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How to Read Paintings
By Christopher P Jones
From famous artworks to lesser-known masterpieces,
a new way of looking at art through close-reading of
individual paintings
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First published by Thinksheet 2020
Copyright © 2020 by Christopher P Jones
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise
without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy
this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means
without permission.
Christopher P Jones asserts the moral right to be identified as
the author of this work. All images are, to author’s knowledge,
in the public domain, and are illustrated here for the purpose of
commentary and criticism.
Christopher P Jones has no responsibility for the persistence or
accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Websites
referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that
any content on such Websites is, or will remain, accurate or
appropriate.
First edition
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Contents
How to Read Paintings
i
Introduction
1
How to Read Paintings
How to use this book
2
3
How to Read Paintings
The Kiss by Gustav Klimt
The Penitent Magdalen by Georges de La Tour
The Last of England by Ford Madox Brown
Apollo Pursuing Daphne by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
Self-Portrait by Albrecht Dürer
The Oxbow by Thomas Cole
Paris Street; Rainy Day by Gustave Caillebotte
Susanna and the Elders by Artemisia Gentileschi
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich
Assumption of the Virgin by Titian
Water Lilies by Claude Monet
The Long Engagement by Arthur Hughes
The Alba Madonna by Raphael
Moonlight, Strandgade 30 by Vilhelm Hammershøi
Mont Sainte-Victoire by Paul Cézanne
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21
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About the Author
Image credits
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Looking at Art in Galleries and Books
Tips for Visiting Art Galleries
Art is an Experiment
Art Appreciations & Books
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Introduction
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How to Read Paintings
The central purpose of this book is to celebrate the act of looking
more deeply. My overwhelming piece of advice for anyone new to
looking at art is this: take your time to actually look.
Artworks can seem like mysterious things, but often, with a few
minutes of attention, their mysteries will easily open up.
My own initiation into this way of thinking occurred more than
two decades ago, when I was on a college trip to the Tate Britain
gallery in London. I was seventeen at the time. It was a small
but lasting lesson in how to look at art, and since then I’ve never
forgotten it. It taught me a lot about patience, about the possibilities
of art, and about myself too.
There I was, a seventeen-year-old wandering around this huge
art gallery, not really knowing what to make of it, when I found
myself standing in front of a Mark Rothko painting. Mark Rothko
was an American painter who made experimental images by
applying layers of paint in abstract bands of colour. On first sight,
his works can be confounding, since there is little to “grab hold of”.
This particular painting had thick bands of yellow, red and orange
running horizontally across the canvas.
At this point, my art teacher came over and suggested that I take
a seat. He must have seen me wandering around in a daze. “There’s
a bench over there,” he said. “Why don’t you get comfortable?”
So I sat down on the bench and began to look at the painting. My
teacher said, “I want you to look at this painting for as long as you
can manage. Stay here for at least half-an-hour. See what happens.”
Half-an-hour sounded like an extremely long time to me. But I did
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it anyway. I looked at the painting until I got bored, then I looked at
it longer still. I looked until my back ached and my mind began to
fidget, float and daydream.
Then, at a certain point, a strange thing happened: I became
entranced. The colours of the painting began to swarm and
pulsate. I saw new colours being born, as if the layers of paint were
revealing themselves to me. It probably sounds odd to say it, but
the object appeared to come alive. The bands of colour began to
blend, and beneath them new colours began to emerge. Perhaps it
was the genius of Mark Rothko or perhaps my eyes were inventing
something new. I didn’t think to question it. I was simply grateful
to my teacher for making me push my attention span longer than a
few seconds so I could see beyond the surface glance.
Ever since then, I’ve always tried to stay a bit longer. To take my
time and try to see beneath the surface. And in many ways, that’s
what I celebrate when I write about art. I don’t go in for the latest
fad; I like to explore things that have taken time to ripen, deepen
and unfurl.
How to use this book
I don’t want to promise that every work of art will provide the same
sort of magical experience as the Mark Rothko painting did for me.
And yet, all the paintings that I’ve chosen to examine in this book
are all remarkable in one way or another.
In actual fact, I think it’s possible to find something remarkable in
any painting you might chose to look at. Every image has a history
behind it, a history of place and time, of meaning, technology and
technique.
The paintings contained here are some of the most important
and iconic images that Western art has produced. What I hope this
book can do is to help you see beneath the surface of these very
famous works, and find among their signs and symbols your own
means of appreciating art more fully.
The first painting I look at in this book is Gustave Klimt’s The
Kiss. Few paintings are as universally admired, even adored, as this
painting. It’s obviously about romance and love, but how long have
you ever spent actually looking at this painting? And have you ever
wondered who the two lovers are or why they have been given such
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answered by looking a little more closely.
Not every image in this book is as well-known as The Kiss. The
treasure trove of works stretches from the Renaissance through
to the early 20th-century, and covers many styles of art by many
different painters. It’s a survey, an attempt to be prepared to look,
even at paintings you may not immediately recognise. Like I said,
there’s something remarkable in every painting, and by taking your
time, you can nearly always find it.
Finally, there’s one thing that this book is not. It’s not a history of
art. I’ve tried to avoid even the most basic structures that usually
go into art history books. The paintings are not presented in
chronological order. Nor are they gathered into sections to try to
illustrate some wider scheme or theory of art history.
Instead, what I’ve tried to do it to recreate the experience of
standing in front of an individual painting in an art gallery, when all
you really have to go on is the image itself. By the end of this book,
I hope you will have learnt enough about looking at art that, the
next time you’re inside a gallery, you can approach even the most
forbidding of paintings and find a way to connect with it.
I’ve concluded the book with three short essays on how you
might go about doing this, sharing some thoughts of mine that will
assist you to look at art with a stronger sense of control over the
situation.
If this book can achieve anything, then I hope it can provide you
with a new set of tools for looking at art, so that next time you find
yourself wondering around art gallery not really knowing what
to make of it, you’ll be able to find your bearings and enjoy the
experience at a deeper and longer-lasting level.
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How to Read Paintings
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The Kiss
by Gustav Klimt
A sumptuous celebration of love that may
also suggest impending tragedy
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The Kiss (1907–08) by Gustav Klimt
Oil and gold leaf on canvas
Österreichische Galerie Belvedere museum, Vienna, Austria
The Austrian artist Gustav Klimt made this painting in around
1908. From the title of the work and from the image itself, it’s
clearly a painting that celebrates the love between a woman and
a man. But when we look more closely, a different, more complex
reality emerges.
The first detail that always draws my eye in The Kiss is the position
of the woman’s feet. They appear to be gripping the very edge of the
world. What lies beyond is uncertain: a speckled golden haze that
might be the night sky or the glistening spectre of a thunderstorm,
or else a cliff-edge abyss.
The woman’s toes are bent under so that her heels face the
unknown. I suppose the reason I always go to this detail is because
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Passion teetering on the brink, lovers curled inwards and around
one another, an expression of both the pleasure and terror of the
embrace.
The subject of The Kiss is centred on a pair of lovers kneeling in a
grassy patch of wildflowers. Everything about their body language
suggests a consensual union. She wraps her arms around his neck;
he cradles her face as he leans in to kiss her. They are ardent and
trusting at the same time. The absence of any eyes — hers are
closed, his are facing away — means that their intimacy cannot
be interrupted by our peering gaze. We will never catch their eye,
never infringe upon their privacy.
The two figures are dressed in gold. It was a favourite technique
of Klimt’s to apply gold leaf directly to his paintings, which he
skillfully blended with his oil paint brushstrokes to create this
sumptuous effect.
There were two formative influences on Klimt’s artistic evolution
which perhaps explain why he was drawn to the decorative effect
of gold, as well as the jewel-like patterns that garnish the forms of
the two lovers.
The first was his father, a Viennese jeweller who specialised in
metalwork and gold engraving. Undoubtedly, the materials the
young Klimt must have seen in his father’s workshop left a deep
impression on the artist. The second influence was a trip to Italy
that Klimt took in 1903. In the city of Ravenna, he visited the 6thcentury Basilica of San Vitale and discovered the gold Byzantine
mosaics that adorn the church’s interior.
Mosaics have a peculiar quality of flatness that can transform into
vibrancy when they catch the light. So many of Klimt’s paintings
work towards capturing the same effect in paint and gold leaf, using
geometric shapes in rich patterns that shimmer as the viewer’s eye
moves across them.
Yet, the decorative surface of The Kiss is not merely ornamental.
It is interesting to note that the play of circles and rectangles not
only delineates the male and female figures, it also expresses a
tension between them. The two basic shapes can be read as primal
elements, as abstract representations of male and female sex organs.
Klimt was searching for a visual language that captured something
fundamental and primitive about two individuals in love.
I think what makes the painting such an appealing image is the
way the figurative details — the hands, limbs and faces of the
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two lovers — thread so effortlessly among these more abstract
elements. See how the woman’s left arm threads in and out of the
abstract shapes. The effect gives rise to a collage of greater and
lesser detail, into which the viewer’s eye is drawn and released,
inwards towards the finer depictions and outwards again to take in
the wider whole.
Art historians have put forward several possible candidates for
who the lovers in the painting might be. For me, the most persuasive
option is Orpheus and Eurydice, the mythical husband and wife
who were tragically separated on the cusp of the Underworld.
As told by the Roman poet Virgil, Orpheus and Eurydice were
nwely married. Yet soon afterwards, Eurydice was bitten by a
snake on the ankle and died. Perhaps that’s why Klimt shows us her
bare feet in the long grass, because they are exposed to oncoming
venom?
On her death, Orpheus was heartbroken and decided to visit the
Underworld in an attempt to bring her back to the land of the living.
Being a musician Orpheus played his lyre and charmed his way into
the Underworld. He was given permission to bring Eurydice back
from the darkness on the one condition that he did not look back as
they left. He led Eurydice out of the Underworld into the daylight,
but so desperate was he to see his wife, he looked back over his
shoulder, at which Eurydice faded away and return to the land of
the dead.
Could this be the story we are looking at in Klimt’s painting? The
two mythical lovers just emerged from the Underworld, kneeling
now in a thin sliver of sunlight that illuminates the last moments
of their reunion? Has Klimt transmuted Orpheus’ “glancing back”
into a kiss?
If so, in Klimt’s painting, the lovers are frozen in their embrace —
and against the unknowable abyss of the speckled gold background
— suspended in a state of eternity too. They teeter on the edge
of their tragedy, but being forever silent and still, will never quite
succumb to it.
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The Penitent Magdalen
by Georges de La Tour
A fascinating image of piety, meditation
and spiritual longing
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The Penitent Magdalen (c. 1640) by Georges de La Tour
Oil on canvas
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, United States
In this painting, by the French artist Georges de La Tour, Mary
Magdalene sits in a meditative pose, with a candle and a mirror in
front of her, and a human skull in her lap.
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The purpose of these objects is to impress upon the viewer that
Mary is reflecting on the fleeting emptiness of worldly possessions.
The burning candle is symbolic of the fragility of life, which may
flicker and extinguish at any moment. The skull in her hands
reminds her that nothing lives forever. In short, Mary is sat among
a form of still-life painting known as a Vanitas — from the Latin
meaning “emptiness”.
And yet, notice the angle of Mary’s gaze, how it passes over the top
of all these objects and away into the shadowy distance. It’s almost
as if her thoughts have drifted and she is longing for something else
other than these mortal reminders.
To notice the direction of Mary’s gaze is also to see the long white
flute of her chest and chin, and how her neck becomes a slender arc
of light cut across by the curve of her hair.
One of the pleasures of looking at this painting is to explore how
La Tour has rendered Mary using just a narrow strip of light. From
her face and torso down to her feet, most of her body is in shadow,
with those parts lit by the candle painted with brilliant clarity and
detail.
La Tour’s painting style has been compared to the Italian artist
Caravaggio because of its extreme use of dark and light, of deep
shadows and glowing highlights. There are, however, obvious
differences between the two painters, not least the silent rustic
calm of La Tour’s work in contrast to Caravaggio’s often highly
dramatic scenes.
Another interesting point of distinction is that Caravaggio tended
to place the light source that illuminated his scenes outside the
picture frame, so that the light flows into and across the canvas.
With La Tour, his lighting is nearly always inside the picture. It
is often the very focus of the attention, glowing like the nucleus
of the work, so that all the other features tend to be arranged
around this light source, creating a bubble of light and an extreme
“vignette” around the outer edges. In this way, the paintings become
emphatically self-contained, never relying on anything beyond the
edge of canvas to complete the scene.
It is for this reason that the direction of Mary’s gaze becomes
all the more interesting. For whilst the painting is unified and
contained by the effect of the candle light, her line-of-sight takes us
beyond the confines of the setting.
La Tour painted at least four versions of Mary Magdalene, all of
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them similar in size and all representing the saint as a seated, fulllength figure lit by a burning flame.
In the Bible, Mary Magdalen was present at several important
events in the life of Christ. She was present at the Crucifixion and
also at the discovery of the empty tomb in which Christ’s body was
being kept.
During medieval times, a tradition evolved that also identified
Mary Magdalene with the unnamed “immoral” woman who fell
at Christ’s feet in repentance for her promiscuity. She wept tears
onto his feet, wiped them dry with her hair, and then anointed his
feet with oil of myrrh from a vase. It is from this story that Mary’s
key attributes in art were taken, principally her long hair and jar of
ointment. (In La Tour’s painting, the jar of ointment can be seen in
the shadows just to the right of the mirror).
This version of Mary Magdalene focuses most attentively on
the act of silent, solitary meditation. As a demonstration of her
atonement for worldly immoderation, she has discarded her pearl
necklace on the dressing table and other jewellery onto the floor.
And so, with this understanding of who Mary Magdalene was, it’s
possible to read the meaning of the presence of the mirror in the
painting with more nuance.
Most obviously, the mirror stands for reflection: the act of looking
at one’s self. Looking into a mirror could be read in two apparently
contradictory ways: the first associated with the virtue of truth (for
the mirror is said not to lie) and the second with a perversion of
truth, with vanity and the darker quality of self-obsession.
But perhaps the two themes are not so contradictory after all,
for what unites them is the sense of something being revealed:
the idea is that mirrors reflect a hidden truth, perhaps a window
into an “anti-world”, a more unvarnished version of our own. We
are accustomed to demons and supernatural creatures having
no reflection on account of being dispossessed of a soul. Thus,
as a means of disclosure, the image that appears in a mirror can
be thought of as revealing more than mere surface appearance.
Hence, in art, the depiction of a mirror is usually for some allegorical
purpose. It is a way of saying, “There lies a deeper truth here.”
In La Tour’s image of Mary Magdalene, the way the mirror doublesup the flame of the candle therefore seems to suggest a further
consideration: That beyond the surface there exists a second life,
a spiritual existence alongside this earthly one, an existence that
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demands our attention more than the pearls, rubies and gilded
mirrors of the physical realm.
So you may wonder: could this thought be where Mary’s gaze has
drifted to?
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The Last of England
by Ford Madox Brown
A work of art about the hopes and fears of migration,
painted in the Pre-Raphaelite style
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The Last of England (c.1855) by Ford Madox Brown
Oil on canvas
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, United Kingdom
This is one of those works of art that grows more fascinating the
more you look at it. The painting may not be immediately attractive
in the conventional sense, but as a story unfolds, your sense of
connection with the work deepens.
The Last of England shows a husband and wife sat side-by-side,
huddled beneath a wind-warped umbrella. They are on the outer
deck of a boat. Her pink scarf is rippling across them, whipped up
by a fierce wind. Behind them, the pale-green waves of the sea race
towards the side of the boat relentlessly. At the front of the boat
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a row of cabbages dangle — the passengers’ sustenance during
the journey. The crossing promises to be long and arduous. The
expressions of the voyagers are stern, stubborn, steadfast.
The first impression of the work is rather forbidding, but first
impressions don’t last. Painted by the English artist Ford Madox
Brown, The Last of England depicts a family leaving the shores of
their home country on a journey of migration. The white cliffs of
Dover — their port of departure — are receding into the distance
behind them.
They are a family of at least three: husband, wife, and if you look
very closely, the suggested form a child — inside the wife’s shawl
— whose hand clutches onto its mother’s between a gap in the
material. These two hands holding each other are echoed in the
hands of the husband and wife clasped nearby.
During the 19th century, Britain had one of the highest rates of
emigration of all European countries. People were travelling to the
colonial territories of the British Empire. Many of those leaving
were farmers, labourers and craftsmen from traditional trades;
many emigrated en masse in family groups. Brown himself, by no
means insensitive to the social conditions of his country at the time,
wrote, “The educated are bound to their country by closer ties
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than the illiterate, whose chief consideration is food and physical
comfort.”
Ford Madox Brown painted this work between 1852 and 1855.
It was not an easy time in the artist’s life, since his professional
success was faltering and his circumstances were dominated by
poverty. He was considering his options over what to do next. In
1852 he watched his friend and Pre-Raphaelite sculptor, Thomas
Woolner, leave Gravesend harbour and emigrate to Australia. After
this, Brown also considered emigration — himself to India — in
an attempt to alleviate his worsening circumstances. He described
himself at the time as “very hard up and a little mad.”
Brown never did emigrate from Britain. In the painting, he depicts
himself and his wife on a journey they never took. Brown described
the painting in a catalogue entry for an 1865 exhibition:
“In order to present the parting in its fullest tragic
development, [I] singled out a couple from the middle class,
high enough, through education and refinement, to appreciate
all they are giving up, and yet dignified enough in means to
have to put up the discomforts and humiliations incident to a
vessel.”
Other families are on the boat too, all tightly packed onto the ship’s
deck. A father smokes a pipe, a child eats an apple, a mother and son
huddle together for warmth. All of these details are crammed into
the narrow left-hand margin, lending the composition a convivial
yet hectic feel. The dinghy painted in the background gives a clue
as to the hopes (if not expectations) of those aboard: its name,
Eldorado, refers to the mythical “city of gold”.
The work is painted in a circular composition known as a tondo.
The word tondo derives from the Italian rotondo, meaning “round”.
Many Renaissance artists used the circular composition in their
works, including Botticelli and Michelangelo, a technique which
they revived from Greek precedents. Brown appears to have wished
to renew the technique for his own times, perhaps because of these
eminent predecessors.
Above all, Brown’s work revels in the precisely painted details
of the boat and the couple aboard it. One of my favourite details is
the piece of string that the man has used to tie his hat to the button
on his coat — presumably to stop it from blowing away should the
wind catch it. Beneath the rim of the hat, the man’s facial
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expression supplies a sense of his inner feelings. He is determined
yet downcast. Brown described: “The husband broods bitterly over
blighted hopes and severance from all that he has been striving for.”
Brown was also a master of painting different textures. Just
looking across the clothes of the main couple, one finds an
extraordinary description of various fabrics, from the woven fabric
of the woman’s shawl to her silk headscarf, from the shabby fur of
the man’s coat to the leather tarpaulin they use as a blanket, not to
mention the materials of the boat, sea and sky.
It is through these graphic details that the viewer can empathise
with the family’s experiences, and in doing so, turn the work from
a comment on social classes into a distinctively vivid image of fear
and hope, regret and perseverance.
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Apollo Pursuing Daphne
by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
A vivid and lively painting that
captures a doomed love story
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Apollo Pursuing Daphne (c. 1760) by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
Oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., United States
This painting, Apollo Pursuing Daphne, was made in around 1760
and is part of the Rococo tradition of Western art. Like many other
paintings of the Rococo tradition, its forms are made up of rich,
contorted shapes and sculpted fabric, with an additional air of
lightness given by the white and pastel colouration.
It is an image full of light and motion. A young man dashes up a
hillside, pointing in the direction of a woman, who appears to have
tree leaves sprouting from her fingertips. It’s a vivid image, not
least because of the bold sense of movement that is woven through
the scene.
I’ve looked at this painting many times, and for so long wondered
how the artist managed to give it such energy. For the painting
never seems to stay still. How can it be that Apollo’s pursuit of
Daphne never seems to quite end?
One way of understanding how Tiepolo managed to conjure
so much dynamism in the scene is to notice how the painting is
composed. Its structure relies on a distinct cross-shape that forms
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an X over the entire image. Let your eye pass from the bottom-right
of the picture, up the slope of the hill and up through Daphne’s body.
That’s one side of the X. Now let your eye run from the bottomleft of the picture, through the body of the old man, up to Apollo’s
outstretched arm. That’s the other side of the X.
Using this basic form, the artist has constructed the image on
a series if diagonal lines that constantly lead the viewer’s eye in
different directions, linking the different elements of the picture
into one overall X-shaped motif that unifies the whole.
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770) was an Italian painter
and printmaker from Venice who is best known for his large-scale
frescoes on the walls and ceilings of churches and palaces. He also
painted many small-scale works, often focusing on scenes from
Classical mythology, as in Apollo Pursuing Daphne.
The story of Apollo and Daphne is as curious as it is tragic. In
the painting, we see the god Apollo running up the slope. See how
brightly dressed he is, wearing that billowing cape of yellow? His
hair is golden too, and behind his head hangs a shining halo like the
sun in the sky. As one of the twelve deities of Olympus, Apollo was
the embodiment of youthful, physical beauty. In classical sculpture,
he represented the ideal form of male physical perfection, and in
Roman times became known as the god of the sun.
To understand the symbolic meaning of the painting, perhaps the
first detail that is worth noting is the small cherub boy hiding on the
left, beneath the folds of a white robe. This is Eros, the Greek god of
love and sex, known as Cupid to the Romans. By firing arrows from
his bow, Cupid played the mischievous game of kindling amorous
love in his victims, and inspiring repulsion in others too.
Cupid is really the genesis of the story being told in the picture.
He is hiding because it was his mischief that brought about the
rather tragic narrative that is unfolding in the main portion of the
painting.
The story of Apollo and Daphne begins with a squabble between
Apollo and Cupid after the sun-god had insulted the archery skills
of the impish Cupid. In an act of revenge, Cupid fired a golden arrow
at Apollo, the sort that aroused the fervour of love. In contrast, he
fired a lead arrow at Daphne, the sort that turned love cold. Apollo
fell in love with Daphne; but she, in response, was repulsed and
fled. This is an age-old tale of unrequited love.
Daphne was a nymph and the daughter of the river god Peneus.
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Peneus is the old man in the painting and is symbolised by a rowing
oar and an upturned urn spilling water. As Apollo followed Daphne,
she called for her father’s assistance, “Help me, Peneus! Open the
earth to enclose me, or change my form, which has brought me into
this danger! Let me be free of this man from this moment forward!”
Thereupon her father transformed her into something that Apollo
could no longer pursue: a laurel tree.
Tiepolo depicted the moment of Daphne’s metamorphosis, just
as her hands turned into branches, her legs became a tree trunk
and her neck stiffened into bark. Daphne’s transformation into a
laurel tree can be seen as an act of eternal chastity and gives the
story its moral lesson: lust has been defeated by chasteness, purity
has won over appetite.
When Apollo reached the tree, still enamored with his sweetheart,
he mourned his loss, as Ovid wrote in the Metamorphoses:
Fairest of maidens, you are lost to me. But at least you shall
be my tree. With your leaves my victors shall wreathe their
brows. You shall have your part in all my triumphs. Apollo and
his laurel shall be joined together wherever songs are sung and
stories told.
This explains why the laurel is a symbol of Apollo and why winners
of competitions in sports, music and poetry are to this day crowned
with laurel leaves.
Tiepolo’s bright and dynamic painting gives the sense that the
story is unfolding in front of us. It also captures something vital
about Greek myth that may explain the longevity of these stories:
their ability to be re-imagined in different ages. For these tales, often strange or beguiling, have a malleable quality that make them
constantly open to new and vivid representations.
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Self-Portrait
by Albrecht Dürer
A complex description of religious piety
and artistic self-assertion
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Self-portrait (1500) by Albrecht Dürer
Oil on lime wood
Alte Pinakothek museum, Munich, Germany
Albrecht Dürer was a German artist, born in 1471. He was just 28
years old when he painted this self-portrait. The inscription in the
top-right of the painting tells us so: “I, Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg
have portrayed myself in my own paints at the age of twenty-eight.”
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From our modern perspective, this may seem a young age to paint
such an assured (and self-assured) depiction. The painted textures
of the artist’s hair and coat are extraordinarily detailed, and the
colour palette is mature in its restrained use of browns and creams.
Yet, by this stage in his life, Dürer had already been working as a
craftsman and artist for over 15 years. From the age of 11 he worked
in his father’s goldsmith workshop where he learned to draw and
engrave. By the age of 15, he was apprenticed to Nuremberg’s
leading painter Michael Wolgemut, whose workshop also designed
stained glass and produced woodcut prints. It is likely that the
young Dürer was involved in the manufacture of the Nuremberg
Chronicle, a huge illustrated world history whose 1,800 woodcut
illustrations were prepared by the Wolgemut workshop.
Dürer travelled widely during his youth, staying in Frankfurt,
Cologne and Basel, and in 1494, an extended trip to Italy. Throughout
this time he worked on numerous engraving projects, and by 1495
had set up his own workshop in Nuremberg. His reputation as a
skilled illustrator and engraver was quickly established, so that by
the time he made this self-portrait in 1500, he was famous across
the continent.
The first thing that tends to strike most viewers of the Selfportrait is its resemblance to Jesus Christ. It is interesting to note
that, in Dürer’s time, it was believed that an eye-witness account of
Christ actually existed. It appeared in a letter written by a Roman
official, Lentulus, supposedly a contemporary of Jesus, who gave a
physical and personal description of Christ:
He is a man of medium size; he has a venerable aspect, and his
beholders can both fear and love him. His hair is of the colour of
the ripe hazel-nut, straight down to the ears, but below the ears
wavy and curled, with a bluish and bright reflection, flowing
over his shoulders. It is parted in two on the top of the head,
after the pattern of the Nazarenes. His brow is smooth and very
cheerful with a face without wrinkle or spot, embellished by a
slightly reddish complexion. His nose and mouth are faultless.
His beard is abundant, of the colour of his hair, not long, but
divided at the chin. His aspect is simple and mature, his eyes
are changeable and bright. He is terrible in his reprimands,
sweet and amiable in his admonitions, cheerful without loss of
gravity. He was never known to laugh, but often to weep. His
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stature is straight, his hands and arms beautiful to behold. His
conversation is grave, infrequent, and modest. He is the most
beautiful among the children of men.
Comparing Dürer’s self-portrait with the letter from Lentulus, from
the “hair the colour of ripe hazel-nut” to “eyes changeable and
bright”, it is hard not to see a connection between the description
and the painting.
Moreover, it is likely that Dürer was acquainted with the description, since the Lentulus letter was first printed in Germany in 1474
as part of the “Life of Christ” by Ludolph the Carthusian. It was later
printed in Nuremberg in 1491 as part of the “Introduction to the
works of St. Anselm” — Dürer was living in Nuremberg when he
made his self-portrait of 1500.
It is now widely accepted that the letter from Lentulus was a forgery; still, the letter was published widely and for a long time was
taken as a direct eyewitness account. It is not surprising, then, that
artists of the period used the description as the basis for their own
representations of Christ and that, subsequently, a certain look established itself in paintings of Christ, as can be seen in works by
numerous artists, from Jan van Eyck and Leonardo da Vinci.
So, did Dürer intentionally paint himself in the guise of Jesus
Christ? And if so, for what purpose?
In Dürer’s time and place, paintings were usually made to commission. In contrast, prints made from woodcut and metal engravings were typically made for speculative sale. With this in mind, it
is likely that the self-portrait was painted as a virtuoso piece rather
than for a specific client: it was an exercise that allowed Dürer to
show off his exceptional observational skills and his technical abilities at depicting textures and facial features.
Still, there can be no doubt that the self-portrait was designed to
resemble Christ. The portrait shows Dürer looking directly out of
the canvas, a common convention in Late Northern medieval depictions of Jesus. In contrast, a frontal pose like this was unusual for a
secular painting.
So, what is going on here? There is perhaps one further detail in
the painting that is worth examining, to gain a fuller understanding
of the work.
The coat he is wearing is lined with marten fur (martens are a
cat-sized animal belonging to the mustelid family, native to
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Northern Europe). Marten fur was also a common material used
in the manufacture of paintbrushes. If you look closely, you can
see the artist is gripping the fur between the fingertips of his right
hand, and in doing so, creating an unusual shape with the arrangement of his thumb and fingers.
It’s possible to interpret the shape of his thumb and first finger
as forming the shape of the letter A, and the shape of his first and
middle finger the shape of the letter D. Combined, they make the
artist’s initials A.D — an echo of the monogram that Dürer signed
many of his works with, appearing top-left in this painting.
So the shape of his fingers become a self-referential motif. And
since they are fingering the marten fur — as used in the paintbrushes — so Dürer is telling the viewer that he owes his position
in society to his skill with his paintbrush.
In this way, Dürer’s representation of himself as Jesus Christ
should not be read as blasphemous audacity. It is more likely
that his self-depiction was accepted and understood by his
contemporaries as part of the tradition of the “Imitation of Christ”
— that is, the practice of following the example of Jesus as part of a
pious Christian life.
With the self-referential hand gesture, Dürer’s intention is to
elevate the status of the artist to a higher plane. In other words, to
assert that his exceptional artistic talents are God-given.
29
The Oxbow
by Thomas Cole
Environmental warnings from a classic work of art
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View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm
— The Oxbow (1836) by Thomas Cole
Oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, United States
Art is a place where ideas are inscribed and experimented with.
Human activity can be made to seem beautiful or destructive,
depending on how the artwork presents itself.
Thomas Cole’s painting of an oxbow in the Connecticut River
Valley has both a light and a dark side, just like human nature and
just like human progress too. The storm that is sweeping across the
left hand side of the painting — a storm that has passed — contrasts
tonally with the sun-bathed expanse that it leaves in its wake.
Cole was very good at dramatic composition. That which is
swathed in shadow is all in the foreground, so that the yellow light
stretching out across the more distant lowlands adds emphasis
to the impression of expanse and openness. The sunlit plains are
occupied by a pastoral scene of fields and farmlands, suggestive
of the prospects of landscape cultivation for development of the
American nation: the land is ploughed into fields, houses have been
built, smoke is rising from chimneys, and in the distant hills, treeclearings scar the slopes.
The high vantage point from Mount Holyoke gives us a sweeping
panorama, so that, as the viewer, we are invited to widen our eyes
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at the beauty and breadth of the scene. If the painting contains
anxieties about the fate of the natural environment, then you have
to look a little closer to find them.
On the surface, Cole has painted a natural wonder: the winding
course of a river across a low-lying valley, with the dramatic addition
of changing weather conditions, giving a sense of the artist having
‘captured’ a fleeting moment. In truth, Cole worked mainly in his
studio, gradually developing his paintings from sketches.
Painted in 1836, the artist produced a vision of a landscape in
a state of transformation. The painting supplies three overlaid
timeframes: the shortest timeframe is the rapid onset of a storm,
which arrives and departs in a matter of minutes or hours; the
clearing of trees and wilderness to be replaced by agriculture and
towns is a process that occurs over years and decades; and then
there is the far slower geological process of a river flowing over
flatlands and slowly silting up, so creating curves that eventually
turn into oxbows, the great horseshoe meander that gives the
painting its subject matter.
The work was first shown at the National Academy of Design
in 1836 with the title View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton,
Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm. Painting the American
landscape was a new facet of American art. Once seen as a place
of peril and hardship, it is a paradox of the American landscape
that it was only as it came under threat from mankind that it
began to be treated as a spectacle of beauty. This is the fate of all
natural territories, of course, in the same manner as European
landscape art was a reaction to 18th century urbanisation and
the scientific Enlightenment. So American landscape art took root
as the American frontier was pushed further westward into the
wilderness.
Cole was a founder member of the Hudson River School, a group of
artists who explored the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding
mountain ranges. In the tradition of European Romantic landscape
painters such as Claude Lorrain and John Constable, the Hudson
River School chronicled the disappearing wilderness and the
expanding presence of modern civilization as concurrent and
sometimes harmonious phenomena.
Cole’s painting, better known simply as The Oxbow, emphatically
draws our attention to this frontier line: the painting is split in half
along the diagonal, decisively juxtaposing a picture of ‘untamed’
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nature with a pastoral settlement, encompassing what Cole
described as “a union of the picturesque, the sublime, and the
magnificent.”
What was Cole trying to paint here? Is this a celebration of
mankind’s dominion over the land or something else, a warning of
an ancient environment under threat perhaps?
From the turn of the 18th century, the relationship between art
and the natural world was the subject of much discussion across
the Western world. During the century, irreversible changes took
place in the way many people interacted with nature. Fewer and
fewer people worked on the land as urbanisation proceeded
apace. Scientific advancements revised the perspective of nature
as a bearer of symbols and emblems into a classifiable system. The
appropriation of wild land into functional, regularised acreage
meant that the realm of ‘real nature’ was pushed to a further
distance.
Cole was living at a time when the diversity and grandeur of
nature were celebrated for its ‘sublime’ qualities, yet the taming of
nature was equally valued for its benefits to society. Cole’s painting
is successful because it links together these possibly contradictory
values into a unified whole.
If this sounds like an ambiguous conclusion, then I think it is still
possible to discern a grave warning note in Cole’s oxbow painting.
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On the ‘wilderness’ side, we see a series of gnarled trees among
a thick forest of impenetrable green. Nature and civilization are
shown as a distinct opposites that fail to co-exist. Broken trees and
a raging storm tell us that the wilderness is threatened and the
culprit is the ‘Arcadia’ of cultivation.
To underline the magnitude of the dilemma, Cole has added a
further clue. On the hill in the far background, logging scars in the
forest appear to form Hebrew letters, a tiny detail that was only
noticed many decades after the painting was first displayed. From
our perspective it reads as Noah. If viewed upside down, as if from
God’s perspective, the word Shaddai is formed, ‘The Almighty.’
Viewed from the perspective of the 21st century, the painting
should remind us that we’ve been pushing back the frontier of
wilderness for a long time now. The operations of mainstream
society today have grown increasingly remote from nature, both
physically and psychologically. This detachment provides the
necessary distance for the natural environment to be a domain
upon which ideas and ideals might be projected, and for the real
effects of the human destruction to become harder and harder to
see.
Cole’s painting gives us access to a time when the tension between
man and nature was a more finely balanced drama. It illustrates
the anxieties that came before our modern world. And as such, it
should encourage us to ask a simple question: how long can we
go on pushing the human frontier at the cost of ever-diminishing
wildlife?
34
Paris Street; Rainy Day
by Gustave Caillebotte
A brilliantly composed work that captures the ebb and
flow of a 19th century Parisian boulevard
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Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877) by Gustave Caillebotte
Oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, United States
It’s raining in Paris. Men walk in frock coats and top hats, women
in heavy, fur-lined dresses. They protect themselves from the rain
with umbrellas, whose interplay of grey curves provide much of
the visual drama of the scene.
The first thing that always strikes me about this painting of a
19th century Parisian street is the way it is split in half by the green
lamppost running down the middle. If you include its reflection on
the ground, the lamppost spans the entire height of the painting.
This can hardly have been a chance detail on the part of the artist,
since it is positioned exactly midway across the canvas, and provides
a subtle but incisive framework for the structure of the picture.
The artist was Gustave Caillebotte (pronounced “kai-bot” with a
hard “t” at the end). In an early sketch for the painting, Caillebotte
included the lamppost as the central motif of the work.
On the right-hand side of the lamppost, the figures on the street
are shown close up. It is crowded on this side — the umbrellas
being carried look as though they’re about to clash. And all three
of the figures on this side of the picture are cut-off in some way by
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the edge of the canvas, thereby adding to the impression of a street
teeming with people.
One of the pleasures of the painting is the contrast between the
left- and right-hand sides, since on the other side of the painting,
the street is allowed to open out and the figures shown only in the
middle and far distance.
The artist’s use of near and far in this way gives the painting its
impressionistic flavour: a snapshot of contemporary Paris, a sense
of lively urban motion, the approaching and receding of elements
and the fleeting overlap of unconnected lives as strangers pass
each other in the rain.
The location of the painting is the Place de Dublin, known as
the Carrefour de Moscou at the time the work was made. It is an
intersection of roads that lies to the east of the Gare Saint-Lazare
in north Paris.
In the artist’s lifetime, the city had undergone enormous change.
He painted this work in 1877, just after the centre of Paris had been
largely rebuilt by the planner Georges-Eugène Haussmann under
Napoleon III (nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte) in a massive and
controversial programme of urban renewal.
Prior to the regeneration works, sections of Paris had been
considered over-crowded, dark and insanitary. One social reformer
wrote: “Paris is an immense workshop of putrefaction, where
misery, pestilence and sickness work in concert, where sunlight
and air rarely penetrate.” Haussmann’s rebuilding of the city was
intended to bring air and light to the centre and to unify the different
neighbourhoods with wide boulevards — even if that meant the
destruction of large swathes of what stood previously. Much of the
Paris we see today is as a result of Haussmann’s radical project.
Caillebotte came from a wealthy family and enjoyed a privileged
upbringing. His father made a great fortune from textiles, and this
wealth meant that Caillebotte didn’t need to sell his work to make
a living. Indeed, he was largely absent from the commercial arenas
of the Paris art scene of the time and kept most of his works in his
own possession. When he died in 1894, aged just 45, his paintings
passed onto his brother (the artist was not married and had no
children).
Caillebotte’s wealth also meant that he could buy large works by
his Impressionist painter friends. He amassed a great collection
during his life, a collection which later became the basis for the
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Impressionist rooms at the Musee d’Orsay. He also took part in the
organisation of Impressionist exhibitions. As such, after his death,
he was known as a patron of the Impressionists as much as an artist
himself. This may explain why Caillebotte is not hugely well known
beyond a handful of his most famous images.
Like many of the Impressionist painters, Caillebotte painted
his personal surroundings, depictions of friends and views of his
immediate life in the city. These are paintings that delight in the
impromptu setting. They treat life as a series of encounters and,
not unlike photography, capture fleeting moments from the flow
of life.
The Paris-based poet Charles Baudelaire used the term “flâneur”
to express the style of this modern type of painter. Flâneur is a
French word meaning “stroller”, “lounger” or “saunterer”. In his
idealisation of his home city, Baudelaire turned the flâneur into
an archetypal figure who represented all that was exciting and
vital about living in the burgeoning city environs of 19th Paris. In
Baudelaire’s own words of 1863:
“For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an
immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid
the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and
the infinite. […] We might liken him to a mirror as vast as the
crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness,
responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the
multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements
of life.”
Caillebotte was in a perfect position to enjoy the “flickering grace”
of Parisian life. His Paris Street; Rainy Day celebrates these new
encounters in the regenerated city. If a flâneur was a person who
enjoyed their leisure with a lucid eye for detail, then Caillebotte’s
brilliant painting attends to all the details of idling recreation and
social etiquette that his upper-class background had tutored him
in.
39
Susanna and the Elders
by Artemisia Gentileschi
A compelling and superbly composed work of art
with a powerful narrative
40
Susanna and the Elders (c. 1610) by Artemisia Gentileschi
Oil on canvas
Schloss Weißenstein collection, Pommersfelden, Germany
This painting, made in 1610 by the Baroque artist Artemisia
Gentileschi, shows two men leering over a wall, spying on an
unclothed woman.
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One of the men whispers into the other’s ear. He has his hand on
the other’s shoulder. They are clearly in collusion as they loom over
the bathing woman on the other side of the wall. The victim of their
scheming is Susanna. She raises her hands in a defensive posture,
illustrating without ambiguity that their attentions are unwanted
and intrusive.
The men’s postures are threatening and lascivious. The way the
two figures combine into a single form, covering the full width of the
painting and adopting the broad shape of a triangle — a pyramid or
a mountain or something else heavy and stout — gives the distinct
impression of them oppressing the woman seated below.
This scene is recognisable in the history of art as depicting
Susanna and the Elders, as told in the Book of Daniel. The tale is
set in Babylon during the Jewish exile and tells of Susanna taking
a bath in her private garden. Two elders from the community
secretly observe her and between them plot to seduce her.
When Susanna sends her maids away and she is alone, the two
lecherous men appear. They threaten the unsuspecting Susanna,
telling her that unless she sleeps with them they will swear in public
that they’d seen her in an act of adultery with a young man. Since
Susanna was married, the accusation would bring great shame to
her and her family, and worse, would carry the penalty of death if
found guilty.
Susanna refused to relent. Instead, she rebuffed the elders and
cried for help. The elders carried out their threat and Susanna was
arrested. She was about to be put to death when Daniel — a noble
Jewish youth of Jerusalem — interrupted and proceeded to crossexamine the two elders. He used a clever ruse of separating the
two men and asking each to describe the tree under which they
apparently saw Susanna commit her adultery. The two elders each
described different trees; and so, with this conflicting evidence,
Susanna’s innocence was proved.
Susanna was a fictional heroine whose symbolic appeal lay
in the idea of innocent virtue triumphing over evil. Her name in
Hebrew means a lily, the symbol of purity. She became a popular
subject in art because of these allegorical connotations, especially
in Christian art, which made Susanna a symbol of the church.
Painted in around 1610, Artemisia Gentileschi was just 17 years
old when she made the work. As the daughter of the Tuscan artist
Orazio Gentileschi, historians have long wondered if the painting
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had a helping-hand from her father, as a way of explaining its
extraordinary competency.
Undoubtedly, the time the young artist spent in her father’s
workshop provided an important apprenticeship for her technique.
However, looking across Artemisia’s entire painting career, she
produced consistently high-quality works that prove her talents
were well established even from such a young age. Moreover, the
realism of her paintings compared to the more stylised technique
of her father suggest that this work belonged to her brush entirely.
Artemisia’s version of Susanna and the Elders is especially
effective in expressing the lascivious intent of the two men and
of the psychological response of Susanna. Many other artists
who painted the same subject gave a more ambiguous reading of
Susanna’s reaction — one that perhaps enabled the (male) viewer
to look upon the naked woman in the painting without the dubious
sensation of participating in the elders’ malign advances. It may be
fair to say that Artemisia Gentileschi’s interpretation of the story
gained from her being a woman, enabling her to depict a more vivid
scene of sexual advance than her male counterparts were capable
or willing to imagine.
Much of Gentileschi’s reputation, particularly in more recent
years, has been shaped by the story of the rape she endured as a
teenager in 1611, at the hands of another artist, Agostino Tassi.
The case went to trial and detailed court records exist: it was
a complicated situation, owing to the fact that Gentileschi and
Tassi continued to have relations after the event, and also to the
contemporary expectation of Gentileschi having been a virgin
prior to the rape, without which the charges could not have been
pressed. At the end of the trial, a disgraced Tassi was exiled from
Rome, although no sentence was ever carried out.
Readings of Gentileschi’s art have been strongly influenced by
these events, with many historians choosing to interpret her art
as a proto-feminist response to her experiences. Indeed, many of
Gentileschi’s paintings focus on strong female heroines from myth,
allegory and the Bible. Two of her most well-known works are
Judith Slaying Holofernes and Salome with the Head of Saint John
the Baptist, both of which show female protagonists in barbarous
acts against men.
It is difficult to discount the effect of Gentileschi’s experience of
rape on the art she subsequently produced. Yet it may be more
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appropriate to place Gentileschi’s artwork in its wider historical
context: as responding to a marketplace whose taste was for
dramatic narratives of heroines from the Bible or classical sources.
In the case of Susanna and the Elders, there is no need for such
uncertainty anyway, since it was painted a year before Tassi’s crime.
What is also beyond question is the skill with which Gentileschi
made the painting. The two elders, in their crouched, shadowy
form, are expertly contrasted with the light-filled Susanna. Her
twisted posture is especially effective in dramatising the very
moment the old men appear to her. Not only does this posture show
off the artist’s ability to represent the human figure in a complex
yet realistic pose — replete with perfectly painted shadows — it
also adds a deep level emotional realism to the incident. Susanna’s
raised hands and splayed fingers, which are positioned in selfdefensive, work in perfect concert with the position of her head,
which is almost doubled-back in alarm.
A contemporary viewer of this work would almost certainly have
been aware of the full Biblical tale of Susanna. They would have
known that her strength of character in the face of false accusations
eventually resulted — with Daniel’s help — in her innocence being
proved. The tension and apprehension depicted in Gentileschi’s
painting would therefore have made the symbolism of innocent
virtue triumphing over evil all the more gripping.
44
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog
by Caspar David Friedrich
A fascinating image of piety, meditation
and spiritual longing
45
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (c. 1818) by Caspar David Friedrich
Oil on canvas
Kunsthalle Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
A man stands on top of a crag of rocks, overlooking a valley cloaked
in mountain mist. Other ridges rise through the fog, giving the
impression of islands in a sea.
The man himself appears to have hiked up the mountain and now
looks out over the precipice at the heights he has scaled. He is an
explorer — though we sense driven more by romantic sensibility
than by any professional pursuit. The way his hair catches in the
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wind, his overtly noble stance with one leg raised, his frock coat and
walking cane, all give the impression of a well-to-do town-dweller
who has chosen to spend time in the wilds of nature — rather than
a seasoned rock-climber.
Like so many paintings by the German Romantic artist Caspar
David Friedrich, this image depicts someone looking out over a
natural landscape. Friedrich’s landscapes are nearly always vast
and impressive; they are often sombre or portentous. The people
in them are frequently on the verge of things, the coast of a sea
or the edge of a valley, a marginalised predicament that gives rise
to the suggestion of journeys being made. Yet these are as much
existential journeys — journeys of contemplation — as they are
physical ones. Friedrich sometimes used tangible symbols of
travel, the sailing boat, or in this case a hiker, to act as the transitory
element. The landscape is both permanent and yet also shifting
— the mountain mists drift before us — as if the thoughts and
feelings of the onlooker can affect a profound change in the reallife moment.
In this painting, we gaze out from just behind the hiker. The
German term for this device is Rückenfigur, or figure seen from
behind, a compositional device by which the viewer can more
readily identify with the scene.
Friedrich invites us to wonder what this man is thinking as
he stands there. It is natural to make the case for an optimistic
interpretation: that he has trekked to the top of this rocky precipice,
and now, exalted by his efforts, looks over the entire world —
glorious and inspired, elevated and dignified.
What is fascinating about this painting is that it can be approached
in the opposite direction too — a pessimistic reading — and still
make sense: a man racked with doubt looks yearningly out over a
vast mountain range. There is a cauldron of swirling mist beneath
his feet. He is all alone in this landscape, in whose limitless and
mighty dimensions he recognises, by contrast, his own fragile
existence.
The success of this painting, I think, lies in the possibility of this
ambiguity: that a scene of such glory can also pose the threat of
tragedy or personal alienation. What is he thinking as he stands
there? It is impossible to tell, because the painting seeks out this
uncertainty.
Locating and representing the moods of nature was Friedrich’s
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northeastern Germany. Gradually, his depictions of nature began to
contain crosses, Gothic buildings and religious motifs reflecting his
strict Lutheran upbringing. With these symbols, he found a means
of heightening the intensity of landscape to a level where it became
heavy with allegory. He often “invented” his paintings by fusing
together several sketches from different locations into one image,
sometimes even using the sketches made by other artists to fulfill
his vision.
Friedrich used landscape as a way of expressing profound
experience, and in his early work linked this to his Protestant
background. His later work explored the spiritual side of
humankind on a more universal level: face to face with the mystery
and loneliness of great landscapes, a pensive glorification of nature
in all its sublime and frightening grandeur.
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is not a real-world view but was
pieced together from different places visited by Friedrich during
his sketching travels across Germany and Switzerland. The details
of the rocky hilltop, for instance, can be traced back to a drawing
made on 3 June 1813 at Kaiserkrone hill in the German state of
Saxony.
Friedrich took great care over the construction of the painting,
demonstrating his intention to create an object of transcendent
grandeur. He was familiar with the “Golden Section”, the principle
of aesthetic harmony as expounded by Luca Pacioli in his De
Divina Proportione of 1509. Friedrich applied this principle to the
structure of his painting, dividing the landscape into two parts
above and below the horizon, in keeping with the mathematical
ratio put forward by Pacioli.
The whole composition is an imagined and idealised scene, a
sort of cosmic question mark that induces a paradoxical mood
of noble optimism and terrifying loneliness. As a later painting,
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog moves away from any overt religious
connotation found in the artist’s earlier work — except perhaps for
the principle of dignity through reflection, a personal type of faith
gained through existential contemplation.
49
Assumption of the Virgin
by Titian
A perfectly arranged work of art that expresses the
rapture of the Virgin Mary’s ascent into heaven
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Assumption of the Virgin (1516–18) by Titian
Oil on panel
Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice, Italy
51
What do you see? A woman standing on a bowl of cloud, apparently
rising upwards, lifted by winged cherubs. Beneath her a crowd of
onlookers gazes on in wonderment.
The image shows the Virgin Mary being lifted towards heaven. As
she enters the realm of God, she opens he arms in rapture.
As a painted description of a soul ascending to heaven, the image
brings to life what might otherwise be a difficult theological concept.
Beneath her cloud, the physical realm of earthly life is huddled
and chaotic: the men in the lower section are surprised, alarmed
and in awe. By contrast, the space of heaven is given geometrical
elegance: a glowing circle of light, where there is no cause for panic
but rather a place of serenity.
Titian’s painting of the Assumption of the Virgin, made around
1518, is one of the most famous painted depictions of Mary’s ascent
into heaven. He made the work when he was around 26 years old.
The painting is nearly seven metres high and hangs above the highaltar of the Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice.
You don’t have to be a Christian to enjoy this painting; you don’t
even need to believe in heaven to understand where the woman
on the cloud is going to. Shortly after her death, the Virgin Mary’s
spirit emerged from her tomb and was lifted upwards towards
heaven. God is shown as a diagonal cleft in a golden ether. Mary
herself stands in a devout pose. Her drapery twists around her as
if caught by a breeze, emphasising the animation of her ascent. She
stands on bales of thick, doughy cloud, carried upwards by divine
cherubim. Below, Titian has more or less omitted the stone tomb
from where she has come and instead makes the terrestrial realm
one of robed men charged with emotion.
Titian has brilliantly utilised the common convention in art of
deifying vertical space, so that the picture grows more sacred as it
rises upwards. To this end, the composition is clearly divided into
three sections: at the bottom, the earthly realm where the apostles
stand; above this, the Virgin being borne aloft by the clouds; and at
the top, the glowing dominion of God.
From a compositional point of view, this three-part scheme is the
most obvious of a complexity of subtle devices that Titian used to
bring a sense of music and energy to the image, all of which help to
further venerate the Virgin’s persona.
Most elegantly, and most simply of all, the upper half of the
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painting forms a perfect circle made by the curved edges of the
cloud and the rounded head of the panel, at the very centre of
which the Virgin’s head is exactly positioned.
More subtly, there is an overall triangular composition constructed
by the two red-robed apostles at the foot of the painting. Follow
the lines of their bodies: the triangle reaches up to a peak at the
Virgin’s red clothing. This geometric shape guides the eyes from
the floor to the heavenly realm and also lends the picture its formal
stability and symmetry.
There is more. By following the highlights and lowlights instigated
by the shape of the Virgin’s blue shawl, a more subtle spiral shape
emerges. It’s not strictly fixed and can be interpreted in various
ways. But it is certainly present, and brings with it a different type
of activity to the composition; and, again, trains the eye on the
Virgin.
Titian’s overall handling of light and space is masterly, as is his
depiction and variety of human forms. Just look at the plethora
of cherubs that adorn the cloud, how each one is individualised
— singing or playing a musical instrument — yet also blended
together in the rising wave of animation.
The tale of the Virgin’s death and subsequent heavenward ascent
— supposedly three days later — has its source not in the Gospels
but in the apocryphal literature of the 3rd and 4th centuries.
Titian painted this image when the cult of the Virgin Mary was at
its height, a phenomena that had been gathering pace for several
centuries before.
The comforting symbolism of the mother-child relationship has
obvious appeal, and has its representational roots in many pagan
religions, perhaps most notably that of the Egyptian goddess Isis
holding her son Horus in her lap. Many ancient religions prospered
under the reassuring presence of a mother figure, a Mater Amabilis,
which acted as a stabilising force and a familial point of veneration.
For the Christian Church, the Virgin Mary emerged as the Purissima
or “most pure” of figures.
Debates wrangled through the early history of the church about
the exact status of the “Mother of God” — the extent and nature of
her divinity — but by the 13th century the Marian cult was firmly
part of the Christian outlook.
It was also during the 13th century that the hugely influential
Golden Legend appeared. This was a compendium of traditional
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stories about the saints and other miracle tales, which was widely
read and drawn upon as a source-book by artists of the following
centuries. The story of Mary’s assumption was retold and cemented
in this book, after which its representation in European art was
established beyond question. The Golden Legend says: “And anon
the soul came again to the body of Mary, and issued gloriously out
of the tomb, and thus was received in the heavenly chamber, and a
great company of angels with her.”
The power of Titian’s painting lies in the clarity of its message.
Every aspect contributes to the veneration of Mary. It is little
wonder, then, that this painting won Titian many plaudits and set
him on a course to become one of Italy’s greatest painters. He died
in 1576 and is buried in the same church where this masterpiece
hangs.
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Water Lilies
by Claude Monet
Amorphous and puzzling paintings that
gain meaning in the looking
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Water Lilies (1906) by Claude Monet
Oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, United States
When you stand in front of a water lily painting by Claude Monet,
you have the sense that a moment of magic is about to take place.
Here is a painting that is many feet wide and several feet tall,
an expanse of misty, vibrating colour that fills your field of vision.
Somewhere in the meeting place between your eyes and the picture
surface, a discovery is taking place. The magic of these pictures —
and why they are so beguiling too — is that the encounter unfolds,
repeats, returns and spirals like a piece of music.
Claude Monet produced around 250 paintings based on the
water lilies that grew on the pond at his home in Giverny, a town in
northern France where the artist lived for the last 40 years of his
life.
Monet had long appreciated the value of working in “series”. His
practice of painting the same subject again and again had yielded
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one of the great achievements of Impressionist art: that the fleeting
effects of light and changing weather conditions could be registered
as an aesthetic insight. To compare and contrast the series of
paintings Monet made of Haystacks, for instance, is to explore the
transient nature of light, and to witness how the painted depictions
might express an extraordinary breadth of colour and texture.
The water lily paintings comprise the largest of all of Monet’s
series projects. He painted them from around 1897 until his
death in 1926. He used his gardens as the subject matter, and the
paintings he made there occupied the artist with growing intensity
as he aged.
The first point of interest in the water lily works is that there is
typically no horizon to the landscape. Nor any sense of scale. We
rarely see the pond’s edge. Monet’s vantage point is looking down
into the water whose surface is made up of two principle elements:
the reflections of the sky and the water lily plants themselves. The
effect of this method of composition is to offer a swathe of enigmatic
reflections, broken up with more definite “events” of the water
lilies. The picture plane is scattered with episodes of more and less
intensity, made with brushmarks of various grades of precision and
looseness.
Given the surreal, abstract nature of the composition, as a viewer
your eyes tend to roam the canvas, left and right, up and down,
looking for a place to settle and anchor, wondering where the form
you are focusing on quite begins and ends, and how exactly it is
constructed.
When seen up close, the paint is daubed in slack, crumbling
brushmarks, many of them so loose and hovering that they blend
like the meeting of tonal mists. Colours overlay one another to
create a shimmer of uncertain sheets. The water lilies themselves
are fashioned from simple elliptical strokes, mainly in lemon
yellows and pale greens, a spot of red here and lilac there, with a
vague underpinning of blue to suggest shadow.
Little else is apparent in any figurative sense. The remaining
space — most of the canvas — is made up from a gentle building
up of dry-brush paint marks: orange and feint green upon pinks
and purples, upon blue and red and orange.
Monet created a large studio at Giverny for the express purpose of
making his water lily paintings. His earlier versions of water lilies
are more precise in their draftsmanship, made on a scale that tends
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to be smaller and more compact. Yet as he explored the subject in
greater depth, the paintings took on a more expansive scale. After
an accident in 1901, which caused temporary loss of sight in one
eye, Monet suffered increasingly from deterioration of his sight. The
impact on his painting was in the steady abandonment of details in
preference for a more nebulous effect of near-abstract panoramas.
Monet’s gradual loss of sight was a source of episodic unhappiness.
He underwent fits of despondency from which he had to rouse
himself with gritted determination. Nonetheless, his artistic rate
of work did not diminish; in fact it was in this stage of his life that
Monet worked on some of the most ambitious canvases he ever
made.
In 1922, aged 82, Monet signed a contract donating a series of
large water lily canvases to the French government, to be housed
in redesigned rooms at the Orangerie museum in the centre of
Paris. Monet’s wish was that the display should make use of natural
light, plain walls and sparse interior decoration. There are eight
paintings on display at the Orangerie, hung in two oval rooms all
along the walls. The effect of the oval shaped rooms is to surround
the viewer from all sides with curving panoramic works, each of
which measures around 37 feet across. The Orangerie works are a
culmination of a series of paintings that were three decades in the
making. As a permanent memorial to the Impressionist artist, the
collection is well worth visiting when making a trip through Paris.
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The Long Engagement
by Arthur Hughes
A poignant image of love frustrated
by society’s expectations
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The Long Engagement (1859) by Arthur Hughes
Oil on canvas
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, United Kingdom
Paint is usually thought to be a static medium, capable of depicting
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only frozen instants. Yet with a little bit of inventiveness, it’s
possible for paint to represent the passage of time too.
Arthur Hughes’ painting, titled The Long Engagement, made in
1859, has within it a wonderful and somewhat poignant detail that
visually describes the onset of time. On the trunk of the tree, the
name “Amy” has been scored into the bark, only to be half-covered
by growing ivy leaves.
This delicate symbol hints at the wider subject of the work: Time
threatening to overtake the first flush of romantic love. It is unlikely
that the name “Amy” was chosen by chance. The name comes from
the Old French, Amée, meaning “beloved”, a vernacular form of the
Latin Amata.
The rest of the image shows two engaged sweethearts meeting
beneath the boughs of a tree. Yet their betrothal has been going
on for too long. From his clothing, the man can be identified as
a member of the clergy — a curate, who assists the work of the
parish priest. It was a low-paid position, and provides the reason
for the extended engagement, since the parents of the girl have not
allowed her to marry until he has secured a better paying role in
the church.
What the artist has depicted is an aspect of English Victorian
society (one that is perhaps not so foreign to us today) that reflected
the importance of financial stability as a basis for marriage. In
short, the painting tells a story, one which a Victorian audience
would have taken great pleasure in deciphering.
The manner in which the couple are huddled nervously beneath
the tree — their own private tryst— suggests that they have been
to these woods before. Their rendezvous was once celebrated by
the carving of the woman’s name into the tree back. Now ivy has
grown has grown over the name, hinting that the engagement is in
doubt.
Other symbols in the background provide material for conjecture.
Nature is in full bloom, suggestive of the promise of marital bliss. A
thicket of wild roses climbs up behind them: in popular Victorian
flower symbolism, the meaning of wild roses — with their fragrant
blooms and sharp thorns — alluded to the pleasures and pains of
love, those bittersweet qualities of romance. Notice too that two
squirrels have paired off and are busy building a nest in preparation
for a family. The woodland animals are offered as a contrast to the
two frustrated sweethearts whose relationship remains in limbo.
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The couple also have a dog at their feet, symbolic of marital
constancy and loyalty. The couple are evidently devoted to each
other, a fact which seems to add a deeper precariousness to their
long engagement.
The artist has also taken great care to paint the scene in forensic
detail. One need only look across a single portion of the painting
and see the various textures — from the sheen of the ivy leaves to
the twill of the man’s trousers, from the glossy fur of the dog to the
satin texture of the woman’s dress — to see how dexterous Hughes
was a painter. These details heighten the message of the painting,
as if the love between the two figures is made more vivid by the
clarity of the depiction.
Hughes was a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group
of Victorian painters who were determined to make their paintings
from direct encounters with nature. Artifice and hyperbole were
to be avoided in favour of an honest account of the world as they
found it.
The painting in fact began life as a scene from the Shakespeare
play As You Like It. It originally showed an image of Orlando and
Rosalind, perhaps set in the Forest of Arden where Rosalind was
exiled. Yet this original work was rejected by the Royal Academy of
Arts in London at their annual exhibition of 1855.
So the artist reworked the piece, this time presenting a pair of
lovers from contemporary society, creating the poignant storyline
as he made it. This version was accepted by the Royal Academy.
When it was eventually displayed in 1859, Hughes added a quote
from Chaucer to accompany the image:
For how might sweetness ever have be known
For him that never never tasted bitterness.
As these lines suggest, how can one enjoy pleasure if one hasn’t
tasted bitterness first?
What is their purpose? Undoubtedly, Hughes was trying to predict
a happier ending for the two lovers, that their bitter frustrations
would eventually turn into sweeter pleasures in the full course of
time.
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The Alba Madonna
by Raphael
A Renaissance masterpiece of geometric
composition and powerful elegance
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The Alba Madonna (c.1510) by Raphael
Oil on panel
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., United States
I find that the more you look at this painting, The Alba Madonna by
Raphael, the more compelling it becomes.
Let your eyes explore the shape and form of the Virgin Mary’s
blue cloak, for instance. See how it gently dominates the scene,
not only unifying the three figures in the picture by holding them
within its folds, but also seeming to rest so naturally around Mary’s
form, over her outstretched leg and onto the ground beneath her.
The effect is not only to create a harmonious composition, but
also to establish the peace and integrity of the holy family — Mary,
Jesus and John the Baptist — in visual form.
Raphael has the somewhat dubious distinction of being called a
“perfect” painter. So many of his works have the aspects of serenity
and inner harmony that it can be all too easy to stop looking at
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them with any degree of scrutiny. He was not a painter of mysterious
or violent scenes. Instead, his artistic efforts went in search of a
different type of mystery — a pursuit of formal beauty. Yet it was a
search that is no less fascinating.
Images of the Virgin Mary and Christ as a young child — otherwise
known as the Madonna and Child — have a long history in Western
art. The earliest examples can be found in the Christian catacombs
in Rome that date as far back as the 3rd century. This painting,
made in around 1510, marks one of the great achievements in
Italian Renaissance art.
Perhaps what is initially most striking about the Alba Madonna
painting its the circular form. As we saw in The Last of England
painting, this is a so-called “tondo” form of painting, from the Italian
rotondo meaning “round”.
Numerous legends sprung up over the centuries that sought
to explain why Raphael painted in the tondo form. Most of them
rehearse the cliché of the itinerant artist moving from place to place,
who, thanks to his spontaneity and exceptional talent, was able to
paint on anything that came to hand — in this case, a circular panel
from a wooden barrel.
In truth, Raphael was a far more considered artist than these
stories give him credit for. To have simply grabbed the first piece
of wood that came his way was wholly unlikely. In fact, the tondo
form was already well-established in Florentine painting and had
its roots in Greek antiquity.
Raphael made numerous sketched studies for the Alba Madonna
and these show that the tondo form was present in his thoughts
throughout the planning process. The sketches also offer a crucial
insight into Raphael’s working technique, not least how he worked
through various ideas of the composition, looking for ways to
interlock the three figures in a rhythmic pattern within the circle.
The Alba Madonna is notable for showing Mary sat on the ground
next to a tree stump. This follows the lesser-known tradition in
Christian art known as the “Madonna of Humility” in which images
of the Virgin show her sat on the floor or on a low cushion, an
indication of her humbleness.
Raphael worked especially hard to arrange the three figures in
a harmonious group, using the interplay of their lines-of-sight to
form an intimate and rhythmic unity. He also learned from artists
around him. The upturned gaze of John the Baptist, for example,
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was a technique common in paintings from Urbino, where Raphael
first trained under the artist Perugino.
Composition always played a vital role in Raphael’s work. The
precise arrangement of elements in the painted space give his work
an inner stillness and structural balance. See how, for example, the
head of John the Baptist is slightly larger than that of Christ, as a
means of balancing out the interplay of glances, and how Jesus
holds John’s staff, so physically linking the figures.
Perhaps more than any other artist of his generation, Raphael
made use of geometrical shapes in his compositions to elevate his
art towards the Renaissance ideal of mathematical perfection. A
few year before making the Alba Madonna, he painted the Madonna
of the Meadow (Madonna del Prato), also known as the Madonna del
Belvedere after the Viennese castle where it hung for many years. In
this work, there is an obvious pyramidal composition.
As Raphael’s work grew in maturity, his reliance on the pyramid
evolved into a more complex blend of structural elements. In the
Alba Madonna, the triangular composition is still present — with
Mary’s head at the apex — but it is allowed to flex with a degree of
musicality that was new to Raphael’s work. An elliptical movement
between various points of interest creates a beautiful rhythm
across the work.
The year Raphael made the Alba Madonna, he’d been in Rome for
two years. He moved there in 1508, summoned by Pope Julius II
to decorate the personal apartments in the Vatican. Before Rome,
Raphael had based himself in Florence, which was one of the great
artistic centres of Italy at the time. Raphael learned from Leonardo
da Vinci and Michelangelo, and in the spirit of the times, imitated
many of their techniques in his own work.
The end painting, then, was not arrived at by chance or
spontaneous inspiration, but by a careful and thorough workingout. The sketches made in preparation for the painting also confirm
the manner in which Raphael looked to other artists for inspiration,
conforming to the prevailing theory of the times in which learning
from other artists was seen as essential for creativity and invention.
The Florentine historian Vasari put it like this: “The most gracious
Raphael of Urbino, who, studying the works of old and modern
masters, took the best from all, and having gathered them together,
enriched the art of painting with that complete perfection.”
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Moonlight, Strandgade 30
by Vilhelm Hammershøi
A poignant interior exploring the
interaction of architecture and light
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Moonlight, Strandgade 30 (1900–1906) by Vilhelm Hammershøi
Oil on canvas
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, United States
The title of this painting, Moonlight, Strandgade 30, by the Danish
artist Vilhelm Hammershøi, is on one level a simple description
of the subject of the image. An interior of a house lit by rays of
moonlight coming in through a window.
On another level, the title of the painting indicates a more poetic
aspect to the artist’s intention. For this image, like so many by
Hammershøi, is a painting of silence and light.
Hammershøi was a Danish artist born in Copenhagen in 1864.
The son of a well-off merchant, he spent most of his life in the city
of his birth. He trained at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art,
taking lessons from the painter Niels Christian Kierkegaard, cousin
of the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard.
Hammershøi lived in an old apartment building at Strandgade 30
in Christianshavn, a neighbourhood of Copenhagen. The apartment
was on the second-floor and was arranged in a “u” shape around
a central courtyard, so that light entered different rooms from
different directions.
Many of his most effective paintings were completed inside
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his own home, sometimes with his wife, Ida, as the model, or
else using the empty room as his primary subject. In these
paintings, one encounters little but the quiet spaces of a well-todo home; the feeling is both leaden and uplifting. Rays of sun or
moonlight penetrate the rooms through the restricted aperture of
a windowpane. Outside is light; inside is real-life amid the simple,
spartan atmosphere of Neo-classical domestic architecture.
Some artists paint in order to add drama and ferment to the world;
others use their art to strip it away to expose the disturbing void
beneath. Hammershøi was one of the latter. His works look upon
the world as if through the gauze of a melancholy consciousness:
here, the most meaningful encounters occur in the most closed-off
quarters.
Hammershøi’s style was hardly revolutionary. His most active
period was at the turn of the 20th century, a time when the artistic
tumult happening in Paris would exercise profound changes on the
course of Western art. While many artists were painting brightly
coloured canvases that were moving in the direction of spontaneous
abstraction, Hammershøi was working in a far more conservative
style. Contrary to the Modernist mode, Hammershøi’s colours
were nearly always muted — you may even say stifled — and his
technique was consistently naturalistic without being concerned
with the outside world.
Still, his melancholy and atmospheric paintings brought him
critical and commercial success. Over the following decades, he
grew a following of artists and intellectuals that included the poet
Rainer Marie Rilke and the painter Emil Nolde.
Despite the muted colour palette, Hammershøi’s use of colour
was in fact remarkably astute. Exploring shades of mauve, pale
yellow and grey, he created beautiful and sophisticated vibrations
of colour harmony that reward the eye the more it explores.
Such spaces contest the idea that art represents; rather,
they yield the possibility of art defining experiences through
images, experiences that words cannot quite surmise. As such,
Hammershøi’s paintings offer a curious invitation. The space is
uncluttered and eloquent; its formal purity perhaps suggestive of
a meditative state of mind we all wish we could access from time
to time.
Moreover, by using combinations of light rays, he was able to
construct semi-abstract compositions within a naturalistic setting.
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Nowhere is this effect better demonstrated than in Moonlight,
Strandgade 30, painted around 1906, where the incoming
moonlight divides the room into a series of squares and rectangles,
made more vivid by the formal rectilinear lines of the architecture.
The painting sums up Hammershøi’s proposition as an artist:
beauty approached through silence, whilst also being suggestive of
the vain hope of entering into that silence without disturbing it. As
Hammershøi said himself, “I have always thought there was such
beauty about a room even though there weren’t any people in it,
perhaps precisely when there weren’t any.”
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Mont Sainte-Victoire
by Paul Cézanne
A technique of fractured forms and shimmering
brushstrokes that inspired a generation of artists
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Mont Sainte-Victoire (c.1902–6) by Paul Cézanne
Oil on canvas
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, United States
Mount Sainte-Victoire stands to the east of Aix-en-Provence in the
south of France. It is a limestone mountain ridge that dominates
views of the surrounding landscape.
Paul Cézanne painted Mount Sainte-Victoire many times. In
this version, which is one of the largest he made of the subject,
the landscape is beginning to disintegrate into the paint. The sky,
for instance, is made up of simple overlapping tiles of colour that
slightly vary in shade to give a rough, patchwork feel. The same
patchwork is continued through the mountain, with fractional more
contrast in tones and only a few crude brush marks delineating the
outline of the ridge.
There is an intentional simplification of the landscape in the
way Cézanne has built up this painting. The effect is much less
about artifice and ornamentation — Cézanne was not trying to
paint a lifelike illusion. Rather, he seemed to be looking for a type
of harmonious form: he used structured blocks that fragment the
surface, covering areas of canvas with parallel brushstrokes to
create this shivering, faceted effect.
Cézanne was a painter who learned much from the Impressionists,
many of whom he counted as friends. He adopted the same practice
of painting outdoors, and like the Impressionists, tried to capture
the effects of light through the layering of rough brushstrokes. His
paintings developed out of meticulous observations of nature, as
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he expressed in his letters to his friend, the painter Emile Bernard:
“I progress very slowly, for nature reveals herself to me in
very complex ways; and the progress needed is endless. One
must look at the model and feel very exactly; and also express
oneself distinctly and with force.”
(Letter to Emile Bernard, 12 May, 1904)
Yet there is more to Cézanne than just a late-Impressionist. His
work also explored the theoretical premise of the painted brush
mark— by which I mean the idea that a brush mark can be seen as
both an illusion and an artistic gesture. This would be a crucial step
in the development of modern art.
Because of his influence on the generation of artists that followed
him, especially on Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, certain
phrases have become connected with Cézanne: a bridge between
Impressionism and Modernism; the forefather of Cubism; a painter
of the natural world in terms of cylinders, spheres and cones. It is
as if Cézanne attempted a new way of perceiving the world, and
in the effort of turning his perception into paint, unlocked a new
method of making art.
To make such grand claims can predispose a viewer to expect
extraordinary things of Cézanne’s art. One of the surprises, then, is
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how sober his work first appears. Landscapes and still-lives painted
in restrained tones of cool-blue, light-green and pale-orange gives
the impression of a cerebral painter, one who hardly accords with
the notion of a revolutionary.
Paul Cézanne was born not far from Mount Sainte-Victoire, in
Aix-en-Provence in 1839. The son of a bourgeois banker, he was
encouraged by his father to study law, but Paul had other ideas. At
the age of 22 he devoted himself entirely to painting. However much
this may have displeased his father, Cézanne was not left out in the
cold; he received a yearly allowance for the next 23 years until his
father’s death, at which Cézanne inherited the family estate.
And so the scene is set, you might say, for a lifetime of painting
pursued without economic distraction. The ability to work without
concern for the marketplace may explain Cézanne’s relatively slow
rise to eminence. That’s not to say that he was inactive. The decade
of his 20s was a period of fervent research: having moved to Paris, he
spent his spare time visiting art galleries with his schoolboy friend,
the writer Émile Zola. He studied the likes of Gustave Courbet and
Nicolas Poussin for guidance in his evolving technique.
Cézanne’s paintings of this early period show a keen search for a
personal voice, one that, like Courbet, was opposed to the bourgeois
academic style. Cézanne’s public recognition was slow to arrive. He
submitted work to the Paris Salon and applied for admission to the
École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, yet was refused both. Only in 1882,
after many failed attempts, did he finally win a place at the Salon,
and this only as a result of an intervention from a friend.
Undeterred by his early disappointments, Cézanne joined forces
with the burgeoning Impressionist group, notably with Camille
Pissarro, who accompanied Cézanne on painting excursions to
the communes of Louveciennes and Pontoise in the outer suburbs
of Paris. In 1870, Cézanne left Paris for L’Estaque, a village on the
Mediterranean sea not far from Marseilles.
Cézanne would spend the rest of his life painting in and around
the landscapes of Provence. A decisive change took place in his art
from this point. Away from Paris, the former earnestness of his
early work gradually loosened, and was replaced by a palette of
lighter colours and simpler tones. His brushwork became more
controlled, softer and more interested in the subtler shifts of light
and shade. You might say the temperature of his paintings changed,
where every inch of canvas became an opportunity to exhibit some
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degree of warmth through tonal relations: oranges beside reds,
blues beside yellows, greens beside pinks, and so on.
Cézanne was beginning to express himself as painter who made
a direct connection with the landscape and with his paint at the
same time. There is no symbolism in his work, nor any underlying
moral allegory. His artistic style was a series of experiments in
what it meant to look at the world and experience it as a real, threedimensional place. It was an attitude that was beginning to win
admirers among his fellow artists.
Outside of his studio, Cézanne painted the landscapes of l’Estaque
and the surrounding countryside. Mont Sainte-Victoire is one of
Cézanne’s surest expressions of volume and tone through what he
called “light vibrations”. As a painting, it pointed the way for later
artists to employ abstract forms to evolve the language of art, to
find tactile and unified expressions of painted form to stand for life
as lived through all of the senses.
Cézanne’s reputation as an integral figure in the development of
artistic style was established quickly after his death in 1906. The
French painter and theorist Maurice Denis wrote a celebratory
essay in 1907 in which he praised Cézanne as standing decisively
at the crossroads between old and new:
“He is at once the climax of the classic tradition and the
result of the great crisis of liberty and illumination which
has rejuvenated modern art. […] In his essentially concrete
perception of objects, form is not separated from colour; they
condition one another, the are indissolubly united. And in
consequence in his execution he wishes to realize them as he
sees them, by a single brush-stroke.”
Cézanne’s influence over upcoming artists was powerful. In the
same year as Denis’s essay, Pablo Picasso was 26 and had been
living in Paris for several years. For a period of time, he and the
artist Georges Braque lived in the same building and saw lots of
each other, sharing ideas about painting and the course of art at
the turn of the century. Between them they had seen the work of
Cézanne and drew inspiration from his manner of representing
objects with broad faceted planes. The landscapes that Picasso and
Braque painted between 1908 and 1910 were in clear emulation of
Cézanne, a style that came to be known as Cubism, and opened the
doors to art of the 20th century.
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Looking at Art in Galleries and Books
Three short essays on the art of looking
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Tips For Visiting Art Galleries
Art galleries can be inspiring places to visit, but they can also be
baffling. Even the most conscientious art lover will have felt the
sensation at least once, of wandering through room after room of
art with a growing sense of disorientation.
Art can be enigmatic, composed of ideas and symbols that are not
always easy to read or make sense of. Here, I want to offer some
simple pieces of advice that may make your next trip to an art gallery just a bit more satisfying.
In at least one room you pass through, settle in for a while
My feeling is this: that art galleries are best enjoyed at a glacial
pace, where a few meaningful connections are more satisfying than
a myriad of momentary glimpses.
To slow yourself down, try pausing for longer than you normally
would in one room, preferably a room with a seat (or just a floor).
Sit down. Take the weight off your feet. Remove yourself from the
ebb-and-flow of the other gallery visitors and try to have your own
experience at your own pace.
The idea is to imitate something of spirit of the act of artistic
creation. When an artist makes a piece of work, they usually do so
in a studio or workshop, probably surrounded by other paintings,
some finished and some half-way through. The artist maybe
concentrating on making one artwork at a time or working across
several pieces simultaneously. Either way, they will be aware
of all the pieces around them, about the dialogue between one
work and another, and the interchange between imagination and
environment.
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By spending some time in one room, either sitting down or
moving around at a snail’s pace, you get the chance to make the
same sorts of links, a self-directed process of perceiving a dialogue
between colours, form and subject matter across different works
of art.
Try to resist the lure of the big-hitters
In some art galleries you can literally feel the urge, like the flow of
blood through arteries, towards the most famous works on display.
If you’ve ever been to the Louvre in Paris, home to the Mona Lisa,
you’ll know the feeling of being swept along by crowds of urgent
sightseers toward the particular room where that painting hangs
behind bullet-proof glass.
Visiting a gallery and seeing one of the stand-out pieces is a thrill
that hardly needs explaining. For me, the pleasure of walking into
a room and seeing a famous Van Gogh, say, has not diminished in
many years. Even if I have to crane my neck and jostle for elbow
room, the joy always survives.
Still, it’s worth sparing a few moments for those artworks
everyone else is ignoring, because time with them is probably just
as rewarding. The fame of an individual work of art does not always
indicate its merits. Stand in front of a lesser-known artwork and
you’ll have time and space to yourself, an up-close view, and most
of all, a more unique experience compared to everyone else. You
may even find a kindred spirit in that singular, lesser-famous work.
Learn more about one individual work before you arrive. Just
one piece is enough
There is nothing quite as satisfying as approaching a work of art
with which you have made prior acquaintance. The connection has
already begun and only deepens on seeing the work in real life.
So before you arrive, try spending ten minutes reading about a
specific work that you know the gallery has on display. Find out
about the year it was made in, what it depicts or is trying to say,
and maybe a bit about the artist too. Then, when you eventually
find that work in the gallery, it will feel like meeting an old friend.
Make it easy on yourself by sticking to just one piece, rather than
overloading yourself with too much to remember. If you do,
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I’m confident it will reward your gallery visit with a new level of
intimacy.
Hold back from the plaque
Whenever I go to an art gallery, I try to play a little game with
myself. It is called “Resist the Plaque.” The game basically amounts
to trying to read (or guess) what the work of art in front of me is
about before I step up to the little information plaque on the wall
to find out more.
I do this under the continuing belief that knowing about art has
as much to do with looking with your own eyes as it does with any
kind of academic study. Even if you have no idea where to begin,
just looking at a work of art will tell you a lot about its artistic
achievements. The reason for this is simple: Most works of art are
made to be experienced on an intuitive level. Artists work on this
level — seeking out just what feels right — and the viewer too can
gain much from the same approach.
That’s not to say that your intuitive response to a work of art is
more valid than the historical or academic reading. It’s always worth
knowing more rather than less. Only, there is also a tremendous
advantage to seeing a work of art with fresh, untutored eyes, where
the textbooks have not yet guided your expectations. Artworks are
journeys into uncharted territories; in this way, it helps to have not
charted the territory too much yourself.
So take a guess at what you’re looking at first. Resist the plaque.
Don’t worry about not knowing enough
In the great halls of an art gallery, all of us can sometimes feel
confined by our own lack of knowledge. I’m not one of those people
who says your reading of a work of art can never be wrong. Some
artworks are made up of a precise collection of signs and symbols
that offer a complex and subtle message. Armed with correct
information, your engagement with the work is bound to be richer
for it.
The truth is, anybody who knows anything about art has begun
their education somewhere. And the beauty of a first connection
is that it tends to be free of any academic context. Maybe it was a
Jackson Pollock drip painting. Perhaps it was a visit to the Sistine
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Chapel in Rome. Maybe someone gave you a postcard with a Claude
Monet painting on the front. Somehow an interest is kindled. I make
this point because we all come to art from a perspective; we have to
start somewhere.
So don’t worry about not knowing enough. Like novels, works of
art are fictional worlds there to be experienced, first and foremost.
They are composed and constructed according to notions of
aesthetic “rightness”, experiments into what the imagination can
experience and the senses can relish.
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Art is an Experiment
Several times in this book, I’ve mentioned the idea that art is an
“experiment”, but you may be wondering what exactly I mean by
that.
The paradigm of the “experiment” is the way I think about art,
since it helps me to cut through some of the uncertainties around
art and it’s purpose. What perhaps drives this uncertainty is the
simple fact that every work of art is different, and therefore the
natural question to ask is “why?” Why has one artist chosen to
paint the world this way, and another artist in that way? What is
the significance of the difference?
One way of answering these questions is to consider every work
of art you come across as its own experiment in solving a problem.
The problem is not of the ordinary variety. It’s not a practical one.
It’s a bit more personal and elusive than that.
An experiment in description
Here’s a thought-experiment: Imagine you are looking at an old
tree, say, or a beautiful sunset, or a view over fields and valleys,
or something else that strikes you as special. You get a feeling.
Perhaps it is a feeling of sadness because the view reminds you of
an old experience that is now passed. Or perhaps it is a feeling of
exultation because the thing you are looking at seems remarkable
to you for some reason.
Now, imagine that someone is stood next to you and asks
you to describe the feeling you are having. They want to know
what you’re experiencing as you look at this view of the world.
If you were to try to answer them in words, then you may well
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reach for easy phrases like “It’s beautiful” or “I feel uplifted.”
These are attempts, but I suspect they wouldn’t really get very
close to the subtly of feelings you’re experiencing. They are vague
approximations; but what if you decided you wanted to describe
the experience in more detail? The question becomes: how? Do you
try to describe every colour and form you see? Do you turn to a
thesaurus to help you? Do you try to give a scientific explanation or
a poetic one? Do you draw on memories or talk about your future
hopes?
Such is the problem that artists are trying to solve when they
make their art. From an initial inspiration, they are trying to answer
the problem of how to best represent it. Be it a memory, an idea, a
feeling, a story from myth or history, or a philosophical notion, a
work of art is the result of trying to solve the dilemma of how best
to describe it in paint or stone, or for more modern practitioners,
video and installation.
When treated in this way, I think it’s possible to see that a work of
art is not a perfect object. It is an experiment. It is an attempt.
The veneration of artworks
Artworks are sometimes called masterpieces to describe their
elevated status within our cultural landscape. They are prized,
valuable items, and people travel the world to see them.
The great museums that look after these masterpieces tend also
to express magnificence in their settings too. The walls are often
white or cream, the ceilings are high, and the lighting is both exact
and discreet. In such a way, the artworks themselves become like
lanterns in a snowdrift of white wall, intense packets of colour
around which visitors sometimes huddle in groups several rows
deep as if to warm themselves in the glow.
It can be easy to venerate objects that are shown in conditions
like these. It can be just as easy to get swept along in the veneration
and forget to look at the object itself, to forget that ordinary human
hands made the work and that an ordinary human heart pushed
the work from first inclination through to the finished object.
This last point is one worth remembering. Why? Because an
artist will usually have spent a huge amount of time with the object
they are making. Hour and hours. Maybe weeks, often months,
sometimes years. And all through this period of time, they will
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have made thousands of tiny decisions about how exactly they’re
making the work: what colours to use, what detail to go into, how
light or dark to make their image, and so on. Every decision is part
of the experiment, as I put it earlier.
This is, I think, what it means to look at a work of art and to “get
it”. If you can see the artwork as an experiment — with all the
imperfections that the word implies — then it is possible to reach
across the void that separates you from the object and to find a way
of seeing it more clearly.
Somebody famous once said that a work of art is never finished,
it is merely abandoned. I think this is true. The experiment is
exhausted, the attempt is done with. It’s time to try something else.
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Art Appreciation & Books
It’s all well and good talking about art galleries and museums, but
sometimes making the journey to an establishment like this just
isn’t possible.
I love to visit galleries, but I believe that the rich experience of
art appreciation can happen anywhere.
Some of the best “looking at art” I’ve done has been in books.
In fact, making a personal connection is often easier, I find, when
flicking through the pages of a book than it is walking among the
hallowed objects of a museum. A book’s pages are personal; their
space is private and their contents somehow tamed, mitigated
— in a way that art gallery exhibits can at times feel grand, even
anointed.
The pages of a book — an art book especially, where the images
are the focus — is a place to nestle and browse and occasionally
settle, like a butterfly skimming over flowers.
The first art book I ever owned belonged to my father, who won
it as a prize at school, making the item over 50 years old. I still
have it. It has a mangled spine and bundles of loose pages held
together with tape.
My father passed it onto me when, at around the same age, I
started to show an interest in art. The book is called Painting in
the Twentieth Century and contains page after page of paintings,
mostly thumbnail black-and-white images, with a few full-page
colour plates here and there. It is modern European artists that
feature most heavily, with a scattering of American painters in the
later sections.
My art appreciation began in the pages of that book. I used to
flick through it avidly, wondering what all these unusual paintings
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meant. I chose my favourites, and later chose other favourites as
my tastes changed.
What excited me was that, even in my ignorance about art
history, I could tell there was something intoxicating happening
in the pages of the book.
I was aware of individual people having made the paintings I
was looking at, and I became fixated with them. It was an array
of foreign names that over time I would come to revere: Matisse,
Picasso, Gris, Mondrian, Miro, Bonnard, Beckmann, Klee, Pollock,
De Kooning, Motherwell, Bacon, Giacometti…
I still remember the thrill of realising their intention: to explore
the world through the possibilities of paint. It was the daunting
discovery that paintings were an utterly unfettered space where
anything might happen that gripped me most tightly. Here was
a place where men and women (though mainly men, sadly, in
the case of most books on art) daringly ventured in order to test
reality. As I scanned the pages, I realised that I too was pushing
the boundaries of my experience, or at the very least make
cautious acquaintance with surreal seascapes, jigging fiddlers,
forest landscapes, not to mention wild deluges of pure color,
dripped and sloshed paint, scratched rampant paint, cloudy paint,
rhythmic paint, precise or reckless paint.
It didn’t seem to matter that some of what I saw made me
feel uncomfortable. The art of someone like De Chirico was too
deliberately bizarre to have much allure for me. What mattered
was that I hooked onto at least some of the artists (the cubist
painter Juan Gris was an early favourite of mine, and then later,
Paul Klee and the German Expressionists) and that was enough to
keep me returning to the book to discover more.
That was my experience. Yours will be different. We all come to
art from different direction. Perhaps this book you are reading
right now is your very first encounter.
My point is that connecting with art doesn’t have to happen
in the setting of a gallery. Books — and the internet too, for that
matter — enable private affinities to bloom. Shielded from the
glare of social interactions and the sometime prohibitive costs of
the museum entry tickets, the attachments you make can have
the feel of something exclusive and confidential. They lead you
to close-encounters with what works of art truly are: ceaseless
experiments into what the imagination can experience.
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About the Author
Christopher P Jones is a writer, art critic and art historian.
His particular areas of interest are 20th century German
Expressionism, 19th century French art, and contemporary
painting. He is currently working on an idiosyncratic guide to the
National Gallery, London.
More at:
http://www.chrisjoneswrites.co.uk
Learn More
Would you like to get a beginner’s overview to the history of styles
in Western art, including?
From Medieval to Contemporary art
Key features of each art style explained
Important artists associated with each movement
Example work of art for every style
Visit:
http://www.chrisjoneswrites.co.uk/sign-up-art
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Image Credits
The Kiss (painted 1907 - 08) By Gustav Klimt (1862 - 1918)
Österreichische Galerie Belvedere museum, Vienna, Austria.
Image source Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.
org/wiki/File:The_Kiss_-_Gustav_Klimt_-_Google_Cultural_
Institute.jpg
The Last of England (painted 1855) By Ford Madox Brown (1821 1893)Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, United Kingdom.
Image source Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.
org/wiki/File:Ford_Madox_Brown_-_The_Last_of_England_-_
Google_Art_Project.jpg
Apollo Pursuing Daphne (painted 1760) By Giovanni Battista
Tiepolo (1696 - 1770)National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.,
United States.
Image source National Gallery of Art: https://www.nga.gov/
collection/art-object-page.41693.html
Self-portrait (painted 1500) By Albrecht Dürer (1471 - 1528)Alte
Pinakothek museum, Munich, Germany.
Image source Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.
org/wiki/File:Albrecht_D%C3%BCrer_-_1500_self-portrait_(High_
resolution_and_detail).jpg
‘View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after
a Thunderstorm — The Oxbow’ (painted 1836) By Thomas Cole
(1801 - 1848)Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, United
States.
Image source The Metropolitan Museum of Art: https://www.
metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/10497
Paris Street; Rainy Day (painted 1877)By Gustave Caillebotte
(1848 - 1894)Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, United States.
88
Image source Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.
org/wiki/File:Gustave_Caillebotte_-_Paris_Street;_Rainy_Day_-_
Google_Art_Project.jpg
Susanna and the Elders (painted 1610)By Artemisia Gentileschi
(1593 - 1653)Schloss Weißenstein collection, Pommersfelden,
Germany.
Image source Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.
org/wiki/File:Susanna_and_the_Elders_(1610),_Artemisia_
Gentileschi.jpg
The Penitent Magdalen (painted 1640)By Georges de La Tour
(1593 - 1652)The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, United
States.
Image source The Metropolitan Museum of Art: https://www.
metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436839
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (painted 1818)By Caspar David
Friedrich (1774 - 1840)Kunsthalle Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany.
Image source Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.
org/wiki/File:Caspar_David_Friedrich_-_Wanderer_above_the_
sea_of_fog.jpg
Assumption of the Virgin (painted 1516 - 18)By Titian (1490 1576)Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice, Italy.
Image source Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.
org/wiki/File:Tizian_041.jpg
Water Lilies (painted 1906)By Claude Monet (1840 - 1926)Art
Institute of Chicago, Illinois, United States.
Image source Art Institute of Chicago: https://www.artic.edu/
artworks/16568/water-lilies
The Long Engagement (painted 1859)By Arthur Hughes (1831 1915)Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, United Kingdom.
Image source Birmingham Museums Trust:
http://dams.birminghammuseums.org.uk/asset-bank/action/
viewAsset?id=3119
The Alba Madonna (painted 1510)By Raphael (1483 - 1520)
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National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., United States.
Image source Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.
org/wiki/File:Raphael_-_The_Alba_Madonna_-_Google_Art_
Project.jpg
Moonlight, Strandgade 30 (painted 1900 - 1906)By Vilhelm
Hammershøi (1864 - 1916)The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York, United States.
Image source The Metropolitan Museum of Art: https://www.
metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/441933
Mont Sainte-Victoire (painted 1902 - 6)By Paul Cézanne (1839 1906)The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, United States.
Image source The Metropolitan Museum of Art: https://www.
metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/435878
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