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The Story in Paintings: Lovis Corinth’s Ariadne on Naxos
Lovis Corinth (1858–1925) defies simple classification, and has been variously described as a member of the Berlin Secession group, a Post-Impressionist, and an Expressionist. All those have a certain...
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The Story in Paintings: Ariadne on Naxos
When discussing Lovis Corinth’s Ariadne on Naxos, I glibly asserted that previous monoscenic approaches were neither strong in a narrative sense, nor complete. Given that the best-known of those is a...
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The Story in Paintings: Peter Nicolai Arbo, Valkyries and Mermen
European painted narratives have been dominated by stories from the classical Greek and Roman canons. Until the 1800s, very few narrative painters tackled myths from other cultures. One early...
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The Story in Paintings: ER Hughes’ flights of fantasy
Edward Robert Hughes (1851-1914) was trained at the Royal Academy Schools in London from 1868, and became a popular portraitist. In addition, he was a studio assistant for more than fifteen years to...
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The Story in Paintings: Night Attack on the Sanjō Palace, a Japanese...
Narrative painting is not, of course, peculiar to European art traditions. I have already looked at some works from the Indian sub-continent, and here look at one particularly striking example from...
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The Story in Paintings: Kalevala, Finland’s Epic 1
Most – perhaps all – societies have their own mythologies which shape their culture and collective identity. Oddly, until recently most European narrative painting has depicted myths from ancient...
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The Story in Paintings: Kalevala, Finland’s Epic 2
My previous article looked at several of the early responses in paintings to the publication of the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala. This concentrates on the single most prolific painter of the...
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The Story in Paintings: What the Dickens?
Charles Dickens (1812-70) was one of the most successful writers in history, and a true child of the nineteenth century. With increasing literacy and the progressive introduction of compulsory...
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The Story in Paintings: Ancient Egypt and Italy
The very earliest paintings, those found in caves throughout the world, and many dating from more than 10,000 years ago, can appear to record events which could, in places, amount to narrative....
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Brief Candles: Jules Bastien-Lepage 1
… Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. (William Shakespeare, Macbeth Act 5, scene 5.) You can...
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The Story in Paintings: Andromeda rescued 1
To my surprise, one story which keeps recurring in my forays into narrative paintings is that of the rescue of Andromeda by Perseus. This is told in several sources, most notably Ovid’s Metamorphoses,...
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The Story in Paintings: Andromeda rescued 2
In the previous article, I showed examples of paintings of this classical myth in which Cetus, the sea monster, was absent or still alive. I come now to consider those in which Cetus is shown to be...
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The Story in Paintings: Between Rome and Renaissance, 300-1100 CE
There might seem to be a void in the history of painting between the collapse of the Roman Empire after 300 CE, and the arrival of the ‘Gothic’ style around 1200. Whether you refer to the period as the...
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The Story in Paintings: Raising Lazarus, and 1100-1400 CE
The start of our journey through some of the wonderful art of the Middle Ages relied on ‘miniature’ paintings made on vellum and included in religious manuscripts, and the embroidery of the Bayeux...
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The Story in Paintings: genocide and an Etruscan tomb
Some narrative paintings need thinking about, to understand their story properly. Sometimes, the more that you think (and read) about a particular painting, the more puzzling it becomes. Take the two...
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The Story in Paintings: Why do angels have wings?
I identified two of the figures in the striking and gruesome painting on the wall of an Etruscan tomb at Vulci as being Etruscan gods: Vanth and Charun. Unless you are already familiar with Etruscan...
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The Story in Paintings: Was Velázquez spinning or weaving?
Reading a painting, and working out its narrative, is not a science, and even experts can sometimes get it wrong. This article follows up my comments about Velázquez’s popular painting known as Las...
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The Story in Paintings: Modes of painted narrative
Over this series of articles, I have shown examples of different modes of visual narrative: most commonly that in which the painting shows a moment in time, usually termed monoscenic, with some...
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The Story in Paintings: Arthur Hughes and romantic legends
Contemporary romantic poems and the legends of the mythical King Arthur of Britain of around 500 CE were central themes in much of Pre-Raphaelite art. Although never a member of the Pre-Raphaelite...
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The Story in Paintings: Apelles, the oldest Master of all
The arts have a tendency to become reflexive, expressing themselves about their art. Writers quite often write about writers, and many movies are about movies and their making (some of the best, too)....
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