Sleeping Beauty, a morning nude, in sickness, and the deathbed. Killed in bed, two unusual depictions of the Virgin Mary in bed, and one of a bed floating on the River Seine.
Collier
Huge divans, closed wooden cabinets, and iron bedsteads. In love, marriage, adultery, problem pictures, and the erotic.
Paintings of telescopes less then ten years after they became available, as symbols of mariners, and microscopes in medical research around 1900.
From his conception in an adulterous deception arranged by Merlin, and drawing a sword from an anvil, to his death following wounds inflicted by the dying Mordred.
the personification of vigilance, Mary Magdalen, in shadowplay, held by Florence Nightingale ‘the lady of the lamp’, and associated with overwork and tiredness.
How Arthur came to be given his sword Excalibur, and how he came to marry Lady Guinevere, who was later to fall in love with Lancelot.
Once popular in wall paintings and miniatures across Europe, these legends were revived in the nineteenth century and adopted by the Pre-Raphaelites.
The curious story of the countess who rode naked through the city of Coventry to win its people a cut in taxes, and Wanda of Kraków.
Using shadows to tell or add detail to a visual story. Examples by Robert Campin, Gérôme. William Holman Hunt, Lovis Corinth and others.
Two last Pre-Raphaelite artists, Evelyn De Morgan and Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, brought narrative painting to a close in the twentieth century.
The Eclectic Light Company 