Orientalism, a duel in fancy dress, gladiators in the Colosseum, the assassination of Julius Caesar, and the cynic Diogenes.
Gérôme
First in a new series to celebrate the bicentenary of one of the major French painters of the second half of the 19th century. Early career as a Neo-Greek.
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.
From the Circus Maximus with its crowd of 150,000 to those walking the tightrope under the canvas of the Big Top.
Hatboxes from Shakespeare to the Champs Elysées, the wig-box of hanged highwayman, Dickens’ cashboxes, and the painter’s pochade.
In classical times, they were strummed like a guitar rather than plucked. Apollo, Orpheus and lyric poets from Raphael, Rubens, Waterhouse and others.
Hyacinthus killed by a discus, a couple married as the result of a running race, funeral games, Roman spectacle, and the games of childhood.
Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, Gérôme’s gladiators, Émile Claus and Luminism, Boudin on the beach, and into the skies with Hans Thoma’s herons.
Rubens’ hunting scenes and Delacroix, the last of his shipwrecks, Sorolla’s fishing scenes, Arthurian legend, the story of Salome, and more.
Paintings in which he helped set the thumbs up and down sign, and painted himself making a sculpture he had previously painted in a painting as a sculpture.
The Eclectic Light Company 