiness for painting.

This study shows one of the figures, known as “the Father”, from the group named “the Father holding his dead son”, seen below in the finished painting.

Géricault also visited morgues to make studies of cadavers and body parts. When he came to paint individual figures, he carefully selected some of sickly appearance, including the young Delacroix, who was ill with jaundice at the time.

In contrast to his previous studies, though, he decided to make the Argus so tiny that this most important element in the whole composition was also its smallest.

The finished work

The end result was a vast canvas, its figures shown life-sized, which has had huge impact on everyone who has seen it since 1819. It appears completely authentic, and given the work that Géricault put into making it so, that is perhaps not surprising. But most gain the impression that the raft was almost square in form, as a result of the tight cropping applied, and that even with those few survivors on board, it was overcrowded. This is because Géricault chose to pack all his figures into one small section of the raft.

The published drawing of the plan of the raft reveals how this painting shows about a quarter of the total area of the raft as it actually was: the lowest rectangular section drawn in Savigny and Corréard’s book.

Another problem was the physical state of the bodies, alive and dead, which hardly reflects thirteen days of almost complete starvation and profound dehydration. Instead Géricault opted for a well-muscled appearance more typical of life classes or classical sculpture. He may have done that in order to increase the heroic impression, rather than making the survivors look weak and pathetic.

With this singular success behind him – and having created one of the greatest narrative paintings of all time – Géricault was already working on preliminary studies for further major narrative paintings on the Spanish Inquisition, and on the slave trade, when he fell terminally ill. When he died at the age of just 32, the world lost one of its most promising narrative painters.

Conclusions

Géricault’s monumental painting shows the moment of peripeteia, and follows Alberti’s rules, with facial expressions and body language major determinants to its reading. However his close-cropped composition can give a false impression of the capacity of the raft, and he chose to show its occupants in muscular, heroic form rather than weakened and pathetic.

References

Shipwrecked art history: Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa

Athanassoglou-Kallmyer N (2010) Théodore Géricault, Phaidon Press. ISBN 978 0 7148 4400 8.
Barnes J (1989) A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, Jonathan Cape.
Barnes J (2015) Keeping an Eye Open. Essays on Art, Jonathan Cape.
Eitner L (1972) Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, Phaidon Press.

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) is today known almost exclusively as a print-maker and illustrator of many books, although you may stumble across an occasional watercolour landscape or huge canvas of his, and he was a sculptor too. Some of his landscapes are outstanding, but produced during the era of Impressionism have been cast aside by history. I here consider some of his narrative oil paintings, for if anyone understood narrative art, it should surely be such a prolific and successful illustrator.

Doré was precocious child, and started his career as a caricaturist for a newspaper at the age of 15. By the 1850s his illustrations were being commissioned by major publishers in both France and Britain, including a new illustrated English Bible. Here are two prints from that work, which was published in 1866.

The first shows the popular story of Judith and Holofernes; Doré avoids the most powerful scene of the decapitation itself, but follows the more guarded approach adopted by Etty and others, as would be more acceptable to a Victorian publisher.

His Death on the Pale Horse, to accompany the book of Revelation 6:8, remains one of the most popular (perhaps truly iconic) portraits of the ‘Grim Reaper’, whose visits to families were all too frequent at the time.

Doré first illustrated Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy as early as 1857, but returned to it in the mid 1860s. He painted several works derived from the first part, Dante’s Inferno (Hell). This describes Dante becoming lost in a wood and unable to find the way to salvation. He is rescued by the Classical Roman poet Virgil, and the pair then descend and travel through the underworld together. By convention, Dante himself is shown dressed in red robes with headgear, and Virgil with a laurel wreath on his head.

The sinners in hell are divided according to the type of sin; in this painting, Doré shows Virgil (left) and Dante at the last of these ‘circles’, the ninth, for those who committed sins of malice, such as treachery. These sinners are shown partially frozen into an icy lake, with additional blocks of ice scattered around, as described by Dante.

Among the side-stories related by Dante is that of Paolo and Francesca da Rimini, who are in the second circle for the sins of lust. She committed adultery with her husband’s brother, Paolo Malatesta. Her husband Giovanni (or Gian Cotto) then killed them both. Doré shows the lovers, Francesca’s stab wound visible near the middle of her chest, Paolo’s still bleeding, as they are blown around and buffetted for their sins. At the lower right he shows Dante and Virgil looking on.

Doré’s painting was first shown at the Salon in 1863, and was highly praised by the critics.

Between Sky and Earth (1862) is a complete contrast and remains something of a mystery. The viewer is high above the fields outside Doré’s native Strasbourg, where several small groups are flying kites. The kite shown at the upper left has just been penetrated by a flying bird. Another unseen kite, off the top of the canvas, has a traditional tail, at the end of which a very anxious frog is tied to it by a hindleg. However a stork appears to have designs on seizing the opportunity to eat the frog, and is approaching from behind, its bill wide open and ready for the meal.

This could be an allegory, of course, but is probably a humorous depiction of kite-flying at the time, when people were still puzzled as to what happened to living creatures as they ascended higher in the atmosphere.

By the late 1860s Doré was tackling more heavyweight narratives on very large canvases. The Triumph Of Christianity Over Paganism (c 1868) has become as elaborately symbolic as the paintings of the younger Gustave Moreau, who by this time was working on his The Muses Leave Apollo, their Father, in Order to go Forth and Enlighten the World (c 1868).

In the upper part of this painting, Christ, bearing his cross, is surrounded by the angelic host, which is flying out, swords drawn and shields borne, to fight the pagan evils on the earth below. Among those pagans are recognisable gods of the Classic world, with Zeus/Jupiter at the centre, holding a thunderbolt in his left hand.

At the time of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Doré volunteered to serve in the National Guard, and produced a series of moving sketches showing the destruction and suffering in Paris at the time of its siege in the autumn of that year.

The following year he committed some of those apocalyptic visions to canvas, in his The Enigma (souvenirs de 1870), and two other major paintings. All three were made using grisaille, greys normally used to model tones in traditional layered technique.

This shows the shattered and still-burning remains of the city in the background, bodies of some of the Prussian artillery in the foreground, and two mythical beasts silhouetted in an embrace. The winged creature is female, and probably represents France, who clasps the head of a sphinx, who personifies the forces which determine victory or defeat. The enigmatic question would then relate to the Franco-Prussian War, and the reasons for France’s defeat.

Doré continued to paint religious narrative works, in particular several versions of Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem. This, a preparatory sketch for the final huge version exhibited at the Salon in 1876, shows his brushwork at its loosest and most gestural.

This shows the conventional Christian account in the Gospels, of Christ entering Jerusalem, in triumph, on the back of a donkey, as the start (‘Palm Sunday’ because of the palm fronds usually involved) of the series of processes leading to his crucifixion. A very popular biblical narrative in European painting, few finished works can match Doré’s at 6 by 10 metres size.

At the time of his death in 1883, Doré was close to completing another only slightly smaller painting showing The Vale of Tears. Drawn not from the Gospels but instead from Psalm 83, reinforced in the writings of Saints Jerome and Boniface, and in the mediaeval hymn Salve Regina (‘Hail Holy Queen’), it refers to the tribulations of worldly life which are left behind when the pious enter heaven. It is also sometimes known as the Valley of Tears.

Christ, now bearing a full-sized cross, is in the distance, surrounded by an arch of light. He is beckoning a large crowd of people, who are struggling up a steep and rough track leading towards him, and the rocky mountains behind. People in the crowd are of all ages, from infants to the aged, many with obvious physical disorders and ailments, all apparently suffering in their ascent up the Vale of Tears. I wonder whether Doré knew that his journey was also coming to a close.

Conclusion

As with Hogarth earlier, and Doré’s contemporary William Frith – and perhaps the earliest painter and prolific print-maker, Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) – most of Doré’s paintings were turned into successful prints. Like Hogarth and Frith (but unlike Dürer, who painted few narrative works), Doré was a fluent teller of stories in paintings. He appears to have used fairly conventional techniques to do so, but without better access to a wider range of his works it is hard to be more definite than that.

It is high time for a thorough account of Doré’s paintings.

References

Wikipedia on Doré.
Musée d’Orsay biography and works.

There does not appear to be a book in print which gives a good account of Doré’s paintings. If you discover one which is available on the secondhand market for a reasonable price, please let me know.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) was a prodigious painter and a talented violinist, who studied under the great Jacques-Louis David from the age of sixteen, and won the coveted Prix de Rome (for history painting) at his second attempt in 1801. He remains one of the most successful painters of the long succession who won that prize.

Although best known now for his later nudes, particularly his Odalisques, many of Ingres’ most brilliant narrative paintings were completed quite early in his career.

Oedipus and the Sphinx (1808, 1827)

The Sphinx guarded the entrance to the Greek city of Thebes, asking a riddle to determine whether to let people into the city. Those who got the answer wrong were apparently strangled by her. One version of this riddle is the question “Which creature has one voice and yet becomes four-footed, two-footed, and three-footed?” Oedipus solved this in his answer of humans, who crawl when a baby, walk on two feet as an adult, then walk with a stick when old. This painting shows Oedipus giving his answer to the Sphinx’s riddle.

Ingres painted this just two years after he had arrived in Rome as the recipient of the prize, working in a studio in the grounds of the Villa Medici. When sent back to Paris, it was criticised over its treatment of light, and lack of idealisation in the figures. In 1825, Ingres decided to develop it into a more narrative work, which he completed in 1827. This time it was well received.

His reworking enlarged the canvas, adding human remains at the lower left, and the contrasting background to the right. The facial expressions are eloquent, and body language well-judged.

Ingres’ work was a clear influence over the later painting of the same scene by Gustave Moreau (1826-1898), in his Oedipus and the Sphinx (1864), which appears to be based on a mirror image of the Ingres. However Moreau lost the facial expressions, particularly that of the Sphinx, which visibly weaked the narrative.

Romulus’ Victory over Acron (1812)

An avid reader of classical literature, Ingres chose several subjects which are poorly-known even to many scholars. In this case, it is one of the dusty corners from Plutarch’s account of the life of Romulus, co-founder of Rome.

The new city of Rome was very short of women, something which the Romans attempted to remedy by abducting the young Sabine women (as has been commonly depicted in paintings of the rape of the Sabine women). In retaliation for that offensive and treacherous act, Acron, king of the neighbouring Caeninenses tribe, made war on the Romans. Romulus led the Romans to annihilate Acron’s people, according to Plutarch:
Romulus, then, after making a vow that if he should conquer and overthrow his adversary, he would carry home the man’s armour and dedicate it in person to Jupiter, not only conquered and overthrew him, but also routed his army in the battle which followed, and took his city as well.

Ingres shows the victorious Romulus, just left of centre with Acron’s golden suit of armour, the defeated city burning in the background. Elements have been drawn from ancient art, but its frieze-like panorama feels a little frozen and stilted. Some of this may have resulted from Ingres’ use of tempera, in keeping with his subject.

Ossian’s Dream (1813)

The story behind this next youthful work is controversial today. In 1760, the Scottish poet James Macpherson published a cycle of epic poems in Scottish Gaelic. He claimed to have collected these from oral sources, rendering them into modern Gaelic. The central character in this epic was Ossian, recalling endless battles and unhappy loves from his earlier days.

These were rapidly translated into English and then, taking Europe by storm, into the other major languages of Europe. Their French translation was completed by 1777. When Macpherson died in 1796, so great was his fame that he was buried in Westminster Abbey. Early sceptics grew in number and influence, but even during the 1800s Macpherson still had many supporters. By the end of the twentieth century, the evidence that Macpherson had fabricated the whole story had become quite conclusive.

This painting shows an episode from Ossian’s epic, with the aged Ossian asleep on his harp, dreaming in monochrome of past wars and loves. It was perhaps appropriately commissioned for a bedroom which Napoleon was intended to occupy during a visit to Rome.

Roger (Ruggiero) Rescuing Angelica (1819)

Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso is an epic poem containing, among others, the tale of the knight Roger or Ruggiero. One day, when out riding near the coast of Brittany, on his hippogriff (half horse, half eagle), he finds Angelica chained to a rock on the Isle of Tears. He discovers that she was abducted and stripped by barbarians, who left her there as a sacrifice to a sea monster. As Roger approaches to free her, the monster appears from the sea, and Roger kills it by driving his lance in between its eyes. He then rides off with the rescued Angelica.

Ingres shows the story largely according to the original text, with Angelica’s head cast back almost unnaturally in her pleading look towards Roger. She appears to have a goitre, something which did not escape the critics of the day. Even so, the painting was purchased for King Louis XVIII and was installed in the Palace of Versailles from 1820.

Similar motifs – such as that of Perseus and Andromeda – have also been popular. William Etty (1787–1849) painted his Britomart Redeems Faire Amoret in 1833, and either or both may have induced John Millais (1829–1896) to attempt his one and only female nude, in his The Knight Errant (1870). In the latter case, the story of being stripped, tied up, and abused had left its classical roots, and mere robbers were to blame. The beautiful and naked victim still had to be rescued by a gallant knight, though.

Apotheosis of Homer (1827)

This last of the paintings I have chosen from Ingres’ career pays homage to Homer, gathering together all those figures whom Ingres had greatest respect for, and were major influences. Although its own narrative is very simple, it invokes and pays tribute to those who Ingres saw as the great masters of narrative.

The group is posed on the steps in front of a classical Greek theatre, in formal symmetric composition. Homer sits at its centre, being crowned with laurel by the winged figure of the Universe.

Among those standing at the left are Dante, Virgil, Raphael, Sappho, Apelles, Euripides, Sophocles (holding a scroll), and the personification of the Iliad (seated, in red); in the lower file are Shakespeare, Tasso, Poussin, and Mozart.

From the right are, among others, Alexander the Great, Aristotle, Michelangelo, Socrates, Plato, Hesiod, Aesop (under the lyre), and the personification of the Odyssey (seated, in green, with an oar); in the lower file are Gluck, Molière, and others less well-known today.

Conclusion

Shown at the Salon in the same year as Ingres’ Apotheosis of Homer was Delacroix’s radical narrative painting Death of Sardanapalus. As the last great classical narrative painter, Ingres must have felt that it was his empire which was in the throes of destruction.

References

Wikipedia on Ingres
Wikipedia on Oedipus and the Sphinx
Wikipedia on The Apotheosis of Homer
Wikipedia on Romulus’ Victory over Acron
Wikipedia on Roger freeing Angelica.

Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) was a history painter and portraitist whose influence dominated painting in France in the early 1800s. His classical style and subjects helped art address more serious issues. He was politically involved in the French Revolution, and somehow managed to switch over to supporting Napoleon when he became Emperor.

His training began in earnest when attended what was then the Royal Academy in the Louvre; from there he made three unsuccessful attempts at the Prix de Rome (the prestigious award for history painting), finally winning on his fourth attempt in 1774.

Antiochus and Stratonica (1774)

According to Plutarch’s Lives, Antiochus was the son of King Seleucus I of Syria. When Seleucus was relatively old, he married the young and beautiful Stratonice (or Stratonica). Antiochus fell mysteriously ill, and was confined to his bed as a result. The eminent anatomist and physician Erasistratus was summoned to assess the young man, and recognised that he had fallen in love with Stratonice, his stepmother.

King Seleucus I realised that the only solution was to divorce Stratonice in 294 BCE so that she could marry Antiochus, and he made his son the King of the eastern provinces to support him in the future. Seleucus was assassinated in 281 BCE, and Antiochus then succeeded him as King of the Hellenistic Seleucid Empire.

David’s painting which won the Prix de Rome shows Antiochus propped up in bed, Erasistratus (in a red cloak) by him and pointing to the beautiful Stratonice at the foot of the bed. Little is shown in facial expressions, apart from Stratonice’s bashful expression with her eyes cast down. Body language and composition combine to tell the story, with Erasistratus’ pointing index finger helping to put Stratonice metaphorically and literally in the spotlight.

That may appear a strange and obscure subject for David’s first major history painting, but it was prescribed by the judges for the Prix de Rome, and not of his choosing.

The Oath of the Horatii (copy) (1786, original 1784-5)

In Roman legend, one of the crises which nearly brought about the early destruction of Rome was a conflict with the city of Alba Longa. Rather than killing most of one another’s young males in conventional war, the two cities agreed that this would be fought out by just three men chosen from each city. Three brothers from one Roman family, the Horatii, agreed to fight three brothers from Alba Longa’s Curiatii family.

When they met in combat, two of the three Horatii were killed, leaving just one brother, who chased the three Curiatii, separated them, and then killed each in turn. This gave victory to Rome, as described by Livy and Dionysius.

Able now to choose his own subject and the moment in the story for depiction, David opts for the three Horatii brothers saluting their father, and taking their swords immediately before combat. Behind the father are three women, of whom the young woman at the far right is Camilla, sister to the Horatii and betrothed to one of the Curiatii, who thus knows that she will lose someone dear to her no matter what the outcome.

Although not a moment of peripeteia as such, this is a decisive and dramatic instant, and David’s composition and use of body language adds considerable power to its narrative.

The painting shown here is actually a smaller copy made by David of the original; the latter is in the Louvre, and was painted only a few years before the start of the French Revolution. It was commissioned for King Louis XVI, as an allegory about loyalty to the state and the monarch, which David interpreted as a message about the nobility of patriotic sacrifice. However he also cunningly managed to leave the viewer to decide where that loyal patriotism should be directed.

The Death of Socrates (1787)

Socrates (470/469-399 BCE) was a major Greek philosopher known still for the Socratic Method, although none of his writings have survived. At the time when Athens was trying to recover from its defeat in the Peloponnesian War, Socrates was openly critical of Athenian politics and society, and made prominent Athenians appear foolish. He was tried, ostensibly for corrupting the minds of the young and for being impious, found guilty, and sentenced to death by drinking the poison hemlock.

Plato’s Phaedo describes Socrates’ execution. Although several encouraged him to escape, he refused. After drinking the hemlock from a bowl, he was told to walk around until his legs became numb. He then lay down, and the numbness slowly ascended until it reached his heart, and caused his death.

For this painting, David shows a form of peripeteia based on Plato’s account. Socrates is half-sitting on a bed, his right hand over the bowl of hemlock, his left gesticulating with his index finger pointing upwards. His face is expressionless. By the head of the bed, five friends are distraught at what is happening, although only one shows grief on his face. Another friend (Crito) sits by Socrates, his right hand resting on Socrates’ left thigh.

The bowl of hemlock is held out by a young man, who is turned away, averting and shielding his eyes from the bowl. At the foot of the bed, an old man (Plato, who told the story) is sat, asleep, but behind him, under an arch, another of Socrates’ friends (Apollodorus) is pressing his face to the wall in his anguish. In the far distance, a small group of patricians are seen walking away, upstairs, the lowermost holding his right hand up as if to bid Socrates farewell.

Again, facial expressions play a limited role, with body language and composition the main tools for telling the story.

The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons (1789)

After the rape of Lucretia, the King, Tarquinius Superbus, was deposed and Brutus and Lucretia’s widower were elected the first consuls of Rome (509 BCE). The Tarquinian royal family then lead some of the citizens of Rome in the Tarquinian Conspiracy, an attempt to overthrow the consuls and restore power to the royal family. Among the conspirators were two brothers of Brutus’ wife, and his two sons.

When the conspiracy was discovered, Brutus and the other consul had the conspirators executed in front of them, although Brutus is reported to have shown understandable emotion when they were killed. Once they had been executed, the headless corpses were returned to their families.

David was completing this painting at the start of the French Revolution, which turned out to be a very appropriate moment for the work. In the background at the left, the lictors (bearers) are bringing the two bodies in, Brutus sat in front, turned away and looking towards the viewer. To the right of centre, his wife – who has lost both her sons and two brothers – is very anxious and disturbed, holding her right hand out in a welcoming gesture, and embracing her two young daughters to her bosom. On a table covered with a blood-red cloth by her is a set of Roman scissors, as a symbol of the execution.

With little facial expression (from only Brutus’ wife and one daughter), David uses body language and composition to good effect, and is careful to hint at the corpses with subtlety rather than show then in full gore.

When it was rumoured in the press that the monarchy intended to prevent this painting from being shown in the 1789 Salon, there was uproar, and it was permitted. It was quickly seen as showing the values required of the French people in supporting the revolution, even if they had to see members of their own family die in the process.

From the early days, David was an ardent supporter of the Revolution, and a friend of Robespierre himself. David became involved in the production of propaganda, and organised ceremonial funerals for those who were denied rites by the church as a result of their involvement in the Revolution.

Marat Assassinated (1793)

Jean-Paul Marat was a leading member of the Revolutionary movement, an influential journalist through his newspaper, and a friend of David’s. Because of a severe skin disease, he spent much of the time in a bath to ease the intense itching. On the morning of 13 July 1793, Charlotte Corday, a young woman from Normandy, turned up at Marat’s house in Paris, asking to see him; his wife turned her away. She gained entry that evening, and started to give Marat the names of some local counter-revolutionaries. While he was writing them down, she drew a kitchen knife with a 15 cm blade from her clothing, and plunged it into Marat’s chest, killing him very quickly.

Corday admitted if not boasted of her actions, and on 17 July she was executed in public by guillotine. Marat became a martyr for the cause, after his friend David had organised another spectacular funeral.

David shows Marat’s body slumped over the side of his bath, the murder weapon and his quill both on the floor, the pen still in his right hand, and a handwritten note in his left hand.

Corday’s note, shown rotated from its orientation in the painting, gives the date, and addresses itself from her to Citizen Marat. It opens with “It suffices to say that I am very unhappy to qualify for your kindness”.

This sparse and simple painting became the quintessential image of The Terror in particular, and the Revolution as a whole.

David narrowly escaped being executed along with Robespierre when the Revolution collapsed. He was arrested and imprisoned for several months in late 1794 and the middle of 1795. His wife visited him there, and helped him cope.

The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799)

I have mentioned the rape of the Sabine women in the early history of Rome in other articles. David decided to present the story with a different emphasis: the role of those women in trying to bring peace.

Some time after the Romans stole their women for wives, to address their own shortage of women, the Sabines attacked Rome to avenge the abductions. Hersilia, the daughter of Tatius, leader of the Sabines, was taken as a bride by Romulus, the leader of Rome, and by this time had had two children by him.

With the Sabines and Romans engaging in battle, Hersilia led the Sabine women, with their children, to put themselves between the two armies, to stop the fighting and force the two sides to make peace.

David shows, in the foreground, Hersilia standing, arms stretched out towards her father Tatius and her enforced husband Romulus. Around her, and separating the two armies, are other Sabine women with babies and young children, deliberately putting themselves and those infants into danger in order to stop the battle. Behind them is an anachronistic fortress, with many spears pointing into the air to indicate the size of the armies involved.

This painting was seen as a plea for the French people to reunite after the slaughter and the division brought by the Revolution, and helped David’s rehabilitation. He met Napoleon, and made his first sketch of him in 1797, two years before Napoleon became First Consul.

The Anger of Achilles (1819)

In Euripides’ tragedy Iphigenia at Aulis, retold in Racine’s French version, the King Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia is intended to be married to Achilles. However Agamemnon has greater issues to deal with: he wants his Greek fleet to be able to set sail for Troy, to attack and capture it. In order to achieve that, the goddess Diana must be appeased by the sacrifice of Iphigenia to her.

When Agamemnon tells the youthful Achilles of Iphigenia’s sacrifice, Achilles reaches for his sword in anger. Agamemnon stops him. Iphigenia understands the situation, and volunteers to be sacrificed. At the last minute, the gods whisk her away and replace her with a deer.

Unusually for David’s history paintings, the figures are close-packed and fill the canvas. Achilles, at the left, reaches for his sword in an uncomfortable manoeuvre with his right arm. A rather masculine and tearful woman just to the right of him is Queen Clytemnestra, Iphigenia’s mother, and her right hand rests on Iphigenia’s shoulder. Iphigenia is dressed as a bride, and looks wistful, staring into the distance, her face empty of outward emotion. At the right, Agamemnon appears emotionless, but indicates firmly to Achilles for him to restrain his emotions.

In the circumstances, the facial expressions and body language are remarkably restrained if not cold – every upper lip is stiff, even Clytemnestra’s tears have been wiped away.

After Napoleon’s defeat and the collapse of his empire, David was put on the list of proscribed individuals, which is unsurprising given his role in the Revolution and as an ardent supporter of Napoleon. Although granted amnesty by Louis XVIII, David went into self-exile in Brussels, where he died after being struck by a carriage on 29 December 1825. Only his heart was allowed to return to France for burial.

Conclusions

David was a powerful story-teller, but his Neo-Classicism and perhaps his own nature stops short of writing much emotion into the faces of his characters. In most of his history paintings, his characters are spaced quite far apart, making them seem emotionally more detached. Even when he does bring his figures close together, they still appear relatively cold.

Reference

Wikipedia.