Ruins at Uxmal by Frederick Catherwood

This scene of Mayan ruins in Yucatan by the English artist and architect Frederick Catherwood (1799-1854) is a favourite and has been since I first saw this picture in a book on archaeology I was given for my tenth birthday.  This tiny book by CW Ceram, which is about the size of a postcard, captured my imagination from the start and no pictures more so than the mystery and atmosphere in Catherwood's illustration.

Catherwood's illustrated books, following his travels in Central America, introduced people to the civilisation of the Mayans, in the 1840s.  Later he ran a store  in San Francisco selling supplies to California gold rush miners.  

SS Arctic

He drowned, at the age of 55, when travelling on the American ship, the SS Arctic from Liverpool to New York, after the Arctic was struck by a French ship in poor visibility.  The ship sank slowly but there was no women and children first on board, with the six lifeboats mostly filled by the crew who ,ignoring discipline, crowded into them at the expense of the passengers, of whom only 28 were saved. No women or children survived and there was no subsequent enquiry.  Calls for the number of lifeboats to be able to hold all the passengers and crew of ships were ignored.

Beyond the Solar System by Chesley Bonestell

This painting is by the hugely influential illustrator Chesley Bonestell (1888-1986). When I was about nine or ten I got Willy Ley's book Beyond the Solar System (1964) from the library, purely because of this wonderful painting, used as the cover picture. 

Probably his most well known painting was one that was only a sketch, which he did for the film When Worlds Collide (1951), in which a rogue star destroys the Earth and scientists build a space ark to take a select few to the planet Zyra, which orbits it.  

In the final scene the spaceship lands on the planet and the explorers look out on what should have been a, no doubt, splendid matte painting by Bonestell. Unfortunately the producers refused to cough up the cash for the final painting and just used Bonestell's sketch instead. It should have looked so much better!

Bonestell's hugely influential pictures of spaceflight speak of a cool, clean, gleaming future that never was.

Lake Keitele by Akseli Gallen-Kallela

This is a 1905 painting of Lake Keitele in Finland by Finnish painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865-1931). This wonderful painting is in the National Gallery in London. 

Portrait of Sibelius 1894

Best known for his paintings of Finnish mythology, which often end up on the covers of Sibelius CDs, he painted the man himself in a famous portrait done in 1894.

Démasquée (1888)

He also designed Finland's army uniforms after the Finnish Civil War in 1919. After naked ladies, the Legatus probably appreciates Baltic landscapes, as a genre, the most, although Gallen-Kallela could produce a sensuous naked lady when he wanted to, as in this example doe during the decade he lived in Paris.

The Plains of Heaven by John Martin

It’s Art Friday! I remember first seeing this painting by John Martin (1789-1854) on a school Art trip to the Tate Gallery in 1976. The most famous exhibit at the time was Carl Andre’s Equivalent VII (the ‘pile of bricks’). My best friend O and I were not impressed by the latter and hatched a plot to relocate one of the bricks to the gallery cafe but were, perhaps fortunately, spotted by a security guard before we had touched one. 

Although his paintings fell out of favour, he influenced many others from the Pre-Raphaelites to film producers, including DW Griffith, the French Romantics and even his friend Brunel, who based some of his railway bridge designs on Martin's work.

Painted between 1851 and 1853 this vast (2.4 x 3.5 metres) painting was more to my taste, to the extent that I bought a large and expensive poster of it in the shop there. No reproduction really does it justice and you really have to see the actual painting to get the full effect (it had only been left to the Tate in 1974). 

The The 2nd Prussian Infantry Regiment assaulting Plancenoit by Carl Röchling

This is one of my favourite Napoleonic Wars subject paintings, by German artist Carl Röchling (1855 – 1920). It depicts the 2nd Prussian Infantry Regiment, the 1st Pommeranian, assaulting Plancenoit during the Battle of Waterloo. Born in Saarbrücken, he studied from 1875 to 1880 in the Karlsruhe Academy of Arts  and later in the Prussian Academy of Arts.  He specialised in military paintings, especially those featuring the Prussian Army, and the Franco-Prussian war in particular, but also did some paintings of  American Civil War battles.

I first saw this painting on the cover of my copy of Albert Nofi’s The Waterloo Campaign and it had a lot to do with my buying a box of Perry plastic Prussians!

Brasenose College by Claude Buckle

This is a picture of my college at Oxford, Brasenose, by railway poster art master Claude Buckle (1905-1973). Originally trained as an architect, between 1932 and 1963 he produced dozens of posters for the railways, together with a number of those panoramic pictures that I can remember used to brighten up railway carriages when I was small.

Old Quad at Brasenose offers the finest view in Oxford, looking out over the dome of the Radcliffe Camera and St Mary's, the university church.  Dating from 1509 the third storey of the quad was added in the seventeenth century,

RMS Queen Mary by William McDowell

This poster of the Queen Mary, featuring  a painting  by William McDowell (1888-1950) was produced in 1938 for Cunard.  McDowell started working in the drawing office of  Vickers shipyard in Barrow-in- Furness. He became a full time artist after Word War 1 and worked on commissions for many of the great shipping lines at the time such as Cunard, Union Castle and White Star Line.

I haven't sailed on the Queen Mary (I'm not that old!) but I have had lunch on her!