How well do paintings of the stories of Perseus and Theseus fit Booker’s Seven Basic Plots? As he gives these as examples of Overcoming the Monster, do his stages work?
Category Archive: Painting
In the last four years of his life, he concentrated on drawing and printmaking. These paintings were Goya’s farewell.
He started painting popular equestrian scenes and social realist works, but after the Franco-Prussian War turned increasingly to old French history.
From the Flemish artist Paul Bril, to Claude Lorrain, and then through the French ports of Claude-Joseph Vernet to the oil sketches of Valenciennes.
They meet a mysterious knight and his squire, whose boasts about beating Don Quixote de la Mancha don’t ring true. So off to combat.
A banquet with a river god, a pitched battle at his friend’s wedding which turned into a full-scale war, a relationship involving incest, suicide and violent death, and the abduction of Helen – quite the career of a Greek hero.
Every 9 years, 9 of the finest young men and 9 young maidens from Athens were sent to be sacrificed to the Minotaur. Then Theseus joined them to kill the monster.
From abandonment by his father, to the reunion in which Medea tried to poison him, Theseus was a true and thoroughly flawed hero.
Whistler encouraged him to paint in 1900, and he went on to Impressionist landscapes during the early 20th century. He also won a gold medal at the Olympics, and taught Winston Churchill.
During the winter of 1824-25, when in Bordeaux, he painted about 40 remarkable miniatures on slivers of ivory. Here are nine of the survivors.
The Eclectic Light Company 