#nude

This was one of a run of nudes his dealer had him churn out fast to sell — and when they went on show in Paris, police shut the exhibition down on opening day for indecency.

The story behind it, from what I can find, is a princess shut in a tower by her father and a god who gets in by turning himself into a shower of gold. It's a small canvas too — under a metre either way, which you'd never guess from a photo of it.

It came out of a huge doorway commission — bronze doors for a museum that was never actually built, so they never got hung anywhere. He kept picking at that project for decades and casting single figures out of it along the way, and this is one of those. The debt to Michelangelo is one he apparently never bothered to hide.

Supposedly he painted this same setup over and over — pale figure, near-black surroundings, no story attached to it — and it sold well enough that he kept at it for years. I couldn't find anything about this one in particular, only that there are a lot like it.

One critic at the time is said to have compared her to a balloon perched on a bonbon box — all polish, no real feeling. The French state bought the painting almost immediately anyway, while a very different crowd of painters, working just blocks away, could barely get their work into the same building.

It's the old Greek story — a princess chained to a rock as an offering to a sea monster, waiting on a rescue that's supposedly on its way. They say the painter spent twenty-odd years working in nothing but charcoal black before he let colour in at all.

This one sat around unfinished for decades — started in Italy, finished in Paris when he was in his seventies and running the state art school, according to Wikipedia. Two of his students painted the background and the water jar for him, which sounds like cheating until you learn that's just how a big studio worked.

He belonged to a group in Vienna who'd walked out on the official art establishment and built their own place to exhibit in, from what I've read. This comes from the stretch afterwards when he was deep into gold and pattern, and doing big pictures about the stages of a life.

It's painted on canvas rather than a wooden panel, which was still an odd choice at the time, and it seems to have been made for a Medici cousin's country house rather than a church. Who exactly ordered it, and what for, nobody seems to have settled.

Nobody actually knows who she is. She gets called Venus by tradition, from what I can find, but there's no story attached — just a young woman on a bed in a grand house, a sleeping dog, and two maids in the back digging through a chest like it's any other afternoon. It sat finished for years before anyone bought it, apparently.

According to Wikipedia, his one solo show — full of nudes like this one — got shut down by the police the day it opened. He died broke a couple of years later, and now his paintings sell for fortunes.

The two outer panels fold shut over the middle like doors, and the backs of them are painted grey — a world with the colour not switched on yet. Whether the middle is a warning about giving in to temptation or something a lot fonder than that, no one seems to have settled in five hundred years.

About as approved-of as painting got at the time — the emperor apparently bought it straight off the Salon wall. Two years later Manet showed a nude in a not-so-different pose and Paris was outraged, which suggests the rule was never really about bare skin, but about who was allowed to be bare.

A suffragette went at this with a small axe in 1914, in protest at Emmeline Pankhurst's arrest — it's said she was fed up with men queuing up to stare at it all day. It was patched up afterwards, and photos of the damage are apparently still floating about.

Gentileschi painted this subject more than once across her career. Some historians connect the way she handles Susanna's fear here to what she went through herself, though how much to read into that is still argued over.

They say the pearls scattered in that shell beside her were supposed to be the tears of drowned sailors, according to old folklore around mermaids and sirens. Apparently painters elected into this particular academy had to hand over a finished painting as a kind of membership due, and this was his.

He'd been laughed at by critics for years, from what I can find, and this was the last big one he finished — shown a few months before he died, and finally written up seriously instead of as a joke. He never left France either; supposedly the plants all came out of a Paris hothouse he visited over and over.

The setup is Venus taking the arrows off Cupid so he can't fire them at anyone. Painted, apparently, for the king's mistress, who bought a lot of pictures like this — mythology was the standard licence for a nude in a respectable room.

According to Wikipedia he came back to this years after finishing it and reworked large parts, including her face. It was also attacked with acid in a museum in the 1980s and took more than a decade to put right.

The official Salon rejected this, so it went into the side exhibition of rejects the emperor allowed that year, where crowds supposedly turned up mainly to laugh at it. It started out with a much duller title, something like 'The Bath', and the arrangement of the three of them is said to be lifted from a centuries-old engraving — which may have been part of the cheek.