From Rembrandt to Velázquez, Goya, Courbet and Fantin-Latour, reading group portraits can be complicated and demanding.
Goya
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.
Humans have always wanted to fly, but Icarus warned us of the dangers. Despite those, Goethe’s Faust, witches, and pioneers with hot air balloons seem to have succeeded.
An early Rembrandt, chiaroscuro lighting, one of Adam Elsheimer’s oil on copper paintings, above Frederick the Great, and adorning Goya’s painting hat.
From Tintoretto in the 1560s, through the canonical Raft of the Medusa by ThĂ©odore GĂ©ricault, to Delacroix’s Shipwreck of the Don Juan.
Goya, Thomas Girtin, Tom Thomson, John Singer Sargent, Renoir, Eva Gonzalès and others painting anglers and those in pursuit of shellfish.
Goya’s crockery salesman, Lhermitte’s Les Halles in Paris, a trio of specialist markets, Rosa Bonheur’s horse fair in Paris, and the last hay market in London.
Shackles of the night, in a well, as a rope ladder how Romeo meets Juliet, trussing up a robber, or hanging John Brown, the abolitionist.
Paintings by Giorgione, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Elisabetta Sirani, Goya, Horace Vernet, Jules Lefebvre, Klimt, Kolo Moser, and Franz von Stuck.
