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Don Quixote: 1 The making of a knight
Cervantes opens the first book with a prologue, together with a series of poems allegedly dedicated to Don Quixote and other characters, to give them an air of reality. He then takes us to a village in...
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The Last History Painter: In memoriam Jean-Paul Laurens 1
Jean-Paul Laurens (1838–1921) was one of the last traditional history painters in Europe, alongside the likes of Gérôme and Rochegrosse. Like them, he continued to paint large canvases in strict Salon...
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The Last History Painter: In memoriam Jean-Paul Laurens 2
A hundred years ago today, 23 March 1921, the last traditional history painter in Europe, Jean-Paul Laurens, died. In the first article of these two commemorating his death, I showed a selection of his...
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Don Quixote: 2 Those books are to be burnt
In the previous episode, having decided in his madness to become a knight, Don Quixote had left his home on his first sally. Realising that he hadn’t been dubbed a knight yet, he found an inn at sunset...
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Rebirth: How patrons shaped the Renaissance
Another reason that Gothic paintings may seem monotonous to the modern eye is that they have a single dominant genre: religious. No realism was necessary, because everyone knew the story, and its...
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A history of history painting after 1800: to 1869
There are two types of history painting: the term can be applied to historia, which basically means any painting telling a story, or in a much narrower sense to paintings of historical events, which...
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A history of history painting after 1800: 1870 on
In the first seventy years of the nineteenth century, history painting – in its narrow sense of the depiction of historical events – had gone from strength to strength, innovating from David to Manet....
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God of the Week: A guide and contents
There are always some more gods, but this article draws a close to my series of articles looking at different deities in paintings. In this and next week’s articles I provide a succinct summary and...
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Don Quixote 3: Windmills
In the previous episode, Don Quixote had tried ineffectively to stop a youth being beaten, and picked a fight with a party of merchants from Toledo. Just as he was charging one of them, his horse...
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The Passion Complete: Telling the whole story 1
To mark and celebrate Easter, this year I’m focussing on paintings which attempt to give a complete account of the Gospel narratives of the Passion, Crucifixion and Resurrection. These are relatively...
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The Passion Complete: Telling the whole story 2
In the first of these two articles looking at complete accounts of the Gospel narratives of the Passion, I showed two early examples of how they were told in individual cells or paintings within a...
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Goddess of the Week: A guide and contents
This article draws a close to my series of articles looking at different deities in paintings. Here I provide a succinct summary and links to individual articles in the series. Goddesses are listed by...
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In Memoriam Vardges Sureniants, father of Armenian narrative art
One hundred years ago today, on 6 April 1921, Vardges Sureniants (1860–1921) died in the Crimean resort of Yalta. Little-known in western Europe and North America, he was the father of Armenian...
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Don Quixote 4: Victory and goatherds
In the previous episode, Don Quixote had stayed at home for a fortnight, during which he recruited his squire Sancho Panza. They rode off and the knight attacked windmills, believing them to be giants....
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Celebrating the bicentenary of Ford Madox Brown: 1 An uncertain start
On 16 April 1821 – almost exactly two hundred years ago – Ford Madox Brown (1821–1893) was born to an Anglo-French family in Calais, France. His father was a purser in the Royal Navy, who married into...
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Celebrating the bicentenary of Ford Madox Brown: 2 The hard road to success
When he turned thirty in 1851, Ford Madox Brown (1821–1893) was in an interesting position. He’d not become one of the ‘bad boys’ of British painting in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but his...
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Don Quixote 5: A Burial
In the previous episode, Don Quixote scored his first success in combat, when he knocked down a Basque escort with his sword, at the cost of part of his helmet and some of his left ear. As the day was...
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Celebrating the bicentenary of Ford Madox Brown: 3 Successful work
In 1861, Ford Madox Brown (1821–1893) became a founding member of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company, and from then until that firm’s dissolution in 1874, he appears to have been mainly concerned...
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Don Quixote 6: Nightmare at the haunted castle
In the previous episode, after they stayed the night with a group of goatherds, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza attended the burial of a local scholar and shepherd who died as a result of his unrequited...
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Rebirth: The rise of narrative painting
From the dawn of painting, humans have used images to tell stories. This article shows how the Renaissance in Florence and Italy took narrative painting to new levels of sophistication, as well as...
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