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.
Waterhouse
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.
Linked stories of Tiresias, the trans-gender soothsayer, Narcissus who fell in love with himself, and Echo who could only repeat what others said.
The Lycians turned into frogs when they refused the goddess Latona a drink of water, and the sorceress Medea accompanied by toads.
The most prominent in paintings, Pandora’s box was really a jar, and didn’t become a popular theme until the late 19th century.
In classical times, they were strummed like a guitar rather than plucked. Apollo, Orpheus and lyric poets from Raphael, Rubens, Waterhouse and others.
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