Stories of the lives of Alexander, Julius Caesar, Phocion, and Cato the Younger, with superb paintings by Gérôme, Poussin, and others. And some lessons for today.
painting
With Monet’s grainstacks and fog on the River Thames, by the 20th century the effects of fog had become part of Western landscape painting.
Until about 1800, Western landscape painting sought to reveal rather than to hide. It was JMW Turner and Caspar David Friedrich who popularised the effect of fog.
A decade in which Ring’s life and work were transformed by marriage to his muse, Sigrid. Many of his best paintings are here.
Transition from paintings of an elderly couple struggling to survive a harsh winter, to well-dressed girls sewing in the sun.
Godfrey’s siege is stalled due to a bewitched wood, then the temperatures rise and streams dry up. The pressure is on him, so they try to find the missing Rinaldo. Superb paintings from Poussin and others.
A century ago, the Great War ended. Here are some great paintings from war artists like John Singer Sargent and Paul Nash, and others like Lovis Corinth.
Great paintings by Rubens, David, Rembrandt, Merson, Sciuti and Tiepolo telling some of the best stories from Plutarch’s ‘Lives’.
Why do Canaletto’s gondolas not have shadows? Where did Cézanne get his shadows wrong, and why, and what colour are shadows really?
Was painting ‘invented’ by the maid of Corinth? What is ‘shadow play’, and how have painters extended it to religious works? A short history of shadows in painting.
