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The Story in Paintings: A Feast of Veronese
Paolo Veronese (1528–1588) was and remains well known for his often huge paintings of feasts featured in the stories of the Christian gospels, about the life and ministry of Jesus Christ. He painted...
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Narrative in paintings and photography: a summary and index
The following articles cover the subject of narrative painting, and narratives in paintings. Across media Telling the story: narrative across media, including spoken, written, movies, graphic novels,...
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The Story in Paintings: Gustave Moreau and the dissolution of history
During the 1800s, history, and other forms of narrative, painting underwent a crisis from which they have never really recovered. This article looks at the narrative paintings of Gustave Moreau, who...
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The Story in Paintings: JW Waterhouse and mediaeval romance
There were history and other narrative painters in the late 1800s who did not see the need to re-invent history painting in the way that Gustave Moreau did. One of the best and most enduring – if still...
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The Story in Paintings: Pre-Raphaelite tableaux
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) was formed as a close-knit and often co-habiting artistic group in 1848, in England. Its early doctrines were expressed in four declarations: to have genuine ideas...
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The Story in Paintings: Jean-Léon Gérôme and the spectacular
Largely forgotten until revived recently, Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) was the most popular painter of the Salon and the art market during the period that the Impressionists were active, and rejecting...
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The Story in Paintings: Impressionist issues
Even without a manifesto or coherent philosophy, one of the few consistent features of the Impressionists was their total abstinence from narrative genres such as history, mythological, and religious...
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The Story in Paintings: Moving panoramas for the masses
During the 1800s, most western cities increased greatly in size, and the scope for exploiting paintings for commercial gain increased concomitantly. The population of Paris grew from just over half a...
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The Story in Paintings: War and puzzles
I have already shown some examples of battle panoramas. Long before the advent of the panorama, painters have been trying to tell the stories of battles and wars. This article looks in more detail at a...
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The Story in Paintings: New narratives
Much of the twentieth century was a difficult period for narrative painting – well, for painting as a whole. Although there were still many fine artists who painted superb works, they were viewed as...
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The Story in Paintings: Changing fortunes
I have already mentioned Poussin’s ‘péripéties’, which he used to condense the causes of an event, its consequences and moral implications, into his narrative paintings. You may have been as blurry in...
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The Story in Paintings: Enlightened by science
Most of the narratives used by the paintings which I have shown so far are fairly conventional. Drawn from classical myth, epic poetry, fairy and folk tales, religion, plays, and most recently movies,...
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The Story in Paintings: Problem pictures
The great majority of narrative paintings refer to well-known oral or text narratives, but a few do not. British painters of the late Victorian period not only made a speciality of painting narratives...
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The Story in Paintings: Daumier’s gestures
Among all the other things that were going on in narrative painting in the 1800s – as seen in the works of Delacroix, Moreau, Gérôme and others – there were the remarkable paintings of Honoré Daumier...
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The Story in Paintings: allegory, symbol, and realism
This series has, quite accidentally, come to highlight the problems which came to dominate if not overwhelm narrative painting during the 1800s, and how they somehow seem to have become resolved by the...
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The Story in Paintings: So what is a narrative painting?
Sometimes you use a term over which you think there is longstanding general agreement, only to discover that others have used it with very different meaning. This is a particular danger in fields in...
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Winslow Homer in Cullercoats: 2 Watchers
Winslow Homer had visited England primarily to study the watercolours of JMW Turner, and to understand his colour theories and their implementation. By mid March 1881, he had completed that phase, and...
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Winslow Homer in Cullercoats: 3 Women at work
Most who have written about Winslow Homer’s paintings from Cullercoats have noted that a large proportion show the fishlasses and fishwives of the community, and that in those few which show both men...
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Winslow Homer in Cullercoats: 4 Boats and the beach
This short series has been looking at Winslow Homer’s paintings from Cullercoats. Life in fishing communities was centred on when the boats came in: the return of the men and boys, hopefully with large...
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Winslow Homer in Cullercoats: 5 Puzzles and achievements
This short series has been looking at Winslow Homer’s paintings from Cullercoats. I have shown how he pictured the fishlasses and fishwives watching for the return of the boats, working ashore, and the...
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