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Reading visual art: 2 Wings of Angels
We all know that angels have wings. It’s the most distinctive of their features, and is pervasive in paintings. In this article, I consider how that might have come about, by going back through visual...
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Paintings of William Shakespeare’s Plays 20: Antony and Cleopatra
After William Shakespeare’s successful and memorable tragedy Julius Caesar, his other well-known play based on Plutarch’s lives is Antony and Cleopatra, thought to have been written in about 1606. This...
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Painted Stories in Britain 7: Benjamin West’s revolution fails
Whether Sir Joshua Reynolds ever claimed that Benjamin West’s 1770 painting of The Death of General Wolfe would bring about a “revolution in the art”, it didn’t. West was next commissioned by William...
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Paintings of William Shakespeare’s Plays 21: Two Gentlemen of Verona
William Shakespeare’s play The Two Gentlemen of Verona may well have been the first that he wrote for professional players, and probably dates from around 1590. Its plot will be familiar to those who...
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Painted Stories in Britain 8: Shakespeare
For Benjamin West, the greatest success of his painting of The Death of General Wolfe (1770) wasn’t his work, but that of Joseph Boydell six years later. Benjamin West (1738–1820), The Death of General...
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Reading visual art: 5 Evil serpents
Snakes or serpents appear so often in both verbal and visual narrative that it seems likely that in the Fertile Crescent and Mediterranean coast they were not uncommon in the past. Their major...
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Reading visual art: 6 Virgin of the Snake
For around half the Christian population of Europe, the Virgin Mary was more than the Mother of God, Queen of Heaven, Star of the Sea, and so on. She was the focus of their devotion, a role model, the...
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Paintings of William Shakespeare’s Plays 22: Cymbeline
One of William Shakespeare’s most original and intricate plays, Cymbeline, King of Britain is a tragicomedy about a semi-legendary king at the time of the Roman occupation, written in about 1610. Its...
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Painted Stories in Britain 9: William Blake
One of the factors I previously identified as causes of the failure of British narrative painting was lack of formal academic training, which was rectified with the formation of the Royal Academy...
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Reading visual art: 7 One arm raised
Figures contribute to narrative and the reading of a painting in several ways, most commonly including facial expressions and their gestures or body language. In this week’s two articles about reading...
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Reading visual art: 8 Both arms raised
While raising one arm can have a range of subtle meanings in paintings, since the Middle Ages raising them both has had more natural interpretations. Ancient sculpture in particular uses outstretched...
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Paintings of William Shakespeare’s Plays 23: Coriolanus
Another of William Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays, Coriolanus is essentially a dramatisation of Plutarch’s biography of Caius Martius, and was probably written in 1608. As a political tragedy it had...
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Painted Stories in Britain 10: JMW Turner
One of the greatest British narrative painters of the nineteenth century was JMW Turner (1775-1851), who today is almost exclusively known for his landscapes. As a young and brilliant student at the...
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Reading visual art: 9 Gaze, looking towards
Being visual art, paintings are often at least partly about, or refer to, the act of looking. For most painters, this is a central concern in their figurative works. A single figure shown looking...
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Paintings of William Shakespeare’s Plays 24: Much Ado About Nothing
William Shakespeare’s play Much Ado About Nothing has remained a popular comedy with audiences since it was first performed, probably in the autumn of 1598. Its underlying story has appeared in many...
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Painted Stories in Britain 11: John Martin
William Hogarth and William Blake came to painting from engraving and print-making. John Martin (1789–1854), a friend and contemporary of JMW Turner, didn’t train at the Royal Academy Schools, nor as...
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Reading visual art: 11 Judgement by body language
Until the nineteenth century, the great majority of narrative paintings told familiar stories. Trying to tell a previously unknown narrative in a single painting is exceedingly difficult: even William...
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Next to Rembrandt: In Memoriam Adriaen van der Werff 1
On 21 January 1659, the Dutch painter Adriaen van der Werff was born in what was then a small village just outside the port of Rotterdam. Although he has been largely forgotten today, his rise was...
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Next to Rembrandt: In Memoriam Adriaen van der Werff 2
Three hundred years ago today, the Dutch painter Adriaen van der Werff (1659–1722) died in Rotterdam. In my first article, I traced his rise to success in a selection of his paintings up to 1714, by...
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Paintings of William Shakespeare’s Plays 25: The Taming of the Shrew
One of William Shakespeare’s earliest plays, The Taming of the Shrew was probably written in about 1590-91, and centres on one of the evergreen themes for stories and plays. It has proved popular on...
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