Anthony Blunt on Nicolas Poussin - Secular Scenes

Nicolas Poussin
Rinaldo and Armida
ca. 1628-30
oil on canvas
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

HISTORY: Possibly anonymous sale, Christie, London, 1788; Noël Desenfans by 1804 bequeathed at his death in 1807 to Sir Francis Bourgeois, and by him to Alleyn's College, Dulwich [whose art collection passed to the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 1817].

"One further group of paintings executed by Poussin in the early and middle 1630's is of importance in connection with his attitude toward his subject matter.  These deal with stories taken from Tasso, a poet whose works greatly attracted painters in the seventeenth century.  At first sight, Poussin's choice of themes from the Gerusalemme liberata may seem curious, for he confines himself to the love stories of Rinaldo and Armida and of Tancred and Erminia and neglects – except in one early drawing – the battles and the heroic episodes of the epic.  Two of the paintings in question [directly above and below] represent the moment when Armida is about to kill the sleeping Rinaldo but is suddenly overcome by his beauty.  The Berlin picture illustrates the next episode in the story, when the enchantress orders her attendants to carry the sleeping warrior to her chariot drawn by dragons, in which she transports him to her enchanted castle.  The Rinaldo cycle is completed by a painting showing his companions, Carlo and Ubaldo, who were sent by Goffredo to save him from the snares of Armida.  Finally, two paintings show Erminia finding the wounded Tancred and cutting off her hair to fasten the bandages round his wounds."

Nicolas Poussin
Rinaldo and Armida
ca. 1635
oil on canvas
Pushkin Museum, Moscow

HISTORY: Acquired by the Empress Catherine II of Russia. Sent to Moscow [from the Hermitage] in 1930.

Nicolas Poussin
Armida carrying off Rinaldo
ca. 1637
oil on canvas
Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

HISTORY: Painted for Jacques Stella ca. 1637; about 1685 belonged to Joachim de Seiglière de Boisfranc. Probably Pasquier sale, Remy, Paris, 1755 (as engraved by Chasteau). The Berlin picture was recorded in the Neues Palais, Potsdam, in 1773.

Nicolas Poussin
The Companions of Rinaldo
ca. 1633-35
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

HISTORY: Cassiano dal Pozzo. The account of Pozzo's collection among the papers of Robert de Cotte mentions a painting "representant les deux chevaliers qui vont delivrer Renaud des enchantements d'Armide." The boat is taken from a Roman relief in Venice, engraved by the Master of the Die. 

The Metropolitan Museum offers a more detailed provenance: "Cassiano dal Pozzo, Rome (died 1657); his brother, Carlo Antonio dal Pozzo, Rome (died 1689); his son, Gabriele dal Pozzo, Rome (died 1695); his son Cosimo Antonio dal Pozzo, Rome (until 1723; sold to Bufalo); Marchese Ottavio Rinaldo dal Bufalo, Rome; Graf Aloys Thomas Raimond von Harrach, Vienna (probably purchased in late 1731 or 1732 [Harrach was Viceroy of the Kingdom of Naples, 1728-32]); Grafen von Harrach, Vienna (by 1738; inventories 1745 and 1749, catalogued in 1856 and 1897 as by Le Sueur, catalogued in 1926 as by Poussin); Countess Stephanie Harrach, Vienna (until 1967; sold to Wildenstein); Wildenstein, New York, 1967-68; sold to Wrightsman); Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, New York (1968-77); given by the Wrightsmans to the Metropolitan Museum in 1977."

Nicolas Poussin
Tancred and Erminia
ca. 1631-33
oil on canvas
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

HISTORY: Bought by the Empress Catherine II of Russia from the painter Abel (no doubt the miniaturist Ernst August Abel) in Paris in 1766.

Nicolas Poussin
Tancred and Erminia
ca. 1637-38
oil on canvas
Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham

HISTORY: Bought by Sir James Thornhill in Paris in 1711; Sir James Thornhill sale, Cock, London, 1734, bought W. Lock (engraved while in his possession by J. Van der Gucht); sold by his son to Earl Poullett, from whose descendant it was bought in 1938 by the Barber Institute through Frank Sabin. 

"The explanation of Poussin's somewhat unexpected choice of themes from the Gerusalemme is to be found in the Allegoria prefixed by Tasso to the poem, in which he tells the reader that it is to be read not simply as a series of stories but as a carefully planned allegory symbolizing the order of things.  This Allegoria is rarely reprinted in modern editions of the poem, but it appeared in the first edition of 1581 and in most of the reprints published during the following decades.  . . .  Many of the writers who favor allegory quote the Gerusalemme as an example of its use.  It is likely that Poussin was aware of their ideas, and he may well have adapted them to his own art of painting.  It is certain that he read Tasso's own writings on epic poetry, for several of his notes on painting published by Bellori are copied from them, with the word "painting" substituted for "poetry."  The hypothesis that he accepted the poet's interpretation of the Gerusalemme as set forth in the Allegoria would explain the otherwise puzzling fact that he selected from the Gerusalemme precisely the love themes.  Seen as allegories of the struggle between Reason and Concupiscence, these paintings take their place naturally alongside the Arcadian Shepherds and the stories of Midas and prepare the way for the more explicitly philosophical paintings of the 1640's."

Nicolas Poussin
Landscape with a Boy drinking from a Stream
ca. 1643-44
oil on canvas
National Gallery, London

HISTORY: Cassiano dal Pozzo. The picture and its pair [directly below] can be traced to the Pozzo collection by the labels and seals on the back, which prove that in 1739 they were given by Cosimo Antonio dal Pozo to his daughter, Maria Laura, who had married Pietro Paolo Boccapaduli; by descent to the Boccapaduli family; Lord Grenville, Dropmore House, Berkshire; by descent to the Fortescue family; sold at Dropmore in 1939; bought Tomàs Harris; bought from him by Sir George Leon; bequeathed to his widow, later Mrs Parrington; presumably sold by her to R.F. Heathcoat Amory; sold by his executors, Sotheby, London, 1962; purchased by the National Gallery in 1970. 

Nicolas Poussin
Landscape with Travelers resting
ca. 1643-44
oil on canvas
National Gallery, London

HISTORY: The Landscape with Travelers resting was, remarkably, never separated from its pair, the Landscape with a Boy drinking from a Stream. They were painted together for Cassiano dal Pozzo, and recognized by Blunt as "Poussin's first pure landscapes."  Subsequently, they followed the same winding path over the course of three hundred years through families in Italy, then Britain, before coming to rest together at the National Gallery late in the twentieth century.

Nicolas Poussin
Landscape with a Roman Road
1648
oil on canvas
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

HISTORY: Painted in 1648; in 1685 belonged to the Chevalier de Lorraine. The Dulwich picture belonged to Noël Desenfans, who at his death in 1807 bequeathed it to Sir Frances Bourgeois; bequeathed by him in 1811 to Alleyn's College, Dulwich [whose art collection passed to the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 1817].

"Two other compositions [directly above and directly below] also show travelers resting, washing their feet, or drinking from a spring.  One of this pair shows a Roman road running straight into the composition, with a milestone beside it in the middle distance and beyond it, a village by the sea.  The other shows a rougher tract of country across which runs an irregular path.  It has been plausibly suggested that these two compositions are designed to mark the contrast between the land as organized and cultivated by the Romans and its primitive state before their arrival, and the straight road is an obvious symbol of Roman civilization.  Both landscapes probably also allude to the virtues of country life as set forth by Varro, Cato, and the other ancient writers on agriculture.  In the center of the National Gallery painting [below] we see a bearded man lying at the foot of a tree in meditation, and above him, hung on the tree, is the image of a tutelary deity and various other objects, including a sword and scabbard.  These are presumably the arms of the man lying below the tree, who, we may suppose, dedicated them to the deity represented by the image when he gave up his life as a soldier and retired to a life of philosophical retirement in the country."

Nicolas Poussin
Landscape with a Man Washing his Feet at a Fountain
ca. 1648
oil on canvas
National Gallery, London

HISTORY: In Sir George Beaumont's collection by 1787 (when engraved by Pether); given by him to the Gallery in 1826. The Landscape with a Man washing his Feet at a Fountain was almost certainly painted as a pair to the Landscape with a Roman Road. 

Nicolas Poussin
Landscape with a Woman Washing her Feet
1650
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

HISTORY: Painted in 1650, perhaps for [Michel] Passart, to whom it belonged. The Ottawa picture was probably in the James Fenton sale, Christie, London, 1880. Earl Howe by 1885 (lent by him to the Royal Academy winter exhibition in that year); Earl Howe sale, Trollope, London, 1920. With Duits, London, 1929; with Durlacher, London, 1930; bought by H.S. Southam, Ottawa; presented to the National Gallery of Canada in 1944. 

"The most puzzling of this group of landscapes is the Woman Washing Her Feet, painted in 1650, probably for Passart.  In type it is like those painted for [Cassiano dal] Pozzo, but it is bigger and more considered, so that at first it is tempting to search for a classical theme that would fit the composition.  But none has been so far suggested, and it is probably wiser to follow the lead given by [André] Félibien, who simply calls it un paysage où l'on voit une femme qui se lave les pieds. Nevertheless, the old woman with a basket of figs beside her who sits watching the girl, and the youth peering at her over the bushes suggest that Poussin meant to do more than paint a girl stopping to wash her feet.  If so, however, the theme is probably something like that of the man killed by a snake [below], because the figures are not in classical dress and, though the youth is satyrlike, he has neither horns nor pointed ears and is probably no more than an inquisitive peasant from the Campagna.  Unfortunately, in this case we have no clue from external evidence, and the landscape itself provides nothing on which to build even a tentative hypothesis."

Nicolas Poussin
Landscape with a Man pursued by a Snake
ca. 1643-44
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Montréal

HISTORY: Probably Cassiano dal Pozzo. Possibly Marquis of Bute sale, Christie, London, 1822. The present picture was bought by Duncan Grant in Paris, soon after 1920; bought from him by Anthony Blunt in 1964. Sold after Blunt's death in 1983, and purchased by the Museum in Montreal. Blunt acknowledges, without agreeing, that "this generally has been taken to be a copy [not by Poussin] of the National Gallery Landscape with a Man killed by a Snake" [directly below].

Nicolas Poussin
Landscape with a Man killed by a Snake
ca. 1648
oil on canvas
National Gallery, London

HISTORY: Painted for [Jean] Pointel, probably in 1648. After his death, which probably took place between 1657 and 1662, bought by Duplessis-Rambouillet; in 1685 belonged to Denis Moreau. Passed by descent to the Nyert family. Bought from them early in, or shortly before, 1773 by Robert Strange. Strange sale, Christie, London, 1773, bought by Sir Warkin Williams-Wynn, 4th Baronet; bought [by the National Gallery] in 1947 from the 8th Baronet, through Horace Buttery. 

"In the Man Killed by a Snake . . . Poussin has taken as his theme a recent incident, which, even if he did not actually witness it, happened in a tract of country that he knew and among people whose misery he had seen.  But he gives a timeless quality to this contemporary incident by his manner of treating it.  He makes no attempt to provide any local color.  . . .  Both Félibien and Fénelon record that his main intention in the painting was to depict the effects of fear as it is expressed in different degrees.  The man in the foreground who actually sees the dead body rushes away with a movement of terror; the women with her bundle sees his terror without seeing the cause of it and so reflects it, but in a less intense degree; and the men sitting on the bank of the lake notice nothing at all."  

Nicolas Poussin
Landscape with Two Nymphs and a Snake
1659
oil on canvas
Musée Condé, Chantilly

HISTORY: Probably painted for Charles Lebrun in 1659. Radziwill collection; Reiset collection; bought from him by the Duc d'Aumale [and bequeathed by him to the Museum in Chantilly]. 

"The feeling of the frightening power of nature is strongly expressed in the mysterious Landscape with Two Nymphs.  Here nature is seen as forceful rather than productive, for although the trees are large and heavy, the general effect is bleak.  The theme of the picture is puzzling.  In the foreground beside a spring sit two nymphs watching a huge snake devouring a bird.  The idea of a snake as the guardian of a spring is common in antiquity, and is linked up with the general connection of snakes with the underworld from which the spring arises.  It probably has this connotation in Poussin's landscape, but it may have a more precise meaning." 

Nicolas Poussin
Landscape with Buildings
ca. 1648-50
oil on canvas
Museo del Prado, Madrid

HISTORY: Recorded in the collection of King Philip V at La Granja in 1746. 

Blunt suggested that the Prado Landscape with Buildings [above] was perhaps the missing painting called Landscape with a Calm [below] which he catalogued as "lost."   

Nicolas Poussin
Landscape with a Calm
1651
oil on canvas
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

HISTORY: This painting was apparently unknown to Blunt (or known and disregarded).  In any case, it is listed in his catalogue as "lost."  After purchasing the picture, the Getty Museum published a provenance, from which the following is extracted – painted for Jean Pointel (died 1660); by 1685 owned by Sieur Louis Bay Marchand of Lyon; by 1743 owned by Peter Delmé of London; by 1854 owned by James Morrison of Basildon Park, Berkshire; descended from the Morrison family to the Dent-Brocklehurst family of Sudeley Castle, Winchcombe; offered at Sotheby's in 1974 as by Gaspard Dughet, and withdrawn; sold by the Dent-Brocklehurst family to the Getty Museum in 1997, as by Poussin. 

Nicolas Poussin
Landscape with a Storm
1651
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen

HISTORY: Painted for [Jean] Pointel in 1651. The Blunt catalogue says "original lost" – but the Rouen painting has since been accepted by Jacques Thuillier and by curators at the Getty. These and other scholars regard both Landscape with a Storm and Landscape with a Calm as originals by Poussin, painted as a pair.

– Anthony Blunt, Nicolas Poussin, (Phaidon Press, 1958) and The Paintings of Nicolas Poussin: Critical Catalogue (Phaidon Press, 1966)

More Delacroix from New York

Eugène Delacroix
Portrait of Madame Frédéric Villot
1833
etching
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Eugène Delacroix
Theatrical troupe on the road
1818
watercolor
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Eugène Delacroix
Seven studies of Moroccan men's costume
1832
drawing with watercolor
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Eugène Delacroix
Landscape with an aqueduct
ca. 1827
wash drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Eugène Delacroix
Tomb and studies of windows in the Church of Valmont Abbey
ca. 1829-31
wash drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Eugène Delacroix
Interior of the Church of Valmont Abbey
ca. 1829-31
wash drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Eugène Delacroix
Wall decorated in Spanish tiles
1832
watercolor
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Eugène Delacroix
Study of Morning Glory arch for Basket of Flowers
1848-49
pastel on blue paper
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Eugène Delacroix
Basket of Flowers
1848-49
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Eugène Delacroix
Hamlet and his Mother
1849
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Eugène Delacroix
Ovid among the Scythians
1862
oil on paper, mounted on panel
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

"Delacroix, the most intelligent and complex of nineteenth-century French artists, was torn by conflicts.  Classic or Romantic?  Racine or Shakespeare?  Mozart or Beethoven?  Again and again the famous diary struggles with the opposing values implied by these names, and he was never able to harmonize them into a final reconciliation.  It was the same in his private life: "A revolutionary in his studio," said Victor Hugo, "he was a conservative in the drawing room."  And Baudelaire, whose analysis of his character remains the subtlest, pointed out that his temperament "contained much of the sauvage . . . and much of the man-of-the-world."  Curiously (or inevitably) this awareness of some basic split in his personality seems to have conditioned the approach of nearly all who have written about him."

"Delacroix has been relatively fortunate in the posthumous writing he has attracted.  It begins with Baudelaire's magnificent obituary, which celebrates the artist chiefly for his evocative qualities, qualities "which recall to the memory the greatest number of feelings and poetical thoughts which we had already known but believed to be buried for ever in the night of the past."  Baudelaire is thereby led to point out "that he has always attracted the admiration of writers . . . painters have never wholly understood him."  Yet even before Baudelaire himself was dead this was to be proved wrong, and we begin to come across the earliest tributes from a host of great painters, unequalled in stature since the seventeenth century, who were to see in Delacroix not "the singular and persistent melancholy that emanates from all his works" but the pioneer colorist whose explorations prepared the ground for nearly all the great artistic experiments between Impressionism and Fauvism."

"For those who visited the great centenary exhibition at the Louvre last year [1963] the problem of trying to reconcile the "painter" and the "poet," revealed in this dichotomy of approach, took a slightly different though related form.  Unlike Baudelaire, we have had the chance to see the work of those "painters of modern life . . . who can snatch its epic quality from the life of today, and make us see and understand, with brush or with pencil, how great and poetic we are in our cravats and our patent-leather boots."  For we have behind us Manet and the Impressionists, who did just that, and for us the convention within which Delacroix was working seems in retrospect to have been no longer wholly valid.  By pumping in much fresh blood he was the last to keep alive a world of imagery which was already dying.  Comments heard at the exhibition seemed to imply that in every "grande machine" there was a modern painting struggling to get out.  Such a viewpoint is, of course, quite unhistorical and fails to understand Delacroix's most passionately held convictions, but it does suggest the nature of the unease we feel before some of his canvases and the sense of relief with which we turn to those that we can annex to our own vision of the world."

– Francis Haskell, from an essay in The New York Review of Books (1964)

Eugène Delacroix
Man-at-arms
before 1863
etching
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Eugène Delacroix
Theseus, conqueror of the Centaur Eurytus - from Parthenon Frieze, Elgin Marbles, London
1825
lithograph
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Eugène Delacroix
Lion Standing
1833
lithograph
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Theodor von Holst, follower of Fuseli

Theodor von Holst
Sheet of figure studies
1834
watercolour and bodycolour
British Museum

Theodor von Holst (1810-1844) - historical painter, the son of a teacher of music of Livonian descent, was born in London on 3 Sept. 1810.  At an early age he was admitted a student at the Royal Academy, where he attracted the notice of Sir Thomas Lawrence, who bought some of his drawings.  But the artist who influenced him most was Fuseli, whose pupil he became and whose peculiarities he copied and exaggerated.  He sent his first picture to the Royal Academy in 1827, and continued to exhibit there and at the British Institution till the year of his death.  His subjects were either taken from literature, Dante, Shakespeare, Scott, and especially Goethe, or inventions of his own with melodramatic titles.  His principle works were The Drinking Scene in Faust, The Apparition to the second Lord Lyttelton, and The Raising of Jairus's daughter (engraved), for which the directors of the British Institution awarded him a prize of fifty guineas in 1841.  He was gifted with a talent for drawing and fine sense of colour, but it was the universal opinion of critics that he was spoilt by ill-advised adulation, and that his powers were wasted on the gloomy and romantic subjects which he chose to paint.  He illustrated an edition of Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, published in 1831.  He died at 2 Percy Street, Bedford Square, on 12 Feb. 1844.

– Dictionary of National Biography, edited by Leslie Stephen (1899)

Theodor von Holst
Sheet of studies, including portrait of E.T.A. Hoffmann
before 1844
drawing
British Museum

Theodor von Holst
Studies of two faces
before 1844
drawing
British Museum

Theodor von Holst
Study of leg and transcription of verse
before 1844
drawing
British Museum

Theodor von Holst
Study of two men and text of letter (in German)
before 1844
drawing
British Museum

Theodor von Holst
Figure study and anatomical studies
before 1844
drawing
British Museum

Theodor von Holst
Faust standing in his study reading
ca. 1820-25
etching  (book illustration)
British Museum

Theodor von Holst
Scene from Goethe's Faust
before 1844
watercolour
British Museum

Theodor von Holst
Whirlwind of lovers following demonic horse out of the chimney of a furnace
(possible illustration to Faust)
ca. 1830-35
etching
British Museum

Theodor von Holst
Figure studies of two nude men, whole-length in mirror-image
(possible illustration to Faust)
1837
lithograph
British Museum

Theodor von Holst
Young woman with lantern and young man with sword
confronting old bearded man
(possible illustration to Faust)
ca. 1828-35
lithograph
British Museum

Theodor von Holst
Witch appearing to maiden
before 1844
drawing
British Museum

Theodor von Holst
Hamlet Act III scene iv
Hamlet and Gertrude with ghost of Hamlet's father
before 1844
drawing
British Museum

Theodor von Holst
Aristotle and Phyllis
(studies of woman riding on back of philosopher, brandishing whip)
before 1844
drawing
British Museum

Theodor von Holst
Man in 16th-century dress
before 1844
watercolour
British Museum

Victorian Painting (Tate Britain)

Charles Robert Leslie
The Carved Room, Petworth House, Sussex
ca. 1856
oil on panel
Tate Britain

"In the early 1830s J.M.W. Turner was a regular visitor to Petworth, the Sussex home of his patron Lord Egremont.  The house contained a fine collection of old master and contemporary British paintings, and many artists were entertained there.  . . .  C.R. Leslie's first contact with Lord Egremont came in May 1823 when, at the suggestion of Thomas Phillips (Egremont's 'official' portraitist) he was asked to make a portrait of one of his grandchildren who was dying.  . . .  Of all the works by C.R. Leslie which owe their inspiration to Egremont and Petworth, this painting [above] is unique in being an exact record of one of the rooms in the house.  . . .  It shows the north-west end of the Carved Room, which takes its name from the carved wall panels which were completed by Grinling Gibbons in 1692.  . . .  So exact is Leslie's treatment of his subject that it is possible to identify the actual items of furniture and works of art in the room; all of them are still at Petworth."   

Charles Robert Leslie
Head of Prince Hal
ca. 1851
oil on canvas
Tate Britain

John Linnell
Reapers - Noonday Rest
1865
oil on canvas
Tate Britain

"Linnell's poetic visions of the countryside, far detached from the sometimes harsh realities of rural life, were much sought-after by collectors.  This painting is a replica, by the artist, of a work he had sold in 1862.  Linnell claimed that it was 'truer to Nature than most pictures'.  However, he had been a friend of the visionary artists William Blake and Samuel Palmer, and there may be a more visionary quality to this scene."

John Linnell
The Sandpits
1856
oil on canvas
Tate Britain

John Linnell
Harvest Home - Sunset - The Last Load
1853
oil on canvas
Tate Britain

John Linnell
Wood-cutting in Windsor Forest
1834-35
oil on panel
Tate Britain

John Linnell
Contemplation
1864-65
oil on canvas
Tate Britain

William Holman Hunt
Cornfield at Ewell
1849
oil on panel
Tate Britain

"An inscription on the label on the back of this sketch suggests that it was made on a farm owned by William Holman Hunt's uncle in Ewell, Surrey.  It also implies that it was probably made outdoors on the spot.  Painting directly from nature was central to the Pre-Raphaelite mission, and here Holman Hunt has captured the feeling of a seized moment on a hot day in late summer."

George Howard, ninth Earl of Carlisle
View from the front of St John Lateran, Rome
ca. 1870
watercolor
Tate Britain

Frederick Sandys
Oriana
1861
oil on panel
Tate Britain

"The subject is taken from an early poem by Tennyson, The Ballad of Oriana, published in the Moxon edition of his Poems (1857).  In the poem Oriana stands on the wall of a castle, watching her betrothed in battle below.  An arrow meant for the knight strays, killing her instead.  Sandys does not attempt to illustrate Tennyson's poem, but refers obliquely to one line of the ballad, 'She stood upon the castle wall'.  . . .  The artist's interest in fifteenth-century Flemish painting, particularly that of Rogier van der Weyden and Jan van Eyck, is apparent in the minute observation of the sitter's skin, hair and clothing, and in the detailed background landscape."

Edward Burne-Jones
Sidonia von Bork, 1560
1860
gouache, watercolor
Tate Britain

"Sidonia von Bork is the central character in Wilhelm Meinhold's gothic romance Sidonia the Sorceress.  The novel is set in sixteenth-century Pomerania and chronicles the crimes of the evil Sidonia, whose beauty captivates all who see her.  She is shown here at the court of the dowager Duchess of Wolgast, one of the early intrigues in a career that leads to her execution as a witch.  Many of the details of Sidonia's appearance are taken directly from Meinhold's description, but the costume is derived from a portrait of Isabella d'Este by Giulio Romano at Hampton Court."

Edward Burne-Jones
Sisyphus
ca. 1870
tempera on paper
Tate Britain

"The roundel was one of eight made to decorate a grand piano for MP William Graham, linked by the story of Orpheus – whose music charmed all who heard it – and his descent into the Underworld in an attempt to rescue Eurydice, his wife.  The beauty of Orpheus's playing caused Sisyphus to pause in his eternal task of rolling a boulder uphill."

William Etty
Standing Female Nude
ca. 1835-40
oil on canvas
Tate Britain

"William Etty was responsible for raising the status of the female nude in Victorian art.  Since there was no precedent for this genre of painting in English art, Etty looked to Venetian art for inspiration, as well as the sensuous handling and voluptuous nudes of Rubens.  His fluid brushstrokes and warm rich colours also reflected the influence of Delacroix, who greatly admired Etty's work.  . . .  Some critics regarded Etty's belief in the importance of colour over design as unwholesome and his works were frequently attacked for their indecency and lack of finish.  The Times considered them 'entirely too luscious for the public eye' and Thackeray warned of their intoxicating effect."

James McNeill Whistler
Three Figures - Pink and Grey
1868-78
oil on canvas
Tate Britain

"The picture derives from one of six oil sketches that Whistler produced in 1868 as part of a plan for a frieze, commissioned by the businessman F.R. Leyland, founder of the Leyland Shipping Line.  Known as the 'Six Projects' the sketches (now in the Freer Art Gallery, Washington) were all scenes with women and flowers, and all six were strongly influenced by his admiration for Japanese art.  . . . Although the three figures are clearly engaged in tending a flowering cherry tree, Whistler's aim in this picture is to create a mood or atmosphere, rather than to suggest any kind of theme.  . . .  It has been suggested that Whistler derived his colour scheme, and even the figures themselves, in their rhythmically flowing drapery, from polychrome Tanagra figures in the British Museum, which was opposite his studio in Great Russell Street."

– quoted passages based on notes by curators at Tate Britain