As narrative painting went into decline, Ophelia became even more popular. From Henrietta Rae through sub-aqua views to Waterhouse’s obsession.
Dagnan-Bouveret
Two superb series of paintings of scenes from Goethe’s Faust Part One, by Ary Scheffer and James Tissot.
Faust and Mephistopheles attend the witches’ celebrations on the Brocken peak in the Harz Mountains – a wild night, it seems.
Viewed as classic and fit for narrative painting, Faust is about good and evil, a powerful story which has inspired powerful paintings.
His late career tackled his dislike of Impressionism, sculpture, photography as an art, and the depiction of truth – in several superb paintings.
Eight of Cabanel’s most precocious and brilliant pupils. Only one won the Prix de Rome, and the others went on to develop Naturalist art. Was Cabanel the father of this new movement?
As an avid photographer, how did he use his many photographs in his paintings? Was he just a copyist?
During his career, over 300 of his paintings were shown in the Salon, many being bought by the state for public collections. Yet he has all but vanished since.
After the early death of Bastien-Lepage, he led the Naturalist movement in France. After 1892, though, he concentrated on religious themes seen in a new light.
Working alongside Jules Bastien-Lepage, he was a brilliant painter who in his early career experimented with different styles.
