William Blake

William Blake, “The Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan, in Whose Wreathings Are Infolded the Nations of the Earth”, 1805-1809, Tempera on Canvas, 30 x 24 Inches, Tate Museum, London

William Blake occupies a unique position in art history in that he was both a major artist and a major poet. Often the two went hand-in-hand, his art illustrating his poetry, or if not his, the poetry of others. The subject is not drawn from any literary source, but from contemporary history.

The spiritual form of Nelson guiding Leviathan was first shown in Blake’s solo exhibition of 1809, held at his brother’s house in London’s Soho. Though the reviews were mostly negative, some of the paintings did sell, including this portrait of Admiral Nelson. Instead of a lifelike portrait, Blake painted Nelson’s “Spiritual” likeness.

Admiral Nelson is in the centre of a graphic explosion of colour, creating a corona of light around him. He is standing on top of the Biblical sea creature, Leviathan, whose body encircles him; he controls the beast with a bridle, attached to its neck, which he holds loosely in his left hand.

Trapped in, crushed under, or in one case, half-consumed within Leviathan’s coiled body, ten figures are arranged around the figure of Nelson. These represent the European nations defeated by the British during the Napoleonic Wars.

Sir Stanley Spencer

Sir Stanley Spencer, “The Bridge”, Oil on Canvas, 1920, Tate Museum

Sir Stanley Spencer CBE RA was an English painter. Shortly after leaving the Slade School of Art, Spencer became well known for his paintings depicting Biblical scenes occurring as if in Cookham, the small village beside the River Thames where he was born and spent much of his life. Spencer referred to Cookham as “a village in Heaven” and in his biblical scenes, fellow-villagers are shown as their Gospel counterparts.

Spencer was skilled at organising multi-figure compositions such as in his large paintings for the Sandham Memorial Chapel and for the ‘Shipbuilding on the Clyde’ series which was a commission for the War Artists’ Advisory Committee during World War Two. As his career progressed Spencer often produced landscapes for commercial necessity and the intensity of his early visionary years diminished somewhat while elements of eccentricity came more to the fore. Although his compositions became more claustrophobic and his use of colour less vivid he maintained an attention to detail in his paintings akin to that of the Pre-Raphaelites.

Spencer’s work frequently combined real and imagined elements. As a result, his paintings have a strong sense of narrative even if the subject is not wholly explicable. He painted “The Bridge” in a temporary studio in the Fee School, Maidenhead. The subject is believed to be spectators watching a boat race, probably the annual Cookham Regatta. They are standing on an invented stone bridge instead of Cookham’s cast-iron bridge, although the decorative quatrefoil motifs are taken from the metal version. The Airedale terrier dog lying on the bridge was called Tinker. Tinker belonged to a Cookham resident, Guy Lacey, who taught Stanley Spencer and his brother Gilbert to swim.

James Havard Thomas

James Havard Thomas, “Thysis”, 1912, Tate Britain Museum, London

James Havard Thomas trained in Paris and then in 1889 moved to Italy, where he lived for seventeen years. In 1905 he sent a male nude ‘Lycidas’ to the Royal Academy, where its rejection caused a scandal. In 1912 Havard Thomas returned to the theme with ‘Thyrsis’. The title comes from the poem of 1866 by Matthew Arnold of that name, and Arnold’s poem had itself been based on Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ written in 1637.

Thyrsis was an ancient Greek shepherd. Arnold chose to commemorate in his poem a friend from Oxford as this pastoral character. The shepherd’s pipe was for Arnold a symbol of his own youth, and Havard Thomas’s figure itself commemorates Italy and classical art. This bronze was cast in 1948, from the original in wax.

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock, “Naked man with a Knife”, Oil on Canvas, 1938-40, Tate Museum of Art, London

Pollock was beginning to find his own individual style when he made this work. The startlingly violent image of three interlocking figures was derived from a lost work by the Mexican painter José Clemente Orozco showing the fraternal struggle between Cain and Abel. Pollock’s exploration of the theme may reflect his interest in the archetypal myths explored in Jungian psychoanalysis. The subject may also refer to the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, which engulfed Europe as America looked on with horror.

Joshua Reynolds

Joshua Reynolds, “The Archers” (Colonel Acland and Lord Sydney), Oil on Canvas, 1769, Tate Collection

This large double portrait depicts on a life-size scale two young aristocrats, Dudley Alexander Sydney Cosby, Lord Sydney (1732–1774), shown on the left, and Colonel John Dyke Acland (1746-1778) leaping forward on the right. Dressed in quasi-historical clothing invented by the artist, they are mimicking a medieval or Renaissance hunt; the dead game they leave in their trail underlining their noble blood and aristocratic right to hunt. The painting celebrates the men’s friendship by linking it to an imaginary chivalric past, when young lords pursued ‘manly’ activities together against a backdrop of ancient forest. The two subjects run and take aim in perfect rhythmic harmony; at one with each other and joint masters over nature.

Joshua Reynolds painted this portrait shortly after he took up duties as the first President of the newly opened Royal Academy of Arts and delivered the first of his famous ‘discourses’ on art. Reynolds’s sitter book confirms that the painting was executed in August – a month he usually reserved for personal projects rather than commissions – suggesting that it was made of his own volition, undoubtedly with an eye to the newly established Royal Academy annual exhibitions. The grand scale of the work, its dramatic, tightly organised composition and deliberate echo of the Italian painter Titian’s great mythological scenes all speak of Reynolds’s extraordinary determination to raise the profile and status of British art in these years. More particularly, this painting, his most ambitious male portrait to date, demonstrated his desire to elevate portraiture to the level of high art, alongside the genre of history painting, which was traditionally seen as superior.

The depiction of the two sitters hunting with bows and arrows points to a renewed enthusiasm for archery in aristocratic circles at this time. Aa attracted by its virile and romantic associations, the figure of the archer became a fashionable reference point for privileged young men and was a popular allegorical guise for contemporary portraits.

The painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy’s second annual exhibition of contemporary British art in 1770, after which it remained in Reynolds’s studio for several years. It was eventually purchased by Acland’s widow in 1779 to commemorate her husband who had died the previous year of a paralytic stroke, probably caused by war injuries.

Gillian Ayres

Gillian Ayres, “Phaëthon”, 1990, Oil on Canvas, 244 x 366 cm, Tate Museum, London

British painter Gillian Ayres’ 1990 “Phaëthon” is a very large oil painting packed with a variety of interlocking but loosely defined shapes, including triangles, circles, semi-circles, arches and zig-zagging lines. Shades of yellow, red and orange are especially prominent, while many of the forms have been given thick white outlines. The surface of the canvas is thick with paint, which appears to have been applied quickly and freely in layers so that every area of the canvas is covered.

At the top of the painting black and white lines radiate from multi-coloured bands that curve from one side to the other over the central composition, which is made up of loosely delineated shapes of various sizes. At the bottom edge of the work is a sequence of vertical parallel lines in black, brown and red paint.

After a period beginning in the mid-1960s in which she worked predominately with acrylic paint, Ayres reverted to oil paint in 1976 and began utilising a much more colorful palette. Thick layers of paint, exuberant colours and expressive paint handling are characteristic of Ayres’s work after she finished teaching at the Winchester School of Art and left London for north Wales in 1981.

The title of this painting refers to the figure of Phaëthon, who, according to Greek mythology, was the son of the sun god Apollo. The predominance of yellow, red and orange in the painting may allude to Phaëthon’s parentage, and in particular to the mythical account of Phaëthon’s journey in his father’s sun chariot, when he drove so fast it caused the surrounding landscape to burst into flames. However, the titles of Ayres’s works are usually conceived after the paintings have been completed, and in some cases have been suggested by the artist’s friends or by a process of free association.