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The Story in Paintings: a glimpse of India
Armed with Professor Goswamy’s wonderful new book, I thought it might be useful to take a brief look at a small selection of narrative paintings from the Indian sub-continent. In doing so, I...
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The Story in Paintings: Frederic, Lord Leighton – Victorian eye candy?
Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830–1896) was a bastion of the arts establishment in the UK in the late nineteenth century, being the President of the Royal Academy from 1878 to 1896. He trained under the...
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The Story in Paintings: index of well-known narratives 6 Non-European
This is an index of the 7 well-known stories and narratives of non-European origin which are covered in articles about narrative painting on this blog. These are arranged in alphabetical order, for...
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The Story in Paintings: The Flood
A great flood is one of the most common elements in most mythologies. Floods appear in several variations across many quite different mythologies, and are a popular subject for depiction in European...
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The Story in Paintings: William Dyce and the cliffs of time
William Dyce (1806–1864) was another very well-trained Victorian British painter. Born in Aberdeen, he was trained in the Royal Academy Schools in London, and spent about two years in Rome between 1825...
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The Story in Paintings: Paul Delaroche’s Horrible Histories
Paul (Hippolyte) Delaroche (1797–1856) was a lifelong resident of Paris, who trained under Baron Gros alongside fellow student Richard Parkes Bonington (1802-1828). One of Delaroche’s students was...
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The Story in Paintings: Painting to the music of time
The two fundamental elements common to all narrative – in paintings, text, movies, or computer games – are events and time. Whereas other articles in this series focus on the events depicted and those...
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The Story in Paintings: Alessandro Magnasco, a maverick
Alessandro Magnasco (1667–1749) is, I think, the most peculiar and individual painter that I have come across, at times making Goya and El Greco look conventional. You are most unlikely to have even...
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The Story in Paintings: The thread of fate
In a previous article, I wrote of, and showed, paintings which depicted the thread of time, and gave a brief glimpse into the subject for this article, the thread of fate and the Fates themselves. The...
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The Story in Paintings: Elihu Vedder
Elihu Vedder (1836–1923) was a symbolist painter who trained in New York, and with François-Édouard Picot in Paris before going to Italy, where he was influenced by the Macchiaioli, particularly...
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The Story in Paintings: Icarus and his downfall
The tragic death of Icarus is quite a popular story for narrative paintings from classical times onwards. It has also lent itself to contrasting treatments, which make it valuable for gaining insight...
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Analysing narrative paintings of Icarus and Daedalus
In the previous article, I have written an account of the different approaches used in paintings showing the story of Daedalus and the fall of Icarus, as given in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. As I was...
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The Story in Paintings: Nausicaä, boy meets girl and more
The Odyssey is one of the oldest and most influential stories, told in epic poetry, in the West. It tells of the ten years of adventures experienced by the Greek Odysseus (known to the Romans as...
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The Story in Paintings: Perseus and Edward Burne-Jones 1
So far, most of the narratives which I have analysed in detail have been relatively simple, and with the exception of some of the moral tales of Hogarth and others, expressible in a single painting. I...
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The Story in Paintings: Perseus and Edward Burne-Jones 2
In the previous article, I summarised the story of Perseus and Andromeda, and explained how Edward Burne-Jones came to paint a series of ten works to show that story for Arthur Balfour, a young MP who...
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The Story in Paintings: Poussin’s Empire of Flora
Many of the finest paintings by masters of narrative painting are notoriously difficult to read, and remain controversial centuries after they were created. This article looks at one of the most...
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The Story in Paintings: Frescoes of the Brancacci Chapel
Before I move on from Masaccio, the early southern Renaissance, and the city of Florence, I would like to take a careful look at narrative in the frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel of the church of Santa...
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The Story in Paintings: Philemon and Baucis, virtue rewarded
There is a deep and fundamental difference between the role of the classical Roman and Greek gods, and those of the major monotheistic religions. For the Romans and Greeks, their gods were the means of...
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The Story in Paintings: Composite images of the Renaissance
I have several times written that early western painting, until the late Renaissance, not uncommonly incorporated multiple copies of the same characters within a single painting, as a narrative...
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Georges Seurat’s Poseuses: new wine in an old skin?
In my recent article on complex narrative forms (‘continuous narrative’) in early painting, I remarked that such paintings became more unusual after 1500, with works becoming almost exclusively...
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