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Fire, surgery, and surrogate pregnancy: an unpaintable story?
Many classical myths must have seemed far-fetched even to the ancient Greeks and Romans. There is none so extraordinary as that told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses of the love affair between Jupiter and...
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Sargent’s Furies: a rare but powerful story
At the end of the First World War, John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) had commitments on both sides of the Atlantic. He had been working on murals in the Boston and Cambridge areas of Massachusetts, but...
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Changing Stories: Ovid’s Metamorphoses on canvas, 0 – index and introduction
There are two major literary sources which have inspired more European and North American paintings than any others: the Bible, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Although most of us are at least fairly...
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Changing Stories: Ovid’s Metamorphoses on canvas, 1 – Lycaon, cannibalism,...
The first book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses starts, just like the Bible and several other major compilations of ancient writing, with the creation of the world. You may be tempted to view Metamorphoses as...
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Hesiod’s Brush, the paintings of Gustave Moreau: 14 Overview and index
In the last thirteen articles I have tried to give an account of the life and work of Gustave Moreau (1826–1898). Early in his career, Moreau made a conscious decision to be a history painter, and to...
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Changing Times: Lovis Corinth, 1915-1919
On 28 July 1914, the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia. Germany then invaded Belgium and Luxembourg, and the First World War had started. Lovis Corinth and his family had only just come to...
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Changing Stories: Ovid’s Metamorphoses on canvas, 2 – Deucalion, the flood,...
In Ovid’s account of the creation, Jupiter, the king of the gods, wants to destroy mankind because of its unacceptable behaviour, and to create a new, better type of human. At first he intends doing...
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The Story in Paintings: Remembering a great general?
Few of us get to write our own obituary, or to determine how we might be remembered in paintings. If you’re a major statesman and general, who commands many thousands of words on Wikipedia, you might...
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Infanticide: Astyanax and making of myth
Whatever the historical basis for the myths of the Trojan War, one of the great challenges is discovering how those myths changed between about 1200 BCE (when Troy most possibly fell) and the...
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Changing Times: Lovis Corinth, 1920-1923
In the autumn of 1919, Corinth and his family had moved into their chalet at Urfeld, on the shore of Walchensee (Lake Walchen), to the south of Munich. From then until Corinth’s death, they divided...
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Changing Times: Lovis Corinth, 1924-1925
During the 1920s, in the last years of his career, Lovis Corinth’s paintings reached a new peak, both in their quantity and their innovative exploration of colour and texture. Lovis Corinth...
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Changing Stories: Ovid’s Metamorphoses on canvas, 3 – Daphne, and how the...
At the end of the last myth concerning the flood, Apollo killed Python, the monster, with his bow and arrows. Ovid uses this, and his lines about the Pythian Games, to lead into the next myth, which...
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JW Waterhouse: Allure and magic 1
It is a century since the death of John William Waterhouse (1849–1917), one of the last major artists to paint mainly in Pre-Raphaelite style. In this and the next article, I consider his career and a...
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JW Waterhouse: Allure and magic 2
John William Waterhouse (1849–1917) was one of the last major artists to paint mainly in Pre-Raphaelite style. This article concludes my short account of his career and paintings, to commemorate his...
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Jules-Élie Delaunay: fragments of history
There were many history painters in France during the latter half of the nineteenth century, of whom Gustave Moreau and Jean-Léon Gérôme were but two of the more prolific, famous, and contrasting....
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Théodore Chassériau: Brief brilliance
There can’t be many artists who died before they reached the age of forty, but still have a whole room in the Louvre dedicated to their work, and a couple of paintings in the Musée d’Orsay too....
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Changing Stories: Ovid’s Metamorphoses on canvas, 4 – Jupiter & Io, Mercury &...
After Apollo’s attempt to rape Daphne, who metamorphosed into the laurel, Ovid tells us no less than three myths with four metamorphoses, ingeniously embedded into a single story. Ovid leads us into...
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Changing Times: Lovis Corinth, self-portraits and nudes 1886-1925
Over the last six weeks or so, I have been looking at the life of Lovis Corinth, together with images of well over a hundred of his paintings. This article and the next draw on those articles to survey...
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Changing Times: Lovis Corinth, narrative paintings 1890-1924
This last article – for the time being – in my series on the life and work of Lovis Corinth looks at some of his narrative paintings across his entire career. I have generally excluded his religious...
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Changing Stories: Ovid’s Metamorphoses on canvas, 5 – Phaëthon, the Heliades,...
The myth of Phaëthon is one of the longest stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Cunningly, it is introduced in the last lines of Book 1, but told in full at the start of Book 2. It balances the account of...
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