After the Bath by Pierre Auguste Renoir

This is, quite possibly, my favourite painting of all time or, at the very least, in the top three (with Boucher's Miss Marie-Louise O'Murphy and Alma-Tadema's In the Tepidarium).  I first saw it, at the age of eleven, in my father's copy of  The Female Nude in European Painting (1957) by the French art critic and novelist Jean-Louis Vaudoyer (1883-1963).  This is a brilliantly selected survey from prehistory to Picasso. The largely black and white, but occasionally glorious colour, illustrations include some of my favourite paintings to this day. 

Not least of these, is the cover illustration of Renoir's After the Bath (1888). I still have this book in my library. It was this book that had me drawing my first non military figures, as I copied many of the pictures inside. It led to a lifelong interest in drawing and painting (and, indeed, ladies) and, five years after discovering it, I first combined the two, thanks to a brave and friendly girl from archery club, who I had softened up by looking at this book with her!

Unconscious Rivals by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

Unconscious Rivals (1893) by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912) is certainly not my favourite example of the artist’s work (that is In the Tepidarium) but it has resonance for other reasons . In my first year at University my girlfriend, C, was a lovely redhead who, like me, was enamoured of classicist paintings. Her best friend, the dark haired K, and I were close too and C thought that “the lascivious K” was pursuing me romantically. K was surprised to learn this and as a joke bought me a postcard of this painting, as it ‘depicted her and C being rivals’. Last year K and I visited the Alma-Tadema exhibition at Leighton House and saw the original (it is usually in the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery). We recalled more torrid times with the amusement that comes from thirty eight years of distance.

I always thought that the setting was rather unusual in that it placed the women in a sort of Roman aircraft hangar.  I don't know of any classical building it is based on which is unusual for Alma-Tadema who was scrupulous about his classical sources.  The cupid here, for example, is based on one found at Pompeii, somewhere the artist had visited.

The sweet siesta of a summer day by JW Godward

The sweet siesta of a summer day (1891), was one of the early successes for the neo-classicist painter John William Godward (1861-1922), It was exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1891. Very much in the Alma-Tadema style, it is almost a pastiche of such paintings, with its languid girls in classical dresses, marble steps, a tiger skin, distant view of the Mediterranean, hanging vines etc. One of the girls is playing an aulos, as Godward tried to create a feeling of delicate flute music, Today, however, we know that the aulos was a martial instrument, used by the Spartan army and gave out a rather raucous buzzing sound not unlike a crumhorn. Not very restful! 

It was painted in his London studio in Smith Street in Chelsea and I actually went to a party there, with my Chinese American girlfriend, back in the mid eighties. She later modelled for some nude pastels for me,  I didn't know it had been Godward's studio at the time, though.  Perhaps that is why I found her so inspiring!

Godward ran off to Italy with one of his models and his parents, never keen on his choice of profession in the first place, never spoke to him again and even cut his picture out of all the family photos. Depressed by the march of modernism he committed suicide in 1922 by gassing himself in his oven at home, leaving a note which said "the world is not big enough for myself and a Picasso"

Mistletoe of Paris by Raphael Kirchner

Back just over a hundred years for this festive filly with her load of mistletoe by Austrian artist Raphael Kirchner (1876-1917).  Kirchner produced some of the earliest pin up paintings, many of which were produced as postcards and were popular with troops during the Great War.  He was a direct influence on Alberto Vargas who went on to produce famous pinups for Esquire and Playboy.

Bathers by Paul Gustave Fischer

Summer on the Beach (circa 1900)

This painting is by Danish artist Paul Gustave Fischer (1860-1934).  Around the end of the nineteenth century, while previously best known for his paintings of grey scenes of Copenhagen, he painted a series of pictures of naked ladies sunbathing amongst the dunes of the Baltic.  

The Kelpie by Herbert Draper

The Kelpie (1913)

Here is a watery maiden by Herbert Draper (1864-1920). Kelpies were spirits who haunted rivers and lakes and would prey on sailors and other travellers. Draper's Kelpie does have something of the sinister about her, although the picture was not well received when it was exhibited; critics thinking that the girl's figure was "too modern" for a mythological subject.  Kelpies were creatures of northern myth and her background setting reflects this. Draper was fascinated, as were other late Victorian artists, with portraying beautiful but evil women and this figure joins his sirens and snake women as another metaphor for the destructiveness of women's sexuality.  The fact that her toes are dipped in the water symbolises the fact that she has lost her virginity.  No innocent maiden, therefore, but a dangerous sexual predator. Draper was an expert at combining source material from different places and fusing them together to provide a realistic and convincing looking whole. In the case of The Kelpie the source material appears to be some photographs he took of a stream in Scotland, together with some detailed pencil studies he made in Savoie. The rendering of the transparently clear water in the foreground of this picture is nothing short of miraculous. 

Sleeping Bather by Théodore Chassériau

 (1850)

Today's wallpaper is  by Théodore Chassériau (1819-1856) and is a remarkably frank nude portrait for the time. It was a body that the artist knew well, however, as she was his lover, Alice Ozy (1820-1893), born Julie Justine Pilloy, the daughter of a Parisian jeweller. Julie worked as an embroideress in Paris and then Lyon.  Returning to Paris, the sixteen year old Julie caught the eye of an actor at a dance hall in Montparnasse. He suggested she become an actress (he suggested several other things to her as well) and got her some small roles. She got her first real role in vaudeville at the age of seventeen and took the stage name Alice Ozy (based on her mother's maiden name). For the next five years her roles and acclaim increased until by 1845, she was one of the best regarded young actresses in Paris.With this fame came wealthy male admirers.  Like many actresses of the time she became a courtesan, being paid by wealthy men for ' companionship'. One of her lovers left her a large legacy when she was still young, which she invested wisely.  In 1843 she started a relationship with the novelist and poet Theophile Gautier and in short order also 'entertained' the writer Nestor Roqueplan, the Emperor Napoleon's son, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (the future Napoleon III of France) as well as Henri d’Orléans, duc d’Aumale, the son of the then King of France, Louis-Philippe. She was never short of suitors and later had an affair with Charles Hugo, the son of the novelist Victor Hugo.  Charles, fed up with Alice's other lovers asked his father what he should do about the situation, whereupon Victor bombarded her with erotic poems and took her as his (additional) mistress instead, much to his son's annoyance. All this ended in 1848, when she fled the revolution in Paris for London.

Portrait of Alice Ozy (1848) by Chassériau

When she returned to Paris, later in 1848, she started a two year, tempestuous relationship with the painter of this picture Théodore Chassériau.  Their relationship ended when she asked him for one of his paintings which he intended for his family. He refused but she insisted and eventually, in order to end the arguments, he agreed to give it to her (so to speak). It just happened that he was enjoying breakfast with Alice at her apartment when the painting arrived by carriage from his studio. In a fit of remorse at giving the painting to Alice, he slashed it to ribbons in front of her and walked out on her for good.  She retired from the stage in 1855 and reverted to her birth name of Julie Pilloy. using her friends in the banking world to increase her fortune. She bought a house outside Paris and kept a lavish apartment on the Boulevard Haussmann.

Time Slaying Love

Another lover of Ozy's was the artist Gustave Doré, who designed a special clock for Ozy's apartment in Paris, where it was displayed in the entrance hall. Called Time Slaying Love it shows Time slaying cherubs with his spear. The message from Ozy was that any relationship with her was going to be fleeting, as time is the enemy of love (how very true). Julie Justine Pilloy remained unmarried (although far from without male companionship) and died, a wealthy woman, in her apartment on March 3rd 1892, at the age of 72.  Chassériau died many years before this, at the age of 37 after years of ill health