Category Archives: Art

Art

Giorgione’s Adoration Of The Shepherds (1510)

December 19, 2025 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

Well, it’s that time of year when we look for the seasonally sublime, and this year let’s visit a nativity scene by one Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco (1470s-1510) – better known simply as Giorgione. Giorgione was the Italian painter who founded the Venetian school of Italian Renaissance painting along with his younger contemporary Titian. He is one of the more mysterious characters in European art; little is known about him other than the brief biographical sketch in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. His work seems to elude critics too, and in fact there are only six surviving paintings that are firmly attributed to him.

Take his Adoration of the Shepherds, for instance. Art historian and Renaissance specialist Bernard Berenson was firmly of the belief that this was by Titian, though earlier had attributed it to Vincenzo Catena, and later hedged his bets somewhat by attributing it partly to Giorgione but finished off by Titian. Roger Fry, meanwhile, had it down as a Giovanni Cariani (“the landscape and the foliage in the foreground leaves little doubt”). These things matter when you’re selling a painting, of course, and this one has an interesting provenance. The painting had come up for sale, as a Giorgione, in 1847 at Christie’s in London and was purchased for £1544 by Thomas Wentworth Beaumont of one of my local stately homes, Bretton Hall in West Yorkshire.

The painting got passed down through several generations of Viscounts Allendale (hence the painting’s alternative name the Allendale Nativity) ultimately to Beaumont’s great grandson, Wentworth Beaumont, who then sold the painting to legendary art collector Lord Duveen in 1937. Duveen’s resident expert was none other than the aforementioned Bernard Berenson. Sadly, the men fell out over the attribution and their long-term partnership ruptured, all because Berenson insisted it was a Titian and Duveen thought it a Giorgione. Duveen sold it on – as a Giorgione (if he’d have seen Titian’s selling power today, perhaps he would have gone along with Berenson) — to department store magnate Samuel Henry Kress who displayed it in the window of his store on Fifth Avenue over the Christmas period 1938. It’s now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.

Giorgione – or Titian, or whoever (though certainly someone Venetian) – places his Nativity in front of a dark grotto rather than a stable, while on the left a bright Venetian landscape recedes into the distance. Joseph and Mary are opulently dressed, and the baby Jesus lies on a white cloth on the ground rather than in a manger – even in the sixteenth century artists sought to be different. You would be forgiven for missing the putti (winged heads) who hover ethereally above the entrance, or the angel surreptitiously floating amid the treetops top-left. Merry Christmas!

Art

Hans Holbein The Younger’s The Ambassadors (1533)

November 7, 2025 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

The Ambassadors is a 1533 painting by German-born Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543). To put things into context, 1533 was the year that Elizabeth I was born, and was slap bang at the dawning of what historians would come to call the Scientific Revolution (conventionally launched by the publication of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543). Whilst at first sight, the painting is a double portrait (of French diplomat Jean de Dinteville and bishop Georges de Selve), closer inspection shows so much more. There is a meticulously rendered array of scientific devices, books and a lute, as well as one of the best-known examples of anamorphosis in art (a distorted projection of a skull that can only be properly viewed from a specific vantage point).

I’m not a fan of the anamorphic skull to be honest, it’s kind of jarring…but the rest is spectacular. I’ve seen this up close and personal at the National Gallery and it is remarkable in its detail. Let’s see some of those details. There are two globes (a terrestrial one and a celestial one), a shepherd’s dial, a quadrant, a torquetum, and a polyhedral sundial, each exquisitely painted.

The lute can be seen to have a broken string, interpreted as a symbol of discord, perhaps between science and religion. Near the lute is a Lutheran hymnal, in which the words and music can be read, and an arithmetic book with minute equations depicted.

Holbein was pretty good with fabric, too. The upper shelf is lined by an Anatolian carpet, a feature that pops up in many a Holbein. The chap on the left is in secular garb, the one on the right is in clerical clothing, both rendered finely, and perhaps, again, a symbol of religious strife. The backdrop, meanwhile, is a richly green, thickly folded curtain (to the top left of which a small crucifix is peeping out).

Holbein moved to England in 1526 and welcomed into the humanist circle of Sir Thomas More. He soon built a strong reputation which is why you can see scores of his painting in the National Portrait Gallery too.

Art

Pieter de Hooch’s The Courtyard Of A House In Delft (1658)

September 26, 2025 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

Pieter de Hooch is not as well-known these days as fellow Dutch masters Rembrandt or Vermeer (both of whom have appeared in these pages) but he was nonetheless a big hitter in the Dutch Golden Age and one of my favourite artists. The Dutch Golden Age, so called, was the period roughly spanning the 17th century in which the newly independent Dutch republic flourished to become Europe’s most prosperous nation and a leading light in European trade, science, and art.

The upheavals of the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648), in which the Dutch secured their independence, entailed a break from the old Monarchist and Catholic traditions under the Habsburgs, and a shake-up in the arts as well as in other areas of life. Out went religious painting and in came a whole new variety of secular subjects from still lifes, landscapes and seascapes, to kamergezichten, or “room-views”, showing glimpses of everyday domestic life, the latter being specialities of Vermeer and this week’s subject, Pieter de Hooch.

Pieter de Hooch was born in Rotterdam to a bricklayer and a midwife, and was brought up in a modest working-class home. He went on to study art in Haarlem under the landscape painter Nicolaes Berchem and became known for his special affinity for figures in interiors. Beginning in 1650, he worked as a painter and servant for a linen-merchant and art collector in Rotterdam, and his work took him to The Hague, Leiden, and Delft, providing him with ample inspiration to pursue his speciality. His paintings capture delightful domestic scenes such as this one from 1658, The Courtyard of a House in Delft, which you can see in London’s National Gallery.

The painting depicts a quiet courtyard scene in which a young maid holds the hand of a small girl. An archway leads from the courtyard into a passageway and through to the other side of the house. Through the archway, a woman stands in the passageway, looking out to the street. The textures and details of the house, such as the tile pattern of the courtyard, the brickwork of the archway and the stone tablet above it, are rendered in detail. Simple but exquisite.

Pieter de Hooch, The Courtyard of a House in Delft

Art

Camille Pissarro’s Jalais Hill, Pontoise (1867)

August 15, 2025 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

Camille Pissarro is the Impressionist who doesn’t quite get the same props these days as the usual crowd: Monet, Manet, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne et al. These names trip off the tongue, and justifiably so due to the indelible stamp they all made on the artistic endeavour of Impressionism, but Pissarro was the one that they all looked up to as the oldest member and “founder” of their collective group. It was Pissarro who really helped get things off the ground and up and running, so to speak, so let’s look at the interesting story of how that came to pass.

Pissarro was born in 1830 on the island of St Thomas in the Danish West Indies (now US Virgin Islands). His father, a French national of Portuguese Jewish descent, had travelled to St Thomas to deal with the estate of a deceased uncle. He ended up staying, marrying his uncle’s widow and having four children with her. According to Jewish law you can’t go marrying your aunt so the family was ostracised, and the young Camille and his siblings were sent to school with the local indigenous kids rather than to the island’s Jewish school.

At age twelve, Camille was sent to boarding school in France, and returned to St Thomas with a love of art and a thorough grounding in drawing and painting. After working for this father for a few years, but being convinced by Danish artist Fritz Melbye that he had a rare talent, he left for Venezuela and took on painting as a full-time profession. At twenty-one, he moved to Paris, working as an assistant to Fritz’s brother Anton Melbye, and attending the École des Beaux-Arts and Académie Suisse.

At the beginning of this period Pissarro’s paintings were in accord with the standards of the Salon, but he soon felt restricted by those standards. He wanted to express the beauties of nature without adulteration. He began to leave the city and paint scenes in the countryside, capturing the daily reality of village life, and painting what he saw, without artifice or grandeur. This inevitably ruffled the feathers of the art world’s old guard who criticised his paintings as “vulgar”.

At the Académie Suisse, however, he met Monet and Cézanne, young artists whose own work was attracting similar criticism, and he sympathised with them and encouraged them. Eventually, other Refusés (Salon rejects) joined the group and in 1873 Pissarro helped establish a collective called the “Société Anonyme des Artistes, Peintres, Sculpteurs et Graveurs” which included fifteen artists…and Impressionism was born. Let’s look at a gallery of Pissarro’s works, with prominence given to his wonderful Jalais Hill, Pontoise which marks his transition into Impressionism.

Art

Henri Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy (1897)

May 24, 2025 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

The art world didn’t used to be quite sure what to do with an artist who hadn’t come up through the ranks in the conventional manner, by studying at somewhere like the Royal Academy of Arts or one of the Écoles des Beaux-Arts. They certainly didn’t know what to do with Henri Rousseau (1844–1910) who only started painting in his early forties, was completely self-taught, and had previously been earning his living as a tax collector (hence his later nickname Le Douanier). His style, too, was not treated kindly by critics – although it would later be referred to as primitivism or Naïve art, Rousseau’s paintings had a childlike simplicity and frankness about them that were widely disparaged by the highbrows.

Picasso, though, knew a natural born artistic genius when he saw one; when he happened upon one of Rousseau’s paintings being sold on the street as a canvas to be painted over, he immediately sought out and met Rousseau. Later he would host a banquet in Rousseau’s honour which would become famous as a notable social event due to the timely presence of so many artists and literary figures from the time (Guillaume Apollinaire, Juan Gris, Gertrude Stein et al).

Rousseau painted a lot of jungle scenes, even though he never visited a jungle nor even left France. Here’s a gallery of Rousseau’s art that showcases his distinct style, with appealing simple shapes and blocks of colour.

The Sleeping Gypsy (French: La Bohémienne endormie) is probably Rousseau’s most famous painting. Painted in 1897, it is a fantastical depiction of a lion musing over a sleeping woman on a moonlit night. Rousseau’s own description is as good as any:

“A wandering Negress, a mandolin player, lies with her jar beside her (a vase with drinking water), overcome by fatigue in a deep sleep. A lion chances to pass by, picks up her scent yet does not devour her. There is a moonlight effect, very poetic. The scene is set in a completely arid desert. The gypsy is dressed in oriental costume.”

It is a bewitching image; The Sleeping Gypsy is held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and is housed right next to Vincent van Gogh’s famous The Starry Night. That’s not a bad pairing!

Art

Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World (1948)

November 22, 2024 davewheeler2@hotmail.com 2 Comments

Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009) is perhaps not a widely known name outside of the States, but he was one of the greats of middle 20th century American art. His oeuvre was American Regionalism, the realist art movement that depicted scenes from the rural, small-town America of the Midwest. Land and people, painted by an artist with an appreciation for nature and the ability to fire the imagination. He was born in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, into an established art-oriented family, his father being the celebrated artist and illustrator N C Wyeth. Andrew was brought up on the art of Winslow Homer, the poetry of Robert Frost and the writings of Henry David Thoreau, and was thus inspired intellectually as well as artistically.

One of Wyeth’s best-known works is his tempera painting Christina’s World, which is held in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York; it was painted in 1948, when he was 31 years old. The work depicts his neighbour, Christina Olson, sprawled on a dry field facing her house in the distance, in Cushing, Maine. Christina had a degenerative muscular disorder that rendered her unable to walk, and she spent most of her time at home. She was firmly against using a wheelchair and so would crawl everywhere, and Wyeth was inspired to create the painting when he saw her crawling across the field.

Christina’s World was first exhibited at the Macbeth Gallery in Manhattan in 1948. It received little attention from critics at the time, but Alfred Barr, the founding director of the MoMA, bought the painting for $1,800 and it gradually grew in popularity to the point that today, it is considered an icon of American art. The Olson house itself has been preserved and renovated to match its appearance in Christina’s World, and because of Wyeth’s profile, it was designated a National Historic Landmark in June 2011.

Art

Albrecht Dürer’s Self-Portrait At Twenty-Eight (1500)

October 26, 2024 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) was a German painter and printmaker and a leading light of the Northern Renaissance. Born in Nuremberg to a successful goldsmith, he lived in the same street where his godfather Anton Koberger was turning Gutenberg’s printing press into a huge commercial enterprise and publishing the famous Nuremberg Chronicle (1493). Albrecht learnt the basics of goldsmithing and drawing under his father and his precocious skills in the latter led him to undergo an apprenticeship under printmaker Michael Wolgemut in which he learnt the art of creating woodcuts for books. After his Wanderjahre – essentially gap years – in which he travelled to study under various masters, he set up a workshop and began to establish a reputation for his high-quality woodcut prints.

Dürer’s woodprints were mainly religious in nature, often in sets such as his sixteen designs for the Apocalypse, the twelve scenes of the Passion, a series of eleven on the Holy Family and Saints, and twenty woodcuts on the Life of the Virgin. He was also particularly renowned for his three Meisterstiche, master prints that are often grouped together because of their perceived quality, namely Knight, Death and the Devil (1513), Saint Jerome in his Study (1514), and Melencolia I (1514). He also made secular woodcuts, such as his famous Rhinoceros (1515), which he never actually saw but created his print using an anonymous written description and brief sketch of an Indian rhinoceros brought to Lisbon in 1515.

However, today we focus on his panel painting in oil, Self-Portrait (or Self-Portrait at Twenty-Eight), held today in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. Painted early in 1500, just before his 29th birthday, Self-Portrait is the last – and most personal and iconic — of his three painted self-portraits. It is remarkable for its directness – does it remind you of anyone? Yes, its resemblance to many earlier representations of Christ has not gone unnoticed: there are clear similarities with the conventions of religious painting, including its symmetry and dark tones, and full-frontal confrontation with the viewer. He even raises his hands to the middle of his chest as if in the act of blessing.

If that is the case, isn’t that blasphemy? Sounds somewhat dangerous, no? Perhaps we’re projecting too much intolerance onto the fifteenth (well, newly-sixteenth) century, or perhaps Dürer’s motivation was simply a way to (literally) imitate Christ, which could be seen as a good thing. Art historian Joseph Koerner interprets it squarely as a pioneering challenge to the norms of self-portraiture, albeit putting it in that particularly verbose way only art historians can do:

“By transferring the attributes of imagistic authority and quasi-magical power once associated with the true and sacred image of God to the novel subject of self-portraiture, Dürer legitimates his radically new notion of art, one based on the irreducible relation between the self and the work or art”.

Albrecht Dürer, Self-portrait at Twenty-Eight

Art

Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s Kalevala Paintings (1890s)

July 19, 2024 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

Greece has its Iliad and Odyssey, Italy its Aeneid, Portugal its Lusiads, Iceland its Eddas, Germany its Nibelungenlied, Britain its Beowulf and Le Morte d’Arthur, and India its Mahabarata and Ramayana. I am talking of course about national folk-epics, those literary masterpieces that were originally an oral canon of folk-stories percolated down through the mists of time and later written down and integrated into the worldview of its people.

Well, Finland’s was the epic poetry collection known as the Kalevala, which was developed quite late — during the 19th century — but still from ancient traditional folk-tales. The Kalevala was an integral part of the Finns’ national awakening in the era of the Grand Duchy of Finland when they were under the yoke of the Russian empire, and it was instrumental in the development of the Finnish national identity, ultimately leading to independence from Russia in 1917.

This national awakening coincided with the so-called Golden Age of Finnish Art roughly spanning the period 1880 to 1910. The Kalevala provided the artistic inspiration for numerous themes at the time in literature (J. L. Runeberg’s The Tales of Ensign Stål; Aleksis Kivi’s The Seven Brothers), music (Jean Sibelius), architecture (Eliel Saarinen), and of course the visual arts, the most notable of which were provided by one Akseli Gallen-Kallela.

Born Axél Waldemar Gallén in Pori, Finland, to a Swedish-speaking family (he Finnicised his name in 1907), Gallen-Kallela first attended drawing classes at the Finnish Art Society before studying at the Académie Julian in Paris. He married Mary Slöör in 1890 and on their honeymoon to East Karelia, he started collecting material for his depictions of the Kalevala. He would soon be inextricably linked with the independence movement as he produced his scenes from the old stories.

The most extensive paintings that Gallen-Kallela made of the Kalevala were his frescoes, originally for the Finnish Pavilion at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900, but painted again in 1928 in the lobby of the National Museum of Finland in Helsinki where they can be seen to this day. However, many standalone works exist too; here’s a flavour of his art, though if you want to know what they depict you’ll have to read the Kalevala!

Art

John Atkinson Grimshaw’s Boar Lane, Leeds (1881)

June 21, 2024 davewheeler2@hotmail.com 2 Comments

Last Sunday I popped along to see Monet’s iconic The Water-Lily Pond, on loan at York Art Gallery, and very nice it was too, being the centrepiece of a nice collection of key loans featuring various French en plein air precursors to Impressionism. However, whilst there, I was reminded that the gallery had also recently acquired for its permanent collection a piece by an artist a little closer to home, Leeds-born John Atkinson Grimshaw, known not for the Impressionistic brushwork or garden scenes of Monet and his ilk but for realistic nocturnal scenes of urban landscapes. The painting is Liverpool Docks at Night (1870s) and it’s a fine example of Grimshaw’s oeuvre. It was also something of a coup for York Art Gallery, given that it had been accepted by HM Government in lieu of inheritance tax from a collection and had been allocated to the gallery for the bargainous price of £0.

Grimshaw was born in a back-to-back house in Park Street, Leeds, in 1836, and at first looked destined for a normal, anonymous life — he married his cousin Frances at age twenty and got a job as clerk for the Great Northern Railway. However, the young John had an artistic gift and an ambition, and it must have taken a great deal of courage and self-belief for him to dismay his parents by packing in his job and launching himself as a painter, but he did just that, in 1861. His primary artistic influence was the Pre-Raphaelites and true to their style he painted with accurate colour and lighting and with vivid detail. Although he did start out painting a variety of genres, Grimshaw was later drawn to depicting moonlit views of city streets in Leeds and London, and dockside scenes in Hull, Liverpool, and Glasgow. James McNeill Whistler, with whom Grimshaw worked later in his career in his Chelsea studios, said: “I considered myself the inventor of nocturnes until I saw Grimmy’s moonlit pictures”.

Unlike Whistler’s Impressionistic night scenes, “Grimmy’s” nocturnes were sharply focused and almost photographic in their quality, and there is an eerie warmth about them. Rather than concentrating on the dirty and depressing aspects of industrial life (that he would have had no trouble finding), Grimshaw imbued his paintings with a lyrical evocation of the urban landscape and there is poetry in his captured mists, reflected streetlight in wet pavements, and dark figures wrapped up against the weather. His twilight cities became his “brand” and became very popular with his middle-class patrons; he must have done well because by the 1870s he and his wife were living at Knostrup Old Hall, in the Temple Newsam area of Leeds, a far cry from the back-to-back in Park Street.

Here is a favourite of mine, Boar Lane, Leeds (1881), a street we Leeds dwellers have walked down many a time on a winter’s day like this.

Art

John Everett Millais’ Ophelia (1851)

March 15, 2024 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

If you were to choose any British art gallery to walk into today, you would be sure to find one or more paintings by one or more artists belonging to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The Pre-Raphaelites were a group of English painters, poets, and art critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and others, who sought to reform art and return it to the glory days, as they saw it, of Italian fifteenth century art. That period of art, so-called Quattrocento art, was characterised by abundant detail, colour and complexity; in the following century, however, artists – such as Raphael – were seen by the group as having a corrupting influence on art, ushering in the unnatural and stylised art of Mannerism. Parmigianino’s Madonna With The Long Neck (1540) is often used as an example of Mannerism playing fast and loose with proper perspective, as I’m sure you can see.

Parmigianino’s Madonna With The Long Neck (1540)

Today, we’re looking at a classic of the Pre-Raphaelites, namely Ophelia, the 1852 painting by British artist Sir John Everett Millais (and held in Tate Britain). Ophelia is of course a character from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a Danish noblewoman driven mad by her love for Prince Hamlet and who ultimately drowns in despair. Her drowning is not usually seen onstage in the play, but merely reported by Queen Gertrude who tells the audience that Ophelia, out of her mind with grief, has fallen from a willow tree overhanging a brook. She lies in the water singing songs, as if unaware of her danger (“incapable of her own distress”), her clothes, trapping air and allowing her to stay afloat for a while (“Her clothes spread wide, / And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up.”). But eventually, “her garments, heavy with their drink, / Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay” down “to muddy death”.

Millais paints Ophelia in a pose with open arms and upward gaze in the manner of saints or martyrs (they did love a tragic woman, the Pre-Raphs). In keeping with the tenets of the Pre-Raphaelites, he has used bright colours, with lots of detailed flora and fidelity to nature. Despite its nominal Danish setting, the landscape has actually come to be seen as quintessentially English (Ophelia was painted along the banks of the Hogsmill River near Tolworth in Surrey). The flowers shown floating on the river were chosen to correspond with Shakespeare’s description of Ophelia’s garland.

Fun fact: at one point, Millais had painted a water vole paddling away near Ophelia, but changed his mind (probably correctly) after an acquaintance mistook it for a hare or rabbit. Although fully painted over, a rough sketch of it still exists in a corner of the canvas hidden by the frame, apparently.

Occasional Glimpses of the Sublime