NARRATIVE PAINTING

Painting is both a public and a private art, depicting great events and telling a story or reflecting the artist’s eye on a subject, sometimes realistically and sometimes imaginatively. This piece will focus on the former – story telling – and is a mixture of great art and more pedestrian but still striking efforts, earnestly trying to win over the viewer.

Paintings handling a number of people give particular pleasure and a supreme master like Raphael sets the scene with this evocation of the ancient world featuring Plato, Aristotle, Socrates and a host of other philosophers and mathematicians:

The School of Athens by Raphael - Fresco in the Vatican Palace (1511)

In the same room as the often-over-rated Mona Lisa hangs in the Louvre, is The Wedding at Cana by Paulo Veronese (1563) rewarding close study – its detail is a joy.

Rather later (1601) we can admire Caravaggio’s The Supper at Emmaus, with his characteristic use of light. The dramatic re-appearance of Christ is brilliantly rendered, telling its story powerfully.

The Wedding at Cana by Paolo Veronese

The Supper at Emmaus by Caravaggio

 

Moving forward rapidly, the many conflicts of the 18^th century gave opportunities to military paintings. In days before flash cameras and TV coverage, artistic images provided the essential information to the public. They were often propagandist and inaccurate, but they told their stories memorably. Two Anglo-Americans, Benjamin West and John Copley, were masters of this genre.

The Death of General Wolfe at Quebec in 1759 by Benjamin West

The Siege and Relief of Gibraltar (1782) by John S. Copley

Entering the sinister period of the French Revolution, we have J-L David, in sympathy with the murder-stained Jacobins, painting the death of Marat as if he were some martyr to a great cause. In fact, he was a terrorist, bravely assassinated by Charlotte Corday.

Death of Marat by J-L David

Scotland Forever! by Lady Butler (1870), The Charge of the Royal Scots Greys at Waterloo in 1815

Revolution gave way to Napoleon and his glittering victories, until he too met his match on the field of Waterloo. How inspiring to British patriotic spirits this painting must have been!

French revolutionary fervour still bubbled away. In 1830, the last of the Bourbons, Charles X, was deposed amid fighting in the streets of Paris – an iconic scene immortalised by the radical imagination of Delacroix.

Liberty leading the People by Eugene Delacroix (1830)

In the UK, the Victorian age changed so many aspects of society, the economy, the move to industry from agriculture, religious fragmentation and vastly improved communications. Emigration to America or Australia became widespread, yet painful, encapsulated in Pre-Raphaelite Ford Madox Brown’s image The Last of England telling its sad little story.

The Last of England by Ford Madox Brown (1855)

The centre of mass production moved to the US and in 1932 the Ford Motor Company in Detroit commissioned the Mexican painter Diego Rivera to paint murals depicting the manufacturing process. It was intended to be a tribute to working people but it came to be seen as yet another example illustrating the inhumanity meted out to labour by the industrialist – not unlike the conveyor-belt in Chaplin’s 1936 movie Modern Times.

Murals for the Ford Motor Company, Detroit, by Diego Rivera

The 20^th century was marked by two World Wars, the Holocaust, the horrors of Marxist persecution and countless other conflicts. The iconic painting by Picasso, Guernica, commemorated an episode in the Spanish civil war but it could easily stretch to represent all mankind’s suffering in war.

Guernica by Pablo Picasso (1937)

SMD

25.08.19

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2019