Five paintings of women in trouble: Ariadne on Naxos, Mary Magdalen, an allegory of logic, the disillusioned Medea, and Cydippe with the apple of Acontius.
Netherlands
The Annunciation, and myth of Vertumnus and Pomona, a tale from Roman history, a favourite fable, stories of schools and a concert of the birds.
A dentist draws a tooth outside a church, a man reckons he holds the winning card, and the five most humorous interpretations of the senses.
More rich and lucent skies light cavalry troopers, migrating peasants, the baptism of an Ethiopian eunuch, and a river scene. Then he suddenly stopped painting.
Trained as a landscape painter, he used his landscapes for genre scenes, animal and human portraits, even myths and a religious work, and was influenced by Claude Lorrain.
One of the founding fathers of animal painting, his Young Bull is almost life-sized and ranked alongside Rembrandt’s work, but he died at the age of only 28.
A period in which the winters were exceptionally cold, landscapes showing folk skating on frozen canals and rivers, promenading, and playing kolf, and ancestor of modern golf.
How Dutch painters studying in Italy came to be influenced by Caravaggio, and took his style back to Utrecht, where they became known as Utrecht Caravaggists.
With much of the Dutch Republic close to water, views of the coast became marines, those of cities showed boats busy nearby, and the countryside was overrun by rivers.
Active in Haarlem and Amsterdam during and after Poussin’s later years, his depiction of trees is outstanding, and his old oaks are lifelike.
The Eclectic Light Company 