In the year ahead, Gustav Klimt, Ferdinand Hodler, Tintoretto, Egon Schiele, and several others: anniversaries which I will celebrate here.
Category Archive: Life
A look back at some of my favourite articles on painters and painting, from Moreau and Salome, to Merson’s tame wolf.
A predatory wolf was troubling a town in the Apennine Mountains one winter. Its delightful story is the basis of a superb painting by Luc-Olivier Merson, famous for his mosaic in the Basilica of the Sacré-Cœur in Montmartre.
Troy is sacked and burning, and its women being taken away as trophies. Two stories stress the horror, as a princess is sacrificed for fair winds, and a callous murder is avenged.
He was remarkably successful, a truly self-made artist, who rose from nothing to international renown. But did he ‘occasion a revolution in the art’?
In his later years, he painted some unusual religious works, including an episode from the life of St Thomas of Villaneuva, and the heavenly and earthly trinities.
From John Singer Sargent to Charles Demuth, war artists showing the horrors of the Great War to the wild waters and hills of central Canada.
A collection of the finest paintings of the Nativity, from 1263 to the 20th century – all innovative, and some unique.
In the hands, and brushes, of great artists, a religious set-piece becomes a succession of marvellous and highly innovative paintings.
On 22 August 1911, he went to the Louvre to paint the Mona Lisa. It had gone missing, though, and didn’t show up for another 2 years.
The Eclectic Light Company 