Curtains around 4-poster beds, revealing hidden opinions, framing a cameo landscape, showing time and place, and in a trompe l’oeil still life.
Malczewski
Soldiers on the front in the First World War, a young woman slaving as a seamstress, Dickens’ miserly Scrooge, and Polish ‘exiles’ in Siberia – those we should be thinking of this Christmas.
Religious paintings of the parable of the Good Samaritan, and Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well, and charitable saints, before all changed in the 19th century..
In their heyday, worked elaborately in gold leaf, but lost with the realism of the Renaissance. Revived by the Pre-Raphaelites, and rarely used for secular figures.
Perseus describes in his wedding speech how he beheaded Medusa, and how she came to have snakes in her hair.
After 1850, there was a resurgence of expressions of the emptiness and futility of earthly life, with symbols of death and transience of ephemeral objects.
How the tradition of Christmas trees is relatively recent, family scenes of celebrating the day before Christmas, and how it also became a day to remember the poor and others less fortunate.
Franz von Stuck, Lovis Corinth, Jacek Malczewski, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Albin Egger-Lienz, and Edmond Aman-Jean tell stories from 1923.
Can William Blake, Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, Jacek Malczewski or others come any closer to the classical Chimera?
Modern interpretations of this popular traditional theme in Christian religious painting, from Pre-Raphaelite to the end of the 19th century.
The Eclectic Light Company 