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Painted Stories in Britain 12: William Dyce
At the start of this series, I identified four reasons why narrative painting in Britain had been so slow to develop: doctrinal suppression because of the religious beliefs of the Reformation, when the...
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Reading visual art: 12 Long hair and the spirit
Hair and its cutting have developed many associations across different cultures, the most consistent being with strength and life itself. Traditions of giving a loved one a lock of your hair as a...
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Reading visual art: 13 Hair in secular paintings
The first of these two articles looking at the reading of head (as opposed to facial or body) hair in paintings concentrated on religious works. Its significance in secular motifs is more widespread...
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Paintings of William Shakespeare’s Plays 26: The Merchant of Venice
Although it’s generally classified as a comedy, William Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice deals with more serious themes, and has long been controversial. Despite that, it has been perennially...
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Painted Stories in Britain 13: Enter the Pre-Raphaelites
With the barriers to development of British narrative painting removed, it wasn’t long before its first school arose. As in so many cases, it appears to have developed entirely unintentionally, among a...
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Reading visual art: 14 Bring on the clowns
Clowns, fools and jesters might appear related species, but they come from quite different traditions, and have separate readings. While jesters and fools were intended to add a little light humour to...
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Reading visual art: 15 Punch and Judy
By the late nineteenth century, the characters of the commedia dell’arte, including Pierrot, Harlequin and Pulcinella, had transferred from their original theatrical comedy to groups of travelling...
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Paintings of William Shakespeare’s Plays 27: All’s Well that Ends Well
Some of William Shakespeare’s plays didn’t become popular for over four centuries. One example is All’s Well That Ends Well, normally considered to be a ‘problem comedy’ because of its inversions of...
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Sunrise on Impressionism: 19 Edgar Degas
Of all the French Impressionists, Edgar Degas (1834–1917) was the odd one out. Not only did he consider himself a Realist rather than Impressionist, but he spent much of his career avoiding painting...
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Painted Stories in Britain 14: British poetry and Arthurian legend
Before the middle of the nineteenth century, British narrative painting had a repertoire of themes that was only distinguished by the popularity of stories from the plays of William Shakespeare. That...
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Reading visual art: 16 Circe and sorceresses
There’s something special about mythical and legendary sorceresses, who combine their working of dark arts with skills of seduction, making them among the earliest femmes fatales. Their depictions are...
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Reading visual art: 17 Medea as sorceress
The myth of Medea is long and complicated, and centres on her relationship with Jason, who with his Argonauts completed a quest to steal the Golden Fleece. Without Medea’s sorcery he couldn’t have...
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Paintings of William Shakespeare’s Plays 28: The Comedy of Errors
For the leading British English playwright, many of William Shakespeare’s works relied on non-English sources and were set overseas. The Comedy of Errors, probably written in about 1594, is a good...
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Painted Stories in Britain 15: Human panoramas
At the same time as the Pre-Raphaelite Brethren were starting to paint narratives in their new style, the influence of William Hogarth was about to result in a transient but distinctively visual...
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Reading visual art: 18 Spinning
Spinning natural fibres into yarn, and weaving that into fabric, have such long traditions in most cultures that they have developed associations in stories. These activities have also become...
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Reading visual art: 19 Weaving
With the wool or other natural fibres spun into yarn in the first of these two articles, we move on to building that yarn into fabric, to assemble into clothing. As with spinning, there are several...
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Paintings of 1922: Narrative
Before the end of each year, I like to look back at those paintings completed a century ago. This is the first in a series of four articles showing some of the finest and most interesting paintings...
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Painted Stories in Britain 16: Open narrative and problem pictures
While Frith’s human panoramas are distinctively visual storytelling, their popularity was limited. By the late nineteenth century they had largely been forgotten, and for the public replaced by a...
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Reading visual art: 20 The face covered
More than any other part of the body, it’s our face that makes us human. It expresses emotion, laughter, crying, love, and anger. It’s one of the central elements for telling any story, the focus of...
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Painted Stories in Britain 17: The end of history
By the early twentieth century, narrative painting was in decline throughout Europe and North America. In Britain, its foremost exponents from the Pre-Raphaelites and their associates were growing old...
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