How her abduction by Hades to the underworld brought the seasons. Paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, Rossetti, and others.
history of painting
Its peak with Bonington, Friedrich, Corot and others. Decline in Impressionism to deliberate omission in ‘primitives’ such as Cézanne and Astrup.
The way that distant hills fade in contrast, detail and colour, and how their hue shifts towards cooler colours. From Antonello (1475) to Thomas Girtin.
The daughter of a Jamaican slave, William Morris’s wife, three Greek cousins known as the Three Graces – all muses and models for Pre-Raphaelites.
Great Pre-Raphaelite women didn’t stand behind their partners, but in front of them, as their muses and models. Masterpieces with two stories to tell.
At Satyrane’s tournament for the golden sash of Florimell, Britomart emerges as the victor, but refuses the prize of the false Florimell. She meets her beloved Artegall at last.
A battle in which the Romans were overwhelmingly defeated, used later as an icon of German nationalism. And the vicious murder of the wife of the emperor Claudius.
Absent from Classical art, she first appears in Apuleius’ ‘The Golden Ass’, which was written in the 2nd century. Wonderful paintings, particularly from women artists, of this novel.
More women reading, from Dante’s beloved Beatrice to Charlotte Corday, who was psyching herself up with Plutarch’s Lives before murdering Marat in his bath.
From a naked woman devouring novels, through a class of young Breton girls, to Berthe Morisot’s and Lovis Corinth’s women reading.
The Eclectic Light Company 