Category Archives: painting
Best Pre-Raphaelites Paintings
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood founded in 1848 by seven young artists who banded together against what they felt was an artificial and mannered approach to painting taught at London’s Royal Academy of Arts. Inspired by the theories of John Ruskin, who urged artists to ‘go to nature’, they believed in an art of serious subjects treatedContinue reading “Best Pre-Raphaelites Paintings”
Vanity by Frank Cadogan Cowper
The subject matter and composition of ‘Vanity’ are derived from Italian Renaissance painting. Cowper has bedecked his youthful beauty with jewels and given her a hand-mirror to signify vanity. She stands before a vine, heavy with ripe grapes, suggestive of abundance and pleasure. Although this painting is secular in subject, the pose of a womanContinue reading “Vanity by Frank Cadogan Cowper”
“So like a shatter’d Column lay the King” by Julia Margaret Cameron
Portrait of Mary Hillier, William Warder, Mrs. Hardinge, an unidentified woman, and two hooded figures in costume and posing as the characters from the accompanying Alfred, Lord Tennyson poems titled “The Passing of Arthur”. Two of the women, Vivien and Morgan le Fay, place a dying King Arthur in a wooden boat to take himContinue reading ““So like a shatter’d Column lay the King” by Julia Margaret Cameron”
The Sleeping Beauty by John Collier
This remarkable picture is eloquent testimony to the survival of Pre-Raphaelite values well into the twentieth century. Dating from as late as 1921, it treats the famous fairy story of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ that had been told many times in European literature. Its origins obscure, in the seventeenth century it was included by Charles Perrault inContinue reading “The Sleeping Beauty by John Collier”
Mysterious Art Century 