Boy meets girl but has to swim a mile in treacherous waters to keep meeting her. When she tells him how she burns with passion, he pushes his luck in the sea.
Shakespeare
West turns to a series of more classical mythological stories for his paintings between 1792 and 1802. These include Shakespeare, the Bible, and the first novel.
In memory of Richard Dadd: ten of his best, and thoughts about his life and work. Would we have been any better towards him even now?
In 1864, he was transferred to the newly-built Broadmoor Asylum. Despite that disruption, he continued to paint.
In which Dadd becomes a nineteenth-century Bosch on some seriously psychotropic drugs. It is a masterpiece like no other.
A couple of watercolours give some insight into those around him, and pose a perplexing puzzle. He ended the 1850s with another masterpiece based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
He painted a series of narratives drawn from the Bible and other sources, and 32 watercolours of ‘Passions’ over this period.
To celebrate his bicentenary, here are some early works, including some of his ‘faerie paintings’ of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’.
The anger of Achilles almost brought the Greek war against Troy to a grinding halt. But is Homer’s account fair, or was there more to it?
Not a Greek myth, this tragic love story is the ultimate ancestor to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and other major works. Here are the best paintings.
