From trompe l’oeil for sculpture to children making rabbits on the wall, shadows have long been popular, and most recently have featured in Surrealist paintings too.
Collier
After the Bible and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the most popular literary source for paintings before 1900, yet hardly anyone knows this epic today. The introduction to a new series.
Popularly intended to transform base metals like lead into gold, alchemy relied on special glassware like alembics, and is included with other ‘dark arts’ in paintings.
Expressing a weariness with this life and yearning for the next, they originated in Flanders, but soon became popular in the Dutch Republic in its Golden Age.
By the end of the 19th century, problem pictures were popular features in the press. Most successful of British painters was John Collier, but they soon died out in the early 20th century.
Significant paintings based on The Sleeping Beauty, Mariana and Mariana in the South, and Break, Break, Break.
One of the most private areas in a house or apartment, shown here by Degas, Maximilien Luce, Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, Eric Ravilious and others.
A member of many of the royal courts of Europe, and featured in several of the plays of William Shakespeare, a jester and entertainer.
Sorolla’s White Slave Trade, a mother’s adultery and break up of her family, the awakened conscience offering redemption, or destitution.
Originating in the Northern Renaissance, these paintings expressed feelings of emptiness, and the futility of earthly life. Examples of these elaborate allegories.
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