Painting
52 postsThe Raft of the Medusa
Painting (oil on canvas) · Théodore Géricault
On the second of July 1816 the French frigate Méduse ran aground on the Bank of Arguin off the coast of Mauritania. The frigate had been sailing under a politically appointed captain, Hugues Duroy de
Portrait of Georg Gisze, Merchant of the Hanseatic League
Painting (oil on oak panel) · Hans Holbein the Younger
The painting is an inventory in oil. On the table in front of the merchant: a folded letter, addressed to him ("To the honourable Georg Gisze in London, in England, to my brother"), a glass vase of ca
The Geographer
Painting (oil on canvas) · Johannes Vermeer
Vermeer painted only about thirty-five works in his entire career. Two of them, painted around 1668 and 1669, depict male scholars: The Astronomer (now at the Louvre) and The Geographer (now at the St
Portrait of Pope Innocent X
Painting (oil on canvas) · Diego Velázquez
Innocent X did not want the portrait to make him look good. He wanted it to make him look right. Velázquez, who had arrived in Rome in 1649 for his second visit to Italy and stayed nearly two years, u
The Coronation of Napoleon
Painting (oil on canvas) · Jacques-Louis David
The painting is six metres by ten. It took David three years to finish. It is the most consequential single piece of imperial propaganda produced by any European regime between Napoleon and the First
Las Meninas
Painting (oil on canvas) · Diego Velázquez
The painting is built around an unanswered question, and the question is the painting's actual subject. Velázquez stands behind a large canvas at the left edge of the picture, brush in hand, looking o
The Death of Marat
Painting (oil on canvas) · Jacques-Louis David
Jean-Paul Marat was murdered on the thirteenth of July 1793 by Charlotte Corday, a young woman from Caen who had travelled to Paris specifically to kill him. He suffered from a severe and disfiguring
Liberty Leading the People
Painting (oil on canvas) · Eugène Delacroix
Delacroix did not fight on the barricades of the July Revolution. He wrote to his brother that if he could not fight for his country he would at least paint for it. The painting that resulted is the c
Saturn Devouring His Son
Mural transferred to canvas · Francisco Goya
Goya painted Saturn on the wall of his own kitchen at sixty-eight, deaf for three decades, after surviving three regimes that wanted him dead. The reading of the Black Paintings as private therapy is
The Garden of Earthly Delights
Triptych (oil on oak panels) · Hieronymus Bosch
Five centuries of writing have not produced a stable reading of this triptych, and the failure is significant. Most paintings yield to interpretation by the second generation of critics. Bosch's centr
The Isle of the Dead
Painting (oil on canvas) · Arnold Böcklin
Böcklin painted five versions of this image between 1880 and 1886. The repetition is the first thing to notice. He did not work on the picture, sell it, and move on; he made it again, then again, then
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog
Painting (oil on canvas) · Caspar David Friedrich
Friedrich's painting works by what he denies the viewer. The figure's face is turned away. The valley is consumed in fog. The mountain ridge in the middle distance breaks the surface only enough to co
