From Jan van Eyck’s trompe l’oeil, through Tanner’s fiery cross, to the modern young Polish woman of Jacek Malczewski.
Rossetti
Two painters: one married Charles Dickens’ daughter and stopped painting, the other became a prolific illustrator, including books by Dickens’ grand-daughter. The Victorian Web at work.
A powerful and well-educated woman, rumoured to have murdered one of her three husbands, painted at the time, and later by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
This story remained almost unknown and unpainted until it suddenly became popular after 1850. Paintings by Etty, Rossetti, Cabanel and others.
The late 19th century took gambling upmarket into glitzy casinos. Seen in paintings by Courbet, Rossetti, Félix Vallotton, and others.
From Velázquez in the 1640s to Renoir in 1882, portraits and scenes of women sewing were popular. How did they develop?
Visit Ford in Northumberland and you’ll see her murals in the old village school. Taught to paint by Rossetti, she is claimed as a Pre-Raphaelite. Was she?
Was she abducted, seduced, or seducer? Victim or whore? Ovid’s pair of letters between Helen and Paris raises questions which many artists have tried to tackle.
In the hands, and brushes, of great artists, a religious set-piece becomes a succession of marvellous and highly innovative paintings.
Her image has been used by the French nation, the Catholic church, Napoleon, revanchists, romantics, feminists, and now the extreme right. Here are some of those powerful paintings.
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