Three remarkable series: in 1793, painted in oil on tinplate; from 1819 his Black Paintings in oil on plaster on the walls of his villa; in 1824-25 using watercolours on tiny thin slivers of ivory.
Goya
Hephaistos or Vulcan in classical myth, cheated on by Aphrodite/Venus, and as creator of Pandora. In Bosch’s Last Judgement, and elsewhere.
Love is blind, so is Cupid, as well as the personification of Fortune. Also applied to those about to be executed, and to celebrate our sense of sight in a widespread game of blind man’s buff.
Plague ravaged cities across Europe and much of the world, cholera came from contaminated water supplies, then there were influenza and tuberculosis.
Pierrot, Harlequin and other characters from the early professional theatre seen in paintings by Watteau, Goya and others.
Self-help thatching and maintaining your scythe, blacksmiths hard at work in their forges, a tilt-hammer in another forge, and a tinker fixing pots.
Views from outside looking up and in, including David and Bathsheba, Romeo and Juliet, an early plein air landscape, and Goya’s majas.
From Rembrandt to Velázquez, Goya, Courbet and Fantin-Latour, reading group portraits can be complicated and demanding.
Threshing cut cereal using flails, horses towing a roller, oxen trampling the corn, a sledge, a hand-cranked machine, and a large threshing machine. With Monet’s grainstacks.
Chaos in the barren classrooms of the 1600s gradually restored to order over the following two centuries as boys and girls learned to read and write.
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