The story of Hypermnestra’s faithfulness to her husband, her trial for not murdering him, and what happened to her sisters, the Danaides.
Waterhouse
Princess, sorceress, seductress, wife, mother, and vengeful filicide – which is the true face of Medea, and why shouldn’t you try to paint her?
Of all Ovid’s Heroines, the most successful, as she both survived and got her revenge on the treacherous Theseus.
Jason is given three tasks, in which he is aided by Medea the sorceress. First he yokes a team of fire-breathing bulls to plough a field, then sows dragon’s teeth, before the prize of the Golden Fleece.
When Edward Burne-Jones was invited to remove his painting from exhibition, it wasn’t so much the male genitals in the centre, but the scandal surrounding its model.
Odysseus had been away from his home, wife Penelope and son Telemachus for over 20 years. What would she have written to him?
Pan pipes, in paintings by Mikhail Vrubel, Poussin, JW Waterhouse, Franz von Stuck, Titian, and others.
Waved by Circe and Medea, later in Tasso’s ‘Jerusalem Delivered’, and by Morgan le Fay in Arthurian legend. Paintings by Poussin, Waterhouse and others.
The earliest known story in the Western canon to end with the suicide of frustrated lovers, it was the precursor to Romeo and Juliet, and extensively depicted.
Concluded with paintings from Willard Metcalf, Pierre Bonnard, JW Waterhouse, Nikolai Astrup, Paul Nash and others.
