Nymphs

Roman Empire
Nymph
AD 125-150
marble
Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

Victor Müller
Model posed as Wood Nymph
ca. 1862
drawing
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Jean-Baptiste Regnault
Sleeping Nymph spied upon by Satyr
ca. 1775-85
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Agostino Carracci
Satyr and sleeping Nymph
(Lascivie Series)
ca. 1590-95
engraving
Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich

Hans Thoma
Faun and Nymph
1888
watercolor on paper
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Alexander Keirincx (landscape) and Dirck van der Lisse (figures)
Nymphs at Rest
ca. 1635
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Carcassonne

François Boucher
Nymphs and River Gods
ca. 1735-40
drawing
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

attributed to Benedetto Bordone
Nymph leading Poliphilo
1499
woodcut and letterpress
(from the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of Francesco Colonna
published by Aldus Manutius in Venice)
Hamburger Kunsthalle

Marco Dente
Vulcan with Nymph and Putti
(series, Antike Basreliefs)
ca. 1510-25
engraving
Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich

Christos Karas
Centaur and Nymph
1930
screenprint
National Gallery, Athens

Pietro Rotari
Marsyas discovered by Nymphs and Satyrs
before 1762
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Anselm Feuerbach
Children making Music while Nymph listens
1864
oil on canvas
Neue Pinakothek, Munich

Felice Torelli
Diana with Nymphs
ca. 1710
oil on canvas
National Museum, Warsaw

Cornelis van Poelenburgh
Diana with her Nymphs
1659
oil on panel
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

Peter Paul Rubens and workshop
Diana and Nymphs departing for the Hunt
ca. 1615
oil on canvas
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio

Jean-Antoine Watteau after Peter Paul Rubens
Satyr embracing Nymph
ca. 1714
drawing
Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

Leonardo was obviously dissatisfied with the current method of drawing trees.  He knew a better way.  "Remember," he taught, "that wherever a branch divides, the stem grows correspondingly thinner, so that, if you draw a circle round the crown of the tree, the sections of every twig must add up to the thickness of the trunk."  I do not know if this law holds.  I do not think it quite does.  But as a hint on "how to draw trees," Leonardo's observation is invaluable.  By teaching the assumed laws of growth he has given the artist a formula for constructing a tree – and so he can still feel like the creator, "Lord and Master of all things," who knows the secrets of nature and can "make" trees as he hoped to "make" a bird that would fly.   

I believe what we call the Renaissance artists' preoccupation with structure has a very practical basis in their need to know the schema of things.  For in a way our very concept of "structure," the idea of some basic scaffolding or armature that determines the "essence" of things, reflects our need for a schema with which to grasp the infinite variety of this world of change.  No wonder these issues have become somewhat clouded by a metaphysical fog which settled over the discussions of art in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  

– E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1960)

Drowse

Ippolito Marracci
Allegory of Sleep with Cupid, Diana, Endymion and Hebe
ca. 1690-1710
ceiling fresco
Palazzo Mansi, Lucca

Tim Gardner
Untitled (Ryan in Bed)
2002
watercolor on paper
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

James Tissot
Woman Sleeping
ca. 1871-73
watercolor and gouache on paper
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Louis-Claude Vassé
Sleeping Shepherd
1751
marble
Musée du Louvre

Lee Friedlander
Helen Levitt, New York City
1959
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Philip-Lorca diCorcia
Auden, Emma and Dogs
1989
C-print
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Domenichino (Domenico Zampieri)
Virgin and sleeping Child with young St John the Baptist
ca. 1605
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Henri Decaisne
Guardian Angel
(after poem by Lamartine)
ca. 1825
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

François Le Moyne
Daphnis with sleeping Chloe
ca. 1721
oil on canvas
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

François-Nicolas Delaistre
Cupid and Psyche
ca. 1790
marble
Musée du Louvre

Juan Antonio Escalante
Angel with prophet Isaiah in the Wilderness
ca. 1660
oil on canvas
Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Anonymous French Photographer
Clinique vétérinaire Malvezin, Paris
ca. 1905
gelatin silver print
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Paris Bordone
Sleeping Warrior
before 1571
drawing
British Museum

Marlene Dumas
Jen
2005
oil on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

attributed to Ubaldo Gandolfi
Sleeping Child
ca. 1760
oil on canvas
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Anne-Louis Girodet
Sleeping Bacchus
ca. 1790-91
oil on panel
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri

Conrad Marca-Relli
Sleeping Figure
1953-54
collage of painted canvas elements on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

from In Time of War

Wandering lost upon the mountains of our choice,

Again and again we sigh for an ancient South,

For the warm nude ages of instinctive poise,

For the taste of joy in the innocent mouth.

Asleep in our huts, how we dream of a part

In the glorious balls of the future; each intricate maze

Has a plan, and the disciplined movements of the heart

Can follow for ever and ever its harmless ways.

We envy streams and houses that are sure:

But we are articled to error; we

Were never nude and calm like a great door,

And never will be perfect like the fountains;

We live in freedom of necessity,

A mountain people dwelling among mountains.

– W.H. Auden (1938)

Visual Preferences (20th Century: 1946)

Jack Grue
Still Life no. 16
1946
watercolor on ivory
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Tennessee

Charles Howard
The First Hypothesis
1946
oil on canvas
Menil Collection, Houston

Paul Landacre
Children's Carnival
1946
wood-engraving
Tacoma Art Museum

Dorothea Tanning
Guardian Angels
1946
oil on canvas
New Orleans Museum of Art

Fernand Léger
The White Butterfly
1946
oil on canvas
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas

Francis Bacon
Figure Study I
1946
oil on canvas
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Max Beckmann
Dressing Room
1946
oil on canvas
Kunsthaus Zürich

David Bomberg
Sunset, The Bay, North Devon
1946
oil on canvas
Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne

Arvid Fougstedt
Mother and Child
1946
oil on canvas
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Dod Procter
Autumn Flowers
1946
oil on canvas
Royal Academy of Arts, London

Tristram Hillier
Quantoxhead
1946
oil on panel
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Clare Leighton
Clam Diggers
1946
wood-engraving
Wichita Art Museum, Kansas

Bernard Brussel-Smith
The Bunk
1946
wood-engraving
Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas

Eugene Berman
Stage Design for ballet Armida
1946
watercolor and gouache on paper
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas

Rein Draijer
The Yellow Chair
1946
oil on canvas
Kunstmuseum, The Hague

Walker Evans
Victorian Building, South Side, Chicago
1946
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

from Dichtung und Wahrheit (An Unwritten Poem)

                                                             VII

The "symboliste" attempt to make poetry as intransitive as music, can get no further than the narcissistic reflexive – "I love Myself"; the attempt to make poetry as objective as painting can get no further than the single comparison "A is like B", "C is like D", "E is like F" . . . No "imagist" poem can be more than a few words long. 

                                                             VIII

As an artistic language, Speech has many advantages – three persons, three tenses (Music and Painting have only the Present Tense), both the active and the passive voice – but it has one serious defect: it lacks the Indicative Mood. All its statements are in the subjunctive and only possibly true until verified (which is not always possible) by non-verbal evidence. 

                                                               IX

First I write I was born in York; then, I was born in New York: to discover which statement is true and which false, it is no use studying my handwriting.

                                                                X

I can imagine a forger clever enough to imitate another's signature so exactly that a handwriting expert would swear in court that it was genuine, but I cannot imagine a forger so clever that he could imitate his own signature inexactly enough to make a handwriting expert swear that it was a forgery. (Or is it only that I cannot imagine the circumstances in which anyone could want to do such a thing?)

– W.H. Auden (1959)

Derivations

Jost Amman
Medea with Dragons
1578
woodcut
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Anonymous German Artist
Mermaid bearing Coat of Arms
ca. 1560
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden

Anonymous German Artist
Mythical Sea Creatures Battling
17th century
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden

Anonymous Artist after Parmigianino
Jason with the Golden Fleece
ca. 1590
woodcut
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Anonymous Ferrarese Artist
Theseus abandoning Ariadne
ca. 1540
oil on panel
Alte Pinakothek, Munich

Nicolaes Berchem
Death of Dido
1678
oil on canvas
Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna

Anonymous European Artist
Bacchanal
17th century
oil on canvas
Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle, Netherlands

Anonymous French Artist
Iphigénie en Tauride
17th century
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Brest

Charles Brocas
Aristides
(as described by Herodotus)
1806
oil on canvas
Musée des Augustins de Toulouse

attributed to Domenico Campagnola
Bacchic Scene
ca. 1520-25
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Heinrich Friedrich Füger
Mythological Scene
ca. 1800
drawing
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Tommaso Piroli
Theseus with slain Minotaur
(series, Antiquities of Herculaneum)
1789
etching
Hamburger Kunsthalle

Pierre Brébiette
Amphitrite assisting Venus descending from Shell Chariot
ca. 1640
engraving
Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich

Marco Carlone
Mythological Figures
ca. 1775-80
watercolor and gouache on paper
(after antique wall painting from the Baths of Titus, Rome)
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Laurent-Honoré Marqueste
Perseus and Medusa
1875
plaster
Musée des Augustins de Toulouse

Rudolf Jettmar
Liberation of Prometheus
1910
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

The Greek revolution deserves its fame.  It is unique in the annals of mankind.  This should be acknowledged even by those who side with Plato in their taste for the archaic and ritualistic.  What makes it unique is precisely the directed efforts, the continued and systematic modifications of the schemata of conceptual art, till making was replaced by the matching of reality through the new skill of mimesis.  We mistake the character of this skill if we speak of the imitation of nature.  Nature cannot be imitated or "transcribed" without first being taken apart and put back together again.  This is not the work of observation alone but rather of ceaseless experimentation.  For here too, the term "observation" has tended to mislead rather than enlighten.  

There is no reason to think Greek artists offered a more complete or more accurate visual inventory of the world than did the art of Egypt, Mesopotamia, or Crete.  On the contrary, in these early cultures the schemata of animals and plants were often refined to an astounding degree.  . . .  After all, Greek art of the classical period concentrated on the portrayal of man almost to the exclusion of other motifs, and even in the portrayal of man it remained wedded to types. This does not apply only to the idealized type of physique which we all associate with Greek art.  Even in the rendering of movement and drapery the repertoire of Greek sculpture and painting has turned out to be strangely limited.  There are a restricted number of formulas for the rendering of figures standing, running, fighting, or falling, which Greek artists repeated with relatively slight variations over a long period of time.  Perhaps if a census of such motifs were taken, the Greek vocabulary would be found to be not much larger than the Egyptian.  

It is not even necessarily true that individual observations, such as the existence of shadows or of foreshortening, were never made by pre-Greek artists.  There are certain striking examples of such observations in Mexican art that would refute [Heinrich] Shäfer's contention that all such departures from conceptual modes are directly dependent on the Greek revolution.  But it was Shäfer himself who rightly pointed out that what is interesting in the isolated instances of such deviations, which can even be found in Egypt, is that they remained without consequence.  They do not become part of the tradition to be improved and extended, as they do in Greece.  On the contrary, one has the impression that they are accidents, random mutations, which are weeded out by a process of natural selection.  . . .  Maybe taboos played their part in this sorting-out process.  But most of all, we may assume, tradition itself had this effect.  Nothing succeeds like success, and nothing survives like survival.  The very fact that certain images had survived for immeasurable periods must have appeared as a token of their magic potency. 

– E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1960)