Paintings by Jan van Eyck, Masaccio, Tintoretto and Delacroix with detailed explanations of their reading and background.
Delacroix
The grandson of the founder of Thebes happens into Diana’s sacred wood when out hunting, and sees the goddess naked. She changes him into a stag, with fatal consequences.
Carrying infants, including Moses, figs with a few asps, the master’s dinner, Manet’s luncheon on the grass, snacks, banquets, and fruit.
She tricks the daughters of King Pelias to murder him, then flees to Corinth, where Jason abandons her. She murders his bride with a poisoned wedding dress, then kills her two children. After that, she tries to kill the young Theseus.
Declining health, tuberculosis and riding accidents, but he still painted the Epsom Derby, Mazappa, and ten portraits of those with psychiatric illness.
Huge divans, closed wooden cabinets, and iron bedsteads. In love, marriage, adultery, problem pictures, and the erotic.
A selection of his early paintings, and an account of the year he spent preparing and painting his masterwork, the Raft of the Medusa.
Jupiter wipes out unworthy humans in a flood. One pious couple survive, and go on to re-create humanity transformed from stones. This leaves the monstrous Python to be killed by Apollo.
From Delacroix’s final Shipwreck off a Coast, through Aivazovsky’s Ninth Wave, to Waterhouse’s painting of The Tempest.
From Tintoretto in the 1560s, through the canonical Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault, to Delacroix’s Shipwreck of the Don Juan.